No Return

by Zachary Jernigan

  “I disagree,” she said.

  They nodded to one another, expressions blank. It had been a year since they had last discussed their positions. She had hoped his would change over time, but it was only hope. In truth, her intention in talking with him had not been to exchange views, but to inform him of the decision she had already made. That she, Captain of the Royal Outbound Mages, needed to talk around the issue instead of dealing with it directly angered her.

  Fortunately, he could read her quite well.

  He sighed. “Tell me what plan you have concocted.”

  ‡

  After Pol left, Ebn squirted a solution of reconstituted elder semen and menstrual fluid into her womb. Five hours later, she had nearly reached the end of her spell-casting.

  Naked, knees spread to the noon sun, she reclined on a chaise a servant had carried onto the balcony. At the juncture of her long, slender thighs, the fingers of her right hand caressed a blood-red flower. She moaned softly, in time to the waves of pleasure spreading through her body. The muscles of her stomach bunched and released. Her buttocks lifted from the cushion, fell back.

  No one could see her from the apartments above, for she had erected a visibility barrier.

  Her skin was the exact color and texture of eggplant, and far hotter to the touch than a human’s. Veins slightly darker than her skin, nearly black, spiderwebbed and branched over the sinuous lines of her body, which was hard and angular. Like most eldermen, her mouth was small, her teeth sharp. Unlike most eldermen, her eyes were emerald rather than amber, her hair just a shade lighter than black. Her variation was not as extreme as Pol’s, but it did cause the occasional second glance.

  Many thought her quite beautiful.

  She closed her eyes. The sunlight caught and refracted in the fine transparent down that covered her body, causing her skin to shimmer as though it were wet. She did not in fact sweat, and like a desert cat avoided touching water to her skin.

  Her moans became louder as she neared orgasm, and her hand descended so that it lay flat against her clitoris. The tongue in the center of her palm lapped hungrily, and she began to gasp. Her left hand, encased as it nearly always was in a black glove, rose from the cushion. She bit a clawtip, pulled the glove off, and spat it to the floor. The tongue in this palm emerged and began licking her left nipple. The small, toothless mouth it had emerged from suckled but made no noise. The tendons of her neck stood out. A sliver of emerald flashed from behind her eyelids and disappeared. As the pleasure increased, her hips rose from the chaise completely.

  A line of clear fluid dripped from underneath her right hand and fell on the cushion, where it hardened almost immediately, puckering into a clear pebble. It rolled off and onto the balcony, where a great many more were scattered.

  She screamed. The sound fell somewhere between a dog’s bark and a seagull’s cry. No one heard it, for she had erected a sound barrier.

  “Pol,” she moaned as she wound down.

  The arch of her body collapsed. She panted, ribs standing out on her whip-thin frame. Her breasts bobbed high and tight on her chest. Now that her hands’ work was done, she balled them into fists, forcing the tongues back into their mouths and fighting a vague sense of nausea. Absently, she reached to the floor, hand still clenched, using the claws of index finger and thumb to retrieve the glove.

  She pulled it on and rested a moment. Then she began to cast her spell again.

  ‡

  She could replay the fantasy in great detail, for much of it had actually occurred. Sixty years previously, during a routine solo ascension to the moon, she had tried to seduce Adrash. Time had not made the fact of her transgression any easier to confront, yet the memory had its use. Desire of that magnitude—hunger that compelled one forward, even to the point of destruction—created a uniquely efficacious mental state for casting a spell of compulsion. Of course, she had altered the memory so that it veered from history at the right moment, ending in satisfaction rather than violence.

  As she relaxed, the sounds of the city below gradually faded away, replaced by the nothingness of the void. It flooded her mind, cold beyond reason. The world of her fantasy rippled into focus, materialized into existence.

  The moon’s fractured surface rushed by underneath her, less than a stone’s throw distant. It seemed to reach for her, drag her down. Adrash floated above her, the plain, graceful geometry of his body half in shadow. With his eyes closed, the divine armor covered him completely.

