Daygo's Fury

by John F. O' Sullivan

  City watch gaolhouses and outposts were seldom far from the wall. They were more designed to help police entrance into the outer city than to police the slums.

  Shadows floated across the street with the gentle movement of white wispy clouds overhead. It was a cool, fresh day, one of the last before the dead summer heat became consistent in Santos. A flock of Woangulls flew overhead, calling to one another in their lightly-sounding language, together like a chorus of musical chimes, unsynchronised yet complementary. Liam’s head rose momentarily as he trailed them through the sky, his eyes squinted and sore from the unaccustomed light. His limbs still ached and his breathing was shallow, though he immediately felt an improvement at his release from the confines of the cell.

  Ensio took the lead, striding down the street. He took the first left which led down to the riverfront. As it came into view, Liam looked across at the great arch of stone under which the river flowed through a large metal grating. He wondered idly how so much stone could be supported without ever touching the ground.

  He was forced to stop suddenly as Ensio reached his destination. He greeted a man of similar age who looked over Ensio’s shoulder at Liam curiously. He was introduced simply as Vara. He held two large brown horses by the reins; different to those Liam was used to seeing pulling wagons on the Great Road. Taller and leaner, they appeared more agile and energetic, tugging at the reins and occasionally clopping a hoof off the dirt floor. Liam assumed that they produced far more speed than the strong, docile animals that came with a wagon attached. Behind them, tied by the reins to the back of these saddles, were two packhorses, slightly more in line with the animals Liam was used to.

  Ensio turned to attend to his horse while Vara looked Liam up and down appraisingly, wrinkling his nose slightly.

  “We need to get you a bath and some new clothes first thing. I’m not having that smell follow me around.”

  “We can use the bath in the smith’s,” replied Ensio into his horse’s saddle, while pushing his gloves into a pocket on its side. “Where would you …”

  “I’ll sort it.” Vara cut across him. Ensio chuckled softly. Liam glanced from Vara to the big man, finding his change of demeanour off-putting. The smith’s …

  “Good, let’s mount up. I want to get out of here before sundown.”

  His eyes dropped to the dirt as Vara led him to his mount. There was a mound of horse dung under its tail. Liam wondered which smelled worse, him or it. Vara switched two saddlebags slung across the animal’s saddle to his fellow and bid Liam climb on. Liam had never been on a horse before, but he swung up easily, feeling unsteady on the saddle. The animal did no more than turn its head to inspect its new cargo.

  “Hold the reins and the saddle horn here,” Vara instructed. Liam nodded, ignoring the long glance that he received from Vara before he walked away.

  Vara took the horse before him, Ensio the one beside that. The two men ahead dug in their heels and the pack animals followed their leaders. Liam held tightly to the saddle horn as he had been instructed.

  They rounded the corner back onto the street. Travelling in the other direction was a troop of five men, clearly from the gang. They looked threateningly at Liam’s party but all noticed the blacks of Ensio and kept walking past. Liam turned in his saddle to look back, but Ensio led them around another corner before he could see if their destination was the gaol.

  They wound their way onto the Great Road to Darwin and Liam felt a strange sensation, though removed, to be actually travelling on it. So often he had looked up and down it, from the wall to the distant forest, wondering at the wider world and wishing to see that forest and the countryside. He had a picture in his head of great expanses of dirt with occasional weeds and green shoots of grass spurting up from it in places, and the trees; they seemed so far away and so full. He had in his mind a great ceiling of branches above the ground, intertwined to leave no gap, full of green leaves, hanging fruit and flowers, taller than two men. He imagined walking below it and looking up. He had often promised himself that when he grew older he would go to see it for himself at some point. He had thought of going to see it anyway, apparently only a few hours’ walk away, but … he just never had.

  As the horses walked further along the road, he began to feel uneasy about the thought of leaving the slums and Teruel. He frowned, uncomfortable with the feeling.

  He glanced left and realised where they were. A hundred yards ahead was the gang’s storehouses for this side of the road. The place where he had brought Racquel, where he had first kissed her. He stared at it blankly and his heartbeat began to rise. Panic started to well up inside of him.

  Then he saw the small convergence of gang members. There were seven or eight of them. Liam recognised Lollan and then, as he turned around, a familiar sandy-haired face. He stared at him as they approached, amazed to see him again. The man’s eyes widened as he saw him. Liam’s heart beat frantically but he did not move. He would have expected a different reaction within himself, but all he felt was a terrible sickness to the pit of his stomach. To the backdrop of the man who had killed her, the coward who had run twice, was the space where he had first kissed Racquel, where his heartbeat had quickened for a different reason; an excited, good reason.

  He was tired. The slums were everywhere, like a disease-ridden carcass. It was not just this man; it was all of them, all men. All he had for the man was a tired, disgusted hate. A dead hate, a flat hate, a hate that knew no matter how many times he could take his vengeance, there were countless more like this man, it was a never ending stream. It was not one man but many. It was not many but a society, a whole species that he hated. And there, in that moment, he realised the hate was no longer personal, the desire for change, for vengeance no longer singular to one or a few individuals. He hated this place. He hated its kind. His kind, he knew. He hated it to the pit of his stomach. He did not know if there was something better elsewhere, he did not know what lay outside of this, but he did know that he never wanted to come back, for as long as he lived he never wanted to be reminded of what lay here. He could no longer deal with it, he could no longer live there, he could no longer compete.

