Orluvoq snatched parka and atigi from the ground and shoved her torso inside like an imperiled hare leaping into its den. The trousers followed just as quickly.
The Madame laughed. “You really are tender, aren’t you? Have to know what we’re working with, sweetie. Some men are very particular about shapes and sizes.”
“Uh. Okay.” Orluvoq’s heart thundered. She didn’t have a clue how one handled herself in these situations. “Am I, um, a good size?”
The Madame waved a dismissal. “Don’t get hung up on it. Lots of men don’t care if it’s just for a night.”
It surprised Orluvoq how much the comment stung.
“Let’s get you settled in, then.”
Stomach a wreck, Orluvoq didn’t move. “Am I supposed to… work tonight?”
“Oh, no, sweetie. It’s a slow night for us. We have ten girls just lounging about. Seventeen total. Eighteen now.” A petite laugh blipped out. “Let’s go introduce you to the girls. You too, sir, come on back with us.”
The Madame’s hands resting on Nalor’s arm, they elbowed through the fish skin flap hanging in strips at the end of the room and into a much more sparsely lit hall. The rooms they passed were empty, occupied by sleepers, or occupied by people very much not asleep. Does sex always involve so much shouting?
Happily, she would not be finding out for herself tonight. She would wait till things quieted down then skulk the rooms, sipping glimmers of beauty from these whores like time itself. Then she and Nalor would be off into the fading night, and he better have some excellent answers, because she had some excellent words waiting on her tongue.
She tried to hold her disgust under her skin. No woman should have to live like this, especially not one as good as Kitornak. Taking beauty from one of them might be enough to get the ‘lucky’ woman out of this life. It had worked well enough for her mother.
They took an ancillary passage into another hall with rooms, the same candle-pricked darkness clinging there. The Madame called and nine or ten girls filtered out of rooms. Most of them wore ridiculous thin shirts that baffled Orluvoq. Why would anyone waste on making something so useless? The thin trousers too. It wasn’t that much warmer in here than in the receiving room. It was like they were trying to—
Oh. Right. The necklines determined to hide as little breast as possible. The pant legs clinging to hips. It was all… packaging.
As the Madame made her way through the sultry introductions, Orluvoq realized the names were more for Nalor’s benefit than hers. Was he shopping? Her cheeks burned.
He brings me here to work candles, to do something terrible and difficult, while he blows the time sleeping with whores? I should leave right now. Leave this moron to his women. Leave the king to rot old and alone in his castle across the sea.
She looked from girl to girl, taking note of the comeliest ones. And was that a child poking its head out of a room? But of course, here of all places, children could be found.
“Oqupip.”
It took Orluvoq a handful of seconds to realize the Madame was referring to her. “Yes?”
“No one here cares much where you sleep unless you’re with a client. Most of the girls sleep two or three together to keep things a little warmer. And not in the way you’re thinking.” She winked. “If a baby starts crying and you get up to tend it, there’s not a soul here who’d complain.”
Orluvoq nodded, forcefully aware of the unnatural jerkiness of the motion. “Thank you.”
Satisfied that the new girl had been taken care of, the Madame made a show of allowing Nalor to choose one of the girls. He in turn made a show of lamenting that though all their beauty deserved boundless attention, he could pick but one. Then he picked the one with the largest posterior. The man who had thrust Orluvoq into this misadventure gave her a wink as his selection led him back to the first hallway.
Desperation and confusion clouded together. This was all a game to him. A horrid, mismatched game. She absently followed as one of the girls invited her in to sleep and gave her an extra blanket. Her thoughts slurred beneath the strange roof, among strange folk.
How had things gone so south so quickly? After seeing them face to face, how could she steal their beauty? Justice unearned doled out by a hand unworthy.
If she didn’t, the king would work his great magic without her. She would be forgotten along with her parents. Clan Watcher would die at the end of the world. And more than that, she would remain broken. Unless she actually harnessed the blue flame, the novelty of her power would dim. Before the world could forget her, she would forget herself.
