Teller of Fate
Fourth Movement: Custodians of the Incunabulum
Chapter Thirty-One
* * *
The Thief landed, cursing, on scree that dug into his back and buttocks. The Book, still open, was clutched to his chest as he rolled on what turned out to be a beach. He slammed his head teeth rattlingly hard on something and blacked out.
Bright light brought him around. The sunlight on this world was fierce.
The right side of his face was pressed against something that felt much different than the gravel he remembered rolling over. In fact, he felt like he was stuck to it.
Odd chattering sounds were getting closer. They might almost have been voices; except they sounded vaguely avian.
They got louder. He’d been spotted.
He peeled his face off a surface that he recognized as a parchment page of the Incunabulum, but not in time to avoid looking briefly at it.
The Thief closed his eyes as quickly as he could, but not before getting a brief glimpse of stuttering, dancing glyphs.
The sky darkened. He looked up into a sun becoming bloated and mud-coloured, looking ready to shit all over the world. The sounds of the ocean, not really noticed until now, changed as well.
His gaze fell upon a body of liquid that looked like piss and moved like bile. The smell was less than enchanting, too.
It was the screams that finally turned his attention landward.
Perhaps they had been bird-people of a sort. He’d never know now.
The horror he felt couldn’t compete with the fascination of watching six living things relive their evolutionary history in front of him.
The Thief would have expected a smooth morphing, yet they flickered like they were strobe-lit.
To judge by their cries, it had to be quite painful.
The show lasted only a few seconds, the last of their screams still echoing in the dead air after they had gone.
All around him living things that had been capable of flight only moments previously thudded dully onto a beach that was now composed of black sand. These bodies faded to nothing seconds after landing.
The Thief closed the book, without looking at it, and picked it up.
He took his first good look at the treasure he had spent so long pursuing.
It was large and heavy, but other than that bore little resemblance to the book of legend. No dragon-hide binding; no jeweled cover; no metal clamps or fiendish locks.
The cover looked to be simple leather, soft and undyed. It wasn’t even stiff, the pages flopping down as he held it by the spine. The book had no title stamped on it. The paper was simple vellum. The only remarkable thing about it was the lack of wear: it was supposed to be well over a hundred millennia old.
When he’d set out to get the Incunabulum, the Thief had had his own exit from Oerth planned.
Getting off this new world would mean knowing where it was or finding a Portal. While there might have been a Portal somewhere on this world; considering the incident with the Book, that might no longer be the case.
Even if there were, and it led to a world he knew or even to Glyph itself, it could take a lifetime to find.
No, he needed a shortcut. The Book could make one, but only for someone who knew how.
He fingered the ring on his left thumb; inset in gold was a cut ruby bigger than his thumbnail.
The Airkhart woman might help. The Thief could mine what she knew, looking for the information he needed, or he could force her to perform the work herself. The former would be easier to carry out, but it could take an awfully long time to find what he needed and even then, he’d have to make the Portal himself and hope he made no mistakes.
The latter would be harder, but he’d be assured of the correct results, and quickly.
The harder choice, the Thief decided, would get him to his payday faster.
He’d need to get off this evil smelling beach first. He headed inland.
Twenty minutes later, the Thief was looking at an abandoned city wondering if he’d merely exterminated the species who built it or erased their entire existence.
He felt an unaccustomed sorrow; it seemed to come from outside of him.
One of the buildings on the plateau would be ideal, but the Thief could see no easy way to get there. He walked along the edge of the chasm, looking for a sheltered spot. An hour of searching brought him halfway around the canyon wall, finding nothing better than a wide ledge in the violet, crystalline stone that formed it.
The Thief climbed down carefully and settled down as comfortably as he could on the ever-present purple scrub.
Several minutes of deep, regular breathing put him in the proper state to go looking for his prisoner. He found her almost immediately, her distress a beacon to him.
He smiled to himself at her predicament; served the bitch right for trying to kill him. Her panic made shoving past her defenses easy.
She fought him, furious at his assault on her mind, but she was unequal to the struggle. The Thief was an expert in getting what he wanted from the unwilling.
In moments, her volition was in his keeping. Now to get what he needed.
He was bending her will to make her use the Incunabulum to open a portal to Glyph when she let escape the knowledge that her brother was likely following her.
‘Can’t have that,’ he thought. So, the Thief first had her make a little surprise for her beloved sibling.
It was fascinating watching his hands dancing over the pages and her eyes over the words of the Book as the components of the trap were laid: the invisible bridge, the storm, and the summoning of the Lord of Entropy.
He could feel her rage and grief as she was forced to plot her brother’s doom. She fought him every step of the way, but his will was adamant. Getting her to make a Portal to Glyph was relatively easy.
The Thief closed the Incunabulum and shoved the guardian back into her private hell.
He stood before the spot where the Portal would open and thought of his first sexual experience so long ago and the taste of fresh blood. A golden vortex opened before him. With both heads erect, the Thief stepped through.
* * *
“Bitch!” That single exclamation was all the anger the Thief had in him. Roughly, he rummaged in his mind, looking for her.
She was nowhere to be found. He was on his own.
The Thief turned his attention to the world he’d been dumped on.
Most rocky planets were deserts of one sort or another. This one probably hadn’t started that way. It took carefully destructive effort over a long time to do something like this to a world.
