“Dag!” his sister cried, waking with a start and grabbing her hair. “Dagger!”
He looked at her getting farther and farther away, helpless, as if in a nightmare, while the other ones kept him busy with his knife, indifferent to hurt as only someone under the effect of magic could be. They let him go only once sure he would not make it; Dagger reached the door just in time to have it slammed in his face. He tried to ram it down, kicking it, but the Spiders lifted him up and pushed him away, still laughing. He slammed his back against the wall and slid to the ground, unarmed, taking his head in his hands as they continued to beat him ferociously, with kicks and punches in the open face. When they stopped, he heard the trapdoor being opened among the hallucinated laughter.
“No! No!” he whimpered helplessly, spitting out blood. Now he understood what Sannah had meant with his last words. He would not punish him, he never would have. Dagger heard the screams of Seeth throughout the night, as well as all the Spiders, as she was administered suffering. At every cry of pain he repeated to himself it was all his fault, of his illusion, because there was no hope, no redemption in that world, not for him. Gods didn’t listen to a street Spider’s prayer.
He was learning his lesson.
He was no one. He was nothing.
“I’ll take you out of here,” he whispered. “I’ll take you out of here even if it’s the last thing I do!”
Only when the sun had begun its slow descent into the putrid horizon of Melekesh, the screaming stopped. Pain had the better of him and he closed his eyes.
He heard the wind.
And the wind-borne sand.
* * * * *
Thirteen years earlier.
2. Desecrated Trinity
The cry of the wind was the only audible sound in the vast silence that hung over the ruins of Adramelech, the ancient and glorious Gorgors’ Metropolis, made a desert by the tireless work of time. The titanic stone faces that emerged from sand, the ruined domes and megalithic walls were all that remained of its ancient inhabitants’ dream; to build a city worthy of Skyrgal, their god and creator, where he could bring his reign in blood once he’d risen again. Now there was nothing left of the ancient splendor, but the ruins half buried under the desolate dunes, sent from the desert to claim back the space from which it had once been stolen. Under the ocher line that bisected the city, hid the ancient Master way. It was this path the woman was following, head bowed and her step uncertain. She wore a worn-out tunic and a cap on the hair as the last refuge from the fury of the elements. The ruins swirled the treacherous currents to push dust between her lips and the narrow slits of her eyes, blinding her. Still, she stubbornly dragged forward, propelled only by the fear of failure.
For a Guardian, failure is never contemplated, she recited in her mind, and then again, All steps you have taken in your life have led you here!
The first commandment of the Guardians. Her favorite one. Those words had a personal meaning for her since the first time she read them. They were engraved in the stone arch at the entrance to the Fortress of Golconda, that one place that, even if for a short period of her life, had been synonymous with home. The pain of a memory suddenly seized her: ‘It’s not really a commandment. It seems a sort of premise,’ she said to her Guardian instructor when, as a child, she stepped in the arena for the first day of her training. Long, long before then. She remembered how he smiled, putting a hand on her hair, as if to caress her. She remembered. She remembered the coldness in his eyes as he began to beat her viciously in front of her companions, to teach her in the most effective way the meaning of blind obedience, the unquestioned loyalty to the six commandments of Angra. For a moment, she wondered if it was not just the complete confidence in the truths revealed from above to have led the world to ruin. It was only a fleeting doubt, soon swept away by the storm along with what remained of her strength. Now, that first, unusual commandment only sounded a bit sarcastic to her. Truly, many steps had taken her right there, on her knees in the dark and cold.
A long howl made her skin crawl. For a moment, at the top of an obelisk, she saw the shadow of a Tankar, a marauder of the desert, opening wide his jaws to the sky and stretching his claws to the currents of the East. He was alerting his companions she had entered their territory. From then on every moment was the right one to shake the cold hand of death. She grinned. No. They would not attack her, they were afraid. Not of her, of course, but of the shadow that was chasing her. She hugged the burden she was carrying to her breast, as if she was hiding the most important thing in the world. Then she pulled herself to her feet to walk on.
I’m almost there. Almost!
Entranced by her tormented thoughts, she nearly didn’t notice she had reached the ‘light at the end of the world’ and, with it, the only refuge that night would offer. It was a filthy tavern for stonecutters, created under the imposing arches of a bridge collapsed, nobody knew how long before, in the dry bed of the river that once it crossed. The first, or last, outpost of civilization, there at the invisible boundary with the Pacific desert and the horrors that lurked in its yellow womb.
After days of walking through the ruins, she set her foot on the one wooden step that was still emerged from the sand. She knew she was suspended between the two lives she had lived. Or maybe, between life and something that had never been life. The fragments of voices coming from inside the tavern crept in the wind, together with the clinking of mugs. They sounded like the enchanted sounds from a world far away, forever lost. She opened the door and let the fury of the storm in. Some of the stonecutters who sat in the heat turned to her, their faces barely lit by the dancing flames in the fireplace.
