Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  Moreover these people had crossed the entirety of the Lake Lands from East Cloven to Lost Lake. All that Prim really knew of the Bewilderment was that going there was inadvisable, because many who went in did not come out. Survivors who did straggle out to one of the chilly seaports along the Backhaul spoke not of wild beasts or lawless brigands—though those certainly existed—but of an endless maze of lakes connected to other lakes by flat streams meandering through mushy land where one could neither walk nor paddle. Bewilderment. Fish and game were plentiful, fresh water everywhere, and so a person with a few skills could live there indefinitely—they just couldn’t leave.

  “Most people who come here only wish to get out,” Ferhuul said. “These lot are the only ones I have ever met who wanted to go deeper in, ever deeper, and that has presented challenges I did not come well prepared for.” He cast a look toward Edda, then glanced significantly at the place on the beach at the mouth of the cave where they had beached their canoes. It was out of the question that Edda could set foot in anything so small and frail. She must have walked, finding an overland route that somehow kept abreast of the movements of the canoes—and that had got her to Lost Lake just in time.

  “Did you get any help from Mab?” Prim asked. “She was of great help to us in finding our way.”

  “We only just met her,” Ferhuul said. “She haunts this place.”

  He looked back over his shoulder across Lost Lake. The sun had risen an hour ago and they had taken the risk of kindling this fire. They had done so in the mouth of the cave. This afforded them some shelter as well as giving them a place into which they could retreat should they once again come under attack.

  Fern had recovered the angel’s sword from the bottom of the lake by stripping off her clothes and diving deep for it. It had plunged like a dart and half-embedded itself in the stony bottom. Blinded by its brilliance, she had swum back to the surface with her eyes closed and carefully handed it hilt-first to Mard, who had found its dark scabbard discarded on the ground near the scene of the fight. Thus shrouded, the weapon was now leaning against a boulder nearby. Fern, still shivering, was squatting against the cavern wall near it, wrapped in blankets and drinking from a mug of soup Edda had given her. Absent was the usual Fernish brusqueness, the impatience that sometimes seemed like outright disdain. The passage through chaos, the angel fight, the intervention of sprite and giantess, the spear of smoke, and the sword forged by Thingor: these were the sorts of prodigies she had been fruitlessly questing after since one such had revealed itself in the sea and taken her family from her. She had flirted with twelve kinds of death and found satisfaction.

  “That angel was extraordinarily brave, or reckless, or ill informed,” Edda said. “This is a place of terror to the servants of El.”

  This naturally made Prim’s scalp prickle. “Why?” she asked. She turned to Weaver. “What is to be found in this place that is so dangerous to them?”

  “You,” Weaver said.

  None of the members of the Firkin contingent was in a mood to climb mountains. But after they had rested in the entrance of the cave, slaked their thirst with sweet lake water, and eaten of the provisions that Ferhuul and the others had brought in their canoes, they did venture out onto the beach and climb for a little distance up onto the formation of gray rock from which they had emerged and that formed the abrupt southern shore of Lost Lake. The forest was a mixture of dark evergreens such as they had seen from Firkin while sailing between far northern Bits, and deciduous trees familiar to those who had spent many falls on Calla. The latter were still mostly green but touched with flame in their upper branches. Enough red and orange leaves had already fallen to cover the ground with a patchy smear of color, like paint scraped over bone. The smell of those fallen leaves spoke more powerfully to Prim than any book or song.

  Before their tired muscles and sore joints could put up too much of a fuss, they emerged into an open space near the top of the cliffs above the lake. To the north they had a clear view across Lost Lake and the Bewilderment, which, according to the map, extended all the way to the distant northern rim of the Land. This was pretty enough with its colorful trees sprinkled across rolling hills, and blue water pooling in the bottomlands, but they had already heard enough about it that they did not gaze on it longer than it took to take some pleasure in the prospect. Then they turned their backs on the Bewilderment and looked south.

