She flung out her arms. “You can cover yourself in shadow and walk unseen! You couldn’t have come and, I don’t know, chaperoned me? Kept me from going momentarily insane and devastating a dozen women’s lives?”
His mouth pressed into a tight slit, keeping back his words—if he had any.
“No, you didn’t even think of that. You were too obsessed with getting your jollies. Dirty old man.” Anger at his actions spun knots with the fright of naming those actions to his face. A flame still burned blue in his hand, evincing a control and a power she couldn’t match. His annoyance at her words could grow too great, and he could tear her voice from her throat just like the Madame. It was brittle ice on which she trod.
“Orluvoq,” Nalor said after a measured pause. “Among us, who do you think is the better tirigusuusik? I could bend your emotions to fit mine like a glove and make use of your body over and over. And more so than you, I could do that to any ordinary girl with the barest of efforts. I could rape my way from igloo to igloo with no consequences, for I can hide where they cannot find me. Never once in all my years of being tirigusuusik have I done so. Yet here you are accusing me of corruption when I make a point of seeking willing partners.”
And what was she to make of that? He had spoken no untruth. Yet his words made little headway in settling her. “She was only willing because she thought she was getting paid.”
A foggy sigh puffed from Nalor’s lips. “I left her with money.” His voice bore the weight of an elder who had watched every last friend be fed to the ice.
Orluvoq’s exasperation floundered with no good target to aim it at. “Oh,” she said quietly.
“Ten years ago, you were almost killed by a bluebody. Why do you think another was never sent after you?”
In that moment, she knew the answer to a question she had always wondered but never asked. Nalor had gone and taken care of the tirigusuusik from Teriannaiq. How many times had he saved her now?
They stood eyeing one another in the low, blue luminance until Nalor swung about and resumed his trudging.
The mouth of the cave drank midday light, and in the swallow, it tickled her eyes open. She sat up and walked out of the shallow cavity, laid a finger aside her nose, and emptied her nostril onto the ice. With a candid lack of dithering, the companion nostril was voided. Casting a leery eye about for Nalor or other undesirables, and none being forthcoming, she squatted and exposed her delicates to the churlish cold.
The first business of the day complete, she stood and refastened her trousers, then turned to see Nalor standing behind her, looking pointedly at another horizon. “Tiaavuluk!” she swore.
“Good to see you’re up.” He swiveled to reveal a piebald hare slung over his shoulder. “I’ve fetched a spot of breakfast.”
“Were you watching me?”
“If I say yes, are you going to demand money?”
She scoffed in outrage. “I’m not a whore, despite you selling me off as one last night.”
“And I’m not a voyeur, despite the Madame strip searching you in front of me last night.” He swung the rabbit around and worked a knife under the fur. “I’m not so callow as to suggest we put all this bordello business behind us. But let us for a moment focus on what lies ahead.”
“What lies ahead?” She planted her hands akimbo on her hips. “What makes you think I want any part in ‘what lies ahead’?”
He splayed ungloved, bloody fingers before him. “There are a lot of places you could be that aren’t here, yet you are none of those places. Why don’t you tell me what makes you want a part in what lies ahead?”
Orluvoq looked away. She had been so close to being her own. No, she had been her own for those brief minutes of blue flame windwalking. Then she’d become something terrifying and helpless. Failed again. Like trying to rejoin her clan. Like trying to tame the tuuaaq. After both of those failures, she’d hidden. This time had to be different. A child no longer.
She put up a hand to shield her eyes from the glinting snow, wishing she had some goggles. Beside her desire for strength throbbed the onerous pressure of committed atrocities goading her to see the labor through. But what rhythm pulsed beneath it? Was it, “I must do something with what I have taken?” Or was it, “What’s one more?”
They ate the raw meat in unrefined silence, then Nalor said, “There is good news, and there is bad news.”
Orluvoq licked her fingers clean of blood. “How can there be any news? We haven’t met anyone.”