The Thief was standing on a slight rise overlooking a graveyard of civilization. A mile or more away, down a slope that seemed too exhausted to be called merely ‘gentle,’ was a zigzagging concrete wall. Even from here, it looked to have been hastily and shoddily made.
Rising over its top was what might have been crumbling structures of some sort. The Thief was too far away to tell for sure what kind they were. This rummage sale of decrepitude extended beyond the range of sight to the left but ended half a mile to the right.
Beyond looked to be the shore of large body of water, though the substance thereof looked strange. Waves of pale blue seemed unusually agitated, perhaps by wind.
Following the contours of the shore was a rail line suspended by ancient-looking girders thirty yards above the beach. Towers of the same metal carried cables going in all directions, cutting up the sky into irregular pie slices.
That sky was blood red on the horizon, fading to the palest pink at the zenith.
There were no visible clouds. To his extreme right, a small, yellow sun hugged the horizon, just over rounded hills that he suspected were the closest thing to mountains this dying world could muster.
No good news behind or to his left, either. Just more low hills.
He looked down at the Book in his hands. No help there. At least, not until he could find that woman’s hiding place and drag her out into the light again.
He was trapped on another dead world. There was probably a Portal to Glyph here, but he had no way of finding it.
The Hermitage of Azhure’en might have a presence here as well. If he could find that he could escape via the Silvergrey Sea and from there to a world that connected to the Nonspace City.
He had to admit that, though Azhure’en would likely be visible from a hundred miles away in this air, the odds of finding it in less than a couple of centuries were not much better than finding a Portal directly to Glyph.
A lesser man might have despaired, but death, even a long and painful one, no longer had the power to move him.
For something to do, he decided to check out the ruins.
The ground was hard packed, pale dust. His soft-soled boots kicked up some of it, but it didn’t rise above his calves before falling lifelessly back.
Not a hint of vegetation did he detect. The air felt excruciatingly bland and was absolutely still. It tasted like boiled water.
Before he was halfway to the wall, his throat was sore and his mouth sticky with drying saliva.
The walk took about twenty minutes. As he neared the decayed corpse of the city, the Thief sensed something was wrong.
The light.
It hadn’t changed. He glanced at the sun. It hadn’t yet begun to set, hadn’t moved at all in fact. His interest in this world was piqued. A world tidally locked to its sun shouldn’t be habitable.
When no explanation for this anomaly occurred to him, the Thief’s momentary good mood vanished. He shrugged and continued walking.
The wall appeared pink in the sunset light and at first looked to be made of huge uniform blocks of stone; bits of mortar hardened in the act of oozing between them.
Not so. As the Thief got closer, the wall was revealed as being made of a type of concrete. What he was looking weren’t blocks but the imprint of forms used as molds when it was poured.
As he approached the foot of the wall, the Thief could make out the small granular aggregate. Imprinted onto the surfaces of the wall were fine sinuous lines and swirls. Some sort of wood had been used to make the forms that shaped the wall.
Looking around again, the Thief wondered how long ago trees had grown here.
He ran a hand over the wall, noting how smooth it was. It rose crookedly but was evidently quite sturdy. It didn’t look like he was going to be able to get over it. After a few moments’ consideration, he decided to go left as the view looked to become more interesting.
The Thief ambled along, keeping a casual eye on the wall in case cracks or holes that he might crawl through became visible, but otherwise just trying to enjoy the exercise.
Flickers of dirty grey cloth just out of his sight, trailed him, flashing into existence out of the air or from the wall. Occasionally a rag wrapped hand would gesture at his back and withdraw. Its movements seemed unsteady.
The Thief had followed the crooked wall for some while when what sounded like gun fire loudly echoed all around him.
Head spinning around, he was just in time to see painfully bright balls of light streak over the sky, coming from the hills to his rear left. Three clustered together were trailed by a fourth. They passed nearly overhead.
The Thief waited a few moments, but nothing more happened. With a shrug, he carried on with his walk.
He was nearing the middle of his second hour of trekking, when he noticed that the wall appeared a bit shabbier than it had at the beginning.
At first, he thought it must be because it was older, but there was a sloppiness to it that told of a later, hastier construction.
Whatever disaster had overtaken this culture, it must have done so more quickly than its inhabitants had calculated. There were cracks in the wall now; not the type associated with the hardening of good concrete, but the kind caused by poor aggregate; there were quite large stones visible in it as well.
Craning his neck, the Thief could see crumbling bits along the top of the barrier.
He took a few steps away from it to get a better look further along and saw something that promised to enliven what had become a tedious chore.
A sizable chunk of wall had come away near the top of the wall and a rough crack had opened beneath it almost all the way to the ground.
After trotting up to the fissure, the Thief was startled again by what sounded like an identical burst of gunfire. He looked over his shoulder and saw the same pattern of lights flash overhead. Something orbiting the planet, perhaps? Couldn’t be, the noises indicated these things were in the atmosphere. Another unsolvable puzzle. Even the mysteries of this world were becoming boring.
Turning back, the Thief saw that the crack widened as it rose steeply to his right, opening out into a V-shaped gap in the wall itself.
‘Shouldn’t be any trouble to climb,’ he thought. There was the problem of the Incunabulum, though. He’d need both hands.
The Thief thought of several options but ended up stuffing it under his shirt where it made an uncomfortable bulge, smooshing the breasts he wasn’t used to having.
He’d barely begun his ascent, one corner of the book digging into his left nipple every other step, when he heard a tumbling, rolling, grinding, grating sound from further along the wall, getting closer.
