by Ken Altabef
Vithrok had nursed Tulunigraq, feeding him, encouraging him with unwavering devotion. Over time, a fire came back into his eyes though he continued to sit, silent and still, his head cradled in his feathered arms, withered and grown weak. Eventually he could utter a few words, but he told nothing of what had been done to him. When Vithrok brought food to his mouth, Tulunigraq regarded the offering with eyes wary of the hand that had reached into his soul and mutilated him.
Meanwhile the Tunrit had the sun and they flourished as never before. The ball of fire granted its gifts of light and warmth. The ice receded and reformed in turns, its inexorable advance had been halted. Food was plentiful and there were none to oppose the Tunrit, who had risen to their rightful place as masters of this frigid, forbidding world. When the sun went down in winter the long, cold night would come again, but these dark times could be borne with the certain knowledge that the sun would rise again in season. And so they had seasons. And years.
And a strange and unexpected thing happened. The Tunrit knew time as they had never known it before. With the sun circling the sky — or as Kidan had postulated, the world circling around the sun — the seasons marked off the years. And the Tunrit changed. Their great labor, the building of Kidan’s citadel, slowed. They grew weak and tired, their hair began to turn white, their skin loosened and limbs drained of strength. The Tunrit had begun to age. And as they aged, some among them died. It had been a long while since any of them had died. In the earliest of times, during the period just after the Great Rift, many had been lost, mostly at the hands of the dagger-toothed cats. But now, the breath of life left them, seemingly for no reason. They became old, and they died. The situation was terrible. In time, they were all going to die.
No doubt the cause of this new blight was the sun, and that meant Vithrok was to blame. The Light-Bringer had become the Death-bringer.
“Put it back,” they told him. “Send it away. It is killing us!”
And so, eternal darkness being preferable to death, they asked him to put out their eyes, and darken their sight once more. Vithrok studied the problem carefully. While it stood to reason that pushing the sun away should be a task equal to pulling it across the divide, or perhaps even easier, the Tunrit had lost the means with which to achieve the goal. According to Kidan’s stargazing device, the Two in Front were too far separated from their grandmother Kingulliq, and the group of stars that made up Satiattiak, the Breastbone, was tilted at the wrong angle. It would be many turns until the alignment stood right again. In earlier times they could wait as long as necessary, but that was before came the ravages of the sun. Now time was precious. And time was against them. Too many turns for the stars to align again. And by then, all the valiant Tunrit would have long been turned to dust.
Worse yet, it had taken the will of all four of the takpiksuq, the Sighted Ones, to pull the sun into place, and it must surely require all four to put it away again. The great irony lay in the diminished condition of Tulunigraq, for he was more than willing to push the sun away but had now been rendered weak and unable.
In a further act of folly, Vithrok tried to organize the remaining Tunrit and instruct them in the ways of the Sighted Ones, so that they might achieve by combined force of will what Tulunigraq lacked. Such a thing proved impossible, for those without the sight could never attain the level of focus necessary. False hope corrupted into frustration and animosity. The people soured against him, for they witnessed firsthand their leader’s weakness and his inability to repair the situation. Vithrok’s mistake loomed large. It would have been far better, he realized too late, to keep the workings of the takpiksuq secret.
When they came for him at last, it was not entirely unexpected. Oogloon had asked Vithrok to meet him at the Ring of Stones. Kidan had built the Ring in order to reckon the seasons, with capstones aligned toward the equinox and solstice, and to predict the curious phenomenon of the solar eclipse. Oogloon said it was his hope that the eclipse could be used in some way as a permanent solution to the problem of the sun.
Oogloon brought Tulunigraq to the meeting, having carried his injured brother up the hill on his back. Tugto huffed as he trudged up the hill. Age had not been kind to him. His legs, which were still as thick around as another man’s waist, had grown weak. He used his long great-hafted spear for support as he struggled up the slope.
The idea of prolonging the eclipse had no practical hope of success and was quickly rejected by Vithrok.
“What else can we do?” asked Oogloon.
