Dagger 4 - The Tankar Dawn: A Dark Fantasy Adventure

by Walt Popester

  “Do your Tankars study too?”

  “Did you hear them talking?”

  “Yes.” Dagger leaned forward. “And I don’t dare to think what you all can see, when you’re taking that substance in the temple of Ktisis.”

  A new contrasting note took away all the melody. “That temple,” Baikal said, his fingers still on the keyboard. “Your temple.”

  Dag laughed. “Mine? Oh, Ktisis, I think you are…” When he thought about that, he found little to laugh about it.

  “You’re Konkra, the god of Emptiness. Isn’t it so?”

  Dagger nodded. “I…think so.”

  “My father let himself be killed for you and that temple.”

  So that’s what it was. “Nothing personal, but I wasn’t there.” He looked for the right words to say what he had to say. In the end, he chose a simple, “I want to go back in there, if you know where it is. It’s important.”

  Baikal turned to him, showing his battered profile. “Why should you?”

  The place where you came to this world for the first time, Dag remembered—the words of Hanoi. That’s the end of the world. That’s the end of the road. He shrugged, hoping to be still good at hiding his hopes.

  The beast began to play again, without looking at his hands—a cadenced rhythm. “I’m having it destroyed piece by piece. That’s the will of my lord. Oh, it’s big, and for the most part buried under this infinite sand. But all the Nehamas who are not engaged in the reunification of the Tankars under my guide are trying to free the world from that terrible knowledge. Yours.”

  “With this, aren’t you saying that we won’t become friends?”

  “I count my friends on the fingers of a hand. And there’s still room for five.”

  “How many fingers do you Tankars have?”

  The Nomad Emperor continued to play with one hand, as he raised the other one to show him the middle finger. “Sometimes, we just need one.”

  Dag felt like laughing, as once he had done only with Ash and Ianka. Then he remembered who was before him, and after that he saw again the bright smile of the former Tormentor Asmeghin.

  The last notes, then the Nehama stood up.

  Ktisis, he almost reaches the ceiling, Dag thought as he watched him approach.

  “Look behind you.”

  The boy did as he was told, and was face to face with himself, reflected in the mirror.

  “That’s the only person you can count on,” said the beast. “The last to leave, the last to betray you. The only one who will always be at your side.”

  “It’s hard to be at the side of yourself.”

  “Turn a little bit.”

  Dagger did again as the Tankar told, standing side to side with himself in the mirror. “You do know a lot of tricks.”

  The Emperor didn’t want to joke any longer. “Who is the boy in the mirror?”

  “An old man,” Dag answered. “The ruin of the person I was. I don’t know who he is anymore, can you believe it?”

  “Maybe you’re learning the oldest, most immutable lesson. Everything changes, inside and outside us. Only one thing never changes.” Baikal tapped his long claw on Dag’s heart. “What’s in your heart. And what’s in heart goes from father to son. Always remember that.”

  “Ktisis, I hope not.” Dagger thought about it. “What do you want from me?”

  The beast went back to the keyboard and played without speaking for a long time, before replying, “What I would expect from a god. Answering a prayer. Did you find it so hard?”

  Dagger shrugged. Then filled his cup of wine to the brim.

  * * * * *

  Baikal barked out loud, hammering his fists to the ground to contain his laughter. “Oh, Ktisis, I would enjoy such a view!”

  “And…and then comes the crab,” Dag continued. “Really, I mean, the crab in all his majesty and I hear him sing, sbash sbash! as the brains of the Gorgors fly everywhere. A show!”

  “I believe that!”

  “And then comes Crowley. That is, he drives me where he is because in the end that was like the bed of a river or things like that, and he acts the tough guy among all those glass panels.” Dagger stood up to mimic the black man’s face, his neck embedded in his shoulders, stumbling with a rigid step and then another, the cup of wine still in his hand. “Me black man, me very cool. Me been shitted to the world.”

  Baikal threw his head back and laughed again. “Oh Ktisis, for a moment I thought he was here before me!”

