Blackbringer

“Poor starved Gutsuck,” cooed Vesper to it. “Who knows when you’ll eat again. Best you finish off the feathered faerie too. And the crows, if you can stomach the taste of ashtray.”

Gutsuck hunched and went to work on his face, gobbling at his scars from within. With a horrible sound of gnashing and slurping he gnawed opened a ragged, fang-filled maw and hissed with a spray of blood, “Your wish, mistress,” and launched himself into the sky.

NINETEEN

Across the forest, the hungry one was restless in his crevice in the rock awaiting the onslaught of night. He didn’t sleep and didn’t dream and never had. If he had dreamed in the Dawn Days, perhaps things would have been different. It was dreams that, like threads, had embroidered the others to this world, while he had roamed and ranged, always restless, bound to nothing.

Such were the humble beginnings of the end of the world: the absence of dreams.

Later, in his prison, in the endless tossing ocean, dreams might have been a companion. Instead, every moment of every millennia had passed waking and dreamless in the company of two entities: his hunger and his vengeance. And, having nothing else to play with, he had nurtured them with singular devotion.

When the seal on his bottle had unexpectedly fallen open it was his hunger that had first burst forth. But those creatures on the boat, they were like water from a wine bottle, an unsettling gulp of nothing. He knew now that they were called humans, a new thing, and they interested him not at all. His hunger and his vengeance had led him like a pair of leashed tigers: sometimes pulling in opposite directions, sometimes prowling for the same doomed prey. In Rome his hunger had led him to the devil-ripe catacombs beneath the city to feed; his vengeance had guided him to the Vritra.

The Vritra had always been the weakest of the Djinn, but it was still a shock seeing him fallen to such a state. How simple it had been to command a wind to extinguish him for good! The wind had tried valiantly to resist, but in the end it was a slave to its secret name, and the hungry one knew all the secret names. And now he knew more secrets. For the delirious Vritra had babbled in his dreams and told him what he needed to know to unlock the world.

How wonderful.

A pomegranate! How long had he searched before the faeries had at last caught him in their bottle? He would have gone on searching too and would never have guessed that what he sought was a pomegranate. A fruit! Truly, without the fire and color of dreams of his own he was ill-equipped to imagine the whims of Djinn. But now he didn’t have to imagine. He knew.

The world hinged upon a single pomegranate.

The world, such as it was. The Tapestry was threadbare, the Djinn were guttering out, Fade and the other dragons were dead, the champions were long gone, and the faeries that remained, while not as flavorless as that pest species, humans, were a far cry from the faeries of the Dawn Days. Once, a single faerie would have sated him for days, but now he couldn’t fill his bottomless hunger no matter how many of them he had.

It riled him. The gnawing hunger distracted him from vengeance. It was primal, inconvenient, an unexpected consequence of his . . . evolution. He had been a very different sort of creature once. The Magruwen might have imprisoned him, but this thing he had become, it was his own creation. Through sheer force of will, through vengeance, bitterness, and rage, he had warped himself into what he was now.

He was the Blackbringer.

TWENTY

Magpie lay outstretched on her belly on a pine bough above Issrin Ev. It chilled her to see the temple in such a state, its eight great columns leaning like old bones, its entrance obliterated. For the first time she considered the possibility that it might just be her own dark luck to live to witness the end of things. The bitter scorch in the bottom of the well was never coming out again. The old legends were gone, and there would be no new ones.

This was what remained: headless statues, their long shadows, and vultures.

Five vultures perched near the ruined temple facade. There, staring back from the stone, was the symbol for infinity that graced all the temples and that had become such a bitter irony now, four thousand years later. Infinity! Or not. Magpie watched the foul birds. The crows and imp were waiting near the mouth of the Deeps where she’d promised Calypso she would join them as soon as she’d gotten a glimpse of the devil. She shivered. Just a glimpse. Soon she would see it. Soon she would know what had laughed as it killed a Djinn.

The sun was all but gone.

Just as the last orange tinge of it drained away behind the hills, a fume issued from a crack in the facade of the temple below. It neither rose to disperse like smoke nor drifted to settle like fog. It pulsed and constricted into a tight clot of shadow far deeper than the dimming night around it.

Magpie blinked. She squinted at it. She could see the vultures’ every feather and even make out the veins in their bloodshot eyes, but of this thing that poured from the shadows she could see nothing but a darkness so profound it stole even the memory of light. And the way it moved . . . It didn’t float but seemed to siphon itself through the air with a steady, hunting will.

She lay very, very still.

Its eyes . . . Though Magpie made no sound, its eyes swiveled straight to her, finding her instantly across the distance and the darkness. A shiver thrilled through her blood. Its eyes were vertical slits like the Magruwen’s—she’d never seen eyes like that on a devil! Its gaze burned her mind. And its hunger . . . She felt it like the tug of a tide. It was tasting her on the air.

When it spoke, its disembodied voice seemed to come from within her own head, invading her mind, filling it. “What’s this? Ah, a draught of the old wine,” it rasped, and came toward her.

Magpie gathered herself into a crouch on the branch and though she was loathe to invite that voice into her head again, she cried out, “What are you?”

“I am the heavens with the stars ripped out” came its whispered reply. “I am the Blackbringer.” Magpie shook her head to clear the voice from it but it went on, “But who are you, faerie? The first taste in this pale place of the old vintage . . . A feast. Be still!”

The voice compelled her to be still. The fume rose slowly off the ground and she found herself frozen, watching it come. Closer. Closer.

“Magpie!” a voice screamed from the sky, scouring the terrible whisper from her mind. Her head jerked up and she saw a figure glide overhead.

“Poppy!” Magpie gasped, then looked quickly back down at the darkness sweeping toward her. Gathering herself up, she leapt skyward, twisting to see that the darkness didn’t follow. She raced to Poppy. “Come on!” She grabbed her friend’s hand. “We got to get out of here!”