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.”

Magpie motioned the crows to fall silent. She listened, sniffed, then moved through the crevice in a sinuous prowl. When Magpie Windwitch was on the hunt a creature nature awoke in her. She moved like a lynx one moment, a lizard the next, a raptor after that, gliding smoothly between them as if she weren’t one creature but all, her faerie self temporarily misplaced in the spaces between. She’d been born to it like a fox kit, a natural tracker with hearing mysteriously sharp, nose unusually keen, and vision clear as a hawk’s or owl’s, by day or night regardless.