Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  The ground shook beneath their feet, and not just with the footfalls of Edda, to which they had grown accustomed. Because of the nature of Weaver’s narration, more than a few of them were predisposed to interpret it as the approach of something really bad. Mab flinched and fluttered. But then a long chortling rumble reached their ears and they understood that they were now close enough to the Evertempest that they could hear its thunder as well as see its lightning. Burr, who had put a second hand on the smoky haft of his weird spear, let go and went back to using it as a walking stick.

  “Get used to that,” Corvus suggested.

  Lyne, once he had got over the brief fright occasioned by the thunderclap, was back on the topic of Weaver’s story. “No wonder the Asking is still such a shithole,” he said.

  “You could almost say god-forsaken,” Mard responded.

  “Gods, plural,” said Querc, with a glance toward Pick. “Remember Pluto ditched out on it too.”

  “We may yet come to wish that Spring had been as careless of these parts,” said Edda. Not in a notably fearful way. More of an observation.

  Prim caught Corvus looking at her. “Yes,” he said, “get ready to kill things.” Burr, Mard, and Lyne each fondled their weapons. Burr had claimed the angel’s sword but did not risk his companions’ eyesight by drawing it even a finger’s breadth from its scabbard. He contented himself with patting its hilt. But Prim knew that Corvus had been talking to her.

  Fern well knew where her cutlass and dagger were to be found, and so kept her arms crossed in front of her. She was eyeing a tree, not far off, that stood dead and black at the top of a rise. Lightning had carved a charred spiral from its top to its roots and blown its bark off.

  “We’re there already, aren’t we?” Fern asked. When no one answered, she glanced at Edda and Weaver and saw that it was true. For the rest of them, she explained: “In the Stormland. Oh, I know it isn’t raining, that the wind is light and that patches of clear sky are to be seen. But that is always how it is when you are in the midst of a wild tempest. It’s not wild all the time. Moments like this one come and go.”

  “We have been in it all day,” Corvus confirmed, “and merely been lucky so far.”

  Lightning flashed behind a veil of cloud. Prim noticed that Mab disappeared altogether; she was a thing of light, who in brighter light was shown to have no solidity whatsoever.

  Weaver had begun flapping her arms as if she too wished to take flight. But she stayed earthbound. She was operating bellows. Air hissed from leaks in the Road Organ’s plumbing. A rosined wheel whirred as it spun up. Weaver opened a valve that conducted air to a low drone pipe, and made a small adjustment to a string that caused the rosin-covered wheel to saw at it and emit another, higher tone that harmonized with the drone. Whether by accident or craft, this was timed so that the peal of thunder rolled in just a moment later, creating the impression that Weaver was making use of the Evertempest as a percussion instrument. She began to sing in the somewhat outlandish haunting tonalities that Prim associated with the seagoing bards of the northern Bits.

  O’er the high fells of the Knot-lands she strayed

  In search of the home that her lover had made

  Though battered by thunder and lashed by the rain

  Lured on by the hope she might see him again.

  “Egdod, my only, first god of the Land,

  Fly to me, darling, reach for my hand,

  Roam with me, lover, o’er the hills that you made,

  Where forests I’ve planted and green meadows laid.”

  Birds and bees were her family, wild lands her home,

  And so aimlessly, over the Land she had roamed,

  For thousands of Falls; but lately she’d learned

  That her dear one, long lost, to the Land had returned.

  “Lord of the Firmament, answer my call!

  Heal the sundering rift of the Fall!

  Together we’ll bide in this world of our making,

  All cares of the Palace and strangers forsaking.”

  Southward across the Bewilderment strode,

  Its riddles to her as plain as a road.

  Ravening beasts came friendly and meek

  To sniff at Spring’s hand and to lick at her cheek.

  As nothing to her was the rage of the storm.

  Much as she’d rather be cozy and warm,

  She knew that ahead of her, deep in the Knot,

  Was a place she’d once visited, never forgot,

  And doubtless be welcome in: Egdod’s retreat,

  Where soon enough she could repair, drink, and eat.

  Hearth to dry out her hair and to warm up her face,

  Then a long night wrapped up in her lover’s embrace.

  Thus the fond fancy that beckoned Spring on,

  Blind to the traces of those who had gone

  Earlier there, in vast force arrayed,

  The Knot mutilated, the Fastness remade.

  The path shifted beneath her, the Precipice yawned,

  But was nothing to Spring, who pressed quicker on.

  Came at last to where roots grew together

  Of mountain-chains, ancient and scarred by the weather.

  Whence a lightning-flash brighter than day

  Lit up a vista that to Spring’s dismay

  Was not what she’d hoped for. A fell prison

  In place of the Fastness had risen.

  Like a proud warrior, who, taken in fight,

  Swarmed under by foes and reduced to the plight

  Of a captive, with collar and chain,

  His courage and beauty made perfectly vain,

  The Fastness of Egdod, bright ornament there

  In the deeps of the Knot and the turbulent air

  Had been ruined. Not by breaking it down,

  But despoiling its nature, lashing it round

  With crude shackles. Bright airy Towers

  Now lidded with iron, ’neath which gardens of flowers

  Spring had once put there to make a fair park

  Must be dead, brown petals, seeking light, finding dark.

