Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  “Well!” he said. “That certainly changes a few things about the Quest. We can’t do this without a Lithoplast.”

  There was a brief silence as this sank in, and then everyone looked at Querc.

  They went deeper in, just to put more distance between them and any Dug who might have the audacity to come in after them. Sealing the entrance through Lithoplasty, which had been Corvus’s original plan, was no longer possible. But as this was a natural cave, it had twists and bottlenecks that they were able to chock up behind them with rocks. Edda had the strength to shift boulders, and Burr’s angel sword could cut stone. So they were able to make going difficult for any who might pursue them into the depths of the Knot.

  Or for themselves, should they try to get back out. But it was obvious that this cave was another of those that Pluto had salted about the Land to make going from place to place easier, and that they would be emerging somewhere else.

  This mere activity—the going in deeper, clambering up and down the cave’s convolutions, helping one another through tight places—had a calming effect on Querc as the scene of that horror fell away behind them.

  The descent became treacherous, and Corvus grew cautious, then irritable, then impossibly annoying as he insisted that all be careful of their footing. Echoes from ahead of them—which was to say, below them—suggested that this narrow shaft was about to open up into something much larger. Light—not from Mab—began to gleam from smooth, damp cavern walls. Prim knew what to expect, and soon saw it.

  The shaft broadened suddenly into a vast cavity whose floor was chaos. The shape of the space was something like a melon poised on end. They had angled down into a location that was neither high up in the dome of its ceiling nor down low in its wall but somewhere in between. The reason for Corvus’s irritability became clear; anyone who lost their footing during the descent of the shaft would have gained speed falling down it and been projected out helplessly into the cavity, then fallen down into the lake of chaos. But by making a controlled descent, the party was able to stop on a bit of a ledge that some Lithoplast—perhaps Pluto himself—had sculpted at the outlet of the tunnel. It could not accommodate all of them. Corvus, Prim, Querc, and Mard spread out along it while Edda, Lyne, Fern, and Burr remained backed up in the tunnel, shifting about to peer over one another’s shoulders. Mab soared free, exulting in the vastness of the space, her light illuminating diverse veins and layers in the rock. To watch her was intoxicating but dangerous; Prim had to avert her eyes when she sensed she might lose her balance.

  Mab settled into a looping flight pattern, remaining more or less on a level about halfway between them and the surface of the chaos below. The surface was not of uniform brightness but dappled, and the dapples came and went. Sometimes they were big and slow, as if something huge was trying to shoulder its way up out of the deep, and other times they flickered so rapidly that by the time the eye had darted to them they had vanished. Over and over Prim had the maddening sense that she was just on the verge of making something out for what it was, as when a name is on the tip of your tongue or a sneeze pent up in your nose. Mab seemed to be looking at the same. Perhaps she had some faculty Prim lacked of collecting the scattered fragments of imagery into a definite vision.

  Something shifted in the chaos. Mab whipped round in a tight circle and then shot vertically up to their level, blazing bright enough to illuminate the walls of the whole cavern. “Now! Follow me!” she cried, then wheeled about so she was head down, and dove.

  Corvus put his shoulder into Prim, who fell into Querc, who fell into Mard, who with his bad arm had no way of stopping. They all fell off the ledge and tumbled helplessly into chaos.

  Somewhere in it, down became up and they began to fall slower and slower instead of faster and faster. Snow, mottled with patches of rock, was skimming below them. Prim put out her hands defensively. The surface came up to meet her. She skidded, then plunged into deep snow that brought her to a stop without breaking anything. When she tried to stand up, she sank to midthigh.

  A bright moon was out. A brighter light banked past her, then went back the way they’d come from. Prim watched Mab descend toward a river of chaos that ran through a gorge a short distance beneath them. The sprite hunted back and forth along it for a minute, then plunged back in.