He stopped to listen, trying to figure out what it was. When it was joined by unmistakable vocal sounds, the Thief decided it would be better not to be seen.
The crack had widened enough that he could just squeeze into it. He couldn’t see to the other side of the wall and hoped he wouldn’t find himself stuck.
Having no choice, the Thief turned sideways and forced himself in. He spent a frustrating few moments getting deep enough that he was hidden by shadow, for the Book kept catching on the jagged edges of the rock. He was glad the noise of those approaching was loud enough to cover occasional curses.
Finally, leather shirt scuffed, hands scraped, knees bruised, he felt far enough in to be hidden.
The rumbling began to sound like the muffled hooves of horses to his ears. Sooner than he expected, the riders entered his field of view.
They certainly weren’t horses. They looked like overgrown relatives of the dog, in fact. Shaggy grey and white fur, muzzles full of sharp-looking teeth dripping saliva and large paws: they had it all. Each one must’ve weighed fifteen hundred pounds. He began to worry he might be smelled out.
In a bit of irony only someone who’d spent time on an Oerth could appreciate, the riders looked like nothing so much as bipedal relatives of the domestic cat. They had cat-like whiskers and muzzles that combined nose and mouth in a way reminiscent of cats.
They looked very much like the same race as that guardian he had killed in the catacomb below Airkhart Manor. Perhaps the woman’s familiarity with it was why she had decided to maroon him here. A nagging doubt told him he should know this race, but it seemed just one more thing he had forgotten.
The ones he could now see were dressed in heavy leather and chainmail. Some carried swords scabbarded to their mounts, others pikes or spears. Carbines in the furred, think-fingered hands of two of them seemed out of place.
A dozen or so just rode by him, but two stopped a bit closer to the wall than their companions. He feared he’d been discovered, but they didn’t seem interested in him, looking instead upward to the top of the wall.
Their speech seemed to consist mostly of hisses and wailing, punctuated by increasingly violent gestures toward something above him as they furiously debated.
One of them stabbed a finger and shouted something that sounded like a particularly nasty hairball incident.
Both grabbed efficient looking, though aesthetically odd, firearms from holsters strapped to their saddles and began shooting at whatever it was they were looking at. Soon, to judge by the volume, most of the tiger-critters were peppering away at some poor bugger on the wall.
After several score rounds, the coughing screams of one of the kitties he couldn’t see got the others to stop firing for gods’ sake.
There were several more moments of hairball yakking before they decided to mount up and get the hell going.
The Thief stayed perfectly still for a slow count of a hundred after he could no longer hear them, then let out a deep breath. He spent a moment in thought and decided that up was still the best way to go; there could be more felicidal cats about.
Preparing his cursing in anticipation, he procrastinated for as long as he dared and then began unwedging his body.
It proved slightly less annoying than the initial journey inward. After seating the Incunabulum more securely and re-tucking his shirt, the Thief began climbing.
The lower part of the crack leaned out slightly farther than the upper, meaning he wouldn’t have to worry about trepanning himself on the way up.
The surface was uneven enough that it formed a rough stairway of sorts. About halfway to the top, the angle became so shallow that he dared to stop using his hands to steady himself.
The Thief had just climbed high enough to see the top when, accompanied by a loud crack and rumbling, the wall under him shifted out about six inches. He nearly overbalanced when it stopped suddenly.
With a haste that would have appeared unseemly to any who knew and feared him, the Thief scampered to the top.
He was careful to step to the wall section to his left when he got there. Once standing, he saw that the crack did not go all the way through the wall and that the lower portion was wedged against the upper on the inner end. The wall itself was about fifteen feet wide.
Three bodies lay along it.
Once again, the sharp reports startled the Thief. He raised his head and had to squint against the light of the sun to see the brilliant balls of fire shoot over the sky from horizon to horizon; first three, then one.
His apathy for the puzzle of the stationary sun and this other anomaly had changed back to one of interest, a development of which the Thief was not consciously aware. Something about this place was changing him, and he did not care enough to notice.
What was beyond the wall was the biggest mystery in a day that already had a surfeit of them.
The structures beyond the wall were decrepit tenements; most of them, anyway. Some looked like factories of some sort; a few were so strange looking he couldn’t begin to guess their purpose.
They were packed cheek-by-jowl rather neatly. The buildings couldn’t have been built here; most of the one’s closest to the wall could only be accessed through upper windows.
In fact, fifty yards along the wall to his right someone, likely the dead at his feet, had used metal planks to bridge the wall and the window of an apartment building.
How the buildings had been moved and why, were two more questions to which the Thief was unlikely to find answers. He breathed out loudly, puffing his cheeks. At least boredom was in abeyance for the nonce.
The red sky painted everything in shades of blood; the sun accented some of it with gold. Still not a hint of movement in the dry, dry air. The elevated railroad loomed above. Rusted, but massive riveted girders slanted inward as they rose to grip its undersides.
The line undulated, hugging the curve of the flickering blue ocean beyond. Several of the supports descended into this garage sale of old buildings. Twists and tangles of wire overhead still netted the sky.
The Thief was sore and hungry. There had to be food somewhere in the maze of structures.
He turned to the slaughtered, curious about them, too.
Here, at last, was a chance to get some immediate answers. The Thief approached the first one and got down on his haunches.