  He knew that he had been right when he was with Racquel, in what he had thought, that he could not live there without her, that she was the only reason to continue, that without her he was dead. It was true. Perhaps there was something for him outside the slums, though he held little hope for it. It did not matter. There was a blankness there, not an acceptance, simply a deflated defeat that ran so deep there was no resistance left, no hope. It might end now, it would end eventually, and he was done playing.

  He felt disgust to his core, at the world, at the king, at the gang, at Deaglan and Carrick, at that one man there in front of him, amazement written on his face as he recognised Liam, but he did not move, he did not act, he watched it all go by.

  The man turned as Liam and his crew passed by, talking frantically to the group behind him and pointing at Liam. He saw heads turn and look towards him. He saw Lollan’s piercing gaze and then a shake of his head. And then he saw the sandy-haired man jump out onto the road and start shouting and screaming in Liam’s direction. Liam turned around, making no effort to hear him. Though the words were vaguely audible, they never reached Liam’s thoughts but instead were filed away in the deep recesses of his mind.

  Towards the outskirts of the slums, Ensio led them to the back of an inn. They tethered their horses but left them saddled and entered the tavern. The innkeeper knew Ensio, and Liam was led to the bath room where he was given a towel and instructed to wash. When he was finished, Vara had found a new tunic and underclothes for him to change into. No sooner was Liam dressed again than they left the inn, Ensio flipping a silver coin to the innkeeper on the way out.

  The slums remained much the same until their outer edges, where some streets were only half built upon and then finally there were none at all. Immediately, the slums turned to farms, wide expanses of land, separated by fen
cing or sometimes ditches. Liam could make little sense of it. The grass fields looked stunning to him, thick and green; he felt an urge to leap from his horse and run along them.

  Cretn wandered the fields; large, lumbering beasts with three horns, sawn off by the farmer at a young age, and a large snout like that of a pig. Liam looked at them with interest. They had wide, round eyes at either side of its pig-like head, nearly completely filled by large, black pupils, giving them a stupid, dead look. Occasionally it was possible to see them flick from side to side. Liam wondered at the small amount of movement afforded them, if this meant that their vision was more limited or in fact greater than his own. Two of the horns grew from underneath these eyes, to either side of the snout, and the third grew upwards from a tilted-back forehead. They were covered in long, dark brown hair of varying shades.

  Intermingled among the grass fields were large expanses of crops that Liam did not recognise. There was an occasional small patch of a vividly red flower that Liam’s eye was drawn to.

  They spoke little on the ride from the city. Vara seemed a quiet, sturdy man. Ensio, who had come across as so domineering and dangerous within the gaolhouse, seemed to loosen up on the open road, engaging both Vara and Liam in conversation as much as possible and steering towards light topics and silly jokes. His angular face often split wide into a smile, and he had a habit of looking at Liam from the corners of his eyes, as though seeing some hidden joke behind his words. In this roundabout, friendly manner he cajoled more from Liam than he had intended to give.

  However, Liam never lost the feeling that he could turn deadly at the drop of a coin, if the situation warranted it.

  Finally, Liam decided to ask Ensio how he had ended up in the gaolhouse, though he could nearly guess. Ensio looked at him from the corner of his eye, considering, before he answered, glancing across at Vara as he did so. He told Liam that he had been taken there after the city watch had been alerted. A troop of their men had happened on the scene and found Liam as the sole survivor, lying unconscious amidst the blood and torn limbs. Not knowing what else to do, they had taken him to the gaol and incarcerated him. As the city watch did not generally get themselves involved in the slums unless there is a particularly bad blood bath, as there was, they felt the situation sufficiently resolved. They would hold Liam until the gang came to pay the proper bribe for his release. Only the swordbearer had arrived first. He had been forced to pay almost three times that which he believed the gang would have had to pay. None of it really surprised Liam, though he now wished he had not asked. It confronted him with what he had done, with what had happened.

  Ensio looked at him sharply as he finished, but Liam simply turned his head away silently, staring back out over the fields.

  He had told Ensio that he tortured them because they killed Racquel. But in truth he did not know why. He could barely remember doing so and the memories he had seemed more like dreams than real memories, there was a surreal gloss to them. Liam still did not know if they were actually his memories or if they were nightmares he had dreamed up in the cell. Until the swordsman had told him of the torture, he was not sure if he had done it.

  He remembered the flames. He remembered kneeling before them. He remembered … what that meant to him, at that time; the terrible, terrified certainty that he had come to. He remembered the man’s words, as he had walked towards him. Your bitch is as dead as you. The snide, cruel expression. The sadistic glee that lit up in his eyes. Then a cloud, a sense, a completeness. An openness, becoming one with all that he was, a pureness of expression, undiluted, unadulterated and unlike anything he had known.

