Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  El resolved to journey there afoot, and rediscovered from of old the Shifting Path, which led him to the Broken Bridge. This had been built at the end of the First Age when the minions of El had gone to that place in great numbers to build a wall around the Fastness. Since then the wall had fallen into disrepair and the middle span of the bridge had been struck down into the chasm. El crossed over, and stood before the Fastness, and in his pride fancied that he would tear it down and altogether reduce it to chaos. He summoned then an army of angels. They changed themselves into the form of wingless souls and marched upon the Knot following the convolutions of the Shifting Path until at last they too stood before the very gates of the Fastness.

  It was there that El at last found a limit to his power. He was not able to tear down the Fastness as he had hoped, for situated as it was in the heart of the Land where the four mountain ranges were tied together, it bore the same relation to the very fabric of the Land as a keystone to an arch; to destroy it, even if such a thing were within his power, would be to unmake the Land itself, to break it asunder into chaos and make all of its souls homeless.

  But there was one thing El could do that would rid him of Egdod once and for all, and that was to lock Egdod inside. So El made a great forge out of a volcano that stood not far away, and there caused prodigious amounts of iron to be brought together from all parts of the Land by armies of Beedles. He rebuilt the bridge so that it could be reached from the north. He summoned hill-giants to serve as his smiths and made for them a stone anvil by cutting down a mountain and flattening its stump. On it, the giants forged bands and chains of iron. The bands were as thick as roads and the chain links as big as houses. These they wrapped and bent about the Fastness. The windows they covered with iron plates and the doors with slabs of stone. Over its top they fashioned an iron dome of great curved plates joined together with rivets as thick as tree trunks. El in the meantime was fashioning a lock to fit in the hasp that joined all of the bands and chains together. When every exit—even drains and sewer holes—had been sealed, he locked it up, imprisoning Egdod there forever. El withdrew, and broke the bridge, and dropped its rubble into the Chasm. Then to his Palace El returned. Egdod had never since been seen abroad in the Land.

  Weaver trailed her fingers across the strings of the harp and let its tone slowly fade away. The song, it seemed, was at an end.

  Lyne was ready for it. “Hang on,” he said, “you can’t just stop there and not say what El did with the key.”

  “On his way out, after breaking the bridge, El flung the key in after it,” Weaver returned.

  “That seems like an incredibly careless way to treat the one object capable of releasing his most feared enemy from his imprisonment,” Lyne pointed out.

  Weaver wasn’t having it. As she knew perfectly well, Lyne had heard versions of this story many times during his young life and was only feigning surprise. “The Chasm is a crack in the world. It has no bottom. The key tumbled into chaos and was unmade. It ceased to exist.”

  “Still, the sheer carelessness of it—” Lyne sputtered.

  “The key was a piece of solid iron the size of an oak a hundred years old,” Weaver said. “Taking such a thing to the top of the Pinnacle would have been a stupefying feat unto itself, and all to no purpose. He destroyed it.”

  “Locks can be picked!”

  “Not this one. El saw to that.”

  “You’ll know,” Corvus announced, “that across the water, less than a day’s sailing, lies East Cloven. Now, many of its people never set foot outside of its wolf walls, but those who do are walking right into the Bewilderment.”

  The mere utterance of this word caused Mard and Lyne to make that little bow in the general direction of the center of the Land: an invocation of El, just in case El happened to be listening and cared about them.

  The term normally used, in polite company, for the region that lay inland of East Cloven, south of the Backhaul and north of the mountains, was the Lake Land, and so this was what everyone had been calling it up to this point. “The Bewilderment” referred to exactly the same place. But it was generally used only in old poetry of a grim temper, or when trying to scare children, or to dissuade loved ones from going to any part of it other than its outermost fringes. If that was their next destination, then, in Prim’s opinion, Corvus might have done well to avoid using that term for it.

  “A pretty place in some ways,” Corvus went on, “but a labyrinth of waterways all hooked up to one another in some pattern not even Pluto could sort out. As a giant talking raven I am in possession of certain advantages, but if I could not fly, I would never venture into it without a knowledgeable guide. Ferhuul here is one such.”

  “Thank you for going to the trouble of crossing the Shiver, Ferhuul,” said Brindle. “I daresay you could have saved yourself the trouble and met us in East Cloven tomorrow!”

  Ferhuul acknowledged Brindle’s courtesy with a nod, but then glanced away.

  “Not all of you will be crossing over, exactly,” Corvus announced. “At least, not tomorrow. So this was the only way to get everyone together for a few moments.”

  Prim could tell that Brindle was angered by this, but he bridled his temper. “Perhaps you might tell us a little more of what you are proposing, then. Since I was under the impression that our quest was taking us over to the mainland.”

  “That much is true,” said Corvus, “but there is one other member of the quest whose services, I am pretty sure, we are going to require. He’ll need to be fetched from south of here. An easy enough voyage by sea. But it makes no sense for all of us to go.”

  Weaver, who hated being on the boat, heaved a great sigh of appreciation. Burr too seemed relieved to hear it; there was little use for him on the water, and he became intolerably restless. “Perhaps on land I could serve some purpose other than ballast,” said Edda.

