Dagger turned and vomited his breakfast, trying to do it noiselessly. Then he leaned his forehead against the tree. “They melted his face! Oh fuck. They—”
“They don’t want to kill’em all, at least not right away,” Kugar deduced, not at all upset. “They did away with the one who slowed their march. Extremely practical.” She grabbed him by the arm and forced him to look. “Watch them, kid. Imagine what they would be able to do to you to—”
“—pull out my blood and bring my father back to life?” Dagger answered and then paused, his eyes still closed. “I know. If you’re trying to convince me not to throw myself into their arms it’s a waste of time. I’m not planning to.”
They watched the Gorgors tear apart the Guardian, cutting him in half, gutting him and tearing his limbs into small pieces. They packed the muscles for the trip and ate raw what they could, especially the liver of which they seemed particularly fond. Then they resumed their march.
“When a prisoner slows their march it becomes useful only to be eaten,” Kugar said as she led him through a patch of larch trees, so dense that a second green sky now stretched above their heads.
They heard a long thunder and soon the soft pattering of rain filled the cold and moist air. When the drops penetrated the leaves, falling on the invisible path they were following, Kugar had to bend down more often to search for enemy footprints. Sometimes it passed some time before she decided which direction to take. He began to think they got lost when they arrived, suddenly, in the presence of a high rock wall, an impenetrable barrier placed on their path, enclosed in a horseshoe. There was no way to continue. Under their eyes, hundreds of tracks, old and recent, crowded on top of each other.
“It would seem a dead end. Instead, this is a point of passage,” Kugar asserted, bending down to look at the footprints. “And not just for Gorgors.”
Dagger got close. “And where does it lead?”
“Begin to search!”
They explored the long, curve, rocky wall looking for a passage. They searched everywhere, until the thing in front of their eyes turned out to be just an impenetrable stone wall.
Kugar walked away thoughtfully. She planted her sword into the ground and sat down, resting her chin on her fist. “Uhm” she mumbled. “Man can go even through the gray stone.”
“What?”
“It is a saying of Golconda, probably invented by someone who has never faced a real wall of gray stone.”
Dagger, obstinate, continued in his search. “You have to go though, somewhere!” He tried to push the rock with all his strength. When he heard a strange sound, like the wail of a wounded beast.
“Stop!” Kugar urged.
Dagger turned, but he could read only fear in the girl’s eyes. He pulled away from the wall.
“He’s looking at us.”
“Who?”
Kugar raised a finger to her lips, staving off any other question. Her senses were more sharpened than his, it seemed, this is why Dagger continued to trust her even when he saw her bring one hand behind her back, to reveal a throwing knife.
“What in bloody Ktisis—?”
“Do you intend to step away or stay there?”
Dagger moved just in time to hear the hiss of her blade. A Cruachan fell to the ground right in front of his eyes, trilling in pain because of the knife plunged into its chest. It struggled and threw the knife away before attacking Dagger, eyes bloodshot with killing spree. The boy managed to dodge the hooked beak just in time for cutting the thin neck and decapitate it. The Cruachan’s body was crossed by the Mayem sparks while still trudging forward, driven only by instinct. Finally it fell to the ground, with no strength and no life. Dagger took a step back, still pointing the blade against the beast.
“Dag!” Kugar said, approaching with an open hand. “It’s over.”
Despite her words, he planted his knife in the middle of the decapitated head. Only when he saw the bluish brain trickling between its eyes, he agreed to consider the Cruachan dead. Then he fell to his knees.
“It’s over,” Kugar told him again.
“No, it’s not over! If there was one, there will be others! They’re coming. It’s me who’s bringing them here!”
The girl leaned over, looking at the animal’s lifeless body. “Don’t be stupid. It was left behind,” she observed, lifting a wing to show him the wide gashes that had prevented the beast from flying. “It was wounded during the clash with the Guardians. It slowed their march. That’s why they have torn its wings, before leaving it behind. Poor beast. Alone against the whole world.”
“Poor beast? He tried to gut us!”
“Beasts kill and no one can blame them for that,” Kugar replied, her eyes unfocused. “There are no courts in the forest, there’s no moral code. Either you are the predator or you become the prey. In any case, it has nothing to do with the group we are following.”
Dagger stared at her. “And what happened to the ones we were following?” he asked.
“And how the hell do I know? At this point, it’s best to let go and get back to the portal. It was all madness, I shouldn’t have trusted you from the beginning!”
“Do you want to give up like that? This is the turning point!”
“This is just a damn wall!” Kugar cried, before looking around. She realized that it was better not do it again, if she wanted to see the sunset alive. “If this were the entrance to their lair, it would be monitored much better and we would already be dead!”
“Their companions will join them soon, when they won’t find me in the wreck,” Dagger opined. “If they come through here, they will show us the way!”
“It’s risky!”
“Risky? When we stepped off the ship you weren’t even alive!”
