from the forthcoming novel The Fate of Stars.
Jane had gotten in somehow so, there had to be a way out of here. 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.
Eight
Teller of Fate
White light. Jane remembered that.
The light through her lids 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 fifty-fifty 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 was 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 came 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: almost exactly eleven yards, then.
It might have been imagination, but Jane thought she felt slightly heavier in the middle than she was 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 gotten in somehow so, there had to be a way out of here. 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 centre 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 and 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.
Nine
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, how 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 wasn’t, she could rapidly run out of daggers to throw.
Because the space was 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 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 she’d woken up on. 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 two yards. 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.
Feeling much relief, Jane jumped.
Ten
Failure was not something the lone surviving thief was used to. He had quested centuries and many, many Œrth 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 the of 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 from his goal. 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, the true extent of which 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 took possession of the woman Jane’s 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. He hadn’t counted on her resistance.
The Thief killed a Miu, a race he hadn’t expected to find on such a primitive world, and had just freed the Book, when he felt his control slipping. She 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 they fell through a hole that hadn’t been there.
Eleven
John Airkhart didn’t know what to expect of his first trip through a Portal, but his intuition told him it should have been something.
But no. No sense of travelling or disorientation; no rushing wind sound; no flashing lights or dark tunnel; no sense of time passing.
There wasn’t even a ping! sound or anything.
John stepped through the black hole onto black sand. He did it just as simply as if he’d entered another room and not, as it appeared, another planet.
He stood transfixed by the sight before him.
The sky was a prismatic green. The clouds, driven to his left at a furious pace, were a pale shade of orange, reflecting perhaps the umber colour of a sun that filled half the sky before him.
The sand, he noticed, wasn’t black but a very dark blue. Highlights of a paler shade sparkled as he shifted his weight. An ocean of something thick and translucent yellow sucked at the sand.
In the distance, sea and sky appeared to blend into each other, denying him a horizon. Whether a brief illusion or a product of the atmosphere itself, he’d never know.
A gust from over the sluggish waves carried a scent unpleasantly cloying to his nostrils.
Besides the waves there was no sound. The creaking of his leathers was loud in John’s ears.
It wasn’t especially cool and a dampness a little too sticky to be that of water forecast much perspiration to come.
He was tempted to shed some of his warmer clothing but reconsidered. This chase had led to another world; it might lead to more whose weather would prove less clement.
He turned to where the hole he’d stepped though was—or had been. There was no hole, nor any surface that it could have been a hole in.
The beach continued a few yards before ending in some purplish scrub brush that climbed a low ridge. Beyond, only sky was visible.
Fighting down a momentary anxiety, John realized that his only course of action was to find which way his quarry went and to follow them.
A brief scan showed nothing resembling footprints in the sand. Up and down the beach it was the same. That left the ocean or the ridge. It was possible Jane and her abductor had landed in a different spot, or that they’d landed on another world, or in another time. Remote as John’s rational mind thought those possibilities were, they were still discouraging.
His only chance of seeing home again lay with the Book carried by the Thief. If she or he were out of reach, he was effectively stuck here. John found himself wondering if the purple plants were edible.
The Custodian’s safest assumption was that they were here and close.
Forced to pick a direction, he decided to go over the ridge. It offered the only possibility of a new view in his immediate future. Though he was an accomplished long-distance swimmer, he didn’t want to touch whatever that sea was made of unless he had no other choice.
John began hoofing it over the sand. It gave more reluctantly than the type of beach sand he was sued to and so supplied firmer footing. He covered the distance in a few strides.
Close to, the leaves on the brush had a deep red tint along their edges. The leaves themselves were long, thin, and saw-edged. They sprang in thick bunches from the very ends of spidery, knobbed branches that grew so close together that he thought the whole patch might be one plant.
He had trouble moving past it. The branches, though thin, were quite resilient and gave only slightly under his weight when he stepped on them. The result was like trying to walk a trampoline while drunk.
