“Where does the aurora come from?” He grinned. “And where does the water of the ocean come from?”
“From… from…” She couldn’t command an answer. “From…” But she dearly wished she could.
“Every few decades someone will take the odd foray deep into Arsarneq, past Nunapisu, and proceed to never return. Perhaps they’ll all pop out at once, very confused.”
“Pop out from Qilaknakka?”
Nalor’s laugh gaily painted the air a deep puffy orange in the last embers of the sunken sun. “All sodden and sputtering. I like how you think. You’re saying it all wraps back on itself, the world some perplexing circle.”
“Wouldn’t it make sense?” Orluvoq asked. “There are whales and other great fishes in the sea. Maybe the narwhals live in Qilaknakka and swim out each night to feed.”
“I would love that,” Nalor said, his eyes gazing so far away his vision wrapped around eternity and emerged inside his soul.
“Wait.” Orluvoq scrunched up her face. “Does he think there’s something beyond Qilaknakka that would help, um, get rid of the ice?”
Nalor shrugged. “Who’s to know? Haven’t talked with the fellow in decades. Does this thing interest you? For I believe it’s something of this very nature King Qummukarpoq desires to discover.”
She nodded, anticipation stretching her taut. “What’s stopped him from wreaking this great work?”
The bare curve of a smile settled on his lips. “For reasons known only to him, he cannot work this the greatest of works unless he has wed himself to the most beautiful woman in the world.”
The tensity held her breath in her chest, save for one syllable. “Why?”
“I have my suspicions, but the true reason is unknown to all but Qummukarpoq himself. Some quirk of the tuuaaq’s power. The bond between powerful people acting to amplify, or somesuch. What are the three parts of a person?”
“Name, body, and spirit.”
“Right. I think that he’s looking for the most perfect person—in name, body, and spirit—to compliment him, which will give the highest chance of success. Orluvoq.” He finally stopped his long gazing and looked to her. “Do you wish to be interred in the Warren of Immortality? You remember the dream, yes?”
“Of course.” Her breaths came quicker, like the days of an old woman’s life.
“Then,” he said, “you must marry the king.”
Blood pounded through her veins like a pack of foaming bears. Her legs were as tallow trailing the side of a candle. “Marry the king? But how can I… That’s—it’s—it’s not possible! You can’t just hop across the sea and be wed to the most powerful man there is. I’d be thrown out right away.”
Still, the thought thrilled. Collected her mind in a cruse and sloshed it to warm froth. This might have been worth leaving the north for. An expansion of powers unreachable at the end of the world. How could she be stronger than as queen of the Nuktipik?
“Women from the world entire come to petition the king, to proffer their beauty. Qummukarpoq holds court and measures their worth. None have been chosen.”
“And what makes you think I’ll do any better? I’ve used the candles to see myself in vision. I’m less beautiful than other women I’ve seen, and I haven’t even seen that many women. There’s not a chance I’m the most beautiful woman in the world.”
In the dark of the dying dusk, she hadn’t seen a candle find its way to Nalor’s hand. Hadn’t seen what sleight he employed to light the tuuaaq. But in the man’s worn glove flickered a baleful light that sucked the warmth from her back through her chest.
Shadows pooled in his unblinking sockets; shadows contrasted by the dance of that fell blue glow. Eyes locked to hers, he uttered.
“Not yet.”
The shadows of the azure flame seeped through Orluvoq’s skin to sway intoxicated on her heart, like the spirits of sea-buried sailors wandering through forsaken depths. Yes, the shadows convened—but so did the light. A mind-stunning admixture of horror and glory, as pathways to greatness tend to be.
She looked to the blue flicker, then back to Nalor. “But… I can’t work the blue flame.” Though she spoke one part of her mind, the other part yearned for him to brush aside her worries.
“And why’s that?”
“Because you have to murder in order to make them. I’d like to have a spot in the Warren.” She hesitated. “But I don’t think I could kill to get one.” One murderous spree had been enough.
