No Return Read online

  No Return © 2013 by Zachary Jernigan

  This edition of No Return © 2013 by Night Shade Books

  Jacket illustration by Robbie Trevino

  Jacket design by Claudia Noble

  Interior layout and design by Amy Popovich

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-59780-456-1

  Night Shade Books www.nightshadebooks.com

  For Amy Martin

  CONTENTS

  TITLE

  DEDICATION

  MAPS

  MONTHS

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  VEDAS TEZUL

  BERUN

  CHURLI CASTA JONS

  EBN BON MARI

  POL TANZ ET SOM

  PART TWO

  VEDAS TEZUL

  BERUN

  CHURLI CASTA JONS

  EBN BON MARI

  POL TANZ ET SOM

  PART THREE

  VEDAS TEZUL

  BERUN

  CHURLI CASTA JONS

  EBN BON MARI

  POL TANZ ET SOM

  PART FOUR

  VEDAS TEZUL

  BERUN

  CHURLI CASTA JONS

  EBN BON MARI

  POL TANZ ET SOM

  PART FIVE

  VEDAS TEZUL

  BERUN

  CHURLI CASTA JONS

  EPILOGUE

  GLOSSARY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THE MONTHS OF THE YEAR

  Month of Ascetics

  Month of Alchemists

  Month of Mages

  Month of Sectarians

  Month of Fishers

  Month of Surgeons

  Month of Sawyers

  Month of Smiths

  Month of Drowsers

  Month of Financiers

  Month of Bakers

  Month of Finnakers

  Month of Soldiers

  Month of Clergymen

  Month of Pilots

  Month of Royalty

  PROLOGUE

  The people were small, quiet, and simple. They had no name for themselves.

  They lived at the top of the world of Jeroun, in a windless and barren valley with no accessible entrance, on the shore of a nameless salt lake—perhaps the most beautiful lake in the world. A deep and flawlessly clear cerulean blue under the cloudless sky, its shallow waters never froze and rarely rippled. Almost perfectly circular, it measured twelve miles across, yet the people neither fished nor set craft upon its surface. Now and then, they drank and collapsed on the shore, subject to visions induced by the ensorcelled liquid.

  Their valley had once been home to a great civilization, the site of a city inhabited by the continent’s extinct native people, who were called elders by common men. Mummified corpses measuring over three yards in length lay everywhere, naked to the ever-present sun. A great many lay buried in the rubble of their buildings, which had been worn nearly unrecognizable by time and sun. With few eroding forces, this process had surely taken thousands upon thousands of years. A stone could not chip the building materials.

  The corpses were beautiful, black-skinned and thin-limbed like insects. Their faces were broad-nosed, mouthless and severe. Downy translucent hair covered their bodies, lengthening and darkening into bristly fur on their scalps. Many were tattooed in bright colors. Though as dry inside as the valley soil, impossibly their skin had the texture of calf ’s leather and tasted like sugar-preserved meat. Ground to a fine powder, their bones tasted metallic and bitter, but caused the mouth to salivate, curing thirst.

  The nameless people had consumed a very small percentage of the corpses, as neither skin nor bonedust needed to be ingested in great quantities. The meat and organs were inedible and lay about in piles that would not rot. Had the larger world known what magical resource existed in the valley, empires would have waged wars, sacrificed thousands, in order to possess it. For the men and women who lived along the shores of the nameless lake, this was immaterial. To them, the elders were merely food.

  While the diet provided scant nourishment for the brain, a body could survive well on nothing but elder skin and bone, guaranteeing that it need never sleep, need never worry about clothing itself. In groups of two or three the people of the valley walked the shore of the lake, all night and all day, single-mindedly stripping small pieces of skin and grinding bone ends. They walked naked even in the depths of winter and never felt the cold.

  From time to time, they met others of their kind and shared a meal. They did not talk. Usually they stared at the placid surface of the lake together. On rare occasions, those who faintly recalled a friendship or long-dead romance held hands and watched the stars, but never for long.

  There were good reasons not to stare too deeply into the sky.

  ‡

  Eating elder skin and bone, a human of hardy stock could live a long time indeed. The average age of the inhabitants in the valley was over five hundred years, and the oldest individual had lived for seventeen centuries. She had in fact not been born in the valley, though her reason for coming—as well as the means of her arrival—were long since forgotten. The nameless people were her children, but this knowledge too had been lost. Time had bleached her mind of any urges other than to eat and to watch the sky.

  In the valley, she alone remembered the reason men should fear the sky. She had cemented this fear in her children but was now too old or too simple to feel it herself.

  Fear had become fascination.

  And indeed, she could not have picked a better location from which to view the sky. The valley experienced four hundred cloudless days out of four hundred and thirty-two calendar days. The thin, cold air did not distort the constant burn of the stars or the fractured face of the world’s immense, bone-pale moon.

  Nor what preceded moonrise.

