by Ken Altabef
“Never,” she said. “Name souls pass from generation to generation, but not the full inua.”
“And it means?”
“It means she will live again.”
“When will she come?”
“Some time in the early spring.”
Ben’s eyes clouded over, but he smiled. “Something to look forward to in spring. Will she have Tama’s smile too, as well as her soul? And her laugh?”
Alaana nodded. “Yes. I think she will.”
“Will she know us?” asked Ben hopefully. “Will she know us when she comes?”
Alaana shrugged. “She’ll call Tooky her mother. But we’ll never be far from her.”
Ben drifted again toward sleep. “I thought I could save her. I thought I could bring her through. But she was already here. Damn, I would have killed them both.”
“You should have told me.”
“I couldn’t. I thought your light would burn them, that it would ruin everything.”
“You should have trusted me.”
“I did,” he said. “I do. I never stopped believing in you.”
“I know. If you had given up on me, I wouldn’t have survived it.”
“You found Tama, Alaana. In the end you found her. That’s all that matters.” He winced and moaned softly.
“Enough excitement,” she said. “You need to rest.”
“It was a gift,” he said, “from your patron. His way of giving something back. His way of making things right.”
“Not good enough,” spat Alaana, her voice trembling.
“Come on. You’re a good woman, stronger than anyone knows. Stronger than you know. You can do great things. You will.”
“I’m tired of hearing that. It does me no good.”
“When your destiny calls, you must answer.”
“Maybe not,” she said. “I don’t think I want any part of it anymore.”
Alaana visited the little cove at the seaside, the place where the Anatatook had buried so many of their dead. There were quite a few new graves. The people lost in the storm, those killed by the shadows. She paused at Massautsicq’s grave. He had been so old and so very wise. She would miss his counsel.
Tikiqaq nudged a loose stone closer to the grave. Alaana looked toward the cave where the little ava had kept her house, where Tama and the tiny creature had once played at drinking tea. The house was empty. The little spirit had gone.
Breath clouded before her face. It was cold, very cold.
Tikiqaq nudged her boot. Its ragged whiskers drooped. Its moonbeam eyes blinked back a tear.
“And what am I to do with you?” she asked. “A creature made only for vengeance.”
She bent down to it. “Come here.”
The tupilaq shuffled backward.
“Come here!” commanded Alaana. “A creature that has no heart!”
A red rage came over her. She had lost too much.
She pushed the tupilaq down on the snow, ripping open the stitches at its chest. There was no blood. “I should have done this long ago.”
Tiki squealed in fright.
“No kill I,” it pleaded, “No kill!”
It was the same thing the pathetic creature had said months ago, when Alaana had first given it life. Its moonbeam eyes gaped wide. The raven’s beak trembled.
Alaana held up a lock of Massautsicq’s hair, which she had braided into a solid lump. She could still see a tiny flicker of his soul which remained within.
“Keep this for me,” she said. “He was very wise, and a true friend to me.” She placed the new heart within the tupilaq’s open chest. “And if he speaks to you, be sure to listen.”
CHAPTER 51
EPILOGUE
“Not dead,” muttered Vithrok softly. “Not dead.”
He shifted listlessly on his high seat of black stone. The limbs of his body, which were certainly dead, shuddered slowly at his command. It was as if the age-old frame of frozen flesh would like nothing more than for his spirit to fly again and leave it to its chilblained rest.
“Not dead,” he reminded the arms and legs. The body could not feel pain, but his spirit was another matter. Dead but not…
He forced himself to his feet as if to prove the point. His frozen bones creaked. His soul ached.
But pain, he had learned, need not cause suffering. White-hot agony could be an exquisite ecstasy if the mind interpreted the sensation correctly. He had learned that secret long ago. Trapped for an eternity within the soulless stone, a solitary mind out of body, feeling nothing, he had come to welcome all sensation.
But the weakness — the weakness of his soul irked him. The idea that this could happen! That he could be brought so low by one woman. A woman!
No matter. With time he would recover. Time to recover. Time spinning forward, time creeping back.
Ironic now to think that he needed time, time to heal, when the crux of his plan was to kill time, to be rid of that nagging nemesis forever.
It was truly ironic. He had been stabbed in the heart with a weapon forged of pure Beforetime. Ironic, when all he wanted to do was to restore the Beforetime, to return this world to the paradise he had known before the Rift. And he would do it. No matter what the cost. He would pay it. He would walk this realm clothed in dead flesh, forcing shriveled muscle and petrified bones to respond to his command; he would haunt these empty halls, his Tunrit all dead and gone.
“Dead,” said a voice.
Voice? What voice was that? He glanced nervously around the throne room. No one could find him here, at the very top of the world. No one at all. Funny, it had sounded like the deep rumble of his old friend Tugto. Tugto’s voice.
“Not dead,” said Vithrok boldly, daring the other to answer.
But there came no reply except the resounding silence of the far north.
Vithrok urged his wooden legs to stand up.
