by Rachel Aaron
“Like something that should never be seen,” Karon whispered. “We should leave.”
“Not before we get what we came for,” Eli said, scooting forward. “Nico described a map room, but I bet we won’t find one in those shacks. My money is on that.” He pointed at the low cave entrance across the little village where the people in the robes were carrying the boxes down into the mountain itself.
Karon grumbled, but Eli ignored it. He pushed himself up into a crouch and began to inch his way down into the valley. The mountain was silent around him, the dead silence of a land without spirits, and every movement he made sounded like a crash in his ears. But the people down in the valley didn’t seem to notice him at all. They just kept hurrying back and forth, their faces as blank as corpses’ as they ferried the boxes from the cart to the cave. Eli reached the outermost shack without incident, and he stayed there, back pressed against the loose stone, until the cart was empty.
Once the last box had been unloaded, one of the armored guards reached down behind the wagon seat and pulled out a small bundle. The bundle struggled as the guard set it on the ground, and Eli realized with a horrified shock that it was a child. A little boy, no older than four, wrapped in a dirty cloth and tied with ragged ropes, his smudged face downcast and streaked with dried tears. The boy’s thin neck was angry and red, as though something had rubbed it raw, and Eli clenched his jaw. He’d seen those injuries on children before, down in the southern islands where Council law was thin. He couldn’t see from where he was, but he would bet the boy had similar marks on his wrists, ankles, and waist. Slavers liked to keep their merchandise secure.
One of the pale, robed figures came forward to take the boy, grabbing him by the shoulders. The child tried to struggle, but it was clear he had no more strength to fight. The robed figure led him away, pulling him to a stone hut that was set off from the others. The cultist opened the gray door with one hand, and Eli shrank back at what he saw inside. There, tied in the dirt like animals, were five more children, boys and girls. They were all tiny, skeletal things. None of them looked up when the newcomer was shoved inside. The boy fell with a sad, light thud as the cultist slammed the door behind him, plunging the children back into the dark.
“They’re all wizards,” Karon whispered.
“I’d guessed that already,” Eli whispered back.
“Don’t you see? Those are the beds of future demonseeds.” Karon’s voice shook with rage. “Aren’t we going to do something?”
“What can we do?” Eli said, taking a deep breath. “We’re here for information, not to play hero. Even if I wanted to, we’ve got no backup. First rule of thievery, if you must fight, only fight the fights you can win.”
Back at the center of town, the cultists were bowing before the cart guards, bending to scrape their heads against the stone. The two large men sneered in unison at the display and turned away, each grabbing one pole of the cart’s empty harness. Then, with a sickening and familiar twisting of shadows, they vanished, taking the cart with them.
Eli rolled his eyes. “Of course this place would be crawling with demonseeds.”
“We should move while they’re gone,” Karon said. “Before anything worse shows up.”
Eli nodded and crept between the shacks toward the cave, keeping an eye on the local inhabitants. He might as well not have bothered. Now that the demonseeds were gone, the people slumped to the ground, exhausted. They didn’t speak, didn’t touch one another. They just sat there, staring at the ground, their frail hands clutching the dusty stone. Just looking at them gave Eli the creeps, and he shuffled faster than he should have toward the cave.
The moment he stepped inside, the sunlight winked out. It was as though the cave’s mouth was a line the sunlight could not cross. Eli blinked in the dark, letting his eyes adjust. Slowly, he saw that the cave was piled with boxes, all made of the same gray, flimsy wood, and all of them unmarked. There was one right by Eli’s feet, and he nudged it experimentally. Whatever was in the box, it was horribly heavy, for the crate didn’t even budge, but the wood on the outside fell away in flakes, completely dead. Eli would have investigated further, but Karon was burning in his chest, reminding him to keep moving.
