“Where’s your other hand, sweetheart?”
“It must have fallen somewhere. Where, I do not know. With the shortage of protein in the local diet some beast must have already collected and digested it, as time does with your stupid human lives, more or less.”
“What a subtle metaphor.”
“Thank you.”
“That hand with which you used to caress me,” Aniah remembered, as her eyes got lost. “Vowing that you would protect me forever.”
The god remained silent. The bandages on his left shoulder moved, letting out a puff of fetid gas. “You think you can still talk to him, don’t you?” he deduced. “Hidden inside this rotting body, you think you can reach Crowley Nightfall, Pendracon of Golconda, vicar of Angra and all that blah blah. You think you can tell him, ‘Fight against him, love of my life! Come out! I’m waiting for you with legs wide open!’ Oh. That’s stupid, woman, very stupid, and technically wrong,the man you loved is now only the skin I wear. You should have realized it after what I did to you. He would have never done anything like that, to you. He used to love you, he used to love you deeply.”
“Oh. Really?”
“Yes I know. Because I also have his memories. Your stupid memories.”
She froze. “Don’t do it. You took him away from me. Leave them to me, at least those.”
“You know which one is my favorite? The wild scent of the Glade of Golconda. If I’m not mistaken, your first time together.” Now Aniah felt that treacherous hiss born inside her. The bastard was doing it on purpose. “What a romance, my little one. The invincible warrior who had killed and fought and won his wars was so embarrassed to get inside a woman’s body for the first time. He was no more than a little kid, all red with shame. A fledgling with its willy. But you were there, expert filly, telling him what to do, ‘Put your hands here, push, bite me here…’ Ah! Worth dying in laughter! Well, since you were weaned so young it’s no surprise you were a little more experienced, honey. You gave him self-confidence. You didn’t make him feel stupid when every other woman would have humiliated him. I appreciate it, you know? You were even able to make him climax, even though he didn’t reciprocate the favor. This man will never know how much we enjoyed ourselves, instead. Oh yeah! I felt you. Surely the force that has lived through all eternity has some more experience, sugar, you have to concede me that at least!”
Aniah locked her fingers into two fists, as Skyrgal shook his decomposing body in an obscene and slow imitation of sex.
“Yes, ride your favorite god once again! To the stars and then down into the throat of hell!” He stopped only when he heard her laughing instead of crying. “Oh, you think it’s funny?” Now the voice was coming straight from the sidereal depths of that mass of bandages. Skyrgal was genuinely surprised.
“I find another thing funny,” she said.
“What?”
She raised her head to look at him, grinning through her tears. “Even now that you just got reincarnated, you lost your left hand,” she said. “Just like the one Angra tore away from you with his teeth, according to the ancient scriptures! Remember how you felt weak as he cut you into pieces? Remember how it was humiliating to scream in pain at his feet, while you were exiled from your true body?”
She laughed in his face, showing the courage she did not have.
“Yes,” Skyrgal replied after a long pause. “You’ll find a lot to laugh about when I’ll take care of your torture again, bitch!”
“Oh. Wasn’t it you who hated coarse language?”
The voice answered inside her,“But this time, I’ll first chop off your hands and feet. So I’ll be sure you won’t escape again. You’ll become a nice human larva, Aniah, naked in a cold and damp cell. It will be nice to see you try to eat, and crawl, and drink from the floor water mixed with the waste of my faithful ones. Of course, I will let them vent all their most vile instincts on you. And I’ll be there watching while you get humiliated to your core. Totally to the core. Only then, will I begin to administer your pain myself. I like to delve into the turbid side of humans, more or less metaphorically. There’s no greater suffering than that which I reserve to those who try to escape from my grasp, nor longer than the one I reserve for those who succeed.”
“Apart from this smell of rotten eggs? Did you far—?”
Skyrgal slammed his hand on the table and Aniah winced. For a moment, time seemed to stand still. Everyone turned to look at them, yet the god kept silent. That terrible silence in which she had seen him make the worst things. Even inside her.
“I hate to be observed in these conditions,” he hissed. “If these beggars don’t stop looking, soon they’ll no longer have eyes to do it.”
Every bit of irony disappeared from her mind. No, it was no longer funny, if ever it was. Perhaps only then Aniah remembered who, or what, she was actually facing. Kam Karkenos the ancients called him. The force that has lived through all eternity.
“They are good people,” she said. “This doesn’t concern them.”
“I love vulgar displays of power. You should read all those books that talk about me.”
When she saw him bring the hand to his scimitar, Aniah knew he was serious. A force, after all, was always serious, so she stood up and shouted, “Well? What the fuck you look at my brother for?” She looked around, trying to sound convincing. “You never seen man devour’d by leprosy?”
A stonecutter without his nose, drunk, tried to stand up with a knife clutched in his hand. “T’ man bothers you, ma’am?” he stammered.
She pointed to the sword on her shoulders, as if to say that certainly she didn’t need his help. The background buzz arose again within the four tavern walls, but Aniah drew a sigh of relief only when she saw Skyrgal rest his hand on the table again.”
