by Troy Denning
He saw nothing but a rubble-choked fissure fifty feet deep, crammed with drifting snow and jagged boulders fallen from the soaring cliffs above. He continued to stare, panting for breath, trying to see paradise in the debris below. Seema sat on the brink beside him and rested her hand on his shoulder. Atreus’s heart grew as heavy as stone. The healer’s touch was the only hint of Langdarma to be found in this basin.
“I am sorry,” she said.
Atreus felt himself starting to sink into despair, but shook his head against the feeling and stood. “No,” he said, “there is no need for sorrow. This is the place. I just have to look harder.”
He removed the map from his cloak and craned his neck to look up, trying locate himself in relation to the summit of the middle Sister. It was a futile task, as it was impossible to see the top of any peak from so close to its bottom. Atreus did notice a band of dark granite that he recalled being almost directly below the pinnacle. He began to work his way along the brink of the clefting, glancing back and forth between the map and the cliff face. Seema followed along, struggling to peer over his shoulder and see what he was looking for.
Rishi and Yago clambered up the slope behind them and peered down into the clefting. The ogre grunted derisively.
“You call that beautiful? Give me a good cave any day.”
Atreus ignored him and stopped when he came to the dark granite a dozen paces later. The clefting here was narrow and drifted over, so it was impossible to tell where the glacier ended and the chasm began. Atreus put his map away, then dropped to his hands and knees and began to dig away the wind-packed snow. An exhausting half-hour later, he finally located the edge of the glacier and started to tunnel down into the clefting.
Yago kneeled beside him and began to rip jagged blocks of snow from the hole. “What’s the plan?” the ogre asked. “To dig our way into Langdarma?”
“If we have to,” answered Atreus. “There’s supposed to be a trail somewhere under here. If we can find it—”
A hole suddenly opened under Yago’s hands. He bellowed and tumbled forward, flailing his arms in an effort to catch himself, but the drift collapsed beneath his weight and fell into the clefting, carrying the ogre along with it.
Atreus started to plummet after his friend but was saved when Rishi caught hold of his collar. For an instant, no one reacted, stunned by the reminder of just how quickly disaster could come in the Yehimals.
An angry voice bellowed out of the clefting, “What are … you waiting for?” Yago sounded as though he were having trouble breathing. “If you think this is fun … think again!”
Atreus clawed his way back to the chasm brink and peered over the edge. Like the rest of the clefting, this part was choked with boulders, many wedged at various heights down the fissure. Twenty-five feet below, the bottom lay hidden under the heaped remnants of the collapsed snowdrift. It took a few moments to find Yago’s head protruding out of the snow in the shadow of a huge rock. The rest of the ogre remained completely buried. He was working his chin back and forth, trying to scrape himself out of the snow, but it would clearly be a long time before he could dig himself free.
“Are you hurt?” Seema called.
“Hurt? Of course not!” he said indignantly. The ogre began to chin the snow more furiously. Like most proud Shieldbreaker warriors, Yago considered pain a sign of weakness. “I’m just stuck!”
“Stop whining, or we’ll leave you there!” called Atreus, relieved.
“Whining?” Yago boomed. “Who’s whining?”
“Who do you think?”
Atreus took a moment to pick a route, swung his legs over the brink of the chasm, and dropped eight feet down to the first snow-capped boulder. When his boots slipped on the landing, he simply jumped to the next one, then bounced down to a third and dropped into the soft snow a few paces from his friend’s head.
“Whining!” growled Yago. “When I get out of here, I’ll show you who’s a whiner!”
“Yeah?” Atreus lifted his foot as though to kick snow in the ogre’s face and said, “Not too bright to tell me now, is it?”
Yago’s purple eyes grew as large as saucers.
“You wouldn’t!”
“What do you think?” Atreus asked and brought his foot down, blanketing the ogre’s head with snow.