If she did become a face thief… what? A girl or two would be less pretty. Could there truly be a crime found in there? Of course there could, and she would be the criminal.
Hours passed in that near febrile state, each thought piling more muck into her mind. Each circular twist in logic leading her back down the same abandoned paths.
One most salient image in the haze was that if she didn’t do it tonight, she would be expected to whore herself out tomorrow. Just like Kitornak. Where would her strength be then?
She could run and hide. There was always that. But regardless where her legs might carry her, Nalor’s legs could follow. She wanted to scream, but she settled for crying.
When her subdued sobs had subdued, something in her settled without further argument. She pushed the blanket aside and stood in the dark, candle coming to one hand and tuuaaq crumb to the other. Heartbeats later, she held the flickering blue.
And it felt good.
Orluvoq was done hiding.
Sinngup shifted in her half-sleep, unsettled by the weight of the four-month fetus in her abdomen. The other girls loved to tell her exactly how her pregnancy would be. So far, they were all about sixteen percent correct. Why had no one warned her about the constipation?
The past few weeks, sleep had been like stepping into fog and eventually stepping out. You couldn’t see where you were going, you didn’t really want to be there, and when you finally got out, you weren’t sure what the point of the whole event was. A part of her longed to be with a client tonight. That would have at least given her mind something to toy with other than quasi-sleep.
Pressure built up on her consciousness. Something she couldn’t put her tongue on. Something dark and cold. Something…
She drew in a sharp breath and cracked her eyes open. A light leaked in around the door flap. A blue light.
A blue light?
“Innang,” she whispered, scooting toward the corner of the room.
The woman in the bedroll next to her stirred. “Hm?”
“Look at the door. Do you see… blue?” Sinngup drew the blanket tighter around herself.
Innang made a sleepy moan, then gasped. “What is that? Sinngup?”
It grew. Stretched from thin, incorporeal fingers to meaty, sapphire talons knifing through the gaps. The faint padding of something stalking prey with balletic grace dripped beneath the door.
“I… don’t…” Sinngup swallowed. The thing in the hall halted outside their room. She and Innang looked at one another, tongues lashed to the floors of their mouths.
A naked hand cut into the gap. It peeled back the flap like a northern wind stripping the skin from a disavowed skull. Then in rolled the cold. Like an ancient cavern of ice belching black flies in clouds beneath the midnight sun. Sinngup cringed as the cold crept beneath the blanket and crawled across her skin.
In floated the candle that burned the baleful blue. Around it a hand coated in skin too smooth. The air pricked Sinngup’s nostrils like chains of fractured ice dragging down into her lungs.
Her mind sat frozen behind her eyes. Blue light? The heavens unwaveringly threw down displays of Arsarneq’s green and purple, of the sun’s albine brilliance. From man came fire’s amber glows. But blue? To capture the ocean in a flame? To reach down nature’s throat and wrench her inside-out? What froward lunatic had made a pact with abomination and pulled it into this world?
Then came the face. Adorned only by sweat-slick hair and jumping with shadows of blue. The girl who’d come in just that night. Veneer of innocence melted to dust. Beauty amplified beyond imagining in the feeble light. She locked eyes with Innang. No one spoke. Perhaps no one could.
The rest of her body slid into the room and the door fell shut behind.
Sinngup curled her legs against her stomach, putting something substantial between the manifestation and the baby. What manner of monster stood before her? Tariaksuq? Kigatilik? Ijiraq? Yes, it must be an ijiraq come down from the end of the world, the border between death and living. And the only reason a shapeshifter would leave its cursed haunts was…
“We have no children here,” Sinngup croaked, arms clinging around her belly.
The demon’s head turned toward her, and finally its eyes turned too, snapping into place. It regarded her in viscous silence. “No,” it whispered, “nor, I fear, shall you have.”
Sinngup’s head spun. Was this creature going to tear the baby out of her? “What? What do you mean? Have you—”
She choked on frigid air. Breaths came slow and ragged and left her as they came. No sounds could she produce save the strugglings of a child drenched by the ocean. In her incapacity, she could only watch as the ijiraq returned its gaze to Innang.
