“Ujarak. Ujarak. Ujarak.”
The babble. It was the spirits reciting their names in a desperate essay to guard against extinction. The stones were not artistic endeavors, but mnemonic cairns. She spake forth the word again with an added measure of reverence. “Ujarak. I shall not forget you.”
“Kingippoq. Savik. Ikuallan. Annilaarti.” Down the cramped corridor she made her procession, kneeling in deference at each stone until the spirit pronounced its name. Each ancient appellation leaving living lips for the first time this epoch as she articulated the premonitions. She wondered whether mayhap her first parents would kiss her ears with whispers of cherished, unforgettable names.
But no. This keep was not theirs to haunt. This reliquary of names; this elaborate effort to append oneself eternally to existence. Whatever sum had been boundlessly named for some to be boundlessly named, her parents had not paid it.
She rolled the ritual along, giving due obeisance at each memorial, speaking once more things that above all mustn’t be forgotten. “Sorsuttar. Uisuk. Aliasunneq. Naassaa.”
“Orluvoq,” said a formless voice.
She froze, and not for the fact that the voice had called her name. That was no effete spirit who had named her. Her eyes flickered up the tunnel.
Or was it?
In the unaccountable light stood a figure, at once wholly a man and wholly an apparition. Taller than most with a face that spoke of eighty years’ wisdom packed into a body of forty. His eyes managed a convergence between sportive and sad.
“Nalor,” she said, subconsciously continuing the ritual of names. Years had transpired since their last encounter, yet with each meeting something he exuded tugged her interest tighter. “Do you walk my dreams, or have you spawned from my mind?”
“I do more than walk, kuluk. I have prodded you here.”
“Prodded? What is this place, then?” She motioned with a gloved hand. “And is it real, or does it only exist in the dream?”
“You stand in the Warren of Immortality.” He plucked up a stone and gazed into its depths. “Memory is a fragile hope we humans hold fast to. We laden children with the names of six, eight, ten of their ancestors and content ourselves that those ancients will not die the final death. But what of them who lived a thousand years ago? Two thousand? Who bears their names? Who among us could identify a single ancient body in Nunapisu’s reaches?”
Nalor’s replaced the pellucid stone. “Call it a temple if you’d like. You stand within the final remembrance.”
Her jaw fell open. “Incredible. I have always wondered about being forgotten by the far future. But how are you connected to all this? What is this place to you?”
He met her eyes with a look of tired amusement. “I am one who remembers.”
A chill jittered in her spine.
“These halls are not full, Orluvoq,” he said. “Your talents are immense, worth remembering. But to carve your name into a gemstone is not an honor doled out with absentminded disregard.”
She nodded. “I wish to be remembered.”
“And remembered you shall be. Ten years it’s been since our first meeting, and now the time is upon us.” He took a step toward her, head nearly brushing the ceiling. “Come find me, Orluvoq. Greatness awaits you, the likes of which will put your dreams to shame.”
Nalor faded from sight until he was no more than a pair of staring eyeballs. Then those, too, blinked to nothing.
She woke frosty with excitement under her blanket, and no matter how she sought, she could find no sleep. But a sluggish few hours and dawn would break upon the day of abandonment.
Kitornak swallowed the raw caribou meat. Pale dawn crept through the igloo door, striping her chin and nothing else. “You will be harshly missed, sweet girl.”
Orluvoq ducked her head in acknowledgement. “Yes, Mama. I’ll miss you too, you know that. It’s not like I’ll stop thinking about you two.”
“Ten years. Ten years?” She reached out and ran a finger across Orluvoq’s cheek. “The person you’ve grown into in ten years—it’ll take the rest of us fifty to catch up. You were completely lost in the sweet tooth, and in nine years you’ve only slipped up a few times.”
Orluvoq grimaced inside. Nothing to bring on a good mood like reminiscing about her most regrettable moments. Thankfully, she’d avoided another slip-up as severe as her thirteen-year-old fiasco, and she’d been using candles solo for three years again. But while she had grown, there was a piece or two—at least—that hadn’t quite grown to fit.
