God of Emptiness

by Walt Popester

  The road ran alongside a very high cliff. He turned back. In the moonlight, he saw hundreds of men, women, and boys—armed with swords that seemed to have seen better times—pounce on them. Fast in the dark, their unknown saviors had surrounded the Beshavis-Tankars pushing them toward the ravine, and then down in the sea of amber ruins below. They exceeded the beasts three to one in number, and used long poles held sideways in a full-frontal assault, but the physical size of their enemies made the element of surprise the only winning weapon.

  Marduk rode a mogwart that still trailed a broken beam. He circumvented his enemies, buried his sword in the face of a woman, and beheaded an old man. A girl didn’t dodge in time and the blade cut off her ear and cheek, exposing an awkward smile.

  “NO!” Anger pushed the boy at her side to tempt fate. He brandished his sword with both hands and cut off an ear of the giant mogwart. Mad with pain, the beast jolted Marduk, disarming him. Aided by his fellows, the boy pushed the Disciple down to the ruin.

  Dagger knew he didn’t have much time. He ran away with his hands behind his back, regardless of the fate of the other prisoners, the Disciples, the Tankars, of those who had freed them and the whole damn world that kept on dying around him. He ran, but tripped and fell rolling on the ground. He looked up to see the last group of Tankars surrounded by the young fighters.

  A Beshavis laid his hands on the shoulders of a young Tankar, probably his son. He raised his face to the sky. “If you can hear us, Exodus,” he shouted. “Forgive us!” He didn’t wait for death: he walked back without stopping, soon imitated by his fellows—rag dolls falling into nothingness.

  Dagger felt nausea. That’s what always happens. That’s mortal life. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of it all. Before he could move a step, twenty swords had already encircled him. The warriors holding them wore an indefinite variety of armor, almost all in leather, here and there reinforced by rings or metal plates. Someone wore a helmet, too big, someone else unpaired boots.

  Dag looked for something sensible to say. “I have no intention to hurt you,” was the best thing he could come up with. He found something to laugh about, bowing his head and waiting for another death. He watched their feet, and noticed now that some were barefoot.

  “May Ktisis take the eye he left me, if I no longer believe what I see!”

  Dagger looked up. The circle of swords broke and a boy stepped forward. He wore worn leather, with the remains of what had once been the symbol of the Sword on the chest—an unmistakable smile on his face, a bandage over his left eye.

  Dagger laughed. “Ianka!”

  “Dag!” Schizo laughed heartily. “He’s an Hotankar! He still is!”

  The others looked at each other. “Hotankar?” one said. “Ktisis, he’s got the Spiral on his chest!”

  Ian murmured, “It would be enough to remove the pause after Ktisis.”

  Dagger raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  “Ktisis has got the Spiral on his chest. Okay, that was a complicated joke, but…hahaha, Dag!” Schizo hugged Dagger. Then he looked at him, patted on his shoulder, and turned to the others. “You know the rules, my brave Hotankars. If he’s really a big shot, we must bring him to our pack leader!”

  “I don’t agree, First Hotankar!” A thug came forward drawing his sword. He had only taken one step, when Ianka unsheathed his manegarm sword to hold him at bay.

  “The boss will decide,” Ianka said. “What problem do you ex stonecutters have? Did Ktisis fart in your heads when you were born?”

  “What do we do with the prisoners?”

  “Yeah, the damn prisoners…” Schizo turned to the road covered with corpses. Some of the wagons escorting Dagger were still intact, and the placid mogwarts that carried them grazed the weed among the rocks.

  “We need hands,” Ian said.

  “To do what?” Dagger asked.

  “To dig. Everyone is digging on this side of the world, don’t you know?” He whistled to draw the attention of all. “Gather everything that may come in handy. We’re leaving.”

  The Hotankars obeyed.

  Schizo helped Dagger to his feet, yet he didn’t break his chains. “We got a tip-off. Godivah warned our pack leader of your arrival before the Disciples raided the Sanctuary. We know everything.”

