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.

“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.