  They were alone.

  She shivered with fear. Though the outboud mages and their telescopists had observed the god immobile many times, Ebn did not know how she had managed to approach him unaware. Perhaps, she reasoned, he had lost himself in meditation or entered into a state of hibernation to conserve energy. Many academics believed that even someone as powerful as Adrash could not survive easily in the void.

  Or perhaps, Ebn said to herself, he has led me here on purpose.

  No, a more prudent part of her whispered. You are here to observe, nothing more. Flee before you bring destruction upon yourself!

  She ignored the voice of reason. Knowing the act to be pure madness, she cast a spell of protection around Adrash’s body, a bubble of breathable atmosphere, and joined hers to it, shuddering as the temperature dropped precipitously. Such spells never joined perfectly, always allowing a bit of the void in.

  She raised the heat immediately, and cautiously floated closer to the god, drawn toward perfection beyond mortal comprehension. Here was an attraction beyond any she had felt before, beyond what she would later experience with Pol. The intensity of her compulsion felt dangerous, as though she were standing on the edge of a cliff. The tongues in her palms stirred, pushing at the fabric of her gloves.

  She reached forward and stopped. She had no desire to touch Adrash with a barrier between them. The skin of her thighs and throat tingled.

  Undressing was a laborious process, as the suit she wore had been designed for traveling the void, protecting its wearer in the event of a brief spell failure. All of one piece and black, sectioned like armor and tattooed with brown sigils, it came off her body like an insect’s shed skin. Her eyes stayed fixed on Adrash as she pulled slowly free.

  Her body was chalked in a unique bonedust blend—ground elder bone, sinew and skin, an extra precaution against the void: she had not become an expert mage due to genius, but thoroughness. Opening her fists, she allowed the mouths in her palms to open, her tongues to taste the trapped air.

  Adrash had not stirred. He might as well have been a statue of white stone. He glowed in the light of the sun, brighter than the moon in the sky. She traced the outline of one heavy pectoral muscle with her left index claw before finding the nerve to lay the back of her hand against it. The surface of the divine armor was cool, only slightly colder than a man’s skin but infinitely smoother. Flawless. The muscle underneath gave to pressure just as it should.

  In every way he was her opposite. Thickly muscled rather than wiry, pale rather than dark, unlined rather than mapped in vein. They shared height, and that was all, she being somewhat short for an elderwoman, he somewhat tall for a man.

  Her right hand went to her womanhood.

  He failed to react to her tentative caress, so she moved closer, running her palm and its tongue over his smooth scalp, the contours of his body. He tasted clean, like water or snow. She avoided the prominent bulge of his genitals for a time, but eventually temptation overcame her. She ran her hand down the ridges of his belly and cupped his testicles, allowing the tongue to lick along his confined length. She closed her eyes and moaned.

  Here, if she had been truly remembering rather than fantasizing, Adrash would wake. The light of his eyes would blind her and his voice would roar in her mind, flooding her, pressing against the inside of her skull until the blood ran from her ears. Then, moving faster than sight could follow, his fingers would be around her neck...

  She turned from such thoughts with practiced ease and con
tinued. He became hard under her caresses, but could not break free from the skin of his armor. His length stayed pressed against his testicles under the smooth barrier. Like anyone, as a child Ebn had been educated about Adrash. Nothing is impossible for him, the tutors had told her. He can split the ocean and walk around the world. He can stop the moon in the sky. He could do all of these things, but in her fantasy he could not break free of embrace of the divine armor.

  His entrapment excited her. He still had not opened his eyes, had not moved his arms or legs. Touching herself, she wrapped her legs around his, heels tight below his firm buttocks. She placed both hands on his chest and ground herself into his erection. She kissed the faint outline of his mouth, and slowly it responded—so slowly that at first she believed herself to be imagining it. His lips warmed, became hot. They parted and her tongue met his. He tasted of cinnamon and anise. His arms encircled her waist.

  She opened her eyes.