The sun had already begun to rise, crossing directly over the heel stone as it always did on summer mornings.
“I don’t know,” said Vithrok.
“You don’t know?” asked Tugto. He glared down at Vithrok. His piercing gaze had dimmed with time. The darks of his eyes were rimmed with milky white resembling the lake ice surrounding the water; his hair was white as snow. He was dressed now in the thick furs of the brown bear, as his beloved mamut had all long since died away.
Vithrok gazed out beyond the ring of twelve standing stones and their lintels, across the harsh land of snow and rock. He turned around, but the view was much the same in every direction. He passed quickly over the sight of Tulunigraq where he lay on the ground. His body was cradled in withered arms still covered with their blue feathers, his beak-like mouth hanging open. He seemed shriveled and small, a broken bird on the ice.
“There is no help here,” said Vithrok. “The sun can not be moved. Not in the way you desire.”
“Is there anything else we can do?” asked Oogloon again.
The sun continued to rise up over the heel stone. Vithrok felt its warmth on his face.
“You’ve killed us all,” said Tugto. “Trying to gain too much, you’ve lost us everything.”
Vithrok looked away with disdain, saying, “I don’t have to explain myself to you.”
Tugto’s attack came with blinding speed. The old man pivoted on his heel, swinging the spear point around and directly at Vithrok’s belly. It was a powerful thrust, carefully feinted to the reverse angle and then brought solidly home, but Vithrok saw it coming. At the last possible instant he reacted just as quickly, reaching out with his mind, exerting power of will against the ivory spearhead. The tip melted down just as it brushed the front of his parka.
The remnant of walrus soul that still lingered within the ivory head screamed as it dissolved, a hideous sound which they all could hear. Tugto quickly reversed his attack, sweeping the haft at the back of Vithrok’s legs but the wood crumbled into dusty fragments at Vithrok’s command.
From the opposite side Oogloon cut across the air with a dagger. Vithrok anticipated his lunge and whirled around. He focused his will upon the soul of the Tunrit in a white-hot surge that arced across the air. Oogloon screamed. His hand shriveled and contorted, the dagger dropping free.
Tugto pressed forward with a series of blows that rained down upon Vithrok’s shoulders. Tugto’s rage was intense and his attacks furious. Vithrok managed to block most of them, though the charge backed him up toward the heel stone. Ultimately the maddened Tugto left himself open and Vithrok slammed his forehead into the other’s nose. Tugto stood stunned but refused to step back or give any ground, a mistake which allowed Vithrok to make a strike to his neck. Tugto sprawled on the ground.
“Why?” asked Vithrok. “I want to know why?”
“You betrayed us! You can’t be trusted,” growled Tugto.
“I did everything for you,” said Vithrok. “For all of you! Even if it all went wrong, how can you say I’ve betrayed anyone?”
“Tulunigraq knew. He spoke against.”
“Tulunigraq?” said Vithrok weakly. “He helped us. In the end.” He realized there was little use for pretense now. It was clear that Tugto had known all along what he had done to Tulunigraq. Unlike Oogloon who could not see the soul-lights of anything but the snow, Tugto had seen the change in Tulunigraq’s flame that very first day. He had said nothing. As Vithrok had borne
the burden all these long years, so had Tugto. All this time, he had said nothing.
Tugto shifted his position on the ground, but didn’t get up. Oogloon stood behind him, cradling his ruined hand, tears streaking down his face.
“We’ll set it right,” said Vithrok. “We’ll find a way. It’s not over.”
Tugto grunted his disapproval.
“We can still fight! We can still find a way to keep ourselves strong.”
“Too late.”
“I won’t lay down. You know that!”
“I know,” returned Tugto. “Instead, you grow more and more desperate, and then what will you do? When the end nears, how will you twist us? What will you make us do?”
“Nothing,” said Vithrok desperately.
“The spear has been cast. There is nothing we can do now except to die. But I think it better to die as we are, as free Tunrit, than as twisted playthings in another of your hopeless designs.”
“I wouldn’t!” hissed Vithrok.
