Dagger 4 - The Tankar Dawn: A Dark Fantasy Adventure

by Walt Popester

  Now he was Ash again. “Go, Dagger. And don’t be so hard on yourself. You made life better for many, at least for those you haven’t killed.”

  Dagger looked at his fingers. He counted one, two, three. Then again two.

  “You’re looking for the divine through the human miseries. I know how hard it can be, because I’m doing the reverse.” Ash smiled. Now it really looked like him. “Goodbye, my friend. We had a good time and I don’t regret anything from our time spent together. But now it’s time to go.”

  “Ash, I’m sorry. Ian, Olem…”

  “They can’t hear you anymore. But they knew, don’t worry. Friends, real friends, always know.”

  Dagger smiled, and in the heart of pain he came to think that to be alive was the greatest thing in the world.

  “Where’s the exit?”

  “The light. It’s always been the light, but you don’t remember. Oh, you can’t remember.”

  Dag was about to ask where it was, when the light took him.

  * * * * *

  Dagger opened his eyes and tried to move, but found himself entangled in the slimy filaments that kept him harnessed. He pulled harder and the filaments gave, breaking suddenly. His black blood spurted everywhere, seeping through tiny holes in his skin as if the white appendages were drinking it.

  He took a step and fell into a sticky slime bed. It was pitch dark except for a distant crack at the bottom of his visual. Ktisis, to be born should be more or less like this.

  He dug his hands into the whitish slime and walked slowly. The last filaments gave like the moorings of a ship, and he was free to drift. He got so near to the great, luminous slit that—although partially blinded—he could see a shadow silhouetted against the thin crack of light: a man sitting cross-legged faced him with hands lying on his knees.

  Dag walked, but fell into a hole opened in the nauseating filth and soon saw nothing but a putrid whiteness. He was buffeted by opposing forces, and thought it was really the end when a powerful, negative energy sucked him.

  He’s eating me too. The fucking crab will have me for dinner tonight.

  A familiar, distant voice replied, Don’t be afraid of your first step into the theater.

  There followed a silent stasis, in which everything seemed to have stopped forever. Then Dagger felt shot into the light. He rolled on the ground in a thick liquid, finally landing on his side. He tried to open his eyes but the sunlight was enough to blind him, as if he had spent an eternity in the dark.

  And maybe I did. He lay on his back and waited. At the top of the promontory he breathed the saline air, enjoying the sound of the waves crashing at the foot of the cliff. I’m back to my world, he thought. The wind shook the leaves of the palm trees, and the flying seagulls were protesting the rude awakening.

  Born out of the white guts of hell, Dag finally opened his eyes and looked around—white stone, everywhere, tamed by the waves of time in a candid sand that clung to his skin. He put his hands on a hard slab of stone with engraved letters half-hidden by the sand and eroded by the wind. He ran his fingers over them. Wander, he read to the touch, and again, Wander. And further, If you will not know the answer, you will never…The rest had been claimed by the desert.

  He looked up.

  The man was still sitting in front of him. He had a face so black and hard it seemed made of leather, framed by long white hair as thin as silk threads. He wore a dust coat that use, time and the merciless desert had reduced to such a shade of sand that it was impossible to understand its original color. His shirt was open to his muscular chest, and Dagger spied the necklace of white stones and amulets contrasting the color of his skin, like the shell bracelets around his wrists.

  The man, or whatever he was, bowed his head slightly forward.

  “Mumakil,” Dagger said as he recognized him. “Look what the crab dragged in.”

  “You took your time,” the black man said. “The anti-god is moving again because of you.”

  Dagger got up on his knees in the white mud, and spat some of it to the ground. “Do you always begin your conversations like that?” He brought his hands to his face to clean it up.

  Mumakil threw to him some rags to wear. “You’re too sarcastic for a boy who’s just spat whitish, foamy stuff.”

