He drew abreast the dying man, matching the moribund pace, and eased back the cloak of candled shadows from his face. “I am Puigor, and I see that your walk is lonely. Let me travel with you. Where are you headed?”
Saying his old name aloud dredged longing within him. If this man would just speak it, the name Puigor hadn’t given in the three years since that night of visitation, then almost he could imagine the syllables falling in benediction from his father’s lips.
Several halting strides trudged by before the old man answered. “Every step you take in life is another footprint on the same path. Though we walk side by side, I have found the end and you have only just lost the start.”
The sudden keenness from a frame so frail stunted Puigor’s thoughts. The old man hadn’t so much as turned an eye toward him, the specter that had emerged from the darksome day. Time injected more and more of itself between each step until the elder finally stopped, huffing at the stinging cold.
“Let me be.” The weight of every step of his life burdened the dying one’s voice. “Leave me with my final dignity.”
Puigor had finally regained hold on his thoughts. He kept his lips tight to fend off frigidity. “There is no dignity in death. Your bones slump in a heap. Your bowels release. Your mouth hangs loose, and you mindlessly eat snow until it eats you.”
“It seems,” said the old man, “there is no dignity in life, either.”
Puigor kept his mouth sealed for several icy inhales, thinking on his dead father, then said, “No.” He dropped the rest of his shadows and blue light sliced through the sunless day. The old man finally turned, fear peeling back his eyelids.
“Demon of the north. You’ve come to take my body.” He took a tottering step in a futile escape attempt. When it was clear he had no hope of outrunning this boy holding the alien glim, he began tugging at his parka; to remove it so that the ice might remove him before the tirigusuusik did.
“I’m heartened to see you trying to escape this, but we both know that however quick the ice might take you, I’m quicker.” Puigor broke out a toothy smile, illuminated blue from below.
“No,” the elder despaired, still struggling with too-weak arms against his coat. “No, I’ve lived well. You can’t do this.”
“You can relax. You’ll see Nunapisu before long. I only need your body for a few hours at most.”
The man lunged a step back toward his far-off village. “You are a monst—”
But Puigor sucked the heat from his body and the word died in a rattle. A long life came to a short end; a man of stature bowed low by the element he had spent a life defying. The cold stole motion from his very veins. All went slack and he settled onto the ice, one leg bent under, the other cast behind in a gawky sprawl.
Puigor looped an arm around the deceased’s torso—light with old age—and dragged him toward the cave he had scouted out. Who knew how long the elder could have walked for? Puigor couldn’t drag him over a league to the cave. Needed him close. Still, stealing the old one’s heat, his last moment… It sat askew on Puigor’s heart.
Not that it should. Sending a man to his death mere minutes earlier than nature would be no crime. Nunapisu was riddled with babies that parents knew could not be provided for. The ice was cold and hard. Winters were dark. It was no secret that life was all three.
He huffed at the exertion, not quite pausing to rest once inside. No need to invite the ice to take the body. Where to put the corpse had consumed his thoughts. Pallet of wood? No, no thickets close enough. Table of stone? Even less of a chance. Sleds were too easy to track. The only way to ensure that the ice wouldn’t take the body too soon was to lay the dead man on top of himself.
Puigor lowered himself and the body to the cave floor with the tenderness of a mother laying her dead child on the ice. The acerbic stench of the elderly pinched the air in his nose. He shuddered and his bones jittered in their sockets.
This was it. The culmination of more than two years’ efforts. After an emotional, self-inflicted exile. After a fevered survival mingled with study of the blue flame. After sailing discreetly to the foot of Qilaknakka and sensing that his father was gone. This would be the first true step in exacting revenge on the prince.
He readied a fresh candle—his last—chipped a bit of tuuaaq into his mouth, and descended into a trance. The weight of the corpse, strangely, counteracted the discomfort of lying beneath a corpse. He rocked his mind back and forth like lazy ocean swells undulating a boat.
And into the body he went.