Nalor flashed a patient smile. “‘What’s the good news, Nalorsiitsarut?’” he said in mock femininity. “The good news, dear Orluvoq, is that thanks be your withering romp last night, we are heartily ahead of schedule.”
“There was a schedule?”
“‘What’s the bad news, Nalor?’” came his girlish approximation. “How perceptive of you to ask, Orluvoq. The bad news is that, despite all your efforts, you’re not quite there. The Madame’s decidedly unladylike manner on the ice last night didn’t help much either. Even after you heal that, we’re going to need to affect a bit of touching up.”
She angled her head sideways, eyes locked on him. “‘Touching up’? ‘Touching up’ worries me.”
“By the looks of it, it will be far less than husking another whole woman dry. I’ll be present this time to ensure you don’t go too far.”
Her stomach clenched like it wanted to reunite rabbit and ice. Not again. I can’t do it again. But it would be only a sliver. Isn’t that what I told myself the first time? But Nalor would be there for this trial. And I trust him? That was insignificant. She needed to try again.
Nalor reinserted his hands in his gloves and clapped. “Let’s be off, then. I think I know just the place.”
The sun lounged on the horizon as they quit their windwalking a few hundred paces outside the village. No village she had ever seen aspired to distinguish itself much, to wax in both elegance and eminence until outsiders respected what a genteel people the denizens were. This cluster of igloos was no different in its functional design, yet Orluvoq couldn’t help but feel it exuded a peculiar impression.
Nalor turned to her, grin set wide. “Here we are. Home, sweet home.”
Her forehead frowned. “This is your home?”
“Don’t be absurd, they hate me. But these people—” he swung a hand toward the village, then dropped it. “Actually, they probably hate me too. Regardless, I suppose I could see how you wouldn’t be jumping and panting with recognition. After all, the last time you saw this location, you had turned the whole place into a lake.”
“Oh, spirits.”
“Yes, you did release some of those, if I recall.”
“Can we,” she said, stomach queasing, “take this somewhere else? Anywhere?”
His smile creased his face further. “Back to the prostitutes, then?”
“Nalor!”
“Are you really so worried about a little family reunion?”
“Family?” She jabbed an open hand past his jocose face and toward the igloos. “You think that Terianniaq is my family? I went to the end of the world and back for them, and they still rejected me. There is no one in this world further from family than them.”
“Well.” His mouth relaxed. “This sounds like just the place to be. Oh—” His eyes focused on an oddity off in the snow. “Is that…” He trotted over and Orluvoq trailed him.
The old angakkuq chortled aloud. “An unexpected boon!” Orluvoq expected him to jump in heel-clicking jubilation.
In the crust of the world lay the elephantine effigy of a man—or woman—carved out of the ice itself. It emanated spectacle in spite of its rough-hewn features, eyes shut, wrists crossed on the breastbone in a moment of eternal repose. Orluvoq could have laid down head-to-toe thrice and matched its length.
The snow above the head began folding in on itself, running to liquid and into the permafrost.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“We’re about to see
just how deep our luck runs,” Nalor answered, concentrating on the concentrated thawing.
“Meaning?”
He didn’t oblige her an answer until he’d bored a hole deep enough to stand in and hopped down with a grunt. “Have you ever stumbled upon one of these before?”
“Uh…” She watched him prod the wall with a glove. “My stumbling usually isn’t so fancy.”
“Have you ever seen an inuksuk?” He seemed satisfied with his probings and began to work the candle again, the wall sloughing away.
“Yes. Pile of rocks made to look like a person. I have been north, you know.” Markers for travel, hunting, and the like.
“Well, this marvelous monument is similar, except it marks death.”
She scrunched her brow. “Mark death? The ice takes the body within half an hour.”
“Not,” he said as something dark poked out of the snow, “if you bury them in one of these.”
A head lolled out of the vanishing wall, its browned teeth clicking like mud-caked rocks. Orluvoq recoiled even though she stood at ground level. She had seen death plenty through the wall of Nunapisu, but this open display twisted her gut. “What? How is this possible?”