Once he tripped. Holding out his uninjured hand to break his fall, he was startled by an intense pain. Regaining his balance as fast as he could, John yanked it up.
It wasn’t cut, but his palm and last two fingers were abraded. Deciding to leave any first aid until he was past the low foliage, he began wobbling and stumbling his way along.
By the time he was past the patch, the Custodian was winded. It took some effort to inhale and his throat was parched and beginning to ache.
Neither would have been the case on Œrth, he knew. Looking again at the multihued green of the sky, John wondered how the atmosphere here differed in composition from that of his native world.
As he stretched to get the kinks out and tried to catch his breath, John caught his first glimpse past the ridge.
Twelve
He saw a valley of what looked like stone over a mile deep and several square miles in extent. It held what at first blush, John took to be a colossal sculpture.
Its overall shape was that of an inverted pyramid. The base was less than a fifth the width of the top and the whole looked to be more than half a mile high. Smaller versions of the overall shape made up its substance.
They weren’t exact copies. They also varied significantly in size from one another. The larger pieces were formed of the smaller ones, contributing to the overall fractal nature of the thing. It reminded John of a natural growth of crystals. The Custodian thought it might be just that.
Here and there, John could see well into the superstructure and in a couple of places, clean through it to the valley floor beyond.
The valley itself was composed of irregular steps, an effect of the crystalline nature of the stone. The top of the valley was a border that appeared perfectly flat. Because of this, John could see beyond it.
Other valleys receded into the distance all around. The shapes of them were all irregular but they fit into the shapes of their neighbours making the whole a gigantic jigsaw puzzle; a plain with strange holes in it all the way to what would have been the horizon, if the air had permitted him to see it.
John could walk all the way to the veiled horizon along natural winding paths, if he chose.
It was the top of the upside-down structure that first gave a clue to its function.
It was flat, with minor irregularities resulting from the smaller scale shapes that formed it, and purplish in colour.
This contrasted with the blue that characterized the stone of the valleys.
John realized this change in colouration meant vegetation at the same moment he recognized the shapes poking up out of it as buildings of some sort.
Looking at the other levels, he could see the same patterns repeating.
What he couldn’t make out was any movement. Distance and atmospheric effects likely prevented him from detecting it.
Assuming the Thief and Jane had come this way, this settlement would have been the first thing they encountered, too.
They might still be there. Considering that getting to the city looked to be a depressingly long and dangerous undertaking, they might still be on their way.
John decided to walk the perimeter of the valley and see if he could spot them either struggling down or climbing up the city.
He turned to his right and began a slow walk, scanning below him and the community beyond. The structure of the plateau revealed itself to his wondering gaze as his view of it slowly changed.
Looked at from one angle, it still seemed something grown rather than built. Walking a few more steps, though, and its synthetic nature became plain.
John made out details he had initially missed.
By the way they grew, the purplish flora was deliberately planted. That meant crops. Several of the fields were laid out in a checkerboard fashion.
Many of the structures seemed to be associated with agriculture as well, though John could identify nothing that might have been stables or corrals. Come to think, he’d seen no signs of animal life at all. Either such things were buried within the inverted pyramid or this was strictly an agricultural settlement.
The blue crystalline rock on the valley gave off occasional dull flashes from the sun, which was now sinking slowly into the sea.
There was no sign of his twin or her abductor.
The air began to darken when he was little more than a third of the way around. Half of the reddish-brown disk of the sun was below the horizon now.
John knew his chances of finding those he chased in the dark would be nil. He quickened his pace. That almost cost him his chance to find an easier way to the village.
Between one step and the next, a bright flash in the air. It passed so quickly he had to stop and backtrack to verify that it hadn’t been an illusion.
Back.
Back.
Slowly…
There! Connecting the ridge and the city. It looked like a ribbon of light. A reflection, it appeared to be but, off no visible surface.
The reflection arced up and out from the town, ending at the plateau about a third down from the top of the valley.
John took half a step further back and saw another ribbon become visible, just after the first one disappeared. It looked the same, only slightly dimmer. John crouched and was rewarded with a narrow reflection, far out over the valley that looked like a bar connecting the other two.
