Troy Denning - Faces of Deception

"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 clef ting.

"By Vaprak's ears, it's a good day to be a Shield-breaker!" chortled Yago. He began to dig himself free. "Its 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 rock-fall. 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 clef ting 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 clef ting, 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 clef ting. 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 was 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 clef ting. 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 clef ting, 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.