Along the crest of the hills ran what was undeniably an artificial structure, a blue-gray wall nearly fifty feet high. It did not run completely level but instead rose and fell slightly with the line of the crest. It reminded Blade very much of pictures he'd seen of the Great Wall of China. Like the Great Wall, it seemed to go on forever.

As the wall came closer, Blade's impression of it began to change. For one thing, it seemed to be made of some solid and homogeneous material rather than built up of individual blocks. The amount of material in just the part of the wall Blade could see must be enough to build a fair-sized city.

There were no towers, there were no gates, there were no stairs or ladders. In many places vines and trees seemed to have sprouted from the hilltops and crept up the wall. Otherwise the outer face of the wall was as bare and unbroken as the face of a dam.

At times Blade thought he saw a faint gold-tinged shimmering along the top of the wall, like waves of heat in the air over a hot road. Twice he thought he saw the sunlight reflected from a large surface of brightly polished metal: Once he could have sworn the metal surface was moving along the top of the wall, at least when he first saw it. When he looked again, it had stopped. When he looked a third time, it had vanished.

The mystery of the wall grew each time Blade looked at it. Certainly it would be the next thing he'd study in this Dimension, after he'd rescued Twana and returned her to Hores.

Or he might have to study the wall even before that. If he and Twana didn't get clean away, the wall offered a possible escape route. If the trees and vines grew on one side of the wall to provide a way up, they probably grew on the other side to provide a way down. The soldiers might be able to climb up after him, but they could hardly get their mounts over the wall. Blade was quite certain he could keep ahead of them on foot.