God of Emptiness

by Walt Popester

  “We should kill him to find out.”

  “If you try it, I’ll kill you,” Ianka replied. “Well, I mean, before you try it. I mean…well, fuck you. Why don’t you try to get some sleep?”

  “I think he’s right,” Erin said.

  “The god of Emptiness may be a whiner, but he does that thing with his tongue that you like so much.” Dagger blocked her hands before she hit him. As she laughed and tried to wriggle free, naked beneath him, he kissed her neck, her small turgid breasts, her flat stomach and then further down.

  “They hear us.”

  “Mh, mh,” Dagger said, opening the delicate petals.

  “Oh-h!”

  “Say it once again that I’m a whiner…it’s not me…who’s weeping now.”

  “Well, I was talking about the eyes!” She grasped his hair. “Ktisis, where did you learn that?”

  He chuckled, satisfying his hunger until she turned on her side and tightened her thighs, to push him back and hold him at the same time.

  “In a thousand and two hundred years, no one had ever—?”

  “There’s someone who’s trying to sleep here!” Ian shouted.

  Erin lay on her back and took Dagger’s face in her hands. “Come here, god of Emptiness.”

  Dagger climbed her body and obeyed her every silent command, until he put his ear between the hot and sweaty breasts of the girl. He listened to her heart ride wildly in the middle of her chest—a divine rhythm, played only for him.

  He closed his eyes, at peace. When he opened them again, he saw the gentle light of dawn, the rays coming through the little square window. The sun rose, casting the shadow of a stone standing on the windowsill. It dressed with gold the high ruins framed in the opposite window, including a unique monolith erected in the middle of nowhere. Adramelech, Dagger thought. And that should be the Hammer of Skyrgal. “Hey.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Erin?”

  “…lemme sleep.”

  “We have to go.”

  She blinked and seemed about to fall asleep again. “Look into the second pocket of my backpack,” she said drowsily. “The one on the bottom.”

  “Why?”

  “Ktisis, can’t you just do one thing when I tell you?”

  “I still don’t understand if you use that name as an exclamation or to call me.”

  “Dag…”

  “What?”

  “Look inside that damn pocket.”

  Dagger did as he was told. As soon as he was outside the blankets, the cold air wrapped him. He rummaged in her backpack and found a number of things of which he saw no use. “You should keep it in order. This stuff is really useless. Can you tell me what’s the use of this?” He turned around holding a wooden handle with dozens of tiny teeth.

  “It’s a brush, Dag. Close that pocket and open the one below.”

  He followed her directions and pulled out a sheath of leather-coated metal. “What’s this?”

  “Happy Birthday. Even if we’re late,” she said.

  He understood immediately that it had been made for Redemption. “You could put some more effort in it.”

  “It was Ianka’s idea. He asked Araya for some amorphis, the sacred metal they use to forge the hardest armor, like the one worn by…” She didn’t finish.

  “Olem,” Dagger concluded. “I appreciate.”

  “You can’t appreciate if you don’t turn that damn thing around and see what we had engraved on the other side.”

  Dagger turned the sheath in his hand, and read the silver writing, Your Friends. The only safe place—the words were bonded to one another in a chain made of six rings. He smiled, spontaneously, and said nothing.

  “If you say you don’t deserve it, I swear I’ll pierce your heart. I’ll do it.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Redemption, Solitude…your weapons seem a dirge. You needed a touch of optimism, didn’t you?”

  “Fuck you.” He got back to her and rested his eyes between her neck and shoulder, that part of Erin’s body made just for him.

  “You have a strange way of sending people to hell.”

  “Why the six rings?”

  “We’re all into this together.”

  “There’s one missing.” Dagger immediately regretted saying that. She was sitting at that table…

  He got up and dressed himself, never ceasing to look at the ruins of Adramelech, which were calling for him. He put on pants and boots, lacing the armor on his chest and tightening the bracelets’ straps.

  Erin hugged him from behind. “You’re still looking at the light at the top of that tower, aren’t you?”

