by Troy Denning
Atreus's heart leaped into his throat. Among ogres, this particular trick always brought the fight to a quick end.
Unable to free himself without ripping open his own neck, the victim either submitted or died. Atreus wanted to shout a reminder about not killing, but held his tongue. It would be too much of an advantage to let Tarch know they did not mean to slay him.
Atreus hit a shady spot and picked up speed. He rolled back into the sun, causing his leg no end of agony, and began to claw at the slush trying to slow his descent before he smashed into the brawl and sent both combatants over the edge of the crevasse.
A muffled bellow sounded from the battle. Yago released his death hold and raised his head. His eyes were wide with panic, his mouth was smeared with scales and blood, and Atreus knew instantly that Tarch had used his fear touch. The ogre slammed a huge palm into the devil's chest, then jumped up and began to back away, oblivious to the danger of losing his footing or stepping into a crevasse.
"Yago, stop!" Atreus shouted, steering himself toward Tarch. "Look behind you!"
The ogre stopped, but could not bring himself to glance away from his scaly enemy. Tarch rolled to his knees. Atreus brought his good leg up, aiming a soggy boot at his enemy's face. The devil scowled; then Atreus was there, feeling the satisfying jolt of his heel smashing into the slave master's arrow-shaped nose.
The impact stopped Atreus dead and launched Tarch over backward. The devil landed on his back and slid headlong toward the crevasse below. As he was about to plummet into its grinning mouth, he whipped his legs over his head and somersaulted in the air and landed on his belly, his legs dangling over the brink of the icy chasm and his talons dug deep into its rim.
"Hurry Yago!" cried Rishi's voice. "Go and finish him!"
Atreus glanced over to see Rishi rushing up behind Yago, having done exactly the opposite of what Atreus instructed. The little Mar tried to shove the terrified ogre into battle and succeeded only in convincing him to retreat farther up the hill. Atreus cocked his knee back and pushed off, launching himself at Tarch.
The devil pulled one set of claws from the ice and pointed up the slope. A roiling orange cloud erupted from his fingers Atreus smelled brimstone and scorched flesh and heard someone screaming.
He remained fully alert, gagging on the stench of his own burning flesh, watching the fire lick across his body, feeling his skin melt in the heat He saw Rishi dash across the slope to Tarch and start kicking at the claws still fastened in the ice. He heard Yago bellow, heard him come crashing across the glacier, felt the ogre's big hands rolling him through the sizzling slush, felt the icy coolness against his stinging flesh, and smelled, at last, the flames hissing into steam.
Yago pulled him into his lap and cradled him against his chest. Atreus saw Rishi at the edge of the crevasse, peering down into its blue depths. All that remained of Tarch were a few rust-colored streaks on the brink of the chasm.
"I was afraid!" Yago moaned. "You needed me, and I couldn't move."
"Not your fault."
The words echoed emptily inside Atreus's head. He could not make his lips work.
He did the same thing to me.
"I am so… sor-ry!" Yago had trouble forming this last word, which was as foreign to the ogre tongue as the term for children won in a game of knucklebones was to humans. "What happened to me?"
The ogre smashed his fist into the side of his own face. The blow struck so sharply that Rishi gave a start and nearly plummeted into the crevasse.
Yago spit an orange tooth out onto the ice, shouting, "Coward!"
Atreus fought through his pain and managed to grasp the ogre's arm. He shook his head.
Yago's eyes grew glassy. "Am so!" the ogre insisted. "You saw me… just standing there!"
"Atreus does not blame you, my friend," said Rishi. the Mar backed away from the crevasse and came up to join them, grimacing at Atreus's condition. "The same thing happened to him on the slave boat. It is the devil's touch."
"It don't matter," growled Yago. "I made the Vow. Shield-breakers aren't scared of nothing!"
"That is an impossible vow to keep. Every man fears something." Rishi grasped the ogre's elbow and urged him up the hill, saying, "And now let us go. What became of Tarch I cannot tell, but it is too much to hope that a fall of only a few hundred feet would kill him."
