No Return

by Zachary Jernigan

  She flinched as a ragged scream tore through the night, far louder a sound than elderman or human lungs could produce.

  “Better get settled, miss,” the tamer said, positioning the grimy blackrimmed goggles over his eyes. “Dragon coming down.”

  ‡

  A long shape blotted out a section of stars above them. Wings the size of galleon sails forced waves of compacted air downward, pushing the voidsuited bodies into the floor. The wyrm roared again. Muffled through the outbound mages’ glass helmets, the sound was nearly indistinguishable from the wind.

  The beast descended and the pressure increased. Ebn craned her neck to see the tamer. He had wrapped his arms and legs around the sky-hook’s shaft, but his goggled eyes were directed upward. He yelled, and whether they were incantations or encouragements, Ebn did not know. Wyrms were violently temperamental, and the elder hybrids the Tamer’s Guild raised from hatchlings could only roughly be called tame.

  Ebn assumed the tamer’s lore would be sufficient to control the beast, for its task was simple enough. Still, she found herself mouthing a silent entreaty to Adrash for his blessing.

  Apparently, he heard. The building shook as it took the wyrm’s weight, and the air stilled.

  Ebn opened eyes she had not realized were closed.

  For a moment, the scope of the animal could not be fathomed. When she turned her head, the large black object a few feet from her head resolved itself into one of the beast’s talons. She gazed up at its heaving stomach, a full thirty feet above her, and shuddered. It was so immense! She had never seen a wyrm up close. Craning her neck painfully, she located its head, which hung far out over the roof ’s edge. The animal seemed to be watching the city.

  The tamer whooped, and Ebn shuddered again to see that vicious, wedgeshaped head swinging toward the roof. It came sailing in, and she lost scope once more: a giant black fist, a meteor tumbling out of the night sky. The visions fused, became a tooth-lined grin as long as two men, a gigantic double-pupiled eye glowing soft blue. The head lay against the stone floor, and above it floated the horned head of the tamer.

  No, not floated. He stood behind the wyrm’s head, and spoke in its ear. The talons near Ebn twitched, scraping across the flagstones. The wyrm gripped the statue easily with one foot and Ebn winced, though she had strengthened the marble with reliable spells only hours ago.

  The great head rose, dragging the length of its neck in an arcing line behind it. Flexing its haunches, the wyrm’s stomach lowered until it seemed it would be impaled by the sky-hook. The tamer huddled under the beast, a huge man compressed into insignificance.

  A cry rose in Ebn’s throat as the wyrm leapt upward, sky-hook firmly gripped in its other foot. The gust of its passage pressed her flat into the roof, knocking the cry from her lips. She counted to thirty as the beast rose into the air, unhooked her feet, and slammed her gauntleted fist into the first spell on her bandolier. To her right, she saw Qon do the same. Ebn whispered the gathering words, her own secret incantation to bind the mages’ energy together and keep them safe during flight. Immediately, she felt as if she were being pushed from either side—like a giant pair of hands squeezing her flat. Lines of red fire shot from the mages’ bodies and wound together above the roof, forming a rope that shot heavenward, converging on the statue clutched in the wyrm’s foot. Any moment now, Ebn thought.

  They shot into the sky.

  ‡

  Rising swiftly under the wyrm’s power, they spun slowly, a circle of suited figures at the end of a fire tether. Ebn’s complex spell caused the mages’ suits to repel each other, so that no one crashed into their neighbor. For all of her planning, however, she had not prepared herself for the nausea. Rising straight into orbit was one thing, spinning and being jounced around another thing entirely. She looked to the right and caught Qon’s eye.

  The woman was grinning.

  “An odd way to enter the void,” she had said when Ebn outlined the plan originally. “I see the need for the wyrm, I suppose, though I think in time we could develop a spell powerful enough to lift something as large as the statue into orbit.”

  “We do not have the time,” Ebn said. “And I want us to be as fresh as possible when we reach orbit.”