“Who knows the mind of the ice?” Nalor replied, plucking some token out of a pocket and secreting it on the body. “It’s said that the ice obviously won’t consume itself, so if you hide a person behind a likeness of themselves, you can trick the ice for several days.” With a boost from his burning tuuaaq he hopped out of the hole.
“What did you put on her?” Orluvoq was fairly certain it was a woman.
“Something to remember me by.”
Orluvoq stared long and bemused at the man. “And what brain is she going to remember you with?”
“Oh, not for her to remember me by. For me to remember me by.”
“For you to…” Her traveling companion had gone mad, and clearly not in the past day.
“Yes, yes, when I visit your humble home up north.” He dusted flakes from his parka and swung his gaze back to the village. “Now then. Your mark for tonight. Any old scores to settle? Any strings of envy fairly thrumming with the lust for vengeance? Any self-absorbed step mincers that need to be taken down a peg?”
The riddle of Nalor and the dead woman clumped in her mind, and she came up short of an answer to his questions. “I suppose it’s been too long, and I was too young.”
“Alright, have it your way. We’ll wait an hour, skulk about until we find a savory damsel, then you’ll take a sip from her flask of youth and be on your way to Qilaknakka before you know it.” He plopped on his rump and took a small bone flute from his pack, the sun’s memory draining from the sky.
The dread clawed between her ribs again and brought its urges to flee and hide. One hour. One tiny hour, and she was to become the monster Orluvoq anew.
No. She now knew what she was up against. She could do it. She could brace open the jaws of the devourer.
When winter sleeps, its dream is summer, as day is the dream of night. When each awakens to reality, it finds nothing as warm, nothing as bright. Winter huddles around itself, railing at life with gales and sleets alive with death. Night steeps in its melancholy, stringing lights through the firmament to glimpse but an echo of its dream.
Orluvoq stole through night’s sullen heart like illness into tranquil lungs. Her tuuaaq taper’s blue glow shone only to her, clothed in the shrouds of shadow she hemmed about herself. Nalor trailed after, prints in the snow the only spoor of their arrival they left. The tusk within her gently chirred its holy song. The power was hers. She would take precisely what she needed down to the finest mote.
They crossed into the igloo warren. They slunk through the halls as demons unseen. They threaded through rooms like nimble winds. They found their mark and began to glean.
The woman’s eyes jolted open just before Orluvoq sank in her discarnate teeth. The pathos in her pupils penetrated the rhapsody of the blue flame, and Orluvoq faltered. How could she stand tall and ravage another woman? How could she—
A fiber of beauty slipped through her hesitation and she became the beast with the azure core. The woman’s face warped and peeled, a tiny sucking sound pinging around the room.
Nalor held the husband and daughter under wraps of slumber. The demon from the end of the world drank deep from a woman who could have loved her. Sweetly flowed the beauty from out beneath her skin as in her bed she writhed; writhed in the strictures of the shaman.
On a fringe the demon heard her name. A tinkling from a far-off land. It came once more, then came again. “Orluvoq. Orluvoq.” A buzz of humbug that merited no heed.
Her head rattled empty, and she thumped against the floor. Smoke wisped up from her extinguished candle, limned by Nalor’s flame. She hunched like a wolf about to die and worked breath into her body. The tuuaaq still in her veins propped up her lucidity.
Control had been in the tusk’s hands, but less so than last time. She could do this. She could lay hold upon this ultimate strength, if only she would crawl forward and reach. However, she couldn’t bear looking at her victim to discover the price of the crawl.
No, she turned her eyes to Nalor. He had looked. He had seen. He knew. The depth of her crime was writ large on his mind. She needed but one conciliatory look from him. A tacit confirmation that she retained some scrap of morality in her. That the crawl was worth the price.
Having pacified the beauty donor asleep, he watched Orluvoq breathe. He gave a nod so slight it could have been candlelight lancing with shadow, then said, “Let us be off.”
She gathered her candle and a measure of wits, and they stalked back through the corridors, masked by Nalor’s shade. Outside and away from the village, he turned and tilted her chin up with a finger. A smile stole across his face as he held his frigid glim almost to her cheek.
