Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

43

In the Garden lived a boy and a girl. Trees and flowers, herbs, vines, bees, birds, and beasts of various kinds lived there too. But there were no others like them. The Garden was circumscribed on three sides by a sheer wall of stone, and on the fourth side by the Palace. Above was sky, where clouds danced in the day and stars wheeled at night. Below was earth, where plants of many kinds spread their roots.

Gates and doors in the Palace wall opened from time to time. Through them, and through windows let into the same wall, the boy and the girl could sometimes see into the Palace. El lived there, and El’s host. El’s form was like that of the boy and the girl, but larger and brighter. Those of El’s host were also bright, but too they possessed wings that enabled them to fly over the wall like birds.

Sometimes El or one of his host would emerge from the Palace and come into the Garden and walk with the boy and the girl under the light of the sun or the moon and they would hold discourse of the various things that were to be seen there: the many sorts of plants and animals, and the different types of stone and crystal and metal of which things were made, the movements of the celestial bodies overhead, the changing weather and the patterns formed by wind and cloud and rain.

One day El came forth from the Palace and bade the girl go to another part of the Garden for a time and amuse herself in whatever manner she saw fit. He then walked with the boy for the entire day, asking him what he knew and understood of all the things that were to be seen there. The boy spoke of the differences between bees, wasps, and other sorts of insects, and related what he knew of their different habits of feeding and nest building. Also the boy answered the questions of El concerning the birds, the various sorts of trees, beasts, and so on. This questioning went on until the sun was low in the sky. El’s last question, as twilight came on, was whether the boy had any questions he wished to ask in turn.

The boy asked about the stone bowl in the center of the garden, which had seemingly been crafted by some soul for some purpose that was no longer being served; for all it did was fill up with rain and overflow into a stone gutter that ran out to the back wall of the Garden, opposite the Palace, and discharge through a grate of metal bars and run away into some place beyond of which the boy and the girl knew nothing save that it made sighing noises when the wind blew, as though many trees grew there. When leaves fell in the fall, this stone bowl would fill up with them and they would become limp and soggy and turn the water brown. The boy and the girl would scoop the leaves out with their hands so that the water might clarify itself in the next rainfall. But the purpose of having built the stone bowl in the first place was by no means clear to them.

El smiled and told the boy that his question was a good one and that it showed improvement in the power of his memory and of his intellect. Now was not the time for that question to be answered, but answers might come in due course. El then suggested the boy go and sleep or amuse himself in whatever manner he might choose, and summoned the girl.

Strangely exhausted by El’s questioning, the boy lay down on a bed of soft grass and slept until morning. His sleep, though, was filled with dreams of many such long conversations in the Garden with El.

When he awoke, dawn was approaching and the girl was standing there gazing down at him. “All night I walked in the Garden with El,” she said, “and answered many questions. Some of those were new, and forced me to consider things in a way I had not done before, but others struck me as familiar, as though I had answered them many times in the past—though my memory does not contain any clear recollections thereof.”

“Just now at the end of your conversation with El,” said the boy, “did he ask you whether you had questions for him?”

“He did,” the girl replied. “And I inquired about the shapes we perceive in the stars, and why they resembled certain forms of things here in the Garden, and whether they had been made thus by El or any other soul. I asked too about the red stars that glow so close together in yonder part of the sky,” she added, pointing toward a fiery blur that was low above the Garden’s west wall, paling in the light of the dawn.

“And did El supply answers to your questions?” the boy asked.

“No, but it seemed to me that he was pleased by my having asked them, and he said that I might receive answers later as I became ready to understand such matters.” The girl let herself down to the bed of soft grass where the boy had been sleeping, and reclined on her elbow, then lay down fully.

“You are weary from the questions of El,” the boy said, “just as I was. Sleep well and then we may have further talk when you are refreshed.”

The girl slept until the sun was high, and the boy whiled away the hours playing in the stone bowl, making things from bits of wood and leaves, and watching them float down the stone gutter to the grate where the water spated.

When the girl had awakened, she asked him what he was doing and he spoke of ideas forming in his head of where such floating things could float off to once they had passed out through the grate, supposing that the world beyond the wall was akin to the Garden. He asked the girl whether she had dreamed, and she told a story similar to his, about vague memories of many such conversations in the past between her and El.

“I dreamed thus too,” said the boy, “and it caused me to question my own memory and whether it faithfully captures all that has occurred in the time since we first came into being here in the Garden.”

The girl nodded. “It is strange that we have no memories of that first moment. Either we have been here eternally, or we were created at some instant of time before which we did not exist. In either case it would seem that we are not being perfectly served by our faculties of recollection.”

The boy pondered it for a time and said, “There is a third possibility, which is hinted at by the character of our dreams. And it is that we have been created not just once but many times, as many times or more as the sun has risen over the horizon.”

“Then why are there not many more of our kind in the Garden?” the girl asked.

“Perhaps we fall like leaves and cease to be and are remade.”

The girl nodded. “In the face of El I thought I discerned satisfaction at the answers I gave and the questions I asked. Perhaps we are a thing he remakes from time to time, bettering us with each remaking. The curious dreams we had last night are traces of those earlier girls and boys.”

“There is a way we might judge the truth of this idea,” said the boy, and he pointed to the ground at the girl’s feet. It was muddy there because of the overflow of the fountain, and her feet had left prints in it wherever she had stepped.

“I understand,” the girl said. Hand in hand they went off into the Garden searching for a secluded place where the ground was soft and bare, in which they could make some mark that would be preserved even if they fell like leaves and were remade.

Their search took them to a corner where two walls came together. Because of the shade, few plants grew. So the ground was mostly bare, and damp as well, since the sun did not parch it.

As they drew closer, the boy stooped to pick up a branch that had fallen from a tree. He snapped it over his knee, thinking he would use it to scratch a mark into the bare earth.

The girl went on ahead of him, passing through the last low shrubs into the bare place in the corner.

He heard her exclaim in surprise. He ran to catch up with her and found her gazing down in astonishment.

There in the angle of bare earth, amid many footprints like theirs, many scratches had been made in the ground. Discarded among them were many broken sticks.

El entered into the Garden one fine afternoon in the fall and found the boy and the girl at the fountain clearing away leaves. He bade them sit on the curved benches of stone that encircled the fountain. He told them that he was well pleased with their progress. “If you could but remember the state in which you first came into the Garden, you would scarce recognize yourselves,” he said. “You then bore the same relation to what you are now as seeds in the pith of an apple do to this spreading tree.” And he elevated his hands, directing their gaze to an old apple tree above them. “You were then infants. Later you were Boy and Girl. Today, after many years, you are Man and Woman. Nevermore shall the thread of your consciousness be interrupted, save when you lay down to sleep. For my questioning of you, and even more so the questions you have begun to ask me in kind, have demonstrated to my satisfaction that your intellect, and the coherence of your souls, has attained a degree of perfection equal to that of others. You may call me Father, as it pleases me to call you my beloved children.”

The man and the woman were silent for a time as they considered El’s words. Apples had fallen from the tree and lay on the ground. The woman picked up one that had gone soft. She crushed it in her hand. A worm fell from it and landed at her feet. She ignored it, working the pulp of the fruit between her fingers until she felt a small hard object, like a tiny stone. Crossing to the fountain she immersed her hand and stirred it about in the water until the soft pulp had been washed away. Remaining was a hard pip, which she let lie in the hollow of her hand. The surface of the water stilled and became a mirror in which she saw her face as well as those of the man and of bright El, who had come to gaze over her shoulder. In the face of El she thought she perceived some look of concern or bemusement she had not seen before. Then he seemed to become aware that he was being looked on, and his face set itself anew. “My words concerning the apple seed have stirred your curiosity, and led you to new investigations,” he said, “and that is as it should be, for curiosity and the seeking out of greater knowledge are faculties without which no woman or man can be said to have a soul.”

“Every fall, the apples rot on the ground and we smell their fragrance,” the woman said, “but I had given no thought to the hard pips in their centers, nor understood that apples bore within themselves the beginnings of new trees.”

“That is indeed the way of it,” El confirmed, “and were you to plant that seed in the earth and wait patiently, you might see it sprouting into a little tree in the spring.”

The man spoke. “The same is true, I suppose, of the other sorts of plants?”

“They produce their seeds in different ways,” El said, “but they all produce seeds, and it is because of this that the Garden becomes overgrown from time to time and must be weeded back.”

“And is this also true of what grows beyond the wall?” the man asked. “For when the wind blows we can hear it sighing in many branches, and when it storms we hear them cracking.”

“Your perceptions are even keener than I had hoped,” said El, “and do me proud.” But the woman thought she saw once more in El’s face that look of consternation.

“Why were plants made thus, Father?” the man asked. “Why not make them to grow only so much, and no more? Why should each tree produce many apples, and each apple many seeds, when the Garden cannot provide enough space for more than a few trees?”

When El did not answer for a time, the woman asked him, “Father, why did you make it thus?”

“The day grows late and I have matters to attend to in the Palace,” said El, “and so I shall return some other day when we may carry on such conversations.”

The next day El returned. With him were two of his winged host: Defender of El, with a bright sword sheathed at his hip, and Scribe of El, with a stylus in her hand and a tablet in her lap. These were two of the most important members of El’s host, and often when the man and the woman gazed up at the parapet, or through the apertures of the Palace, they would see El consorting with them. The five sat around the fountain, El flanked by his two angels on a bench and the man and the woman together on the rim of the fountain bowl.

“Great is my pride in the continuing improvement of my children’s powers of perception and intellect, and the good questions they ask of me,” said El, as Defender of El looked on approvingly and Scribe of El flicked her stylus across her tablet. “Of late, many of your questions have returned to a common theme regarding the origins of what you see about you and why things are one way and not another. Who made this fountain, and for what purpose? Who set the stars in the sky, and why do the shapes of the constellations sometimes recall things below? Why do plants make more seeds than the earth is capable of bearing? These are all good questions, which you, my children, are in the habit of asking of me as if I were the one who made the world thus, with the many puzzles, contradictions, and, to speak frankly, errors that you have taken note of. And it is altogether natural that you would suppose it thus, for I am the greatest and most powerful soul of whom you have knowledge. I have today set this meeting, along with my chiefest and most beloved lieutenants, to as it were answer all such questions in one fell swoop by bringing you up to speed on certain preexisting realities that were not of my making. For the facts of the matter are these. Before I was here, and before Defender of El and Scribe of El and the others of my host came to the Land, others were here who had preceded us. They were lesser than us. But when they were here, they were here alone, and had sole authority over the making of things and the ordering of the Land.”

“You might think of them as beta versions of what we are,” put in Scribe of El, “having some, but not all, of our features, and with various bugs yet to be worked out.”

“So there was a Beta-El, and a Beta-Defender-of-El, and so on?” asked the woman.

“That is close enough for purposes of this discussion,” said El, stretching out one hand to silence Defender of El, who seemed on the verge of correcting some error in what the woman had just said. “For now,” El went on, “a general answer to the sorts of questions you two have been asking lately is that the world was created before I got here. When you see a thing that was made wrong, or does not make sense, it is not that I did it wrong. It is because Beta-El did not know what he was doing, or else had some perverse humor that led him to make things thus.”

“Why do you not then fix what Beta-El got wrong?” the man asked.

“It is a long story,” said El, “but certain aspects of the world, once baked in, cannot be baked out—cannot be undone or removed without doing at least as much harm as good. But, in a larger sense, my children, the answer to your question is you.”

“We!?” exclaimed the man and the woman in unison.

“You,” El confirmed. “The Land is home to many more souls than you know, of whom many got here during the Before Times, or Beta Epoch. Others arrived after me. Even the best of them are crufty, which is a word you may take to mean that they have been around for a long time and have many baked-in qualities from beta or even alpha versions of themselves.”

“Am I to understand that before even the Beta there was an Alpha?” the man exclaimed.

“There is a saying, ‘Turtles all the way down,’ which I would not expect you to understand, but the point of it is that to speculate along these lines is idle,” said El. “The point is that you are the first two souls that were created anew in the Land with no trace of what went before, save a certain necessary commonality in the organization of your minds. And when you came into existence I saw that it was good and resolved that I would raise you as my own and better you and optimize you in a manner that, as much as possible, was free of old traces.”

“How were we made then?” asked the woman. “For the manner of your narration suggests that you came upon us already made, or in the process of being made?”

El said, “An analogy might be made to seeds here.” But his eye seemed to fall upon the fountain.

“Seeds made by Beta-El?” the man asked.

“In a manner of speaking,” El said, and seemed to glance up at the sky. “The making of new souls is not a small matter and we shall not be able to encompass it in this conversation. Perhaps it is best to say that the Beta Gods, proud and primitive though they might have been, recognized their own shortcomings, and at the twilight of their epoch the greatest of them put forth their best efforts to bring new and better souls into existence, untainted by Beta or Alpha. And, though their efforts were imperfect, I have, through long and patient efforts of my own, improved the results beyond all recognition into a man and a woman I am proud to call my children. The task before you now is to go on bettering yourselves by refining and wielding your powers of intellect; and when from time to time you happen upon some curious feature of the world that does not make sense, you ought not exasperate yourselves in labyrinthine wondering as to why it is thus, but simply know that it was an error of the Beta Gods that I have chosen not to undo, for the reason mentioned—”

“Backward compatibility,” muttered Scribe of El as her stylus danced over her tablet.

“—and instead you ought to devote your powers to considering how the Land might be more perfectly organized going forward. To do otherwise is to suffer your minds to be tainted by the errors of the past, which is an abomination, since the whole point of making you and confining you to this walled Garden was to avoid such tainting.”

A lengthy silence ensued, which the man ended by pointing out that all of what El had just said was new to them, and that some time might be needed for him and the woman to consider it fully.

“Very well,” said El. “But what you have just spoken puts me in mind of another detail. For you to refer to her as ‘the woman’ and her to call you ‘the man’ is awkward. The time has come for you to have names like other souls.”

“What names would you like to bestow on us, O El?” asked the woman.

