“But it was the Shepherdess who trapped the demon under the mountain,” Karon whispered. “Her will that keeps it pinned.” A tremor ran through Eli’s chest, and he realized the lava spirit was terrified. “This isn’t something we want to mess with, Eli.”
“Maybe so,” the thief said, grinning. “But we’re already here. We need to find Slorn, and there’s no harm in just taking a look. Besides, last time I checked, even demons weren’t omniscient. If we play our cards right, they’ll never know we were here.”
The burn tingled again, painfully this time, and Eli gave his chest a pat. “We’ll leave at the first sign of trouble,” he promised. “Fast as we can, trust me.”
“First sign, don’t forget.”
“I swear,” Eli said.
The burning sensation faded, and Eli rubbed his chest with a long, painful breath. Now, to business. He looked down at his suit. It was a simple cat burglar suit, all muted grays and blacks tied close to keep his limbs limber. This particular suit was a little worn. It had been given to him by the original Monpress, back when the old man still thought his adopted son would make a respectable cat burglar one day. He’d learned better, of course, but Eli had kept the suit. Not for sentimental reasons, but because he’d remade it with some improvements.
Eli moved his long fingers over his padded shoes, drying them out with Karon’s heat and talking constantly about what he needed them to do in the low, excited voice that smaller spirits found irresistible. They woke easily, the woven fibers turning like snakes under his fingers. Once his feet were awake, he moved up his legs to his chest, then his arms, talking constantly in that same low voice. He did his mask last, unwrapping and holding it up between his hands as he gave an extremely energized pep talk about what they were all about to do together.
Altogether the process took about fifteen minutes. Of course, if his suit had been made from Shaper cloth it would always be awake and he wouldn’t have to go through this every time, but Shapers were nosy, and Eli preferred to keep the true nature of his thieving clothes a secret. If the old Monpress had taught Eli anything, it was that you never showed all your cards. Besides, Shaper cloth was horridly expensive.
Now that it was properly awake, Eli’s cat burglar suit began to show its true value. Every thread had seven colors, a spectacular bit of dye work that had taken Eli five tries and one very angry cloth merchant to get right. Once awakened, these threads had one job: turn in unison so that the color on the suit’s surface best matched the color of whatever Eli was hiding against. Now that every piece was awake, the effect was instant. The moment Eli tied his mask back around his face, his suit went dapple gray-white, a perfect match for the snow he crouched in.
Eli grinned behind his mask. It wasn’t perfect, of course. Even when he could blend them together by alternating threads, seven colors was hardly enough to camouflage him from someone who was really looking. Someday, when he had favors to burn, he’d have Slorn make him a suit with a hundred different colors. Assuming, he thought bleakly, they found the bear in time. For now, though, he was satisfied to creep through the snow, keeping Karon’s heat just at his body as he made his way across the valley until, at last, he stood at the foot of the mountain where piled snow met bare stone in a razor-sharp line.
Eli stopped, staring at the division between the normal world and the forbidden. Finally, he took a deep breath and, bracing himself one last time, lifted his foot out of the snow and placed it carefully on the mountain’s dry slope.
Nothing happened. Eli blinked, confused. He’d always imagined that setting foot on the Dead Mountain would feel different, forbidden, or at least dangerous. But standing there, with one foot on the stone and one in the snow, he didn’t feel anything special. In fact, he felt absolutely nothing. It was like stepping into a void. He could hear the wind screaming behind him, the wet of the snow pressing against his back, but ahead there was nothing but cold, empty silence. Even so, it took him a solid minute to put his other foot on the slope. It was the emptiness. Stepping into something that silent, that bare, made him feel tiny and weak, like a rabbit stepping into an open field when there were hawks overhead. Eli swallowed. He wasn’t used to feeling like prey.
His suit dutifully switched from dapple white to dull black as he began his creep up the mountain. It was rough going. Other than being coal black and completely bare of snow, it was much like any of the other mountains in the range, only taller and sharper, unshaped by wind for who knew how long. The air on the slope was still and heavy, yet even as he took great gasps of it, there wasn’t enough. He felt light-headed and weak, and it only got worse the farther up he went. He clung to the slope, a tiny black spot moving up the great black spike of the mountain’s peak, until, at last, he reached a ledge.
Eli threw himself onto the flat surface with a relieved gasp and lay there on his back for several minutes, catching what breath he could from the strange, heavy air. When he felt somewhat himself again he lifted his head and looked around. He was lying on the lip of a long, level rise tucked between the sharp cliffs of the mountain’s face, cutting between the impossible slopes almost like a path. But that wasn’t all. Eli tilted his head, staring at the ground beside him. The ledge was covered in fine black dust, proof that, even separated from the elements, the Dead Mountain was decaying. Well, Eli thought, no surprise there. No physical body, not even a mountain, could keep itself together without its spirit. But it was what he saw in the dust that caught his eye. There, not an inch from his head, was a small scuff in the blanket of powdered stone, a long depression in the unmistakable shape of a human foot.
Eli sat up, careful not to touch the footprint. There was another one not far from it, and another by the cliff’s edge, following the slope of the ledge behind the cliffs and up the mountain.
“Well, well,” Eli said, standing. “Not so lifeless after all.”
Karon’s only answer was a deep, terrified shudder as Eli dusted himself off, turned his suit a duller black with a wave of his hand, and began to follow the footprints up the mountain. The path, for it was unmistakably a path now, wound up the mountainside, cutting back and forth to avoid the steep drops between the cliffs. Eli climbed it slowly, partly because he was being careful and partly because he couldn’t go any faster. The air was nearly unbreathable now, thin and dank and icy cold. Every breath burned his lungs, yet he couldn’t stop gasping. He sucked in the air as best he could, moving at a slow shamble until the path he was following suddenly and unceremoniously ended at the lip of a little hidden valley. Eli cursed and dropped, pressing himself against the ground as he stared wide-eyed over the valley’s edge.
“I don’t believe it,” he whispered.
Just below him, nestled in a hidden valley on the Dead Mountain, was a town. It was a small town, two dozen stone shacks arranged in a semicircle around a stone cistern half filled with greasy water. Still, that was two dozen more shacks than Eli had expected to find on the forbidden mountain. All around the shacks, people in threadbare black robes moved with their heads down, carrying boxes from a horseless wagon into a small cave at the other end of the valley under the supervision of two large men in matching black leather armor.
“Who sets up shop on the Dead Mountain?” Eli whispered. When Karon didn’t reply, Eli answered his own question. “They must be cult members. I remember hearing the League saying something about the cult of the Dead Mountain, misguided idiots who actually want a demonseed inside them.”
“How can they live here?” Karon said, trembling. “Can’t they see it?”
“Of course not,” Eli said, waving his hand in front of his face. “Blind, remember?” He paused. “Out of curiosity, what does it look like?”
“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