The Custodian realized he was looking at a crystalline bridge, one that was visible only because its planes reflected light.
Thirteen
Getting down to the level of the near end twice almost cost John his life.
The rock was solid and even broken up enough to offer foot and handholds that resembled ladders and stairways.
As crystals often do, however, it tended to fracture along those very cleavage planes that made it so stair-like. Twice when John put his weight one, it did exactly that.
The Custodian avoided injury, but only just.
Walking carefully, he approached the spot where the foot of the bridge should be.
Purplish scrub grew in patches along this stretch of the ridge. Some of it was flattened in a rectangular pattern.
John reached out his hand and met resistance just before he could touch the crushed foliage. Something was there. Except for the pressure of a smooth solid surface, it spoke nothing to his questing fingertips.
John smiled. Whatever this bridge was made of, it was made recently. The flattened, though still living plants, proved it.
It could only have been the work of the Incunabulum and the Thief who stole it. John was on the right track.
He was bothered slightly by its precision. Jane, as one of the few people literate in the language of the Book, must have been coerced somehow into cooperating with her captor. She must still be alive, then. More good news.
John relaxed his back and shoulder muscles. He had been tensing them unconsciously since his arrival.
He stood and reached both hands out and down, fumbling slightly until he contacted the railings on either side. The bridge was just wide enough for him to pass.
His hands never leaving the rails, John slid his feet along, inching his way over the gently arching span. Despite the mirrorlike smoothness this bridge had to be surfaced with, the curved path was not the least bit slippery.
The distance to the settlement hadn’t seemed that long when he began, but halfway through, arms and fingers aching from the intensity of his grip, John realized that the footbridge spanned almost half a mile.
Between his feet was nothing visible to block his view of an exceptionally long drop to the ground below.
After what seemed like hours, but had been only about fifteen minutes, John stepped gratefully onto the purple turf of the plateau.
Massaging some life back into his shoulders, the guardian took his first good look at the deserted settlement. Fields at different heights stretched away in three directions. Buildings in small clusters dotted the landscape.
The ridge he’d crossed to get his first glimpse of the valley was a secant to the russet sun, now descending fast enough that John could see its movement. He had only minutes of daylight left.
Coincident with this, he heard the first natural noise in this place since he’d left the beach; it was the sound of wind.
Fourteen
Twenty yards away to his left was a barn made of, for want of a better word, wood. It might have been the same colour as all the other flora, but in the fading light the whole thing looked black.
A breeze tugged at his hair, momentarily obscuring his already dim vision of the barn; the wind was rising as the sun set.
A feeling of dread settled over John Airkhart.
Night on a strange world in a dead city with a storm coming; his only means of retreat an exposed, invisible bridge half a mile long.
A strong urge to get out of sight sent him trotting toward the barn.
His destination had large double doors that slid on railed tracks above. With a hard shove, one of them gave just enough for him to squeeze inside.
With some effort, John managed to get the door closed again. The squeal of metal grinding against rusted metal drowned out the sound of the approaching storm.
There was no bar or latch to secure the doors.
Now that he was in dubious safety, John took note of the light. Above him, a vertical beam supported the edge of a loft that crossed the width of the barn. A hurricane lamp hung from a nail just below the edge of the latter.
It was lit. That could mean his quarry had been here.
If so, Jane and her abductor might still be here.
Too late for silence.
Unless they were dead or unconscious, they’d had to have heard him come in. Taking care to minimize his movements anyway, John scanned the barn.
The ground level was one big space. It seemed odd until he realized that what was missing were stalls where one would normally keep cattle or horses on Œrth. Scattered over a floor of blue flagstones were bits of reddish-purple straw.
Beside the lamp was a crude wooden ladder built right into the structure. It was a pastel violet, almost mauve.
Above, the loft was in deep shadow. Anyone could be hiding up there, watching.
