Orluvoq

by Benny Hinrichs

  I can step outside, then wake them up.

  The light in her hand rippled and flipped to orange.

  The gauziness coddling her thoughts broke. Effluent spewed out of her mind, chased by cataracts of understanding. Their faces. Their faces!

  Tiaavuluk! I—I’ve ravaged them!

  The memories stung clean as an ice-shredded breeze. That first girl. Orluvoq had tried to siphon off a smidgeon of beauty, the tiniest ounce, but it wouldn’t stop! Why would it not stop? Infecting her mind with that unslakable, unbreakable hunger, pulling her from room to room.

  She couldn’t tear her eyes from the sleeping figures on the floor. The appalling countenances of her victims etched themselves into her mind along with their disheveled forms sprawled in exhausted disarray.

  She clumsily set the crying baby down and staggered out of the room. Ceilings clustered violently and walls lurched from darkness as she wove down the hall. She knew she was making too much noise, but her thoughts were only noise. After searching and searching, she found the exit chamber, devoid of Madame and light.

  Gracelessly, the monster Orluvoq fled into the night.

  13

  Puigor

  Decades Long Dead

  The dark sky’s oily streak of green waved ponderously, like a colossal sail in a gentle breeze, and its reflection on the landscape waved back. Miniscule shadows of hunters darted around the bigger pod-like shapes. Man and narwhal locked in the dance of generations.

  Puigor watched the display wholly unaffected, huddled alone on a knoll. He should sleep, but he had no desire to lie in that tiny room made boundless by blackness. Lying, waiting for light, the darkness thickened by his mother’s sorrow emanating like incense.

  As angakkuq, he might as well be on hand to provide healing should a hunter get injured. And if he got to a kill before any of the huntsmen…

  A narwhal flailed as it fell from the aurora, no doubt spraying its lifeblood to dapple the ice below in crimson constellation. Puigor’s heart perked up and he hopped to his feet, groping for tallow and tuuaaq. Within a moment the flame was alive, and he jumped into a windwalk. No, the flame was more than alive.

  It was blue.

  He cackled as his feet whirled, pulling shadows around him. Normal angakkuq ways paled to white in comparison. The height. The power. It was divine.

  Pure happenstance had colored the glim blue during that fated homeward voyage two months ago. A collision of substance abuse and severe weather. The unfettered wrath of sky and sea had inspired him with enough survival ambition to light up a candle whilst intoxicated. He still wasn’t sure how he got the flame to flip, but he now knew he had been far too full of tusk. As soon as it had flickered blue, it had punched him into unconsciousness. Four times in a row.

  When at last he’d burned off enough tuuaaq to handle the new color, he’d pushed a ring of tranquility out from his ship for spans and spans. Normal angakkuq Puigor could only dream of such weather control.

  But he knew by some intrinsic provenance that the blue flame was not a thing to be shared and flared for all to behold. He must hold it jealously to his bosom, seclude it behind a clutching glove. They would spurn him for his aberration, more than they already disdained him for his failure of a rescue mission.

  Few if any of his clansfolk believed the prince had actually stolen the name from Puigor’s head. It had to, they mused, be a cover for the boy’s ignominious return. No man—or demon—had ever stolen names. A man might as well try and steal a spirit. And the prince certainly wasn’t coming for them, whatever that meant. Princes didn’t do things like that.

  Puigor dropped out of his windwalk as he neared the corpse, pulsing out to see how much time he had before company arrived. A hunter was kiting down, still a minute or more off. The dog sleds hadn’t even reached halfway.

  A piece had already cleaved off the narwhal’s tusk from the landing. Fortunate. Knife marks weren’t very discreet, and fresh tusk was a lot harder to break than dead tusk. With little effort, thanks to his blue candle, he probed and found the sizable shard fifty paces away before the hunter had touched down. Not that he would have worried much had it taken longer. His control over shadows exceeded any man’s control over their eyes.

  As he windwalked away, slick with glee over the tuuaaq tied inside his trousers, his thoughts turned to the prince. As they always did.

