Faces of Deception by Troy Denning

place to sleep. Atreus took the sword and began to cut willows for insulation. As promised, the feeling soon returned to Atreus’s feet, and he wished it had not. The flesh felt as if it were on fire, and the bones underneath ached with the cold. He hacked all the harder.
    The light was just starting to fade when a sporadic series of screeches and agonized whinnies echoed across the swamp. Hardly able to believe the awful sound was being made by ponies, Atreus stopped work and looked up. In the twilight sky, he could barely make out three distant columns of smoke.
    “In the name of Sune,” Atreus gasped. “What’s Naraka doing? Burning his ponies alive?”
    “That is no doubt what the poor beasts fear, but we are not to be so lucky,” said Rishi. “The ponies must be warmed and dried before the night turns cold, or ice will form on their legs and perhaps cripple them before morning.”
    Atreus glanced at the grazing yaks, who seemed quite content with the snowy ice balls hanging from their shaggy legs.
    “Oh no, do not worry about the yaks,” laughed Rishi. “For them, cold is better. If not for us, they could keep going all night.”
    This turned Atreus’s thoughts to his own soggy feet. He cleared a place for a fire and gathered several handfuls of brown grass from under the hummock’s heavy thatch. Rishi looked increasingly distressed as Atreus began to stack dead willow stalks next to the fire pit. When he withdrew his flint and steel from the rucksack, the Mar could contain his alarm no longer.
    “Excuse me, but surely the good sir is not thinking of making a fire.”
    “He is doing more than thinking of it,” Atreus replied. “His feet are wet and cold, and he wants to be able walk when he gets out of this swamp.”
    Rishi paled. “Perhaps the good sir is unaccustomed to the trials of being a fugitive. Even if the patrol cannot see the fire’s light, we are upwind. They will smell the smoke and follow it to us.”
    Atreus turned toward the frigid channel, where Yago was kneeling on the shore with his arm thrust into the swamp up to the elbow. “Through that water? Impossible!”
    Rishi calmly removed his boots and trousers, stepped past Yago, and waded out into the icy swamp. He turned to face Atreus. “How l-long would you like me to stay?”
    Yago raised his brow at the Mar’s strange behavior, then gasped and looked back into the water. There was a brief splash, and he flipped an odd two-foot fish up onto the hummock. With a bulldog jaw and a long round body striped with brown and yellow scales, the thing looked like a hybrid of catfish and grayling. As soon as it hit the snow, it began to flop about, working its way back toward the water.
    Yago lunged up the hill to pin down his catch, and Atreus turned back to Rishi.
    “All right, no fire.” He waved the Mar out of the water. “But I thought you said Edenvale Mar had no determination?”
    “I do not think Naraka is from Edenvale.” Rishi climbed ashore and began drying his legs with grass. “But he will certainly turn back in the morning. He is only hoping we will be foolish enough to make a fire tonight and lead him to us.”
    Yago looked at his catch. “No fire?”
    Atreus put the flint and steel away. “Afraid not.”
    “Great,” the ogre grumbled. “As if eatin’ fish wasn’t bad enough.”
    He killed the swamp fish with a bite to the back of the neck, then began to devour it, scales and all. Atreus and Rishi made do with a dinner of raw barley in warm yak milk, and the sun vanished, plunging the camp into chilling darkness. Rishi brought the yaks over to the bed he had prepared, forcing them to lie down about three feet apart, with their backs toward each other and their heads at opposite ends. He tethered them in place by tying each beast’s lead to the tail of the other one.
    Atreus removed his boots and put on a dry pair of socks. He and Rishi wrapped themselves in their extra cloaks and settled down between the yaks, each