Finally, finally she was becoming someone who she could rely on. She could scarcely remember a time she felt so optimistic. The urge to run and tell her parents leapt within her, but she knew time must be bided. Unless she could exhibit complete control, they would be horrified if she told them. They would have to be clueless a while longer.
As the high dropped and the hour of her parents’ waking neared, she held the raw tuuaaq in her gaze. She could take a smidge more. Just enough to ease her into the day. It would help her appear less tired to the two archons of the Watcher clan.
No. She wasn’t strong enough yet. Perhaps soon.
The spire of tuuaaq smiled at Orluvoq beneath the midnight sun. “Hello to you,” it seemed to say. Eight nights over the past few weeks she had taken up the struggle, and eight nights she had grown in strength. Her thoughts were largely hers. Her words were often hers. Her movements sometimes bore jitters and spasms. But either this time or the next, she would return home under the spell of the sweet tooth. This next challenge, passing undetected before her parents, she would not hide from it.
When morning came and she made the trek back, she pocketed the tuuaaq with great reluctance and no new bites. Not quite ready. But soon. Definitely. She smiled as she trotted. Simply choosing was its own act of strength.
The day ambled on and her mind wandered to the time when she’d next battle against the crooked horn. Maybe that night? She’d already kept wide eyes through one night. Another likely would do her little good. But she needed the practice. She needed the tusk. The turmoil fed into itself again and again. When her mother asked her to look at mending some snowshoes, she snapped.
“No! You fix the stupid shoes. I have more important things to worry about.” She stomped past the igloo at the end of the world.
“Orluvoq,” said Kitornak. “What has gotten into you?”
Nothing, she grumbled to herself. And that’s the problem. Nothing in me right now.
Night couldn’t come soon enough.
The spire of tuuaaq beamed at Orluvoq beneath the midnight sun. Finally, she could put her time to good use. She bit down and lost herself in the work. When she finally revealed her newfound power to her parents, they would be so proud. Beaming, just like the tuuaaq. She went hunting for hares without a candle to guide her.
The spire of tuuaaq twinkled at Orluvoq beneath the midnight sun. She chewed her chunk and danced her glee. Daytime did nothing but drag. Dullard’s delight. She could have flung herself into the abyss just to escape the inanity. Come the hour of her parents’ sleep, come the hour of her strength. Perhaps she should just start sleeping during the day, then rise in the evening to pursue the heights. She smiled at the thought as she ran along Nunapisu’s edge.
The spire of tuuaaq laughed at Orluvoq beneath the noonday sun. Finally, not limiting herself to nocturnal haunts, for what were limits but weakness? The point at which you became helpless? If she couldn’t take the tusk whenever, then who was the true master?
It was said the king at the start of the world had mastered the art of the angakkuq, but had he mastered the tusk itself? With power over both candle and tusk, who was to say she couldn’t run south and become queen?
The spire of tuuaaq cackled at Orluvoq beneath a gray pall of evening cloud cast. “We are the best of enemies, are we not?” it told her. She bit her assent and cavorted away.
The tuuaaq called to her from within a dream. “Come test me,” it said. “Are you strong enough to break from your sleep and fight me?”
She roused from her slumber and answered the call.
The tuuaaq pulled her wherever she sat. It pulled her from between her parents. It pulled her from the caribou hunt. It pulled her from the suicidal wanderer headed for the world’s dark end. Pulled her Watcher’s eyes from what they ought behold. Pulled her anywhere into the white wilderness that it thought she might follow. The tuuaaq pulled.
The tuuaaq knew.
The tuuaaq knew.
The spire of tuuaaq leered at her beneath a clear sky of morning blue. Orluvoq held it before her mouth, but she could not bite, for she, too, knew. She was not strong. She was not able. These past months she had courted delusion. It was all false. She was still broken.
Still helpless.
