The Legend Of Eli Monpress (86 page)

Slorn narrowed his eyes. “Quite clearly, demon hunter.”

The Lord of Storms gave him one final, crackling glare before pushing his way through the small crowd of Shaper elders and stomping back across the frozen terrace toward the brightly lit hall.

Alric thanked the Shaper elders before running after his commander. “Honestly,” he said, keeping his voice low, “it would make my life easier if you learned a little tact. They were just trying to help.”

“Help?” the Lord of Storms scoffed. “There’s nothing someone outside the League could do to help. Let them do whatever they like. It’ll end the same. No seed sleeps forever, Alric. Sooner or later, she’s going to crack, and when that happens, I’ll be there. The next time I corner her, there will be no escape. I don’t care if I have to cut through every spirit in the sphere, I won’t stop until I have her seed in my hand.” He clenched his fists. “Now, get everyone out of here, including corpses. We burn the dead tonight at headquarters. I want nothing of ours left in this mountain.”

And with that he vanished, just disappeared into thin air, leaving Alric walking alone through the center of the
Shaper hall. Alric skidded to a stop. It was always like this when things were bad, but the only thing to do was obey. Gritting his teeth, he walked over to the best mended of the walking wounded and began giving orders to move out. His words were met with grim stares. Most of the League were too wounded to make a safe portal back to the fortress, but they were soldiers, and they obeyed without grumbling, working quietly under Alric to bring home the dead through the long, bloody night.

Ferdinand Slorn, Head Shaper and Guildmaster of the Shaper Clans, watched the Lord of Storms’ exit with heavy-lidded eyes. The other heads of the Shaper disciplines were already dispersing, whispering to one another as they walked into the crowded hall. Only one stayed behind. Etgar, the Master Weaver, youngest of the elders, remained at the edge of the terrace, the embroidered hem of his elegant coat twitching nervously against his shins.

The old Shaper smiled. “Go on, Etgar.”

Etgar paled. “Master Shaper,” he said, his deep voice strangely timid. “Yours is the voice of all Shapers. I do not oppose your judgment, but—”

“But you do not agree,” the Master Shaper finished.

“We’re all upset,” Etgar said, his words coming in long, angry puffs of white vapor in the cold night. “What happened in that valley is tragedy enough to fill our laments for the next dozen years, but demons are the League’s responsibility. Even if we could do something, if the demon is still alive as the League thinks, it’s probably gone back to the Dead Mountain by now.”

“No,” Slorn said. “Once awakened, a seed can never return to the mountain. The seal works both ways,
repelling awakened demons from the outside as surely as it pins their Master below the mountain’s stone. My son told me that much before he vanished.” The old man smiled a long, sad smile and turned his eyes to the snowcovered mountains. “No, Etgar, if the creature is still alive, it’s out there, somewhere, and if it wishes to survive the League’s wrath long enough to recover its power, it will have to hide. If that is indeed the case, the best place for it is under the only cover the creature has left, its human skin. Demons may be League business, but humans are another matter.”

“What difference does that make?” Etgar shook his head in frustration. “Even if she does take a human form to escape the League’s justice, what are we to do about it? I want justice served as much as any, but we are crafters, Guildmaster, not bounty hunters. How are we even to search for her?”

“We will not,” Slorn said. “We shall allow others to search for us.” The Guildmaster reached into his robes and pulled out a small notebook. “She may be a daughter of the Dead Mountain, but so long as she takes refuge in a human form, she will be vulnerable to human greed.” He pulled an ink pencil from his shirt pocket and began to write furiously. After a few moments he smiled, ripped the page from his book, and handed it to Etgar. “Take this to the Council of Thrones.”

Etgar stared dumbly at the paper. “What is it?”

“A bounty pledge,” Slorn said. “The girl, alive, for two hundred thousand gold standards.”

Etgar’s eyes went wide. “Two hundred thousand gold standards?” he cried, looking at the paper again as though it had suddenly grown fangs. Sure enough, there was the
figure, written out in the Guildmaster’s nearly illegible hand across the very bottom of the note.

