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. Instead, 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.”
