No Return

by Zachary Jernigan

  “Who?” Berun asked.

  Omali blinked out of existence again, and reappeared after a handful of seconds. The man at Berun’s feet did the same. Suddenly, the view Berun had of the street in Butchertown superimposed itself over everything. It blinked on and off. The vision started to fade around Berun.

  “Who?” he asked again. “Tell me, Father.”

  Omali shook his head, frowned. He started to speak, stopped. For a brief moment, he had no mouth, just a smooth layer of skin below his nose. After several false starts, he finally spoke in a voice that grated like a whetstone against a rusty steel blade.

  “A man who will upset the balance. He is—”

  Before any more could be said, the vision ended.

  ‡

  “My father has summoned me on an errand,” Berun told the abbey master. “I must go to Danoor.”

  Nhamed looked up from his meal. He dipped his chopsticks in the steel cleansing cup and positioned them precisely on his napkin. The dinner items were arranged before him carefully, aligned so that each complemented its neighbor. He ran hands over thighs and stomach, as though seeking to brush invisible crumbs from him. He sighed, eyes roving around the nearly empty room, landing everywhere but on Berun.

  Berun did not mind the wait. The master was an interesting man to observe. He projected an air of tense, even awkward fastidiousness inside the walls of the abbey, which clashed oddly with the wild zeal he displayed in battle.

  “Explain,” Nhamed eventually said.

  Berun described the vision, the details of which had not faded, but cemented themselves in his mind. When he looked inward, he could recall the events as if they had occurred in the abbey the day previously.

  Nhamed’s eyes stared fixedly above Berun’s head. “To my knowledge, your creator is dead. You think a dream enough to leave the city? There are men who will remember your name along the road.” He furrowed his brow. “Men who... Men who will not be friendly.”

  “I know this,” Berun said. “And yes, it’s enough.”

  Strangely, it was. Despite his youth, Berun was not naïve. Omali had never appeared to him before, but it explained why Berun had recently experienced visions with such regularity. Surely, Omali had caused them for a reason. Perhaps this trust itself proved that his creator had programmed him for certain behavior, but Berun was not generally given to flights of speculation.

  Besides, he surmised, there would be fighting in Danoor. To celebrate the new year, the city had scheduled a secular tournament to follow the contest between the Black and White orders. That alone was reason to go. For a moment, he questioned why the trip had not occurred to him before.

  Nhamed’s eyes finally found Berun’s. “Then we will miss you. Will you...” The master cleared his throat delicately. “Will you return? We have grown fond of you, and the White Suits...”

  Berun caught his meaning. “I will return,” he said. “And I will bring money.” Nhamed raised his eyebrows and made a noncommittal sound. Berun assumed the man would not try to stop him, but he had misjudged people before. Men, he knew, often hid their intentions from themselves. They made decisions without knowing why.

  “Well,” Nhamed finally said. “If you insist upon leaving, I have just received word of another man’s journey to Danoor. Golna’s champion has been chosen.” A sour expression crossed his face. He moved his lips, apparently searching for words. “He is, I know, a man of honor. I have never trusted his master, but I do not doubt his charge. It will be safer to travel with him. He may even protect you.”

  Berun refrained from laughing. “Who is he?”

  ‡

  The abbey masters had arranged for Berun and his traveling companion to meet the following morning at the Tam Docks in Heblast, the westernmost neighborhood in Golna. Impatient to get moving, Berun arrived early and attempted to distract himself by watching the fishermen unload the night’s catch from their flat-bottomed riverboats. In quick time, butcher stalls were erected. Chum buckets overflowed. Restaurant and foodstall owners filled the boardwalk, straining past their neighbors to offer money for the best cuts.

  Nhamed had given Berun a description of Vedas Tezul, but he disregarded it. He would not search the crowd for a particular face. Like Ulomi men, Knosi all looked the same to him. Most likely, it would be some time before he was able to differentiate Vedas from his countrymen. It made far more sense for the man to find Berun.