She twisted her hands in sweat-soaked gloves around the crooked horn. She had tried, and she had failed. Like the havoc she’d strewn when she’d tried to rejoin her clan. There was but one path left for her.
Hide.
She gripped the tusk as hard as she could, then wound her arm back and slung it sailing off over the tundra. A shallow drift of top-snow swallowed it without a puff of noise. Time held its breath as she stared at the distance where it had vanished.
The tuuaaq pulled. It guggled between her scalp and skull like air gulping water.
It knew.
The taste fuzzed the back of her tongue.
It knew.
Her body shivered in jagged convolution. She had to hide.
Orluvoq turned and began the walk back home. Slow, heavy, empty.
The spire of tuuaaq nodded to her as she clawed it out from the wet snow, inklings of aurora feathering the sky. Two days it had pulled. Two days she had pushed. Two days it had spat, and two days she had swallowed.
Tears striped her face as she lifted the tusk to her gritted teeth. Hunched over the frozen wastes, she punched the ground. She punched it again. Hard packed ice broke knuckle skin through gloves. She shouldn’t be here. How could something that felt so good hurt so much? No matter how much she took from it, it took more from her.
Yet here she’d come again.
Orluvoq screamed between sobs, and after the scream, she chewed.
The spire of tuuaaq leered at her before Nunapisu’s inked-out depths. It knew she was too weak to fight it. It had always known. Through every “scrimmage” it had been smiling behind a hand.
She wanted to run as she’d done years ago, but this time to the southron reaches. Find Nalor. Beg him to unfold to her all the esoterica of his mastery. She loved her parents, but neither of them was truly powerful. These five years, she hadn’t found the strength she needed from them, though they’d given her much.
Five more years until that day she could sip from Nalor’s cup. Almost half a life. In the meantime, she stood here with the crooked horn.
It knew. As she raised the cursed tooth, it knew. From the tremble of her hand to the tightness around her eyes, it knew. It knew she was helpless. It knew—
She threw it. Flung it as far as her muscles would fling. The tuuaaq screamed as it tumbled into the black of forever, profaning her name in the plunge. She watched it disbelieving until there wasn’t a scrap left to watch, then she collapsed at the edge of it all.
It didn’t know everything.
There would be no more. She would tell Dad to sleep with their tuuaaq. She would only use candles with her parents around. Stricter curfews. Meditation. No more clueless parents. She would become the best hider. For what could she otherwise be, save for the best slave? A hider could at least choose the place of her cowering, but even the best slave could only choose where to die.
She shivered, this time from cold. She hadn’t a candle on her to quell the chill. Maybe she should crawl back home, fall asleep, and do as Nalor had suggested all those years ago. Dream of somewhere much warmer. She did just that.
From the plummeting chasm, the tuuaaq pulled.
Orluvoq didn’t answer.
She was hiding.
Part II
Qilaknakka
18 YEARS OLD
9
Puigor
Decades Long Dead
Tendrils of lightning lashed against the storm’s bowled back, and the storm bellowed back against the lacerations lining its tender gills. Nubivagant ribbons carved brighter than any aurora through the weighty gray, and the witless cries of wounded clouds bulled long over the tundral moors.
Puigor sat in the doorway of his igloo, eyes snapping to
sticks of lightning as swiftly as they did manifest. His heart snapped just as frenetically, but to a different rhythm. In the corner of the snow shanty, his mother murmured tuneless tones of a song, an old lay reserved for seekers of consolation amidst desperation. The singing had gnawed hours.
The forks of electricity that wrecked into the ocean worried him most. Somewhere out on the white-capped sea pitched a boat. Maybe. And in that boat clung his father.
Maybe.
Twenty days gone, Piukkunna had voyaged south with the clan patriarch to ensure safe passage as Angakkuq Preservant. Seafaring craft hauling and laveering across the main needed all the preternatural aid they could muster. Eight days to the royal island, three days of council, eight days back. The king never let the assembly run overlong. Two days the thundersnow had been spitting and fussing. Too malign for coincidence.
