No Return (44 page)

“What about your men? The war with the chimera?”

“As I recall, after finding the glove I abandoned my men on Pergossas. I requisitioned a small keelboat and sailed into the Eenos Ocean.”

“Why?” she asked, tearing petals from an unopened rosebud with her fingernails.

He shrugged, chest pulling against her back. “I wanted to be alone.”

“What happened to your men?”

He paused. Her question should have been,
Where did you go?
She rarely deviated from the script.

He dismissed it as nothing. “I suppose they died,” he answered. “Our brief victory meant little. The chimera had been expecting replacements from Belloja for some time. We had no chance. Why do you ask?”

“You had the glove. With it you could have helped the men.”

“No.” He disengaged his armored hand from hers and lay back on the bed of flowers. He knew she had no real interest in whether he helped or hurt men. “I did not yet know how to use it, or indeed if it could be turned to violence.”

She rose and stared down over her shoulder. She did not look directly at him, instead focusing on a distant point in her mind. “But you,” she said. “You know how to use the glove now. There is no limit to your power.”

“Hardly,” he said. “It only seems that way to you because you have so little power.”

He meant the comment as a joke, but her expression showed he had failed. Her brows came together and her lips set in a straight line. Anger, a common enough emotion for her.

Her temper collapsed suddenly, and her eyes became wet.

This, he had never seen. He wanted to be somewhere else, away from a situation he had so clearly misjudged.

“Eloue. What is it?”

Her eyes found his. “Are you ever going to share it with me?”

“No,” he said.

‡

On the surface, it was not an occurrence worthy of note. Many people had expected Adrash to share his power, and were disappointed when he did not. Eloue’s desire for power did not disappoint him. Rather, her vulnerability did. He had not expected it, and his response shocked him. He recoiled from her and left Herouca with a feeling uncomfortably close to fear.

He had not felt fear in a long time, indeed.

Her voice lingered in his mind—her touch and smell and taste, but mostly her voice. On regular occasions he woke from deep sleep, sure he had heard her calling to him. He began to suspect more than her vulnerability had driven him away. He examined his memories of her with the perfect recollection of a young god, and in examining heard what a normal man could not hear: Layers of sound, dense and sharp, pulsating like the stars at the limit of his vision. Eloue’s true voice was bliss and terror—the twitch of muscles in a man’s leg before coitus and the sound of the void freezing his lungs. It both invited and repelled.

No, he had not loved her. He came to realize affection had never drawn them together. No cute lie or routine bound them. Instead, a force beyond reason had compelled Eloue to him, and he to her. After several years away from Herouca, he could not deny this fact any more than he could deny his armor’s overwhelming need to be worn. Perhaps, instead of running he should have stayed and bested his fear. Had he turned his back on a great gift, an arcane magic?

More troubling still, he wondered if he had left a great weapon in the hands of an enemy.

He grew tired of thinking about it, tired of being intimidated by the unknown.

When he returned, Eloue was already dead, her home a slag-pile. Powerful magic had been brought to bear by a competitor or jealous suitor. Adrash had no interest in retribution, for her death freed him of his burden of thought. He bestowed his blessings upon the people who worshipped him and moved on. He visited the Royal Courts in Knos Min, from which his descendants, or those who pretended to be his descendants, ruled.

But the whole affair troubled him vaguely, as if something had soured in his stomach. He vowed never to set foot on Herouca again. It was only one island, and being there reminded him of his idiot fancy and miscalculation. He had squandered a possibility.

With effort, he managed to forget Eloue’s voice. He traveled his realm and found lovers to replace her—women and men who had never heard of Herouca, some of whom had never heard of Adrash. Far from the epicenter of his influence, on islands unlinked to Knoori, where the men had long ago forgotten the magics needed to cross the ocean, he begat children and raised dynasties. When a place ceased to inspire him, he left.

‡

Four millennia after men spilled forth onto the world’s surface, even the most advanced peoples of Jeroun had lost the ability to navigate the shallow sea and defend themselves from its creatures. The islanders disappeared due to disaster and famine, but Knoori’s population continued to grow, flourishing under the stern eye of Adrash.

