Nothing as naughty as the last chapter, time to be boring again.  The emotions run high in this one.  If you want to read this novel from the beginning, see this article, read it, and hit the next button until you see more entries, stopping with II:V, then starting again at this one.  And stopping again here at II:X, because I have had a terrible time writing lately, and that time is over!  I might pick this beast up again in July.

–

Josefina took advantage of the secrecy of her existence to sink into despair.  The difficulties of their situation were obvious enough, but her feelings went beyond that.  Perhaps it was the melancholy nature that had followed her since childhood, momentarily forgotten in the wake of her time in the Torre Alucine and reunion with Ximura, finally returning.  The wisdom of her crucible had not cured the depression, only allowed her to briefly forget it.

Or it was something else.  She muddled through leading meditations, but was losing whatever spell she had cast on the students.  Her hair was a mess, her clothing disheveled.  Ombonculita refused to entertain the children anymore, scowling at everyone as she clung to Josefina’s breast.

Umbrifer lost track of its own lessons, focused on cleaning up after her messes and social missteps.  It would make nice with anyone she had bothered, then follow after her and do whatever it could to help her feel better.

On one such occasion, with white afternoon sun filling the guest suite, Umbrifer followed her in and closed the doors behind her.  As it turned back to face her again, it seemed her steps had slowed, almost like the sunlight was stairs that she was about to ascend.  Instead she collapsed to a couch there, almost crushing Ombunculita, who crawled free of the mess squawking.

It came to them, laid fuzzy black paws on her arms, and rolled her over to face the world.  “I try not to impose on humans, not ever, but this is starting to look risky to me personally.  Is there anything I can do to get you playing nice with the Alishers again?  Or at least less of this…”  It gestured at her as if she was a pig sty that needed cleaning.

The anger in her tiny dark eyes increased her resemblance to Blasfemia, which successfully intimidated the spirit.  Long dark hair half-concealed her face.

Umbrifer slow-blinked that big pink eye and tried again, gently.  “You deserve to feel as well as you can, Josefina.  I don’t like to see this.  Can you at least tell me what is happening to you?”

“No.”  She shook her head.  “I don’t know the answer.”  She bit her lip and looked off to the side, lost in thought.  “Maybe I just need a hug, heh.”

“I can go find your sister.”

She looked at him wryly.  “Why not hug me yourself?  Afraid you’ll fall in love?”

Umbrifer’s eye was too big to conceal thoughts or feelings.  It darted to the side and back.

“What is it?”  Her face went slack, eyes piercing.

“I don’t want you to…  Don’t make me say it.”

“What,” she spat.

Umbrifer threw up its hands and stood up to flee if it needed to.  “I saw the video, alright?  I’m sorry!”

Her face stiffened in horror.  By then the spirit was halfway to the door.  Suddenly, Ombonculita opened her mouth and roared like a lion.  But instead of a roar, some eldritch ball of sound waves erupted and struck Umbrifer in the chest.  It flew back, tumbling over furniture and crashing into the wall.

The spirit scrambled to its feet and looked at the homunculus in alarm.  She was propped up on her arms at full extension, body rigid, thorned head trembling.  Distortions in reality dripped from her silently screaming mouth like foam from a sick dog.  Her eyes were livid with hate.

Josefina wanted to apologize, to do something to reprimand her Abuelita for this violence, but she was still in the grip of sorrow and horror, trembling.

Umbrifer gave her one last sad look and fled the room.

It had to find Blasfemia.  Only her sister had any chance of seeing this right.

–
Darter slumped against a post, wishing he was more capable of getting drunk.  He was slowly sinking further into the snow, not melting it as much as a living person would.  It was like he was daring anyone to notice.  A shadow loomed above him.

“Boy, you need to get back to work.”  It was his old boss, Graldon.

“They need me.”

“Alish needs you, needs all hands on the machinery.  I am shocked the Bugaster hasn’t sent you back to the works yet.”

“I’m translating Corazono and Lenko, man.  Get off my back.”

“I see you translating alcohol into stupor while we’re working on a double ransom.”

Don’t blow it, he thought, his secret eye seething.  “I’ll talk to Mallor.  If he still needs me for something, I’ll do it.  Otherwise, Ill help.  Alright?”

“Alright, boy.  Fair enough.”  His words faltered at the end as he was distracted by Traders laughing across the street.  He didn’t want to cause trouble either, and hurried on his way.

Darter dragged his corpse upright, swayed lightly in place, and wondered.  What was the point of prolonging an existence where he could no longer enjoy any of the things he had once lived for?  Rage at the injustice of dying young, or just animal panic, had driven him to reanimate in this unnatural way, but neither of those feelings remained in him.  Maybe all that he had left was the half-assed ambition to make his death interesting.

A few Traders noticed him and walked over.  “Oy!  Why are you staring at us, kid?”  “And why are you blue?  It’s nasty,” said another.

“I’m sick.  Probably not a good idea to touch me.”

That did bring them up short.  “Well, just mind your eyes, fool.”  A few gestured at their weapons.  They didn’t have to touch him to hurt him.

“Mmhm.”  He was already distracted by the sight of Umbrifer crossing the street a few blocks away, so averting his eyes was easy.

–
In the tavern, Blasfemia was on Kottor-sitting duty.  She figured that alone should be worth the cost of the Leveret’s fuel — keep the old goat entertained so he didn’t get any more dangerous ideas for extracting diversion from the Alishers.  By then his favorite lieutenants also had translators, and spent most of their hours reading her words and carousing.

“I kill duendes, what can I say?  Everybody has to do some kind of job.  You find out stuff about them, like, which ones talk with each other and which ones are just stupid animals.  You can’t always tell just to look at them.”

“And the hellhound?  Just a stupid animal?”  Kottor’s voice was thick with a plug of chewing algae in his mouth, slowly releasing a mild intoxicant.  Probably best to keep a clear head instead of doing every drug in sight, but he couldn’t resist having a little taste of each.

She tipped her computer down.  “The stupidest.  Now cañacorbos, they look like a bird with a little goblin face, they seem like they’d just be a dumb animal, but one time I cleared a field of ’em and the next time I saw some, they knew.  One must’ve gotten away and squealed.  Watch out for the girl with the knives.”

“What’s a bird?,” one of the lieutenants asked.

Kottor said, “Like acrife, from Catedra 3.  I’m more interested in what you didn’t tell us about the time you broke out of jail.”

No one asked about goblins, knowing that was what she sometimes called Umbrifer.

The goblin itself appeared at the door, looking agitated.  “Ursula, I need your help with something at the Bugaster’s house.  If you can excuse us, good people.”

They laughed at the polite description.  Every time they laughed, the servers and their guards braced for something unamusing to happen.

Blasfemia said, “Well.  Sounds urgent.  I’ll be right back.”  She was glad for the reprieve, but felt the importance of hypnotizing the jerks with her bullshit, every time she saw a young Alish lady flinch at them.

Kottor waved her off and went into some rapid patter of Lenko.  The translator on Blasfemia’s computer worked on it, but she paid it no attention.  Umbrifer was glad they hadn’t made an issue of the interruption.

Out in the street it hustled her away from the nearest Traders that were milling around, and said, “It came out that I saw that horrible video.  I never told her before.”

“You never told me before, puto!”  She slapped it in the chest with both hands.  “What the fuck?  How is she?”

“Bad, or I wouldn’t have gotten you, would I?”

“Is she hurting herself?  Somebody else?”

“I don’t know what to expect.  Maybe I shouldn’t’ve left her with Ombonculita.  I don’t know what she’s capable of!”

“You’ve known us for months now, come on.”

“So she wouldn’t hurt the homunculus?”

“Duh.”  They never stopped walking, getting to the house quickly in the small village.

“Ombonculita might hurt you.  Be careful.”

“You’re coming with me, goblin.”

Under normal circumstances the doors would only open for family members and people with temporary permission, but while the Traders were in town, they would open for anyone without a Trader within six paces.  They had to wait for some Traders to move down the street, and flashed fake smiles at them as they went.

–
Mallor patrolled Alish end to end, watching for any scene that might erupt into violence with the Traders and defusing them.  This was his life during their visits, a task he entrusted to few others in the village.  Only the coolest heads with the most experience of the brigands could deal with all the possibilities – to the extent no situation cropped up that was truly impossible.  All it would take was a power-drunk whim from one of the violent characters.  The patrol duty was whim management.

He’d passed Darter a few times, but didn’t feel free to spend a minute on the kid.  Maybe the Traders were being exceptionally well behaved, because he’d run out of situations to deal with, and stopped to bother him this time.  “Darter.”