A grin tugged over his serious expression. “You don’t have to murder to make them.”
“I don’t care who’s doing the murdering, I don’t want a part in it.”
“There’s no offing in the offing.”
“There’s no what?”
Nalor barked mirth from his mouth, eyes nearly swallowed by his laughter. “No one gets killed. That’s only what I say to people. The shroud of mystery is fantastic fashion.”
Expressions weltered across her face. A decade of preconceptions uncloaked as misconceptions. Not a murderer? “You lied?”
“Ears ache for the taboo; lustful morsels they can turn over and over in their hearts and bring to their tongues for another taste when they find themselves near other aching ears.” He watched the spirited blue in his hand. “It’s easier to tell people what they want to hear than to try and convince them of raw realities. Besides that, I didn’t deem you in a state to hear the truth.”
“And what is the truth?” It came out more defensively than intended, but the overcautious regret of earlier didn’t follow.
“The truth…” He took a step forward, the cold coming closer. “What is the first rule of being an angakkuq?”
A girlhood riddled with tribulations had taught her that lesson too well. “Never eat the tuuaaq.” She had only slipped up a few times since her eight-year-old escapades.
“Just so. And what,” he said, “do you think is the first rule of being a tirigusuusik?”
A different cold than the candle’s cast cooled her insides. Her breath fled her lips in blue haze. “I… I don’t know.”
The mélange of light and shadow muddled Nalor’s face to an imitation of a corpse peering out through Nunapisu. “Always eat the tuuaaq.”
Orluvoq reeled backward, a keen sickness skewering through her chest. “No. No, no. I can’t. This isn’t—we just—I don’t want—sorry. I’m not the one. The king can find his own wife without any help from me.”
“Of course he can. That’s irrelevant. None of them are you.” The eerie scraping of his boots scratched at her ears as he floated toward her, feet dragging like timbers. “You’re the most naturally talented angakkuq I’ve met, beside the king. I can trust no one else to ensure that the king’s magic succeeds. That all of Nuktipik isn’t washed to Nunapisu. Then there’s no one to remember.”
She fell to her haunches, one glove to the ice and one before her eyes in warding. “Please. Please, don’t make me. When I eat the tusk, it eats me. Teeth the height of a man stabbing through my spirit over and over. Spit my name into the sea and feed my body to the dogs, but don’t make me eat. I’ve been doing so good.”
“I wouldn’t ask it of you if I thought you incompetent. I’ve no use for a gibbering, insensate bag of blood and bones. I’ve summoned you for that very reason; you’re equipped with firsthand knowledge of the vice. It’s nigh impossible to train someone into a tirigusuusik unless they’ve roiled in the darkness of tuuaaq. They always twist into addicts.
“But you have inculcated a deep fear of the tusk into your mind. More than a fear. A hate. You hate the unbridled love you have for it. And that hate will preserve your life. More than preserve, it will elevate you to unclaimed heights.”
As he spoke, his voice detached from his body, thrumming from everywhere save above the feet dangling against the ice. Visions refracted across her mindspace. Lurid sleeps with puffy fevers. Saliva and sweat seeking egress. Throbs of ecstasy compelling her into ardent servitude. A girl entranced by an i
nfinitely contracted world.
“No, I’m not what you think.” She still avoided his eyes. “I’m weak. So weak. I’m—I’m broken.” Broken. No matter the time, no matter the healing, she was nonetheless a medley of fragments waiting for a master puzzler to banish her chaos. Her voice dropped to a croak. “I’m broken.”
“And why should being broken hold you from changing the world?” Nalor asked.
“I couldn’t change the world even if I wasn’t broken.”
“If all is as all should be, then the only changes one can make are negative. Sitting on a pinnacle, the sole place to go is down. Good can happen only when things aren’t perfect. Will you lie alone in the world’s grim desolation and let the imperfections pulp you? Or will you rise and lift the world as you do so?”
She sniffed an effete laugh. “That’s a whole lot of words to convince me to do drugs again.”