“That’s not what Tulunigraq tells me.”
A searing pain slashed through Vithrok’s leg, and he realized his mistake. He had turned his back on the cripple. Out of shame, he had kept Tulunigraq out of sight.
Tulunigraq had driven a dagger through the tendons at his knee. Vithrok went down on one leg. Tugto stood up, moving in for the kill.
Vithrok shed his body like an old cloak and took to the skies in spirit-form. His body, suddenly empty of spirit, slumped down into the snow. True, they could easily murder his abandoned body but there would still come a deadly reckoning when they had to answer to his vengeful spirit.
He thought it would take the others some brief time to follow, time that he could use to his advantage. He should have known. Things had changed. The others followed in the way he had shown them, leaving their bodies behind almost instantaneously.
In spirit-form Oogloon appeared as handsome and unmarked as the day he had first emerged from the mud after the Great Rift. Tugto appeared young and strong again. The scars of their struggles with the elements and the marks the ferocious beasts of the dawn time had drawn across their skin did not mar their spirits. Tulunigraq’s bare inuseq, however, was hideous to see, a sick and twisted thing. Vithrok’s heart sank and he faltered for a moment in his flight.
Surrounded by the three spirits, he recalled the episode with Savikkigut, the guardian of the dagger-toothed cats. Savikkigut, hissing and spitting as he faced his doom at the hands of Punnik and the others.
Vithrok shook his head in disbelief. So many mistakes. The obvious deception of the eclipse had been meant only to bring him to this place. The way Tugto had maneuvered him into position to allow Tulunigraq to strike. And now this. If they had needed to pull him out of his body by force, they could not have done it. Their goal had been to lure his spirit out, and it was already too late to return.
Oogloon blocked his way back down and Tugto threw his mighty arms around Vithrok’s spirit-man, holding him fast. Oogloon and Tugto pulled, and even Tulunigraq’s mangled spirit added weakly to the effort. Vithrok struggled but there was no hope for it. As he had pointed out so many times, Tugto had always been the strongest of the four.
He saw it yawning below him — an endless abyss, a dull gray stone with no soul. The trap was made clear. He wondered briefly which one of the others had removed the soul from the stone, taking on the role of sorcerer, the crime of which he had been accused. He felt certain it had not been Oogloon, who was still innocent and playful as the snow. Vithrok hoped it had been that twisted wretch Tulunigraq and not Tugto. It was sad to think of Tugto tainted in that way. How easy to bend any rule when it was deemed necessary, how easy the path to corruption from self-righteousness. Just a small step, just one step sideways.
Vithrok raged as they dragged him down, down toward the soulless catchstone. He heard again the sound of Savikkigut’s dying scream, this time coming from his own lips.
Remembering these events, Vithrok flinches in horror at the thought of his imprisonment. The black volcanic stone of the citadel suddenly seems another lonely prison, another dark corner of the soulless catchstone. His spirit flings wide in protest. He must escape. He feels himself flying apart as the rolling tundra cascades away beneath his expanding soul.
Panic throws him far and wide. Stretched to its limits his consciousness threatens to dissolve into nothingness.
No. Not the catchstone. Not that eternity alone in the darkness.
But that is the past, he reminds himself. That horror is done.
Trapped within the soulless stone with no way out, he had held on. Time played its perverse tricks, stretching and standing still, his frozen soul trapped in darkness. Not dead, he had told himself, not dead.
Vithrok felt the pull of it now, the dizzying, disorienting sway of it. Time, his implacable enemy. He felt torn in opposing directions. Dissolution beckoned again.
His spirit had been strengthened by all the fragments of the Beforetime he had reclaimed from the souls of the shamans in and around Nunatsiaq. He was strong enough to pull himself together, but only just. He drew his spirit back, seeking again whatever stability and solace the citadel could provide.
The familiarity of the old place was soothing. But it was not enough. He required a more permanent solution, a resting place he could trust. He knew what he had to do. And he was ready.
