Page 54 of The Guardians of Dreamdark (Windwitch #1)

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 Rather-sting 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 mightn’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 Rather-sting 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 in a crouch, 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 then 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 gray 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.

“Who—?” 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.