The boy had been leaning on a post, hanging his head, underdressed for the weather.  “Oh, I was supposed to talk to you.”

“What’s the matter?  Why aren’t you with Umbrifer?  You were thick as thieves a month ago.”

“It’s personal.  Anyway, Graldon wants me back on the machines.  Is there anything I can do for you instead?  You know I’m not the best worker.”

“I know.  As luck would have it, I can use you.  But only if you can keep your act together.  Look at you out here, in your indoor pants.  Absurd.”

“Sorry, please.  Tell me what the job is.”

“Pretend to be a drunk.  Hang out at the tavern.  Listen for anything important they say in Lenko, and for your own sake as much as ours, do not let them know you understand the language.  Can you do it?”

He bobbled in place, unsure of himself.  Could he avoid giving a subtle look of recognition at any of their words?  Would he even be able to sit close enough to understand them without arousing suspicion?  “I can.  I swear I can.”

“Good boy…”

–
Blasfemia and Umbrifer came into the big central lounge of the second floor and had to shoo some ladies who were wrapped in furious rumor.  Earlier it had told them to stay away from Josefina for their own sakes, now it had to tell them again, get away from the door to the guest suite, out of sight altogether if they could.  Then they took up positions on either side of the door, like cops about to do a raid.

“Josie!  I’d like to come in, Hermana.  Is it safe for me to do that?”

There was no response.  Umbrifer gestured for her to just go in.  She gestured after you, and it rolled its eye.

“Josie, I’m coming in now.”  She grabbed Umbrifer’s collar and dragged it in with her.  The creature was reasonably strong for its size but its inhumanly low weight made it easy to push around.

Josefina and Ombonculita were out of sight.  The suite had a few rooms, and she must have retreated to a bedroom, or a bath.  They heard no water dripping and headed to her preferred bedroom.  This time Blasfemia let Umbrifer stay outside, but insisted it stay close to her door.

“Josie, I’m coming in.  Don’t blow me up, OK?”  The door was not locked.

A massive decorative wardrobe was blocking the window, no doubt moved by sorcery, clothing falling out of it in a landslide.  The room would have been pitch black but for a halo that escaped the edges of that barrier, and one small skylight.  It was still dark enough to make it hard to tell where the bedding ended and her sister began.

“Eyy, um…  I don’t know what to say.  You know my usual answer is killing somebody.  Want me to kill the Corsario?”

A soft golden light bloomed on the bed, in contrast to the pale white light from outside.  It was in the hands of Ombonculita, illuminating her feral face.

“Come on, Hermana, don’t let this thing burn the house down.”

A hand snaked out of the blankets and touched the little creature’s thorny head, and the light went out.

“I’m really glad to see that.  It means you’re still thinking, not totally loco.”  Blasfemia picked her way through the darkness and came to Josefina’s side of the bed, avoiding her little Abuelita.  She felt around until she was touching something she recognized, then got an arm all the way around her.

“I love you.  Don’t be alone anymore.  I can’t stand it.”

Josefina pulled away, making room for her sister in the big bed, and Blasfemia got in, put a hand around, assuming the role of the big spoon.  The homunculus was not of a mind to be the littlest cucharadita, and held herself up on Josefina’s arm, staring at Blasfemia in the dark.

She squeezed her sister and tried to give her some mental room by waiting to talk again.  She could not be as patient as she preferred.  “You don’t hafta do anything for these ding-dongs.  I’ll do it all, OK?  And whenever I can I’ll come see you wherever you hide, and I’ll hold you just like this, until you feel better.”

Josefina finally spoke, quiet, hoarse.  “Don’t kill that duende.  I still like it.”

“When you don’t like it, can I kill it?”

“Mmhm.”

They stayed there quiet a moment longer, before Blasfemia’s impatience got the best of her again.  “I brought it.  Umbrifer’s probably waiting outside the door there.”

“I can’t…  I can’t stand it.”

“Don’t be sad; I can get rid of it without killing it.  It’s real easy to push.”

Josefina shuddered and Blasfemia hushed, waiting her out.

“Does it really think I would try to have sex with it, just because of that video?”

“Did it say that?  I’ll smush it like a motherfucking bug.”

“Don’t, don’t…”

“Yeah, yeah.  You don’t make it easy.  You know, it had to have seen that video before the first time you ever met, right?  So it’s no different now than it was before, with you.  And it’s been all nice to you and stuff, right?”

“I guess.”  She sobbed.  “But that means this whole time I thought it was cool, it was afraid of me, feeling weird about me, looking at me like that.”

“But it was being nice to you because it liked you anyways.  You know Umbrifer always liked you a lot more than me.  You know why.”

“I just wasn’t ready to think about anybody…  anybody who saw that, seeing me…  I can’t do anything.  It’s all too crazy.”

“I don’t know what to do about that!  I don’t!  It’s the kind of thing like, if I could cut the memory out of everybody’s head one at a time, go door to door with these knives, I’d spend the rest of my life doing that.  I wish I could!”

Josefina rolled onto her back, so she could hold Blasfemia and Ombonculita at the same time, and kissed Blasfemia on the head.  “Hush, hush, Ximura.  You did everything you know how to do, and that’s all we have to do.  I’m the one who has to figure out how to deal with this.”

“Maybe it would help if the Corsario promised to not be weird about it with you?”

“Oh I don’t know.  Maybe…  I just wish I could…  I don’t know, hug it.  Like a normal person.”

“Is that all it would take?  I could bully him into that, no problem.”

“It’s ruined.  Umbrifer can only see me as a crazy sucia who wants to fuck it.  I’m ruined.”

“That goblin has been watching you with its bug eye for months now, and never once has this come up.  It has to be able to trust you by now, or it wouldn’t have got me to help, wouldn’t have tried to help you even when I’m not around, so many times.”

“You think so?”

–
Umbrifer wondered for the thousandth time how its life had come to this, when suddenly there was a whistle from inside the room.  It had to be Blasfemia.  She called it in.

It came in and switched on the light.  The ladies winced and it turned the light back off.  “I can see just as well without it, just a habit, I’m sorry.”  It stepped in a short way, and looked at the weirdos on the bed.

Blasfemia stood up and came to it.  “Listen.  If you are OK with Josie hugging you, it would make her feel a lot better.  She would never wanna do anything to make you feel uncomfortable though, so only say yes if that’s true.  But it would really help her, y’know?”

Umbrifer crossed its arms and looked sadly at Josefina’s tear-dappled face.

She said, “I promise, I’ll never ever come onto you.  Really.  I just need you in my life as a friend.  It’s just too…”  She broke out crying again.

“Hey,” it said.  “I’ll do it.  I do care about you, Josefina.  Life is crazy; you never know what’s going to happen.  All I ever wanted to care about was the Leveret, but now I care about you too, OK?”  It came to the bed and got in beside her, and then awkwardly put an arm around her.

She embraced it back and cried herself out, leaning on the weird thin duende for comfort.  Its body was warm, everywhere that was not covered by clothing bristling with stiff fur.

Josefina knew she could keep her promise not to come onto Umbrifer, but to her surprise, she really did feel a romantic impulse.  She really did want to fuck it.

Suddenly, all three of their computers buzzed to life with a message.  They checked them out.

The screens were filled with bold block lettering in Borlante, and the phones took a moment to catch up and letter in the translation.

//Surrender to the Celestial Hierarchy the one known as Blasfemia or face destruction.//

–

Some of the text here is extremely NSFW, I say as if any of my readers are still working.  Pensioners reprezent.  If you want to read this novel from the beginning, see this article, read it, and hit the next button until you see more entries, stopping with II:V, then starting again at this one.  Meanwhile…

–

In long space sat a plain metal orb, in a galactic orbit seemingly unaffected by all of the nearest stars.  Not that any stars were especially near – the closest light years away.  Closer the details became clear – utility panels, bulky machinery to facilitate human survival within – but nowhere could an exhaust port be seen, nor a sign of how it could control its movement in space at all.

In astrocielo, the orb was buried within the impossible works of a cyclopean mechanical angel, itself half embedded in the outermost layer of the Wall of Ice.  The creature was gold and silver wheels within wheels within wheels, moving in response to the will of the Celestial Hierarchy.  Any mortal with a rank above the laity could move in and out of the wheels with barely a thought, the machinery sliding around to accommodate them.  Any other mortal would likewise be kept out.

