The Nominal Hero, chapter 7: Fungi-ble
“Gah!” the nearest one cried, jumping back. “That’s freaky.”
“What?” Caden asked, confused.
“Your Noggles, you just took them off, like--” The Noun seemed to notice the other kids. “You’ve all taken off your--ghah!”
The other Mushrooms didn’t seem to have noticed anything. They weren’t even looking at Caden or his friends, only at each other, and sort of--humming? Making a noise, anyway, weird and wordless, and, Caden realized, getting louder.
“Do your glasses not come off?” Hunter asked Duck.
“Well, not in public,” Duck said, as though it were obvious. Maybe that was why Hairspray had disappeared, Caden thought. Not because he had the power to unsummon Nouns, but just because they’d been startled. It was a worrying thought.
Duck was looking nervous. “Listen, maybe we should get out of--”
The humming reached a crescendo, and a sudden jet of flame shot up into the air from the centre of the cluster of Mushrooms. It was close enough that Caden could feel the searing heat, a shock to his cold skin. “No, no,” Duck moaned.
“What’s happening?” Caden demanded.
“They’re witches!”
Caden stared. Somehow his hazy idea of the Nouns’ world hadn’t included such a thing. Not when it had farmers and hair stylists and delivery trucks. Witches just didn’t seem to fit.
“Are you actually witches?” he asked, pitching his voice louder to be heard over the humming that had started again.
As one, the twelve clustered Nouns turned to face him. They had the same square glasses, the same cartoonish expressions as the other Nouns he’d met, but on them it looked sinister, the lenses a silvery glitter of malice.
“Toadstool, poison, fairy ring,
Burn and bite and swell and sting,
Mycelium of eldritch power,
Every hour a witching hour!”
Mushrooms began to pop up through the snow, in a circle around Caden and the others. A fairy ring, Caden thought, a circle of toadstools. In stories you could get trapped in one, and be taken to Fairyland, or put to sleep for a hundred years, or transformed-- “Come on!” Caden hissed, and tried to step out of the circle.
His foot hit something solid, invisible but hard as ice. He poked at the air over the ring, and met the same resistance. Trapped.
“I think they are actually witches,” Masami whispered. “I think they are, Caden.”
The one Mushroom who had spoken like a normal person lifted their hand tentatively. “I’m a botanist.”
“Bah,” Duck muttered. “Science. Useless.”
“It’s not useless!” the botanist Mushroom snapped. They glanced over at the pack of witches, and lowered their voice. “It’s not useless.”
“Useless against them,” Duck said. “Everybody knows that. When science fights magic, magic always wins.”
“That is not even close to true,” the botanist said huffily. “Back me up here, little naked-faced people.”
“We don’t really know much about magic,” Caden admitted. He’d read a lot of books with magic in them, obviously, but they didn’t usually have science too. It was generally one or the other.
“Maybe science is a kind of magic?” Masami suggested. Duck and Mushroom reacted to that with nearly identical grimaces.
“They’re completely different,” Mushroom said. “Science is a way of looking at the world systematically. You observe things, you come up with an idea for why they might be the way they are, and you test your idea to see if it’s true. And anyone else can do the same test and get the same answer. That’s how you learn things, with science. Magic is unpredictable. You never get exactly the same results as the next person, and so you can never work out the fundamental rules. It’s just guessing and hoping, all the time, forever. That’s why the scientific worldview will triumph eventually.”
“Okay, but magic is what’s got us stuck in this mushroom circle,” Hunter pointed out, “so it obviously works pretty well. Caden, maybe you should call up--”
“I’m not calling up anybody!” Caden protested shrilly. “Who knows what they’ll turn out to be? The Mushrooms are witches! Nobody would have guessed that! Maybe Kittens will eat people! Maybe Hammers will blow up the sun! Maybe--”
He realized he was shouting, and stopped. The witches were staring at him again. One lifted a hand to point at him, and chanted,
“Nymery, nomery,
Caden the Summoner:
Is he too cautious or
is he too bold?
With his mysterious
binocularity,
What’s the new world he will
make of the old?”
“That’s creepy,” Masami whispered.
“Yeah,” Caden muttered, shivering. Caden the Summoner. It was the first time any of the Nouns had seemed to know him.