“It will be quiet.” Paarsisoq’s eyes lingered on his food.
The air sat heavy while the trio broke the fast. Paarsisoq spoke again. “What exactly is it you’ll be doing? It’s not that I lack respect where our friend Nalorsitsaarut is concerned, though I can’t say his methods fill me with confidence either.”
“I… I’m not certain.” Orluvoq kept her expression calm, trying to instill the surety absent in her words. “But I am certain it’s greater than anything I could do here.” Regret stabbed her innards. “Uh, that is, not to say that our clan isn’t noteworthy. We do wonderful things that are very important. Uh, but there might be greater.”
The words tasted stale, a breath held too long, not at all like the names she nurtured in the night. “I mean no disrespect, I love you both, but, you know, the world ends here—” she gestured north, twenty paces to the endless cliff “—and the rest of it is there.” She extended her second hand southward. “And I’ve been here forever, and I hardly ever see anybody else, and—”
“Orluvoq.”
Her tangle of words finally snagged. “Yes, Dad?”
“Go.”
A pained tautness pulled at Kitornak’s mouth, but compassion shone in her eyes. “We will always love you. In a perfect world, you would never have to leave. But you know just how perfect this world is, kuluk. Especially living here for a decade. At the end of the day, we are Watchers, not keepers. Have you known us to force someone to stay when they truly desire to go?”
“Oh…” Orluvoq’s words had tangled even more. She had anticipated more pushback, but now facing the moment, she wasn’t sure why. Could there be found more docile souls than her parents? Her feelings tipped from audacious to melancholy. Perhaps she had wanted more pushback, and so had indurated herself against it. Bereft of a battle, her ice determination turned to wash. A tear streaked out into the cold air. “I really will miss you.”
Kitornak shook her head and sobbed out a laugh, then leaned forward and took Orluvoq against her breast. “We know. It’s been our privilege to raise you, even when you knocked your father’s new spear off Nunapisu. We’ve always known we couldn’t keep you here forever. I hope that doesn’t mean you’ll keep away forever. You know where we are.”
Paarsisoq ran a hand over Orluvoq’s hair. “Yes, your mother could stand a visit now and then.”
“Oh, hush now.” Kitornak batted at his hand. “We all know who the bigger doter is.”
A self-incriminating grin curved across the old man’s face. “Well, I suppose your father wouldn’t mind a visit here and there too.”
Orluvoq laughed and wiped at her cheeks. “Will you get along without my angakkuq help?”
“I’m not the most adept worker of the flames,” said Paarsisoq, “but you do recall that I somehow survived two decades without your talents. Not to say they won’t be missed.”
“You’re right, you’re right. I’ve been thinking of this day for so long, and now I just feel clumsy in my goodbyes. I guess I haven’t had much practice.”
Kitornak clucked. “No, that’s true. I hope we soon find out how good your hellos are.”
“Of course, Mama.”
“You’re a Watcher. It’s in your blood now. Think of all the good we try and do here. Maybe it’s time to export a little of that to the rest of the world.”
“I know you will make us proud.” Paarsisoq’s voice hitched. “You already do every day.”
Orluvoq crawl
ed out the door and stood before the endless abyss she’d gazed into more than half her days. A silly nostalgia snuck into her at the thought of not seeing this gaping maw of nothingness for months, if not years. Slowly, the same giddiness of the sleepless night suffused through her and she turned to the south.
The day of abandonment had arrived.
Escape. The fluid movements of windwalking broke through bindings that had held her for ten years, crisp sun and brisk air splashing over her with equal relish. Not that those bindings had been objectionable, merely that every child flexes against familial fetters, peeling off the parental collar that once fit so safe and snug.
The past handful of years had seen her windwalking the ultimate coastline, Nunapisu’s verge, regularly, seeking self-styled wastrels come to embrace nullity. Her angakkuq prowess augmented Paarsisoq’s enterprise of salvaging lives at the end of the world beyond what he had allowed himself to hope. How many had she talked down from the infinite precipice?
