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

by Walt Popester

  It was not him, although that was his nature. It was two-thirds of Ktisis, of Kam Konkra. With a single, broad movement of the right arm, the Beast generated a shock wave that sheared in half the body of Tankars, Gorgors and Guardians altogether, married in death without distinction. He watched them die one by one, as they sought a mad refuge in the flames’ embrace, their insides melted together on the last labor. Blow after blow, it restored the purity of the Glade defiled by mortals.

  Isolated from the world, as he looked at everything from above, Konkra grinned. Then he was on the ground, lifeless, next to the dagger of mayem expelled from his body.

  I rode the lightning. Did you see Angra? I rode it.

  Finally everything went dark, while two wrinkled hands dragged him away.

  * * * * *

  Epilogue

  From the Poison tower top, Dagger watched the living taking care of the dead in what had once been the Glade. Skeletal tree trunks emerged from the ashes like black fingers pointed at him. The sweet smell of burned flesh filled the air, as well as that of the carbonized hair and the vaporized Gorgors’ sewage.

  In the room where he had awakened and where he had spent the last seven days, everything was still in perfect order. It seemed that neither Araya nor Kugar had ever gone away. But the desert had taken everyone, and he was once again alone.

  He got back inside while a gust of fetid wind shook the silk curtains, brushing his face. He went down the stairs and crossed the empty and silent Fortress, then the Glade, watching the surviving Guardians moving like forgotten shadows among the charred and dismembered bodies of their Blood Brothers. The hands of the dead were still clenched on the handles of swords, their faces in the ground, their backs pierced by black arrows, their bellies lacerated, their chests open exposing the naked organs to the shapeless sky looming over the world. Guardians piled Gorgors and Tankars without order in macabre funeral pyres, sick lighthouses in the impenetrable, endless night that permeated every intimate fold of the survivors.

  A group of Guardians stood around Olem’s petrified body. They all watched him and somebody spat on him. Some shook their heads, others used his face to clean their boots of mud and ash and shit. The Sword Dracon had always been a pure man, unable to compromise, a reliable guide through every storm. An illusion for all. Now they thought him a Disciple and a traitor, but they did not know he had been just a man.

  Dag couldn’t get close until they left. He wiped his hard face with his hand and closed his eyes. He didn’t pray. He no longer had a god to pray to, but Olem was still there with him.

  Long shadows, dancing in the light of the funeral pyres, rose behind him and covered his brother’s corpse.

  A Guardian turned Dag around with force. He uncovered the boy’s chest, a quick way to distinguish traitors from friends. “Look. He’s one of them! We have to pull his soul out! Who has a virgin manegarm blade?”

  Dagger took a step back, overcome again with the fierce anger that had always accompanied him in the most difficult times. He bared his teeth and drew his shiny Redemption, resisting the temptation to stick the knife in his wrist to become the Beast again.

  The man who had recognized him moved back. “That dagger! He’s the one…the one who walked through the flames! The one who…!” He broke off and stared, his eyes filled with fear, then grabbed the deformed skull of a Gorgor and threw it at Dagger, shouting, “Go away, monster!” The Guardian hit his forehead, slicing the skin open.

  Dag tried to cover his face with an arm as stones and sharp charred bones began to rain down on him.

  “Go away, monster!”

  Dagger stumbled away, sheltering himself as best he could while his torn skin leaked his cursed blood. They were right. He didn’t belong to that place. Mingling with the Guardians had been a mistake. Believing he could feel love and have friends had been a mistake. Believing himself to be a human had been a mistake.

  “Stop. He’s leaving!” came a shout.

  “We can’t let him go back to his own kind!” someone else cried out.

  “How are you going to stop him? Don’t you remember what he did? He’s powerful!”

  Dagger smiled through tears. Powerful? He was amused by that word. ‘God’ is alone, and who is alone is fragile and helpless. He was strong at the Spiders’ guild, where his fist was legendary, where someone was always waiting for him to return from a night sortie. He was powerful when he had nothing but the smile of those who loved him. But ‘god’ is alone.