He made Zanzi his home. Situated at the center of what would one day be called the Aroonan Mesa, his villa overlooked the million homes of The Golden City, the largest and most beautiful metropolis in Jeroun’s history. From there he traveled the continent, vanquished the last of the fire dragons, brought low the mage-kings who had installed themselves in various locales, and monitored the use and trade of elder corpses.

He reasoned his strength was not so great that another might not rival it. Though they lived in a state of suspension, the elders of the Clouded Continent were powerful enough to keep men from seeing their land, and Adrash from setting foot upon it. If the near-dead could do so much, perhaps a man might one day do more. And if the elders one day woke, who knew what powers they could bring to bear?

Of course, time would prove these fears ungrounded. Over the next two millennia he tested the limits of the divine armor, growing stronger and stronger until even the elder magic could not restrain him. He walked the Clouded Continent, grew to know its slumbering people through their beautiful artifacts. Cities that spun slowly like leaves on water. Crystal windmills half a mile high. A stadium seated for millions with a lake at its center. A field of glass war machines whose angular surfaces glittered in the sun.

Fearing the elders were the source of Eloue’s true voice, he took one of their number to a secluded island and allowed the sun to revive it.

They battled like old enemies. The elder’s aggression surprised Adrash, as did its expression, which so closely mimicked a man’s. Perhaps the creature had sensed Adrash’s intentions all along, knew it could not match him, and so spent its final energy on hate. This pride suited the creators of such breathtaking monuments.

Yet for all of its vitriol, the creature was easily overcome.

At no point did Adrash hear anything other than the sound of its breathing. It was not an enchanted being—merely a strong one. The realization was little comfort, for he had come no closer to understanding the nature of Eloue’s magic.

And then, three thousand years after her death, he heard the voice again, calling from the bottom of the world.

‡

He came to the largest of the southern islands curious. He remembered cracking an iron egg on its cold, weathered rock surface, sure the men who spilled forth would perish in the harsh land. To find its people not only surviving, but thriving, after five thousand years heartened him. After all, the ocean was no friend to man, nor were its inhabitants. Oft-times, the world itself seemed inimical to man, especially those who lived on the islands. Air currents sent locusts, dry weather, and disease. Volcanoes and earthquakes returned the islands to the sea.

Eighteen-year-old Tsema had never heard of such things. If the people of his land had ever suffered, he did not care. He heard music in his dreams and on the wind, and re-created it. Not for money or fame did he play. He played because it hurt not to.

A creature born of the island’s exotic magics, the smooth, long lines of his body revealed a peculiar heritage. Eyes flashed orange to match the short fur covering his whip-thin body. His fine-boned face looked more animal than man depending on the angle. His hands were large and calloused. The seven triple-jointed toes of his feet helped him adjust the innumerable gears and cogs of his musical instrument, a four-story building of driftwood and stone, thin slabs of transparent crystal and glass. He called this machine The Element. He carried two wrenches curled in his tail, and from his belt swung a collection of lesser-used tools of odd design.

It took one hundred men to haul the creaking instrument at a snail’s pace across the stepped rock surface of the island, and another fifteen men to feed them. People claimed the boy’s closest attendants lived on his music alone, but any fool could have smelled the mythmaking in this. For all of the magic virtuosity the boy displayed, Tsema was no miracle worker. He had no interest in redemption, yet the people read much in his tales. He became a prophet. Even the island’s king listened to his cryptic lyrics with a keen ear.

When Adrash heard the boy’s voice for the first time, the world ignited and blackened in the corners of his eyes. Underneath the rich tenor and the clanging cacophony of The Element, the boy’s true voice shrieked at a stone-shattering pitch. He was not as strong as Eloue had been, but in time he surely would be. Adrash had become sensitive to the voice after so much reflection.

Other things he had always seen. The auras of most men radiated tones of grey and barely rose from their bodies even when excited, but the boy’s flared violet and orange, coruscating in wild arcs from his body when he sang.

Just as with Eloue, Adrash could not fight his attraction.

