Inktober #4: Freeze (Patreon)

 Based on Diane Duane’s “Young Wizards” and “Feline Wizards” series. It was mentioned there are dog wizards, but I don’t recall ever getting to meet any. (If any did turn up and the canon contradicts me, I apologize. I didn’t read all the later books.) 

***

Faro padded gingerly out onto the ice. It held her weight at first, but six body-lengths and it was starting to creak dangerously. “This is bad, Ilya,” she said. “It’s taking my weight for the moment, but I feel like it could crack any minute.” The ice was supposed to be solid and firm out a mile or more from shore. 

“Be careful, Faro!” her partner, Ilya, shouted to her.

He was speaking his own language, which Faro referred to as Ruhhyi, and Faro was speaking her own – which Ilya’s kind called Kyonsky, or Kyonish when he was speaking with the Americans they worked with sometimes, but Faro just referred to it as what it was – Pack-speech. She often felt that she was one of the luckiest rawuu’uhff, Pack-people, on the planet; most Pack-people couldn’t make themselves understood to their huun packmates, and had to study and work incredibly hard just to make sense of a handful of commands in huun-speech. But Faro and Ilya were both wizards, both capable of the Speech – the language of magic, of the universe’s creation – and as such, could understand any other language spoken to them.

“I’m always careful!” Faro barked back. In her mind she assembled, and then whispered, a phrase to the ice, reminding it of when it had been solid and thick, easily able to hold a Pack-person’s weight. The ice, so reminded, obliged her by bearing her out as far as it existed. She jumped from floe to floe, digging thick claws into the ice when she landed to avoid skidding, until the ice layer that floated atop the seawater was so thin, it might as well be water and she’d have needed an entirely different spell to be able to walk on it.

Less than a quarter mile. Faro turned around and bounded back. “We’ve lost 75% of the ice in this area,” she whined to Ilya, tail between her legs and her head down, not as an expression of guilt or shame – the beings who’d wreaked this devastation were Ilya’s species, not hers, and besides, Faro didn’t believe in blaming people for something done by an entirely different pack – but intense sorrow. “We’re going to see a species die-off that rivals the dinosaurs.”

“That might be overstating it just a little bit,” Ilya said, but his smile was wan. He sat down on the ice – well, technically on his backpack, which he’d dropped onto the ice – and Faro trotted over to him, accepting the comfort of gloved huun fingers rubbing her scruff through her thick fur. It was nicer when Ilya’s fingernails weren’t covered, but even if it had been unpleasant she’d have let Ilya do it, because huun liked to pet Pack-people as much as Pack-people liked to be petted. “But you’re right. Siberia, Norway, Alaska, now we’ve confirmed Canada is just as bad. I don’t think we need to do a spot check in Greenland, do we?”

“It’s the same sun and the same sky everywhere on Earth.” Faro looked up at Ilya. “Are we going to intervene?”

“It’s complicated.”

“It’s thousands of living things.”

“Probably millions, actually, but—”

“And if you don’t think we have enough power, I agree the working would be too much for the two of us, but we could recruit some assistance. I know a wizard wolf pack around here—”

“Really? Wolves get to be wizards too?”

Faro chuffed. “All Pack-people are covered by the same Choice. We made it a long, long time ago, before even you huun did. So yes, there are wolf wizards, and coyote wizards, and I even heard there’s a dingo pack in Australia—”

“It’s not about the power, Faro.” Ilya stared at the ice below him, his scent profoundly sad. “My kind are the ones who’re doing this.”

“No one blames you for what the other huun are doing, Ilya. They’re not your pack.”

“That’s not my point.” He stood up and flung his arms out. “This isn’t being done by magic. We humans are doing this by accident, a side effect of technology we’re refusing to give up.”

“Yeah, the Packless One loves to trick life into destroying itself. It doesn’t even need to resort to magic to do it. So what? We don’t have to limit ourselves to interventions only when magic is involved, not on this scale. We’re talking about an entire biome potentially being destroyed.” Faro ran a short distance, barked, ran another short distance and barked, then turned on her paws and raced back to Ilya – a gesture that a huun could have accomplished with an outward swing of arms, a gesture that meant “all this territory is what I’m talking about.” “We need to freeze it, Ilya! We need to save them! I admit that freezing the entire coastline around the Arctic Circle is a little much, but we could get a lot of other wizards—”

“Faro! Just listen to me!”

Faro shut up.

“I know humans. If we freeze the Arctic with wizardry, we’ll save an entire biome, right. For a while. But it’s the fact that the ice is melting that’s making my people finally realize how badly we’re screwing up the planet. You know humans don’t know about wizards, in general—”

“Yeah, I’ve never understood that. Why don’t you just tell the other humans?”

Ilya rolled his eyes. “For the same reason we’re destroying the Arctic in the first place. Because there are a lot of corrupt and idiotic humans who’d misuse the existence of wizardry the way we’ve misused everything else. My point is. If everything freezes back over, they won’t know wizards did it. They’ll think it’s natural. And if it’s natural, then the warming was natural too, because the scientists’ predictions of the Arctic melting will be proven wrong. So all the people who are just now starting to think that maybe, possibly, they might have to change their lifestyles or do something inconvenient to protect the planet… they’ll all think ‘Oh, false alarm!’ And nothing will change.” He sat down on the knapsack again. “It’s the entire planet warming, not just the Arctic. Wizardry can’t fix that. Humans need to stop putting carbon in the atmosphere or the entire planet will keep heating up, and it’s here in the Arctic that it’s most obvious.”

His logic made too much sense. Faro whined. “But isn’t there anything we can do?”

“We can do what we’re been doing. We can track down enough animals and send them to the future that there’ll be a breeding population even if they go extinct in the here and now. We can do small local fixes. We can identify anything that’s so endangered it risks dying out right now and transport its members further inland to save their lives immediately. But magic isn’t what’s destroying the Arctic, or the rest of the planet, and if we try to use wizardry to fix it, we’ll be stuck using wizardry to fix it over and over again, because humans won’t learn. We won’t change unless we think we’ll die if we don’t.”

Faro wanted to howl. The Great Pack Mother and Her Pups had granted her all of this power, power to change the lives of huun and Pack-people alike, and she couldn’t use it to save the world. She couldn’t use it to freeze her home back over and save the bears and the delicious fish and the huun who needed to hunt those things to live. 

She managed to keep the howl back, but she whimpered, and couldn’t stop whimpering, occasionally breaking into small yips of distress. Ilya ruffled her fur again. “I know. I know, girl,” he said, his own voice rough with the effort of keeping back tears, smelling of despair and resignation. “Let’s go back home. We’re done here for the day. We can come back tomorrow and try to save some animals, but right now, you need a steak and I need a hot buttered rum and cherry vareniki.”

“That sounds good,” Faro choked out, getting her whimpers under control. “Maybe after we eat we’ll think of something we can do.”

“Maybe,” Ilya said, but he didn’t sound or smell like he believed it.