  Not far away Prim could hear the uncouth gagging noises that she had come to associate with Corvus’s changing back into his bird form. There was no better place to be a bird. They were very high up in mountains. Half the sky was clear. The other half was stone. Below them chaos filled the lower reaches of a deep straight-sided canyon. Its opposite bank was a sheer cliff topped with a glacier. Beyond that the land dropped away into dark forest.

  Her brain put it all together from maps. The cliff on the opposite, or north, side of the canyon was the Precipice. The plateau atop it was the domain where the Shifting Path threaded among hidden crevasses across territory patrolled by Lightning Bears.

  They had simply skipped over, or tunneled through, that whole portion of the journey. They would not need to cross the Chasm; they had just put it behind them. They had reached—they were standing on—the Knot. The Fastness must have been nearby.

  Four dark forms hurtled up out of the Chasm and tumbled and skidded through the snow around her. Edda took longer to stop than the others, carving a deep gouge in the snow and finally coming to a stop a bow-shot higher up the slope. She was laughing. Her laughter was music, bells, and birdsong. She got to her feet. Looking a little beyond Edda, higher up the slope, Prim perceived that the snow became patchier and soon petered out altogether, giving way to bare rock. Which stood to reason since it was more and more sheltered by the overhanging brow of stone that blotted out half the sky: a place Prim had heard about but never seen depicted on any map, since it could not be. Instead, bards tried analogies: thick ropes knotted together or folds in heavy blankets, except bigger, and made of mountains.

  They climbed. It was slow going and exceptionally hard work. That might have been a blessing in disguise since it was very cold indeed, and only the most strenuous effort was going to keep them warm. For a while it seemed like her wading and staggering in the deep powder was making no difference at all, but finally she got to a place where it improved noticeably with each step, and soon after that she joined several of the others who were huddled together for warmth on bare rocky ground. They were all tending to look in the same direction: back the way they had come and down the slope. So once Prim got up there and made sure of her footing, she turned around and looked at what they were looking at.

  Seeing what mattered took a moment because it was a graceful and slender thing in a world of slabs and chasms, silver and sharp in snow-reflected moonlight.

  “The Broken Bridge!” she exclaimed. “I never thought I would actually see it!”

  The place where it was anchored to the opposite wall of the canyon was plain to see. A heavy buttress gripped the rim of the precipice. One foot of an arch was jammed against the canyon wall below. That and the bridge’s deck reached only part of the way across the Chasm before they were terminated by a little tower, arching over a gate to nowhere. Reaching toward it on this side would be its twin. Prim could complete the bridge in her imagination and get an idea of where it must have connected on this side. But the folds and convolutions of the Knot got in the way, so they couldn’t see their end of it. It would be a couple of miles from here.

  They began to walk in that direction. Or so it seemed at the beginning. But Corvus wanted them to go in ways that did not make obvious sense to ground-pounders. Everyone in this party understood that the usual rules of getting from one place to another would be worse than useless in the Knot. The fact that they were, on the whole, getting deeper in, where the wind left them alone and the air was less frigid, helped.

  So they arrived at the Cube.

  It stood in a little side fold of the mountain, sheltered from weather. You’d have to have known it was there in order to find
it. Which raised the question of how Corvus had known that the Cube was here.

  There was no question whatsoever as to what the Cube ought to be called. You could not conceivably call it anything else. In height, breadth, and depth it was about twice Burr’s arm span. It was made of adamant, a substance of which most of them had seen more than a lifetime’s worth in the fault. But it was something of a novelty to Burr, who ran a hand across one face of it and down one of its vertical edges. Then he drew back with a curse and showed them a bloody fingertip. The Cube’s edge was so crisp it had cut him.

  So the Cube it was, without a doubt. But Prim had never heard of the Cube. She looked at Querc, but Querc could do nothing but shake her head and turn up her palms.

  Edda must have known about the Cube! They looked to the giantess.

  “Corvus,” she said, “you have me at a disadvantage. What is this thing? Other than a cube of adamant sitting in the Knot for no apparent reason.”

