Teller of Fate
Fourth Movement: Custodians of the Incunabulum
Chapter Thirty-Five
* * *
It turned out no one in the ghetto knew exactly where the Portal to Glyph was. They’d need to take a detour to the colony of Hinglish, where the Thief hoped someone remembered.
That’s how they found themselves wandering down the beach on the other side of the overhead tracks later that day and he finally found out what was causing the strange fluttering of the sea.
It was on fire.
The Thief asked the obvious question and was told that, yes, it was water. The ‘how’ question no one living knew.
Despite appearances, the flame was cool to the touch, and it hadn’t killed the seas. The fear was that it would eventually, if not restored to its previous state. A grim bit of news to chew on as the pair trod the sand to the expatriate colony.
For most of the trip, rocky bluffs flanked them on their left. As the second day of their march neared its end, Erahn and the Thief saw the cliffs slowly give way to gentle, turf covered slopes.
After a mile of this, they rounded a final inland bend, saw a little bay ringed by a collection of neat stone buildings. They had arrived at the Hinglish village.
The land behind the settlement continued in rolling green waves all the way up to the red sky. A road paved with flagstones wound into the distance, flanked by crops.
The elevated line had followed them the whole trek. It cast a curved bar of shadow under which were neither buildings nor crops. As the sun never moved, that only made sense.
They wandered right up to the nearest house.
An elderly woman dressed entirely in white greeted them. She was heavily tattooed in a way that must have looked stunning when she was younger and did fair service to her beauty even now.
Her surprise at seeing him was non-existent. Apparently, Hinglish arrived all the time. She did perk up when he told her they hadn’t come from Glyph but were headed for that city.
Over tea, the Thief satisfied his curiosity regarding how people became exiles from what was, in a sense, the ultimate free city.
The first such arrivals had come long ago and had been refugees from a war on another world. The rest were those deported from Glyph by the Garda, the unseen protectors of the Pax Glyphica.
Infractions that threatened the neutrality or hospitality of the city were punished; some with exile, others with death.
After the ritual of courtesy was observed, Erahndira and the Thief were directed to a home, barely more than a hut, that housed a man named Braeden.
He greeted them at the door.
Unlike their previous host, Braeden seemed worried about everything. He was also unkempt and smelled like he’d been eating cheese and onions for some time.
Twitchy though he was, the man was quite useful. He had with him a collection of parchment scrolls that led, he said, to all the entrances to Glyph that, “They don’t want you to know about.” Whoever ‘they’ were.
Erahn was disgusted to the point of violence by his manner and his smell.
The Thief placated her as best he could, finally sending her out into the warm day and dickering with the ill-favoured troll for possession of the scrolls. He wouldn’t part with any of them, but did make copies available, provided they didn’t tell anyone where they’d gotten them.
The Thief couldn’t give Braeden what he wanted, time alone one of them, but got him to accept a compromise whereby he’d live if he gave up the copies. He sold Braeden on the deal by retrieving one of his nastier facial expressions from his days without conscience (was it only a week ago?) and got what he wanted.
* * *
One of the enormous legs supporting the elevated tracks buried itself into the sand a hundred yards past the village. The Thief had dreaded the thought of mountaineering up one of them, but that turned out not to be necessary. Generations of exiles from Glyph had made and then maintained a crude ladder-stair that ascended to the level of the tracks.
It was still a mildly panic-inducing experience, but Erahn managed to make it more an adventure than a fear filled chore.
Her demeanour since they’d decided to travel together had been more playful than anything else. The Thief suspected he was now an emotional surrogate for her dead daughter.
He shrugged off his worry and let himself be distracted by how cute her twitching tail was as she preceded him up the rickety metal steps.
Sighing with relief Thief climbed the last rung and stepped onto a…road?
Square paving stones of differing size formed a complex greyish mosaic. Embedded flecks of mica made the sun’s light dance and sparkle as he moved to stand next to the Miu. The path was about seven yards wide and curved gently in both directions. There was no sign wear or aging.
“Erahn—” the Miu turned from staring her future in the face—“you said that trains used this?” The Thief swept the road with his hand. “I expected tracks, or something.”
“Tracks?”
“Yeah, you know. Metal rails running parallel.” He made gestures to help with his description.
She shook her head. “Trains don’t need that, ya.” She went on to describe a long multi-segmented vehicle that hovered above the ground and followed a path defined by electric current generated by something buried under the road.
“Oh.” The Thief felt a bit embarrassed. This world had once had technology beyond his prejudice’s estimates. As he glanced at the burning ocean then at the never setting sun, he wondered how much beyond.
The three and one sonic boom happened, and the glowing white dots once again passed overhead.