“Good. Very good. This is enough to convince any man—Qummukarpoq included—that you are indeed the most beautiful woman in the world. You are a marvel.”
“A marvel?” she asked, eyes pointed at the ground. “I feel like wet clothes. I can’t believe I did it again.” Yet it was a lie. The crooked tooth must be straightened.
“A marvel,” Nalor affirmed. “I’ve never met another who could accomplish what you have as quickly. Peerless. Prodigious. Marvelous. A woman of fable. Spoken of in fevered tones by men with hairs of gray. When lightning splits she takes a prong in either hand and rends it at the fork. Into separate abysms she hurls each fiery twig. The sky is her glittering promenade, her path lacquered green with the light of creation. Ware the glim grasped in her hand! Ware the visage she exposes! Both pulse with beauty and cruelest beguiling. What end awaits should one venture too near?”
She had not the wherewithal to process everything he said. His eyes said he knew as much as he continued on.
“And now your time has come to take your walk to Arsarneq.”
“My walk?” She tugged at her hood, but it was as snug as it could go.
“The aurora is only out at night. If you leave now, you’ll make it to Qilaknakka with time to spare.”
“But, me? Just me?”
“You have the idea.” An insouciant smile popped onto his lips.
She found her stomach twirling once more. Alone. She was to go alone. “But…”
“I would come, no doubt in the slightest, if it weren’t for a diplomatic agreement between the king and I that myself stays off that quaint little island. You have enough candle to get you there, I presume?”
Her hand lifted toward her pack then fell. “I guess.” But wasn’t this what she wanted? To treat with the most supreme angakkuq and claim as much ability as she could grasp? “You know I’m not going to marry him. Well, maybe. But if I don’t like him then I’m skywalking back to Nunapisu.”
“Good, good.” Nalor took her by the shoulders. “This has been a most riveting outing, Orluvoq. I expect to be hearing good news from you very soon.”
“How?”
&nbs
p; He tutted. “Do you so easily forget our nighttime conversation of just a couple days ago?”
She grunted, recalling the dream talk.
He gave her one last clap on the shoulder and stepped back, motioning up to Arsarneq. “The world’s finest footpath awaits the world’s finest lady.”
She sparked up her candle. Hesitation snagged her a second, then she chewed a speck of the sweet tooth and deepened the color of the flame. It hummed to her just right. Orluvoq took one last look at her old homestead and stepped into the sky.
15
Puigor
Decades Long Dead
Puigor groaned at the air and the air groaned back.
In the hollow nights where bones couldn’t hide from the cold—the cold that robbed the world of all color—voices carried for more than a league. Sap froze solid in mighty boles, straining until it sundered the pines in strident claps of thunder. Ocean breakers curled to solid spars of black, then the ice pressed down, gnawing ocean currents for its fare.
That dread chill of fearsome lineage claimed fast every nose. Should one not blink, it’d eat the eyes while sawing off the toes. No caribou cloak, no sealskin mantle, no hide of beast could stave that chill. Only rocking back and rocking forth could rob it of another kill.
Even warding the cold off with his blue flame, icy tongues licked past his defenses and swiped shivers into his limbs. The very air hurt his face. Why did the air hurt? He needed to scream, but he feared what frigid nightmare would sneak down his throat should he open his mouth too wide.
In his seventeen years, he’d never seen a more bitter winter.
Winter. The season where darkness conquered day, for no aurora hung in the sky, and day was dimmer than night. It suited Puigor fine. Fewer celestial lights, fewer nosy eyes. But tiaavuluk. It was cold. The sun’s return would also suit him fine.
In the black of day, he stalked behind a man waiting to die. The elder had taken the final dignity and walked away from his clan to perish alone on the ice. Puigor had windwalked between villages for weeks looking for this very opportunity. He sometimes mused on returning to his home, but the pain of consideration was too great, let alone the pain of actually returning. No, this moment would have to be shared with a complete stranger.
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