He raised an arm, thrust a clawed hand toward the dome of the citadel. The barrier of coruscating, pulsating Beforetime arced overhead, charged with electric energy and vibrant color, alive with every taste and smell ever conceived. This was his shield. No sound could penetrate it, no mindspeak messages or pleas for help from his captive, no soul-light. To anyone with the vision it cast a shroud of white noise over the citadel, as white as the snow, keeping his fortress invisible to prying spirit-eyes, keeping him safe.
His blackened hand clenched, drawing down a dollop of quicksilver from the shield. The Beforetime glistened in his palm, scintillating, reverberating, speaking to him in the dissonant language of pure fantasy. He sucked it in and the blazing fire of creation invigorated his soul, lending strength to his wounded spirit. He remembered soaring through a sky of crystalline blue ice, circling the frozen world below in an instant; he turned inward, falling into an explosion of color and sound; he swam to the surface of the bubbling, roiling pool, a great bowhead whale who had been submerged for centuries and, breaching the surface, took his first glorious breath of crisp, frosty air. Alive, alive. And then the strength left him again. Standing on shaky legs, half-asleep, with little sustenance to continue.
But he would not relent. He would not.
He forced his legs to carry him into the next chamber.
The name soul of Klah Kritlaq had taken human form. Not the form of that weak shaman it had so recently inhabited, but an old favorite — Klah Kritlaq, the sorcerous shaman that had so terrorized the Anatatook and been killed by Old Manatook many years ago. The name soul stood on two lanky legs, its body resembling an attractively muscled man except for the blood-red color of the shifting ooze that made up its naked flesh. Still, a powerful name.
The yellowed eyes glowed as they turned upon Vithrok.
“I’ll get it out of him,” said Kritlaq. “He can not hold out much longer.”
Splayed out across the chamber was the soul of Balikqi the polar bear shaman. Klah Kritlaq had devised an ingenious method of tearing the soul apart, separating it into glistening strands of inua tha
t hung, shivering and squirming, in the air about the room. At the center of this perverted web, Kritlaq worked the raw strands as a musical instrument, eliciting soulscreams in bizarre pitches and cadence.
Scream all you like, thought Vithrok, glancing up at the impenetrable barrier of Beforetime, your friends will never hear.
The bear had been unwound and stretched to the limit. Its torment was exquisite. Vithrok had never seen a soul tortured in such a horrific way. The various strands of its essence were wound here and there in lines of fine chord. Kritlaq had sorted through its memories, twisted them, manipulated them, tearing them away if they had been pleasant or warm, until the bear did not even know its own name. All its secrets were laid bare, all its magicks revealed.
“I’ll get it,” said Kritlaq. “And soon we’ll weave your web.”
“And bring it back,” said Vithrok.
Kritlaq squinted one yellowed eye at the hole in the center of the dome which revealed a patch of night sky and the brilliantly-shining Never Moves. “Are you sure we can reach it?”
“It’s out there,” said Vithrok, “though I don’t suppose you can you see it.”
Kritlaq’s eyes flashed in their crimson sockets as he bore that insult. The Thing, a blistering ball of liquid darkness, was far too distant for his spirit-eyes. The Thing that had precipitated the first battle, the war in heaven that had caused the Great Rift and brought an end to the Beforetime.
“Oh yes, it’s there,” continued Vithrok. “The Thing That Was Cast Out. I can sense it, drifting slowly away into the Outer Darkness. You can’t hear it but it speaks to my ears plainly, even across the gap of centuries. It has traveled far, but there is still time to draw it back, to put things to rights.”
Kritlaq turned his bloody face away, returning to the task of stripping bare another strand of Balikqi’s tormented soul.
“What happens when darkness meets light?” asked Vithrok. “One should correct one’s mistakes. Don’t you agree?”
Klah Kritlaq knew better than to answer. Any comment on the errors of his master’s past seemed to draw the same result — a harsh and painful discipline. A sorcerer of sorcerers, Vithrok could torture Kritlaq’s soul as easily as he had destroyed the bear’s, and would not hesitate to do so.
“Correcting my one great mistake,” said Vithrok.
“Putting out the sun won’t return the Beforetime,” said Kritlaq.
“Oh yes it will,” snapped Vithrok. “Oh yes it will. I’ve been collecting them. All the pieces. The shamans, the souls. It’s like a puzzle. A child’s game. And I’ll put all those pieces back together again, good as new. I’ll have the turgats too, just give me time.”
He wanted to say ‘time to rest’, but dare not show weakness in front of Kritlaq.
“You just do your part,” Vithrok said angrily. “Get the secrets from him.”
Kritlaq shuddered beneath the fiery gaze of his master.
“I’ve got some of it out of him already,” said Kritlaq. “Not long. We’ll have the rest.”
Balikqi, in a haze of pain, screamed the word “Autdlarpoq!”
“Good,” said Vithrok. He would not stray from this purpose, not until his work was done. It would take a great deal of time, the weaving of this web. Time, time, time would be of little consequence in the end, for without the sun, time would be stilled once more. Just as it had been in the great dark after the Rift. And then to restore the Beforetime. A daunting task to be sure. A dream. But Vithrok knew from long experience that dreams could be made to come true, if only the will was strong enough. But for now he badly needed rest. He turned back toward his high seat.