“That door won’t close on its own!” cried the innkeeper, somewhere in the faint, reddish light.
The woman closed the door behind her and pulled down her hood, revealing a pleasant face marred by a deep scar on the right cheek. Despite this, many of the stonecutters looked with a cloudy interest at the small breasts’ protuberances under the worn and dirty clothes, the white skin and the hair that shone like copper in the dim light. Some of them, not necessarily the most drunk ones, would have tried to win her favors in a more or less legitimate way, was it not for the giant broadsword secured on her back, the belt of daggers on her belly and the long knife tied to the calf.
The woman stumbled undisturbed to the table at the bottom, the most discreet one, and collapsed on a stool. At no time did she broke the protective embrace on the bundle she carried with her. She arranged it in such a way that no one could peek inside it, though very few were wondering what she was carrying in there now that her firm buttocks, perfectly laid on the stool, awoke in them feelings that some thought even lost.
Soon I’ll kill you. Soon I’ll kill you and it’s going to be all over.
“This fucking storm has stopped everything. The quarry, the shipping, everything!” She heard someone murmur behind her, while someone else, on her right, said,“Yes, truly a nice ass.”
“Three months, Ktisisdamn! Three months that none of us works! I talked to the boss, told him, ‘What the fuck, do you want to starve us to death?’”
“Yeah, you were right…”
“The fool just answered, “And what am I supposed to do, pray to the gods? Go to the light at the end of the world, and you’ll eat for free!’ I thought he meant death, with that expression.”
“Yeah, death…”
“Then I come to know that, as long as the storm lasts, the desert mayor threatened to raze to the ground the taverns that do not empty their warehouses, and I realized what he meant. Yep, I love that man and the way he talks to people, I mean it. I will vote for him again but, holy shit! Now there’s only beer left!”
“Yeah, beer…”
“Barrels and barrels of beer and not a fuckin’ bone to chew on! My little one, he’s begun to hunt mices, you know? He runs after them with a stick, smashes their skull with a blow and would eat’em raw, for the hunger, if someone does not stop him. If th
e wind keeps on blowing like this I’ll have to kill the dog, though I doubt there’s still meat attached to that four-legged skeleton. My children won’t like that. We picked it up from the street just six months ago, but at least they’ll have something to eat. At least I won’t have to kill the weakest of them to feed the brothers, just like last year. They didn’t know where that meat came from, they were too hungry to ask. But I did. I cannot debone another one of my children, Iahn! Do you know the noise it makes a bone so small when it’s broken? I hear it every night. Every damn night!”
“Yeah, every night…”
She closed her eyes, drew a deep breath, and prayed. My Angra, how can you allow all this suffering? she thought, but said nothing. All the world that was dying around her was none of her business.
The innkeeper came and planted his fists on the table. She lifted her face to look at him, finding no welcoming smile. Those people were not accustomed to good manners, it seemed. And they stank. They stank of the stale sweat brought as a gift by the lack of water and the long hours of work under the worst weather conditions possible, spent at dismantling the old Adramelech’ walls to extract stone for the civilized world.
She felt an instinctive sympathy for them.
“I’d recognize a Guardian of that Ktisisdamn Fortress even from miles away,” the old innkeeper began. He ran a hand over his dirty apron in a nervous gesture. “Probably for that trunk of a sword that you always carry around. A sword of Manegarm, ain’t it? When I was a little kid my grandfather always told me about your swords. He said you could catch the soul of a god with those, yes, those fuckin’ swords. Even then I wondered what depraved and corrupt people would play with a god’s soul. Wherever they go, guardians bring death with them, and also inside.” He looked at her, grimly, before adding, “What do you want, in this place of peace?”
“Beer. A lot of beer. And milk.”
The old man looked at her in disgust and opened his mouth to reply, when the chubby hand of a newborn baby popped out from the bundle on the woman’s chest. Now it was clear for whom was the beer and for whom the milk.
“Uhm,” he muttered. “A Guardian and a baby. Terrible match. For the wrath of Skyrgal, a child so small shouldn’t—”
“Milk,” she ordered, looking at him as if suggesting that whatever she was doing there, was none of his business. He passed his hand on the apron once again.
“We have no milk here,” he said. “I mean, look around you, woman. People is fuckin’ starving here! Where do you think I—”
“I know. I’ve kept my ears open. In addition to the chatter I heard other voices, barely perceptible, talking about how your son is not even losing weight while in this poor people’s slum death follows death, hopping from one baby cot to the other. Voices that came from that table over there DON’T turn around, dammit, do not turn around. The man without a hand and the woman older than him, surely you know them. They were talking about making you pay for it, if they discovered something about it. The way they thought to make you pay… well, I’ll spare you the details. However, nothing compared to what a mother discreetly armed can do, with a child who has not eaten in a long time in his arms. Now that’s a terrible match.”
The innkeeper was shocked and she smiled. He loved to read in the eyes of the people.
“We’ve got only Mokai.”
