He drew these sounds inside himself, into his voice and the bass, then transmuted them and locked them into the incantation, bound them with rhythm and words of power. Everything sounded with transformation. Drenched with galdur, the rags on the floor crawled into small piles that slid together into a single mass of clothing in front of him. The melody grew stronger, the beat faster, and the dirty laundry rose up and shaped itself. Shirtsleeves and dirty socks became jutting limbs that grew erratically from the central body. Sæmundur stopped playing, handed the creature a wad of crumpled bills and commanded with a strong voice:
“Go to Rotsvelgur. Buy moss. Return.”
Immediately the thing collapsed and rolled out towards the window. Underwear, shirts, jackets and jeans, stretched up to the window ledge and pulled themselves up. Woollen socks and hoodie sleeves grabbed the ledge and the creature rolled itself out of the window.
Sæmundur threw himself back on to the mattress. He felt as if he was coming undone from the reverberation of the world’s composition.
* * *
Sæmundur slept while the highland moss wore off. He dozed on his mattress in a fugue and didn’t come around until noon had passed and the cloth-golem returned. Rotsvelgur had put a rat’s tail in the bag with the moss, a sign that this was his last chance – it was time he paid his dues. A problem for another day. Sæmundur commanded the filthy pile of clothes to go and wash themselves in the laundry room. He really should have done that yesterday, he thought. The hearing was today, after all.
He moved to the kitchen and prepared a simple breakfast. Oatmeal and a few slices of liver sausage. While he ate he scanned through a yellowed manuscript, one of the countless documents that lay scattered around the apartment. Bruise-coloured patterns and symbols decorated the page and even though Sæmundur could read the ancient scribble well his mind couldn’t stick to it.
No one could use galdur like he did. The cloth-golem made that obvious. It never occurred to anyone to make a golem any way other than with the traditional methods, which Sæmundur found preposterous. Cowards. All he had done was combine the foreign tradition of golem-making with a Hrímlandic svartigaldur – the thieving tilberi. To properly fuse them together one needed not only the exact esoteric language, but a new cadence, a new rhythm, which belonged to both incantations equally. He had looked outside academia to find the methodology to combine these two incantations: music. It was very risky, yet he’d made incredible progress.
Still – it wasn’t enough. Not for Sæmundur. He still couldn’t comprehend the source of galdur’s power or how it worked. But he was closer. He just had to risk pushing the limits a little bit further.
But he’d get nowhere without Svartiskóli.
After Sæmundur’s expulsion from the university he had discovered a remarkable wellspring of ambition within himself. He’d dived head first into his independent studies, inspired by a sense of liberation from the dogma and distractions of the university’s overbearing bureaucracy. He’d used all his available resources to get the manuscripts he needed for his research, or at least copies of them.
Then he’d reached a dead end and with no favours left to call in, nor allies to lean on, he’d made no progress for weeks. Admittedly, he had learned something before getting stuck, but it wasn’t nearly enough. He had to get back into Svartiskóli.
Sæmundur had studied galdur at the Royal University of Reykjavík. The School of Supernatural Sciences was housed in a special building, called Svartiskóli after the Hrímlandic school of old. Svartiskóli was split into two faculties: seiður and galdur. To the public these two were basically interchangeable; sorcery was sorcery, no matter what you called it. But that was not the case within the walls of Svartiskóli.
It was once believed that seiður transcended human understanding; that it was an unpredictable and esoteric force, which did not abide by the rules of the natural sciences. This force was found in certain places of power, where seiðskrattar drew seiðmagn from the land like water from a well and used it for supernatural works. Few such places remained in the world. And where seiðmagn could be found in sufficient quantities, the energy source was violent and primal. Hrímland, mostly the highlands, was such a source for seiðmagn, but had been considered too dangerous and unworkable up until a few decades earlier, when Vésteinn Alrúnarson stepped forward with his theories on seiður and built the first sorcerous power plant on the forested hill of Öskjuhlíð. The esoteric rituals of seiður became supernatural science. Seiður became a force of supernature that could be understood, controlled and harnessed.
Galdur was fundamentally different; it could not be drawn from nature like seiður. Unlike its supernatural cousin, the force that powered galdur was unmeasurable and unknowable. It did not belong to this world. All you needed to use galdur was the right incantation and words of power, an uncomfortably low threshold for the dabbling kuklari – the slightest error could result in terrible consequences. If a slight warping in pronunciation or the smallest syntax error crept into the incantation then the effects were unpredictable. Many galdramenn had doomed themselves because of a simple mistake or a lack of precision. When rituals of galdur took a turn for the worse, demons tainted the bones of the unsuspecting galdramaður, sometimes resulting in their becoming possessed. The threat of the demonic was always there, even in the most innocent galdur. This fact resulted in a strict ban on experimentation and research in galdur at the university. Only studying tried and true rituals and maintaining an age-old tradition was permitted. That was the only way to be safe from the devouring outer dimensions.
Naturally, this core edict was what Sæmundur had set his sights on bringing down.
From the beginning, his questionable theories turned the whole of academia against him. He had dangerous theories on the true nature of
