The 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.
Maud Allan in the role of Salomé with the head of John the Baptist, circa 1906–1910; a publicity photo for her play Vision of Salomé. Rotary Photo, E.G. From Wikimedia Commons, cropped and coloured by RYC.
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.
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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.
5
Before allowing the edges of her shoe to slip beneath the next curtain, Dactalla paused. She sensed an unnerving stillness on the other side. Nothing was moving. The air was completely motionless. She slipped between the curtain that was split in the middle, one side slightly overlapping with the other. She slid into the room, which was permeated by a pale pink light. She drifted through space, millimetre by millimetre. There was a Behemoth floating somewhere in the air. She could feel it. It was the walls and ceiling itself. It was breathing slowly.
She moved without sound, as if she hardly existed, through the steel grey curtain of the fifth veil.
6
The walls of the next room flowed and seemed to breath, as if some crimson and dark brown life-form stretched from floor to ceiling. Beneath her feet, Dactalla felt the ground wasn’t quite firm, as if she was walking on the spine or exoskeleton of some primordial beast. The light was thick and perfumed, as if with a combination of musk, chypre, and fougère. In the middle of the room on a divan that was lost under his enormous bulk, sat the Demon Priest Gascitar. He looked like a mountain covered in a dark green foothill of robes, and valleys of black velvet. He’d been waiting decades for a moment like this.
From what Knifestream had told Gascitar, he imagined Dactalla as a dark goddess. In his lurid imagination, she was part reptile, smooth and slick enough to slide around every danger one might find in Fallar Discordia. He would give his eye teeth, put his own head on a platter, just to see the bright form beneath.
Tattooed Salome, 1874, by Gustave Moreau. Source. (Wikipedia Commons, slightly colour-enhanced by RYC)
Gascitar wondered what lay beneath her perfect form: a saw-scaled viper with sharp fangs, or an insectivorous lizard that could devour its prey like a Venus flytrap? He imagined her in the way one might imagine Salome dancing before Herod, or the seven-stage striptease of Inanna on her way to meet Ereshkigal, the dark goddess of the underworld.
This, and the following image, are photos taken from my copy of the second volume of Promethea (2001), written by Alan Moore and illustrated by J.H. Williams and Mick Gray. I have cropped them and intensified the colours.
Gascitar imagined her resplendent Derelectan body in front of his eyes, all her defences down, in obeisance to her dark lord. He would take it all in, and perhaps finally admit to himself what he had always kept a secret: that his precious lust for power wasn’t as great as that other lust, which he knew to be dangerous, since it might turn him from victimizer to victim. Deep down, he feared, and yet he also hoped, that this was the only type of surrender he would ever make. He yearned to be one with the primal swamp magic that had made the Derelectans the most feared and desired creature in the universe.
Dactalla knew what leches these Demon Priests were. She unbuttoned the blouse that floated across her abdominal belt, just long enough for the old geezer to open his mouth in awe, at which point she pulled down her skirt and let the glowing blue pentagrams flow and crackle around his dark green cloak.
She then pulled up her skirt, readjusted her blouse, and walked through the ash grey of the sixth veil.
For the next week, Gascitar sat immobile, staring at the stars as their light dwindled and his spirit shrivelled into a tiny black dot, and then floated into space.
7
In the next room Knifestream sat at an olive-coloured desk, looking at his screens. He knew Gascitar would buckle at the first scent that emanated from Dactalla’s lower belt. He knew the ingredients of those smells. His lab had worked it out. Thousands of his spies were using the exact same proportion of chemicals, gulling security agents and state ministers, depriving presidents of their will to keep secrets, and paralyzing even the hardest operatives from remembering what they’d let slip. He wasn’t about to be taken in by such a crude display of swamp magic.
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Good Old Mom
Knifestream remembered fondly the first words his mother whispered above his swinging crib: You’re born with mother, but you’ll die alone. For Fallarians, these were comforting words. They didn’t hold out some grand hope that a decade or two of experience would destroy. Often his mother would add, Make the most out of life that you can. Be your own man, not some snivelling runt who can’t stand on his own two feet.
These tender words came back to Knifestream in moments of anguish and mortal danger. Wherever he was, and however dire the situation, there would always be one person who never lied to him, never told him that he could be anything he wanted to be. Never told him that it would all work out in the end, somehow. This one person had been there since the beginning, whispering in his ear her words of truth and integrity. Even if he suffered some terrible accident or premature disease and she was there on his deathbed, she would never betray him with false visions of Hope. His mother. There was no one a Fallarian loved more than his mother.
Knifestream saw something of his mother in Dactalla. His mother would cut the throat of anyone who tried to brutalize or devour her child. She would do her son an ever greater service: she would toss her knife across to him and let him defend himself. She didn’t care about knives. She would rip the assailants to shreds with her bare teeth. The important thing was to make sure that her son could handle the blade and take care of himself.
Certainly, Dactalla also had such a mother. Although from what Knifestream heard, Derelectan mothers went a step further: they threw their knife to their child and then, if the child was a girl, attack her to make double sure that she could handle even the most vicious assailant — which of course was a Derelectan mother. She would menace the child, imprinting deeply in its psyche that there was no one, not even your mother, who you could trust. She would taunt her with these words: Stand on your own two feet! Don’t fly away from a fight, even though your wings are as swift as those of a hummingbird. Stand and face your mother in the field of battle. Only when your knife is up against my throat will you be free!
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Her Own Level
Knifestream looked up from his screen and saw Dactalla’s face glowing with triumph. And yet she was still on high alert, not making the causal error that one victory necessarily leads to the next. She kept her distance, and made sure not to insult Knifestream by trying to intimidate him, by hovering above him menacingly. Such posturing would only give him the excuse to flip some switch and send a lightning bolt through her head, or open up an abyss at her feet. No, she stopped two feet from the curtain behind her and waited for his instructions.
He said gently, “Come, sit down and relax.” He pointed to an armchair at the side of his desk. Next to it was a low table with a diamond-studded carafe and an ornate crystal glass. He further entreated her, “Please, rest a spell. Pour yourself an elixitar.”
Knifestream didn’t notice the way Dactalla relaxed her inner core and her shoulders eased down, millimetre by millimetre. He did, however, see how magnificently her alert eyes took on a charming air, as her mouth curved into a slight smile. This part of the process wasn’t about skill in battle or attitude. He already knew she was as fierce as anyone he’d ever seen. What he wanted now was proof of subtlety and diplomacy, proof of her skills in beguiling beauty and the espionage arts.
Finally, she had arrived at her own level.
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Next: Le Bijou 1: The Star of Montmartre