  Qon’s eyes roved over the thaumatic diagrams again. “Two questions. Will the tamer be able to handle heights of this magnitude? Thirty miles is no joke, Ebn. And will this spell”—she pointed to the projections Ebn had drawn out—“be enough to lift the statue in the event several of the less experienced mages are disoriented from the ride? Or simply afraid?”

  Ebn nodded. “The tamer assures me that he can make it, and I see no reason to disbelieve him. It is his life on the line, too. From the point where he turns back to earth, it is but a short push. I have done the maths over and over. You and Pol and I could lift it into orbit by ourselves if need be.”

  “Would we be able to affect any spells afterwards?”

  “Probably not.” Ebn traced the line of trajectory she had drawn, met her friend’s eyes, and shrugged. “But I think it highly unlikely that thirty-nine well-trained mages will suffer fits of uselessness at the exact same time.”

  Qon quirked an eyebrow. “I think we crossed the line separating likely and unlikely some time ago.”

  POL TANZ ET SOM

  THE 23rd TO THE 25rd OF THE MONTH OF CLERGYMEN, 12499 MD

  JEROUN ORBIT

  From twenty miles up, Tansot was only a speck of light on the ebon blanket of earth. The stars above burned brighter every second. A vague but definite shadow above the spinning mages, the wyrm beat immense wings against air too thin for any natural creature to fly upon.

  Pol pictured Shav, wrapped tight around the sky-hook, trusting in his pet’s grip, shouting words of tamer lore and encouragement. As the air grew thinner, the spell the quarterstock had imbibed before calling the beast down supplied more and more oxygen to his body. He did not breathe in at all. Drawing in the cold would freeze his lungs instantly.

  With greater height, sound itself began to fail. In his mind’s eye, Pol saw Shav climbing the wyrm’s legs and flank, shimmying up its long neck, straddling its giant head so that he might whisper directions into its ear. When his voice could no longer be heard, the violently shivering tamer crushed another spell against the wyrm’s skull and pressed his ear to the wet scales, freezing the two beings together, forming a seal.

  Tamer and wyrm’s thoughts meshed and became one.

  If the animal allowed, that is.

  Even then it was a tenuous link, Pol knew, though he did not understand the process exactly. In the half-month since he had taken Shav as a lover, he had picked up more tamer lore than the guild normally allowed to outsiders. Still, he was far from conversant. Strictly speaking, he had no desire to be.

  He knew without question that Ebn had made no study of their lore. If she had done so, her plan might not rely upon a madman and his unpredictable charge.

  Pol considered the odd coincidence of Shav’s appearance. Though not by nature a paranoid man, he could not avoid wondering how it was that Ebn had started looking for a tamer at nearly the exact moment of Pol’s meeting one. Shav himself had expressed a similar sentiment. An odd confluence, surely, yet in Pol’s experience such things often occurred without anyone’s arrangement.

  But coincidence or no, he could not ignore the potential in such a meeting of fates. He would turn it to his advantage by remaining vigilant, open to possibilities as they arose. The more connected he became to the world—the less like his timid peers, cloistered behind the walls of the academy—the better he would be able to mold events to suit his needs.

  Fear is not an attribute of Adrash , Pol reminded himself. It will not be one of mine.

  Ebn’s spell pushed the mages farther and farther apart as gravity lost its hold, until their bodies spun nearly horizontal to the distant ground. The fiery tether binding them to the wyrm had faded to nothing in the rarified atmosphere, as Ebn had told them it would,
making it difficult to see one another. The mages signed excitedly over their helmets nonetheless.

  Pol did not partake in the simple conversation. Yes, he knew the plan. Yes, he knew his role. In the last month, Ebn had conducted thirteen briefings. If her officers did not yet know what must be done, they never would.

  A quick and effortless spell, and Pol knew they had reached an altitude of almost twenty-three miles. Another hour, very likely.

  Soon thereafter, Ebn would see the error of her conviction. Adrash had no interest in receiving supplicants, and even less interest in gifts. What need did a god have for baubles when he could cause steel monuments to rise from the moon itself? If the stories of Adrash were true—if seclusion had not turned the god into a shadow of himself—he would see their groveling as the insult it was, and react accordingly.

