The girl nodded, avoiding Marduk’s gaze. “You’re feeling sorry for me. Don’t do it. If my mother hated me, she’d throw me in a river, right? But she wanted me to live. She loved me somehow.”
“When war soils the world,” the Dracon Delta said, “many mothers prefer to abandon…to hand over their children to those who can look after them, or who can save them from certain death. In this case, abandonment is an act of love, not of hatred. Although it’s sad.”
Kugar stood up. “No, it’s not sad.” She clung to the bars, leaning her cheeks against them. “It’s war, Drac. And wars must be fought despite the pain that will come from it.”
“Kug…”
“Yes, I know. It’s not anyone’s fault and that’s how things go. But this stuff doesn’t work with me.” She closed her eyes. “No, it doesn’t work. Waste your breath with Dag, if you like. I have other things in mind, and other feelings. If you want to kick me out, go ahead. I’m ready to get back out there. I’ll get by, as I’ve always done.”
Marduk tried to circumvent the harsh tones. “That’s not the point. There’s a compromise that would allow you to get out of this prison without being banished from the Fortress.”
She turned around. “Which one?”
“You will know soon.”
“I asked the wrong question. To someone like you I should ask, how much?”
“It doesn’t matter how much it will cost you. You will not refuse this offer,” the Dracon Delta concluded. “You’ll stay at the Fortress for some time, locked inside the Poison tower as the princesses of the fairy tales. You’ll get out of this prison cell, you’ll go up to the room at the top of the fucking tower and you’ll stay there. Araya will train you for your next and final mission.”
“Last mission? Ktisis! What have you set your sick mind on?”
“What part of you don’t have a choice hasn’t got into your sick mind? To be a half-Tankar and hide among the Guardians…Ktisis! You must be crazy to do such a thing.” He stood up. “Don’t do stupid things, like trying to run away or something. No one has ever escaped from this place.” He looked at her one last time, then left them alone.
The girl turned to Dagger. “Of course, you don’t know anything. And don’t look at me like that. Pity is a form of contempt!”
“You already said that.” Dagger’s eyes fell right on the barely visible wound beneath her breast: a rose cut on the white skin, exposed between the shreds of worn clothing. “It healed quickly.”
“I’m a Tankar.” She collapsed on the bench and leaned her head against the wall. “My tissues regenerate six times faster than human ones and I can see the smallest details in the surroundings, when you would just crawl in the dark. This is why Moak took me onto the world Beyond hunting for Gorgors, breaking all the rules of the Fortress. He trusted me.” She paused and then said, in a hoarse whisper, “He knew that I would survive even when we left the ship in the world Beyond.”
“And now you’re in a cage. Just like all good dogs.”
“You don’t need to be mean to me.” She pulled her head from the wall to look at him. “I would have gotten out, somehow. But the fact that they want me to get out is worrisome in a way that you probably can’t even understand.”
He sat down beside her. “There’s something big at stake, it doesn’t seem difficult to understand.”
Kugar ran her hand through his hair. “Of course you understand everything, street kid. Tell me, did they accept you into the Guardians?”
Dagger nodded.
“And don’t you ask yourself why they did it?”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“Oh, for a lot of good reasons. The son of Skyrgal here at the Fortress, so close to his father? No, dammit! They must really have a good reason to do it, just like keeping a wolf-girl with them.”
“I’m not the son of Skyrgal!”
“And I’m not a Tankar.”
“Where else could they continue to hide me?”
“Everywhere. Not in the one place where they will come looking for you.”
“Who?”
“Oh, you know too well their names. Don’t play this game, not with me. Not you, who have another pair of eyes on the back of your head.” She was silent for a while. “What did they decide to do with the second portal?”
Dagger was about to open his mouth when Marduk’s voice scolded him from above, “Dag! Just a word with her and you’re out of the order in no time!”
Dagger turned to her again.
“You see? Even the walls listen in here.” She put a finger on his lips. “And if you know how to hear, every now and then they may speak too. Hold on to your silence, it will often be your only friend.” The gesture turned into a caress and her eyes filled with sadness. “In what order were you taken?”
“Olem took me in the Sword Guardians, even though he didn’t want me to become a Guardian.” His voice came out in little more than a whisper, his heart beginning to gallop in the chest. “It’s a long story.”
“Surely a predictable one.”
“Why?”
“Because Crowley was the Sword Dracon before being elected Pendracon, and those who don’t know you for what you are want you to follow in his footsteps—perhaps even Marduk, who would have definitely liked to see you wear the Delta Amaranth…if only to control you better.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “This way is simpler, more credible. And the world needs credible bullshit, don’t you think? Even if you’re shitting yourself to death at the very idea of handling a sword.”
“That’s not true!”
“Yes that is true, stinker. I can smell you a mile away!”
“It must be your smell and that of the bucket!”
Kugar slid down to lay her head on his thighs. She watched as he stroked her filthy hair, enjoying every last, dirty moment they were allowed to spend together. “Don’t say stupid things,” she said. “Don’t ruin everything.”
“I never say stupid things.” Dagger held her hand, fingers through fingers.