The first thing he determined was that the corpses were, indeed, of the same race as the guardian under Airkhart Manor.
It—no, she, as it happened—was wearing undyed, but well-made leather; snug pants that ended just below the knee and a vest, laced partway. Small breasts pushed the top out slightly. She was furred in grey.
The face was odd. He couldn’t decide if it was handsome or not; it was too strange for that kind of aesthetic assessment. Of course, the ugly holes in her forehead and left cheek didn’t help. The face was wider than a human face, but no so wide as those of the one’s doing the shooting.
Facial fur was exceptionally fine, especially around the eyes and muzzle, or nose and mouth. No, muzzle.
The Thief couldn’t decide how it appeared. Something in his comprehension kept sliding back and forth.
It wasn’t quite a cat’s muzzle. There was a distinct nose, slightly turned up, and the mouth didn’t have that bifurcated upper lip of the cat. Her lips were quite full.
Her lower face was pushed out though, and the narrow nose lay along the gently outward curve ending just above the lips. Narrow, dark lines, bare of fur led from the inner corners of her eyes along either side of her muzzle—tear stripes.
After thumbing open an eyelid, the Thief was slightly disappointed to find a round pupil. It was dilated.
The iris, still bright even in death, was a pale green. It looked perfectly human.
Dozens of thin, translucent whiskers, some almost a foot long, jutted from the slightly swollen-looking sides of her upper lip, with two smaller colonies rising from above the closed eyes.
That and the fur on the cheeks, which was much longer, gave her face the illusion of much width. Cheek fur was plaited in threes on either side and tied with fine strips of rawhide.
The hair on her head was shaggy and would have hung to her neck when she was vertical. It was soft and had a sheen.
He felt ridges along the side of her head, just where it rounded to become the top. Parting the hair, he found an ear. It was long, rounded at the bottom tapering sharply to a point at the top. The whole was about four inches. It was recessed into the skull itself.
The juncture between ear and skull was a soft and wrinkled ridge. Pulling on it, revealed it to be an extension of the ear. When fully out, it would jut out of her hair, looking very catlike, and would be capable of swinging quite far back.
He carefully pried open her mouth. Her teeth looked more human than cat-like, though the front teeth were pointed, and the cuspids were noticeably longer and saw-edged. The tongue, when he lifted it, appeared anchored well back in the mouth. The mandible, though getting stiff, was well articulated, swivelling about thirty-five degrees.
She would have been capable of complex speech. The Thief wondered why the others had spoken as they did, as if they could only make sounds like—well, cats.
The Thief picked up her right hand, examining it carefully. Standard four and one arrangement of digits; slenderer than they appeared, for the back was covered with short, glossy fur. The palm was calloused, the finger pads thicker than his. Gently, he pinched the index finger.
A shiny black, curved claw half an inch long slid out. It had an edge on its underside and was quite sharp and strong.
Her feet, as he took a squatting step down to examine them, were a bit shorter and wider than his and had four long, splayed toes, the upper sides also fur covered, this fur longer and coarser.
An experimental pinch, harder this time, showed a thicker claw well over an inch long. There was another hidden in a sheath in her ‘heel,’ or what looked like a backwards facing knee about eight inches from the pads of her paw.
The sole was a heavily calloused pad matching the ones on the underside of her long toes. Evidently not fans of footwear, these people.
Slowly, and with a care whose motives he didn’t examine, the Thief stripped off her clothing.
Another ugly wound was in her left side. The fur was exceptionally fine, short, and soft on her breast and abdomen. It disappeared altogether only on the breasts themselves and on a narrow strip running down the center of her trunk.
The skin was livid now, of course but, judging by the blood crusted in her wounds, would have flushed red. Nothing of the physiology greatly different from a human’s.
Her legs were also similar. Coated with a thicker, denser layer of fur, her thighs and calves seemed normally proportioned, though with more muscle mass than he expected. Her hair was much shorter and softer between her thighs, her pubic mound finely furred.
Her vulva when he examined it, held no surprises, at least externally. He briefly considered examining the vaginal canal but decided against it. Again, the reluctance spoke of an emotion which the Thief didn’t care to examine.
He gently turned her over. Here was the first surprise in a while.
She had a tail. It wasn’t a patch on the average cat’s tail, but it was more than vestigial. The upper/outer side was bushy, more like a rabbit’s than a cat’s. It was about two feet long. The underside was hairless and soft. It must have been quite supple in life.
It was also subtly textured. It had been lying against her lower back when he turned her over, but he saw that it would comfortably fit into the groove of her buttocks, also completely hairless, and would cover her anus and vulva completely.
So, protection of a sort, and something else. The Thief noted how well the shape of the underside would fit over the vulva and the textured inner surface now made a kind of sense. He couldn’t resist a smile. He also wondered what the tails of the males looked like.
Her back was the most heavily furred part of her. The skin under it seemed tougher as well. A white stripe ran the full length of her spine, missing her tail and running down the back of both legs ending at the dewclaw.
Finished with his exam, he dressed her and straightened her limbs, a gesture of respect that would have been completely foreign to him before he came to this world.
Looking down at her he thought that were she human, she would have been no more than seventeen.
His vision blurred and he felt wetness on his cheek. He was having trouble swallowing and his breath began coming in gasps.
Horrified, the Thief realized he was weeping. He turned away from the body and, after a discomfiting few moments, roughly seized control of himself. He let his tears dry on their own.
