Dagger - The Light at the End of the World Read online

  Tum, tin, tin.

  “I won’t always be so lucky,” he said. “Try to learn how to take care of yourself. I spent the whole night in the rain to beg Ktisis for a stroke of luck, and you? I’d bet my soul you gave up at the first difficulties to get back here. Sometimes I wonder how you can be still alive in a place like this. It would be much easier for me if you were not here!”

  With a moment’s delay, he realized that he had said too much. He saw her smile disappear from her face, slowly, very slowly. She bent down her head and closed herself in that offended and impenetrable silence of hers. She did not answer even after he stroked her hair. Crap, Dagger thought. She was really upset. He hated when she made him feel guilty like that. This time she was not doing it on purpose, as she always did. He could see through her emotions. In truth, he could literally see through her body: Seeth had white skin, white hair and white eyebrows. She was thin and looked like the ghost of a girl her age. Yet he found her beautiful; a frail, rare and priceless beauty that did not belong to that world, certainly not to the ship cemetery. Everyone in there thought she had a demonic nature. This was the reason why they always kept her at a distance, at least, those who did not approach her from time to time in order to try to sacrifice her to Ktisis. Dagger too knew what it meant to be considered a monstrous creature. Nobody ever wanted to have anything to do with him either, because he had one thing in common with that little girl, just one thing: his eyes. Red as if the flames of hell themselves burned in them. In that world of snakes, having eyes of the same color was enough to feel close to someone. If it were not for her, his life would have been unbearable. If it were not for him, Seeth would have ended in a brothel, or worse, but perhaps there was no need to remind her every time.

  Ktisisdamn. I’m really an ass when I put myself to it.

  “Come on,” he said. “Take that look off your face. You know I didn’t mean it. I never mean it. I’m an asshole, remember?”

  Seeth shrugged. “I just couldn’t do it, really, Dag, I tried to, but tonight I couldn’t stay in the rain. If I get sick once again I won’t be so unlucky to survive,” she coughed. “You never get sick.”

  “Your cough on request is becoming more and more impressive, little sis.”

  “Did I already say ‘fuck you’?”

  “No.”

  “Well, fuck you!”

  Dagger looked around and saw that the other Spiders were so taken by the magic dust that they hadn’t noticed anything. He hated this place, full of spies. He hated his fellows. He hated being there.

  He kissed Seeth on the forehead, under a lock of hair white as milk, to remind her that he cared about her at all times, ever since their paths had crossed.

  “You and I are one,” he said. “What happens to you, happens to me.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “No. It’s that without you I… I…”

  She smiled and hugged him. “Love you, Dag. Even if you are a disaster at words.”

  Dagger closed his eyes and hoped that moment could last a bit longer than those in which he felt alone. She was his refuge from the ugliness of the world, those skinny arms, that one creature who needed him. If, for her, Dagger was salvation and the only form of protection in the world, for him Seeth was even more. She was his only Redemption, the one element of his life that the Overgods would not fault him on the day he would die. Leaving behind his mortal remains, he would have faced them on Almagard’s threshold, asking for toll; a single act of pure and selfless good accomplished in the sea of mortal sin. Redemption.

  Seeth was his.

  It had been like that ever since his companions brought her in there for the first time, in a bag, closed with a punch. He observed her fragile body pushing against the worn fabric, felt her desperation in the weak moans filled with suffering coming from the inside.

  ‘Guess what’s in here!’ the spider holding the bag asked, his eyes dilated, a stupid smile on his face, his fingers white with magic.

  ‘A dog!’ one of the little Spiders answered, yellow in face.

  ‘No, a cat!’ another one replied, his skin greenish.

  ‘No matter what it is, let’s eat it!’ the last one stated, causing the laughter of all. But not that of Dagger. He immediately realized that there was a little girl in there.

