The Tankar Dawn

by Walt Popester

  From then on, unreachable loopholes lit their way, thick dust swimming in their rays. That place was still voracious for death, still waiting for it. Some unexcavated spaces were traced in outline with chalk or paint upon the walls. Further on, almost every inch of available space was occupied, and sometimes the graves were dug in the floor. The niches were of all sizes, from that of an infant to that of an adult man. But the vast preponderance of children’s graves was striking. Sometimes they were large enough to hold two, three or even four bodies, which were often placed with the head of one toward the feet of the other. Mumakil closed his eyes. Doesn’t it remember, after all, the way children sleep? Those of the poor families, who most sought the help of Hanoi.

  “I don’t understand,” Warren said, close behind. “It was a people of brats?”

  Mumakil opened his eyes, only to watch new, ancient pain immortalized in a mosaic. “Hanoi claimed a significant sacrifice from his followers,” he explained. “These tombs were excavated at different times, as you can see here, and…here. Different engravings, different cultures. No one would dare to contradict the will of his god, but even the most terrible living being can be chased by remorse to his grave. Many parents wanted to be buried next to their sons, whose sacrifice had granted prosperity to the rest of the family.”

  “And some damn good harvest, I guess.”

  “Stop it. Death is the only time when a person says, thinks and does the truth.” In an aside he added, “I know something about it.”

  “The children’s graves are the most numerous, though. Most parents simply forgot them. Killed them, and forgot them.”

  The black man didn’t answer. He kept walking.

  Several chambers, at regular distances, had been dug in the rock on either side of the galleries, with which they connected through low and narrow passages. These bore the character of family vaults, and were lined with graves like the corridors without. They were generally square, but the most crowded displayed an octagonal arrangement. They had to belong to the richest families, since the bodies were almost all mummified. They rested undisturbed in their funeral clothes, their lips about to unfold to greet the unexpected but not unwelcome guests, their eyes about to follow them. The sense of life still emanated by their faces dissolved to dust when Mumakil but rested his eyes on their skeletal hands or the bony, frail feet. Death, he thought. Death sucks.

  The cubicula had vaulted roofs, and were sometimes plastered or cased with marble and paved with tiles, or with mosaic. These were visibly additions of later date than the original construction, as were the semi-columns and capitals.

  Here the catacombs were still weakly ventilated and partly illuminated by numerous openings. Faint rays struggled to those gloomy depths and bore no light but a visible darkness.

  The rains of a thousand forgotten winters had washed tons of earth down the breathing-holes, destroyed the symmetry of the openings, and filled the galleries with debris.

  They descended. The awful silence and darkness became almost palpable in the deepest dungeons, the only ones clear enough to adventure further. The main corridors were at least three feet in width, but the lateral passages were much narrower, often affording room for but one person to pass. It was a place mute of all light, where death reigned supreme. Not even a lizard or a bat had dared to penetrate those obscure recesses. There was nothing but skulls and skeletons, dust and ashes, on every side. The air was impure now, and difficult to breathe. Yet Mumakil, certainly not a virgin to the horrors of the world, found it impossible not to stop and watch in silence the crumbling relics of mortality committed ages ago, with care and many tears, to their last, long rest. “Don’t you feel like you know them?” he asked under the baleful light of the ensiferum sphere in his hand.

  “Who?”

  “Those who rest here.”

  Warren shrugged. “How do you know these tunnels?”

  “I was brought to my execution through these, the same that I used to run away from Hanoi when Angra freed me.” In front of a hole with a tiny skeleton inside, Mumakil could see a mother as if she were still before his eyes—her heart wrung with anguish, as she silently entrusted to the stony bed the little body that she had so often cherished in her warm embrace. So rude a couch for such a tender…

  He put his hand to his forehead as the river of memories broke its banks, Dad. Dad!

  He didn’t understand. No, he really didn’t understand why his eyes were crying.

  The room was ventilated again, Mumakil noticed, a sign that the exit was not far. “Let’s take a break.” His voice was faint as he put the sphere of ensiferum away. He preferred the comfortable darkness to the fearsome beam of light that now lit up the air.