  Of course, resentment spurred this decision, as well. The presumption of Nhamed, thinking Berun needed protection! He wondered why he had allowed himself to be corralled to the docks, why he did not even now walk away. He always knew the direction in which he traveled, could always place himself on the map of Knoori his creator had placed inside his head. Surely, he could walk from Dareth Hlum to Danoor in three and a half months. One and a half months would have been enough time. Nhamed worried too much.

  Nonetheless, Berun waited, curious despite himself. A Black Suit—perhaps the man Omali had commanded him to watch. Certainly, Berun had received no message not to accompany the man, even though his presence slowed travel considerably.

  Despite having spent a day and night meditating on Omali’s mystifying words, Berun had not been able to achieve peace. Indeed, his indignation only grew. He chafed at being controlled, but did not know enough to call his mission a fool’s errand. What if Vedas truly did pose a threat? Berun would not revolt against his creator without a compelling reason.

  Conceivably, he did not possess the means to revolt. He shifted from foot to foot, suddenly restless. Winning tournaments in Golna had bolstered his confidence, assured him of his strength. The possibility that he had underestimated his own weakness discomforted him.

  The sun rose above the horizon, and the crowd began to clear from the boardwalk.

  “You are Berun?”

  “Yes,” Berun rumbled. He turned from his view of the river and regarded the man.

  As he had expected, Vedas Tezul was to most appearances a typical Knosi, broad nosed and black skinned. Unlike many of his countrymen, however, he did not wear his hair in long matted cords or as a halo around his head. Instead, he chose to shave his scalp and face bald. He had not adorned his elder-cloth suit with artistic designs or caused it to form thick armor. Overall, Berun considered the effect somewhat unimpressive, as if the man were only half-finished. Even his posture was unnaturally stiff. He looked like a man who had never become comfortable in his skin.

  “Ten days.” Vedas said. “Nbena is only two hundred miles. You can manage twenty miles a day?”

  Berun bit back his first reply. “Yes,” he said simply. Was the man an idiot? Of course he could walk twenty miles a day. He could walk miles around Vedas Tezul.

  “Do you need to purchase any supplies?” the man asked.

  Berun stared.

  Father, he thought. This can’t be the man you want me to watch.

  CHURLI CASTA JONS

  THE 18th AND 19th OF THE MONTH OF SOLDIERS, 12499 MD

  THE TOWN OF BASEC, NATION OF CASTA

  The old men of Basec thrust their staff-ends into the unfinished wooden stands of their small theater. They did not smile or stand in respect, and the weak sound of their applause drifted away with the dry breeze. Several of the torches had gone out during the fight, but no one had moved to relight them. Money changed hands quietly as the crowd of old men climbed the stands—white-robed figures disappearing over the hillock like undead returning to graves.

  Churls lowered her tattooed arms and looked down. The boy’s body lay broken on the blood-spattered dirt at her feet, a vertical dent running the length of his pulped face.

  “Peace,” she said, expressionless.

  She patted herself down and rubbed her bare skin, checking for unnoticed injury and letting several grams of dirt float free from her leathers. Her eyes felt scratchy in their sockets. She pulled a torch from the perimeter of the fighting floor and searched the ground for thrown coins.

  “Coins,” s
he muttered. “Fucking savages.”

  A quick search found seven, barely worth the effort. One beer’s worth, probably. She dropped the torch and retrieved her sword from the ground. Its pitted surface came clean with a little gritty dirt. Lastly, she clipped the coin belts free from her and the boy’s waists, and cut each bag open. Sixty-four bona, as she had been promised. At the expected exchange rate, it would get her two grams of heavily contaminated bonedust. Hardly worth the effort of conversion.

  She was tired, disappointed with the fight’s outcome. The boy had been trained well, and killing him had not been her intention. He never stopped attacking, though, even after she broke his left femur and kicked the flail out of his hand. Grunting through a mouthful of blood, he crawled after her. No one in the crowd called it done. Resigned, she had finally flipped him over and crushed his skull.