The omnidirectional voice swept around her and coalesced in Nalor’s mouth. “Orluvoq.”
She inhaled, dropped her hand, and raised her gaze. Lambent eyes locked on hers.
“I have walked every inch of this world in your boots, and when they broke, I walked back on blackened stumps. I have wept in the ice fens for father, in the sterile moors for mother. I have ransacked the hovels of sleeping wizards, sweeping the floor with my tongue in search of tuuaaq crumbs, fingers frozen to witless stubs. I have stood in Arsarneq’s sidereal belly, clutching and unclutching the candle, disputing whether to throw myself headlong into the dark earth. Gaze upon me with your deepest eyes! Am I broken?”
From his visage streamed glories, a countenance carven from embers blue and embers green. From her nether regard, his shoulders braced the heavens, gathering the drizzled light of the aurora like a dusting of snow. Resplendence and dread dwelt in but one realm, and here stood its lord in the midst of the air.
“No.” It came as a whisper. “I don’t know if anything could be farther from broken.”
“And that is because you only gaze upon me and not into me.” He motioned to his spirit. “Within you’ll find only pieces, and none that seem to fit. Edges that never lose their sharpness, no matter how much they grind one against the other. I will not accept that the broken have no part in shaping the world. Orluvoq. Greatness awaits you, the likes of which will put your dreams to shame.”
The words touched the innermost motes of self floating around her core, and they would not be still. Vibrations pulsed and her particles aligned into something greater than roamed her flesh before.
“So you’re saying that you’re broken, but strong? That you can be broken but not helpless?”
“I have been broken for just slightly longer,” he raised the candle, “than I have been strong.”
Hiding. She had been hiding so long it hurt her brain to envision stepping out into the open. To face the devourer once more. Yet she’d anticipated this day longer than any other. If not now, as she stood in the presence of a master, then would she ever rise?
She placed both hands beneath her and raised her head level to the cold flame, neck tilting up to look at the hovering man. Her spirit stepped into the open.
“I’ll try it. I don’t know if I’ll succeed, but I’ll try.”
Nalor quirked an eyebrow up but said nothing. A shudder ran up the inside of Orluvoq’s spine. Lightness puffed up beneath her ribs. This was it. She was doing it.
“Now,” she continued in tones of mounting boldness. “There’s been so much talk about whether it’s going to happen that I’m not even sure what’s going to happen. Exactly how does burning a blue flame make me the most beautiful woman in the world? Is it just a secondary effect?”
“Ha.” Nalor eased his weight to his feet. “If things were that easy, I’d look a lot less like twice coughed up weasel vomit. No, beauty’s one of those things that you only get about as much as you’re born with.” He smirked. “Unless you steal it.”
Her confidence of the moment grew old with the moment. “Uh. Steal it?”
“From pretty girls.”
“But…”
“I suppose you could steal it from ugly ones as well. Same work less gain though. They are less likely to be hurt than the pretty ones, if that’s weighing on your mind.”
She murmured his last few words to herself, eyes not quite focused on anything.
He snuffed the candle. “No time like the present. Let us be off.”
Tonight? He wants me to ransack someone’s life tonight? It took her feet a spell to overcome inertia, then she mutely plodded down the hill, the hand of perturbation rummaging through her insides.
11
Puigor
Decades Long Dead
Puigor grumbled and the sea grumbled back.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” he said.
“And you think I was talking to you?” it sloshed.
That was hopefully just the hallucinations. The rigor of keeping the keel pointed down and the hull pointed south had transcended his initial estimates, even with aid from the candles. He wanted enough wick left to issue him a visa back home should the weather turn too ugly though, so he had left the candles mostly be, and enervation had nuzzled into his creases.
With his feet on the shore, absconding with a ship and sailing southward had seemed a thing begotten of wisdom. On this, the eighth day, he suspicioned that idiocy had been the one stumbling into that assignation. The patriarch likely had been less than pleased to wake to the seaside scene of one less vessel. Maybe he’d even shouted a curse that the fourteen-year-old thief might die of ineptitude.
