The Great Game 🎲 Fallar Discordia

The Aphrodisiac of Priests

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If you showed him a short video of a puppy jumping awkwardly over a cushion and flying into its mother’s arms, the Priest would show no emotion whatsoever. He’d merely think to himself, Who’d bother to make such a video? What kind of idiot would watch it?

If you showed him a video of a little boy gnawing on a dusty chicken bone in a scorching refugee camp, he’d wonder, What’s taking so long? Where are my cooks? I’m hungry, goddammit!

But then he’d reconsider his outburst. Eventually, he’d concede that such anger wasn’t worthy of him. He’d conclude, as the author of Ecclesiastes did so long ago, that all was vanity. What’s the point anyway? The cooks always put too much pepper-dust on the wild simorg. It’s nailed to the wooden plate, and presented to you with all the elegance of haute cuisine — but then the bird flails its wings and you end up sneezing in a cloud of dust. Who can eat like that?

If you showed Father Cagnazzo a fluffy pink loveliness, accompanied by the music of harps and violins, he’d bark at you, Stop that racket! Who’s behind that stupid cloud? What are you trying to hide? The antennae on his forehead would quiver with rage.

And yet, there he was, hunched in his dark priestly cloak, chuckling with glee.

The cryptogram Dactalla sent him was exactly what he needed. He had sent her on a dangerous mission into the very heart of Aatari Lok, and she had triumphed. She even went the extra mile, providing footnotes on how she got the files, and highlighting in red the places in each file which were most likely to interest him.

Her cryptogram allowed him to see how the Aataris ran their security system, and how Cagnazzo might get his hooks into the various branches of their judicial system. 200 years ago he had controlled an entire Aatari planet, yet in order for him to elude detection this planet needed to be in the dustiest corner of the Aatari Lok universe. Yet here he had an agent on Aatari Prime itself, two minutes by foot from the headquarters of the Secret Service. And not only that: his agent now had access to the private computer of the most highly-placed officer in the Aatari Intelligence Service: Qayam Ontari.

The files Dactalla sent him were chock-full of incriminating detail. Kickbacks, bribery, embezzlement, lechery, and blackmail — a true delight! Cagnazzo’s wide insectizoid mouth made a gruesome smile, from ear to ear.

To the Priest, Dactalla was a gift from below. She was a sorceress of espionage, with a body as white as her thoughts were black. Bitumen-black, like her eyes. On Earth, the woman who looked most like Dactalla was Carlotta Antonelli, the resourceful gypsy from Suburra: Blood on Rome.

But to Cagnazzo she was no gypsy; she was a goddess, a dark-eyed Ereshkigal, wide awake among the sleeping Sumerians. It was impossible to hide secrets from her, just like it was impossible to hide your earthly deeds from the Goddess of the Underworld.

Dactalla could get in anywhere, penetrate any security system, and no one was the wiser. Her dark eyes, once in a dark boudoir of secrets, lit up. Each iris was a circular flame, each pupil a world of things that others never saw.

She was the wise owl of his Fallarian night. On the cover-page of his innermost file on Dactalla, Cagnazzo wrote in jet black ink the following three lines:

She is the mistress of the pitch-black forest

and the midnight plain,

the echoing vale and the gathering rain.

Cagnazzo had tried everything he could — art, music, AI simulation, heroine, somatherin — yet only the abstraction of words could get at his painful obsession, his feeling that she was right there and all his, and yet she was also elsewhere and would never he his.

Cagnazzo was forced to write poetry, yet he hated it. He despised that twisting of words and buckling of time that could make even an accountant curse. He imagined the poor wreck, counting the numbers, and staying up till 5 AM trying to make the lines of his numbers rhyme.

Trying to understand his derangement for Dactalla, Cagnazzo broke his two cardinal laws: 1. Thou shalt live in the world of facts and liberty. 2. Thou shalt not write poetry. And yet there was the evidence, tattooed around his left and right thighs:

Even if Cagnazzo could detach himself from Dactalla’s beauty, he could never do without the information she uncovered.

She’d proved herself to him three decades ago by unveiling the treachery of his colleagues Graffiacane and Draghignazzo. She duped both Priests with her dark eyes, and sounded their plans by merely lowering her blouse, one centimetre for every secret they let slip. They never suspected a thing. Cagnazzo had of course spied on her every step of the way.

Cagnazzo was now almost completely sure that Dactalla would never betray him. 99% sure. This was a staggering number for a Ferridian Priest. On average, they trusted their parents 2% of the time.

And yet her very presence among the Ferridan Priessts of the Black Horde was almost unbelievable. They were such an insular cult, and would normally never consider admitting a Derelectan, especially one born in the notorious Datchau Slum. The Slum resembled a war zone in eastern Congo, riddled with violence both continual and sporadic, often at the whim of gangsters and methanine addicts. Yet what kept Cagnazzo awake at night was less how she survived that place than how she got through the tightly-controlled doors of the Borjès.

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