  The day of visitation was not far off. That he was certain of. The regent of Qilaknakka would descend clothed in his awful might and… and what? Something dastardly. Something about rapine and the sovereign rights to one’s own mind. Whatever it was, it would surprise the prince to find he wasn’t the only wielder of the blue flame. Puigor’s second encounter with him would resemble the first on no accounts.

  The clan’s sole angakkuq scuttled around the sparse forest convenient to the igloos, exercising his dominance with the tusk. In and out he dodged among shafts of lucent green that bled from sky through spindly tree fingers. He whiled away an hour of night in pursuit of whatever he could fold into his influence.

  The clansfolk would have declared that luck ran companion at his side, for he avoided any demonic encounters alone in the groves. Luck. Yes, alright, let them nestle their heads against their claims so they might find sleep. Puigor knew it was the blue that kept all fiends at bay.

  Here and there he ran across the carcass of some beast he had taken control of on previous nights. Why they refused to eat after he had relinquished control over them, he couldn’t say. He should probably inform someone of the caribou meat in the morning.

  Mysteries disregarded, his sport wasn’t enough, swallowing shadows and conning his way into the minds of lured animals. He craved the next challenge. The human challenge.

  He set his face eastward and skittered to the village.

  Deep night clutched the igloos. The two narwhal kills lay in different states of carnage, left for morning butchering. An icy crust spangled the cooling corpses, creeping where steam had long since ceased to rise.

  Puigor didn’t trifle with tiptoes. The candle gobbled his scuffles with as much alacrity as he did tuuaaq. He rippled over the ground like a shrewd breeze. He stalked as does a tiriaksuq, glimpsed only in shadows cast, vanishing under direct observation. To where did he stalk? Where else?

  He slunk inside the hovel where his mother lay.

  She slept against a wall, curled like a wounded stoat. For a moment, despite the tuuaaq rush—or because of it?—he transmuted from wily, puissant lord of flames to anxious, sheepish lad of fourteen. Father gone. Father taken. Mother yearning to not awaken. All sympathy his clansfolk had held firm against their chests. Alone he stood, regardless of where, fragile skin stretched over his face. He durst not cry for fear that that face would shatter at the touch of the first tear.

  He pushed aside the frivolous emotions. Prince Qummukarpoq could arrive any day. It was moronic, perhaps suicidal, to become a melancholy dweller before then. Puigor must lose himself to preparation.

  He bunched his brow and threw his focus at his mother’s mind. His thoughts stammered like the hooves of a nervous caribou. All efforts at grasping the reins of her mind slipped and slipped and slipped. There was nothing to grasp. No hames, no traces. Or if there was, it was like infinitesimally flaxen strands purling in an unfelt wind, floating through each grasping finger.

  The lemmings and the terns had been so effortless to claim. Shadows fell into file almost without him asking. The ground flew beneath him like thundering water. Yet a solitary woman could defy him from within the bowels of unconsciousness? What—what witchcraft was this? A fatal failing inborn in him? An innate resilience in her? An arbitrary governance on the candles?

  He reached out and flailed once more. Nothing and nothing. Measured shock pumped through him. There must be something sacrosanct about the human mind, something the tusk refused to touch.

  But the prince. He stole my father’s name straight from my head. If you can take a piece of the mind, surely you
can take the whole thing.

  Again. Something had to relent. A covert crevasse concealing the entrance would reveal itself. A veil would rend. A fog would part. Something!

  Screams scratched at his throat, but even under the influence of tuuaaq he had enough presence of mind to hold them down. A conscious subject would be far harder to insinuate himself into than the slumbering one before him.

  Where was it? The… the thing. The thing that was so easy to find in the creatures of the forest. The latch to pry open. He swerved and stabbed at her from a confusion of angles, whatever that meant. He didn’t know. He only knew failing and trying again. Again. Again.

  There. The spindly fingers of his mind wrapped around something slight, something gossamer. The portal to another’s mind.

  Ha, he cackled in his head. There it was. There it is!