The Thief turned to the other two. The one closest was another female, this one without a face left and with most of her innards fanned out around her.
Neither her internal organs nor her brain matter looked unusual, though his knowledge of internal medicine was too rudimentary to make a definitive judgement.
He walked around the dislocated corpse to the last victim, a fair distance away from the other two. This one was male. Standing, he would have been much taller than the others, perhaps seven feet.
He couldn’t find a wound at first. Turned out he’d been shot just behind the left ear. That and the fact that his body was splayed facedown, head away from the outside of the wall told of an abortive attempt at flight.
Evidently, watching his companions gunned down had unmanned him.
There was no difference in the tail, other than being longer to cover a larger area. The penis retracted, like the claws. There was no os penis that he could find (he had no trouble digging for that, at least) and the tissue of the penis seemed not unlike that of the human male. Testes, hairless, were in a pocket just behind the penis. All this facilitated the defensive role of the tail, though it would be much harder for the male to use it to get off.
Curiosity satisfied; the Thief turned to the plank bridge that must have been how these poor bastards got onto the wall.
He was halfway there before it hit him that there was nothing resembling a weapon among the deceased.
* * *
As he approached the makeshift bridge, the Thief was less and less sure crossing it would be a good idea. By the time he was standing at its foot, he was certain it was not.
There were two metal planks, each about a foot wide, rusted in places right through. They were just lying there. No attempt had been made to secure them beyond laying them down.
Slightly warped along their length, far ends barely clinging to the sill, he had visions of them twisting or bending and tossing him to the ground below.
The Thief remembered his indifference to death (was it only hours ago?) and wondered what had happened to him. Once again taking himself in hand, he stepped boldly onto the bridge.
The far side was only a dozen broad steps away. The planks never moved, groaned, or creaked. He might have been walking on solid ground.
The window entrance was more than four feet high and about two and half broad. It had once had a sash, but all that remained was a wooden frame that had once been painted white. He crouched and dropped lightly to the floor beyond.
A flash of movement; the sound of running feet!
Darting to the doorway in search of the spy, the Thief didn’t notice much about the room other than the dirt and lack of furnishing.
He turned toward a doorway and hurried after the retreating sound. He followed it into a hall lit only by daylight coming through another window to his right, glass intact. He turned left and trotted.
After a half dozen steps, the Thief could see little and so slowed down.
A door slamming ahead and to his right stopped him. He remained still until his eyes adjusted to the gloom.
It was an apartment hallway. From the tacky, worn carpeting to the cheap, peeling wallpaper and the darkened faux gaslight wall sconces, the placed screamed ‘low rent.’
The only things missing were the loud domestic arguments and the smells of boiling cabbage and curry.
The Thief realized that these ‘memories’ were not his and briefly wondered where they were coming from. It was telling that he did not connect the new memories and his change in emotional intelligence with the prisoner he had trapped in her own psyche; the prisoner he could no longer find.
The hall continued only another dozen yards or so before ending at another hall running at right angles. The Thief was sure that the slamming door was on his right and there were only two doors on that side. Taking a guess, he decided on the further door first.
He walked slowly, soft soled boots silent on the carpet, until he was one step from being in front of the door. The peephole he expected, but his foreign memories assessed that the mail slot below was unusual for a building of this level of cheapness.
Crouching, the Thief took an awkward sideways step, centering him in front of the door.
For a slow count of one hundred, he listened, ear pressed to the wood.
No sound. He decided to risk a peek.
Very slowly, the Thief lifted the mail slot flap, wincing at the brief creak. Inside was another that opened inward. Reaching his free hand through, he pushed it open with his fingertips. This, at least, was silent.
Bright amber, fur framed eyes stared back at him, trembling, unblinking.
“Hello,” the Thief tried.
A sound, halfway between a moan and a hiss, with something clicking in it answered him. He assumed it was a word or two or three. The figure stood. It was too short for an adult. After a couple of seconds, they trotted away, going down a hall and turning a corner deeper in the apartment.
“Hey!” Before he had time to decide what to do, the figure returned with another taller cat person. The Thief stood as he heard a deadbolt slide back.
The door opened the length of a chain and the left half of a feline face looked down at him from a height of over six feet.
He stared up into a bright yellow eye as its brow descended. A sound escaped the figure that went from the Thief’s ears straight to his hind brain.
He took two steps back before he remembered himself. He held his arms out from his sides, palm forward and open. “Hello? Do you understand me?”
The growl stopped and the figure said something that sounded like, “Hinglish,” in a voice like the doom of worlds.
Taking a chance, “Yes, English. I found some of your” —the door closed, the chain rattled—“uh” —the door opened, and the figure emerged. It was male, quite distressingly muscled, and naked—“people on the” —the Thief never got a chance to finish.
The cat-man, sharp teeth bared in what the Thief feared was a smile, lunged forward and laid hands on him.
Fear paralysed the Thief.
He cursed himself as the figure threw him to the ground and leaped after him. He recovered himself enough to fight back, but he wasn’t strong enough since the body switch at the manor house.
It wouldn’t have mattered anyway; his attacker was wickedly strong.
The sound of the door behind him opening almost escaped his notice as the cat-man grabbed the Thief’s leggings and began to pull them down.
A surge of panic that was not his blossomed in his forebrain and he began screaming and pounding quite ineffectually at his attacker. Rational thought was banished and all he could think of was the horror of being raped.
