Shaman of Stonewylde by Kit Berry

spoil the balance and the harmony o’ things. If you want your bed warmed, get yourself a cat.’
    Harold’s round glasses were bright with the reflected glare of his desk lamp as he gazed at the screen. Around him the bedroom was in near darkness and all the surfaces were piled high with plates and cups, legacy of too many meals taken in private away from the humiliation of the Dining Hall. Harold was not a popular member of the community right now and he found it much easier to bring his food up here and stay out of sight.
    Muttering to himself, he sat tapping rapidly at the keyboard, entering data into the new system. He was attempting to repair the damage done at Imbolc but it was a daunting task. He’d spent ages building up the enterprise that was Stonewylde.com , but it had fallen in a matter of minutes, and would take a long time to resurrect. Harold was still mystified and more than a little frightened by what had happened that night, when his hopes and dreams for a great business empire had tumbled before his eyes and that strange message had flashed repeatedly on the screen.
    He’d tried to hide the damage in a futile attempt to put it all right before anyone noticed. That had been stupid. Clearly the whole network had been hacked by someone who knew what they were doing. Yul had soon discovered that the system was down, as had all the students and teachers, Hazel and the medical staff and even Martin and the household staff – everyone, in fact, who used the network. Harold had prayed that it was only a few files infected but slowly it dawned on both him and Yul that the whole lot had gone. For a few days he’d tried everything he could possibly think of, with Yul raging at him constantly. But Harold was no computer wizard and had been forced to admit defeat. The final straw had been when he’d tried to reinstall the back-up and had reinfected the system. The virus had started up all over again; the backup was corrupted too and none of the data on it could ever be used. Everything had gone.
    The expert called in to sort out the mess, at great expense, had been impressed by the sheer ingenuity of the virus. It was one he’d never seen before and extremely cleverly programmed. Much of his explanation and speculation had gone over Harold’s head, but the bottom line was that Harold’s data – his files and accounts , contacts and records, everything he’d worked so hard to build up – had all gone. As had the household accounts and records, the medical and dental files, everything to do with the farming and production of food, and all the school records too – lesson plans, student coursework and personal data. The system had to be wiped clean to destroy the virus that permeated the entire network; little bits of code, like poisonous seeds, were ingeniously tucked away inside the back-ups and programmes, and would suddenly bloom into deadly flower all over again at a hidden stimulus.
    Perhaps the worst aspect was what had happened to all the customers’ data. When Harold had launched his pre-Yule marketing campaign he’d succeeded beyond all expectation. The orders for goods had come flooding in during November and December, hundreds and hundreds of wealthy customers finding the unusual and exclusive Stonewylde products to be the perfect answer to their Christmas gift dilemmas. Harold had introduced a ‘recommend a friend’ reward scheme to bring more contacts to the mailing list, and this had resulted in a massive expansion of potential customers, whom he’d intended to contact in the New Year with a newsletter. But one of the nasty twists of the virus was to corrupt this database of contacts and send obscene spam to each e-mail address. There’d been a flood of complaints and Stonewylde’s name had become sullied and blacklisted even though Harold had convinced the authorities of the company’s innocence. Because of the collapse of the system, he couldn’t even contact his customers to