“All we need is time,” he said. “All that has been lost shall be regained. We will weave Balikqi’s web. We shall bring The Thing That Was Cast Out back to this world and it shall blot out the sun. And then we shall set this world to rights.”
Alaana stood before Tama’s cairn, for the few moments she could stand the freezing cold of mid-winter. Though her daughter’s old body lay below the stones, she would soon have a new body, a new life. Alaana didn’t understand it, but she was grateful. She would make sure the new child bore the same name. Tamuanuaq.
Names were important, and true names most of all. The true identity of her patron still eluded her, though her conflict with Vithrok had given her much to think about in that regard. Certainly her patron was a spirit of great power. There was no doubt of that. Must its name be forever hidden from her?
“It doesn’t matter,” she said in an annoyed grumble. “I don’t want to know.”
“Don’t you?” asked a familiar, reedy voice.
“Nunavik!” cried Alaana.
Nunavik it was. Alaana turned to see the glowing outline of her childhood spirit-helper, the golden walrus.
“Now this is a nice, sweet fuddling you’ve gotten yourself into,” said the Walrus On The Ice. “Accckk! You look half-dead.”
“Nunavik!” shouted Alaana again. “I thought I’d never see you again! Why did you leave me?”
“Oh the many, many things you don’t know.” The walrus’ round face shook merrily as it chuckled, its whiskers flapping. “I went after that imposter who showed up at your initiation. Sila isn’t your guardian, you know.”
“I know that already.”
“But I found out who is,” said the walrus, proudly inflating his broad, golden chest. “I followed him after the initiation. At great risk to myself. That’s where I went!”
“Tell me!” said Alaana.
“It’s quite a tale indeed,” said Nunavik. “But we need the proper place to tell it. Perhaps inside the iglu, with a good lamp burning, and the smell of boiling fish…”
“You don’t feel the cold,” protested Alaana, “with blubber like that.”
“Like what? I…” Nunavik glanced down at his voluminous form and shook his head.
“It’s not for me,” said Nunavik, “but Weyahok is near frozen solid.” He stretched out a flipper. On the golden pad lay Weyahok, another of Alaana’s childhood friends, a loyal and somewhat naïve lump of soapstone.
“I know your true name, your true patron, I know it all,” said the walrus.
“Tell me!”
“Don’t worry, ungarpalik,” said the walrus, using Alaana’s childhood nickname. “I will tell you everything.”
THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES IN:
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Praise for “Il Teatro Oscuro”:
“A heartbreaking work of fantasy that addresses the call of the lost, golden past in the human heart.”
-- Lois Tilton for LOCUS online
Praise for “The Woman Who Married the Snow”:
“This is a rich, atmospheric tale of the interaction of spirits amongst both living and dead. I appreciated the writer’s impeccable voice.”
-- Colleen Chen for TANGENT online
“A well-told tale with great details about Inuit culture.”
-- Sam Tomaino for SFRevu
Praise for “The Lost Elephants of Kenyisha”:
“This well executed story deserves a 'thumbs up,' for its well-crafted writing.”
--KJ Hannah Greenberg, TANGENT online
“The herd of ghost elephants is a neat idea and a great premise for a story.”
--Lois Tilton, LOCUS online
“This was another well-told story that I enjoyed immensely.”
--Sam Tomaino, SF REVU
COMING 9/25/16:
The Kingdom or the Girl?
In a primitive land filled with magic, witches and giants, a young musician named David is summoned by the king to chase away the nightmares that torment him, but the palace isn’t as safe as it seems. Demons haunt the king and two powerful foes—the Witch of Endor and a giant named Goliath—lead an army that threatens to enslave the country.
Princess Michal is drawn to David, but a romance with the poor musician
is strictly forbidden. Only by defying her father’s wishes and risking her freedom, can they be together.
To save the kingdom, David will need more than music; he’ll need to defeat Goliath in a battle of champions. Only a fool would face the giant, but when David falls in love with the rebellious princess, his heart tugs him toward the impossible. As he steps into battle, he faces an unthinkable choice—either save the kingdom or be with the girl of his dreams. He can’t do both.
GLOSSARY OF ANATATOOK TERMS
agvisugruk bowhead whale
allaruk the vision trance
amaut pouch for holding a baby
angatkok shaman
angakua shaman’s spirit light
anorak woman’s coat
aqviq whale
ava tiny spirit women
Aviktugalik The Great Rift
iglu snow house
ihumataaq one who has much wisdom
ilimarpoq the soul flight
inua spirit or soul
inuseq astral projection of the body
inuvik game of blanket toss
ipiitaq aularuq child’s string game, cat’s cradle
kabloona white-skinned man
kamiks light boots
karigi ceremonial house
kiruq taboos of the hunt
mamut mammoth
mattak fermented narwhal skin
maguruq giant prehistoric wolves
mauya soft, deep snow
Niuqtuabruk master of the mountain hawks
Nunatsiaq Our Beautiful Land
pibloktoq the snow madness
Punnik guardian spirit of the mammoths
qaqmaq snow house with tent cover as roof
Savikkigut guardian spirit of sabre-tooth tigers
saugssat a whale trapped in ice
Sedna guardian spirit of sea life