Dagger - The Light at the End of the World (32 page)

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Authors: Walt Popester

Tags: #horror, #fantasy, #heavy metal, #dagger, #walt popester

“
Tell us something we don’t
know,” Olem said, puffing smoke.

Araya hissed, amused, then laughed and Olem
echoed.

“
Did you already
know?”

“
Ah! Of course!”

“
And who told you
that?”

“
The Divine himself,” Olem
answered. “Or at least his emissaries. Each month a damn Gorgor
presents himself under the walls of Agalloch, bringing his message:
he wants you, only you. He’s still looking for the lost soul of
Skyrgal, he wants to possess it again inside his own mangled body.
It’s the reason for its existence, as a drug for a drug-addicted,
alcohol for an alcoholic…”

“
Go easy on the metaphors.”
Araya said.

“
And if you brought him back
to life, the Divine would lose his favorite game,” Olem kept on.
“He would be desperate, condemned to live forever in search for
something he will never have again. So his ambassadors come to
Golconda every month. We open the doors. We welcome them with
courtesy, as fits to all ambassadors. We make them eat, rest, we
prepare them a warm bath and let them fuck our sisters. Then they
pronounce with their horrid accent, ‘Where is the boy? Give him to
us and you won’t regret it!’ It looks like they can’t say anything
else. It must have cost them a great effort to learn to say those
few words, in such a way as to be vaguely understood. Well, it does
not matter. In response, we shackle them, cut their hands and
tongue, skin them alive, completely, making sure to put in it the
expertise and the time required. Then we put them in salt to please
Angra and ourselves, , before letting them dry in the sun with
their testicles or a few fingers in their mouths, with sand in
their eyes and wind eroding their face and anything that could make
it a tad more excruciating a death. Their bodies regenerates, you
saw it, which means we can prolong their suffering at our own pace.
Only when we stop finding it funny, and this does not happen very
often, I have to say – and surely not fast – we split their head in
two. Generally these Poison’s madmen retain their gray matter, or
in this case
green
matter, for their horrid studies.”

“
It’s only thanks to those
studies that we were able to slow the Divine, mind you. From a
Gorgor’s brain, come the most powerful of poisons, poisons that
make agreements with death itself, slowing it, dissimulating it… or
simulating it. A lot of people didn’t die before being buried,” the
Meshuggah added.

“
A real show, I was saying,”
Olem continued. “We ensure to always put them so high that even
from far away it would be possible to see them. Yet every month a
new emissary comes to treat your delivery and the poor creature
knows what end awaits him, once those cold, sterile words are
repeated. Give us the boy. I’ll tell I found it funny for a while,
then I realized that their sense of sacrifice is similar to ours
and I always wonder if it’s not us to be in the wrong. In the end,
they just want to do you in pieces and make you disappear forever.
Anyone with some sense in his head would do the same.” He
smiled.

“
Anyway, the Gorgors no
longer want the return of their ancient god,” Araya completed. “Now
they worship a common one, their leper messiah. But there
are
others
who
serve the lord of Destruction, now, and those are figures less
obscure than you could imagine.”

Olem became suddenly serious, turning
slowly. “Araya,” he warned in a low voice. “It’s really too early
for this.”
The Poison Dracon did not continue, perhaps
regretting he had said that much, or perhaps caught in the middle
of the urge to say and the belief that it was better to keep
quiet.

“
Who are them?” Dagger
asked. “Who wants him back today?”

“
If Olem says it’s too
early, it is.”

“
It’s never too early for
truth!” the boy replied, standing up. He drew Redemption, which
tore the gloom apart with its light. “Speak!”

Araya froze him with his eyes. “Put that
blade away before someone gets hurt,” he said. “What do you want to
do? Kill us?”

“
Oh, no. I did not
unsheathed it for you,” he precised, taking the knife against his
throat. “I just have to kill myself if I want to know more. I go to
Daddy and come back in a moment!”

Darkness crossed the eyes of the lizard
Dracon. “Don’t! Never! We are not keeping anything from you, just
the things you still wouldn’t understand.”

“
I want to know, what will
happen to me once they have squeezed the blood out of my body! I
want to know who I really am, who I will be… who I was!”

Araya stood up, taking a step toward him.
“I want to know who I am,” he repeated, comprehensively. “That’s
what all humans say. Ask yourself if it’s not others who tell us
who we really are through the use they make of us.” He took another
step. “And through the lies they tell us with the sole purpose to
use us. How many people, or gods, are trying to use you this time,
Dag?”
Dagger could not answer to that. Araya was
now in front of him and, with the greatest naturalness, lowered the
blade tight in his fist. The Dracon’s eyes hid a deep wisdom. He
wondered how old that creature was, and how many horrible things he
had been forced to see in his long existence. How many people he
cared for he had seen die. He felt him somehow close.

“
At the Fortress, I will
ensure you’ll receive all the information you ask for, at least the
ones we have,” Araya said, so as to be heard only by him. “You have
my word, the word of a Messhuggah, and that you could write on
stone. Now there’s only one thing I would focus on if I were you,
don’t die anymore. Every time you talk to Karkenos, you walk away
more and more from truth. There’s only the voice inside you that
you must listen, that is the only guide. I see it, my boy: you want
to trust us! You do feel that only we can be on your side and, even
if I would like to let you know that you’re right, I cannot, I
can’t manage to prove it. The truth is big, and it’s destructive,
but at the Fortress everything will be explained to you all the
same. Now is the moment of trust. Do you trust me?”

Dagger saw a sympathetic look, the look of
a being who understood his pain and confusion. He found himself
nodding, sheathing back Redemption.

“
Good,” Araya breathed.
“Stay with us and I promise that you will like this round, this
time.”

“
Araya, sit down. What the
fuck, you’re making me nervous!” Olem said.