The ogre’s orange cheeks darkened to fiery crimson. “That’s a fine thing to do when you can’t even pay my wages,” he said.
Atreus laughed, then kneeled beside the ogre, began to dig, and said, “That’s what you get for scaring me half to death,”
“You think you’re scared now …” Yago warned as he tried to hold a straight face but could not keep from grinning. “When I get out of here, I’m gonna …” He began to guffaw so hard that his head rocked back and forth. “I’m gonna knock you … from one end of this gully to the other!”
“Be quiet down there!” cried Seema. “What is wrong with you? You’ll bring the whole mountain down on your heads.”
Atreus craned his neck around. Far above, he saw two little heads peering over the icy side of the chasm, with nothing above but blue sky on one side and looming granite on the other. Before he could answer, the ogre’s arm came bursting up out of the snow and caught him square in the chest, sending him tumbling head over heels down the clefting.
“By Vaprak’s ears, it’s a good day to be a Shieldbreaker!” chortled Yago. He began to dig himself free. “It’s a good day not to be dead!”
This drew another round of laughter from Atreus, who was so relieved to find his friend uninjured that he could barely control himself. Yago joined in the mirth, and Rishi and Seema looked to one another in puzzlement.
“My goodness, the air down there must be bad,” said Rishi. “They have lost their wits!”
“Is that it?” called Seema. “Are you dizzy?”
Atreus could only shake his head and hold his ribs, trying to avoid laughing too hard and starting a rockfall. Ogre humor could not be explained, especially to someone who would certainly see nothing funny in taking advantage of a helpless friend. The mirth slowly faded as Yago dug himself out, and by the time he finished, the hysterics were completely gone.
“Atreus, I don’t see no signs of this trail of yours,” Yago said, glancing along the clefting in both directions. “Where’s it supposed to be?”
Atreus led the way across a dozen snowy boulders to the dark band in the mountain’s craggy face, then looked at his map. It was difficult to relate the symbols on the map to their location in the clefting, but the ladder did seem to lie directly under the peak, which ought to be more or less straight up the dark band above them.
“I think it starts somewhere around here,” he answered. Not bothering to show the map to the ogre, Atreus pointed down the chasm. “You look down there. I’ll go the other way.”
Leaving Rishi and Seema on the glacier to watch for Tarch, Atreus and Yago began their search. It took Atreus a full hour to scramble over the rubble to the far end of the clefting. He found nothing but more boulders and deeper snowdrifts, sometimes so powdery that he practically had to swim. In places, where the wind had bridged the abyss with wind crust, the chasm became a narrow, winding tunnel. In other places it became more of a gully than a gorge, with gently sloping sides and a bed of jumbled boulders. Atreus saw no sign of a ladder or trail, though he was acutely aware that it might lie buried under all the tons of snow and rubble under his feet.
By the time Atreus turned around, the frigid air in the bottom of the shadowed chasm had chilled him to the bone. He grew more and more convinced that the ladder was not a literal one. After all, he had seen for himself that the valley on his map contained only ice and snow. On the way back, he tried to look at everything in a new light. He searched for patterns in the rock that resembled the trail on his map, sang Sune’s praises and offered her prayers as he went, and once he even stopped to meditate in a rare ray of reflected sunshine.
When Atreus returned to the dark band, he w
as no closer to Langdarma than before. Yago was in the bottom of a deep hole, surrounded by a low wall of snow and struggling to tear a man-sized boulder out of the ice. Seema was peering down from above, watching the ogre work and looking puzzled. Atreus kneeled at the edge of the excavation, his heart pounding with the faint hope that Yago had a good reason for his work.
“What’s all this?” Atreus asked.
Instead of answering, Yago gave a hearty grunt and finally tore the boulder from its icy moorings. He took a deep breath, then turned and pushed the stone up toward his friend. Atreus leaped aside and helped the ogre roll the heavy rock safely away from the edge of the hole.
“Did you find something?” he asked.