Reproofs nagged incessantly as she ran farther from home. Her journey-seeking was self-serving drivel, and scores would worse than die from her disregard for duty. Her parents would fold themselves over and over with worry, both for her and for the suicidals they couldn’t reach. And for what? So she could go rendezvous with some murderous, dark shaman, the tirigusuusik? So she could become exactly that herself?
Orluvoq focused on the candle in her hand and the streaming landscape around her, letting the accusations slough away. Mostly. Deep longing and a touch of unembellished curiosity drove this expedition. She would see herself unbroken, and Nalor was the one to show her. Once she had had her fill of the world, she would return to Nunapisu better equipped to help others. And there was no curiosity potent enough to drive her again to the depravity of murder. That much was absolute.
She exulted in the simple fact that her course led neither east or west—or north, for that matter. The pulse that was her candle-fed intuition of Nalor’s location drew her down to the heartland of Nuktipik, and perhaps on to the sea.
Eleven years had gone since she’d last frolicked in the damp, warmth-wicking air of the south; since she’d watched puffins and cormorants spar with kayakers for fish. She pushed the memories aside. Those jaunty days were too fraught. Too full of her first parents.
The young yet adept angakkuq ran until a star winked on her left and the sun spewed orange and red on her right, plating the earth in auroral antithesis. It was then, after burning through wellnigh an entire candle, that she spied him atop a hill, limned by the ruddy refulgence. Gentle anxiety clutched in her chest. After all the years of constructing her own mythos around him, what would she really see in those eyes? What would she know, come the dawn, to shatter her conceptions?
She slowed out of her motion blur and walked the remaining twenty paces to his side. Nalor didn’t turn at her footfalls on the ice.
“Not the worst thing you’ve seen, eh?” He motioned to the bleeding sun.
Orluvoq searched for good words, something to impress her expectant mentor. “Once I saw a caribou give birth to twins and die while the second was halfway out.”
He slid his eyes to her, head still forward, then back to the horizon. “You know, you’re probably the least sheltered, most sheltered person I’ve ever met. Never been to a party. Melted a whole village.”
“We had some parties when I lived on the ship.”
“Oh, my apologies. How quickly I forget your storied years of carousing with sailors, gobbling down tuuaaq every spare moment.”
Her brow dipped down, trying to determine what level of gravity his words carried and pick out a response that wouldn’t offend. It would be quite the dispiriting to be turned back here for an aberrant tongue.
Nalor grinned. “No need to be a fussbudget. I jest. Glad you came so swiftly. I was tiring of standing on this rise.”
Orluvoq relaxed. “Have you been here all day?”
“What I do on my own time is my own business, thank you.” He took off a glove and examined his nails. “How’s the old man?”
“Paarsisoq?” She examined his nails too, bemused at the sheer elegance in the splay. Who was he cleaning up for? He wore gloves. “Um, good. Or he was when I left. Maybe he accidentally fell off Nunapisu since then.”
Nalor clucked his tongue and reinserted the hand. “Sounds like he hasn’t changed since the day I met him. And your… mother? Is that how you’re referring to each other these days? Mother and daughter?”
“I call Kitornak mother,” said Orluvoq. “But what mother just says daughter? Don’t most parents usually use their child’s name? That’s what I remember from my small years.”
“My mother liked calling me daughter, but we can swap treasured childhood memories on another occasion.” His eyes skipped her up and down several times, then he puffed a petite sigh. “I told myself I wouldn’t say it, but it seems my self-control is less than I esteem it to be. Look how big you’ve gotten! Is this really how time works these days?”
She gave him a commensurate appraisal. “It would appear not, looking at you. Is that some trick you’ve learned working the blue flame, always looking the same age?”
“No matter how many times I extol the virtues of skin care in this harsh, dry, windy climate, no one dares take me seriously.”
“Skin care? Like what, rubbing pit sweat and blubber on your face?”
“No, mostly just working the blue flame.”
She reached up and shoved his shoulder, then froze. Too familiar too fast. Not skipping a beat, Nalor chuckled wryly, and Orluvoq slowly untensed. She laid a mental finger to her nose in reminder that however convivial he seemed, he had killed before. Or had he? Maybe he had a blue candle supplier the same way some people have a coat supplier.
