The Tundra Shall Burn!

by Ken Altabef

  “There’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” he said.

  “And what’s that?”

  She had not turned to face him. She was still enjoying the sky and the Moon, and perhaps that made it easier. “I’ve been thinking things might be better for us if we left this place. If we went far enough away, maybe even all the way to the States, we could have a different kind of life. A better one.”

  “You’ve been talking to Gekko,” she said.

  “I have. I won’t deny it. He said something about a ship, a Company ship. It’ll be easier to go by water than over land. We could leave from Old Bea. The Company ships take on supplies in America somewhere. California, I think he said.”

  “California,” she repeated, a word she had never heard before. She liked the way it sounded coming from Ben’s lips, with his slight southern drawl.

  “Sure. California. Louisiana. Whatever. It won’t be easy but we’ll be all right. Don’t you see? You can leave all this behind. We don’t need to worry about the children any more. Kinak’s doing so well now that his nightmares are gone. And Noona, well, I think she’s got herself a man.”

  “He has a good soul.”

  “Sure. She’ll be fine. Let’s think about ourselves for a change. It’s warm in the States, Alaana and there’s so many nice things there. Wait ‘till you taste jambalaya! You’ll love it.”

  She shook her head slightly. “There’s something you’re not telling me…”

  “Would I try to hide something from you?”

  Her eyes locked with his. “You’re joking, but it’s something serious. What is it? The voices…”

  Though he tried to fight it, Ben’s face turned suddenly grim. He didn’t like to talk about weakness. But there was no escaping it now. “The voices, the shadows. I can’t stand it anymore. All day they call out to me. They won’t leave me alone. What do they want from me?”

  “I don’t know.” Her eyes did not leave him.

  “Do you think I’d still hear them? I mean, if we went that far away?”

  “That far away,” she said, “you won’t hear them anymore. I’m sure.”

  He didn’t tell her the worst of it. The tormented voice that called to him from the shadow world most often was his own. How far would he have to travel to outrun that voice?

  “I can’t stand it anymore,” he said again.

  She looked away. “If you need to go, then you should go.”

  “Go? Me? Alaana, I’m talking about both of us going.”

  She turned to face him again. She looked so tired, so pale. The marks on her face where she’d been stung by bats or whatever they were still hadn’t healed. “I can’t, Ben. I can’t ever leave here. The only thing that stands between my people and starvation or deadly sickness, or some other disaster, is their shaman. And that’s me.”

  “Take a look at yourself. It’s killing you, Alaana.”

  She looked away again. “I won’t ever leave them. Go if you have to. I understand.”

  Silence.

  “You should have known from the beginning,” she added. “I can’t leave them.”

  “I know,” he said.

  And he couldn’t leave her, for the very same reason. He knew that if he left her, she would die. Plain and simple. She wouldn’t be able to go on. He couldn’t do that to her. He’d been suffering his whole life one thing or another, and the cries of the shadows were far from the worst of it. He would bear them if he had to.

  “And you should know, I won’t leave you. Not now, or ever.”

  Alaana turned her eyes on him again but instead of a cold, uncompromising stare, they were wet with tears.

  CHAPTER 44

  THE DARK

  Vithrok, alone in his stronghold at the very top of the world, gazed through the lens of Kidan’s device.

  It was time. All the celestial bodies, grinding slowly through their courses, had reached the proper alignment.

  But Time occasionally played its tricks.

  Oh please, he thought, don’t go backward. Don’t play tricks now, after all the waiting, waiting, waiting. It was finally time. Time to pull the Thing down from the sky.

  He wanted this moment to last. He was ready. He had dreamed of it so many times, and dreams were powerful. Dreams were the stuff of the Beforetime. Paradise.

  “Autdlarpoq!” he roared.

  The night sky parted, laying the great weave bare, a shimmering blue web in an intricate and seemingly endless pattern that stretched up to the Moon and away into the Outer Darkness. Strand by strand he had weaved this web, chanting the runes, day after day, year after year.