  Fucking savages .

  Still, one had to live somehow. In her own estimation, Churls possessed no other skills to speak of. Gambling had gotten her in quite a bit of trouble a year previously, so it would be some time before she could return to Onsa, where the real money was. Shame the men of the badlands had so little money. Shame they had so little talent. They took what entertainment they could from watching their boys fight, watching them die.

  There were good reasons so few fighters made it out here, Churls knew. One had to be in dire straits to scrounge in the dirt for coins.

  Leaving the body where it lay, she climbed the shallow steps of the theater. An odd feeling, as if she were being watched, made her pause at the top. Her heart pounded against her ribs.

  “What do you want?” she asked. She tried to make her body move forward, and failed.

  She turned. A pale figure stood next to the boy’s corpse: A white-skinned child, dressed in a white school tunic. Her hair, her slippers, her socks—all white. Her face could not be seen from the top of the theater, but Churls did not need to see it. She would have recognized the girl’s posture anywhere. Few children had ever communicated world-weariness so well, or at such a young age.

  Churls had not seen her daughter for at least three months. A decade had passed since she had seen the girl alive.

  “Hello, Fyra,” Churls said.

  The girl nodded, gaze never leaving the body at her feet.

  You killed him, she said.

  “Yes.” Churls sighed. “I killed him.”

  Fyra disappeared and reappeared next to her mother. Involuntarily, Churls flinched, just as she had done when the girl surprised her by popping out from behind a corner when she was alive. Fyra had lived with her grandmother, and as a result Churls never became accustomed to children. Not even her own daughter. The fact that the girl had become a ghost did not change matters overly much.

  Fyra looked up at Churls with eyes far older than a ten-year-old’s. They alone were not a shade of white, but clear and blue like her mother’s.

  Did you like it? Fyra asked.

  Churls took a step backwards just as Fyra reached for her hand. It was a coincidence, Churls reasoned to herself, yet she stared at the little hand the way one might stare at a live scorpion.

  “No,” she answered. “I didn’t like killing him at all.”

  Are you sure? Fyra said. You liked killing the last man. You told me you did.

  Churls frowned. She knew the man her daughter referred to. The last time Fyra appeared, Churls had just killed an infantryman of the Castan Third in a fair fight. He had nearly bested her, and she had enjoyed every moment.

  “That’s true.” Churls smiled awkwardly, like a person trying on an expression for the first time. “But that was a very different situation. You do see the difference, don’t you, Fyra?”

  The girl looked down at her hand, and slowly let it fall back to her side.

  She said, There’s no difference, Mama. This one’s just as dead as the other one.

  Churls shook her head. “You’re not seeing what I mean. The man I killed in Donda was a trained warrior. He and I both knew what we were getting into. The difference is clear. I know you’re old enough to see it. And you can, can’t you, now that I’ve explained it?”

  Fyra disappeared and reappeared next to the boy’s corpse. For a long while, she simply stared at him. Churls grew uncomfortable and tried to think of something to say. Surely, the child could tell the difference. She was not, after all, a child.

  Fyra cocked her head like a dog, then cocked it the other way.

  No, she finally said. I don’t see the difference at all.

  Their eyes met from across the theater. Churls formed the old words in her mind, working up the nerve to speak. I wish you wouldn’t watch me when I fight. I wish I’d been there when you died. I’m happy I wasn’t. I love you. I hate you. Why don’t you leave me alone? Don’t leave, sweetie. Stay. Though the words were true, none of them sounded right, and her lips would not move no matter how hard she tried. Nonetheless, a raw lump formed in her throat, as though she had been speaking for a long time indeed.

  “I...” The word was a croak. “Fyra, you...”

  I don’t want to talk about this boy anymore , the child said. And someone is waiting for you in your hostel.

