Blackbringer Read Free

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.

THREE
    “Skive,” Magpie cursed.
    “Trail’s cold as cold,” said Calypso.
    “What trail?” she grumbled. “If we even found a trail that’d be something. But unless Maniac and Mingus come back with news, this snag’s good and gone.”
    They stood on the head of a ruined monument to some long-dead human, eyes sweeping restlessly over the olive groves that sprawled down the hillside from their hunting camp. “They should’ve been back this morning at the latest,” said the crow.
    “Aye. If it was Pup and Pigeon I wouldn’t fret, they dither about so, but Maniac and Mingus are never late. I don’t like it.”
    “Nor I, pet.”
    A devil leaves no footprints upon the ocean, so Magpie and the crows had split into pairs to search the coastlines that touched all sides of the Surrounded Sea. For a week she and Calypso had questioned gulls, wharf rats, and low snags in the ports of North Ifrit. Had any new devils come to town, fresh from their bottles? Again and again they’d asked, paying in wine and trinkets for this greasy gossip of devil life, but they hadn’t learned a thing. Neither had Swig and Bertram, or Pup and Pigeon, who had arrived back to their island camp the previous day as arranged. Only Maniac and Mingus were yet to return, and as the day passed in a slow scorching arc, Magpie paced and cursed.
    When the sun sank from sight with no sign of them winging up the hillside, Magpie swooped down from her perch to where the crows sat smoking. “Come on, birds,” she told them. “We got to go find Maniac and Mingus.”
    The crows stubbed out their cheroots and rose in unison to follow her.
    They left their brightly painted caravans behind on the small island and traveled light, flying high above the masts of ships and later above the towers and battlements of cities. Magpie looked down on the moon-washed rooftops and thought, This is not my world. It was some other idea of the world laid atop the geography of her own, smothering it.
    It was the humans’ world.
    In her hundred years she had seen their towns swell into cities and blacken from the fumes of their foul fires. They dammed rivers, gouged minerals from mountains, built stout ships for murdering whales, chopped down whole forests just to build roofs and cradles for all the new people they daily made.
    And the faeries in their wild places knew little of it.
    They hadn’t paid much attention when the once-monkeys had come down from the trees. They’d laughed at their crude clothing and the fires sparked by sticks instead of spells, and they’d gone on dancing, turning their backs on the land outside their forests. When next they peered out and saw how much of the world had been plowed into fields or crushed under cities, it had come as a great surprise. In fact, the word human meant “surprise” in Old Tongue, the language of the ancients. No one knew where they came from, only that the Djinn who made every other creature had not made them. They hadn’t even predicted them. And there was the rub.
    Many thousands of years ago, when the faeries had at long last won the wars, the seven champions had captured the devils in bottles and cast them into the sea. They had crafted elaborate magicks so that nothing could ever free them from their prisons—nothing then alive in the world,