Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  “Look about. We have our backs to the cliff edge. The bridge is broken. What choice is there but to fight it?”

  “You know perfectly well.”

  “Oh, no, Princess! You must not!”

  “Why not, Burr!?”

  “This thing is the only being that has the power to stop him who pursues us!” And Burr—normally a stand-square-to-the-enemy type—took the unusual measure of turning his back on the Chasmian for a moment and pointing with his sword to the opposite side of the gorge.

  “Burr! Look out!” Prim shouted. But instead of taking the time to look, Burr dove sideways and rolled to his feet. In the place where he had been standing a moment earlier, an adamant claw had sunk into the snow and broken the rock. It was the extremity of a writhing snake of stone and aura that reached all the way back to the Chasmian’s shoulder. Both Burr and Prim had assumed the foe to be far out of range; but they now knew it could fling its arms out to a distance many times their apparent length. The claw began to drag backward across the ground, then sprang into the air as its owner retracted it.

  While the Chasmian was reassembling itself, Prim spared a moment to look the way Burr had pointed. The last time she had paid any attention to the top of the glacier, she’d seen nothing but a lightning storm, strangely focused on one place. As if all of the Lightning Bears had come together for a purpose. Now, though, there was nothing to see opposite save an individual soul. He was walking along the path toward the far end of the Broken Bridge. He was barefoot, and lightly dressed for the weather in a white robe. In form he was like an angel, but he did not have wings. Circling high above him, like a crow harrying an eagle, was Corvus.

  So this, it seemed, was the soul who had followed the Quest all the way across the Stormland. Instead of passing through the cave as they had done, he had simply strolled barefoot along the Shifting Path over the glacier. No wonder the Lightning Bears had been so furious. But they had not stopped him.

  Once again the Chasmian lashed out from a distance, forcing Burr to dodge and roll clear of a meteoric claw.

  “Sing of me that I fought this,” he said to Prim as he came to his feet. Then he leaned forward and took off running toward the giant, hoping perhaps that in the time it would take the foe to collect itself he could get close enough to attack its legs. “No!” Prim cried, and took off running on a parallel track.

  The next blow came sooner than expected, but Burr was in a position to dodge cleverly behind a mound of slag, and so barely broke stride before he was able to resume his headlong attack. Prim could not match the warrior’s pace. But she thought she was close enough now. She fixed her gaze on the storm of stone that served as the Chasmian’s head—

  —and found herself skidding across the ground with snow in her mouth. Something had knocked her down. Not the Chasmian, or she’d have been dead. She rolled onto her back and looked up to see Corvus wheeling back around toward her. “You must not do it,” he said. “The Chasmian is the only thing that can buy us the time we need. Spring made it for the purpose it must carry out next, and for long ages it has collected its strength in the deep, preparing for this day. Do not seek to deprive this one of his destiny.”

  The light of the angel sword flashed. Prim got to her feet and looked to the Chasmian. Burr had got close enough to have a go at its ankles. Any part of the creature above its shins was out of his reach. The warrior was able to close in and land a few strikes. Even that sword could do little more than cleave off shards of the adamant boulders that served the Chasmian as feet. Preoccupied as he was with avoiding kicks and stomps that the Chasmian aimed his way, Burr was blind to what came from above: a long downward sweep of the arm that caught him full along the side of his body and launched him into the air. Somewhere in midflight the sword fell from his nerveless hand and sank blade-first into the frozen earth, casting the plain into darkness. Burr tumbled and rolled for some distance when he came down again. Some of those movements recalled those of a living soul. But when he stopped, he stopped for good.

  “Nothing could have survived that,” Corvus said. “Burr did his job! Now do yours and get after the others!”

  The Chasmian had turned his head to look curiously toward Prim. She put her back to the bridge and began running. The giant took a step toward her, perhaps thinking to bar the way, but then Corvus was in its face, distracting it for long enough that Prim was able to dodge behind an abandoned ore wagon that was larger than some people’s houses. From there she identified another hiding place a short distance away, in the form of a mound of coal beside a forge, and from there another and another until she had put a good distance between herself and the Chasmian without ever having to spend too much time in the open.

