The Terror

by Dan Simmons

  While most spirits who are not contained in souls are content to dwell down in the spirit world, there are creatures abroad who carry the inua spirits of monsters.

  Some of the smaller of these monsters are called tupilek and were actually brought to life by people called ilisituk hundreds and thousands of years ago. These ilisituk were not shamans, but rather evil old men and women who learned much of the shamans’ powers but used them to dabble in magic rather than in healing and faith.

  All humans, and especially the Real People, live by eating souls — they know this well. What is hunting but one soul seeking out another soul and willing it into the ultimate submission of death? When a seal, for instance, agrees to be killed by a hunter, that hunter must honor the inua of the seal who has agreed to be killed, after it is killed but before it is eaten — since it is a creature of the water — by giving it a small ceremonial drink of water. Some of the Real People hunters carry small cups on a stick for that purpose, but some of the oldest and finest hunters still pass the water from their own mouths to the dead seals’ mouths.

  We are all eaters of souls.

  But the evil ilisituk old men and women were soul-robbers. They used their incantations to take control of hunters, who often then took their families away from the village to live — and die — far away on the ice or in the interior mountains. Any descendants of these victims of soul-robbery were known as qivitok and were always more savage than human.

  When families and villages began to suspect the old ilisituk of their evil, the sorcerers would often create small evil animals — the tupilek — to stalk, injure, or kill their enemies. The tupilek started out as lifeless things as small as finger-stones, but after being animated by the ilisituk’s magic, they would grow to any size they wanted and take on terrible, unspeakable shapes. But since such monsters were easy for their victims to spot and flee from in the daylight, the stealthy tupilek usually chose to take the approximate shape of any true living thing — a walrus, perhaps, or a white bear. Then the unsuspecting hunter who had been cursed by the evil ilisituk would become the hunted. Human beings very rarely escaped the murderous tupilek once they were sent out to do their killing.

  But there are very few evil, old ilisituk sorcerers left in the world today. One reason for this is that if the tupilek did not succeed in killing its assigned victim — if a shaman intervened or if the hunter was so clever as to escape by his own devices — the tupilek invariably returned to slaughter its creator. One by the one, the old ilisituk became victims of their own terrible creations.

  Then there came a time, many thousands of years ago, when Sedna, the Spirit of the Sea, became infuriated with her fellow spirits, the Spirit of the Air and the Spirit of the Moon.

  To kill them — these other two parts of the Trinity that made up the basic forces of the universe — Sedna created her own tupilek.

  This spirit-animated killing machine was so terrible that it had its own name-soul and became a thing called Tuunbaq.

  The Tuunbaq was able to move freely between the spirit world and the Earth world of human beings, and it could take any shape it chose. Any form it took was so terrible that even a pure spirit could not look upon it directly without going mad. Its power — concentrated by Sedna only on the goals of wreaking havoc and death — was pure terror itself. On top of that, Sedna had granted her Tuunbaq the power of commanding the ixitqusiqjuk, the innumerable smaller evil spirits abroad.

  By itself, one on one, the Tuunbaq could have killed either the Spirit of the Moon or Sila, the Spirit of the Air.

  But the Tuunbaq, while terrible in every aspect, was not as stealthy as the tinier tupilek.

  Sila, the Spirit of the Air, whose energy fills the universe, sensed its murderous presence as it stalked her through the spirit world. Knowing that she could be destroyed by the Tuunbaq and also knowing that if she was destroyed the universe would be thrown down into chaos again, Sila called on the Spirit of the Moon to help her defeat the creature.

  The Spirit of the Moon was not interested in helping her. Nor was he concerned about the fate of the universe.

  Sila then beseeched Naarjuk, the Spirit of Consciousness and one of the oldest inua deep-spirits (who, like Sila, had appeared when the chaos of the cosmos had been separated from the thin but growing living green reed of order so very long ago), to help her.

  Naarjuk agreed.

  Together, in a battle that lasted for ten thousand years and which left craters and rents and vacuums in the fabric of the spirit world itself, Sila and Naarjuk defeated the terrible Tuunbaq’s attack.

  As all tupilek who have failed in their assassination assignments are destined to do, the Tuunbaq then turned back to destroy its creator … Sedna.

  But Sedna, who had learned all of her lessons the hard way since even before her father had betrayed her so long ago, had understood the danger the Tuunbaq posed to her even before she created it, so now she activated a secret weakness she had built into the Tuunbaq, chanting her own spirit-world irinaliutit incantations.

  Instantly the Tuunbaq was banished to the surface of the Earth, never able to return to the spirit world nor to the deep bottom of the sea nor to hold pure spirit form in either place. Sedna was safe.

  The Earth and all its denizens, on the other hand, were no longer safe.

  Sedna had banished the Tuunbaq to the coldest, emptiest part of the crowded Earth — the perpetually frozen region near the north pole. She chose the far north rather than other distant, frozen areas because only the north, the center of the Earth to the many inuat gods, had shamans there with any history of dealing with angry evil spirits.

