Page 74 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
Talon gaped at the cyclone of fire that had swallowed Magpie. He looked quickly around, crouched, and leapt, catching a stalactite and swinging himself up to a crevice in the cave ceiling where he wedged his feet and squinted down into the eye of the fiery tornado. He saw Magpie suspended within, apparently unconscious with her head thrown back, eyes closed, feet drifting above the smoke as she spun, limp, inside the wide whorl of flames.
“Calypso!” he called, and the crow beat his way over the flames, the stench of singed feathers strong on him. He spotted Magpie and exchanged a look with Talon. They both nodded, then the lad leapt and the crow dove, down into the center of the flames roaring round Magpie’s floating figure. They perched upon the arched lid of a coffer that rose like a small island from the sea of smoke, one on either side of her, to guard her.
Magpie’s eyes were closed, but other eyes had opened. Whether within her or beyond her, she knew not. A door had been flung open in her mind to reveal the thing she had always sensed waiting there, that coiled and patient power, the unseen pulse. The Tapestry.
Here the living lights didn’t shimmy off the edges of her vision. They were all she saw. She lost track of her body and just stared at them, dazzled. Streamers of light shimmered and undulated in a pattern as intricate as the whole history of dreams poured tirelessly into its weave. It was vast, curving over every horizon of this mystical space where Magpie’s mind now joined the Magruwen’s.
He guided her eyes across the mesh of harmonious traceries and came to rest on a bright clot of light where they didn’t interweave so much as snarl and snag. A flaw. Twisted threads, tangles. This was how devils were made. The Djinn was showing what the Astaroth had done, Magpie thought. Did that mean he was going to help her? But his next words stunned her. “Behold your handiwork, little meddler,” he said.
She gasped. “My—? Neh, I’ve never...” Her voice trailed off. But, of course, she had. Hadn’t Bellatrix told her she couldweave it? All these years of feeling the pulse all around her, was this what she’d been doing? She’d been desecrating the Tapestry! She was flooded with horror. “I made snags?” she asked in a tiny, desperate voice.
He said, “Nay, little bird. I don’t know why these hideous knots of yours have wrought no devils, but they haven’t.”
“I haven’t...ruined it?” she asked.
“Nay,” he said. “These knots of yours, you could consider them...scabs.”
“Scabs?”
“Ugly things, but without which a wound would never heal. They were a dream of the Vritra’s, in fact, back in the time of the devil wars when wounds were many. Healers know the glyph for them and use it in their magic. It was one of those you saved when the Vritra was killed.”
“Isaved...”
“Aye. Your knots have healed the Tapestry, little bird. Without them, the nothingness would have bled through its wounds and overtaken the world.”
Magpie was too stunned to respond.
“And we would not be here now,” the Magruwen’s voice continued. “I don’t know where you came from or whether the world deserved to be spared, but it seems that choices were made whilst I slept, and I will accept them, for I had forsaken my place. But I am awake now, and I can’t allow the fabric of creation to become an eyesore.”
Magpie braced herself. He was going to tell her not to meddle in the affairs of the Djinn. To close these new mystical eyeshe’d just opened for her. Was he also going to tell her to let the Tapestry fall apart?
“You must control your wild magicks, child. If you knew the things you’d done! Gecko footprints in frosting! Is this the stuff of magic? You must learn to see and to weave. We must begin at once!”
“What? Lord, do you mean you’llteachme?”
“It’s that or spell you into a bottle for safekeeping. The choice is yours.”
“But—teach, of course, Lord. Thank you!” Magpie cried. She could scarcely believe it. He didn’t want to stop her! The Djinn King was going to teach her! “I know just where to start,” she said eagerly. “Stopping the Blackbringer—I haven’t figured out how to go about that yet, you can help me with that, but there’s something else—”
The Magruwen interrupted her. “We will begin at the beginning. Hush.”
She closed her mouth.
The Tapestry began to roll before her then, and she had the sensation she was flying over a luminous landscape. The rolling slowed and stopped, and before her gleamed a thread, straight and true and much brighter than the smaller ones that anchored on to it. “A warp thread,” the Magruwen told her. “These are the bones of the Tapestry, and all other threads hang on them. The greatest are earth, air, water, and fire, and the lesser are the component elements of everything in this world, carbon, gold, manganese, and on...”
Magpie had never been to school. She’d learned at campfires while fanning cheroot smoke out of her face, or in selkies’ caves or dungeons, or wherever the caravans set down for a season. With her parents and grandmother, she’d excavated the ruins of the Djinns’ forsaken temples in four far-flung lands—those of the Ithuriel, the Sidi-Haroun, the Iblis, and the Azazel—and she had helped her father bind and translate the ancient manuscripts they unearthed there. She had learned her glyphs from dozens of faeries in as many forests, from books she stole back from monkeys, even from the eyeless imps who swam the unfathomable springs of the water elementals.
Now here she was at the fount of all mystery, the Tapestry, with the Djinn King himself for a teacher. She knew her parents would pay toes for this chance, and so, ordinarily, would she. But her mind kept turning to the shadow that hunted in Dreamdark, and the look in Poppy’s eyes as she dissolved right out of life.
“It will take you years to learn to read it,” the Magruwen went on, plucking each thread and glyph as he named it so it glowed brighter. “Diamond, flamingo, rust, snow...”
“But I don’t have years!” she said. “The Blackbringer—!”
“Be still. The Tapestry will be no use to you unless you can understand it.”
Unhappily, Magpie listened. “Fig, lava, zinc, spider, teeth...” She wouldn’t have thought that here, beyond her body, she would be in danger of getting the wiggles, but she couldn’t help herself. The Djinn’s rasping voice began to wear away like a file at Magpie’s patience. She fidgeted.
He came to a glyph she recognized, and she called out its meaning. “Threshold!” It was part of the spell Snoshti had taught her for traveling to and from the Moonlit Gardens. It hit her how when she’d held that glyph in her mind, this was what she’d called upon, this bright symbol—it was something real—and she began to understand how it all worked. In her excitement, she felt a tingling in her fingertips. She gasped, and froze. Three curls of light were winding away from her like water snakes.
