“
What in bloody
Ktisis—?”
“
Do you intend to step away
or stay there?”
Dagger moved just in time to hear the hiss
of her blade. A Cruachan fell to the ground right in front of his
eyes, trilling in pain because of the knife plunged into its chest.
It struggled and threw the knife away before attacking Dagger, eyes
bloodshot with killing spree. The boy managed to dodge the hooked
beak just in time for cutting the thin neck and decapitate it. The
Cruachan’s body was crossed by the Mayem sparks while still
trudging forward, driven only by instinct. Finally it fell to the
ground, with no strength and no life. Dagger took a step back,
still pointing the blade against the beast.
“
Dag!” Kugar said,
approaching with an open hand. “It’s over.”
Despite her words, he planted his knife in
the middle of the decapitated head. Only when he saw the bluish
brain trickling between its eyes, he agreed to consider the
Cruachan dead. Then he fell to his knees.
“
It’s over,” Kugar told him
again.
“
No, it’s not over! If there
was one, there will be others! They’re coming. It’s me who’s
bringing them here!”
The girl leaned over, looking at the
animal’s lifeless body. “Don’t be stupid. It was left behind,” she
observed, lifting a wing to show him the wide gashes that had
prevented the beast from flying. “It was wounded during the clash
with the Guardians. It slowed their march. That’s why they have
torn its wings, before leaving it behind. Poor beast. Alone against
the whole world.”
“
Poor beast? He tried to gut
us!”
“
Beasts kill and no one can
blame them for that,” Kugar replied, her eyes unfocused. “There are
no courts in the forest, there’s no moral code. Either you are the
predator or you become the prey. In any case, it has nothing to do
with the group we are following.”
Dagger stared at her. “And what happened to
the ones we were following?” he asked.
“
And how the hell do I know?
At this point, it’s best to let go and get back to the portal. It
was all madness, I shouldn’t have trusted you from the
beginning!”
“
Do you want to give up like
that? This is the turning point!”
“
This is just a damn wall!”
Kugar cried, before looking around. She realized that it was better
not do it again, if she wanted to see the sunset alive. “If this
were the entrance to their lair, it would be monitored much better
and we would already be dead!”
“
Their companions will join
them soon, when they won’t find me in the wreck,” Dagger opined.
“If they come through here, they will show us the way!”
“
It’s risky!”
“
Risky? When we stepped off
the ship you weren’t even alive!”
“
All right!” Kugar
interrupted.
Dagger was surprised. He would have never
thought to win so easily.
“
It will be better to find a
suitable place to spend the night,” she went on, retracing their
steps. “A tree, possibly. Soon, we’ll find ourselves in mud up to
our knees.”
They found a tree sturdy enough to bear
them, close enough to let them see, far enough not to let them be
slaughtered by any passer-by. The rain grew more and more intense.
Kugar could collect enough water to drink, with her cupped hands.
Then she pulled the hood over her head and, with her back resting
against the trunk, began to look straight at the wall.
Dagger lay down on the branch, letting the
rain soak him as always. He watched his dagger, the one that had
saved his life. When it was in his hands, nothing could affect its
luster. He touched the edge and got cut.
“
Don’t play with it,” Kugar
warned. “That light is visible from afar and makes us easy prey.
That’s no ordinary weapon, respect it.”
Dagger didn’t answer. He sheathed back the
blade and clasped his knees with his arms, staring at the rock wall
in turn.
“
What name did you give
it?”
“
To what?”
“
Your knife,” Kugar
answered. “Guardians always give a name to their
weapons.”
“
I never thought about that.
If it really must have a name, it’s going to be
Redemption.”
Kugar grinned. “What a fucking name for a
dagger! Anyway, nothing strange from someone who got called
Dagger.”
The time passed slowly and nothing happened
until, beyond the clouds, the sun began its slow descent into the
horizon.