  That was all that he was left with. A sense of it, an imprint of emotion, like a red mark left on his vision without remembering the light that had caused it. A general feel of what had happened and vague, gruesome flashes; images that somehow did not seem real. And a sense of foreboding. What had happened? What had he done? What had he become?

  It was a chilling thought, one that he kept from his mind, but it lurked, like a repeated, inaudible whisper of something he should not know, something that he tried not to hear, tried to ignore; afraid that if he listened too closely, he might decipher its meaning.

  They were only two hours outside the city when they called a halt. They would spend the night out in the open, on top of the hill facing Teruel, with the Belvoir forest to either side. Once the horses had been unsaddled and tethered and the bedrolls spread, Ensio commanded Liam to kneel.

  “Now I want your oath,” he said as Liam did so. “You are a believer of the Sevi Natan, am I correct?” Liam nodded. “Then repeat after me. I swear by Levitas and by Daygo, all that is and all that ever can be, by the flow of life, movement and time, on my hope of rebirth, of contentment within the Daygo stream, on fear of fire and damnation. I swear on myself and all I hold dear, that I will not break this sacred bond. That I will pledge myself to the service of the swordbearers and the Keisland nation until so released, and that I will live in service to, and under the rule of, Ensio Fahme, until such service commences or, in the lack of, for two years henceforth.” Once Liam had finished repeating the words sentence by sentence, Ensio unsheathed his sword and put the flat tip underneath his chin. “Now you have spoken the words, do you know their meaning?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you now, once more, under no duress, swear to abide by them?”

  “Yes.”

  “You swear?”

  “I swear.”

  Ensio turned the sword underneath Liam’s chin so that the sharp end of the blade touched the skin. Liam could almost feel his skin splitting to the razor edge. “Then hear this, Liam. You remember what I said to you earlier today.” It wasn’t a question. “Every word was the truth. I did not need to come to you. I did not need to pay for your release or to take you from that despot behind you. I have given you life where there was none. You are in my debt. I will not ask of you anything that is not within your own benefit to do or which is not an honourable request. I am giving you a chance for a real life, not what you had in there.” His eyes flicked towards the city behind him once more. His eyes turned back to Liam with steel in them, the hard lines of his face spoke of hard and simple truth. “You betray this gift, you betray your oath. You fail to live up to your part of the bargain and I will kill you, before the day is done.” He paused.

  “Look at me,” he said, “and know that I speak the truth.” Liam looked at him and knew it for true. Every muscle in the man’s body spoke of stern, unbending resolve. The sword turned and spun upwards from Liam’s neck with a flick of his wrist that seemed impossibly swift, and Liam had a sudden image of it coming down with equal, easy speed to slice his head from his shoulders. He glanced at the blade, wishing for a moment for it to fall, but Ensio turned the sword and sheathed it with smooth efficiency.

  “Now rise,” he said, with a smile that Liam found off-putting. He grasped Liam’s shoulder as he stood up. “And be ready to live again.”

  Liam waited for him to relinquish his grip and, once he did, he turned and walked to his bedroll, uncaring of the life he had pledged himself to or any life at all.

  ******

  His eyes shot open suddenly … be riding that bitch of yours … I’ll be riding that bitch of yours tonight … He did not move an inch; he was frozen in terror as though he had seen a beast venture into their campsite. His body was covered in a cold sweat. I’ll be riding that bitch of yours … The words echoed around and around in his head. Was this a dream or was it real? Is that what he had shouted at him, or had he just now dreamt it up? Was this his mind, playing a terrible trick on him? All of a sudden he was back there again, in front of those flames.

  His heartbeat quickened. He could feel panic and anxiety bubble up within him. He had seen the flames, their home burning high into the sky. He had left Racquel within, that was the last place he had seen her. She had a badly hurt leg. She would not have been very mobile. Could she have gotten out? Would they have just set i
t alight without looking? Would they have set it alight with her inside? She was beautiful. She was worth more than that. Did they take her?

  Why had he been so certain that she was dead, why did he think her inside, burnt alive? Did he even have time to think? It was just a gut reaction, a first instinct. He had known! He had known! And the man had said it, the words, your bitch is as dead as you! That was confirmation surely, was it not? She was dead and he would be next.

  But it did not fit, it did not make sense, it was not the gang’s way. They used everything, they exploited everything. But he said she was dead! And the flames, the house! It was gone, it was dust!

  I’ll be riding that bitch of yours …

  “Noooo,” he screamed out into the open night. “Noooooo!”

  “Liam?”

  He lifted his hands up to the side of his head and pulled at his hair and ears. It was a dream. It was a bad dream. He had not heard what he said. If he had heard, he would have heard! But the words seemed sure, they were there, right there, like a certain memory.

  He turned his head to look back to the city, the slums; dimly flickering lights. He could not go back. He could not. She was dead. How could he wish for her to be dead? But she was, surely! What if she’s alive? She’s there, thrown in to some Lev-forsaken whorehouse, doing Lev knows what … But he cannot go back! He can’t face it. Those words were false. But they felt true.

  What could he do anyway? He could never rescue her. Ensio said he would kill him. She was probably dead anyway. How could he wish that? Would she leave him—ever? He couldn’t … He couldn’t …