The womanish thing leaned, tilting over the quivering Innang, face alight with crooked hunger. Its heels came off the ground and it dipped beyond reason until its face hovered above Innang’s. In a tight circle it wove the candle, illuminating each of the girl’s angles. “Mm, you are a pretty one.”
Sinngup could see Innang fighting to scream, but the same cold constricted them both. She made to stand, to flee and fetch aid, to shriek the halls full of working women and their clients. Nothing came to her limbs but the chill and its shivers. Blood of sleet and bones of ice. Breath of cloud and flesh of snow. Pinned in her bed by the candle’s hateful glow.
Then Innang’s face bulged. Not in the manner of puffed cheeks and high-flung eyebrows, but as if hooks snagged her by a dozen different barbs and tugged outward. Sinngup’s already flailing heart convulsed harder.
Tiaavuluk! What thing has crawled from Nunapisu’s black depths? Why can’t I move? Please!
The skin stretched further from Innang’s face, little gaps tearing in the sides. Innang’s expression was too warped to read emotion, but the twitching of her body and desperate, retching vocalizations supplied every intimate agony. A lustrous, blue-tainted mist seeped out of the holes in her face and flowed up into the ijiraq’s mouth and eyes. No, not an ijiraq. This was beyond any demon Sinngup had heard of.
It sucked at the woman like a starving man sucking the marrow from a fresh-found bone, drier and drier. The moment dragged on; the entire world shrunken to the confines of the room suspended in this disaster. Sinngup tried again and again to break away, to draw a regular breath, to stop shivering. Every effort shattered like the thinnest glaze of ice. She would die, become her child’s frozen tomb, even as Nunapisu would soon become her final home.
The demon drew back.
Innang’s head hit the pillow. Sinngup squinted over at her. Something was wrong, but the light was too weak to tell what. The labored breathing said that she still lived. Sinngup looked to the unknown terror looming.
Its eyes fluttered closed and it released a stuttering sigh, a thing of practiced pleasure.
Please. Please be done. Just leave. Just let me breathe again.
The eyelids didn’t tarry. The thing returned its gaze to Innang, and the struggling woman’s breaths evened out.
Asleep. It had just thrown sleep over her like a blanket. But… sleep? Not death? What demon was this?
Sinngup looked again to her bed mate. The light caught just right, and she was struck. Ghastly. Though no sign of the holes that had torn remained, the once comely Innang was wrapped with a grotesque simulacrum of what her face should be. Sinngup threw her eyes back to the demon and her cold stomach froze solid.
It’s a beauty snatcher come to ravage us.
She tried to run, this time from the impending destitution. Anywhere into the night would do. Anywhere that might not be shared by this unheard-of monster. To the end of the earth, if she must.
The demon’s eyes locked on hers, and she was immobile. Not for the cold, but for the pure shock its preternatural beauty jolted into her. The single most perfect face Sinngup had ever seen looked down upon her as the sun looks upon a morning fog. There smoldered a hunger that would soon know satisfaction. Her shivering intensified.
Slowly, the demon tipped until its face hung above hers, eyes and candle making their circuit.
“I will savor you,” was all it said, face bathed blue by that odious flicker.
Sinngup told her arms to twitch up, to push it away. They held their jittering grip on her belly. She told her tongue to scream. Her teeth wouldn’t be pried open.
It started as a tickle, then grew to an itch. Her vision blurred. Too many tears in the way. Her breasts, her stomach, her hips, her legs. But most of all, her face. They itched and buzzed like a blizzard scratching the land, all traveling in one direction. Pain pierced through as her face tore and the first wisps of beauty leaked out.
She screamed, but it ended as frozen gagging. Tears poured beneath her skin, across her muscle, and flowed out through her open wounds. She gagged and gagged and gagged.
Essence of pulchritude flowed into Orluvoq bit by luscious bit, and nothing in her power could staunch it. The atrociously stretched face and the girl below blurred behind the fog. Orluvoq tried to sever the stream, to amputate the parasitic communion. She failed over and over.
