Blackbringer Read online

  “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.

  TWO

  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.

  THREE

  “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 lo
aves to wedge them down through the narrow grate, but after all that trouble they never did get to eat them.

  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.