"And you?" she asked.
Atreus looked back toward the barren cliffs beneath the Sisters, then shook his head. "I've come too far," he said. "if Tarch kills me, he kills me, but I'm not leaving."
"Then I will stay, too." Seema smiled, then added, "Do you think I am the kind of girl you can kiss and send away?"
Atreus felt the heat rise to his cheeks. He turned away before the blush could further mottle his blotchy complexion, disguising the maneuver by drawing Sune's map from within his cloak and pretending to study features he already knew by heart According to the chart the little basin before him was a hanging meadow at the upper end of Langdarma, surrounded on three sides by the sheer cliffs of the Sisters of Serenity. In the back of the basin, almost directly beneath the peak of the middle Sister, was the ladder symbol, leading to a narrow switchback trail that was the only route into the meadow from the surrounding mountains.
As far as Atreus could see, the only semblance between the map and the area before him were the sheer cliffs and the general shape of the basin. The meadow, of course, was buried under the small glacier that spilled down the icefall, and the main valley of Langdarma was supposed to start about where the avalanche run out lay. It occurred to Atreus that perhaps Langdarma had been scoured away by glaciers hundreds of years before, but he quickly chased the thought from his mind. Surely, a goddess could not be guilty of such a terrible mistake.
Atreus pointed across the valley toward the base of the middle Sister. There, the glacier sloped up to a dark line that marked the chasm where the ice pulled away from the mountain. "That is where we need to go."
Seema arched her delicate eyebrows. The clef ting?" She snatched the map from Atreus's hands, studied it warily, and said, "What are we to do there?"
Atreus shrugged. "I don't know." he said. "Look around… see what we find. None of this is what I expected."
Atreus's confusion seemed to relieve Seema. She returned his map, and they gathered their things and set off. Although the glacier was relatively flat across most of the basin, they had to wind their way through a labyrinth of newly opened crevasses and listing boulders, all the while watching their back trail for Tarch. The short journey seemed to take forever, and by the time they reached the head of the glacier, Atreus could no longer bear Seema's slow, deliberate pace. He slipped past Yago and Rishi and would have taken the lead himself had Seema not increased her own pace and left him panting for breath. When they finally reached the clef ting, he collapsed gasping on the steep slope, his arms draped over the brink of the chasm and his eyes staring down into its frigid depths.
He saw nothing but a rubble-choked fissure fifty feet deep, crammed with drifting snow and jagged boulders fallen from the soaring cliffs above. He continued to stare, panting for breath, trying to see paradise in the debris below. Seema sat on the brink beside him and rested her hand on his shoulder. Atreus's heart grew as heavy as stone. The healer's touch was the only hint of Langdarma to be found in this basin.
"I am sorry," she said.
Atreus felt himself starting to sink into despair, but shook his head against the feeling and stood. "No," he said, "there is no need for sorrow. This is the place. I just have to look harder."
He removed the map from his cloak and craned his neck to look up, trying locate himself in relation to the summit of the middle Sister. It was a futile task, as it was impossible to see the top of any peak from so close to its bottom. Atreus did notice a band of dark granite that he recalled being almost directly below the pinnacle. He began to work his way along the brink of the clef ting, glancing back and forth between the map and the cliff face. Seema followed along, struggling to peer over his shoulder and see what he was looking for.
Rishi and Yago clambered up the slope behind them and peered down into the clef ting. The ogre grunted derisively.
"You call that beautiful? Give me a good cave any day."
Atreus ignored him and stopped when he came to the dark granite a dozen paces later. The clef ting here was narrow and drifted over, so it was impossible to tell where the glacier ended and the chasm began. Atreus put his map away, then dropped to his hands and knees and began to dig away the wind-packed snow. An exhausting half-hour later, he finally located the edge of the glacier and started to tunnel down into the clef ting.
Yago kneeled beside him and began to rip jagged blocks of snow from the hole. "What's the plan?" the ogre asked. To dig our way into Langdarma?"
"If we have to," answered Atreus. "There's supposed to be a trail somewhere winder here. If we can find it-"
A hole suddenly opened under Yago's hands. He bellowed and tumbled forward, flailing has arms in an effort to catch himself, but the drift collapsed beneath his weight and fell into the clef ting, carrying the ogre along with it
Atreus started to plummet after his friend but was saved when Rishi caught hold of his collar. For an instant, no one reacted, stunned by the reminder of just how quickly disaster could come in the Yehimals.
An angry voice bellowed out of the clef ting, "What are… you waiting for?" Yago sounded as though he were having trouble breathing. "If you think this is fun… think again!"
Atreus clawed his way back to the chasm brink and peered over the edge. Like the rest of the clef ting, this part was choked with boulders, many wedged at various heights down the fissure. Twenty-five feet below, the bottom lay bidden under the heaped remnants of the collapsed snowdrift. It took a few moments to find Yago's head protruding out of the snow in the shadow of a huge rock. The rest of the ogre remained completely buried. He was working his chin back and forth, trying to scrape himself out of the snow, but it would dearly be a long time before he could dig himself free.
"Are you hurt?" Seema called.
"Hurt? Of course not!" he said indignantly. The ogre began to chin the snow more furiously. Like most proud Shield-breaker warriors, Yago considered pain a sign of weakness. "I'm just stock!"
"Stop whining, or well leave you there!" called Atreus, relieved.
"Whining?" Yago boomed. "Who's whining?"
"Who do you think?"
Atreus took a moment to pick a route, swung his legs over the brink of the chasm, and dropped eight feet down to the first snow-capped boulder. When his boots slipped on the landing, he simply jumped to the next one, then bounced down to a third and dropped into the soft snow a few paces from his friend's head.
"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.