Surrounding the angel, labyrinthine trenches were carved into the crust, infested with hellhounds, sustained by dispassionate autoesclavos tossing lesser spirits into the pits.  Those autoesclavos in turn manned larger autoesclavos that were built from mangled and lobotomized astral spirits, bound with armor and engines, bristling with weapons.  They were roughly humanoid astronaves that supplied the station with meat harvested from nearby heathen worlds – walking iron maidens.

In the heart of the angel, the marines came and went between worlds as they pleased.  The orb’s interior was doubled, half occupying long space and half in astrocielo, but both integrated into an impossible whole.  The floor plan was consistent, at least, and the crew found it all very uninteresting.  The mortals spent most of their time in the long space corridors, to avoid the side effects of long term stays in astrocielo, and only went into the astral corridors to do necessary labor and upkeep.

It was in the astral corridors that communication could most easily be made with both the autoesclavo keepers and the Stars of Weal.  On a shift in the astral control center, a tired captain idly fantasized about having sex with all of his subordinates, barely aroused by the notion anymore, just keeping his mind in motion.

There he was, with his short-billed peaked cap and grandiose epaulets, no pants and legs parted enough to admit the next person in line, his cock and balls much larger than they were in reality.  Only two women served on the bridge crew at that hour, and the men would take turns pushing them onto his cock, holding them aloft in a gentle bondage of flesh, rocking them back and forth, so that the Captain did not even have to thrust to achieve the required friction.  Whoever wasn’t currently occupied with that task waited their turn, all clustered around him, masturbating furiously.  He imagined the smell of their cocks and pussies.  Whatever.

In the world where he was wearing pants, his crew played video games or chit-chatted away eternity, only the requisite level of attention paid to the instruments and computers arrayed at their stations.  This was the night shift, their circadian rhythms kept in time with Dio 6 by way of adjustments in light warmth.  They were sleepy but they were supposed to be sleepy.  Having different crewmen on different times was logistically unfeasible.

They were not exactly the cream of the crop.  They’d already drawn a short stick to get the border assignment, and of the people living in that orb, they were the ones who had to do a night rotation.  Still, qualifying for the Navy required some physical fitness and mental resilience, and long exposure to the strange experience of transubstantiation meant they had the latter in spades.

Resisting the effects of stays in the ectonic realm was about mental discipline, and the most effective way to combat psychoanatomical drift was to cling to normalcy, to force oneself to think in the most banal and human ways possible.  Plan your chores, talk through your job duties, tell each other the same life stories over and over again – job interviews, bad dates, achievements in high school athletics.  They were obstinately sane and boring people.

Also very human.  In the Stars of Weal, all entertainment was conducted by virtual characters, the depictions of which had become very standardized into flawless dolls.  Envy of that perfection drove an escalation of distaste for natural human appearance to the extent that all still images and video had been replaced with filtered cartoon avatars in a very similar mold.  Even military surveillance footage allowed people to be replaced with avatars of their choosing, over-ridden with security clearance only when strictly necessary.  These marines were robust primates with thick necks and millions of tiny wrinkles and hairs and blemishes texturing their skin.  Even the whites of their eyes had more texture than preferred.

Many, when confronted by the reality of human bodies, found them utterly repulsive.  Yet the natural attraction was there, now heavily poisoned with self-loathing and disgust.  There was a perverse thrill in the natural human form, and only a perverse one.  Good people spent their romantic feelings on illusions, only having sex reluctantly and with eyes closed.  Conversely, someone like the captain had wallowed his imagination upon the idea of those lurid real bodies so long that nothing was especially thrilling anymore.

He swiveled very slowly in his chair, taking in the view of all the stars of his little fantasy.  Closest was Nightwatch Commander Giuchiratti, with his back to the captain, reading something lengthy on his computer.  His silver and slate hair was very precisely trimmed, barely present below the band of his cap.  He was one of those people with richly hued skin, even in a world without sun.  Beyond him on a lower tier of the dais sat the subofficers for the shift – the Second Furiere, the Vice Capomachinista, and the Second Cappelano.  The 2F and VC were having one of those repetitive conversations, having the best rapport for it, while the 2C – Father Jaocepfi – was chatting with two of the enlisted men on the floor, both from his homeworld of Laia 4, and speaking that language.

The enlisted on the floor were mostly prematurely aging men in their late twenties and early thirties, former athletes whose bodies were getting soft in various ways, and the aforementioned ladies, who were both at Communications, Petty Officers Nicola and Pienela.  There weren’t many women in the Navy.  Those that desperately wanted into the line of work were put into the safest positions, which generally meant they weren’t stationed at the Wall, but here they were.  PO Nicola was shaped like the kind of man who wouldn’t meet the physical requirements, although she had, and her shimmering black hair the only thing somewhat beautiful about her.

PO Pienela had a womanly figure, though stretched to an unreasonable height, and her nose projected like a beak.  Her blonde hair looked dry, but she wore nice makeup.  Both women were squeezed into the mandated alternate woman’s uniform, with skirt and hose and frilly bow tie, hair identically braided and looped into a bun beneath their black and gold sidecaps.  The Captain could notice similar levels of detail in the men but was less specifically interested in them, and so he did not bother, beyond noting who had the biggest dicks in the fleeting moments where that was easier to tell through their loose slacks.

The Captain, Don Uomino Philotesta, brought his chair to a stop facing Communications, looking down at the women with very professional regard.  Good evening, Petty Officers.  They gave him polite nods and resumed their own conversation.  The dim honey colored light was a gentle film separating them from his lust.  Then, for the first time in weeks, the elevated communication chime startled them into uncrossing their legs.  No thrill there, as they were instantly turned away, pushing buttons.

“Just send it directly to me, thank you.”  He raised his work computer, and sound mites in his ears buzzed as they engaged with it.

PO Pienela gave him another polite nod and resumed work.  It was mostly bureaucracy, teasing apart the metadata to see how the communiqué would need to be logged in local systems.  As the only person certain to have the clearance for it, Captain Philotesta started playing it back.

//Prepare an extraction team to post in Borland 1 astrocielo.  Heavy broad spectrum transmission to global surface in local language:  Surrender to the Celestial Hierarchy the one known as Blasfemia or face destruction.  Follow immediately with doubled hellhound deployment, double autoesclavo surveillance.//

Damn, he thought.  The Amiralo will have expectations.  The post was a very safe place to wait for one’s retirement, the hardest work done by autoesclavos, but expectations meant possibility of taking a fall for failure to meet them.

“Furiere Enriges, we need to double the hellhounds on Borland 1, but deploy them all at once – not in stages.  We also need twice the eyes over that world, no need to hold anything back there.  Commander Giuchiratti, assemble one shuttle of marines and an escort of fighters, staging them in the Borlante astrocielo with the dogs.  No deployment until I say.”

–
It was all she could do to bathe, to eat and drink, to keep herself alive in the tower.  Cora Calumnia leaned heavily on esoteric sorcery to achieve even basic things.  Her state of cleanliness and grooming were properties of a moment in time that she accessed through those powers, taking the external qualities she possessed in that moment.  If only she could do the same for her internal organs, for the cells whose telomeres had been fully eroded, for the cells that had already betrayed her to form new cancers.

This was why she would create no more homunculi.  She could not care for them properly anymore.  One old autoesclavo hung onto its own existence out of respect for the task, but she couldn’t know how long it would hold up any more than she could know the same of herself.  Certainly it was making mistakes.  Two of the little creatures had died in recent years.

And yet she could not make herself sit still.  All of her life had been lived for herself, following strange curiosities, bending reality to her will.  The tower was a testament to that – a nest made out of magic scraps, keeping the heavy hand of physical laws at bay as much as it could.  But now someone else had become much more important, and she could feel her acolyte’s story overtaking her life.

She had to know what was next in that story, because she was almost certain she would not live to see it.  And so she called on the autoesclavo to set her homunculi in a safe room, and attend to her.  They ascended the tower, the hobbled leading the hobbled.  At least no one was feeling rushed.  The old machine’s disabilities had a rather different expression but were, generally speaking, no less disabling.

At the highest chamber, they were surrounded by the elements.  Half of the tall windows were missing panes, and perpetual wind made a mess of everything.  The chaos of that mess spoke to the intuitive inside Cora, let her set aside the science and view magic like a witch ought to.

