Blackbringer (2 page)

“I reckon they heard the story about the wishes,” replied Swig.

Magpie sighed. One devil, just one in all of devil history, had granted three wishes to the human who freed it. Magpie had caught that troublemaking snag five years ago and put him back, but the damage was already done. The mannies had a mania for it now, and every chance they got they freed some wicked thing back into the world, and they surely didn’t get wishes for their trouble.

What had these fools gotten? Just their shoes left behind, and no one to spread
that
story. “Poor dumb mannies,” she muttered.

“Curiosity killed the eejit,” Calypso replied with a shrug.

Magpie frowned at him. Usually pity was the last emotion humans inspired in her, but something about those empty shoes tugged at her heart. She reached toward the frayed fabric of the nearest slipper, forming pictures in her mind as she did so. Glyphs—symbols drawn in one’s thoughts—were the basic element of faerie magic. The simplest were mere shapes that every sprout mastered with learning to read. Making light and fire, floating, hiding, protection from trespass, basic healing, and housework; these things were as easy as the alphabet. Real magic came with more complex glyphs and fusing multiple glyphs together in precise ways, being able to conjure them from memory and “vision” them, hold them burning in one’s mind with perfect concentration.

The glyphs Magpie visioned now were for “memory” and “touch,” and no sooner had she laid her fingers on the human’s slipper than a jolt surged up her arm and she was engulfed in darkness. It went as soon as she jerked her hand away, but the shock drove her to her knees and she gasped.

“ ’Pie!” squawked Calypso. “ ’Pie, darlin’, what is it?”

Her fingers were still tingling from the jolt. She said, “Darkness.”

“Eh? That all?”

The mannies’ last memory, seared into the last thing they’d touched, was of darkness. This spell for memory touch, learned from faeries in the high Sayash Mountains, had become a valuable snag-hunting tool, more than once showing Magpie the face of the devil she was seeking as glimpsed in its victims’ last moments. But these mannies had seen only darkness. Or had there been something else?

She hesitated and touched the shoe again. This time, braced for it, she didn’t let it knock her to her knees, but she couldn’t stop the gasp it forced from her lips. She drew her hand hastily away and said, “Hunger.”

“Hunger?”

“Aye. Mad hunger.” She shivered and with one last quick look around said, “Let’s go,” and they flew back up on deck, several crows lugging the devil’s bottle between them. “Rest awhile,” she told them. “It’s a long sky till landfall and I don’t want to feed any crows to the sea.”

Calypso stretched his wings and yawned. “Just a catnap, then. Wake us when it’s time to go, ’Pie.” He tucked his head against his breast and closed his eyes.

Magpie stretched too and looked around. Her grandfather had conjured his faerie skin and was waiting for her in the midst of a clump of napping crows, looking just like a jolly old codger with whiskers, broad-chested and lively. Elementals like the winds or the Djinn could put on skins and enjoy a taste of mortal life, which was how Magpie came to have the West Wind for a grandfather. Six hundred years ago he’d taken one look at a lovely lass named Sparrow, fallen head over heels for her, and gone to craft himself a faerie skin handsome enough to woo her in.

Sparrow had fallen in love back and he’d swept her off to a life in the sky, to travel always cuddled to his chest as he soared above the world. It was a bold, wild life for a faerie—most never even left their forests—but she was a bold, wild lass, and so were her daughter and granddaughter after her, and their place in the world was everywhere and nowhere, like gypsies on wing. No home had they but their caravans and campfires, and no family but the one they’d cobbled together of crows, creatures, and kindred souls they’d met on their endless journey round and round the world.

“Ach, Grandpa, it’s what you thought,” Magpie said, plopping down next to him and resting her glossy head on his shoulder.

“Jacksmoke!” the old fellow cursed, cradling her to his side and absently smoothing down the foxlick that stood up like a tuft from the top of her wind-whipped head. “Another loose devil? Skiving plague of meddlesome mannies, can’t leave a bottle well enough alone!”

“Aye, that’s six in as many months. They keep on like this, the world’ll be crawling with snags like it was before the devil wars! I can’t keep up, all on my own.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t try, love. Leave ’em free! There are too many mannies anyway, neh?”