Careful not to touch the fragile boxes, Eli edged his way past the stacks and started deeper into the cave. He walked for some time, stumbling in the thick, heavy dark. The cave floor was uneven and tilted upward, climbing toward the mountain’s peak. Eli crept low in the dark, keeping as silent as he could, but they didn’t see anyone, or anything, until suddenly, after nearly an hour of climbing, the cave opened up again. Eli blinked in the sudden brightness. The cave let out onto a cliff high above where they’d entered. He’d crossed the mountain as well, and as best as Eli could tell he was now on the opposite face from where he had entered, looking north. The view was spectacular. He could look down for miles on the peaks of the lesser mountains, snowcapped and silent in the afternoon sunshine. It was actually quite pretty, and Eli stood a moment, enjoying the scenery, until Karon made a little, terrified noise. Eli whirled around, arms up, ready to take on whatever demonseed or cult thrall was surely about to jump them. But there was no one. Just another view.
Eli stood and stared, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. He was looking down on a valley, a long, straight stretch between mountains just like the approach he’d taken to the Dead Mountain, only this valley obviously should not have been there. No natural formation of stone could have made a valley that straight. It ran like a road from the foot of the Dead Mountain due northwest, and wherever a mountain got in its way, that mountain was sundered, ripped apart in long, terrible gouges until only sheer cliffs remained.
“What happened here?” Eli’s voice was barely a whisper.
“I don’t want to know,” Karon whispered back. “But one thing is certain. Something ate those mountains.”
“Ate?” Eli said. “What do you mean, ‘ate’?”
“Look at the valley floor.”
Eli looked, squinting to make sense of the tumbled impressions beneath the drifts of snow. Slowly, the random shapes came together to form enormous craters. He could see the great ripped-up places where mountains had been, but now nothing was left except piles of boulders, their faces as black and dead as the slope Eli stood on.
Eli swallowed. “What eats a mountain?”
“I already said I don’t want to know,” Karon rumbled, pulling farther back inside Eli’s body. “It’s like the demon of the mountain itself escaped and made a run for it, eating everything in its path.”
“Come on,” Eli said. “If that had happened we’d all be dead. But you’re right; something came out.” He crept closer to the cliff edge, his eyes following the trail of destruction north and west toward the horizon. “I wonder where it was going. The only thing north of here is the Shaper Mountain.” He frowned, contemplating. “ And I wonder what stopped it, and why I haven’t heard about it. I would like to think I’d know about something that eats mountains.”
Karon’s burn began to singe. “Let’s just go.”
Eli tore his eyes away from the destruction and set back to the task at hand. The path between the two cliffs was steep, narrow, and open. Had there been wind, the crossing would have been impossible, but this being the Dead Mountain, Eli was able to pick his way along the narrow going with little trouble. After a hundred feet, the path began to jackknife, taking them steeply upward toward the Dead Mountain’s knife-sharp peak. They saw no one as they went, not a guard, not a cultist, not a seed, nothing but dead stone and air. They walked so long Eli began to wonder if he’d missed something, for they were quickly running out of mountain. But just as he was about to suggest they turn around, the path ended abruptly at the mouth of a cave.
Eli stopped in his tracks. This was not like the cave they’d come in through. That at least had been somewhat normal, just an opening in the stone. This was like looking into a pool of ink. No light penetrated past the stone’s edge. Ins
tead, the cave’s darkness seemed to press outward like a living thing, moving subtly just beyond what Eli could see. He stared into the blackness, waiting for Karon to say something, but the lava spirit was silent. For a moment, Eli seriously considered turning back, but the idea of having to explain to Josef that he’d chickened out gave Eli the burst of courage he needed. With a final breath of the cold, thin air, Eli lurched forward and stepped into the dark.
The blackness swallowed him as soon as he moved. All light vanished, and for a moment Eli stood there groping like a blind man. He was on the edge of turning back around when he realized that, despite this, he could still see. The dark was total, and yet it did not obscure his surroundings. He was standing at the apex of a large, circular cave. Perfectly circular, he realized, as though it had been cut into the stone with inhuman precision. The floor was smooth underfoot, the black stone polished to a slick edge except for the pattern cut deep into its surface. Eli followed the grooves with his eyes through the strange not-dark, biting his lip as the familiar symbol came into focus. It was Benehime’s mark.