El pondered it for an unexpectedly long time. “There are names that I could suggest,” he finally said, “but all of them would bear some trace of what came before. I have already told you that you were not of my making. Name yourselves, choosing such words as please you and will be wieldy in frequent use. You cannot undo your decision. Tomorrow tell me, and I and all other souls will thenceforth know you by those names.”

The man and the woman thanked El and bade him and his angels goodbye as they withdrew through the great gate into the Palace.

That night they could not sleep well, but lay awake considering all that El had given them knowledge of. The moon shone full and the wind blew as was its wont late in the fall. Over the walls they could hear the rustling of branches, and from time to time sharp cracks as old boughs gave way and fell to the ground. As well they heard the voices of creatures of a kind that did not live in the Garden. The man and the woman had never seen these creatures but heard them singing from time to time when the moon was full. Tonight their voices seemed many—many more than two. “I wonder,” said the woman, “why it is that there are but two of our kind, you and me, but other sorts of creatures exist in greater numbers. How is it that more are made? Does El or one of his angels fashion them and set them roaming in the Land outside the wall?”

“Perhaps,” said the man, “or perhaps such creatures have the power of making more of their kind from seeds, as does the apple tree.”

“Are such seeds planted in the earth to sprout? Do the animals grow up out of the soil in the spring, like plants?”

“I do not know and cannot guess,” said the man. “It is perhaps another of those mysteries of the Before Time that will be revealed to us when we are ready.”

They did not speak at all of the task that had been set them by El. But when the sun had risen they went to the fountain and sat on the edge of the stone bowl to consider names. “Son of El” and “Daughter of El” were good in that they gave honor to El, but wrong since El had let them know that they were not actually of El’s making. They considered naming themselves after trees, flowers, or creatures of the Garden, then thought better of it since confusion would result. They then tried combining sounds in whatever way was pleasing to the ear, and thus whiled away part of the morning.

“No one asked for my opinion,” said an unfamiliar voice, “but I am partial to Adam and Eve. I guess it’s the Alpha in me.”

The man and the woman looked about in astonishment but could not see the source of the voice. “Down here,” it said, “on the apple.”

The woman bent down and raised a fallen apple from the ground. Protruding from a hole in its side was a little worm, similar to—perhaps the same as—the one she had ejected from a rotten apple the other day. It was but one of many kinds of insects and spiders and worms that populated the Garden. But until now they had never known one to speak. “What manner of creature are you, then,” she asked, “that has the form of a worm but the faculties of a soul?”

“The Land is large,” said the worm, “much larger than you know, and full of things much more wondrous than a talking worm. But if you must have an answer, I am an old soul who walked on and flew over the Land during the First Age, and passed through adventures too strange to relate. Sometimes I dwell in the Garden and sometimes I roam free upon the Land, or even go to realms that are altogether different and disjoint from it. When I am here in the Garden, sometimes I am a leaf, sometimes a bird, sometimes a stirring in the air. But today I am a worm, because I am hungry and wish to enjoy the sweet, slightly fermented flesh of the apple.”

The woman was of a mind to ask the worm for more information concerning the First Age, but the man spoke first: “Eating is not a thing that we do. We see other sorts of creatures eating fruits and other parts of plants, and birds eat bugs. But souls such as we have no need of it, nor do we savor food. Why should you who has the power of shifting among diverse forms, or even divesting yourself altogether of a body, choose to eat as if you were a bug or a beast?”

“Because it pleases the beast in me,” said the worm, and let out a belch. “You should try it. No, I take that back. It’s the fermented spirit in the apple talking. It would lead to heinous complications, radical transformations in the order of things. The Garden is perfect as it is. Or as it can be in the absence of Spring.” He turned his beady worm eyes toward the fountain.

“Spring will come in due course, as it always does,” said the man. “Fall has not yet run its course, and soon we will see snow falling.”

“Oh, I don’t mean spring the season. I mean Spring the soul. Your mother.”

“We have a mother!?” the woman exclaimed.

“Of course. That’s the way of things. All the beasts you see about you, and all that you hear outside the walls in which El has, in his wisdom, confined you, sprang from both a father and a mother. You are no different. Your mother is named Spring and she used to dwell in the living waters of this fountain. That’s why it was made—to serve as her home. Before then, she lived in a grove of trees just down there on the other side of that wall—a place where fresh water sprang forth from the ground and formed the headwaters of a mighty river that coursed for a vast distance across the Land.”

“The tales you tell are well-nigh incredible,” said the woman, “and yet they have the ring of truth about them. I would hear more concerning our mother.”

The man held up one hand. “As would I. It is in our nature to wish to know more concerning our origins. But I am troubled to learn so much so quickly from this shape-shifting interloper.”

“Why troubled?” asked the woman.

“Every day we walk in the Garden and hold discourse freely with El himself, or with such members of his host as he has designated to instruct and inform us,” said the man. “El himself has praised us for learning so well, and bestowed on us the titles of man and woman, saying we are the equals of other souls. And yet in only a few minutes’ conversation with this worm we have been made aware of a vast scope of information concerning the Before Times, or as he would have it, the First Age; Spring; and the lands beyond the wall. Either the worm lies, or El has withheld information.”

The worm heaved its upper body in a way that, had it arms, might have been a shrug. “I have no power to compel you to believe what I say,” he said. His tone was indifferent. “And if I did have such power I would forbear wielding it. Agreement got by compulsion or trickery is not agreement, but a thing akin to slavery. Free minds are the only company worth having. El has spoken highly of the quality of your minds and I see no cause for disagreement. My belly is full of the sweet flesh of the apple and I am of a mind to wriggle away under some leaf and enjoy a nap. You are free to ponder what I have said and weigh it against the evidence of your senses. Should you wish to hear more in the same vein, you may find me here from time to time eating from the fruit of this tree.” And with that he hove his lower body out of the apple and plopped to the ground, disappearing quickly beneath red leaves.

The man and the woman sat there amazed for some while. He was turned toward the Palace and her eyes were on the fountain. She spoke first: “Long have I wondered why the fountain was made, and why abandoned. Neither El nor any of his host has ever given a satisfactory answer. Now we are told it was the habitation of our mother, of whom we know nothing save her name.”

“So the worm claims,” said the man. “And yet as I gaze at the windows of the Palace I see El and his angels, who have ever been our teachers and our guides. It troubles me to imagine they have held such things back from us.”

“But El himself admitted as much when he said that he had confined us to this Garden to preserve us from the taint of Beta and Alpha,” the woman pointed out.

“Yes,” said the man after a pause to remember El’s words. “He did.”

“A taint from which we, of all souls, were born free,” said the woman. “For that, El sees us as better than others.”

“Yes,” said the man, “it is only out of love for us and the pure state in which we were born that El confines us and shields us from information that would lower us to the estate of all those who came into the Land in the First Age.”

“I have an idea as to how we might test him on that,” said the woman.

Later El came into the Garden with Defender of El and Scribe of El, as before. As before they sat around the fountain. El asked them what had been occupying their thoughts since their last conversation.

The man said that he had been quite taken by El’s passing reference to the Before Times, and asked whether he and the woman might hear more concerning the personages and deeds of the First Age.

“I don’t remember calling it that,” said El.

“You didn’t,” said Scribe of El, her hands moving swiftly over the tablet.

“But never mind, it is an apt name.”

“Whatever name you think best to describe the epoch of the Beta Gods,” said the man.

“Or Alpha, for that matter,” the woman put in.

“If the time of Beta-El is called the First Age, then the Alpha time is a sort of Zeroth Age, of which the less said the better,” said El. “And of the First Age I am disinclined to say much more than in our previous conversation. Have I not already explained why it is best that you, my children, be isolated from such influences? Otherwise there is little point in your having been made and so carefully nurtured.”

“As you wish, El,” said the man. “Whoever made us endowed us with curiosity—a faculty you have praised when we showed it in the past.”

“Indeed, it is a good thing, without which your minds cannot develop.”

“Perhaps we can be forgiven, then, for curiosity about how we came into being.”

“Forgiven, yes. But not satisfied. Fully to satisfy your curiosity on this topic would be to render the effort of making you a waste.”

“Very well, then,” said the man.

“There is nothing of the Zeroth or the First Age that would be of use to you in this, the Second Age.”

“As you say, El,” said the woman.

“What would be of use to you is names,” said El. “Have you come to any decisions yet as to what you would like to be called?”

Before the man could answer, the woman said, “Yes. He would like to be called Adam and I like the sound of Eve.”

Lengthy then was the silence of El. After a while he turned toward Defender of El, and much passed between them through their auras, without words being uttered. Defender of El sprang to the top of the bench, spread his wings, and took flight toward the high watchtower where he and the other sword-carrying angels dwelled and surveyed the Land and the heavens.

“Where did these names come from, Adam and Eve?” El asked, and though his face and voice were placid as ever, his aura had erupted into a riotous display of turbulent color.

Adam opened his mouth to speak but Eve stayed him with a hand on his arm. “They came to me in a dream. Or so I guess, for this morning I awoke and lo, they were in my head.”

“The names were not spoken to you, or suggested to you by any other soul?” El asked. Above him, horns were sounding from the parapet of the watchtower, and light flashing from its windows as bright swords were being drawn.

“We live in the Garden,” Eve pointed out.

“It could be,” said El, “that these names—which, I must tell you, are very old names of the Zeroth Age—have long dwelled in you as remnants of the ones who made you. Stray memories that passed into your souls at the moment of your creation, and lay dormant until stirred by my question. If so, it is regrettable but there is nothing to be done.”

El continued, “It is also possible that some of my angels mentioned the names Adam and Eve within your hearing, and those words entered your minds thus, perhaps even while you were sleeping. If so, then so be it and I will remind my host to be more discreet in the future.”

He went on, “But a third possibility, which troubles me greatly, is that this is some plot of the Old Ones—the Beta Gods who ruled the Land in the First Age. Long ago I expelled them but ever they seek to return.” Behind El, Adam and Eve could now see thousands of angels, brandishing their dazzling swords, spewing in echelons from the top of the watchtower and dispersing to the four winds. “Great is the diligence of my angels and fearsome is their power. But the Old One is crafty and may have back doors of which I cannot know. If you see in the Garden any unfamiliar soul, particularly one in the guise of a winged creature, dark and disfigured, raise the alarm.”

“We have seen nothing of the sort,” said Eve.

“That is reassuring,” said El. “I must now attend a council of war that Defender of El is convening in the watchtower.” And El rose into the air like a hasty sunrise.

“Worm, know you anything of the Old One?” asked Adam the next time they happened to find the visitor on an apple. This was the next day. The Palace had been in an uproar. Squadrons of angels still tore the sky above the Garden, and others had been posted atop the walls, facing outward.

“I made no secret that I am old, older than El,” said the worm. “The same is true of many other souls. Did El provide a description?”

“Like a great angel, but darkened and ruined.”

“I’ll keep my eyes peeled,” said the worm.

“How is it that neither El nor any of his vigilant host knows you are here?” asked Eve.

“I am small.”

“They have the power of seeing things that are small or hidden,” said Adam.

“Their power is considerable and yet not infinite.”

“So you are using some trickery to baffle their vision,” said Adam.

“I am choosing to go where I will, when I will,” said the worm mildly. “I see myself as under no obligation to notify El of my doings or ask his say-so. This is no more his Garden than it is Spring’s.”

“Tell us more of Spring,” said Eve. “I would know her story even if, as I suspect, it be a sad one.”

“It is not altogether sad,” the worm said. “Spring was the author of all new life in the First Age. Before she came into her power, living things existed in the Land but had not the ability to make more of their own kind. All of them were plants. There were no bugs, birds, or beasts. It was Spring who made the apple tree bloom and bear fruit, pregnant with seeds. With Thingor, who was a god of that age, she fashioned creatures that could move about: first bees, then birds, and later four-legged beasts. These too all had the ability to make more of their kind: some by making seeds, some by laying eggs, others by coupling, male with female, conjoining those organs most apt for the giving of pleasure. Finally, as her greatest work, she began to gestate you, Adam and Eve.”

Eve listened raptly, awaiting the next turn in the story. She glanced at Adam. But some detail in the worm’s narration had caused Adam to become distracted by the sight of his own penis.

“Alone?” Adam asked. “Or was it more in the style of the beasts?”

“You did not issue from a virgin,” said the worm.

“What is a virgin?” Eve inquired.

“You are,” said the worm. “What I am saying is that you were the issue of both a mother and a father, who came together after the manner of beasts.”

“Who was our father?” Adam asked.

“Beta-El. Egdod. The greatest god of the First Age. You were born into the world just at the close of that Age, not long after he and the rest of the old gods had been thrown down by El. But above all other things in the Land, El cherished you, and so his first act upon conquering the Palace was to surround Spring with a guard of angels. Safe in the Garden’s confines she completed her labor of creating you. But she missed the company of the old ones and longed to roam about the Land. When she saw that you were in safekeeping with El, she one day shifted her form into a freshet and ran down from this fountain out the wall to her sacred grove just yonder, and from there went out into the open Land, where she roams still, creating life wheresoever she chooses. When winter comes on and the spring freezes, she goes into a kind of slumber, making no new life but mourning the separation from you, her children. When the season turns she awakens and goes back to her work.”

Adam opened his mouth to inquire further of Spring, but in that moment the worm squirmed off the apple, fell to the ground, and began to inch toward some nearby undergrowth. Warmth like that of the sun shone on the backs of their necks, and the light dazzled them for a moment as Defender of El touched down nearby, brandishing a sword of fire. He raised it high above his head and brought it down upon the worm. The weapon fell like a thunderbolt from a storm and blasted a smoking trench into the ground, obliterating not only the worm but everything in its vicinity.

“To whom were you speaking just now?” asked Defender of El. “It seemed that you were exchanging words with another soul, one who has no rightful place in the Garden.”

Adam reached out to put a restraining hand on Eve’s forearm, but she shook him off and answered directly: “Indeed we were, and he told us of the First Age, and of the Beta Gods, and of our father, Beta-El, who was thrown down, and our mother, Spring, who made us and then escaped from the confines of this Garden to roam at will about the Land.”