  Every evening, the woman sat and watched as the objects rose above the horizon. The largest of the steel-colored, circular masses was nearly a third the size of the moon. The smallest could only be seen during the early morning, when sunlight reflected on its edges. Twenty-seven in all, she counted. Elsewhere, beyond the reach or understanding of the people of the valley, men called the arrow-straight arrangement the Needle, or sometimes the Spine. Unbeknownst to the woman, on the world she alone had counted all of the objects with the naked eye.

  She knew on some level that they were weapons.

  She had also discovered their construction. They were not flat structures, but slowly rotating spheres. They were not solid, either, but spindly, like gigantic cages.

  It was as if their maker had taken thin-rimmed carriage wheels and welded them along a centerline so that the rims fanned around a vertical axis. The woman had stared long enough to note their slow rotation, the slight shift as one rim caught the light and another gave it up. This effect was most easy to see on the odd days the moon remained in the sky well into morning. The speed of the spheres changed from time to time, and sometimes even seemed to stop. Such alterations depended on factors the woman could not begin to guess.

  Well into her hundredth year in the valley, the night sky had been just stars and moon. Later, one object appeared. Then two. Eventually they extended like a bead necklace nearly a fifth of the length of the sky, smallest to largest leading to the moon, twenty-nine in all. They seemed to pull the moon across the sky, led by some invisibly massive draft animal.

  Over the next five hundred years they had moved slowly to form a diamond pattern, then a cross. For a while they had floated around the moon, sometimes nearer, sometimes farther from its surface, and then they trailed it across the length of the sky. For a long time, the woman thought they had disappeared completely, until she saw the edge of one pee
king out from behind the moon.

  In her seven hundredth year in the valley, the two smallest spheres had fallen to the earth. The woman recalled it dimly, the fiery streaks as the objects hit the atmosphere. They arrowed in opposite directions, and so she had tracked one as it sped westward over the horizon. She waited for something to happen, and when it did not she turned to the east and witnessed a great flash of light. Hours later, the ground shook. The following day a blanket of rainless clouds rolled in, almost touching the spires of the jagged summits ringing the valley.

  It grew much colder for several years, which affected the people of the valley not at all. The woman felt some sadness that she could no longer watch the sky, but she had still been young enough then to take comfort in the closeness of her children. When the clouds lifted, the objects were scattered across the night sky so that not all could be viewed at once. Over the course of a decade, they moved back toward the moon, finally taking on their original, straight arrangement.

  As the brains shrunk in their skulls, the people of the valley drifted apart. The woman circled the edge of the lake alone, drinking its hallucinogenic waters regularly until the greater part of her consciousness lifted free of her body. In time her children forgot that she was their mother, and she pushed them away when they approached her. A low growl lodged deep in her chest.

  Now and then even the taste of skin and bone grew sour in her mouth.

  She did not put a name to it, but she thought often of dying. She watched the sky and hoped to see the objects falling, their beautiful trails of fire dissecting the sky into a giant wheel. She had no religion, no memory of Adrash, the god the other men of the world worshipped, but still it was a form of prayer—a silent, inarticulate longing for change.

  ‡

  Jeroun spun slowly at Adrash’s back, thousands upon thousands of leagues distant. The moon, its gaze locked on the darkened world, loomed to his left, closer though by no means near.

  Adrash floated before a motionless iron sphere, dwarfed by the wall of one immense rim. Its smooth surface extended in all directions. This close, its curvature could not be discerned. The eye tried and failed to see a furthest edge.

  Welded onto its surface was a handle small enough for a large man to grasp with two hands.

  Adrash gripped it tightly. He spread his legs, appeared to plant his feet on the nothingness of the void, and pulled. The heavy muscles of his chest and shoulders bunched with the effort, his sinewy torso turned, and slowly the handle moved forward. At the fullest extension of his arms he stepped to the left and repeated the process. In this way, he spun the sphere faster and faster. His body became a blur of frenzied movement.

  Eventually, he stopped and drifted back from the wall, the rapidly

  approaching edge of which had still not come into view. A comfortable ache suffused his body. Though unnecessary, the exertion had felt good. In the past he had chosen to move the spheres with his mind, but those days were over. It was unsatisfying, somehow. Now he preferred to feel the texture of the metal, the elongation and contraction of muscle tissue.

  His body was that of a man, well over two yards tall and coldly beautiful, a marble statue brought to life. But for his eyes—which glowed a harsh yellow-white, lacking iris and pupil—the seamless white material of his armor sheathed him smoothly from crown to sole, hugging the curves of his powerful frame. Broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, he held himself like a professional soldier, spine straight, hands in loose fists. The features of his face were mere suggestions above the strong line of his jaw.

  From a greater distance, he regarded the sphere. It had become recognizable as such despite its vast scope. Still farther out, the structure appeared delicate and airy due to the great distance between rims. A decorative bauble, a fragile ornament through which the stars burned. To the sphere’s left, a great distance away, spun its larger brother. To the right, a slightly smaller brother. The others were not yet in sight, and the pale hulking weight of the moon suddenly seemed to loom far too near, as if it were pulling the three spheres into it.

