Garún’s heart plummeted. She wanted to throw up. It was here. It could see their delýsíð signs, clear as day, luminous with seiðmagn. It was watching them. A predator in hiding.
With trembling hands she reached deep into her nearly empty backpack and found the can of spray paint hiding in there. She rushed to the centre of the crowd, where they had dragged the wounded, their wounds a grotesque growth of sharp, twisted bone and deformed flesh.
Jón came to her as she was spraying on the ground. His hands were covered in blood.
“Garún, what are you doing?’
“It’s here – it’s watching us. We have to run, we have to make a break for it.”
She painted a circle within a circle. An eye. She struck over it with two parallel diagonal lines. She wasn’t sure what she was basing this on. Some half-remembered sigil. It didn’t matter. Anything that could possibly work to counteract the protest signs. To her it screamed fear, suffering, blindness. Run.
Some form of realisation dawned on Jón.
“What did you do?’
He looked up at the signs of protest, still held aloft, took in the drumbeat, still sounding out, the foundation upon which the ongoing protest shouts were based upon. He saw people picking up more sharp stones and throwing them at rigid lines of cold, hard uniforms.
“What did you do to us?’
She finished the sign and grabbed the megaphone from Jón’s hand.
“Seiðskratti!’ she screamed with all her might. “They have a seiðskratti!’
A flash of lightning. Thunder, in the distance – but she could feel it resounding through her. Jón was staring at her. His left eye twitched, rolled lazily to the side. Then his head burst in a coral structure, a sickening crystalline flower made from bone growing like frost on a window before her very eyes. In an instant he was gone and this malformed thing was standing there instead.
He dropped to the ground, dead. The blood-red growth kept blooming. People were screaming. Another flash, but not from the firing squad. Cameras. There were more of them now.
“Run!’ she shouted.
Diljá was looking at her, filled with horror as people around them lay dying, screaming, their bodies twisted and broken.
“Grab the wounded!’ Diljá shouted. “Run for it!’
The spell was undone. People woke up from the trance, fear in their eyes. Two marbendlar picked up a wounded huldukona and a human man, carrying them easily, but moving slowly. People shielded them by throwing stones, holding up signs. The police moved in to make arrests now that they were broken up. They beat down the outliers with brutal force, the batons collapsing a woman instantly. The man she had been supporting fell down, the gnarled bone-branch growing out of his leg breaking with a sickening snap. He was not spared from the beating, sending him into a seizure. Blood welled from their mouths and spattered the street.
Garún picked up a wounded man, his shoulder deformed into an asymmetrical aquatic flower, and dragged him as fast as she could. Behind the enemy lines she saw that pale mask, still as emotionless as before, but now it looked almost livid. It was watching her. It saw what she did. Her knees gave out and she almost vomited. She was going to die. They were going to arrest them all and execute them one by one.
Then, hands underneath her arms, pulling her up. Styrhildur. Hraki and Diljá pulled up the man she had been dragging. They ran, stumbling. There was smoke in the air, tears welling up in her eyes. They ran forward, but the police were closing in on them.
They landed with a heavy thud, crushing the officers beneath them in an instant, using the momentum to lunge forward, eviscerating even more on their coarse, jagged beaks. Náskárar. They jumped forward with their powerful feet, using their wingspan to elevate even higher, then dived down again, crushing and gutting those unfortunate enough to find themselves within range. Garún looked up and saw a squadron of them diving into the firing squad, their wings beating as they tore into the soldiers in a wild spray of blood and gore. She saw a man, clad in a soldier’s uniform, holding in his guts as they poured out.
She felt the surge before she saw it. An unnatural wound in reality. A forceful unmaking about to be unleashed. She turned and ran. Behind her, a wild torrent of sorcerous energy was unleashed as a náskári tearing into the soldiers burst in a blinding flash. The air smelled of static electricity and fresh blood. She sprinted as hard as she could, her feet steady now from fear, helping Diljá to carry the injured man. She risked a look behind her.
The air crackled around the seiðskratti in spasms. Around it was a wasteland of death, a crater of deformed bodies. It turned its white-beaked mask towards her and watched as she ran.
Ellefu
Sæmundur flung open the apartment door and slammed it shut behind him. His heart was pounding in his chest as if it wanted to burst out. He felt the inside pocket of his coat again and was relieved when he felt the thick skin page was still there. It hadn’t been a hallucination.
He looked out of the window to see if anyone was outside, if he had been followed. The bare trees shivered in the autumn wind. He pulled down the curtains. He was drenched in cold sweat and shivering uncontrollably. The mushroom high was still potent, turning his mind sluggish and murky.
When Sæmundur had made Edda return to the library’s lobby he found Almía where he had left her, hidden underneath the librarian’s desk. The fungus had spread out of her throat, all over her face and down the neckline. Her head had been transformed into a colony of mushrooms. The air around them was