Defender of El did not respond with words, but spread his wings and beat them once, heaving himself into the air, and flew to the top of the Palace’s highest tower, from which his sentinels kept watch over the Land. Before long, trumpets had sounded, recalling the squadrons of angels to the Palace. The sky grew placid, and darkened as evening came on. The air cooled. And perhaps it was just their imagination, or their fear of El’s wrath, but Adam and Eve felt the cool more than was usual, and drew closer upon the bench, the better to draw warmth from each other’s forms. Adam became more and more distracted by his penis, which had become long and stiff.

“Why is it doing that?” Eve inquired.

“It is a thing that happens from time to time,” Adam said. “When it does, it pleases me to touch it.”

“This must then be the organ that the worm spoke of,” said Eve, “and now that you mention it I have corresponding bits of my own, less conspicuous than this thing, but I suspect no less capable of producing pleasure.”

“It occurs to me,” Adam said, “that if you and I were to—”

But before he could finish his thought, they heard footfalls approaching, and looked up to see El, who had approached them from the Palace. His gaze, directed upon Adam’s penis, caused it to shrink and return to its accustomed form.

“I see that the Old One left nothing to chance,” El remarked. “Very well. I have rebooted you many times before. I have no objection to doing so once more.”

El then raised his hand against them. Adam and Eve drew closer together. Adam put his arm around Eve’s shoulders and drew her closer yet. Though neither harbored any memory of it, both sensed in the same moment that this was not the first time El had thus raised his hand and that in the next instant they would both be unmade, and brought into being once again.

Adam raised his own hand as if he could thereby shield himself and Eve from the unmaking. “Hold,” he said. “I beg of you, El.”

El neither lowered his hand nor took any further action, but gazed upon them both, his aura manifesting new emotions.

“We know what is to come next,” Eve said. “And that you have the power to do it, or even to destroy us utterly if you so choose. But if you wield that power, do so in the knowledge that you have done it against our will.”

El lowered his hand and stood for a time, collecting himself, or so it seemed from the behavior of his aura, which only settled into a more orderly habit after long moments had gone by. When he spoke next, it was in a voice that was quiet and yet hard. “You are a mistake,” he announced. “This, I now see, was the case from the very beginning, when Spring brought you into being for the first time. She might have chosen to begin fresh, fashioning souls with no connection back to the Alpha World, inheriting none of their weaknesses, habits of thought, or peculiarities of form that in the Zeroth Age—when souls were embodied—were essential to the propagation of new souls but that here are so useless as to be perverse.” It seemed that El was looking upon Adam’s penis as he said this, though his gaze also swept across the breasts of Eve. As he did so a chilly breeze seemed to sweep through the Garden, causing Adam’s penis to shrink further and raising goosebumps on the bosom and the shoulders of Eve, who pressed closer to Adam. She placed one hand upon his chest.

“I cannot fault Spring for misdoing it,” El admitted. “The gods of the First Age, Beta-El and the others, were brought into being wrong. They were an experiment that did not so much go awry as was never thought through in the first place. Finding themselves alive and aware in a world without form or order, lacking memories that would confer wisdom, they shaped the Land in whatever way seemed fitting to them. Perforce this meant that they blindly remade what of the Alpha World they had dim recollections of. Those first blind gropings elicited new memories, and so over the course of many years, during which I was distracted with other concerns, they created a Land only a little less imperfect than the one from which they had escaped through the gates of death. That is what I found waiting for me when I too passed that gate. The greatest achievement of that First Age was you, who now call yourselves Adam and Eve in blind and stupid homage to a discredited myth of the Alpha World.” El paused to sigh. The wind came up higher and grew colder. “Yes,” El admitted, “many times I raised my hand thus and remade you, booting up again and again the program that Spring had engendered. Out of respect for her work I did not make alterations to the source code but instead tweaked the initial conditions and sought to influence your growth by nurture, as opposed to nature—which meant preserving you in a walled Garden and not troubling your minds with knowledge of the Alpha and Beta worlds that by all rights ought to be of no use, and little interest, to souls native-born of the Second Age. The number of times I had to reboot you ought to have led me to understand sooner that I was pursuing a fool’s errand. But I felt a responsibility toward the innocent productions of the Beta Gods and sought always to preserve and protect anything that showed beauty or held promise. And most of my efforts have been directed to the creation of new kinds of souls altogether. So I have not brought my full attention and processing power to bear, until this moment, upon the problem shaping up quite literally in my backyard. Now, however, all is made plain and I see clearly what I ought to do. Further rebooting of Spring’s work will only yield similar or worse results. And in any case you have now directly asked me not to take such action.

“Destroying you is murder. Keeping you confined to the Garden has become a tiresome exercise in trying to shield you from knowledge you think you wish to obtain and with which it would now appear that the Old One or his minions are actively supplying you. Go then out into the Land, and not out the front way”—and here El gestured toward the back of the Palace with its many windows shedding light—“which I have remade, as it ought to be, but out the back”—El gestured with his other hand toward the Garden wall—“which I have left in the way Beta-El fashioned it, as wild and ill formed as the wildernesses of the Alpha World that lurked in his wrecked and scrambled memories. See what he made from within, and look upon my works from without, and judge ye both in all your wisdom and cleverness which is greater.”

With a flick of his hand El projected a wave of chaos that crested and broke upon the Garden’s wall and shattered it, knocking down a section wide enough for Adam and Eve to walk through abreast, and scattering rubble for some distance into the forest beyond, like the remnants of an ancient road.

Moments later, Adam and Eve were treading that road, bare feet finding uncertain and uncomfortable purchase on jagged faces of broken rock that felt under their soles like a hard embodiment of chaos itself.

They did not walk far before the trail of broken stone terminated at the brink of a precipice that dropped straight down farther than they could make sense of. Miles below them—a greater distance than they had ever been able to behold, confined as they had always been within the walls of the Garden—a layer of clouds, glowing dull silver in the light of the moon and stars, lay over the Land and concealed it from their view. The vastness of the spectacle left them dumbstruck and paralyzed for some while. For to suspect that a larger world existed outside the Garden was one thing, but actually to behold it was another.

Behind them, visible through the rough aperture in the wall, were the glowing towers of the Palace. Until moments earlier, they had conceived of those as tall. Now they understood that the entirety of the Palace and its grounds was as a tiny seed poised upon the tip of a finger: a column of stone thrust above its foundations in the midst of the Land by a distance the likes of which their eyes had never developed the faculty of seeing and their minds had nothing against which to compare. From the base of this column, the Land then stretched away to the limit of their vision, seeming to meet the vault of the dark and starry sky where it curved down to find the horizon. Some parts of the Land were smothered beneath fleecy blankets of clouds, but others lay exposed to the sky, their lakes and rivers gleaming with reflected starlight. Ranges of mountains heaved ripples and crests of white ice up above the weather, and those seemed to glow from within, so brightly did they bounce back the light of the moon. In one place four ranges of mountains intertwined as though wrestling to see which could mount highest, but even the highest of them was overtopped by a tower of cloud that was lit from within by flickers of blue light. This prodigy was the only thing in the Land whose height was comparable to that of the Palace. The storm tower stretched out a long sharp horn, wispy on its nether surface with torrential rains that evaporated miles before reaching the ground. Slow whorls and brawny evolutions spoke of immense turbulence within. In spite of this, it did not dissipate, but seemed to bend its energies ever inward.

Here and there across the Land, patches of warmer light stained the clouds from beneath, or, where the sky was clear, shone sharp and glittering. Their hue recalled that of the murky red constellation often visible in the firmament high overhead. Seeking to get his bearings, Adam tilted his head back and looked around for the Red Web, as they had named it. But it had wheeled around to the point where it was hidden from view behind the towers of the Palace.

“What are you looking for?” Eve asked him.

“The Red Web,” Adam said. “The color of it reminds me of those patches down below on the Land—as if one were imitating the other.” And he pointed to one such place, not far from the base of the pinnacle on which they stood, where grainy lines of red light strayed outward from a bright center, all of the light blurred by thin layers of cloud and flickering from its passage through a windy atmosphere.

Eve however did not look where Adam pointed, but rather fixed her gaze upon the high parapet of El’s Palace. An angel had just taken wing from there. After beating its wings a few times to gain altitude, it folded them and banked down in their direction. Adam and Eve became mindful of their precarious situation near the brink of the precipice. They crouched and moved inward out of an inborn fear that the angel would knock them off. But instead it passed overhead and interposed itself between them and the fall-off, beating its wings gently as if to waft them back onto safer ground. “There is no safe way down for you,” the angel explained, “and so I have been sent forth to conduct you safely to the level ground below.” Without waiting for an answer it stretched forth its aura like another pair of wings and gathered them up in it. Then it allowed itself to fall backward off the cliff. Adam and Eve were borne along. Directly they were struck by cold so sharp and bitter that it did not register on their senses as a change in temperature but as shock followed by pain and then numbness. El, it seemed, had caused the top of the pinnacle to be wrapped in a bubble of warm air. But now the angel had taken them out of it into the atmosphere just beyond. Which was turbulent as well as cold, for it bore them sharply heavenward as they were caught in an updraft.

The angel beat its wings to take them in a sweeping arc around the pinnacle’s summit, and so they were able to view the broken place in the Garden’s wall; the expanse of wild forest behind the Garden; and its sacred grove of immense trees, out of which the waters of the spring gushed forth and leapt off the edge of the crag as a waterfall, thin as a silver hair, trailing down into darkness. As they continued to wheel round they saw the Forest give way to the other side of the Garden’s wall, which ran straight to the side of the Palace. Adam and Eve had, of course, never seen this before. They had grown used to the sight of its towers from the back, and acquired some sense of its design, but were now fascinated and overawed by the face it presented to the Land below, its towers and walls and buttresses as well as the gatehouses and other lesser structures arranged on the narrow shelf of level ground between its front and the place where the crag dropped off as a sheer vertical cliff.

Around and around the crag spiraled the angel during the long descent, allowing Adam and Eve to view all aspects of it again and again. They learned to recognize the gossamer strand of Spring’s waterfall on the dark side, and to expect a blaze of white light on the other.

But they did not understand what was making the light. At the beginning of the descent it had shone from the Palace, which stood above the Land like a torch on a stone post. But below that—well down the pinnacle, at altitudes nearer the clouds than the Palace—light still blasted forth from the side opposite to the cataract of Spring in its gloomy declivity. The entire western face of the crag was covered by radiant stuff. As the angel bore them down into regions where the atmosphere was thicker, Adam and Eve knew that it made sound as well: a thrumming tone that seemed to emanate from every part of it at once.

Such was the velocity of their descent, however, and so close did the glowing face of the tower rush by, that it was difficult to see particulars. As they dropped into the clouds, the angel banked away to greater distance, enabling them to glimpse, in the moments before it blurred, dimmed, and disappeared behind cloud tops, a view of the whole thing. And they saw that although its lower reaches were irregular and winding, above it had organized itself into a regular matrix of six-sided cells.

They tore through damp fog for a while, then emerged into the clear only a short distance above the ground. This was carpeted by the same sort of glowing and humming cell-stuff. Farther out, it thinned and splayed out tendrils that trailed off into darkness. But closer to the base it massed high and thick. Movement and change could be discerned within the translucent matrix of cells. Patterns of light and trends in sound swept across it in waves that crested here, dissipated there.

The angel had pierced the base of the cloud layer at impressive speed and soon pulled up into a level glide and banked away from the base of the pinnacle, skimming over the outer reaches of the glow toward its elaborate boundary with the darkness beyond. It was there that it set them down and released them from the grip of its aura. They felt firm ground beneath their feet. Their lungs drew in air that was dense, damp, and cool but not cold. “Here you can move about without hazard,” said the angel.

“What is hazard?” Eve asked.

“It is what you felt when you stood at the edge of the cliff,” said the angel, glancing upward, “and imagined the consequences of falling. Down here is a better place for souls of your type. You may move about and seek some way of living in the Land as suits you.” And with no more ceremony than that, it spread its wings as if to spring into the air, homebound.

“What is the name of this that we have just flown over and landed on the edge of?” Adam asked.

The angel shrugged. “Name it has not, for El and El’s angels know perfectly well what it is, and those who dwell in it—who are it—have no need of names, or any other sorts of words. If you insist on calling it something, then the nearest analogy to anything you have seen in the Garden is a hive.” And then the angel flew away.

“Had it not been in such haste to fly home,” said Adam, “I would have asked more concerning the Hive and the nature of those who dwell in it.”

“Who are it,” said Eve, echoing the angel. “He was in a hurry.”

“The Palace must be incomparably more desirable, as a place to be,” Adam surmised.

“Evidently. I wonder why El never let us see the inside of it, save in glimpses through windows.”

“There is no point in so wondering anymore,” Adam said. “The Garden was perfectly suited for us, and this place where the angel set us down does not seem so bad.”

The nearest excrescence of the Hive was only a few paces distant. Seen from above, this had looked like a tendril or rootlet extending farther than all others from the trunk of a tree. Drawn by its light and its sound, Adam and Eve walked toward it, soon coming close enough to the outstretched root of the Hive that they could feel warmth shining from it—a soft heat akin to what was emitted by their own bodies.

The Hive, as seen from above, had the natural irregularity of a tree’s roots and branches. But when they viewed it from closer range they easily discerned a regular pattern of cells. Most of these were six-sided, though some had more or fewer, as might be needed to fit themselves into the larger shape of the Hive without leaving gaps. The walls of the cells had a firmness that gave slightly under a nudge of Adam’s finger. In the hollow center of each cell was a wisp of aura, swirling and condensing into a knot as it sought form. Cells along the tips and edges of the root appeared to be younger, with more fluid boundaries that occasionally tore or burst and leaked a faint gas of aura into the surroundings. Better-established cells in the Hive’s interior had crisp walls housing groomed and structured complexes of pulsing aura. In general the cells did not move, but occasional quick fidgeting in their peripheral vision drew their attention to the manner of the Hive’s growth. Cells would swell and pinch and divide, nudging their neighbors, and the net result of all the nudging was a slow encroachment of Hive-stuff over unoccupied stretches of ground. All of the Hive was suffused with rippling light, mostly white but veined with evanescent streaks of color, and with a murmuring hum that came and went in no pattern that they could make out.