  He stroked his manegarm sword and smiled. With her, he was not afraid anymore. Guardians always give a name to their weapons, Kugar’s voice reminded him and his bittersweet grin disappeared. “Solitude,” he baptized it. It seemed the blade was shaken by a tremor, yet it had to be just a feeling. Do you like this name, Olem? Do you like Solitude?

  He walked through the gates of the Fortress, face down, camouflaged among the Guardians who were carrying Tankars’ bodies away. With them, he crossed the streets of Agalloch, pushed, hit, and insulted by its inhabitants, but not because they knew his true identity. For those people, he was a just Guardian like the others. There were no heroes and no champions in that world, there never had been. The Guardians drew their swords and soon the disarmed population was thinned out, leaving their fallen on the ground: an old man, a pregnant woman with her face broken in half by a blow and a little girl dressed in bloody rags. The latter was still alive, with a fist clenched around a stone. Blood flowed from a wound in her chest.

  He saw that she was still moving her lips and bent to hear what she was saying, “Don’t leave me alone,” she whispered. “Please, don’t leave me alone. Please don’t leave me…”

  The boy took off his cloak and covered her. The girl looked at him and barely nodded, before following those who had preceded her in the long march toward the light at the end of the world.

  Dagger didn’t have time to think or feel anything. A rusty hook penetrated into his cheek, and the bittersweet taste of iron mixed with his own blood flooded his mouth.

  A woman behind him growled, “You killed my daughter!”

  Dag tried to bring his hands to his burning, throbbing face, but the woman pushed him to the ground and dragged him down the street, driven by the strength of her pain. “He’s one of them!” she yelled. “He’s one of them! We have to tear him to pieces!”

  “Yeah, let’s do it!” the crowd screamed.

  He tried to get up as they punched and kicked him but they quickly tied his hands behind his back. Prodding and half-dragging Dagger, they arrived at a small square and a man burst through the crowd with a stump and an ax.

  No! Please! Don’t tear me apart! he wanted to say, but the hook blocked his tongue. The crowd closed in and someone tried to get his hands on Redemption and Solitude. The weapons seemed to repel any touch that was not Dag’s. When a second man screamed and thrust a smoldering, burned hand into the air, Dag’s sharp companions were left in peace.

  Then, horror began. Someone put his legs on the log, holding them still. They took off Dagger’s boots and rolled up his leather pants to his knees, laughing.

  “NN—” he tried to scream, but the woman twisted the hook along with his tongue and the meat of his face.

  The gleaming ax hovered over a wild and toothless grin, before falling down.

  STAK! it sang, separating Dag’s feet from his ankles in vermilion streams.

  “AghGR!” Dagger tried to scream in the grip of iron, when the searing pain shot through his body. Drenched in his own blood, he tried to escape but the hook, the ropes and the chains pinned him to the ground.

  Punches, kicks, slaps.

  STAK! the ax sang again, climbing his body and depriving him of his legs below the knees. STAK! STAK! STAK!

  When it was over, only a pile of dismembered limbs and a beheaded trunk remained of Dagger at the feet of the intrigued and horrified crowd.

  With two gleaming weapons watching over him.

  * * * * *

 
Stone. Cold and black under his hands.

  “So…you did fall off the face of the world.”

  “You get funnier every day, Dad.”

  “I do my best.”

  Konkra stood up, raising his eyes to…“That’s news! You came out of the light?”

  Sitting on his shadow-throne, made up of that same hard, black stone, Karkenos smiled. “We all came out of the light. You too, isn’t it?” The god’s voice rose from everywhere, even though his lips didn’t move in the titanic, malignant goat face. “For a brief moment, the three parts of Konkra’s soul have been reassembled, so nothing will ever be the same.”

  “Was it really me? That beast of pure shadow that stopped them?”

  “Uhm. No. You surely remember you missed the left side of your torso and face.”

  “That part of Ktisis is inside the armor, I suppose.”

