Such a ceremony was a thing of legend, and the faeries gawked, unnerved, until Calypso once again broke the silence with a joyous squawk. "Hail, Magpie Windwitch, Magruwen's champion!" he cried. The words were taken up by the faeries, but their voices were weak and their faces stunned. Talon's voice rang out above the rest, and his face was alight with joy. Magpie's eyes fastened on it in the crowd and their eyes held, shining.

Turning to the Magruwen, she said solemnly, "It's my great pride and honor to serve you, Lord."

"And you know what your first service must be."

"Aye, I know."

He held out the firedrake tunic. "Put this on," he instructed, and with reverence she took it. The scales felt cool, like enamel, and light, and she knew no better protection could be forged on any anvil. She slipped it over her head, easing her wings out through the apertures designed for them. The tunic was large on her, but she cinched her belt around it and looked back up at the Magruwen.

With a soft sparkle he conjured something in each hand. He presented first a seal bearing his sigil and glinting with dense magicks, and then a bundle wrapped in a familiar tatter. It was a scrap of the Djinn's burst skin Talon had seen abandoned beneath the smoke of the Magruwen's cave. Fireproof, as any Djinn's skin must be, it was rolled tight to contain the precious thing Magpie knew must burn within it, a seed from the mystical pomegranate. A star to light her way through the darkness and, she hoped, to spark the other lights to life.

"I hope you're right, little bird," the Magruwen said gruffly.

"Me too."

"Blessings fly with you, Magpie Windwitch." The Djinn inclined his golden head and moved away, back toward the hole that would become his new temple. As he disappeared within, Magpie thought of the great place it had once been and would be again, if she succeeded.

She turned back to the crowd and all those eyes just blinked at her. The faeries gathered here would later recount the Magruwen's return as a day of exaltation and boast of having witnessed it with their own eyes. They would forget the stunned stupor with which they had regarded their new champion, remembering instead the cheering and celebration that should have occurred.

At present, celebration was the last thing on Magpie's mind. She flew back toward the crowd, pausing before Poppy's father to tell him earnestly, "I'm going to bring her back, sir."

Magpie He reached out his hands, palms outfaced, and she pressed hers against them. They nodded to each other and Magpie withdrew. To the crows and Talon she said, "At dusk we meet the Blackbringer," and taking a deep breath, she added, "in the Spiderdowns."

THIRTY-NINE.

Magpie stood in the dying light at the edge of the Spiderdowns. Nothing grew in this poisoned place. The trees had long ago choked on the spiders' venom and warped into the tortured corpses they were now. Their bare branches twisted into a dense canopy from which hung sheets and clots of sticking web, and the earth beneath was split into ragged cracks.

"The light couldn't be worse," Nettle was telling Magpie. "The webs will be nigh invisible. We only ever go in at brightest dawn, when the dew shines and we can see every filament. This is . . ." Her words trailed off.

"Madness?"

"Aye, though sure it would be a greater madness to seek him belowground in the spiders' lair. Listen, you got to be quick. They'll drop down on you from above and spin you right up, and their venom kills flesh and curdles blood."

"The light's going," said Magpie. "It's got to be now." She glanced over her shoulder to where the full force of Rathersting might was mustered and ready for her signal. The crows clustered together around the Blackbringer's bottle, as wily and tattered as alley cats.

"Magpie," Talon said. "Wait. Last night I made something." He pulled it out of his pocket and when she saw its shimmer she thought it was a skin, but it wasn't. It was a single long cord of finely woven spidersilk, coiled like a rope. "It's a tether," he told her, "to tie round yourself, so you can find your way back out of the dark."

"Lad!" croaked Calypso and smacked him on the back. "Blessings but that's a fine thing! I'm shivered to think we might'n't have thought of it at all, and then what? Thanks to ye!"

"Aye . . ." Magpie spun the end of it between her fingers. It was thin as a whisker. "Will it hold?" she asked.

"Try to cut it."

"Eh?"

"Go ahead."