Narssuk was, as always, difficult to locate at first. It was a chaotic force, spinning madly around the heavens without logic or reason. It tumbled through the sky, spewing blizzards and bad weather, churning up wind and snow.
Traveling with the speed of thought, Vithrok found it in the sky above the Tongue, spinning end over end, singing a giddy song composed mostly of childish laughter.
He was amazed at the changes time had wrought upon Narssuk. All the great spirits were weakened now, so many years removed from the heady magic of the Beforetime. They were old and tired, worn down with the years. Narssuk, the rogue spirit that caused the weather, had always been a blind force of rage and madness. Whether Vithrok had known Narssuk in the Beforetime he couldn’t say, for in its madness the weather spirit was unrecognizable as any entity he had ever encountered. Perhaps it had been fashioned from bits of all of them, from their worst parts, jammed together in a way that made no comprehensible whole. Perhaps that had made it so completely insane and unpredictable.
Vithrok had first encountered Narssuk in the period after the Great Rift, during one of his many soul flights. Narssuk had appeared back then like a jagged ball of living thunder. It raged this way and that, its spirit-body fluid and only roughly held together.
Now, it had mellowed with age. It had taken the form of a human child, an infant whose head was oversized for its poor body. Vithrok was saddened to witness this degradation — the flabby lips, the bulbous cheeks, the idiot maddened eyes that burned without understanding. The huge head trailed a flaccid body, useless limbs flailing senselessly.
Vithrok circled around the great spirit, but it was difficult to match its chaotic course across the sky. He needed to get its attention.
Steeling himself for the pain, Vithrok thrust a mental hand into the seething furnace of Narssuk’s soul. And squeezed.
Narssuk howled in blind agony. Its eyes rolled wildly in its head.
“Poor Narssuk,” said Vithrok across the ether. “Look at what you’ve become.”
The infant weather-spirit took flight, but Vithrok had himself firmly attached.
“Pathetic,” continued Vithrok, “Taking your sustenance from all the unwanted babies left to die upon the snows. You grow fat with their suffering.”
He squeezed again. The orphan-baby Narssuk squealed with the helpless screams of an infant. Its eyes at last met his own.
Burning bright with the souls of the shamans he had consumed, Vithrok appeared as a fiery sorcerer, shining with light and energy, bristling with all the possibility of the Beforetime. An impressive sight, even if exaggerating the reality, but Narssuk had
always been easy to intimidate.
“You remember me. Yes, I see that you do,” said Vithrok. “You remember what I used to do to you.”
Narssuk let loose his caribou skin diaper, releasing a panicked blast of wind and rain.
“You won’t lose me, not like that. I am not some helpless human whom you may cause to become lost in the squall.”
Vithrok dug his spirit hand deeper. Narssuk wailed in agony and fear.
The two had met many times during the long night that came after the Rift. Once Vithrok had become adept at manipulating the souls of animals he made it his ambition to control one of the great turgats. Narssuk was the natural choice as it had always been little more than a baby. Vithrok hounded the stormy spirit, torturing Narssuk in an attempt to get it to do what he wanted. Control of the weather would have been a very useful thing for the Tunrit.
But he never could get the baby to do as he desired. It was too stupid, too wild.
This time it was simpler, he thought as he drove Narssuk toward the Ring of Stones.
He didn’t have to convince Narssuk to do anything.
This only had to hurt.
CHAPTER 27
THE EDGE OF THE STORM
Aquppak ran his finger along the length of the weapon. The barrel was cold, hard metal but the stock was made of polished wood.
“She says these things have no soul,” he said.
Nuralak leaned forward, surveying the gun through slitted eyes, then leaned back.
“It shoots these,” explained Aquppak, displaying a handful of bullets. He weighed them in his hand. “They’re heavy. I don’t think they have souls either.”
“And so?” Nuralak spoke softly, the words a quiet puff of frosted morning air.
“I don’t think she could stop them.” Aquppak put the bullets away. “I heard that if you try to stab a shaman with a knife it won’t work. If the blade is made of antler or bone, the shaman can convince it not to hurt him. That’s what I heard.”