“
Soon Mothernight will fall
and it will be completely dark,” Kugar said quietly. “There are no
lights in a forest, and no taverns. Have you ever spent a night in
a forest at night, Dag?”
“
No,” he replied. “But if
you want to play at ‘who’s got the longest one’ about the most
dangerous place where we have spent the nights of our life, you
would lose. First, because you’re a girl. Second, because I hope
you’ve never spent an entire night under the corpses of your
comrades, to look dead in the eyes of those who would have liked to
see the color of your guts. If we stay with our butts on these
branches, nothing will happen to us.”
“
Don’t fall asleep, then.
I’m not going to pick you up from the ground.”
“
Did I already say fuck
you?”
“
No more than
necessary.”
Dagger shuddered.
“
What, are you
stunned?”
He did not answer. He lay down on the
branch, keeping in perfect balance with one leg dangling in the
air, and closed his eyes.
‘
Seeth.’
“
Dag!” Kugar called in a
hissing voice. “Wake up, dammit!”
Dagger sat abruptly up and almost lost his
balance. He had fallen asleep as the night spread its dark mantle
over the world. The face of Kugar slowly emerged from the shadows,
illuminated by a light getting stronger and stronger, nearer and
nearer. With a finger to her lips she was advising him to keep
silent. Dagger found nothing to object. Soon from the black of the
night emerged he, or that being, that was making his way through
the trees, severing the dense undergrowth with blades mounted on a
clawed glove. He was not a Gorgor, nor a human.
“
And what the Ktisis is
that?”
“
A Tankar,” Kugar revealed.
“A desert raider. Even them, here.”
The thick fur, wet from the rain, shone at
torch’s fire, giving the Tankar’s mighty body a statuesque
appearance. Atavistic and overwhelming horror were instilled in his
sharp fangs and bloodshot eyes; the black lips contracted in a
constant grin, drooling copiously; the bony orbits and the
prominent forehead; the mane that ran down the back from the head
to the sacrum. The arms, strong and muscular, were as long as his
legs, forcing the being to walk bent to the ground. Every single
vertebra, malleolus and bony prominence emerged from the skin,
while the rest of his body seemed made up of muscle fibers and
tendons. There was not an ounce of fat on that beastly and
ancestral being, in which everything seemed conceived to allow
survival in extreme environments.
It was a living machine of brutal, savage
death.
Dagger turned to Kugar: light shone on her
face, like on everything else around them. If the beast had looked
up, he would have had no difficulty in seeing them. But luckily he
walked on, arriving in front of the wall. Here, he began to push
aside the mud with his paw, of which he used only the front part,
like dogs. Then he stooped down. With the index claw he began to
make little circles on the ground, searching for something, that he
seemed to have found when he grunted smugly. He put his fingers
into the ground, lifted a manhole, and vanished below it.
A trapdoor!
Dagger thought, feeling suddenly the dumbest
creature in the world. “A fuckin’ damn trapdoor!” He turned to look
at the mocking eyes of Kugar, who must have felt as stupid as
he.
But a gust of wind, cold and heavy with
rain, made him feel even more alone than he already was and Kugar
had disappeared. He looked around, convinced that she was on the
trail of the beast. He called her in a whisper, as not to arouse
the shadows around him; in the reconquered darkness, it would be
difficult to recognize a real one from one drawn solely from fear.
He unsheathed Redemption and, with it, was not afraid anymore. He
dropped from branch to branch and jumped to the ground, making his
way through the leaves and clawed branches. He called Kugar again,
before he found himself in front of the rock wall but she was not
there.
He bent down to the ground. In the pouring
rain, he saw that a frame of leaves, mud and stones perfectly
camouflaged the trapdoor, making it invisible with the complicity
of the rain. He picked it up and found himself in front of a deep
hole.
“
Yet another leap in the
dark,” he considered. “Let’s hope it’s not another hold.” He looked
around again, then leaned in to watch. Too forward: he skidded on
the mud and fell face down on the rough stone floor. “Damn you
Ktisis!”