“A small sum compared to what we have lost tonight,” Slorn said, his voice cold and terrible. “This world is not so large that we can afford to be placid, Etgar. Too long we Shapers have left these things to the League, and look where it has gotten us. There are more seeds than ever, and now a fully awakened demon slaughters our ancient allies while we do nothing but wring our hands. I don’t know what game the Shepherdess is playing letting things get this bad, but we cannot afford to play along anymore. This may all be for nothing, but no matter the outcome, I will not be the Guildmaster who shuts his hall against what he does not wish to see.” He reached out, folding the younger man’s hands over the paper. “See that that gets to Zarin.”

For a moment Etgar just stood there, staring dumbly at the note in his fist. Finally, he bowed. “As you will, Master Shaper.”

The old man clapped Etgar on the shoulder and set off for the great hall, the ice on the stones creeping away to make a clear path for him across the wide terrace. Etgar stayed put, looking down at the torn page in his hand, reading it again, just to be sure. Two hundred thousand gold council standards to be paid out on proof of death for the daughter of the Dead Mountain. That was it, no mention of the crime, no personal details, just the amount and a short description of a thin, pale girl with dark hair and dark eyes taken from what one of the wounded League men had been able to get out before he died.

“The Weaver’s will be done,” Etgar muttered. Frowning, he thrust the bounty request into his pocket and set
off across the terrace to find a messenger to take the order to Zarin.

In the hills at the foot of the mountains, just above the tree line where the snow was still thin, something black fell from the sky. Ice and dirt flew up in an explosion where it hit, leaving a rounded crater on the silent mountainside. Eventually, the dust settled, but inside the crater, nothing moved. The mountain slope returned to its previous stillness, until, when the sky was turning gray with the predawn light, something reached up and clutched the crater’s edge. Black and bleeding, it pulled itself up, leaving a trail in the dirt. It climbed over the crater’s lip and tumbled down the mountainside, sliding down the slope until it hit the first of the scraggly trees. The creature rasped in pain, clutching itself with long black limbs. It stayed like that for a long while, lying still against the scrubby pines.

As the sky grew lighter, the darkness clinging around the slumped figure burned away, leaving the small, broken body of a girl. She was pale and naked, lying doubled over on her side, clutching her stomach. There was snow on the ground around her, but her body scarcely seemed to feel it. She lay on the frozen ground, never shivering, eyes open wider than any human eyes should, staring up at the mountains above, or, rather, past them, toward something only she could see. Her skeletal body twitched, and she took a shallow, ragged breath.

Why are you still here?
The voice was colder than the snow.

The girl on the ground closed her eyes in shame and took another breath.

Stop that
, the voice said.
You failed. You lost. What right do you have to go on living? Why do you waste my time?

The girl shook her head and curled her body tighter. “Please,” she whispered, her voice little more than a hoarse vibration in her throat. “Please don’t leave me, Master.”

The voice made a disgusted sound.
Shut up. You don’t get to speak. You don’t even deserve my attention. Just die in a place that’s easy to find so my seed doesn’t go to waste.

The girl gave a sobbing cry, but the voice was already gone. Her head throbbed at the sudden emptiness, and she realized she was alone. Truly alone, for the first time since she could remember. She would have wept then, but she had no strength left even to break down. She could only lie there in the shade of the tree, hoping the slope was close enough to fulfill the Master’s final request. After losing so completely, it was the least she could do.

It wouldn’t be long, at least. Her blood was red again, mixing with the dirt to dye the snow a dull burgundy in a circle around her. Soon, all her failures would be behind her. All her weakness, everything, it would all be gone. She was so focused on this she didn’t notice the man coming across the mountain slope toward her until his shadow blotted out the sun in her eyes. She looked up in surprise. He was very tall, dressed like a poor farmer in a ragged wool coat, but his body was that of a fighter, with blades strapped up and down his torso and a monstrous iron sword on his back.