It took an infuriating few seconds to reassert control himself and restore calm.
A hideous yowling from behind startled him and the large cat-man alike. The latter’s scowl returned as he looked up and grunted, hissed, and yapped back.
A cacophonous dialogue ensued right near the pain threshold, while the Thief wriggled out from under his attacker, trying to keep his pants on.
His would-be rapist offered only token resistance to his escape attempt, as the dialogue on civic relations vis-à-vis assault on strangers with intent to dishonour played out.
By the time the Thief had himself squared away, both disputants were standing. The tomcat retreated, hurling sentiments that sounded uncomplimentary over his shoulder as he did so.
The door slammed behind the big cat, punctuating his retreat.
Only then did the Thief turn around.
Flashes of terror were still pushing upward, but the Thief had himself well in hand now and managed to ignore them.
His rescuer was female and naked to the waist. He was getting the feeling he’d woken everyone up. Shorter than he, she looked older than the poor girl he’d found dead on the wall, though not by much.
Her left forearm was above her head against the jam, her right akimbo. Her feet were crossed at the ankle. The longer hair atop her head was a shaggy, unkempt mess.
Her whiskers twitched as she considered him. “So, you are a Hinglish, ya?” Other than mangling one word, her command of the common language was good, though heavily accented, her voice high and husky. Her cobalt eyes were frankly appraising.
He nodded.
“What ya want here, Hinglish?”
He decided against diplomacy, “Three of your people are dead on the wall, shot to death.”
Her ears sprang up, twitching, from the tangle of her hair. Her eyes glowed.
Without a sound, she sprang out of the doorway and headed back the way the Thief had come. He followed.
By the time he got to the broken-out window, she was across the metal bridge and sprinting.
He heard her keening before he was halfway back across, as did most of the community behind them. Queries began to be howled and hissed from various windows.
If his rescuer answered amidst the crying of her grief, he couldn’t tell, but the other cats seemed to know, anyway.
Other makeshift bridges slammed onto the top of the wall and soon it was crowded.
Feeling like a leper at the feast, the Thief slowly approached the group crowded around the bodies.
Initially, he feared he might be blamed out of hand for the atrocity. He needn’t have worried.
From the looks and wild gesticulations toward the world outside the wall, it was clear they had a better idea of who had done this than he did.
A few among the throng managed to calm things down. A commanding voice, gender indeterminate, began issuing commands. Several cats, male by their size, went back into the maze of buildings. Others quickly descended the wall to the outside, exhibiting a grace he could never have mustered, and began walking the trail the giant doggy-things had left, some went right, others left.
Considering how their quarry was armed, the Thief thought these cat-persons were either accomplished unarmed fighters or very stupid.
Some, principally female, began tending to the dead. This consisted mostly in laying them out and, in one case, returning various bits into a body cavity.
Some of the males returned from the buildings bearing large steaming pitchers and linens. After that, the work of preparing the dead began in earnest.
The female who had saved the Thief, or rather Jane Airkhart as she no doubt thought, from the proverbial fate worse than death padded over toward him. Tears glistened in her eyes, but her voice was firm. “Hinglish, you come with me, ya.” She took his hand in a firm grip and began leading him back across toward the settlement.
Reasoning that resistance had no upside just now, the Thief let himself be led.
Her hand, slightly calloused and mostly furry, felt warm and comfortable in his. A waft of scent, noticed but subliminally at the entrance to her apartment, was musky and something purely animal. The Thief felt a stirring in his loins.
Oddly, this reaction, or perhaps the cat-woman’s touch, calmed him completely.
They crossed a different bridge, this one much easier on his nerves.
The gloom was as unbroken in this hall, however. Before and behind, other cats stalked silently. They all smelled different, the males harsher, the females softer, yet all had that same animalness that the Thief found so beguiling.
Around several corners and down three flights of stairs, they went. Some doors had planks nailed across them, some stairwells, too. They passed ladders ascending to rough-cut holes in ceilings. They passed through halls that had once been parts of apartments. They went through holes cut out of walls.
Once they passed out of buildings altogether. The Thief thought they were merely travelling along a brick-lined corridor (different coloured bricks, orange on the left, red on the right) roofed and floored with rough timber. Around a corner going left was the red light of this world’s sun and they came out into the perpetual late afternoon light, walking along the black metal grill of a fire escape balcony clinging to the side of an orange bricked building, which rose above them another dozen stories.
On the right, one of the enormous, rusted iron beams that upheld the elevated rail line had pulverized a building, by the look of it. The air cooled noticeably as they passed into its shadow. Wreckage was piled around the thick girder. A few unbroken windows near ground level remained in the half-demolished structure. They may have meant occupation.
The buildings across from the open space were considerably narrower at ground level than they were in their upper storeys. Shaded by the structures above, ground level open spaces like wide roads dove into the decaying city.
Some surrounding buildings were low enough that he again saw that large body of water. From his better vantage, it looked large enough that must be a sea. The flickering of its waves looked weirder the closer he got to them without providing him with any new understanding of what was going on.
The group re-entered the dim.
A short hallway ended in a metal cage. It was an ironwork elevator. He and his guide were the first in. One more, a male, and it was full.
Two doors, inner and outer, accordioned closed with a clank. Shining down through the grillwork of the lift’s ceiling, a small, recessed light made yellow stripes on heads and upper torsos.
