Three Fortunes on Alcestis as Told by the Fraud Baeliss Shudal by Louis Inglis Hall (audio)

You are listening to The Last Story for the month of February 2026, issue 233 for Clarksworld magazine. Welcome to Three Fortunes on Alcastus, as told by the fraud Bayliss Shudal. It is by Louis Inglis Hall. Louis Inglis Hall lives and works in Scotland. His stories can be found at Clarksworld, Strange Horizons, The Dark, and Podcastle, amongst others. If he isn't writing or cooking, he might be talking about writing or cooking at louisenglishhole.bsky.social. And we have other stories. I implore you to go back and listen or read. Four People I Need You to Kill Before the Dance Begins, The Eighth Pyramid, Numismatic Archetypes in the Year of Five Reagents, and Fishing the Intergalactic Stream. So my dear listener, I hope that you can sit back, relax and let me tell you a story first fortune cladomancy there are a thousand thousand routes to divination i say routes because that is what they are that is what my grandmother first taught me we stand before an infinity of paths. They branch and jostle and compete and finally converge at a single destination. Some routes are easier and some are clearer. Some expose summits, other routes conceal. Each, however, leads us to the same end. Every part of every planet is speaking to us, each trailing meteor, each blade of grass, all of it calling out the steps to a single universal dance. We have forgotten how to listen. We stumble through our lives the best we can, caught on paths we cannot see, held by orbits we cannot detect. The future can be found in a desert or a grain of sand. Precious few are left who remember how to read it. There is dendromancy, the prophecy of trees. There is lithomancy, the oracle of ancient stones. There is even alluromancy, one of my own favorites, which finds the future in a selection of small and rather delicious cakes. The methods and titles of divination come naturally to me across the medelins of Alcestis. There is no one who knows them better. The paths were open to my family a long, long time ago. We have been the seers of this world ever since. We have counseled shepherds and directed the planting of crops. We have provided cardomancy in the drawing up of fresh townships, and we have accredited true love when runaways meet by night beside the banks of the river, sir. We are esteemed and we are beloved, and through it all we hold one truth close. We have forgotten how to listen, too. The paths closed generations back in the time of my grandmother's grandmother. Even then I have my doubts. What reason did we have to hold the gift of foresight? What genetic quirk attuned us to the language of the universe? If ever such a spark existed, its long since died out. I would ask my parents, my ancestors, but I cannot. I am the final fragment of our once great house. So then, I am a fraud. I count cards, I work tricks, I have a bag of dusts and potions, and a thousand thousand ways to spy a future that I cannot see. The effect is more or less the same. Sham prophets have existed since before the first nomad settled done, Alcestis, since before Alcestis was sworn to the Ducal fold, and incorporated shaggy and uninhabited as it was into the grandeur of that vast domain. I cannot read a desert, cannot read sand, but I can read people and tell them words they will believe. The rest is theatre, the rest is presentation. This being so, I was not overly concerned when soldiers came and crashed themselves through the low stone of my doorway, the ducal crest shone out in scarlet tone against the beaten metal of their helmets. I gathered up my bag of tricks and followed them without delay, out past the river, past the community that I had cherished and I had deceived toward the hulking gunmetal imposition that was the Duke's official residence. I had spent my life lying. The sun caught itself in tight folds of the river, sir, and I smiled politely to the soldier beside me and thought that lying to nobility would be very much the same. The Ducal Embassy squatted over a pleat of hills that overlooked the river town. The base of the embassy was Alkeston in design, thickly dovetailed wood, a forest reassembled. Rough to the touch, unvarnished, wide-windowed and functional, a compromise with the land. It was a silhouette I had known for all my life, a silhouette that had been suddenly enlarged. The Fold is a grand dominion. There is little hope of every world, of every system, even receiving personal visitation. El Kestis has never known its sovereign, never known its embassy fitted to its true purpose. The dropship had come the week before in a halo of wind and storm. It had lowered itself down, an almighty grey carbuncle, and docked itself along the wooden seams of the embassy's peak. Something metal and alive had laced the two of them together and turned a low Elkestin barn into something like a fortress. In the long nights of drinking at the river's edge, we had wondered what had brought our ruler to this place. Elkestis was an obscure possession, best known for the cultivation of a kind of long-horned herbivore. Their scruffy, ungulate bodies were carved all over the embassy's lower levels. Their berserker eyes stared out at me from the grain of wood. I climbed a stairway that had once led to a flattened roof Now there was a doorway of reinforced metal A variation in the pressure of the air The future was hidden from me as it ever was But as I emerged into the Duke's own chambers I knew his purpose would soon be laid bare I stepped into another world And the rush of heat almost bent me double Hot air, humid air I felt the charcoal around my eyes begin to run It was