  “Your thinking aligns with mine,” said Corvus. “Our absent hosts own a ship, a cargo carrier much bigger than the boat of Robst, onto which you could discreetly embark without drawing much notice or arousing the superstitions of the crew. Weaver, Burr, and Ferhuul can sail over with you, and once you are on dry land you can begin journeying east—Ferhuul is in command of the specifics—and get a head start on certain aspects of the Quest. Acquiring legendary weapons. Delving into cryptic archives. Meanwhile, the rest of us can board Firkin, if Robst is willing, and fetch the chap from down south.”

  Prim was somewhat crestfallen to learn that she would not be journeying directly to the mainland (to say nothing of acquiring legendary weapons and delving into cryptic archives!) and so was a few moments putting her feelings in check.

  “A minute ago you said ‘south of here’ and now it’s ‘down south,’ which to me sounds farther,” Brindle pointed out. “In plain language, just where is this person?”

  “Well, it’s impossible to be sure,” said Corvus, “but at last report he was pursuing a line of investigation that only makes sense if he is hanging around along the brink of the Newest Shiver.”

  Brindle could scarcely believe it. “But that runs across the Last Bit!”

  “Yes,” said Corvus with a nervous sideways hop.

  “That is very nearly as far south as Toravithranax!” Prim exclaimed. But whereas Brindle might have said the same words in a stormy tone of voice, Prim couldn’t help sounding rather pleased.

  “Yes,” Corvus allowed, “and really it will be simplest if we just tell Robst that that’s where we are going. I’ll mention the side trip to the Last Bit once we are under way.”

  “Well, if we’re to sail right under the towers of Secondel . . . ,” Brindle began, employing a common abbreviation of “Secondeltown.”

  “No choice,” put in Lyne, “in that small of a boat.”

  “. . . then we had better make other arrangements for Edda and Burr!” Brindle concluded.

  Prim didn’t entirely follow, but it seemed reasonable to guess that it might have something to do with the detail
that had come up the other evening about Burr’s having terminated one of his past lives by getting into some kind of altercation with an angel. That was the sort of activity that could, among the El-fearing souls of Secondel, certainly put a dent in one’s reputation.

  Prim had noticed that Edda slept rarely, if at all. She was up at all hours with night owls like Brindle, and yet no matter how early Prim got out of bed, Edda was always awake and engaged in some sort of project. That night, Brindle broke form and went to bed early enough that his breathing kept Prim awake, and so she got up and went to the house’s front room, on its ground floor, where they had piled the things they had carried with them up from the boat. Among those was the tube containing the maps. Prim had a thought that she might unroll the big one—her favorite—and refresh her memory. But as she descended the stairs she saw lantern light flickering on the wall, and when she came round the corner into the front room she found Edda seated cross-legged on the floor with the big map spread out on her lap. It had suffered some damage from moisture. The dyes had dissolved into stains and some of the stitched-on bits had been ruined. Prim’s instinct would have been to make such small repairs as she might, in the hopes of preserving what information still remained. But Edda, not one for half measures, had simply pulled out all the damaged parts, stripping the map down to bare animal hide, and begun to redo them. The old needle holes in the leather, the stains from the dyes, the pattern of faded and unfaded hide, presumably gave her some reminders as to where the rivers were supposed to flow, where cities and mountains were thought to exist, and so on. But as Prim padded over to watch the darting of Edda’s needle, she saw that the giantess was not overly concerned with precisely copying the story that the map had formerly told.

  Prim found that shocking in a way, since she had grown up staring at this map, and had always believed it to be a true and correct depiction of the Land. So at first she doubted her own senses, and wondered if this was a trick of the light, or even if she was really still asleep and merely dreaming all of this. But stepping in closer and bending down to watch, she saw beyond doubt that Edda was blithely and confidently altering the courses of rivers and the coastlines of Bits, moving a city to the opposite side of a river, changing deserts to forests. And yet this was not done carelessly. Had such changes been wrought by anyone else, Prim would have felt outrage, but as it was she could only assume that Edda knew better than whoever had originally made the map and that it was better now than it had been. In a half-asleep way she even fancied for a few moments that Edda might be working a kind of magic here and that the people who lived in that city would wake up tomorrow morning astonished to find that the entire thing had been translated across the river while they slept.

  The faded and frayed threads Edda had torn out were strewn about on the floor: coarse tufts of weakly colored fiber such as one might use to stuff a pillow. In her needle was a filament so fine that Prim had to drop to her knees and bend close in order to see it; but when she did, it was the color of a new blade of grass when the sun first comes out from behind the clouds after a week of spring rain. Edda was using it to correct a sliver of map that had formerly been depicted as the edge of a desert. Now she was making it into a forest by using needle and thread to fashion a lot of clever little knots that looked the way trees must have looked to Corvus when he was soaring high above. The movements of her needle were deliberate, unhurried. Prim, no stranger to embroidery, winced a little whenever Edda’s needle plunged into the map, for it was as fine as the green thread and it seemed impossible to shove it through the tough ancient hide without breaking it. But it slipped through as if Edda were sewing in burlap. The smoothness with which the giantess worked was hypnotic to Prim, who passed into a state that somehow combined the most delicious alertness with a lack of moment-to-moment awareness akin to sleep. Time passed at once quickly and slowly. The tying of an individual tree knot, or a series of running stitches marking the course of a river’s tributary in bright blue silk, was carried out in carefully considered steps, and yet when Prim tore her gaze away from the detailed operation of the needle and rocked back to gaze at the entire map, she saw that a vast territory had been so depicted. And yet the sun had not yet begun to lighten the sky, and the lanterns had not consumed much oil.