  “Looks like plain sunlight to me.”

  “But you know whom I was talking about.” She ran a hand through his hair. “Kugar’s gone. She abandoned the both of us. And now I’ve got this guy beside me, but he’s out of reach.”

  “I need someone who doesn’t need me. We can work it out somehow, I mean—”

  “You’re in love.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “It’s the same.” She sat down in front of the dying embers. She stared at him, with a burning reflection in her eyes. “Kugar will die, if she’s not already dead because of the Hammer Guardians. Today or tomorrow, she’ll be gone and you’ll remain alone. Like an asshole.”

  “You could be a little more sensitive with the delicate issues of immortality.”

  “There’s nothing delicate in immortality. For a century it may be fun. Then comes the rest.” Erin shook her head. “They will all die. It will happen, Dag. You know that.”

  He turned over the sheath in his hands. Six rings, he thought. Perhaps the six rings are them. Maybe I’m the one left out of the chain. Perhaps Kugar is still important to her. “Am I still too innocent to understand what was there between you two?”

  “You remember every word, huh?”

  “I did that for a living, once.”

  “Even if we’d like at all costs to be present in someone’s heart, the chain binding that of everybody is made of different rings.” She raised her face to look at him. “Maybe I’m the one who’s not there, for you. Who can say?”

  “Knock it off.”

  “Surely there’s Ianka. He reminds you of Olem, at least.”

  “How do you kn—”

  “One thousand and two hundred years—remember that. It’s a long time. It opens your eyes to so many things.”

  Dagger was silent. Absently, he took a few steps toward Schizo and sat beside him. He watched him for a while, then slapped him on the neck.

  Ian awoke. “What the f—!?”

  “Ian?”

  “What?”

  “What do they mean? The six rings?”

  Ianka tilted his head to the side, sitting up. He smiled, before landing a fist on the side of his friend. “It means that friends are the family you choose, of course!” he explained. “And family means that you’re never left behind, or forgotten. Family means you’re not alone.”

  “You’ve broken twelveteen ribs!” Dagger didn’t know if he wanted to cry or laugh.

  “None of us has had a real family, and the ones who—more or less—had one, well…it was better they hadn’t,” Ianka continued. “But not us. We’re the Hotankars. It’s simple, remember: there’s no alternative to being together.”

  Dagger was frozen by those words, until somehow, he managed to breathe again.

  Erin jumped on them, hugging and kissing them both.

  “Hey, he’s mine!” Ianka objected.

  Dag said, “I don’t deserve something more?”

  “The three of you will deserve that when you won’t always be the last to be ready,” Ash scolded as he entered the room.

  They all turned around.

  “So, how was your watch?” Erin asked.

  “Fairly quiet. Some beast tried to draw near. Perhaps we stole its den for the night. Kerry made it clear it should find different accommodation.”

  “It’s time
to get back in march. Oh yes,” the Messhuggah agreed, coming up beside Ash.

  Dagger stood up. “First I have to pee, and eat something.”

  Ash exchanged a glance with Kerry. “They’re untrained people, lizard. They have no idea of what it means to forge ahead and similar.”

  “Don’t call me that, whitey!”

  Ianka shoved them both away. “Ho, I won’t listen to you. Dag’s right, when you wake up you must change water to your fish. It should be one of the seven commandments.”

  “They are six.”

  “Who cares at this time of the morning!”

  Dagger followed Schizo outside, in the cold of the desert. “Shit, it’s freezing.”

  “After you walk some forty miles, you don’t feel it anymore.”

  “The only thing I can’t feel is my prick.”

  They went around a corner and saw the distant silhouette of the tower of Sabbath, looming up above a compact mass of ruins.

  “That gives me the creeps, if everything else wasn’t enough.” Ianka put his hands on his hips and looked at it, pissing freely. He had slept wearing only the upper part of his armor, and only because Kerry had insisted. “I need a draug. At least one. Remind me why we’re doing all this.”