  For some while it was impossible for them to look at or care about anything other than the storm that, seen from here, constituted most of the southern sky. In that quarter of the world there was no horizon, since the boundary between the sky and the Land was hidden behind gray curtains and skirts of rain, wreathed in mist and bejeweled with silent flashes and twisting whips of lightning. The under-surface of the Evertempest was flat, though here and there, whirling convolutions above resolved into spinning formations below that extended, slowly and inexorably, until they punched into the ground. Those would scour the surface of the Land for a while, rooting around like pigs in the dark, then grow narrow and frail before dissolving. The main body of the storm was a stacked, churning architecture of wind-driven cloud, black and silver, riven with long horizontal bolts of lightning that could not but remind them of the angel’s sword. At its top—which according to legend was of equal height with the Palace of El, hundreds of miles to its south—the storm extended a long sharp horn like that of an anvil. Cloudbursts heavy enough to inundate any city in the Land fell from high shelves of cloud only to be swallowed by lower parts of the storm before they could get within miles of the ground.

  The Calla people, as well as Querc and Fern, had been reading or hearing of this thing their whole lives but had never seen it. So there was nothing to be done for a while but let them drink it in, much as they had earlier sated themselves with lake water. Then, however, they began to lower their gaze to examine the territory ahead.

  If the tangle of mountains that lay beneath the storm were a tree, and the tree had thrown out roots of an ancient gnarled character, and those roots were made of stone, and reached greater or lesser distances from the trunk, then the farthest flung of them all, at least on this northern side, was the one that finally plunged into the ground at the shore of this lake. They were standing on its utmost tendril. It was at least partly hollow. And though Pick had not yet gone to the trouble of coming right out and saying as much, all who had descended into the fault in the Asking, only to emerge here, understood that Pluto had, in the waning years of the First Age, explored these deeps and connected them with roads of chaos so that he might more easily make his way from one part of the Land to another without having to trudge across all of the intervening ground. To follow those roads without going astray and losing oneself in unknown realms was subtle and dangerous, but Pick knew how to find their beginnings and Mab knew how to trace them to safe ends.

  The canoes were laden with goods and victuals that they now unloaded on the shore of the lake. A lot of the cargo consisted of clothing; lacking very much of it, the Firkin contingent simply put that on. The remainder they distributed among packs that they could carry on their backs or suspend from poles that two could carry between them on their shoulders.

  Pick was of a mind to explore the several other cave entrances that could easily be seen from here, but Corvus literally bristled at that suggestion. “It would take forever,” he said. “Mab assures us they do not lead where we wish to go. Now that you know how to find this place you can come back here later, after we have saved the world, and do all of that.”

  “If our purpose is to save the world,” said Ferhuul, “this is the first I have been made aware of it.”

  “Yes,” said Lyne, “you might have mentioned it earlier.”

  “Oh, come on!” said Fern. “It’s perfectly obvious. Has been all along.”

  “Sometimes I must express myself in few words,” said Corvus, “so that these Quest councils don’t go on forever. If ‘save the world’ is objectionable I can exp
and on it. Doing so wouldn’t help. Things are wrongly set up in the Land now, as anyone who has seen what we have lately seen would agree. Even if you can’t quite put your finger on it, I think you’d have to admit it’s not how a proper god would compose a world. It is not going to fix itself. That is probably why I came here from the other plane of existence. Things were set in motion there that it is my purpose to see through here. Stop arguing.”

  “What does seeing them through mean, exactly?” Lyne inquired, in a most polite and agreeable tone, to emphasize that he was not arguing.

  “I don’t know,” Corvus admitted, “but I think we are all going to be glad that Ferhuul had the presence of mind to bring warm dry clothing. Our road runs south into the Stormland.”

  “You’re saying,” said Prim, “that we are going to the Fastness. You want to penetrate the storm and break into the Fastness.”

  “It has just been sitting there since the Fall of the Old Gods,” said Corvus in an almost defensive tone.

