Faces of Deception (17 page)

Atreus skipped backward and slapped the weapon down, bringing his blocking hand up in a vicious back-fisted strike. The slaver’s jaw clacked shut He spit out the tip of his tongue and stumbled back, blind with pain and slashing his dagger about madly. Atreus whirled the chain down across his attacker’s wrist, entangling the fellow’s arm and knocking his knife loose. The slaver howled and tried to jerk free but succeeded only in drawing Atreus closer.

Atreus grabbed him behind the neck and pulled, at the same time slamming a knee to his foe’s chest. There were two muffled cracks, and the man groaned and dropped to the ground, wheezing and clutching at his side.

Atreus kicked the slaver down the slope and saw Rishi scrambling up the mountainside, moving quickly despite his limp and the large bundle slung over his shoulder. Farther below, Tarch and a dozen men were just starting across the narrow flat that separated the mountains from the swamp. Staggering along in front of them, covering six feet a step despite a numb-footed limp, was Yago.

The ogre’s face and cloak were caked with ice and mud, and a veritable copse of broken willow stalks jutted up from inside his belt and collar. He looked as if he had passed the night wallowing in the swamp, but Atreus knew better. Yago understood the value of concealment as well as any good hunter, and his camouflage suggested he had spent the night trailing Tarch and his slavers. They had probably not even realized he was there until he broke from the willows and started across the flat.

Too breathless to call out to his friend, Atreus merely waved, then scrambled up the mountainside, his lungs burning so badly he feared he had bruised them tumbling down the hill. On the cliff above, the slaver finally released Seema’s ankle and dropped to the ground. She started to climb higher, looked down at Atreus, and stopped where she was.

The slaver retrieved his sword and met Atreus five paces below the cliff, using his uphill advantage to attack with a vicious overhand strike. Too exhausted to dodge or feint, Atreus simply dropped to the ground and swung his chain around in an overhand strike.

The surprised slaver stumbled forward off-balance, and the chain caught him across the wrist, twining itself around his forearm. Atreus spun downhill, whipping his foe overhead like a stone in a sling. The chain reached the end of its length and untwined, hurtling the fellow down the slope like a catapult The slaver hit a dozen paces below, crashing headlong into a boulder and tumbling down the mountainside in a limp heap: Atreus retrieved his dropped sword and rushed up the slope to Seema.

“are you…” he started to say, but was too out of breath to finish.

I am fine,” Seema replied, sounding rather aloof. “Have you injured yourself again?”

“I don’t think so. Unless you count… being out of breath.”

Atreus turned to see Rishi taking the dagger from the second slaver’s weapon belt Instead of slitting the man’s throat, he surprised Atreus by simply adding the knife to his bundle of goods. Fifty paces below, Yago was climbing up the slope, steadily opening the distance between himself and the rest of the slavers.

“I’m sorry for the trouble waiting with us caused you,” Atreus said, motioning to the barge.

“Yes, so am I,” Seema said, glancing toward the two slavers lying motionless below. “Be quiet now and rest. When your friend gets here we will have to move quickly, or there will be more bloodshed.”

Atreus braced his hands on his knees and struggled to catch his breath between fits of coughing. His wounds were throbbing, but the pain was nothing compared to the agony in his pounding head and burning chest. He silently thanked Vaprak, god of the ogres, for looking after his bodyguard. Without Yago, he could not imagine where he would find the strength to defeat Tarch and his men.

Rishi arrived gasping and trembling, hardly able to hold the blanket bundled over his shoulder.

“So you decided to forget about the gold after all,” Atreus observed.

“It was… decided for me,” Rishi wheezed. “But perhaps … the gods will see fit to… leave it there until we return.”

“Which will not be until your next life, if we do not leave before Tarch’s giant catches us,” said Seema.

“Tarch’s giant?” Atreus turned toward Yago, who was only twenty paces below. “That’s no giant, that’s Yago … my bodyguard.”

Seema raised her brow at this, but seemed to take no comfort in the fact that they had an ogre on their side. She simply turned away, eyed the cliff above their heads, and said, “I suppose you two and your ogre friend cannot climb.”

“Not that!” Atreus exclaimed, astonished she would even suggest such a thing. “It must be five hundred feet high.”