  “To find Warren and the Sword, if we can.” Dag unbuckled his belt. “And to understand who he was with when he escaped from the Fortress. To kill some asshole of the Hammer and a dozen Tankars.” And to find the Hermit Araya was talking about…and I don’t even know who he is!

  “Wasted is all the time not spent in downing a draug or killing a Tankar.” Schizo looked around, at three stone houses, a well with a wrought iron crab above it, and forty ghost barracks, their blackened wood drowning in a sea of sand. An old spiral staircase ascended to nowhere. “That was the common house, where we all would gather to listen to the stories of the old people, or to play at…” He thought about it. “No. When the old bastards began with their drunk babbling, we ran away with the girls.”

  “Ktisis, your home did suck.”

  “Home is always home, unfortunately.” He shook his prick. “If more of us valued gold above food, cheer, and song, it would be a merrier world. Ktisis, surely it would be more fun and with less dead people around. People would do crazy things for a little living space in the east, believe me.”

  “Ian, what the Ktisis—?”

  Ianka turned his back on him. “Regretting home is never worth a fuck. Remember, always go forward, or at least go out and drink all night long.”

  Dagger was left alone. The desert freedom was all around him with the nameless charm of a nomadic life. He absently put a hand to the small leather box at his neck and stared long at the swirling dust. He almost didn’t notice that his friends had reached him outside, finding him prick in hand.

  Kerry tilted his head to the side. “Um. Now I do understand a lot of things. You and your family are obsessed with four handed swords.”

  Dag pulled up his pants.

  Ash threw a backpack at his feet. “You’re not expecting us to carry it for you, right?”

  Cra! A black bird flew across the sky, before resting on the remains of an old barn. Dagger was sure it was looking at him, and only him, as it called again with its sinister cry, Cra!

  They were soon back in march, surrounded by a surreal silence in which nothing moved. Traces of the beautiful irrigation system—which once had surely made a garden of that barren land—abounded along the Main Road. Kerry had decided to avoid the Road. Too many prying eyes, he had said as soon as they left the door of Agalloch. Quite different eyes were watching them now from above. There’s no true escape, I’m watching all the time, the crow seemed to say with its impenetrable gaze, hovering on their heads.

  On the horizon, the chilling and distant profile of Sabbath.

  Mirages were continuous and deceptive, when real walls of sand forced them to leave the channels to walk at ground level. On the border between the remains of civilization and endless nothingness, appeared blue lakes with towers and ruins mirrored on their surfaces, giving place to silvery mountains with bright waters at their feet. These images were humiliating and exasperating deceptions, all so absolutely real that the real often seemed the delusion.

  Once in a while, Ianka raised his face and sang, “I am the one to show you the way, salvation is in the fields! Listen up children and follow me, or you will pay the price of Hanoi!”

  There was no salvation in that middle earth. Everything was doomed to an existential wear deeper than mere abandonment. Left by its inhabitants because of the wars that had devastated it, now that land seemed to have never known life.

  The wind teased them with phantom voices and laughter of those who were gone. For the first time, Dagger told himself that it wasn’t just a feeling due to tiredness. Memories themselves had become ghosts in that huge nothing that was slowly making its way inside them.

  When the dying sun hid behind the dark profile of Sabbath, the first vestiges of Adramelech appeared, black against the amethyst sky. Barns and abandoned sandstone ruins gave way to large, square blocks of that same stone in which the Fortress had been erected. Since it was the area of the holy city more accessible to the Guardians, it was the most widely used as a quarry. Among the monoliths scattered without any order survived only one town, far to the north. There was no living soul, though the ones of the dead seemed to wander restlessly between the ruins of a world that was no more, prudish to the gaze of the living.

  “I expected some surprises,” Dagger said. “It all seems so easy.”

  “Do you remember having butchered half a Tankar army?” Ash said.