  The Tuunbaq, deprived of its monstrous spirit form but still monstrous in essence, soon changed form — as all tupilek do — into the most terrible living thing it could find on Earth. It chose the shape and substance of the smartest, stealthiest, most deadly predator on Earth — the white northern bear — but was to the bear in size and cunning as a bear itself is to one of the dogs of the Real People. The Tuunbaq killed and ate the ferocious white bears — devouring their souls — as easily as the Real People hunted ptarmigan.

  The more complicated the inua-soul of a living thing is, the more delicious it is to a soul-predator. The Tuunbaq soon learned that it enjoyed eating men more than eating nanuq, the bears, enjoyed eating man-souls more than it enjoyed eating walrus-souls, and enjoyed eating men more even than it enjoyed devouring the large, gentle, and intelligent inua-souls of the orca.

  For generations, the Tuunbaq gorged itself on human beings. Large parts of the snowy north that once were thick with villages, areas of the sea that once saw fleets of kayaks, and sheltered places that had heard the laughter of thousands of the Real People were soon abandoned as human beings fled south.

  But there was no fleeing the Tuunbaq. Sedna’s ultimate tupilek could outswim, outrun, outthink, outstalk, and outfight any human being alive. It commanded the ixitqusiqjuk bad spirits to move the glaciers farther south, making the glaciers themselves follow the human beings who’d fled into green lands so that the white-furred Tuunbaq would be comfortable and concealed in the cold as it continued to eat human souls.

  Hundreds of hunters were sent out from the Real People villages to kill the thing, and none of the men returned alive. Sometimes the Tuunbaq would taunt the families of the dead hunters by returning parts of their bodies — sometimes leaving the heads and legs and arms and torsos of several hunters all mixed together so that the families could not even carry out the proper burial ceremonies.

  Sedna’s monster soul-eater looked as if it might eat all the human-being souls on Earth.

  But, as Sedna had hoped, the shamans of the hundreds of groups of the Real People huddled around the periphery of the cold north, sent verbal messages, then met in angakkuit shaman enclaves and talked, prayed to all their friendly spirits, conferred with their helping-spirits, and eventually came up with a plan to deal with the Tuunbaq.

  They could not kill this God That
Walked Like a Man — even Sila, the Spirit of the Air, and Sedna, the Spirit of the Sea, could not kill the talipek Tuunbaq.

  But they could contain it. They could keep it from coming south and killing all of the human beings and all of the Real People.

  The best of the best shamans — the angakkuit — chose the best men and women among them with shamanic abilities of clairvoyant thought-hearing and thought-sending, and they bred these best men with the best women the way the Real People today breed sledge dogs to create an even better, stronger, smarter generation.

  They called these beyond-shamanic clairvoyant children the sixam ieua, or spirit-governors-of-the-sky, and sent them north with their families to stop the Tuunbaq from slaughtering the Real People.

  These sixam ieua were able to communicate directly with the Tuunbaq — not through the language of the tuurngait helping-spirits as the mere shaman had attempted, but by directly touching the Tuunbaq’s mind and life-soul.

  The spirit-governors-of-the-sky learned to summon Tuunbaq with their throat singing. Devoting themselves to communicating with the Tuunbaq, they agreed to allow the jealous and monstrous creature to deprive them of their ability to speak to their fellow human beings. In exchange for the tupilek killing-creature no longer preying on human souls, the spirit-governors-of-the-sky promised the God Who Walks Like a Man that they — the human beings and Real People — would no longer make their dwelling places in its northernmost snowy domain. They promised the God Who Walks Like a Man that they would honour it by never fishing or hunting within its kingdom without the monster-creature’s permission.

  They promised that all future generations would help feed the God Who Walks Like a Man’s voracious appetite, the sixam ieua and other Real People catching and bringing fish, walruses, seals, caribou, hares, whales, wolves, and even the Tuunbaq’s smaller cousins — the white bears — for it to feast on. They promised that no human being’s kayak or boat would trespass on the God Who Walks Like a Man’s sea-domain unless it was to bring food or to sing the throat songs that soothed the beast or to pay homage to the killing-thing.

  The sixam ieua knew through their forward-thoughts that when the Tuunbaq’s domain was finally invaded by the pale people — the kabloona — it would be the beginning of the End of Times. Poisoned by the kabloonas’ pale souls, the Tuunbaq would sicken and die. The Real People would forget their ways and their language. Their homes would be filled with drunkenness and despair. Men would forget their kindness and beat their wives. The inua of the children would become confused, and the Real People would lose their good dreams.

  When the Tuunbaq dies because of the kabloona sickness, the spirit-governors-of-the-sky knew, its cold, white domain will begin to heat and melt and thaw. The white bears will have no ice for a home, so their cubs will die. The whales and walruses will have nowhere to feed. The birds will wheel in circles and cry to the Raven for help, their breeding grounds gone.

  This is the future they saw.

  The sixam ieua knew that as terrible as the Tuunbaq was, this future without it — and without their cold world — would be worse.

  But in the times before this should come to pass, and because the young clairvoyant men and women who were the spirit-governors-of-the-sky spoke to the Tuunbaq as only Sedna and the other spirits could — never with voices but always directly, mind to mind — the still-living God Who Walks Like a Man listened to their propositions and their promises.

