No Return
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
For Amy Martin
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
T
he 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.