  “Proof,” Corvus said (he was perched, naturally, on top of the Cube), “of the reality of the other plane of existence of which I have spoken repeatedly in the past.” Then, because he couldn’t resist rubbing it in, “Oh, I have seen you roll your eyes when I speak of the other plane of existence. I know you think—”

  “It’s not that anyone thinks you’re crazy,” Prim said. “It’s just that the other plane of existence is just a lot of made-up stories until you can present some kind of, uh . . .”

  “Proof,” Corvus said. “Behold.”

  “This doesn’t prove it,” Lyne said. “Seems like something Pluto might have put here to amuse himself.”

  Prim braced herself for a retort in a bitter or vindictive tone from the giant talking raven. Instead he gave a bird shrug. “Fair,” he said. “You’ll be singing a different tune, though, when Querc melts away the adamant to reveal what is embedded in this thing.”

  “You’ve known this was waiting for us all along,” Prim surmised, while Querc was busy clapping her hands over her face and shaking her head in dismay.

  “It was put here long ago by an entity on the other plane of existence. Hidden away where no one would find it unless they knew exactly where to look. Sealed in adamant so that only a Lithoplast, guided by an incorporeal sprite, would know what to do.”

  “My sword could cut it,” Burr pointed out in a mildly offended tone. He was gazing at Querc, who still seemed notably lacking in self-confidence. Lyne had put his arm around her shoulders and was mumbling some kind of presumably encouraging words into the side of her head.

  “It may come to that,” said Corvus, “but I don’t wish to damage what is inside.”

  “It’s not just a matter of knowing what to do, and how to do it,” Querc explained. “Certain things are needed.”

  “Can you be a little more specific?” Mard inquired politely.

  “Well—going back to the very beginning—according to Pick, chaos came first. When it began to take on those patterns that embodied or enacted thought, it became what we call aura.”

  Mard shouldered his cloak back and looked down at his aura hand. “So aura is chaos, but . . .”

  “Patterned chaos,” Querc said. “Like a wave moving across the water, which is water plus something: a shape that retains its character even while it propagates through the stuff of which it’s made.”

  “How does aura become form, then?” Mard asked. To him it was a very personal question at the moment.

  Prim, not wishing to stare, glanced away. But this only brought Mab into view. And what was Mab if not an extraordinarily focused bit of aura? As if to make that very point, Mab flew into the cube and popped out the other side a moment later.

  “The very first of all solid things was adamant,” said Querc. “Which seems quite different from chaos. But really it is just one configuration of chaos that happens to be stable. Egdod found it very early, and made the Land out of it, and as long as the Land—and later the Firmament—remained nothing more complicated than adamant, they could be reshaped—”

  “Through Lithoplasty. I understand,” said Mard. Leaving unspoken the fact that he was really trying to find out how he might get his hand back.

  Hand, and arm. For he used his good hand now to pull his sleeve back, well above his elbow. Flesh had retreated and aura had advanced well above the place where the sword of Elshield had cut into him.

  Querc sighed. “It is old magic, not understood or practiced much since the First Age. Pick knew it. We of this age are confined for the most part to fixed forms, bounded by our own skins. In the Before Times, forms were more fluid and many had auras that reached beyond their forms.”

  “I saw it among the high Autochthons of Secondel,” said Prim.

  “And Pick could do it,” said Lyne. “We saw his aura reach out from his head beneath the Overstrike.”

  “I, unfortunately, cannot,” said Querc. “Which is where Mard might come into the picture. But first, there is another thing. In Pick’s sample case were bits of chaos and so on that he had collected from various locations such as the Chasm we just crossed.”

  “I have no other purpose here,” Lyne offered.

  “Nor I,” said Fern. “We can go to the brink of the Chasm if Mab leads the way.”

  “I’ll lead the way,” said Corvus. He was swinging his beak side to side, watching with his beady black eyes as Mab flew back and forth through the Cube. “Mab is more useful here.”