  ‘Where did you find her? It’s not funny, let her go!’ He noticed that, just hearing his voice, the little girl in the sack had begun to move slower. They had been bound then, without having yet seen each other. He was only seven-years old, but he had no misgiving to face three Spiders of twelve years each. He already knew how to use a blade, at least well enough to leave one of his older companions bleeding on the floor, with a hand to his open throat, and the other two unarmed and with their bare hands outstretched toward him. Dagger seemed to be born with a dagger in his hand.

  ‘It was just a joke!’ they had said, stepping back. ‘Calm down, you little shit, you keep her! You can do whatever you want with her.’

  And Dagger had kept her. He could have done whatever he wanted with her, so he had made a sister. From then on, he and Seeth had grown up together, inseparable. She was the closest thing to the concept of family he ever knew. Every time he looked into her red eyes he felt free, even if in a cage and despite all his rage.

  She smiled. “Dork.”

  He opened his mouth to answer something, when a rough voice broke through the guild: “Dagger! Bring your ass here if you got back!”

  They both turned to the door of Mama’s cabin.

  “If you’ve done something stupid tell him before he finds out, as he always does,” Seeth said. “It’s impossible to hide anything from the man. I don’t keep secrets from him, not in here.”

  “So he knows I give you a hand, too?”

  “Did I already say ‘fuck you’?”

  “No more than necessary.”

  Seeth rested her head against his chest, closing her eyes. “Don’t you do something stupid,” she said. “Don’t you ever. Don’t you leave me alone.”

  “I’m afraid it’s too late.”

  “Hmm?”

  “I fucked up tonight. He saw my face.”

  “Who?”

  “The client I robbed.”

  She shivered. “And I suppose you didn’t kill him, right?”

  “You know I never kill. Never.”

  “Shit!” Seeth whispered through clenched teeth. “You and your damned pact with yourself! Why? Why must you always be so stupid? There’s no other moral in this town. Either they die or you die.”

  Dagger kept silent.

  “Ain’t you about to say that you’re different?”

  “We are different. We are not like this place. We can be better.” He bowed his head and waited for his sister to go into a rage.

  “Where did it happen?” she asked instead.

  “Outside the tavern of the ‘Gypsy.’ That jerk was drunk, I swear, he looked like… I threw him on the ground, with the knife on his throat, and then he stretched out his hand and tore the handkerchief from my face, screaming like a madman. The gypsy turned on the light and illuminated me. Fortunately, he didn’t feel like getting out in the dark to help a stranger.”

  “You had to kill him. You’re in deep shit. Mama will know about it. Mama always knows everything. Maybe if he was really drunk he won’t remember your face.”

  “I don’t think so. He clearly said, ‘Oh shit, what color are your eyes?’” He grinned bitterly. “You easily remember a pair of red eyes.”

  “Shit.”

  “You already said that. I will think of something this time too.”

  “This time is different. This time we lose.”

  Dagger passed his hand through her hair one last time, before getting up to face the old man. Advancing toward the door, he felt someone crying beneath the floor. He froze. Mama always used to wait until the night’s accounts were closed before punishing those who had done something stupid, or had refused to go out into the night to b
ring him the Dragoons. The moans and screams of pain that rose from the lower deck every night were a torture even for those who had been good. Surely they were a warning. Not pissing off the man was essential for survival between those rotting walls.

  “The prayers!” the voice of Mama admonished.

  Dagger turned. Right next to the door, locked up in a sacred shrine and surrounded by black and red candles, Ktisis watched him gnashing his wood fangs, roughly carved in his eternal sneer. He knelt down and prayed. He prayed Ktisis to help him just once more, only once. But the god did not answer. He just kept on staring at him, grinning.