With a frown of skepticism she unsheathed Skuldraig and touched it to the strand, expecting the blade to slice right through. It did not. She tried again harder but it only glanced off. "Jacksmoke!" she said, slashing at it harder and smiling in wonderment. "How'd you do that?"

"Knitted it with glyphs for strength," he told her.

"You should use those on your next skin too."

"For true," he agreed, "for you never know when a lass may try to slit your throat."

"Ach!"

"Tie it round you. Go on. I'll be holding the other end, you ken, until you come back out."

She bowed her head and tied the cord round her waist over Bellatrix's tunic, and when she looked back up, her smile was gone. "I've never had such a shiver," she told him quietly.

"Nor I."

They shared a solemn look until Magpie broke it, chasing all anxiety from her eyes and saying abruptly, "Here we go." She tugged the tether hard to test her knot and said, squaring her shoulders, "Hang on to me, Talon."

"I will. Blessings, Magpie."

Then, with the warriors following silently, she turned and walked in among the dead trees. She felt the presence of many spiders lying in lurk. Very many. She hadn't gone far before one plunged down at her on a silk tether of its own. She dove and had to scramble aside as it nearly landed on top of her. She stabbed at it and it burst like the bagful of venom it was. As its eight spindly legs danced a frenzied death, she stood and prowled on, deeper into the Downs.

The fissures in the dead earth widened, their edges crusted with congealed poison and the bones and wings of dead things. The Blackbringer was down in one of those cracks while spiders boiled up and out to do his bidding.

Dark deepened.

Magpie dodged another spider, and it skittered past her toward the advancing Rathersting. She heard a pop and gush as it was dispatched. Another came and she slew it and watched its fat bag of a body shrivel as its venom drooled out. She shuddered in disgust. It seemed impossible she owed her own wings to these vile things, but so it was, and for that reason the Rathersting suffered them to live, century after century.

But not this night. Looking back, Magpie saw many dark shapes spring down onto the warriors, and a frenzy of slaying ensued. She killed two more herself, felt the sizzle of their poison on her hands and arms, and whirled back toward the black cracks in the ground, her senses reeling wildly, trying to stay alert to everything, all around, as night fell.

A warrior screamed somewhere behind her and the hairs pricked up on her neck. More spiders came boiling up out of the ground and shambled forth. So many! She visioned a hasty spell for light as she leapt and dodged them, trying to keep clear of the sly filaments of web stretched from tree to tree. She heard another faerie cry out.

This would never do! The faeries couldn't possibly dodge all these spiders and the Blackbringer too once he showed himself, and that was sure to be soon. . . .

He rose.

This time he came as no slow fume. He jetted from the earth in a dark spew, churning through the air and sucking his skin into the shape of a horned beast. It was but a mockery of the Magruwen's form, a pathetic imitation by a creature with no dreams of his own. He landed crouched, his darkness pooling and shifting. Squinting, Magpie could just detect the dense thatch of traceries alive over the skin of him, tightly woven of many, many glyphs. It was a calculus of magic such as she had never dreamed, a prison wrought of the Djinns' highest craft.

He turned to Magpie, fixing her with savage eyes. "You," he purred, "I've been hunting for you."

"And I for you, Blackbringer," she returned, then bellowed, "Warriors! Now!" and the Rathersting leapt, whooping their war cries, veering in the air, slashing down spiders and web as they drew round to encircle the Blackbringer.

He laughed at them. "Do you think you can slay me, faeries? Or have you come to spare me the trouble of hunting this night?"

"We'll spare you the trouble of hunting ever again!" spat Magpie.

He laughed once more, and from within him his ghastly tongue suddenly unspooled and shot at her. She leapt against the side of a tree just as a spider rappelled down it. Its fangs missed her face by a hair's breadth. She flung it to the ground. The Blackbringer drew his tongue back and hurled it again. An old warrior heaved himself clear of it and fell within reach of a spider. The spider reared and struck, and the warrior screamed.

Magpie knew it was time to conjure the champion's glyph and dive into the darkness, but she hesitated. She couldn't leave the Rathersting like this! She glanced back at Talon, who held a knife in one hand and her tether tight in the other, leaping and slashing as more spiders came at him and more. There were just too many!

