The Great Game 🎲 Fallar Discordia

Priests

🎲

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 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 little boy gnawing on a dusty chicken bone in a scorching refugee camp, he’d wonder, What’s taking so long? Where are my cooking 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 this? 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! Who’s behind that stupid cloud? What are they 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 cryptograms sent by Dactalla were very specific about how the Aataris ran their security system, and about how Cagnazzo might get his hooks into this or that branch of their judicial system. The cryptograms were also chock full of incriminating detail. Kickbacks, bribery, embezzlement, lechery, and blackmail — a true delight! His 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. Coal-black, like her eyes. Here on Earth the woman who looks most like Dactalla might be Carlotta Antonelli, who plays the the dark-eyed gypsy in Suburra: Blood on Rome.

But to Cagnazzo she was no gypsy; she was a goddess, a dark-eyed Ereshkigal, wide awake among the sleeping Fallarians. It was impossible to hide things from her, just like it was impossible to hide your earthly deeds from the Goddess of the Dead. Dactalla could get in anywhere, penetrate any security system, and no one was the wiser. Winged, like all Fallarians, she was mistress of the pitch-black forest and the midnight plain. Like the owls at Ereshkigal’s feet, she was powerful in flight, and most deadly at night.

Dactalla first proved herself to Cagnazzo 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 and hiking her mini-skirt. They never suspected a thing. Cagnazzo had of course spied on her every step of the way.

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

🎲

Dactalla came from the slums of Fallar Discordia, which resembled a war zone in eastern Congo. Cagnazzo wondered how she managed to survive in such an environment. He wondered even more at how she managed to make it through the doors of the Borjès. (The Borjès was the headquarters of the spy agency run by the Demon Priests of the Black Horde. It was a looming square building that stood literally and symbolically across from the Capital, much as the Lubyanka looms several blocks from the Kremlin.)

Cagnazzo had looked into Dactalla’s background numerous times, but all he found was that she was a Derelectan and 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 Borjès was no mean feat. Especially if you were a Derelectan, the most abused and frowned-upon race on Fallar Discordia. Cagnazzo concluded that she was either the genuine upstanding article or she had covered her tracks with exquisite skill. As a Demon Priest, he imagined the latter. Only the Omnipotent Father in the Empty Black Sky knew what she’d done to get so far so quickly.

Cagnazzo controlled millions of elite spies, slaves, and courtesans, yet he knew he could never make Dactalla his lover. He knew it the moment he met her a hundred years ago, when she first applied for service at the Borjès. I will never, ever lose myself in those black eyes, he said to himself when she 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. Still, he was 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, beneath that perfect skin her heart and lungs were fusion machines of beauty and instinct. By breathing in deeply and pushing her chest up and out, the Derelectan could extend the gap between her neck and collarbone. Opening her treasure-chest, she could mesmerize 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 such a cheap side-show of flashing lights and gimmicks. Instead, he would sit at a safe distance, observing with superior detachment how the fiery depths cast purple and orange patterns onto her porcelain face.

Besides, it was well-known 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.

🎲

Looking more carefully at the cryptograms she sent, Cagnazzo saw 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, and seduced Qayam. She had lowered his guard to the point where she found herself unsupervised for three hours in his apartment, opening the files on his personal computer.

Dactalla included in her cryptograms detailed notes on how she got Qayam to let down his guard. She listed the sexual enticements she offered — starting with the mink coat that fell down her slim legs, and the black satin shift that was so thin that Qayam could see her nipples and pubic hair — as well as the drugs she used to put him out in Fairly Land for several hours. Cagnazzo imagined her in action, as if she were in a Bond film, at the card table and then in the bedroom. In his mind she was the icy-hearted yet welcoming Kseniya Onatopp, on a deep-cover mission to bring down that goodie two-shoes, the dandy James Bond, and his condescending Britain.

But why did Dactalla have to send him all that stupid information? He didn’t give a damn about it! Why didn’t she just file it in a separate report, in an appendix, or in the fucking end notes? Instead, she put all these unnecessary infernal details in footnotes, directly below the items copied from Qayam’s files.

These items were invaluable: they contained specific information about criminals, and also about the methods Qayam used to track them. The items laid bare how agents from Aatari Prime surveilled the trillion galaxies of the Aatari Lok universe. They also laid bare the manner in which Aatari agents communicated with their counterparts in the Vicinese Federation.

