The Tankar Dawn

by Walt Popester

  “What?”

  “Up there, look.”

  They leaped in flight again. The cruachan reached a break point in the absolute harmony of the stone, a black hole in which it threw itself headlong.

  “No!” The first thing Dagger saw emerging from the dark was the scream of Ktisis, his jaws open wide toward him. Apatridus avoided the sharp claws of the god, plunging along the mighty arm and the petrified muscles.

  Only when they landed on the shoulder of the colossus did Dagger understand the size of the horror he was facing. Little had changed in that cursed place since Skyrgal pierced through his father’s chest to steal his soul.

  Except that soul is back home, now. He watched, far at his feet, the wide cave in which the titan was rising. There were Tankars down below, and the torches projected the shadows of those who climbed up and down the immense stairs.

  He saw again himself and Olem laying low to spy on the army encamped in the antechamber of the temple. Did you hear what I said? Get down!

  It seemed so long ago. They were all alive, then, even the friends he hadn’t known yet.

  “Don’t think about it,” Kugar whispered, as if she knew exactly what he was thinking.

  He wondered if she, too, who had been there with him that day, was thinking about their friends. All the people that hate and revenge had taken away.

  “In silence, my friend,” he whispered to the cruachan. They flew brushing the ceiling, where the eyes of the Tankars couldn’t get. Yet even from up there Dagger heard the sound of the drills and the hammers. If the blood of a god was indelible, the white beasts could only destroy the stones that were soaked with it.

  Skyrgal’s warnings resounded in his head, They all lie. Only I know why you’re in the world. His voice seemed everywhere around him, as they flew among the Mastodons and the crucified Burzums. You’re so irresponsible…and like all the irresponsible, you’ve led to the death those who found you irresistible.

  The gray skulls emerged from the past with gnawed fangs and empty orbits. Dagger felt their frosty breath on his skin. He unsheathed Solitude, but tears and darkness prevented him from seeing.

  We both knew it would end like this, didn’t we?

  “NO!”

  “Dag!”

  The cruachan flew through the ribs, femurs and arched horns, answering the screams of the gods.

  Kugar’s voice tore him from his torment, “To the right. Here!”

  Dagger directed Apatridus where she said and suddenly they were flying in the deepest darkness. The winged steed could see in the dark, however, and repeatedly turned abruptly away.

  At the far end of the dark appeared a black and starry sky, different from all the night skies Dagger had seen on Candehel-mas. Endless stars shone in this one, and all were white; a pleasant and comforting show…were it not that they were still underground.

  Dagger incited Apatridus to fly to the distant stars. Fly high, touch the sky!

  “Dag!” Kugar called from behind. She said something else but he didn’t listen. He reached out to touch the stars and picked a handful of them. He brought them under his eyes. They were slimy.

  “Insects?”

  She tugged at him to draw his attention. “That’s what I’ve been screaming for centuries!”

  Apatridus stretched its wings and beat them to stay still in mid-air. In the blue, ghostly light Dagger saw a winged little animal fly toward the lights just like they had done…and remain enveloped in the sticky filaments woven by the insects.

  They fly toward the light, too, and die when they reach it. The discovery bewildered him.

  The cruachan landed on the ground, raising a cloud of dust with its wings.

  This is the dust of the centuries. We are the first mortals to set foot in here. Dag dismounted and caressed the beast. Why did you come to me, Apatridus? What happened to Mumakil?

  The cruachan shook his head weakly.

  Kugar got off with some difficulty and looked around, her nose up. “Look. Look well,” she said. “In no existing world will you ever see such a thing.”

  Dagger could only agree. The fake stars illuminated the distant lines written with the blood of the gods on the walls. But the stars couldn’t light the darkness above their heads, so the writings seemed suspended above the void as if they belonged to a higher, unreachable world.

  He turned to Kugar. Her blue eyes reflected the bizarre sky, focusing on the infinite knowledge awaiting them. At that moment he realized the sense of mutual belonging that bonded them despite all that had happened. Only you and I are left.

  She put a hand on her belly and laughed. She pulled him to her, and embraced him. “Here we are. Here we are, Dag!”

  “What’s the big plan?”

  She turned and smiled. “We read.”

  * * * * *

  They camped out under the stars, and with the help of Apatridus wandered in the infinite temple. They collected the little the Tankars had left behind in their work of destruction: wood logs, a blanket, and dried food of the sort the Nehamas carried with them for long journeys—dried chickpeas, dried goat meat, and more dried chickpeas.

  Dagger felt tears well in his eyes every time he thought of the Fortress, but now his feelings were almost exclusively about the kitchen of the Fortress.

  Kugar, instead, had tears in her eyes whenever they walked or flew in front of a completely white wall on which the signs of chisels and hammers were clear. “They’re destroying it all,” she repeated. “All.”

  Only a small section of the long corridors was frescoed with the blood of the gods. Tankars dug day and night, and risked erasing the answers and the questions at the same time. Dagger and Kugar watched them from above, flying silently below the vault ornamented by the partially collapsed, divine skeletons. When they could proceed to the ground, Kug often wriggled her nose and warned him about the presence of Tankars nearby. Looking for the part of the temple she remembered was becoming exhausting.