  The Tuunbaq, who — like all the greater inuat spirits — loves to be pampered, agreed. He would eat their offerings rather than their souls.

  Over the generations, the sixam ieua clairvoyants continued to breed only with other human beings with the same skill. At an early age, each sixam ieua child gave up his or her ability to speak with his or her fellow human beings to show the God Who Walks Like a Man that they were devoted to speaking only to him, to the Tuunbaq.

  Over the generations, the small families of the sixam ieua who live so much farther north than the other villages of Real People (who are still terrified of the Tuunbaq), always making their homes on the permanently snow-and-glacier-covered earth and ice pack, became known as the God-Walking People, and even their speaking-families’ language became a strange blend of the other Real People’s tongues.

  Of course, the sixam ieua themselves can speak no language — except for the clairvoyant speech of qaumaniq and angakkua, thought-sending and thought-receiving. But they are still human beings, they still love their families and belong to their larger family groups, so to speak to the other Real People, the sixam ieua men use a special sign language and the sixam ieua women tend to use the string-shape games that their mothers taught them.

  Before leaving our village,

  and going out onto the ice

  to find the man I must marry,

  the man my father and I dreamt of,

  back when the paddles were clean,

  my father took a dark stone, aumaa,

  and he marked each paddle.

  he knew that he would not return

  alive from the ice

  we had both seen in our sixam ieua dreams,

  the only dreams that are true,

  that he, my beloved Aja,

  would die out there,

  at the hands of a pale-person.

  since coming off the ice,

  I’ve looked for that stone

  in the hills

  and on the river-beds,

  but I have never found it.

  upon my return to my people

  I will find the paddle on which the aumaa

  made its grey mark.

  birth was a short line

  at the blade tip.

  but longer and above this,

  death was drawn parallel.

  come again! shouts the Raven.

  63

  CROZIER

  Crozier awakes with one hell of a splitting headache.

  He wakes most mornings these days with a splitting headache. One would think that with his back and chest and arms and shoulders peppered by shotgun blasts and with no fewer than three bullet wounds in his body, he’d have other pains to notice upon awakening, and while those agonies descend on him quickly enough, it’s the terrible headaches he notices first.

  It reminds Crozier of all the years he drank whiskey every night and regretted it every morning after.

  Sometimes he wakes, as he did this morning, with nonsense syllables and strings of meaningless words echoing in his aching skull. The words are all clickety-clack-sounding, like children making up vowel-heavy clucking noises just to find the right number of syllables for a jumping-rope song, but they seem to mean something in those few painful seconds before he comes fully awake. Crozier feels mentally tired all the time these days, as if he’s spent his nights reading Homer in Greek. Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier has never in his life attempted to read Greek. Nor wanted to. He’s always left that to scholars and to poor book-obsessed souls like the old steward, Peglar’s friend, Bridgens.

  This dark morning he’s awakened in their snow-house by Silence, who is using the string shapes shifting between her fingers to tell him that it is time to go seal hunting again. She is already dressed in her parka and disappears out the entrance tunnel as soon as she’s finished communicating with him.

  Grumpy that there is to be no breakfast — not even some cold seal blubber from last night’s dinner — Crozier dresses himself, pulling on his parka and mittens last, and crawls downhill out through the entrance passage that faces south, away from the wind.

  Outside in the dark, Crozier gets carefully to his feet — his left leg still sometimes refuses to accept his weight in the morning — and looks around. Their snow-house glows slightly from the blubber lamp that is left burning to keep the temperature up inside even while they are away. Crozier clearly remembers the long sledge voyage that brought them to this place. He remembers watching, fur-bundled on his sledge and as helpless as he had been those many weeks ago, with somet
hing like awe as Silence had spent hours digging out and then constructing this snow-house.

  Since then, the mathematician in Crozier had spent hours lying beneath his robes in the snug little space and admiring the catenary curve of the thing and the absolute and seemingly effortless precision that went into the woman’s cutting of the snow blocks — in starlight — and the near perfection of the rising, inward-tilting walls made from those snow blocks.

  Even as he watched from beneath his furs that long night or dark day — I’m as useless as tits on a boar, had been his thought — he’d also thought, This thing should fall. The upper blocks were almost horizontal. The last blocks she’d cut had been trapezoidal, and she’d actually shoved that final block — the key block — out from the inside and then trimmed the edges and tugged it into position from within the new snow-house. Finally Silence had come out and climbed onto the catenary-curve almost-dome of snow blocks, scrambled to the top, jumped up and down, and actually slid down its sides.

  At first Crozier thought she was just acting like the child she sometimes looked to be, but then he realized that she was testing the strength and stability of their new home.

  By the next day — another day without sunlight — the Esquimaux woman had used her oil lamp to melt the inside surface of the snow-house, then let the walls freeze again, coating it with a thin but very hard glaze of ice. She then thawed the sealskins that had been used first for the tent and then for the sledge and rigged them with sinew cords punched through the walls and ceilings of the snow-house, hanging the skins a few inches from the inside walls to provide an inner lining. Crozier had seen immediately that this protected them from dripping even while raising the temperature inside their living space.