Yago started to rise, then caught himself and sat back down. "Let him come," he said. "I'm not running."
Atreus squeezed Yago's forearm and tried to nod. The effort sent waves of agony surging through his body, but he was terrified that the stubborn ogre would let his pride get them all killed. He could feel his own strength oozing out through his scalded pores, but just as importantly, he could tell by the nervous edge in his friend's voice that Yago was not ready to face Tarch again.
"There, do you see?" Rishi asked, motioning to Atreus's nodding head. "The good sir wants us to go. He needs Seema's help."
Yago scowled in thought, then reluctantly nodded. "Well go," he said "but not because I'm scared."
"Oh no, there has never been any question of that," agreed Rishi. "I am frightened enough for us all. You are thinking only of the good sir's welfare."
Still scowling, Yago started up the hill. Atreus's burns began to ache in earnest. He could not keep from moaning as the ogre's clothes rubbed against his raw flesh. His broken leg became a distant throbbing, and he slipped into a murky world of pain and delirium. He grew desperately thirsty and started to shiver. Yago's voice became a nightmarish roar, alternately trying to comfort Atreus and cursing himself for a coward. Amazingly enough, Rishi proved the staunch one, continually reassuring Atreus that he really looked no worse than before, perhaps even better. It was a terrible lie, of course, but exactly what Atreus needed to hear.
Sometime later — it seemed hours, but could not have been more than three or four minutes-Seema came bounding and sliding down the slope. "How bad?" she demanded, dropping the supply bundle at Yago's feet. "Put him down where I can see him. Get those rags off him. Pack him in snow. Rishi, talk to him! Keep talking _
"
Atreus's companions rushed to obey the healer's orders. His body roared with pain. When the tattered remnants of his clothes were pulled free, he could not help screaming. As much as it hurt to be touched, the cold slush had a numbing effect on his burns, and his anguish dulled to a raw ache.
Soon, he felt Seema's hands on him, rubbing his wounds with some minty-smelling potion. The sting faded completely, leaving him to a deeper anguish inside his seared muscles. Seema uttered a spell in the exotic language of her magic, then pressed her lips to Atreus's. He remembered the kiss of the day before and tried to steal another, but she only wet his lips with one of her potions, using her own tongue to dribble it into his mouth.
A languid fog rose up to engulf him, and he prayed he would fall into insensible sleep. Instead, he slipped into a terrible waking dream, aware of his anguish but apart from it conscious of what was happening but unable to do anything about it.
"What's wrong with him?" demanded Yago. "He's going to live, ain't he?"
"I have taken away his pain," answered Seema. "The rest is not for me to control."
"Don't you say that! You're a healer. Heal!"
"I have done what I can, but my magic is weak," Seema said. "What happened to Tarch? Was there killing?"
"There will be if you don't do something… and fast!"
Don't threaten her! Atreus wanted to shout the command, but he could not even whisper it, could not even shake his head. He was a spectator in his own body.
"I am sure Seema is certainly doing her best," said Rishi. "She is as fond of Atreus in her way as you are in yours."
"She has a bad way of showing it," snapped Yago. "If she would have let us kill Tarch in the first place…"
"I could not have done even this much for Atreus," said Seema. "Now tell me what happened. If you did not kill Tarch-"
"He is most certainly alive!" said R
ishi. "I saw him moving in the bottom of the crevasse."
This was not what the Mar had told Yago, but Atreus was hardly in a position to correct him.
"I will try another time."
Again, Seema uttered one of her spells, then pressed her lips to Atreus's and dribbled more of her potion into his mouth. He slipped further into his dream-world, so that events alternately rushed by in a blur or crept past in excruciating slowness. He did not feel any stronger.
"Wellllll?" Yago's voice was deep and torpid.
"I don't know," Seema replied.
"You mean it isn't working!" Yago was silent for a moment, then asked, "What happens to your precious magic if Atreus dies? You might as well have flamed him yourself, for all your high talk about not killing."
Seema recoiled from the anger in the ogre's voice.
"That is hardly fair."
