Teller of Fate
Fourth Movement: Custodians of the Incunabulum
Chapter Twenty-Eight
* * *
White light. Jane remembered that.
The light through her eyelids now was red.
Disorientation slowly passed. She had been assaulted. Jane was no longer at the manor house, that much she could feel.
She opened her eyes a crack and the deep, ruby glow brightened. It was almost enough to force her eyes closed again.
With slitted eyelids, she levered herself up on her elbows.
Jane was lying, fully clothed, on a foam pallet. The floor around her seemed to be gold and was textured in a fine swirling pattern.
The room itself was round, about ten yards across and edged with a solid railing, also gold.
As her eyes finally adjusted, she wiped the tears from them and looked up at the source of the light. The room was capped by a faceted dome of glass or crystal through which a pulsing, flowing lake of bright red…something…flowed.
Jane stood to walk toward the railing and stopped. The dome parallaxed, showing more of its bottom. It was much larger than the platform she stood on. She walked toward the railing, advancing until the railing pressed against her thighs. Looking down, she saw that the dome was a complete sphere and the platform she stood on floated in its middle. The faceted ruby sphere defined a space that was vast by human standards.
A moment of intense vertigo seized her. She stepped back quickly to avoid tumbling from her perch.
Sitting with her back to the rail, she mulled over her options.
John had been in the building when the assault had happened, of that she was certain. Whether he knew more than she or not, he would first try to secure the Incunabulum. Failing that, he would pursue its thieves. Only in the event he could secure the Book would he begin looking for her.
All possibilities being equal, there was only a one-in-three chance her brother was actively seeking her right now.
Jane was on her own.
Checking her personal inventory, she noted that nothing had been removed from her during her capture. She still had all her weapons and tools concealed about her including a cell phone.
She tried it, thinking there was a chance she might be able to contact John or at least the outside world. No signal. Well, it had been worth a shot.
Jane let her memory go back to the last few seconds before the light, digging for information. All she could get was an image of a man, tall and dark, who looked down at her.
The white light had come from his eyes.
She could see the pinpoints of brightness blazing and expanding, feel the pressure in her head, feel consciousness flee not with a sense of falling, but of being pushed backward extremely fast.
Interesting, but none of it gave her any clue as to how she got wherever this was, let alone how to get out.
Jane stood and began pacing, slowly and deliberately, directly across the platform. It was eleven paces: eleven yards, then.
It might have been imagination, but Jane thought she felt slightly heavier in the middle than at the edges. She walked across again very slowly, trying to feel the difference.
There it was. Not much, maybe as little as a pound, but it was telling.
On a hunch, Jane decided to measure off the circumference of the space. She left a dagger lying on the rail to mark her starting point. It was twenty-eight paces. She smiled.
It should have been about thirty-five. She was in an artificial space, one with a very sharp curvature. The surface she paced only looked flat. Its topology more resembled that of a bowl, or a small hill.
She was in a hypersphere, one with its own gravity. A nice place to maroon someone.
She looked across the floor to the opposite rail. It looked perfectly flat, but there was no way it could be. Jane knew she couldn’t trust her senses here. The crystalline Buckyball around her probably didn’t look anything like what she saw. It might not even be there.
Jane had got in here somehow so there had to be a way out. This was a prison for her, whatever it had been designed for, and every prison had at least one exit.
A prison without an exit was a tomb.
Jane briefly considered the possibility that that was precisely what this was—an oubliette. A place to drop her in and forget her.
She dismissed the notion just as fast. If that were the case, whoever had done this would surely just have killed her rather than go to the effort they obviously had.
Somewhere above or below her was the center of gravity for this little space-time bubble she was in.
Hyperbolic topology lessons were a long time ago, but from what she recalled, the center was where one entered or exited one of these hyperspheres. She had to determine the direction of curvature.
Easily done. She took the dagger off the railing, moved to the center of the floor, and threw it up as hard as she could. About six yards above her it disappeared. It reappeared less than a second later just to the left of where it had vanished and fell to the platform. So, below then.
Kneeling, Jane leaned over the rail.
Prepared though she was for the view, a momentary wave of dizziness swept over her anyway. She gripped the rail until it passed, letting her weight press her abdomen firmly against its sharp edge. Somewhere along a virtual line starting from the middle of the floor behind her and down to the ruby faceted bottom of this space lay a point that was its center.
Jane had two problems. First, figuring out where exactly that point was. Second, devising a workable plan to get there.
If it was close to the platform, she might find it by tossing more daggers. A safer bet was that the center was far out of range, though.
