Blackbringer (14 page)

In the sky above the Manygreen lands Magpie unfastened the pins Snoshti had put in her hair and let it tumble down around her shoulders. Like an arrow off a bowstring she shot through the air with mad speed, zinging back and forth once over Poppy’s workshop with her hair streaming behind her. Then she froze, folded her wings, and dropped like a stone out of the sky for one of her frightful sharp landings. A flick of her wings and she caught herself at the moment the earth loomed to meet her. She ran inside the workshop.

Poppy looked up, startled. “Magpie!” she exclaimed. “Where—?”

“That the batter?” Magpie asked, cutting her off.

“Aye.”

With three long sweeps of her fingers Magpie combed the wind from her hair. It cascaded invisibly into the bowl of cake batter and settled there. “Calypso’s waiting outside with his shadow,” she said.

Poppy followed and watched as Magpie held the bowl in outstretched arms in the brightest spot in the garden. Overhead, Calypso flew in spirals, slow as he could, and Magpie chased his shadow round and round. Several times she nearly captured it but it always seemed to slip over the lip of the bowl to freedom. At last, though, she trapped it, and after just the briefest shadowless moment another sprouted in its place, growing larger as Calypso dropped in to land. Behind him came Swig, carrying a small bird’s nest in one foot, with an acorn and a blackened twig nestled inside it, and holding a porcupine quill in his beak.

Once Magpie took the quill, he said, “Ye’ve Maniac to thank for that, Mags. The porcupine weren’t keen to part with it.”

“Maniac?” Magpie groaned. “It had to be him? He’s already mad at me! Didn’t hurt him bad, did it?”

“Neh, but he does make a fuss.”

“For true.”

“Magpie . . . ,” Poppy cut in hesitantly. “Did you find out anything . . . about the devil?”

Magpie dropped the porcupine quill in her shock and turned to her friend. “How do you know about that?”

“All the forest knows of it,” she said. “Well, except the faeries. All they’re worrying about is why Queen Vesper keeps to her chamber!”

“But what have you heard?”

“The trees say the age of unweaving has begun.”

“Unweaving? Unweaving what?” asked Magpie.

“I don’t know. They’re saying it’s the faeries’ doom to forget what ought never be forgotten and that this devil hunted in Dreamdark once before.”

“What? I never heard of a snag who . . . but that’s the point, neh? That’s our doom.” She said it bitterly, then asked, “Did they at least have a name for it, Poppy?”

Poppy looked flustered as she nodded. “Aye, they called it something, but you might not believe it. . . .”

“Poppy, what?”

She let out a nervous laugh. “It sounds so silly. It’s the bogeyman, Magpie. They’re saying it’s the Blackbringer!”

Magpie let out a short laugh too. The Blackbringer? The name inspired no shiver. It had been dragged through too many nurseries, worn thin by the empty threats of countless faerie mothers and grannies. The Blackbringer was the thing that would get you if you were naughty, that was waiting to grab up sprouts who stayed out past dark. The Blackbringer was the dark come to life. . . .

Magpie’s laugh fell hollow. Perhaps it didn’t sound quite so silly. “Well, whatever it is, let’s make this cake. I’ve got to get to the Magruwen.”

 

With the cake tucked into the starling’s nest as the recipe directed, Magpie carried it across the whole of Dreamdark in her arms. Calypso flew at her side, wings flashing in the sun. Mile after mile they surged over the wide, wild forest, until at last they were cresting the hedge and sailing over the grounds of the human school that Father Linden had described to Poppy.

Magpie spotted the well and they spiraled down to land on its crumbling lip. A draft of deep-buried heat rose from within the earth, cooling as it passed them and merged into the world. “Here we are, feather,” Magpie said with a tremor in her voice. “Onward and downward.” She spelled up a light and dropped down into the pit, Calypso following closely.

After a long, steady downward drift they reached the bottom. The stones of the shaft flared wide into a cavernous space and Magpie could see a few ill-formed paths snaking off and twisting away where the light couldn’t follow. There was a door and, carved on it, the Magruwen’s sigil intertwined with the glyph for dream. The tree had told true. Magpie trembled. To think the king of Djinn was on the other side of a door . . . It was as unreal as if a statue of Bellatrix were suddenly to flick its wings and fly from its pedestal. It was legend meeting life.