  Adrash had become Pol. He stared at her with two sets of pupils, and the corners of his mouth twitched. His hands fell to grip her hips. Her hearts beat off rhythm as she guided his length into her.

  She screamed.

  ‡

  For sixty years, two decades longer than most eldermen lived, Ebn had rented a closet-sized room in the southern wing of the Academy of Applied Magics library. Its single window looked out on three academy rooftops liberally covered in pigeon droppings. Beyond these, humble, single-story buildings carpeted the broad eastern valley floor. Not a river or lake in sight.

  She preferred the office to her sumptuous apartment, just as she preferred oil lamps to alchemical candelabras. Here she had built shelves that covered the walls, filling them with every important book she owned. Cracked-spined novels and pornographic picture books mingled with esoteric texts on religion and the magics. Two shelves buckled under the weight of her most prized possession: the twenty-seven volume Historig Jerung, Ponmargel’s survey of mankind’s recorded and fabled antiquity. Twenty-four millennia of history, nearly two hundred pounds of text. She had read it through only once.

  From the ceiling hung her favorite models. An airship she had built as a child, struts showing through a thin sheepskin gasbag. An elephant-drawn carriage. The twelve known planets, spinning lazily around an orange sun.

  Knickknacks collected during a long career lined the windowsill. Presents from associates and mementoes from travel, mostly.

  Papers littered her desk and gathered dust in piles. A half circle of clear area remained, though it too was busy with ink blotches and compass scratches.

  She had built a hinged bed that secured against the wall under her desk. Seven days out of nine she slept here, even though it was a mere five-minute walk to her apartment. Certainly, she loved close spaces and the smell of books, but her preference was based more upon the position of the office than its interior. The Needle crossed the upper portion of the window for a mere nine days in the Month of Sawyers. The rest of the year it sailed clear over.

  Experience proved that if she saw it too often her optimism failed her. It became impossible to deny the obvious any longer: A string of steel cages large enough to affect the tides was not an ornament. It was a threat of annihilation.

  Of course, the inhabitants of the world knew this as well, but they had the luxury of ignorance, of self-deception. They prayed to Adrash for redemption and fought wars of faith, believing their efforts had an effect, all the while succored into a false sense of security by the Needle’s apparent immutability. Despite its fluctuations—and time had turned even the Cataclysm into a minor fluctuation, a myth—it had extended across the sky for fifty generations. It had become fact, passed down mankind’s generations. For all their words of doom, few believed in the threat of actual destruction.

  Ebn knew better. She had experienced Adrash’s wrath firsthand, and only escaped it by a miracle. Allowed to approach him while he slept—a miracle in and of itself—she had been spared to do the work of proving the world’s worth.

  This responsibility weighed upon her. She considered her weaknesses, and wondered if she might not be overcome by temptation a second time. Surely, she had lived life fearful that someone would repeat her mistake. For fear of bringing ruin upon them all, she had assured that no outbound mage ventured too close to Adrash.

  For decades, this cautiousness had seemed a virtue, but age had brought with it doubt. Perhaps, she reasoned, she had hobbled her mages to keep them away from the god. Perhaps she had merely been biding her time, waiting for another opportunity.

  At night, she dreamt of surviving the death of the world with Adrash at her side.

  ‡

  Ebn allowed only one person to meet her regularly in the office. Qon et Gal, her second-in-command, had been her friend since the age of six. For forty years Ebn had shared her age-nullifying treatment, a unique alteration to the standard alchemical solution developed by her predecessor, with Qon alone.

  Growing old, Ebn joked, would be awful without someone to share the indignity.

  Qon rolled one of the clear pebbles Ebn’s spell had produced between her clawtips. She held it close to her nose and sniffed. Her eyes narrowed.

  “No,” she said. “I have never seen one, but I have heard of it. Apparently, sex spells require a fine touch to produce the desired effect.” She eyed the full clay jar. “How long have you been working on these?”

  Ebn shrugged, cheeks darkening almost imperceptibly as she blushed. “A year, approximately. I can only do it every couple of weeks, it tires me so much. Before beginning, I studied and practiced for several months.”

