The Great Game 🎲 Fallar Discordia
The Borjès
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The Borjès was the headquarters of the spy agency run by the Ferridian Priests of the Black Horde. It was a heavy square building that loomed across Anarchy Square from the Capital, much as the Lubyanka loomed several blocks from the Kremlin.
FSB of Russia block at Bolshaya Lubyanka Street 1 (across the 'old' KGB building), built in 1983, March 2017, by Edgar Cherkasov, from 500px (archived version) by the Archive Team (detail page). (From Wikimedia Commons)
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, abhored, feared 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 Ferridian Priest, he imagined the latter, and respected it more than anything else. Only the Omnipotent Father in His Empty Black Heaven knew what she’d done to get so far so quickly.
Cagnazzo controlled millions of elite spies 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 told 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. 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 smooth and milky white — and large, always very large — beneath that perfect ivory skin her heart and lungs were fusion reactors of beauty and intoxication. A Derelectan could, by breathing in deeply and pushing her chest up and out, 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.
Becky Sharp as a "syren", a man-killing mermaid. An untitled image from the novel. The number indicates the Djvu page number of the Wikisource transclusion. From Vanity Fair - A Novel Without a Hero, 1848 (From Wikimedia Commons).
Cagnazzo wouldn’t lower himself to leer dumbly at such a cheap side-show of glittering lights and symphonic gimmicks. Instead, he would sit at a safe distance, observing with studied detachment how the rollicking depths cast purple and orange patterns onto her porcelain face, and how the notes moved in and out of the audible range, working here and there on the ears, the organs, and the solar plexus, tempering the nerves like a harpsichord or blasting the finest resolve like a carpenter’s workshop of hammers by Mahler.
Cagnazzo knew 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.
