Shadows

by Ken Altabef

  “Yes he’s dead,” said Alaana. “Now you can finally get the idea of killing him out of your head I hope. I’ll give you a new mission instead of killing Kritlaq. If you get the chance, Tikiqaq, I want you to avenge him.”

  CHAPTER 43

  SHADOW OF THE PAST

  The voices from the other side were silenced in the dark, leaving Ben finally able to think. Their ranting had become maddening during the day, calling to him, pleading, begging. Only at night did he find some respite from the wails of his family and friends on the other side. In the dark he returned to his ordinary life, an entirely different life.

  But rather than reassure him, the quiet of night was an ominous quiet. The shadows were silenced, but they were not at peace. What dreadful thing happened to them in the night, he still didn’t know.

  Earlier that day the dome of their too-soft iglu had fallen in, and Alaana stretched an old walrus skin across the top, forming a quagmoq. The structure was cold and wet, but it would last them through the final night before their journey to the bay. Kinak and Noona huddled close, both fast asleep. Ben lay propped up on one elbow, applying a soothing balm to the cracks in Alaana’s face while she dozed. The smell of the poultice reminded him of the first time he had seen her, when they were both prisoners in the Yupikut camp. A young woman, not much more than a girl, she had been beaten and tortured by the raiders. He had applied the same balm to her raw back. They had just met, had not even exchanged a civil word yet. He couldn’t have guessed then that so many years later would find them married with three children.

  He traced the raw, red line with his finger, rubbing the poultice in. Alaana groaned softly, opened her eyes.

  “Does it hurt?” he asked.

  “Less than before,” she answered and tried to smile.

  “I’m sorry,” he said sadly.

  “For what?”

  “I haven’t been much of a husband to you lately.”

  “It’s my fault,” she said.

  “No it isn’t. Alaana, everything isn’t your fault.” He laid the palm of his hand gently against her ravaged cheek.

  Alaana grunted softly. She had begun to suspect that he was right. A malicious intelligence was at the heart of all their troubles. The sorcerer. Did he have something to do with Tama’s disappearance, she wondered. She didn’t dare mention the sorcerer to Ben.

  Ben had such a powerful distaste for the spirit world. Alaana bitterly remembered how such fears had driven her first love Mikisork from her. With Ben she had adopted an unspoken rule as the basis of their marriage. She served out her duties as shaman but did not speak much of it. Ben was only interested in a normal life with his wife and children and she was determined to give that to him. A normal life was all she had ever wanted too. But now it was all being stripped away, piece by piece. How much more would she have to sacrifice?

  Her duty and obligation had always driven an unhealthy wedge between them. A weakness the sorcerer might seek to exploit? She didn’t know. There was so much about Vithrok she didn’t understand.

  One thing was for certain. Even now she must keep her suspicions about the sorcerer from her husband. As the shaman, Alaana did what she had to do, but she didn’t have to tell him about it. She would let him go if he wanted, but damned if she was going to drive him away.

  “We have to put this behind us,” said Ben. “Right now. I don’t blame you for Tama’s death — you know that. I don’t even blame Tooky or poor old Tugtutsiak. People do stupid things. Things happen. We’ve seen family and friends die by accident enough times. That’s all it was, an accident.” He sniffled once, but no tears dropped from his eyes. Ben didn’t ever let anyone see him cry.

  He continued, “And I want you to know, now, that I don’t blame you for what happened to her spirit. I just couldn’t stand the thought of her out there lost and alone. I still can’t. But it’s not your fault.”

  “I will find her,” she insisted. “I know I will.”

  “I wish I could believe that.”

  “Believe it. It was promised to me.”

  “By who?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, with a sadly ironic chuckle. “I really don’t know.”

  Oh, Alaana, thought Ben. She tries so hard but she’s dealing with forces that no one can understand nor reasonably confront. She didn’t want him to know about the terrible things she had to face as shaman and all the dangers her position held. But as her husband he must never doubt her. He did not doubt her quiet strength. He did not doubt her devotion to her people. He did not ever doubt his unfaltering love for her.