“All right!” Kugar interrupted.
Dagger was surprised. He would have never thought to win so easily.
“It will be better to find a suitable place to spend the night,” she went on, retracing their steps. “A tree, possibly. Soon, we’ll find ourselves in mud up to our knees.”
They found a tree sturdy enough to bear them, close enough to let them see, far enough not to let them be slaughtered by any passer-by. The rain grew more and more intense. Kugar could collect enough water to drink, with her cupped hands. Then she pulled the hood over her head and, with her back resting against the trunk, began to look straight at the wall.
Dagger lay down on the branch, letting the rain soak him as always. He watched his dagger, the one that had saved his life. When it was in his hands, nothing could affect its luster. He touched the edge and got cut.
“Don’t play with it,” Kugar warned. “That light is visible from afar and makes us easy prey. That’s no ordinary weapon, respect it.”
Dagger didn’t answer. He sheathed back the blade and clasped his knees with his arms, staring at the rock wall in turn.
“What name did you give it?”
“To what?”
“Your knife,” Kugar answered. “Guardians always give a name to their weapons.”
“I never thought about that. If it really must have a name, it’s going to be Redemption.”
Kugar grinned. “What a fucking name for a dagger! Anyway, nothing strange from someone who got called Dagger.”
The time passed slowly and nothing happened until, beyond the clouds, the sun began its slow descent into the horizon.
“Soon Mothernight will fall and it will be completely dark,” Kugar said quietly. “There are no lights in a forest, and no taverns. Have you ever spent a night in a forest at night, Dag?”
“No,” he replied. “But if you want to play at ‘who’s got the longest one’ about the most dangerous place where we have spent the nights of our life, you would lose. First, because you’re a girl. Second, because I hope you’ve never spent an entire night under the corpses of your comrades, to look dead in the eyes of those who would have liked to see the color of your guts. If we stay with our butts on these branches, nothing w
ill happen to us.”
“Don’t fall asleep, then. I’m not going to pick you up from the ground.”
“Did I already say fuck you?”
“No more than necessary.”
Dagger shuddered.
“What, are you stunned?”
He did not answer. He lay down on the branch, keeping in perfect balance with one leg dangling in the air, and closed his eyes.
‘Seeth.’
“Dag!” Kugar called in a hissing voice. “Wake up, dammit!”
Dagger sat abruptly up and almost lost his balance. He had fallen asleep as the night spread its dark mantle over the world. The face of Kugar slowly emerged from the shadows, illuminated by a light getting stronger and stronger, nearer and nearer. With a finger to her lips she was advising him to keep silent. Dagger found nothing to object. Soon from the black of the night emerged he, or that being, that was making his way through the trees, severing the dense undergrowth with blades mounted on a clawed glove. He was not a Gorgor, nor a human.
“And what the Ktisis is that?”
“A Tankar,” Kugar revealed. “A desert raider. Even them, here.”
The thick fur, wet from the rain, shone at torch’s fire, giving the Tankar’s mighty body a statuesque appearance. Atavistic and overwhelming horror were instilled in his sharp fangs and bloodshot eyes; the black lips contracted in a constant grin, drooling copiously; the bony orbits and the prominent forehead; the mane that ran down the back from the head to the sacrum. The arms, strong and muscular, were as long as his legs, forcing the being to walk bent to the ground. Every single vertebra, malleolus and bony prominence emerged from the skin, while the rest of his body seemed made up of muscle fibers and tendons. There was not an ounce of fat on that beastly and ancestral being, in which everything seemed conceived to allow survival in extreme environments.
It was a living machine of brutal, savage death.
Dagger turned to Kugar: light shone on her face, like on everything else around them. If the beast had looked up, he would have had no difficulty in seeing them. But luckily he walked on, arriving in front of the wall. Here, he began to push aside the mud with his paw, of which he used only the front part, like dogs. Then he stooped down. With the index claw he began to make little circles on the ground, searching for something, that he seemed to have found when he grunted smugly. He put his fingers into the ground, lifted a manhole, and vanished below it.
A trapdoor! Dagger thought, feeling suddenly the dumbest creature in the world. “A fuckin’ damn trapdoor!” He turned to look at the mocking eyes of Kugar, who must have felt as stupid as he.
But a gust of wind, cold and heavy with rain, made him feel even more alone than he already was and Kugar had disappeared. He looked around, convinced that she was on the trail of the beast. He called her in a whisper, as not to arouse the shadows around him; in the reconquered darkness, it would be difficult to recognize a real one from one drawn solely from fear. He unsheathed Redemption and, with it, was not afraid anymore. He dropped from branch to branch and jumped to the ground, making his way through the leaves and clawed branches. He called Kugar again, before he found himself in front of the rock wall but she was not there.
He bent down to the ground. In the pouring rain, he saw that a frame of leaves, mud and stones perfectly camouflaged the trapdoor, making it invisible with the complicity of the rain. He picked it up and found himself in front of a deep hole.
