Tundra

I had chalk on my fingers. It had been years since I had done Blackmouth magic, but that night I dared. It was a night for fantastic things. The moon was a sickle moon, a scythe moon, a harvest moon, and in the ivy outside the Tower’s high, open window was a bed of stars. The real stars, meanwhile, anticipated execution, twinkling anxiously. Candles with long flames were threatened by the night’s breath, and all across the horizon, the tundra was an irregular, frosty blanket, bathed in pale.

I watched as the sigils I had drawn on the floor of the abandoned room began to lift off the flagstones, peeling with smoky outlines, hovering and quivering like the tongues of snakes. A ring of cold fire had formed, and these lines were now the ghosts of etchings burned up. The smoke was coiling up now, forming a pillar to screen the thing that was becoming existent; the thing from another dimension being pulled back into the physical plane. Slowly, two horns emerged, silver and curved as fishhooks, devilishly sharp. Two eyes glittered, with pupils slitted like cats’. A robe tied about his waist hid the legs of the demon, which ended in hooves.

‘So,’ he said, savouring the single syllable, his long tongue a goat’s. ‘After all this time, you call us back to you. Blackmouth may have rejected you, but you have not rejected it.’

‘You’re here because I want information,’ I said, ‘not a lecture.’ The chalk crumble in my hand, useless now, and fell to the floor as dust. I had tried every book in the Tower, even the ones chained to the shelves in this last, locked room, but nothing had yielded answers for me. No writer, no Runecaster before me, had left an adequate account of the druids. Nowhere were fungus giants mentioned except in passing, and then in the most hushed tones runes could convey.

‘So you need us, then?’ the demon hissed. ‘And what do we get in return?’

‘Nothing,’ I answered. ‘No new pacts. You still owe me from the last time we did this.’ I remembered an occasion ten years ago now, with blood given from my wrist, the wrist that bore a scar from a knife instead of a black handprint brand.

‘But it’s customary to offer us something, isn’t it? Some small token of your appreciation for the work we do.’

I shook my head, cursing Blackmouth and fanatic Master Ulrik. ‘I don’t appreciate your work,’ I told the demon. ‘You’re not an entity, a tool. You are the vessel through which I exercise my will, and the fact that you talk doesn’t change that.’

He cackled loudly, his voice as chill as the bottom of a grave. ‘If only that were true! You really don’t have anything for us? No molten gold, no dead animals, no little pieces of your conscience that you weren’t really using anyway?’

‘No.’ I said it aloud, knowing that, bound and trapped within the ring of my devising, there was nothing he could do.

‘Very well,’ he conceded, bitterly. ‘What do you want, then? Be quick, we have more attentive supplicants.’

‘You can’t leave until I dismiss you.’

‘This is true.’ The demon tested his binds, and found my handiwork adequate. ‘But every moment we are here, we are attracting attention. This school’s defensive spells will no doubt have alerted your colleagues to our presence. This is a new school for us, too. We’ve only been here a handful of times. Perhaps you should let us out so that we can explore.’

Again, I told him, ‘No.’

‘We offer you a pact. Let us out of this circle, and we will give you a hundred years of life.’

‘No. You can’t tempt me. I’m not interested in pacts, or deals, or offers, or anything of the sort, particularly not with you. All I want from you is information, and you are already bound to give me that.’

‘Very well. We are nothing without our obligations, after all. What is it that you want to know? What’s so important that you broke your silence to us?’

I licked my lips, choosing my question precisely. ‘What’s going on out on the tundra?’

The response was predictably evasive. ‘Any number of things.’

I put forth my second question. ‘Tell me about the fungus that the druids call the Blood of the Otherworld.’

Obediently, the answer came, simply as if by rote. ‘It is a fungus which allows them to perceive spirits, and allows spirits to possess them. It also makes them conduits for the Otherworld’s energy.’

‘So it’s akin to a summoning spell?’

‘No. We are summoned to perform a specific task and, like the good and faithful servants we are, we fulfil that task.’ The demon shuffled, uneasy about the amount of information it was being forced to divulge. ‘Spirits simply possess whoever they can who happens to be nearby. Certain druids have certain spells by which they can compel certain spirits, but by and large it is chaos. There is no order to the Otherworld, not like where we come from. You should see the place we come from!’ Here, his eyes glittered malevolently. ‘Row upon row of souls, each linked to the others in the great chain of consequence and misery. Mills the size of worlds, churning out new horrors, each identical to the last. We offer you a pact– for a price, we can show you our world. Wouldn’t that be a more valuable contribution than your current researches?’