Even if it weren’t, she could rapidly run out of daggers to throw.
Because the space curved in on itself, every dagger that missed would fall until it hit the invisible edge of the hypersphere and appear above her, still falling.
Toss enough daggers that missed, and Jane would end up surrounded by bladed weapons perpetually whizzing past at speed.
The second problem was even more deadly. Assuming she found the spot and it was close; she’d have to jump and try to angle her descent to intersect the precise point. Failure could mean a fall that would never end or would end abruptly when she hit the platform at the velocity aptly called terminal.
With a sigh, she pulled herself back from the railing and turned away from the drop. She sat, back to the rail again, and thought, staring blankly at the mattress on which she’d woken up. How to get down there and be sure of hitting the center of the hypersphere…
The mattress!
It had bothered her subconsciously that she had been so brutally taken and yet her comfort had been provided for in the form of something soft to lie on. Yet she hadn’t been given food.
Was Jane was expected to starve to death here but not bruise herself on a hard surface?
She strode over to the pallet and pulled it aside.
There in the middle of the floor was a circular hatch. The mattress had concealed it.
‘Every prison has an exit,’ she thought, feeling a bit of triumph. Getting the cover open took longer than it should have but was easier than a prison door should have been.
‘A puzzle,’ she thought. Someone may have expected her to leave if she had the talent. The possibility made her captor more intriguing.
After Jane pried the hatch loose and hoisted it out of the way—it was lighter than something made of gold should have been—she took a wary peek down.
The shaft’s length was the thickness of the platform, about six feet. Past it was only air.
All Jane had to do was step forward and drop. If she were right, she’d fall until she intersected the center of the hypersphere and pass through that portal to wherever it led, maybe even to her own home.
If she’d made any wrong guesses or she forgot to take something into account, she could be committing a messy suicide. Her alternative was to wait in the hopes that someone would come for her before she starved.
A moment’s hesitation and Jane decided to risk another dagger.
It dropped about eleven yards then vanished. She waited until a count of ten, looking up. It did not appear again.
Feeling much relief, Jane jumped.
* * *
Failure was not something the lone surviving thief was used to. He had quested centuries and many, many Oerth analogues for the Incunabulum. At the brink of triumph, many little failures threatened that victory. Something much more important than money hung in the balance.
He remembered little of his life before.
This puzzled him because he was sure he had known everything about himself when he started this search. At least, he thought he was sure. His memory seemed a slippery thing now. He knew he had been an immortal with great power and that he’d hidden in this form to evade an enemy. That was all.
Though he knew he had to get the Incunabulum, the Thief didn’t know why the Book was important anymore.
He remembered Glyph, too. Someone was waiting there for it. The Thief would be paid once he delivered it, though he no longer knew what the agreed payment was.
He didn’t even know what his name was, though in his darkest moments he feared he had no name at all.
Once the Thief was sure of the Incunabulum’s location, he’d spent his time studying the history of the Clan Airkhart, its Custodians. They kept it in an ancient manor house and trained their children from infancy to deal out lethal responses to any who got too close.
Getting to the Book would mean getting past them. There were only two at present. The Thief timed his invasion of the home to the absence of one of them. The plan was to render the sole resident Custodian dead or otherwise incapable of offering resistance and simply take the Book.
That plan showed its inadequacy before they got into the manor itself. First, the male Airkhart, John, found out he’d been decoyed and pursued them to the place, overtaking them less than a mile way. He’d almost halved the crew the Thief had assembled.
Once the survivors got the house itself, it proved to be one giant booby trap, something his research had failed to reveal.
It began peeling off more members of his team with depressing frequency. Also, when he’d begin his assault, the Thief hadn’t realized he’d need the services of the resident Airkhart if he were to have any hope of succeeding.
He got that help the only way he remembered how; he had taken possession of her body and mind.
He’d had to dispatch his remaining compatriots, of course. They’d seen him as he really was. He’d have to end the woman for similar reasons, but for now she was useful. Her resistance to his occupancy of her was quite strong. Yet another thing he hadn’t counted on.
The Thief killed a being alien to Oerth, something he hadn’t expected to find on such a disconnected world and had just freed the Book, when he felt his control slipping. The Custodian whose body he occupied broke free just long enough to yank the Incunabulum open. He’d looked at it without thinking and had paid the price.
The exotic black and red characters twitched, flashed, and changed on the very vellum of the page before him, almost as if the Incunabulum were reading him.
The world turned sideways, and he fell through a hole that hadn’t been there.
— Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, August 2026
© Gideon Jagged
All Rights Reserved