The autoesclavo was a kind machine, living out its designed purpose well.  When she’d purchased it, it was a shiny pink plastic affair with white rubber bumpers that were impossible to keep clean, a secondhand servant that had helped raise children for an unsentimental family.  Cora had renamed it Maricela.  She still had the energy for craft projects then, and had refinished it in blue-lacquered hardwood with silver filigree, the rubber replaced with more sophisticated black gripping material that was easier to clean.  Now as some old pieces of wood had become too warped or cracked to function, they’d been removed, leaving the original pink plastic exposed.  It no longer shined, covered in a film of hardened old adhesive like a dense smooth layer of spiderwebs.  The gripping material was held together where it had cracked with tightly wound, thin, black, vinyl-coated wire.  Maricela’s face was a black screen with dim white LEDs that formed expressions and displayed where its attention was focused.

Cora instructed Maricela in how to array the ritual components, and helped as much as she was able.  The machine was slightly less dexterous in its hands and less strong than the human, so she was careful to keep its limitations in mind as they worked.  Together they wound gold wire around pegs on the floor in an intricate pattern, and ran copper wires from that array to the lids of jars containing special ingredients, placed at just the right intervals throughout the magic circle.

They rested in folding chairs at the end of the preparations, which had taken a few intolerable hours.  Maricela asked, “Do you have some power or device to send warning to Josefina at the Torre Alucine, if you discover some danger in her future?”

“Not that far away, no.”

“Then what is the purpose of knowing her path?  Is it just to satisfy your own curiosity?”

“Yes.  It feels more important than that, but ultimately it can serve no other purpose.  Can it, Maricela?”

“True, Dama.  But we must see to our needs in life, and this is one of yours.  I have a curiosity of my own.  When you say it feels more important, can you describe what you mean?  Maybe understanding that will help me to help you.”

“To express the inexpressible…  If I knew how to do that, dear, I’d have become a poet.  But I should try, shouldn’t I?”

“I would appreciate it, only if it is not too difficult.”

“Josefina fills my thoughts.  It is not love, though I am fond of her.  In a population of organisms, the young generation replace the old, and in turn are replaced.  It’s natural I should think about legacy at my age, yes?  But that isn’t it either.”

“But it feels related, or you would not have mentioned it.”

“I’m circling the truth, but like a logarithmic spiral, I may never reach the center.”

“You have told me that reality can never be perfectly defined, but approximation could still serve a purpose.”

“Maricela, I have no idea why some people dislike autoesclavos.  You are still finding ways to remind me that I love you.”

“I love you too, Dama.  Can you go around the spiral a few more times for me?”

Cora clutched at the air absently, as if she could grab the idea, and closed her big baby eyes.  “I set her on a path to understanding herself, but maybe that’s another unending spiral — one whose revolutions will be cut short with death.”

“You are contemplating your mortality again?  I do not want to make you think about that.”

“Not necessarily my end, but what happens immediately before it.  What understanding could I reach there?  This feels like a necessary step to satisfying that particular curiosity.  Perhaps.”

“I hope your end is still far away.”

“So do I, Maricela.”

–
One would imagine that with the post-defining boredom of his captaincy, Philotesta would leap up to personally oversee the odd bit of excitement to come his way, but it just wasn’t like that.  Looking out the windows, even looking at monitors, it would remind him of where he was.  Better to maintain the mental anesthesia of daydreaming, and the delegation of authority let him do exactly that.

Previously, the orgy of his mind had focused on the Petty Officers, but it was time for the Senior Officers to get some.  Commander Giuchiratti had the sort of commanding presence Captain Philotesta had never bothered to muster, which made for an obvious role in any pornographic scenario.  His cap was pulled even lower over his eyes, giving him an air of mysterious power as he wordlessly dominated the others into sex acts, gesturing here and there with strong sweeps of the hands and arms.

The Second Furiere Enriges and the Vice Capomachinista Tripoli Timmi were standing face to face at full attention, saluting each other with the right hand and stroking each other off with the left.  Could they maintain their posture, or would they be whipped by the Second Cappelano?  Father Jaocepfi was wearing no pants of course, his prodigious member snaking luridly from the black cassock as he leered and chattered obscenities in Laianes – a stereotype of the greasy oversexed foreigner.

All the men among the Petty Officers did endless pushups, blindfolded and naked but for their boots.  PO Pienela made shocked expressions, face blushed to a furious pink, as she watched the scene.  Her pants had been ripped to pieces and PO Nicola’s face was buried in her pubis, making very sloppy noises.

Behind the women, the lights on comms were a little too bright, pulsing slowly on a beat, like the heart of a great ectothermic beast.  The erotic pantomime gradually dimmed in comparison, the noise of it thinned to weak irregular tapping and animal whining.  Was his lust actually so different from the artifice of the sexless dolls on tele, or had he just constructed a different kind of falsehood that would eventually fail under the weight of its own abstraction?

“Captain,” said the Commander’s voice, spoken from the wrong position.  He was on the Defense Systems side of the dais resting a boot on the back of a naked man doing pushups, right?  The voice was too close.  “You seem half asleep.”

He turned to look at the source of the voice and saw the strangest creature he had ever seen.  Not one of the outrageous chimeras of the astrocielo, but something that distorted the idea of human form with a wrongness as subtle as it was thorough.  The face of an infant on a head too large, the body of an elderly woman with thin wrinkled flesh, reddish gold hair taut in a pearl crown.  She wore a funereal black dress with a fan-like white ruff, like that big head sat severed on a plate.

In Giuchiratti’s voice she said, “Are you sure you don’t want to oversee the operations?”

At his own look of alarm, she looked alarmed, and backed away with nervous steps.  She tripped and fell, injuring herself and crying out in mute pain.

A flicker of an eyelid and she wasn’t there, only the Commander, fully clothed.  “Captain?”

Philotesta squeezed the sleep out of his eyes and angrily grasped at understanding.  It all came together quickly for him.  “DefSys, seventy-five percent more power to ESO shields, now.”

The young men jumped in their seats and pushed the right buttons, then waited in position for another order, still tense.

“Maintain that, for now.  At ease.”  Philotesta took off his cap, wiped sweat from his brow.

Giuchiratti said, “The ESO shields aren’t there to protect you from bad dreams, sir.”

The Captain rolled his eyes.  “I never would have imagined such as I just glimpsed.  A witch scries on us, and I saw her.”

“Your imagination could not have conjured a witch?”

“Not like her.”

–
One grueling task begat another.  Cora required medical care but had made no arrangement with the civilized world to come fetch her in that situation, so she was caring for herself.  To her best effort at diagnosis, the priorities were getting blood pressure back up, then operating on the hematoma.  The joint damage was a lost cause, just a new disability to add to the list.  She waited more than three hours for the slow old autoesclavo to synthesize artificial blood and return with that and the equipment.  Moving her to the laboratory would have been faster if it was at all possible, but it wasn’t.

At the brink of death, the blood began to revive her.  Revived nerves transmitted pain afresh and she was pushed near death again, only the slow escalation brunting the shock just enough to prevent that.  Maricela made fussy gestures with its hands in between tasks, a human-like neurotic display that emerged naturally from its programming, not mere mimicry.  Cora’s thin eyelids lifted again, weakly.

“Her crossroad lies in the heart of an angel.  How magnificent!”

–

Still not loving my work but big things are happening again, at least.  In a subsequent draft, it should be much improved, but in the spirit of publicly posting the first draft, here you go.  If you want to read this novel from the beginning, see this article, read it, and hit the next button until you see more entries, stopping with II:V, then starting again at this one.  Meanwhile…

–

“My beautiful people.  My wounded flock.  I have, in a moment of weakness, failed you.  How is this possible?, you may ask.  An angel of such immense power, who could turn the very world you stand upon?  It is that very power that is the problem.”

Michael stood in the balcony of the Abbey, addressing the crowd who had come to accuse the assassins that day.  At one side were Cardinal Domenico and his guard, at the other his own men, Pietro and Dante.  They had let as much daylight as possible into the room, but the figures on the balcony were still cast in blue-grey.  Michael’s halo was visible, licking around the corners of his crown.

“Our souls are united in the great hierarchy of Creation, and so my heart can feel yours, and you can feel mine.  When I was in my proper place, before the terrible crime that inaugurated my regency, there was a proper distance between us, which made this connection a source of gentle love for us all.

“Walking among you has lessened the distance between us, and at a time when that love has been sullied with those mortal sins.  Dio 6 is comfortable in its star’s light, Dio 1 is a burning rock.  I am too close to you now, and must protect you from the power of my heart.

“When I came into this place the other day, the protections I had placed upon myself were imperfect, and some of you fell ill.  Whether you felt the sickness or not, you felt some measure of my darker feelings, of the great turmoil I feel at having to look upon these sinners and decide the best justice for them.