It came leisurely, like the first fleck of a long-awaited snow drifting its way from cloud to earth. A susurrus suffused with sidereal promise. A clamor of voices babbling in tongues the earth had never known. Drawn by the echoes into the void left by the elder’s spirit, Puigor abandoned his bones and put on flesh anew.
It was… cold. Frigid to the marrow. Not that he’d expected much else from a bluebody, not when the weather cracked skin and took life without ruth. He opened his—its?—eyes and saw his stiff face twisted in concentration, tinged with blue. After a study of his own sleeping face, the person everyone else saw him as, he pushed the body to its feet.
It wasn’t a perfect transference of consciousness, more an amalgam of mostly here and a little there. Likely a good thing, else the ice might assume his body had no spirit and port him to Nunapisu.
He ventured a few steps toward the light at the tunnel’s end. All sensation came dulled save thermoception. The cold rang true like wind whistling through the field of ice flutes he’d found by the sea. He reached the cave mouth and pushed the body into a run.
The leaps and bounds came fluidly. Almost too easily. He steered the bluebody across the tundra at a withering pace, requiring but apathetic effort. His first windwalking experience had been far less of a silky jaunt. There might still be a trophy scar marking his skin from that adventure.
Corpse feet pounded, but the reverberations hit him like a wolf crying from outside a dream. He pressed the cold body for what fire it had to offer. Perhaps he could run it all the way to the ocean. Whatever the limits of a single candle, he would find them.
And the prince would die.
Puigor chortled, though whether in his cave-lying or field-sprinting form he couldn’t wholly say. Perhaps both. Today marked the beginning of the end of Qummukarpoq’s power.
A year prior, Puigor had finally met another who could work the blue flame. A seemingly simple clan angakkuq he’d boarded with for a week. At first blush, the words of the middle-aged woman had tasted foul to him. To arrogate a corpse and jerk it to and fro as his personal property? It was too much. The dead were Nunapisu’s chattel, not the playthings of man.
But months had crept by. Days had grown long. Dull and lonesome aches had sharpened. And his father was no longer. No whisper of a name. No trace of a body. And no hope of a spirit.
The prince had vowed to end Puigor should they again meet. So, they wouldn’t. Qummukarpoq would meet a dead man, and Puigor would guarantee him all the honors he had granted Puigor’s father.
The old man’s old form sped on without so much as a wheeze of the lungs. But speed wasn’t all he’d need to strike the prince down. Puigor slowed up and took in the scene, what little he could discern in the dimness glazed blue. A… hill? A far-off stand of trees? A… No, that was about the sum of it.
He closed corpse eyes and quested out with his mind. Pleasantly enough, the searching centered itself at the bluebody and not his comatose form. Somewhere in his periphery, he nudged into a hulking presence. He flung corpse eyes wide and turned in a flash.
Empty. The few stars peeking through cloud gaps did more looking than luminating. The ghostly blanket spread over the ground in all directions held nothing save trillions of snowflakes. His heart pace quickened in the cave, and he leaned his mind back into questing.
There. Closer than before. It bulged obtrusively as an obelisk jutting from the tundra. What creature could be that massive? A narwhal wouldn�
��t be moving like that. The sea was too far away for a walrus. Could be an ox. Was it—
His stomach fell somewhere along the invisible string that connected his two bodies. Was the thing inside the cave? What body was the feeling coming from?
He twitched.
Need to move. Need to move. Nothing that big is safe.
But his eyes stayed fast. His spirit still communed with the bluebody. He couldn’t waste his last candle like this. Maybe… maybe he could run it back to the cave in time and fend off the intruder with the corpse. He opened the bluebody’s eyes.
In the breath-thin light, the lusterless plain moved. The disorienting, blue-tainted image that played in his mind edged him toward nausea. The world, it seemed, shifted, but he felt nothing. It tilted again, translating in the other direction.
No, wait, that’s not the earth moving, that’s…
In the midst of the darkness, an even deeper pit of blackness gaped open. Puigor’s mouth dropped as he finally reconciled the image before him.
