Dagger 2 - Blood Brothers - A Dark Fantasy Adventure (Born to Be Free series)

by Walt Popester

  The lizard continued, “When the boy was born, they were all working together for the same goal. Then the destabilizing element came—that Mr. Crowley—and the streets of Gorgors, Tankars and Disciples…” He paused, closing his eyes and then his membranes, too, after pronouncing that name. “So, their paths split. Funny how both pass through our destruction, now. Under the guidance of Crowley risen again, Tankars and Gorgors have ousted the Skinless out of the temple of Ktisis. Now, the eyes of our banished brothers are turned to us alone.”

  “If Gorgors just want Crowley’s remains,” Varg intervened. “Why not giv—?”

  “NO!” Marduk slammed his fist down on the table, with such a force that his dagger danced. He closed his eyes, regaining control, but his voice sounded like a growl of anger when he continued, “Never! I’ll NEVER hand over the remains of our Warrior King to the shadows and their mangy dogs. We must help Angra. We can’t leave our father alone. We can’t let his sacrifice be in vain.”

  “How?” Olem asked. “Attacking the Tankars?”

  “We could infiltrate one of our men in their ranks, disguised as a Tankar,” Marduk replied. “We must copy the writings of that temple. We need to find someone who can translate and interpret them.”

  “Nothing easier!” the Dracon of the Sword said. “Infiltrate one of us among the Tankars and expect he comes back alive at the Fortress—how do you think to do it? We give him a fur coat and put a mask on his face, and teach him to say, Me big Tankar of desert, Me kill children?”

  No one laughed. Slowly, they all turned toward Araya.

  “Actually, there is a Tankar among us,” Olem concluded. “A Tankar who has studied too much.”

  The Poison Dracon shuddered nervously. Dagger was sure he wasn’t the only one to notice it.

  * * * * *

  4. The conspiracy

  Walking down the narrow and slippery flight of stairs below the Poison tower, Dagger sensed that this claustrophobic bowel had been the passage toward death for many men and women throughout history. He thought he could follow the footprints left by their bare feet, and could almost hear the echo of their quiet sobbing that the porous and black stone had absorbed over the years. He saw several graffiti depicting the prisoners naked and with their tongues locked by horrible gags. One of these recited:

  Last march for tonight’s shift, then to bed. I’m so tired of death.

  The walls became narrower and narrower. When they passed under a low arc that forced them to bend over, he and Marduk came into the vast prison situated under the Fortress, a huge and bottomless pit with a path that sloped all around toward the infinite nowhere.

  Descending, Dagger noticed that the cells were dug into the floor, accessible through small holes dug in the pavement and the numerous chains that flourished out of them. Fearful in their black armor, the Hammer Guardians roamed around them, armed with hooks and knives.

  “Did they take control of the prisons too?” Dag asked his guide.

  “They turned our prisons into a butchery,” Marduk angrily replied. “Deltas used to run them together with the Poison Guardians, holding off each other so that no one would cross the boundary between punishment and mere rage against the weakest—the most exposed to the dangers of crime. Now…well, you’ll see it with your own eyes. Some images are worth a thousand words.”

  A hand appeared out of a hole, followed by a cry for help. One of the guards laughed, before raising his hammer in the fetid air. He slammed it down with all his might against the rebel fingers, shattering bones and making blood squirt. A scream, nothing else, then the prisoner was brought out using the chain locked around his ankle, so tight to have caused gangrene. He was a boy, not much older than Dag.

  “We want information,” said a guard, who had watched the scene with cold indifference. “Information. Information.”

  “Please, I’m so afraid, you don’t know what you’re—” The prisoner screamed when the laughing guards planted the hooks in the soles of his bare feet. They hung him upside down against the wall, together with the detainees who had preceded him; their bloody skins piled on the floor, like tunics taken off over their heads.

  “We want information,” the jailer kept on, turning the hook inside the tendons and the naked flesh. “You and your friends were caught in the incriminated brothel. There were spies. We want information.”

