"One thing bubbles from this muddle." Adira Strongheart shook her head of tousled curls. "Johan's off the leash, and someone must bring him to heel."
"True." Jedit surveyed the room and the Circle of Seven as if ready to take command. "Terrent Amese makes our path shine clear as moonlight. The sooner we hunt down Johan and kill him, the better for all our peoples. Are we avowed? You know what such an endeavor entails."
"Suffering and death," said Adira without self-pity. She rubbed her game leg. "We've done it before. Yet what must be, must be. We mount an expedition westward into the wastes. For justice, and finally, we hope, for a lasting peace."
Chapter 8
"Unbelievable!"
"It's not a cliff?" asked Sister Wilemina.
"Nay," said Hazezon, "it's a wall. Built by hand and magic, but I can't imagine how."
Adira Strongheart and her Circle of Seven-Virgil, Whistledove, Murdoch, Simone the Siren, Heath and Wilemina the archers, and the woods witch Jasmine Boreal-sat on horseback and stared. Traveling with them were Hazezon Tamar, an entourage of servants, and four palace guards. Sixteen people and a talking tiger, gaping awestruck at the legendary cliffs that boxed off the Western Wastes. Except the looming monstrosity was not a natural-hewn cliff but a hand-laid wall hundreds of feet high.
"I'd never have believed it had my own eyes not beheld it," murmured Hazezon.
Kneeing his horse onto a small rise, Hazezon scanned from south to north. The Western Wastes were just that, a dreary expanse of pebbly hills and crooked draws with little vegetation and no water. A single charmed jug of ever-flowing water was all that allowed the adventurers to enter these barrens. Hazezon had paid dearly for that jug, and with every sip every member held his breath and hoped its magic didn't fizzle and die, or they surely would. Three weeks it had taken to cross the wastelands on horseback, though Jedit walked every step because no horse would have him and no lumbering monoxes had been available. Often, too, he must drop to all fours to snuffle the sands, for he tracked his enemy.
From Palmyra, Johan's barefoot trail had wended due west into the desert, then, abruptly, diverted north. Twelve days later he'd rendezvoused with twenty people descending from Tirras. Tyrant and entourage had marched west, straight toward the towering wall barring their way. Why Johan had entered the wastelands, why he changed course, how he'd summoned servants across empty miles, how he'd surmounted the wall-these were mysteries.
Always curious, Hazezon Tamar had accompanied Adira's crew simply because he'd never journeyed here before. Now, after three mind-dulling weeks, he wished to never see them again. Yet he was unexpectedly rewarded by this engineering phenomenon of titanic proportions. Shading his eyes, the mage saw the wall ran for miles, far out of sight to the south and north, though not compass-true. Perhaps it curved inward. So immense it was, Hazezon couldn't be sure. The construction reared more than two hundred feet, not quite sheer, with each layer of stone set back a small interval. Even godlike engineers, the wizard supposed, hesitated to push their luck and fudged the slope back a hair.
Turning, Hazezon called, "Heath, how far to the wall, do you reckon?"
Nickering to his horse, the pale archer clopped forward. Hazezon had known Heath for decades, yet he remained an enigma. The quiet man never aged. His hair was bone-white, his face thin, his eyes melancholy as if harboring a secret sorrow. He wore a linen tunic of no color with a deer-hide vest and carried a bow of glossy ebony. His eyes were sharp as a hawk's.
With a glance, Heath pronounced, "Five miles and nine rods, I make it."
"Amazing." Hazezon's eyes were weak from forty years of pirating on bright water and glaring deserts. Yet he could see the wall was made of rough stones carefully stacked and chinked with smaller rocks. No single stone looked hewn by a hammer. "So, a single boulder must be…"
Heath scratched his nose and pointed with a string-callused finger. "That granite stone with the black streak is nineteen armspans or more across."
The others stirred in their saddles. Jedit Ojanen stood with arms folded as he studied the cliff, high as an oncoming cloud bank. Someone whistled.
Simone the Siren asked, "Who can shift rocks fifty feet across?"
"Gods," said Jasmine, "and a few magic-makers. But not many."
"What's that tuft of greenery near the top?" Wilemina pointed.
"A birch grove," answered Heath.
Another whistle. The "tuft" spread like moss along a cottage roof. Heath pointed to a twig and pronounced it a wolf pine growing sideways. Its roots were seated amid rocks bigger than houses.
Jedit pointed a black claw. "What's that white stuff dusting the rocks?"
"Snow," said Heath. To the tiger-man's fuddled look, he added, "Soft ice that sifts from the sky."
A frown creased Jedit's striped face. Obviously he was unsure if the humans joked. ."I don't understand." Simone pouted, lips red and luscious in her oiled-ebony face. "Glaciers covered all these lands in the Ice Ages, then melted overnight and flooded everything before them, or so legends say. How could this giant wall have been built since? By whom?"
Hazezon shook his white head. "The wall predates the glaciers. It could be tens of thousands of years old. As to who built it, who can say?"
"And who cares?" Adira cut off discussion. "It doesn't matter if the wall is made of rocks or wood or green cheese. We can't scale it, that's certain. So-"
"I could scale it," interjected Jedit.
Adira Strongheart glared, for she disliked being contradicted, as Hazezon well knew. Yet Jedit Ojanen was at least talking again. He'd been quiet these three weeks, asking again and again for stories of his father's exploits, then silently absorbing them. Day by day, with every step Jedit Ojanen seemed to sink into the earth, as if weighed down by the burden of punishing his father's killer.
Sniffing away Jedit's boast, Adira stated, "We're beached. I didn't believe the cliffs existed, or if they did, they'd be puny and surmountable. Now that we've shoaled…"
"I can lift you up the cliff face," Hazezon jibed his ex-wife.
"How?" sparked Adira. "You're an old and surefooted goat, it's true, if not a randy one, but you couldn't hoist that lard-belly up a coaster's companionway, let alone a stone cliff."
Stung, Hazezon glared from under white eyebrows. "You'll see. Before nightfall. Unless we lose the day arguing."
Calling to their mounts, the troop clattered down a shingle slope, ever westward. Echo was absent, for she'd suffered dizzy spells from her head blow. Missing too was Badger, still recovering from burns. Lacking the old mariner's leadership and light humor, Simone the Siren had adopted the dual roles of lieutenant and court jester.
Now she quipped, "It happens every time. Adira and Hazezon get thrown together by politics, and first they're polite, then they spit, and finally they flay each other with words sharper than an enemy's sword. Makes me glad I wore my old shirt. We'll all be spattered by blood before their love-making is done."
"Shut up," said both Adira and Hazezon.
The party rode into the shadow of the cliffs, which stretched for miles across the desert floor as the sun sank, and no one spoke, struck silent by awe. Up close their necks tired from craning upward. Far, far toward the heavens, thin clouds spilled past the lip of rough rocks and misty greenery. The majestic heights and autumnal chill made the party shiver after weeks of austere, scorched desert.