nighttime here. A domed sky, metal arcing overhead. And beyond it, the pitch and glimmer of vacuum. A colossal planet above it all. Greens and blues corrupted with the grays and yellows that denoted civilization. I boggled. It was mid-morning on Augustus and there was no planets in our sky. I stopped and searched and there in one distant corner, a pixel flicker revealed the dome to be a vast and curving screen. Somewhere beyond me. A thin voice. The speed of light, of course. A matter of minutes now, I should think. You're so very far away, you see. The dome enclosed something a little like a greenhouse, and a little like a library. Carefully rooted rainforest erupted all around, a whirl of dripping lianas and sweaty branches, and wide-brimmed crimson blooms. Scattered through the jungle was a rack of furniture, a lacquered desk, several sets of disintegrating wicker chairs. Sheet music melted into vegetable mulch and was dotted with pale, sticky droppings. The edges of my hair began to curl. I pushed my way toward the source of the voice. Twelve minutes only, I think. Maybe eleven. Fancy that. He was pacing up and down a narrow clearing. Behind him was a long table, and on it lay haphazard tools a variety of stringed instruments in disrepair. I recognized him from coins and statues in video form, a frail body, a pale face that bulged out like fungi, shallow metals that jingled against the brocade at his chest. Duke Ernestid Arcady, protector of the fold and ruler of every world I might hope to see, he beamed and beckoned my approach. Ah, soothsayer, he said, welcome to my aviary. I had prepared myself for this moment. Prosperity, my lord, I cried in prostrated myself at his feet. Prosperity for all. Long life and prosperity. I moved my hands in ways I intended to signal mystic understanding. Something warm and wet soaked itself in the fabric of my robe. Well, he said to someone who wasn't there, wasn't she quick? A soft hand tugged my arm and I arose The duke smiled again I come all this way to see you soothsayer I think we can do a little better than that The duke's retinue watched with careful eyes as I took my seat. Their master had been distracted by one of the heaped and broken instruments. He was restringing it the best he could, working with his tongue stuck out of the corner of his mouth. Not long now, he told them, without looking up. Are you ready, soothsayer? Not soldiers or servants, three birds aligned in perfect formation on the table's edge, shaggy, white feathers swollen over their face and bodies. All that peered out were slivers of walnut beak, long toes wrapping against the woodwork. what reading would you prefer my lord i asked will it be the cards or heart of spicy i looked evilly toward the row of birds they fluff themselves as if in determination to keep their guts on the inside tea leaves he said so fiddling with the instrument of course i said perhaps no he said and the frailty of his voice altogether drained away he slammed the instrument down and a crack erupted across its polished casing. I said nothing. In unison, the birds turned their head toward me. People used to read the future and tea leaves, the Duke said, and he was looking at me too, a look that went through the charcoal and went through the robing and found the lyre hidden underneath it all. But they were small. Small people. Small lives. I nodded absent any other choice. My future, soothsayer, is something rather larger. Of course, my lord. Cut the mummery, he said. You're an intelligent woman. I'm here looking for the truth. You understand me. The truth is what I intend to get. I straightened myself. Theatrics weren't for everyone. You might not like it, I said in a voice rather lighter than it had been before. This was a customer type I recognized, one in search of hard truths, one questioning their legacy, a different kind of sell. He waved that away. I am dying, he said, tedious, but there it is. Flesh fails, nothing that can be done. I arranged myself an expression of contrition. You want to know if the fold will endure? The succession. his eyes met mine and something cold and mad bloomed within them I have a curiosity there he said but that is secondary secondary to I wish to see posterity I need to know how I am remembered your subjects love you I said automatically again he stared me down and the lie withered in my throat beyond subjects he said beyond empire at the end of it all the death of the universe does love reach that far soothsayer does anything tell me my name my axe does any of it still endure this would be a tricky calibration as to the method i said buying myself time he gestured upward to the projection of an alien sky and a planet far away. I have shaped worlds, Zeus, say. It is only fitting that my destiny is read in one. Astrology, I said, relaxing in my seat. Astrology required data and required charts. That might give me days. These are the alignments of your birth? No, he said, and again his voice was winter and it was desolate. Not astrology. An inkling crept across my consciousness. I prayed that I was wrong. You have divined by sacrifice, he asked. You have read the organs of beasts. Yes, I said. Of course. Some of my most potent readings, but far from astrological. My fortune requires great sacrifice, I think, he said. I stood up from the table. The birds, startled, flew into crap jungle trees. The air was hot breathed. It was a choking, solid thing. I want you to read my future. In a shattered planet, he said. In the entrails of an entire civilization. I looked up at the glittering world above me and searched for words of reason. None came. No, I said eventually. I glared at the ruler of my