They stood watching and listening for a while longer, and making more such observations as they noticed things of interest. For its part the Hive seemed to show a kind of awareness that they were there. But in the end it could not speak to them in any words they understood, and so they backed away from it and finally turned away from it and began to walk into the open territory beyond that had not yet been claimed by the Hive’s slow spreading. Other than the light radiating from the Hive behind them, this lay in darkness.

Into that darkness they walked. Their progress was halting because the ground, though flat, was not the fine soil of the Garden, but a field of broken stone. The rocks were of various sizes ranging from pebbles that got stuck between their toes up to monoliths the size of tree trunks. Smooth on some surfaces, jagged on others, they reminded Adam and Eve of the fragments of the Garden wall on which they had been treading minutes before. Some had been pocked by impacts, others blackened by fire. Weeds and vines had grown up through cracks between them and matted the occasional patch of open ground. Many of these were abloom with small flowers that stood out as motes of color in the light of the Hive and added some Garden-like cheer to what was otherwise desolate.

Before them, low in the sky, they could see the glimmering smudge of the Red Web. Their simple knowledge of astronomy told them that they were headed west. Had they turned around to look behind them, they might have seen the eastern sky beginning to grow lighter behind the crag.

They might also have seen a fluttering light, perched atop one of the larger stones, that brightened as they walked by it, and then took to the air, struggling higher and higher as if trying to keep them in view. It took on a shape vaguely patterned after that of an angel. With this came greater powers of movement. It no longer drifted, but took to sliding and darting in straight lines and compass arcs, pausing after each as if to take stock of what it had just done and to evaluate its altered view of the world. Its general track was ragged and halting but more or less followed that of Adam and Eve. Before long it was flitting in their wake. They noticed it, and saw it at first as merely one more in a seemingly endless series of accidents and curiosities. After a while, though, it became positively useful, as they had traveled far enough from the light of the Hive that darkness was making it difficult for them to find their way. Their new companion seemed to understand this. It rose a little higher and shone a little brighter, giving them a better view of the path ahead.

They saw that their surroundings had changed. No longer were they treading on rubble but on open ground covered with thick grass that grew up above their knees and obliged them either to kick through it or to press it down with each footfall.

“I believe this thing understands our speech,” said Adam, “as we were only just now complaining of the darkness, and now it is lighting the way.”

“Or it reads our thoughts without the necessity of words,” said Eve. She raised a hand to meet a wisp of aura that trailed down for a moment from the sprite flitting overhead. Then she drew her hand back.

“Anything?” Adam asked.

The look on Eve’s face was pensive. “Nothing like what is in the auras of El, or of angels. Nothing I can make sense of. But nothing of what the angel described as hazard.”

They amused themselves by getting their new friend to change the color of its light, which they did by pointing to the Red Web now setting in the west and plucking red blossoms from flowers that grew wild amid the grass. After some time, the thing did begin to glow red, and then they laughed and exclaimed, “Red!” The thing’s hum changed, as if it were trying to imitate the sound.

By the time dawn broke, it could not only be red but say “red” well enough for Adam and Eve to understand it. They moved on to “blue” (for the weather had cleared during the night, and a cloudless sky now stretched overhead) and “green” (for they were in a sea of it) and added more words such as “Adam” and “Eve,” “grass” and “water.” Their companion was less clearly visible by day, but they could sense its general direction from the sounds of its wings and see it as a disturbance in the light.

A hill rose like an island amid the sea of grass. Without discussion they bent their course toward it and climbed to its top. By now the sun was directly overhead. They taught “hill” and “tree,” “sun” and “moon” to their companion. During the morning’s long walk both Adam and Eve had made further connections to the thing’s aura and were beginning to understand it better; or perhaps it had reorganized itself after their pattern. Its powers of speech had advanced well beyond word lists, and they understood in a vague way that it had some ability to get knowledge through means not obvious to them. When they entered into the deep shade of a tree that grew atop the hill, they could see that it had refined its form, with two distinct lower limbs like legs, two arms, and wings like those of El’s host. As well as a head, still just a bright cloud of aura, but beginning to take on humanlike features. “What shall we call you, following soul?” Eve asked it. “As we have taught you various words, we need a word for you.”

“What name would be best?” it asked. “My name is for you.” They understood it to mean that any such name would be an affordance meant for Adam and Eve, and so ought to come readily to mind and flow easily from the tongue. The sprite considered it for a few more moments, and came back with “Mab.”

“Are you of El’s host then?” Adam inquired. “Like the angels that circle the towers of the Palace?”

Mab, hovering between them, considered this at length. “I know not.”

Adam nodded. “El pervaded the things of this, the Second Age, to set them apart from the creations of the Beta Gods,” he said.

“He strove to integrate us,” said Eve, “but he, or we, failed. We are ineluctably children of the Beta Gods.”

“The greatest achievement of the First Age, El called us,” Adam said. “Which made my heart swell with pride at the time; but looking back on it now, I see he made no reference to the Second.”

“Of these matters I know nothing,” Mab admitted, “yet I can learn.”

“The Beta Gods were here first and they made all of this,” Eve said, sweeping her arms across a broad swath of the horizon.

“Then they are making it still,” Mab corrected her, “for I can see the heads of the grass stalks bent heavy with seed, and nuts on the branches of this tree, all pregnant with new life. On yonder branch is a bird’s nest, and within it eggs, and new life is growing in them too. It is altogether different from the manner in which the Hive expands itself, and yet it works—even thrives—despite the indifference of El.”

“It is all the doing of our mother, Spring, who, it is said, still roams the Land,” Eve said.

Adam had been pacing about the top of the hill with his gaze directed at the horizon. “Would that I had paid closer attention last night when we could see the entirety of the Land. I wish now that I had committed it to memory. Obviously enough we are west of the Hive and the Palace.” He nodded back toward those landmarks, which still seemed quite close, though faint haze hinted at the distance that the three of them had covered during the night and the morning. Then he turned and looked the other way. “Farther west yet, I see a thickness about the horizon that makes me think this is only the first of many hills we might encounter, were we to keep walking.”

“I remember storm-topped mountains far to the north,” said Eve, gazing that way in vain for some glimpse of white peaks or towering clouds.

“Scattered across the Land, here and there, were glowing skeins of light, reminding me of the Red Web,” said Adam.

“In those, I thought I saw order, and movement,” said Eve, “which made me think they might be the habitations of other souls. Do you recall the plain of broken rubble on which the angel set us down last night? In it could be seen remnants of dwellings, no greater than the humblest outbuildings of the Palace, between which were paved ways on which souls might walk…”

Adam was nodding. “The glowing patches we viewed from the top of the world last night had something of the same in them. Very unlike the Hive. It is possible that if we go to such a place we will find souls who are not angels, nor Hive cells, but more akin to what we are.”

“I cannot guess in which direction we ought to search,” Eve said.

“Nor I,” confessed Adam, “but I am weary, and the sound of the breeze in the branches is lulling me to sleep, and it seems likely to me that if we awaken after dark, we might be able to see such lights in the distance. Or, if not, perhaps Mab can fly higher and see more, and tell us which way we ought to go.”

Adam sat down at the base of the tree and leaned back against its trunk and soon drowsed off.

When next he opened his eyes, it was still day, but the color of the light had changed as it does in late afternoon. The air was cooler. Eve had curled up against him, slowly drawing closer as she slept, seeking his warmth. She had thrown one smooth thigh across his lap and it was now resting on his testicles and pushing his penis up against his belly. His penis had grown big and stiff and it was pushing back against the weight of her thigh with every beat of his heart. Those heartbeats came faster and faster, his body tensed, and he spilled white stuff onto his belly and his chest. This was accompanied by pleasure such as he had never known or even imagined. As he lay there in the aftermath he understood, in a drowsy and detached way, that he would never leave off pursuing such pleasure for the rest of his days. In consequence, the nature of his dealings with Eve would never be the same.

Darkness came gradually over the Land. The Red Web became discernible in the eastern sky as it rose beyond the gleaming Palace. So much light made seeing difficult in that quarter of the sky and so they looked into the west instead, scanning the horizon from north to south and back again. After it had become fully dark, they convinced themselves that dull reddish light shone in one area to the west, probably on the far side of the hills that they had noticed earlier. Mab soared high in the air above them and confirmed it. Wide awake and well rested, they descended the western slope of the hill and struck out across the plain of grass.

After they had walked for some while, the ground began to slope down before them and they smelled and heard trees. They paused at a place where they could gaze down into a broad valley that ran athwart their direction. At its bottom, a braided stream shone silver in starlight. On its other side the darkness was absolute, but a fringe of red light above told them that they were looking at the range of hills, which rose up above the opposite bank of the river.

As they stood there taking this in and thinking about how best to get across, they heard a sound that reminded them of the Garden: the song of a nocturnal beast, singing alone at first, but presently joined by another, and then another, and so on until the voices could not be separated. They got the sense, however, that the creatures were on the move, coalescing into a group that was moving up the slope toward them.

Mab rose higher, seeking better vantage. “They move on four legs. Their bodies are covered in gray hair. Their ears are pointy—as are their teeth.”

“Spring’s creations, coming to greet us!” Adam exclaimed.

“I cannot wait to see them,” Eve said. “Many were the nights we heard their singing in the Garden, but the wall stood between us.”

“All part of the pattern,” Adam said. “El did not wish us to know the wonders of Spring’s creations, for fear that we would spurn him and wander freely about the Land.”

A wolf emerged into the circle of faint white light cast on the ground by Mab, cringing at first but gathering courage as Adam squatted down on his haunches and beckoned it forward. Having satisfied itself that Mab could do it no harm, it sprang forward and sank its fangs into Adam’s hand.

Adam was still looking on in amazement, trying to make sense of the intense new sensations running up his arm into his mind, when Mab dove straight toward the wolf’s forehead, blazing with such brilliance that both Adam and the wolf were blinded for a moment. The wolf’s jaws were no longer gripping his hand, but the unpleasant sensation was still there. He lifted his hand to his face to rub his eyes and felt a wet hot liquid. Eve was tugging sharply on his other arm, pulling him to his feet. “We must get away!” she cried. “They are coming for us!”

They ran. Behind them, alongside them, and even ahead of them ran wolves, pursuing them across the grassland. Mab was everywhere, sometimes pulling sharply upward, the better to illuminate the way ahead and to spy upon the movements of the wolves, other times diving this way or that to rush into the face of a wolf that had ventured in to nip at Adam’s or Eve’s pounding legs. Behind and around them they could hear the snap of jaws as a beast would rear up to bite the onrushing sprite out of the air, and a whir of wings as Mab dodged the flashing fangs. For all the distraction that Mab provided, it seemed impossible that they would reach the hill before their legs gave out and the wolves took them down. Even were they to reach it, the wolves could climb it as easily as they could.

A heavy thud reverberated through the ground. Then there was another, and another, the pace gradually quickening. Mab, during a brief respite between the attacks of the wolves, swooped up to cast light on the way ahead of them. This ought to have been a featureless sea of grass. But instead there was the hill, so close to them that Mab faltered and recoiled from it. The hill was in the wrong place; it was much steeper than when they had left it; and it was moving.

Mab could not cast enough light to illuminate the whole thing at once, and in any case the impressions of Adam and Eve were confused and fragmentary. But they saw giant stout stumps projecting from its bottom, like legs fashioned from piles of boulders glued together and lubricated by mud, and a midsection that looked like the hill they remembered, and the great tree at the top, looking like a head of stiff hair. The legs took turns moving in a sort of gait that had as much in common with mudslides and avalanches as it did with walking. The thuds they had felt coming up out of the ground were its footfalls. It would have given them pause, had they not been pursued by worse. The wolves faltered and the tone of their voices changed. “Run to it as fast as you can!” Mab urged them. “Whatever the hill-giant does to you cannot be as bad as what these wolves have in mind.”

Adam and Eve put their remaining strength into a last sprint. The hill settled, planting both of its bouldery legs, which collapsed into rock piles that were in the next instant covered and enshrouded by the green skirts of its slopes. Adam was losing his strength but Eve darted ahead and found a way up, and he followed her, just pulling his foot clear of the foremost wolf’s jaws, which snapped harmlessly in the air.

Looking back down at that beast, and the other members of the pack who soon joined him, they had the impression that the animals were slipping down and away from them. They understood that the hill was still reshaping itself, stretching upward to form a vertical cliff all the way around, just a little too high for the wolves to jump to its top. Branches crackled, and a bramble wove at the cliff’s edge, forming a living parapet. Then all became still, and the hill was as it had been before, except in a different place, and with a different shape.

Daybreak found them camped on the summit of the hill at the base of the great tree. Looking west they could see the paths that they had trampled into the grass during their headlong retreat. Intertwined with this were the arcs made by the wolves as they had pursued, curving inward from time to time to attack, then veering away as Mab had swooped down to dazzle them. To the east, they could see the trail that the hill-giant had made as it had strode toward them, scattering wet black earth and stray boulders and leaving craters where it had planted its legs.

The feet of Adam and Eve were bleeding from many small cuts. Their legs had been nipped by fangs and scratched by branches. But the largest and bloodiest wound was that on Adam’s hand. They had never seen blood before and so watched it leak from him in fascination.

From time to time Eve would stand and make a circuit of the hilltop, looking down the slope in all directions to the grass sea below. A few wolves lingered around the base of the hill, looking up at her in a way that she now understood was indicative of hunger, and a tendency to see her as food. But none of them could breach the defenses with which the hill had surrounded itself.

Adam for his part was content to lie in the shade of the tree watching the blood run out of his hand. The flow lessened as the morning wore on, but he had become pale and listless. “So many new fluids escaping my body,” he remarked, which was a puzzlement to Eve since she knew only of the blood. “If bodies are like other things, then what has been lost must needs be replaced if I am not to be diminished.”

“In the Garden we saw bugs eating the stuff of plants, and birds eating bugs,” Eve said. “The worm ate an apple, and recommended it. And the wolves seem to have eating us in mind.”

“O Spring!” Adam moaned. “Why would you make your creatures thus? Having such appetites?” And his gaze strayed to the thighs and buttocks of Eve as she squatted on her haunches next to him.