  “Just the other day,” Lyne pointed out, “we sat and listened—very patiently, I might add—to a song from Weaver explaining that it’s locked up behind magical chains and such.”

  “Anyway, no one can get anywhere near that thing,” Weaver objected. “The Expedition of Lord Stranath couldn’t even get within sight of it.”

  “According to that one survivor, sure!” Corvus said. “But he turned tail and ran home when the Lightning Bears sprang their ambush. Not even halfway to the Precipice, which according to the Dark Codex is the first vantage point from which it’s possible to even glimpse the inmost convolutions of the Knot.”

  “The Dark Codex blinds any person who reads it,” Weaver scoffed.

  “You have to set it up in a mirror and read it backward,” Edda put in.

  “Oh.”

  “And I’m not exactly a person,” Corvus added. “Look, we have to go there—it is the entire point of the Quest—and we have many advantages compared to Lord Stranath. We will not be tackling the Lightning Bears, and the Vortex Wraiths are overrated.”

  “I’ve never heard of them,” said Weaver. Behind her back, Mard and Lyne exchanged satisfied looks.

  “Then the less said, the better. Coming to the Fastness? Our way lies south, on the surface for now. Abandoning the Quest? There are some perfectly serviceable canoes awaiting you just there.”

  “And the whole Bewilderment to cross,” cracked Lyne to Mard.

  “I can cross it,” Ferhuul pointed out, “as I have just demonstrated. And cross it again is what I am going to do now. Any of you is welcome to come with me.”

  They all looked at him. After a few moments, he shrugged. “The only reason people like Weaver know enough of Lord Stranath to sing songs about him is because one of his company ‘turned tail and ran home’ when that struck him as intelligent. Such a moment has now arrived for me. You are all mad. I have seen all I care to see of angels and such. Farewell, and please look me up in East Cloven if you make it out, and sing your songs.”

  No one else showed interest in the Bewilderment. So once they had helped Ferhuul go on his way, paddling north in the stern of his canoe, they began the journey south. From here all was mountain and storm; but, for now, they knew which way to go.

  53

  When El came in glory and flung Egdod, and the Pantheon, and the old souls loyal to them, into the outer darkness, they kindled red fires on the blackness of the Firmament where they struck it,” said Weaver. “Not wishing that El and all the other souls of the Land should gaze upon their humiliation every night when the Red Web rose in the eastern sky, Egdod drew a veil of smoke and steam across its face. What goes on behind that veil is ever a mystery to us.”

  The campfire had burned down to red coals, glowing clear and sharp in the night. Weaver was attempting to draw a poetic contrast between them and the Red Web, which was putting in an appearance above the eastern horizon just as she said. It was going to be a fleeting appearance, since its arc would soon take it behind the eternal storm looming to the south.

  Querc, Mard, and Lyne were looking back and forth between the embers of the fire and the constellation as if Weaver’s point made all kinds of sense to them, but to Prim the two did not look much different: both were clear and crisp as the lightning bolts that occasionally fractured the thunderheads. She saw no benefit in pointing this out.

  Mard, perhaps remembering their uneasy conversation on the Asking, glanced at her. When she pretended not to notice, he gave her a more searching look. Then a huge bolt illuminated the whole camp for a moment with sharp blue-white light. She looked back at him and he glanced away.

  Querc rose to the bait. “Growing up in the southern desert I heard songs and tales of these parts,” she said, “but many scoffed that they were superstitions of frostbitten northerners.”

  “You are about to walk into one of those superstitions,” said Weaver. “Some call it the Madness of Spring.”

  “I saw the phrase once, in an old book I was copying,” said Querc, “and remembered it because of its strangeness. But that is all I know of it.”

  “Strange indeed,” said Weaver. “I shall say more of it tomorrow, as we are marching into it.”

  “I think we’re already there,” Mard said. “When I was gathering firewood, I’m fairly certain a tree tried to kill me—and a squirrel put him up to it.”