  In Pol’s estimation, the chances of the outbound mages returning to Jeroun were slim.

  He sighed. Having made preparations for the worst, there was nothing left to do but wait.

  He closed his eyes and considered the riddle of Shav again.

  ‡

  The way his bulk occupied the small apartment near the docks, filling it so that it seemed he could not move without breaking something. Yet move he did. In private, Shav possessed an awareness of his outsized body that shocked Pol. Such poise could rarely be learned. Clearly, he affected clumsiness while fighting to trick his opponents.

  Uncharacteristically and in opposition to the obvious hierarchy of species, Pol found himself intimidated by the quarterstock.

  But it was not merely Shav’s physical prowess that put Pol off balance. That the quarterstock was mad could not be denied. The sickness revealed itself primarily through his eyes, which stared through Pol more often than not, focused on images in his own mind. Sometimes his hands shook and his lips moved as though he were having a silent conversation. Slight tremors moved through him, often causing his whole body to vibrate like a tuning fork.

  At times his madness bloomed into something else—something far beyond the bounds of mental imbalance, bordering on the mystical. While he slept, he spoke in different tongues.

  Pol heard their cadence and rhythm and knew them to be true languages, though he recognized none of the words. His curiosity had compelled him to capture several of the monologues in acoustic jars and show them to a colleague in ancient languages. The man, obviously excited by what he heard, practically demanded to know where Pol had procured the recordings. Pol, unwilling to reveal his source, had walked away, little the wiser.

  This was not all. On several trancelike occasions Shav had seemed to shift into another persona, changing tone, pitch, and vocabulary so completely that Pol wondered if the quarterstock were not in fact inhabited by other personalities. He had heard such things were possible.

  Of course, he knew not to probe Shav too obviously. As their relationship developed, the quarterstock had revealed a deep, incisive intelligence, voiced in ever more sophisticated speech. Recently, he had begun to reveal troublingly precise insights into Pol’s mind. He seemed to possess an instinctive clairvoyance, and as a result Pol no longer knew what to hide and what to reveal. The quarterstock seemed possessed of faculties reason could not explain.

  These traits both repelled and attracted Pol. Shav was important, somehow—even if only because Pol willed it so. He had pursued Shav intuitively, unsure of his own motives, and the quarterstock seemed to be responding in kind. Like opponents in a game of yhor, they danced half-blind around one another, trying to peer at the other’s pieces.

  “You have a plan for me,” Shav had told him the last time they met—undoubtedly, their most troubling conversation yet.

  Pol finished his honey and saffron flatbread slowly, considering. A direct response seemed best. “Obviously I do, Shav. Beyond physical pleasure, I want to understand your hybrid nature. We have talked about it many times. My intentions are no mystery.”

  “No, Pol.” The hybrid’s thick fingers folded the bread around the spiced dates expertly. “That’s not what I mean. I’m good at reading faces, and yours says you’re hiding things from me. Things beyond pleasure and breeding. It’s fine for now if you want to hide. I’ll eventually figure it out, with or without your help.”

  Pol felt an all-too-familiar moment of paranoia, and quickly reviewed their conversation to make sure he had not revealed anything he had not meant to. He opened his mouth, sure of words to come.

  “Don’t,” Shav said. “Denying it won’t do any good. I’ve contacted a linealogist at your academy, and he confirmed my suspicions. A drop of blood or semen will answer all of your questions about my heritage. You have access to both. Of course, you would still need a linealogist to perform the spells, and then your study would be public. Somehow, I gather that isn’t part of your plan. The linealogist was quite eager to know your name.”

  Pol’s hearts beat harder. To be caught pursuing another guild’s lore could land him in some trouble. The fact that he had no intention of casting linealogical spells would make no difference. If the administration searched deep enough, they might even discover that he had been pursuing his own unregistered research with illegally acquired alchemicals. The academy, which inherited any documents of magical innovation upon a mage’s death, considered such illicit practices acts of sedition against Stol, punishable by death.