  And then there were the shadows. He wanted to tell her about the shadows, about everything, but she would ruin it all. Ben felt selfish keeping Tama all to himself but the Light-Bringer had told him that a shaman must never traverse the shadow lands. In that world, a shaman’s light would burn anyone they touched. Alaana would rush to Tama’s side and everything would be ruined. Look at her, he thought, already ruined. She’s so weak. She would rush off on some astral flight, killing herself and their daughter in the process.

  The voices of the shadows took on an even more frantic tone when Alaana was near. Frightened, they sought to drive Ben away from his wife. No, his life among the shadows must be kept apart. For now. Just until he found out the truth about Tama. Then he would straighten everything out.

  Alaana laid her hand atop Ben’s as he caressed the line of her jaw. “Wherever she is, I will find her. And I will see her to rest. I promise.”

  He looked at her, so broken and weak, and smiled. He nodded his head, and lied to her. “I do believe it.”

  Alaana’s eyes closed. In better days she would have recognized his deception easily. But now she was so diminished.

  “Can you see me,” he asked, “the way you used to? Can you look upon my soul-light and see what I feel?”

  “Not anymore,” she returned. “Maybe that talent was just a gift of youth. I guess I’m not as young as I used to be. And right now I…can’t…”

  He knew what she meant. She didn’t have the strength to try.

  “Then let me tell you how I feel,” he said. “I love you, like no woman I have ever known.”

  Ben glanced at Noona beside her, wondering if their daughter might still be awake and listening. But the girl was asleep, or at least she knew enough to keep her face turned away.

  Alaana drifted back to sleep. She looked as if she was nearly dead.

  “Tomorrow,” he said, “you must try to get some food down.”

  CHAPTER 44

  BALIKQI

  The stars shone bleakly down from the night sky.

  Vithrok regarded them with a suspicious eye. He remembered how they used to look long ago when the Tunrit first rose from the mud of this world. And now they were different. The old stars and constellations were still there. The Never Moves was greatest among them, shining directly above. But now in the forefront blazed a multitude of what he considered to be newer stars. They were larger, brighter. They twinkled in a way that seemed to mock him.

  Yes, he thought, I know what you are. I know.

  Out of reach, so far out of reach. What would it take to pull one of them down, he wondered? Now, he realized, his plan hinged upon it. So he would succeed. If he had to rip the sky apart as he had done before, he would do it. But there was perhaps an easier way.

  He stood in the center of the great unfinished citadel of the Tunrit. Around him, carved from the black volcanic rock at the roof of the world, rose a circular rotunda inlaid with a ring of heavy columns meant to support Kidan’s great dome. The Tunrit, who had once possessed all the time in the world, had never managed to finish it. And that was his fault. That was his shame. They had died, one by one, withered by age. The sun had done away with them, had dimmed their sight, turning their hair white and their strong limbs to ash. The sun and the scourge it had brought with it from the other side of the sky. The scourge that was Time. His mistake.

  “I am sorry, my brothers
,” Vithrok said as if the other Tunrit were casually standing beside him. If only they were here, he thought. Oogloon and faithful Tugto and even Tulunigraq. This work would be so much easier to bear if he were not left entirely alone here. Alone, within the soulless stone. Trapped. His imagination running wild, dreaming up one nightmare after another. Alone. Totally alone.

  No, that wasn’t true. He was not dead. Dead. Not dead. This was real. This world of snow and ice and petty little creatures that called themselves men. And women, he thought with revulsion, who were even weaker than the men. This world was reality, this his purgatory for the sins of pride and ambition. But he would set things right again. He had already begun collecting the pieces, the little bits of the Beforetime that were the souls of the shamans of Nunatsiaq. That part was easy. He would put it all back together again, just as soon as he had stopped Time.

  He inhaled slowly, deeply. His body, dead as it was, had no real need of breath but he found the motion soothing.

  He turned back to the citadel of black stone. Now, he could do in a few moments what the Tunrit could not have done in ages of sweat and strain. The black stone of this place contained a spirit as well. It was a vast sleeping giant.

