The Glaciermen #47: Finale

Early access prepublication manuscripts of "The Glaciermen"

Hello Dear Readers,

This is it—the finale. It’s been a long time coming, so I won’t regale you with anything other than a warning: it probably isn’t what you were expecting.

Let’s jump in…

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P.S. If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a new batch of free books available through BookFunnel! (No account required.) You can find them here or at the bottom of this post.

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

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Recap (spoilers!): Lee and the viking confront the shaman, only to be overwhelmed by his violent abilities. The tide almost turns when Amanda surprises everyone with a molotov cocktail, but the shaman defeats them with a blast of electrical energy after being wounded by the viking.

Finale

Geodesic mountain waves rose and fell among dancing oscilloscopes of shimmering color. Iridescent scintillations pulsed and twisted, whirling and dancing among tesseract geometries of intersecting spectrums of solid-seeming illumination.

With a crack, the vision snapped away.

Lee was awake. He was on his knees, hands tied behind his back and a blindfold over his head. He felt a burning pain in his shoulder where the lighting had struck him, but the pain somehow did not bother him much. His skin tingled with satisfying energy. Around him, he could hear the shuffling of moccasined feet, the creaking of ropes being stretched and tightened, and the whimpers of muted crying.

“Oh honey, this is not good.”

It was the old-woman voice of the bear spirit.

Why are you here? He asked, a twisting angst rising in his gut.

“Somebody must have slathered you with that blue stuff. You know that always brings me around—ohh, looks like we’re about to find out.”

The blindfold was torn from Lee’s head. He blinked away disorientation as he took in his surroundings one element at a time. There was a gently glistening pool of godseye gel before him. Above him, the chamber walls stretched upward to an opening to the sky high above. Starlight twinkled down.

The pool of godseye looped all around him in a circle. He was kneeling on a small island in the middle of the pool, with probably fifteen feet between him and the other shore of the pool—too far to jump.

The island was just big enough for him and… the shaman! The caribou mask was once again perched over his head, antlers stretching up like hungry fingers, and the craggly metal staff was clutched his grip. The wound on his chest from the vikings axe was exposed, but no longer bleeding due to a thick layering of godseye packing the wound and coating the rest of his skin.

“You!” Lee croaked, his throat dry and hoarse.

He tried to lunge at the sinister figure standing beside him, but his wrists were securely tied to a spike on the ground. He could not help but notice again the tickling warmth on his skin, the bracing sharpness in his mind, the nagging urge to exert force—to hurt, to exact vengeance.

The shaman snorted. “You still cannot see it yet, can you?”

“See what?” Lee snapped.

“The hopelessness of the weak—the necessity of power. Look around you, see how your friends have fallen. They have failed you. Pity them.”

Lee finished his scan of the room and noticed the rest of the chamber’s occupants. Tied to pillars gently leaning over the pool of godseye gel were the crew from the science station: Amanda, Runa, Rolf, Erika—who was the source of the whimpering—and David. Behind each of the pillars was a tunlaq guard. They were adorned with their own animal skull headpieces, smaller than the shaman’s and more like hats than masks, and each was holding a long curving blade. The viking was nowhere to be seen.

They never made it out, Lee realized, his anger burning hotter, goaded by the prickling energy of the godseye on his skin.

“Let them go,” he said, “They have nothing to do with you.”

The shaman clicked his tongue. “Oh, but they do. They are here to help me teach you a very important lesson. A lesson about power—and the price the spirits demand for its abundance. That fool of a slave, the outsider who raised you, recognized the same power I see in you—but he was wrong.

“He believed you were blessed by the Kigatilik, the spirit who hunts shaman. You are blessed, but not as he believed. You are favored by the spirits who do not have a name, the spirits of the deep ice, who respect only strength, survival, and cunning. I too was chosen, long ago, by those who came before me. The bloodline of my forefathers was crossed and matched to produce the fortitude within me that can withstand the madness that overtakes any other who indulges in the gift of the spirits.

“But in a sick twist of fate, the bloodline has been corrupted. No matter how much I purified the breeding stock, no matter how many times I selected the strong from among my tunlaq and sikanuk slaves, breeding them together like animals, my efforts came to failure, producing only pathetic dullards and deformed abominations!

“Then one day out of the sky, the spirits gave me a gift—one who took to their blessing like a seal to water, better than any man I have seen. One day, Adopted One, you will take my place and become their new favored acolyte—the next shaman!

“The spirits have deigned to gift us their ichor and the power it bestows, but this great generosity is not without its burden. In return, we must quench their bloodlust, darken our own hearts to be like the blackness of the deep ice, lest the spirits turn their wrath upon us. This is the price we must pay—blood.”

The shaman waved his hand. The ceremonial guard behind David’s pillar stepped forward and dragged his wicked blade across David’s neck, opening it wide and spilling a stream of blood down into the pool of godseye gel. Amanda screamed and thrashed against her binds, but her cries did nothing to stop the life from slipping out through her father’s open throat as he gasped a final, gurgling breath.

As the blood poured into the gel, the shaman grabbed Lee by the back of his neck and whispered directly into his ear, his voice dripping with expectation, “You will feel it, boy. You will know why I have selected you. Why I have generously given you chance after chance. Feel the power as it pulses through you… let it into you. Let the spirits in.”

