Zachary Jernigan - No Return

Will you accept this small gesture in your honor? the man had asked.

Sure , Vedas had told him.

“Vedas,” Churls said. “Vedas. What would be the point? The damage is done. She’s dead, and she won’t give a shit what this priest says.” Her voice became gentle. “Let it go.”

The tendons in Vedas’s neck stood taught. A frown deformed his features.

He spat at the priest’s foot and turned away.

Churls and Berun followed him to the road. They retrieved their packs and continued on. No one talked as the sun moved in a shallow arc on the horizon. The travelers they passed neither greeted nor questioned them.

Vedas’s hands shook. He washed them in every stream and river. For the first time in his memory, he felt truly unclean, as if his suit were a normal garment that needed to be removed and washed. He fought the urge to scratch, to pull the constricting fabric away from his skin.

‡

Though he was hundreds of miles away, high upon a mesa, he saw it happen. A massive woman rose from Lake Ten and stepped over Locborder Wall. Her tattooed thighs were as wide as the city of Ynon, which she crushed under her naked feet as if it were a folded paper toy. Mountains of muscle and fat jumped with each lumbering movement, shaking the water from her body. Droplets as large as lakes fell from her skirt to the earth, crushing hills and mountains, turning fields into mud flats.

Vedas ran from her across the flat top of the mesa, but not fast enough. It would never be fast enough, for she covered leagues with a single step, and his legs were heavy and slow. She would be upon him in no time at all. She roared his name, a bestial sound that threw him to the ground and threatened to rupture his eardrums. He rose and fell again. He started crawling. Over his shoulder he saw her head rise above the edge of the mesa.

So soon! She moved faster than he could ever have imagined. Her hand reached for him, and it eclipsed the sky.

“Vedas.”

The world faded. Flickered.

“Vedas.”

He woke. Two glowing blue coals stared down at him from a face composed of brass spheres. A hard hand shook him gently, companionably. A low, brassy chuckle.

“Berun,” Vedas said, relieved to be out of the dream. He rose on an elbow to peer past the constructed man’s crouched form, and located Churls. She lay close to the smoldering campfire, which was surprisingly far away. “What am I doing over here?”

The constructed man rocked back on his heels with a whisper of metal sliding against metal. “You crawled here. One minute you were sound asleep, the next you tensed. I readied myself, thinking of another cat attack or worse, but when you started crawling I knew that something else was happening. Then you flipped over, and it looked like you were going to start throwing punches. Were you dreaming?”

Vedas lay back. The road was solid beneath him. “Yes. About the dead woman.” A rumbling sound came from Berun’s chest: the sound of many spheres shifting position, rearranging themselves. “That Adrashi priest was wrong,” the constructed man said. “He made a connection between you and the woman when there was no connection at all. You had nothing to do with her death.” The rumbling stopped. “You’re a good man, but you’re not a whole man. You don’t know yourself.”

Too tired to protest, Vedas simply nodded.

“The Baleshuuk thief. Why did you save her?”

Vedas thought back, came up empty. “I don’t know. I just didn’t want her to die.”

“And the woman today? Why did her death affect you so?”

The muscles of Vedas’s jaw jumped as he bit down on his first response.

It was my fault. If I hadn’t agreed to Fesuy’s offer, she wouldn’t have died. He wondered for a moment if this was what he truly believed. Could a man be blamed for being in a certain place at a certain time ? Adrash has simply put you here now to do this thing , the priest had told him.

“I don’t know,” Vedas said. “It was wrong. Evil.”

Berun nodded. “True. A man who does things like that deserves no sympathy. He has become worse than an animal.” The constructed man opened and closed his gigantic fists, and his eyes flared brighter. “True, I love fighting. I sometimes enjoy killing. Churls is a fighter, through and through. No doubt, we’ve both got our share of bloodlust. We’ve committed sins. But you see the difference, don’t you—between us and murderers?”

“Yes,” Vedas answered honestly.

“You think we should forgive ourselves our crimes, our mistakes?”

“Yes.”

Berun stood, a thousand joints sighing all at once. He stared down at Vedas.

“You should take your own advice.”

BERUN

THE 21 stOF THE MONTH OF ROYALTY, 12499 MD

THE CITY OF SENT TO GRASS TRAIL, THE REPUBLIC OF KNOS MIN

Huge, sluggish fish swam in the stygian depths, their sinuous bodies only partially visible in the weak radiance cast by Berun’s eyes. An arm-sized fin waving. A black eyed, blunt-nosed head, needle-toothed maw slowly opening and closing. Dwarfing the constructed man, they swam in close but never touched him. He did not smell right, did not sound right. No beating of a heart, only the steady emanation of heat. Smaller fish darted before his face, attracted by the light and warmth, but these too were merely curious.

He had been here before. During the storm that drowned the Atavest , the heaving deck of the ship had catapulted him into the lake, where he immediately sank—for how long, he did not know. In his despair, he forgot to count. All sensation stopped during the fall, which seemed to last forever. And then the silt floor embraced him so gently that for a moment he did not realize the bottom had finally been reached.

Immediately, he had struggled upright in the soft mud and checked his map. Nothing. Knoori did not appear before his eyes. The weight of water prevented him from summoning the map. Lake Ten sunk to a far greater depth than the sea, he had heard, so far that the sun never reached its bottom. If this were true, the likelihood of reaching land any time soon was unlikely, and the island of Tan-Ten nearly impossible. Even if he knew the general direction, how could he walk in a straight line without points of reference?

Of course, such conjecture had been pointless. Long before he reached land, his body would shut down. Like all constructs, Berun’s cellular composition was largely elder, and required frequent exposure to sunlight. Unlike the physically weaker but more versatile hybrid animals, a construct possessed no digestive system, and thus could not subsist in the darkness for more than a few days. The full weight of this realization struck him, filled his being with dread so powerful that he no longer felt whole.

Unconnected to his component pieces, a mere collection of marbles, inert. Unsurprisingly, Berun was not happy to find himself back in this place. How had he arrived here? Where had he last been? He did not know the answer to either question. He watched the sluggish behemoth fish turn around him, recalling the dread, the absolute certainty of death. To be shut off forever: this was the thing Berun most feared. Some men believed in heaven, or at least a type of continuity, and Berun could see why. The body remained warm for a time after it died. It rotted, split apart and offered its contents to the soil, spurning new growth. But a construct was not a man. It went cold, and then became exactly as it was before life touched it.

If souls existed, they resided in flesh.

Berun threw his head back and roared the tone of a great brass cymbal. Dark water muffled the wordless cry, extinguished it only inches from the ringing cavern of his mouth as if it were nothing, had never existed—yet the fish jerked and dropped to the lake bottom around him, stunned or killed by the pressure of his voice. Small and large, they littered the ground at his feet. He took no joy in this. It had not been his desire. He had not acted with intention, only feeling.