A giant bear.
The bluebody rattled as a bellow from the belly of the bear blew over it. Puigor didn’t have even a second to react before jaws clamped down on the corpse.
He jolted back into his body and lashed out on the cave floor in search of the candle. His glove latched around it and he immediately quested out for signs of danger. Nothing jumping out at him, he drew back into himself and blew out the candle.
He curled up and waited for his breathing to slow. Though he tried, he could direct his mind nowhere else: the elder would never see Nunapisu.
16
Orluvoq
Far below, the ocean pitched and yawed, but such details etched out their births and instant deaths beyond Orluvoq’s perception. A river of green flowed soundlessly around her. Her candle pulsed its rhythmic orange. And she was flush with brow-creasing thoughts.
Now more than ever she could easily flee to her home in the north. One awkward conversation when Nalor came to retrieve that token he’d placed with the corpse, then she’d be free to live as she was wont.
But that would be like taking a mouthful of milk and never swallowing. The blushes of beauty she’d burgled had been the coup at the pinnacle of years of unrest. And after a coup, a new government must follow. So she strode to Qilaknakka and its fearsome king.
She would see this great magic worked. That much she could do. Whether she stayed was another matter entirely.
And if Qummukarpoq desired to take her as his bride? Must she then remain the most beautiful woman, the scourge of the south that gobbled up girls ad infinitum? To grow ever stronger, the price of the crawl racking ever higher?
And if Qummukarpoq didn’t want her? Then… then… Distended and detached faces bulged in her mind as she had sucked virtue dry. Plucking out a raggedy dirge on Nunapisu’s unpeopled chasm strand. Hiding.
Could she content herself with returning to Nunapisu and simply loving her parents until they passed? Until the love turned to pain? Is that what came after Qilaknakka? More keenly than any point in the past decade, loneliness stabbed her through the core. Though the beauty of many adorned her face, it ran only skin deep.
She reached for more tuuaaq.
Her heart fluttered, and she stopped her hand.
I shouldn’t waste it.
Ah, but it would be so lovely.
Her hand quivered.
I shouldn't take any more than is needed.
Though with a bite or two more, she could hasten her path. The ocean was long, and she must reach its start before night broke.
But I haven’t tried more than a crumb. Is Arsarneq really the place to stretch my limits?
There was no place better.
The voice of denial made no reply. It stepped aside just enough to give hesitation a spectator spot. And where hesitation came, surrender followed.
As she marched through the green serenity scoring the sky, her fingers twitched their way to a naked spike of tuuaaq. The sweet tooth fit in her fingers like long-lost lovers finding each other’s embrace. Out from the pocket. Up to the lips. Musky and dry the aroma ascended, dusting through each nostril.
Not too much.
The hiss of reason careered through her head as her eyes laid trained on the sallow tusk. She pushed it between her lips, sank in her teeth, and snapped off an over-generous lump. As the chalky chunk broke apart in her mouth, she broke Arsarneq’s silence with something between a moan and a whimper. Orluvoq’s loneliness evaporated, falling upward to dance with the moonbeams.
Orgasmic delirium curled her eyes back into her head while her legs kept pedaling on. The hero’s song rumbled to the forefront of her mind. Oh, how she’d missed this.
High and lonesome he stood above the world at its start. Through the castle’s window, in the aurora’s light, he gazed upon the water reaching ever the higher. That specter that had loomed over his back for decades upon scores. That custodian of secrets that had baffled his every questing and devoured every bluebody. But it couldn’t stand mute forever. Soon, it would yield. Soon.
In his liminal angakkuq’s senses, a beacon tugged from the north. He slid his eyes shut and tracked the pull with his mind.
It radiated undeniable power and moved toward the castle like plummeting icicles. Obviously careening through Arsarneq. Either angakkuq or demon. But what angakkuq announced his coming with such hue and cry? A demon, then, though none the likes of which he knew.
He must make ready for war.
