Page 92 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
Calypso and Mingus dragged the Blackbringer’s bottle into the ragged hole in the mountain that had once been the face of Issrin Ev. The other crows followed, with Talon astride Bertram. All dread the Djinn King had once inspired in them was forgotten as they cried out for him.
“Lord Magruwen!” they cawed, their voices muffled by the dust of four thousand years that blanketed the ancient corridors.
They emerged into a great chamber, where Talon’s light spell glittered over a trove of treasure. They swooped around the room, distraught and shrieking for the Djinn.
“Is it done?” he demanded, emerging from a doorway. “Where is the lass?”
Calypso and Mingus beat down to him, lowering the bottle. “Lord!” cried Calypso. “Ye got to unseal it!”
“What?” he hissed.
Talon leapt off Bertram’s back to the ground. He held Skuldraig in one hand and the shrouded star in the other. He laid them both before the Magruwen and said, “Just before the seal settled on, a devil attacked Magpie, and the Blackbringer reached out and sucked them both in with him! You got to get her out!”
The Magruwen looked at the bottle, and the blade, and the bundle of old skin pulsing with starlight. No expression played over the sculpted planes of his mask, but flames spewed from his eyes and horns. “Nay!” he choked, and seized the bottle, his golden gloves clashing against its silver. But he didn’t pry off the seal that bore his sigil. He only said, “The seal is fixed. The faerie is lost.”
Until he heard the Magruwen’s words, Talon had not for a moment considered that Magpie might be lost. The absurdity of it! That single second when this thing had happened—it was barely as long as the blink of an eye, and he just couldn’t believe that so small a moment could wreak so terrible a change. Asense of crazed outrage welled up in him, as if a mistake had been made in the arrangement of the moments and he should be able to reach back in time and correct it. It would take so little, just seeing the devil in time or skewering the tongue on his knife as he’d done once before.
But there was not now and never had been magic for reaching back in time. Past moments lay as they fell, and nothing would stir them.
Talon collapsed to his knees as his stubborn disbelief was stripped away, and with it vanished a feeling he hadn’t even known was growing in him, a new sense that the world was wild with possibility, that the whole of life was not a castle rampart or a single forest, but a mesh of pathways waiting to be forged.
Magpie...
The crows were sobbing themselves hoarse, and it was the most desolate sound Talon had ever heard.
“What’s all this noise?” he heard someone ask, and looked up into the imp-marm’s black eyes as she suddenly appeared.
“Good-imp Snoshti...” he said, his heart clenching at the thought of giving her the news.
“I had a time finding ye lot, what with the crush out there. All them souls. Blessings! She did it, neh? My lass!” Her furry little creature face was bright with joy that hurt Talon’s heart to see.
“Good-imp—” he started to say, but she cut him off.
“But what’s all this snoolery? Feather!” She tugged at Calypso’s wing. “What’s happened to ye?”
Calypso couldn’t even answer. He pressed his head against the silver bottle and wept.
“It’s Magpie...” Talon said quietly.
“Eh?” Snoshti’s whiskers twitched. “What of her?”
“The Blackbringer...” he told her. “He...he got her, mistress. She’s in there.”
Snoshti looked at the bottle, then at Talon, then back at the bottle, puzzled. “Lad,” she growled, her face ferocious. Then she chuffed and snorted. It sounded almost like a laugh. “What blither!” she declared. “Magpie’s not in there!”
“Aye, for I saw it myself.”
“Neh, lad! Foolish faerie! And ye birds, who should know her better! Magpie’s not in there!”
Talon looked at her, wide-eyed and confused.
“She’s in the Moonlit Gardens!”
Magpie was dreaming of the Tapestry. She lay on a soft, white cushion in a little room in the peak of an impossibly tall spindle of rock. It rose from the floor of the dragon’s canyon like a needle standing on end, and at its very tip Fade had hollowed out this little room just for her. A dreaming place of her own. In it were many high windows—a panorama of moon—and the single deep cushion on which she slept.
She had never known such exhaustion.
When she’d found herself yanked suddenly back into the dark, she’d been too weak to think and far too weak to summon the devilishly complex champion’s glyph. It had failed her utterly. But as she felt her edges begin to melt, another, simplerglyph flickered in her mind. Threshold, moonlight, garden, just like Snoshti had taught her. With an effort that felt like an explosion behind her eyes, she’d visioned it, and everything went black as the moth wings took her.