He took a deep breath, and turned to Mushroom. “Okay. You’re a botanist. You know about plants, right? How do we get this fairy ring to let us out?”
“Fungi aren’t plants,” the botanist said, “and these ones are magic, so I have no idea, actually.”
“All right, but if they were normal ones?” Caden persisted. “How do you get rid of normal mushrooms?”
Mushroom frowned. “Hm. Mushrooms actually do grow in circles like this sometimes. Naturally, I mean. It’s because they’re all growing out from one underground spore, called a mycelium. The mycelium dies at the centre, eventually, but keeps growing at the edges, so the ring keeps getting bigger. Although--” They paused. “Hm. I wonder.”
From somewhere indistinct, Mushroom drew a pointed spade and a small black bottle, and experimentally shoved the spade into the dirt. The ground should have been frozen solid, this time of year, but within the circle it was soft under the snow, smelling of earth and rot.
“Lepiota morgani,” Mushroom commented, poking at one of the mushrooms. It didn’t look much like their head, which was red with white spots, like a toadstool in a video game. The mushrooms in the ring were beige flecked with brown, broad and almost flat, with greenish undersides. “The so-called false parasol. Poisonous, of course.”
“Morgani?” Caden repeated. “Like Morgan Le Fay?” He’d read several King Arthur stories that mentioned the wicked sorceress.
“Hm. Probably a coincidence.” Murshroom was digging carefully near the centre of the circle. The witches didn’t seem to be paying any attention to the trapped group. Instead, they were huddled close together, humming and muttering. Every so often, a blue or green flame spurted skyward from the hands of one or another. Whatever they were doing, it seemed to be taking all their concentration.
“You see, normally,” Mushroom continued, as they piled up a little mound of dirt, “it would be hard to kill all the mushrooms at once, because their root network would only be alive at the edges of the circle, like I said. And they’re growing so fast, they could probably replace any that we dug up before we could get out. But since this thing popped up all at once, I’m guessing--hah!” They levered up a mass of thready white roots with their spade, careful not to break them off. The roots seemed to flicker back and forth between the blocky, digital appearance of the Nouns and the look of normal plants. It was eerie. “None of the mycelium has had time to die yet, which means all the mushrooms are connected to the centre, and so they should all absorb this--” They began dripping a dark brown liquid from the bottle onto the roots. “--at the same time. Get ready to jump.”
Caden tensed, glancing at each of his companions. Hunter and Masami nodded firmly. Duck was staring at the ground, lost in gloomy thought. Caden tugged at their wing to get their attention. The roots had begun to sizzle quietly.
Dark patches started appearing on the mushrooms’ caps. Slowly they started to wilt, flopping over sideways. Then, suddenly, there was a loud crackle and a flash of light that raced around the circle and vanished. A couple of the witches shrieked, clutching their heads. The barrier was down.
“Run!” Caden ordered, and dragged Duck forward. He half expected to crash into something, but the invisible wall was gone and the five of them surged forward, the soft mushrooms squelching underfoot. The witches were howling at each other, some trying to brace their fallen companions while others argued in piercing voices. The sound slowly faded as they fell behind.
Caden and his friends floundered through the trees. They’d gotten onto a trail, where the parallel tracks of cross-country skis were visible in the snow, but their feet sank in deeper than the tracks (except for Duck’s, which were nearly as good as snowshoes). It was slow going, like running in a nightmare, but the witches didn’t seem to be trying to give chase. Caden couldn’t hear them anymore.
Their chant had sunk into his ears, though, keeping time with his footfalls and the pounding of his blood. Nymery nomery, Caden the Summoner--
He rounded a bend in the trail and collided with something large and dark and soft. Not a tree. Witch! he thought, and drew in breath to scream a warning to the others behind him.
“Caden?” the figure said incredulously, and Caden gulped with astonishment. It was Ruth, his older sister, in her puffy black parka and infinity scarf, standing there glaring at him with her arms folded.
“Um,” he said. “Hi.” The others crowded in behind him, Masami and Hunter and Mushroom and Duck. Ruth surveyed them all with withering scorn.
“Well?” she demanded. “What have you goofballs done now?”
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