Espionage

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

If you showed the reverend father a video of a dusty little boy gnawing at a bare chicken bone in a scorching refugee camp, he’d wonder, What’s taking so long? Where are my slaves? I’m hungry, goddammit! But then he’d reconsider his outburst, concede that such anger wasn’t worthy of him, and conclude that all was vanity. What’s the point anyway? They always put too much pepper dust on the wild simorg. It’s nailed to the wooden plate, yet when it flails its wings you end up sneezing in a cloud of dust. Who can eat like that? It’s impossible to get good help these days.

If you showed Father Cagnazzo a fluffy pink loveliness, accompanied by harp and violin, he’d scowl, and bark at you, Stop that racket! What’s beneath that stupid cloud? What are they trying to hide?

And yet, there he was, hunched in his dark priestly cloak, chuckling with glee. The cryptograms sent by Dactalla were chock full of incriminating detail. Kickbacks, bribery, embezzlement, lechery, and blackmail — a true delight! His wide insectizoid mouth made a gruesome smile, 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. Coal-black, like her eyes. She was a goddess, a dark-eyed Ereshkigal walking among the half-dead Fallarians. She could get in anywhere, penetrate any security system, and no one was the wiser.

Dactalla first proved herself to Father Cagnazzo among his colleagues Father Graffiacane and Father Draghignazzo. She duped them with her dark eyes into telling her all about their plans to destroy him. Cagnazzo had of course spied on her every step of the way. He was now almost completely sure that she would never betray him. 99% sure. This was a staggering number for a Demon Priest. On average, they trusted their parents 33% of the time.

Dactalla came from the slums of Fallar Discordia, which resembled a war zone in eastern Congo. Cagnazzo wondered how she survived such an environment, and how she managed to obtain the credentials to make it through the doors of the spy agency run by the Demon Priests of the Black Horde. He looked into her background numerous times, but all he found was that she was a hard-working member of society. She believed in individual liberty, self-interest, inequality, and self-reliance. In other words, she was a Fallarian.

Still, getting through the doors of the spy agency was no mean feat. Especially if you were a Derelectan, the most brutal, most criminal of the inhabitants of Fallar Discordia. Cagnazzo concluded that she was either the genuine article — a white seashell washed up on a beach of black sand — or she had covered her tracks with exquisite skill. Only God in His emptiness below knew what she’d done to get so far, so fast.

Cagnazzo controlled millions of elite spies, slaves, and courtesans, yet he knew he could never command or pay Dactalla enough to become his lover. He knew this the moment he met her a hundred years ago. I will never, ever lose myself in that perfect white face! he said to himself the moment she first stepped into his office. He meant this in two ways: first, he’d never debase himself by pleading to be her lover; second, he’d never be her lover because she’d never let him. The first way covered up the second as best it could.

Yet as the years went by, he admitted to himself that she was what he desired more than anything in the entire Fallarian Dominion. And yet he was still too proud, and too wise, to beg for her affection. He would never weep before her dark eyes, never snivel before her majestic white breasts, never drop salt tears onto her white toes.

Nor would he find sinister ways to peer down her blouse and into the gap between her neck and clavicle. He told himself that he was above that type of voyeurism, but secretly he feared what might happen. While the breasts of the Derelectan were milky white on the outside, on the inside they were a tempest-tossed world of adventure. By breathing in deeply and pushing her breasts up and out, the Derelectan could extend the gap between her neck and collarbone. Opening her treasure-chest, she mesmerized whoever looked directly into its smouldering liquids and gems, its pungent oils and perfumes, its ocean of heaving fire.

Cagnazzo wouldn’t lower himself to peer into this world of flashing lights and gimmicks. Instead, he decided to sit at a safe distance. He would content himself to watch the fiery depths of Dactalla’s treasure-chest cast mauve and orange patterns onto her porcelain face.

Besides, it was common knowledge that the heart of a Derelectan was the heart of a siren. One look at it and you’d steer your boat straight into the wave-battered cliffs.

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Looking carefully at the cryptograms she had just sent, Cagnazzo could see that Dactalla’s liaison with Qayam the Aatari security agent had finally born fruit. At long last. It had taken decades, yet finally she had established herself as an innocuous travel agent, seduced Qayam, and lowered his guard to the point where she found herself unsupervised for three hours in his apartment. She had infiltrated his outer work life and his inner personal life, and now she was infiltrating the information he kept in his computer.