Standing on the threshold of a being who had wrought the world, Magpie felt very small, very young, and utterly insignificant. Who was she to presume to awaken a Djinn? But she knew the answer to that. As with each devil she captured, she was the only one trying.

Magpie took a deep breath and walked toward the door.

 

In his sleep the Magruwen sensed their coming. He smelled feathers, and an image of vultures came into his mind, planted there by the imp’s riddle. He recalled the distant day his brother Djinn had made them. Some creatures had been made as art; others were pure utility. Vultures had been shaped in haste to clean a field of slaughter when a powerful elemental had first begun to toy with death in the new-made world. The notion of murder had been born that day, and the Djinn had fashioned vultures to spare themselves the sight of it. They’d made them out of shame and had done well to make them; vultures had never fallen out of use since.

But there was no scuff of death on these feathers that beat heavily down the well shaft; they smelled of rain and fires. And there was another scent: faerie.

The Magruwen came awake. His sleep had been troubled and he had not sunk far. Flames took the shape of a horned beast rising to its feet. The scent of faerie, pure as dew, was bitter to him. His flame hands clenched with the memory of betrayal, and he waited.

 

Magpie leaned on the door with all her might to push it open a crack. It creaked, and a trickle of smoke began to seep out. Magpie pushed harder, cradling the cake to her chest, and stepped into the Magruwen’s cave, heart pounding. “My lord Magruwen . . . ?” she asked tentatively. The lake of smoke before her moved with a sluggish tide, and the scuttle of salamanders up and down the stalactites sounded like a chorus of otherworldly whispers. The source of light seemed to be in the deep reaches of the cave where the ceiling sloped down like rows of teeth in a giant jaw.

“First an imp and now a faerie,” came a harsh whisper, sending ripples through the smoke and chills down Magpie’s spine. “Get you gone. I don’t deal in treasure anymore.”

“My lord? I . . . I’ve come for wisdom, not treasure,” she said, her eyes searching wildly for her first glimpse of the Djinn.

“Wisdom? For whom?”

“For all my kind. We need your help.”

“You are past helping . . . ,” the whisper said, growing louder. Magpie watched breathlessly as the glow from the deep of the cave moved closer, flickering in the rough form of legs striding. “Past deserving,” the voice continued. “Faeries have become a second race of butterflies, mere ornaments for the air.”

The Djinn grew brighter and Magpie had to cast down her eyes, feeling his heat pulsing at her in waves as he drew nearer. Her mind raced. The Djinn wore skins, didn’t they? In the stories they appeared clad in wondrous forms. She had expected some majestic ancient, crowned perhaps, with a beard of fire and sparks for eyes, sitting in state on a hematite throne. Not this wild open flame. She tried to look at him but he was so white-bright she had to snap her eyes closed. Behind her shut lids an afterimage burned of a beast with curved horns of flame. She began to back blindly away.

“We are more than butterflies, Lord,” she whispered.

“Aye, you are right. You are more treacherous. More false.”

“Neh!” Magpie said. “Not that! Careless maybe, not treacherous. Faeries aren’t traitors.”

“You think you know. Faeries! You are your own undoing. Old treachery comes back to haunt you, but even now you won’t learn, even when the last of you flickers out.”

“What old treachery?” Magpie cried. “What do you mean, flicker out?”

“Don’t you like surprises?” he asked. He rushed up close then and Magpie stumbled backward against the door, feeling the intense weight of heat upon her face and smelling scorched hair. For an instant she could find no air to breathe and sank to the floor, realizing for the first time with what simplicity the end could come.

Then, just as suddenly, the Magruwen drew away.

“What is that?” he asked in a quick sharp hiss.

Magpie remembered the cake. “My lord,” she gasped, holding it out. “An offering. Your favorite . . . I hope.”

“That recipe has long been gone from this world!” But even as he said it, the Magruwen’s voice faltered. Into his sulfurous cavern this small faerie had carried the scent of honey, tears, and lightning, of thirsty roots in future soil, of wind through wings, a fragrance long absent, but well remembered.

