Dagger 4 - The Tankar Dawn: A Dark Fantasy Adventure

by Walt Popester

  At the end of the tunnel, the light reflected on the low ceiling flowed in a wide space. Baikal raised the torch, a small light in a great darkness. The last steps, and Dagger found himself looking up to a vault as high and vast as the roof of a barn, entirely frescoed just like the walls. His slow footsteps echoed as he passed Baikal, his jaw dropped, eyes staring in wonder. Everywhere around him shadowy, grotesque and statuary figures crowded, ran or slaughtered each other in the dance of mortality. Perfect bodies of men and women with amber skin narrated stories of such a vital power that Dagger felt the need to close his eyes.

  “No,” the Nomad Emperor said. “Never look away in the face of beauty, whoever dared to bring it to this world. It’s so rare, in this world.”

  Baikal was standing in a circle of green light projected to the ground. Dagger followed the cone of light with his eyes to one of the two round glass panels embedded in the bottom wall. They were the eyes of the Gorgor sculpted on the fortress facade, the concave side.

  “The inside of a mask hides dreams and betrayed nightmares. Remember that, every time you try to figure out someone’s behavior.”

  Dag almost didn’t hear the Nehama’s words, focused as he was on the feeble ray coming through a slit at the base of the wall. It was the Gorgor’s lips, barely opened; a whisper eternally suspended between a prudish silence and the terror of a revealed truth.

  Betrayed dreams and nightmares…Dagger raised his eyes again. The two rose windows filtered the cruel light of the sky, spreading a green veil on the ancient ceiling frescoed by the Gorgors.

  “Some magic is real, Dag. Even in this desert.”

  The perfect shape of every painted muscle corresponded to the precise subdivision of the spaces. Nine central frames narrated stories about which Dag didn’t dare to wonder. The plaster had partially come down, making dust of poetry, yet he saw the strong arms of a jackal god dividing lights from shadows, and an imposing winged creature—maybe Angra—indicating the stars.

  He recognized his father Skyrgal as he created and castigated his Gorgors. It was birth and death, life and death, joy and death.

  Death, he thought. The nine boxes were surrounded by twelve Gorgor prophets and seers. They held in their hands heavy volumes on which they hesitated to trace the truths suspended on the tip of their pens.

  One of them attracted Dagger more than the others. His long hair, resting on the rust colored clothes, burned red as fire even in the placid green luminosity. He kept a foot on the chopped head of a Gorgor with almond eyes and black, curly hair. On the marble step painted under his bare foot was written…

  “Brother will kill brother, spilling blood on the holy land,” Baikal recited, reading where Dagger had laid his gaze. “The only surviving citation of the prophet Mastain. Few words, but so true. And heavy.”

  “Who was he?”

  “One of the four prophets of the Gorgor origins and of the previous world, claimed by the sands of time.”

  Dagger wandered from one figure to another, trying to understand and interpret the meaning of every detail, every pose, every object those Gorgors halfway between myth and reality kept at their sides. “Why?” he asked.

  Bai understood the meaning of that simple question. “Why have I brought you here?” His footsteps echoed under the high roof. “To see if your reaction was like mine, when I set foot on this inlaid marble floor for the first time.”

  Bonded by blood, the prophet Balov reminded him. Baikal looked at him for a long moment. Behind that Gorgor a long line of shadows walked toward the foreground. Someone had a child on his shoulders, someone else clutched a bundle which contained what remained of his existence.

  “Exodus,” Baikal said in a barely audible growl. “Exodus means to sever your story, you know?”

  Another prophet drew Dagger’s attention. He was imposing and had a curly mane. One of his hands held his testament, while the other arm was suspended in a circular movement as he seemed to invite the beholder to do a sort of tribal dance.

  The prophecy at his feet made Dagger spontaneously sing, “Salvation is in the fields.” He had heard Ianka sing it when they crossed the desert together.

  But everything seemed to originate from a prophet greater than the others, placed as keystone on the bottom wall. He was dressed in black, the same color of his long, straight hair.