  Dagger sat cross-legged, laughing. “And…and he still says all that bullshit, Come here to me, and gives me two hundred explanations about whys and whats, but it’s easy to understand that he has suffered solitude all the time, and that’s his problem.”

  That made the smile flicker on the black lips of the Tankar, before it was broken by a sip of wine.

  Dagger talked louder, “He acts pretty cool and thinks he can defeat me, so what do I do? I say, Hey, look at this trick Mumakil just taught me. And bam! Before you know it, the roof, the glasses and the Ktisisdamn fossil forest collapse…and I find him out of the metal box, crawling like a worm. Hanoi tentacles get to him and slurp! Good-bye black man of my ass.”

  Baikal’s laughter dropped to a dignified silence, but it was all sham, Dag knew. Those smiles never touched the Nomad Emperor’s eyes. What do you want from me? Why are you trying to soften me? he wondered, continuing to laugh.

  The Nehama guzzled down his wine then, with his back to the wall, watched the empty bottle roll along the carpet depicting Adramelech in the full of its splendor. “It’s easy not to be hurt, my boy. Just don’t leave your side exposed,” he said. “It’s the very shape of an uncovered side that incites a low blow, just like the shape of a sword incites to violence.”

  “Oh, Ktisis. Are you starting with explanations all over again?”

  Baikal didn’t hear him, or perhaps just pretended not to. “Nobody is ever really cheated if not because, even for a single moment, he wanted it. If not because he allowed it, lulling his own illusions.” He stared straight into the huge void in front of his blue eyes. “That goes for Crowley too. Look at the world around you. Does it look like it was made for good feelings?”

  “The search for happiness is always personal.” Dag brought the cup to his mouth, trying to drown those two or three voices which protested on the bottom of his consciousness. He already knew what they would say, but at that moment a white, giant and real Tankar was saying something more reasonable.

  “Sad,” Baikal said. “The world is sad, my boy. Everyone is born crying, and our first word is usually the last one we say before going back in the current. There’s a reason, don’t you think? The only place where we’ve really been hidden and protected. When you’re born, you can’t hide anymore.”

  Dagger hated him for saying that. “Baikal,” he said. “Bai. Why doesn’t Kugar speak anymore?”

  The Nomad Emperor was silent for a long time. “Evoken.” Anger filled his voice in that one name. “Neither humans nor Tankars have a sympathy for incest. Imagine how you would feel if you had fucked your uncle.”

  “Or my aunt.”

  “Or your uncle.”

  “You mean Marduk? Now that you make me think about it, I think I would close myself in a cell and I wouldn’t talk to anyone anymore.”

  “And I assure you. From what I heard about him, Marduk made some mistakes because he was alone and helpless…”

  Oh, here’s another one, Dagger thought.

  “…but Evoken was disgusting even for being a human. He was refined and elegant, he never swore and didn’t drink. He didn’t smoke. He never lost control. Nothing good will ever come from someone like that, trust a Tankar.”

  “Of course I trust you. He was your allied. Where I come from, they say a man must be judged by the people around him.”

  Baikal conceded that moment of sarcasm, but locked his enormous right hand in a fist as big as Dagger’s chest. “And what about a Tankar?”

&n
bsp; “Oh. Ah. No one ever specified that.” Dag shrugged. “So what’s it going to be, then?”

  “It’s terrible when girls can’t cry. Try to make her speak, or at least cry. I tried, with no success.”

  “You didn’t torture her, right?”

  Sitting beside the green sarcophagus containing the beheaded body of the Tormentor Asmeghin—whom he had skinned alive—and the other two he was planning to fill in a similar or worse way, Baikal shook his head. “Who do you think you’re dealing with? I’m not a beast.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I’ve looked for the blood of my blood longer than you think. I wouldn’t dare to blot a hair of hers for anything in the world. But for my enemy I have no pity.” He instinctively brought the cup to his lips, before he realized it was empty. “Nobody should ever stand between me and the place I’m heading to—the end of the road, the dawn of the new day. It will come, Dag. It must come.”