He got up on his knees, immediately on the
watch. In front of him was a long tunnel with smooth and linear
walls, as if it had been carved by expert hands and not from the
cold nature’s will. He saw the distant light of the torch, becoming
smaller and smaller, and nothing else. Only a spark in the dark, he
thought, to follow or from which escape. He turned to the forest,
black and threatening above him. It was not exciting to venture
back out there, alone. Without the guidance of Kugar, it would take
a long time to end up in the loving embrace of Gorgors, but also
the light in front of him would probably run straight to the
shadows. Soon he realized that the only option he was granted, at
that time, was between a sinister light to follow and the darkness
that hounded him.
With the faithful blade at
his side, he took the first step toward the
light.
* * * *
*
Darkness helped the most remote fears
emerge back on the surface from the depths of his conscience, after
the brief respite they had given him. Loneliness and pain returned,
as well as the fear of dying, faced with the inexperience of a
child. The lifeless eyes of Seeth appeared in front of him, the
gash on her throat, the screams of pain rising from the punishment
room in the long sleepless nights at the ship cemetery. It was one
fear with different faces: Sannah and Mawson, Gorgors and the doped
city guards. He pushed that fear back from where it had emerged. He
would not lose control, he swore to himself. He had to repeat it
with more and more conviction when light disappeared, and he
suddenly found himself in complete darkness. He was tempted to grab
Redemption to enlighten his path, then he quickly changed his mind:
it would manifest his presence to the Tankar.
He felt a slow howl behind him and turned
fast, ready to grab the handle. Fate was playing with him, finding
it funny to torment him. He stood still, listening. Having left the
trapdoor open, any beast could follow him down there, waiting, step
by step, the right moment to attack. Certainly not a Gorgor, who
would not lose a moment to strike deadly, but maybe another Tankar,
who was enjoying hunting him calmly sipping his fear, before he
could taste his blood. On the second howl he knew he was caught
between two fires: he was chasing and followed in turn. This
realization fueled every possible paranoia, as alcohol with fire.
He saw the face of Sannah projected in the overwhelming darkness,
his dead eyes, the ever-present grin, soon replaced by evil red
eyes staring at him out of nowhere. A gash on white skin opened
before his eyes, his dirty hands digging and digging and digging.
And again the howl. He struck his forehead several times, to return
to his senses.
Stand and fight! Stand and fight!
Where was he, what were the boundaries of
that darkness? He forced his mind to silence, suppressed every
thought and went on putting one foot in front of the other, because
that was the only way he could deal with that enormous trouble: one
step at a time. The faint glimmer appeared once again before him,
driving away the ghosts from his head. Slowly, it continued to move
forward until it stopped reflecting on the low tunnel’s ceiling to
get lost in the void and begin to rise, and rise.
As a spirit rising from the grave.
When he heard the whisper of a thousand
water drops echoing all around him, Dagger realized he was in a
cave of vast proportions. He found himself balancing on a precipice
and felt a giddy thrill. He closed his eyes and when he opened them
again, from the darkness of his senses, emerged the irregular
profile of the stalagmites and stalactites, the chalky flows and
the translucent veils carved by the unconscious time in the depths
of the earth. That one torch could not illuminate the whole
ambient. The more it got far, the more darkness returned to hide
what it had just revealed, as ignorance with knowledge.
The beast was marching on a winding ridge
of limestone that ran through the cave from side to side, carved in
a staircase, at the top of which stood tall columns of calcium
salts, such as a white redwood forest. He waited until the Tankar
ended his climb, before following him. The stairs were steep and
uneven, slippery. The fear of falling into the void obliged him to
measure each step. When he reached the top, he saw with pleasure
the warm light of a thousand torches, hung everywhere, reflecting
on their humid surface and illuminating the path between the white
columns.