"Is too!" growled Yago. "He should've never made you that promise. But how could the boy think straight, with you batting them pretty eyes and flashing them white teeth? If he dies, it's on your head, not mine."
The conversation came to Atreus as though he were listening to a trio of ghosts. Seema fell silent. Some dim part of him realized he should be speaking in her defense, that he should be telling Yago he knew exactly what he was doing, but Atreus could barely gather his thoughts, much less make them known.
After a moment, Rishi said, "Nobody is to blame for what happened to Atreus except Tarch. Perhaps my friend Yago, feeling that he may have in some way failed his master, is putting the blame he feels — "
"What blame?" Yago snarled.
"Then again, perhaps not," said Rishi.
But Yago was not done yet
"If not for Seema and her promise, we'd have been rid of Tarch a long time ago. He wouldn't never have touched me!" the ogre bellowed, shaking his head angrily. "The blame here don't belong to me. You can't go fighting devils unless you mean to kill them."
"You are right, of course," interrupted Seema. "This is all my fault."
"You bet it is!" said Yago. "What are you going to do about it?"
Seema was silent for several moments, then said, "I have caused many deaths and much pain, and that is why my magic has grown weak." She laid a cloak over Atreus, and be could not help groaning at even its light touch. "We have no choice but to take him to my valley."
"I doubt he can survive such a long journey," said Rishi. "Surely, it would be better to let him rest and take our chances that he will recover."
"What about Tarch? If he is alive, as you told me, he will come after us."
Seema stood and started up the icefall. "Besides," she said, "my home is closer than you think, and we will be safe there."
Yago scooped Atreus up, but made no move to follow the healer.
"Where you going? I didn't see nothing but snow up there."
"Of course not," Seema answered, pausing to look over her shoulder. "It is not so easy to see Langdarma."
CHAPTER 13
In the purple afternoon shadows, the band of dark granite looked hollow and empty, like a giant fissure splitting the cliff down the center. Atreus could imagine following the crevice through to the other side of the mountain, or down into the stony roots of the Sisters of Serenity themselves. As delirious as he was, Atreus could imagine a lot of things, such as the husky form behind them, appearing and disappearing as it twined its way across the boulder-strewn glacier below. The figure was holding its ribs and limping, and it kept pitching forward onto its hands and knees. Every now and then it glanced around behind itself, searching for a tail it no longer had, and sometimes it looked up to check the progress of Atreus and his companions.
Atreus tried to point and found his arm pinned against Yago's chest. He groaned as the effort brought him back into his pain-racked body. Until now, he had passed the trip across the glacier a pleasant distance above himself, somewhere outside the seared and hideous form in Yago's arms, a spirit connected to his body by only a thin strand of memory. Time itself had ebbed and flowed, swirling past in slow eddies as his companions scrambled up the icefall, then rushing ahead madly as they crossed the snowy flats. Atreus had floated along, vaguely aware that Seema had promised to take them to Langdarma and wondering how she could offer such a thing. She herself had called it a myth, and he could not believe she would deceive him. Not about something so important
Seema reached the clef ting and stopped directly across from the dark band of granite. With the sun hidden behind the middle Sister, this part of the glacier was a sheet of hard ice, so she had to stand in the tracks they had made that morning. Rishi stopped a pace below her, both feet planted comfortably in one of Yago's frozen footprints, and Yago stopped behind the Mar. Atreus found himself looking back down into the basin. Their pursuer had vanished again, leaving Atreus to wonder whether he had been imagining the dark figure all along.
"This isn't Langdarma," said Yago. The ogre leaned past Rishi and peered down into the frigid blue murk of the clef ting. "We been here before."
"You searched, but you did not examine," said Seema. "This is the way to Langdarma. Rishi and I will go first. Then you can pass Atreus down to us."
The healer lowered herself into the clef ting, dropping onto the first of the boulders wedged between the cliff and the glacier wall. Rishi followed, and Yago stepped to the brink of the chasm. As the ogre turned to straddle the edge, Atreus glimpsed a dark figure below, angling up the slope along the course of their frozen tracks. The form was hazy and indistinct, no more than a darker blue in the indigo shadow of the mountain, but it looked solid enough to set Atreus's heart pounding.