backward little world and let the world luxuriate. All paths lead to the same destination. There's really no need. And some paths are clearer than others, he said. We must see further than anyone ever has. Don't insult me, soothsayer. I've done my research. Somehow he was at my side. His face had paled further. His eyes were yellowed against the silver of his skin. There was a smell of sickness, of desperation. Cladamancy, he said. The reading of the future in a planetary disaster. I think you are familiar with the term. He inclined his head upward. Calliston, no one's favorite by a long shot. She'll do very nicely. It's an inhabited world, I said, as if he might suddenly realize. He shrugged. They've been given due notice. I'm told there was some limited evacuation. They'll come after you, I said. That's your prophecy right there. they'll kill you for it. They'll have to be very fast, he said. He was an old man and dying, but he was more besides. He was the destroyer of the Pandendron Hive. He was the man who had ended the Sapphire Rebellions. He possessed the Ducal Fold, and he had brought fresh worlds under his heel. I had no doubt that he was capable. I won't do it, I said, knowing that my words were death. Find someone else. His fingers were at my wrist, his skin still soft despite it all. There is no one else. There is no more time. I came to you. I can't help. Vanity silenced me then, held my tongue as it always had. The words Calliston needed would not come. I took a breath. I'm a fraud, you see. I always have been. Something tight within me unwound and disappeared like a child's balloon. He rolled his eyes. A good try, soothsayer. I mean it. He said there were plain words, true words, riddled with belief. I tried not to think about what had happened to the leaders on Sapphire, how they had been dismantled piece by piece. This is a live feed, he said, as if we hadn't quarreled. Or the closest thing. Caliston is rather far away. A group of soldiers had entered the clearing behind me. It takes light 29 minutes to reach out Kestis from Caliston. The Duke continued. He nodded to the new arrivals and I felt my arms pinioned behind my back, which means we should see the planet end in two minutes if my watch is fully wound. I think I begged then for a planet I had never seen and could never save that had died before I'd even entered the room. Amongst it all, I found space for Venom. I told him more would come. I told him that his work would be undone, his name forgotten. I told him I would see his tyrant bones broken and reduced to fossil shards. This is all in your personal capacity, he said. I brought you here as a professional soothsayer. remember that above us silent calliston crumpled and burst along at seams long strings of continent unwound like peel like calligraphy bleeding out into space there was volcanism and there was a shock of liquid boiling away as the detonation ceased the fragments drifted by and made such pretty patterns as they went murdered calliston screaming out a message that i could not hear The Duke smiled and his future was written across the entirety of the sky Second Fortune Bellomancy The snow-white parrots of Duke, Ernested, wheeled their way above the battlefield. Augury is perhaps the oldest form of divination. it is an interpretation of the flight of birds their numerology and their murmuration bird omens are easily created in my garden there are cages concealed with webbing and low branches white birds and black well trained an augury for every occasion here the flight of birds had no meaning only that the aviary had been destroyed only that they were overcome with animal greed that they had stained scarlet across their downy chests from feasting on the dead i could not begrudge the birds their freedom. It was bound alongside mine. The embassy had been razed to the ground, dropship and al-Kesten timber both. Only its lower layer had been preserved, the stony cells that drilled down beneath the earth. I had been insulated by deep foundations. I had felt the reverberation of the stones as the final troop ships came to land, the rush of air as the roof of my prison was blasted away. In those final days before the battle came, the duke had sent for me many times. I would be escorted to the aviary the hothouse sink the scream of pale birds there the horizon screen was forever replaying Calliston's end its suffering and disarray I would be given pens and charts and told if I did this one thing I might still live eventually I was not sent for and I knew the duke was dead then I was forgotten I was abandoned below the earth buried already war had come to the vastness of the fold as its ruler had known it would Strike and counter-strike, a scramble of fractions as alliances dragged one system after another into the fray. The troops that reached Elkestis were much depleted. They were survivors only. Refugees from the silence and splendor of a war in vacuum. Elkestis, hilly and bare. Elkestis, whose only sins was that it was the seer's home. My fraud had caught a tyrant's eye. It had brought hellfire down upon us all. Now the war was done. the rage of it was all burned out, the rage and the tyrant both. The Alkeston plains were a mud churn, a metal graveyard, a shred of bodies. The river Sur had overflowed itself, gutted on oil, blood, and chemical pollutants. A bog land built on engine fuel, flammable and heavy in the air. Collapse and slurry, machine fragments halfway swallowed by the earth. I picked my way in the direction that had been the river town. Someway ahead, a parrot landed on a rubble shard and cocked his head, extended out its long, hungry neck. There was a scream from the