“I suppose we must go around,” Seema said, taking the bundle from Rishi. “What is in here?”

“Blankets and food,” the Mar replied. “Other things we might need.”

Seema fished through the bundle, then withdrew the dagger he had taken from the second slaver and pitched it down the mountainside.

“We will not need that,” she said, motioning to the sword and chain in Atreus’s hands. “Or those.”

Atreus glanced down the slope at Tarch and his warriors. He shoved the sword into his belt and draped the chain over his shoulders. “It will do me no harm to carry it,” he told her.

“If you must.”

Yago arrived stinking of swamp mud and sweat. Too exhausted to offer greetings, the ogre simply braced his hands on his knees and filled the cold air with clouds of white breath.

“It’s good to see you again,” Atreus said, and clasped his friend’s big shoulder. “It’s about time.”

The ogre’s head snapped up, then he saw Atreus’s grin, gave him the evil eye, and said, “You could of left a boat for me!”

“Oh, you have no business blaming us for that.” Rishi grinned, then added, “We had to get our own. Certainly, a big fellow like you should have had no trouble doing the same thing.”

Yago snarled and looked as though he would bite the Mar. Seema grabbed Rishi’s supply bundle and shoved it into the ogre’s waist.

“Now that you are here, make yourself useful,” she said. “It is going to be difficult enough to save all of you without wasting any more time.”

With that, she whirled away and started along the base of the cliff, moving so swiftly and gracefully that Atreus felt as if he was stumbling along after her. Rishi was almost skipping, and even Yago had to scurry to keep pace.

When Tarch and his slavers saw where the four were going, they began to angle toward the edge of the cliff and close the distance. Seema gathered her skirt and broke into a trot, and Atreus, Rishi, and Yago were soon puffing as hard as before.

They rounded the cliff with their pursuers less than fifty paces behind, then started to pick their way up a boulder-strewn couloir—a narrow rock chute so steep that Atreus and Rishi began to grab for handholds. Seema simply leaned a little forward and sprang up the gully as though hopping stones across a stream. Atreus tried to imitate her gait and only found himself tiring more rapidly. Behind him, Yago’s heavy breath sounded like a forge bellows, and Rishi’s wheezing left no doubt that he found the climb just as difficult as his companions.

Atreus looked up and wished he had not. The couloir continued to climb at the same steep angle for at least a thousand paces, then vanished into the clouds.

Rishi groaned. “My lungs will burst,” he complained. “I cannot keep running!”

Seema did not look back, only said, “Just a little farther.”

A boulder wobbled beneath her feet, and she sprang up the gully all the more quickly.

Atreus stopped beside the rock and looked back. When he saw Tarch and his men clambering into the bottom of the narrow gully, he stepped around to the upper side of the boulder.

“Rishi! Out of… the way.”

When he began to push, Seema finally stopped climbing.

“Wait!” She looked down toward Tarch, then yelled, “You must take shelter! We are going to start pushing boulders down.”

The slavers looked up, confused, then suddenly seemed to realize what Seema was saying. They rushed back down the couloir and disappeared around the corner. Tarch merely scowled and started up the gully at his best sprint.

Atreus shoved the boulder.

The rock toppled free and rumbled down the couloir, gathering speed and cracking into other boulders. Each time it struck, another huge stone came loose and tumbled down the chute, until the whole lower gully seemed to be crashing down on the slavers. Tarch flung himself at the gulch wall and scrambled up the rocky face like a huge lizard, then clung there watching stones pass beneath him.

Rishi whirled on Seema, panting, “Why did you warn

them? We could have had them all!”

“Not Tarch, and he is the only one that matters,” said Seema. “Now you have had your rest We must go again.”

With the rockslide still rumbling, she turned and bounded up the gully.

Atreus and the others followed as best they could, but none of them could match Seema’s pace. She would bound ahead, then stop to urge them on, never seeming more than a little winded. Atreus grew so exhausted that he became dizzy and had to steady himself with every step, and he noticed Rishi and Yago doing the same. Their trembling knees started to give out at unpredictable moments, and Rishi’s wounded leg knotted itself into such a tight ball that he cried out in agony with every step. Not once did Seema lose her balance, and soon she started to hang back and pull the Mar along by his arm.