Puigor spat at the sea and the sea spat back, though with a much more convincing cataract. He swore and the sea merely bobbed a nod. It must’ve appreciated hearing its native tongue.
A month of malaise had hazed by since the patriarch’s pronouncement of Piukkunna’s incarceration—if indeed it was incarceration that had befallen Puigor’s father. Omens burbled in his belly, speaking direful words, insisting a greater corruption than captivity had its claws around Piukkunna. He scraped the tiniest wafer of tuuaaq off a candle wick and slipped it between his teeth.
Oh, tiaavuluk, he thought, clutching the gunwale to avoid being lifted into the sky. He felt his feet leave the boards but looked down and saw them planted firmly as if they’d frozen.
Of course it had been stupid popping the first flake in his mouth three weeks ago. Of course it snubbed the years his father had spent hammering his head flat with remonstrances against it. Of course it was stealing valuable resources from the clan. But he couldn’t bring himself to trudge despondent through every moment, to fold himself thick with worry. Scraping tuuaaq was scraping happiness. And it’s not like he took so much he couldn’t function.
Settled into the high, Puigor cast his eyes over the bow and locked them on the unfathomable wall of water reaching skyward. Qilaknakka. Four days past it had first come into view, a fluff of mist grazing the horizon’s expanse. Now it towered; thundered at his eyes. There wasn’t a height it didn’t attain. It made him feel… diminished. Like it might at some moment decide to fall, and no matter his speed, he’d be swallowed and deepened.
And finally, there at the base of the boundless skywall, he espied an island. The island. The august edifice at the start of the world puncturing humid air. It was said that the ice of the sculpted keep never grew, never varied in its form. Come damp, come wind, come slurried sleet, all harm sloughed off in swarm.
An hour more of plashing in his vessel's solitude and hull finally found shore. Puigor tumbled over the confines of his world and pressed his gloved hands to the cold, white earth, drinking up gulps of rigidity. Eight days. Too long for committing oneself to the elements and not a spirit with which to share the waves. Some would come through such an ordeal feeling sanctified. He couldn’t help but somehow feel less holy. A shoddy sailor and tawdry savior were what the ocean had spit upon the strand.
He tried to shake the inebriated intuition that he had come to fail and raised to his f
eet.
Before him stood a man—a boy?—garbed in white furs and other snowy finery. Puigor’s heart skipped when his eyes lighted on the fellow’s head. A silvery diadem set with alicorns ascending from back to front hugged his brow. The king? No, the king was a heavyset man of many decades.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” said the prince, his accent harsh. He squinted with only the bottom eyelids.
“I—”
“But that is alright.” He couldn’t have been more than five years Puigor’s senior. “You wouldn’t cross an ocean for no reason. Tell me, boy, what petition brings you to Qilaknakka?”
Any misgiving that the prince was a boy and not a man evaporated along with any surety that Puigor was a man and not a boy. “I… It’s my father. He came here more than a month ago for the council, but he never returned. I have come to bring him home.”
An amused sneer crooked the prince’s lip. “I thought it might be you. Tell me, what is your father’s name?”
“Piukkunna. He was our angakkuq and we desperately need him back.”
“Piukkunna.” The prince tutted. “Shall we go see him, then?”
Puigor’s spine whipped straight. “Yes. Yes.” Not dead. Not dead!
He followed his unexpected host up a long, straight acclivity and into the mouth of the fortress. Capacious, pristine halls robbed him of his attention and left him nearly charmed. The halls of home made him feel like crouching, and he had at least one more growth spurt in him. Back home, he bathed lying in a steam room with a roof mere hands above his face. His people’s abodes were dolven from the ice so that they only needed to cast a ceiling overhead. No worry for walls. He didn’t understand how a structure like this could exist, but he wanted to walk the halls of one every day.
Twice he opened his lips to question why his father had been taken, and twice he’d sealed them again. He should probably hold off on melting that bridge. One misplaced sentence and Piukkunna might never come home.
Orluvoq Page 13