He stood a step away from her, his face shadowed and unreadable with the sun behind him. Then, in one smooth
motion, he drew a short sword from the sheath at his hip. This much, at least, she could understand, and the girl closed her eyes, ready for the blow.

It never came. The man simply stood there, staring at her with the blade in his hand. When she opened her eyes again, he spoke.

“Do you want to die?”

The girl nodded.

Overhead, the sword whistled through the cold air, then stopped. The man’s voice spoke again. “Look at me and say you want to die.”

The girl lifted her head and stared up at him. The morning sun glinted off the sharp blade he held in the air, ready to come down. How easy it would be to let this stranger end it, how simple. And yet, when she tried to tell him to go on, finish what the demon hunters had started, her voice would not come. She tried again, but all she managed was a squeak. The dull red circle on the snow around her was very wide now. Soon, she wouldn’t even have a choice. She knew she should take his offer, end it quickly, but her mouth would not move, because it was not true.

She did not want to die. The realization came as a surprise, but the truth of it rang in her, vibrating against the inner corners of herself she’d long forgotten. She had been defeated, abandoned, wounded beyond repair. She owed it to the Master to die, owed it to herself to save the horrible shame of living on when she was not wanted, but still, despite all reason …

“I want to live.” The words came out in a croak, and she only recognized the voice as her own from the pain in her dry throat.

Above her, the man nodded and sheathed his sword. “Then take another breath.”

She met his eyes and slowly, shuddering with pain, did as he said.

He grinned wide and reached down, grabbing her arms in his hands. He lifted her like she weighed nothing and tossed her over his shoulder. “Come on, then,” he said. “I had a long walk up here to see what that crash was, and we’ve got a long walk back. If you’ve chosen to live, you’ll have to keep your end and keep breathing. Just focus on that and I’ll get us back down to camp to see to your wounds. Then we’ll see where we go from there. What’s your name?”

“Nico,” the girl said, wincing against his shoulder. The Master had given her that name.

“Nico, then,” the man said, setting off down the mountain. “I’m Josef.”

Nico pushed away from his shoulder, trying not to get blood on his shirt, but he just shrugged her back on and kept going. Eventually she gave up, resting her head on his back to focus all of her energy on breathing, letting her breaths fill the emptiness the Master had left inside her. As she focused her mind on the feel of her lungs expanding and contracting, she felt something close at the back of her mind, like a door gently swinging shut. But even as she became aware of the sensation, she realized she could no longer remember how she’d come to be on that mountain slope, or where her wounds came from, and just as quickly, she realized she didn’t care. The one thing she could remember was that before the man Josef appeared, she’d been ready to die. Now, clinging to his shoulder, death was her enemy. Something deep
had changed, and Nico was content to let it stay that way. Reveling in a strange feeling of freedom, she went limp on Josef’s shoulder, focusing only on savoring each gasp of air she caught between jolts as Josef jogged down the steep slope to the valley below.

Two years later.

T
he house on chicken legs crouched between two steep hills, its claws digging deep into the leaf litter to keep the building from sliding farther down into the small ravine. If Heinricht Slorn had any worries about the precarious position he’d put his walking house in, his face didn’t show it. He sat in his workroom, his brown fur glowing in the strong lamplight. His dark, round eyes glittered as they focused on the object taking up most of the large worktable. It was about four feet long, white as a dried bone, and shaped somewhat like a sword, or like a stick a child had carved into a sword. Despite its crude form, Slorn hovered over the object, his enormous hands running over its smooth surface with the painful, meticulous slowness of one master appreciating the work of another.

Pele sat at his elbow, also staring at the white sword.
She was trying her best to match her father’s focus, but they’d been doing this for two days now and she was getting awful sick of staring and seeing nothing. Sitting in the dark room, her mind began to wander back to the other, more interesting projects she’d been working on before Slorn had put her to work on the Fenzetti blade.