“Prefect—” the great Mama started to say.
Mawson needed just to lift a finger to shut him up. “Do you want to bargain, old man?” he said. “Then I’ll make you an offer to avoid other accidents like this. Me and my men close all of you in this wretched place and set it on fire. Yet I doubt these four axes of rotten wood can catch fire, and anyway, what would be the use of it?” he snorted. “What good would it be to burn down this whole damn sewer? Rats like you would find a way to escape and, within a short span of time, you’ll build from scratch your little wicked world once again. Because wealth feeds on misery. And all in all, this city is very wealthy. At least for those who rule us all from the top of the Hill and say, with their every action, ‘keep the change!’”
The Great Mama assumed a serious expression. “How many of them do you want?” he tried. “Ten? Twenty? They’re all yours. You can do what you want with them. I don’t think what this little piece of shit has done is worth more than the life of twenty of the others.”
“Not if this little piece of shit has robbed the son of a nobleman.”
Mama’s eyes widened for the surprise. “The son of a—?”
“Yes. The son of a particularly obsessive nobleman,” the prefect interrupted him. “And you know how my ass and yours is afloat until the balance that governs the existence of this crappy city is not compromised. I must say, this is a very effective way to compromise it. If the child of a nobleman is robbed, the latter will ask me to bring him the head of the guilty. Otherwise he will have the lawful right to take mine. And I don’t want to lose my head. I need it.”
“We’ve never worked on the Hill, we know that it’s forbidden!” Mama said.
“I know, I know. But apparently that good boy did well to occasionally frequent the bad places,” Mawson replied. “Of course, the boy here has been a little unlucky, but such is life.”
Once he said that, he pulled the sword from under his cloak, as if he had got tired of words.
Just seeing the sharp blade, rekindled the survival instinct in Dagger. He looked around, but the situation was falling apart too fast to think of a solution. He looked at Mama, who was also caught off guard. The old man was never caught off guard and this only increased his sense of loss. Surrender or fight to the end? It was over, all over, he thought, but he did not want to die. Only now when his time was close at hand he realized how much he cared to live.
Funny.
“Go… to hell!” Everybody turned around. Seeth was standing in the doorway. She spoke again, “Leave him alone!”
Dagger shook his head, speechless. Seeth came forward and limped past him.
“Even dead may walk,” Sannah muttered, aghast.
Her face. Her face was like in his dream, a framework of deep and red cuts. Dagger felt the cold hand of terror grab his throat and prevent him from breathing.
“It was me. I’ll pay for what I did, whatever the price!”
Dagger took her by the arm and pulled her, but in a moment Mama threw him to the ground and blocked him with one foot on the neck. As always, the old man had already decided who suited him best to sacrifice.
“Red eyes!” he said. “Of course! This fuckin’ albino also has them!”
“NO!” Dagger cried in the grip of panic. “No! Please! NO!”
Mawson shrugged. “Really touching.”
Seeth collected what was left of her strength and spat in his face. She was immediately landed and beaten by the guards, for long, methodically. When they were finished, she was stunned and could not speak anymore.
“Sons of a bitch!” Dagger cried. “Sons of a bitch!”
“Shut up!” Mama ordered, struggling to hold him down. “What in bloody hell do you want to do, be torn to pieces in her place? Look! She’s already dead!”
From that position Dagger could see only Mawson’s boots approach.
“What happened to the girl’s face, old man?”
“It was an accident.”
“An accident? It seems to me someone has enjoyed to redraw it, just like you filthy animals usually do to punish your subdued. You should really try it out.”
The old man was about to reply when, in a single motion, the prefect opened a gash on his cheek and then on the other. Right to left. Left to right.
Sannah yelled but did not move, merely bringing his hands to his bleeding face.
“Anyway, you did well to leave her eyes in place,” Mawson replied, sheathing back his dagger. “Those will be enough. Keep the boy if you care so much about him. My men will think about everything.”
That said, he turned away. Dagger grabbed the knife from the ground and broke free from the hold of Mama, still distracted by his wounds. He sprang to the prefect, but Mawson turned around, unsheathing his sword at the same time, and wounded him on the chest, tearing his robe.
The boy was on his guard. “Leave my sister be, asshole!”
Mawson lowered his sword and raised a hand to the guards, who were about to pounce on the boy. “Stop!” he ordered. “ALL OF YOU!”
Dagger wondered why he had not let the guards massacre him. Maybe he just wanted to save that pleasure for himself, he thought, when he realized the prefect was not looking at him with hate, now, nor in anger. He looked suspicious. He approached and, with the tip of his blade, uncovered his chest. His eyes were suddenly crossed by a spark of desire and fear. Dagger could read in people’s eyes, he had been forced to learn it from the game of survival; that was the look of a man in front of a wealth too big to be hold with his bare hands. The prefect’s lips trembled, twitched, to let finally escape a shaky, “Oh, Ktisisdamn!”
