The captain had expected Ethis and Jugar to be joining the expedition but there, too, was a brightly beaming Lyric and, most surprising of all, Mala holding her pack and looked down at the deck, seemingly avoiding anyone’s eyes.
“There is no way they are coming with us!” she said.
“There is no way they cannot,” Drakis replied.
“I’m not dragging those women across the Sand Sea!”
“You’re not dragging anyone,” Drakis said. “Both the Lyric and Mala need to be watched. . and not out of my sight.”
“You don’t trust my crew?”
“Not with Mala,” he replied.
“Fine!” Urulani shouted. “But if she so much as spits in my direction, I’m going to kill her myself, and I promise you I will not be asking your permission ahead of time, you understand?”
“I understand,” Drakis answered.
Urulani turned on Mala, jabbing her finger at her collarbone. “And do you understand, princess?”
“Yes,” Mala answered, not looking up.
“Well, what a happy crew,” Urulani said though there was nothing happy in her tone at all.
Urulani had beached the Cydron on the riverbank, so they jumped from the bow of the boat onto the sands of the shore. Their feet sank down into the warm sands, causing them to struggle slightly until they managed to clamber up onto the remains of the roadway. There was some concern about the dwarf, who panicked for a time in the sands trying to get his footing, but in the end they managed to pull him onto the path as well.
The road of tightly fitted stones was broken in many places and completely obscured by drifting sand in so many more that Jugar feared they would lose it altogether, but in time they followed it up, at last cresting the sand dune at the edge of the river’s channel.
They were greeted with the sight of a chain of towering mountains that seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. Purple-blue in the distance and appearing to waver in the heat of day, their peaks were sharp, jagged pinnacles whose crests were still draped in the white of perpetual snow. They looked as though they had been pushed up angrily from below, rising abruptly from the sands at their base in sheer granite crags and towers-the savage teeth of the world.
“The God’s Wall!” Jugar cried and began dancing a strange, dwarven step on the ancient stones.
“How did we miss that?” Ethis blurted out.
“We’ve been in the river channel,” Urulani shrugged. “The dunes must have hidden them from us.”
“That doesn’t prove anything, dwarf,” Drakis said, his eyes narrowing to try to examine the mountains better. He raised his arm and pointed. “What are those?”
“What?” Urulani asked.
“There at the base. . those tall shapes at the base of the range. They’re too evenly spaced to be natural, and they seem to run down the length of the range.”
“They are my brothers,” the Lyric said with pride. “We are home!”