  She reached the shadow of the stone anvil. Risking a look behind her, she saw that the danger was past. The Chasmian had lost interest in her. It stood with its back to her now, facing north toward the bridge.

  Curiosity now overtook her good sense. She trotted up a set of rude stair steps that led to the anvil’s flat top. There she had a look round. First she looked south, thinking only to glance at the rest of the party and make a note of where they were. Which she did; but then, gazing a little farther down the road, where it led deeper beneath the overhang, she spied something that demanded a longer look.

  She had imagined for some reason that the Fastness would be farther away and more deeply embedded in the Knot. But there it stood. It was right before them. And sweeping her gaze quickly from side to side, she took in the whole scene and understood how it was that the four great mountain ranges of the Land came together in this place, each with its own kind of rock, and were involved with one another in a manner that explained why it was called the Knot and why it could not be undone without breaking the Land asunder. Looking up at the Overhang, she could see snow and loose stones resting upon surfaces where by rights they ought to have fallen down on her head. She sensed that, had the Quest approached from some other direction, they might have been standing there right now and looking “up” at where Prim stood and wondering why she did not fall off the anvil.

  But if you approached it from the north, as they had done, why, then when you reached this place the Fastness stood upright as a proper castle ought to and the road led straight to its front door. It was not surrounded with a moat or other fortification, like some castles down in the Land, for it was guarded by the Evertempest and all the terrain the party had put behind them during the last few days. Its walls rose sheer from the black bedrock to a great height. For Egdod had raised it with the power of his soul, the same that had made the entirety of the Land, and observed no ordinary limits as to where building stones might be quarried or how high they might be stacked up. He had done it, according to legend, to prove to himself that he still had that power, at least when he could work in a solitary place without the eyes of other souls upon him. So its bastions and towers borrowed some of their general shapes from fortifications of a more practical nature, but were fantastical and strangely wrought according to Egdod’s whim. The front of it was symmetrical, perhaps as a way to discourage curious visitors, but farther back along its sides Egdod had experimented with more fanciful inventions in the way of high towers and oriels, some of which were still connected to the living rock of the Knot that enfolded the whole structure. The road led straight to its front gate, and the side fork of the Chasm tunneled beneath.

  But those parts Prim had to guess at and see in her mind’s eye, for, as Weaver had sung, the whole top of it was surmounted by an iron dome of curving plates riveted together, rough and ready like the battle helms that Beedle smiths hammered out in their forges and issued to Beedle sergeants. From the rim of it, chains and straps of iron depended and lower down were connected in a haphazard improvised style to more ironmongery that encircled the walls, clasping plates over windows and doorways. From this distance it put her in mind of how it looked when a carter piled a lot of assorted cargo on a wagon and then threw loops of rope around it every which
way, tying a knot here, bending a rope through another rope there and hauling it tight, not caring whether the web had any order or symmetry about it provided it served its purpose. She almost wondered whether its very crudeness had been intended to mock the beauty of what it enclosed.

  Beneath her feet the anvil shook. She whirled about to see that the Chasmian had turned about and was now headed her way! But during the few moments that she stood paralyzed with shock, it diverted to one side and stepped over toward the huge curved plate of iron she had noticed earlier, leaning against a cliff. She had assumed it was a portion of the great dome that for some long-forgotten reason had never been used. And perhaps it was; but the Chasmian intended to use it now. The giant gripped the plate between its claws and rotated it to show its concave side. This had a length of chain riveted in place like the straps on the back of a warrior’s shield. The Chasmian slung it over its shoulder.

