by Troy Denning
Yago came pounding up the stairs so hard that he shook the entire hut, stomping across Atreus’s room toward the balcony. Seema met him at the door, her eyes wide with alarm, her hand raised to stop him.
“Stay inside,” she warned, “or you will tear my poor balcony off my house.”
Yago dropped to his hands and knees, then thrust his head and shoulders out through the door.
Before the ogre could speak, Atreus said, “Yago, calm down. I’m sure your news can wait until you gather your thoughts.”
“A moment, yes, but perhaps not longer,” panted Rishi. The Mar squeezed past the ogre. “We have just come from Phari, where there is most disturbing news.”
“Phari?” Atreus asked.
“A hamlet on the other side of the basin,” explained Seema. “What is wrong in Phari?”
“Tarch!” boomed Yago.
Seema’s face paled to sickly yellow. “That is not possible!” she said. “He could not follow us through the Passing.”
“He did,” insisted Yago. “A man’s daughter is missing.”
Seema frowned. “You saw Tarch take her?” she asked.
“No, thank the Forgotten Ones,” answered Rishi. “She did not come home last night. They were searching for her when we arrived.”
Seema took a moment to gather her wits, then asked, “What did you tell them?”
“Tell them?” echoed Rishi. “That we had not seen the girl. Then we left. They kept looking at Yago and his big teeth and saying absurd things about the yeti, and I could see at once there was no use trying to reason with them.”
“You said nothing about Tarch?” Seema asked.
Yago shook his head. “They were edgy enough without us starting rumors about scaly devils,” he explained.
Seema closed her eyes in relief. “You were right to hold your tongues,” she said. “I am sure this has nothing to do with Tarch.”
“How?” Atreus asked, perched on the edge of his chair. “How do you know that?”
Seema said, “Even if he could have tracked us into the mountain—which he could not do—he does not know the Passing magic. He would be trapped inside forever.”
“All the same, Tarch has a nasty way of surprising us,” said Atreus. He stood, biting back a hiss of pain as his mending leg objected. “We’d better go have a look.”
“There is no need.” Seema pushed Atreus into his chair and added, “Even if there was, you are in no condition to go anywhere.”
“But Tarch—”
“Could not have followed us,” Seema insisted. There was just enough doubt in her voice to make Atreus wonder whom she was trying to convince. “Even in Langdarma, we have the normal sorts of tragedy. Children drown or hit their heads or get lost just like anyplace else, and you will only add to the family’s anguish with senseless talk of devils.”
14
Atreus sat alone at the rough-hewn table, sipping buttered tea from a wooden mug while Seema cleaned the iron breakfast pot He would have helped, but her cooking area was more an apothecary than a kitchen, and no one was permitted to invade that spicy-smelling realm of earthenware jars and stoppered vials. Yago and Rishi were clumping around upstairs, gathering bedrolls and extra cloaks in preparation for an overnight foray. Having found no sign of the Fountain of Infinite Grace in the basin, Atreus had prevailed upon them to begin exploring the main valley.
“There is no need to be envious,” said Seema. “We will be joining your friends soon. Your leg is growing stronger every day.”
Atreus nodded slowly. “That’s just what I was thinking,” he said, “and soon after that I’ll be well enough to leave.”
“Perhaps not so soon. The sannyasi will not ask you to go until you are strong enough to cross the High Yehimals without help, and by then the weather may well have turned.” Seema feigned a look of pity and added, “I am sorry to tell you this, but it is possible you will still be here next spring.”
“I can think of worse fates,” Atreus said, half grinning. “This place has a way of growing on you.”
Seema pouted and asked, “And what of the company?”
“I liked the company from the start. The company is what I’ll miss most when I go.” Atreus paused, then asked, “I will have to go, won’t I?”
“I am afraid Yago has nothing to worry about,” Seema said, referring to the ogre’s obvious eagerness to be on his way home. Any place that frowned on head-bashing and banned hunting was hardly a Shieldbreaker’s idea of paradise. “The sannyasi has never allowed an outsider to remain in Langdarma. When it is safe for you to leave, he will insist that you do.”
