Page 5 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
Only there were no rats.
There was nothing at all.
“He’s been here,” Magpie said. “The hungry one.”
The crows puzzled over this. “But there en’t any tracks,” observed Bertram.
Magpie looked down at the dirt. Bertram was right. Every time they’d hunted a devil it had left a ripe trail of some kind to follow, be it drool or destruction or at least rooster tracks. It is a strange fact of magic that a devil, no matter what its feet are shaped like, will always leave rooster prints in soft ground, but though Magpie knew a horde of snags had fled this way, there were no tracks at all. The whole corridor seemed swept clean.Violently so, perhaps. “Looks like that wind came through here, my feathers.”
“Why, Mags” Pigeon fretted. “Why would it come down here? It en’t natural.”
“Neh, it isn’t. We’ll keep on this way,” she said, pointing down the passage. They flew along slowly and listened for life as Magpie’s light gleamed off the stacks of yellowed skulls. Nothing slunk in the shadows or whispered among the bones. Every word the crows spoke echoed. Every wing beat stirred plumes of dust. Magpie had never felt a place so desolate. Even the forsaken temples of the Djinn, so long ago left to crumble into ruin, had not this feeling of death. Of stolen life. Of absence.
Something profound had happened here, she knew, something far deeper than a wind’s rampage or the disappearance of a ragtag population of sad snags. The further she went along the skull-lined passage, the more the feeling stole over her, the sense of a warp in the world where something had been and now was not.
“Mags,” croaked Swig. “A passage.”
They might easily have walked right past it, for it was barely a passage at all, just a place where the skulls had recessed enough for something to slide past.
“I don’t like the look of it,” whispered Pigeon. “’Tis sneaky, like.”
Magpie motioned the crows to fall silent. She listened, sniffed, then moved through the crevice in a sinuous prowl. When Magpie Windwitch was on the hunt, a creature nature awoke in her. She moved like a lynx one moment, a lizardthe next, a raptor after that, gliding smoothly between them as if she weren’t one creature but all, her faerie self temporarily misplaced in the spaces between. She’d been born to it like a fox kit, a natural tracker with hearing mysteriously sharp, nose unusually keen, and vision clear as a hawk’s or owl’s, by day or night regardless.
But none of these senses propelled her forward now. She saw no tracks, smelled no scent, heard no sound. As on the fishing boat, there was nothing. No blood, no stink. And still something kept her moving and guided her right or left when the narrow passage began to fork, then fork again. It was a sense she had learned not to speak of, for words failed her and she’d grown tired of the blank stares.
It was an awareness of a force that pulsed beneath the skin of the world, unseen and unknowable but as real to her as the blood under the white skin of her own wrists. Her parents didn’t feel it, or her grandmother. No one did. She was alone in it. And sometimes, sometimes...the pulse caught her up in its flow and carried her along, and when that happened, the way ahead felt as clear as a path paved with light.
It carried her now, and she went forth on her wings, the crows hurrying behind her until the passage spilled them all into a chamber. The echoes of their wing beats fluttered like living creatures in the high-vaulted space, and they all fell still. Magpie was the first to see what lay in the center of the room.
Skeletons. Faerie skeletons, many, and so old everything had disintegrated but the white bones themselves. The bones, and the knife that protruded from the nearest one’s spine.
Magpie didn’t linger long over this sight however, for something else caught her notice—a door in the far wall, engraved with a symbol—and her eyes widened in shocked recognition. “Neh...” she whispered, and her wings lifted her toward it, right over the skeletons, her eyes never leaving the symbol. “Can it really be...?”
“’Pie!” squawked Calypso suddenly, and at that moment her senses throbbed a warning and she felt something coming at her, plummeting from the shadowed reaches above. She thrust herself backward, twisting in air and reaching in one fluid motion for the knife handle she’d seen, wrenching it free of its sheath of bone and spilling the skeleton asunder. As she spun toward her attacker, all sound was lost in the ruckus of crow squalls and their echoes, and she came face-to-face with...the oldest faerie she had ever seen.
Quickly she stayed the knife and hung in the air before him, staring. She had never beheld so ancient a member of her race. The skin of his face sagged like melted wax, and his long white beard was woven round him into a cloak that fell to the floor. He wore a crested helm and brandished a sword, and he snarled the wordDevil!as he lunged at her. She easily dodged him, seeing as she did that his eyes were clouded—probably blind—and sunk deep in bruise-colored sockets, staring and wild. Never had she seen a soul so blighted by terror.
He raised his sword to swing it again.
“Sir!” she cried. “I’m no devil! I’m a faerie and a friend!”
Hearing her words, he dropped his sword with a clatter and fell to his knees. He reached out gnarled hands, his blind eyesrolling, seeking her. She set aside the knife and stepped forward, placing her palms flat against his in the greeting that had become custom in wartimes when devils had been wont to masquerade as faeries. Their fingers had ever given away their disguise, having either too many joints or too few, and this meeting of hands was proof of kinship—or the lack of it. Though all faeries still used it, few remembered its grim origin. Something told Magpie this one did.
“Blessings...” the old warrior whispered, then closed his hands tight over Magpie’s. She tried to ease her fingers away, but his grip was surprisingly strong.
Alarmed, she wrenched free and drew back from him. “Old uncle,” she said warily. “All these faeries who lie here dead—was it you who slew them?”
He answered in a hoarse voice, “Nay, ’twas Skuldraig murdered them all. They never learn to leave him lie.”
“Skuldraig? Who—?”
He cut her off. “’Tis of no consequence now. The devil is returned!”
“Which devil, uncle?”
“The worst of them all...the hungry one,” he said with a violent shudder.
“The hungry one?” Magpie demanded. “What is he?”