  The chair creaked under Shav as he sat back. He did not need to smile to show his satisfaction. Not for the first time, Pol wondered what it would be like to fight the quarterstock—what it would be like to straddle his back and wrap fingers around his throat.

  “No,” Shav answered the unspoken question. “I didn’t give him your name. Your secret is safe.”

  “Scholars and mages are jealous of their lore,” Pol said, shrugging the matter away. “The linealogists are no exception. Nor am I. The tamers themselves, for that matter.”

  Shav shook his head. “There’s more to it than that. Sometimes I think you’re simply stalling, waiting for something to announce itself. I’m not... I’m...” Mouth working, he stared through Pol’s chest.

  The back of Pol’s neck tingled as the shift occurred.

  “The dragon and I,” Shav finally said, voice lower than normal, words slightly slurred with the touch of an accent Pol could not name. “A halfbreed and a quarterbreed at this moment in time. The conjunction of the two is interesting, Pol. Interesting. I’ve seen a dragon crash into the sea, sure the animal had killed itself. Instead it surfaced, twisting its long neck and beating its wings upon the water, a great sea serpent clamped in its jaws—a sea serpent so large that it could’ve swallowed our tiny boat in one bite. Its skin shone like silver in the moonlight, and its thrashing frothed the sea like a child’s hand slapping bathwater.”

  Pol did not interrupt, though he knew no mortal man had ever sailed upon the ocean.

  Shav leaned forward, eyes liquid and unfocused. “The Needle had only risen halfway, and the moon showed a quarter of her face. I stared at the destruction coming swiftly: a wall of black water that blotted out the stars along the horizon. I waited and told my men to prepare themselves. Some of them prayed to Adrash, some to Orrus, and some to the devil.” He dipped his head and touched his horns almost reverently. “Me, I just waited for the inevitable, almost wanting it. Most likely, I would die along with my men. An odd feeling, being that powerless.”

  He blinked. His amber eyes refocused. The corners of his mouth twitched, and he spoke in the voice Pol had become accustomed to.

  “Someday soon, I think you’ll know what that feels like.”

  ‡

  To Pol’s astonishment, the statement had haunted him for days. Finally, chagrined that it should take him so long to see the light of reason, he dismissed the possibility that Shav had performed an extraordinary feat of magic. No, the quarterstock had merely read the signs of Pol’s anxiety.

  Though he had seen Adrash through the cloudy lens of magnification spells many times, Pol had never vent
ured within a thousand miles of the god. He had always run from the divine presence as he had been taught—yet if all went according to Ebn’s plan, in less than two weeks he would encounter Adrash in the flesh. The thought made his hearts thunder.

  Pol examined his fear, and it disgusted him.

  Is this the man Adrash will see? he asked himself. A coward?

  Shame drove him forward. A mere day after talking with Shav, he began tattooing himself with alchemical ink of his own design—a foolhardy enterprise, surely. There were precedents, but only a few, and by accounts those men had gone mad.

  Gone mad? An understatement, surely. The mage Dor wa Dol, driven to such insanity by his sigils, had single-handedly caused the Cataclysm. He had been captain of the outbound mages at the time, an elderman in the prime of his ability.

  Clearly, even the hardiest elderman could not handle that much alchemy coursing through his body for long.

  Pol knew the risks, having researched the possibility for years. Aside from the likelihood of overloading one’s body with magic, the execution of each sigil had to be exact. One misstroke, and the consequences would be dire.

  Nonetheless, he proceeded.

  First, his left shoulder: a rudimentary warding sigil. His hand shook so severely that the character—four simple lines—took nearly an hour to complete. When nothing untoward happened—indeed, when his voice failed to rouse the symbol to life—he painted a second, slightly more complex character on his bicep: a flight sigil. This too remained dormant despite his attempts to activate it. Emboldened and not a little frustrated, he drew a sigil on his right wrist, his left shin, his stomach.

  Once started, he could not stop. In numb horror he watched his body become a canvas of inert magical symbols.