“Ktisis, you’re smitten with me, huh?” A shadow crossed her eyes. “Things might have turned out differently, Dag, but it didn’t happen. Maybe I’m the only living person, aside from the Dracons, to know who you really are. They will never let us be this close again, do you understand?” She squeezed his hand. “This prison is the last place where we are free to be together.”
They got so near to each other that their lips nearly touched. They stayed like that for an infinite time, breath against breath, so close and yet already so far.
“You fell in love with the wrong one, punk,” she said. “It often happens around here. Nothing good will ever come from loving a half-Tankar, and your fate is too dark, indefinite, even for me. Don’t waste your time with human feelings, they will just burn you. Do you understand who you are? Did they give you the explanations? You—”
Dagger prevented any other unnecessary words, kissing her once and for all. He got lost in her taste of sweat and blood, living and pulsating, preferring it to any sterile smell of the Glade, to all the reasonable words he had heard in those days, the explanations of gods and men. There’s no alternative to staying together, he thought. Then he raised his face. He looked at her closed eyes and half-opened lips. “All your words can’t hide a simple fact,” he said.
“Don’t say it.”
“You too…care about me.”
She opened her eyes. “You’re crying.”
“No.”
“Yes you are! Shit, you’re becoming a pussy! You’re crying!” She smiled, resting her forehead against his. “Don’t do it. This is still your lucky day.”
“The last time you said that, we ended up with an army of shadows on our heels,” Dag said.
“I’ll never thank you enough for not leaving me behind, for watching over my body. I’ll never thank you enough for being there.” She squeezed him until it hurt.
“Don’t leave me. Not you too.”
She bro
ke her embrace. “You just needed someone. It could have been anyone to come out of the mist.”
“Maybe. But I saw you.”
Kugar stroked him again, as if she were unable to break away from him despite what she forced herself to say. “I already know what they have in mind. Now that Moak is dead, I’m the only person in the world able to translate the inscriptions in the temple of Ktisis. And I’m a Tankar—a bad combination. Now there’s only the road, Dag, and I assure you that you don’t want to follow me where it leads.”
“If you come back, I’ll be here waiting for you.” How can I let this happen again? “Otherwise I’ll follow you on that damn road.”
“Until the end?”
“Until the end.”
She abandoned her head to the will of gravity and fell on his thighs. “Say that again.”
“Until the end?”
“No, stupid! That thing. Our thing.”
“You and I are bonded forever. What happens to you, happens to me.”
Kugar closed her eyes, as if to enjoy those words before silence claimed them. Without another word she got up and walked out.
Watching her, Dagger smiled. Before an overwhelming sense of death, an impending death, pervaded all of his mind.
* * * * *
“Here begins your unusual journey as a Guardian,” the Dracon Delta said.
Looking up, Dagger saw they were parading before the Pendracons immortalized in the porphyry colonnade.
“Don’t expect a preferential treatment from the Guardians, just because they believe you’re Crowley’s son,” his uncle continued. “Nor from us, only because we know who you really are. If you take too long to learn, and if you’re not always on the alert, you may pay it dearly. If your cover is blown you can take it for granted that someone will try to sacrifice you to…something or someone. Just do what Olem says and everything will be all right.”
“Olem’s crazy.”
“You don’t say.”
Dagger turned to observe the Pendracons. The statues closer to the door, the oldest ones, were so eroded that their features had been for the most part erased, even if they all had an eye clearly gouged out. Further, their faces emerged from the past looking out on the present. Their expressions and shapes became so realistic that it was possible to see that some depicted women—Warrior Queens—who disappeared at the point where power seemed to become a prerogative of men alone.
“Why didn’t Olem leave me with you, and the Deltas?”
The Dracon shrugged his shoulders. “There were reasons. There are always reasons within these walls. Kugar has already tried to explain it to you.”
“It’s rude to eavesdrop on people!” Dag was about to add something, then he remembered how he met Angra. Instead he said, “That man has just a huge repressed anger, and now he’s found a way to vent it: against me.”
“Olem’s not mad at you. Let’s say that…ah, Ktisisdamn!”
On the chest of one of the statues, someone had drawn the words, Angra traitor! Aeternus lives! Marduk hastened to erase the graffiti with the sleeve of his tunic.
Dagger walked to his side. The empty socket returned his gaze in the middle of a flat face, on which he could clearly see violent chisel blows. The same that had wiped out the statue’s name. Is that you, Aeternus?
Marduk stood up and nervously kept walking. Dag followed him. “You ask me about Olem, my boy. Bah…what did I do wrong to have to talk about his feelings? Let’s say that your return to the Fortress has awakened in his head a buried—but never removed—pain. He cared a lot about your mother and…well, this is something he will talk about with you, if he wants. But that will never happen. You may have noticed that man’s been fighting with words for a long time.” He suddenly stopped, and raised his face to look at the last statue.
As they approached it, the boy read the name at its base:
Crowley Nightfall
223rd Pendracon and Warrior King
3651–3612
“How did things really go, the day he went away?”
A shadow crossed the Dracon’s eyes. “Why do you want to know?”
“I want to know his story. After all, he is…almost my father.”