Puigor rolled a candle between his palms, ever tempted to light it and jaunt off across the squabbling surf and regain his strayward father. If only windwalking the sea didn’t consume so much tuuaaq. If only his aptitude for working the candles was better than his fourteen years would suggest. If only the sea didn’t consume so much life.
How fleeting. How fragile.
“This is it.”
He started at his mother’s spoken words which broke her monotonous song. “Mama?”
“Your father. He’s not coming back. This is it. I feel it in the storm.” She stared past him, mundane candles throwing bitter shadows helter-skelter across her face and the curves of the igloo.
Puigor turned and frowned, his face rimed by a pallid flash of lightning. He had little respect for the premonitions of a non-angakkuq, but he wouldn’t openly disdain his mother. Besides, he had begun to amass similar misgivings. Every time he lit a candle and quested out for Piukkunna or the clan patriarch, it felt like grasping at dream filaments. They existed in memory only.
“I’ll… I’ll give the candle another go.” He reached behind and held the narwhal tusk wick against one of the hutch’s flickering flames. The glow spilled into his heart as he connected with the tuuaaq. His eyes slid shut and he pushed his perception southward.
Ells and furlongs and miles and leagues he quested into the whipping blackness, probing for his father's thrum. Stretched to the fringe his skills afforded, he felt…
Blackness. Only blackness. No pull any which way. No kernel of life for a lure before his mind. The desolate leagues grated deeper the groove of his misgivings.
Then what of the patriarch? Puigor recalibrated his dour thoughts and sought for the clan archon. Ells and furlongs and miles and—
A pulse. A pause. A pull.
The old man was seafaring and homebound. The upper crust of Puigor’s heart lightened, but the bottom darkened to a snow-bitten black.
“Mama.” He licked moisture into his lips, eyes jumping open.
She lifted slowly her gaze from a rhythmic flame, like a hundred spirits pulled her eyes toward the earth.
“It’s Ataasengut,” said Puigor. “He’s returning.”
“And—” A flash-boom deafened them for long heartbeats. Her chin quivered as the thunder abated. “And… and your father?”
Puigor held her stare for as long as he could bear, heart frozen fast in his chest. Even bidden, the words pronouncing the potential demise of her husband wouldn’t cross his lips. He finally shook his head and puffed out the tuuaaq wick. “He’s some hours out still.”
“Probably more than a day.”
The correction from one who didn’t work the candles pricked his patience. But she was right. The candles discerned afar, and no vessel would make good time in the throes of inclemency. Their alternatives to waiting were scant and imitated insanity. That was all one could ever do in this wasteland. Wait or embrace insanity. When would he be the one they waited upon? He despised the suspense.
So, they hoveled in like bedding bears and awaited the dawn, the storm break, or the patriarch’s homecoming, whichever event led.
As Puigor lay twisted in his bedroll, old childhood fears of being prematurely consumed by the ice and frozen alive in Nunapisu returned to plague him. Freezing teeth knifing up from the ground to gobble him with greedy verve. Snickering, disembodied mouths dragging him through muricated tunnels, ice spines scarifying skin and flaying the lids from his eyes so that he mightn’t look anywhere but into the crush of champing terrors. Then they left him in the middle of the earth and denied him death, his spirit unable to withdraw from his body, and returned to tear at his flesh for millennia.
He at last broke from his slumber, but kept his eyes sealed for a time, basking in the pleasure of willed darkness. When he reached satisfaction, he clad himself and ducked out the igloo.
It was morning. If not here, somewhere on this bleak scrap of land. The lightning taskmaster had retired, at least for a time. A dainty spread of flakes drifted from the yet shadowed firmament. He voided his bladder then lit the tuuaaq anew.
The pull of the clan archon bumped into him immediately, much stronger than the previous attempt. It wouldn’t be more than an hour now. He prodded his mother awake, and they roused the rest of the village and clustered near the shore.
