Zachary Jernigan - No Return

There! Chuuurrllss. Veeedaas.

She threw the covers to the side. Vedas jumped up from the floor, ready, but Churls silenced him with a gesture. She tapped her ear, and he listened.

His eyes widened.

They raced down the stairs and out the front door.

“Chuuurrllss! Veeedaas!” the voice called—closer, from out of the depths of black forest before them. A voice like a bell, deep and resounding in the pit of one’s gut. Hearing it, Churls’s heart pumped harder, strong and healthy and alive. She had not known how much the voice meant to her— how greatly she had come to rely upon the constructed man’s presence as she walked, as she slept.

Again he called their names. Loudly enough to wake dogs and set them barking.

And then, a low rumble came to her ears. A steady drumming. Huge, heavy feet pounding the earth. Closer and closer.

Voices rose in Oasena, and the dogs began to howl.

Churls grinned, and stepped forward to meet Berun.

EBN BON MARI

THE 25 thOF THE MONTH OF PILOTS, 12499 MD

THE CITY OF TANSOT, KINGDOM OF STOL

Tor a month, the same routine before breakfast: With the assistance of a recall spell, Ebn watched the disastrous encounter with Adrash—over and over again methodically, like a composer playing an identical refrain to resolve an irksome melody. The spell made her forehead throb as it pushed against the confining walls of her skull, yet she persevered. She had missed something. Some detail that would help her to interpret the events that had transpired.

Adrash gestured at the statue.

Stop , Ebn commanded, stilling the image in her mind’s eye. As always, and despite the pain of holding the memory still, Ebn lingered on the god’s perfection. The graceful, sculpted proportions of his body. The lines of tension that defined the muscle and sinew of his back and extended arm. More than any other feature, she admired the flawless pearl complexion of the divine armor, an artifact she knew felt like the finest elder-cloth. Cold, infinitely smoother than skin. Her tongues stirred in her palms at the thought.

Her desire nearly overcame her every time. The memory wavered as though she viewed the scene through fire, and then lust gave way to sadness.

She would never possess such beauty. She had been a fool to think she could.

Enough , she told herself. Enough foolishness.

She resumed the memory at quarter-speed. Adrash shattered the statue with a gesture, sending a thousand sharp-edged fragments of marble toward the mages. His eyes blazed brighter than the sun.

Stop , right before the first impacts. At the time, Ebn had been focused on Adrash, but in her recall it became possible to examine the other mages, who extended in a glittering arc just slightly out of focus in her peripheral vision. Sunlight reflected on the polished black skins of their suits. Qon’s feet were only just visible above her. Pol floated directly opposite her. Ebn focused on his face, but read nothing new in his expression.

She moved forward in time slowly, by now familiar with the grim details. She had erected a shield with plenty of time to spare, perhaps because she had subconsciously expected the attack. Silver veins flickered on the surface of Pol’s suit, signaling that he too had erected a protective spell. Eighteen others, mostly talented young mages, acted quickly to defend themselves, using spells both ordinary and exotic.

Three—Qon included—cast a fraction too slowly, deflecting only some of the stone fragments.

They did not die immediately.

The remaining seventeen mages were cut to shreds near-instantaneously. Ebn watched them die. She made herself do it, though the section she suspected of holding a clue came afterwards. Replaying the entirety of the disaster was her penance.

Gota fi Junnun, only sixteen years old but a promising student, face flayed as his helmet burst, torso pocked with innumerable small holes, bloomed an aura of blood that vaporized instantly around him. Hamen i Loren, Ebn’s one-time lover, a man of immaculate taste and speech, was cut nearly in two by a large flake of marble. Intestines bubbled and burst from both halves of his body. Zi-Te bon Ueses, martial arts master and gambling enthusiast, was sliced from clavicle to groin but stayed conscious for several seconds, screaming a fine red mist.

Ebn watched each fatal blow, reversing the spell repeatedly so that all of her officers could be accounted for. Her stomach did not turn as it had the first few times—proof a person could grow used to anything.

In the midst of the chaos, Adrash disappeared. Ebn reversed and slowed her memory to a crawl. No fade, no wavering around the god’s body, no sign at all that he would vanish. Clearly, nothing could be gleaned from this portion of memory, yet Ebn lingered on it every time. The god stood, fixed as stone. Then he did not, and it was as though he had never existed in that place. The raw power needed to enact such magic boggled her mind, horrified her in a way the deaths of the mages did not.

And here, in the vacuum Adrash had created: An anomalous event that had eluded her for the first two weeks of her search through the recalled memory. She chastened herself for taking so long to spot it, but knew how lucky she had been to notice it at all. Certainly, she could not be blamed for missing such a slight gesture during the disaster. Qon’s hemorrhaging had occupied all of her attention.

The sequence lasted only four seconds. Immediately following Adrash’s disappearance, Pol swiveled his head toward the moon, eyes clearly tracking a moving object. He ripped his gloves off and made a gesture, as if he were turning a globe in his hands. A heartbeat later, his eyes widened and his mouth fell open. It was this expression—so odd on Pol’s typically controlled features—that had first alerted her to the moment’s significance.

Stop . Ebn returned to the beginning and replayed the sequence slowly. By its nature, a recalled memory wanted to move at normal speed, and her head ached with the strain of holding it back.

There. Between these two seconds , she told herself. Something out of place.

Again . Again . Her temples pounded.

Nothing new revealed itself, yet she knew in her womb that Pol had done something highly irregular. After years of traveling in orbit, she had learned to trust her intuition. The obvious conclusion was that he had seen Adrash leaving and cast a spell in response, but Ebn could not make herself believe this. Pol’s magical faculties had not progressed beyond hers. His lore was not so esoteric that she could not recognize it.

Frustrated, she moved forward to the second event of note. She watched herself fumble to hold the flaps of Qon’s suit closed, willing them to mend while her friend hemorrhaged, coughing clouds of blood that frosted on Ebn’s helmet. She pulled Qon to her chest and attempted to extend her spell of protection around them both. Tired from casting her own disastrous spell of influence at Adrash, the minor charm proved beyond her abilities.

In the final seconds of her life, Qon pointed in the direction of the Needle. Her expression alone had caused Ebn to turn, yet the view did not impress anything upon her. Despite repeated and painstaking examination, the spheres appeared unaltered.

Of course, she had not trusted her eyes alone. Queries over the last month had confirmed her suspicion: since the disaster, the telescopists had not observed a major change in the Needle’s alignment.

Nonetheless, Qon and Pol had seen something. Had they actually followed the god’s flight?

Or had they seen something else entirely?

‡

The recall spell faded. It exited through the sutures of her skull, easing the pressure within.