They lived together in the top floor of The Element, where the boy proved an excellent lover. He clearly did not live only for music, yet he sang often during their lovemaking. The otherworldly timbre of his voice aroused Adrash’s libido, focusing his awareness of pleasure as it had never been focused. The boy’s confident touch reminded Adrash of Eloue. His body responded as hers had. The armor—which Adrash still wore as a glove—fascinated him, though he knew nothing of its reputation.

“What does it do?” he asked.

“Does it have to do something?”

The boy spread Adrash’s armored hand palm down on his thin, furred thigh. “Can’t feel where it ends, where skin begins.” He turned the hand palm up. “Can see no lines under it. No heart line, no love line. No age line! Man can hide that, powerful doing.”

Adrash shook his head and moved his hand up the boy’s thigh. The boy had not seen him covered by the armor completely, and Adrash did not intend to show him. “I acquired it in Loreacte,” he lied, referring to the halfmythical land he had claimed was his home. “A clothier had it under the counter, and I saw it. He would not let me try it on, but I convinced him. I knew immediately that I’d made a mistake, but in the end it is harmless. I have even grown to admire it.”

“Love it.” The boy covered Adrash’s hand with his own. “Want one just like it.”

The subject came up again and again. Adrash recognized the boy’s desire to possess the armor and fed it, though he could not say what compelled him to do so.

He woke one night to find the boy rubbing oil on his wrist, where the armor fused with his skin. It burned slightly, but not enough to have woken him. Instead, he focused on a low sound that came from inside the boy. It reminded him vaguely of the crash of surf on rocks, wind rustling the leaves of a tree. He had never heard it before.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

The boy’s head jerked upwards. His eyes were solid yellow-white. A growl began low in his throat, rumbling down through the register, into the depths of the earth below them. Before the command had been given, the armor tickled on Adrash’s wrist, began rising up his forearm. He placed his palm upon the boy’s chest, tried to push him down, and found that he could not. The boy gripped his forearm in steel fingers, as if trying to stop the armor’s advance.

“Want it,” the boy said. “Off. Now.”

White rose above the boy’s fingers, and Adrash felt a surge of strength flow through his limbs. Cold purpose flooded his mind. He took hold of the boy’s free arm and threw him from the bed. The furred body crumpled like a stuffed toy as it hit the sharp teeth of the giant gear projecting into their room. Vertebrae snapped audibly as his head ricocheted off the metal.

Adrash stood and regarded the body. For several seconds, it seemed to him that the world was mute, that all sound had been cancelled.

He had listened to the boy’s voice for so long he had ceased to hear it.

He vowed never to let this happen again.

‡

He encountered the voice of the prophet many times after Tsema. A thousand years passed between occurrences, two thousand—never more than three. Adrash heard it more clearly each time, but grew no closer to understanding its nature. For twenty millennia, the voice announced itself across the face of Jeroun, inhabiting the bodies of young and old, male and female and elderman. Its avatars were heroes and sometimes villains, but they were never ordinary.

Each attracted and repelled Adrash. As he grew ever more powerful, testing the ultimate capabilities of the divine armor, the fiercer those who spoke with the voice pursued it.

Sleum Edylnara, who wielded the crescent aszhuri blade with a dancer’s grace and made love like an animal, tried to decapitate Adrash during one of their practice sessions. Adrash caught the blade in his hand, broke it, and strangled the woman. She did not beg for her life or try to tear Adrash’s fingers from her neck. Instead, her eyes had slowly turned to golden fire as her true voice singed the inside of Adrash’s skull.

Kengon Asperis Dafes, the Necromancer of Bridgtul, fed Adrash a potion that paralyzed him for several minutes. While Dafes’s back was turned, the armor covered Adrash’s body and began filtering the poison from his system. Adrash watched as the necromancer attacked with magefire, enchanted blades, and corrosive liquids. He felt nothing, cocooned safely inside the impenetrable white material. When he finally could move, he moved swiftly, crushing Dafes’s skull between his palm and a marble autopsy table. The rumbling voice warbled and died, but its echoes resounded in his head for weeks thereafter.