  Maybe it’s not too late to learn how to love, was engraved in cubital characters on the fake marble slab dividing the prophet from the wide fresco that filled the whole wall below.

  Here, Dagger’s eyes got lost more and more. Infinite figures orbited around a man who was familiar to him. Only his beard survived, cut short along the jaw. He held one arm raised and the other lowered in a circular motion. There was something before him and something after.

  At his back, the crab.

  “This wall has been painted later than the ceiling,” the Tankar said. “I think a careful eye understands that immediately.”

  At the base of the whole depiction was a place full of flames and demons, where everyone sat laughing and drinking, or danced bumping each other’s shoulders. The redeemer in the middle of the composition had sent them here, at the gates of Almagard, while the worthless ones were condemned to ascend toward the light.

  He was helped by a personification of death and a slayer, who seemed to be born of him. A completely bald man watched his back, riding a metal monster spitting smoke and fire, while a short, immense man watched the horizon, where there was no sign of the morning coming.

  At the foot of the redeemer, Stay clean—like a message no one should forget. And then, Who created a world like this, so full of blood, pain and wars? Who created us like this?

  “Khalifa,” Dagger whispered, recognizing him even if only his beard survived. Chisel blows had erased much of his body, leaving only fragments of his white robe. On the old, rippled plaster someone had successively traced in rough black lines a sketch of the deity to come, but it was hard to understand who it was from those few signs.

  “The prophets shared the truth with the world, but who likes the truth?” Baikal said, after having watched Dag in silence. “Who is willing to hear it to the end? Life is nothing but a lie we tell ourselves waiting for the great beyond. And any idiocy, sufficiently argued, always ends up truth.”

  Dag gave an annoyed sound. “I begin to understand where my pessimism comes from. You…” He didn’t continue. A woman, a seer, caught his attention. She had fair skin and intense green eyes. I’ll be darned if that’s not…“Erin?” he said. “She—”

  “She’s the daughter of Angra, and the prophet of the Tankar dawn. She’s the one who saw it before anyone else, writing it down in her centuries.”

  Beneath Erin’s bare feet, the prophecy said, One day a messiah will lead us to the promised land. The end of the road is in truth its beginning, like beyond every sunset lies the dawn of the day to come.

  Dagger stared at her portrait, as if he could see her lips moving, Reading and writing some good books is a good way to spend part of the eternity, her voice reminded him. The end of the road…

  “The story is always more complex than the way we are told,” Baikal said distractedly.

  “Let’s start from yours.” The boy lowered his eyes to him. “In a people who say exactly what they think as soon as they think it, your reserve is exasperating.”

  “I’m always courteous with you.”

  “Yes. But even aloof, remote, especially when we talk about your past. Nobody can ever tell what goes through your mind.”

  Bai offered half a smile. “I was born in the sterile heart of Adramelech, and I’ve lived here all my life,” he said in a distressed voice which showed how much he hated to speak of such things. “Maybe I am made of stone too, and my home is these ruins and roads. All my life I loved the sound of the wind blowing in the forgotten alleys, and now journeying is my destiny, the one for which I was chosen. I’ve got a long road behind me, but I never look back. In this place almost
as old as the stone with which it was built, I was chosen as the Guardian of the river. No one will come after me.”

  Guardian of the river? Dagger cocked his head sideways. “There was a man with me. A Gorgor.”

  “Where?”

  “Inside the crab.” He pointed at the Gorgor in the middle of the wide fresco. “His name was Khalifa. He had white hair and a completely black body. He claimed to be the Guardian of the river.”

  Baikal walked around, his steps echoing under the vault. “A Guardian of the river lives forever, as long as his master doesn’t forget about him,” he said. “All those who have been inside him left a part of themselves. The problem is that some of them don’t even know they’re dead.”

  Hanoi doesn’t speak with me anymore. So Khalifa had said in the belly of the crab, the first time Dagger had met him. The boy shivered. Maybe Khalifa was just a memory of the anti-god. Maybe he lives only in his mind.