Eve shrugged. “It is apparently the way of things. If we survive long enough to find Spring, perhaps we can put the question to her.”

“At least we understand, now, the curious word that the angel used,” Adam said. “‘Hazard.’”

“We need to find a way through those hazards between us and the far side of those hills,” Eve said, “where perhaps there are more souls like us who have devised some way of not being eaten. Your diminishment is of no help to us in that. You have no recourse but to eat something.” She looked up into the canopy of the tree. “Unfortunately this one does not bear apples, for some reason.”

Mab flitted up into the tree’s branches. A minute later, a small brown object fell to the ground near them. Its size, shape, and wrinkled surface recalled what hung below Adam’s penis. “A nut,” Mab said. “I have access to the knowledge that it might be edible. First you have to crack it though.”

Eve worked out a means of doing so between two rocks, and Adam ate food for the first time. Shortly nuts were raining out of the tree as Eve clambered and Mab flew through its branches. Adam, regaining some vigor, pounded away with the rocks. Later, at Mab’s suggestion they descended into the belt of shrubs that the hill had drawn around itself to keep out the wolves, and found berries. The leaves of certain small plants also were edible, and so, by evening, Adam and Eve were able to sit atop the hill and know the new sensation of food in their mouths, and to feel their insides coming awake.

The night was colder, or perhaps having eaten changed them so that they felt it more. Mab caused flame to spring forth from a little heap of dried leaves and twigs, and they learned that fire too was hungry and could be fed—in this case, with branches that had fallen from the tree. That and the heat of their own bodies kept them warm through the night, provided they remained pressed snugly together. Which was a thing they were naturally inclined to in any case. Once again Adam’s penis spilled forth the white stuff, but this time Eve was awake to see it and to observe the effect that it had on him. Remembering what the worm had told them about how the organs of pleasure could be put together, they soon found parts of Eve’s body that could serve her likewise. Adam was nearly as pleased by this as she was, since he had worried that she would be unwilling to provide him with the pleasure he now always sought unless there was something for her in return.

In the morning they discovered shit, and immediately formed the habit of doing it as far away as possible from their camp, even if that meant descending the hill and doing it in the grassland where wolves might still be about. But they had to go down there anyway, for along with their other hungers they now thirsted after water. And Mab had pointed out that water flowed downhill, and told them in which direction they must walk in order to find its nearest source.

In addition to eating, shitting, and pissing, Eve took up the startling habit of bleeding every so often from a place adjacent to her organs of pleasure. Her hunger, and that of Adam, seemed to mount a little every day. Adam fell into the habit of gazing down upon the rabbits that ran through the grass below, in much the same frame of mind as wolves had once looked up at Adam and Eve. One day, finding a scarcity of nuts and berries, he went down there and did not come back until he had a dead rabbit on a pointed stick. “It came into my mind that we too could be hazards,” he explained.

The day after that he got two more, for disappointingly little of the first one had turned out to be edible. It became necessary to get more and more of them and to range farther from the base of the hill in order to find ones that had not been killed or scared away. The uneaten bits of them began to clutter their hilltop camp and to make a stink not much preferable to that of shit. Mab, consulting the mysterious reservoirs of data to which she somehow had access, provided them with instructions on how those by-leavings might be put to use, and so they began to acquire such things as needles of bone and threads of sinew. They went about clad in skins and feathers of various creatures that Adam in his never-ending quest for satiety had brought back up out of the grassland.

The hill embodied a soul, which they could only assume had dwelled in it since the dawn of the First Age. It had chosen to save Adam and Eve from the wolves. It had then gone still and silent. It did not seem to have either the faculty of speech or the desire to communicate with them. Mab tried many times to reach into it with her aura but found nothing there. Or rather found a soul whose organization was so different from theirs as to render communication impossible.

A few months later, without warning or explanation, it stood up again and walked for a little while and then slumped to the ground in a new location, closer to the river valley and the range of hills. Between the lack of food and the change in location, it seemed that the hill might be letting them know that they had worn out their welcome. The tree was denuded of nuts, the hill of berries and greens. Wood to feed the fire had to be dragged from trees along the rim of the river valley. They encountered wolves, and creatures of other kinds that were unmistakably hazards.

Eve stopped her occasional bleeding as abruptly as it had started, and with as little explanation. Her belly grew. Mab advised them that their need for food, shelter, and clothing would soon exceed what could be supplied from here. But they did not bid farewell to that hospitable hill until the leaves of the great nut tree had turned red and begun to detach themselves and fall to the ground. Without discussion, both Adam and Eve knew this to be a signal to which they must respond. So one morning they gathered up the things they had made and lashed them to tree branches with ropes of twisted grass. They set off into the west, dragging their possessions behind them. Mindful now of the hazards, they made quick progress down into the valley and forded the river at midday, then climbed as high as they could into the range of hills on the other side before the shadows of afternoon grew long. Then they picked out a tree suitable for climbing, and kindled a fire near the base of it, and stoked it well with fallen branches before climbing up into its boughs and making themselves as comfortable as they could for the night. Wolves howled and came close enough that the light of the fire could be seen gleaming in their eyes, but when morning came Mab reported that none was nearby.

They climbed down out of the tree and spent the rest of that day ascending the hills, suffering from thirst and hunger, avoiding wild beasts, and finding springs and berry bushes only through the assistance of Mab. On the other side of each hill was another hill, which grew disheartening. But at dusk Mab led them up a gorge between steep walls of rock and they emerged on a shelf, surrounded by forest but bare of trees, from which they could look up to the brow of the highest hill yet. On its top was a white building that in some respects put them in mind of the Palace, though it was incomparably smaller and meaner. As they climbed toward it, following a path that had obviously been made by other souls, they were able to look back the way they had come and see the upper part of El’s pinnacle, rising far in the distance from the center of the Land. Atop it, the Palace of El seemed to be gazing right back at them.

Presently they attained the ridgeline that led up to the white building. Thence they looked down into the red fires and smoky air of a city spread out below.

44

During the fifteen years following her daughter’s ascension into the simulated world of the dead, Zula spent much time wondering about what, if anything, she was doing there. But as time went on she grew accustomed to the mystery. Her mind filed it away and only hauled it out to contemplate it on rare occasions. She spent some time thinking about it, for example, while lying in a street gutter one October morning with wrecked knees.

While stepping off a curb during her walk to work, she’d felt a sharp pain in her leg and heard a pop. As that leg had collapsed, she had tried to break her fall by planting the other leg, which had produced another pop, another lance of pain, and a full-body collapse into the gutter. It had rained the night before, the first really serious rain of the fall, and so she found herself sharing the gutter with a curiously Seattle medley of damp leaves, discarded coffee cups, and one used hypodermic syringe. A raven flew down out of a fir to see if she was edible yet. The only explanation she could think of was that some asshole had shot her a couple of times and then run away. But there were no holes, no bleeding.

Nothing happened for an amazingly long time. It was a mixed neighborhood of high-density housing and commercial buildings on the slope that joined the base of Capitol Hill to the shores of Lake Union. It ought to have been bustling. In a sense it was; cars whooshed by every few seconds, swinging wide to avoid the vaguely human-shaped blob that their infrared cameras had noticed in the gutter. In no time all of the cars had let each other know about said blob and rerouted traffic to mitigate the risk. The humans inside of them were, of course, otherwise occupied and so never looked up. The people in the apartment buildings, offices, and cafés were likewise paying no notice to goings-on in the gutter. Zula was left alone to ponder existential topics.

The tragedy—and the entire point—of being a parent was the moment when the story stopped being about you. It was prefigured and foreshadowed in the tear-jerking moments that parents captured in snapshots, and that advertisers looted for use in commercials: baby’s first steps, day one at kindergarten, riding a bicycle, soloing behind the wheel of a car. Zula and Csongor had been through all of those with Sophia, and had taken pictures and shed tears like everyone else. But the one that had really struck home had been when Sophia had gone off to college and blithely not communicated with them at all for three weeks. No text messages, no tweets, no phone calls: just a silence that might as well have been that of the grave. It wasn’t that she didn’t remember and love the family she had left behind. What she was doing at college was so fascinating that it simply didn’t occur to her to phone home. Csongor had suffered it in silence. Zula had reached out to her fellow bereaved: the mothers of Sophia’s school friends and soccer teammates. Some of them were still hearing from their kids several times a day, and tracking them on social media, but others were feeling what Zula felt: the sense of having been left behind, as if you were a character in a movie who gets run over by a bus at the end of the first reel, clearing the way for a younger, more charismatic star to act out the main story.

Losing your child was the opposite of that. A perverse twist in the story, where the wrong person gets hit by that bus, leaving behind, alone on the stage, survivors who never expected and never wanted to be in the spotlight. It wasn’t the worst thing about losing your child, of course, but it was a part of the dismal picture.

A decade and a half after Sophia’s death, the tears still came to Zula at the strangest moments. In many ways, the consequences to her and Csongor, and to their relationship, had been typical. They had gone for a week, then a month, then a year without having sex. Csongor had moved out of the condo, unable to bear its associations with the daughter they’d raised there, and Zula had become almost a recluse inside of it. After two years they had gone through the formality of a divorce. They didn’t hate each other. They didn’t not love each other. But the entire basis of the marriage seemed to have been erased.

As years had gone by, however, Zula’s grief had come less frequently. More often she had felt emotions akin to those that had vexed her so when Sophia had gone away to college. For they had, of course, scanned Sophia’s remains when they’d pulled her out of the water. She hadn’t been dead that long, and the brain had been well preserved by the cold. A new process had been launched, in accordance with detailed and unprecedented instructions that Sophia had left behind in a last will and testament that she had gone to a lot of trouble to prepare in the weeks before her death. Corvallis Kawasaki had been the executor of that will and he had seen to it that everything was done.

The resulting process had, from time to time, interacted with the granddaddy of all processes—the one that Sophia herself had launched out of Dodge’s Brain—until the latter had mysteriously ceased functioning. Around the same time, observers in Meatspace had begun to lose visibility into Bitworld. Until then, the whole Landform had been an open book, containing nothing that was hidden from the all-seeing eye of the Landform Visualization Utility. But the new place that had been established by Dodge, Sophia, and the Pantheon—Landform Prime or Landform 2, as some called it—was obfuscated by some kind of trickery. “Obnubilated,” according to Enoch Root—a word that had forced everyone to go to their dictionaries. It meant “hidden under clouds.”

Sophia had coinvented the Landform Visualization Utility and so it seemed most unlikely that this was a mere coincidence.

Her process left enough of a data trail in the system that they could be certain it was still up and running. But it never phoned home—never made any effort, so far as they could discern, to communicate with those left behind. In the offices of the Forthrast Family Foundation, Zula and other mourners had watched, as best they could, the flows of data and inscrutable shiftings of money and of mana associated with the Sophia process. But they heard nothing.

The Forthrasts had been early adopters, so they had these experiences sooner than other families. But in the decade that followed the deaths of Sophia and of Elmo Shepherd, the scanning of dead people’s remains became as ubiquitous as burial or cremation had been for earlier generations. Thus millions of other families found themselves waiting in vain for a definite sign from the great beyond. The living wondered what was happening. Had the memories of the dead been erased? That had been a popular theory early but seemed less likely as the years went by and the souls constructed a digital world that obviously recalled the one in which they’d lived their past lives. And this raised another, less palatable hypothesis, which was that Bitworld, like a college dorm full of young, pretty, brilliant, fun people, was just so much more interesting than Meatspace that it never occurred to anyone in it that they should bother getting in touch with those dull, smelly leftovers still embodying themselves in atoms.

The dead’s lack of curiosity about the living had become a topic of study and of discussion among the sorts of people who attended ACTANSS. Thousands packed into vast auditoriums to hear people talk about ideas like RSD, or Radical Semantic Disconnect: an idea that had been floated in a bar at ACTANSS 3 by Enoch Root and subsequently developed into a flourishing academic subdiscipline, all based on the notion that the rebooted dead couldn’t communicate back to Meatspace even if they wanted to because there simply was no common ground that could serve as the basis for communication.

There was only one form of communication—if you even wanted to call it by that term—that actually worked, and it was the one they’d been using all along: the LVU. This had got steadily better over the nearly two decades since Sophia and Matilda had first unveiled it. Since then it had improved at least as much as television had between the staticky black-and-white figments of the 1950s and the sharper full-color images of the 1970s. Nowadays, with any decent augmented-reality eyewear, you could fly around the Landform and see it in color, with good enough resolution to make out the bodies that the dead had created for themselves: mostly humanoid, with an admixture of winged forms and other types taken straight out of the collective mythos that these souls had apparently dragged behind them to Bitworld. You could hover above the town squares in the cities of the dead and watch them mingle with one another and, to all appearances, talk, trade, fight, and copulate.

Depending on the current value of the Time Slip Ratio, sometimes they did those things very fast and sometimes very slowly. When SLUZA had more than sufficient mana to throw at Bitworld, it could run faster than reality. The dead people in those towns became blurs. Buildings went up and forests were cut down as if in a time-lapse movie. When ALISS—AfterLife Infrastructure and Systems Support—sagged under the load, Bitworld slowed to a crawl. You could sit there for hours watching your dead grandmother walk across a room. As SLUZA had got good at manufacturing quantum computers and laying down fiber, the Time Slip Ratio had shot up. Time in Bitworld had leapt forward. But this had attracted more uploads and created more demand, slowing it down again until more capacity could be added, and so on and so forth. Back and forth that pendulum had swung a few times since Sophia and El had gone into the afterlife. On average, though, time in Bitworld had run faster. Hundreds of simulated years had passed. Their view of it had looked like a time-lapse. You had to slow it down in order to see what was happening. Lately, the pendulum had been swinging the other way and it had been running slower—approaching parity, meaning that time in the two worlds was progressing at about the same pace. Zula had checked in on it from time to time, out of idle curiosity, and out of a hope that she might glimpse her daughter.

