“
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.