“Ach, and what of everyone else? It wasn’t mannies that scarab devil killed but faeries!”

“And what of this one? Got away?”

“Aye.” She scowled. “And Grandpa, there’s something mad strange about this one. . . . Its bottle, it was sealed by the Magruwen.”

“Eh? Impossible!” he declared. “That old scorch never dirtied his hands on devils.”

“You never heard of anything, then, during the wars? Some lost story?”

“Neh, and sure I’d remember, no matter it was twenty-five thousand years ago. I remember Bellatrix clear as yesterday. What a sight she was in battle! ’Twas she and the other champions who caught all the snags.”

“Aye, I always thought so, but what of this seal?”

He took it and examined it, frowning. “Jacksmoke. It’s his, all right. Ancient and true.” He handed it back. “No idea what was in the bottle?”

“Neh, none. There’s no smell, no drool, no blood. Nothing at all.”

“And what of the fishermen?”

“Ate them, I reckon.”

“Ate them? I thought you said there was no blood.”

“Nary a drop,” Magpie admitted.

“Ach, there would be! You ever know a devil to chew with its mouth closed?”

“Neh . . . ,” she said. But she could still feel that hunger tugging at her through the manny’s left-behind memory. “If it didn’t eat them, what did it do to them?”

He shrugged. “Could be they launched a skiff and got away.”

“Maybe,” Magpie murmured skeptically, thinking of the shoes left so suddenly behind, “but I don’t think so.”

“We’ll put the word out,” the West Wind said. “Split up and ask around in the ports. You’ll find its trail soon enough. You always do, love.”

“I reckon. But this one . . . it shivers me, Grandpa.”

“Mmm. Always listen to your shivers. They’ll save your life sometime.”

When the sun touched the sea, Magpie rousted the crows and the wind shed his faerie skin and became, once again, a force of nature. Carrying the devil’s empty bottle with them they took to the sky and traveled on through twilight and starlight, back toward land.

Across the water in the hidden places beneath a vast city, a new thing was taking possession of the darkness. Legions of lesser devils had made their home here for centuries in the underbelly of the human world. Now they fled in panic on their cloven hooves and splayed toes.

A furious wind howled in the underground passages. Those creatures who paused to look back over their shoulders found themselves swept up by a terrible hunger and had scarcely time to wonder what was happening before they ceased to exist. Rats, imps, low devils, and quavering translucent spirits roiled up and out of the sewer grates and made for whatever scraps of shadow they could find in the world above.

Soon the catacombs were empty and the hungry one prowled on, hunting something far greater than this snack of devils. Dust spun and churned as the wind struggled in his grip, but he dragged it along, merciless. He could feel its panic but it was powerless against him, for he wielded the one weapon it could never resist: he knew its secret name. He had chanted the elementals’ secret names like a song in his prison, plotting this moment. Vengeance had never been far from his thoughts all the thousands of years of his imprisonment, and now his time had come at last.

Doom dawned.

He seeped like a fog through the stacks of skulls lining the corridors. These were the skulls of a species who had not yet walked the world when he had last been abroad in it. So long had he drifted in the sea that in that time a new species had risen, built cities, fought its own wars, and been dying long enough to overflow its cemeteries. So many years, so many bones. And through the thick stink of dead humans he scented something else, deeper, older. Faerie bones. He followed the smell and found the way.

Skeletons slumped silent under years of dust, but the hungry one scarcely noticed them. He had found what he sought. He almost couldn’t believe it: an ember within a circle of dull stones. A mere ember? How the mighty had fallen! What had come to pass, he wondered for the hundredth time since bursting from his bottle, that doom might prove such a simple matter after all?

He savored the moment. As soon as he commanded the wind to expend its final fury in snuffing that dim ember, a new age would begin, an age of unweaving. An age of endings. The hungry one laughed, and began to speak.

“Skive,” Magpie cursed.

“Trail’s cold as cold,” said Calypso.

“What trail?” she grumbled. “If we even found a trail that’d be something. But unless Maniac and Mingus come back with news, this snag’s good and gone.”

