Tundra

Go out and find the fungus. That’s what the demon had said. Those words ran through my mind like a mantra and a prayer for a divine justification of my actions, for I was panicked. I had stolen a book. I never would have thought it possible. I wondered quietly what my elders at the nameless academy would say when they discovered that I had gone a step further in ‘interfering with my colleague’s studies’.

Shadow lay soft on his eyes as I had seen him recline beneath an evergreen oak in the courtyard below the library tower. The sky wore its best disguise of clouds, where boughs were beams arching over my friend, and a leaf-work lattice laced with dreams extended like a dome of architecture over his sleeping brow. I watched him for a moment to ensure that he was asleep, and that no trickery could be at foot, besides mine, before I snatched up the volume that had been lying on his work table. Every inch of its velvety vellum seemed to whisper against me, but the stolen book was hushed. No spell leapt out to catch or caution a thief. Nevertheless, I scurried away back to my humble office, the book tucked securely under one arm.

Misshapen candle stumps greeted me in my own lair, where I made do with what was available in a land with short supplies. The single armchair had been repaired by magic more than once, and now one rickety leg sat permanently on a square of paper with a stability rune inked on it. The window was a small one, curtained with fading cloth, so that even the view was sparse. There, I split the book along its spine, propping it up on a dusty lectern, and carefully turned page after page until I found the notes I was looking for. Here, made out with excellent craftsmanship, were detailed sketches of the rock I had wanted so desperately to find– a rock with red veins. Beside them, cramped in the margin, in place of striking marginalia, squashed between the block text and the edge of the page, was sloping handwriting giving a description of and directions to the site where the recorded specimens had been found.

As I left my room, an Apprentice came running up to me. Wearing an assortment of tundra rags and furs, he didn’t clearly come from any school before the nameless one –neither stoic Blackmouth nor cool Lightshale nor brutal Firepeak. ‘I saw somebody,’ he said, staring up at me in the unblinking way of boys born on the howling plain. ‘Somebody was in the locked tower room yesterday evening, and then again today. Somebody dressed in black.’ His stare became a scrutinising glare as he hugged the books he himself was holding. Thankfully, his look did not light on the heavy notebook that was my own package.

‘But,’ I said, ‘that’s forbidden.’

And, turning on my heel with a whip of my black robe, which I ignored, I sped away. I hiked all afternoon, coming at last to the site on the earthquake. Only a speed rune could have taken me so far from the base of my dear Tower, where at any time my theft could be discovered. In the jaws of rock the earthquake had left open, ready to seize up and clamp shut on another tectonic shiver, I found veins of bleeding red fungus like trails of buried gold. These I followed until they led to a sheer drop, into the belly of the earth. I held my breath, drew in the air the rune I needed for a safe fall, and jumped.

Inside the cave, fathoms from the surface of the tundra, there was only blackness. Voices sounded, and so I lit at once a run that cast a sunny aura about the cavern. Thus, I also saw faces. One was strong and proud and human. The other was… something else. Fins protruded from his cheeks in a mask.

‘What new monster is this?’ asked the second.

‘A Seafarer?’ replied the first. In the low light, he turned to me, his dark eyes glinting hard as the waves. ‘Who are you,’ he asked me, ‘and what are you doing down here? I am Eiron, and this noble man-fish is Aais.’

‘Noble man-fish?’ the fish man asked, confused.

‘I’m searching for answers about this fungus.’ I told them both. With a flick of my wrist, I sent another spell balling through the air. This one was to reveal any possession the fungus had affected about either of them. The ball of lightning came back to me, untainted. So, it was safe to talk, maybe.

‘What was that?’ the man demanded. ‘What did you just do?’

‘I had to make sure you weren’t possessed.’

His eyes grew wide. ‘So you’ve seen them too? They’re multiplying fast. They’re everywhere.’

‘I thought it was mainly just the druids,’ I confessed, and the human shook his head of braids.

‘No,’ said the fish man, in a gurgling voice. ‘Some of my people have also fallen to the Otherworld.’

‘And it wouldn’t surprise me if the Seafarers had gone over, too,’ grunted his companion.

‘So is that what you’re doing down here?’ I guessed. ‘Trying to wait it out?’

The man, intimidating in coils of ropey muscle, objected at once. ‘Of course not!’ he growled. ‘We intend to find whoever is behind all this and kill them.’

‘Just the two of you?’

I didn’t get a reply. Rather, I found that the human man’s eyes had narrowed. He was now scrutinising me, just as the Apprentice had done, with suspicion. ‘Wait,’ he said with slow dawning realisation, ‘I know who you are. You’re one of the wizards who stands at the prow of boats, aren’t you?’

‘That’s not all I do,’ I said simply.

‘So, are the wizards on our side? Can we rain fire down out of the sky onto our enemy now? That would make this whole thing a lot easier.’

Now I shook my head. ‘The nameless school does not involve itself in politics.’

The human objected heatedly. ‘This goes beyond politics,’ he said. ‘These things, these monsters, they’re everywhere.’

‘Nonetheless,’ I informed him, ‘my school will not get involved. They’ll take the minimum action necessary to protect themselves and no more.’

‘So we’re on our own?’

‘It seems that way. What do you know about what’s happened?’

The fish man was silent. Again, it was the man who answered. ‘The druids at Mossen Grove sent me to kill another druid. They didn’t say why. When I got there, I was ambushed and attacked by some kind of monster southerner. Could he be behind it?’

‘No.’ I rejected this notion. ‘The person to blame for all this is a druid.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I know,’ I said sternly, drawing myself up to height, in a vain attempt to seem as dominant as the man who was nearly a mountain. I saw then that his side was bleeding, the flow of blood not stemmed by some weeds that had been caked to the wound. ‘Here,’ I muttered, following the words with an incantation. The wound sealed itself immediately, leaving nothing but a bluish scar.

The man was incredulous. ‘That’s still not much of an answer,’ he said, in spite of his awe.

‘The answer is, I found out through magic.’

‘Ah well. He and I will meet again, I’m sure of it.’

‘So what do we do now?’ the fish man interjected.

‘We get back to the surface,’ I said, surveying the cave for exists, ‘and we plan from there.’