  He wove the strings into his grasp and gave his stoutest tug. But they didn’t budge. No, whatever gangly cords leading back to his mother’s mind he had ahold of stretched. More frustrations threatened to break out of his throat as he pulled and pulled. Just when he thought the ceaseless slack was coming to its end, the flame in his real hand jumped from blue to orange.

  Ah! His mouth felt like it had been stuffed with furs for how dry it was. He should have topped off on tuuaaq a few minutes ago.

  His eyes lighted on the sleeping bundle that was his mother. A fiery connection blazed through his mind, from her back to the animals of the woods he had ensorcelled, and the world slowly warped around him.

  The prince had taken the name from Puigor and hadn’t given it back. Puigor had taken control from the animals and hadn’t given it back. That’s why they just stood there until they collapsed. But what if. What if it couldn’t be given back?

  He snuffed the candle and clutched his soured gut. Did… did I just nearly kill my own mother?

  The visions of insensate, frost-rimed animals swerved at him in lurid flashes, melting into the specter of his spirit-bereft mother. “Can’t be given back,” and, “can’t be given back,” rang through his skull loud enough to fracture the insides. He slumped down and pushed himself against a wall to await the pale of morning.

  A sleepless hour later, restlessness drove him to light a tuuaaq candle. As it came to life, he toyed with a crumb, debating whether to eat the tusk. To don the truer power. The thought of a spiritless mother decided for him. Better to wait awhile. The blue flame gave magnificent power. But was there such a thing as a power too great? A sky too wide? A moment too momentous?

  He wasn’t exactly sure why he’d sparked the candle to life. Habit? Distraction? The need to prove he could work more than malevolence with the flame? Whatever the amalgam of reasons, he sent his mind a-questing toward the open sea.

  The sea tugged back.

  Rather, something—someone—seaward plucked a murmur on his mindscape. That shouldn’t be there. He probed again.

  Close. It was nearly upon the village. And—and it was coming from the sky? A meteor? The odd story about those hinted they could be sensed by an angakkuq. But no. It felt far too human.

  He hopped up and ran outside, easy since he had neglected to remove his parka earlier. Lids peeled back as far as they would go, he cast his eyes to Arsarneq’s green ribbon. Of course, he saw nothing other than the occasional dark smudge of a narwhal. Yet, letting his eyes slide shut and seeking outward, he felt it clear as noonday. A demon striding the sky straight toward the village.

  Part of him begged for it to just pass over. What need had he for a night full of terrors from beyond his own mind? The other part of him needed it to come down, to show its brutish face. If he could trounce a roving demon, his clansfolk would have no choice but to put all stock in him as angakkuq ascendant.

  But if it were to fall upon the village, and Puigor were to vanquish it, he would need witnesses. For who knew but that a demon’s body might shred to scraps as it doubled over in defeat? Or if it were some warped man or woman—as he suspected—the ice might well claim their body to appease Nunapisu’s gluttony.

  Witnesses! He picked up his feet to rouse his sleeping kin. They were loath to shed their cocoons, but they had to give him some credence, as he was the only one among them who could commune with the candles. Eventually eleven men and five women had assembled, scowling and squinting in the harsh night air.

  “So what exactly is it we’re awaiting?” asked Puigor’s uncle, hand on a harpoon. “What demon?”

  Puigor regripped his uncomfortably short taper. “I’m… not really sure. But it’s—oh, spirits, there it is.”

  From Arsarneq’s glittering midst came a figure striding. Long scything steps that glossed the air. With each pace, Puigor’s unease twisted further.

  “Abyss take me!” someone exclaimed, hefting a spear. “It’s a skeleton.”

  Two of the men began drumming, dancing, and singing in hopes their song might turn it away.

  But onward it came, enrobed in a mantle of the purest white. Austere horns jutted from its head as if the thing had dislodged itself from a cavern ceiling and swept into the night. Unease huddled the clansfolk tighter together. Hunters sometimes returned from the aurora with tales of demons stalking their merry way through the glow. Puigor’s fellows debated the nature of the beast and what malevolence it had come to wreak upon them.