  Warren, an unbearable grin on his face, sat instead in the light cone. “So, what’s the story, old man?” he asked.

  “What story?”

  “Yours.” War shrugged. “I may not be Dagger, but I can read a thing or two in the eyes of people, too. This whole place doesn’t leave you indifferent.”

  The black man didn’t answer.

  “Finish the story you were telling before we got here,” the white blood continued. “Did your children, Baomani and Sannah, think you had killed their brother, when it wasn’t true? Or maybe you were on the riverbanks and pulled out the corpse of the boy, and when they saw you they thought that—”

  “No,” Mumakil interrupted. A single, terrible sound. “I did kill my son. With these hands.” In the dim light, he lifted the limbs in question and War didn’t dare speak. “I tightened his throat until I felt the last scream trying to escape. I watched his eyes as they faded away asking why? And there, in the last act before the never-ending horror, I saw it.” He bent his head. “Awareness. My son knew why I was killing him. My son knew that game was forbidden.”

  Warren was taken aback.

  “What is it, white blood? You’re still so emotional? Are you or not the same boy who has slain a virgin in Skyrgal’s womb?”

  “It wasn’t me. It was just part of my initiation rite, probably.”

  “It’s the same.” Mumakil gazed toward the unbearable light. “An old Gorgor saying states that if the innocent are not opposing, they are already guilty.”

  “Just like your son?”

  The black man was silent, and for a moment the darkness around him seemed about to catch fire. “Korkore should have killed him,” he said after a while. “As he had done with all the others he took for himself and Hanoi. Instead, he made of my son his pupil. Of all the Guardians’ children he could choose, he wanted that of a Pendracon. Korkore wanted him, a harmless creature who would not hurt…” He didn’t conclude.

  “… an ant?”

  Mumakil sighed. “Parents never have a favorite child, you know that?”

  “Oh, don’t say that to me.”

  “Right. Who was Hammoth’s favorite, you or Ash?”

  Warren showed no reaction. He bent forward. “Korkore wanted your son as apprentice, but for what?”

  Wherever and however I’ll be given to fight against that power, I will do it, Mumakil remembered. According to Araya, Korkore had cursed in this way his brother Aeternus. He has embraced the power of Hanoi, the damn crab. He has cradled that cancer in the depths of the Fortress, on the banks of the river, and perhaps he wanted to become its Guardian. “To pay the price of Hanoi. To get his revenge on Aeternus.” He watched the darkness waiting for them. “Brother will kill brother, spilling his blood across the land. This is the only survived prophecy of the prophet Mastain. And it’s like that. It’s always been.”

  “The price of Hanoi—”

  “The appendages of the damn crab go upstream along the subterranean river toward the Fortress of the Guardians, where the river is born. It’s from those that Korkore drew his power and his ecstasy, but he couldn’t abandon their slimy embrace. He was forced to stay there, in the belly of the darkness, his own beast’s parasite.”

  Warren found something to laugh about it. “Oh, r
eally?”

  Soon there will be nothing to laugh about, my unfortunate friend, Mumakil thought. Soon I’ll deliver to eternal peace your desecrated body. “I know that feeling,” was all he said. “The agony and ecstasy given by the contact with the anti-god, the cosmic funeral from which only Angra could free me. Korkore needed apprentices provided with two legs to move out there. He used the thousands of appendages haunting the Fortress to guide the children to his underground forge.”

  “To feed off them?”

  “No, damn it!” the black man snapped. “None of them were up to it, this is why he killed them. He influenced them, yes, and he drugged them with the power of Hanoi. And with that he ended them when they failed, when they didn’t live up to his expectations. Does it remind you of anything, Warren?”

  “I’ve always lived up to expectations,” War replied dryly. “So that’s the story. You sent Baomani and Sannah, your two remaining sons, far from the Fortress.”