Eli swallowed. Now that he knew what he was looking at, what he saw directly ahead of him suddenly became much more terrifying. At the center of the room, standing at the place where the lines of the Lady’s mark came together, was a man. He was dressed in the same dark robes as the cultists of the valley below, but unlike them, this man was not stooped or downtrodden. He stood straight and haughty, his arms crossed over his chest in a way that only emphasized how skeletally thin he was, and his eyes glowed with a cold light that illuminated nothing.
For a long, long moment, no one spoke. Eli stood frozen at the edge of the circle, his boots just touching its outer border. Karon’s mad fear was burning through him, mixing with his own until the urge to run was so strong it was physically painful to remain still. But Eli did not move. He stood his ground, clamping down as hard as he could on the terror while Slorn’s voice played over and over again through his head.
Demons feed on fear.
After almost a minute of silence, the man at the center of the circle began to chuckle. “Very brave, little favorite.”
Eli winced. There was something horribly wrong with the man’s voice. It was far too deep for his thin frame, and there was something wrong with the tone. It was like an inner harmonic was missing, leaving only the shell of a voice. But even the strangeness could not mask the power that reverberated through it.
“You did an excellent job getting past my servants,” the man said. “Of course, since I knew weeks ago that you were coming, you needn’t have bothered. They had orders to escort you up.”
“How hospitable,” Eli said slowly. “And who are you?”
“Come, now,” the man said, laughing. “You know who I am. Your little lava spirit certainly does.”
Eli crossed his arms over Karon’s burn, shielding the terrified spirit. “Humor me.”
“My kind do not indulge in the conceit of names,” the man said, walking forward. “But my children call me the Master of the Dead Mountain.”
There was something horribly wrong with the way the man walked. It was jerky, unnatural, like there was something inside his skin moving just a hair faster than his flesh.
“Of course,” the man said, stopping a bare inch from the edge of the circle, so close Eli could smell his flesh rotting. “Your mistress gave me another name.”
“Yes,” Eli said, making sure he was firmly outside the circle of the Shepherdess’s seal. “Demon.”
“There.” The strange, horrible voice hummed with satisfaction. “Was that so hard?”
The demon smiled at Eli’s sour look and turned on his heel, marching back across the seal with that horrible jerky walk until he was at the opposite side of the cavern. “As I said, I knew you were coming, and I know why you’re here.” The demon put out his hand, brushing the wall where it touched the circle’s edge. All at once, the stone began to change. It sank away from his touch in places and rose to meet it at others, forming an intricate carving of tiny mountains, valleys, and seabeds across the curve of the wall. Eli watched in amazement as a perfect map of the world emerged from the dark stone, and not just the Council Kingdoms, but the Frozen Lands of the far north and the great realm of the Immortal Empress herself, far across the Barrier Sea. As the land took shape, other things appeared as well. Small, black shapes seeped from the black stone. Round, multilegged buglike things with shells like liquid tar. They rose from the stone and crouched on the continents, tiny antennae quivering whenever the demon’s hand passed near.
“Here,” the demon said, stretching up to point at one particularly large black beetle crawling far to the east of the great black point marking the Dead Mountain, somewhere in the coastal foothills of the Sleeping Mountains. “This is where you’ll find Sted. If you hurry, you might even catch him before that bear-headed friend of yours does.” He looked at Eli, his face all concern. “And I would hurry. Between the two of us, Slorn doesn’t stand a chance.”
Eli just stared at him, utterly speechless for once in his life. This encounter had taken a sharp turn from horrifying to bizarre. “Wait,” he said. “Wait, wait, wait, what are you doing?”
The demon looked hurt. “I’m helping you.”
“Yes,” Eli said. “Why?” He pointed at the map, so confused he almost stretched his arms over the seal before he caught himself. “Why show me this? Why tell me where Sted is? You know I can’t possibly trust you.”