“The same as you I imagine,” panted the ogre. “Ice and rock.”
Atreus’s stomach grew hollow.
“What’s this hole for?”
“Just getting a jump on things,” said Yago. “You said—”
“I know what I said! Do you think we’re going to dig the whole glacier out?” Atreus gestured at the looming wall of ice beside them and added, “In the name of beauty … I thought I knew how stupid ogres could be.”
Yago furrowed his jutting brow and turned back to his digging, this time pulling a dog-sized chunk of ice from the hole.
“Atreus, why are you yelling at your friend?” demanded Seema. “It is yourself you are angry with.”
Atreus scowled up at the healer, and the soft beauty of her eyes withered his angry rebuke.
“Yago has risked much to help you,” Seema said. “Do you not think he deserves an apology?”
So gentle and soothing was Seema’s tone that Atreus saw at once how right she was. The longer he searched for the elusive path to Langdarma, the more he feared he would not find it. Perhaps his stubborn devotion had touched a cruel corner of Sune’s heart. Perhaps she had answered his constant prayers not with the gift he sought so earnestly, but by making him the butt of the most vicious joke he had yet suffered.
Atreus whirled on Yago. “I’ve had enough of this,” he said. “I’m getting out of here.”
“Glad to be rid of you!” came the reply.
Yago went back to his hole, and Atreus stormed off down the clefting. No doubt, the exchange was not the apology Seema had expected, but it was what passed for reconciliation among ogres.
This end of the chasm was much the same as the first, except that Yago had already broken trail and the going was faster than before. As Atreus moved, he tried to see his surroundings not so much in a literal sense, as an ogre might, but in the more symbolic manner Seema suggested. The journey to a distant land would be the physical expression of his desire for change, the high mountains the measure of the difficulty of the task, the snow and ice the purity of heart required to succeed. And what of his companions? Rishi could only be greed and temptation, Seema the beauty he came to pursue, Tarch—cruel and indestructible—the lurking monster that would destroy the prize to possess it, and Yago, an ogre, was his savage past, the brutish aspect of himself he had to forsake in order to win his prize.
The sun finally rose high enough to peer over the brink of the clefting, pouring its golden warmth down into the shadowed chasm. Atreus stopped, struck by the harmony of it all. Every element had its place, every part its meaning. The scheme was so neat and symmetrical that only Sune could have arranged it; or his own mind, fabricating interpretations for what were really random events.
Atreus pulled the map from inside his cloak and studied it in light of his newfound insight. It looked the same as before, but now he saw only names stenciled into empty valleys, nothing to suggest the untold acres of ice he had crossed, nor the verdant paradises he had imagined. Seema was right. Langdarma was a myth, and myths existed only within the heart. He tore the map into tiny pieces, then looked up into the sky.
“This is the best you can do, Goddess?” He dropped the shredded map into the snow. “You expect me to desert Yago to be beautiful inside?”
The sun vanished behind the looming mountain, once again plunging Atreus into the frozen shadows of the clefting.
12
“You’re what?” growled Yago. The ogre stood shoulder-deep in his trench, glaring up at Atreus in slack-jawed disbelief.
“I’m going home,” Atreus replied, squatting down to help his friend out of the hole. It was less than an hour after his revelation in the sun, and already the bottom of the clefting was as cold as night. “Come on.”
Yago did not take the offered hand. “Already?” the ogre asked.
Atreus shrugged. “Seema was right,” he said. “Langdarma is a myth.”
The ogre eyed Atreus warily.
“They’ve been telling you that since Edenvale. Why believe them now?”
Atreus gestured at the icy wall behind them and said, “The glacier. If Langdarma ever existed, it’s gone now.”
Yago shook his head. “You said yourself there was a trick to it,” he reminded Atreus. The ogre stooped down and returned to his digging, his voice becoming hollow and tinny. “This isn’t like you, giving up so easy.”