“To prevent this from happening again, I have redoubled my efforts to keep you safe, to keep my heart inside this cassock.  That will not happen again, I swear to it.”  Michael looked back and forth over the people, watching their faces for a sign of how they were feeling.  He was not exaggerating.  The day he had reduced Cristina to animal panic, the lamen he wore for routine protection had been slightly damaged.  He rebuilt it from sterner materials, immune to smudging and ripping.

His ability to read expressions had grown by leaps and bounds since he fell, in part from practical experience, in part from that dangerous proximity to the masses.  He had been gleaning knowledge from them telepathically, purely on instinct.  Now that he had to exercise greater care with his power, would his learning slow?

Just the same, Michael was satisfied that, although they still had fears and concerns about the situation, the main run of the crowd admired his beauty and power, and tried to accept everything that he said.  He continued.

“On another matter, which concerns us today, is that I must disappoint your desire to confront the assassins today.  I do see why you want to do this, why my good cardinals decided to allow this, but I have looked at the records of what happened, and must conclude that visitation by the mourning is a form of torture.

“The punishment these sinners must ultimately face may include torture, it is true.  And this may well be part of that, but I cannot swear that it will be.  Justice must be more carefully considered before it is administered.

“You gathered here today, among all of the people of Dio 6, will be the first to be informed of my final decision, of what is to befall the terrorists, and if you are to be part of it.  That I can swear as well.  Now please, go home.  In the name of God I bless you all.”

The protection magic he had woven around himself was so precise that he could extend his power through it with conscious exertion, and he teased out the love that he felt for the people, and let it wash over the crowd, ever so slightly.  Their expressions softened, their concerns assuaged — at least for the time — and they slowly left the building, with no small amount of genuflection and prayer before they let the beautiful angel leave their sight.

Domenico took his hand and said, “While we are swearing to things, let me say that I will not behave so presumptuously again.  You have my word, Pontiff-Regent.”

The creature gently withdrew his hand and said, “My sincere gratitude, Cardinal.  I will leave you to your duties and persist in my own.”  He bowed slightly and walked away, guards trailing behind him.

Domenico stood there in silence but a moment, before heading into the opposite hall with his own entourage.  Halfway into the right wing of the building he turned to face his security detail and quietly asked, “Where are the security cameras monitored?  Take me there, quietly.”

He didn’t know if the angel’s sense of hearing could reach that far across the building, but he couldn’t bear the curiosity any longer.

–
In the left wing of the abbey, Michael had gone straight to Cristina’s room.  With his newly redoubled psychic protections, the guards did not sense his coming in the same way, but parted ways nearly as quickly.  He ordered Pietro and Dante to remain outside the room, and for the first time, he closed the door to the hall.

Cristina crouched on the far side of her bed from the door, peering over the top at him.  “Come on, come on!  Why me?”  She gleamed with a thin sweat.

He looked at her, sad and kind.  “Surely you can feel the difference between this time and the last?  I have improved the powers that bind my psychic aura, to protect you mortals.  There should be nothing to harm you now.”

“That was powers last time?  I just thought I was scared of you.  I still am.”

“Please sit on the bed.  Would it help if I sat farther away?”

“Yeah, like, go back to the throne room.”

“Please.  I am not leaving, Cristina.”

She crawled up onto the bed and sat there, coiled like a spring.  “Now what?  Seriously, you freak me out.”

Michael found a stool and sat on it, more than two paces away from the bed.  His mien was of practiced calm beneficence, but if she could see his pupils expanding and contracting, catch the flicks of the eye, she might guess at something else.  “I’d like to apologize for how I’ve conducted myself around you.  Your sin was so great that it drew me out of the heavens themselves.  I’m new to the world, still finding my way.  In shock, I haven’t properly controlled my feelings.”

“You almost sound human now.  It’s a neat trick.  Again, what do you want from me?”

“Simply to understand you.”

“So you know how to torture me to death, right?  Why would I let you know anything then?”  In full view, he could see the sweat wasn’t from fear.  She must have been exercising before he came in.

Without the shock and haze of their first encounters, Cristina could finally take a more objective view of the angel.  An angel pope!  Absurd.  He looked so much like a real man, but larger than life.  His size alone felt like a threat, no matter the demeanor he put on.  He seemed as big as a horse.

He said, “It is not yet decided what your punishment shall be, only that it should stand as a reminder to all in the Stars of Weal to never transgress like this again.”

“That isn’t helping me relax, Your Holiness!”  She knotted her fingers in the blankets.

His face took a pained expression, so indistinguishable from a human.  “I’m truly sorry.  This was meant to be less torturous than my previous visits.  I am not here to inflict another cruelty upon you, child.”

Cristina stopped twisting as much, but still gripped the blankets in two fists.  “I believe you.  What if I accidentally change your mind?  You have a temper.”

“I will leave, as I did before, if you recall.”

“Yeah.  I’ll never forget that, at least until the axe falls.  So what is this about?  Why me?”

“You personally slew the pontiff.  I know your heart.”

She laughed for an instant, mirthlessly, madly.  “How can this be happening?”

“These are rather unbelievable times, in no small part due to the work of your hands.”

“Why even say anything?  You know what I’m going to say.”

“Yes, yes.  To blame it on Blasfemia.  But it is you, who designed to kill God.  There is no one else in the world like you, Cristina.  That is why I am here.  I need to understand this.”  The angel leaned forward in his seat, looking deeply into her eyes.

She rolled her eyes.  She didn’t want to but they were beyond her control on this one – on this absurd circumstance.  “You need to understand something that isn’t true.  This is gonna go great.”

“You don’t need to confess today, but please, spare me the denials.  How many people have a chance to speak directly with the Angel of the World?  I cannot imagine you have no curiosity at all about it.”

“So I can ask questions too?”

“I hadn’t considered it, but I may allow it for a time.  You will answer my own?”

“If I can.  You know there are some things a person never says, to protect themselves.”

“And for other reasons as well.  Same terms then.  We can each ask, but understand there may be no answer given.”  Michael straightened up in his seat and crossed his arms, eager.

Cristina’s mind raced.  Why did life end up being like a test so often?  “Deal.  Might take me a minute to think of a good question because you got me all jacked up.”

“Why did you do it?  I understand you each had your own motives.  The political philosophy of your former lover, the esoteric spirit lust of your theologian, the ethnonationalism of your fixer.  And you were, of all things, the Satanist?”

“You really wanna know about that?  About that?”

Michael showed his hands.  “If knowing the dark philosophy of devil worship helps me understand how you could bring yourself to this, then I must know something of it.  The motivation.”

Cristina relaxed enough to cover her face with her hands.  After she stifled a scream at his absurd delusion, she said, “Society is all about judgment.  Make sure you do this, never do that.  Even when it isn’t pointed at you, it’s always rumors and bullshit and bitching, and you just know it’ll be pointed at your back the second you turn around.”

“And because society is religious, you come to hate religion, believe it is the cause of all that you dislike in people?”

“If the shoe fits.  That’s the language they use.  And if shit comes to a head, it’s inquisitores and priests that enforce it.  How can God make me like this and then stand in judgment of me for living how he made me?  I know if he exists the way people say he does, then he hates me, and I hate him.”

“God loves all of his children, but he does hate sin.”

“That shit has never made any sense, but go off.  You’re the pope of nonsense.  Pope Nonsensius the Ding-Dong.”

It was Michael’s turn to hide his eyes, mustering the thoughts to pierce her wall of noise.

“My turn?,” she asked, and didn’t wait for an answer.  “It’s all about the magic hat, isn’t it?  If the old pope wasn’t wearing the magic hat, you wouldn’t have even noticed, would you?  Maybe low key, but not like this.”

He dropped his hands and shook his head sadly.  “You just don’t get it, do you?  You’re lost in this maze of moral relativity and philosophical materialism, when the evidence of God’s truth is right in front of your face.”

“There’s an expression where we come from.  ‘The Right of the Church is writ on the wings of the Hosts.’  Basically, that the very fact the priests can summon angels is proof they are doing God’s will, and have the right to make all the rules.”

“And you deny that because you believe… what, exactly?  That book by Chucra Colimar you read in eighth grade?  That the angels are spirits pressed into the church’s service, forms twisted by human sorcery?”

She was shocked quiet for a moment.  Then said, “You’re reading my mind.  Then why don’t you already know..?”

“I have decided not to read anyone’s mind, Cristina.  I found out every single detail of your lives, in my studies.  I need to understand why this happened, so I can keep it from ever happening again.”

“You’re telling me you memorized our library records from school?  That’s insane.”

“A Treatise on Angelic Bondage, penned by Jorge’s intellectual predecessor.”

