No Return (9 page)

“Yes, I know the feeling,” she said. Outbound mages were loath to miss even one orbital ascension. There were only so many years in their lives, after all. “My apologies for the interruption of your schedule, but I desire your counsel on something. Recently, the changes in the Needle have caused the telescopists some consternation. We have not—”

“What is recently?” he interrupted.

“Several weeks,” she lied automatically. It had in fact been over a year of increasingly erratic changes, but he need not know that. “We have not seen variations of this frequency before, both in the speed and direction of the spheres.”

“Yes,” he said. “I have heard rumors.”

She suspected he had. In fact, he probably knew a great deal more than he let on.

“The fact will be announced to the general academy later today,” she said.

He smirked and gestured to encompass the campus. “You think they will have an answer to the riddle?”

She smiled wanly but did not rise to the jibe. “We cannot keep this to ourselves.”

“Of course we can. We own the telescopes. All information about the Needle is filtered through us. Everything else is myth and foreign hearsay, so easily discounted by the academy. There is no advantage in opening the discussion up. Clearly, the changes reflect a shift in Adrash himself, and finding someone who can explain the god’s mind is not possible. We will have as much luck listening to seers proclaim doom in Vaces Square as we will have listening to the responses of the general academy.”

She fought the temptation to concede the point. Perhaps unavoidably, he had absorbed a great deal of her cynicism. At the same time, he had not yet come to grasp the reality of academy politics: Concessions had to be made in order to achieve one’s goals.

“We need funding for further research,” she said. “And the best way to acquire funds is to reveal a problem that must be solved.”

“If you have already decided, why am I here?”

She touched his hand lightly. “I agree with you that Adrash’s will cannot be known unless he himself announces it. I also do not want to assume the changes reflect hostility, but we must assume they do. Thus, the only thing we can change is our approach to Adrash. Before the noise of the academy’s panic fills my head, I want to discuss this fact. Speak freely.”

A smile just touched the corners of Pol’s mouth. He had always spoken freely.

“We must be more aggressive in our supplication.”

She waited, but he had said all he intended to say.

“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 continued. 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.