wreckage. The bird retreated to a further stump and waited for carrion to be made. The woman in the rubble was not Elkestan. Her hair was cropped and dark, distinct from the loops and braiding of our native kind. Her combat uniform was blackened, made sticky by the thickness of her blood. I ought to have left her. I ought to have tended to my own, to the remnants of the river town. Some of the buildings there were still standing. I could see window lights, the insectoid movement of distant activity. The battle was done and she was broken and I did not want to see her die alone. Hello, I said and felt with it a slight curdle of embarrassment. I did not quite know what to say. Hello, she said with unexpected vigor. Her leg was a nest of splinters, her face sallow and exsanguinant. Have you come to kill me? No, I said carefully. For all I knew, she was still armed. Just for the company. She nodded her head at that. My terms had been accepted. honey i looked at her blankly it's my name sorry i said honey i've never done this before it's easy she said all you have to do is wait i can do that i said tucking myself into a hollow of the rubble i looked down toward the town once more the people there seemed to be organizing. Hanne couldn't follow my eyeline from her sprawl. Let me guess. Help is on its way. I think so. Yeah, I've said that one before. Her hand curled its way into mine. Stay here all the same. I wondered how I looked to her, a malnourished banshee dressed in rags, soot smeared around its temples, a vision of death, something belonging to the battlefield. I'm Bayless, I said, to lessen the effect. I live here. Must be nice, she said. Alkestis, you've got those. Those. Algulal, I said. We call them Algulal, the things with horns. I saw one in a zoo once. I laughed at that Al-Ghulal or a simple herd animal not the sort of thing anyone should pay to see I like them you don't know them, I said they're all pricks yeah, said Hanne she squeezed my hand that's what I like about them where are you from, Hanne? Calliston, she said I startled in her palm and she gave me a pathetic sort of smile I know he's dead at least I think that means I won I craned my head there were figures in the distance dressed in the clothing of the river town there were stretchers an antibody station aid I'm not lying I said I really think you're getting out of this when I turned back Hanne was shivering her eyes did not make it all the way to mine we'll see she said and her breath was coming weaker than before i thought i had understood despair in those long nights under the earth the howl and pop of munitions overhead the destruction of the valleys i had loved the knowledge that it was mirrored and it was amplified in a wave of death that passed across the empire of the sky knowing that all this would not have come without the legend of Elkestus, its family of oracles, its false and orphaned prophet. If my grandmother's grandmother had been able to read the universe, had it told her this would come? Perhaps that was why the paths had closed, out of shame. One hand was rooted amongst Hane's fingers. I sank the other into traumatized Elkestan earth and prayed. I felt about the soil and clods and prayed that they would speak to me at last. They surely owed me that one miracle. Alkestis was silent as she always was. The universe continued on without me. Something in me burned. I would have to do it by myself. Honey, I said. I didn't mention something earlier. Something important, really. the faintest pressure on my hand my name is balis shudal and i'm i'm a fortune teller the old lie blazed it was heat and it was fury and this time it was going to get her out alive i had power now all my own disconnected from alcestis from my lineage from the inevitable message of the universe. This was my message, mine alone. Tell her words she will believe. I'd very much like to read your fortune, I babbled. I hope you don't mind. Your lifeline is exceptional. I traced the length of it on her palm. And I am so intrigued to know more. She gave a bubbly sort of laugh. I don't have cards with me, I said. And your guts are still mostly on the inside, so I think I have to read the battlefield. We call that bellomancy The lies were easier than they had ever been There is no art to reading a battlefield they are chaos they are the eater of fortunes tell me hane said and i returned to myself well i said well the first thing is you're going to live and that's not just the lifeline there's a place up ahead where three tracks cross where the treads from the artillery have made a sort of star and that actually means that you're fine oh she said that's good and that there's more i said you'll have a big house and and you're going to have a child there's a strut over there and it's all bent, but still it's curving to the sky, and that means children. Who is, she asked. Tall and handsome. No, I said, short and off-putting, I don't make the rules. She laughed again, and it was the sound of something draining away. Another sound then, another voice calling out across the plane, a voice I recognized. I let go of her hand. I stood up straight and waved my arms. I was a scarecrow of delirium. Over here, I shouted. We're over here. What next? She said. Tell me what comes next. The next portent, I said, and the joy was coming off me in waves, is that the town surgeon is walking toward me and I can tell you, Anne, that this omen means only one thing. I scrambled in the dirt until I had her hand. it means that you will see me again. The medics came and I sat with Hane while they worked. They needed blood and I had plenty of my own and they were more than happy to put some of mine