Page 41 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
“Gutsuck,” Vesper said with icy control, “I have just had an interesting piece of news. Batch Hangnail lives.” She paused. “Is not that odd? I find it so, since you swore to me you had finished him!”
Its eyes were deep black slits, leering back at her.
“But that’s not all,” she went on. “He’s here, in Dreamdark!” A trill of laughter came from her lips, high and wild. “So I summon you forth to do what you swore you had already done. Kill the imp!”
The surface of the mirror distorted as the thing began to push out into the world, but there was a sound like a fizz as its face emerged, and it drew back sharply, welts rising on its skin. Its slit eyes narrowed further as it glared at its mistress.
“Oh! Irksome protection spells!” cried Vesper, just now remembering them. “Of course you can’t come forth in Never Nigh!” With a groan of exasperation she stood, slid the mirror into a deep pocket of her gown, and fluttered to the window. She looked carefully around, then slid out between the curtains to be lost among the trees.
Poppy Manygreen had planted many, many things in her hundred years, and she never tired of the miracle. Each time a seed or nut or bulb awakened to its own unique life, the awe awakened in her anew. Cradling the scorched acorn in her arms now, she marveled that the dreamer king himself hadtouched it. It seemed to thrum with mystery, and she felt sure the pulse—as Magpie had called it—quickened around it.
By holding out a hand over the soil, a Manygreen could probe for a sweet spot, a nurturing nook of rich earth among the roots and rocks of the ancient forest where a new life could take hold. She found such a spot on a little ridge overlooking Misky Creek, and she was just tucking the nut into its bed when she felt a murmur on the move. A whisper of news flitted from fern to ivy to ash and when she heard what it was she sank quietly out of sight among the leaves.
Only a moment later, Lady Vesper landed downcreek. She drew something out of her pocket and spoke, and Poppy could just barely hear her words over the sluice of the creek. “To Issrin Ev,” Vesper said. “Kill Batch Hangnail!” Poppy’s eyes widened. What business, she wondered, had the queen with that scavenger? Then her eyes widened further as a misshapen creature squirmed out of the mirror and unpeeled great membranous bat wings that were wrapped tightly round its body.
“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.
CHAPTER 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 calledhumans—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-ripecatacombs 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 sortof 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.
CHAPTER 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! Ornot. 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 tosettle 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 tosiphonitself through the air with a steady, hunting will.
She lay very, very still.