As she had with the last ten girls.
She couldn’t remember why that was supposed to be bad. She was trying. Everybody loved triers. She would just take a little more, then cut it off…
Oh. That didn’t work. I thought for sure it would work this time.
Strange. Why wouldn’t it work? She was a good angakkuq. Maybe the best. How could she fail so many times in a row at something as simple as not ripping the beauty from another person’s body? That’s why it was bad. She should be better at working candles than this.
The flow of the glamor glow slowed. She made another push and severed the tie. Quicker than last time! She was getting better. Even the best had to practice now and then. No one was perfect the first try. Those were just the facts of life.
She floated back to her feet and shuddered at the settling influx of virtue. It coursed between skin and muscle like rivulets of summer water reshaping the land. Glissading on the substrate of tuuaaq in her veins, it felt perfect. Like her body was the most well crafted glove ever. Like her skin itself was skywalking the aurora. She ran the backside of a finger over her cheek. Smoother than seal skin.
A sound pulled her from her reverie. She looked down and briefly wondered why the woman half covered by blanket was making those constrained panting noises. Ah, right, Orluvoq had issued forth a stifling cold minutes earlier.
She fumbled with her mind on the candle, and the girl’s breathing leveled. Orluvoq didn’t know whether she had given sleep or taken consciousness. Did it matter though? She was trying.
A thought dispersed the choking cold, and she wandered back into the hall, her blue light its only illumination. Her feet wandered aimlessly, but her hands wandered passionately over her body and skin. Every morsel of flesh curved in pristine proportion. Every modicum of skin exhaled serenity like a field driven white by a soundless storm.
Fit for a king. Perhaps too fit. Did that pompous cur across the ocean really deserve her, no doubt the world’s most beautiful woman, not to mention most gifted angakkuq?
Wait. Her hand stopped tracing. Something seems off about that. Isn’t Nalor better than me? And isn’t Qummukarpoq better than Nalor?
Her mind picked up as her feet left off, strolling down avenues of perplexion. What was that off feeling? Should she go find another girl to leech bea
uty from? No, the urge didn’t thrum like it had after the other ones. That last lick of loveliness had imparted a sense of completeness.
Thinking on it, the memories of imbibing hung askew, like a queerly angled bird cutting across the morning pale. But why? Where was the lie?
A babe’s cry broke the night, and Orluvoq’s thoughts scattered. She waited as the child wailed a few doors down. Only a moment and mother’s calming touch would caress away the terrors of night and hunger. Yes, it would be but a moment.
The cries dragged on.
Any… moment?
No one. Not the mother, not another. No soul rushed, or grudgingly walked, to succor the child. It was as if this whole side of the clan had been—
—put to sleep. I did that. Right. She wrinkled her brow. Was it not frowned upon to send someone into deep sleep unless they had specifically requested it? Yet she had done it. She had also—hm. Yes. She had also sucked the picturesque parts out of almost a dozen women. Would she really do something like that?
Annoyed by the bawling baby and the ebbing of her tuuaaq high, she sauntered down the corridor. The fish skin flap pressed heavy against her fingers as if she feared to see what lay inside. Had she not walked here mere minutes before? She shook her head and entered.
There. See? It was just two supine women and one wriggling baby painted dim blue. Nothing to be afraid of. She almost laughed at herself as she bent and scooped up the child.
She rocked it for a long moment to no effect. Mama had told her about inconsolable babies, but she’d had scant exposure. The image she’d slotted in her head had been too tame. This was a waking nightmare. It felt like high time to hand it off to the mother. She looked around, frazzled.
Oh. Right. Maybe I should wake her. Them.
No telling which one was the mother.
But if I wake them…
She refocused on their faces. Their wizened, year-stricken faces. Their sagging, pocked faces. Their grotesque, dysmorphic faces.
It… must be the light. The blue could make anyone look bad.
The baby’s crying rapped against her ear over and over. The faces seemed to twist and droop into ever uglier pastiches of humanity.
Orluvoq Page 15