  Vithrok stood alone at the top of the citadel, on the edge of paradise. And it was right he should stand alone. If there was anyone else worthy to witness this event it might have been Balikqi, the polar bear shaman who had shared the secret of the web with him. But Balikqi could not be here to see this. He had completely consumed that spirit years ago. Nothing left of him, but this work.

  “This plan…” said Tugto’s voice, “will not succeed.”

  “It will succeed!” said Vithrok.

  Of that he had no doubt. Fear and doubt were dangerous for a shaman and even more devastating to a sorcerer. While such emotions withered a shaman’s powers, they could so rapidly consume a sorcerer like wildfire, rendering his soul a shriveled, tormented husk. Vithrok had faced only one moment of doubt since his resurrection from the mud of the Great Rift. That moment was when he saw how the sun was killing his people. And he had paid dearly for that one fleeting doubt, that one instant of weakness, which had allowed the others to capture and imprison him.

  He had paid for that doubt with long, lonely eons within the catchstone. But during that time he had struggled and, with great resolve, he had eliminated all doubt and fear once and for all. Without any such hindrance he was free to concentrate on the monumental task at hand.

  Vithrok focused his will in supreme concentration. Beginning at the base of the tower, he sent his spirit slowly creeping along the psychic tendrils of the web, flowing fast and true to their attachments at the dark citadel hidden on the far side of the Moon. He felt a tremendous exhilaration as his spirit-man occupied the entire length of the tether. He hung in the night sky, arching over the earth itself, secure in the knowledge that there was none who could oppose him. He tested the lines of force he had woven into the bedrock of the Moon’s surface. The Moon was critical, for it was the lever against which he must pull.

  He paused, one foot resting on the balcony of the Tunrit palace, the other in the bedrock of the Moon, straddling the heavens. He sent his consciousness out along the web, stretching as far as ever an earthly mind had ever traveled, out into the Celestial world, the seventh world, where only very few had ever managed to tread. He felt the weight of the other bodies there, the massive planets, the blazing stars. Slowly testing the constellations, he adjusted the last few strands of his web. There was tremendous power in such an arrangement of planets and stars and he let it flow slowly into his being.

  The Thing That Was Cast Out drifted at the limits of his perception. It was, as always, half asleep. At this vast distance he was dimly aware of its senseless muttering, and that was all. Now came the most difficult part, for he must stretch out his spirit-hands, the same hands that had eons ago reached for the sun and dragged it hence from beyond the curtain of the sky. And in so doing the fingers had been burned down to clawed stumps, scars which he still carried to this day.

  There must be no fear. There must be no doubt.

  Vithrok reached his blackened, clawed hand to the Thing. And grabbed hold.

  His mind brushed against the Thing. A mindless, roiling chaos, a supreme darkness battered his consciousness, making him feel that he was but an immaterial speck in the grand scheme. This entity was so vast and powerful, it represented half of the universe. And it was completely insane.

  The Thing spoke to him. “Cold,” it said, “Cold. Cold.”

  Vi
throk’s hand, where it touched the Thing, burned with the infinite cold of space. The pain was incredible; he thought it even worse than the fires of the sun. Still he maintained. No fear, no doubt. His plan would succeed.

  “You’ll be warm again,” Vithrok said, “as soon as you arrive here. I have a ball of fire waiting for you.”

  “I sense it,” whispered the Thing. “I want it!”

  “I know. You shall certainly have it.”

  “Truth,” said the Thing That Was Cast Out. “Truth. Truth. Truth.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes,” said the Thing. “Truth. Bring me back, little one. Bring me back. Good. Back and warm and water. Water.”

  “You shall have fire first.”

  “Fire. Warmth. Closer. Closer. Yes, I see. Golden, boiling steam. Sweet fire flowing free. Pull. So cold. Cold. Truth. Tsungi.”

  At mention of that name Vithrok experienced such a wave of intense, insane hatred he felt as if he’d been blasted from the sky. The wretched Thing flared with rage, searing Vithrok’s own soul with the full bitter cold of deep space. It burst into a fit of panicked and mindless screaming. Vithrok bit back against the terrible pain. Its hatred and anger was almost impossible to bear. Vithrok felt it sizzling white-cold against his mind and had to pull himself back or be lost to its dizzying chaos.

