Tundra

Back at the Tower, we were a motley assemblage. Joining the looming Seafarer, the fin-headed fish man and I were half a dozen Apprentices still obedient to me, in their various garbs –the black robes of Blackmouth, the pale blue and silver slips of Lightshale, the dark brown, heavy wraps of Firepeak and the rags and furs of the tundra. Nobody else would still join me on my ventures. We had bound between us the possessed Reshrin, secured with runes chalked upon the floorboards of my office. The single armchair had been pushed aside. The dusty, faded curtains were mercifully shut.

‘You can’t do this!’ the druid snarled, twisting in his binds, which were like thin, white cords. ‘This body is mine! I took it fairly– he invited me in. You can’t cast me out!’

‘We are not bound by your laws,’ I declared, throwing my arms wide so that my voluminous sleeves draped below them theatrically. ‘Besides, your presence here is unnatural.’

‘You will pay for this, mage,’ the druid swore. ‘As soon as I am out of these spells, you will feel my wrath and that of my brothers and sisters.’

I beckoned the Apprentices closer. Together, we bent our chalk sticks onto the floor, and sketched the embellishments to the circle. The white lines lifted a little, hovering above the ground where they were marked, and eager to be free. They could not peel fully away until the circle was complete– thankfully, many hands made light the work. The druid howled in his bindings, and then groaned, rocking back and forth on the floor in agony where he was tethered, just as the demon had been before him. Then, with a lasting scream, the spirit was ejected back into the Otherworld. First shaking and then more steadily, Reshrin regained control of himself.

The first words out of his mouth were a demand, hostile as hissing. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Reshrin.’ I welcomed my friend back with open arms. ‘We’ve brought you back! You were possessed.’

‘Of course I was!’ he cursed me. ‘What are you doing interfering with that?’

Eiron spoke next, slow and simple as a stone. ‘We’re rescuing you.’

‘You idiots,’ Reshrin seethed. ‘I don’t need rescuing. I brought that spirit into myself, and now you’ve cast it out before the sacred season is over! You’ve made me useless, and you’ve caused me to break taboo. I hope you’re proud of yourselves.’

‘We’re sorry,’ I said, ‘and ordinarily we wouldn’t do any of this, but the situation is dire. You remember how we saw the fungus growing out of season?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s not just an isolated growth. It’s everywhere. All this talk of secular and sacred seasons, I don’t think it applies anymore. Something unnatural has happened, and it is being manipulated by one of your number.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I used my own magic,’ I told him, neglecting the particulars of my struggle with my Masters and my petty theft. ‘We need to know what the spirits are doing.’

My words did nothing to calm the druid, however. Not since I was cast out of Blackmouth had I ever seen anyone so angry. ‘Why should I help you, when you’ve taken my power away from me?’ he hissed. ‘It’s going to take me months to appease the spirits after this!’

‘We want the same things,’ I reasoned. ‘You care about the progression of the seasons, yes?’

‘I don’t just care about it. I live my life by it.’

‘Well, that’s what is at stake here. This person, whoever he is, will make it so that the sacred season continues for ever. You don’t want that, and I don’t want spirits everywhere possessing people and causing havoc.’

Reshrin eyed me warily. ‘I thought your school was supposed to stay out of this sort of thing?’

I sighed. It was the truth, flowing out in my breath, so that it enveloped us all– shocked Apprentices, Seafarer, fish man– everyone. ‘This isn’t the school. This is me.’

‘All right,’ the druid said at length. ‘You have to understand, spirits are a fractious bunch. They’re not, as a rule, given to cooperating, and when they do, it’s usually against other bands of spirits.’

To my surprise, Eiron spoke up. ‘I know how that works,’ he said.

‘You would,’ snapped Reshrin, curtly. ‘Anyway, I and a lot of other spirits were headed to the same place, which is highly unusual in and of itself.’

‘Did someone send you there?’ I wondered.

‘Maybe. I was possessed and in the throes of fungus-frenzy. I don’t remember a lot of what happened.’

Eiron asked, ‘Where were you going?’

The druid in turn asked, ‘Have you got a map?’ From the cluttered walls of my study, a map was produced, and the bowing Apprentice ducked away. The druid pointed a finger with a dirty, blood-stained and split nail at a spot in the open ocean. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’ he asked.

‘It looks like the middle of nowhere to me,’ I said, ‘but then, I know nothing about the ocean. Eiron, this is more your department, I think.’

‘There’s nothing there,’ he confirmed, turning to me. ‘That’s open ocean. It’s not even on the way to anywhere.’

With a timid voice that startled me, Aais raised a finger. ‘Might I have a look at it?’ he asked. The Apprentices baulked, dodging away from the freakish fish man as he lumbered forward, still uncertain on the land. ‘I have no idea what any of this means,’ he confessed, fins aquiver as he regarded the map with large, sharp eyes.

‘It’s a map,’ Eiron grunted by way of reply. ‘It shows where things are in relation to one another.’

‘Oh. Does it show currents?’

‘Only the major ones.’

‘Alright,’ Aais said finally. ‘There’s a rock I know, where the turtles go to lay their eggs. Where is that?’

Eiron pointed with a finger like a sausage. ‘Here.’

‘And these lines next to it, those are a strong current? And they show the direction it moves?’

‘Yes.’

‘And where were you going?’ Aais begged of Reshrin.

‘Here,’ he replied.

‘Oh,’ said Aais, his fins sagging, looking quite crestfallen. ‘I know where you were going, then...’

I asked fastest. ‘Where?’

‘That is deep, dark water,’ he said in a solemn tone, ‘where my people are not supposed to go. There are elders sleeping there.’