  While it was thus occupied Prim had a clear view north up the road to the bridge. The white figure had by now advanced from the far side of the Chasm all the way up the bridge to the first gatehouse. Calmly he raised his hands, and the bridge began to grow ahead of him. He strolled forward, planting his bare feet on newly made bridge deck that had not existed moments earlier. Beneath that, the supporting arch mounted at a pace to match. The near stump of the bridge had become tinged with chaos, like Mard’s arm where it had been cut. It began to extend itself north, reaching across the gorge to join up with its other half.

  The Chasmian picked up a chain link that had been lying discarded on the ground for millennia. It had been made by taking a rod of iron as thick as the body of a full-grown man and looping it round. The giant reared back and slung it directly at El. For the white figure on the bridge could only be El himself. El saw it coming and with a casual flick of the arm made it falter in its flight and crash down upon the bridge. There it did damage. But El had the means to repair it and so this did not much slow him. The Chasmian threw other things, with similar results; the bridge, on the whole, continued to heal itself. The gap narrowed. El advanced.

  The dawn had progressed to the point where the whole scene was well lit. Prim could see Corvus silhouetted, wheeling about the Chasmian and apparently trying to offer suggestions. And somehow he must have got through to whatever passed for its mind, for suddenly it unfixed its gaze from El and looked straight up. Then directly it hove up its shield, just in time to deflect a rock the size of a house that had dropped straight down out of the sky. The sound that it made when it caromed from the iron plate was sickening.

  Prim looked up and saw a rock falling directly toward her. It, and more, were coming from the Overhang. El, through some conjury, was reversing the direction of gravity up there. She ran across the flat of the anvil and dove over its edge just before the boulder smashed into the place where she had been standing. The stairway caught her fall. Immediately she rolled onto her back and gazed up, expecting more. El’s strategy was clear. He knew that he faced Death. He must keep Death at bay.

  That being the case, she did not wish to endanger her comrades by coming too close to them. They were struggling up a long stair that led to the front gate of the Fastness, where the great lock hung askew in its web of chains. They were most of the way there. Prim could see a mote of light orbiting round the lock, darting into its keyhole and out again. Lyne was up there, moving on a chain like a spider on silk. Querc and Marc had already got to the lock. Mard was reaching into it with his auric hand, perhaps cleaning out thousands of years’ piled snow and dirt. Fern was pacing Edda on her slow and labored ascent of the stairs, turning to face her. Prim knew what she was doing: talking to the giantess, who now looked like nothing other than a poor hag bent under a burden far too heavy to bear. Yet there was nothing Fern could do to help her other than to offer words of encouragement. With each step Edda surmounted, Fern celebrated and praised her and urged her to the next.

  Battle had been joined at the bridgehead, and part of Prim regretted she was not there to witness it and perhaps write it in a song, or, one day in the future, describe it to a weaver who could make of it a tapestry. She looked up to see if any more boulders were falling but saw none. Perhaps El had his hands full for the moment fighting the Chasmian. One would certainly think so! There had to be limits even to El’s power. If not, why did he fear Egdod so? Why had he not, in El’s absence, altogether remade the Land as he wished to see it?

  And he feared Prim. He feared the power that was hers enough that he had tried to kill her once already.

  Did El know—could he know—that they had a key to the Fastness? It must have lodged in that cube of stone for a long time. Had El known of its existence, he’d have destroyed it. They had only got it free of the Cube this morning. But El had been following them across the Stormland for days. So it could not be the case that the knowledge of the key had drawn him here.

  Sophia had drawn him here. Even at the Quest’s outset, El had somehow known that a person of interest would be passing through Secondel and had alerted Elshield. The death of Elshield and of several others must have confirmed what he had perhaps suspected, or feared: that Sophia was abroad in the Land and knew her power. He had made a second attempt to catch her at the Asking, but she had vanished. And at almost the same instant, one of his angels had died at Lost Lake. El must have known of Pluto’s system of chaos tunnels and must have guessed that Sophia had made use of one. He had gone to Lost Lake and followed their trail. Now he was here, raining boulders against the Chasmian’s shield while advancing one step at a time across the remade bridge. The Chasmian was giving almost as good as he got, lashing out with his claw to attack while shouldering his shield to defend. His weapon did not seem able to penetrate the sphere of aura that surrounded El.