  Dagger opened his mouth to answer, closed it, then said, “Very funny.” He put on the worn, gray clothes—trousers so old they could stand on their own, and a perforated jacket. He looked at the black man, raising an eyebrow.

  “What did you expect me to find in the ruins of a village built on the back of a crab?”

  Dagger turned to the crab. His jaws were locked, now, but his eyes—two large balls silhouetted against the sky—glowed in the sunset. Have I really been in there?

  Hanoi had swallowed him after his meeting with Baomani and now was moving, almost imperceptibly. His claw was closing with exasperating slowness, while the appendages on his face feebly swayed to enjoy the breeze coming up from the sea. The surface of his carapace was irregular and contained limestone formations, most of which were adapted to dwellings. They looked abandoned, yet at the edge of his vision Dagger thought he saw some shadows spying on him from the doors and windows. When he looked again they had already disappeared in the blind darkness as if they had never existed.

  The disdainful eyes of the unknown god cast a growing blue light and were looking eastward, toward the sun slowly defeated by night.

  “He has—”

  “He vomited you. Who threw you in there should have known. Hanoi has never refused a meal—I surely know that—but the Ktisisdamn half gods…he must not like them a lot. After all there must be a reason they call him anti-god. There must be a reason he’s been called onto this world.”

  Dag turned toward his interlocutor, surrounded by the shadows cast on the rocks by the blue light. “Erin…” he began.

  “I know,” said the black man. “I know everything.” A winged beast fell from the sky, so big it could be ridden, and complete with saddle and large pockets. It had thick green plumage and a graceful body. Its emerald eyes reflected such a clever light that they seemed human. It was like no beast he had ever seen, yet Dagger had the feeling he already knew it from somewhere. The beast moved a few, clawed steps to his master’s side and croaked something.

  Mumakil smiled, as if he had heard a joke. “That’s a sure fact, Apatridus. Sure enough.” He became serious, focusing again on Dag. “I turned myself inside out to slow the growth of the Beast inside Erin, but you didn’t care. You threw yourself into the river to bring her straight to the arms of my son Baomani, the only man, or being, from which you had to stay away. Didn’t I warn you? Didn’t I warn you about the unreliability of humans?”

  “Didn’t I already thank you for your lesson?”

  “A lesson you didn’t learn, apparently.”

  The bird, Apatridus, shook its head and seemed to agree with its master. It opened its beak, but nothing came out, at least nothing Dagger could hear.

  “You’re right again, Apatridus,” Mumakil continued. “You trusted Kugar, damn you. You didn’t smell any burning in her behavior before she gave you to the Hammer Guardians.”

  The boy moved around and the bird turned its head to follow him. Its strict eyes seemed to reproach him. “Aeternus once said that only love can blind me.”

  “I doubt Aeternus expressed himself in these terms.”

  Dagger kicked away a fossil shell. “Well, your only advice was to tear down the wall, you could be a little more specific!” he snapped. “What did you expect? A black man caught me in the desert and let the Hammer Guardians torture me to make me learn my lesson. Somehow I manage to escape from that hell and I should remember your advice? Tear down the wall? Oh, thank you, thank you so much—they skinned me alive before chopping my legs, do you remember that, do you?”

  The black man tilted his head sideways. “Yes. And I seem to remember they cut off something else from you. A clue. It hangs between your legs the
few times you’re not fucking half the world and you often reason with that.”

  “Well, these things only happen to the living.”

  The bird spread its wings, outraged, and moved a paw toward him. Mumakil held it by the reins, stroking its plumes. “You’re very kind, Dag. A simple thank you would have been enough.” He shook his head. “I’m not the black man you have to defend yourself from, try to understand. Angra wanted me here with you, remember?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.” The boy sat down cross-legged and clasped his hands under his chin. “Could we start all over again?”

  “I agree.” Mumakil said no more. He got up and headed for the path winding up the crab’s carapace.