With a great thrust of will, Magpie forced open the inner eyes the Magruwen had revealed to her, and even in the heart of that terrible place the sight of the Tapestry dazzled her. A thread glinted and caught her eye and she recognized it at once. The Magruwen had named it for her; it was the thread for spider. With ferocious concentration she reached for it now. The pulse roiled around her like rapids as she conjured beside it one of the simplest of glyphs, the symbol for sleep. Urgently she intertwined them. It was a desperate move. Fusing glyphs was a precise art, and joining the same symbols into different patterns could result in wildly unpredictable magicks. For all she knew, she could be casting a spell that would make the spiders' bite induce a deep sleep from which there was no waking.

But she heard the rain of thick bodies hitting the earth and she knew she had gotten it right. The ground in the Downs, lit intermittently by the spells of the warriors, was littered with heaps of the stunned spiders. Magpie held the new glyph in her mind. She would have to maintain it even as she conjured the champion's glyph or the spiders would awaken. She didn't know if she was capable of such a thing.

She would have to be!

Gathering all her will, she summoned the champion's glyph forth in her mind and it bloomed there great and shining and spun beside the smaller spell. She felt the strain of it at once, as if an hourglass had been turned and her strength was beginning to slip away. How long could she hold it? She little knew.

In her fierce concentration she didn't see the tongue coming. Straight at her it struck. But before she could even gasp, a flare of light exploded and the slithering grey thing was slapped aside with a sizzle. It fell limp to the ground.

The champion's glyph had protected her.

The Blackbringer reeled his tongue back, dragging it through the strewn spiders. Magpie felt his surprise. He released the absurd shape he had been affecting and became again a loose clot of deepest dark.

"Whoa"?" he started to hiss.

Then Magpie sprang. Holding the two spells side by side in her mind, she dove into the darkness of the Blackbringer and disappeared.

Talon saw her leap and gave her tether slack. He tried to catch a glimmer of her inside the beast but saw only blackness. He shivered, and hoped. He felt a slow tug at the silk line. Magpie had gone into a deep and endless place, and she was moving away from him. He slowly fed the slack to her, kept his eyes on his foe, and waited.

The Blackbringer paused in shock. He'd reached for the faerie, tasting her power on the air, eager to unskin her spark and drink her light and surge with stolen strength as she ebbed into the emptiness.

Instead he was stung, stunned. It had been thousands and thousands of years since last he'd felt it, but instantly he knew the force that thwarted him. The Magruwen. Traitor. And this lass with Skuldraig in her graspa"she was the Djinn King's champion. A new champion!

Yanking back his stunned tongue, the Blackbringer remembered the other, the huntress who had undone his armies and finally himself. His bane, Bellatrix. He had believed the world fallen and all such power with it, but he'd been wrong. He experienced a pang of fear as he looked at the small fierce lass.

And then she stunned him again. She dove into him.

Her power didn't surge instantly into his own as with all the other, weaker faeries, but he knew it wouldn't. She wielded the champion's glyph, and as long as she could vision it, she would be whole. The Ithuriel's champion, that Ifrit warrior with coffee-black skin who'd been his final victim in the Dawn Days, had held himself whole far longer than the Blackbringer would have thought possible. Into the bottle and into the ocean, Kipepeo had clung to that glyph inside the Blackbringer, adrift in the emptiness and not knowing he had already gone beyond all rescue. He had held on fiercely to life, some power beyond magic feeding him strength. But it was useless. He was a prisoner within a prisoner within a prison. When he had at last faltered and failed, the Blackbringer had tasted his power and raged inside his bottle, frenzied with strength and unable to spend it.

This new champion, too, would fail. It was only a matter of when.

Magpie struggled to hold the glyphs bright in her mind and peered around. Darkness without end. It was like falling outside of time, outside the world. As in her memory and in her dream, dim lights flickered in the black. She groped for the bundle the Magruwen had given her and with utmost care, unwrapped it. Heat pulsed within and bright traceries spun from its folds. She pulled away the tatter and unveiled it.

