Dagger - The Light at the End of the World (4 page)
Read Dagger - The Light at the End of the World Online
Authors: Walt Popester
Tags: #horror, #fantasy, #heavy metal, #dagger, #walt popester
descent into the putrid horizon of Melekesh, the screaming stopped.
Pain had the better of him and he closed his eyes.
He heard the wind.
And the wind-borne sand.
* * *
* *
Thirteen years
earlier
.
2. Desecrated Trinity
The cry of the wind was the
only audible sound in the vast silence that hung over the ruins of
Adramelech, the ancient and glorious Gorgors’ Metropolis, made a
desert by the tireless work of time. The titanic stone faces that
emerged from sand, the ruined domes and megalithic walls were all
that remained of its ancient inhabitants’ dream; to build a city
worthy of Skyrgal, their god and creator, where he could bring his
reign in blood once he’d risen again. Now there was nothing left of
the ancient splendor, but the ruins half buried under the desolate
dunes, sent from the desert to claim back the space from which it
had once been stolen. Under the ocher line that bisected the city,
hid the ancient
Master
way. It was this path the woman was following, head bowed and
her step uncertain. She wore a worn-out tunic and a cap on the hair
as the last refuge from the fury of the elements. The ruins swirled
the treacherous currents to push dust between her lips and the
narrow slits of her eyes, blinding her. Still, she stubbornly
dragged forward, propelled only by the fear of failure.
For a Guardian, failure is
never contemplated,
she recited in her
mind, and then again,
All steps you have
taken in your life have led you here!
The first commandment of the
Guardians. Her favorite one. Those words had a personal meaning for
her since the first time she read them. They were engraved in the
stone arch at the entrance to the Fortress of Golconda, that one
place that, even if for a short period of her life, had been
synonymous with home. The pain of a memory suddenly seized
her:
‘It’s not really a commandment. It
seems a sort of premise,’
she said to her
Guardian instructor when, as a child, she stepped in the arena for
the first day of her training. Long, long before then. She
remembered how he smiled, putting a hand on her hair, as if to
caress her. She remembered. She remembered the coldness in his eyes
as he began to beat her viciously in front of her companions, to
teach her in the most effective way the meaning of blind obedience,
the unquestioned loyalty to the six commandments of Angra. For a
moment, she wondered if it was not just the complete confidence in
the truths revealed from above to have led the world to ruin. It
was only a fleeting doubt, soon swept away by the storm along with
what remained of her strength. Now, that first, unusual commandment
only sounded a bit sarcastic to her. Truly, many steps had taken
her right there, on her knees in the dark and cold.
moment, at the top of an obelisk, she saw the shadow of a Tankar, a
marauder of the desert, opening wide his jaws to the sky and
stretching his claws to the currents of the East. He was alerting
his companions she had entered their territory. From then on every
moment was the right one to shake the cold hand of death. She
grinned. No. They would not attack her, they were afraid. Not of
her, of course, but of the shadow that was chasing her. She hugged
the burden she was carrying to her breast, as if she was hiding the
most important thing in the world. Then she pulled herself to her
feet to walk on.
I’m almost there. Almost!
Entranced by her tormented thoughts, she
nearly didn’t notice she had reached the ‘light at the end of the
world’ and, with it, the only refuge that night would offer. It was
a filthy tavern for stonecutters, created under the imposing arches
of a bridge collapsed, nobody knew how long before, in the dry bed
of the river that once it crossed. The first, or last, outpost of
civilization, there at the invisible boundary with the Pacific
desert and the horrors that lurked in its yellow womb.
After days of walking through the ruins,
she set her foot on the one wooden step that was still emerged from
the sand. She knew she was suspended between the two lives she had
lived. Or maybe, between life and something that had never been
life. The fragments of voices coming from inside the tavern crept
in the wind, together with the clinking of mugs. They sounded like
the enchanted sounds from a world far away, forever lost. She
opened the door and let the fury of the storm in. Some of the
stonecutters who sat in the heat turned to her, their faces barely
lit by the dancing flames in the fireplace.
“
That door won’t close on
its own!” cried the innkeeper, somewhere in the faint, reddish
light.
pulled down her hood, revealing a pleasant face marred by a deep
scar on the right cheek. Despite this, many of the stonecutters
looked with a cloudy interest at the small breasts’ protuberances
under the worn and dirty clothes, the white skin and the hair that
shone like copper in the dim light. Some of them, not necessarily
the most drunk ones, would have tried to win her favors in a more
or less legitimate way, was it not for the giant broadsword secured
on her back, the belt of daggers on her belly and the long knife
tied to the calf.
The woman stumbled undisturbed to the table
at the bottom, the most discreet one, and collapsed on a stool. At
no time did she broke the protective embrace on the bundle she
carried with her. She arranged it in such a way that no one could
peek inside it, though very few were wondering what she was
carrying in there now that her firm buttocks, perfectly laid on the
stool, awoke in them feelings that some thought even lost.
Soon I’ll kill you. Soon I’ll kill you and
it’s going to be all over.
“
This fucking storm has
stopped everything. The quarry, the shipping, everything!” She
heard someone murmur behind her, while someone else, on her right,
said,“Yes, truly a nice ass.”
“
Three months, Ktisisdamn!
Three months that none of us works! I talked to the boss, told him,
‘What the fuck, do you want to starve us to death?’”
“
Yeah, you were
right…”
“
The fool
just answered, “And what am I supposed to do, pray to the gods? Go
to the light at the end of the world, and you’ll eat for free!’ I
thought he meant
death
, with that expression.”
“
Yeah, death…”
“
Then I
come to know that, as long as the storm lasts, the
desert mayor
threatened
to raze to the ground the taverns that do not empty their
warehouses, and I realized what he meant. Yep, I love that man and
the way he talks to people, I mean it. I will vote for him again
but, holy shit! Now there’s only beer left!”
