Blackbringer

“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.

This was a new kind of wickedness in a devil, to recognize a fate worse than death and inflict it. But now the old warrior had let go, and so died the last of another great clan. So many bloodlines had ended without heirs—like Bellatrix’s, to the world’s lasting sorrow. Many others might as well have. With the sad state of magic in this age, faeries bore little resemblance to their glorious forebears. Magpie mourned for bygone days more than most of her folk, because she knew better than they what had been lost. Much had been lost, was being lost every day. That loss was the shape of her life: the struggle against it, the hunt, the unending journey, the hollowness of suspecting that ultimately her family’s work was in vain. That they were as ants trying to stop a landslide by catching one pebble at a time.

The greatness of her folk was past.

Magpie laid her hand over the wizened fingers of the old warrior, closed her eyes, and blessed him in silence. But she cursed him too. A few more moments, she thought. If he had only waited he could have told her what manner of devil this hungry one was! Whom could she ask now? She could track the invisible trail of death memories until she added her own to it. Or . . .

She began to chew her lip and a sharp focus gradually came back into her eyes.

“What ye pond’rin’, ’Pie?” asked Calypso, who knew her looks.

“Whatever this snag is,” she said, “it’s like nothing we’ve fought before.”

“Nothing in the world,” he agreed.

“Nor nothing we’ve heard or read of.”

“Neh.”

“And the only soul we’ve found that’s seen him just took himself where we can’t follow.”

“Aye, and hasty.”

“So there’s only one thing to do.”

“Aye . . . eh?” He squinted at her. “What?”