  “Pull, dog!” said the Thing. “Pull!”

  Vithrok smarted at the command. I’m no dog, he told himself. He was not humbled in the face of such a powerful spirit. He was enacting his own plan. A plan that would render the Thing, and Tsungi himself, back into the greater fold of spirits communing equally in the Beforetime. When paradise was restored, they would all stand eye to eye.

  Thus he focused carefully, slowly, directing the energies of all the aligned celestial bodies in a supreme effort aimed at the fulcrum of the Moon.

  He pulled, screaming, straining at the web like an animal. And at the other end, the writhing ball of utter darkness reversed its course to begin its retreat back toward the earth. The Thing trilled with delight.

  A desperate message came to Vithrok from the dark side of the Moon.

  “We have trouble,” it said.

  “Not now!” returned Vithrok.

  “It’s my father the Moon-Man.”

  In the lightless reaches of the far side of the Moon, the Dark held court.

  They came in a tide as the sea, streaming up from the world below, the broken, the cursed, a host of lost souls wandering without direction. They milled around his crumbling throne of black rock with its tall spire, a beacon to the lost and lonely among fields of desolation and darkness.

  The high seat was supposed to make him feel important. It did not. The Dark was disgusted with the court of lost souls, the lamentations of the supplicants pressing at his doorstep in their long, long line. Let them wait forever. He was tired of directing them where to go, tired of their vacant stares and dull pleas for mercy. Some he sent to the Distant Lands of peace and tranquility, some he sent screaming to the Underworld, others he bent and twisted like putty, trying to find a shape for them to fit, an existence with some sort of harmony to it, and generally failing. And of late he had grown tired of all of it.

  Tired of this place where the sun never reached, this realm of utter blackness on the backside of his father’s ass.

  He sat upon his throne, ignoring the tumult from the pleading souls. But just simply ignoring them was not enough.

  A jarring sensation rocked his seat. He felt Vithrok’s pull and knew that all would soon be set right. The ground trembled with the force of it; he heard the sound of cracking stone, but the Dark was not concerned. In the end, the Moon would hold together. The sorcerer knew what he was doing.

  “What are you doing?”

  The Dark turned to face his father. He had not set eyes on the Moon-Man in centuries. Annigan seemed so diminished from what he had previously been, though he always appeared less impressive here on the dark side where there was no light of the sun for him to reflect. It was easy to believe him only an old man, dressed in a white parka which shone dull gray in the absence of light, his head a pale warty sphere as pitted and creased with age as the Moon itself.

  “I’m not doing anything,” said the Dark.

  “Something’s happening,” said the Moon-Man. “I feel it.”

  “Nothing,” said the Dark. “I’m just here in the dark where you have left me, doing the chores you can’t be bothered with. As always.”

  The Moon-Man glanced around, still seeking the source of the disturbance. “I thought you were happy here,” he said absently.

  “Is that what you thought? Did you ever think of me at all?”

  The Moon-Man’s vacant expression returned his answer, infuriating the Dark.

  “Gjt! You think I’m useless,” the Dark said, knowing there was little point in rehashing old grievances at this moment, but unable to resist. So near the end, he might not get another chance. “You think you made a mistake, creating me.”

  “I did make a mistake,” said Annigan. “You can’t create a child from resentment and heart-break.”

  “And that’s why I’ll never be as good as my sister,” said the Dark, nodding his head enthusiastically. “She comes from love, is that right?”

  “You two are very different. You have no soul. I should have realized that from the start. I’m sorry.”

  “Then why didn’t you just take me apart then? Why didn’t you just destroy me?”

  “I couldn’t do that either. You are flawed, my son, but you are just that. My son.”

  “Left to rot in the dark. Well, all that is going to change, father.”

  “What do you mean?”

  They felt the pull again, and Annigan grew very suspicious. He fixed his gaze on the spiked throne from which the Dark reigned down his thorny judgments. Realization slowly dawned in his old gray eyes as he cast a glance up at the heavens and then back down to the black seat.

