Teller of Fate

First Movement: The Birth of a Teller of Fate

Chapter Four

The Dark Man rarely thought of himself.

As he trudged, mile after mile amidst glowing, shrieking bits of hellfire, he found himself drifting to his past and to how his steps had led, through years of searching, to this moment. The Dark Man was a collector of rare powers for select clients.

None of his objects of lust were mere pretties. They were weapons, generators, granters of wishes, givers of gifts, makers of kings.

It was during an investigation for one such weapon that, he had found the Syrat in the hands of Davida’s mother, a whore he knew slightly, as he had been a client of hers.

The Dark Man had known her to be a fortune reader as well but had never seen the cards she used. She had called herself a Teller of Fate, but so did many others who used nothing more sophisticated than mental tricks, he had never given any thought to the notion that she might be more, though she also had had a reputation as more than usually gifted.

Out of curiosity, more than anything else, he had casually asked around those who travelled in her circle.

To his surprise, the tales told of her all but convinced the Dark Man that she used the Syrat in her work.

He had long known of the Syrat as a cursed book of sorcery that took the form of a deck of cards.

After having again availed himself of her carnal services—she was very skilled—he’d planned on taking the deck. Had he known then what he learned subsequently—that he could not take the deck forcibly—he would have adjusted his strategy. When threats did not work, he had decided to simply kill her.

He now wondered why she hadn’t done what her brat had—used the cards to escape. He hadn’t really given her the time, he decided.

That the Teller had had a child was a detail about which he had neglected to ask. It still vexed him. Knowing as he now did that the girl was his, he feared her birth had been no accident. He wondered if the whore had intended that he be the father, or if she just wanted someone to hand the Syrat off to. If the former, there would be inheritance issues to sort out. Parentage was an easy thing to prove on Scorn.

That slip of a girl, a slut-in-training as he had thought, had fled from the screams.

He’d only had a glimpse of threadbare skirts and dirty heels as most of his attention was on keeping the claws of his victim from his eyes while he strangled her.

Only after the whore was dead did he discover that the Syrat, which had been on a shelf behind her, was gone. The Dark Man could find no sign of the deck, either on her body or in the hovel itself. The chit must have taken it as she’d fled. He had later berated himself for not pursuing the girl at once.

The Syrat represented that bit of legendry: the doomsday device.

Rumour said it was in the swarm of worlds that included Scorn. Word had first come with the refugees from the worlds of the Scarlet Nebula some seventy years before. It was from them that the claim a Syrat had wiped out all life there had first come.

After failing to secure it in the Under, the Dark Man had spent many months looking for evidence of the coming of such a thing along with the traveller’s tales.

There were many.

Reputed eyewitness accounts of refugees included the erasure of individuals, cities, and entire worlds. Three of those tales came from people who claimed to have laid sight on an actual deck. That had startled him most.

The Syrat was a kind of thing, not a unique thing itself. One could make a deck if one had the knowledge and the talent, so went the tales. Two of these survivors recounted detailed descriptions of the deck’s design.

They differed in slight ways but tallied in so many others that he came to give some credit to the rumours that the Syrat had caused the deaths of everyone in the twenty-three inhabited worlds of the Scarlet Nebula.

The Dark Man obtained copies of the historical files relevant to the appearances of the Syrat and arranged for the ‘accidental’ destruction of the originals.

He then carefully searched for bits of news about decks of cards resembling the description of the Syrat, supplementing that with frequent visits to the Under. If the harlot’s whelp wasn’t dead, she might be using the Syrat as her mother had.

Scorn’s lower classes reveled in cards of all sorts, for games as well as fortune reading. There were five main flavours of decks and dozens of variations that he’d been able to track down. Some of these had to have been influenced by tales of the Syrat, but none were the one he sought. He had an ample collection of such variants stored in his home.

For almost two years he searched, eventually scaling back and ultimately abandoned his effort. He became convinced that either the child had fled Scorn with the deck, or someone had killed her and taken it offworld themselves.

The money and effort wasted caused him to curse the thing that had made its way here from those now dead worlds.

Until today, it had not crossed his mind that the girl might have been using the Syrat to shield herself from an unfriendly gaze.

⁂

As the second hour of his trek through hell wore on, the Dark Man sighed. Second guessing himself was another activity he hated. He should never have taken his eyes off her, shouldn’t have let his worry about being magickally attacked override his mission.

In a life longer than any on this world suspected, the Dark Man had seen many wonders, but none to match a Portal made from magick. None that he remembered, anyway. There was something unreal about what had happened.

The place to which the Teller had fled was another surprise. He would have been willing to wager a lot that only three people living knew the abandoned settlement existed and neither of the others ever visited the Under, let alone trafficked down there.

The collection of wind decaying structures he now marched toward was all that remain of a quixotic effort three centuries earlier to escape the ‘corruption’ of the city and learn to live as a native of this uninhabitable world would have, had any natives ever existed, of course. The Dark Man couldn’t remember what its name had been.

Wind frozen reddish black pavement loomed out of the storm. He’d found the settlement, marking the penultimate stage of his quest. Somewhere ahead was the room that held his prize.

— Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, July 2026

© Gideon Jagged
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