“You’re too good,” he pointed out, watching her as she sat back. “You’ve always been. You keep on exposing yourself to save the lives of others, even though I don’t remember anyone has ever done much to help you. Not when you were a child and your father played with you in a… somewhat unusual way, or when you were grown up. Men have always walked all over you, Aniah, but you never learn,” he sighed, drumming his skeleton fingers on the table. “Well, all of you mortals will die, one day. It’s part of your nature. Then what’s this desire to survive and save others from their fate?”
“A Guardian lives forever as long as the Guardians live,” the woman recited, looking him straight in the one eye. “Sixth and last commandment.”
“Oh. You don’t know how many times I heard such a stupid thing in the course of eternity. And where are they all now? Where are the people and their essential wars fought in the name of non-existent gods? Scattered like dust in the infinite abyss of the universe, a dust composed of beings that in different times and places thought to be the center of Creation.”
“This one is nice, where did you read it?”
“But it could be different for you,” the force continued, as if he had not even heard her. “Yes, it could be different, as for all those who have served me well. If only you stayed with me, you’d discover how beautiful it is to live after death. I could make you an eternal being.”
Aniah nodded. “I know that kind of living. The existence of your most faithful servants. I saw you rot, hour after hour, and drag in your slow decline that one person, for me, synonymous with life. From then on, yours was just a slow swim in death’s murky black waters. Angra really killed you that distant day, leaving you alive.”
The god did not answer this time, and he did not laugh. Only hearing that name awoke in his mind sorrows as old as time, rekindling a grudge never faded.
“Your body. Angra kicked you out of your body—”
“Stop it.”
“…when even a rat rotting in a sewer has its own!”
“Stop that!”
Aniah didn’t go on, relieved to have found his weak point.
Skyrgal bowed his head. “You’re right,” he allowed in a whisper. Then
he looked up at the baby the woman was holding in her arms and became serious, impassive. A wild light of desire shone in his eye. “But sometimes, in view of the ultimate objective, the moral quality of every single action that leads us to that totally loses importance. We, eternal beings, are not afraid to compromise, not even with death, and those of you who want to become almost as powerful as we have to learn this art among the less noble ones. If Gorgors had not stumbled upon the sacrilegious knowledge preserved for thousands of years by the desert sands, I could have never reach the world for my second coming. Now that I have, I won’t just rot in a corpse, or wander from man to man for eternity. I want my true body, kept on top of your Ktisisdamn sacred mountain. It belongs to me!” He clenched his hand into a fist, then seemed to relax, spreading it peacefully on the table. “Yes. I just had to make my blood flow back into this mortal world, no matter by what means. I was able to do so only thanks to you. Thank you, woman, for giving me a son!” Beneath the bandages, he seemed to smile. “His divine blood will give new life to the colossal stone limbs of my body, allowing the end to this torment, the end of my exile. The power, fruit of thy womb, is ancient, Aniah. Where do you think you can hide a being like that?”
“I won’t hide him. He must not live! I’ll take him to the Fortress so that my blood brothers can kill him.”
“Kill him?”
“Araya will!”
“NO!” Skyrgal bowed his head. “No,” he repeated.
He brought a hand to his chest, making way through the bandages that covered it. He exposed the black and necrotic sternum where, as if composed of inextinguishable flames, burned that red blood symbol that she knew all too well.
∞
The Spiral. That same symbol that his son had on his chest, black and turned off, sign of a nature blasphemous and divine at the same time.
She looked away.
“My son is immortal, just like me,” Skyrgal hissed. “He can be buried, his body dismembered and scattered to the four corners of the world. He can be burned, drowned and tortured to madness. He can be eroded by a thousand acids and killed by a thousand poisons. He will come back. He is immortal. I created him so, in my image and likeness, so he may one day serve the purpose.” He looked at her. “When my faithful servants raze your damn Fortress to the ground and set foot on the sacred mountain, through his blood I’ll come back to life once again. Who will face me, then? On which side will you want to be, then? You! Who have tested my power, have an obligation to go back before it’s too late! I grant you to live and watch him grow until that day! In the end, is this not the only thing you want? The only thing a mother would want? To bring up your own son until he reaches the purpose for which he was born!”
The woman let him finish. Then, slowly but firmly, she shook her head.
“You and Crowley couldn’t have children, right?” Skyrgal said. “That’s your problem.”
“Stop it!”
“You tried for a long time. Do you remember how painful it was to be different from all those women? Because it’s this, what makes a woman, regeneration.”
“Stop it,” Aniah whispered, in tears.
“And now that you hold a child grown in your lap you can’t give up the illusion that he’s a bit yours. I understand that. Your tortuous emotions are a source of great interest to me, they even fascinate me. You have given birth to him with pain, a pain bigger and deeper than any woman has ever experienced to give birth to her offspring. Pain binds more than anything else in the mortal world. You feel bound to this creature, even though you say you want to put an end to his existence. But he’s mine! It’s my blood!”
His voice got stronger and that last scream sounded human to her. Silence fell and everyone turned to them again. Aniah realized that something horrible was going to happen, and it was going to happen soon, when the innkeeper came up again with a worried expression on his face.