  Qon’s eyebrows rose ever so slightly. “Poor you.”

  “Shut up,” Ebn said good-naturedly. “I talked with Pol over breakfast.”

  “Ah.” Qon’s expression did not change, though she knew of her friend’s attraction. She had voiced her low opinion of Pol many times, speaking honestly as a true friend should. “It was as you expected?”

  “Yes.”

  “And these?” Qon nodded at the jar. “You intend to seduce him, then sway him to your viewpoint?”

  Ebn sighed. “You think that little of me? No. I have already talked with him. He does not see our perspective, but he understands my command: Adrash must not be approached by any one mage. Making our intention clear is dependent on everyone acting in concert.” A brief memory of her hands on the god’s flanks flashed through her mind. “Even then we do not know what may offend him.”

  Qon nodded, silent. Ebn knew her lieutenant did not take the explanation at face value. She would not come out and ask if Ebn intended to seduce Pol, but undoubtedly she wondered. If Ebn did manage to seduce Pol—an act she had dreamt many times but could hardly conceive of doing—all speculation would cease. In fact, Qon would probably congratulate her.

  Ebn picked up a spell, rolled it between her palms. “I have been producing these with no clear intention in mind. Talking with Pol this morning gave me an idea, however. I think we can use them to show our goodwill to Adrash.”

  “Are you sure this is wise?”

  Spent, Ebn smiled without feeling. “No. I am not sure it is wise. But if you will sit with me I will try to explain. Maybe we can work the kinks out together.”

  POL TANZ ET SOM

  THE 16th OF THE MONTH OF SOLDIERS, 12499 MD

  THE CITY OF TANSOT, KINGDOM OF STOL

  The taste of lemon lingered, cloying in his mouth. He prepared a heavily spiced lunch on his own and ate it over a collection of stamped forms, struggling not to let anger overtake him. Fourteen separate requisitions for alchemicals, denied in the last month. Clipped to the final form was a note from the department bursar: Pol Tanz et Som, M.O.: Due to the ever-rising prices of the elder corpse market,

  we must reject the additional alchemicals you have herein requested. Perhaps in the future, your research will warrant an expenditure of this magnitude. You are invited, as always, to make use of recycled materials in the faculty labs.

  Recycled m
aterials! Drained, lusterless ampoules of spent magic, barely suitable for the most basic of spells! Apparently, the administration expected him to do advanced research with fingernail clippings and candle wax. Maybe they thought prayer alone could sustain him.

  Pol wondered if he could bring himself to ask a senior mage for assistance.

  No. He possessed little stomach for begging favors from his peers, and such eldermen were likely to report his more esoteric undertakings to Ebn. At times, he felt as if she had persuaded the entire corps to watch him. Even the most conservative of his recent proposals had been met with suspicion. Some of the junior mages expressed interest in his theories, of course, but the junior mages were powerless and thus easily manipulated. They would spy on him to advance their careers.

  You are too young to be so ambitious. Wait your turn.

  He brushed the forms into the trash with the gnawed ostrich anklebones. He absently popped a gingersalt candy in his mouth and considered the problem. By its very nature, the academy did not cater to new thinking, and in the ranks of outbound mages the effect was even worse. He would need to take an unconventional tack if he had any chance of acquiring what he needed to resume his research and weaken Ebn’s position.

  A more diplomatic approach, she had said. Ridiculous.

  He left the apartment, not yet sure where he was going. The hallways were nearly empty. A quick spell, no more than a brief automatic query, gave him the time: thirty-three minutes past two. That explained it. Lunch and catnaps in the slanting sun. Eldermen were adept at many things, but afternoons were not one of them.

  Pol himself felt the pull of a full stomach and sunbath, but the energy of youth sustained him. At twenty-three, his constitution was at its most agreeable. As a boy, it had seemed forever would come and go before his body would respond to his wishes. Then again, without the age-nullifying treatments that came with high rank in the academy, in ten years he would be an old man.