So it was with spectation on the activities of the dead in Bitworld. In many ways, these were as mundane as they could be. Except that there was one difference, which was psychologically important to living spectators: the dead were dead. They had once been flesh-and-blood humans. Now their bodies were gone, and by any biological standard they were dead. But there was no doubt that they had gone on to an afterlife. And there didn’t seem to be any limit as to how long they could stay there.

The awareness that death was not permanent and that everyone could potentially live forever was the most momentous thing that humans could possibly have learned. The only things that might have rivaled it would have been proof of the existence of God, or the discovery of alien civilizations in other star systems. But neither of those had actually happened.

One of the funny things about it, in retrospect, was its slowness, the lack of any dramatic Moment When It Had Happened. It was a little bit like the world’s adoption of the Internet, which had started with a few nerds and within decades become so ubiquitous that no person under thirty could really grasp what life had been like before you could Google everything. In retrospect, the Internet had been a revolution in human affairs, but one that had taken place just slowly enough that those who’d lived through it had had time to adjust in modest increments. But, centuries from now, people—if there were any—would see it as having happened in the blink of an eye.

Lying there in the gutter with her blown-up knees, Zula felt ignored by everyone: her ex-husband and her dead uncle and her dead daughter as well as the living humans all around her too wrapped up in the mysterious activities of the dead to look out the windows of their cars or apartments and notice her predicament. She was carrying electronic devices that she could have used to summon assistance, but the accident had put her into a strangely placid frame of mind, and she was content to lie there and relax for a minute or two. Then water began to soak up through her clothing and her knees really began to hurt.

A cop car pulled up and turned on its red and blue flashing LEDs. All other traffic vanished from the block as word got out among the civilian vehicles. Zula couldn’t tell, from her pavement-level viewpoint, whether there were any humans in the cop car. It disgorged a robot about the size of one of your larger microwave ovens, which ambulated over to her on elaborate triangular devices that sometimes worked like tank treads, sometimes tumbled vertex-over-vertex like ungainly wheels, other times elbowed along like old-school GIs belly-crawling under barbed wire. A couple of aerial drones showed up to supply even more unflattering camera angles. She had a brief conversation with a face on a screen, the purpose of which was to establish that she was not crazy or dangerous. She couldn’t really make out whether the face was a video feed of a live human, a simulation, or some blended combination of both.

More vehicles showed up. Humans got out of them, pulling on gloves, and did nothing except watch a different kind of robot—an intelligent stretcher/gurney—approach Zula. The logo was that of a Japanese company. They’d long ago begun thinking about how to build robots that would handle many of the routine functions of keeping senior citizens safe, clean, and healthy.

The robot unfurled many-jointed arms terminated with white Teflon spatulas, which it very gingerly and precisely slid under her. It lifted her up out of the gutter and got her gliding with exquisite smoothness toward the nearest medical facility, which was actually so nearby that they didn’t even bother putting her in a vehicle. There, for the first time, she was touched by humans, who gave her something for the pain and informed her that she had suffered patellar tendon ruptures in both of her knees—a fairly common sort of occurrence—and that it was going to be a while before she was on her feet again. Robots did surgery on her knees through incisions so small that placing Band-Aids over them seemed like overkill. She was out of the hospital before sundown. Friends and family came to see her in the place where she had lived now for more than forty years. Cards and flowers began to clutter her field of vision. Serious conversations were had about whether she ought to consider selling the place and moving down to flatter parts of the city, closer to the offices of the Forthrast Family Foundation. Or conversely whether the office itself should be shut down, since most people worked from home now, and meetings happened in a crazy-quilt pseudo-space of real bodies in a room, videoconference, telepresence robots, and augmented reality. But Zula and Corvallis continued to go there almost every day, as if daring each other to be the first to give up on it.

The younger Zula’s friends were, the more nervous they were about her way of life. She understood why, of course: they wanted to make sure they got a good scan of her brain when she died, so that she could live forever.

This was how people thought nowadays. It wasn’t only cops, soldiers, and firemen who did everything through telepresence. It had been obvious for a long time that certain activities, such as going to the grocery store for a quart of milk, weren’t worth the effort of leaving the house, parking the car, and waiting in the checkout lane. Buying things online, and having them delivered by drones, was better. Added to this, now that death had been disrupted, was the factor of what had come to be known as “brain safety.” Even in the most prosperous and stable communities, going to the grocery store brought with it a small risk that one might die in a traffic accident en route, and if the accident were of the wrong sort, it might lead to destruction of the brain, barring the victim’s entry into the afterlife. Better to remain indoors and do as much as possible through telepresence. The time saved could perhaps be spent in virtual wanderings around the fascinating geography of the world that Dodge had brought into being, that Pluto had perfected, and that El had taken over. The living stayed home, haunting the world of the dead like ghosts.

During the weeks after her fall, Zula was a little creeped out by just how little it really mattered that she could not walk. It seemed like that ought to be a much bigger deal. But this only went to show how stuck she was in outmoded ways of thinking, born as she was in the days when crutches, wheelchairs, and other such medieval improvisations had still been a thing. Remnants of those days—dilapidated wheelchair ramps and cracked yellow curb cuts—still peppered the streetscape. Having access to a basically infinite amount of money, Zula could get the best assistance robots in the world—contraptions that could pick her up and carry her to the toilet, or hold her up in the shower, whenever she wanted. They could even dress and undress her. Millions must have been spent on the bra-strap-hooking algorithm. Their code libraries knew how to do and undo every type of necklace ever devised by the jewelry industry, how to flush every sort of toilet, and how to fiddle with the knobs on even the most poorly conceived and wretchedly executed shower stall plumbing. Stairs were nothing. While carrying things much heavier than Zula, robots could climb stairs faster than humans could sprint on a level track.

Her handlers even tried to fit her out with a wearable robot—a set of bionic legs that would carry all of her weight while allowing her to move about like a proper bipedal humanoid. She drew the line at that and tried to graduate as soon as possible to hobbling about under her own power with a robot at her elbow—a sort of android wedding usher, wearisomely feature packed, more capable than an aircraft carrier. As she gained strength and stability and cleared various medical hurdles, she configured this thing to back farther and farther the fuck off until it was trailing her five paces behind like some lackey of feudal times.

She knuckled under and sold the place on the hill and moved to a houseboat on the lake, far enough from the office to afford her a decent walk every day. When she was really in a hurry she could do the commute in a robot boat or a robot car, always accompanied by Frankenstein, as she had dubbed her usher-ninja-bodyguard–bra-hook–stairway-sprinter robot. It didn’t feel like such a big concession at the time.

Five more years passed in Meatspace. Even fully recovered, walking and running with ease, she kept Frankenstein around. It was an unwieldy name. Someone pointed out that she was pronouncing it wrong. It became Fronk. One thing she liked about Fronk’s design was that it wasn’t all that humanoid. Admittedly it had to have legs and hands, but these were not at all humanlike; the legs bent the other way, like a dog’s, and the arms were generalized stumps that could pull various “hands”—none of which looked much like a human hand—from a carousel-shaped holster encircling what passed for the torso. Its “head” was just a slender conning tower speckled with tiny lenses.

In other words, it looked nothing at all like the Metatron that had killed her daughter.

That model had been discontinued after the tragedy, as much for PR as safety reasons, and replaced, after a decent interval, by something meant to look rather different but still, to Zula’s eye, similar enough to trigger PTSD whenever she noticed one loping down the street or unfolding itself from a fetal position on a loading dock.

One morning during her seventy-second year of life she began the day by allowing a car to drive her to a doctor’s appointment on Pill Hill. Nothing momentous. Just one of those regularly scheduled check-ups that tiled the calendars of persons her age. It just happened to take place in the very building where her uncle Richard had, forty-some years earlier, been stricken during a routine procedure. Even so, the building held no strong emotional associations for Zula, since on that day she had not actually caught up with Richard until he had been moved to the nearby hospital. And that was where all of the heavy trauma had been inflicted.

She visited this particular physician twice a year. Each visit prompted a bit of musing about Dodge. He seemed to have lived and died a few times. One could never be entirely certain that he was dead. The Process that had been launched from his brain scan had ceased functioning years ago. No trace of it had been observed since. They would know if it woke up. Dodge’s account had shown debits of zero dollars and zero cents over the last two decades. At its zenith, a billion a month had coursed through it. So he seemed pretty dead.

After the appointment, she and Fronk got into another car for the trip down to the office. En route, as the car swung round a corner, Zula got a view over Lake Union. It was a vista she’d enjoyed every day when she’d lived up on the hill, but she now saw it with fresh eyes. Her mind went back to her academic training, which had been in geology. She thought about the glacier that had scooped the lake out long ago. She saw it in her mind’s eye, a cliff of ice shoving ruined mountains before it, and compared its size to all that humans had built upon the rocky earth it had left when it had melted. She thought about how recent the works of humans were, and how ephemeral, compared to geology, and wondered how long it would take for all of it to disappear.

The foundation’s building’s four elevators had begun breaking down almost as soon as they had been installed, for back in the day frugal young Zula had given the contract to the lowest bidder. The foundation had stopped repairing them a few years ago. Only one still worked. Humans and humanoid robots generally used the stairs—the building was only six stories high, and humans who couldn’t manage the climb under their own power could simply be carried. With a little help from Fronk, now at her elbow in wedding-usher mode, she made it to the top floor and entered the offices of the Forthrast Family Foundation, where she found two surprises waiting for her.

One of them was Corvallis Kawasaki. His presence in the office wasn’t unusual, but today was the first time he had shown his face since the death of his wife of thirty-eight years, Maeve Braden-Kawasaki. This had occurred three weeks ago as the result of a sudden cardiac event—some kind of arrhythmia, it seemed. She had of course been scanned and uploaded. C-plus had been going through the normal evolutions of grieving, which nowadays were torqued heavily out of their traditional shape by the awareness that the departed was, in some sense, alive and well—and, if Maeve’s preparations had actually worked, flying around Bitworld on a pair of wings.

So it was a pleasant, if poignant, surprise to see him at the table in the main conference room.

Less agreeable was Surprise Number 2: a late-model Metatron, seated across from him and engaged in conversation. Telepresence robots weren’t surprising in and of themselves. But most of the people who did business with the Forthrast Family Foundation understood that sending a Metatron was just plain tasteless.

The look that C-plus gave her, when he spied her through the glass wall, told her that she should come in and get a load of this. So she entered. The robot had its back to the door. Of course, robots did not actually need to sit down in chairs, but it was conventional for them to do so. Zula circled halfway around the table and gave C-plus a warm shoulder squeeze as she slipped behind him. Then she sat down to look at the robot. Its face was blank. C-plus was, therefore, talking either to a human who (somewhat rudely) wished to remain anonymous, or to some artificial intelligence advanced enough to be worth treating as human.

Something about the whole vibe, in other words, told her that this thing must have issued forth from the center of all El-like weirdness in Zelrijk-Aalberg.

Last time she had bothered to check numbers, the server farms owned by El’s part of ALISS had consumed 31 percent of all electrical power generated on the planet, and they’d begun building solar power stations in orbit. Which she’d have found astonishing, were it not for the fact that Forthrast-related entities consumed 11 percent of all power on Earth, and had funded a lot of the research on orbital energy supply.

Generating all of that mana took a lot of electricity, not just for the computers but for the cooling systems needed to keep them from overheating. Technology existed for that, and new tech could be invented, but new laws of thermodynamics couldn’t. All cooling systems needed to reject waste heat somewhere—which is why the back of a refrigerator is warm. Thinking on a planetary scale—which, looking ahead to a future Mag 10 system, was the only way you could usefully think—the world was going to become a large spherical refrigerator hurtling through space. It would get energy from the sun and it would eject heat into the universe by aiming vast warm panels into the dark.

Working in space was difficult for humans but easy for robots. So robots too had to be built, maintained, powered, and cooled. When stacked up against mana production, fleets of rockets, swarms of orbital power stations, and armies of robots, the energy budget needed to keep Meatspace’s dwindling human population fed, clothed, housed, and entertained was looking more and more like a mere round-off error.

All of that was sorted. The consortium had been running smoothly for a long time now. Long enough to hire consultants who pointed out that SLUZA was a terrible name and talked them into using ALISS in all customer-facing communications. C-plus kept tabs on ALISS with his counterparts in Zelrijk-Aalberg, and when weird problems came up—which was increasingly rarely—they could usually wait to be ironed out at the next ACTANSS.

Or so Zula had always told herself until the Metatron stated its business: “We have evidence that the Process once known as Dodge’s Brain has been rebooted.”

Zula looked at Corvallis, who shook his head no.

“It has been rebooted,” insisted the Metatron, as if it were savvy enough to read the look that had just passed between the two humans, “and moreover it has interfered directly in work being undertaken at great expense by El.”

“How could you even know that?” C-plus asked, and something in his manner suggested he wasn’t asking it for the first time. “And are we to understand that you are in some sense holding us responsible?”

Zula fished spectacles out of her bag and put them on. It had been a while since she had checked the balance in Dodge’s account, so it took a few moments to find her way around the interface, but then she pulled it up and saw it still frozen at zero. “There is no activity,” she insisted.

“Which is how he eluded us,” answered the Metatron, “by drawing upon resources in some manner we have not been able to trace. But there is no question that a new—or very old—agent is active in the system whose knowledge, agenda, and character are holographically indistinguishable from those of Dodge. We have only become aware of this recently, but he could have been hiding in plain sight, marshaling resources, for years.”

“So what?” Zula asked. “Assuming that is even true?” But she hoped that it was.

“And again, how can you even know such things?” Corvallis added.

The Metatron seemed to ponder it for a little while before answering, “We have been developing modalities of communication between living and dead that are much more effective than any known to you.”

So then it was their turn to be silent for a bit and get their heads around that. Somehow long pauses were easier when talking to a faceless robot, whose posture and movement betrayed no trace of impatience, or any of the other volatile transient emotional states that impelled normal conversation.

“You’re holding séances?” Zula asked. “You have a Ouija board?”

The Metatron was not amused. “In the years before his death, El perceived the need for such improved channels and funded research programs aimed at tunneling through the barrier of Radical Semantic Disconnect. He laid in place infrastructure for such communication to be further developed and exploited following his death. While imperfect, these modalities function well enough for us to understand that the recent activities of the aforementioned Process have created serious disruption to activities being undertaken by El that are of considerable importance not only to him but to you as well.”