  With a short, slow movement of his blinding sword, Burr sliced a corner from the top of the Cube, since Mab had flown through it and reported nothing there. He used the tip of the sword to hollow out the surface, making a nut-sized depression. He repeated the procedure with another corner. The two pieces, clapped together, now made a container that crudely approximated one of the carven adamant drawers from Pick’s old sample case. Lyne and Fern borrowed as many warm clothes as the others could spare and set out with Corvus, carrying this makeshift sample holder with them. On one side of the Cube, Burr began to carve off more bits where Mab told him it was safe to do so.

  On the opposite side, where the light of the angel sword would not be such an annoyance, Querc talked at length to Mard, recounting what she had learned during her years with Pick. Mard began to experiment with reaching into the Cube with the hand that was no longer material. That inability to come to grips with solid objects had seemed an important deficiency when he was trying to button his cloak or break his fall. But here and now it was enabling him to perform what for lack of a better term one would have to call magic. “Can you feel anything?” Querc was asking him. “Are there sensations in that hand?” Mard insisted it was altogether numb, as if it weren’t there at all. “But you can open and close it, can you not?” Querc asked.

  Mard withdrew his hand from the stone and made it clench into a fist, then opened it again. So there was the answer. “No sensation, though,” he insisted. “Just tingling.”

  “Tingling is a sensation,” Querc pointed out.

  Some hours passed. Prim, having nothing to do at the moment, found a hollow in the rock where she could curl up and pull her cloak up over her head to block most of the light from the sword. This flared and flashed unpredictably as Burr wielded it against the Cube. Edda had boosted him onto its flat top. He was carving off bits under the direction of Mab, who seemed to have a very clear notion of where it was and was not safe to remove material. From time to time a chunk of adamant would break free, slide off, and bang into the ground, startling Prim. So this was far from the most restful nap she had ever taken.

  She must, against all odds, have gone to sleep, though, because at some point she woke up. A deep boom, transmitted through the bedrock of the Knot, had been felt in her ribs and was already just a memory. It was not accompanied by a crash of severed stone from the nearby Cube. This had nothing to do with that. It was bigger, from farther away. Yesterday she might have identified it as a thunderclap. Indeed they were still within the Evertempest, the entire purpose of which was to protect
this place. But this didn’t rumble and reverberate like thunder. And no sound was reaching her ears. She peeled the hood back from her head and squinted in the light as chill dry air bathed her face. The others were still at work, much as before. The shoulders and sides of the Cube had been cut down quite a bit; Burr was now standing on a pedestal just wide enough to support him. Around that the stone sloped roughly down where he had chopped it away, and the crisp base of the Cube was obscured by shards that had sloughed off. Prim shaded her eyes with one hand and lay still for a while, maintaining firm contact between her body and the living rock of the Knot. Then she felt another of those shocks. She took her hand from her eyes, raised her head, and looked at the others. None of them seemed to have noticed. Burr and Mab were intent upon their work, as Querc and Mard were upon theirs.

  Where was Edda? Prim stood up, more than a little stiff, and found the giantess off to one side, sitting on a natural bench in the rock. She was leaning a little to one side, gazing down as if the stone were a window, resting the palm of one hand upon it like a mother checking the pulse of a child’s heart.

  So Prim wasn’t just imagining things. Which did not answer the question of what was shaking the foundations of the Knot so.

  It seemed a natural topic of conversation. But before Prim could go and take it up with Edda, she heard voices approaching, one of which had the distinctive harsh timbre of a giant talking raven. Corvus came into view first, and not far behind him were Fern and Lyne. The latter was bearing in his hands a heavy thing all wrapped up in cloth.

  “Easier than expected,” he announced, dropping to one knee and setting his burden down near what a few hours ago had been a cube. He began carefully to unwrap it.

  “We found a stair,” Fern explained, “that some Lithoplast, I suppose, had made in the face of the cliff that descends into the Chasm. It took us right down to where the Land gives way to chaos.”