Marduk didn’t answer immediately. “You won’t be able to go on, if you don’t stop thinking about how miserable human life can be,” he said then.
“Do you call that an answer?”
Half a smile lit up the face of his uncle, as if aroused by an old memory. “If he were still alive, he’d know what to do even in a situation like this. He’d have guzzled down five mugs of draug, found a good reason to throw a punch at Hammoth, and then driven us to safe harbor in the middle of the storm. He was different. His eyes were different. His way to talk to you and understand you was different. There was such a light in his eyes that, from the very first meeting, he could conquer your unquestioned trust.” The smile disappeared. “The desert took him away at the end of the Sixth holy war, the first that saw us opposed to Tankars—the fight for Skyrgal and his return had always been extraneous to them. Then one day, while the bulk of our army was up north fighting Gorgors, the Tankars crossed the desert and fell on us, totally unexpected.”
“Why?”
“Why have you been rolling that coin over your fingers for hours?”
Dagger was frozen, as well as his hand with the coin stopped between the middle and ring fingers.
“Someone gave them a reason to do it,” the Dracon continued. “Sabbath didn’t exist then, and Tankars razed to the ground our guard-post on the Main Road way too easily. Marching against the Fortress, the beasts used some of the prisoners they had taken—flayed, but still alive—as war banners so that we could see what they’d do to all of us once our defenses would drop. This memory still burns inside the Hammer Guardians, who were responsible of the guard-post. To compensate the massacre, they later erected that enormous phallus of their black tower, but then the cockroaches were tortured for long by the merciless beasts, their bodies rearranged into bizarre sculptures. I fear that great part of their current behavior can be explained in the light of that event. Well, the Tankars placed their base camp at safe distance from Agalloch’s walls, starting to dig long under-earth tunnels. They worked all day in those cursed galleries, just like they had done for years in the sandy insides of the forgotten temple. When we went out to attack them, we always ended up massacred, or worse captured with all the consequences—new parades of bodies sewn together, men and women whose orgasmic pain was destined to become a warning.”
“Why were they digging those tunnels?”
“Oh, we wondered about that too, until we saw the ancient walls collapse in several places. It’s hard to explain the sound something so big makes when it comes down so fast. That day, those mangy dogs revealed a knowledge they had never shown. They, people of hunters and diggers whose mathematical skills stop at the notion that five blades are better than four, brought down a structure that was standing there since history could remember. Evidently, those who had moved them to war knew well the walls and their weakness. What you see today is only a reconstruction that won’t hold up to any attack.” He frowned. His tone of voice became even more gloomy. “Tankars poured into town giving free rein to all their wildest instincts, and enjoying the pain they consider the only reason why a war is worth fighting. Neither the gains, nor profits—the enemy’s suffering is the highest rewards that can be claimed when the sun goes down on a battlefield. They bashed children’s heads against the wall before the eyes of their mothers, then they raped the women too as they tore them to pieces, satiating of their meat in every possible way. They castrated men with red-hot pincers, urging them not to scream if they didn’t want their children to receive the same treatment…keeping the promise in their own way. If moved with compassion, they simply closed entire families inside the houses to set them on fire, dancing all around with fingers wrapped around the hair of a severed head. Circling and circling and dancing, drunk with blood and p
ain.” Marduk stopped and closed his eyes on the deep darkness of his memories. “I still hear their screams in the night. The screams of those locked inside, burning alive, mixed with the wild barking of Tankars. Dancing. Drunk. All around.”
Dagger felt again the damp and rotten smell of the Melekesh channels, as relived the night the ship cemetery had burned.
“The streets turned red, scarlet rivers that ran down the basalt paving. But despite their devastating attack, the Tankars failed to prevail over our desperate defenses, even though for very little. The unexpected element they hadn’t considered was a man.” He looked up at the statue in front of him. “Our Warrior King. While everyone was still watching the Tankars digging their damned tunnels in awe, Crowley ordered to put hay bales soaked with pitch everywhere in the streets of Agalloch. He ordered whole buildings to be dismantled and neighborhoods to be evacuated. He looked like a fool and all of the citizens hated him. In the end, no one had ever knocked down those walls, so mighty that they seemed built by the hands of gods and not by the deceitful ones of men. Instead, Crowley had realized things could turn out differently that time. When the Tankars walked in the heart of the city, we came out in the mass using the old tunnel connecting the Fortress directly to the walls. We took the enemy between the hammer and the anvil, cutting off every possible escape. Street by street, alley by alley, we turned Agalloch into one mighty hell for the beasts.” He caught his breath, shaken by the terrible story as if he were experiencing it now. “I loved that smell of burnt air in the morning. It smelled like…victory. When they saw that everything was lost, the Tankars who had remained outside the walls retreated. It was then that the inevitable happened. At nightfall, Crowley left the Fortress at the head of his Faithful Twelve, in secrecy, to pursue the enemy in the desert. He wanted to sweep them away, look into the eyes of the last of them as he strangled him with his bare hands. He, too, couldn’t forget those screams. The screams of the children, locked inside.”
Dagger 2 - Blood Brothers - A Dark Fantasy Adventure (Born to Be Free series) Page 11