  “Enjoy the quiet, you’ll miss it when the hammer will fall,” Kerry said. “This desert city is so vast that, if you know which areas to avoid, you could walk on for years without ever meeting anyone. It’s a sea of ruins, with a few villages scattered like islands. The Disciples are dividing themselves between Adramelech and the Fortress itself. The Tankars avoid these lands since the Hammer Guardians wiped them out, and the latter are waiting for us at Sabbath. Not to speak of Gorgors…Ktisis only knows what happened to the Gorgors.”

  Dagger was about to open his mouth.

  “Don’t you say: No, I don’t know!” the Messhuggah snapped. “I don’t like when you joke so. It’s blasphemy!”

  Ianka commented, “Yeah. You must show a little respect for a dog god.”

  “This joke stopped being funny a quarter of an hour ago.”

  “It’s not a dog, it’s a jackal,” Ash pointed out.

  “The jackal is a dog.”

  “Well, lizard, technically—”

  “Oh, the hell with this crap!” Schizo interrupted Ash. “Shit, I can’t stand the two of you anymore. Always talking about concepts and definitions and fooling yourselves around. I need a draug!”

  “Where do you think we’re going to find a draug around here?”

  Kerry smiled. “Actually, there’s a place for that. It was the favorite of your father.”

  “Which one?”

  “Crowley. Excuse me, Dag, it’s the force of habit. The Light at the End of the World is north of here, where an old community of stonecutters survives.”

  Dagger cocked his head sideways. “Shouldn’t we keep a low profile?”

  “Probably.”

  “And isn’t going into a tavern full of people perhaps the best way to keep a high profile?”

  “It could also be the best way to find the information we’re looking for.” The lizard looked up.

  Cra! the bird replied, landing on a block of granite and shaking its little, treacherous head. Cra!

  The Messhuggah grinned. “I’m not the only one who noticed that we’re followed, right? And that we can start a fire visible for miles without being disturbed.”

  When he grins like that, the resemblance with Araya is terrific, Dagger thought.

  “It’s probably catching up with its master during the night, to report our movements. Someone is waiting
for us.”

  Dagger thought about it. “I’d like to know what language they speak, lizard…”

  “That of the Disciples,” Ash guessed, kicking off a stone.

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” the young Messhuggah replied. “If I remember correctly, They use other messengers. Even at the Sanctuary there’s someone who can interact with animals.”

  “What kind of place is the Sanctuary?” Dagger asked.

  Everybody else turned to Ianka.

  “One you don’t want to know,” Schizo answered.

  Kerry stopped. “What do we think to do, put on a fake mustache and knock on Sabbath’s door to pass?”

  “It was one of the best ideas I had.”

  “Dag, we don’t want to know the others.”

  Ash looked around. “We spent the best years of our lives in a place where we were just puppets in a theater. Don’t tell me that after all this way nothing has changed? With all this free space!”

  “The free and huge world out here could prove only a larger stage.”

  They all reasoned about Kerry’s words.

  “So?”

  The lizard moved the first step northward. “I feel like having a draug, now.”

  When Dagger reached him, the Messhuggah said, “Don’t you feel that you’ve stepped in line to walk among the dead? I’m afraid we’re just marching on a path already marked for us…for you!”

  “By whom?”

  “By all—by the gods, by who imitates them since always, by friends and enemies. The same Main Road was born as a straight line toward perdition, wasn’t it?”

  “You’re supposed to be my guide.”

  “A leader’s task is so clearly to find a path out of the dark, a Messhuggah dogma goes.” Kerry nodded. “Yet Olem should have taught you that sometimes even a guide needs a guide. I must find my brother. That damn Agent Orange will tell me what needs to be done, or at least what’s happening on this side of Agalloch walls. Too much silence, too much. Don’t you hear it? It’s deafening.”

  Kerry patted Dagger’s shoulder, inviting him to look up. A distant winged shape crossed the sunset sky. “That is a messenger of the gods, not the damn crows. From here you can’t see the purple feathers of their wings, but it seems the correspondence is quite intense lately. That must be the fourth or the fifth one I have seen today. They’re their messengers. Sooner or later, these birds of prey will come to blows above our heads.”