Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  Lyne had exposed the two fragments of adamant that Burr had earlier cut off and whittled into a makeshift container. These were clapped together, but when Lyne carefully shifted the top one, they could all see chaos within. “Scooped it up like water into a ladle,” he said. After he had handed the sample to Querc, Prim went to him and Fern—who seemed great friends now that they had been on an adventure together—and asked, “Did you see, or hear or feel, anything moving—perhaps just beginning to move—in the depths of the Chasm?”

  “You’ve seen chaos,” Lyne answered. “When is it ever not moving?”

  “I mean not its usual fluctuation but something coherent and purposeful. With a mind,” Prim explained.

  “No,” Lyne said, and his sincerity was plain.

  Prim’s gaze shifted to Fern. “Nothing small,” she said. “What I am asking about would be like the thing that took your family in the southern ocean.”

  Fern froze up in the way Prim had sometimes seen men do when they were getting ready to lose their temper. But no such outburst came. “I understand,” she said, after swallowing a bite of food. “You’re saying it might be too big to notice.”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  Fern was now gazing off at nothing in particular. Lyne, either bored or uneasy, ambled off toward Mard and Querc. Edda by this point had boosted them to the top of what had been the Cube and was gradually becoming more of an irregular obelisk as Burr cut away at it.

  “I understand the nature of your question,” Fern said. But that was all she said for now.

  Something in chaos was infectious and could break down adamant or other solid forms. Normally adamant was proof against it. That was the whole point. It was why Egdod had brought it into being: so that he could make something permanent in the ocean of chaos. But Egdod had done so when he had been a formless swirl of aura. What he had done could be undone. Chaos could infect adamant, or anything solid, when directed to that purpose by the will of a soul. If that soul were embodied in a solid form, it would suffer the same fate even as it was performing the work. This was why Pick had used his aura, not his hands or any physical tool, when going about such tasks.

  Destroying was a thousand times easier than building up. For Mard the neophyte to convert chaos to adamant—to say nothing of more complex things—would not have been possible. But melting adamant into chaos was a simple trick easily learned.

  And so what transpired over the next few hours was that Mard and Querc, working together with her knowledge and his aura, and beginning with the sample that Fern and Lyne had fetched to them, melted away the adamant. Mab told them which parts of it to remove. It became chaos and dissipated like smoke, and what was left of the Cube seemed to dissolve like a chunk of ice left in the sun.

  What began to emerge from it was a thing made out of iron. The first part to be exposed was a sort of handle, ornately carved with symbols that put Prim in mind of the decorations on the Temple complex of Elkirk. Below that for some distance was nothing but a shaft, thick as Burr’s thigh, oriented vertically within the Cube. Below a certain level this broadened and ramified into an extraordinarily complex tracery, the very look of which made them all glad that Burr’s sword had not come anywhere near it. Even the most talented sculptors of the faraway Teemings, working with their finest chisels, could not have freed this thing from the stone in which it had been embedded without damaging its finer convolutions, some of which were no bigger than hairs.

  “It is plainly enough a key,” Edda said to Corvus, as the work proceeded. “Which means it must purport to be the key. You brought me here because only I can carry something that heavy. This all makes sense, to a point. But it is perfectly well-known to all learned persons that El destroyed the key to the Fastness. As Lyne was pointing out the other day, for El to have done otherwise would have been utmost folly. The merest glance at the complexity of that object makes it obvious that no copy or counterfeit is possible. So there is something to this whole matter that reaches beyond my understanding. I who was born in Camp to Eve, and saw Cairn kill Messenger of El, and drank the angel’s stuff into my form, and have dwelled in the Land ever since and been all over it, have no ken of what goes on here.”