“I must ask you to leave,” he said. “You’re disturbing the peace of this place.”
Skyrgal kept silent for a time that seemed interminable. Then he nodded, and she knew that most of those people, perhaps all, were already dead.
“Yes, I was just leaving, dear middle man,” he said. “Certainly I do not want to disturb the peace of this place. No one will ever do it from now on, remembering what happened here. All that blood. Those people torn to pieces.”
He stood up and drew his scimitar. The innkeeper made a surprised, intrigued expression when he found himself holding his own purple bowels in his hands. He had not seen him move. He looked at him, as if asking for explanations, then fell to the ground calling the name of a woman who was not there with him as he died. Everybody stood up. Chairs fell, beer was overthrown on the tables. The younger tried to run to the door, the older ones remained where they stood, petrified with terror. No one had time to escape. Aniah unsheathed her sword when Skyrgal was already performing the final crescendo of his symphony of destruction, decapitating a girl, a little more than a child.
A carpet of dismembered bodies covered the wooden tavern floor. Blood, leaking from the severed arteries, ran along its cracks, mingling with the thin layer of sand that covered the floor. In the quagmire only half a man survived, dragging on with his trailing intestines. He turned and looked at his legs, far from him, his pelvis, the spine that emerged from the guts. Beyond the wall of pain, he understood. He bowed his head to abandon himself to the protective embrace of the big nothing.
He’s still very powerful, even in that body!
Skyrgal turned, surrounded by blood and naked flesh. “So,” he said. “What were we saying?” Aniah tried to attack him, but when the god opened his palm toward her all her weapons were shattered to pieces. Only a dagger still survived on her waist and she drew it out. But looking at it, she realized it would serve little purpose— its blade was rough and porous, of a greenish color. It seemed to belong to a museum.
“Uhm, look what the cat dragged in,” Skyrgal said. “Who gave you that knife?”
Aniah did not answer. She glanced several times from the god to the useless blade she still held in her hand.
“That weapon was carved from a single block of Mayem,” Skyrgal explained. “It contains something very valuable for my son and it was quite jealously preserved. I wonder who gave it to you. I wonder who helped you in all this useless runaway, after all, but now it doesn’t matter anymore.” His inexorable gaze fell on the child. “Nothing matters, anymore,” he continued, moving a step. “I was pleasantly surprised by your courage. If it was my respect you were looking for, I must admit you’ve earned it. But now stop opposing my growing power.”
“The greatest power is that of creation,” she said, as she watched him approaching. “It’s the power of Angra and women. A power you will never understand!”
Skyrgal stopped. “How moving,” he told her face to face. He raised his scimitar and placed it on her hair, using it to clean the blood from the blade. “You’re a stubborn little girl, just like all the Guardians. Sometimes I think you fight only for the pleasure in it, because you have never done anything else in your long, pointless history. Beyond what moved you in the beginning and your current potential for success. It’s stupid to fight when you already know that you will lose. What’s the use of it, if not prolonging your agony?”
Aniah felt weak and powerless, while outside of the tavern came a Tankar’s cry, a howl loaded with pain.
“The desert raiders have been lured here by blood,” the god observed. “Sure they’ll fight to death to snatch the last piece of flesh from your bones, once I’m gone. For them there’s no alternative, but for you there is. Don’t pretend to be braver than what you are. Come with me, and I promise this time you will not suffer. In the end, I really want you to bring up my son until he serves the purpose.”
The woman handed him the baby, as if she just wanted to get rid of it. “Take me away, please. I don’t want to die in the fangs of those beast. It was all crazy, forgive me!”
; Skyrgal sheathed his scimitar. He grabbed the boy by one leg and held him up in front of his eyes, looking at him with lust while he was desperately crying. “Yes!” he hissed. Under the bandages, his devastated lips smiled and his eye shone even brighter. “Yes!”
The child screamed until he was out of breath. Then the god put it in the crook of his elbow, rocking him gently. He broke the bottles and glasses and poured their alcoholic content on the floor, then he disseminated the embers of the fireplace throughout. When he was sure that fire would purge that place, he opened the tavern door and, with the penitent woman on his side, came out.
He stopped immediately, looking up. The wind laughed at him, shaking the bandages on his face. “Uhm,” he murmured. “Look what the cat dragged in…”
“You never change words, do you?”
Twelve swords were pointed against him, held in the hand of twelve men and women in their amaranth tunics, facing him to form an impenetrable phalanx. Skyrgal recognized those swords and the metal in which they were forged Manegarm, ‘Slaughter of the soul’ in the ancient Mastodon language. The only metal able to weed out and imprison the soul of the forces that have lived through all eternity, a peculiarity he knew too well. Caught between the cold light of those blades, and the fire that would have not forgiven his already worn out body, he realized he was trapped. Especially when at the head of the twelve Guardians he saw a man whose long white hair was barely contained by the cap. He had only one eye, as all those who had taken place at the head of the Fortress throughout history, as Angra’s vicars on earth.
Dagger - The Light at the End of the World Page 4