Dagger - The Light at the End of the World Read Online Free

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,