  Dagger watched him until he disappeared from view. Fuck, he thought. Yet another shadow who wants to guide me in the dark. But how can a shadow show the way in the dark?

  He stood up and descended the short path to the beach. He undressed, moving the first steps in the cold, icy waters of the sea. The stones under his feet were smooth. He stumbled a few times, then found his balance. He watched the sky at sunset as he caressed the timid waves with his hands, rhythmically, getting used to the temperature before diving.

  He swam. The water soon became deep, and in the last light of day he saw the scales of the fish shine below the surface. The more darkness had the better of light, the more those reflections around him appeared like the projection of a starry sky, chaotic and in motion beneath him.

  There was endless life hidden from his perception, struggling since always to carve out its place in the infinity. Something awaited him beyond that simple experience. He felt in contact with the All, immersed in the All, part of the enormous degeneration of existence.

  He remained afloat watching the stars, especially the brightest one, at the center of Skyrgal’s belt. I know. Oh, I know you’re watching over me, Angra, he thought instinctively. The star seemed to shine more vigorously for a moment. It was straight as the crow flies above the distant light on the horizon Dagger had seen before being swallowed by Hanoi—beyond the sea, beyond the end of the world.

  If you’re really the one who brought Mumakil back to life, I’ll stop and listen to what he has to say, he thought. Even if only for a moment.

  With a few strokes he swam back to the shore and got out of the cold waters.

  He dressed again, and in the young night went in search of his new obscure guide. The climb was hard. White stone everywhere, with pink and purple veins, brittle and rough to the touch. It wounded him as he ascended. Spirals of fossil shells were embedded in its profile carved by the wind, like gems waiting to be pulled out of the mountain.

  He leveraged on his tired knees and risked more than once breaking a foot, but step after step Dagger began to notice the first signs of life—somebody had created pyramids of stones along the path. He picked up one from the ground and piled it on top of the others, feeling the intrinsic religiosity in that simple gesture.

  The immensity of the sky and its last reflexes on the sea were an invaluable show from up there. He could have stayed there for hours. He could have died, there, and everything would still have a meaning. There was such a balance in the innocent show offered to his eyes that there was no space for evil, pain, and betrayal. If everyone, he thought, had shared the mute harmony of that sterile, white stone facing the starry sky, the troubles in the world would have never got to be.

  Step by step, by step. Square fences built with those perfect stones appeared on the surrounding ranges. The stones were stacked on top of each other without any kind of cement, so that a little shove would be enough to make them collapse. Yet Dag didn’t do that. He didn’t want to unsettle the absolute, unstable balance of that place. Fences for the cattle, he thought. But how old?

  Step by step, he got to the summit.

  A breath of wind made him feel even more alone than he was.

  Infinite pink appendages ran under the thin surface of the crab. They seemed to shrink at his passage, like blood vessels constricted by a slight pressure. These are the same I saw at Sabbath and in Kugar’s hideout. Did you generate them, Hanoi?

  He found himself in the ghost village dug in the calcareous concretions on the immense carapace. He walked along the alleys between the white walls, in which crooked doors and asymmetrical windows were opened.

  Two high blue spheres soon rose above the roofs. Hanoi’s eyes were so bright that they countered the light of the smallest moon, just appeared in the golden Adramelech night. He reached them through the narrow streets of that place on the border between reality and dream. It was uninhabited, except perhaps for a precarious structure with a hammock hanging just outside. There were children, here, he remembered. But how long ago? Did I really see them before being swallowed, or were they too only ghosts?

  A warm light came from inside the isolated house. He entered, sure to follow Mumakil. The first things he noticed were the old toys on the ground, made with exoskeletons of crustaceans, conchs, and a light and porous wood. A giant valve covered with iridescent mother-of-pearl served as a kind of sink, while above his head hung a chandelier made from an enormous blue spiral shell. It was so transparent that light shone through it as if it were made of colored glass. The walls were all covered with parietal drawings of fishes, starfishes, unknown divinities and hybrid creatures of land and sea, all framed by rings of yellow plaster and red ocher arabesques. The inside of the dome ceiling was covered with blue mosaic tiles, partly fallen to the ground to mix with the sand.