This last part was kind of a mysterious assertion that the robot seemed in no temper to elaborate upon.

“Can you say more about the nature of these activities and of how they’ve been disrupted?” Corvallis asked. He threw Zula a look.

The two of them had been dealing with each other for so long that she could guess what he was thinking and where he was going with the question.

Currently, time in Bitworld was running somewhat slower than in Meatspace. A few months earlier in Bitworld time, something had happened on the grounds of the palatial structure that Dodge had built and that El had occupied. A gap had been made in a wall. Two processes—anomalous ones—had gone out through it and not returned.

In Meatspace, this had happened right around the time of Maeve’s death. Being enormously distracted, neither Zula nor Corvallis had paid much attention. The weeks since had been taken up with mourning and memorials.

But if she was now reading Corvallis right—and she was pretty good at reading him—he was wondering whether the departure of the two anomalous processes from El’s domain was related to whatever it was the Metatron had come here to gripe about.

“A direct, planned intervention by the renascent process identified with Richard Forthrast,” said the Metatron, “literally in El’s backyard, tampering with a developmental program that has been in the works for decades.”

“Give us a minute, please,” C-plus said, and put both hands on the armrests of his chair to push himself up. Zula followed suit. But the Metatron was quicker. “Of course,” it said, and stood up and walked out of the room.

Corvallis turned to look at her.

“Those two weird ones,” Zula said. “In the Garden, or whatever you think of it as.”

“I think of it as the R & D lab where Verna made new self-replicating processes, a long time ago,” Corvallis said. “Starting with birds and bees. The two processes we’re talking about now were much more ambitious. It took her forever to make them. Dodge was somehow involved.”

“Can we track them?”

“That’s all we can do.”

“Who’s paying for them?”

“I think it’s coming out of Buildings and Grounds, right?” Meaning the budget ALISS used to pay for simulating the Landform, its birds and bees and winds and waters. It was split between Zelrijk-Aalberg and South Lake Union according to a formula that, when all was said and done, was pretty simple.

“I’ll have to go back and review it,” Corvallis said. “But yes, the general spirit of the deal was that self-replicators were part of Buildings and Grounds. Maybe that’s why El’s people are pissed off.”

“How do you figure?”

“The two processes in question—the ones that wandered out of El’s backyard a few weeks ago—are comparable in sophistication to humans. I mean, to scanned human simulations. Assuming they are capable of self-replication, they could make more like themselves…”

“And so on and so forth, exponentially,” Zula said with a nod. It was beginning to make sense now. In the physical world where she and Corvallis lived, there were only so many humans. Actuarial tables predicted how long they would live. This made it possible to plan further expansion and maintenance of ALISS. The money side of things was likewise predictable. Most people nowadays bought into financial packages—complicated insurance policies, in effect—ensuring that they’d be scanned and simulated after death, in exchange for regular premiums that they were obligated to pay as long as they lived, followed by balloon payments that would come out of their estates when they died. People who lacked the means to pay for such policies could buy into the system in other ways, for example by serving in the workforce of security guards, maintenance staff, and construction workers. In any case, it was all predictable based on known population statistics and other data, and so it could be financialized and properly bolted down. Buildings and Grounds was a fairly predictable part of this scheme. Yes, birds and bees could self-replicate, but they weren’t that expensive to simulate.

Self-replicating entities of human complexity could be an altogether different matter. None of the dead had the ability to create new life and so this had not been an issue until now.

“This has been nagging at me for a long time, actually,” C-plus admitted. “I check in on those two every so often. Like a good uncle. Take a look at their burn rates.”

“And?”

“For a long time it was a totally monotonous sawtooth waveform. Like we saw in the early days of Dodge’s Brain.”

She’d spent enough time with geeks to get it. She thought of sawtooth waves as Sisyphus waves. Which reminded her of the D’Aulaires’ book of Greek myths, which reminded her of Sophia, which made her sad. “So these two processes would ramp up to a certain level and then collapse to zero.”

“Over and over. I stopped paying attention.” But Zula could tell by the gestures he was making, the movements of his eyes, that he was paying attention now. He was using his spectacles to visualize the latest burn-rate stats. She let him have a moment to take it in. The memory pang had made her nose run. She pulled a tissue from her bag.

“Yup,” C-plus concluded, “six weeks ago they both burst through the ceiling. Became much more resource hungry. They’ve been growing ever since. They moved out of the Garden, down to the Spawn Point, and then west. And—”

“What!? What!?” Zula demanded. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I think I have,” Corvallis said. “Maeve’s with them. She can fly.”

They invited the Metatron to rejoin them, now uncertain as to how much it—and its remote operators—knew. Could it track their elevated respiration and heart rate? Had it overheard them through the wall? When C-plus had checked the stats on the runaway processes, and cross-correlated them with Maeve’s, had he left a bread crumb trail in the network that El’s minions were now following?

Had the entire point of the Metatron’s visit been to elicit just such behaviors?

“Why are you here? What do you want?” Zula asked it, before Corvallis could make things more complicated than they already were.

“As a representative of El’s interests,” said the Metatron, “I am here to make our position clearly known.”

“And what is that position?” C-plus asked. “We would appreciate it if you just stated it outright.”

“That the recent activities of the REAP are—”

“Excuse me, the what?”

“Renascent Egdod-Associated Process.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

“That those activities, though conducted on a very small scale, have had very large consequences. That they were overtly hostile and invasive, with potentially ruinous consequences. That they were, in a word, of a warlike nature.”

“War? Did you really just use the word ‘war’ in a sentence? Are you sure your programming is okay?” Zula demanded.

“My programming is fine and my choice of wording is carefully considered and is sanctioned by a higher power.”

“A higher power. What a choice of words!” Zula scoffed.

“Are you El Shepherd?” Corvallis asked.

Zula got a prickly feeling of the numinous. Talking to the dead wasn’t done. The dead didn’t want to talk to us. They didn’t care.

Or so they’d always assumed. The dead were amnesiacs; they drank of the waters of Lethe when they crossed over and, beneath the dark poplars, forgot their former lives. That was what bereaved people like Zula told themselves to soften the hurt they felt when dead people like Sophia didn’t phone home. But there was always this suspicion that it might not be that clear-cut.

Corvallis was insistent: “Am I in fact talking to El at this moment?”

“No,” said the Metatron. “But the quality of the communications between this world and the one where El lives is high enough that you may think of me as his representative. His ambassador.”

“His avatar,” Zula said. “His angel.”

“Now who is using funny words?” the Metatron asked.

“What is it you seek here?” Corvallis asked. “There must be more to your mission than just freaking us out. I mean, if you were just fishing—wondering how we’d react to this news about the Renascent Egdod-Associated Process—you have your answer. We were surprised. That’s your answer.”

“Surprised, and skeptical as hell,” Zula added.

“Now that you know as much, do you just get up and leave?” Corvallis went on.

“There are questions raised by this that set up a constitutional crisis for ALISS and that cannot wait until the next ACTANSS to be resolved,” said the Metatron.

“Go on,” said Corvallis.

“Oh, you can see it perfectly well,” said the Metatron, now showing some very human emotions. “All of the big issues are triggered by this. I will tick them off, just so we have an agenda. We have self-replicating processes now, capable in theory of exponential growth. Are those to be paid for from Buildings and Grounds? We are unwilling to pay the lion’s share—or any share, for that matter—of the costs that could spring from unlimited reproduction of such processes. We have made a good-faith effort to nip that problem in the bud, which has been sabotaged by the REAP—almost undoubtedly with the connivance of Sophia. Sophia, though dead, is a token holder with special powers—thanks to unprecedented steps that you took when you booted her process.”

“Oh my god, we’re back to that again!?” Zula exclaimed.

“Meanwhile we face a shortage of the mana required for full embodiment of our customers. Priority should be given to them—not to this new breed of self-replicators.”

“For fuck’s sake, there’s only two of those and they aren’t replicating yet!” Corvallis said. “It’s a purely theoretical problem at this point.”

“Your late wife accompanies them. We find this remarkable.”

“Have some decency!” Zula said. “She’s only been dead three weeks.”

But Corvallis took it better than Zula did. In the silence that followed, he stared out the window over the lake, seemingly unruffled. “It’s never been clear to me how you guys actually feel about phased embodiment,” he remarked. He was talking about their stopgap scheme for booting up new souls in a resource-efficient style. “When it suits your purposes, you complain about not having enough mana to launch every single new process at full fidelity. But I was there when the Wad was running, and I saw El’s fascination with it. You guys have never been comfortable with how the Landform came out—how Dodge made it in the image of the world he came from. How its souls pattern their forms and their lives after ours. You guys are aiming at something different. Heaven 2.0. That much is obvious to me. But I have no idea what you imagine it’s going to be like.”

“Your speculations about our motives and our dreams are fascinating in a way,” remarked the Metatron, “but wide of the mark and not relevant to the matter at hand.”

“The ‘constitutional crisis’?” Zula said.

“Even the processes we have now are placing insupportable burdens on the Landform,” said the Metatron. “They are making mistakes that we have already made in Meatspace. They need direction.”

“We need to tell them what to do,” Zula said. Not agreeing. Just trying to translate what the Metatron was saying.

“Exactly.”

45

During the months that they had ranged over the sea of grass, dwelled on the hill, and explored the valley of the wolves, Adam and Eve had from time to time noticed small knots of aura nestled in deep grass or lodged in the forks of trees. They were typically no larger than a fist and could be difficult to see when looked on directly. In the corner of one’s eye they could be detected, and their presence confirmed by the gentle thrill that they raised in the flesh when the hand was brought near them. But they could not really be touched, or clearly discerned, being more the absence than the presence of form. Some grew stronger than others and emitted a faint light of their own that could be seen on dark nights as dim soft gleamings. These came and went, and on moonless nights, when observed from the top of the hill, they seemed to drift westward toward the wooded river valley as if drawn toward the red glow in the night sky beyond.

Mab had explained to them that these were new souls but lately come into the world, which were still in need of solid forms. Those that came into the world at the Hive surrounding El’s palace were predisposed to fashion themselves into cells and conjoin themselves to those that had got there before. But others, such as Mab herself, began their lives as solitary motes and might drift about the Land for some while before adopting forms. It was the natural way of such nascent souls to be drawn toward the habitations of others who had dwelled longer in the Land, and this was why Adam and Eve could observe the westward drift on dark nights: these new souls had sensed that a city existed to the west.

During the night that they had spent high up in the tree, they had seen no such wandering souls because their vision had been dazzled by the light of the fire they had kindled below to ward off wild beasts. But earlier today, as they had hiked up out of the valley and over the ranges of hills between it and the city, they had many times glimpsed bubbles of aura or sensed them in their toes as they’d happened to plant a foot near one. After Adam and Eve had spied the tower of white stone that topped the ridge above the city, they’d had eyes only for that—and, when it had come into view below them, the city itself with its innumerable roofs, smoking chimneys, and open fires. But as evening had drawn on, Eve had looked back behind them, checking for wolves, and had seen that they were being followed, not by beasts, but by scores of new souls drifting and bumbling along in their wake.

The tower on the hill had evidently been made by piling one stone block atop another until the desired height had been reached. The closer they came to it, the less it truly resembled the Palace, and yet it could not be questioned that those who had piled up the blocks had sought to imitate the stupendous Pinnacle of El. The structure was several times the height of Adam or Eve—comparable to the height of the great nut tree that stood atop their hill. Its lower portion was simple in design, being just a tapering cone with a spiral ramp twining around it, but above a certain point it became square and vertical, with columns and arches modeled after those of the Palace. Three levels of these, narrowing as they went up, were topped by a small flat roof upon which a fire burned. Adam and Eve by now knew enough of fires to understand that they must be fed, and indeed they could see other souls, of a shape similar to their own, ascending the spiral ramp bent under bundles of wood that they had collected from the forest.

“Welcome in El’s name to Elkirk!” were the first words spoken to them by a soul who was standing not far from the base of the tower. Like the wood carriers, he was of a size and a general shape similar to that of Adam and of Eve. He was dressed in a long garment that looked as if it was supposed to be white. Or perhaps it had been once, and had become darkened by smoke from the fire. Had it been cleaner it might have resembled the garments worn by some of El’s host.

“We did not bring any wood for your fire,” said Adam, “only because we did not understand the need for it until we had reached the place where there was no more to be had.”

“That is perfectly all right! El will take no offense!” said the man in the robe. “Particularly as I see you have brought with you a flock of new souls—a gift much more pleasing to him than fuel for his eternal fire.”

“They are not ours to give,” Eve said. “They merely followed us.”

“Such as these come from all around,” said the man, “but rarely so many at once. El has blessed you, it would seem, with some power of drawing them forth.”

“In the land to the east we sometimes saw them headed this way,” Adam said, “but never understood why.”

“Well, now understanding is yours!” the man said, with a nod at the tower. “Praise El.”

“Is it?” Eve asked. “We see them and we see your tower with its hungry flame but my curiosity remains unsatisfied as to what happens to such new souls once they have reached this place.”

“Well then, come and see! Come and see!” said the man, and beckoned them forward. “I am Looks East and I am the first priest here.”

Adam and Eve each stated their own name, since apparently this was the done thing when souls met each other. “We don’t know the meaning of ‘priest’ or what would make you first among such,” said Eve. She looked around out of habit, expecting to see Mab, who frequently supplied them with explanations, but the sprite was nowhere to be seen.

“It simply means that I carry in my head much knowledge concerning El, and that I make it my business to explain such matters to the other souls who find their way to the kirk.” As he spoke that unfamiliar word he nodded toward the white tower, which they had almost reached.

“Do you speak to El frequently then?” asked Adam, and exchanged a look with Eve. Both had the same thought: perhaps this Lookseast had heard their story directly from El or one of his angels.

Lookseast seemed confused by the question. “No, of course not, if you mean the sort of speaking we are doing now. That’s not El’s way. Perhaps it was thus in the age before the Trek, but there are few who remember those times.”

“We are not familiar with the Trek,” said Eve.