Dagger looked down.
∞
The mark. Mawson had seen the mark that was on his chest since he had been abandoned. Dagger knew its story, Sannah had told him. That was the symbol pirates used to tattoo on the sternum of the children in whom they found clear signs of a curse, before abandoning them to the currents of the sea. The old man had picked him up on a beach, in a wicker basket, and took him with him. Doom, red eyes, abandonment. He never questioned that story, he never had the interest nor the reason. It did not matter. It had never mattered.
He took advantage of the situation and snapped in a flash, with the sole purpose of scarring that man. When he felt the blade slide down his freshly shaven cheek he did not dare to strike again. He realized he had made it. He would never thought it was possible to hurt the prefect, but he had done it. The whole town would remember his name since that day and now, he said to himself, he was ready to die.
Mawson ran a hand over his face, to uncover his blood-stained grin. “Make that bitch stand up!” he ordered his guards, who dragged Seeth to stand up face-to-face with Dagger.
The two looked each other into their red eyes. Mawson nodded to a guard, who immediately immobilized the boy with the black arm around his neck.
“You see,” Mawson said. “You probably don’t think I’m a good guy, but I have this problem, I don’t like sewer rats like you, and sewer rats like you do not like me.”
Mama came to his senses. “Mawson, you can’t—” he tried to say, before being interrupted by a fast slap from the prefect.
“I know what I can do! I know what I have to do to keep everyone of you in line!” he boomed. He pulled his sword and laid it on Seeth’s neck, held in place by one hand on the forehead to expose the most tender part of her neck. The girl did not tremble. She showed no sign of fear or weakness. Maybe it was slumber to make her so brave, or maybe not. Maybe she had always been better than he.
She looked straight into Dagger’s eyes, and smiled. “Don’t be afraid, big bro,” she said. “You make a funny foolish face when you’re scared.”
Then the blade slid on her throat, opening a red smile of death. Her eyes turned up, her mouth opened, her legs were shaken by an electric thrill. Seeth paid her last red tribute to the world and fell on the floor. A pool of blood formed on the ground and in that blood Dagger fell to his knees, deprived
of all his strength.
“No,” he just whispered. “No, don’t leave me.” Once again, the great emptiness was filling him. He never thought there might be a pain so deep.
Mawson brought his sword on his neck and Dagger lifted his bare throat, as if he were looking for nothing else than death. The prefect was no longer grinning now. “You,” he said. “You are nothing. And those like you only deserve to live to see their failures.”
He stared into his eyes for one last moment, but Dagger saw nothing but fear in his. That man was afraid of him. Why? That question remained dormant in his mind when the prefect stunned him with a kick to his temple. He clenched his fists and tried to get up in his sister’s blood—without success. Mawson sheathed the blade and Dagger, on the ground, watched him go. His mind emptied of every thought and feeling; his contracted lips trying to say something. He didn’t even feel pain, now. In the land between consciousness and unconsciousness, he swore to himself he would have killed the man.
He would kill him, he said. Then he fainted.
When he opened his eyes again, it was dark. He was still lying on the ground and was hitting the floor long enough to make his knuckles bleed. Mama was sitting next to him with a bottle of wine next to half-full, in addition to those he had already emptied. He noticed that the boy was awake and held out a hand, but Dagger ignored it. He caught a glimpse of the compassionate Spiders’ eyes, perhaps the only family he had ever known, looking at him, peeping out of the door. Now none of them was laughing. They were sorry for him, but he did not want their pity. Pity was a form of despise, he had always believed.
The old man made an impatient gesture and all the Spiders went back into their holes, leaving him alone in the cold of night. Dagger turned to look at what remained of Seeth. He passed a hand over her remaining eye; the other one had been dug out as a proof of death to show to the nobleman who had decreed it. He closed it forever. Her face was cold. He, too, was going cold and soon there was no place for pain. He just felt that deep emptiness swallowing him more and more at every breath, at every heartbeat.
He tried to pull himself up and found himself on his knees with hands planted in dry blood. “You killed her,” he said. “It was me who had to die.”
Mama sighed. “I cannot let you die,” he replied. “After all, you cannot die. This is why, there’s no Redemption for you.”
The cruel tone that had always characterized his voice was gone now, but Dagger had not heard a single one of his words. He raised his open hand. With the other drew his knife. The Great Mama looked nervous, perhaps forgetting that Dagger would have never dared to strike him. The boy used the knife to open a cut on his hand, fusing his blood with that of Seeth. Then he clenched his fingers into a fist and looked at their blood falling drop by drop, melted together forever.
“Nothing’s left to us but bury her,” said the old man.
“I won’t let you bury her,” he said. He got up and loaded the frail body of his sister on his shoulders, before starting to walk. The old man was too drunk to stop him.