After watching them fade into the seaward distance behind them, the lovers looked down at each other. The events of the last few days had driven much of his curiosity from him.
It returned now. “What are those things?”
Erahndira shrugged and looked away, “We used to have a moon, ya.” The flat way she said it, made his skin tingle.
“The sun never sets here—”
“War did that, too. This world is dyin’, I think.”
He readjusted the satchel strap across his chest and moved beside her and took her hand. She gripped it tightly. “Does it ever rain?”
She gave him a pale smile, “In the colder months, ya.”
“There’s hope then. Things have changed, but so long as there’s sun and rain, there’s hope.”
“Yes, I suppose.” Erahn sighed. “I’m tired of this world, ya. I wanna see some place new.”
“Well, what are we waiting for, then?”
Off they went.
The Thief stilled a ridiculous urge to start skipping and singing a silly song from a movie he was almost sure he’d never seen.
* * *
The possessed human and the Miu walked in companionable silence for most of that first day. The vista from their height wasn’t exactly breathtaking, but it was illuminating.
The flaming blue sea stretched all the way to a horizon that he saw for the first time. Later, during the second day, they passed over the ghetto.
From their height, they had a good view inside it. The Thief was surprised to see many open spaces, some floored with green. Gardens, Erahn told him. Though the Miu diet was typically largely meat, they’d had to adjust to a life with little. Much of their food, which was cultivated deep underground she reminded him, included a herd of livestock.
A trail of Miu could be seen leaving by the gate, as well as over the walls in places, following the ghost of a road south.
Erahn told him that most of the returning exiles were young. The elder Miu preferred to live their remaining days where they were. The southerners had told them that the cities were still there, still functioning; that there was room for growth and work for the willing. Eventually, people from the south would come to upgrade and repair the ghetto for those who wished to remain.
Centuries of exile following decades of genocidal war were ended. The healing of the soul of these people was making a slow beginning.
* * *
It took three days—three sleeps, that is—to get to the Porta Gate to Glyph.
Not that they intended to take that Gate. The Thief thought he might be being overly cautious, but his mission might be known.
If we went blithely through one of the main entrances and some who opposed his intended actions were waiting, this whole enterprise would be over before it started. For the sake of worlds like this one, he couldn’t afford to fail.
He told none of this to his companion, of course.
And so, the end of their trip found Erahn and the Thief sitting, legs dangling, at the edge of the elevated tracks looking down at the Porta Gate.
It stood in a meadow of yellowing grass about a quarter mile away. A thirty-foot-high rectangle outlined in steel, the opening showed the beginnings of a cobbled street lined with booths and filled with wandering shoppers. The whole was lit a deep blue.
To Erahn’s query, the Thief explained that the sky of Glyph was always populated with glowing spheres in different colours. Just then, darker ones. The deep red of the sky behind it added to the surreal feel of the scene.
He turned away to re-examine one of the parchments provided by Braeden, spreading it across his knees. After a few moments, “Look here.”
Erahn leaned over, pressing her shoulder against his. She remembered to keep her whiskers from his face, but the Miu’s longer hair tickled his neck.
Her touch reminded the Thief that she’d been wonderful company. He was developing feelings for her, something that would complicate matters. He didn’t really care.
The map showed the Porta gate and no less than seventeen other entrances to Glyph in a three-mile radius. The Thief had trouble crediting that number.
The one that intrigued him was on the backside of the Porta Gate itself.
Part of the Thief knew that he should know everything about Portals, but he could only recall snippets of disconnected information. What little he did remember suggested that a Portal on the backside of another was improbable. The Thief now suspected Braeden was shining him on with his maps.
“What do you think?” he asked her.
Erahndira looked at the symbols next to the indicated Portal; consulted a crude legend at the bottom of the map, “Says it comes out in a cellar under the Magsmen’s Guild, ya.” She gave him a mischievous grin, “Sounds like a gate a thief would take, don’t ya think?”
“It does,” he conceded. “Getting out of that place won’t be easy, though I might be able to bluff past them.” He thought for a moment. “What the hell, let’s give it a try. What do you say?”
“Sure, ya.” Erahndira placed her head on his shoulder as his arm encircled her waist. They held that pose for a minute, each thinking private thoughts about the significance of the coming departure.
“Let’s go, ya.” She gave him a hug and a kiss before rising.
They packed up and were standing, facing a two-hundred-foot drop before the Thief thought to ask, “How? Shouldn’t there be stairs down?”
Instead of replying, Erahn lay down flat with her head looking over the edge of the road. The Thief followed her example.
One of the upright girders was bolted to the horizontal road support below them and just a bit to their right. The former angled outward and just slightly to the right, burying itself in a clump of bushes not far from an outcrop of rock. About twelve feet down, a horizontal beam crossed the support. Erahn looked from it up to him.