  “It was just…AAAH! Please, it was just…we accompanied Urchin for his first…it was just a game…for his first fuck and then you plunged in and killed everybody, everybody!”

  “Information.”

  “I’m so scared!”

  “Information!”

  Marduk said, “Don’t look, Dag. Not now!”

  The men surrounded the young prisoner, contemplating his pathetic movements. Then, with a knife, they began to circle the skin of his calves.

  “AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!”

  Dagger turned to his left to avoid looking, but there he saw a black Guardian throwing a naked woman on the ground and lifting her hips. “Don’t struggle like that or I will only love you more!”

  The Dracon Delta finally covered Dagger’s eyes with a hand. “Let’s go, dammit.”

  Surrounded by suffering, they went down to meet the distant and wild barking that, from time to time, swept the screams of pain away.

  Dag found the strength to ask, “Why?”

  The Dracon replied in a whisper, “Since it’s been rumored about a network of spies in Agalloch, the Pendracon has given free rein to every murkier perversion of his men to find it out. Hungered for years, the city is now fed with the violence of man against man, aggressive discipline and barbaric control.”

  “Yet they revere him, I saw it. As he marched into the city, they—”

  “What do you think you saw?” Marduk growled. “Apathy and tolerance are the last virtues of a dying society. We are Megatherion. We live our death everyday. The people of Agalloch show reverence to him for fear of ending up down here. It’s violence, Dag, that holds everything together when every moral principle has failed. However, no one can hide the face of death, the oppression ruled by bloodshed—” A terrible scream ripped through his words, making it impossible to listen. “—no, it won’t go on much longer, not like this…it can’t go on! Soon we’ll wake up to find the city against us, and we will be the ones hung upside down and skinned alive!”

  Dagger found the courage to raise his eyes as they went down and down in the still, black vortex. Shouts of pain rose continuously around them, followed or preceded by the sound of an ax shearing a bone or complex machinery started up in a scream of metal chains.

  The violence of man against man, aggressive discipline and barbaric control, he thought again, seized by the blood fever.

  He glimpsed a wire tightening around the neck of a girl tied to a wooden pole, until her head was separated from her body in a blood spray on the snow-white breasts. He saw flames and acid splashes, as yells of agony tore through the vermilion silence. He almost bumped into a block of wood surrounded by amputated limbs, tongues and eyes. The smell of raw meat penetrated into his nostrils without remedy. It was a different smell from that of the ship cemetery—that was clean and sterile.

  The smell of authority. The smell of order exercised far from prying eyes, while the world keeps on living in its unconscious ignorance.

  The path became narrower, as well as the holes opened in the ground. They had probably been closed that way after the passage of the prisoner, condemned to a living burial that, after all, was not supposed to last long. Only until the diet made of few unlucky rats, the fetid water on the bottom and madness let the body and soul rot.

  From then on, Marduk let him go on alone—a shadow who watched him going down into the belly of the black and dying earth.

  Narrow cells opened to his right, dug into the porous stone, and beyond these nothing more but a slope swallowed by the indomitable silence. Dagger found Kugar in the last one before the precipice. Her wolfish body was returning t
o human form before his very eyes. Her hairs re-entered her skin; her paws became feet and hands; and the muzzle of a beast was again the freckled face of a girl. Dagger knelt down, drumming his knuckles on a bar. She moved in the rags, torn by the shift and placed with no order on her fragile body.

  Disturbed, a mouse peeped through a hole in the wall and ran away. It drew close to the last hole in the path. Too close—a hand flashed to grab it, pulling back into nothingness with the prey. He thought he heard a crazy laugh echoing down there, soon overtopped by an enthusiastic rattling of chains.

  Dagger sat down with his back against the bars and waited. He was about to fall asleep, when he felt a hand brushing his cheek. He kissed that dirty skin, suddenly happy in spite of horror.

  “I’ll take you away from here,” he said. “Even if it’s the last thing I do, I will save you.” He turned and found himself kissing her lips through the bars. But when he tried to rest his forehead against hers, he found only the cold metal.