Out through the window he stepped on the wind and hiked it to the castle’s roof. Clouds content to linger hung above the green aurora. Softly plashed the ocean on the ice strand far below. Deeply groaned the sea wall stretching ever up behind. Darkly hummed the odor from the candle to his nose.
Though demons fell from heaven to best him; though shamans crossed the sea to worst him; he had laughed at every would-be. He had cast their flesh to ice then fed their bodies to the wall. Ever they came to vanquish, and ever did they fall.
But this thing. This thing in the middle of Arsarneq, it brimmed with untold might. With the power of the morning sun shaking off its slumber while sinful beaks of birds proclaim the coming of the light. This thing, did he fear it? He feared that he just might.
But no. He was Qummukarpoq, king of Nuktipik and all the world. Vultures’ beaks broke upon his skin. Ice froze again upon his passing. The aurora bent the knee before him. In his belly wriggled primeval magics waiting to gush forth. He slapped distances flat with the bark of his voice, and as the hills re-echoed, they carved valleys to his feet.
No, this thing, he did not fear it.
It stayed its course and drew the nearer. The king readied him another taper and dashed more tuuaaq on his tongue. The wind reached round and grazed his skin, though he did not feel its fingers. The candle did its job on that front. Now to test its mettle in the job to come.
He steeled his jaw as the demon hurtled toward him straight down the belly of Arsarneq. It reached the apex above his head—
—and flew straight into Qilaknakka?
Water plumed out from the far-off impact, sprinkling as mist by the time it reached the ocean. The king blinked and kept all the steel in his jaw. Had that been a woman? Holding a flame of blue? If not a demon…
He rolled the possibilities and plausibilities over in his mind, then slipped another shard of tuuaaq into his mouth. This wouldn’t be easy.
Once before, and only once, had he assayed a task so fraught. But on this night, it seemed his lot to bend the world to him once more.
He sank into a mindful trance. Felt the light above him slither. Felt the stolid wall of water and the periled girl inside it. That band of green with violet fringe became his only rival. That provenance of tusk was found his only worthy foe. He raised up feral talons and propelled them at its throat.
His wraithlike power tangled with the adamant aurora, throwing varicolored sparks into the frigid, darksome sea. His lips spat curses on the name of each of hi
s forebears while the wind whipped up and stole the drops from every sweating pore.
And though it yowled in bastard tongues, the light began to budge. And though it frothed in motley hues, it listed when he nudged. In stitches he affixed his will along its nether side. Lastly it relented and untethered from the sky.
Hence and thence it slowly swerved, as is wont for behemoths. He stayed its weft, he held it fast, then rammed it into Qilaknakka. Like a great and laminar tongue, it wriggled as he fished within, combing to and fro to beckon forth the wandered demon girl. There he grazed her finding depths and swiftly compassed her with light; plucked her from the inky bowels and bore her into vital night.
Down he drew the emerald ribbon from its course on heaven’s heights, sundered it from lofty haven, bent it low before his feet. Its luster glazed the castle over, blazed it to a radiant gem. Verdance spilled along the sides, pooled in fishes’ wondering eyes.
Qummukarpoq released the aurora and doubled over. It snapped back home, and a growl of thunder followed. He looked down at what it had left—what he’d salvaged from death. Not a demon. A girl. A most beautiful girl, even in her deluged state. Might he say, a beauty with no equal? And a tirigusuusik at that?
His eyes fixed on the vast wall of water, then slid back to the woman. The most beautiful woman. For the first time in a great while, Qummukarpoq smiled.
Orluvoq hated death so far. There was too much spinning. Would she always be this thirsty? Why was it still cold? She tugged at the blanket to cover her nipped nose. Eventually the furry dryness in her throat convinced her to look for water.
She opened her eyes to pure white environs. Not so different from life, save that every edge was cut with precision. She was loath to leave the exquisite bed. Never had she slept in one raised off the ground. Still, the itch in her throat wasn’t leaving, so she peeled back the covers and sat up.
Orluvoq Page 19