Atreus could only nod. Having fallen under the spell of what little of Langdarma he had seen, he would gladly have traded all his wealth back in Erlkazar for a simple stone hut on the Sisters’ verdant slopes.
Seema’s brown eyes grew sad, and she began to coat her iron pot with flower oil.
“Today, shall we walk down to the play yard and see the children again? I think they would like that.”
“So would I,” he said. When Atreus had limped by the day before, several little girls had surprised him by bringing him a garland of wildflowers to help him heal. “Do you know, that’s the first time a child ever ran toward me?”
Seema laughed. “Yes, I could see that. You were so surprised, I thought you would run.”
“I would have, if my leg had been stronger.”
Atreus smiled and took a drink from his wooden mug. The brew tasted more like a salty bouillon than tea. It was thick and greasy and probably the one thing he did not really love about Langdarma.
From the street outside came the thump-thump of running feet A dark streak raced past the open window, and the door banged open. An adolescent boy rushed inside, panting for breath and filling the hut with the smell of sweat.
“There has been a rockslide!” He gulped down a breath, then continued, “My father needs help.”
Seema grabbed a woolen satchel off the wall and began to stuff it with herbs and vials. “I will do what I can Timin, but you know the sannyasi has taken away my—”
“Oh no, not your help!” interrupted Timin. “Kumara is already there, but the rocks are very large and we need the orange man to move them.”
Seema let her satchel drop, her face falling as though she had been slapped. “Of course,” she said.
Atreus limped to the stairs and hollered, “Yago!”
“Yeah?”
“Come quick!”
The ceiling shook as the ogre pounded across the floor above.
Seema handed Timin the last of Atreus’s buttered tea. “Drink,” she told him. “You will need strength for the run back. Where is your father trapped?”
“Beneath the Caves of Blue.”
The youth began to gulp down the greasy tea.
“The Caves of Blue?” Seema frowned. “What was he doing there?”
Timin lowered the mug and passed it back to Atreus. “Searching for my sister,” he said.
Atreus and Seema exchanged alarmed glances. Before they could ask any more questions, Yago squeezed down the stairs, his orange fangs bared in alarm.
“What is it?”
“Come quickly!” Paying no attention to Yago’s expression, Timin grasped the ogre by the wrist and tugged him toward the door, saying, “You are needed.”
Yago scowled and glanced toward Atreus.
Atreus nodded and said, “Do as he asks.”
The ogre shrugged, then ducked through the door behind Timin. Atreus glanced at Rishi, who was coming down the stairs to investigate the uproar.
“Go with them,” Atreus said to the Mar, pointing out the door. “Hurry … and keep an eye out for Tarch.”
Rishi paled. “Tarch? I thought there was no way—”
“There isn’t,” said Seema, and Atreus finished for her, “But this is a strange coincidence.”
“And if it is more than a coincidence?” Rishi demanded. “What do you expect me to do about it?”
“The same thing you did at the icefall,” Atreus said as he shoved the little Mar out the door. “We’ll be along as fast as I can run.”
“Run?” Seema asked, shaking her head. “You are not even ready to walk, and the Caves of Blue are at the far end of the basin, very high up the slope.”
Atreus started out the door after his friends. “I’ll crawl if I have to,” he promised.
In the end, Seema borrowed a yak and led the way toward the Caves of Blue. Had Atreus’s thoughts not been consumed by visions of Tarch abducting the beautiful girls of the valley, the journey would have been an enchanting one. The trails were lined with soaring birch and fir, many so large that even Yago could not have closed his long arms around the trunks. The ground itself was blanketed with a bounteous undergrowth of blossoming rhododendron that arched out over the trail sprinkling pink petals on their heads as they passed. Every now and then, they would come to a golden stream snaking its way down to the big river in the center of the basin, or cross an open meadow of long green grass where a small herd of yaks grazed contentedly.