  “You suppose correctly. You’ll come back to be what you are only when the three parts of the soul will be joined again.”

  “And, managing such a power, don’t you think I will easily defeat your Disciples?”

  Karkenos laughed at his innocence. “It doesn’t work like that, son. Do you think you can unleash the Beast to your liking? Every time you’ll do it, one of the portals will fall and you’ll get closer to the point of no return. To madness.”

  “How many times can I still use that power?”

  “Do you really think I’m so stupid to tell you?”

  “No?”

  “No!” Karkenos laughed and Konkra realized there was no way to make him talk. “Angra has become the holy diver,” the voice coming from everywhere continued. “Some bars of my prison have become consequently weaker—we were able to speak, that time in the Glade—so now I can exercise a stronger control on my servants. Things are on their way and I haven’t even moved a finger! You’ll see some changes when you’ll rise again, you know?” Through the two malformed horns that fell on either side of his face, he grinned. “You’ll see a lot of things, my father…and son.”

  “You’re not beginning with explanations again, right?”

  “What good would it be? I don’t think I ever had a child more stubborn than you, or more stupid.”

  Konkra cocked his head to one side. “When he put himself to it, the god of Destruction can really be offensive. I’m impressed.”

  “Tell me what someone wants, and I’ll tell you how to use him. Tell me what experiences left a mark on him, and I’ll tell you how to exploit them. Tell me who or what he’s loved, and I’ll tell you how to destroy him. I’ll do the same with you. I will reach my goal, do you hear me? I won’t let your unstable, mortal feelings get in the middle!”

  “Is it so important for you to destroy everything? Sometimes I can’t understand you.”

  Karkenos leaned forward. “It’s great to be the best at something. It’s my nature. Are you surprised? Is my name, perhaps, the ‘god of universal love and other lost causes’? No, I’m the god of Destruction, and there’s no greater accomplishment for me. I saw it—the emptiness all around us. You don’t know what fear is until you see it. Your mind gets detached from your soul, and then you…understand what a great achievement Megatherion can be. Are there alternatives? The power inside us is so great that the only rational solution is to let it flow toward Megatherion. Otherwise, we will fall into the hands of mortals and they will employ us to sow death and suffering on themselves. It’s already happening, as it’s always happened. Yet you don’t see, because you’re blinded and continue to see me as the absolute evil. Pain is evil, not eternal idleness.”

  “I understand you.”

  “Really?”

  “Well…at times.”

  “Then take my hand and I’ll lead you to the real promised land—the end. The end supreme. Everything’s gone too far, anyway. If you fall into the wrong hands, you’ll just become an instrument of death for those who only want your power. Megatherion is the only sensible solution, at least for we gods who have seen a fragment of the great and dreadful show beyond the boundaries of perception.”

  Konkra found some meaning in it. Then he remembered, ‘Be human’, probably the last message of his mother. “Fuck you.” he replied.

  Karkenos tightened his clawed fingers on the throne-arms. “I don’t need to convince you anymore, as I said. Your help is no longer needed. Go and taste all the illusions you’ll be offered. Swim again in the pleasures and pains of a mortal life for the little time you’ll be given. Some mistakes will be made no more.”

  “If you can read my mind, you’ve already realized that I’m looking for the Hermit. He knows about my nature more than anyone else.”

  The god of Destruction shuddered. “Stay away from that man.”

  Konkra smiled. “And why should I trust your words?”

  Silence fell between them.

  Before the mocking laughter of his father dismissed him from the world on the edge of the All.

  * * * * *

  The glow of a fire in the hearth.

  The firelight is way more pleasant than the cold and metallic ensiferum! Marduk’s voice said, far away in the sea of memory.

  “Is he waking up?”

  “Oh yes. Apparently.”

  Dagger opened his eyes a slit. He saw Ash moving red and fiery fragments of furniture with a poker, as he smiled at him.