“Can I ask a question I’ve been wondering for years?”
He heaved a melodramatic sigh. “I will bear your interrogations if I must.”
“What were you really doing with five blue candles in that cave?”
“That’s almost the start of a good riddle,” he said. “But in this case, the answer is simple. I was controlling a very distant bluebody.”
“You—what?” She screwed her head back and forth. “I thought you didn’t like them?”
“Well, not when other people send them scuttling down Nunapisu after me.”
“But five candles? What for?”
“Have you ever wished all the ice covering the world just disappeared?” He flicked his gloved fingers toward the horizon. “Sometimes I like to look into those possibilities.”
She made to reply.
“Anyhow,” Nalor cut her off, “you’ve scurried a long way—I’m sure for something more than a spot of frivolous repartee. Now it’s my turn for a question.” He leveled a calcifying gaze in her direction. “Do you know Qummukarpoq?”
“You mean the king at the start of the world, as far south as you can go? I’ve heard of him, of course, but out at Nunapisu he’s more of a fairy tale. Why?” Every sentence she strung together was stitched with the foreboding that she spake nothing but the wrong answer.
“You outdo yourself, Orluvoq. King at the start of the world indeed, icy carven castle nestled before that great wall of water that reaches upward forever. Fire in the skies and he is the arsonist! An iridescent bow flexes across the heavens and he has limbered it! The stars and vapors he sings from the heights and spools them into his vesture! The host of the gallant array themselves in queue, and lo! there he stands first, and lo! there he stands last!”
Orluvoq left her mouth agape, wonder flowering in her bosom. She ran her tongue through the gap where a baby eye tooth had fallen out three years before with yet no mature canine to follow. “Is he really so magnificent? I've never heard any stories like that. Just that he’s a good angakkuq.”
Nalor shrugged. “Rumor likes to sing songs it does not know. But he is one of the greatest angakkuit the Nuktipik have seen since the ice began.”
She tried to dampen the
tingle of jealousy at the thought of an angakkuq greater than her. “You’re saying that his abilities aren’t just rumor, then?”
“I am a curious creature.” He tossed a bone knife up and down, torquing it with dazzling twirls. “And an envious creature. I couldn’t just take someone’s word that there was a greater worker of the candles than myself. I have been to the castle at the base of Qilaknakka, that wall of water stretching forever upward. I have seen him bend the very aurora to wreathe him in its radiance.”
Jealousy relented, and awe abounded. “The aurora? That’s, well, incredible at the best. Impossible at the worst.” The things you could do when directly tapped into the aurora. Assuming you could tap into it. Gleaning anything from it was hard, even while walking through Arsarneq burning a candle.
“It was impossible. Until Qummukarpoq did it.” He caught the knife and it vanished somewhere into his coat. “Has word of his plight reached you in your northern retreat?”
“His ‘plight’? No, what’s that all about?” Is this really what it had come to? She had to run across half the world in order to fetch a scrap of news?
Nalor rubbed his mustache, veiling a thin smile. “He seeks to work a great wonder, greater than has ever been seen. So marvelous it will make bending Arsarneq look like bending your piss stream.”
“But I don’t—”
“Pee green? It’s relieving to hear your relieving is clear. Nevertheless, no one knows exactly what wonder he wants to wreak, but it involves the great wall of Qilaknakka, and it will change the world as we know it.”
“Is there any work of the candles so great it could change the world? Unless you mean a bunch of little works.” And what would such a thing look like in relation to Qilaknakka? Did he mean to bring it down on the world, washing everyone over the edge of Nunapisu and leaving only a necropolis embedded in the end of the world?
“No,” said Nalor, “not little works. A single great one. My best guess is it has to do with what lies beyond Qilaknakka.”
“But… beyond?” Orluvoq squinted though the sun had descended. “It’s the start of the world. How could there be anything beyond? Is there anything beyond Nunapisu?”
Orluvoq Page 12