  “Dag,” the broken voice of the girl asked. “Look at me, Dag.”

  “No.”

  “Dumb.” She stroked his hair.

  He raised his red eyes to meet hers. Among all the things he wanted to ask, the only one that came out of his lips was, “How are you?”

  Kugar shrugged and smiled, breaking her dry lips. “I was sleeping,” she answered as a drop of blood trickled down her chin.

  “They can’t keep you locked in here for long,” he said. “You’re too important.”

  “We’re both important, and we’re both in a cage. Yours is just a bit bigger and cozier than mine, but it’s a cage all the same. What’s that face? Do you find it funny?”

  “Remember when you told me we have nothing in common?”

  Kugar rested her face on the bars. “It’s been a while.”

  “Time will pass and we’ll still be together.” He held her hand. “You and I are one. We’ve already met before here and now. I know.”

  “Surely we met on another world.”

  “What I mean is…”

  “Dag?”

  “…that you’ve always been there and this is just another return to the starting point, where it comes full circle.”

  “Araya must have filled you with shit while you were gone.” She kissed his fingers. “In the end, he had to keep you at bay until the Council.”

  Dagger put his lips on their dirty hands, locked together around the bar. He closed his eyes, inhaling deeply.

  “Did you really mean it?” she asked, pinching his nose.

  “Ouch.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “What?”

  “That thing about having always been there, about coming full circle. That.”

  “We’ve gone through the depths of time to meet again. I know.”

  “You’re just saying that to hook me,” she said. “But it’s all too simple. Dying before you won’t be too difficult, just don’t disappear until that day. Do you think you can do it?”

  “I…” Dag left her hand, realizing the meaning of those words with a moment’s delay.

  “It will happen,” Kugar continued. “With me or someone else. It will happen all over again and you will suffer.”

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head. “There’s no alternative to being together,” he said stubbornly. “Loneliness makes you empty and helpless. Love is the only Redemption, even for me. Love conquers all.”

  Kugar didn’t answer and suddenly Dagger realized that she was right. He bowed his face.

  She ran a hand through his hair, but he felt it was the white hand of Seeth to caress him, inviting him to be reasonable. “Saying goodbye, at times, it’s the right thing to do.”

  “If you must go through hell, be sure that you’ll need company like mine. Stay with me, sweet sister, because you see: there’s no one around here, too.” For a moment, just a moment, Dagger was sure he saw a fleeting smile on her bloody lips. It was more than he could ask for. Loneliness was cozy, the only company he would never be denied. Yet he found that just one smile, set aside for him, was better than a lifetime alone.

  But it was only a moment.

  “You can’t fight yourself, don’t you see?” She took him by the collar through the bars. “Open your eyes, for Ktisis. Once I said you and I had nothing in common. Well, I was wrong! I know your pain, the pain of those excluded from life, those left outside. So you have to accept this advice, at least from me: don’t fight yourself. Don’t ever do it! Follow the beast inside or it will devour you, and it will drag down with you everything you love.” She let him go. “The problem is…that I’d be glad to be in hell, with you. If you love me, let me go, Dag. Please.”

  Dagger grabbed the bars and was on the verge of answering, when he felt Marduk’s hands on his shoulders.

  “Drac,” she said. “It’s been a long time. Why am I still here?”

  “Because you’re a fool,” the Dracon Delta answered. “And you’re a Tankar. What did you expect—a red carpet under your feet? Who would convince Olem to let you walk freely in the Fortress?”

  Kugar turned to Dag. “I’m not a Tankar,” she replied, but she didn’t sound so sure. She left the bars and fell on the worm-eaten bench. “Come freely inside my house, and leave a little of the happiness you bring. And don’t look at me like that. I don’t often use that…thing!” She pointed at a bucket in the corner, covered by a wooden board. “The diet in this place surely helps.” She coughed.

