The Glaciermen #36: Guide

Early access prepublication manuscripts of "The Glaciermen"

Howdy There Dear Readers,

Happy October, by the way. It’s my birthday soon, and my first anniversary, and my brother’s birthday, and my other brother, and it was just my dad’s on the first, along with my one uncle… and my niece’s is coming up, plus, there’s Halloween to cap it all off. Lotsa birthdays and things going on in October for me.

Make’s me wonder what the heck the appeal of January was to make all those babies. I guess it was just cold out?

Speaking of cold, it’s time to return to the chilling ice tunnels of the glacier—I hope you have a blanket, because it’s cold down there, and Lee must become even more cold blooded if he’s gonna make it.

(Here’s the previous segment if you missed it, and the first chapter and index, if you’re new).

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Recap: Lee broke away from the returning hunters, luring the tunlaq guard Taqtu using his captive, Tyra, as the bait. With an incapacitated tunlaq, Lee is one step closer to carrying out his desperate plan to save the girl.

Guide

Taqtu awoke to two pale faces staring down at him, a bald young man, bare chested and shaven-headed, and a girl with yellow hair. Both were dimly illuminated blue by a curious blue glow from a soaked cloth at the end of a spear. He was lying on his back. His head pounded with shooting pain, and there was a pulsing throb above his temple. The faces grimaced as he showed signs of life, and he struggled to reconnect his scattered memories leading to that moment.

Guarding the harvest… a girl.

His thoughts were clouded and slow, as if moving through a sticky fog.

Adopted One… the girl, he remembered, then, betrayer!

Taqtu snarled in anger and tried to lash upwards at the faces, but his hands were bound tightly with rope, preventing his revenge. He thrashed against the binds, but he could not break them. He tried to sit up to stand, but a gentle push from the betrayer sent him back down with ease. He tried again, but the hand on his chest became as heavy as an iceberg. He reached to shove it off, but there was a heavy dullness in his limbs and he could barely move his arms, much less free himself. He groaned with the strain, then gave up with a weak gasp, noticing a cloying, bone-dry thirst in his throat. His tongue was like sand in his mouth. A pang of fear struck. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

Trembling with rage and angst, Taqtu slowly looked down at his body. The unfamiliar tan hue of his exposed skin greeted him. He realized all at once what had happened and let out a shrieking cry of utter terror.

The betrayer had taken the blessing of the spirits, and now he was powerless.

• • •

The frigid air of the tunnel was beginning to get to Lee. It had been a few hours since he had removed his own layer of godseye to soak the girl’s shirt and craft the makeshift lantern, and he was missing its warming effect.

Taqtu’s episode had disturbed him. The man’s terror at the loss of the godseye was unnerving, but it was how long his screaming had lasted that had truly made Lee uncomfortable. Nothing he or the girl, Tyra, had done to make it stop produced any effect, including stuffing something in his mouth. He simply screamed past it, going red in the face. Finally, on a hunch, Lee rubbed a dab of godseye under his nostrils. Within a few seconds, the pitiful man noticed the effect and his screaming stopped, quickly replaced by a frantic begging for more.

Lee thought he was going to have to cajole, threaten, or even torture the tunlaq guard to get what he needed, but it turned out all it took was a dab of the clear gel to make the man do anything, so now they were on their way to wherever the sled of corpses had been taken to carry out the next step of Lee’s plan.

They needed to get there soon, too, because Trya had taken to shivering despite her thick winter jacket, and Lee himself was beginning to feel the cold creeping in. Plus, there was no telling how long Taqtu would last. He was in a truly pathetic state.

Lee tugged on the rope hanging back from his new prisoner, who now was walking ahead of him in the passage, guiding the way.

“Hey, how much farther?” Lee asked.

Taqtu, hunched over and shuffling, turned and said in a jumpy rasp, “Not far. Not far. Very close. Next turn. More blessing, now? I grow weaker. Surely not make it. More godseye? Please, more now?”

“When we get there,” Lee said. “Not until then.”

“But need it now,” the man whined, “Or I will die—no doubt, no doubt.”

“Shut up. You’re not getting any until we get to the sleds. Ask again and I’ll torture the route out of you, then I’ll break your legs and leave you here to die without any godseye at all. Get us to the sleds—without any more talking—and you’ll get your godseye.”

The man whined in response to the brutal threat, then turned and continued shuffling forward, his pace quickened.

Lee did not like how he sounded to himself while delivering the threat, but the tunlaq had been begging him at every opportunity since they got moving, and the threat of violence, or more importantly, the threat of no more godseye, was the only thing that effectively worked to shut him up.

 Taqtu was a broken man, desperate, sniveling, shameless. All it had taken to break him had been taking away his godseye. Lee wondered if the other tunlaq were so fragile, but testing the hypothesis was out of the question for the time being.

