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, anyway. Not faerie nor dragon, elemental, snag, creature, imp, or finfolk could break those seals. But humans? Humans didn’t exist. And then one millennium along they came, fishing the world’s oceans, pulling up ancient bottles in their nets and uncorking them to see what was inside.
Now devils were creeping back into the world, faster and faster all the time, but the age of champions was long past, and little Magpie Windwitch found herself alone against them.
Sometime in the night they met a breeze who carried a message for them. “Those two crows are waiting for you in Rome,” said the breeze, an air elemental of slight power. “They’re all a-twitch and a-twitter about the news.”
“What news?”
“There’s some telling of a wind gone underground, missy, down where the mannies stack their skeletons.”
“Neh!” Magpie declared.
“I hope it’s not true,” said the breeze.
“And I,” Magpie said, knowing how air elementals loathe close spaces. None would ever willingly venture underground. Something strange was at work there. “I thank you, cousin,” Magpie said. She adjusted her course for Rome, that king of human cities. Beneath its majestic domes and spires it was rotting from the roots, its catacombs and cellars a snug home to multitudes of dim snags. These were the ones faeries had never taken the trouble to capture because they were no more dangerous than dogs. Such creatures dwelt in the dark places wherever there were humans, living off garbage and unwary cats and the occasional stray child, but few cities were as infested with them as Rome.
Magpie and the crows flew most of the night, getting a push from whatever wind or breeze they encountered, and they reached the city before the earliest gleams of dawn. They descended into the catacombs through a grate in a bakery cellar, pausing to steal bread while the baker’s back was turned. They had to hop up and down on the loaves to wedge them down through the narrow grate, but after all that trouble they never did get to eat them.
For when Magpie dropped into the underground passage, she knew something was wrong. She peered down the darkened corridor and found no sign of Maniac and Mingus or of anything else. It was utterly silent.
“Where’ve all the snags got to?” whispered Pup.
“Flummox me . . . ,” she whispered back.
Their whispers seemed to boom in the unnatural hush of the catacombs.
“Something’s mad wrong,” breathed Pigeon with an anxious flutter.
“Aye,” Magpie agreed. There should have been snags here. She had come before to buy their gossip and though she’d hated the stink of their hidden world, she’d never feared them, as now she feared their absence.
Magpie frowned and began to form glyphs in her mind, but before she was even finished she was flooded with a powerful memory touch. Darkness. Hunger. She stumbled, and each step brought a new burst of the same terrible memory. Many memories, many creatures, suffering the same terrible fate. Darkness. Hunger. Again and again. Finally she leapt to her wings, drawing her feet away from the memories seared into the floor. She shook off the visions, her breath coming fast.
“Mags! Ye okay, Mags?” the crows were demanding, crowding round her, unable to feel the magic that had so shaken her. Their bread lay forgotten in the shadows for some rat to retrieve once they’d gone.
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, 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 farther 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.”