“No,” when he saw her smile.
She stood, pivoted until her back faced the drop and stepped back into space.
Her hands caught the edge of the stone slab her toes had stood on. They held on just long enough to allow her body to change direction slightly. She landed delicately on the horizontal iron beam, grasping the vertical support, looked up at him and grinned.
That was how it was supposed to go, anyway.
What happened was that the slab Erahn grasped tilted under her.
She slipped with a curse and the distinctive sound of claws snapping off.
Before the Thief had time to shout, the cat-woman had slammed into the horizontal beam with her shins and fallen away. Somehow, she managed to twist her body and grab the beam. He saw blood on her hand.
She hoisted herself up one handed and was standing on it a moment later, striving to look as if the whole thing was planned. Like all cats, she somehow managed to pull it off.
Then she looked at him and he could see her chagrin. Erahn swore prolifically in Miu—with its hisses, growls, and shrieks, it sounded a wonderful language for profanity—while she rubbed her shin with her uninjured hand. “Your turn, ya.”
“Sure! That looked like tons of fun⸮”
“If you don’t, you’ll be here for a long time, ya.”
“I know, I know.”
“C’mon. I’ll catch you.”
The Thief slid over until he was directly above the Miu and with great reluctance, slowly lowered himself over the edge until the hard stone of the track was pressing into his abdomen, then couldn’t go any further. A part of his brain simply refused his commands to keep going.
The pounding of blood in his ears must have disguised the sound of Erahn’s movements. When she reached out and touched the Thief’s calf, he nearly lost his grip. “Ease down slow, lover. I’ll catch ya.”
He did as she asked, the rough edge scraping the breasts he would never be used having, hurting his nipples even through leather.
The Thief could feel the Miu’s grip on his leg, then his waist, tighten. His left foot found purchase on something small—a bolt, he thought.
Groping for another, his right foot finally found one. Then he was at arm’s length, and it was too late to go back. She still had to coax him to let go, though.
Erahn was hanging on to the opposite side of the support girder with one hand and his waist with the other. When he let go, she pulled him sharply inward. There was a panicky second when her grip was all that kept him from a long drop to the ground.
Then he had the I-beam in a death grip and was afraid his heartbeat was strong enough to shake him loose.
Erahn waited patiently, stroking his shoulder, for his panting to stop. When the Thief opened his eyes, she gifted him a smile that didn’t tease even a little. “Let’s climb down, ya.”
The Thief nodded.
It took over an hour to get to the ground.
The horizontal beams where they could rest were too far apart for the Thief’s comfort and they consequently spent more time resting on them than they should have.
Finally, both panting and shaking with fatigue, they made it to the undergrowth. The bushes growing around the base of the support were sparsely and softly leaved making the last few feet easier than the rest.
The Thief reflected that were Erahndira alone, she could have made the descent in a few minutes. She had exhausted herself for his sake. He made a mental note to make it up to her.
They crawled free to the springy turf beyond and lay down for a while, recovering.
As the adrenalin wore off, the aches started.
The Thief’s biceps, thighs and lower back were queuing up to bitch at him. He sat up slowly, tendons singing, to see how his companion was doing.
Erahn was purring very softly, on the edge of a nap.
The first two fingers of her left hand were crusted with blood but didn’t seem to be bleeding any more. A large bump he spotted just below her left knee, but a gentle examination showed no broken skin, just a nasty bruise.
He woke her slowly and they decided on a meal and a little first aid. While the Thief broke out dried meat and stale bread, Erahn used some of their water to bathe her injured fingers.
It was a grim business at first and the Thief wondered if she’d mutilated herself. After the blood was cleaned away, there looked to be no visible injury. Erahn explained to him that the wounds were inside the sheath that concealed her claws.
The cat-woman reached for his hand with her uninjured one. She gripped it painfully tight, her eyes squeezed shut and her impressive collection of sharp teeth bared as she slowly pushed claws on her injured fingers out.
A whimper escaped her just before her mangled claws emerged, and tears squeezed out from the corners of her eyes and left their shiny trails down the dark tear stripes to each side of her furred muzzle.
The Miu let out a ragged sigh, then.
Her index finger claw had just the tip snapped off. It was the middle finger that had suffered the worst injury. The claw had cracked and splintered vertically. It was now a collection of jagged splinters. The effort of pushing them out had evidently opened fresh wounds for blood began to ooze from around the base of the claw as soon as it emerged.
“What can I do?” asked the Thief.