“And what is that?”
“Skar – raw milk, fermented in a barrel with honey, bacon and dried fruit. It’s the specialty here. We also give it to small children to help them survive the cold, of course… not so small.”
“Well, that won’t kill him,” she replied. “And I always like to taste the specialties of the place, even when it comes to a bunch of yokels – plague victims like you.”
She smiled and waited for the innkeeper to go away, together with his stupid skeptical look, before taking off a strip of cloth that wrapped the baby to look at him. She could not remember how long it had been since the last time she had done it. The hardness on her face, the deep furrows of tiredness, even the scar on her cheek melted into a sweet motherly smile.
“Soon I’ll kill you, sweet child o’ mine,” she whispered. “Yes, soon I’ll kill you and it’s going to be all over. At least for you.”
In that moment, she heard him coming. Maybe not just her. Even some of the stonecutters raised their eyes to look around, confused, as if they were aware of something wrong beyond the sweet wall that intoxication had erected around their senses. The temperature lowered, as well as light. Her heart began to beat stronger and faster and she found herself planting her nails in the table to remain calm.
She could feel his stench.
The tavern door swung open and everyone turned. In the rectangle of darkness, opened on the storm, a shadow appeared, vaguely human, that even sand and wind seemed to circumvent in fearfulness.
It’s him! she thought, while an electric thrill ran through her legs. He didn’t send Gorgors after me. He wants to do the dirty work himself!
The host slammed a mug of beer on the counter and shouted,“That damn door!”
The shadow took no notice of his words. He moved a step, emerging from darkness. Rich black silk fabrics wrapped his whole body, including his face, exposing only the right eye in which shone a yellow and malignant light, not reflecting that of the hearth. An ancient scimitar, with a finely crafted handle, was by his side. The shadow had nothing else with him,no bag for food, no water supply, no equipment to deal with the eternal winter of that land. He marched under the astonished gaze of everyone to reach the table where the woman sat, and looked down on her. The innkeeper went to close his damn door by himself, before approaching the two with a no longer hostile, but seriously worried, expression.
“What can I—?”
The shadow silenced him just by raising his hand. Two red and fat larvae emerged between the bandages folds, falling on the floor, satiated of death. The hand was black and skeletal, with a few flesh shreds still attached to the yellowish phalanges. It did not belong to a living being, nor a being that had died recently, after all. The host swallowed a lump of saliva and walked away, silent.
The Shadow sat down and the buzzing around them faded into a overwhelming whispering. “Aniah, light of my life,” he began. “Where were you going, precisely? I think you’ve got something that belongs to me.”
The bandages folds did not moved at all as he spoke, as if that evil hiss was coming straight from the depths of his decomposing body. The sound was produced by the mechanical movement of the larynx of a dead man and what remained of his diaphragm. Then, there was the echo that overlapped it, coming straight from the realm of the dead. Sometimes Aniah had the terrible feeling that the echo arose within her, merging with her own thoughts and causing a nauseating feeling.
She observed that one eye, digging deep into the fatal glance, and grinned. “I’m afraid the beauty treatments you administer yourself are not giving great results, Skyrgal,” she said. “You should try the sulfur baths of your loyal Gorgors. They have softened the edges of my wound, you know?” She put a hand to the scar on her face. “The one you opened on my face as you laughed at my stupidity.”
The Shadow cocked his head to the left and right, making his neck vertebrae crack. Then he looked at her once again. “Sulfur,” he hissed. “Very funny! Irony, especially if drawn out at less probable times, is something that has always fascinated me in you. You mortals, I mean. Also Crowley used to make completely out of place jokes and the more they were of a bad taste, the more he found a dark pleasure in it. I have found him irresistible since the beginning.”
Aniah smiled. “Oh yes, Crowley had a great sense of sarcasm. Maybe that’s what made me fall in love with him. I don’t dare think about how many jokes would come to his mind seeing the state you are reducing his body. You’re making him fall apart. It’s very rude of you. You used him only to convince me to follow you and impregnant me with your…”
She could not finish the sentence. Her sm
ile disappeared, irony disappeared, and she had to fight against her eyes not to cry. After all that time, she could not still understand, or nominate what she had given birth to. She shuddered when she realized to have named him always and just ‘Sweet child of mine’.
“What can you do about it?” Skyrgal added, amused by her sudden dismay. “A mortal body is not made to accommodate a god’s soul for too long and you simply can’t imagine how boring that can be. Do you think it was nice scratching my nose and then finding it between my fingers? Oh, my dear. Inside me, I feel infinite cavities filled with putrid liquid and gas just waiting to get out by unnatural ways. It’s not a good existence. Put yourself in my shoes. Well, they’re encrusted with all sorts of dry fluids. So, let’s say, see it from my side,I find it of the utmost importance that you come back home, together with what belongs to me.” He raised his index to indicate the child. “That is my blood and I need it. I need it badly.”
Dagger - The Light at the End of the World Page 3