  They reached the scattered remains of the wagon where Dagger was. Some priests, among the wooden splinters, crawled back seeing them coming.

  Ian examined them one by one, focusing at last on the one with mayem teeth. He froze. “You, too, here?”

  The man returned his gaze with a metallic grin on his face. “Oh my Ktisis, look what the cat dragged in,” he said. “You’ve come a long way, my little boy. Do you still scream in the night? Do you still scream my name?”

  “Arax,” Ianka called him in a whisper. “It’s hard to forget you and your heavy breath. Did you finally find the dead rat in your throat?”

  Dagger realized that the priest would never let Ianka’s irony have the better of the fear born out of memories.

  “Look at the wonderful moons,” Arax said. “Remember our game? Yellow moon, me. Red moon, you.”

  Schizo nodded. He looked up to the sky. The golden moon slowly hid behind a nomadic cloud, painting Candehel-mas red blood. He laughed. “Angra wants it.” He moved his blade in a slow arc, placing it sideways. “I forgive you.” He used the weapon like an axe and drove it into the cheekbone of Arax. The priest screamed, putting his hands to his face, when the boy used the sword to pry the skull. He pushed, pulled, and pushed and pulled until, with a sound like that of a branch slowly breaking, the man’s head split. Blood and brains leaked copiously from the skull—a dripping mess of moist death.

  In the silence that followed, the sword tip elegantly touched the ground as Ianka stared into the past.

  Dag ran a hand on his own cheek, to clean it up from a blood splash. “Ian?”

  Schizo turned to Dagger, his face filthy. “I knew him, you know?” he said.

  They were soon in march. The other fighters picked up what they could use again and carry easily—mostly weapons and pieces of armor, before following along with the prisoners who survived the attack.

  “First Hotankar, this looks interesting.” A little girl brought Ianka a small box made of a green, porous metal: mayem. It was squared, free of friezes, and without a keyhole.

  “What do they hold in there, Ktisis?” the First Hotankar said.

  “No,” Dagger answered. He put a hand on it and the metal came to life, becoming shiny. Just like Redemption!

  “Cocksucker!” Ian dropped the box and blew on his burned hands. “What else?”

  The little girl made a black book appear. “I found this in the wagon at the head of the procession, the one where the Disciple was.”

  Dawn! Dagger thought, feeling nausea.

  “You know what that is, do you?”

  “No,” Dagger lied. “But…try to take care of it.”

  “You’ve never been good at saying bullshit,” Schizo said, quickly scrolling Dawn’s pages. “Now, is that any way to write? People’s calligraphy can be really terrible!”

  “Is it cool stuff?” asked the little girl who had found that.

  “No. Books are boring things. But take everything to our base.” Ianka dismissed her ruffling her hair. “A metal box that you can’t open and a book someone wrote with a pen stuck in his ass…weapons, for Ktisis! It’s with those that you win wars! By the way, never mind the chains. They are meant to reassure the others, you know? Although, to be honest, I’ve never considered you too reliable. Stitched up two-three times by Warren, I find you handcuffed on a wagon of slaves Asa-bound. Are you sure you know your way?”

  “I did my best. But I begin to think that everybody wants me here.”

  “I wouldn’t bet my sword on that.”

  “What happened to Erin? Why isn’t she here with you?”

  That question took the smile away from his friend’s face. “You’ll meet her again. Now I�
��m not in the mood for a summary.”

  “I may not be good at lying and you may have just one eye left, but you can read everything inside it.”

  “You’ll meet again, I told you!” Schizo said with an angry note that Dagger had never perceived in his voice. “You too should understand that. It means she’s still alive. Be happy with that!”

  The First Hotankar led them through steep and narrow streets, following a path sketched in his mind. They walked under an obelisk which crashed into a building, and climbed a titanic woman’s face, which emerged from the debris to shout her anger against the sky. Dag often turned back, but for the moment only the vigilant eyes of the statues seemed to watch over his path. The air felt more humid and warmer than it did before he died. Is the desert really gone?

