Teller of Fate
Second Movement: The Last Templar
Chapter Thirteen
⁂
Nameless exited the Portal at the end of a blind alley that, judging by the stench, had been used to dump animal carcasses for quite some time.
This world was called Noir. It was a moon orbiting a glowing gas giant planet. Its sun, Spinner, was a distant speck of red light, little more than a bright star, in its sky.
Most of Noir’s light came from the pearlescent white of its planet, Geist, a self-luminescent brown dwarf.
Noir was violently active, tectonically, due to the gravity of its planet. The only habitable regions were the poles and only the north one had a landmass of any size.
The rest of the moon was covered by a very saline sea that boiled at the equator. A consequence was that Noir was almost constantly wrapped in fog.
Good trench coat and fedora weather. With a smile, he recalled stories he used to write, in another life.
Presently, the sky was black. A large pearl of light enveloped the top half of a lamppost ahead.
Walking through the fog, Nameless soon found himself on a quiet street that sloped down to the left. Looking that way, he could dimly see the lights of a harbour. He went up.
Overhead tracks to his left gave Nameless a direction to head. After twenty minutes of rights and lefts, he arrived at a decrepit train station buried under a pile of old buildings. Inquiries led to the purchase of a ticket for Vita, a city on the other side of the continent. The city he was in, Santo Mortis, was the largest on this moon, but Vita was the administrative center.
Noir wasn’t part of a larger political entity, but it did have good relations with its neighbours in the system.
It was a two hour wait before the train left, so Nameless spent the time drinking Scotch in a bar down the street called Spillane’s.
Leafing through a local paper, he noted that he had guessed right about a port on the Silvergrey Sea on this world. The effective radius of forgetfulness of the port’s existence on Noir was larger than the continent, so no one had trouble remembering it.
An article talked about the price of the local fish on the market dropping and the tariffs charged by the Hermetists for shipping non-local supplies rising. Typical bitch intended for the working man.
He checked his UT chronometer. Still time for a sandwich.
It was delicious, which surprised him.
He was on the train and halfway through his second bourbon when it pulled out for what he was certain would be an eventless six-hour trip.
⁂
He wasn’t disappointed.
⁂
Easy deceleration woke him as the train pulled into the station. Nameless was stiff and groggy; he’d fallen asleep minutes after the train lurched into motion.
He stood and tried stretching while he waited, hunched under the overhead luggage rack, for the line of departing passengers to present him an opening.
He stepped out in the aisle, reaching up to grab the backpack he’d been carrying, and followed the last of the passengers along and down the steep steps at the end of the car.
The platform was one of six concrete slabs arrayed in the yard; it was the only one with a train next to it. The inverted vees of steel awnings overhung them, held up by square aluminum pillars.
Donning his backpack, Nameless followed the crowd, yawning and trying to shake off his lassitude.
Five minutes later, he was through the terminal and out on the street.
The sky was clear, the air twilit and warm. Geist, fat and livid, covered half the sky. Nameless realized then that this was as bright as the day got on this moon.
He consulted his internal map, hoping it was more accurate than the one for Glyph, and headed in the direction of planet rise, going slightly uphill.
Vita looked to be a smaller, neater city than Santo Mortis. The sidewalks were wider and lined with unusual looking trees. They were thin and spidery, and the leaves looked like dangling orange lace. They gave off a pungent sweet scent as he passed them.
Motorcars occasionally whispered past: huge things with wide fenders and running boards, they made almost no sound in the clear air.
The pedestrians dressed for the cool. They would nod or smile a greeting as he passed.
This district seemed mostly commercial. The shops were understated things of dark wood and etched glass, selling mostly useful items. He passed a couple of open-air markets and heard laughter and buskers.
He turned left off the avenue and down a street lined with low rise apartments.
It was quieter here, but the people were no less friendly. Several offered him directions, before he even thought to ask. Nameless’s faith in the layout of this city was vindicated.
Finally, after almost half an hour’s foot travel, the street began to get foggy again. It had a different texture to the peasouper he’d waded through in Noir’s other great city. It was dry and…sparkly? That wasn’t quite the word, but it would have to do.
The information gleaned from the Dark Man’s network had once again been correct.
He entered a large square.
Everything was a detailless shadow in the mist. The light from Geist made the air pale grey and something else filled it with bright silver sparks. In the center of the square was a small area set off with a chain upheld by four metal posts. The fog intensified there. It was an impenetrably dense white. Nameless could see neither the square nor the chain behind it.
This was his destination.
He walked down the gentle slope, stepped over the chain and into the blinding light.
When the light faded enough to see again, he was standing on a wooden dock.
Ahead was sparkling grey air, no distance, no horizon. Moving, scallops of blinding white light, exactly like light reflecting off waves on a sea, retreated into distance. There was no other indicator of liquid, not even sound. Nameless looked up, no sun, no other light source.
He’d arrived at a port on the Silvergrey Sea.
Slightly apprehensive, Nameless sent out a mental hail. No answer, nor any indication that anything was there to answer. If Poseidon was still in the Silvergrey, he was too far away to sense.
⁂
The only people on this side of the fog wore double breasted coats that flared at the waist and ended below the knee and snug round caps with exceedingly wide brims.
Nameless had also found Hermetists.
Booking passage on a ship bound for Mercurius proved to be a delicate business. With very few exceptions, Hermetists were the only ones allowed on that world.
Families and close associates did live there, in a village of the same name that served the Mother Lodge. Otherwise, no casual traffic, no tourism was permitted.
Hermetists didn’t strike most people as anything other than intelligent, polite, and quite curious. It was an image they spent considerable time and resources cultivating.
They were all those things.
They were also, when the need arose, ruthlessly efficient in getting what they wanted (knowledge) and preventing what they didn’t (unauthorized access to said knowledge).
Nameless was confident he could bluff his way onto a ship and to the planet. He knew he wouldn’t have any trouble getting into Azhure’en itself because it would recognize one of its architects.
He decided to play it straight, knowing he’d be much better off for the cooperation of the Fellowship of the Thrice Great.
There was one ship, the brigantine Goethe, headed directly for Mercurius’s main port. He arranged for a private interview with the captain, Rachel by name.
Once aboard and in the captain’s cabin, he revealed somewhat of his true nature.
She took it well. Nameless had guessed right about the extent of their knowledge of ancient events. She agreed to passage gratis and told him she’d be most eager to aid him in any way possible.
Nameless responded with a request for silence concerning his identity and one of the lesser cabins for the voyage. Over her protests, he insisted on not having better quarters. He wanted to travel as anonymously as possible.
— Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, July 2026
© Gideon Jagged
All Rights Reserved
