The Finest Ear-Muffs Money Can Buy

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There was a gate behind which Qayam found what he was looking for, as the narcozines and methetapines flooded his cells with bliss. When the somatherin hit his brain he came upon a pool in which naked maidens reached out their slender white arms to him, begging him to join them in their world of seaweed and love.

Pink lily pads sang to him, and swaying porcelain nymphs — their faces the many faces of Dactalla, their eyes glistening, their bodies humming — caressed his body, which was one with the deep blue water, deep in the very fibres of his brain. They were drowning him in their bodies, carving deep blue ripples in the tissues of his mind. Meanwhile, Dactalla slipped through the gate, and closed it behind her.

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During the hours Qayam spent swimming in the redolent fantasies of his pent-up eroticism, Dactalla rummaged though his files and extracted a great deal of information, the most important of which she had no intention of sending to her boss.

Knifestream forbade her to use the word boss, insisting said that they shared a deep mutual trust that defied labels. He hinted that one day, if she played her cards right, she might be admitted to his inner circle. There, she would see the true glory of the Demon Priests. And perhaps, if she tuned her instincts to perfection, she might become part of his intimate life.

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Dactalla sent the final batch of cryptograms, footnotes and all. The Demon Priest slowly raised his elbow toward the tabletop, the sleeves of his dark robe neatly covering the footnotes at the bottom of the pages. He was once again the most powerful Demon Priest in the Fallarian Dominion. He was the godlike master of the waters, a Neptune commanding the trillion watery worlds beneath.

He was ever-alluring to all the pretty young things he lifted into the higher world of his understanding.

Knifestream had indeed saved many of these women from the prison cells in the lower floors of the Borjes, the Stalinesque headquarters of the Demon Priests in Fallar Discordia. These women were so lost in their gratitude that they didn’t even notice that he was gathering information about the watery worlds they knew so well. Yet if he suspected that any one of them was thinking of betraying him, he would slice through the lily pads and scatter chemicals over the face of the water. These chemicals commanded the piranhas of the deep, or whatever else was down there, to swim to the surface.

Buoyed with these happy thoughts of his own grandeur, Knifestream decided to send Dactalla the precious exociphers that she needed in order make sense of the deeply-encrypted data streams of the Aatari agent. Slowly, Knifestream pressed a key and sent her these exociphers. He was reluctant to place so much power in her hands.

Yet the risk was necessary, since the Aatari streams had to be extracted immediately and without trace. They needed to be scanned in a trillionth of a second and instantaneously translated into a different cipher. Dactalla had to do it the moment they appeared on Qayam’s screen. Knifestream wished he could do it himself, but only Dactalla could get access to Qayam’s personal computer.

Without informing Dactalla, Knifestream had also placed nano-scanners within the exociphers. The pride of the Demon Priests, these nano-scanners could detect the deeply-encoded sensors of the Vicinese Purple Guard. These Vicinese sensors passed through the security systems of the lesser species unnoticed. Knifestream assumed that such sensors could be found lurking among the data banks of the overrated Ataari.

In return for his treachery, Dactalla hid her own fractal decoding algosensors within the data she sent him. These algosensors detected the nonoscanners Knifestream thought he had hidden so cleverly. Dactalla’s algosenors not only detected Knifestream’s nonoscanners, but also tracked them into the depths of his private network, which he called the Darkest Web. What Dactalla’s algosenors detected was then relayed through a network of Crimson Stalker black gravity strings back to Dactalla’s computer in her apartment.

What she sent to Knifestream was a selective trickle of the Aatari data. She kept the rest for herself — and for her old accomplice Farenn, who had his own network, penetrating deep into the high councils and the private studies of Vicino Prossimo.

While Knifestream suspected Demon Priests like Gascitar and Kaldriscat to scheme in this manner, it never occurred to him that a swamp-dwelling Derelectan could, however brilliant she might be, succeed in out-spying a Demon Priest. 