  They camped for a few hours at the foot of a sandstone crab, and at dawn resumed their endless ascension into the abyss, into the void, into nothingness.

  “What happened after we split up?” Dagger dared to ask at one point of the long march.

  Ian continued to walk in silence, until he said, “We were given to the slave traders. Things have happened. When I met these people, I was in chains like you. Orgor continuously organizes expeditions to Asa, where the Disciples have withdrawn. According to our pack leader, They are building a new army.”

  “Your pack leader?”

  Ianka turned to him. “I think you’ll like our boss.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “The Disciples must take the temple again, start to dig again, and take the Sword again. And when people must do so many things again, they need a lot of arms. They won’t give up their revenge against Angra so easily. They’re just reorganizing themselves. They’re, uh…tenacious.”

  “You have no idea.”

  A steep, insidious descent followed. The blackened ruins seemed to dive into the desert from which they had risen like a wave in the sea.

  They reached the ancient bed of a canal, part of a wider irrigation system that had by now disappeared—lines in the sand was almost all that was left of it. They walked down in a single line, holding on to the crumbly rock wall to their left so they did not stumble on the uneven bottom.

  “At least once, there really was water here.”

  “No one knows the course of the underground river, except for where it rises to the surface, because it’s where the ancient wells were dug,” Schizo explained. “Some fell into disuse. Others resisted against the flow of time along with the stubborn life that clung to them.”

  “Like you guys?”

  “We’re no longer alive. We’re the survivors of a world that no longer exists. Former Guardians, former priests, former inhabitants of Agalloch, Molok, and human territories. We’re just the shadows of a society that enjoyed the grapes of wrath. The river links us all together, even if we don’t see it. I shudder to think about it. I feel like there’s something more to that, don’t you?”

  They climbed a winding path that twisted and turned on the side of a hill, among countless boulders on which it was possible to see the signs of the past flowing of water. Beyond a high, rocky outcrop, a rift in the stone appeared.

  Ianka warned him, “Play the part of the prisoner with our boss. No jokes, no irony, no puns, no nothing.”

  Once they crossed the threshold of the narrow, black slit, it became impossible to walk in a single line. Dagger couldn’t even rest both feet at the same time, and his shoulders continuously hit the sharp rock.

  “Welcome back, First Hotankar,” said a voice in the dark, followed by others.

  Dagger thought he saw the glint of a blade and the tip of an arrow in that wide blackness—pointing at him.

  “Big game, guys,” Ian said to the Hotankars guarding the passage.

  The long, narrow walls flowed into a vast cave overlooking a deep pit. The air was humid and fresh. Dagger closed his eyes and breathed, forgetting the desert.

  Ianka stopped, staring into the void. The freed prisoners looked at him, waiting to know their fate.

  “If you’re not the first one who smells a rat against the wind and defend the piece of land you depend on, you can’t expect someone to do it for you,” Schizo said. “Tonight dreams are allowed. Tomorrow is a new day. Don’t expect happy days and fight with us. Even dying for something is a luxury these days. The stars are out of reach.” He nodded to his companions, who led the prisoners through one of the passages in the cave.

  It was just the two of them, now. Ianka advanced on the last threshold before the abyss and put his hands on his hips. “Come and enjoy the show, Ktisis.”

  In chains, Dagger walked to his side. “Wow,” he let out, looking down.

  A forest suspended in a blue-green mist lay at the bottom of the well. The big, tortuous branches squeezed into the ruined arches of a ramp carved into the rock. They eradicated the exotic, black, and curvy caryatids placed as ornament to the pillars. Dagger was sure that, hundreds of years before, he would have seen tireless mogwarts climbing up and down the helical path with barrels on their backs. The levels the water reached in the course of history were still visible on the inner wall, as well as the holes for the ropes. The mighty branches penetrated in the cave where Dagger and Ianka were, which probably had once been an old collateral structure. They covered the ceiling and descended into the underground, proliferating everywhere along with the white, spiral appendages covering them.

  Dag felt a slight pressure on his hands, and then his chains were broken. He turned around and met the smiling eyes of his friend, pliers in hands.

