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.
As the riders slid stiffly from saddles and watered and tended their mounts, Jedit Ojanen squatted over tufts of green and brown that sprinkled the stony soil.
To the tiger's obvious confusion, Heath explained, "Pine needles. Like cactus thorns, only soft."
Frowning, Jedit Ojanen touched a black claw to an invisible spot on the soil. "Johan's last footstep. The trail ends here."
In silence, the party stared upward, thinking but not asking the same question.
"Then we'll stop here too." Hazezon Tamar made his voice flippant, for the atmosphere was chilled and gloomy in the wall's shadow. He opened a saddlebag and unwrapped a squat, square jug. With jug in hands, he asked, "Who goes, and who stays?"
"Goes where?" As always, Adira was suspicious of Hazezon's magic, which had a tendency to run riot once unleashed. "Atop the wall?"
"Where else? It's why we came!" Refusing to be sucked into another endless argument, Hazezon explained patiently. "We shan't all go, uh, aloft. I'm staying here in Sukurvia."
"You'll what?" barked Adira. "You whiskery walrus! Why did you waste three weeks trekking a wasteland just to sheer about and haul for home?"
"I came," Hazezon spat through gritted teeth, "to boost you, you ungrateful minx, up to the top of the. cliffs!"
Adira raked back her auburn curls, always a danger sign. "Oh, so? Us and eight horses, near five tons of deadweight, flung into the air like a flock of flamingos? How did you know there even were cliffs, O Master of the All-Seeing Eye? You're so bat-blind you've pitched down a privy hole just lifting your skirts!"
"I wear robes as befit a civilized gentlemen!" retorted Hazezon. "Unlike some hell-bound hussies who dress in men's garb because they can't decide which side of the bed to sleep in!"
"I slept in your bed too many nights," shrilled Adira, "and suffered one damned disappointment after another."
Some pirates chuckled as the squabble rattled on. Others grimaced in embarrassment. Simone the Siren clutched hands over her heart and simpered as if love-struck. Jedit Ojanen studied the wall as if measuring the best route to climb.
"… leave it to Hamhanded Trembler to concoct some addle-pated scheme built on untried magic!" Adira Strongheart didn't mention that she practiced small magics herself. She jabbed a callused finger at the bottle in her ex-husband's hand. "What stinkpot trick this time? Will you stuff me and my crew in that jug like imps and hurl us up high?"
"No, I'll shift you!"
"Like hell!"
A stunned silence fell as the words sank in. Hazezon was aware that both Adira's mercenaries and his own servants and palace guards stared.
Rubbing her nose in agitation, Adira demanded, "Shift? As in, step across the spheres?"
"Nothing so grand," mumbled the elder mage, "but I've practiced and experimented many a long night. Shifting is the first step toward planeswalking, it's true, but likely I won't live long enough to achieve that. Still, I can shift. Some things."
"What things?" snapped Adira. "How far?"
"Statues, if you must know!" snarled Hazezon. "And within eyeshot!"