Blackbringer (3 page)

For when Magpie dropped into the underground passage, she knew something was wrong. She peered down the darkened corridor and found no sign of Maniac and Mingus or of anything else. It was utterly silent.

“Where’ve all the snags got to?” whispered Pup.

“Flummox me . . . ,” she whispered back.

Their whispers seemed to boom in the unnatural hush of the catacombs.

“Something’s mad wrong,” breathed Pigeon with an anxious flutter.

“Aye,” Magpie agreed. There should have been snags here. She had come before to buy their gossip and though she’d hated the stink of their hidden world, she’d never feared them, as now she feared their absence.

Magpie frowned and began to form glyphs in her mind, but before she was even finished she was flooded with a powerful memory touch. Darkness. Hunger. She stumbled, and each step brought a new burst of the same terrible memory. Many memories, many creatures, suffering the same terrible fate. Darkness. Hunger. Again and again. Finally she leapt to her wings, drawing her feet away from the memories seared into the floor. She shook off the visions, her breath coming fast.

“Mags! Ye okay, Mags?” the crows were demanding, crowding round her, unable to feel the magic that had so shaken her. Their bread lay forgotten in the shadows for some rat to retrieve once they’d gone.

Only there were no rats.

There was nothing at all.

“He’s been here,” Magpie said. “The hungry one.”

The crows puzzled over this. “But there en’t any tracks,” observed Bertram.

Magpie looked down at the dirt. Bertram was right. Every time they’d hunted a devil it had left a ripe trail of some kind to follow, be it drool or destruction or at least rooster tracks. It is a strange fact of magic that a devil, no matter what its feet are shaped like, will always leave rooster prints in soft ground, but though Magpie knew a horde of snags had fled this way, there were no tracks at all. The whole corridor seemed swept clean. Violently so, perhaps. “Looks like that wind came through here, feathers.”

“Why, Mags?” Pigeon fretted. “Why would it come down here? It en’t natural.”

“Neh, it isn’t. We’ll keep on this way,” she said, pointing down the passage. They flew along slowly and listened for life as Magpie’s light gleamed off the stacks of yellowed skulls. Nothing slunk in the shadows or whispered among the bones. Every word the crows spoke echoed. Every wing beat stirred plumes of dust. Magpie had never felt a place so desolate. Even the forsaken temples of the Djinn, so long ago left to crumble into ruin, had not this feeling of death. Of stolen life. Of absence.

Something profound had happened here, she knew, something far deeper than a wind’s rampage or the disappearance of a ragtag population of sad snags. The farther she went along the skull-lined passage, the more the feeling stole over her, the sense of a warp in the world where something had been and now was not.

“Mags,” croaked Swig. “A passage.”

They might easily have walked right past it, for it was barely a passage at all, just a place where the skulls had recessed enough for something to slide past.

“I don’t like the look of it,” whispered Pigeon. “ ’Tis sneaky, like.”

Magpie motioned the crows to fall silent. She listened, sniffed, then moved through the crevice in a sinuous prowl. When Magpie Windwitch was on the hunt a creature nature awoke in her. She moved like a lynx one moment, a lizard the next, a raptor after that, gliding smoothly between them as if she weren’t one creature but all, her faerie self temporarily misplaced in the spaces between. She’d been born to it like a fox kit, a natural tracker with hearing mysteriously sharp, nose unusually keen, and vision clear as a hawk’s or owl’s, by day or night regardless.

But none of these senses propelled her forward now. She saw no tracks, smelled no scent, heard no sound. As on the fishing boat, there was nothing. No blood, no stink. And still something kept her moving and guided her right or left when the narrow passage began to fork, then fork again. It was a sense she had learned not to speak of, for words failed her and she’d grown tired of the blank stares.

It was an awareness of a force that pulsed beneath the skin of the world, unseen and unknowable but as real to her as the blood under the white skin of her own wrists. Her parents didn’t feel it, or her grandmother. No one did. She was alone in it. And sometimes, sometimes . . . the pulse caught her up in its flow and carried her along, and when that happened, the way ahead felt as clear as a path paved with light.

It carried her now and she went forth on her wings, the crows hurrying behind her until the passage spilled them all into a chamber. The echoes of their wing beats fluttered like living creatures in the high-vaulted space, and they all fell still. Magpie was the first to see what lay in the center of the room.