  Marduk let out a pitying look. He opened the cell in a high-pitched squeak and sat down beside her. When he laid one arm on her shoulders, he felt visibly uncomfortable. “Kugar,” he began. “Neither I nor your friends like to see you in this condition and neither do those who fought by your side. Certainly not the Poison Guardians, who are and forever will be your Blood Brothers. Yet you know that your power is dangerous, both for us and yourself.”

  She rejected his embrace and rested her elbows on her legs, staring at the floor of beaten earth. “Nothing ever happened. Not a single incident since I’ve been here.”

  “Something bad would have happened, sooner or later,” Marduk pointed out. “You could face the problem. Araya and Moak would surely find a way to…”

  “We tried,” she cut short. “For long. And I assure you those attempts were particularly…unpleasant. I’ll spare you the details, but in a few cases I was certain I was about to die by their hands. Actually, in a few cases I think I died for real, but they loved me and I knew it was all for the best. They left no stone unturned, before arriving at the conclusion that there was nothing to do.” She remained silent for a while. “No, there was no hope. You can’t fight your own blood, right? You can’t fight yourself, try to make this jerk understand.” She averted her gaze as she vaguely pointed at Dag. “Try not to make too much noise, my child, they just said when even the last attempt had failed. For a moment, I found something to laugh about it. The true meaning of those words came later, when I had to run away from my friends not to hurt them. Caring so much about someone that you have to run away from him…do you know what that means, Drac? How can you judge us?”

  Marduk raised an eyebrow. “So Araya already knew.”

  “Araya knows everything, always. Angra himself can’t understand what goes on inside his head. He knows the ways to lock down his thoughts and he’s not the only one in here.”

  “You should have informed me too.”

  “What’s the matter, do you feel discriminated for once that you don’t have everybody under your control? A Poison Guardian can keep a secret on the right side of his mouth. A Delta…I don’t know. You handle blades better than words. When you’re in shit up to the neck, just shut up—first teaching of the lizard Dracon. I’ve always put it into practice.” She looked up at the man.

  “Why are Messhuggahs so obsessed with shit?” the Dracon wondered. “I can’t figure it out. Half of their sayings have to do with shit. It’s something s
ick!”

  The girl smiled bitterly. “They understand the usefulness of evil. It’s always been like this. There’s a reason if Angra considers them his new favourite children.”

  “I see your point,” Marduk replied. “But, of course, pretending that a problem doesn’t exist doesn’t solve it. And now, here you are.”

  Kugar tightened the straw in her hands. “I didn’t want to be marginalized more than I already was. My only priority was that no one discovered my secret, apart from my mentors—they would never abandon me, never betray me. A lizard and a fatso who despised life as much as me; no, I was too important to them. I want to talk to Moak, please, he always knows what to…”

  “Moak’s dead,” Dag informed her, unable to lie.

  Marduk gave him a withering look.

  The most sincere sorrow crossed Kugar’s eyes. “No…” A tear cut a channel through the dirt on her cheek then fell down, dissolving a coin of old dust. “Ktisis, life can really suck when it puts itself to it.”

  “He sacrificed himself for the Balance,” the Dracon Delta tried to say. “He died for a good cause.”

  “Oh. Now I feel so much better. Only the good die young and for the right reasons, right?”

  “You and Dagger have a lot of things in common, you know? One of these days I will strangle you with your fucking irony!”

  The boy and the girl looked at each other.

  For a moment, Kug seemed to smile through her tears. “So what are you going to do with me? I think you won’t let me reach my companions in the Nest. At least, I hope I won’t reach those at Almagard.”

  Marduk seemed to look for the right words to say what he had to say. As usual, he didn’t find them. “We know your story. We don’t know where you came to light, but we know your mother was a Guardian of the Hammer, as proved by the symbol on the Arsis you had around your neck when you were found.”

  Kugar brought a hand at her pendant, turning it in her fingers.

  “And that you still wear now. But you’ve been brought up as a novice of the Poison. One of the best ever, judging by what everyone says, even Araya.”