Ataasengut ran the catamaran into the bank with a dull thud and gingerly lowered himself off, sail already stowed. His wife, the matriarch, stepped from the clan huddle and draped his arm across her shoulder to support his creaking bones.
“That,” he said, shaking his hanging head, “was the worst voyage of my sour life. I thought I was a dead man more times than is worth numbering.”
“What news do you have of my husband?” asked Puigor’s mother from the crowd of thirty.
The patriarch eyed her from gaunt sockets without raising his slumped head, a strand of gray hair cutting across the left pupil. “Piukkunna,” spoke he with measured anger, visage as an eel leering out from its grotto, voice slick with rheum, “has been taken by the king.”
A murmur oscillated the clansfolk.
“Taken?” came her tremulous reply. Puigor gripped his mother’s hand. “What spirits can tell me what that means?”
“I know not what it means.” Ataasengut rolled his deteriorating teeth over one another. “But I know it means he’s not coming back. He is a dead man.”
Racket flared in the quiescent morning snowfall.
“What?” a clansman exclaimed. “He was our only angakkuq. How are we to survive?”
Puigor frowned. “I’m also—”
“The king can’t just take my brother,” shouted his aunt.
“Why didn’t you stop him?”
“We’re going to die!”
“We will make war on the king!”
Ataasengut endured the clamor until his brows had nearly swallowed his eyes. “Enough!”
The clansfolk quieted. Waves combed the tense silence.
“I haven’t the smallest clue what we’ll do. Yes, Siooraneq, perhaps we will die. At this moment, I haven’t the smallest care either. I’m going to go lay myself down for a long spell. If I’m lucky, the ice will take me before I wake. If you’re lucky, too, because if I actually wake up from this sleep, I’ll be mighty surly. Good day.” He strode right through their midst and off to his igloo, wife assisting his stumping gait.
He didn’t even acknowledge me. Puigor stared at the gray surf.
His mother wept.
Another thought rose, hot like runner’s breath. It grew hotter still as he watched his mother’s tears.
I am going to kill the king.
10
Orluvoq
She dreamt of ice. Of what else could she dream? Ancient ice, primordial odors dead in her nostrils. Barrow ice, interred by heaping centuries as land sought to caress the auroral ribbon. She took a new lungful of senescence and sensed more than stale air within the tombic walls.
Spirits congregated in the long-sealed catacomb. And though cold it might be, frigid it was not. No winds to scathe and castigate the noble and abominable without partiality.
No stars to wheel the heavens over in their villainous, warmth-wicking swirl. She didn’t think spirits could feel such things, but perhaps memory alone was caustic enough for them. So, the phantasms clustered in their cloister unseen… but not unheard.
Hints of syllables teased her straining ears. Utterances unknown emanated from the aged walls, from the floor of frost, from her very forehead. An ineffable pressure, as when someone enters your quarters in pitch night. It clung around her as she advanced through the tunnel with faintly crunching steps.
Unhewn stones of deep-colored translucence, the likes of which her imagination had never conjured, jutted from the path in regular intervals, laid by some unnamed ancestor.
Unnamed? Could that be so? Such would imply that whatever long-dead artisan who here plied their craft existed no longer. Body, spirit, and name. Without one, the other two might as well cast themselves from Nunapisu’s precipice. But who would still be repeating this ancestor’s name? They must have died the final death. Unnamed.
She halted and crouched low to observe the nearest stone. A meticulous string of characters unrecognizable crowded the most prominent facet. She probed its strokes, stems, and spurs for a shred of significance, tried to tune herself to its tenor. The fist-sized stone remained taciturn. Its meaning was not meant for her.
As she gave it one last pass with her eyes, a bodiless voice solidified from the ghostly gauze around her.
“Ujarak.”
A man’s name. She repeated the word.
So did the spirit.
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