“I found it,” Magpie said in a small voice. “I hope I made it okay.” She continued to hold it out to him, her arms shaking. After a moment she felt the heavy heat again and the weight of the cake was lifted from her arms. The twigs of the starling’s nest crackled like kindling, and she waited.

The sound he made was something like a sigh. A little of the tension that held Magpie rigid eased from her limbs and she rose again to her feet. “My lord . . . is it . . . all right?”

“Imperfect,” he said, spitting. The acorn shot from his mouth and pinged into the smoke, setting off a loud cascade of hidden treasures, and Magpie tensed, ready to spring aside should he come at her again. “There’s no thousand years in that nut,” the Magruwen said, flaring high. Then he diminished, thinned, and said quietly, “But it was not . . . badly done.”

Relief flooded Magpie and she found she could look at him now, if she squinted. He had made himself into a spindle of flame that still bore within it the impression of a figure rising to taper into tremendous curving horns. And there were eyes. Once Magpie found them she felt locked onto them and couldn’t look away. They were vertical, windows through fire into the infinite. They were dizzying.

“Why have you woken me?” he asked, and Magpie blinked and was able to break her gaze from his.

“T-there’s . . . ,” she stammered, “there’s a devil, escaped from its bottle. A devil you saw fit once, yourself, to imprison.”

“And how do you know this?”

“I found the bottle and your seal. I never knew you snared any devils yourself, so it . . . it flummoxed me.”

“There is but one bottle that bears my seal.”

“Not anymore, then, Lord; if there was just the one, then it’s sure. He’s got out.”

“I know.”

“Oh.” Magpie hesitated. “Did you also know, Lord, that he’s killed the Vritra?”

The fire wavered and a hiss issued from him. “Aye, I felt it,” he muttered to himself. “A rending such as this the Tapestry cannot withstand. The threads fall slack and will not sing true.”

“Tapestry?” Magpie asked.

At first the Magruwen didn’t answer. Magpie felt he was staring at her, weighing her worth and finding her lacking. “The Tapestry is unknown to you?” he asked.

Magpie nodded slowly. A dreamlike image floated in her mind, but like the traceries of light it flitted away when she tried to look at it.

“Get you gone, faerie.” The Magruwen’s voice snapped in mirthless laughter. “Gather up the folk that remain and go you all to the Moonlit Gardens. Feel blessed there’s such a place for you to go . . . for now. Even it won’t hold forever. When the last threads snap it too will sink into the darkness, a soft echo of greater doom.”

“What?” Magpie asked, bewildered. “Darkness? Doom? What do you mean, Lord, please! Sure you can’t be meaning the snag! What is he?”

“Who are
you,
that you should peer behind a veil of mysteries that has been in place for years beyond counting?”

“I’m a hunter. He’s come to Dreamdark! I just want to catch him, before he hurts any more faeries and before he hurts
. . . you.”

Again the Magruwen laughed. It was a terrible sound. “Faerie, this foe won’t be caught, not by you or anyone. He is a contagion of darkness. There’s poetry in his return, though a faerie wouldn’t see it.”

“Poetry!
He
said there was poetry in the Vritra’s death. I don’t see poetry in any of it!”

“He said? How do you know what he said?”

“I touched the Vritra’s last memory. The devil called him a traitor!”

“A traitor . . . ,” the Djinn hissed. “Aye. We are all traitors. For what is living but a chain of impossible choices? Every choice casts a shadow, and sometimes those shadows stalk your dreams. But what do faeries know of shame? You’ll be blind to your own until the end!”

“What? Lord, please. It’s true faeries are less than they were. I know how much has been lost. But the end? It’s just one devil. However bad he is, he can’t be the end of the world!”

“The world has long been ending. Everything ends. It builds, then it is, then it slides down the far slope of nothing, back into the nothing that was before.”

“Then we have to stop it!” Magpie cried in desperation.

“Sure you can’t just see all your beautiful dreams vanish like that!”

“I’ll dream more dreams.”

“Oh, aye, will you then? Feed us to the devil then go make yourself another world to play with? Is that what you dream about? How you’ll make it better next time? What about
us
?”

“What
about
you? Live with what you wrought and die from it!”

“What we’ve wrought? Faeries didn’t make devils!”

“Nay. And yet the seals are broken.”

“Humans break the seals!”