  Dagger felt tears gather in his eyes. He hid his face in his cup. “And that’s why you want her talking.” He drank the last sip. “That’s why you’ve been looking for her. She knows something.”

  “Something? There are a lot of somethings that girl should start talking about. First of all, what kind of trip has she taken with the one Evoken called Moak the fatso.”

  “You say she is no longer the chubby baby you saw the last time, then.”

  Baikal snarled without opening his jaws—a vibration so deep it made Dagger dizzy. The Emperor didn’t like the irony on the blood of his blood.

  Borderline crossed. Dagger raised his hands. “I didn’t mean to offend you. Seriously.”

  The Nomad Emperor rose to pour another cup of wine. Dagger thought that the tacit battle between them—to who best held his liquor—was lost at the beginning. He himself had to weigh more or less like the liver of the beast.

  “Are you still here?” the Nehama said. “I let you keep your skin, that doesn’t mean you’re exempt from following my orders as soon as I give them to you. Go to her. Talk to her. In the name of Ktisis, or any other god you are or believe in, put her mouth back into motion.”

  Looking at the tremor in the hands of the Tankar, Dag deemed it high time to leave.

  Baikal didn’t feel threatened by his presence, and Dagger was certain the Nehama knew more about him than he wanted him to think. More than once he had proved to know many details about his life—especially about him and Kugar. He had probably informed himself when he was still an ally of the Hammer Guardians, and his obsession for Ktisis was in virtually everything he said.

  Yet, as soon as Dagger left his room at the top of the tower, the guards reminded him his state of more or less free prisoner. They escorted him downstairs, never more than a spit of distance from him. Their white hair was becoming a more disturbing presence than all the shadows of that ancient place.

  One step from Kugar’s room, or prison, Dag turned around and said, “You could leave me alone at least here. You heard your lord!”

  The two guards didn’t answer. The highest in rank, judging from the metal plates on his leather armor, opened the door.

  Kugar was still there where he had left her. Perhaps she hadn’t really moved a step, yet her eyes looked at him, and stared through him, past him just like Erin had done—remote blue eyes looking on another world.

  Dagger closed the door and sat in front of her, his hands interlocked under his chin.

  He looked for something to say, something deep and hearty. “You’ll be happy now,” he said. “You bitch.”

  A catatonic and exasperating silence was her only reaction.

  “If your past had forgotten you, maybe there was a reason,” Dag continued, realizing the tremor in his hands. “Yet you didn’t care. You had a goal, only one, and you followed it to your ruin.” Whom am I talking about, now? He tried and tried to be angry with her. But he couldn’t. Soon it all came back to his mind—the faint lights of a fleeing ship in a faraway world, the stolen smiles and the rain in the forest. Her cold skin against his, the glow of flames dancing on her face. All the happiness of the world was enclosed in a few precious, fragile memories, which were all he still had. He found himself naked and disarmed when he realized those memories made a human of him. He couldn’t let them go away in the current. He would have spent the rest of his life, eternal or not, regretting that.

  He cursed himself and all the cursed world that put itself in the way, the one time he was given to be happy.

  Where were we, before you killed your best enemy?

  * * * * *

  A total, impenetrable silence was the only thing Dagger remembered of that meeting, when the morning after he was walking with Baikal along the steep alleys of the village at the top of the fortress.

  He had tried everything. Words. Physicality. He had lifted her chin with his finger, yet Kugar had locked herself in her mute, lost world.

  “The desert took everything,” Baikal said in the middle of a long ascent.

  “I just thought she was…everything,” Dagger answered.

  “I know that feeling.”

  “Which one?”

  “Picking up the fragments of what was all we had. Never do that. Never give yourself over to just one person, even if it seems the will of destiny. Because destiny has its own way to settle the scores, and all that love gone wrong washes your world in black.”

  “It’s not in your interest to give me such an advice.” Dagger looked up at him. “How do you do that?”

  “What?”

  “Understand me.”