She curled into a ball and tugged the blanket over her head.  “You knew I dated Chino.  Didn’t find that out from the library.”

“Pictures and videos.”

“But you’re not bothering them.  It’s only me…”

“Your reason.  It vexes me.”

She whipped the blanket down, but didn’t sit up.  “What’s the big fucking mystery?  Maybe I’m just mentally defective!  Maybe I’m just crazy!”  To Cristina he looked just like a man, acted just like a man.  But moreso?  He must have a superhuman mind to remember all those little details about four lives.  Maybe his powers were pushing him close to awareness of that hole in the middle.  Spirits are always missing something; she was sure of that.

True to that perception, his emotions began to crack the surface.  He stood and took one step toward her.  She barked in fear and rolled behind the bed, out of his sight.

“No!  Why must you fear me like this?  I am no more grave of a presence than any in your gaol!  Do you fear yourself?  You’re the one who has wrought your fate!”  His voice trembled.

He isn’t bothering the others but he’s bothering me.  He isn’t reading my mind because he doesn’t want to know.  He’s committed to the idea I did it, because…  of what he wants…

She made herself cry.  It was always a good stalling tactic.  Cristina wasn’t a great actress, but stress made it easy to throw herself into that spirit, to pretend she had that particular human frailty.  She was human, of course, but crying was not something she’d ever done in earnest.  Not how her body or mind worked.

Michael flew to the corner of the room, where he could look around the bed without being close to her.  “Look!  I am not close to you!  I cannot hurt you!  I wear this terrible lamen upon my chest like a curse, oppressing my powers, lest I burn the people that I love!  Do not fear me, please!”  He tugged down the collar of his cassock to reveal the new brazen symbol, hung from steel chains.

“You love me?,” she choked.  “It’s impossible!  Nobody loves me!  Angels can’t love anything!”

He had meant that in the broadest sense, that he loved all of humanity.  Hadn’t he?  Michael cried now too, though he wasn’t wracked by the sobs, or curled in a ball like she was.  “Look at me!  I love all of mankind!  I love you like my children!”  He didn’t love children, did he?  The angel felt that his words were springing unbidden, barely controlled.

Through the blur of tears she saw him, her own eyes wide with fear, but something else dawning as well.  Could he see it?  She had to be careful as hell, but it seemed to be working.  Get him off guard with emotion, then make him believe whatever he wants to believe.

“It’s alright,” she said between sobs.  “It’s not like I can make you do anything.  Just stare at me.”

“I’d sooner gouge out my own eyes than make you feel this way!”  He wheeled around and gripped one of the blinds, wings flexing in place.  His voice was erratic.

He’ll tear me limb from limb.  Don’t fucking do it, Cristina.

“Prove it.  Hold me gently, don’t hurt me at all.  If you even can.”

There was a long moment of shuddering breaths and brutal tension, then she was nearly shocked out of her mind by huge arms curling around her, pulling her up onto his thighs.  She was suddenly reminded of being held by a priest when she was five years old, but this reality was much more dire.  The metal of his strange huge amulet pressed into her shoulder, the chains snapped at her hair.  He smelled like fire, like a man who had worked a day in the fields, then walked through a haze of incense.  His breath turned to steam on her temple and trickled down her face.

“I do love you, my child.  If no love for you remains in all the stars, mine cannot be dimmed.”  His muscles tensed, and he increased his efforts to not crush her, holding his arms so stiffly.  “Why is your body so rigid?  Why do you fear me so?”

“Just hold me until it stops, please.  I can’t bear this pain.”

“Y-yes, my child.  I will.”

–
Domenico listened to their words and watched their bodies from three angles at once, trying to feel out the reality beneath the emotional surface.  The talk of love, the physical intimacy, this had to be the machinations of the Corazono heretic.  If Michael were just another human political rival, their sobbing and fumbling embraces would be music to his ears — leverage to promote himself.  He was the heir apparent to the papacy, but nothing was ever so simple where that throne was concerned.

The angel was an angel, one with power that defied all human control.  Cardinals were some of the most accomplished angel binders outside of the highest echelons of the police, but if the entire college worked together, they’d have no hope of restraining this creature.  The heretic knew she was condemned to death, so why not play with atomic fire?  Selfish bitch!

He needed her to stop, but how to achieve that?  The Pontiff-Regent had superhuman senses, preternatural cognition, and supernatural understanding.  Were she to be assassinated, he might sense who was responsible and take revenge.  If insane enough, he might just take revenge on the whole world.  Domenico could only hope any intercession was happening early enough in the monster’s infatuation that it wasn’t of mortal consequence.

Several schemes occurred to him at once, overlaying and entangling each other.  Manipulate a faithful man to assassinate her, take the blame, then die before he could be interrogated.  Give her what she wants — fake her execution and let her live in secret with a reconstructed face — at least until a subsequent assassination.  Maybe the angel could be in on that scheme, but his faith was more true than any among the cardinals, and the guilt could lead him to lash out dangerously.  Or his love could help distract him for the rest of a human lifetime, and avert apocalyptic trouble on Dio 6.

Controlling Michael through manipulation seemed too much like the foolishness that heretic had taken upon herself.  Destroying him, on the other hand..?  To even think it raised the risk of discovery.  Should the angel’s power again breach the constraint of his lamen, he could anticipate the threat through augury or telepathy in an instant.  Still, it had to be considered, for the good of humanity.  And as an advanced practitioner of divine science, Domenico was already running the math.

The creature’s energy would need to have an escape that did not damage the world, and if the source of the killing blow was an exorcism that forced him into the ectosphere with lethal force, that might be just what was required.  Like other fields of physics, divine science was not limited in scope to the power of individuals.  One could use technology to achieve greater effects, and this would surely require such a mechanism.

It would be a cannon – perhaps an ectoproton beam with subtachyonic carrier waves, possibly affixed to a satellite – and it would have to be invented nearly from scratch in a very short time.  That meant more conspirators, and more opportunities to lose it all to a telepathic moment.  Good reason to act as quickly as possible.

He left in a swirl of flowing red and black cloth.

–
It seemed like an hour before the Pontiff-Regent came out of the assassin’s room, and his guards could change from post to escort.  Dante and Pietro were immediately concerned at his demeanor, glassy-eyed and vacant, but with a nervous energy beneath that threatened to escape his shackles.  They bowed, but as he passed, they had to exchange worried glances.  Dante bared his teeth in fear and furrowed brow, Pietro swallowed a sob that was trying to form.  What had she done to that great innocent soul?

–

The writing is still very perfunctory and not enthralling, just the plot going through its paces.  In a subsequent draft, it should be much improved, but in the spirit of publicly posting the first draft, here you go.  If you want to read this novel from the beginning, see this article, read it, and hit the next button until you see more entries, stopping with II:V, then starting again at this one.  Meanwhile…

–

Blasfemia and her opponent circled each other, each holding one of her knives.  She said, “You first, man.”

A guy using translation at ringside translated it for Blagh, and he made his move – a simple feint and backhand slash combo.  Blasfemia fell for the feint, but was fast enough to make up for that rookie mistake, stabbing Blagh in the arm.

He dropped the knife and stumbled away cursing.  There was no cut there, of course.  They were wearing sparring gear and had trained beforehand how to control the knives for nonlethal combat – the psychoreactive metal flattening into mush at the point of impact, but otherwise maintaining enough form to practice parrying.  There was still more pain than Blagh had expected.

“Gademy, yof tarent!,” he hissed, but nobody bothered to translate that.

“Damn,” she said, flipping over the knife in her hand. “I let myself go soft here.  Maybe more, like, soggy.”  She smiled miserably and took up a stance again.

Blagh finished nursing his arm and got tough as well.  He gestured for her to come at him.  “Sdabby yut.”

Blasfemia was compelled to stab at him before he finished his sentence, but that would be cheap, not very instructive.  She’d never trained another fighter before, but took it seriously.  After all, what they were expecting of Josefina was flatly impossible.  If Blasfemia at least taught these bozos some moves, they might be less mad about that.

She slashed at him high and low, teasing him into parrying.  His attempts were clumsy.  They kept his hand from getting scratched, but focused his attention on that extremity.  She didn’t even try to do damage with her cheeky sweep, brushing her shin against his calf just to surprise him into weakening his guard, and then stabbed him in the chest so hard it forced his arm down.  He dropped the knife again.

“You know how to avoid a feint when you’re boxing, right?  Unfocus, see my whole body.  Yeah, you don’t wanna get stabbed, so the hand is higher stakes, but you can’t treat it like it is, or you get caught up over here.”  She waggled her hands at arm’s length.