After a time, they reached the terraced slopes surrounding a small hamlet similar to the one where Seema lived. Here, they were besieged by distressed women who began to fill in the troubling details of the rockslide. Timin’s father had awakened that morning to discover his eldest daughter, a young woman of seventeen, missing. Discovering two set of footprints leading away from his hut, he had set off at once to catch the pair. Not long afterward, the rumble of a nearby landslide had shaken the hamlet. Timin had followed the dust plume to a slope of talus—a jumbled scarp of loose rock—beneath the Caves of Blue. There he found his father trapped under a huge boulder. There was no sign of his sister or the mysterious man with whom she had left.
Atreus was astonished by the utter innocence of the villagers. Had a similar event occurred in Erlkazar, the father would have assumed the worst and set off with a company of armed men to hunt down the abductor. Here, the girl’s disappearance seemed more confusing than alarming, as though they could not imagine why she would leave without saying good-bye.
By the time they reached the other side of the hamlet, Atreus was convinced that Tarch had found his way into the valley. He said nothing to Seema, thinking it wiser to let her decide this for herself. In many ways, they were growing closer every day, but there remained between them a certain uneasiness he did not want to aggravate by pushing her to a conclusion she would soon reach for herself. Without exception, the women of Langdarma were as beautiful as Seema was, and it could hardly be a coincidence that two of them had disappeared since she had escaped Tarch.
As they traveled along the terraced vegetable slopes, Atreus soon found himself looking out over the edge of the basin, to where it dropped away into greater Langdarma. The valley was even more vast than he remembered, so wide that the other side was obscured in haze, and so deep that he could see no bottom, only the far wall plunging ever downward. The impossibility of finding the Fountain of Infinite Grace in such a immense place struck him heavily. Yago and Rishi had spent nearly a tenday searching just the upper basin, and it could not have been a thousandth the size of the main valley.
Clearly, he would need Seema’s help to find the fountain, but he did not dare ask. The secret loomed over their relationship as heavy and foreboding as the ice-blue sky, an unspoken conflict they both feared to address. Atreus had asked many times whether there was not some way to change his external appearance, and Seema had always sidestepped the question, invariably changing the subject to his perception of himself. He could feel her holding back, trying desperately to avoid lying to him as she had lied about Langdarma, yet determined to keep from him some confidence she held even more dear than the valley’s existence. As for Atreus, he felt burdened with guilt, like a thief who insinuates himself into a rich man’s house in order to rob him blind. He did not see how Langdarma would be harmed by taking a single vial of water from the Fountain of Infinite Grace, yet he did not dare broach the subject for fear that the mere asking would somehow make his task impossible.
The trail entered the woods again and continued forward over the brink of the basin, but Seema turned up a side path and began to lead them uphill. The slope grew steadily steeper as they went. Soon, they were zigzagging up a series of switchbacks, creeping across craggy outcroppings and stealing glimpses down into the main valley. In many ways, it was a larger version of the upper basin, with a little less forest, a lot more barley field, and a broad blue river snaking down the center. At the far end, the valley gradually narrowed to a shadowy black gorge and disappeared into a wall of ice-capped mountains.
They had just reached the steepest part of the hillside when they began to hear voices chattering ahead. Seema broke from a fast walk into a run, tugging Atreus’s yak along behind her. From somewhere ahead came a loud crash, followed by the clatter of tumbling stone.
Atreus and Seema emerged from the forest onto a steep, jumbled talus slope. Twenty paces below, a circle of men were gathered around Yago’s stooped form. Above the ogre stood an old man in a scarlet tabard, issuing commands in a thickly accented voice that Yago probably could not understand. By the woolen herb satchel hanging over the old man’s shoulder, Atreus guessed that this was Kumara, the healer Timin had mentioned.
