Tundra

I felt lost, as though there was some part of me I had left behind in that matrix of thorny branches; something that could never be as whole in one body as the druids were in a landscape. For a brief moment, I had transcended ordinary reality, and I knew that for the rest of my life I would walk with the feeling of being mundane. I was doomed to live in three dimensions. When I emerged, staggering, from the tree line, I found my bloodstained Apprentice waiting for me. There was something worse than shock in her eyes, as though she looked through scar tissue alone. The day had changed both of us.

Behind her, the battle had sunk into chaos. Wounded sounds mixed with triumphant cries, and the crashing sounds of toppling belonged to ancient oaks as well as to giant creatures. Some of the infected Seafarers had turned on each other, and were wreaking bloody cannibalism all over the field. The long spikes of spinifex grass that needled all over the tundra were slick with crimson. The snow around them drank it up. My best guess was that the druids of Mossen Grove were asserting some control over the spirits involved in the Seafarers’ possession. They came so close to Hackley and I, as we stood in the eye of an invisible storm, time slowed down around us like treacle in an hourglass, that we were forced to raise a force field cage over ourselves.

My Apprentice eyed me eagerly. ‘What did you find out?’ she asked, casting anxious backward glances at the massacre.

‘We’re on our own,’ I told her.

‘We can’t be on our own,’ she said, refusing to believe. We cannot stop Erasmus by ourselves. Look at him. What’s wrong with your eyes?’

I ignored the second part of her question. ‘Both he and the druid he serves derive their power from the Otherworld,’ I reasoned. ‘If we can cut them off from that, we can stop them.’

‘Really, you don’t look well...’

‘It must be the fungus,’ I snapped. ‘Hackley, you were right.’

‘About what?’

‘I can see only one way for us to win here. You were right about the plan. It was what the demon wanted.’

She wrung her hands nervously, standing in the midst of a hurricane of blood. ‘How? No...’

‘Yes,’ I confirmed. ‘The demon implied that it could do what we need. Right now, there is no other way that I can see. We cannot exorcise them, and we cannot seal off the Otherworld in time by ourselves. We have to make a pact, now, when we are at our most vulnerable.’

‘There has to be some other way.’

A shout rose up like a breaking wave, rolling over us so that my words were nearly drowned. ‘There isn’t. Do you think you can maintain this force cage long enough for me to complete a summoning?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but–’

‘Then do it. I realise this is all dreadfully familiar for you, but right now this is what I need. Just visualise.’ Only by the time I was finished speaking did I realise that I was trembling. I had put the sensation down to the earth-shattering force of the skitterer slamming into the thick of the forest, but it was me alone who was shaking. I was an earthquake of one.

Hackley bowed her head and swallowed her complaints. ‘Yes, Master,’ she said. Her eyes fluttered closed as she cast the spell, as though she were silently praying, or saying goodbye. A single tear leaked out onto her stony cheek. I stood under her guard, performing the ritual. It was hastily drawn, in air this time, not in chalk, but I was sure by necessity that it would work. Astoundingly, I was right. Thin, silver horns like cruel hooks glinted in the moonlight, as they had done before. From the waist down, the demon was shrouded by a half robe, his hooves and the tip of his tail protruding from under its hem. Experimentally, he tested his binds, and frowned when he found them to be satisfactory. He let his shackled wrists drop in front of him.

‘We told you we would see you again,’ he hissed. ‘Have you decided to come with us?’

‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘You told me before that you could strike down this druid, this Grisson.’

‘Yes.’ The demon inspected his claws lazily. ‘And you did not show us the respect we were due.’ His eyes flickered up to meet mine at the same time as his forked tongue shot out of his mouth, tasting the air. He hummed pleasantly when he detected the flavour of blood. ‘Death…’ he sighed, savouring.

‘And I don’t intend to start now.’ I talked over the top of him. ‘Are you capable of going further? This rift into the Otherworld, this aurora, can you close it?’

Once again, he met my glance with ice-cold eyes. ‘Considering the flows of energy involved, doing so would be a violation of all sorts of natural laws,’ he informed me. His tone tipped up, becoming merry. ‘Happily,’ he went on to say, ‘violation comes naturally to us. We can do what you ask.’

‘Good.’

‘However,’ the demon continued, ‘you are desperate. You know what will happen if you fail here. Therefore, we offer you a pact: We will sever the ties between here and the Otherworld momentarily. In return, we will have your body. We will possess you, and take all your skills and knowledge for ourselves. We will use it to walk the tundra unmolested, spreading our works through your magic.’

I knew my expression was grave, but it could not have been as grim as Hackley’s in that moment. ‘For how long?’ I asked.

‘Until you die,’ the demon replied, casually. ‘You cannot refuse us. You had to know it would end like this.’

I inhaled deeply, breathing in the moment and the inevitability of my own end. It smelled as thick to me as the scent of death wafting over the battlefield. I would be just another casualty, unnumbered, but something good could yet come of all this. ‘Done,’ I answered, my voice barely a whisper.

The demon whirled on the spot, his manacles vanishing in a puff of black smoke. ‘Excellent. We will see you soon.’