  As Prim watched, its claw faltered in midstrike and fell like an amputated hand into the gorge. The Chasmian was soon able to replace it with a discarded piece of ironmongery, a huge tong that must have been used once to hoist a crucible. But while he was doing so, El advanced, at last putting the bridge behind him and setting foot on the near side of the Chasm. Prim had the presence of mind to guess that El might now take advantage of his foe’s disordered state to aim more attacks at her, and she was correct; looking up she saw several more rocks fall loose from the Overhang and come her way. Seen, they were easily avoided.

  She was more worried about the party on the front steps of the Fastness. Preoccupied as they were with the key and the lock, they wouldn’t know that El had crossed over and would not be looking for incoming rocks. But El did not seem to be sending any their way. Which confirmed in her mind that El might not even have known about the key. He might have been asking himself why Sophia had gone to such trouble to come here, where her one power was of no use; but his only thought was to get to her and kill her.

  So she ascended the stair again, all the way to the flat top of the stone anvil, and put her back to the Fastness and walked north to the very edge, making sure that El could see her. She could actually feel his gaze upon her when he had a moment to take his eyes away from the Chasmian. She felt almost close enough to look him in the eye and kill him. But he knew her power and would keep his distance. By standing here and merely staying alive, she could keep him at bay. She could keep El from reaching, or even knowing about, the ones behind her with the key. So there she stood, observing the fight and standing sentinel for anything El might throw her way.

  He was finding more opportunities to do so. From time to time he would absorb a blow from the Chasmian that would nearly reduce him to formless aura, but he had the power to regenerate before his foe could wind up to deliver another. The Chasmian took somewhat longer to reorganize its form when El had disrupted it. Balancing this was the fact that the Chasmian had an infinite reserve handy of the two things of which it was made: rocks and chaos. At one point a flying boulder laid it out flat on the brink of the gorge, right next to the bridge, so that Prim feared it would slide off and sink into the chaos below; but instea
d the chaos came to it, and replenished what it had lost, and the boulder that had struck it down became part of its form. Thus the battle raged back and forth, and Prim dared not go back to the other edge of the anvil to see how Edda was getting along. But she did notice a conflagration of Lightning Bears up on the glacier, seemingly headed toward the bridge; and in their midst was a darker form that she took at first for an Autochthon, since it was riding a mount.

  But the bears would have annihilated any such. They were not there to fight the rider. They were escorting it. Escorting her.

  El seemed aware of this. Prim could very nearly read his mind. He wanted no part of fighting the Chasmian while being trapped between Death and this personage on the galloping mount. He made himself larger, and in a few moments’ time delivered such a barrage upon the Chasmian, from all directions, as to derange it completely. It collapsed to a disordered pile of rocks and chaos, most of which avalanched down into the gorge. Prim sensed it was not dead. It would always come back. But in the time it would take for it to reorganize itself, El could attend to other matters. He glanced toward Sophia for a few moments, then turned his back to her; faced the bridge; and brought it down with a gesture.

  Prim had learned to look up when El might be in a position to attack her. She did so now, and saw nothing. But she did get dizzy, as sometimes happened when looking up, and this time it was enough to drop her to her knees. She felt a pain in her breast and tried to put her hand to the spot, but it was interrupted by something hard.

  She looked down to see that she had been transfixed by a black arrow. It had gone straight into her chest. It had come, she understood, from El; he had conjured it into being and launched it at her during that brief glance. Its shaft was already enshrouded in her aura as her body began to dissolve around it.

  She fell over on her side. With her eyes half-open she could see the rider gallop down to the bridgehead and rein in her horse at the bridge that was now again broken. Behind her a pack of Lightning Bears was coming in off the glacier.