“
Yeah,
beer…”
“
Barrels
and barrels of beer and not a fuckin’ bone to chew on! My little
one, he’s begun to hunt mices, you know? He runs after them with a
stick, smashes their skull with a blow and would eat’em raw, for
the hunger, if someone does not stop him. If the wind keeps on
blowing like this I’ll have to kill the dog, though I doubt there’s
still meat attached to that four-legged skeleton. My children won’t
like that. We picked it up from the street just six months ago, but
at least they’ll have something to eat. At least I won’t have to
kill the weakest of them to feed the brothers, just like last year.
They didn’t know where that meat came from, they were too hungry to
ask. But I did. I cannot debone another one of my children, Iahn!
Do you know the noise it makes a bone so small when it’s broken? I
hear it every night. Every damn night!”
“
Yeah,
every night…”
She closed her eyes, drew a
deep breath, and prayed.
My Angra, how can
you allow all this suffering?
she thought,
but said nothing. All the world that was dying around her was none
of her business.
the table. She lifted her face to look at him, finding no welcoming
smile. Those people were not accustomed to good manners, it seemed.
And they stank. They stank of the stale sweat brought as a gift by
the lack of water and the long hours of work under the worst
weather conditions possible, spent at dismantling the old
Adramelech’ walls to extract stone for the civilized world.
She felt an instinctive sympathy for
them.
“
I’d recognize a Guardian of
that Ktisisdamn Fortress even from miles away,” the old innkeeper
began. He ran a hand over his dirty apron in a nervous gesture.
“Probably for that trunk of a sword that you always carry around. A
sword of Manegarm, ain’t it? When I was a little kid my grandfather
always told me about your swords. He said you could catch the soul
of a god with those, yes, those fuckin’ swords. Even then I
wondered what depraved and corrupt people would play with a god’s
soul. Wherever they go, guardians bring death with them, and also
inside.” He looked at her, grimly, before adding, “What do you
want, in this place of peace?”
“
Beer. A lot of beer. And
milk.”
opened his mouth to reply, when the chubby hand of a newborn baby
popped out from the bundle on the woman’s chest. Now it was clear
for whom was the beer and for whom the milk.
“
Uhm
,” he muttered. “A Guardian and a baby. Terrible match. For
the wrath of Skyrgal, a child so small shouldn’t—”
“
Milk,” she ordered, looking
at him as if suggesting that whatever she was doing there, was none
of his business. He passed his hand on the apron once
again.
“
We have no milk here,” he
said. “I mean, look around you, woman. People is fuckin’ starving
here! Where do you think I—”
“
I know. I’ve kept my ears
open. In addition to the chatter I heard other voices, barely
perceptible, talking about how your son is not even losing weight
while in this poor people’s slum death follows death, hopping from
one baby cot to the other. Voices that came from that table over
there DON’T turn around, dammit, do not turn around. The man
without a hand and the woman older than him, surely you know them.
They were talking about making you pay for it, if they discovered
something about it. The way they thought to make you pay… well,
I’ll spare you the details. However, nothing compared to what a
mother discreetly armed can do, with a child who has not eaten in a
long time in his arms. Now that’s a terrible match.”
He loved to read in the eyes of the people.
“
We’ve got only
Mokai.”
“
And what is
that?”
“
Skar – raw milk, fermented
in a barrel with honey, bacon and dried fruit. It’s the specialty
here. We also give it to small children to help them survive the
cold, of course… not so small.”
“
Well, that won’t kill him,”
she replied. “And I always like to taste the specialties of the
place, even when it comes to a bunch of yokels – plague victims
like you.”
go away, together with his stupid skeptical look, before taking off
a strip of cloth that wrapped the baby to look at him. She could
not remember how long it had been since the last time she had done
it. The hardness on her face, the deep furrows of tiredness, even
the scar on her cheek melted into a sweet motherly smile.
“
Soon I’ll kill you, sweet
child o’ mine,” she whispered. “Yes, soon I’ll kill you and it’s
going to be all over. At least for you.”
not just her. Even some of the stonecutters raised their eyes to
look around, confused, as if they were aware of something wrong
beyond the sweet wall that intoxication had erected around their
senses. The temperature lowered, as well as light. Her heart began
to beat stronger and faster and she found herself planting her
nails in the table to remain calm.
She could feel his stench.
The tavern door swung open and everyone
turned. In the rectangle of darkness, opened on the storm, a shadow
appeared, vaguely human, that even sand and wind seemed to
circumvent in fearfulness.
It’s him!
she thought, while an electric thrill ran through
her legs.
He didn’t send Gorgors after me.
He wants to do the dirty work himself!
counter and shouted,“That damn door!”
The shadow took no notice of his words. He
moved a step, emerging from darkness. Rich black silk fabrics
wrapped his whole body, including his face, exposing only the right
eye in which shone a yellow and malignant light, not reflecting
that of the hearth. An ancient scimitar, with a finely crafted
handle, was by his side. The shadow had nothing else with him,no
bag for food, no water supply, no equipment to deal with the
eternal winter of that land. He marched under the astonished gaze
of everyone to reach the table where the woman sat, and looked down
on her. The innkeeper went to close his damn door by himself,
before approaching the two with a no longer hostile, but seriously
worried, expression.
“
What can I—?”
hand. Two red and fat larvae emerged between the bandages folds,
falling on the floor, satiated of death. The hand was black and
skeletal, with a few flesh shreds still attached to the yellowish
phalanges. It did not belong to a living being, nor a being that
had died recently, after all. The host swallowed a lump of saliva
and walked away, silent.