  “Singing that song would wake everyone up,” said Weaver, showing what some members of the Quest might have considered uncharacteristic consideration for those of her traveling companions who were fond of peace and quiet. “Tomorrow. The point is, be careful of anything that is alive.”

  “This is one of those songs that begins right in the middle,” said Weaver the next morning, after they had got under way and found a solid marching rhythm. Or, in the cases of those who didn’t march, settled into a flight pattern apparently meant to scan the path ahead of them while keeping an eye peeled for airborne threats. Corvus was of the view that no force in the Land short of a battalion of angels would dare take them on; but he was nervous anyway, and would be until they got beneath the Evertempest, after which he would be nervous for different reasons.

  At some point between Cloven and Lost Lake, Weaver had modified her kit. During the journey’s first phase, from the Hall of the Calladons to West Cloven, she’d been carrying a couple of flutes and a harp that required so much tuning that it was useless. Those were gone now, and in their place she had an instrument called a Road Organ. Though to refer to it as a single instrument was to understate its ambition, for it comprised several devices that looked to have been crafted in different historical epochs by artisans with clashing views as to what the point was.

  The preparations involved in grappling this thing to Weaver just after breakfast and checking out its various systems had led to a lot of foreboding and dreadful glances between Mard and Lyne. Even Prim, who enjoyed Weaver’s singing, set forth on the day’s journey with a certain amount of trepidation as to the scale and duration of the planned entertainments. But when Weaver began to play some little marching ditties on the Road Organ, Prim thought that they blended so naturally into the mood of the place that it wasn’t at all like enduring a performance.

  They were hiking very slightly uphill, and as they gained altitude, dark evergreens supplanted leafy sorts of trees. The latter were now in the full brilliant color of the fall, just at the point when enough leaves were on the ground to paint it with reds, purples, yellows, and oranges that had not yet faded. Yet enough were still clinging to the trees that the branches did not look bare. Walking all day through such gaudy color would have inured them to it. But as they went on, dark stands of evergreens were more and more frequently interspersed with the deciduous trees, so that when they would top a ridge or traverse round the flank of a hill and suddenly come in view of a deciduous stand, they had it in them to be surprised and delighted all over again by its glory. The leaves called to Prim in a way she did not understand, and she kept picking
individual ones off the ground and gazing at length into the subtle and tiny variegations in their color and the repeating patterns in their veins, shot like branched lightning through the flesh of a cloud. Weaver’s improvisations on the Road Organ were in harmony with this hypnotic condition of mind. To the point where Prim was somewhat discomposed—almost offended—when Weaver began to talk.

  “Now, if you were one of the sorts of souls to whom this was originally sung, you’d already know the first part. Namely that the vast scope of work entailed in converting the Fastness into an ironbound prison for Egdod reverberated all through the Land, as Beedles went here and there to mine in places where Pluto had deemed it good to situate ore, and Autochthons ventured into remote and wild places to recruit hill-giants and make them into blacksmiths, or to round up and enslave great beasts of burden. It didn’t last for long—perhaps three falls—but it touched all parts of the Land. And so at last Spring came to know of it. She did not know at first the nature of the undertaking, but she could see well enough that it was affecting her creations. Trees that she had planted were being toppled to build ore wagons, and beasts she had created with the intention that they should roam free upon the Land were being yoked together under the whips of Beedle teamsters. Starting from a very remote place in the Asking—where she had been trying to create plants and animals more capable of dwelling in that harsh place—she began to make her way in toward the center, following wheel ruts of ore caravans, footprints of migrating giants, carpets of tree stumps.

  “By the time she at last came under the Evertempest, El had finished his work and pitched the key off the Precipice. He and his angels and the Autochthons were already long gone. Beedles were marching away in long columns, headed back to the places whence they had been mustered. Hill-giants, released from bondage, were stomping about aimlessly. Beasts of burden, no longer needed for anything, had simply been turned loose in harsh country where forage was scarce. Spring by then had come to understand that Egdod had returned to the Land, not just once but many times, and had roamed up and down it in diverse guises looking for her to no avail.”