Look!
The word echoed around inside Atreus's mind, but could not quite find his lips. He had a little more luck trying to point. As Yago bent down to lower him into the clef ting, his arm came free of the ogre's grasp and swung toward the dark figure. A surge of anguish rushed through his body, but he kept his hand raised.
"Don't worry," Yago said. "They know what'll happen if they drop you."
Atreus forced himself to keep pointing as he heard an agonized groan escape his lips.
"I do not think it is us he fears," said Rishi. "Is he not pointing down the slope?"
Atreus sighed in relief and let his arm drop. Yago scowled and passed him into the waiting arms of Seema and Rishi, then turned to look down toward the glacier.
"He must've seen our friend back there," said Yago. Tarch is coming up fast now."
Atreus nearly choked on his astonishment. If his companions knew about Tarch, what were they doing here? They would be trapped in the clef ting, with no room to flee and even less to maneuver.
"We must hurry," said Seema. Leaving Atreus to Rishi's care, she squatted at the edge of the boulder, then jumped down to the next one, landing as lightly as a feather. "Come along."
Yago lowered himself into the clef ting, took Atreus from Rishi, and descended to the bottom of the trench in two quick hops. Seema and Rishi followed close behind, and soon Atreus's companions were standing together in the bottom of abyss. The murk was thick and frozen, as dense as resin and as cold as death. Atreus started to shiver and felt, absurdly, a ring of goose bumps surrounding his burns. A fiery nettling sank deep into his bones. His broken leg began to throb, and he sensed himself slipping away, aware of his pain yet apart from it.
Yago said something about losing him, and Rishi began to worry about Tarch catching them in the trench. Seema spoke to them both in calm assurance and took their hands, leading the way to the dark band of granite. Atreus's perceptions must have grown hazy and unreliable, for it seemed to him that she simply pressed herself against the face of the cliff and melted inside.
Yago and Rishi followed and gasped, and Atreus's stomach floated up toward his chest, as though he were falling. Seema walked ahead and became the only thing visible in the darkness. Yago and Rishi followed, and the falling sensation continued.
After a time, a golden wheel appeared far below their feet, its scarlet s
pokes slowing revolving around the glimmering six-pointed star of a snow-flake. As they traveled deeper into the murk, the wheel stayed beneath them, growing larger with each step. The snow-flake began to pulse. As it grew larger, it became apparent that the different triangles inside its star were pulsing randomly, flashing first sapphire, then emerald, ruby, diamond… all the colors of the gems.
Seema continued to walk, and the falling sensation persisted. The wheel grew ever larger, its golden rim spreading outward until it became large enough to encircle them all. The scarlet spokes ceased their spinning, and Atreus grew dizzy, as though he were twirling around. The snow-flake seemed to dissolve, to become nothing but pulsing arrows, each pointing down a different spoke of the wheel.
The wheel became as the basin beneath the Sisters of Serenity. The scarlet spokes grew as long and wide as roads, each pointing off toward a different corner of the compass, and the pulsing triangles became the size of ship decks.
At last Seema stopped walking, and the triangles rejoined, becoming a snow-flake as large as the glacier basin. The wheel's golden rim disappeared somewhere over the horizon, and the scarlet spokes vanished. The dizziness and the falling sensation faded. The air grew tepid and moist, and Atreus stopped shivering. Seema turned toward one of the snow-flake's distant points and spoke a few words in the archaic tongue of her people.
A blue light appeared above the point. Yago and Rishi cried out as their knees buckled. A warm wind began to whip past, and though there was no sensation of movement, the light slowly began to expand, becoming a tiny blue square. What little sense of time Atreus still had vanished completely. They seemed to stand there forever watching the square grow larger, the breeze whipping through their hair, and the musty smell of a cave growing ever stronger in their nostrils. When the square had expanded to the size of a man and they found themselves standing before a shining blue portal, it seemed that only an instant had passed.