inside her. Eventually they cut her free and carried her away to a river town and I was left on the battlefield with the parts of Hane's leg that had altogether died. I watched the birds in the sky and their motions were obscure and meaningless as before. I remained because I had a vow to keep, because sometimes you have to make the future you have promised to another. The sun was shining very clear, and when I felt strong enough, I headed back up the hill to see what remained. Of Duke Ernested. Third Fortune. Osteomancy. Years passed before I told another fortune. Alkestis was in recovery. We needed labor, not prophecy. I drudged the river and I planted crops and I fitted snug joints into pillars of wood. Far above us, the ducal fold endured in its way. There were new rulers, a new regime. No one asked us to rebuild our embassy. We grew our crops and grazed our herbivores, and things were never quite the same as they were before. I had woken that morning suffused with strange purpose. It was a rest day and I had intended to spend it at the river's edge. I had been fermenting a thick brown something in a bucket underneath my sink, and today it seemed the ideal day to drink it. Instead I found myself walking to the distant end of the town and beyond past the fallow fields and still infected by the chemical decay into the far hills a place of scrub and rock and solitude. You might walk for hours here entirely alone except for the presence of the ever belligerent Al-Ghulal. You might pass a herder only watching from a safe distance their body protected by a stiff and leather dungaree. You might greet them, as I did. I looked this particular herder up and down. Her hair was longer now, shaped into the looping Elkeston style, a neat prosthetic fitted over one leg. Honey, I said, and the universe around me sighed with relief. Something told me you'd be here. We walked back together to the town. Hane lived in a block of temporary flats, a shared space with many of the other dispossessed. It's not a big house, she said, but I'll let you off with that one. I hadn't known that she had stayed. It pleased me that she had. After Calliston, Alkestis was as good a place as any. Hane unlatched a wooden door. It was a simple home, not very different from my own. Wait here, she said. I got someone who wants to meet you. my bag of powdered tricks have been abandoned in a dungeon long ago i had never sought it since instead i carried a pouch dark and velvet stringed around my neck hane's baby pawed at it with some fascination the texture was novel this encouraged her to try for flavor hane apologized and pulled the baby back onto her own lap it's all right i said there were flowery cakes on the table and that was recompense enough. Hanne's baby burbled at me, outraged that I was permitted cake while velvet had been forbidden for her. My fingers tightened around the pouch. It had been a long time since I had thought to open it. I want to read her fortune, I said. The words surprised me, but they were true. It was nothing I wanted more in all the world. all right said hane that's all right isn't it briella the two of them looked at me expectantly i started to untie the string for my neck sorry hane i said client confidentiality do you mind leaving us to it she laughed and retreated into another room what are you using she asked me as she went. Carts? Bones, I said and jangled the pouch. Al-Ghulal. Something like that. When Brayla and I were quiet alone, I returned to the table and carefully swept the cake crumbs to one side. Remind me to tell you about a loromancy one day, I told Brayla. That's one of the best ones. She nodded and tried to hide one hand inside her mouth. Osteomancy, I said to her, tells your future through the positioning of bones, finger bones usually, or knuckle. We'll see how they fall on the table, and that tells us what the future holds. My infant audience watched and rapped in difference. Most people use animal bones, I told her, dropping my voice down low. but I've got something better than that. I shook out the midnight little pouch and the bones of Duke Ernested's hand shattered themselves across the breadth of polished wood. There are a thousand thousand routes to divination. I know all of them which is to say I know none of them. I spent my childhood staring into pools of milky bones and they never spoke a word. They were random and they were chaos and I was left to build a future the best I could. i sat in hane's living room and bounced braella on my knee and this time the bones on the table were an open book written in a familiar hand and everything that she would live and love and do was very plain to see afterward i called her mother through and i even stayed a little longer until braella slept in the pile of cakes was much reduced it was darkening by the time i left the flat by the time I walked my way home along the banks of the river Sur. I found a quiet place and watched the water work its course. The pattern of it was endless, darkness and light and shadow and reflection. I stood there for a while, and the ripples carried on forever. The velvet of the pouch was a whisper in my hand. I skimmed the finger bones out onto the water and watched them sink away into the glossy and infinite black. I want to thank you for joining us for this month's stories. We have a whole new issue coming your way for March, and that is thanks to your ongoing support. I do hope you come back and listen, so as you so choose, and I do hope you're keeping well, all things considered. Thanks for taking the time to escape with us. until the next time my dear listener i would you very fond and hopefully very temporary farewell