This wasn’t supposed to happen. The infection wasn’t supposed to take hold so quickly. It had become too powerful for him to be able to put a stop to it. The fungus had slipped his control and would now work to spread its deathly spores to as many people as it could. He had lost control somewhere, without realising it. The galdur had perhaps been incomplete. It had buried itself deep inside them. They were worse than dead now and soon others would share their fate.
He left Almía there and made Edda stumble back to him, as fast as she could. His control over her walking corpse had dwindled rapidly. He felt how she could no longer breathe because of the growth spreading in her lungs.
Fortunately she was not spotted shambling from the library like a rigid corpse. Eventually Sæmundur lost control and Edda collapsed outside Almía’s office. He had dragged her in, tearing the page from her stiff, gnarled hand, and run away, delirious with fear. The hallucinations had become intensely disturbing and all illusion of control had evaporated. It was only a matter of time before the galdur would completely fade away and the fungus would bring Almía and Edda back to life, under its own power and unchained will. He shuddered with the thought. The fungus-infested corpses would shamble around and spew spore-clouds, attacking every living creature that came into range.
He’d thrown up, somewhere out in the marshland surrounding Svartiskóli. He wanted to scream, to cry. None of this was supposed to have happened. This was not what he had intended.
He told himself, over and over again: this was the only way forward. He had been cornered, forced into this position. There was always a sacrifice. He knew this. That was the essence of studying and practising galdur. What was the price you were willing to pay? That was the only real question a galdramaður faced.
But he had been unaware of the true cost he had just paid. They were dead. Other people could be killed. The infestation could spread out into the city. Hundreds of people might die.
Sæmundur fished the patch of skin out of his pocket as delicately as he could, his hands shaking uncontrollably. He collapsed down from weak legs on the mattress in the middle of the floor and spread out the manuscript page.
The skin was ancient and the blood-brown writing faint. A circular symbol occupied most of the page, a spiral swallowing itself. A black hole. A vortex. Oddly shaped galdrastafir and words were located around and inside the symbol. Between them were drawn straight lines, forming a weird symbol over the spiral itself. It was a circle of invocation. Cramped handwriting filled the rest of the page – instructions for the use and purpose of the galdur, alongside incantations. Fresher handwriting was in the margin, written in different hands throughout the ages. He’d tried to take a copy of the manuscript but Edda’s hands were too stiff for such a delicate task at that point.
Sæmundur devoured the text in the weak lamplight. He inspected the circle of invocation thoroughly and identified a few symbols of galdur, but he didn’t recognise most of them.
Suddenly he sat up and folded the page hurriedly. The spiral had started to turn, without his noticing it, and he could hear a low scratching in the back of his head. As soon as he looked up from the symbol and folded the page the scratching stopped.
He didn’t fully comprehend the ritual. Some of the words of power were like nothing he’d seen before, although he understood enough to recognise that he stood on the deranged precipice of galdur and pure insanity. Any serious ritual of galdur was time-consuming, but this one demanded only a handful of raw materials, all of which he had ready. The actual invocation, the central nervous system of the ritual, was esoteric and complex, but not impossible for him to manage. Sæmundur contemplated the folded skin and considered if he’d torn the wrong page from Rauðskinna. Whether this was a trap set by Gottskálkur the Cruel.
Sæmundur sighed and lay back on the mattress. There was no guarantee that this ritual would help him understand the nature of galdur, but he needed assistance. Blindly researching the causality of galdur would be as reasonable as sending a man into a darkened dynamite factory with a box of matches. He needed outside assistance.
Mæja started mewing at her bowl for food. He didn’t have anything for the cat, so he ignored her. She purred and butted her head against his feet, occasionally giving an inquisitive mew if he stirred, but eventually she gave up and started to groom herself. He reached for the pipe on the floor. Found the pouch that the cloth-golem had fetched for him earlier that day and stuffed the pipe with moss. Sæmundur gave it a good whiff, taking a moment to enjoy the fragrance. Real stuff, probably from Snæfellsjökull glacier. Nothing like the crap they picked from the lava fields just out of Huldufjörður. He sat up, lit the long pipe, and smoked.
The smoke moved around him like an eel in the depths. He had burned every bridge behind him. Kári would wake up soon. He’d spoken a galdur of forgetfulness and amnesia over him, but who knew how much he retained? There was no way but forward. What was done was done. He could ponder the consequences later, sober. When he had fully grasped what this ritual offered. Only then could he weigh up the cost of it.
He’d fucked up so many things. First his relationship with Garún. Then the expulsion from Svartiskóli. He’d lost control over the moss smoking a long time ago. Probably that had been the first thing to go. His debt with Rotsvelgur was spiralling out of control. He’d be lucky to get out of that with only a limb or so missing. He suddenly remembered that he had a concert coming up