“Don’t!” Atreus leaped into the trench, grabbed the ogre’s arm, and said, “Do you want me to say it? You were right. Sune never meant to make me handsome. She just wanted me out of her church.”
Yago frowned, pondering Atreus’s words, then grew sad and covered his friend’s shoulder with his big hand. “We’ll pay a visit to that fickle sow’s temple when we get back,” he promised, “and teach her a thing or two about making promises she don’t keep.”
“You’d do that for me, I know, but this thing’s ugly enough,” Atreus said, pointing at his own face. “I don’t want it known as the face that started a war.”
Yago sighed and boosted Atreus up to the lowest of the boulders above their heads, then they clambered out of the clefting. Even in the shadow of the middle Sister’s looming cliffs, the air was much warmer than down in the chasm. This did little to cheer Atreus, who merely motioned for the others to follow and started down the slope. The glacier below was still blinding white with the sun’s afternoon reflection. With any luck, they could cross it and be well past the icefall before the evening shadows came.
Seema quickly caught up to him. “What did you find?” she asked.
“What you said I would,” replied Atreus. “Nothing.”
She frowned and said, “I said that you would find Langdarma inside. Did you not say you had after the avalanche?”
“I said a lot of things,” Atreus replied. “I was half dead.”
Seema shook her head. “No,” she said. “I saw it in your eyes. You had seen it.”
“Is it there now?” Atreus stopped and glared down at her and pressed, “Do you still see it?”
“No,” Seema said as she backed away, her face growing pale. “I see only that you are angry with me.”
The sight of Seema’s alarm shamed Atreus. Her kindness had lulled him into forgetting that he was a monster, that on his face any sign of ire took on the appearance of a mortal threat He willed his face to relax and started down the slope again.
“I am angry, yes, but not with you,” he said gently. “Without you, I would have gotten myself and my friends killed a dozen times. My anger is with my goddess and with myself for being fool enough to believe her.”
“There is no reason to be angry with either,” said Seema. “You have seen Langdarma. If you look inside, you will find it again.”
“I’m not interested in what’s inside.” Atreus could not keep the bitterness out of his voice. “I came to change what is on the outside.”
Seema shook her head sadly and said, “You have forgotten everything.”
“What have I forgotten? That I must change inside before I can change outside? I have heard that a thousand times, but I am done playing Sune’s fool. I’ll always have this face … no matter how I feel about it”
“That is true,” said Seema.
“It is not what Sune promised. She deceived me.�
��
Seema fell silent and looked away. They reached the bottom of the slope, stepped out onto the sunny part of the glacier, and began to wind their way through a labyrinth of boulders and crevasses toward the icefall. With the full sun beating down on their backs, the four companions soon grew so hot that they removed their cloaks and made poor Yago carry them in the supply bundle. The glare was unbearable. Even squinting, it made their eyes burn and sent daggers of pain shooting through their heads.
After a time, Seema returned to walk at Atreus’s side. “It is not always cruel, you know,” she told him.
“What isn’t?”
“Deceiving,” Seema answered. “Sometimes it is done for a person’s own good.”
“This wasn’t. Sune didn’t have to send me across the world to prove I would always be ugly. I was pretty sure of that already.”
“Perhaps that is not why she sent you,” suggested Seema. “Perhaps she sent you to learn that you are not ugly.”
Atreus glared down at her. “Thanks for trying,” he said, “but I’m done with fables … and you’re only making things worse.”
Seema’s head snapped away as though struck, and Atreus instantly regretted his words. He had not intended to hurt the healer’s feelings, and he was not quite sure how he had. Most of the time, people were relieved to hear him acknowledge his hideousness. It freed them of the uncomfortable burden of pretending to find him attractive. Seema, on the other hand, had reacted as though he had called her ugly. Atreus thought the matter over a while longer, then shrugged. Perhaps she had just seen something particularly unpleasant in his face.