Dactalla included in her communiqué to Cagnazzo several brief notes on how she got Qayam to let down his guard. She put this information in footnotes, below the various items copied from Qayam’s files. These were items about criminals, yet also items which detailed the methods Qayam used to track criminals. The items laid bare how agents from Aatari Prime surveilled the trillion galaxies of Aatari Lok. They also laid bare the manner in which Aatari agents communicated with their counterparts in the more powerful empire of the Vicinese Federation.

Cagnazzo was beyond himself with glee. This was the information he needed to infiltrate the Blue Dream Alliance, the coalition of six universes dominated by the Vicinese Federation.

By worming his way into Aatari Lok, Father Cagnazzo planned to bypass the three universes in the Dolcezza, all of which were firmly controlled by the Vicinese. This would allow him to do two things. First, he could more directly infiltrate the Vicinese intelligence network. He had already got some way to this goal by seducing the wife of Giorgio Obrion, the Director of the Vicinese White Guard. Second, he might secure a sturdier foothold in the Violet Hoop, which was home to both the Soul Star and Planet Earth.

According to legend, the Soul Star lay at the centre of everything. It was a heavenly place to which souls travelled after their bodies died. Yet figuring out the exact “centre of everything” was difficult (galaxies and universes were constantly shifting), and calculating the trajectory of souls was impossible (the trajectory was only detectable for a second or two). Cagnazzo had spent over 200 years trying to measure this trajectory. He had even built a death laboratory on the planet of Tarry Doom, with the hope that mass extinction might lead to a stronger trajectory signal. Yet his lab was blown up by what he called the enemies of science. The same idiots were obsessed with Earth. So what if it mirrored the cosmos in such strange ways? Their obsessions just dotted the empty stretches of the Virgo Supercluster with spy stations and agents from every corner of the cosmos.

Because of the Soul Star and Earth, the Violet Hoop was exceptionally difficult to infiltrate. Cagnazzo prodded and jabbed, yet it was like the famed Incan Temple of the Sun: its building blocks were so tightly packed that you couldn’t find a crack for even the thinnest blade.

The power line that stretched from the Purple Pulse to Ataari Lok, on the other hand, was open to all sorts of adventure. It was here that Cagnazzo was able to set up his Planet of Doom in order to make measurements on the trajectories of souls after they die.

It was also in Aatari Lok that he planted his best spies. Like Dactalla. If she could turn Qayam, he might establish a power base from where he could sink his claws into the Vicinese Guard. And, of course, this would give him a more solid base to strike laterally into any of the six universes of the Great Triangle and Dolcezza. Who knows, if he could create a network that penetrated the Great Triangle, he might find a way to direct the occult affinities that were found on Earth and to ferret out the Soul Star itself.

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Cagnazzo was delighted by all of these possible plans, yet his eyes were also drawn to the bottom of the pages Dactalla sent him. Her footnotes about her seduction of the agent were written in point-form, as if she was in a rush yet still wanted to do a thorough, professional job. Cagnazzo knew that the important information was above, but his eyes were, as usual, draw to what was below:

❧ slipped narcozine, methetapine, and somatherin into subject’s martini ❧ led subject into bedroom [Cagnazzo repeated to himself, I will never, ever lose myself in that perfect white face!] ❧ slowly dropped top, skirt, bra, panties ❧ fondled subject’s large cock ❧ applied mouth [I will never, ever lose myself in that perfect white body!] ❧ subject took forever so used hands ❧ slapped subject out of it ❧ threw subject on bed ❧ inserted cock inside [Her incandescent body, glowing with colours and drenched in perfume! I will never, ever lose myself in that perfect white body! ]

Cagnazzo broke off reading her communiqué. He couldn’t stand it any longer.

Only after throwing his goblet of sanguinol at the wall could he return to Dactalla’s exposé of criminality: the kickbacks, lechery, bribery, embezzlement, and blackmail, none of which he cared about now. He chuckled drily, all the joy sucked out of him by the great sucking Emptiness below.

Finally, he asked himself, Why didn’t she just say that she drugged Qayam and that his mind went missing for hours?

He refused to think about what went on in that bedroom. It had nothing to do with the main point: he had infiltrated the Vicinese Guard!

He felt like he was suffocating or drowning. The water thrashed all around him as he grabbed onto an ankle, slim and white. And yet all he felt were scales.

He didn’t give a damn what Qayam knew, as long as he dragged him down with him, beneath the thrashing currents.

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Next: ✏️ In Over My Head

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