The pomegranate seed. A single star plucked from an ancient sky. Its brilliance pierced the darkness, and Magpie had to shut her eyes. But even behind closed eyelids she saw something was happening. Traceries exploded like fireworks! A feeling swelled in her, not of hollowness or warp or absence but life. And all around her the dying lights began to flicker and flare.

In her wonder she felt the glyphs begin to slip in her mind and she quickly thrust all her energy back to maintaining them. The effort left her numb, and tendrils of exhaustion began to steal into the core of her being. With great care, and taking comfort in the tug of the tether around her waist, she began to move deeper into the darkness, holding aloft the blazing star.

In her wake the sparks shifted, and followed.

In the Spiderdowns a fierce, swooping battle was under way. The spiders still lay scattered but the Blackbringer raged. His essence oozed and pooled from one hideous shape to the next as he chased the whooping warriors. They were fleet and evasive but it didn't matter. They were tiring and he was not. He grabbed one by the beard and sucked him in. He caught a lad by the ankle, but another, a lass, slashed clean through the end of his tongue, and the lad leapt free while the severed tongue tip twitched and oozed into the black ground.

Talon's heart pounded. The Blackbringer had almost had him. Nettle and Hiss had kept close ever since they set foot in the Downs, guarding him and the thread in his hands. He'd been uncoiling the thread steadily since Magpie disappeared, and he had now come to its end. He wrapped it several times around his fist and clenched it tight. He hoped he'd made it long enough. He'd made it as long as one night's knitting permitted. Magpie could go no farther. He gave it a tug and waited, hoping he would feel it slacken. Hoping she would soon emerge.

A very long time seemed to pass.

His old uncle Caelum, who'd drawn his tattoos, was seized, and Hesperus, whose first babe had been born this year. The warriors were falling.

The darkness was winning.

The Blackbringer bucked and bellowed. Talon felt the tether pull taut and tug him forward. He planted his feet and strained against it, feeling his heels skid over the dead ground. He strained with all his strength and the tether cinched tight around his fist, biting into his flesh and drawing blood. Slowly, grimacing, Talon was drawn toward the beast.

"Nettle!" he hollered, trying to dig in his heels.

His sister dashed to his side, sheathing her knives so she could grip the silk string with both hands. Side by side they struggled against the pull of Magpie's tether but the Blackbringer seemed to have gone wild, swirling like storm clouds, morphing into crazed shapes, spinning, hissing. The silk bit through Talon's palm. He'd spelled the thing himself and knew it was strong enough to slice right through his hand.

His blood was making it slick and hard to hold.

Nettle stumbled and dropped the cord, and without her added strength resisting its pull, Talon was yanked right off his feet. He fell to his chest and was dragged through fetid spider bodies as the tether bit tighter and deeper into his hand.

The Blackbringer was only a few yards away.

"Talon!" Nettle screamed, lunging to grab his feet and trying to wrestle him back from that yawning darkness. "Let go of it!" He knew if he did, Magpie would be lost, but if he didn't, he'd be lost with her.

He didn't let go.

He thought of the surge of strength that had flowed through him as he coursed over Dreamdark on wings he had conjured with his own hands, and a bellow rose from his throat as he twisted his legs around in front of him to find some lip in the ragged ground to brace himself against, even for a moment. His heels met rock and, gritting his teeth, he took his throbbing, bleeding hand and pulled away from the darkness with all his might.

A scream choked from his throat. The bones of his hand constricted and blood pulsed from his wound. He strained against the darkness but it was no use. The pull was too strong. The Blackbringer contorted and spun, and Talon felt himself lifted into the air, tumbling toward it. He gritted his teeth and held on, thinking of the courage it had taken Magpie to dive into that nothingness. He wrenched open his eyes and stared into it. This was his last chance to save himself.

He tightened his grip.

He was drawn through the air in a kind of effortless flight, and the darkness was rushing to meet him. Then, suddenly, it cleaved open and Magpie tumbled out, falling to her knees.