  The existential anxiety Dag had felt the first time he set foot in there, following Olem and Moak beyond the portal, weighed on his heart. He had already been there. An infinite time before then, he had created that immense structure and blessed it with the blood of his children. Why? What was I looking for? Megatherion, he remembered. The end of All. Or maybe there was more?

  His mind gave him respite only when they got back to the base camp, under the starry sky that was the death of all the creatures so crazy to dream it.

  One day, or perhaps one night, they saw the Nehamas hastening to march away from where they had for the most part settled down. They had abandoned their work of destruction.

  “This is a stroke of luck!” Kugar said.

  I wouldn’t be so sure of it, Dagger thought. Where are they going? he wondered, and then, What are they escaping from?

  For Kugar, that was a clear sign of fate. They left the previous base camp to move to the sector of the temple left by the Tankars.

  They found themselves at the foot of a wide, white wall.

  “It’s here…it’s this!”

  Precarious wooden scaffoldings scaled the wall in many points. The orange fire of a torch or a timid sphere of ensiferum were still burning on some of the very high platforms. Thus, islands of light in the immense darkness were created, and the whole structure seemed like a window open on a new starry sky.

  As soon as she set foot to the ground, Kugar ran on the stairs and disappeared into the shadows.

  Dagger followed her and found her reading the writings with the big eyes of a child. The symbols were in themselves graceful. Somewhere they were higher than them, elsewhere they became small as human writings. Even a god’s blasphemous swearing seems ornamental, he thought.

  Kugar’s finger didn’t follow a straight path, but jumped from symbol to symbol, pausing on some for longer, running frantically on others.

  “Look here. It could mean Hanoi absorbs the evil of man. Or is it the blood?”

  Dagger approached. �
�How do you know that it talks about Hanoi?”

  Kugar turned and pointed to a symbol.

  For him, there in the dark, it had no apparent meaning. He raised an eyebrow. “I get it. I’ll put the kettle on.”

  She focused back on the writings. “Look here…”

  Dagger climbed down to the ground, lit a fire and boiled the water as he heard her running up and down the stairs, murmuring to herself and even laughing.

  Kugar had never seemed so happy. He looked around, hoping the echo of that place was not as good as he thought.

  They’ll fall on us. It’s clear, he thought. They’ll fall on the three of us.

  He was still thinking that when, tired of waiting, he climbed to Kugar with the cold tea and a blanket.

  He found her sitting cross-legged on the ground, sketching frantically with a charcoal on a burnished parchment. “Of course. Of course!” she murmured.

  “What?”

  She turned around as if she hadn’t heard him. She had dilated pupils. Dagger noticed the white powder on her fingers and began to realize the content of the sachet hanging at her neck. “The absolute truth of this language lies in its concatenation, internal and external,” she explained. “This is the architecture of Creation, it represents the layout of the structures we have to look for…look here. In the place of this symbol you could put any being, even one of which Ktisis was unaware. An insect, a man, a god, a monster!”

  “Like us?”

  “Exactly, these are not simple writings,” she continued. She didn’t even listen to him. “These symbols, marked in blood, are in contact with this world and us. The blood of the gods infiltrated everything, but if this is one of the key points of the temple, why did they abandon it?”

  Dag left the terracotta cup on the wooden platform and spread on the shoulders of Kugar the worn blanket he had brought with him. He caressed her maternal womb and rose.

  Without taking her eyes off the wall, she looked for the chipped cup with her hand and brought it to her mouth.

  Dagger was already climbing down when he heard her say, “It’s good,” and then, like an admission, “Thank you.” At that moment he got a bizarre, almost embarrassing feeling of being the happiest god in the Creation.

  And the one less alone. Is this deliverance…is this the end?

  Everything was broken when a rueful laugh exploded in the dark. Dag leaned over the unsteady wooden handrail and looked down, then up. Kugar seemed unaware of anything.

  He ran down, but stopped when he noticed something left on the platform. He picked up a rag doll with rough features and thick hair.

  He knew that hair. He would have recognized the smell even in the stink of hell.

  These are Kugar’s. Several pins were stuck in the cloth to pierce her body—one, the biggest, straight in the womb.

  Don’t take her away from me again. He raised his face and gazed into the heart of hostility. Whoever you are.

  He heard a dull thud, soon lost in the darkness of the temple.

  * * * * *

  Tankars didn’t come. They seemed to have really abandoned that part of the temple.

  “This is the Theater of Pain,” Kugar revealed one day, her face emaciated.

  “You should eat,” Dagger said.

  “You should take Solstice too!” There was anger in her voice. Dag didn’t answer.

  Kugar approached and hugged him. “I’m sorry.”

  “Nehama or not, you won’t last long if you keep on like this. And even…”

  She put her right hand to her womb, too. She almost never moved away the left one from there. “I don’t want to last long. If I hurry up, we can get to happiness.”

  “To what?”

