The Great Game 🎲 Fallar Discordia

Spies

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Old Ones, Shegseths, Dimensional Shamblers, Vooniths, Insect Philosophers, Zooms, and Servitors of the Outer Gods — Lovecraft had only supplied a partial list. Millions of creatures from the Black Pulse slithered and throbbed into the centre of the cosmos every day, through the harsh worlds of the Frozen Skiff and the Yellow Sky and into the Midbelt with its rich and fertile soil. Yet there were also billions of decent Fallarians who travelled nord every day, on business or pleasure. Many served as ambassadors for the Black Council. All of them were counterarguments to the insidious designs of the Demon Priests.

Everyone knew, though no one dared say it, that the Frozen Skiff and the Yellow Sky were firmly in the Fallarian sphere of influence. They were the Kazakhstan and Caucasus of the Kraslika. A Skiff Assassinar or a Blood Skyte might slice your head off for suggesting that his race was in any way subservient to the Demon Priests or the High Ministers of Fallar Discordia, but he’d also look around him before he said it.

For Cagnazzo, Skiffs and Skytes were easy conduits of Fallarian power, and they were therefore crucial to the Demon Priests. They were also crucial to Cagnazzo’s personal operations in the Grey Phantom, from where he tried to establish a spy nexus in the Great Triangle, which might then allow him to infiltrate the Vicinese Federation. As for the Dolcezza — with its Blue Dream, its Pink Sea, and its Panophilia — it would simply have to wait.

So far, Cagnazzo had enjoyed great success in Aatari Lok. Centuries ago he had controlled the death-planet Tarry Doom (some called it The Tarry Dot), and had made his own measurements of the trajectories of souls after the bodies were destroyed. Tarry Doom, he thought nostalgically, it was my own private version of Treblinka or Chasiv Yar. And, as usual, no one understood that my intentions were noble.

Now Cagnazzo had his best double agent in the arms of the most senior ranking Aatari spy and security official. If Dactalla could turn Qayam, Cagnazzo might establish a power base from where he could sink his claws into the Vicinese Guard. This was his most cherished desire. He also hoped that a base in Aatari Lok would allow him to strike laterally into the Great Triangle. Who knows, if he could create a network that penetrated the Violet Hoop, he might find a way to direct the occult affinities that were found on Earth, and he might ferret out the Soul Star itself.

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Cagnazzo was so delighted by these possibilities that in his brain he had superimposed a schematic of universes over everything he read in the cryptogram Dactalla sent him. At the thought of Dactalla, however, the map disappeared, and he was once again looking at the information she had extracted from Qayam’s computer. As intriguing as these pieces of information were, he couldn’t stop his eyes from straying to the footnotes at the bottom of the page.

Her footnotes about her seduction of the Aatari agent were written in point-form, as if she were in a rush yet still wanted to do a thorough job. Cagnazzo knew that the important information was above, but his eyes were 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 those black eyes!] ❧ slowly dropped top, skirt, bra, panties ❧ fondled subject’s large cock ❧ applied mouth [I will never, ever lose myself in those perfect red lips!] ❧ subject took forever, so I used my 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 Aatari 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 this Qayam knew. He would drag him down with him, beneath the thrashing currents.

The Siren, 1900, by John William Waterhouse Source/Photographer (Wikimedia Commons)