The three of them rounded a bend in the passage and came upon a larger chamber. Two more passages joined it in addition to the one through which they had arrived. The space was illuminated in the center by a single blue-flamed torch. On one side, hunting implements and supplies were stacked in piles against the wall.. There were spears, nets, ropes slung over crates, and various other small things. On the other side parked three large wooden sleds, the kind used during hunts. Fresh scrape marks in the ice led up to one of them. Its contents were covered with a thick animal skin tarp.

“Wait here,” Lee said to Taqtu as he wiped a dab of the godseye gel off the torch and gave it to him. The man immediately smeared it under his nostrils and around his eyes, sighing with relief and crouching down to let his eyes roll back as the effect washed over him.

Lee rifled among the supplies in the chamber, retrieving a spear and two extra knives, along with a thick canvas covering from one of the crates and a pouch of dried godseye mycelium shavings. He wrapped the canvas around Tyra’s shoulders, then held out a pinch of the mycelium.

“Put this in your lip. Like this,” he said, then pressed the pinch between his lower lip and gum.

The fibers were less poignant than it had been for him the first time, but he could still feel a good bump in his mental acuity. He held out another pinch for the girl. She took it and put it in her lip just as he had shown her. She gave a hum of pleasant surprise as the potent kick of a first-time user tingled in her brain and dilated her pupils.

Lee then handed her the spear and a sheathed knife.

“If he makes any moves, stab him,” he said, pointing to Taqtu and miming a spearing motion.

Tyra nodded, taking the spear and pointing it toward the prisoner.

Lee crossed the chamber toward the sled. He was never sure how much the girl comprehended. She seemed to understand some English, but she could not speak it, and Lee had no idea what she was saying when she spoke in whatever language was native to her. They ended up in mutual silence most of the time, communicating only as needed with simple gestures.

On the other side of the chamber, the sled was heavily laden, and Lee knew what he would find under the tarp as he pulled it off the cargo. The still freezing corpses of those who had not survived the raid lay piled underneath, stiff and lifeless. Lee would have to work quickly, as Taqtu had revealed that this chamber was merely a staging point. The tunlaq would come back and retrieve the sled once they were done with their business in the killing pit. Lee guessed their next stop was the shaman’s chamber, where the bodies from the sled would be stacked into a new macabre pyramid for the shaman’s throne.

Lee pulled his focus back to the task at hand, grimacing at the thought he was about to do, but it was the only way he could save the girl. He began looking at the faces on the pile, searching for one that would suit his purposes. Soon enough, he found what he was looking for: a woman with blonde hair and a fair-skinned face. She looked similar enough to the girl, a bit older perhaps, but it would do. He wrestled the corpse out from under a few others, then began the awkward process of removing the parka and snow pants from its frozen limbs.

When he had finished, he turned to Taqtu and said, “Which way to the killing pit?”

Taqtu’s head jerked back from his reverie, then he said, “More? More godseye?”

Lee sighed, then shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

After giving the man another dab, Lee asked again, “So which way to the killing pit, and which way to the Sikanuk village from there?”

Taqtu pointed toward one of the passages leading out of the chamber. “That way. Straight tunnel to death pit. No turns.”

“And the village?” Lee said.

“Follow markings.”

“What markings?”

Taqtue pointed again. Lee had never noticed them before, but roughly carved into the ice, only visible if one was looking for them, there were symbols above the different passages. 

Two were marked above the passage Taqtu had pointed toward.

“Which symbol is the village?” Lee asked

“There. Symbol on right,” Taqtu said.

Two vertical lines were carved into the ice. The village. A u-shaped symbol was lingering to its left. The pit. Lee looked at the passage leading back to the way they had come—an upside-down semicircle underneath a dot. The surface. A third tunnel led off from the chamber with two branching, scraggly lines that looked like lightning… or antlers. The shaman. 

“Thanks. For your trouble,” Lee said, and offered Taqtu a large dab of godseye.

As the man greedily rubbed the substance onto his face, Lee stepped behind him and unsheathed one of the newly retrieved knives. He took a last look at the once proud tunlaq hunter, now turned pathetic addict. He was filled with pity, but only for a moment, as memories of atrocities returned. With a quick jab, Lee stabbed the knife into the back of Taqtu’s head, just below the base of his skill, killing him instantly.

Tyra did not even flinch.

Lee took the parka and snow pants he had removed from the corpse and began fitting them around the still-warm limbs of the Taqtu’s now dead form, then dragged it across to the sled and hoisted it onto the pile with the others. Lee pulled the parka hood as far down over Taqtu’s face as possible, then laid two other bodies on top of him. It would take a long time for the other tunlaq to find him in the pile, and Lee hoped the discovery would moreso breed confusion rather than suspicion.

“Alright, Tyra,” Lee said, hoisting the corpse of the dead blond woman over his shoulder, then grabbing an extra spear with his free hand, “one more stop left.”

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And that’s it for now folks

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– Xavier Macfarlane
Author, The Glaciermen

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