  “I myself am somewhat amazed, and cannot give sure answers,” said Corvus. “But I have known that Cube and key were here for longer than you, and so I have had a little more time to ponder such questions. Suppose that the other plane of existence is real, and that it was preexisting. Which is to say that the Land was born out of it, much as you were born out of Eve. It follows that in that other plane are powers or faculties of creation that somehow account for the whole story of the Land’s coming into being, and underlie every aspect of what we take to be real. Moreover that plane is populated by souls who know of us and our doings, and who from time to time may for reasons we cannot even speculate on choose to effect changes to the Land—but to do so without violating what makes the Land coherent. If you accept those premises, can you not accept that an object that once existed in the Land, having been crafted to a purpose by El, and used and then utterly destroyed by El, might be brought into existence again? Not by any craft of any soul who dwells here, but by one on the other plane of existence, wielding powers the nature of which we cannot begin to understand? The only way that I can explain the existence of this key is to suppose that all of those things are the case. And moreover that my purpose in crossing over from that plane into this one is to see that key being turned in the lock on the Fastness.”

  At a certain point the key simply toppled over, forcing Mard and Querc to jump out of the way. It was entirely free now of the matrix of rock in which it had been embedded. Some of its crannies were still plugged up with adamant, but Mard, having got the hang of this, could melt that away easily enough. Edda walked to it, bent down, hooked both arms under the shaft of the key, and tried to move it in an exploratory way, getting a sense of its balance. At Mard’s request she rolled it over to expose a part of it that needed his attention. One by one, though, he polished off those lingering traces. A few clots of adamant clung to the decorative work of the key’s handle, where presumably it wouldn’t make a difference. But the part that was meant to go into the lock seemed perfectly clean. It was the most complicated object any of them had ever seen, like a hundred mazes made out of smaller mazes, wrought in solid iron and brazed together. Encircling the delicate and complicated parts was a protective shroud of thicker metal—this explained why nothing important had been damaged when the key had fallen over. The shroud would have served its purpose perfectly well had it been square or cylindrical in cross-section, but of course it had innumerable grooves and protrusions, clearly meant to go one way, and only one way, into a matching keyhole.

  Mab flew in and out of it for a while, inspecting parts so deep in its convolutions that they could not even be seen by anyone else. She directed Mard where he needed to reach with his aura hand in order to dissolve the last few clinging bits of rock. When she pronounced the work finished, Mard and Querc backed well clear of the thing as Edda stepped forward, bent her knees, got an arm under the key’s shaft, and heaved it up onto her shoulder.

  Then for the first time since meeting the giantess at her home on Calla, Prim saw in her face signs of distress. Edda was feeling what ordinary souls felt when they shouldered a burden so heavy as to raise the fear that their strength was not equal to it. “Let us be on our way, crow,” she said. “In the soles of my feet I sense things moving it would be well for us to avoid.”

  They walked for perhaps an hour. Not because the distance was so great but because Edda needed to plant each foot with deliberation. Sometimes she went the long way round when footing was uncertain.

  The air began to move in ways suggesting that they were leaving behind the sheltered convolutions of the Knot and approaching a more open area. All of them, seeing how Edda labored under her burden, felt a natural impulse to go to her and lend a hand, as anyone would if they saw their mother bent u
nder the weight of a log, and in danger of losing her footing. But those considerate feelings were useless here; none of them had strength to help the giantess, and by going to her they could only get in her way and risk grave injury. So instead they scampered ahead, scouting for shortcuts or for places where loose gravel might put her at hazard.

  It was on one of those scouting-ahead runs that Prim surmounted a fold in the bedrock and felt icy wind in her face and saw, revealed all at once below her, the entirety of the Broken Bridge. As well she could see much of the open space on the near side of it, which on maps was called the Anvil Plain. Formerly, according to the most ancient legends, it had been the Front Yard of the Fastness. It was beginning to collect light now from the eastern sky, which had brightened to the point where stars were dissolving into it. Turning her head to the west, she saw the Red Web a hand’s breadth above the horizon, and wondered if the eyes of the Pantheon might be upon her at this moment.