They stood on the head of a ruined monument to some long-dead human, eyes sweeping restlessly over the olive groves that sprawled down the hillside from their hunting camp. “They should’ve been back this morning at the latest,” said the crow.

“Aye. If it was Pup and Pigeon I wouldn’t fret, they dither about so, but Maniac and Mingus are never late. I don’t like it.”

“Nor I, pet.”

A devil leaves no footprints upon the ocean, so Magpie and the crows had split into pairs to search the coastlines that touched all sides of the Surrounded Sea. For a week she and Calypso had questioned gulls, wharf rats, and low snags in the ports of North Ifrit. Had any new devils come to town, fresh from their bottles? Again and again they’d asked, paying in wine and trinkets for this greasy gossip of devil life, but they hadn’t learned a thing. Neither had Swig and Bertram, or Pup and Pigeon, who had arrived back to their island camp the previous day as arranged. Only Maniac and Mingus were yet to return, and as the day passed in a slow scorching arc, Magpie paced and cursed.

When the sun sank from sight with no sign of them winging up the hillside, Magpie swooped down from her perch to where the crows sat smoking. “Come on, birds,” she told them. “We got to go find Maniac and Mingus.”

The crows stubbed out their cheroots and rose in unison to follow her.

They left their brightly painted caravans behind on the small island and traveled light, flying high above the masts of ships and later above the towers and battlements of cities. Magpie looked down on the moon-washed rooftops and thought, This is not my world. It was some other idea of the world laid atop the geography of her own, smothering it.

It was the humans’ world.

In her hundred years she had seen their towns swell into cities and blacken from the fumes of their foul fires. They dammed rivers, gouged minerals from mountains, built stout ships for murdering whales, chopped down whole forests just to build roofs and cradles for all the new people they daily made.

And the faeries in their wild places knew little of it.

They hadn’t paid much attention when the once-monkeys had come down from the trees. They’d laughed at their crude clothing and the fires sparked by sticks instead of spells, and they’d gone on dancing, turning their backs on the land outside their forests. When next they peered out and saw how much of the world had been plowed into fields or crushed under cities, it had come as a great surprise. In fact, the word
human
meant “surprise” in Old Tongue, the language of the ancients. No one knew where they came from, only that the Djinn who made every other creature had not made them. They hadn’t even predicted them. And there was the rub.

Many thousands of years ago, when the faeries had at long last won the wars, the seven champions had captured the devils in bottles and cast them into the sea. They had crafted elaborate magicks so that nothing could ever free them from their prisons—nothing then alive in the world, anyway. Not faerie nor dragon, elemental, snag, creature, imp, or finfolk could break those seals. But humans? Humans didn’t exist. And then one millennium along they came, fishing the world’s oceans, pulling up ancient bottles in their nets and uncorking them to see what was inside.

Now devils were creeping back into the world, faster and faster all the time, but the age of champions was long past, and little Magpie Windwitch found herself alone against them.

Sometime in the night they met a breeze who carried a message for them. “Those two crows are waiting for you in Rome,” said the breeze, an air elemental of slight power. “They’re all a-twitch and a-twitter about the news.”

“What news?”

“There’s some telling of a wind gone underground, missy, down where the mannies stack their skeletons.”

“Neh!” Magpie declared.

“I hope it’s not true,” said the breeze.

“And I,” Magpie said, knowing how air elementals loathe close spaces. None would ever willingly venture underground. Something strange was at work there. “I thank you, cousin,” Magpie said. She adjusted her course for Rome, that king of human cities. Beneath its majestic domes and spires it was rotting from the roots, its catacombs and cellars a snug home to multitudes of dim snags. These were the ones faeries had never taken the trouble to capture because they were no more dangerous than dogs. Such creatures dwelt in the dark places wherever there were humans, living off garbage and unwary cats and the occasional stray child, but few cities were as infested with them as Rome.

Magpie and the crows flew most of the night, getting a push from whatever wind or breeze they encountered, and they reached the city before the earliest gleams of dawn. They descended into the catacombs through a grate in a bakery cellar, pausing to steal bread while the baker’s back was turned. They had to hop up and down on the loaves to wedge them down through the narrow grate, but after all that trouble they never did get to eat them.