  Dagger opened the door and found himself absorbed in a magnetic gaze, the stifling gaze of eyes dark as night; sitting behind the desk, old Mama was waiting for him. His presence filled the whole room. It was like the notebooks where he used to write everything, the trunks in which he was the only one who could get his hands into and the dusty, rusty weapons around him were appendages of his body. He was that room. He didn’t just live there. Everything in it reflected his own personality, especially the trapdoor in front of the desk. The lament of the Spider closed below rose even more desperately, hearing his footsteps. Dagger had been down there only once, but not to be punished. Mama never did punish him, not even when he did something really stupid. He got down there pushed by curiosity, one of the many times the old man was drunk to the bone. He did not find anything special in that great, dark and cold space. There was definitely nothing scary. It was just a cold and dark hold, with a filthy mattress lying on the ground. He could not imagine what the old man did to his fellows down there. None of them had ever wanted to talk about it, as if they were ashamed. But every time he summoned one of his Spiders, the old Mama made him stand upon the trap door, painted in black with splashes of red paint, from which came the need to never make him angry, not in there. Dagger stepped forward, prisoner of his eyes, until his bare feet stood on the rough painted surface of the trapdoor.

  The old man looked at him in silence, his eternal grin on his face. “Tell me.” He began. “Did you get the three Dragoons even tonight?”

  One by one, Dagger dropped the three golden coins on the desk.

  “Three?”

  Dagger nodded.

  “Admirable!” Mama replied, staring into his eyes. “And you’re still helping your sister, aren’t you?”

  The boy nodded again.

  Mama smiled lovingly. “I know,” he replied. “I can understand that, I’m not so cruel. I myself had a sister once, a sweet sister with blond and long curls. I avenged her, you know? Oh yes. My father looked into my eyes as I killed him. He knows that it was me who killed him, and why. They say revenge is never complete if your victim does not know that it was you who killed him and why. Yes, because my sister is dead. Oh, I already told you, but that’s another story.” He looked at the desk’s surface with lost eyes, softly uttering obscene words, barely understandable, among which suddenly emerged, “Now, is there anything else that I should know?”

  Dagger shook his head. He left out the small detail of not having killed the client who had seen his face, that night. Sure that somehow Mama would still come to know. It was a terrible certainty, as night that follows the day, but if he had known that morning, his life would have ended there, so he had everything to gain. If nothing else, a few hours of sleep.

  “Three Dragoon,” Mama repeated, fiddling with a cigar between his fingers. “You’re the only one that still manages to bring them to me, except of course your sister, but that’s another story. You must have been at the tavern of the gypsy. Yes, that place would remain open late even if the entire city would end under water. And you have waited a long time, since you got back this late. I like it, Dag, it means you can wait for the right time and that sooner or later you always get what you want. You’d have a long way with me, if you weren’t a hopeless troublemaker who sooner or later will bring me to war with the Three Galleons. It already happened, remember?”

  Dagger nodded.

  “And maybe you’re still wondering why I haven’t killed you after what you’ve done,” Mama thoughtfully continued, in one of those moments in which he seemed to be speaking only to himself. “Disfiguring the face of a member of the Three Galleons. You have to be really crazy, or desperate, to do it.”

  “But he wanted to gouge out my red eyes and burn me alive because he thought I was the son of Kti—!”

  “Shhh!” the old man said, raising an index finger. “Do. Not. Interrupt. Me. We paid a high price. I had to hand them three of your fellows, of course the most incompetent, but that’s another story. Only Ktisis knows, in his divine cruelty, how much those guys have suffered before they kicked the bucket. If they are already dead. In that guild, there are people able to torture you for the rest of your days, you know? Once they used to work for me, then they made a career. This world brutalizes. You don’t have a little remorse?”

  Dagger shook his head and Mama slammed his hand on the table, before bursting into wild laughter. “To Ktisis! Neither do I!” Also his yellow eyes laughed with him, weeping as when he was really happy, or really drunk.

  He’s crazy. He’s totally crazy!