  “My men were supposed to lead them to a safe place, away from the reach of Korkore,” Mumakil said. “But Aeternus killed my men and trained my children. They were powerful when they got back home, masters of the Immortal Rites. They paid a visit to me at night, in my tower, and when I felt them in the dark it was already too late. I became another ghost of the Fortress, disappeared under mysterious circumstances.” His eyes stared into the past. “And in his underground forge, Korkore trained them and contaminated them with the power of Hanoi, the anti-god that has infiltrated the world.”

  “The very reason you sent them away.” Warren snorted an amused sound. “Ktisis, old man. You’ve seen a lot of shit.”

  “They have been taught by both Aeternus and Korkore. Now they know the power of Skyrgal and that of Hanoi.” Mumakil drove away a beetle. Insects. Good. We’re nearly there. He stood up. “The end is near, it’s crystal clear.”

  They walked the gloomy galleries with the company of the dead. The light appeared straight in front of them—a bright slit at the end of the darkness.

  “Over here, quick!” Mumakil took Warren’s arm and dragged him along.

  Light blinded them. They lost distance perception and nearly fell into the void. Mumakil looked at the ravine beneath his feet. Then he looked up, and laughed.

  “Cow shit.” Warren whistled.

  Hanoi was there. The perfect shape of his carapace—like a geometric form embedded in the mountain—still homed the village of calcified concretions.

  War turned to the black man, yet Mumakil had eyes only for the place where he had experienced the most inhuman captivity. Everything seemed unchanged—the sea, the sun reflected on the waves, the palm trees everywhere, and along the bay the distant profile of Asa, the ancient port of Adramelech from which the bay took its name.

  A single claw emerged from the rocks. When he focused his attention on that, even his black face seemed to fade. “He,” Mumakil said in a trembling voice. “He is moving.”

  “How can it be? Are you sure?”

  Mumakil smiled. “Come.” He went down along the steep trail to the base of the rocks, followed by Warren. In motion again, in motion again…but why? Did the Hermit really try to force him to host Dagger? Mumakil didn’t share his torment with Warren. He kept that dubiousness to himself, as well as the doubt that there could be much more hidden behind the deceptive barrier of the mortal senses, in which he felt imprisoned, isolated, after being recalled from the cosmic funeral.

  How can he—

  A stone he had estimated to be steady gave way under his foot and he slid to the ground.

  “Ktisis!” he exclaimed tapping the superficial wound on his knee. Then he looked at his hand. Blood. He smiled. Of course!

  Warren was behind him. “Everything okay?”

  “Now it is.” Mumakil stood up, black-faced. So this is the great plan, right? He kept on going down. Hanoi is here for Skyrgal, how could I forget? He’s looking for his blood and found it in Dagger. That’s what has him on the move again, and Hanoi won’t rest until he satisfies his hunger, erasing all traces of the god of Destruction. The Gorgors, Crowley…the Disciples! And that would be useful to many.

  At the end of the steep path he marched on the expanse of sharp stones. He ran under the gaze of the merciless sun, and then of the crab, on the sand that seemed to claim his feet. He rushed to the place where once he had been born to a new life, and suddenly stopped.

  The basalt altar was still in place. Mumakil approached it slowly and brushed its hard, black stone. Wherever and however I’ll be given to fight against that power, I will do it. It must still be like that.

  A memory crossed his mind—two boys, his sons. The stone seemed to still remember what it had seen.

  “Our destiny lies deep in the dark, and time stands still before you! Kill our father. Make him experience the cosmic funeral!”

  “No! Baomani, don’t!”

  That memory knocked his feet from under him like a gust of cold wind, and Mumakil fell to his knees. Why? Why, my son?

  Warren reached him after a while. “What happened here?”

  “The waiting is over. Dagger is inside him and the crab is moving again.”

  “And what do we do now?”

  Well, my unlucky friend. We offer him a welcome-back sacrifice, don’t we?

  The black man sat a little further and lit a fire with a sliver of hvis to keep the looming darkness at bay. He smoked his pipe and soon his hands stopped shaking. He stared at the flames in silence.

