Tundra

Fresh out of sleep, I emerged off the dusty stairs into the Tower proper. Morning light peeked in the arched windows, and was thrown around the walls. Crows called outside on the gabled roof, ringing in the day. So soon after dawn, I expected to be the only one awake, but as I soon discovered, one other person was inexplicably keen for study. He was not somebody, like me, who had nothing better to do once his bed grew cold, no breakfast to eat and no friends to eat it with. He was someone I had already encountered several times, and his presence did not bode well for my peace and quiet.

‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ I asked him, casually.

‘Excuse me?’ A pencil dropped, lying flat where it had performed pirouettes moments before.

‘The earthquake,’ I prompted him. ‘Did it give you any new insights?’

The figure, bent hunched over his paper, back turned to me, guffawed. ‘I suspect you’re mocking me,’ he said, taking the time to turn around slowly. There was something odd about his face, as if the sleepless rings under his eyes were deeper than should have been possible. ‘But yes, actually, it did. Come down to my sanctum and I’ll show you.’

I couldn’t tell you why I agreed. We let quiet footfalls carry us back down the stairs and out of the tower. Ice coated the flagstones outside, making our progress along the garden path slippery. Then, the path petered out, and we were walking on the tundra. The stalks of grass beneath my feet were dangerous needles that skewered my shoes, a weak, thin sealskin variety of footwear that offered little protection from the frost. Finally, we reached a small, thatched shack, its windows blind with cobwebs.

‘In here,’ the Geomancer gestured, holding the rotted door open.

Inside, the room brimmed with instruments. Small brass tubes connected to larger brass tubes and finely wrought glass bottles on tripods. Jars held all manner of sediments and oozing things, at least some of which I got the impression had grown unintentionally in an environment of neglect. One dish, however, held something that could not have been unintentional, a substance red as blood and lumpy as jam.

‘I’ve seen that before,’ I said. I couldn’t help myself.

‘Yes, I thought you might have,’ was the answer. ‘I found it growing in the cracks where the earth had shifted. It was a strange quake, too– normally, one would expect it to follow fault lines, but here it’s as though something has just wrenched the rocks apart.’

‘That fungus is unnatural,’ I found myself saying. ‘The druids are quite worried about it. It may be dangerous.’

The Geomancer laughed heartily again. ‘Oh, it’s not dangerous!’ he declared. ‘I ingested some before, to see what would happen, and ever since I feel invigorated. Come, let me show you.’

With careworn hands, he shifted the dish. With a sickening pop the bubbles burst, releasing a thick cloud of spores into the air. They mingled with the dust motes, eddying around us like blood in water. I put my voluminous sleeve to my mouth, horrified.

‘You ingested it?’

‘I did,’ the Geomancer replied calmly, but with eerie distance in his voice. ‘And now I understand. I know why you’re so interested in the druids. They’re primitives, but they have access to a power we’ve never tapped into before… So much power, and they do nothing with it. Breathe deep, brother. Let the Otherworld suffuse you, and you’ll see.’

I only breathed because I couldn’t help it. Coughing and choking, I lurched forward, sending a careful collection of instruments spinning and crashing to their doom. Ink spilled from their wounds, and hissing steam was their dying breath, seeping from where the glass bulbs lay shattered. But that wasn’t all I saw. The Geomancer, as he moved, seemed to shift between fox and man, sprouting ears and a muzzle one moment, and ordinary the next. It was as if there was another dimension to him, but when he spoke, it was always the fox face whose snarling lips moved.

‘What’s happened to you?’ I cried. ‘I can see that thing in your mind!’

Worse, now I saw other things, too, things floating like silver mirages in the air, things that were part animal and part fish– things waiting to possess me.

‘Nothing’s happened to me,’ the Geomancer assured me. ‘I have acquired a new familiar spirit, it’s true, but I am in complete control. Open yourself to the power of the Otherworld.’ He gestured around the room at the spirits, whose open, devouring mouths and jowls he could apparently see. ‘Think about what we could do with this power if it was properly studied and quantified. No more magic hoarded by ignorant old shamans, no more using it to scare mammoth people. Think of what we could build. We could stop simply studying history and start making it.’

Luckily, I still had a scrap of paper on me, which I had intended to use for practice. Snatching one of the unbroken inkwells from the work tables, and dipping into it the first stick of anything I could find, I scrawled a rune for breathing, which burned bright upon the parchment, and I ran. With my aura of scribblings fresh about my head, I thought I had broken free unscathed, but it was only the beginning of the end.