  Heavy upon the grim prison’s front gate

  Sign of El’s victory and seal ’pon the fate

  Of him captive, depended a lock

  There to stay. There to mock

  Any who came to this pass armed with hope.

  There to mock Spring, if she thought she could open

  That door. In old times El’s captive, when Adam and Eve

  Were growing inside her, then suffered to leave

  Without her two children, Spring understood better

  Than anyone how strict were those fetters.

  How fell the enchantments such that only one key,

  Precious trophy of El, could ever set Egdod free.

  Horror drove Spring from that place once so fair,

  Now so abominable. Sparks pervaded her hair

  As she recklessly fled, borne on storm’s wings,

  Her only thought vengeance against the bright King

  And to peel from the Usurper’s dead hand

  The key that would set Egdod free in the land.

  Halfway down, though, Spring encountered a bard

  The Autochthons had sent off riding toward

  Parts of the Land where descendants of Eve

  Therefore of Spring herself, given leave

  To exist round the Land’s wild rim,

  Egdod remembered, still hoped for him

  One day to return, the Fall to undo,

  El to throw down, rulership true

  To establish, peace with all folk

  If they wanted it, once free from El’s yoke.

  The grim charge of this minstrel being to spread

  In such reaches the news that, though he was not dead,

  Egdod might just as well be. News she told first

  To Spring, when, telling the tale, she saved worst

  For last: that Lord El in his spite

  Had hurle
d the one key down into the night

  Deep and eternal of chaos, from which fate

  Naught returned. Spring was too late.

  Too feeble for Spring’s grief were tears.

  She went mad, and stayed mad for years.

  Raged over the Knot-lands and country around,

  To pinnacles lofty and chasms profound.

  Spurned likewise that body in which she had dwelled

  And roamed everywhere. It would never be held

  In the arms of her lover, so could not please

  Her, hadn’t in it her anguish to ease.

  Shaped herself after, came one with the Storm,

  Whose energies can’t be confined to one form,

  But rampantly lash out and whirl and stray

  As they burgeon and propagate every which way.

  When air, Spring was lightning, making night into day

  As her bright tendrils out from her aura would stray.

  When water, a cataract, sundering hills

  And emptying rivers that Pluto had filled.

  When earth, Spring was adamant, throwing up walls

  Traps and hazards, El’s troops to appall.

  When fire, a forge, smelting stones into steel

  To arm vengeant legions that in time she’d reveal.

  For the greatest by far of all of Spring’s powers

  Was to make life: not just birds, bees, and flowers,

  But as well dreadful beasts armed with talon and horn

  Who, when they mated, could make more to be born

  And so on and so forth: which explained why El hated

  Her, and all of her progeny, and never abated

  His strife against Adam and Eve, and all of the Sprung

  In so many battles of which stories are sung.

  The task that Spring set herself, mad though she was,

  Was to retake the Land and kill El. And because

  El had warriors, she needed ones stronger,

  More vicious, more swift, standing tall, marching longer.

  And so in the depths of the wilderness fort

  Spring set to work making beasts of a sort

  So terrible . . .

  “Hang on,” said Lyne. “Have you, Weaver, given any consideration to the effect that you are having on morale?”

  “It’s okay,” said Weaver. “Eve shows up. Calms Spring down before things go too far. You’ll see.” And she drew breath to continue the stanza, but then she was interrupted again, this time by Pick.

  “Are you that bard, Weaver?” he asked. “The one who encountered Spring in the wilderness and gave her the news that drove her mad?”

  “I believe so,” said Weaver, and looked to Edda, who nodded to confirm it. “Since then I have passed on several times, and in my mind the distinction is not always perfectly clear between what I saw with my own eyes and what I later heard of from other bards. But the Madness of Spring I know well. For it is a rare song in which the storyteller is part of the story.”

  A few minutes later, Weaver was struck by a lightning bolt and vaporized. The surviving members of the party scarce had time to become shocked by this turn of events before the sky turned nearly black. At first some of them looked to Fern, as one who had survived a lot of strange weather, but she was too fascinated by what was going on in the sky to be of much use. Corvus was busy changing himself into human form, maybe reckoning wings and feathers would only get torn off by whatever was going to occur next. Mab seemed unconcerned; Prim had a clue as to why, which was that she might not have a body at all. But she was in some form of communication with Edda that no one else was privy to. Edda thus became the leader of the Quest, at least for now. She conducted them down a slope that they normally might not have descended in such haste. A knuckle of bedrock protruded from the soil; they barely glimpsed it before a plank of wind struck them from behind and they all fell down, went blind, and became thoroughly drenched in a few moments’ time. Completely unaffected were Edda and Mab. The latter showed the way while Edda helped the others into a niche beneath that outcropping of stone. This afforded but a little shelter, however it grew larger as Pick sculpted it and the others dug into the earth and flung it out to be snatched from the air and sluiced away by the rain.