* * * * *
Twelve years he had wasted looking for the Spiral, anywhere, from the port of Melekesh to the Hill; beating every damn street, every house; torturing and destroying entire families.
Fuck!
Every death had deprived him of his humanity, in the meantime, pushing further his goal, until it had almost disappeared. Until he had forgotten what was the purpose of that bloody research, and there was nothing left but the pleasure of it in itself.
Shit. Shit! SHIT!
Killing had become living, a worthy vent to his inner malaise. He had been repeatedly punished for his incapacity and, after each punishment, he was back on the search with even more tenacity, making his work more brutal every day. Blacklisting and public sacrifices; indiscriminate violence—he had put that whole city under siege against itself, without ever being able to get the spider out of the hole. Get a spider out of the hole, he thought. Sometimes fate shows a subtle sense of irony.
He had never considered that Guardians could have been so foolish as to hide the boy in that one place, where there were not even human beings worthy of the name. Where no one even ventured, except in cases of absolute necessity. After all, what’s a stroke of genius, if not a folly which no one would think of?
As he descended the long spiral stairs dug under the tooth of Marbal, the remnant of an ancient volcanic cone eroded by wind, Mawson could not help but let his meandering thoughts torment him. Now, it all made perfect sense. Now everything would change. Yes, he could go down those stairs as a free man to claim his well-deserved reward.
Twelve years of waiting were finally over.
Only, the shadows. He hoped those would agree too. They despised him. They roamed the infinite staircase that went down into the putrid bowels of earth, hidden in the dark, carefully watching his every move. He felt them, and knew he was not welcome. Every so often, he thought to glimpse their red eyes or feel a fetid breath on his neck; he could see, on the edge of his vision, black silhouettes darker than the blackness surrounding them. But when he turned, they were already gone.
He tried to convince himself that his senses were cheating him. That he was alone, yet the shadows were there and were jealous of him. Mawson was the only referent of the Divine in that city, his legs and hands, since he had been brought under there for the first time, in chains and semiconscious. Everything had changed that day. His life, his expectations, even his fears. That place still smelled of death even now that twelve years had passed.
He went down the stairs and crossed the narrow tunnel that would lead him to his presence. He did not perceive any noise down there. Everything was still. His heart was not beating; he did not need to breathe; he felt airborne dust spread against him as he advanced, as if time itself refused to come down there. It had no sense, it could not be, yet it was.
Slowly, from the shadows, emerged the ghostly purple light that illuminated only the black rock floor, leaving the rest of the room in complete darkness. Sat on his throne, the Divine was waiting for him, as always. Light prostrated at his feet, making visible only the boots of the armor he wore. In the still air, Mawson felt the stench of his decomposing body. Several times the Divine had told him he didn’t have his legs and right arm anymore. It was just that armor that allowed him to move. It was made of pure Mayem, the sacred metal that responded to the will of the wearer and, he thought, even to his emotions.
As former chief of the Three Galleons, the prefect always wondered what the value of an armor like that could be. Maybe there was no possible buyer, not on that world. There was no price a father would not pay to see his son walk again. There was nothing he would not do in return.
Behind the throne, the shadows were watching him quietly, safe in the protective embrace of the big dark. They were hostile.
“What do you want from us?” the voice in the armor hissed. “Your confused thoughts upset me.” Light was shaken by the sound waves of the voice.
“I’ve found him, your Eternity.”
The shadows twitched and erupted in their incomprehensible cries, similar to those of a flock of birds in flight. Mawson had never seen them but he knew they were there, in front of his eyes, where they accompanied the Divine’s reaction with their gruesome cries.
“Explain yourself, mortal.”
“The boy you’re looking for is hiding here in Melekesh, as you’ve always sustained,” the prefect said. “To be precise, at the ships cemetery.”
The Divine’s right foot moved. Mawson imagined him leaning forward to pay full attention. He had been waiting for that moment for years, after all, away from existence.
Twelve years, rotting in darkness.
“Are you sure?”
“Guardians surely knew you were on his trail and put us off the track. The bastards are smart. If only I had known the color of his eyes, I could—”
The Divine slammed his fist. The sad figures echoed his anger with the gnashing of t
heir teeth.
“DO YOU THINK THIS MATTERS?” he shouted. “Where is he now?! Why you didn’t bring him me here?!”
Mawson bowed his face. “My Divine. I…” he paused. “I was afraid.”
Then there was silence.
“Fear, you say,” the one who sat in darkness replied. “Yes. You are telling the truth. I can feel it. I always feel everything. It’s this armor, which you think it’s only a prison, to confer me this power. You are really afraid. Afraid of us; afraid of all matters that affect our world; afraid of the ancient god we worship. But I feel even desire. Desire to learn; desire to share, and this is a good thing. Curiosity drives us beyond the boundaries from which fear keeps us away. However, I also feel you’re not telling the whole truth. Tell me what you really want.”
Dagger - The Light at the End of the World Page 9
