The Great Game 🎲 Fallar Discordia

Dance of the Seven Veils

Knifestream remembered the first time he set eyes on Dactalla. He knew immediately that she was beneath him. A lowly Derelecta. It was only two thousand years since the Derelectans had risen from the swamps. It would be another two thousand years before they had the mental acuity to grasp the fine-points of Fallarian civilization. But still, a more radiant Fallarian specimen he had never seen. 

Knifestream noted with passing trepidation that it was rare for a Derelectan to apply for any sort of position with the Order of the Demon Priests. It was unheard of that the deadly female of the species, the Derelecta, would even think of going near their headquarters. Usually, they were busy doing whatever they did (the government rarely knew what) in the trenches and back alleys of Fallar Discordia, the great intergalactic capital of Chaos & Law. Whether in these trenches or in the purple-strobed high streets, the best one could hope from a Derelecta was that she didn’t slit your throat. Backing away from one was the only way to survive. Avoid the fight in order to live another day was the general consensus. Who in their right mind would willingly confront these ferex bitches, whose only aim was the jugular or the thin nerve between your thorax and your head?

And yet Dactalla had signed up for the rigorous screening of The Seven Veils. This took place in the Cobalt District, in the dark rooms and hallways of The Borjes, a labyrinth which the Demon Priests had constructed from the first to the 77th floor beneath the Great Temple.

1

The first veil separated the exterior of the Borjes from the interior. Not only was this veil invisible, but it was also completely unexpected. Applicants weren’t even aware that entering the building was to pass beyond it. But the clerks and data-miners, the collators and syntheticists had done their work, so that the successful applicant would pass through the invisible curtain without so much as a frisson of static electricity. 

The unsuccessful applicant, on the other hand, was jolted so hard by a wave of electrostatic energy that his antennae were burnt to a crisp. Or, if he was of humanoid form, the hairs on his head would be singed to the root, and the cells beneath would pop, just like his eardrums. He would therefore be unable to hear the metal curtain sweeping his body into the mouth of a gutter. If the data-miner was in a bad mood, his body would be swept into a steel trap into which he fell headlong and was never heard from again.

Dactalla stepped without incident through the invisible curtain. This suggested that her credentials were verifiable enough to please the military bureaucrats, and mysterious enough to intrigue the Demon Priests. 

2

Once on the other side, Dactalla found herself in what appeared to be a Waiting Room. But she knew the mettle of the Priests who ran the place. Waiting Room, indeed! She took one look at the patient souls sitting in their row of chairs, and kept walking toward what looked like a grey rectangular perforation on the far wall. 

On the hour (which chimed from some obscure tower in the upper portions of the Borjes), the chairs of the waiting applicants started in a terrifying movement — as if they were on some ratchety roller-coaster in a small, poor town. Sudden and violent, the movement made the applicants instinctively hang onto the arms of their chairs for dear life. The legs of the chairs were soldered onto a series of interlocking platforms which rolled on sturdy iron rails below. Before the hapless applicants could get a sense of what was happening, the row of chairs was flying sideways toward a black square on the side wall. Their faces were buffed with a freezing wind, and as the rails veered out of the building and back in again their bodies were whipped into the alley behind the Borjes. 

The Demon Priests prohibited the feeding of the stray cazids and hyenakines within the city limits of Fallar Discordia. That way, they were sure to hang around the alley behind the Borjes, just angry and quarrelsome enough to teach the timid applicants a final lesson in whatever there is to be gained by patience and humility. The scavengers heard the chiming of the hour, nipped at each others’ heels, and leapt toward the conveyor belt.

3

Behind the second veil (the grey rectangle was in fact a holographic curtain), the genealogist asked Dactalla, Where are you from? Dactalla said this was none of his business. “I am who I choose to be. If you persist in violating my privacy, I’ll tear your head from your skinny throat.” The genealogist shrunk from her as she walked past him. 

A female psychologist bade her take a seat so that she could ask her several questions about her upbringing and her education. Dactalla called her “a painted tart” and told her, with a mix of scorn and disdain, “You must have been nothing more than a slave to your parents. Do you or any of the other furry-gowned idiots here have even the slightest clue how to defend yourselves against a pack of rogue Drastrakshasas in the trenches of the Gratchau District? What would you do, blow words at them like a blowfish?” 

Arcing a lasso of light-strings around the room, Dactalla scorched the psychologist’s velvet cap and latched onto the Psychosphincterus Award on her desk. Dactalla hurled the flakey award against the wall so hard that it disintegrated into a million pieces. Closing her pores, Dactalla strode through the fine dust and went through the harbour-grey curtain of the third veil.

4

As she put her left foot against the curtain, she opened it lightly with her left hand, so that she could take a visual sweep of the room. She saw a Rodentizoid, with a laserpin at the ready. Before her right foot stepped into the room she spat a beamslicer toward its jugular. The Rodentizoid barely had time to lift its laserpin and point it at Dactalla before its head rolled to her feet. 

The test was apparently the time it took the applicant to act. The death of the Rotentizoid was immaterial. Or rather, it was of benefit to the Demon Priests, who weren’t interested in guard-slaves who couldn’t draw fast enough to save their masters. Dactalla didn’t even look back to see the body twitch.

The real test was something different, monitored from the seventh room where Knifestream sat watching the entrance way to the Borjes and the rooms between the veils.

🎲

Sang-Froid

Looking on from the 7th room, what impressed Knifestream was that Dactalla didn’t pause, not even a microsecond, after decapitating the Rotentizoid. Had she enjoyed, or was she indifferent to, the slicing off of its head? Her actions appeared to separate her from the average Derelectan, who wouldn’t have been able to stop himself from indulging himself for a moment after the coup de grace. Fallarians called the coup de grace Gnadenstoß, and saw it as an almost sacrificial rite, one that on Earth only Aztec priests or Russian oligarchs really understood. Emblazoned on the Dojohall of Fine Swords in the Central Business District of Fallar Discordia was the idealistic couplet, They offered life in sacrifice / So that others could go on. The Fallarian who didn’t relish the Gnadenstoß wasn’t a common Fallarian. The Derelectan who didn’t relish it was either not a Derelactan or had the willpower of a god.   

Knifestream had never seen such sang-froid in any creature who wasn’t a Demon Priest. For the blood power of a Demon Priest was measured in a purely negative way: by the degree to which the Priest didn’t show any glee or excitement during the Gnadenstoß. The energy rose from his groin and shocked his brain with delightful chemicals, yet a true Priest was above this flow. He was above life and also above the taking of life. He exhibited only an unswerving devotion to dominance over all things. 

Upon reflection, Dactalla’s response was as disturbing as it was impressive. Implicit in the very definition of a Demon Priest was the fact that a Demon Priest could not be a female. Dactalla’s sex thus confounded Knifestream’s most fundamental understanding — even though he knew that the female Derelectan was twice as dangerous as the male. Still, he thought the category of sex must have been fundamental in some essential, universal, catholic way. He quoted to himself from the Fallarian classic, Love in the Time of Anarchy, written a million years ago: Those who persist in believing what they want to believe instead of what is proven, will lose their heads one way or the other. 

Knifestream struggled to be fair: whatever her sex, Dactalla proved herself worthy of the Demon Priests by not relishing the Gnadenstoß. Whether she refrained from a higher instinct, akin to that of a Demon Priest, or from a skillful dissimulation (to make it look like she possessed this higher instinct), didn’t matter. If she possessed such a higher nature, then she was an exceptional specimen, of whatever species or whatever sex. If she dissimulated, then she was even more valuable to him as an operative.

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Next: Five & Six

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