Hardan laughed. The rift was walled with heaps of rocky debris, boulders brought down from the poles in glacial eras and sections of splintered igneous rock. He put his arm and shoulder against them and heaved. He sang lustily as he worked.
One after another they fell, the smaller ones entering the crevice and bounding downward to rip the climbing Drylanders from their hold; the others clogging forever the way from below. He rolled a last rounded boulder of green-shot basaltic origin and turned, hand at his sword.
Ylda was standing there, his vurth-padded garment's ugliness in her extended hands. She smiled, her eyes warm in the shadow of her wide-rimmed quilted headgear of vurth. Suddenly Hardan was aware of the growing intensity of the morning sunlight parching his down-covered flesh. In his excitement he had forgotten the blistering sun.
He slipped quickly into the coverall-like covering, its dampness doubly welcome after his exposure to the deadly atmosphere of the Drylands, and went with her to the rim of the narrow flat-roofed ridge where they had climbed.
"We can't go back, Ylda," he told her, his hand pointing out the way they had come up across the arid lands from the Isr River.
Ylda's eyes swung northward and then on around to the south again. She shuddered and Hardan sensed her terror of this molten naked hell of tortured rock and waterless slope that hemmed them in.
"We'll follow this stream up to its source," he went on after a moment, "and then find another that flows westward toward the Gron or the Aba. Nothing to it."
The girl's lips twisted in a tremulous attempt at a smile.
"Hardan," she said, "before you start back with me I must tell you why I was held captive by the rebelling sarifs."
Hardan shook his head, his mind raging. There could be only one reason for her to be in chains. Nitka Porn had wanted her and until she would consent to be his woman she might escape. That could be the only truth, he thought, and he wanted to hear nothing about it.