  “Wake up,” he growled in the secret language. The dark rock of the citadel, nestled under the ice and snow where it had never felt the sun, shuddered.

  “Up!” he commanded. “Up! Up!” Vithrok exerted an incredible amount of pressure, enough to reshape the rock itself. It didn’t want to take on another form; it was satisfied slumbering as it was, snuggled down close in the bed of the world — but he commanded it to rise up, to stretch and flow, to arch above the columns as Kidan had intended. He would brook no resistance. The earth shrieked with the effort and Vithrok groaned along with it. He took hold of the spirit of the rock, just as surely as he had manipulated the spirit within that first lemming out on the tundra, or Tulunigraq’s resisting angakua. He took hold of it, and he commanded the mountain to change its shape, to take on every detail and filigree as Kidan had described to the Tunrit in painstaking detail on those long, cold nights after the Rift.

  The rock flowed over his head in a liquid tide, completing the dome. He left nothing out. Interlocking pilasters crawled up along the inner surface, thinning from thick, brutish limbs down to delicate twisted threads as they rose higher and higher. The intricate pattern spread across the gentle curves of the structure in an elaborate and beautiful design.

  The strain was incredible, but when it was done Vithrok drew in a deep, satisfied breath. It had felt good. The dome was complete with only one circular opening at the top, a small oculus that allowed a glimpse of the starry sky.

  Cold. Cold, cold, cold.

  Of all the world, winter came first to the pole. The sun had gone from this place and would not appear again for half the year. The great prying eye had fled, the mark of his disgrace chased away to the other side of the world. Good. Darkness now was his friend.

  The Tunrit citadel lay so far north that it would never be found. Not by the wandering bands of Nunatsiaq, not by the Anatatook, not by the roving raiders, not even by the white men. Not even by the little shaman, if she still possessed strength enough to seek it out. No, thought Vithrok, Alaana would trouble him no more. The end was near for the little shaman.

  Vithrok stood outside the citadel, once again examining the starry sky. The new stars hung on the dome of the night like bloated leeches stuck to the underside of a great whale. Which one of them was the one he sought? Which one of them, of these dead shamans in the sky, knew the secret? Time to find out.

  He turned toward the citadel. Beside the newly fashioned gate of black onyx stood two of his watch dogs. He had found their bones unearthed in the permafrost gouged up by Narssuk’s storm. And within the bones of the great animals a remnant of their souls still remained. He had sparked those souls and clothed the bones again in flesh, restoring the prehistoric beasts to their huge natural proportions. Each of the maguruq stood twenty paces high, sporting thick scaly hides frilled by patches of thorny fur.

  On each side of the gate, the beasts snorted and shuffled their pointed, cloven hooves. One snapped a long vicious snout full of monstrous teeth as Vithrok passed. A pair of short tusks curled from the lower jaws and matching horns spiked from the upper. Vithrok snarled back, and the creature dipped its head. Though their brains were small and easy to control, they were kin to him in many ways. Their long captivity in the ice paralleled his own imprisonment within the soulless catchstone. Time had played its cruel tricks on them too, the spinning years had taken away all of their brethren, leaving them the last of their kind. They did not belong here. Like him also, they had lost none of their ferocity.

  “If anybody comes,” he told them, “you may destroy them. But not the bear.” He wagged a thin, blackened finger at them. “Not the bear.”

  Primitive brutish minds, they understood Vithrok’s will if not his words. The beasts rocked top-heavy shoulders from side to side. One of them let loose its distinctive howl.

  Vithrok strode quickly through the cyclopean halls of the citadel, his dull footfalls the only sound in the empty palace.

  In the center of the rotunda, directly below the small circular opening at the top of the dome, the spirit of Beluga Killer was strung up. It floated in the air, held tight by Vithrok’s force of will.

  For the bear’s ghost, being held immobile was incredible torture. It was driven to a fitful rage. It strained and seethed against invisible bonds, trying to break free with all its might. Vithrok held it clamped firmly within his grasp.

  “Do you know what a lever is?” he asked the bear. “I don’t suppose you do. My brother Kidan invented levers a long, long time ago. He invented many things. Wonderful things, now forgotten.” Vithrok strove to illustrate by passing an expansive gesture around the interior of the citadel. A soul lost in torment, Beluga Killer did not notice.

