Dan Simmons - The Terror

The Real People enjoy knowing about these three most powerful spirits in the cosmos – the all-pervasive Spirit of the Air, the Spirit of the Sea, who controls all animals who live in the sea or depend upon the sea, and the final member of this trinity, the Spirit of the Moon – but these three original inuat are too powerful to pay much attention to the Real People (or to human beings of any sort) since these ultimate inuat are as far above the many other spirits as those lesser spirits are above human beings, so the Real People do not worship this trinity. Shamans rarely try to contact these most powerful of spirits – such as Sedna – and content themselves with making sure that the Real People do not break taboos that would anger the Spirit of the Sea, the Spirit of the Moon, or the Spirit of the Air.

But slowly, over many generations, the shamans – known as angakkuit among the Real People – have learned more secrets of the hidden universe and of the lesser inuat spirits. Over many centuries, some of the shamans have acquired the gift that Memo Moira called the Second Sight – clairvoyance. The Real People call these abilities qaumaniq or angakkua , depending upon how they manifest themselves. Just as human beings once tamed their cousin-spirits, the wolves, to become dogs who shared their masters’ inua , so did the angakkuit with the hearing-thoughts or sending-thoughts gifts learn how to tame and domesticate and control the smaller spirits who appeared to them. These helping-spirits were called tuurngait , and they not only helped the shamans see the invisible spirit world and look back to times before human beings, but also allowed them to look into other human beings’ minds to see the faults committed by the Real People when they break the rules of the universe’s order. The tuurngait helping-spirits aid the shamans in restoring order and balance. They taught the angakkuit their language, the language of the small spirits, which is called irinaliutit , so that the shamans could address themselves directly to their own ancestors and to the more powerful inuat powers of the universe.

Once the shamans had learned the irinaliutit language of the spirit-helper tuurngait , the shamans could then help human beings confess their misbehavior and faults so as to cure diseases and to restore order out of the confusion that is human affairs, thus restoring the order of the world itself. This system of rules and taboos passed down by the shamans was as complex as the crisscross string patterns created between the fingers of Real People women to this day.

The shamans also acted as protectors.

Some minor evil spirits roam among the Real People, haunting them and bringing bad weather, but the shamans have learned how to create and consecrate a sacred knife and to kill these tupilait .

To stop the storms themselves, the angakkuit found and handed down a special hook that can cut the silagiksaqtuq , the vein of the wind.

The shamans can also fly and act as mediators between the Real People and the spirits, but they can – and frequently do – also betray the trust of their own powers and harm human beings by using ilisiiqsiniq , powerful spells they cast which stir up jealousy and rivalry and which can even a create a hatred sufficient to compel a Real Person to kill others for no reason. Frequently a shaman loses control of his tuurngait helping-spirits, and when that happens, if it is not remedied quickly, that incompetent shaman is like a large metallic rock calling down the summer’s lightning and there is little choice except for the Real People either to bind up the shaman and leave him behind or to kill him, cutting off his head and keeping it separate from the body so that the shaman cannot bring himself back to life and pursue them.

Most shamans with any power at all can fly, heal people, families, and entire villages (actually by helping people heal themselves by finding balance again after confessing their faults), leave their bodies to travel to the moon or to the bottom of the sea (wherever the inuat most powerful of spirits might dwell), and – after the proper irinaliutit shamanic incantions, singing, and beating of drums – turn themselves into animals such as the white bear.

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.