Skeletons. Faerie skeletons, many, and so old everything had disintegrated but the white bones themselves. The bones, and the knife that protruded from the nearest one’s spine.

Magpie didn’t linger long over this sight, however, for something else caught her notice—a door in the far wall, engraved with a symbol—and her eyes widened in shocked recognition. “Neh . . . ,” she whispered, and her wings lifted her toward it, right over the skeletons, her eyes never leaving the symbol. “Can it really be . . . ?”

“ ’Pie!” squawked Calypso suddenly, and at that moment her senses throbbed a warning and she felt something coming at her, plummeting from the shadowed reaches above. She thrust herself backward, twisting in air and reaching in one fluid motion for the knife handle she’d seen, wrenching it free of its sheath of bone and spilling the skeleton asunder. As she spun toward her attacker all sound was lost in the ruckus of crow squalls and their echoes, and she came face-to-face with . . . the oldest faerie she had ever seen.

Quickly she stayed the knife and hung in the air before him, staring. She had never beheld so ancient a member of her race. The skin of his face sagged like melted wax and his long white beard was woven round him into a cloak that fell to the floor. He wore a crested helm and brandished a sword, and he snarled the word “Devil!” as he lunged at her. She easily dodged him, seeing as she did that his eyes were clouded—probably blind—and sunk deep in bruise-colored sockets, staring and wild. Never had she seen a soul so blighted by terror.

He raised his sword to swing it again.

“Sir!” she cried. “I’m no devil! I’m a faerie and a friend!”

Hearing her words, he dropped his sword with a clatter and fell to his knees. He reached out gnarled hands, his blind eyes rolling, seeking her. She set aside the knife and stepped forward, placing her palms flat against his in the greeting that had become custom in wartimes when devils had been wont to masquerade as faeries. Their fingers had ever given away their disguise, having either too many joints or too few, and this meeting of hands was proof of kinship—or the lack of it. Though all faeries still used it, few remembered its grim origin. Something told Magpie this one did.

“Blessings . . . ,” the old warrior whispered, then closed his hands tight over Magpie’s. She tried to ease her fingers away but his grip was surprisingly strong.

Alarmed, she wrenched free and drew back from him. “Old uncle,” she said warily. “All these faeries who lie here dead—was it you who slew them?”

He answered in a hoarse voice, “Neh, ’twas Skuldraig murdered them all. They never learn to leave him lie.”

“Skuldraig? Who—?”

He cut her off. “ ’Tis of no consequence now. The devil is returned!”

“Which devil, uncle?”

“The worst of them all . . . the hungry one,” he said with a violent shudder.

“The hungry one?” Magpie demanded. “What is he?”

“I couldn’t stop him . . . ,” he whispered, a look of horror on his face.

“Stop him from what?”

“He should have killed me too,” he went on.

“Killed? Whom did he kill?”

“He laughed at me . . . ,” the old faerie whispered, seeming to sink in on himself. “He left me alive. I outlived my master,” he choked. “I failed.”

“Who’s your—?” Magpie started to ask, but the answer seized her with icy fingers and she turned back to the door with the symbol engraved on it. “The Vritra,” she whispered. A numbness came over her mind. “It’s not possible,” she said. “It’s not possible.”

The Vritra was a Djinn, one of the seven fire elementals who had leapt through the blackness of the beginning to light the forge fires of creation. They had wrought the world, every stick and stone of it, each lightning bolt and firefly, aurora and sunrise, firedrake and fox, onyx and oryx, lemon tree and poison frog, and every frizz of Spanish moss. They had even made the faeries.

And four thousand years ago they had disappeared without a trace.

With one sweep of his great arm, so the legend said, the Magruwen had knocked his temple at Issrin Ev down the mountainside and vanished, and within days the other six had gone from their own temples as well, never to be seen again. If there was a reason, it was lost in the swirling dusts of the past. Generations of faeries had lived and died since then and the Djinn were all but forgotten. Some said they’d never existed at all and others believed they’d returned to the blackness whence they came. But Magpie and her parents and her grandmother Sparrow believed something else, and here was the proof they were right.

Excavating the ruined temple of the Iblis—one of the Djinn—they had uncovered a symbol in an ancient scroll in which the Iblis’s sigil intertwined with the glyph for dream. A similar symbol had been uncovered in scrolls at the Ithuriel’s temple, and Magpie’s folk had come to believe the seven fire elementals had withdrawn deep into the earth to sleep and dream. But though they had searched, they had never yet found the symbols carved in stone. Magpie stared at the inner door. They had never found a Djinn’s dreaming place or any sign of a Djinn. Until now.