The lizard Dracon sat back down. “He
trusted Skyrgal.”
Olem grinned. “Yes. I heard. I told you he
did not seem so smart to me. Who would not trust a god banished
from the world at the dawn of time? Bring him back to life, do!
Then he himself will prove how much he cares for you… and for all
of us!” Olem laughed, with his wild laughter, before slowly
darkening, as if a black thought had seized his mind. “All fathers,
in the end, just want the blood of their children,” he said grimly.
“To destroy the future they have created, eat the fruit of their
gonads. It’s the old man who’s afraid of the new, the death that
fears life.”

“
You should not be drunk, I
didn’t see you drink.” Araya tried to say, but Dagger could see
that those words had hit him somehow.

“
When I’m drunk, I’m
quiet.”

“
Oh yeah, I
forgot.”

“
They’ll take him sooner or
later!” Olem went on. He took a new drag on his pipe. “Yes. They’ll
take him back and we’ll lose control of the situation. Provided
that we have ever had it.”

Araya smoked in turn, reasoning. “Many
pieces are moving in an unusual way in this gigantic chessboard,”
he added. “And are driving us more and more toward an inevitable
failure. Or maybe this is not the chessboard on which we have
always played, at least not anymore.”
A deep silence followed.

“
Dagger, don’t die anymore,”
Olem said. “Your father can be very convincing when he talks with
mortals. He could be able to convince them of anything, even to
trust him. It’s already happened: think about that bitch of your
mother.”

Dagger felt a sudden urge to open a smile
from ear to ear on his throat.

“
What is done is dead,”
Araya said in the end. “Rest, you who can, dark days lay in front
of my eyes. And, after those, days even worse.” He dumped the
contents of his pipe to the ground and snuffed it out with his
foot. He crossed glances with Dagger. “Go to sleep. We can
guard.”

“
You never
sleep?”

“
We’re too tired to sleep,”
replied the Dracon.

Dagger lay down and fell asleep almost
immediately, confident that the watchful eyes of Araya would watch
over him.
He felt the wind. The
wind-borne sand.

* * * * *

9 . The end of the Divine

The trees, caressed by the wind of the
morning, greeted a new day, shaking the leaves covered with dew. A
nice view after so much death. Then his eyes fell on the path
opening before them, and Dagger felt emptiness and fear fill his
mind again.
Olem was sitting next to Kugar. He did not
look tired, even though he must have spent the whole night awake.
Araya was gathering their things without haste. It seemed they
wanted just to enjoy the peace of the early morning, before the
danger that awaited them. They didn’t obliterate the traces of
their passage, confident that no one would follow them in there.
Soon, all too soon, they were again on the march to fight every
step against death.

“
All the steps taken in your
life led you here,” Araya softly recited. “First
Commandment.”

“
What does it mean?” Dagger
asked.

“
That things go as they go,
not as they
should
go, and everything contributes to the final result, even what
we do not want. In life, there are no decisions, choices or
experiences more significant than others. When you laugh and when
you cry, when you are alone against the world or with the world on
your side. The people you loved and left, those who betrayed and
those who returned. All contributes to the final result. Almost
nothing in existence depends entirely on our will, and all the
steps taken in life…” He stopped. “Did you hear that?”

They stood in silence, trying to catch even
the slightest noise in the now sinister voice of the wind. Soon the
unmistakable cry of a Cruachan gave him the creeps.

“
He’s smelling
us.”

“
They are waiting,” Araya
said, pointing straight ahead. From then on, the roof of branches
and leaves that had been protecting them had been thinned,
destroyed, so as to allow the light of the cloudy gray sky to
penetrate.

“
He’s flying over the area,”
the Messhuggah murmured again. “He’s hunting us, the son of a
bitch!”

“
And what are we supposed to
do, run through the traps?”

Araya shook his head. “There are no traps
in the last part of the Pass. Even they must know.”

“
Let’s go ahead then, we
can’t do anything else. Give it a break with philosophy and think
about your skin, or what the fuck you lizards have on your
bones.”

Araya continued to measure the distance,
until they reached two large white stones on the sides of the road.
From then on, he began to walk faster, regardless of where he put
his feet. Dagger realized the traps were over. Now death could only
come down from above the tops of the trees, thinned out more and
more, making them easy targets.

“
We’re going straight into a
trap and we can’t go back,” Araya deduced. “They want us to come
out, then they’ll attack.”

Behind them, the prey cry of the Cruachan
seemed to confirm his suspicions.

“
And what’s the
plan?”

This time Araya did not answer. He just let
the chains slip along his arms. Olem got the message and pulled the
sword from the scabbard on his back. Dagger wielded Redemption. So,
they went out to meet their fate, while the secure twilight brought
as a gift from the foliage, thinned out more and more.

“
Do you think we should
start to run?” Olem asked.

In response, a Cruachan emerged between the
branches and hovered over their heads, as if it wanted to smell
them, before flying up again and remain suspended in the air,
watching close. It cast its hellish trill. Araya threw a knife. The
beast dodged. It continued to follow them, deafening them with its
cries.
When, from behind, they heard the creepy
rustle of leaves once again, they realized that all was lost. Nine
Cruachans ridden by nine Gorgors appeared and began to fly in
circles above them, savoring their downfall.

“
Needless to escape,” Araya
resigned, stopping.

“
What have you in mind?”
Olem asked.

“
Run. Take the kids and run
to the portal. It’s not very far, you should make it.”

“
And you?”

Araya turned the chains between his
fingers, silencing him with his eyes. Olem clenched his fists, then
looked up and realized they had no more time.

“
Damn you!” he simply said.
He loaded Kugar on his shoulders and began to run.

“
Follow him,” Araya
said.

“
And what are
you…?”