Faces of Deception

by Troy Denning

  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 Rishi. “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 dreamworld, 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 he 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.”

  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 clefting 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 clefting. “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 clefting, 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 clefting, 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 clefting, 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 clefting, 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 spokes slowing revolving around the glimmering six-pointed star of a snowflake. As they traveled deeper into the murk, the wheel stayed beneath them, growing larger with each step. The snowflake 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 snowflake 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 snowflake 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 snowflake’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.

  Again Seema took the hands of Yago and Rishi. “You will see many strange things,” she told them. “Do not release my hand, or you will be lost.”

  Seema stepped through the portal. The blue light began to swirl and eddy around her, and her movements grew smooth and slow. Rishi gulped down a deep breath and followed, but Yago stopped at the door and stared wide into the whirling radiance.

  Seema said something that did not pass the portal, then opened her mouth wide and drew in a deep breath. A moment later, she exhaled, sending little eddies of current swirling away from her face. She smiled and pulled the ogre’s hand. Yago took a deep breath and allowed himself to be drawn forward. As they passed through the door, Atreus felt liquid pressure all around him. The watery warmth made his burns itch, and he watched from somewhere outside himself as his mouth opened to groan. His heart began to pound in fear, but the strange fluid that rushed down into his lungs could not have been water. Instead of coughing or choking, he merely moaned. It was a strange, gurgling sound that reminded him of the chortling call of flying cranes.

  They seemed to be in some sort of strange underwater labyrinth made of undulating weeds and rocky ledges, with no surface that Atreus could see. Seema started forward, leading the way across the sandy bottom as though she had walked the maze a thousand times. Atreus did not even try to keep track of their route. The agony caused by the warm water more than bridged the gap between his body and spirit. He could think of nothing but his anguish, so it was enough for him that they seemed to be heading uphill.

  After a time, they climbed high enough that they began to see the crests of the maze walls looming above their heads. There were fish up there, swimming back and forth and gobbling each other up as only fish can do, but none of them ever seemed to drift down into the corridors of the watery labyrinth. Atreus thought this strange, until Yago finally broke the surface and emerged into the scorching hot air.

  Atreus’s body erupted into such anguish that he could no longer tell whether he was above it or in it. He simply opened his mouth and let out a bellow that sent the air-swimming fish wiggling off into the distant corners of the atmosphere. After that, he lost all track of his surroundings. He barely noticed the pools of burning water in which Seema cooled his wounds, or the billowing thunderclouds that rolled along the floor and stabbed up into the darkness with bolts of lightning, or the constant tolling of the wind chimes in the still hot air. All these, Atreus dismissed as fever delirium, so when they stepped through a dark portal and found themselves standing on a rocky ledge two miles above the floor of a broad, verdant basin, his first thought was that he was still hallucinating.

  A gentle drizzle was wafting down from a mottled blue sky that might have been ice as easily as clouds. The first shadows of purple twilight were stealing down the sheer faces of the basin’s granite walls. Here and there, a tongue of blue ice hung high on a cliff, creeping out from beneath the edges of the blotchy sky to send a long horsetail waterfall cascading toward the valley floor. The silvery ribbons turned to mist after a thousand feet or so, vanishing into the empty air long before they reached the slopes at the base of the cliffs.

  The slopes themselves were mottled in deep woods and emerald meadows, flecked with thatch-roofed hamlets and crude stock sheds. A glistening web of narrow streams spilled down into the center of the valley, where a broad clear river meandered through several miles of neat green barley fields, disappearing over the edge of the basin into a deep, vast valley beyond.

  “Welcome to my home,” Seema said, at last releasing the hands of her companions. “Welcome to Langdarma.”

  This was too much for Atreus. Too weary and pained to rejoice, he simply allowed himself to believe what he saw, to accept the truth of Seema’s words and not consider their implications, to embrace the lushness and the warmth of the place and not question whether it was real or hallucination.

  He experienced a strange calm then, a peace that flowed up and through him, connecting him to the beauty below in some enigmatic way he could never understand. He felt himself return to his anguished body. His pain washed over him like running water, sank into his flesh like the bright warmth of the sun and filled his chest like salty sea
air. This time he did not fight it. He embraced his agony as a part of himself, welcomed it as the scream of life still raging strong inside him, and then he felt the fear leave. His body released its hold on his spirit, now confident that he would not allow the pain to chase him away, and he saw the clouds of oblivion rise up to carry him into the world of numbness and rest.

  Later, Atreus’s slumber was invaded by a male voice much too dulcet to belong to his companions. For a time, he dreamed that he was back in the Church of Beauty, listening to a perfectly pitched tenor sing the goddess’s praises. Never had he heard such a pure sound, untainted by the slightest tinge of coarseness or the faintest hint of hollowness. It was as lyrical as silk and smooth as a poem, and Atreus felt blessed just to hear it in a dream.

  As Atreus grew aware of the bitter reek of a butter lamp, he began to realize he was not dreaming. The voice was real, coming from someplace down beyond his feet. Seema was answering, apprehensive and apologetic, her own sweet voice sounding twittery and flutey by comparison. As Atreus struggled to wakefulness, his pain began to return, though not as terrible as before. He could feel a piece of chiffon covering the burns on his upper body, and Seema’s warm hand was smearing a watery ointment over his raw and naked legs.

  An embarrassing thought flashed through Atreus’s mind, snapping him instantly to full consciousness. His eyes popped open, and he found himself staring at the ceiling planks of a small stone hut. He was lying on a straw-covered pallet, with a flickering butter lamp resting on a rough-hewn table beside him. The room was remarkably warm, at least compared to the snow caves in which they had been sleeping the last few nights, and he could hear a fire crackling in a hearth somewhere nearby.

  Atreus raised his head and glanced down the length of his body, discovering that his worst fears were true. He lay hideously naked from the waist down, with his scorched flesh and broken leg, crooked hips and ugly ogrelike loins fully exposed. Nor did he have any illusions about who had removed the remnants of his trousers, as Seema was rubbing her ointment onto a burn higher on his thigh than any female hand had ever touched before. He found himself suddenly thankful for his pain. It was probably the only thing that saved him from an even greater embarrassment.