The wind became a gale, rattling the boards of the barn. Waiting served no purpose. He’d have to ascend and take his chances.
Moving slowly, in case they were up there and had, by some stroke of luck not heard him, he advanced to the ladder and began to climb.
For all it looked to have been carelessly assembled, the ladder was sturdy, easily taking his weight. The injury to his hands, not properly treated yet, made the climb awkward; the wood was worn in the middle of each step, making for a slightly slippery grip.
The hurricane lamp, when he passed it, looked to be made of a kind of ceramic, painted blue. The fuel burned blue with a bright actinic light, yet the lamp was cool to the touch. He could not figure out what fuel it was burning. After a moment, John decided against taking it with him on his climb. If chance allowed, he could just grab it after he attained the loft.
Having reached the last rung before having to reveal himself to any waiting above, John hesitated.
The Thief could be lying in wait; planning to attack from cover the moment John revealed himself. Worse, he could be planning to harm Jane. He made his decision.
John crouched on the ladder, climbing two more rungs. He was now hanging just below visible range, knees under his chin. The lamp, within arm’s reach was almost blinding in his right eye.
He braced himself and, in one convulsive movement, sprang upward. Arching over the end of the ladder, arms outstretched, John flew over remnants of hay bales. He landed and rolled upright. Spinning around, he scanned the loft quickly.
Fifteen
No movement. No people.
The light was too dim to make much out; just mounds and stacks of what he took to be more hay bales. He wondered briefly why, if there were no animals, the residents bothered to grow, much less bale, hay.
He went back to the edge of the loft and, crouching, reached down and took the lantern off the nail. The beam of light fell first on what John thought was a large stack of bales. It turned out to be shack of sorts. The first thing he noticed, even in the pale blue light of the lamp, was that the planks were of blonde wood. The wood for this hadn’t come from nearby; possibly not from this world at all.
John slowly circled the shack, trying to ignore the gusts of the storm outside rattling the rafters of the barn. He was torn between worry that the Thief might be behind the shack and that the barn would come apart in the storm.
One slow circuit later, John knew two things. No one else was in the barn and the shack had no visible entrance. Thinking he might find Jane and her abductor somehow in the structure despite no visible means of ingress, John shone the lantern between two ill-fitting slats and peered inside.
The room was devoid of any contents, like people. Moving the lantern about to try to illuminate different parts of the space, he looked for a hidden entrance in the floor. The only thing he saw were swirls and mounds of sand. ‘Where’d that come from?’ John thought. He also espied some dark blotches and smears on the floor.
The light was too poor to make out what colour the latter might have been. John grimly contemplated that the stains might be his sister’s blood.
His brown study was interrupted by the end of the world.
The sound of the metal roof tearing away from the heavy wooden rafters anchoring it to the barn was a scream of tortured metal. For a moment, it drowned out the shriek of the wind, which then became louder for the roof’s absence.
When he saw the sky, the Custodian’s gaze became one of ecstatic terror.
Shredded pieces of the roof were sucked up into a vortex of deep red light that filled the hole where the roof had been.
Billowing clouds streamed across its face, seemingly immune to its pull.
Not so the immediate landscape.
The wreckage of buildings and even whole chunks of the inverted mountain itself were leaping into John’s vision as they flew into its maw.
Black specks swirled around the edge of the tornado of fire, spiralling into it.
Much more than just the city was vanishing. This phenomenon, colossal in size and astronomical in distance, might very well be eating this entire world.
There was nothing to be done. Whether a natural event or a force unleashed by the Incunabulum, John was as helpless to determine his fate as any of the inanimate bits of junk hurling upward.
The barn began disintegrating as he felt his weight lessen. It was a sickening sensation.
The lantern was torn from his hand. He avoided panic, remembering he had faced death many times in his life.
John of Clan Airkhart would do as he had always done. He would stare it down.
The Custodian wrapped his cloak tightly around him and looked into the eye of hell. Making no protest, he was pulled from his feet and drawn into its gaze.
—Gideon Jagged
Innsmouth, March 2020
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