  Adrash increased the speed of his retreat. Before long the entire chain of twenty-seven spheres became visible. Positioned halfway down the line, he tried to admire the precision of their placement, their carefully calculated speeds. His last adjustment had guaranteed that once every month the sun’s light would hit the spheres in a particular way, turning the Needle into a line of pale fire in Jeroun’s night sky.

  Of course, he would not witness it from orbit.

  He considered how few of the world’s inhabitants would notice the effect. Those who did would react by pressing their fists to their heads and praying, or by blotting out the Needle with one hand and cursing.

  Both prospects depressed Adrash. Still, he resisted the urge to begin another series of adjustments.

  For many hundreds of years, much of his time had been spent altering the positions and speeds of the spheres, an obsessive drive to find the perfect expression of his dissatisfaction. Finding this abstract expression, he believed, would calm him, heal the wounds in his soul. Ultimately, he had grown weary of the monumental effort and returned the spheres to their original alignment, stringing them in a line equidistant to each other, aligned to the moon’s orbit perfectly, and thus narrowing his focus.

  The only adjustment he allowed himself now was rotational speed. Once, he had spun the spheres so that each revolution matched exactly for a full year. Four hundred and thirty-two revolutions per hour. One hundred and twenty million times the rims passed before his eyes without any revelation. Then he had slowed down and sped up every other sphere in increasing increments so that the fastest two were at either end and the middle one remained still.

  He felt compelled to explore every permutation. Ultimately, he wasted time, distracting himself from the decision he would soon have to make.

  Return to Jeroun as mankind’s redeemer, or cleanse the world of mankind forever.

  ‡

  Unfortunately, time had only made the world’s destruction more of an inevitability. Though Adrash had successfully put off the decision for seven thousand years—first by exiling himself above Jeroun, and then by creating the Needle itself—his relationship to the people of the world had not changed.

  He could not love mankind, because he saw their brilliance for the thing it was: an exquisitely frail quality that could never make up for the effects of their fear. In fact, more often than not intelligence compounded mankind’s negative tendencies. The aggressive wielded their intellects like weapons to subjugate the humble and the less gifted. Given free reign—and there was little reason to think they would not eventually achieve complete dominion—such men would bury what little virtue remained in the world.

  No, he could not forgive men their pettiness, their squabbling, their ridiculous and violent worship. Of course, as a young god he had spent several eons encouraging this behavior, but in truth men had never needed encouraging. How could one change the nature of men? Twenty thousand years of Adrash’s urging—two-thirds of his life, bent to this endeavor—had not made them more peaceful, any likelier to see reason.

  Nor, obviously, did the threat of annihilation.

  They could not pretend ignorance. Adrash had made his feelings known for millennia. When his words and actions had failed to inspire permanent change, he abandoned mankind for the void. As their empires had grown ever more contentious, he dredged material from the blind side of the moon and constructed the Needle. At the height of their power and hubris, he had hurled the two smallest spheres down, killing hundreds of thousands and blanketing the earth in dust for a decade. The Cataclysm, as men now called it.

  These efforts to communicate his desperation had been folly, Adrash now understood. Mankind’s ingenuity in the face of trial was short-lived, and Adrash did not possess the energy to continue reminding them of their priorities. He felt the constant temptation to simply complete what he had begun with the Cataclysm, and send all of his weapons to t
heir task.

  You have been too patient , he told himself. You have waited on them long enough.

  And yet—inexplicably, in the face of all reason—hope remained. When he could stand to hear them, he listened to the thoughts rising from the world below, hoping to hear a call rise above the others and proclaim change. He wondered if his constant adjustments to the Needle of late were an attempt to signal this person, to create a sigil in the sky for a prophet to recognize.

  For there had been prophets once, he felt sure: Men and women who had spoken with fearful, exquisite voices—voices that resounded into the bowels of the earth, filled the void with light, and nearly shook Adrash’s heart to a halt.

  They had existed, had they not?

  Sometimes, Adrash wondered if he had only invented these avatars to keep from going mad.

  Sometimes, he wondered if he had prevented madness at all.

  Perhaps his obsession revealed the rot that had already spread throughout his soul.

  ‡

  He turned somber eyes away from the Needle and looked upon Jeroun, a bluegreen marble rolling on a sheet of stars. A shallow ocean covered the world but for two small continents straddling opposite sides of the equator: Knoori, the home of man, and Iswee, the perpetually cloud-covered home of the slumbering elders. Everywhere else, uninhabited islands lay scattered like windblown seed.

  From experience, Adrash knew the difficulties of navigating between those islands, of traveling from Knoori to Iswee. Mortal men rarely dipped foot in or sailed upon the ocean for fear of its predatory fish and reptiles, but Adrash knew those beasts numbered fairly far down on the list of dangers. Nonetheless, for eons he had preferred to live upon the ocean, where he could be alone, a man instead of a god. But for his armor, which he usually caused to retreat until it was a white helm clinging to his hairless scalp, the sun had shone on his bare black skin.