  By the time they had thereby gained some small measure of comfort and begun to feel a bit of satisfaction, the storm abated—not in the sense of slowly dying away. It just stopped, and the sky turned green. Not a muddy pea-soup green but the green of thick moss on a wet rock when a beam of sunlight strikes it. This was extraordinarily beautiful, but peculiar enough that it did not make anyone especially keen on venturing out from cover. Which was good, because when their ears adjusted—which took a little while because of the recent detonation, at close range, of Weaver—they heard something that sounded very dangerous and large.

  “What is that crackling?” Querc shouted. She referred to an element of the sound that put them in mind of a pig chewing up dry acorns.

  “Tree trunks snapping,” Edda said. Then, noting the effect on the others’ faces: “Oh, it is much too big to be a Vortex Wraith. This is just a tornado.”

  In a way, though, this set them at ease, since if all of those snapping noises really were tree trunks, then the thing snapping them had to be terrifically enormous and hence far away.

  The storm later hit one more time, as bad as the first, with an aftershock following that. Finding no lack of downed tree branches they kindled a large fire—really more of a wall of flame—just downslope of the shelter rock, and dried things out. No one was feeling proud of the distance they had covered from last night’s camp, but it was clear that they were done for the day; even if the storm had not occurred, a decent respect for the memory of their bard would have dictated a stop. As Corvus pointed out, after changing back into a giant talking raven, they needed to get used to a new set of hazards. Angels were not going to come here. Egdod himself had made the Evertempest to prevent winged souls from pestering him, and according to legend only he and Freewander could traverse these skies. Autochthons and Beedles were unlikely to pursue them into a wilderness that mad Spring had populated with creatures whose purpose was to kill Autochthons and Beedles. So the Quest could move in the open, and they could light all the huge fires they pleased, and fear other things.

  “Could someone please say more about the Lightning Bears?” Querc pleaded, as it got dark—not because of a storm but because the sun went down—and the fire was raked into a more compact shape and dried clothes repacked. “Because they were mentioned in passing the other day. I know nothing of them but the name causes me a certain amount of trepidation.” To judge from the look on her face, she was forcing herself to understate, as much as she could, the force of her emotions on this topic. Prim, who sometimes found Querc annoying, and who was frankly jealous of the intimacy the girl shared with Lyne, suddenly felt empathy for her. In Querc’s mind, the Quest might have been done and dusted when they had performed the prodigious feat of descending into a fault in one part of the Land and popping out of a cave somewhere else to watch a giantess kill an angel. And really, what sane soul wouldn’t be satisfied, after all of that, with going home and living a quiet life?

  No one had really explained anything about the remainder of the Quest, to which the epic proceedings heretofore were, as she was now seeing, just minor preliminaries.

  “Bears get bigger and lighter in color as you go to colder places,” Corvus said, as if speaking to a child. “In the far north they are white, and really huge. In the mountains of the Knot they are made out of lightning, and correspondingly huger. We will come nowhere near any Lightning Bears. They live on the glaciated heights where the Shifting Path leads—for some definition of ‘leads’—to the Precipice. We are going to avoid all of that thanks to your boss and mentor.”

  Mab hurled herself at Corvus, passed all the way through his head, and came out the other side. En route she must have inflicted some punishment, for “And Mab” Corvus ad
ded in haste.

  “How about the Vortex Wraiths?” Querc asked. “Are we going to avoid them as well? And what the hell are they?”

  Edda’s fall of white hair shifted in the firelight as she turned her unfathomable eyes on the young scribe. Prim had learned the knack of not gazing directly on Edda unless she had the time and the desire to get lost in what she saw. She knew that Edda’s hair right now was a mountain waterfall lit by the orange rays of a stormy dawn. All well and good, but not to the point at this particular moment. “An attempt that Spring made, while she was completely out of her mind, to imbue parts of the Evertempest with some level of intelligence by combining them with souls,” Edda explained. “It didn’t work. It’s like combining oil and water—the two always separate before long.”

  “But are they still around? Thousands of years later?”

  “The souls who became involved in this experiment of Spring’s were changed by it. It turns out that they rather enjoyed being incarnated as disturbances of the wind. That is the only form they are desirous of having—even if they can only have it for a few minutes at a time. So they haunt the Stormland, formless and very nearly invisible, and they wait.”

  “For what?” Querc asked. “Victims? Those must come along rarely.”

  “Opportunities to take forms,” said Edda. “Typically when a great whirlwind descends out of the Evertempest and they can draw strength from it.”

  “So there might be some around now? Because that just happened, did it not?”

  “Yes,” said Edda, “but there aren’t. Not this time. We’d know.”

  “What would you suggest we do,” Mard inquired, “should a Vortex Wraith come along on a future occasion?”

  “Lie flat and cover your head. I’ll take care of it,” said Edda.

  “Can anything kill you, Edda? Are you afraid of anything?” Querc asked. It seemed that Edda’s matter-of-fact answers were calming her down.