  She could from this perch have drawn an arrow, aimed north, let it fly, and watched it arc down several long moments later at the place where the bridge gripped the bedrock of the Knot. From there it reached far out across the Chasm to the nearer of the two gatehouses. The opposite—which she had seen earlier from another vantage point—resumed on the far side of the break and led to the top of the glacier. This was alive with silent distant lightning, as if the whole fury of the Evertempest had been poured down upon one small target. The light shattered her vision and obliged her to instead look down at closer things. “This way!” she called to those coming up behind her. “But you’ll need to find another path round.” It was out of the question for Edda to climb what she had climbed.

  The Chasm was not a straight ditch; it forked and curved like a canyon. Beyond the near terminus of the Broken Bridge, a branch of it split off and curved aside toward the Knot. Running parallel to that was a road, meandering somewhat, but on the whole cutting south across the Anvil Plain. Its first few paces were exposed to the sky and buried in snow, but beyond that it cut through an old rampart of stones and ducked under the shelter of the mountain range and so ran over bare ground. It was too cold here for any plants to grow. Instead of vegetation the road ran among scraps of iron, slag heaps, unfinished chain links, rusted and broken-down wagons, and mounds of coal next to forges that eons ago had gone cold and dark. For El’s legions clearly had not seen any point in tidying up after themselves when they had completed their great work and retreated across the bridge. Notable was a huge curving plate, roughly triangular but evidently forged as one segment of a dome. This was simply leaning up against a cliff as if some giant had propped it up there to cool off and forgotten about it. Not far beyond it, the road, and the Chasm’s side fork, ran out of view. She had to move sideways a little distance in order to see what gave the Anvil Plain its name: the truncated stump of what had once been a stone crag. El himself had cut it down and flattened its top to make a surface against which his giant smiths could beat out metal. Lying next to it were a hammer and tongs, sized to match.

  She felt a bit of a letdown that she could not actually view the Fastness from right here. But the enormous works and discarded pieces of iron that she could see were proof that it could not be much farther away, once they got to the Anvil Plain.

  She could have scampered down to that in a few moments. Finding a path suitable for Edda might take a little longer. Turning her head she saw Lyne, Mard, Fern, and Querc exploring a possible route under the illumination of Mab. From habit she knew to look for Burr either ahead of or behind the main group—wherever he judged danger to be greatest. Indeed she now picked him out clambering over the rubble wall below, ghostly in predawn sky-light. He would soon reach the bridge. Meanwhile Prim could feel each of Edda’s footfalls as she made her way. She soon would turn right, toward the Fastness, where Burr had gone left toward the bridge.

  But as well she sensed other, deeper disturbances, like the one that had awakened her earlier. Those had first begun when Lyne and Fern had descended to the Chasm and scooped up their sample of chaos. Since then they had come irregularly. But now a series of them came all at once in rapid succession, causing loose stones to skitter down from the slope below her.

  A great being was on the move down there. It could only be one of the wild souls left over from the very beginning of the Land.

  A thing like a grappling hook reached up from below and caught on the bridge just where it was anchored to the rim. A succession of booms ensued, and then the Chasmian—it could only be the Chasmian—got a second hook-hand planted on the cliff edge. Head, then shoulders appeared, and then the whole thing came up out of the deep at once. It must have planted a foot on the bridge’s arch and used that to vault up. First one knee, then the other, came down like thunder on the snowy ground of the Chasm’s rim. It was on all fours. Then it rose up, got its feet under it, and stood.

  Prim had never actually laid eyes on a hill-giant, unless you counted the sleeping one upon whose back the Calladons had, according to legend, constructed their estate. She had read enough books and seen enough depictions to know that the Chasmian was something made after the same general pattern. Perhaps Spring during her madness had rounded up one such who had been enslaved by El and made to do blacksmith’s work. Indeed once the Chasmian had drawn himself up to his full height he stepped over the rampart with a single stride and went on an aimless stroll among the dark forges, and reached down with one of his claws to touch the flat top of the great stone anvil.

