‘Your idiot cock-sucking son interrupted our work. He will die slowly for that irritation. I could have done so much more with this white dullard.’

The shaman opened his medicine bundle, pressed the bloody cross to his forehead where it left its mark, and dropped it into the leather pouch, his eyes still on Henderson’s body. The pale thing that was dark underneath, now boiled in its rage.

‘Look at me, you cunt!’

Hunting Wolf closed his eyes and knelt down on the hard, freezing tunnel floor. He raised his hands above his head, swayed forward and back and chanted a prayer to the Thunder Spirit for purity. The monotone of his deep intonations bounced between the rock walls, returning to his ears almost as a chorus rather than a single voice.

The darkness behind the pretence of pale flesh was losing its grip on the illusion. It watched the man with a hatred too intense to quantify, and its form shifted like sand.

‘Father! Father, I can speak. Help me!’

Hunting Wolf twitched but continued chanting, his eyes closed in concentration.

Then a boy’s scream, and the sound of flesh being torn and bones snapping. The shaman closed his eyes tighter and finished his prayer, the final blessing making him touch his scarred cuts unconsciously with a finger.

When he opened his eyes the body of his son was lying before him, his torso ripped open and its guts lying fanned out like a display at a feast. He looked coldly on the apparition, then stood again and waited. He was pure now.

Slowly the vision of Walks Alone faded as he knew it would and the pale man stepped back into view from the gloom.

‘Destroy me, or see all you love destroyed.’

Hunting Wolf’s head was high. ‘How may I destroy that which is nothing?’

The pale face was still, but the dark clouds raged. Its voice was no longer coming from the mouth as it lost its hold of the human illusion in its anger. Instead Hunting Wolf heard it as a screaming in his own head.

‘I am not nothing, you scum from the cunt of a whore! I am Sitconski!’

‘We give you that name. If it pleases us. We can make names mean what we please, for we are men. Now, here, it is the name for nothing. You are nothing, because I choose it.’

‘I am Inktomni!’

‘No. You are nothing. Only we are something. We have life.’

There was mayhem in the tunnel for a moment as the air around Hunting Wolf’s head whipped and churned. Then it became still.

The voice was calm and deep and inside the shaman’s head again. ‘You fear me because I am eternal. It is you who are nothing.’