To be fair, Dactalla hadn’t done this alone. She’d been given the fractal decoding algosensors by the Fallarian who was a complete mystery to the Demon Priests, even though they had listened to his speeches a dozen times, and even though they considered him to be one of their most valuable assets: the Fallarian diplomat Farenn of Caldemar.

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Dactalla met Farenn when they were students in Fallar Discordia, the capital of the Fallarian Empire.

Dactalla saw Farenn at a Math Cult Mixer on the Derelectan side of the university. He was a wild figure who seemed to stumble toward her with a Byronic sense of destiny. After drinking two Discordian jugs of methamead, Farenn told Dactalla that he knew a thing or two about Derelectan roots.

He said that he had stumbled upon the Mixer, but Dactalla found it a suspicious coincidence, given how closely they seemed to feel about the world around them. Farenn conceded, after another jug, that it was a fabricated coincidence, which he said was always the best kind. Dactalla agreed. Finally, he admitted that he had in fact connived to bump into her and that he had much to discuss. Dactalla thought to herself, “Duh.”

Three nights they caroused and walked and talked along the trenches in the Derelectan Quarter next to the university. Yet they never slept together, since both of them knew that such an experience couldn’t be forgotten, and would likely mess up all of the other plans they were making. As a male Fallarian, Farenn was clear about one thing: there was a limit to how much should be penetrated, and where.

They also agreed to make sure that no one could connect the two of them. When she went for her interview with the Demon Priests, no one could detect a hint of Farenn’s influence, let alone a whiff of his political philosophy.

Whenever Dactalla was alone and thought about those student days, her treasure-chest glowed in the dark. This nostalgic feeling was becoming particularly acute, given that she had spent fifty years in the doldrums of the Aatari suburbs, drinking endless cups of weak tea and conversing with airheads.

It took her fifty years to establish herself as an innocuous travel agent, one who was more interested in flight schedules than nanonuclear devices. Yet she had finally succeeded set up the alibi necessary to meet Qayam and get into his personal files. The years had been tedious and she yearned for the good old days. For fifty years she measured her life with oxycoffee spoons, and told herself that there would always be time — yet it was always later — to murder and procreate. In other words, she still held a torch for Farenn of Caldemar.

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The cryptograms Dactalla sent Knifestream kept him riveted to the screen. He saw, to his great self-congratulation, that his colleague Gascitar was indeed far more dangerous than anyone else had thought — although it wasn’t a surprise to Knifestream. He also confirmed that Kaldriscat was nothing but a common wolf in sheep’s clothing. In Fallarian, the expression was “a Vicinese in Fallixian mink.”

This clothing metaphor reminded Knifestream of the black cloak Kaldriscat had so ceremoniously gifted him. In exchange, Knifestream gave him the finest fur ear-muffs that a Fallarian could buy. Unlike Kaldriscat’s gift, the muffs didn’t scratch his skin or give him the very disease that it was supposed to protect him from. No, the ear-muffs just warmed his ears and clarified the sounds that went into them, just like a pair of sunglasses filtered the rays of the sun.

Well, the earmuffs also doubled the waves entering his ears, allowing one set of waves to travel as normal, and the other set to travel on an angled bandwidth that Knifestream picked off like a ripe cherry from its stem. Not only could Knifestream hear what information Kaldriscat heard or said; the angled sensors also had a subatomic cerebral wave-pattern recognition mechanism that transmitted to him what Kaldriscat was thinking. 

Knifestream had obtained this wave-pattern mechanism from his Vicinese double-agent Vinella, the treacherous wife of the Vicinese security agent, Brion of Romagna. Vinella assured him that the Vicinese had many such devices, and they were all constantly monitored. Knifestream was free to use the device sood of the Middlebelt (in the Soodbelt and Black Pulse universes), yet anywhere nord of that it would be readily detected.

For this reason, Knifestream stopped himself from giving Dactalla this gift of soft and fluffy ear-muffs. He would, and he gulped as he thought this, just have to trust her for now.

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Next: 🎲 Dance of the Seven Veils

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