  Puigor needed no debate. He knew. A solitary flicker of blue escaped from its hand, held just so before its chest, and torment seized him by his chest.

  “No,” he broke their conversation, voice a crackle. “It is none of those things you say. We are being paid a visit by our esteemed prince Qummukarpoq.”

  The atmosphere between them tipped slowly then shifted its weight to a new disquiet. The horror that, perhaps, this boy they had so quickly discounted was more than the sum of a few tall tales. At the same time, it was a horror striated with relief. Not a demon from the heavens. Just a man with a candle.

  That relief evaporated as one by one they espied the candle’s hue. The thought rolled through each mind: what sorcery had the boy claimed the prince capable of? The men’s song dropped to naught but hollow night, and the prince dropped to the ice.

  Puigor fumbled a piece of tuuaaq into his mouth and shifted from foot to foot, awaiting the high. Ten paces away, the prince held his stiff gaze upon the gathered few. The clansfolk held spears and breath with equal tension.

  “I applaud your ready reception of me,” spake the prince, proffering no introduction.

  Unnoticed by all, Puigor’s flame jumped to blue. The high sloshed his brain from side to side. Tiaavuluk. I might have taken too much tuuaaq.

  “Since you’ve all congregated so sanctimoniously, surely you know why I’ve come this night.”

  A few eyes in the huddle glanced askance at each other. No one savored the notion of being voice for the group.

  “No reason? This is what I’m hearing? You think I’ve tramped over the ocean just to stare at a paltry audience of my subjects, then turn tail on you?”

  Heads shook. No. Though he might have just declared their hopes, their hopes and beliefs belonged to different clans tonight.

  “I assume this isn’t your entire village. Go and fetch any sleepers.”

  A handful of people broke away, eager to remove themselves from the prince’s presence, and Puigor snuffed his candle. A silence ensued, unnerving the more the longer it stretched. Qummukarpoq paid it no heed and twitched not a finger. He passed his stare over each of them as more clansfolk filtered in, pausing when he came to Puigor at the back of the sparse crowd.

  “Ah, the man I was hoping to see. Have you informed your kin of why I’m here? Have you even figured it out yourself?”

  Before Puigor could sift an answer out of his addled mind, his mother’s cries cut into the night.

  “Where is he? Where is my husband? What have you done to him? Why would you take him from me?” And on and on. She came running across the snow, course aimed straight for the prince. As she ran past the group o
f villagers, she extended her arms, claws curled for her target’s throat.

  “Bring him ba—”

  She gasped and fell to the earth before his feet, limbs curling in around her body. The clansfolk shuddered as a wall of chill wafted over them.

  “Let us dispense with hysterics,” said the prince. “I’m going to release you, and you’re going to go stand with your friends.”

  He struck no bargain, merely stated fact. Somewhere inside the too intense tuuaaq haze, Puigor cringed at his mother’s actions while feverishly trying to gather a plan. A moment later, his mother gasped again, got to her knees, and crawled over to the clan as she sobbed.

  Spirits. What sort of angakkuq power is that? Puigor thought, reconsidering his conviction in bringing down the prince.

  “Is everyone gathered yet?” Qummukarpoq asked, not so much as a hint that he had just incapacitated a woman without touching her. With a nod from the crowd, he continued. “Then. I ask, what are the three parts of a person?”

  After a quiet space, the patriarch cleared his throat and answered. “Body, spirit, and name.” His demure demeanor was the white to the black of every irascible remark he had made about royalty over the past two months.

  “Body, spirit, and name,” Qummukarpoq confirmed. “And what happens when one of these dies?”

  It was a child’s catechism, but no one dared scoff at the simplicity.

  “If one dies, the other two die,” said the patriarch.

  “Yes. Thus, Nunapisu. Thus, naming our children for a dozen or more ancestors. But I’ve long wondered, how true is this truism? This ‘fact’ so plain that any child of words can recite it? How do we know this to be true? Can any of you say for certain that a name forgotten is an ancestor killed? That a body dismembered is a murderer denied an afterlife? Is there any among us who can commune with the spirits so consistently to determine such a thing?”