"Magpie!" Talon screamed as the inexorable pull released him. He fell back to the ground as, with infinite weariness, Magpie trembled and rose slowly to her feet.

Desperate with exhaustion, she turned to the Blackbringer, raised Skuldraig with a heavy arm, and brought it down against his skin of night. As the blade met the black, a pure chime rang out through the Spiderdowns and the beast froze, his tongue dropping like a dead snake to the ground. And as Magpie held her enemy thus immobile, she saw lights begin to sparkle forth from within him like fireflies dancing out of a dark wood. The beauty of it gave her a small swell of strength and she straightened her weary arm and held Skuldraig proud.

As the lights emerged, shadows seemed to peel away from the Blackbringer in long strips. The sparks leapt to fill them, each to each, and figures bloomed within. In every shadow burst a blinding dazzle. Pale forms moved and turned, stretched wings and arms, opened long-closed eyes, awakened. On unsteady legs they staggered forth, blinking like sleepwalkers who had awakened in a foreign land. There came faeries and imps, many, many, but Magpie kept her eyes fixed on the Blackbringer, afraid if she were to turn and watch the miracle she was working, her concentration might give way to wonder. It was a sight for others to marvel at, and they did. The Rathersting stared, panting, bleeding, broken, and awestruck, as souls emerged to reclaim their beautiful skins from shadow.

Of course, not all the skins were beautiful. The Blackbringer had feasted on his share of devils, and they too stepped out of the darkness. Ignoble things, wheezing, slope-shouldered, and foul, on tentacles, on cloven hooves, with suckers for mouths, with double and triple mouths. One dismal creature possessed a mouth like a wound, and as it dragged its limp wings through the throng, its mistress's last command slowly rose to the surface of its muddled mind.

And there were humans! The first ever to stand so deep in Dreamdark, four hulking, barefoot mannies swayed among the rest of the creatures. There were so many souls. Hundreds! They were like a river of light pouring from the void. Magpie glimpsed a flash of copper hair and turned her head just long enough to see that it was Poppy. Relieved, she refocused her energy on her glyphs but kept watch out for one shape, one she knew well for she had seen it silhouetted in flight a thousand times at least: Maniac. But he was nowhere to be seen, so even as the flow of souls slowed and gradually stopped, she kept her trembling arm outstretched, and waited.

"Magpie." She heard Talon's voice through the hypnotic ringing of the blade. She wanted to look at him, to focus on his clear, steady eyes as the world lurched around her, but she didn't dare turn. She was certain Maniac had still not come forth, and it was all she could do to keep the glyphs burning in her mind, second after endless second. She was utterly depleted, hanging on to consciousness by the thinnest of threads, and when one last shadow finally peeled away from the blacknessa"a crow!a"she let her arm fall with a bone-weary shudder, dropping Skuldraig and the veiled pomegranate seed both upon the ground.

Maniac wobbled and careened to earth as a trio of warriors rushed to steady his landing and Magpie gasped, "Crows, now!" The other birds, circling in the sky, beat down to her through the branches, bearing the Blackbringer's bottle with them.

She didn't know how she could possibly find within herself the strength to cast one last spell. She would have to let the champion's glyph go and the Djinn's protection with it. No sooner did she realize this than the glyph was snuffed from her mind, leaving a ghost image where it had so long burned. As that too faded, she breathed deep, dug into her mind for her last reserve of power, and visioned a new glyph in its place.

At once a vortex whirled to life in the neck of the silver bottle, and the Blackbringer, weakened and shrunken, was powerless against it. The whipping air grasped the edge of his skin and the king of devils lost his hold on the world. With a roaring of wind he was seized and sucked back toward his ancient prison. As if the skin of night were truly a fabric, its edges flapped and swirled and he whirled slowly out of sight, his terrible rasp of a voice filling everyone's minds with his fury.

Magpie collapsed to her knees and frantically fumbled the seal out of her pocket. She held it out to the vortex and it began to spiral through the air toward the bottle's narrow throat.