  It was hot. Dagger crushed a mosquito.

  An arch occupied the whole bottom wall. Beyond, a staircase disappeared in the black bowels of the crab.

  He walked in the darkness without fear. In the end, it’s not the first time it’s happened to me, he thought, yet his umpteenth leap in the dark didn’t last long. At the bottom of the stairs, a flickering aquamarine light revealed new paintings on the walls—there was the crab, everywhere, and the human sacrifices he had learned about in the temples to the unknown god scattered throughout Adramelech. The fish smell was omnipresent, but not so strong to be annoying. His stomach growled and Dag wondered how long it had been since the last time he had eaten.

  The whole place was housed in the exoskeleton of the creature, he knew it. No structure had been added from outside.

  He advanced in the vast hall walking on the uneven floor. The vault was relatively low and decorated with the same representations which covered the walls and the calcified columns. These were towering in the middle of the place and gradually shrank toward the sides creating secondary rooms.

  Chapels? he wondered seeing the little sepulchers with the old toys on them. “So what’s the story? Did they sacrifice their sons and then repented?”

  A voice answered him, “Who are you to judge the terror of a people so far away in time? So far from your so civil and comfortable world.” The place made the voice echo from everywhere, deforming it. “Because today it doesn’t happen. It never happens that parents sacrifice their children, regretting the future they created for their own inability to fight.”

  Everything here was drenched in a sinister religion, and Dagger’s mind soon went back to the belly of Skyrgal. Forgotten powers, buried by the sands of time.

  He found Mumakil again following the long shadow he cast in the belly of the crab. The black man was sitting in front of a fire shielded by a translucent, green spiral shell, which dyed the whole place and made the painted figures move as if they were dancing on the floor of the sea.

  The winged steed was crouched beside him, its sleepy head resting on its closed wings.

  Dagger joined them, still looking around. “You’ve changed since the last time I saw you.”

  “You too.” The black man didn’t look up, his eyes fixed on the flames. “We all change incessantly, and we who come into contact with the gods or the anti-gods change even faster. Usually for the worst.”

  “Like Warren? The last thing he said was that
he wanted to see the sea. It’s strange that he’s not here too.”

  Mumakil tilted his head to the side. “You wake up from a dream like that, and the first person you think about is your enemy?”

  “He was not my enemy!” Dag said, perhaps with too much conviction. “Even though sometimes I wish he really was, at least it would be easier to handle him.”

  “Fire,” Mumakil replied.

  “Hmm?”

  “Some people are fire, and fire is an unpredictable thing,” he continued. “No one knows which way a flame will go. Some people, instead, are like water. They follow a predictable, boring course. But you don’t want to be around the rare times they stop doing that.”

  “Tell the truth. As a good black man, you ate him.”

  This time Mumakil stared at him, clearly not understanding his irony. “Warren was yet another victim of changes. He thought he was still living in his old world of intrigues and subterfuges…he must have learned the hard way that none of us is the axis around which the All revolves.”

  “What happened to him?”

  The black man shook his head. “I don’t know. I lost contact with him after the black tower and my austere, winged friend, here, has not yet been able to find him, neither alive, nor dead…nor everything in between. When I planned the destruction of Sabbath—”

  “Wait a minute. That was your doing?” Dagger sat on the other side of the fire.

  Mumakil smiled. “I admit the timing was totally wrong. My only regret is that I wasn’t there while Missy and my black baby with his long silver chains shaved down that damn place. Don’t think it’s fortunate to be able to manage the creatures of the dark.” His smile disappeared. “I could because I’m one of them. It was light to make us so.”

  “Yeah, I noticed you’re all a bit tanned.”

  “Do these jokes come to you on the spot or someone writes them for you?”