Behind them, Tarch scrambled up the couloir alone, his men having decided they were more likely to survive his wrath than the sporadic volleys of boulders Atreus kept launching. Although the rockslides caused the slave master to keep falling farther behind, they were never a danger to him. Every time Atreus laid his shoulder to a loose rock, Seema would shout a warning.

They had almost reached the clouds when Rishi dropped to a knee, then collapsed again as he tried to get up. Tarch started to sprint up the couloir, sensing he had finally run his quarry to ground.

“Come along.” Seema tugged at the Mar’s arm, “We are almost in the clouds.”

Rishi tried to stand, but fell as soon as he put weight on his wounded leg. “It is no good,” he admitted. “I can go no farther.”

Tarch continued to sprint up the gully. Atreus pressed against a boulder, but the stone would not budge.

“You must get up!” Seema said, then clasped her hand around Rishi’s wrist and started to drag him up the couloir. “I do not want it on my soul if Tarch kills you.”

“You should have … thought of that before you warned him about the rocks,” Rishi said as he tried to jerk his hand free and failed. He was too tired. “You are a disloyal and ungrateful woman.”

“Ungrateful!” Seema exclaimed, but she continued up the slope, dragging Rishi along. Atreus grabbed the Mar by the other arm and did his best to help. Yago brought up the rear, breathing harder than any of them, using one hand to steady himself and the other to hold the supply bundle.

“Why should I be grateful for what you have done?” Seema demanded. “I did not ask you to free me. I did not ask you to kill those men.”

“You were… running,” Atreus panted. He glanced back, then kicked a loose rock down the gully. The stone, too small to start a slide, bounced past Tarch harmlessly. “You must not want to be a slave.”

“No one wants to be slave,” Seema said, her gaze remaining fixed on the clouds above them. “That does not mean you can kill the slavers.”

“They was going to sell you,” Yago wheezed. His chest was heaving from the exertion, and his orange skin had paled to a sickly ivory. “They deserved to get killed.”

The man who passes judgment on another also judges himself,” Seema said. She tore her eyes away from the clouds and gave the ogre a hard stare. “I saw the slavers do many terrible things, but they did not kill anyone.”

Atreus remained silent, stung by her disapproving tone. Until now, he had simply assumed that Seema wanted to be rescued, thinking her aversion to killing nothing more than a healers natural distaste for death. It had not occurred to him that she might regard the slaying of her captors as an evil greater than being enslaved in the first place.

When Atreus said nothing to defend him, Yago scowled and said, “A person fights for himself. A person does not let others make him a slave.”

“A person does not kill,” Seema hissed. “It is a terrible stain on the soul, and I will not have it done in my name.”

The words struck Atreus like a blow to the chest He forgot to watch his footing and slipped on a tuft of grass, barely noticing as Yago caught him and stopped him from sliding down the slope. Though Sune did not prohibit her worshipers from fighting—especially in defense of beauty, love, or their own lives—she did regard both warmongering and unprovoked murder as terrible scars upon a worshiper’s soul. To Seema, apparently, any kind of killing was an ugliness of spirit

Atreus scrambled to his feet and grasped Rishi’s arm again. A few moments later they reached the clouds and entered a misty world of white air and damp rock. Seema dragged them another fifty paces up the couloir, then suddenly stopped on a large boulder. Though he was only an arm’s length away, the fog made her look ghostly and ethereal

“You will not kill again,” she told them all. It was neither a question nor a command, only a statement “No more deaths.”

“Now is certainly not the best time … to debate this,” gasped Rishi. “We must keep going, or there will undoubtedly be at least three more when we are caught…”

Seema made no move to continue up the couloir. “No,” she insisted. “I must know before we carry on.”

Yago growled softly, and Atreus glanced back to see his friend glaring down the gulch. It was impossible to see anything in the mist, but this was the ogre’s way of making plain what he thought about taking orders from strangers, though, of course, he would do whatever Atreus wanted.

Atreus drew the sword from his belt and swung it flat against the boulder. The blade snapped with a sharp chime, and Yago groaned miserably.

“By the gods!” Rishi cried. “Have you lost your mind?”

Atreus ignored him, looked to Seema, and said, “No more deaths.”