  Baikal was still talking, “The story of Khalifa taught me that when your people falls, you have to fall with it. Because there’s nothing after, nothing beyond. You must share the fate of your people whatever it is. Death. Deportation. Captivity.”

  How many ghosts are chasing you, too? Dag thought. Are they still fighting in your head? “Go on with the story. It’s interesting.”

  “I was taught my first lesson in injustice when I was too little to understand it,” the Emperor continued. “But I kept the pain closed beyond the portal in my head. That pain often tried to break on through to my present, but I didn’t allow it. Not even when slavery came, and the night pots of my masters that I had to empty while fighting against vomit. Since then, I know the stink of power and of despotism every time it comes to my muzzle.”

  “It’s the stink of shit, I imagine.”

  Baikal raised an arm. Dagger stepped back and fell to the ground.

  The Tankar stared at him. He held his hand out and the boy was again on his feet.

  “I met my savior on the road toward the end. That’s where Hanoi chose to take me with him.” The fearsome beast looked up at the painted figures fighting for survival. “I won’t bore you with the rest of my story. I met myself only when I found my people again and shared its destiny, when I faced the expectation they had for me—the only survivor of the clan Nehama. There I really understood who I was. I just had to get the best out of that shit.”

  “You never say shit.”

  “Sometimes I make exceptions. Think about my alliance with the Hammer Guardians. Without them I could never overwhelm the Tormentors. Yet the stink coming out of their night pots was making its way toward my nose again, forcing me to remember that first lesson. It’s not right. No, it’s never right to be deprived of a future.”

  “You did wrong when you gutted him. Mind that I wouldn’t say this about all humans.”

  “I know it’s hard to see, but sometimes I have problems with the control of anger.” He became serious. “A boss is never useful. And then, now I have you.”

  “How kind of you. Do you want to use me in your war?”

  “You are the key.” Baikal lowered his gaze on him. “In the end, we’re fighting since always for the same purpose, aren’t we?”

  “Freedom, good feelings and all the rest?”

  “No.” Baikal shook his head. “Home. The only safe place. That’s still the key to reach Kugar.” He turned his back to Dagger and disappeared in the darkness that had led them there.

  * * * * *

  Even that night, Dagger went to see Kugar.

  Home, Dag. The one you’ll never have, not even in my arms. The words she had pronounced after having killed Ianka still burned in his memory, as he climbed.

  Home was us. You and me. Home means that no one is ever left alone, or behind. After running away from a hell of fire and mud to one of subterfuges and betrayals, he still believed that.

  The guards didn’t seem to notice his presence, and let him pass undisturbed.

  Kugar welcomed him with a colder silence than usual.

  Dag looked for her gaze more than once, but she kept her catatonic eyes fixed on the carpet and the desert landscape it depicted.

  Dag reached out for her belly, but Kug backed away just a little to deny that to him.

  He sat at her side. He watched his useless hands and thought about Baikal’s words. The only safe place. “The crab,” he began. “You would have liked the crab.” For a moment he felt ridiculous sitting there to talk alone—Kugar was totally listless. “There was a whole village built on his back, deserted of course. Can you believe that? Once there were tens, hundreds of Gorgors. Their things were scattered everywhere, even the kids’ toys, things that once were important to someone. But when I saw him, there was no one taking care of him. No one, of all those who once worshiped him.” He looked at her. “Except for Khalifa. Maybe you have studied his story somewhere. Hanoi still remembers him, and he wanders aimlessly in his memory. He was not a Gorgor as we know them—do you remember the ones we faced when we ran away from the world Beyond? He looked like us, us humans I mean.” He laughed, alone. “Okay, I know what you’re thinking. None of us is human, actually. And you’re right, Kugar.” He lowered his gaze on his hands again. “You’ve always been right.”

  Dagger went on for hours.

