Tundra

There is nothing a sorcerer fears so much as an Archmage. If the Masters at Blackmouth were fearsome, there was something more intimidating about the Archmages of the nameless school. They did not come with brands or tattoos, but on the plains, where the weather did not distinguish between vulnerable human bodies, they were a single, solid, unmarked entity. The Archmages were almost always of one mind, just as they were of one uniform robe and one wind-calloused skin.

Hackley and I stood solemnly in the Hall of the Masters, awaiting our admonishments. The seven Masters, one for each discipline –Runecasting, Geomancing, Aircasting, Watercasting, Flamecasting, Infusions and Beastmastery– stood arrayed in their black, academic vestments. Beside them, to my anger and shock, were the Geomancer I worked with and Reshrin, whose antlers poked through his long, feathery hair.

‘You’re still here?’ I asked him directly.

‘Where else would I be?’ he asked rhetorically, an edge of bitterness in his voice. ‘You forced me to break taboo, remember? No spirits will speak to me for the rest of the season. There is nowhere else for me to go.’

‘And they’re not worried about you stealing our secrets?’

‘What secrets?’ He made a deploring noise. ‘You have nothing I would consider worth stealing.’

‘This is one of the foremost magic schools in the world, you know,’ Hackley said, speaking out of turn and earning herself a scowl from each Archmage.

‘Magic?’ Reshrin’s furry eyebrows shot up into his bushy hair. ‘This isn’t magic. Centuries ago someone made a spell and wrote it down, and now you all ape that person? Why would I want to know how to do that?’

‘It’s more complicated than that,’ I assured him.

‘No, it isn’t.’ He rejected my words. ‘I’ve been wandering around this place for a while now,’ he told me, ‘and I’ve seen what you do.’

‘You’ve just been wandering around?’ I asked, and was surprised that none of my superiors interrupted to cut off my conversation.

‘Why not?’ Reshrin posed. ‘I have no magic of my own at the moment. I don’t think they quite know what to do with me.’

At this, the Geomancer stepped down from the podium on which the inquisition stood. ‘He’s actually been quite helpful with my research,’ he remarked. ‘I hadn’t realised how much movement in the spirit world affected our world until he told me.’

‘So you’re prepared to help him now?’ I scoffed.

‘I told him where a herd of spirits grazed, and where they ran,’ Reshrin said. ‘It’s hardly a secret.’

‘Do you know why we were summoned back?’ Hackely asked, appealing to nobody in particular.

‘I do, but I can’t say,’ the Geomancer replied.

As if waking from a reverie, the Archmages began to stir. Their robes shifted, a sea of sable, and their eyes turned from stone to disapproval.

‘Well?’ the Grand Master Runecaster asked, ‘What do you have to say for yourselves?’

‘We don’t know what we’re doing here,’ I said.

‘Really? You broke one of our most fundamental rules, and you don’t know why we’ve summoned you?’

‘What are you talking about, Master?’

‘You involved us in the politics of the outside world,’ the Archmage elaborated, accusingly.

‘I did not, Master,’ I swore. ‘Anything I did, I did of my own initiative, not as an agent of the school.’

‘So when you roped a number of Apprentices in to helping you interfere with the druids’ conflict, in the middle of this school no less, that was you making sure we were not involved?’

‘That is exactly what you did,’ Reshrin assisted.

‘You’re not helping,’ I snapped at him.

‘And when you and your apprentice took to the seas and used powerful runes as part of whatever this seafarer power struggle is, that was you keeping us out of it?’ the Grand Master Runecaster asked again.

‘That’s not fair, Master,’ I told him, without losing my grovelling tone. ‘I made sure the Seafarer leaders knew I was acting in my own right.’

‘Perhaps, but that’s not what people saw, is it? They saw a storm quelled with powerful runes, allowing one Seafarer faction to gain ascendance over another. This is the exact thing we worked so hard to avoid. Now people think we take sides. How long do you think it will be until they rise up in arms against us?’

‘Probably a long time,’ I replied, honestly. ‘They’re engaged in their own civil war; a war which, by all rights, we should be involved in.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Listen,’ I told them all, boldly, ‘I have not involved you in politics. I have not broken any rules. But there is a man out there intent on throwing the world off its axis. He wants to break the natural order and freeze the seasons in place, and he has the power to do it. If we don’t stand against him, it is only a matter of time before he destroys the whole tundra, and maybe the lands beyond as well. We need to do something.’

‘No.’ The Archmage resisted me. ‘We need to do what we always do, which is endure. What you and your Apprentice do not understand is that our way is tried and tested by history. We have come through any number of cataclysms by sealing the school away and riding them out, and that is what we intend to do now.’

‘I’m not only his Apprentice,’ Hackley protested.

‘You should have thought of that before you followed him on his unethical mission. Do you have anything to say?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘This is a mistake.’

‘It is,’ the Archmage agreed. ‘You made it. Ever since you came here, and we took you in out of the goodness of our hearts, you have been nothing but trouble. You have been sullen and insolent, you have disobeyed us, and now you run the risk of dragging us into these local wars. We will not tolerate it any longer.’

‘You took me in because you wanted to know Blackmouth’s secrets.’ I was beyond deference and politeness now. The raw truth was leaking out of me. ‘You know it’s true,’ I said.

‘Be that as it may,’ my Grand Master continued, ‘you and your Apprentice are more trouble than you’re worth. You, both of you, are cast out. You want to be a part of the world so much, fine. Go and live in it.’