Erahn was panting, eyes glistening, whiskers laid back along her muzzle. She answered hoarsely, “Take the knife—” she pointed to a pen knife among other implements laid out on a tray—“and cut off the jagged bits, ya.” She released his hand and gripped his thigh.
The Thief did as she asked, wincing every time he, in his clumsiness, exacerbated her injury. Twice, Erahn’s claws sank into his thigh during the procedure.
Finally, all that was left was a ragged stump of the claw, barely enough to clear the sheath. At her direction, he took a small file and rounded the ends of both broken claws. She retracted both, smiling for him and heaved another shaky sigh.
All that remained was to staunch the bleeding, then clean and bind the wounds. Two strips of clean cloth carefully pushed into the two sheaths for a few minutes were enough to stop the flow of blood. Two more, soaked in a bit of the liquor they had left from what they’d brought with them, did for the disinfecting.
Erahn told him they burned and then numbed the pain. Finally, another two small bits of clean cloth shoved in to act as bandages. The fingers themselves didn’t need binding she told him. For the bruise on her shin, there was nothing to be done except to let it heal on its own. She would limp for a couple of days, that was all. The Thief’s only injuries were mild scrapes along his stomach where his top had pulled out from his leggings. They’d heal without additional aid.
The twain enjoyed the meal more than they thought they would, laughing at their misadventures so far. Polishing off the last of the liquor likely had something to do with it.
Looking up during a gap in the conversation, the Thief wondered aloud, “How do the Hinglish get up onto the tracks?”
Erahn cracked one eye—she’d started dozing again, “Don’t know, ya. Maybe there’s a way up further down the tracks.” The blue eye closed. She smiled. “Probably shoulda looked for them.”
“Probably.” The Thief felt like taking a nap, himself. Instead, he decided to get on with getting on and nudged Erahn until she threatened to gut him.
She did get up though, seeming much better for her rest.
The Thief rolled out the relevant chart.
To get to the gate they wanted, they were going to have to go around the Porta Gate to its backside. The Thief decided it was better not to walk close past the Gate, reasoning that if anyone saw two people simply walking past, it might cause comment. He wanted to slip into Glyph without anyone being the wiser. Erahn agreed.
It looked like they could backtrack about a half mile to get around the rocky rise in front of them and come upon the Gate from behind. Course decided, they packed up and head off.
Erahndira had a longer stride and soon was a couple of paces ahead. She turned back as she walked through waist tall grass and held out a hand for him to grasp.
Feeling a little impish, he took a few quick strides and instead grasped her twitching tail, holding on and letting her pull him in her wake for a bit.
She laughed and wiggled her bum while she walked.
* * *
An hour later the Thief and Erahndira were crouched behind some bushes looking down a long gentle slope at the back of the Gate.
He wasn’t sure what he expected to see. ‘Nothing’ was low on the list. He thought maybe a ghost of the images on the other side or maybe blank stone, but it appeared entirely empty. The supports of the raised railway and the brush beyond were clearly visible through the uprights and lintel of the Gate. It sat there like some big spindly henge. He looked at Erahn, “What do you think?”
“I dunno. Is that even the gate? How can it be a path on one side and nothin’ on the other, ya?”
“Search me. When you think about it, how can it be in the first place?” Again, the nagging sensation that he should know these answers. A bit more of them seemed to be surfacing. Unfortunately, nothing that would make what they were about to try any easier on the nerves.
She nodded, “True that.” She shrugged, “I say let’s just go.”
“Agreed.”
Hand in hand, they walked the distance.
The sun was before them as they descended, except for a brief period when the raised road blocked it. That was probably why they didn’t notice the images sooner; they took them for the effects of an eye full of sunlight.
Pale coloured ghosts were in the air all around them. Just patches of light at first but becoming clearer. They stopped and looked closer.
Some of the mirages were moving.
Erahn spotted it first, “They’re people, ya.”
The Thief pointed to wall of light just visible in front of the rising bluff to their left. “Those are stalls against a wall. We’re seeing the Street beyond the Porta Gate.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Don’t know. I can’t feel them or hear them. Best if we don’t linger though. They might be able to sense us if we stay still too long.”
He took Erahn’s hand again and they covered the last few yards.
When they got to where they thought the actual back of the Gateway had to be, they found that they couldn’t see forward anymore. It wasn’t a wall they faced but pale white light that had gradually leached all definition out of the landscape as they progressed toward it.
They paused a moment and looked at each other. The Thief’s eyes asked Erahn if she really wanted to leave the world in which she had spent her whole life.
Erahndira’s eyes answered a strong yes.
Still holding hands, they thought of darkness and the feel of sand on bare toes and together said, “Hope.”
A mauve vortex of light opened before them. They stepped through.
— Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, August 2026
© Gideon Jagged
All Rights Reserved