  “We’re independent,” Ianka said. “We’ve got water and we can take care of our sustenance, since we never get more people than we can feed.”

  “And since not all of you come back alive from your sorties.”

  Ianka nodded once. “Look at the bright side. It’s a process that selects the most skilled ones, and we’re becoming a band of chosen warriors.”

  Dagger heard footsteps behind him.

  It Was Hagga. “Your illusions will melt like ice in the sun at dawn, when the power will rise in the east,” the man said. “For now you’re tolerated, but the spring is under tension and it will soon release its awakened force.”

  Dagger turned to his friend. “This is Hagga, banished from the Sanctuary.”

  Schizo didn’t answer. Light was gone from his eye. He went away, kicking a stone.

  “Nice to see you again,” the priest said.

  Dagger watched Ianka vanish into darkness. “Who are you really?”

  “A traitor and a thief.” Hagga sat right next to the arch to the outside. “There are faults the world will never forgive you, like the clothes you decided to wear or the stigma you bear on your chest. You should know.”

  The boy wasn’t satisfied with that. “What happened at the Sanctuary? Those desperate mothers, the unaware children…”

  “In your opinion?”

  “The priests fed on people’s pain by sacrificing their children, just like the Gorgors did in honor of Hanoi.”

  The priest was silent. He shook his head. “No. The priests fed directly on their children.” He gave Dagger time to metabolize those words, then he added, “Don’t gross out at it. Sooner or later every society does that, even though it often happens in a more…metaphorical, elegant way. But there are many ways to make future precarious, unstable, and tamable in every possible way.”

  “They…”

  “The pool at the center of the Sanctuary porch had a mayem bottom, remember? That’s the head of the Hammer. Its sacred waters, like that of the fountain, come from an underground spring. Thanks to the heat provided by the presence of Ktisis, water ascended from the depths of the earth, ran along its metal imperfections, and gushed out.”

  The river…Dag thought.

  “It was a miraculous water, with healing and redeeming properties, and that has made the fortune of the Sanctuary. The only drawback is that on a precise day of the year, the god’s soul heated the water enough to boil
it.” Now Hagga wasn’t smiling anymore.

  Dagger never thought he would find the image of the children playing in the pool so sinister. “Ktisis…”

  “He himself,” the Hermit’s pupil answered. “After the sacrifice, the priests gathered around the white marble table at the foot of the monumental fountain, and honored the god of Emptiness just like their ancestors once worshiped the unknown god. Rites survive through the centuries. They mutate and change, yet they always celebrate the same demons: those deep in our head—the instincts dictated by the primitive layers of our mind. The Holy Father wore a wooden mask of Ktisis and danced at the head of the table, watching his brothers as they feasted on the dismembered victims served on mayem dishes. Aeternus used to do the same, once, and maybe he still does. On a certain day of the year, in the petrified stomach of Skyrgal, he and his predecessors slit the throat of a young virgin before proceeding with the rest.”

  Dagger fought against a contraction of his abdomen.

  “You’re too sensitive, my boy, after all that you’ve seen.”

  “Every once in a while this world surprises me too.” He belched inside his mouth and closed his eyes. “And what happens to the kids? Do you still sacrifice them that way?”

  The priest shook his head. “No. Not that way, since Ktisis is no longer at the Sanctuary. There are several ways to destroy the future leaving it alive, and many ways to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. After all, if a man decides to hide from the eyes of the world and take shelter among four white walls to prolong a dark, ignorant past, he does so only because of his inadequacy to some aspects of existence. Conveniently concealed behind a veil of holiness, any horror and abuse can take place, any instinct have vent. Common people will avert their gazes in front of virtually anything so as not to offend a god. Any god.” He ran a hand on his bald head again. “Candehel-mas is like this. Killers save the world. Heroes have a soft spot for virginity.”

  “Dag!” Ianka called from the bottom of the cave. “Our pack leader wants to see you. Now!”

  The priest smiled and said, “Go, boy. Your mother is calling.”