  Edda seemed to be working her way around the map according to whatever whim took her at the moment. She had begun with some corrections to the network of Shivers through which they would have to sail in order to get past Secondel, but then she had jumped down to the Last Bit and done some work with the silvery-blue silk that she favored for drawing the slender arms of the sea where they reached between islands; it was the color of cresting waves and so it warned mariners that here was surf over shallows and stones. Thence she had jumped over to the mainland and brightened the city of Toravithranax with many fine stitches in all colors, then continued eastward across the Land, running generally parallel to, and south of, the long feature known as the Hive-Way. Though Prim had never seen it, she had been told that it was made of the same stuff as the great Hive that buttressed the tall spire upon which El kept his Palace. In the middle of the Land, the Hive-Way fattened to an elongated lozenge enclosing the spire and the Palace, but east and west of there it was as slender as needle and yarn could make it. If one thought of the Hive-Way as a road, then it connected the Land’s west coast, at Secondel, to its east coast at Far Teem and North Teem, passing round the Palace in the middle. If one thought of it as a barrier, however, it cut the Land in two, between a north and a south half that were roughly equal in area. In order to get round it, one had to travel by sea—or, if one were Corvus, simply to fly over it.

  Prim yawned, and all of a sudden had it in mind that she’d been up with Edda for a long time. She had been assisting the giantess by fetching lengths of colored silk, as requested, from her sewing kit, which was small enough to go in a pocket and yet seemed to contain no end of threads and needles. Threading such fine needles ought to have been nearly impossible in such dim light, but Prim had found that if she gazed fixedly upon the eye of one of Edda’s needles, it would seem to open up until it was the size of a doorway.

  “Do you ever sleep?” Prim asked.

  “I can sleep if I choose,” said Edda, “but if I don’t, it is fine.”

  “Why is that, I wonder?” Prim asked.

  “You see much in the day that needs to be sorted through, picked over, weeded, made sense of. That happens while you sleep. When you wake up, you remember what was important and you have it all sorted. For me, these things happen in the moment. And I have less need than you of forgetting.”

  “Does that mean you remember more?”

  “I am constituted differently from you. There is simply more to me,” said the giantess.

  Feeling that the conversation had gone into wild territory, Prim decided to change the subject. “When I first came down here,” she said, “I guessed you were only mending the damaged parts of the map. But you have added much.”

  “Where you are going, Primula,” Edda answered, “details matter.”

  Prim bent closer to look at the web of Shivers in the vicinity of Secondel. “Lyne said that because our boat is small we shall have no choice but to sail right past Secondel. What did he mean by that?”

  “As you can see there are only two ways south,” said Edda. “One must either go straight down the main channel of the First Shiver—which is well protected from the sea, and safe for even the smallest craft—or else swing wide around the big island of Thunkmarch, which because of its situation will bring you straight out into the open water here. Rounding this cape is perilous—wind and waves will fling you against a lee shore unless you sail much farther out into the ocean than is wise for a craft as small as Firkin.”

  Prim nodded. Edda was referring to features of the map that were small and easily overlooked until she drew attention to them and supplied these explanations, but then Prim could visualize the surf hammering the rocky southwest cape of Thunk
march as if she were there atop the cliff looking down at it.

  “Well, I shall hope we slip past Secondel without incident, then,” said Prim, turning her attention to the safer inland route. “I look forward to seeing it; but part of me wishes I could simply cross over to East Cloven with you tomorrow.”

  “Today,” Brindle corrected her.

  Prim looked up to see him standing in the doorway, framed in pink dawn light. “Have you stayed up all night?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Prim, suddenly feeling shy, “but I shall sleep on the boat.”

  Edda set her needles and silks aside and began to roll up the map, beginning at its eastern limit and working west. Prim understood that this was to a purpose; if they wished to consult it later for information about the western part, where the Bits and Shivers lay, they would only have to unroll the first part of it. Considerable time might pass before Prim could see the whole thing again, so she let her eye roam curiously over the parts that were about to fall under Edda’s roll, enjoying the beauty of her handiwork. By and large the old parts of the map that had not been damaged and not been repaired—the parts so familiar to Prim—now seemed as if she were looking at them through a fogged windowpane, from which Edda had wiped away the mist in the areas she had mended. But one region, lying well to the north of the Hive and the Palace, but south of the Bewilderment (as it was frankly labeled here, this being a very old map), stood out from all the others for being very nearly blank. “Why is nothing on the map there?” Prim asked.