Cagnazzo was beside 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, 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 gone some way to this goal by seducing the wife of Giorgio Obrion, the Director of the Vicinese White Guard. Second, a spy network in Aatari Lok would give him a sturdier base to infiltrate the Violet Hoop, which was home to Earth and the elusive Soul Star.

According to legend, the Soul Star lies at the centre of everything, somewhere in the Local Void of the Virgo Supercluster. It’s rumoured to be a heavenly place to which souls travel after their bodies die. Yet figuring out the exact “centre of everything” is difficult (galaxy walls and universes shift constantly), and calculating the trajectory of souls is impossible (the initial moment of trajectory is only measurable for a second or two). Cagnazzo spent over 200 years trying to measure this trajectory. He even built a death laboratory on the planet of Tarry Doom (also called Tarry Dot), with the hope that simultaneous mass extinctions might lead to a stronger trajectory signal. Yet his lab was blown up by what he called the enemies of science.

These were the same idiots who were obsessed with Earth and its potential to be a Gateway to Heaven. So what if human poets wrote about a heavenly star “whose worth’s unknown although its height be taken.” So what if their planet mirrored the cosmos in strange ways. He didn’t care that the Vicinese and Fallarian word manipulare was the same in Italian. The Italians were a backward mess of pre-quantum dolts. Its height be taken — what a laugh! They couldn’t even measure the size of their own universe! Cagnazzo couldn’t care less about word origins. And he couldn’t care even less about poetry.

But one thing he did care about was getting control of the Soul Star. He wanted to turn it into a Black Star that would suck in all the energy around it, which could then be directed against the enemies of the Demon Priests.

But it was hard to get anything done in the Violet Hoop, let along the Virgo Supercluster. The latter was especially rife with spy stations and agents from every corner of the cosmos. The Grey Phantom universe cluster, on the other hand, was open to all sorts of manipulation and coercion. The Grey Phantom, what a perfect name, Cagnazzo thought, for the shadowy operations that go on there! Operations that kept the members of the Aatari Guard up at night.

Every day Frozen Skiffs made secret deals with Crimson Stalkers, and every day the seediest of Yellow Sky operatives did their best to entrap and blackmail the otherwise obstinate businessmen of the Copper Tarn.

But the Tarnese were a rugged and sophisticated lot. They were perhaps even a model for what a Kraslikan needs to be: willing to face a Derelectan in the trenches of Fallar Discordia, but willing to do so in order to protect the principles of quid pro quo, free & fair trade, a deal was a deal, and, if necessary, habeas corpus. While the Blue Dream Alliance includes Aatari Lok, it also has deep philosophical and commercial ties with the Copper Tarn.

🎲

The most striking thing about the cosmos of the Kraslika is its lack of purity. Everything from language to genetics is a mix. The reason this is striking is that on the surface it seems the exact opposite. Theoretically, the Vicinese and Fallarians each have their place firmly on the moral spectrum: the Vicinese are angelic and the Fallarians demonic. Yet in practice the spectrum collapses into a line, the line curves into a ball, and the ball spins around itself and rolls away. The angelic Vicinese have some of the dirtiest, rottenest scoundrels that ever walked on two feet. Likewise, the demonic Fallarians have some of the most principled and heroic souls that ever took flight into the air.

This same mix is found in languages and cultures throughout the Kraslika. The Vicinese vaunt their purity and write long books on the Tuscan dialect, but a third of their words are what we’d call Slavic, Turkic, and Germanic. Likewise, about a third of Fallarian words are what we’d call Italianate. The Vicinese and Fallarians also have innumerable words that we’d call Semitic, Indian, African, and Chinese.

Imagine, as E.M. Forster does, that writers from everywhere are writing together in a circular room. Each writer is writing in their own language and special dialect. Each is writing about their way of life, their thinking, and their civilization. Each thinks their language is precisely what’s needed to get at the truth of things.

One of the writers, catching a vague melody floating through the air, writes the following sentence: “Only a benign fate kept the curling vapours thick enough at the right moment, for they were constantly shifting and threatening to vanish.” He wonders, Is this the life we’ve lived so far, the gift the cosmos has given us, among so many other presents? He looks up from his pen and paper, and notices that the other writers also have pens in their hands. All of them are writing on paper, and everything they write about seems to be the truth, a final capping or articulation of their finest brains.

From somewhere outside the circular room, beyond and perhaps above, he hears the song of a nightingale.

🎲

Next: 🎲 Heaven & Hell

Back to Top

Contents - Characters - Glossary: A-F∙G-Z - Maps - Storylines