  In the otherwise darkened room, the weak sunlight penetrated in two slanting rays through a pair of carved eyes. He realized that the entire wall to his left was a monstrous face, of which he was appreciating the inside, like a mask. The amputated legs from a colossal statue sustained a high and unreachable ceiling. All around he noticed yellow-stone pupils and claws, grinning teeth and forked tongues, kinked tails and grotesque maws. The fireplace had once been the lips of a dilated vagina.

  With so much of a clitoris.

  “Oh yes. We are in Agalloch,” Kerry said, his body silhouetted against the sky in the half-open mouth. “Built with the ruins of Adramelech.”

  Dagger sat up abruptly, finding himself on a filthy mattress lying on the ground. “Those bastards tore me to pieces!”

  Ash put the poker down. “You have to thank Kerry for finding you. Oh yes.”

  “Stop mimicking me, white blood!”

  “Under a pile of corpses,” the son of Hammoth continued, as he got near. “What the fuck were you doing there?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  Ash dropped down beside him on the mattress. “We dug in those bodies all night, Ktisisdamn. At dawn, we stank of shit and death. Do you know what it means to bring out, one by one, the bodies of men, women, and children with their sphincters—”

  “Ash?” Kerry interrupted. “We can definitely leave out some details, oh yes!”

  Dagger shook his head. “Why? Why did you do it?”

  Ash made a curious expression, as if he considered that question meaningless. “Why? Because you are our friend, that’s why—a Hotankar, remember?”

  Dag shook his head. “Now you know who I am for real.”

  “We’ve been informed a while ago. Just Ianka…if he can’t hold it in his hands, he can’t understand it, Olem always said. We tried to explain to him the concept of force lived through all eternity. He merely asked if you were a good guy in the end, and we answered that yes, in the end you were a good guy. Then he shrugged and finished decapitating that guy who had almost managed to steal your weapons.”

  Dag, eyes widened. “Olem!” The white blood didn’t understand what he meant. “My sword!”

  “Look behind you.”

  Beside the mattress, Dag found his manegarm sword. Redemption, instead, was faithful to his side.

  “Jackals are raging in the city. Agalloch arose and the survivor Guardians locked themselves in the Fortress, as always. They had to leave many body-piles to rot outside the city walls, without burning them, which was fortunate, otherwise Kerry would have never sensed the slight smell your blood gives off even when you die.”

 
; “Not even a Gorgor would succeed in following it, oh no!”

  “And the others?”

  “They’re making provisions for the journey.”

  Dagger nodded, without asking what journey he meant.

  “Even Ianka needed someone to watch his back, with all the riffraff that goes around in the old market square,” Ash continued. “We have abandoned all the Guardians’ symbols. It will be best to keep a low profile when we’re on the road, I think you’ll understand.”

  Dag brought his hand to his bare chest, and the symbol on his sternum.

  “This won’t go away so easily.”

  “Everything is going fade away,” it was Kerry who spoke this time, shadow against the light. “Nothing is eternal. In one way or another, everything is to disappear into the belly of the big nothing.”

  “Marduk would have liked to explain a lot of things to us, when he came out of the room where he stunned you,” Ash said. “Look, he’s a Disciple. He joined them! he told us. But Araya had thought about that too. He must have sensed his intentions, that’s why he had you followed by his own son night and day—the one most unable to keep his mouth shut, as it seems, so we’ve been informed of everything.”

  “And then?”

  “And then? We turned against him, but Marduk didn’t become the Delta Dracon by accident, as he didn’t become a Disciple for the same reason. Only Erin came to drive her nails in your forearm to try to snatch your body from him, yet he managed to take you away from us.”

  Dag smiled, remembering that Marduk had provided a slightly different version of the story.

  “In the end, the battle broke out and the whole world came undone under our feet,” Ash continued. “We ran to our rooms to arm ourselves. We don’t know what happened to you, until we saw you do…what you did.”

  A door was thrown open. Ianka took a step forward, emerging from darkness. Four red scars crossed the left half of his face, from his forehead to his chin. He wore a black patch on the mutilated eye. It seemed that he would never be able to smile, not really.