Seema tied the yak’s lead to a bush. Atreus dismounted and followed her down to the crowd. They arrived to find the head and shoulders of a glassy-eyed man protruding from beneath a wagon-sized slab of granite. The poor fellow was lying on a blood-smeared boulder, babbling incoherently about yetis and devils. Yago stood over him, struggling alongside several villagers to keep the huge slab from dropping on his chest. Timin was kneeling next to the victim, presumably his father, stroking his hair and speaking gently while two other men pulled his arms. A third man had crawled under the stone so far that only the soles of his boots remained visible.
The victim shrieked in pain, and a muffled voice under the slab cried out, “Now!”
The men holding the victim’s arms stepped back, pulling him from beneath the boulder. As his legs came free, one ankle began to spurt long arcs of blood. The other merely oozed from a smashed stump. Kumara instantly jumped down beside the injured man and pressed one hand to the spurting ankle, fishing through his woolen satchel with the other.
The brave man under the slab began to inch out, but Yago was having trouble holding the heavy stone. He groaned deeply, and gasped, “Fingers … slipping!”
The villagers frowned and began to jabber in confusion, and Atreus realized they had not understood the ogre’s warning. He shouldered his way into the crowd, grabbed the ankles of the man under the stone, and jerked him out backward.
“In the name of the Five Kingdoms, take care!” the hero cried, twisting around to glare up at his handler.
“Rishi?” Atreus gasped, surprised to find himself staring down at his sly guide. “What are you getting out of this?”
“Nothing,” Rishi, flushed with embarrassment, answered. “I am as surprised as you are, but no one else believed Yago could hold the stone.”
At that instant, Yago cried out in alarm and jumped back. The granite slab crashed down, shaking the whole talus slope, and Atreus thought for an instant that the rockslide would begin again.
Rishi’s eyes widened at the near miss, and he spun to glare at Yago. The ogre merely shrugged and turned away, stooping over the other onlookers to peer down at Timin’s father.
“Is he gonna live?”
The father’s glassy eyes grew round, then he began to shake his head in fear.
“Yeti devil!”
Yago’s heavy brow rose. “Me?”
The man tried to push himself away. “Thief of daughters!” He scraped his fingers across the rock, searching for something to throw, crying, “Where is my Lakya?”
Atreus stooped over the man. “Is that what happened to your daughter?” he asked. “Did a devil steal her?”
When the man’s gaze shi
fted to Atreus, he screamed in terror and cried, “Devils everywhere!”
He struggled to escape, flailing around so hard that the old healer could no longer hold him.
“You must step away,” ordered Kumara. His glower slid from Atreus to Yago. “Both of you.”
Yago scowled. “You guys are the ones that asked me—”
“Please, my father means no offense,” said Timin, moving to block the injured man’s view of Yago. “He is delirious.”
Atreus nodded and pulled the ogre away, but even that did not calm Timin’s father.
“Return my Lakya!” the man screamed. “Give her back!”
Kumara reached into his satchel and removed a small, clear vial. The liquid inside looked remarkably like water, save that it seemed to catch the light like a fine diamond and cast it back in a sparkling aura of radiance. When Atreus made the mistake of gasping, Kumara frowned and shifted around to hide the vial from view. There was a small popping noise, then the sound of liquid being poured. A silvery halo rose around both the healer and his patient, and Timin’s father grew instantly quiet.
This time, it was the villagers who gasped.
Atreus’s heart began to pound faster. He leaned over to Seema and, as casually as he could manage, whispered, “What was that?”
Seema hesitated, then said, “Water.”
Atreus risked a doubtful frown. “Water?” he asked. “No water I’ve ever seen—”
“It comes from a special place!” Seema hissed. “Only healers may go there, and now you must ask no more.”
“Why?”
Seema scowled at him. “Because it is the sannyasi’s wish, that is why!” She moved away, kneeled down beside Kumara, and said, “Is there anything I can do to help, Old Uncle?”
The old man gave her a glare that could have melted granite. “Have you not done enough already?” he asked.
Seema recoiled as though struck.
“What do you mean?”