  But hill-giants were put together out of ordinary stones. Between those was earth. Soil covered them like flesh when they stopped moving for more than a few falls, and in the soil grew grass and flowers and trees. If the Chasmian had been that kind of hill-giant at the beginning, one could guess that his vegetation had been burned off by the heat of the forge as he toiled for El, or frozen by the cold of the Knot when he was allowed to rest. When El had broken the bridge and abandoned it here, the giant must have been nothing more than boulders mortared together by sand and clay, clothed in ice.

  In that estate Spring would have found him wandering upon the Anvil Plain, alone and without purpose. Since then his boulders had been replaced, one by one, with chunks of adamant shaped to their purposes: long ones in the limbs, clusters of lumps at joints. Instead of earth, what held him together now was chaos, flowing and surging between the stone bones as they moved. Prim thought for some reason of watching Edda knead dough in her kitchen, how her strong hands made the soft stuff surge out from beneath them and escape through the spaces between her fingers. The chaos did something like that as the Chasmian’s adamant skeleton pushed it this way and that. Whenever it seemed it was about to escape and dissipate, it would turn back inward, proving that it was under the power of an animating soul.

  Another thing said of hill-giants was that they didn’t have discernible heads—at least, not the kind that swiveled on necks and had faces on them. But this Chasmian had ordered itself differently. Above the shoulders, a never-ending avalanche of smaller chunks of adamant was turning itself inside out, driven by an inner core of turbulent aura that could only be glimpsed through ephemeral gaps opening and closing between the storm of black stone. Stared at closely, this looked a little like a whorl of dry leaves caught in a pocket of wind, save that the wind was a soul and the leaves were chunks of primordial rock. But if one tore one’s gaze from it—which required some willpower—and looked at it sidelong, in the overall scheme of the Chasmian’s form it answered to the posture and movements of a head.

  Which meant that it could turn this way and that, and look at things. During its first moments on the Anvil Plain, it looked mostly at the ruins of the works where it had once toiled. But then its attention—as well as Prim’s—was drawn to a brilliant light that had exposed itself.

  Burr had drawn his sword.

  The Chasmian saw it, and knew it. Something in the way it moved made it clear that it recognized the weapon; feared it; and hated it. El’s angels must have us
ed such things to drive the Chasmian, as Beedles drove beasts with sticks and whips.

  “Burr, no!” Prim called. She was already on her way down to him. As she descended she cut across the path that Edda was soon to tread with measured steps toward the Fastness. Burr’s plan was clear: he would draw the Chasmian back toward the bridge, distracting its gaze and leaving the way clear for the rest of the party to cut behind it and get to the Fastness.

  “Stay well back, Princess!” Burr shouted to her. Indeed she had slowed as she got nearer to him, for the brilliance of the sword made it difficult for her to see the path ahead, and the footing was difficult. “This is a task for me.”

  “It is a task for me!” Prim insisted. “I see that now. It is why I was brought here.” Shading her eyes with one arm, she looked about for Corvus. Corvus had foreseen all of this. He had known that only Prim could slay the Chasmian. With a word, Corvus could cause Burr to sheathe the sword. But she did not see the giant talking raven anywhere. Only the Chasmian. Its rage had overcome its fear and it was advancing toward Burr with a fixed regard and a steady pace.

  Edda emerged into the open ground of the Anvil Plain, following Lyne, who was showing her the way and kicking loose pebbles out of her path. The Chasmian either did not see her or did not care. Burr ran laterally, brandishing his sword, both movements calculated to draw the giant’s attention away from Edda. Edda looked ancient and bent under her burden but seemed to find it in her now to lengthen her stride a bit and cover ground faster.

  So that was all to the good. Prim went the way Burr was going. She might not have been able to talk Burr out of his mad scheme, but once the Chasmian drew close enough, she could kill it. Provided that she went where it was going. Which was wherever Burr was waving that sword about.

  “It’s working!” she informed Burr, when she thought she had advanced within range of his hearing. “The others are cutting around behind. But you do not have to fight this thing! Run away!”