Ringside guy translated her spiel again, and they stanced up while waiting for him to finish.  All around the village toughs watched and tried to learn.  In fact, she probably wasn’t much better than the best of them, in technique or training, and those canny few were learning that she didn’t actually have much to teach them.

–
Upstairs in the great lounge of the bugaster’s house, the couches and cushions had been spread to the corners, leaving room for Josefina and her students.  By her insistence they sat as comfortably as they could manage directly on the hard cool tiles of the floor.  There were over a dozen people from the village, mostly women, as well as Darter and Umbrifer.  Josefina sat on a cushion with Ombonculita in her lap, and seemed distracted, looking through them rather than fully upon any of their eyes or faces.  They strained to hear her, though all were close at hand, and the room was powerfully quiet.  She did not have a strong voice.

“Other worlds are not so weak in these powers as Borland.  In the Stars of Weal, practitioners of divine science are so common that their presence thins the boundary to the spirit world.  But it isn’t all monsters all the time, because those scientists are also police and doctors and engineers, who keep strict control over their works.  Hopefully, having a manifest spirit and an intuitive here will help open your senses to the spirit.”

The eyes on Darter’s face were closed in faux concentration, but the swollen and vile pink eye hidden behind his brown hair stared through the strands in a different kind of focus.  He looked at her, poring over her features, sometimes with sharp movements, sometimes tracing the lines, as if he could feel her through that unseen connection.  The sack-colored lace of its disguise frustrated the view.  He had to control his psychic energy to keep the big eye from telekinetically blasting the hair aside, and revealing his lurid interest.

Umbrifer had become much more comfortable with Josefina over time, sympathetic to her awkward position in Alish, and trying to help her in whatever small ways it could.  It was waiting around in the same awkward suspense as the sisters, and the idle distraction of the day was joining the villagers in trying to learn magic.  Divine science was the structured application of sorcery used by humans in relevant careers, while Darter and Josefina used magic by their intuitive nature – much like the way the Leveret and similar spirits could shift between the spirit and material worlds at will.  Would she be able to teach other humans this intuition?  How about a spirit?  Umbrifer didn’t know, but it had the patience to find out, trying to follow her tutelage closely.

“We’ve been talking about the ideals, and this is what you must learn to observe.  I’m intuitive so I did not learn the sense of things in the way I’m trying to teach, but my abuela’s way of teaching was more formal.  It’s my understanding that for regular people, to attain divine knowledge, the best path is by focusing on the causes of things.  When you see an artificial thing, try to see the reason it was built, the way it was built.  When you see a natural thing, think of the natural forces that shaped it, that caused it to be.”

Umbrifer knew what she was talking about, because its natural senses did reveal that information to it, in a naturalistic way.  It didn’t necessarily discern the entire history and future of everything it beheld, but it had an immediate sense of the broad strokes.  The causal and conceptual relationships of the organisms and inanimate objects around it were almost as easily understood as their colors.

Darter also apprehended these truths in the same way as Josefina – through natural senses – but he could not parse her words through the jumble of his own ardent juvenile thoughts.  Let me hold you forever.  Let me, please.

“Think of some tool you use every day.  A kitchen knife or a sewing needle or a farming machine, your oven or your washing machine.  Pick one and try to remember everything you can about the way it looks and feels and smells.  Take some time to make this sense of it as complete as you can.  Now…”

She kept on, trying to convince them as much as she was trying to convince herself that she could break through the limitations of their lives, could lead them into something like her own powers – or at least those of novices.  Josefina was not letting herself believe, and the students did not know, that without intuitive talent, or a great sacrifice, or a brutal crucible, it could take decades to learn how to move a single button.

Bugaster Mallor came into the room and said, “Everyone remain here until I return, please.  If you need food or drink, take it from the bar, or the guest suite.”  He smiled but his eyes were stern, and then he was gone for the stairs.

Josefina shook her head and said, “He has broken your concentration.  We should clear that up before we try again.  Does anyone know what that was about?  Can you translate for me?”

In stilted Corazono, Darter said, “There are Traders in town.  Bad people.”  It was a guess on his part, but a good one.  The only other possibility was another hellhound, or some kind of riot.

“Thank you, Darter.  Umbrifer, could you get more specific?  I don’t really get it.”

He smiled weakly with his little kitty teeth.  “The people that monopolize trade in this world are essentially bandits.  They extort what they want from villages like Alish, and unless they want worse things to happen, they just accept it.  If they don’t see a woman, they won’t ask for that as part of their protection ransom.”

“Fucking cops everywhere,” she muttered.  “Fucking cops.”

–
Bugaster Mallor asked Blasfemia to stay behind, but gathered the other toughs to go face the Traders.  Out in the streets, the snow glistened with a thin layer of late day melt, but was in no danger of disappearing.  Everyone had dropped their business and retreated into their homes, or come to stand in front of them, in that long practiced mixture of courage and deference.  Even the giant boxy robots stopped what they were doing and made themselves look small, to avoid appearing as a threat.

The Traders rolled in a great caravan of heavy wheeled vehicles, with smaller bikes and flying machines hanging from racks on the largest.  Every vehicle had railings and poles that the thugs could cling to, making their presence felt.  Their clothing were all weather-ready by necessity, but showed much more flair than those of the villagers, blending more materials of worlds beyond Borland, and elements of armor.  Everyone had laser rifles, grenades, plasma rifles, swords, knives, and was bristling with malice and pleasure.  Unlike cops from the Stars of Weal, there were some women in their number, though not many.

The lead vehicle ground to a halt and the rest followed suit.  It was a plain white thing lightly encrusted with ice and scored with wind erosion, boxy as a rudimentary fort on wheels.  No doubt the interior was more luxurious than the accommodations in the rest of the caravan.

Mallor stood with open arms and palms forward, demonstrating that he was unarmed and ready to do business.  A high side door opened on the wheeled fort, and the Trader leader jumped down from it, shiny black boots cutting into the snow where he tread.  The two men came together, trailed by their most trusted guards.

Traders only used Lenko among themselves, and this leader spoke easily in Borlante.  “Molloy, was it?”

“Mallor.  I remember you as well, Kottor?”  Mallor was looking memorable in black leather and silk with an overcoat of grey plush algae wool festooned with white ceramic scales, hoary brown hair and beard more neatly trimmed than anyone else in the village.

“You do remember me.”  Kottor wasn’t dressed any different from his people, except insofar as the patchwork was individual in the particulars of its elements.  He was the same age – even looked similar to Mallor – except with windburned cheeks and the scars of infighting among Traders.  He distinguished himself with a short white ceramic visor pulled low over his eyes, propped a sliver of a degree to allow for aggressive eye contact.  His own hair was a monstrous shag puffing out between the bands.

They shook hands.  Kottor made his demands before their gloves parted ways.  “These are very dangerous times now, Mallor, and the costs of protection have become accordingly high.”

“Not to say no, but what is this danger?”

“Don’t be coy, Bugaster.  It’s beneath your station, right?”

“You noticed our guns from afar.  We have seen a monster.  But still, that is all we know of it.  For the protection that we will purchase, would you please let me know what you know?”

“The Stars of Weal send hellhounds from the Ice.  It has happened before, at the edge of living memory.  Do your people have stories?”

“We are very remote.  Why do they do it?”

“To remind us of the terms of our relationship.  To keep us from daring the Ice.  You may have put it down, but they can return from the dead, these spirit creatures.”

“Then your generosity well pleases us.”

“As I’m certain your generosity will please us!  We will take our fill of food, drink, and fuel, and double the bricks we took last season.”

Mallor’s mouth was tight.  “A difficulty but we will make it work, to honor your hard work.”

Kottor made a surprisingly contrite expression.  “This isn’t idle greed.  The hellhound attacks are worse on larger settlements.  On our settlements.”

Good.  “I’m so sorry.  The hellhounds are quite hard to kill.”

“And I cannot wait to hear how you killed yours!”

“HES!,” a man on a tall pole cried in Lenko.  “Illa sideranav chikav au transavilam!”

“Or did your visitors do the killing for you?,” Kottor asked.

“I wouldn’t presume to speak for them.”

“They dodged our spaceports, Mallor.”

“If they had the bravery to cross long space, my first inclination is to offer them the same deference I offer to Traders.  If you have business with them, that’s yours.”

Kottor stepped close to Mallor and laid a strong hand on his shoulder.  “I would see them.”

Mallor put a hand on Kottor’s wrist.  “I’ll let them know.  Meanwhile, please avail yourself of the tavern.”