  “I don’t know what your brother’s mind is about, he’s really a strange fellow. I thought he would keep me locked up in that cursed amorphis cage, but it was only some sort of joke. Of course, a very sick joke. I shat in my pants in there and I thought it was really over.” Dag closed his eyes and sighed. He was tired. “And that’s when I thought about you,” he continued. “You travel, you see new things, you get to the bottom of your will to see new places like—what do I know—like Adramelech and Melekesh and all the temples in the desert. And one day you wake up on a shore in Asa bay and look at the stars, the moons reflected in the sea, and the only thing you can think of is, Ktisis, where’s my girl?” He turned to her.

  Kugar was looking at him, now, for the first time.

  “Where’s her embrace, and her skin, her eyes as blue as the sea?” Dag continued. “And then…and then the next day you wake up in a place like Asa and say, Shit, what am I doing here? and you’re in march again, because you miss too much the peace in her arms. The truce. The one which no one else can offer you. I’m yours.” He breathed, shocked by his own words. And he stared at her, sure that if he had but averted his eyes everything would be lost. “And you are mine. I don’t know if I have to be happy or curse you, I don’t know if…I was locked up in that cage, and for all I cared I could stay there forever. And I thought about you. I thought about you even when I was inside that crab, and I wasn’t even myself in there.”

  “Stop calling him crab,” she answered in a barely perceptible—but clearly bothered—way.

  He got up on his knees and grabbed her head to see himself in her eyes. Gently, she moved his hands away and wandered to the balcony to look out. It didn’t seem she wanted to add anything.

  * * * * *

  “And she said no more?” Baikal wiggled his wine.

  “No more.”

  The Nomad Emperor gave an amused sound, echoed by the skulls in the throne room. “I think that’s…little, but in the end, she’s right. Stop calling him crab.”

  “He looked pretty much a crab to me.”

  “You would show more respect if you saw what he can do to your soul.”

  “You mean through Solstice?”

  The Nehama lowered his eyes, as if to look at his own reflection on the ruby liquid, or to watch the bottom of the cup as if all the answers were there.

  “Bai…what’s between me and Kugar is a matter between me and her. The world doesn’t depend on this. You don’t depend on this. If we’re leaving, can’t we just leave those lands in their hands?”

  The Emperor didn’t take his eyes away from the wine as he answered, “Nehamas’ lands are the lands where even just one Nehama is buried, and I’m the Nomad Emperor o
f all the Tankars. I will not leave anyone of them alone with his destiny.”

  “Kahars are stronger than the Tormentors, though, and this time you don’t have the Hammer Guardians at your side. The guards are saying that all the time.”

  “Are you eavesdropping on them?”

  “They talk so loudly.”

  “And more than they should.” Baikal drowned his doubts in the wine. “Kahars don’t worry me. They have been decimated in the battle of the Fortress. They are tired and hungry.”

  “A bit like you.” Dagger approached the table where the map of Adramelech lay half rolled. “But from what I’ve seen here, they’re better deployed.”

  “They’re surrounding us, you say?”

  “The feeling was that, more or less. They are the red dots, right?”

  “Yes. Red like their blood.” The Asmeghin threw the empty cup to the smiles of the dead. “The bully is sticking a finger in my chest, trying to tell me he’s the best, but I don’t give a damn because now I’m armed really well. Rush is a bad counselor, yet patience drives you in the worst blind alleys. Wait, wait, and for what? For the slow wear of a situation that will never change on its own. No, it’s not for me. Better screw up the situation for good, but do it immediately, than macerate in the slow consequences of one’s own responsibilities. I can’t negotiate, not with him.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You can’t understand how rooted is this hatred. I’ll answer blow after blow to Vektor, son of Nehorur, Kahar Asmeghin. I won’t see him march again on the corpses of our children.” He stared at Dagger. “I will march. Even with only the company of the scimitars at my sides, I will march. The real problem, the real obstacle along the road, is at the east.”

  “The Disciples…”

  “Your enemy. The one you swore vengeance to.”

  The cup slipped from Dagger’s fingers. “And what do you know?” He looked at Baikal. “Of course. The cursed Hammer Guardians must be loquacious like your Nehamas.”