“You came here specifically to see this map,” the demon said, dropping his arms. “If you can’t trust me, why did you even bother?”
Eli snapped his jaw shut. He couldn’t tell the demon that spying on the map would have made the information much more trustworthy than having the thing presented to him. But what was really getting under his skin was how much the creature knew. How did the demon know they were after Slorn? How had it known he was coming? It was a powerful, powerful creature with a wide network of spies, so he was willing to accept a certain amount of omniscience, but this was getting downright uncomfortable.
“Come now, Eli,” the demon said when the thief’s silence had stretched on too long. “You and I both know I’m your last shot. Old Gredit won’t tell you anything without payment. I’m giving you this for free. You can either take it and save your friend or go back to stealing kings and stocking that charming little museum of a town you keep as a monument to your own audacity.”
“How do you know all this?” Eli shouted. He regretted the words as soon as they were out. If there was anything he knew about demons, it was that you never showed them a weakness. But if all his secrets were hanging in the open air, he had to know how.
Across the blackness, the creature inside the puppet suit of flesh grinned wide. “My dear thief,” he said. “A father sees everything through the eyes of his children, and my children are very, very watchful.”
Eli’s stomach dropped to his feet as everything fell into place. “Nico.”
The creature smiled wider still. “First rule of thievery,” he quoted. “The last place a man looks is under his own feet.”
Eli took a step back. “I’m going now,” he said, keeping his voice carefully flat. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t thank you for your help.”
“I never expected you to,” the demon said with a toothy smile. “ Good-bye, Eli Monpress. I’ll be watching.”
Eli’s mouth twitched, but he kept his face blank. He walked backward, his eyes locked on the demon’s glowing gaze until, at last, he reached the cave mouth. The afternoon sunlight hit him like a hammer, and Eli stumbled, blinking in the brightness. As soon as he could see again, he was off, sprinting down the mountain as fast as his legs could carry him with no care at all for how much noise he made.
“I don’t believe it,” he hissed. “She’s been playing us for fools this whole time. How could I have been so stupid? Awakening and going back? Skipping through shadows like it’s nothing? She’s been his little creature this whole
time, and I ate it up. I believed that drivel about fighting for her humanity. She’s nothing but a little spy.”
“Eli,” Karon said in a warning tone. “Remember that the demon is a trickster. You can’t trust anything he says.”
“Trust has nothing to do with it,” Eli snarled. “He made his case clear enough.”
Karon’s heat flickered under his skin. “What are you going to do?”
“First, I’m getting off this mountain,” Eli said, slowing down to navigate the thin strip of path between the cliffs where he’d stopped before to gawk at the horrible destruction left by the thing that ate mountains. “Then, I don’t know. Nothing at first. Josef is going to be the linchpin in all of this. I’ll have to break it to him slowly.”
“I still don’t understand why,” Karon said. “Why would the demon put all this energy into spying on you?”
“Because I’m the favorite,” Eli said bitterly. “Because I’m the greatest thief in the world. Because spirits listen to me whether I want them to or not. Because I’m the key to Benehime, who locked him up in the first place.”
“Then why would he let you know he was watching?”
“I don’t know!” Eli shouted. “There are so many angles going on, I don’t know which way is up anymore. But trust me, I’m going to find out.”
“Just watch out you don’t break your team when you do,” Karon muttered.
Eli had no answer to that. He plunged ahead, racing for the tunnel he’d taken up here from the cultists’ encampment. He was so intent on getting off the demon’s land, he didn’t even notice the enormous storm clouds on the other side of the mountain, blackening the entire mountain range where he’d left Josef and Nico.
CHAPTER
10
When the Lord of Storms’ sword cut into Josef’s back, Nico lost control. She raged against the pressure holding her down, muscles burning as she fought to stand and attack the smug man made of storms who stood over Josef. She wanted to rip him open, to eat him whole, to punch that smug look off his face.