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Buccina Exaudibilis had long been a thorn in Daedalus's mother's side. He hoped the woman would not become his problem as well.
He restrained a scowl as the Princeps Mindholder approached him where he stood in the corridor, sweating beneath his weighty paenula in the humid evening air.
Above them, the crowd roared like the sea. One hundred thousand people sat in this more colossal of Vola Apertus's two open-air amphitheaters. The other fifteen million residents here in the planetary capital city milled around the streets, gazing up at the sky in excited expectation. All around Aquarius, over a billion people likewise turned to the heavens.
He would love to switch places with any of them and escape this woman. No one much liked mindholders and their invasive mental tricks, but he disliked this one more than all the others.
Buccina Exaudibilis's name meant "Horn Worthy of Being Heard." He wished she would live up to the traditional name for a daughter of the ruling mindholder bloodline. A little brash, bold directness would be a refreshing change.
Instead, Buccina should have been named "Whisper." Other than at official orations, Daedalus never once heard his fellow Princeps raise her voice above a soothing murmur or speak her mind in a direct manner.
Instead, Buccina was always whispering in one's ear. Always circling the topic at hand. Always insinuating herself into others' business, and that was when she was not insinuating herself into others' minds.
No one knew Buccina's true appearance. Like most mindholders, she could lure one's mind into seeing whatever she wished. Unlike other mindholders, she never dispelled her illusions.
Over the years, he saw her wear several different faces. In his earliest memories, she donned the visage of an unassuming adolescent of indeterminate gender with a smooth terracotta-brown complexion and shaved hair. As a child, he often saw her as a spindly mahogany-skinned crone with luxurious waves of flowing silver locks. And every so often, she bore the appearance of a pockmarked young boy with luminous sapphire eyes shining in an ebony face instead of a laurel.
He shivered at the sight of the illusory sallow visage she adopted these days. She reminded him of some pallid night-side monstrosity. Legend said a few of the Ancients had looked like this, including one of Buccina's early mindholder ancestors. Daedalus found such claims hard to believe, for the Holy Ovidiana said naught about such things. The Pale People must be some wondertale embellishment, like man-eating mushrooms, whales, and other fantastical beasts.
He braced himself as she approached, but as always, he found his defenses folding before the full force of her presence. In any disguise she wore, her seeping, oily aura remained the one constant. He hated it.
Over the years, he overheard people describe disconcerting experiences of wandering unprotected on the night-side beneath the Devouring Eyes. One might be forgiven for thinking the accounts described encounters with Buccina Exaudibilis instead of malign planets.