‘So the Otherworld is not where you come from?’ I asked, feeling underprepared. In truth, I had learned little demonology at Blackmouth. I knew that there were astral planes, inhabited by creatures that could be called up for a pact, but beyond that, my understanding was basic.

‘The Otherworld is nothing to do with us,’ the demon said, spiting my ignorance. ‘Like our home, it is a world that is not this one, but there the similarities end. It is an overgrowth-world, a world of animalistic hungers. We want nothing to do with it.’

It was time for my third question, which I had planned out in advance. ‘Why is the fungus appearing now?’

‘Ordinarily, it requires the light of the Otherworld to grow, so it only appears at certain times of the year. That’s when the druids swallow it for their rituals. We confess, we have often thought that the mass possession the druids indulge in would be good for us if we could ever implement it. Imagine a city of demons, or a school of them.’

‘The light of the Otherworld?’

‘The aurora.’ Clawed hands reached for the sky in gesture. ‘But something has changed. The fungus is growing out of season.’

‘Why?’ I demanded to know.

‘We don’t know.’

I shook my head, wondering how he could have been dodging his obligation to reply truthfully. ‘How can you not know?’ I asked. ‘Demons are supposed to be all-knowing. Isn’t that the point of your world-beyond-the-world, that you can see everything that happens to us?’

‘There are certain things we cannot see. Some things are so powerful they mask their presence from us. We see their shadows and what they leave in their wake, but not the things themselves.’

I sighed. ‘Do you know anything at all about why this is happening?’

The demon shuffled his hooves unwillingly, and then– ‘There is a druid.’ The words rolled off his long beast’s tongue. ‘More accurately, there was a druid. That word may not be the right one to describe him now. For reasons best known to himself, he decided that the season where the Otherworld is close enough to affect this world was not long enough. He is attempting to hold the seasons in place so that the Otherworld will always be dominant.’

‘Why?’

‘If we had to guess? Eternal life. So long as he is animated by the energies of the Otherworld, he cannot die. Power, too, maybe – if he can control spirits, that those spirits can more easily possess the people around him grants him great power over them. Or, he may be possessed himself. We don’t know.’

Now, I was in unfamiliar territory. The demon didn’t know! I tried a new question, one that was not planned. ‘And how has he done this?’

Again, nothing. ‘That’s what we don’t know. Is that why you want to know? You’re jealous that such a great feat of magic was performed without your knowledge? Understand, this man is twice the magician you are, twice the magician you will ever be. If we don’t understand what he’s done, you cannot hope to comprehend it.’

I gritted my teeth. ‘You cannot make me jealous, demon.’

‘Nonetheless,’ he said, under oath of truth, which only made the words sting more, ‘this man is your better.’ The demon grinned, knowing the significance of his statement bound by pact.

I changed the topic. ‘Where can I find the druids?’

‘They will be of no help. The Otherworld season has begun, they are all either possessed or asleep.’

‘Asleep?’

The demon relished the opportunity to school me, his booming voice obnoxious and dripping with disdain. ‘The eldest among them sleep in the earth, and walk the astral plane in dreams. Normally, they communicate with their followers, or custodians, or apprentices at Mossen Grove, but the Grove is full of the possessed now. No-one can help you except us. We offer you a pact – for the souls of everyone in this building, we will find this once-was-druid and strike him down.’

‘How?’ I asked.

‘That is not for you to know.’

I tried a new angle. ‘What books to I need to read to find out more?’

‘There are none. The druids keep their secrets well. Your colleague was on the right track with his earthquake. That was not a natural occurrence.’

I heaved another sigh, and brushed my chalky hands together. The demon stared up at me, his binds, the ones that wrapped his wrists, presented in his hands as he sought leave. ‘That’s all I’m going to get,’ I decided. ‘You are dismissed.’

‘You’re not going to thank us?’

‘No. Get out. Go back to where you came from!’ It wasn’t a line Master Ulrik, who walked with demons like old friends and was in his heavily scarred and branded skin the effigy of all that was twisted and sold, would have advised.

‘Very well,’ the demon agreed, ‘but you will call on us again, and when you do, we will remember this discourtesy.’

‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I won’t.’

‘You will,’ he insisted. ‘We have seen it.’

Then, the remains of the column of smoke, which had been drifting about our feet, rose up and enveloped the demon again. In a puff and with a great whooshing sound, he was gone.