The male cranked a large handle mounted on the side of the lift half a turn and the cage lurched into motion. The smell of grease was strong.
Sliding, squeaking, clanking all the way, the lift descended past hallway after identical hallway, showing a decaying elegance missing from what he had seen of this community so far.
After nine floors, the Thief was sure they were below ground level.
After twelve, they descended into a cavernous room. It might have been a ballroom or a concert hall. Now, it was a big empty space furnished with little besides candles and lanterns.
The elevator lurched to a stop a few feet above the floor.
The male cat was the first out. The Thief followed behind his escort, who still hadn’t let go of his hand.
They stepped onto bare concrete and down six steps to the floor.
A few cat-people were already there, most wearing little or nothing. They were clustered near a dais at one end of the room, where most of the lighting was.
It was there the Thief was led.
A large lantern, burning a bright blue-white, was placed on the floor. Everyone sat around it. The Thief thought he recognized it but couldn’t say from where.
His companion loosened her grip on his hand but didn’t let go. His palm cooled as sweat evaporated. He felt the dampness of the fur around the edges of hers.
The circle sat silently, everyone staring at the light. Not knowing what else to do, the Thief joined in.
The flame in the lamp flickered oddly. It had a pattern that he couldn’t identify. The Thief felt it was sending signals to him.
He concentrated, trying to figure it out.
The world narrowed until the blue flame of the lamp was all. There was meaning there, he could feel it. It was just out of his grasp…
He was shaking—no, someone was shaking him. The lamp had turned mostly gray…and fuzzy.
“Hinglish. Wake up, ya.”
His eyes focused.
It was her; the cat-woman who led him. Still blue were her eyes, glowing in the shadow of the blue light. He was lying on his back. His head hurt.
“I’m awake,” he barely heard himself. Louder, “I’m awake!” His voice sounded strange to his ears.
Strong hands gripped the Thief’s upper arms, feeling the slightest prick of claws on his left bicep, and he was hauled back into a sitting position.
The Incunabulum, forgotten in the excitement of recent events, dug into his breasts and gut.
Her look of concern melted, exposing mirth beneath. “You seem to be that. The blue lamp can be dangerous, ya. It pulls the thoughts right out.” She let go and sat back, between him and the light of the lamp. The room was empty; all the other lamps gone. He wondered how long he’d been here.
“What am I doing here?”
Under the mirth was grief. “We needed to confer about the deaths, ya. You were brought here to tell us what happened.” Her accent gave him some difficulty, but the Thief seemed to be getting better at interpreting it.
“What do you want to know?” He had already decided to tell them everything.
“We already got it, ya.” She cocked her head toward the lantern.
He wondered how much she did get. If it was really everything, he might not have much longer to live. “Oh. What now?”
“We have to leave our homes.”
“What—I’m sorry, what’s your name?”
“Erahndira.” A ghost of a smile. “What’s yours?”
On the off chance they didn’t know everything, “I’m Jane. Well, Erahndira, why do you have to go? Where will you go? While we’re at it, why are you here? This place—” he indicated, with a gesture, the whole of the city around them—“has the feeling of a ghetto.”
The faces of these people are quite expressive, he thought. Her face would have screamed, “Confused!” to a person legally blind. Something to do with how the fur on their faces moved over the muscles of their cheeks and brows, he thought.
“It’s like a prison here.”
She nodded, “That it is, ya.”
“Why are you all here?”
“We don’t follow the god, so we were locked away by the preests.”
‘Priests?’ he thought it must be. “How long ago?”
She told him of the wars of centuries past. The great wars when the believers had burned the land, the sky and even the sea of this world, called Porta, to root out the godless.
‘Porta,’ the Thief thought. He was only a large open Portal away from Glyph. He felt greatly relieved.
The survivors of the losing side had been rounded up and locked away with all their possessions in walled camps.
Erahndira’s people had been left to starve. Until the murders that morning she and her people believed their gaolers had forgotten about them.
A century of relative peace had made the younger ones careless of the need for stealth. No preest had been seen in thirty local years. The Thief wondered how they told time when the sun never moved.
Their elders feared, with justification it turned out, that it was only a matter of time until their survival was discovered.
“We hoped they thought we were dead, ya,” she concluded. “Now, they know better. My gran told me what happened the last time the preests came with their guns, ya.” Her expression was enough elaboration for the Thief.
“Can’t you fight?”
“We have some guns, ya. They came with the other Hinglish. Sometimes, we trade them for food, ya.”
“Other English? You mean like me.”
She nodded.
“When did they come? From where?”
“They come sometimes down the track, ya.” She pointed up. The Thief realized she meant the overhead rails he’d seen on his way in. “My gran said they come from Glyph, a city somewhere—”
“Nowhere,” the Thief corrected. “Are the English here? In the ghetto?”
She shook her head. “They have their own place, ya; down by the water.”
“That’s why know my language,” the Thief said to himself.
Erahndira nodded.
“Will they help fight?”
“Dunno.” The idea seemed to surprise her.
* * *
They talked more about when and where the ‘preests’ would come, what they might do to prepare, and how to get people out of harm’s way. The change in his attitude since landing here didn’t bother the Thief at all anymore. He had stopped giving it any thought, in fact.
Time began to tell on the Thief’s aching posterior. He asked if he might have a bed for the night.
Erahndira smiled. “You can have a bunk with me, ya.”
