Page 3 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
“And what of this one? Got away?”
“Aye.” She scowled. “And Grandpa, there’s something mad strange about this one...Its bottle, it was sealed by the Magruwen.”
“Eh? Impossible!” he declared. “That old scorch never dirtied his hands on devils.”
“You never heard of anything, then, during the wars? Some lost story?”
“Neh, and sure I’d remember, no matter it was twenty-five thousand years ago. I remember Bellatrix clear as yesterday. What a sight she was in battle! ’Twas she and the other champions who caught all the snags.”
“Aye, I always thought so, but what of this seal?”
He took it and examined it, frowning. “Jacksmoke. It’s his, all right. Ancient and true.” He handed it back. “No idea what was in the bottle?”
“Neh, none. There’s no smell, no drool, no blood. Nothing at all.”
“And what of the fishermen?”
“Ate them, I reckon.”
“Ate them? I thought you said there was no blood.”
“Nary a drop,” Magpie admitted.
“Ach, there would be! You ever know a devil to chew with its mouth closed?”
“Neh...” she said. But she could still feel that hunger tugging at her through the manny’s left-behind memory. “If it didn’t eat them, what did it do to them?”
He shrugged. “Could be they launched a skiff and got away.”
“Maybe,” Magpie murmured skeptically, thinking of the shoes left so suddenly behind. “But I don’t think so.”
“We’ll put the word out,” the West Wind said. “Split up and ask around in the ports. You’ll find its trail soon enough. You always do, love.”
“I reckon. But this one...it shivers me, Grandpa.”
“Mmm. Always listen to your shivers. They’ll save your life sometime.”
When the sun touched the sea, Magpie rousted the crows, and the wind shed his faerie skin and became, once again, a force of nature. Carrying the devil’s empty bottle with them, they took to the sky and traveled on through twilight and starlight, back toward land.
CHAPTER TWO
Across the water in the hidden places beneath a vast city, a new thing was taking possession of the darkness. Legions of lesser devils had made their home here for centuries in the underbelly of the human world. Now they fled in panic on their cloven hooves and splayed toes.
A furious wind howled in the underground passages. Those creatures who paused to look back over their shoulders found themselves swept up by a terrible hunger and scarcely had time to wonder what was happening before they ceased to exist. Rats, imps, low devils, and quavering translucent spirits roiled up and out of the sewer grates and made for whatever scraps of shadow they could find in the world above.
Soon the catacombs were empty, and the hungry one prowled on, hunting something far greater than this snack of devils. Dust spun and churned as the wind struggled in his grip, but he dragged it along, merciless. He could feel its panic, but it was powerless against him, for he wielded the one weapon it could never resist: He knew its secret name. He had chanted the elementals’ secret names like a song in his prison, plotting this moment. Vengeance had never been far from his thoughts all the thousands of years of his imprisonment, and now his time had come at last.
Doom dawned.
He seeped like a fog through the stacks of skulls lining the corridors. These were the skulls of a species who had not yet walked the world when he had last been abroad in it. So long had he drifted in the sea that in that time, a new species had risen, built cities, fought its own wars, and been dying long enough to overflow its cemeteries. So many years, so many bones. And through the thick stink of dead humans, he scented something else, deeper, older. Faerie bones. He followed the smell and found the way.
Skeletons slumped silent under years of dust, but the hungry one scarcely noticed them. He had found what he sought. He almost couldn’t believe it: an ember within a circle of dull stones. A mere ember? How the mighty had fallen!What had come to pass, he wondered for the hundredth time since bursting from his bottle, that doom might prove such a simple matter after all?
He savored the moment. As soon as he commanded the wind to expend its final fury in snuffing that dim ember, a new age would begin, an age of unweaving. An age of endings. The hungry one laughed and began to speak.
CHAPTER THREE
“Skive,” Magpie cursed.