  “Who dares?” he asked. “Who dares?”

  “Gjt! You’ll find out,” said the Dark. “I’ve already called him. You’ll see!”

  The veil was lifted from the Moon-Man’s eyes then, and he felt the full force of his adversary. He felt the constellations bearing down. The strain was incredible. The whole sky seemed arranged against him.

  “Who dares?” asked the Moon-Man again. He flexed his entire will in direct opposition to Vithrok’s pull.

  The Moon groaned beneath the strain. “I won’t allow it!” he said. The base of the ebon throne snapped.

  “You can’t stop it,” said the Dark. “Let him pull. Let him pull! Let him put the sun away, and then all the Moon will be rendered dark. Let your lie be exposed. Let everyone see. You are a sham, father — all your light is reflected from the sun. Let everything be made dark and then I will be the lord of all the Moon. Gjt! How will you like that? You can watch the dawn from here as I do. In darkness, never again in light.”

  “I didn’t realize…” said Annigan.

  “Didn’t you?” laughed the Dark. “I’m not surprised. Poor old Annigan, so oblivious to all the suffering he’s caused his children, as fathers usually are, too concerned with his own failed marriage. This betrayal must be so unexpected — to a self-absorbed fool!”

  And then Vithrok stepped down from the heavens and set foot on the Moon.

  “You!” said Annigan.

  “You know me?” asked Vithrok. He cut an impressive sight, standing as tall as the Moon-Man, clad from neck to toe in a sleek armor composed entirely of liquid Beforetime. The armor writhed and shimmered, reflecting fantastical colors as it rippled across his body.

  Annigan cast a weathered eye at Vithrok. “The sorcerer who so many have been seeking lately. The Tunrit.”

  “The Truth!”

  The Moon-Man nodded. “They have called you that. And Death-Bringer too. It’s a long, long time ago but I still remember. I saw it all from here. I remember how you doomed all your kind.”

  �
��Light-Bringer,” said Vithrok. “I was Light-Bringer once, then Death-Bringer. But now I shall be Light-Bringer again. For the final time.”

  The Moon-Man glanced up at the starry sky. “That Thing you deal with has nothing to do with light. And to bring it here, you would use me as a lever. I won’t let you do it.”

  “And how are you going to stop me, old man?”

  With a great creaking and heaving Annigan expanded to his full natural height, perhaps ten times as tall as an ordinary man.

  Vithrok likewise enlarged, his glistening armor reshaping itself to suit his needs. Without another word he charged at the Moon-Man and the two titans grappled. The sorcerer flung his clawed hands around the Moon’s throat. Annigan struggled to break his grip.

  “You shouldn’t have come here, not to this side,” said Vithrok. “No sunlight here to reflect. You are weak.”

  The Moon-Man felt something he hadn’t experienced in hundreds of years of sitting quietly in the cold sky. He felt red rage. “You think me… weak?”

  He shoved Vithrok away, breaking his murderous grip.

  Annigan took a step backward, and it was a stumbling, old man’s step.

  He was old. He was ancient. It had been a long time since he had done anything except sit and contemplate the world below. His back ached. His knees felt ready to pop. He watched the young upstart as he made his charge in glittering silver armor, but he was not afraid.

  Annigan reached out to the heavens. With the sun hidden from sight by the bulk of the Moon itself, he began collecting the light from the nearby stars. He commanded the ivory rock beneath his feet to reshape itself and rise to his hand. An instant later he held a weapon in a two-handed grip. It was a long spike made of moonstuff, glowing hot with starlight. The Moon-Man’s white parka shone brilliant with moonlight, his crusted skin shone alabaster. He straightened his spine. He raised his chin, tilting his huge gourd-like head high. He was ready.

  Annigan lashed out with his weapon, sending a blistering stream of moonlight at his adversary. Vithrok was knocked back a pace by the mighty blow, but the sorcerer had chosen well. His silvered armor, fashioned of the Beforetime itself, simply reflected the light and cast it back out to the heavens.