  She disappeared, back to the land of the dead.

  ‡

  Churls finished her fifth beer, worried that the evening might result in a bad decision. Frankly, the situation felt out of her hands. The young men in the bar, none of whom had been present at the fight but had heard of her victory—young men who were nothing like their fathers, who knew the price of killing—would not let her pay for her drinks. And as the fight and Fyra’s appearance had not stopped troubling her, she decided to keep drinking.

  Last but by no means least, she had no intention of returning to her hostel. Someone is waiting for you.

  Fuck that, Churls thought. Probably trying to collect on her debt. She owed nearly sixty ounces in gambling losses. Onsa was only eight hundred miles away, and she had not been overly attentive while covering her tracks. As if on cue, a hand fell on her shoulder. She did not tense up, but let her right fist drop into her lap like it had fallen. Closer to her sword, better position for an elbow to the groin.

  “Thought I’d find you here,” a familiar voice said. There was garlic on his breath. “Another drink?”

  Churls closed her eyes and smiled into her empty glass. “This is a bad dream, then, isn’t it? Of all the people I wanted to see, in all the world, you’re the last.” She turned to the speaker and winced theatrically. “You look like shit, Gorum. You know you look like shit? You woke up and told yourself, I’m going to look like shit today?”

  The man grinned. “I’m one of the only friends you got left in the world. Better be nice to me.”

  They laughed and embraced. She held the contact longer than usual.

  Over his shoulder, Churls saw scowls on a few faces. We bought you a beer, the expressions said. And now you’re running off with him?

  She had experienced their kind of attention many times before. In the badlands, miles from anything resembling civilization, she became something of an exotic treat. Her freckled skin and short-cropped brown hair, her muscles and tattoos and scars, marked her as a different species from the long-haired, slate-skinned local women. Their thin hands and feet barely peeked out from folds of draped cloth while Churls walked about in leather halter and brass-pleated skirt.

  The men of the badlands thought her small breasts were cute. They thought the gap between her two front teeth was cute.

  They could get possessive very quickly.

  “Boys!” she yelled, disengaging from Gorum. “The round’s on my friend here!”

  Still no smiles, but they took their drinks while Gorum scowled and paid. He understood such things, though Churls knew his preference was to push his luck as far as it would extend, and then break some bones. He had been a fighter once, before discovering how much money could be made representing other fighters. He arranged matches for them and took a percentage of the cut.r />
  She had been a disappointment to him of late. She had lost too much money gambling, started drinking too much, and started losing fights. As things got worse, she took to fighting easier opponents. Less money, less respect. Soon the strongarms were knocking on her door, leaving threatening messages at her haunts. She left Onsa the autumn of ’98 and kept a low profile, avoiding city centers as much as possible. Gorum had not contacted her, presumably because she was no longer bringing in any real money.

  They had been lovers once, what felt like a long time ago.

  “How did you get here?” she asked as soon as the beer was distributed, the bill paid. They sat together at a corner table, close but not touching. His fingernails were dirtier than she had ever seen them. The tops of his forearms were sunburned. He did not like horses or camping, and never strayed far from cities. Something extraordinary had brought him to her.

  “Construct horse, if you can believe it.” He rubbed his thighs and grunted. She imagined the cost of such a thing and whistled. He continued. “I was actually finishing a tour of the Five Sisters, looking for talent. Not much luck. In Dunn, I received a message and knew I had to get to you. Fortunately, you were easy to find.”

  “Well then, that’s that. What’s this message all about?”

  He wiped foam from his mustache. “An opportunity, Churli. Have you heard about the tournament in Danoor?”

  “You can’t be serious.” Of course she knew about it. What else occurred at the end of every decade and attracted every madman in the world? Of course, this year’s would be even madder, falling as it did halfway through the millennium. “It’s a thousand miles away, through places I’d rather not go. Besides, I try not to mix religion and killing. Liable to get you killed.”