Blackbringer

The cavern floor glimmered as opals, amethysts, and moonstones caught the glow of the Magruwen’s flame and held it burning in their bellies. There were chalices and lyres and mirrors framed in pearls, broadswords and tiaras and bolts of wondrous cloth. Quite forgetting the reason he’d been sent here, Batch flexed his toes and waded in.

He caressed a clockwork hummingbird that could be wound up to collect nectar in a teacup in its belly. He trailed his fingers over a cauldron of sapphires and paused at a ruby-crusted scimitar. The Magruwen watched. That blade had a nasty habit of turning to smoke at the moment of need. Such dark treasures lay among the bright, and one could not always tell from looking which was which. That paring knife lying there so plain beside the scimitar, for example, could cut through any metal ever forged.

Batch moved on, a pendulum of drool swinging from his lower lip. He didn’t know what he wanted until he saw it, but as soon as he did, desire gripped him by the guts and a new obsession began to take root in his soul. There upon stacks of folded lace lay a little pair of silver bat wings just his size. Of all the absurd dreams an imp can harbor in his secret soul, Batch’s was the silliest. He had always longed to fly! To twirl like a faerie in the shimmering forest light. To swoop. To soar! He had a vision of himself fluttering back up the deep shaft of the well and gliding over the world. His fingers reached trembling for the wings.

But he jerked his hand back and wailed. The terrible voice had surfaced inside his head. “The pomegranate,” it had said, and he remembered why he had come. Snuffling, he turned from the wings and faced the Magruwen. “My lord,” he said, “the treasure I desire is not here.”

“What is your desire?” the Magruwen asked.

“Your pomegranate, my lord, is my desire.”

The Magruwen’s flames quieted, clenching into a white-hot ball at his very core. “What did you just say?” he asked in a low, dangerous tone.

“The pomegranate,” cried Batch. “The pomegranate!”

Belatedly the Magruwen hissed, “What was the answer to your riddle?”

“The answer is my master! Escorted through the sky by vultures! He said you must give me what I want if you don’t guess it!”

“I must? Your master seeks to bind me to the Djinn’s honor?”

Batch nodded uncertainly.

The Magruwen laughed. It started low as a cat’s yowl but grew to raging and the old skin burst open and fell away in tatters. Uncloaked, he stood before Batch as a tornado of fire, frenzied and churning, and the imp cringed away from the dazzle. Smoke crept back in like a tide to swallow the treasures.

At last the Magruwen’s awful laughter subsided. “Very well,” he said, “since honor requires it.” And while Batch crouched with his face in his hands, the Magruwen stretched out long arms of smoke. They grew longer and longer until they disappeared through the ceiling of the cave. Up they reached, across strata of earth and rock and root, through the bleached ribs of a dragon and a dark spring swum by water elementals and their imps, through layers of rabbit warrens and forgotten plague cemeteries, finally reaching the school vegetable garden. Smoke fingers plundered among the roots until they found what they were looking for.

In the garden a human lass sat back with a gasp as a turnip top was tugged right out of her hand to disappear in the soil. Gophers, she thought, and moved down the row with a nervous glance at the smoke curling up from the hole.

“Here’s your pomegranate,” said the Magruwen, tossing Batch the scorched turnip. “Send your master my regards.” Preoccupied by the activities of his tail, Batch missed and the vegetable skittered into the smoke. He fumbled for it and shoved it into his satchel without a glance. He succeeded in hooking the bat wings and drew them to him beneath the smoke, but just as he made to shove them into his satchel he saw a salamander clinging to them. It grinned at him before sinking its teeth into his fingers. “Aiii!” he shrieked, dropping the wings.

“So you’d like to fly, would you?” asked the Magruwen.

Batch brightened. But before he could answer, the Magruwen sucked all the encircling smoke into himself and blew.

A fiery gust somersaulted Batch backward and right out the door. Up, up, and up the well he rocketed until he flew out into the world and landed in the branches of a tree. He lay there, skin singed bald and whiskers sizzled to bristles, unconscious and twitching, for quite some time.

It had not been the kind of flight he’d had in mind.

Down in his cave, the Magruwen paced and muttered. He held a withered, ancient thing, a pomegranate so old the skin was no longer red, but brown and brittle as parchment. As delicate as it looked, however, it was unharmed by the Djinn’s fiery grip.

“I’ve drifted in the ocean’s womb . . . ,” the riddle had said. He should have guessed then, but the other clues hadn’t matched. The vultures, that was clever, weaving them into the riddle to seem like one creature. It was so clear now. “Fires put out . . .” The Magruwen wondered which one it had been, which Djinn, where. This was the world to which he had awakened, a world diminished by one Djinn, a tremendous absence that he should have recognized instantly. One of his six brethren had been extinguished, and more had gone out of the world than that one smoldering fire. And something else . . . something else had come back in.

“So,” he whispered. “Ocean spit you out? Have this world, then. I don’t use it anymore.”

He was so weary. He retreated into the depths of his cave and sank back into oblivion, subsiding once again to a smolder, the pomegranate still tight in his grasp. He dreamed that an immense tapestry was hanging from the eaves of the world. He’d dreamed of it many times, but this time the tapestry shivered and fell to dust and all that remained was the deep black of space with no world spinning in it, graceful and green. No world at all.

FIVE

Magpie and the crows flew by night, high enough above the human lands that the jumble of gypsy caravans they towed wouldn’t attract attention. They didn’t worry about meeting anyone up here. The pathways of the skies were traveled by winds and white geese, wheeling bats and butterflies, but they never encountered other faeries here, and it had been decades since they had seen a witch silhouetted against the moon.

“Take ’em down, my lovelies!” Calypso croaked, sweeping along the line of airborne caravans. “The sun, she stirs! Time to fill our bellies and shut our eyes!”

There was a bloom of light on the horizon. Day was coming on. They bade the wind goodbye and dropped down toward the forest far below. This stretch of Iskeri was the last place of safety before the channel they would cross the next night on the way to Dreamdark. They eased through the treetops and set their five caravans down gently in a nook between roots.