Troy Denning - Faces of Deception

The names caused Atreus's heart to leap into his throat Both places were on his map, and Yamdruk was no more than six valleys from Langdarma.

Seema started forward again, casting a wary eye on the cliff above their heads. Atreus followed along, trying to quell his growing excitement and avoid alarming his beautiful guide. Given her anger over the dead slavers, he was far from certain she would be eager to help him find Langdarma, especially if that happened to be the high place from which she came.

Atreus took a deep breath, then tried to sound casual as he asked, "If you aren't from Yamdruk or Gyatse, how did you come to be captured with their people?"

"I needed yellow man's beard," she explained. "They do not grow in my home, so I came down to search for ft."

Atreus frowned and, confused, asked, "Do you mean you have no men in your home?" Perhaps she came from some sort of devotional order that allowed only women. "Or that your men have no beards?"

"We have men! What kind of place has no men?" she laughed. It was a light, happy sound that chimed off the ice cliff and sang away into the fog. "We do not have hemlock trees, and they are where yellow man's beard grows. It is a moss good for curing black-belly fever."

"So Tarch captured you in Yamdruk?"

It was a hopeful guess. On his map, Yamdruk was closer to, Langdarma than Gyatse.

Seema grew quiet, then said, "He caught me near Yamdruk, yes. But my people do not make a habit of visiting others."

"Perhaps you will allow me to repay your kindness by going to Yamdruk and collecting some yellow man's beard for you?"

Seema glanced over her shoulder warily, then shook her head saying, "The child is long dead. Black-belly fever kills quickly, and I have been gone for weeks."

Atreus could not tell whether her tone was suspicious or sad. "I am sorry to hear that," he said.

Seema was careful not to turn around.

"Yes, so am I"

They reached the edge of the ice cliff and began to pick their way up a jumble of toppled seracs, pausing every now and then to offer Yago a steadying hand. As they climbed, the fog began to thin. The wind came up, the temperature dropped, and the glacier came alive with silver light and blue shadows. They cut holes in their extra blankets and wore them over their shoulders like tunics, but this did nothing to protect their fingers and noses from the biting cold.

At last they crested the slope and found themselves looking across a vast crinkled plain of ice, bulging with pressure ridges and furrowed with concentric rings of crevasses. Here and there, pyramids of granite jutted up through the ice in the interior, while long curving glaciers swept like spider arms down into the canyons along the edges. Scattered along the rim, scratching at a cobalt sky with pinnacles as sharp and gleaming as sword tips, were the impossibly high peaks Atreus had seen from the far side of the swamp. And there, almost directly across the ice field, were three bell-shaped spires. The Sisters of Serenity.

The crash of a tumbling serac rumbled up the glacier behind them. Atreus cast a wary took down the slope but saw only the billowing white clouds through which they had just ascended.

"Probably just an avalanche," he said.

"Just an avalanche," agreed Yago.

Rishi rolled his eyes and shook his head, and neither Atreus nor Yago looked away until Seema pointed toward a small glacier on the left.

"That leads to Gyatse. I will see you safely down to the valley, then return to my own home."

Atreus shook his head and told her, "We're not going to Gyatse."

He could feel that it was a bad time to broach the subject, but he did not want to waste any steps going in the wrong direction, especially not with the Sisters Of Serenity in plain sight and Tarch on their trail.

He pointed across the ice field toward the three mountains and said, "That is where we're going." Seema did not look as surprised as Atreus expected. "The Sisters?" she asked. "There is nothing but ice and rock there. Why would you want to go there?"

Atreus's reply was frank. "To find Langdarma."

Seema regarded him with a combination of wariness and pity, then pursed her lips and took his forearm. "What is it you are looking for in Langdarma?" she asked quietly.

A sense of profound relief filled Atreus. "Beauty," he answered. "I have been told I will become handsome there."

Seema's eyes grew glassy. "You have journeyed all this way for nothing," she said simply. "You cannot find beauty in Langdarma. It is a myth, just as is Ysdar."

She touched his heart, "It exists here," then reached up to touch his face, "not here."

Atreus caught her hand. "Don't. I know what you're doing. I've seen it all my life. You think an ugly man has no business in Langdarma." He withdrew Sune's map, unfolded it, and pointed at the valley beneath the Sisters of Serenity and said, "I know about Langdarma. There's no use lying to me, so please don't"

A clatter echoed up from me clouds below.

Rishi shifted uncomfortably on Yago's back and glanced down the glacier. "That was no avalanche!" he called.

Seema ignored him and examined Atreus's map. "Someone is lying to you, but it is not me," she said, shaking her head sadly. "You cannot go to Langdarma. It is a state of being, not a place, and no man with a murderous heart may find it. I am sorry. More sorry than you can know."

"This was given to me by Sune herself." Atreus insisted and shook the map in her face. "Who do you expect me to believe… my goddess, or you?"

Seema's gaze grew stony.

"I do not know this Sune of yours, but I do know the Yehimals. There is no Langdarma. I will take you to the Sisters of Serenity, and you will see for yourself that there is no valley there."

A two-day crust of ice clung to Atreus's bushy eyebrows, numbing cold and so heavy it pushed his lids-down over his eyes. He was half blind with snow glare anyway, so it hardly mattered. Even with wide open eyes, the Sisters of Serenity would have looked much the same. They were three craggy white bells silhouetted against an azure sky, so high they loomed over Atreus and his companions, even miles away, standing at the precipitous brink of the vast plain of ice they had just crossed.

A hundred feet below, a snow-blanketed glacier swept away almost vertically, spilling into the broad valley that separated them from their destination. There it joined a jumbled blue cascade of ice blocks curving down from a second glacier beneath the Sisters of Serenity. The two flows became one and continued down the valley, creating yet another glacier, this one more than a mile wide and as long as a river.

Seema pointed at the huge glacier and said, There is your Langdarma."

Atreus stared down at the ice without responding. Unlike the smaller glaciers feeding it, this one looked almost smooth, with a long stripe of rock and gravel running down its center. The tine marked the seam between the smaller glaciers where the two edges came together full of rock and gravel torn from mountainsides. The dark stripe looked almost painted on, as if some god had thought a dirty streak just the thing to bring out the pearly crispness of the ice and snow.

After a time, Yago said, "It's not what I expected." The ogre rubbed his stubbled chin and added, "But there's beauty in it I can see that"

"Maybe, but not the kind of beauty we're looking for," said Atreus. "Sune is no fan of starkness."

He opened his map and studied the area around the Sisters of Serenity. According to the chart Langdarma lay in the broad valley directly below, but a ladder symbol beneath the three Sisters suggested the entrance might lie at the base of the middle one.

"You see?" said Seema. There is nothing but ice here."