“Yet another leap in the dark,” he considered. “Let’s hope it’s not another hold.” He looked around again, then leaned in to watch. Too forward: he skidded on the mud and fell face down on the rough stone floor. “Damn you Ktisis!”
He got up on his knees, immediately on the watch. In front of him was a long tunnel with smooth and linear walls, as if it had been carved by expert hands and not from the cold nature’s will. He saw the distant light of the torch, becoming smaller and smaller, and nothing else. Only a spark in the dark, he thought, to follow or from which escape. He turned to the forest, black and threatening above him. It was not exciting to venture back out there, alone. Without the guidance of Kugar, it would take a long time to end up in the loving embrace of Gorgors, but also the light in front of him would probably run straight to the shadows. Soon he realized that the only option he was granted, at that time, was between a sinister light to follow and the darkness that hounded him.
With the faithful blade at his side, he took the first step toward the light.
* * * * *
Darkness helped the most remote fears emerge back on the surface from the depths of his conscience, after the brief respite they had given him. Loneliness and pain returned, as well as the fear of dying, faced with the inexperience of a child. The lifeless eyes of Seeth appeared in front of him, the gash on her throat, the screams of pain rising from the punishment room in the long sleepless nights at the ship cemetery. It was one fear with different faces: Sannah and Mawson, Gorgors and the doped city guards. He pushed that fear back from where it had emerged. He would not lose control, he swore to himself. He had to repeat it with more and more conviction when light disappeared, and he suddenly found himself in complete darkness. He was tempted to grab Redemption to enlighten his path, then he quickly changed his mind: it would manifest his presence to the Tankar.
He felt a slow howl behind him and turned fast, ready to grab the handle. Fate was playing with him, finding it funny to torment him. He stood still, listening. Having left the trapdoor open, any beast could follow him down there, waiting, step by step, the right moment to attack. Certainly not a Gorgor, who would not lose a moment to strike deadly, but maybe another Tankar, who was enjoying hunting him calmly sipping his fear, before he could taste his blood. On the second howl he knew he was caught between two fires: he was chasing and followed in turn. This realization fueled every possible paranoia, as alcohol with fire. He saw the face of Sannah projected in the overwhelming darkness, his dead eyes, the ever-present grin, soon replaced by evil red eyes staring at him out of nowhere. A gash on white skin opened before his eyes, his dirty hands digging and digging and digging. And again the howl. He struck his forehead several times, to return to his senses.
Stand and fight! Stand and fight!
Where was he, what were the boundaries of that darkness? He forced his mind to silence, suppressed every thought and went on putting one foot in front of the other, because that was the only way he could deal with that enormous trouble: one step at a time. The faint glimmer appeared once again before him, driving away the ghosts from his head. Slowly, it continued to move forward until it stopped reflecting on the low tunnel’s ceiling to get lost in the void and begin to rise, and rise.
As a spirit rising from the grave.
When he heard the whisper of a thousand water drops echoing all around him, Dagger realized he was in a cave of vast proportions. He found himself balancing on a precipice and felt a giddy thrill. He closed his eyes and when he opened them again, from the darkness of his senses, emerged the irregular profile of the stalagmites and stalactites, the chalky flows and the translucent veils carved by the unconscious time in the depths of the earth. That one torch could not illuminate the whole ambient. The more it got far, the more darkness returned to hide what it had just revealed, as ignorance with knowledge.
The beast was marching on a winding ridge of limestone that ran through the cave from side to side, carved in a staircase, at the top of which stood tall columns of calcium salts, such as a white redwood forest. He waited until the Tankar ended his climb, before following him. The stairs were steep and uneven, slippery. The fear of falling into the void obliged him to measure each step. When he reached the top, he saw with pleasure the warm light of a thousand torches, hung everywhere, reflecting on their humid surface and illuminating the path between the white columns.
He heard a confused chatter and advanced until it was possible, before hiding to observe. The Tankar had reached one of his like, sitting on the floor in front of a fire.
Beyond them, the winding path continued to ascend toward the top of the cave, but for the moment it seemed the two didn’t want to go further. They passed from hand to hand a large leather bag, from which they drew great drafts of a thick and frothy liquid. Between the sips, in that silence where even the smallest sound had its moment of importance, he heard them speak in an articulated language and understood they could not be mere irrational beasts.
In addition, he could roughly understand what they were saying, “Shadows made things big big,” muttered the one he had followed there. “Ship destroyed, made prisoners. All very Bum Bum! Fire and blood everywhere!”
The bigger one, barked in satisfaction. “Yay, fire and blood!” he replied. “Saw humans pass in chains, in terror. Perhaps fools understand where Gorgor come to this world, pity they not live long enough to tell their fellows.”
They both laughed heartily, drinking on.
Dagger - The Light at the End of the World Page 17