The gel into which the blood was pouring began to glow brighter than the rest. The brightness spread, tendrils of light snaking out through the rest of the pool, splitting exponentially across the surface and down into the depths of the gel. The shaman stood back to his full height, then dipped his foot into the edge of the godseye pool.

He began muttering beneath his breath, and from the throats of the tunlaq came a single, continuous basso tone that reverberated within the concave chamber, making Lee’s bones tingle. The tendrils of spreading light in the pool began to snake toward the shaman’s submerged foot. The pool continued to brighten such that Lee had to squint at its luminosity. The gel began to crackle with static until the whole of its surface was dancing with tiny sparks flicking in and out of existence.

The shaman shuddered, then with a harrowing bellow, he slammed the butt of his staff into the gel. The zapping sparks suddenly streaked toward the staff, combining and coalescing into crackling arcs of electricity. Then, all at once, the shaman thrust his staff toward the sky. With a booming clap, all the energy building up in the pool jumped at once. A great bolt of purple-white lightning, massively larger than any Lee had seen the shaman produce before, exploded through the staff and shot upward out of the cavern into the night sky.

The energy washed over Lee as it passed next to him, some of it even jumped across his skin as it made its way to the staff. The feeling was euphoric, soaking deep into him with exhilarating pleasurable intensity. As he felt it, he did not want it to end.

Lee’s vision was pure white from the flash. As his eyes recovered, the dance of colorful geometry returned for a few fleeting seconds before fading to purple blips across his vision. His skin tingled from the heat and electricity. The sharp scent of burnt air and ozone stung at his nostrils, and there was a twitchy energy in his muscles. He shifted on his knees. As he did so, he felt the binds on his wrists loosen—they must have been singed in the blast.

The shaman let out a satisfied growl that shifted into villainous laughter.

“Yes! Ah!” he exhaled, “Witness me! I, Angakkuk, blessed one of the dark spirits of the ice, hold the rage of the sky in my hand—the power over life and death, the power even to strike against the great metal birds of the surface dwellers!”

He leaned down to Lee again, grabbed him by the chin and held his face inches away, so close that Lee could see the glint of the shaman’s real eyes in the dark recesses of the caribous skull eye sockets.

“That’s right, boy. I brought you down to me from above. I killed your metal flying machine and everyone in it because I craved the power their lifeblood would open up to me. And I know you feel it, boy—I can see it in your eyes. The power. You like it. You are the chosen heir to this power. All of it can be yours. Give yourself over to it.”

“Go to hell,” Lee snarled, but he could feel the stirring, the call of the godseye, beckoning him, seducing him.

He could not even be sure if he meant the words. The pleasure of the energy was still dissipating from his flesh, and he could not help but crave even more of the blissful stimulus.

“Your heart is strong, boy, but it betrays you. It weakens you. But no matter, we still have three more offerings to sacrifice to the spirits. You will give in. Let yourself experience the full rapture of the blessings.”

The shaman waved his hand again, and the next guard stepped up behind Erika. Lee licked his lips involuntarily as the thought of another blast triggered a hungry response in his flesh.

“Don’t do this, honey,” the grandmotherly voice of the bear spirit said.

I don’t want to, Lee replied, but I don’t know if I can hold myself back.

The guard opened Erika’s throat. She thrashed in pain as more blood spilled into the pool.

“Why do you think I chose you?” the voice said.

Lee squeezed his eyes shut as the gel began to glow brighter.

You’re not even real—what does it matter?

“Aguta saw something in you, little one, and so does this monster. Do you know why? Because they fear you. They fear the power you can tap into. You are the only one who can avenge my murdered children. You are the only one who can save your friends, or consume them. You are the only one who can defeat the shaman—or become him. The choice is yours. What will you decide?”

I’m nothing like him! Lee shouted in his mind, fighting the lusting anticipation growing in his flesh as he knew the next euphoric blast of energy was approaching.

He opened his eyes. The shaman was laughing again. Erika was still. Her body hung pale and limp, drained of its essence.

He brought down the plane, Lee realized.

“You!” he shouted, “You killed my mother! And Sandy, and Aguta, and everyone else I’ve ever cared about!”

The shaman only kept laughing as tendrils of light began to spread throughout the pool. Lee knew he would not be able to resist another intoxicating blast of energy.

He had a choice. There was always a choice.

Lee tugged against his binds, felt them give a little. The shaman raised his arms up to grasp the staff above his head with both hands as the gel began to crackle with static sparking. Lee jerked his hands back and forth, tugging against the binds as they became looser.

The shaman twitched, convulsed, then slammed the butt of the staff into the gel.

The binds broke loose just as the sparks streaked and converged toward the staff. With a sweeping spin, Lee swung his leg to kick the base of the staff with all the strength in his body, knocking it sideways. With his support suddenly moved, the shaman stumbled a step into the pool, and the staff no longer pointed to the sky, but to his chest. The caribou skull mask jerked down toward Lee only to see broken binds and empty space.

Lee broke the surface of the pool with a slopping plop, sinking fast as the momentum of his dive pushed him into the gelatinous godseye, then slowing as the thick substance closed around him.

It was warm.

That was all he noticed before there was a bright flash above him, and a great booming shockwave rolled through the gel. It rippled through his whole body, breaking capillaries on his skin and eyes, bruising his flesh and tingling his eardrums.

As he sank deeper into the pool, he felt himself slowly slipping away into pleasant darkness, and he did not fight it.

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Until Next Week (ideally)

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– Xavier Macfarlane
Author, The Glaciermen

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