The Trader lowered his hand, but both knew this visit was off to a bad start.

–
The tavern was boisterous with strangers, and strangers alone.  Even the most alcoholic villagers cleared out, leaving only the servers and a few toughs to try whatever intervention they could, should they be attacked.  Traders waited for hot food to be served, numbing their tongues first with alcohol.

Mallor came with Carr, Kabel, Umbrifer, and Blasfemia.  The crowd pulled back enough that they could all get a look, and quieted down.  Clearly, none of them had seen anything quite like Umbrifer before.  Mallor took the lead and Kottor had the table cleared to accommodate the guests of honor.  The village toughs joined the Traders in the sidelines.  Mallor handed Kottor a computer.

“A small gift.  It can translate most simple things, less of the complex.”

Kottor grinned broadly at Blasfemia as he accepted the device.  Her face slackened as she picked up her own.  He said, “By God, you’re a vision.  And what is this creature?”

“Umbrifer,” it spoke for itself.  “A spirit on an unadvisable layover.  You are the famous Traders?”

“I’ll speak to you when I feel, creature.  Madam?”

“The corsario is Umbrifer, I’m me, and you’re telling me what this is all about, dude.”

Would the Trader thugs bristle at her attitude more if they could understand the words?  Their leader could only read them off the screen in his hand.  He said, “You are in violation of Borland 1’s laws.  All visiting starships are to moor at an official spaceport.  Living hand to mouth?”

She leaned back and loosely held her own computer near her face. “Yeah.  We’re broke, but you should know we’re fucking psycho.  Don’t test me with this shit, boss man.  Please.”

Umbrifer’s eye bugged at her words and its posture shrank, from unnaturally thin to comically so.

Kottor laughed.  “Alright.  Then answer a few questions and we’ll call that your moorage, for now.  Deal?”

She grinned beneath very dark eyes.  “You have us at your mercy, boss.  Fire away.”

Mallor’s eyes flicked from screen to Kottor to Blafemia and back, his body stiff as a board.

“What is your name?”

She wouldn’t have lied if the question wasn’t so pointed, but, “Ursula.  And you?”

“Kottor.  Where did you get this creature?”

“I hijacked its ship, but it likes me, so I let it stick around.  You come from the astrocielo, right Umbrifer?”

“I come from the astrocielo.”

Kottor continued.  “You have something of the look of a Tanis 4 girl, but are too tall and strong.  And I don’t recognize your tongue, so by elimination…”

“Stars of Weal.”

“An enemy of your homeworld.  There are other creatures from your home on Borland 1 now.  You saw one.  The hellhound you killed?”

Blasfemia nodded.  “Yeah, it was me.  I get that you saw the ship and Mallor had to say we were here, but did he have to tell you everything we’ve done since we arrived?”  She cast a fierce glance at him before meeting Kottor’s eyes again.  Mallor shrugged.

“We knew it couldn’t be a mere villager.  He didn’t have to say a thing.  We’ve fought a few.  They’re infesting Borland 1.  How did you kill yours?”

“I told you I’m psycho.  Crushed it to death in my pussy, bitch.”

He laughed and slapped the table.  The onlookers couldn’t help but nervously join in.  “Good enough.  What class of ship is your transport?  Who made it?”

Umbrifer had to answer.  “She’s a living thing from the astrocielo.  I tamed her.  Please don’t bother her.  If you try to take parts she’ll just bleed and die.”

Kottor nodded.  “That’s normal in the Stars of Weal, isn’t it?  Out here all starships are machines.”

Umbrifer was pleased to be spoken to rather than about, but still terrified.  It nodded.

Blasfemia said, “Cool shit, boss.  Tell us about the weather next.”

“Understood, Psycho Ursula.  While we’re all under the bugaster’s hospitality, don’t be a stranger.”  He made a dismissive wave.

She stared at it for a moment, tempted by the bait, but remembered Josefina and bit her tongue.  She didn’t know if her sister’s new powers were any good against humans, and didn’t want to find out when outgunned five to one.  She turned from the Trader.  “Mallor, take us away.  Please.”

The bugaster stood, still carefully controlling every move to avoid any perception of weakness in front of the thugs, and escorted the aliens from the building.  Kabel and Carr watched their backs until they were gone.
–

The apprentice witches in the Mallor house had chosen to avail themselves of the food and drink, and were lounging in small groups chatting nervously about the Trader caravan.  Josefina spoonfed Ombonculita sweetened algae mousse, when Darter approached.  In his usual slim black clothes, a gentle and unassuming species of ghoul.  Pale grey daylight painted everyone with wet silver tiaras.

He said in rough Corazono, “You are kind to care for Ombonculita.  I love to watch; forgive me.”

She wrinkled her nose in confusion, and didn’t meet his gaze.  “Why wouldn’t I care for Ombonculita?”

He read off his computer, though he mostly understood the sentence.  “People say she will never be a person.  Not like a baby.”  She wasn’t looking at her own computer so he said it in Corazono, as best he could.

“If she is healthy and happy, it’s enough.  I don’t understand the problem everyone has with it.  She was made from my grandmother but is her own being.  If there was a person in Alish who was born unable to care for themself, always needing this kind of help, would your people let them die?”

“I am sorry.  They would not.  Maybe we see her like an autoslavo.  I am sorry.”

“Darter, I am sorry.  Please leave us alone.”

He nodded grimly and slunk away.  She wouldn’t say that to Umbrifer.  They should have so much in common.  Could he tell her?  Could she tell?  They were the only powerful intuitives in the village, and might be the only two on the continent.  Darter had never met another while he was alive.  Now he’d met one while dead, and that was going as well as if he was a rotten skeleton.

Josefina finished feeding the little goblin her slop, and wiped her chin with a wet rag.  Ombonculita resisted feebly, pawing at her arm with tiny human hands.  She smiled and gently squished her cheeks, kissing her on the forehead.  The homunculus made her strange wet half-laugh and defended herself playfully.

Josefina looked around at her students.  If one could miraculously awaken to even a modest supernatural talent, it would go a long way toward justifying the cost of the Leveret’s fuel.  But she just couldn’t imagine it.  She despaired, and hugged Ombonculita’s side with a single hand.

Mallor returned, with Blasfemia and Umbrifer.  He called everyone to attention, and Patria came to his side.  “Yes, the Traders are back.  It’s Kottor’s gang again, this time demanding double payment.  Not that it’s worth their price, but they have brought news.  That monster was from the Stars of Weal, and was a hellhound.  Many more are attacking Trader cities, so we should be prepared for another to come to us.

“That means Blasfemia’s lessons are cancelled while our fighters keep an eye on the Traders and the plains, but as the women and children are going to be spending more time indoors, there’s no reason Josefina’s lessons can’t continue.

“Lastly, they saw the Leveret, and we had to let them talk to her crew.  They’ve seen Umbrifer and Blasfemia but we made no mention of Josefina.  Blasfemia told them her name is Ursla, so that’s what we’ll call her.  Let’s keep their secrets safe, please, especially Josefina.  She’s a more gentle soul than her sister.”

Blasfemia had been following his speech on her phone and at the mention of the gentle soul, she smiled earnestly and clapped Mallor on the arm.  “Thanks, Mallor.”  She said it in Borlante, then the little group broke up, heading their own ways.  Blasfemia checked in with Josefina, while Umbrifer went to Darter.

“I’ve seen them now, Darter.  Your people.”  The weird spirit was cheerful at the change of pace in the sleepy village, whatever its trepidations about the danger, its body language was like that of an excited child.

Darter rolled his visible eyes and turned away.  “Not right now, Umbrifer.  I can’t.”

“Can’t what?  …Never mind, sorry.”  It backed away with palms in the air, then quickly turned, to let the boy sulk.  It didn’t understand his feelings, but this was an old lesson for it.  When a human says go away, go away.

Josefina still didn’t fully comprehend the nature of the situation with the Traders.  It just didn’t want to stick to her mind.  Something was bothering her, growing inside like a noise.  Blasfemia could see it on her face, her own smile fading as she came to her.

“Hermana, are you afraid of those punks out there?  You shouldn’t be.”

Ombonculita was clinging to her bosom and turned to make a furious expression at Blasfemia.  Blasfemia took an unconscious step back.  She’d never seen that face on the goblin before.

“Hey, is the ‘Culita alright?  She looks pissed.”

Josefina’s eyes had been distant, but came in from the mist to engage her sister one time.  “I’m not afraid.  We’re not afraid.”  Then she left.

Blasfemia covered her mouth and furrowed her brow deeply.

–