  “I’m glad I kept you with me, because you will have a long way,” Mama summed up, trying to get serious. “The fact remains that you must never hide anything from me. I know how to fix things. I can treat. This is why we’re all still alive, or at least afloat, in this rabid dog’s world. Pacts are important. You always have to compromise with existence. Many think I’m crazy. They proved me right. They proved me wrong. But they could never last this long.” He drummed his index finger on the desk. “Not in this hell. I’ve gone crazy in this hell. Once I was not like this. I was a legend, a living legend, they called me. I had a tower, you know? From there you could see the desert, the whole fuckin’ desert, with the Ktisisdamn ruins and everything. Then you came. The infamous fate, in his unconscious and inscrutable wisdom, has decided to entrust you in my sinful hands. Yeah, I was a legend once, but you know what remains of human deeds once time buries them under his generous load of shit?”

  He looked Dagger straight in the eye and suddenly there was silence. There was no longer the murmur of the other Spiders beyond the door, or the sound of waves crashing timidly against the ship’s rotten wood.

  There was only the cry of the boy closed below.

  “Tell me,” the Great Mama uttered. “I will not punish you this morning. Is there anything else I should know before I get a visit from the Three Galleons’ emissaries, or the men of the prefect, or both, knocking on my door, armed to the teeth?”

  Dagger lowered his eyes and shook his head.

  “Good. I believe you,” the old man replied. “It’s just that in your eyes sometimes I read things that… well, that are not there. I haven’t been a good father to you. All this responsibility made me mad, but once it wasn’t like this. It would have been better to die a thousand times than to live this life, and now you know that too. One day I killed my father, you know? He killed my little brother. I killed him. But that’s another story.”

  Dagger spun on his heels, walking to the exit trying not to look as if he wanted to get away from there as soon as possible.

  “Ah. Dagger?”

  He stopped, turning again. Mama was standing in front of him. He didn’t even hear him move. He found himself hit by a punch in the stomach, more legendary than his, and when he looked up he found a fat index finger against his face.

  “Next time you help that little bitch get the three Dragoons I throw you both into the sea, together. With your ankles tied.” He laughed. “Oh yeah. It will be a nice thing to see. From now on she must do it alone, otherwise it’s useless she remains here with us! This district is full of brothels and with her exotic beauty I won’t have trouble selling her. You know she’s not your sister. Why do you help her?”

  “Because she’s my only hope of Redemption,” Dagger said.

  Mama remained silent, struck by that answ
er. Then he shook his head. “Oh, but there’s no redemption in this world. Not for you. So this is your problem. You still need to understand it, but don’t worry. Now I’m going to help you. I always know what needs to be done for your own good.”

  For a moment he looked at him seriously, then burst out laughing. Dagger stood up and left the room without another word. He reached Seeth, lying under a porthole, and snuggled against her dirty back.

  “Without you, I am nothing,” he said, supposing she was asleep. “What happens to you, happens to me.”

  She turned in her sleep, pillowing her sprawled face on his arm and snorting. Dagger smiled and closed his eyes. Fatigue got the better of him. In the land between dream and reality he felt, as always, the wind in his hair. That wind-borne sand was about to push him in the Antiworld, the world of unconsciousness and dreams where even dead were given to speech.

  But he was drawn back to reality when he heard the door to the Mama’s cabin open again. He listened to his voice, barely a murmur to some Spiders nearby. Then he heard their footsteps, slowly approaching, and put his hand to the knife, getting ready. When it was the right time he jumped up, pointing the blade toward them.

  “What do you want?” he asked but, looking in their eyes, he realized that those five were not there to talk, and they were so high on magic that they didn’t fear even death. They were there to obey an order of the Great Mama, and they would at any cost. Dagger did not wait to attack. No one could compete with him in there when it came to the blade. He fought back all their attacks, far too weak and predictable, and came to cut one of them in the face, thrusting the blade into the cheek and a spray of blood hitting him. With pleasure, he heard his scream of pain mixed with toxic panic. Before realizing he had fallen into their trap with both feet, two of the Spiders grabbed Seeth, still lay on the ground and dragged her by the hair toward the studio of Mama, laughing crazily, their pupils dilated.