“Mags!” said Pup at her elbow. “Listen—Maniac and Mingus!”

Indeed, crows could be heard squawking frantically on the other side of the engraved door, but Magpie barely heard them. She could think only of what else might be behind that door. She darted forward and strained against it. Swig joined her and together they pushed it open. Maniac and Mingus fluttered out, croaking and cawing. Strong, stoic Mingus said only, “Thanks, Mags, fine to see ye,” but Maniac had worked himself into one of his rages.

“Where’s that dastard codger?” he fumed. “He shut us up in the dark to die! Let me at ’im!”

“Neh,” said Magpie, grabbing his wing tip. “You don’t understand what’s happened—”

“Don’t I? We came a-hunting that wind and the old prune trapped us here!”

“Maniac!” she said sharply. “Show some respect to the guardian of a Djinn!”

“Guardian? That gristle?” He paused then, realizing what Magpie had said, and repeated, “Djinn?”

“Aye, now hush,” said Magpie, turning toward the inner chamber. With a sickening feeling she saw it was utterly dark. A fire elemental’s cave devoid of fire? She swept past the crows and flared her spelled light. Its orange glow fell over the eight sacred pillars that graced all Djinns’ temples, and Magpie knew she was right about this place. On the ground she spotted a small circle of blackened stones. She flew to it and hovered above it. Inside it was nothing but ash.

“I outlived my master,” the old faerie had said. Magpie stared at the pit of ash. A Djinn had been dreaming here.

A Djinn was dead.

Her mind revolted. That old faerie was blind, he couldn’t know what had happened, but Magpie could, if she dared. Slowly she stretched out her hand, drew the glyphs in her mind, and ever so gently touched a fingertip to the ashes.

The force of the Vritra’s last memory seemed to scour her hollow. She crumpled over, clutching her arms round herself, choking for air that didn’t come. She could feel the Djinn’s mind screaming inside her as he was unmade. Smoldering flame giving way to a curl of dying smoke. Darkness, and the desperate dying wail of a second creature—a wind—as it was forced to use its own great power to snuff out its creator and spend its own life in the process.

There came a dry crust of a laugh at the very end and a terrible voice that whispered, “The fire that burns its bellows can only fall to ash. What poetry in a traitor’s death!” Then the Vritra knew no more, and Magpie was released from the memory to collapse sobbing to the ground.

It was only after many minutes of crow hugs and rocking and soothing that she began to come back from the depth of unfathomable loss and think about what she’d seen. A wind . . . It hadn’t been her grandfather, of that she was sure, but kin nonetheless. The devil had commanded a wind to extinguish the Djinn and the wind had been powerless to resist. The devil had known its secret name. What devil could wield such power? Only the Djinn knew the elementals’ secret names!

The shiver that had gripped Magpie on the fishing boat had long since deepened to dread, and now it deepened into something approaching despair. What had the humans loosed on the world this time?

“The devil is returned. . . .” That was what the old faerie had said. He knew what the beast was! Magpie struggled to her feet and returned to the antechamber where she’d left him.

He was still slumped on his knees, but his haggard face was uplifted in a posture Magpie had seen before, and he was muttering words in Old Tongue.

“Wait!” she screamed, darting toward him.

But she was too late. She reached him just as the light left his clouded eyes and he slumped forward, dead. He had released himself to the Moonlit Gardens, leaving his sad old body behind.

“Neh neh neh . . . ,” she said frantically, trying to shake him awake, knowing it was futile. “Not yet, not yet,” she whispered. But he had gone.

The Moonlit Gardens were the faeries’ next world, a calm silvered land they traveled to on a day of their own choosing—unless some violence chose the day for them—and from which there was no return. This old warrior—for such he surely was, of the legendary Shadowsharp clan who had guarded the Vritra in ancient days—had long outlasted his life. Faeries could live a thousand years, more if they were stubborn, but never this much more. Magpie had thought the Shadowsharp clan long dead. She couldn’t even guess what will had enabled this one to hold on these centuries past his time. He must have been the last of his clan, unwilling to leave his master alone in the world. What a cruel fate then to fail and live on, all those tired, lonely centuries for naught.