  “Aren’t we taking too many breaks?” Warren asked. “Not that I mind sitting around the fire and talking to you, mind.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Sure. You’re nice.”

  Mumakil smiled. “Come on,” he said. “Who are you, really?”

  War froze. “What do you mean?”

  “I have tolerated your staging to see where you wanted to get to. There wasn’t a single moment I lost sight of you, but I still don’t understand. No, I really don’t. What do you want from me? Did Aeternus send you to spy on me? Does he really estimate me so little?”

  Warren stared at him in silence. Then he grinned.

  The black man grinned too.

  The energy that exploded soon after would have blinded any common mortal condemned to see it. When light settled, Mumakil was holding in his hands the skeleton neck of a Disciple.

  “A shape-shifter!” Mumakil shouted. “I’ll kick your face in the ass if you don’t tell me!”

  “What?” The shape-shifter laughed. “What, you stupid anti-man?”

  “Where’s Warren?”

  The Disciple smiled again. “Out there, just like life!” A blackish and deformed appendage snapped from his sternum and shoved him away.

  Mumakil went flying and crashed back first into the rock. He went forward again in a cloud of dust. “What was that, a spring made of slime? Skyrgal has really satisfied his creativity, crippling your filthy bodies.”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  The old Pendracon stopped. “No. The deformities donated by Hanoi don’t affect the body…but memories, and time. The way time passes.” He took a step. “And then there’s the shadow. The damn, unreachable shadow beyond the three arches. It looks like he’s waiting, it could drive you crazy. I think he’s…a certain individual, trapped in there to save himself. A long story.”

  “Believe me, this is really interesting. But time is passing and Warren is further and further away.”

  Then the damn white blood is not dead. Mumakil didn’t know if that was good or bad. He spread his arms. “Didn’t you shape-shifters take the form of those you killed?”

  “Maybe I was talking about his corpse. Maybe not. Maybe Warren became a Disciple and got stuck between life and death like all of us.”

  That consideration made Mumakil smile. He lowered his guard. “Let’s talk about it. Seriously. I want to understand.”

  His enemy looked at him suspiciously. “I haven’t even met him,” he said lowering his arms in tu
rn. “The Lord of all Disciples just told me Warren was the only one you would trust. It was he who molded me in his form.”

  “Your lord of all the assholes should have chosen someone who could play the role better. That boy is way different from how you impersonated him. He’s more…”

  “Mean? Evil?”

  “Hum. No. More asshole. But it was easy to guess the key to his soul, his suffering hidden from the eyes of the world.”

  The Disciple said nothing.

  Mumakil cocked his head sideways. “At this point you should ask Which one?”

  Aeternus’ servant raised his open hands, caught off guard. “Oh, sorry, I forgot the rules.” His eyes widened. “Which one?”

  “His father Hammoth.” Mumakil became serious. “Just hearing that name was enough to make him stop breathing. You were always indifferent to that. You looked like a plaintive queer, ready to—”

  The Disciple went on the attack. Mumakil stretched out his left arm and opened his hand. The opponent’s deformed body was sucked in by a powerful negative energy, bent over, broken.

  Thanks, Hanoi, for your power, the black man thought. Soon I will reciprocate.

  The Disciple’s skin tore and disappeared into the joints of the muscles. Spikes of broken bones jumped out, pulling and tearing the arteries. The skullcap exploded in a shower of macerated, bluish brains, as the skinned chest opened and expelled the cursed heart and the turbid ramifications with which it had poisoned the body. The Disciple, eviscerated, rolled in the air several times before ending up on the ground, reduced to a smoking, completely turned over carcass.

  His heart was still beating, and tissues were already forming again from the morbid vessels.

  Mumakil stepped forward and pierced the beating organ with a virgin mayem blade.

  One last gleaming beat, then there was silence, and death.

  “If I warned you, there was a reason.” Mumakil looked up at the distant city of Asa, visible along the bay. I never felt so insulted in my life, not even when I was alive. He knew Aeternus was not there, yet he screamed, “Next time, send me someone who is up to me! Who do you think you’re dealing with?”