  “Your father — Balikqi is it? — he invented something like a lever as well. A powerful spell. I have need of it.” Vithrok pursed his blackened lips and nodded slowly. “I will use it to put things right.”

  Vithrok regarded the ghost of the gigantic bear. He knew its story, having ripped the details directly from its soul. The way it had been slaughtered unfairly by the people of Nunatsiaq, killed by trickery without the consent of the spirits. It had been butchered, out on the ice.

  Vithrok moved his forefinger slowly in the air. The spirit of Beluga Killer howled in pain and rage as a slash appeared across its wrist. The gash continued up along the length of the forepaw, parting the ghostly fur in a long red line. The white bear roared, thrashing its head fitfully. Not again! It would not suffer this indignity again.

  “Do you know the method?” asked Vithrok. “Your father Balikqi knew. A shaman among the white bears, wasn’t he?”

  Beluga Killer redoubled its efforts to break free, but remained held in place by Vithrok’s unbreakable determination. Vithrok continued butchering the bear’s ghost in the exact manner that the men used for skinning a kill.

  “Your father Balikqi. He was determined to release your soul from its prison of ice and stone under the mountain.”

  Vithrok cut a deep rut across the bear’s collar line. Beluga Killer spit and growled in its torment.

  “Balikqi,” continued the sorcerer, “spun a web in the air. And using the weight of the Moon he was able to move the ice mountain back. A lever, it was, written large across the sky. So I ask you again, little bear. Do you know the method?”

  The dissection of the spirit-bear had reached the middle of its heaving chest. The knife of Vithrok’s desire edged just under its skin. The helpless ghost turned its fierce gaze upon its tormentor. Its eyes, set far back along the snout, blazed pure mindless ferocity. And something else. A plea for mercy.

  “Unfortunately not,” said Vithrok. He glanced up at the night sky as visible through the oculus. “But this is getting us nowhere. I need you to scream louder.”

  H
e split the chest wall, reached inside, pulled something out and twisted it. He had hold of Beluga Killer’s memories of life among the bears of the ice mountain. Of his family and friends, of his mate and his cubs, of his dear father Balikqi. Vithrok twisted and squeezed, and the memories stretched and distorted, turning to mindless babble. Beluga Killer let out a peal of animal pain. For what else does a ghost have, aside from its memories?

  “That’s right. That’s the way it has to be.”

  He twisted again. Between his spirit-fingers he ground the precious memories into paste. Beluga Killer’s screams shook the citadel, rattling the massive stony pillars of the rotunda.

  “Scream louder!” shouted Vithrok.

  But it was already enough. The oculus of the rotunda filled with an ethereal light. The white glow, contained by an innumerable myriad of tiny sparks, swept into the citadel like a swarm of bats. As the river of light streamed through the dome, Vithrok heard a sound like a musical chime. Particles of Beforetime dust, a million tiny stars, flowed down, then coalesced onto a resplendent figure — the pure angakua of Balikqi, the polar bear shaman.

  Balikqi, who had once appeared to Alaana as an old, venerable polar bear grown thick in the middle with patchy and yellowed fur, now took the form of a young, robust white bear in his prime, for that was the way he envisioned his spirit. Balikqi possessed no physical body, just a spirit-form constructed of light and will. Nonetheless he reared up, standing as tall as the Tunrit sorcerer. Without hesitation he slashed a clawed paw through the air. “Let my son go,” he said, using the secret language of the shamans.

  “Gone,” said Vithrok.

  His blackened hand snapped closed, snuffing out the soul of Beluga Killer. Vithrok sucked in a tiny gasp, his blackened lips hanging open for just an instant. The bear’s soul was still potent. Invigorating. A tasty snack.

  Balikqi’s heart skipped a beat. Just like that. The soul of a once-mighty spirit destroyed with brutal finality. Irrevocably gone, simply consumed. Balikqi reeled with the shock of it. He had never witnessed such an act of depravity, such an abuse of raw power.