  She looked at him. “Did I say happiness?” She laughed. “I meant truth.” She led him to the section of the wall on which she had spent the last two days. “Look. Ktisis, it seems everything works in threes for the gods. This is where Angra studied the writings of his father, the power of Creation, but his knowledge doesn’t interest anyone, anymore. Probably the Tankars are looking for the Black Room.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “The place where your father…” Kugar stopped. “Where Skyrgal became the Lord of Destruction.”

  Those few words generated a nearly physical pain in Dagger.

  Kugar appeared to him like a small, tiny creature in front of the immense wall before her. He hugged her from behind, rested his chin on her shoulder, and sighed. I want you around. Don’t let this thing kill you. “Refined scholar and expert of the world, aren’t you getting lost?”

  “Aeternus really did a hell of a job with his book,” Kug said. “But there are obvious transcription mistakes. I begin to understand much of the crap he did. Here it should be something like, Only them, in the middle of the void, or He and she in the infinite nothingness. Look here, instead. With her, I miss nothing. She is my light, my comfortable darkness at the beginning of the world.”

  “Continue,” Dagger said.

  “As it was in the beginning, so…hey, easy!”

  “Go on.”

  “Stupid.”

  “Kug…”

  “She is my place in the Creation, at the boundaries between life and death. They don’t exist as long as she fills the cosmic space between emptiness and emptiness…and emptiness, Dag, Ktisis. There. Go on.”

  He tore her away from her writings in the desert and satisfied his infinite thirst for her on the floor where the father of the gods had slain his children.

  Life went on through mild meals, charcoal sketches, and sparks of happiness stolen from the huge void which slowly was finding its way to them. And they both felt it.

  Some of the writings on the wall seemed to have nothing to do with the others, in Dagger’s eyes. They were often separated from the rest and had been drawn by a clearly different hand. That feeling of uneasiness grew when he saw a freshly drawn writing where he was sure he hadn’t seen one before.

  “There’s someone with us,” he said. “Someone, in here.”

  Kugar looked at him. “We already have enough trouble without you seeing ghosts in the dark. Aren’t those who really exist enough anymore?”

  Dagger looked around. No, she wasn’t right. He was. He knew. “You don’t have enough experience with them.”

  “Them, who?”

  “The shadows. Those who are everywhere and look for you in the dark.”

  Kug was not indifferent to those words, yet nothing could distract her from her studies.

  That confused disorder of notes, decrepit wood, and food leftovers tasted like home for him, too. Kugar read at candlelight, often munching a piece of hard bread to stop listening to Dagger’s worries. Sometimes, only after hours did she look up and realize Dag was watching her silently. Then she smiled. She arranged her hair. She kept on reading.

  “It’s written on the wall,” she told him one night in his arms.

  “What?”

  “What may happen, or maybe has already happened. What if this is all a diary? The more truth draws near, the more I fear.”

  “I’m here with you.”

  Kugar gave a tired look. “Maybe that’s exactly what makes me afraid. Those writings talk about you, about what you did in her womb. And maybe even in mine.”

  Those words froze him. She’s talking about Erin. “Then, why did you—”

  She silenced him, resting a finger on his mouth. Her touch became a caress on his stubble. “Because I still spend whole nights watching you, hoping you won’t notice it.”

  “Do you look at me while I sleep?”

  “Only if I can touch me.”

  “Hey!”

  Kugar leaped over him, clutching his wrists. Her black hair fell on Dag’s forehead. “We must find Erin again. We must find a way to…” She didn’t finish. She traced invisible circles on Dagger’s chest.

  “Why are you talking about her now?”

  “She wanted a son, only a son, and she knew you were
the only one who could give it to her. They used all this against her, all her need for love, to push her on a false road.”

  Those words were like a stabbing to him. He opened his mouth, then remembered, You must promise. I want to raise my child…our child, so that one day it will be the salvation of the world. That’s all I ask. “In a normal world you should be jealous.”

  “In a normal world, gods don’t go around putting women into trouble.”

  “I think you’re jealous.”

  “Stop that.”

  “At least a bit.”

  Kugar touched Dagger’s throat with her forefinger. “Erin has spent an eternity regretting a father’s affection. Even after twelve hundred years, an orphan will always feel like an orphan. I don’t know what feelings a creature of that age can feel for you, but of one thing I’m sure. The void you filled was too big for you.” She let him go and knelt in front of him. “It’s unfair, Dag. All her life is unfair.”

  “Something tells me you’re talking about you, not her.”

  “Don’t play this game with me. You and I are not predestined, you and Erin are. It’s written on the wall, damn it, everything about you two calls each other and—”

  “Bah, destiny, destiny. Do you really believe in that?”

  Kugar stopped and looked at him. “No.”

  “So why do you—”

  “Because it’s madness.”

  “What?”

  “Me and you.”

  Dagger found something to laugh about it, and as usual she put her hands on his mouth to stop him. They ended up embracing on the ground as if they had never grown up, not really.

  “Please, stupid. Don’t say that bullshit about love being always madness.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Kiss me.”

  He drew near, but she pushed him away. “No,” she said. “Not there.”

  * * * * *

  The last coals were burning slowly, refusing to surrender to the cold of the temple, of the void, of the nothingness. The stars above them were restless. One fell down near them, and Dagger expressed a desire.

  “Dag?”

  “Hmm?”