  “You speak my tongue since you came out of that—”

  “I meant—”

  “I know what you meant!” Baikal interrupted him. “You’re both hanging there, waiting for everything to come undone or get back to its place, but things never get back to their places. Not on their own, at least. Even you must have learned that.”

  Dagger looked around, fleeing from his thoughts and fears.

  The conical pigeon towers were numerous all over the village, and were everywhere far more imposing than the Tankars’ houses. The interior was divided by two walls cutting each other across at right angles, their entire surface occupied by pigeon cells.

  The crucial point of the matter was to gather as much guano as possible.

  “The desert is sterile,” Baikal answered, following his gaze. “We have only that to make it fertile again. And luckily it is something this world will never stop dispensing.”

  A little Tankar girl caught Dagger’s attention. She threw pieces of dry bread to the pigeons, who rushed to get them. She looked happy, but then another little girl approached and threw stones at the birds making them fly away.

  Baikal gave an amused snort. “All children may be divided into those who throw crumbs at the pigeons, and those who throw stones at them. Adults are not very different, they only have some…extra shades.”

  “How do I get to Kugar? How do I reach her in there?”

  “Only you know the answer.”

  They came to a terracing with a low wall which separated them from a desperate and majestic view.

  Dagger watched the village of low mud houses crowding along the side of the mountain, and the yukas of the Nehamas. Beyond those lay patches of land stolen from the ruins, cultivated and beautifully green, but which seemed shortly to take on the yellow hue of the surrounding waste. There was the freedom of the desert, but without the desert. It was a greener place, more humid, less hostile—a precarious beauty on the point of being overwhelmed.

  The Tormentor’s yuka camp had sprouted beyond the opium cultivation, divided between the remains of the immense buildings. They preferred not to mix with the Nehamas. Beyond them, only the mighty waves and the indomitable currents of an ocher sand sea.

  “This city. Its lesson. You can become as rich for the wreckage of a civilization as for its upbuilding,” Baikal said. “Your world has become one caravan of slaves headed eastward. My world, a long march of slaves walking toward the pipe
r’s call. It must be the music to bring them here, the beauty in the heart of a horror they considered unbreakable, ineluctable, predicted.”

  “You gave them a dream, something to believe in,” Dag said, lost in thought. “No one ever says no to such a call.”

  Baikal looked down on him and smiled. “You see? You’ve worked it out.” He closed his eyes, letting the desert breeze shake the hair on his face. “There’s the secret of the strongest power. To be responsible for the dreams of the others, dragging them into something great and wonderful, the break of chains, the payback, the Redemption. It works with people, with friends, with the love of our life. Nobody will ever give his back to us if we can make him dream.” He put his hand to the canteen hanging on his neck—practically a pendant on his broad chest—and chugged a good half of it. “The people you were have been buried under the mud of existence. Move a bit of that mud away, make her dream the dawn if you want to find your Kugar again. We both need her.”

  “You too?”

  “Yes. Me.” Baikal rested his elbows on the rough stone balustrade and looked at the infinite embroideries of the desert beneath him. “I never cheated myself on the nature of my enemies. Ever since my trip started, it’s always been clear that I should face the darkest side of Creation. The gods, their servants…and the creatures who sacrificed their happiness to be their servants.”

  Aeternus, Dagger instinctively thought. “The Disciples hold the ancient port of Asa and the Beshavis-Tankar. You want to free them, too. You want to free them all.”

  Baikal looked far, far east. “Come,” he said. “I want to take you to a place.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Don’t bother me with details.”

  * * * * *

  Baikal was walking ahead of him holding up the torch, their last ally against the darkness, its light glimmering off the black stone walls as they advanced. The Nomad Emperor didn’t like the ensiferum and the cold shadows it projected.

  Some people are fire, Dag thought, Pure fire.

  Judging by the path they had followed there, they had to be somewhere behind the giant Gorgor face that watched over the desert. Given the poor surveillance they had met, it surely was a separate place from the tower and the rooms where the power of the Emperor was exercised.