He couldn’t resist a smile himself. “Let’s go, then.”
He was bidden to close his eyes before the blue lamp was hidden somewhere. They then returned to Erahndira’s flat near the wall. She took no light, and it was dark; he was obliged to hold her hand again.
Her apartment was small, only three cramped rooms. She told him she’d lived with her daughter until today. The latter was the young cat-woman whose body he had first examined, the very one he had cried over. Her voice broke when she spoke of it and they both ended up weeping in each other’s arms.
It was a small step from that to the bed, a simple affair of layered furs. ‘Of what animals?’ the Thief wondered.
They shared a look, arms still around each other and were kissing without a conscious decision being made.
Her tongue was just a little rougher than he’d expected, but it was experienced. She pressed herself against him, growled into his mouth, yanked his shirt free of his trousers and threw the Incunabulum over his shoulder. He knew he should be alarmed but arousal dominated. The rest of their clothing followed awkwardly as they shed it without breaking contact.
The sensation of her breasts against his was lost with the pressure of her embrace. Her hands’ heels ran up and down his back, pulling painfully on still dry skin.
Her claws skittering along his spine, tickling in the most titillating way as she ground her crotch against his leg. It was damp already.
His hands headed for her ass and found her tail. He stroked it softly and then, moved by a sudden mischievous urge, pulled it hard.
The cat-woman gasped into his mouth and ground her pussy harder against his thigh, dragging it frenetically back and forth. Moisture drizzled down his leg from the contact.
He continued pulling her tail in time to her thrusts. Sweat greased the interface of their cores; the slippery sensation of movement was delicious.
She grabbed the Thief’s hair and pulled his face away from hers. Her smile was savage as she plunged her mouth toward his neck. He felt the needle-prick sensation of her teeth against the skin. The musk rising from her nape made his scalp tingle.
Hooking his right ankle around hers, the Thief thrust forward, sending them both tumbling onto the furs. His weight atop her drew a grunt segueing into a staccato moan as his thigh lost contact with her vulva.
The Thief yanked his hands free and pushed himself toward her crotch, licking and placing small kisses along her the bare path down the center of her trunk as he did so.
Erahndira’s legs parted to make way for his face. He pushed her hips up with one hand and bunched furs under them with the other.
He dove.
His hands met hers on her breasts, where she coaxed him to pinch and twist her nipples.
The scent, the taste, the texture of her sex drove all sense from him. He licked and sucked, tickled, and bit, now harder now barely making contact.
With tongue, lips, teeth, and then fingers he worked, struggling at times to keep up with her writhing, bucking frame.
Her moans and howls were a symphony to his ears. Her tail tickled his throat and slapped his cheeks the whole time.
When he knew she was close, he pushed her legs closer together and swung his over them, pinning them in place. The Thief pushed his fingers between her closed thighs and continued gently punishing her clitoris. Erahn’s legs pushed out against his knees harder and harder, but he held them firm. A low, reverberating, animal moan in sync with her abdominal contractions began her orgasm.
After a dozen contractions, the Thief eased up on her lower half as she curled up, still in spasm, panting, her cries higher up the register, lower in volume. She relaxed after a time and accepted his embrace, whispering thanks over and over in his ear.
Sweat dripping exhaustion claimed her for a time.
Eventually, she moved back and looked at him. Blue, deep, glorious, luminous eyes met his; the heads of comets whose tails were her tear stripes.
The cat-woman’s lips pulled back far enough to show sharp narrow fangs, upper and lower. “Your turn, Jane.” She slid down his chest, teeth nipping him all the way.
The Thief had never particularly enjoyed nipple play, but Jane evidently loved it. That first tentative lick of his left one sent shivers that traveled all the way down to his vulva, which began to tingle most deliciously. He realized he was going to experience his first orgasm as a woman.
After torturing his nipples for a few moments, getting him most of the way there—at least he thought he was close—Erahn finally began moving down to his crotch.
That tongue!
It tickled his clit in the most infuriatingly teasing way. Despite his repeated hip thrusts, it danced away, maintaining the same lightest of touches.
Arms stronger than he thought they could be pinioned his thighs, denying his sex the rougher contact it craved. He could feel grool coat his inner thighs and trickle down toward the bed. Prickly sparks of pleasure radiated outward to his abdomen and down almost to his knees.
Hoping to kickstart his climax, the Thief began to pull on and pinch his own nipples, or Jane’s; it was hard to think straight, for some reason. His efforts brought him closer but couldn’t send him over the edge.
Just as he thought he should go mad from the denial of orgasm, Erahn’s tongue plunged into his cunt a surprisingly long distance. Her upper lip pressed hard against his swollen button and rubbed against it in zigzags and circles.
That tongue had the length to find his g-spot as it punched the latter precisely the same rhythm as the orgasm that exploded in the core of him seconds later.
Wow. Women had much more fun during sex than he ever had.
The world went away as the Thief felt that he was floating off the bed.
Afterward, they lay in the dark.
Erahndira’a leg lay on his right one, an arm along his chest, her hand resting on his right breast. Her body fit snuggly along his side. The fur of her back was matted and still damp. Her tail idly swishing…slowing…stopping; her breathing deeper, also slower.
Finally, what he’d been waiting for: the vibration against his ribs, the two-toned rumbling filling the air.
Erahndira was purring. He smiled as sleep claimed him.
— Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, August 2026
© Gideon Jagged
All Rights Reserved
