“Aye, that’s six in as many months. They keep on like this, the world’ll be crawling with snags like it was before the devil wars! I can’t keep up, all on my own.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t try, love. Leave ’em free! There are too many mannies anyway, neh?”
“Ach, and what of everyone else? It wasn’t mannies that scarab devil killed but faeries!”
“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.
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 had scarcely 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.
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.