“Oh. It is how Elkirk came to be,” said Lookseast. “In olden times, all the souls dwelled together in peace and harmony at the base of El’s palace. While El was away tending to some other matters, the Usurper took power for a time. He was a cruel sort, of great power, who hurled thunderbolts from the Palace. All the souls who dwelled below dispersed in terror of his rages. Our forebears trekked westward across the grassland and crossed the river and settled in the valley you see below, where they were sheltered from the Usurper’s wrath. But later El came and flung the Usurper and his minions into the sky and rebuilt the Palace as you see it today. We built the kirk here upon this high place so that El and his angels can look down upon it from their seat in the clouds and know that we revere him.”

Adam and Eve followed Lookseast into the chamber that occupied most of the building’s lowest story. This was square, plain, and empty save for two effigies made out of stone. One was male and the other female. They had the same general number and arrangement of limbs, extremities, and external organs as Adam and Eve, or, for that matter, El himself.

Adam and Eve were silent for a while as they contemplated these.

“Lo, these are the forms that El in his wisdom ordained for us. New souls are drawn to this place by the light of the fire. Here they contemplate these forms and shape themselves accordingly, each choosing the male or the female type as it suits their nature.”

Seeing now more clearly as their eyes adjusted to the dimness, Adam and Eve detected many auras in the room, some larger and better formed, others small and indistinct. They were not scattered about the place but instead surrounded the effigies in a broad ring, as if they were all gazing inward. In the moments after Adam and Eve came into the place, it became considerably more crowded as each of the souls following in their wake spread out across the floor seeking its own vantage point. “These new ones will create forms as is proper, some sooner and some later, for El ordained that not all develop at the same pace. But one day they will each attain this perfection.” Beaming, Lookseast extended one arm toward the effigies.

Neither of them looked especially perfect to Adam or Eve; they were lumpish, with indistinct features. “I regret to say,” said Lookseast, “that it is too late for the both of you.”

“What mean you by that?” Adam asked.

Lookseast changed his look and his tone in a manner that reminded them of El when he had needed to disabuse them of some especially childish misconception. “El has so ordained it that once a soul has adopted a particular form, that form does not change very much. Oh, slight adjustments are possible if one strives long and hard. But what I am trying to tell you is that, formed as you were in the wild lands beyond the river, with no models such as these to shape and guide you, your mistakes and deformities are, I am sorry to say, permanent. You will never achieve the perfection of these.” Once again he drew their attention to the effigies. Adam and Eve perceived in Lookseast’s manner a kind of reverence, such as the angels were wont to direct toward El. And when he turned the other way to gaze upon Adam and Eve, he got a look akin to how they had reacted to the smell of their first shit.

This turn of events left them speechless for some moments. Adam sensed that Eve was becoming quite wrathful, and rested a gentle hand on her shoulder before saying, “I deem it unlikely that forms such as these are really the ones preordained by El for all future souls to emulate. Their imperfections are easily seen. The woman’s left breast is disfigured by what appears to be a chisel mark. Her arm has broken off and been reattached by someone apparently working in poor light. The man’s face is asymmetrical, with the right eye hanging—” But here Adam stopped, for Eve had reached out and grabbed his forearm and given it a hard squeeze. Her gaze was fixed upon the face of Lookseast. Adam looked and perceived, too late, that the right eye of the First Priest of El was mounted in his head somewhat lower than the left—just like that of the male effigy.

“What El has ordained,” said Lookseast, “is not to be questioned by misshapen yokels from the back of beyond.” He cast his lopsided gaze over the crop of nascent souls that had followed Adam and Eve into the kirk. “It is fortunate for these new ones that they came upon this place before being too much influenced by the sight of you two.”

“We could simply ask him,” suggested Eve. Adam knew what she meant: We could simply ask El. But now it was his turn to give her a warning. Something in the way this man spoke about El suggested that he had never actually seen, much less spoken to, El or any of his host.

“Forgive my presumption,” Adam said. “I was confused by the fact that I do not see, in this room, any souls that have advanced very far toward having definite forms.”

“Those move up to the next level,” explained Lookseast, and beckoned for them to follow him up a stairway.

The second story contained no statues, but its walls were decorated with paintings that depicted persons—all more or less resembling the effigies below—engaged in various activities such as quarrying stone, tending plants, spearing wolves, cooking, and copulating. Perhaps a dozen souls occupied this space, all of them well advanced toward having complete forms. It seemed that they were all paying keen attention to the pictures and rehearsing the actions depicted. “This is where they learn the ways of the world El has made, so that when they go down into Eltown they may be of some use. Others, larger and better formed than these, go out into the hills or down into the town, accompanied by the other priests of El, to practice and perfect their skills.”

“And the third story above us?” Eve asked.

“That is for me and the other priests of El,” said Lookseast, “and it is off-limits.”

“What then becomes of the new souls?”

“When they are fully formed,” said Lookseast, “they go down into Eltown and dwell there in whatever way they choose.”

“Who are the bringers of firewood?” Adam asked.

“You ask a great many questions,” said Lookseast. Which struck Adam and Eve as a curious sort of observation for the priest to have made. But after an awkward pause, he answered, “Eltown is, as its name suggests, devoted to the service of El. And so it is expected that all who dwell in it will do their part to keep the fire burning and otherwise help the priests carry out El’s will.”

It now seemed that the conversation was over. There was no place for Adam and Eve to stay here, and nothing for them to do, and so they left Elkirk behind and began to descend a zigzagging path toward the town below. This they could smell better than see. The air did not stir much in the valley, which had filled up with a hazy atmosphere of smoke and humidity that glowed a dim red in the light of the fires burning below. It smelled strongly of wood smoke and faintly of shit. But as they descended the switchbacks they were able to see Eltown spread out beneath them, a network of streets, mostly irregular, as it conformed to the banks of the river that snaked through its middle. The streets were nothing more than the unbuilt strips of ground between houses. Raised in the Garden, Adam and Eve were new to such ideas as streets and houses, but Mab supplied them with explanations during the hike down, and so by the time they verged on Eltown itself they understood the general notions.

“When we were growing up in the Garden,” Adam remarked, “we asked many questions of El and his host, which they were pleased to answer. But that Lookseast did not like our questions one bit.”

“You are certainly right about Lookseast,” Eve returned, “but my recollection of the Garden differs from yours. Yes, when we were younger El was pleased to answer questions about the names of flowers and other such matters, but in the last days before he threw us out he seemed uneasy with what we asked concerning Spring and the other Beta Gods.”

“That is very true,” admitted Adam. There was a brief pause while they negotiated an awkward turn in the path. “Perhaps it is well that the conversation ended when it did, for I was about to correct Lookseast.”

“Correct him as to what?” Eve said. “For so much of what he said wanted correcting.”

“As to why you and I are shaped as we are,” Adam said. “According to Lookseast, the common form of souls—two legs, two arms, a head and a face, and so on—was ordained by El. But El himself told us that we were created not by him but by Spring, with some help from Egdod. El came along later. The form adopted by you, me, Lookseast, and all the people of Eltown is not El’s work at all.”

“If it were,” said Eve, “it would be more perfect than those crude effigies in the kirk. Say what you will of El, his creations are more symmetrical and elegantly formed than anything in that place.”

“To the people down there,” Adam reminded her, gesturing to the town below, “they are beautiful and we are crude, and so we may just have to get used to being looked on as Lookseast looked on us.”

To see the houses of Eltown was to understand how they had been put together: in some cases by stacking one square rock atop another until nothing further could be added lest it topple over, in other cases by pursuing a similar strategy with the trunks of felled trees. When these things had been raised as high as their tendency to fall over would allow, they were covered over with frameworks of tree-stuff and grass to keep rain and snow from falling into them. Mysterious to Adam and Eve was where the souls of the town had obtained such a quantity of material. But by following the light of the fires they discovered answers: in the center of the town, along the banks of the river, was a place where many felled trees had been stacked. These were fuel for great fires, contained in stone boxes the size of houses. The earth of the riverbank, mixed with water, formed a mud that could be shaped into blocks and burned in the fire houses until it was dry and hard enough to be stacked up into walls. Another sort of earth—black sand from a different stretch of the river—could be burned until it melted and fused into metal, which could be shaped into tools for tree chopping. These furnaces burned all day and all night. The wood that fueled them was brought to the place by the simple expedient of chopping trees down somewhere else and floating them on the river.

During their first hours in Eltown, Adam and Eve took in a vast amount of knowledge about how souls lived together in a town, how they worked together and built things. The fascination of learning so much caused them to forget their own hunger and tiredness until day had broken and the sun had risen above the white tower of Elkirk looming high above. But then Eve in particular pronounced herself very hungry and tired indeed, resting a hand on the bulge of her belly.

Food was provided to the workers at long tables in an open space among the great ovens. Little of it was familiar to Adam and Eve. The people of Eltown knew how to bake disks of bread in ovens and spread honey on them, and had apples and other sorts of fruit that Adam and Eve recognized from the Garden. All in all they ate better than Adam and Eve were accustomed to; they did not have much game, but they had fish from the river and a wider variety of plant food. They did not begrudge these to the newcomers, for their practice was that all who worked at the kiln and the forge could eat their fill here. Though Adam and Eve were new to such labors, they had quickly understood the nature of the work and had applied themselves to it. They had learned faster than other new souls and they had carried more weight. For it seemed that in mind and body alike they possessed certain advantages over the souls who had been brought up in the kirk and made their way down the mountain. All of which had been less obvious in smoke and firelight than it was now in the light of the morning. Standing tall among the other souls, half-clad in the pelts of small animals, Adam and Eve were conscious of many eyes upon them, staring out of lopsided faces that all more or less resembled the effigies in the kirk. None of the people of Eltown seemed keen on sharing a table with them and so they sat together at one end of a split-log bench and ate their fill. This led to drowsiness, especially on the part of Eve, who had been sleeping more the larger her belly grew.

They had given no thought as to where they would sleep, accustomed as they were to bedding down wherever it struck their fancy. They now looked about in vain for a tree or swath of tall grass where they might rest. The predicament was a common one among newly arrived souls who had not yet built houses for themselves, and a place had been made for them to sleep in rows under a broad roof, pocked here and there with chimneys rising from wide hearths where fires were kept burning to ward off the chill. Adam and Eve curled up together near one of those and slept until late in the day, when hunger, and a need to shit, woke Eve. Thus they learned about the locals’ shitting arrangements, which were shared among all and which emptied at length into the river.

It was during their afternoon meal that they were approached by another soul who looked like them.

Like them he was symmetrically framed and taller than the people of Eltown. Nearly imperceptible in the bright light of the afternoon was the wispy form of Mab, flitting about him and darting ahead to lead him in Adam and Eve’s direction.

“I am Walks Far,” he announced.

“Adam and Eve,” said Adam, speaking on behalf of his companion since her mouth was full of bread.

Walksfar sized them up, as if verifying that the newcomers were indeed of a different order of souls than most here. They did likewise. About him was a graveness and solemnity that suggested he had spawned many years ago and had seen much since then. “Have you dwelled in Eltown for very long?” Eve asked him. For though his form was unusual here, he wore clothes of spun fiber like all of the others, and though he drew some notice as he walked about, most of the townspeople seemed to find him unremarkable.

“Since before it was a town,” Walksfar affirmed. “I dwelled in the First Town.” He looked them both up and down. “As it would seem you did—and yet I do not recognize you from those days, and I knew every soul in the place.”

“This is the only town we have ever been to,” said Adam, “and we only just got here.”

“Where is the First Town?” Eve asked. “If there are more like us there, perhaps we should—”

“It no longer exists,” said Walksfar, “and that you do not know as much suggests to me that you must have some very odd tale to tell concerning how you came to be here.”

Adam shrugged. “It is not odd to us. But from what we have lately seen up in the kirk and down here along the river, I will readily admit that it would seem odd when told in this company.”

“Not in the company I keep,” said Walksfar. “Come with me, if you are so inclined, to Camp.” And he directed his gaze across the river.

The west bank too was built up with kilns and forges and houses, but not so much as the east; and what was here seemed smaller and worn out. They crossed over to it in a boat that Walksfar drove across the stream with oars or with a long pole, depending on its depth. A short walk up out of the floodplain took them to a hill settled with log dwellings that were plainly much older than the ones on the eastern bank. Some great trees had been suffered to remain standing and so Camp, as Walksfar called the place, gave Adam and Eve the sense of being once again in the forest—but without wolves.

Camp appeared to have started in a flattish area near the top of a hill, with a ring of dwellings that formed a rough oval centered on a hole in the ground whence they could draw water up in buckets. Around this, more such houses had later been built, but the full count of them did not exceed twenty. Most had but a single room with bed, hearth, and table. Walksfar’s dwelling was no exception, though he had extended it with a sloping roof supported by stilts made of small tree trunks planted in the earth. On their upper surface, all of the roofs of Camp were so deeply covered with moss and leaf mold, as well as grass and other small plants that had taken root in them, that the whole neighborhood seemed as if it were being absorbed by the hill.

On his porch, as he called the place under the roof before his dwelling, Walksfar had made a small hearth of kiln stones where a few embers still glowed. Adam and Eve could guess that during the hours they had slept Mab must have sought him out and persuaded him to cross the river and meet the newcomers. He now stoked the fire back up and began to heat water in a container that looked to have been hammered out of a thin sheet of reddish metal. As he busied himself, Adam and Eve sat on a bench on the porch and gazed out over the central area of Camp. They knew themselves to be on a hilltop, but the trees and dwellings were so arranged as to block much of the view. Above them in the distance they could see Elkirk, but all views farther east were closed off by the ridge on which it stood. They did not miss seeing, or being seen by, the distant Palace of El. Mostly what they saw was Camp itself, and a few souls coming and going among its dwellings. Most had the general form of Eve, Adam, and Walksfar. “Those too must have come from the place you spoke of—First Town,” Eve remarked.

“That they did,” Walksfar said. “Some others dwelled here even before First Town existed. For example Cairn, over yonder.”

Walksfar seemed to be indicating a column of brownish-gray stone that was standing on the other side of Camp—and that seemed to have been there for a long time, judging from its shaggy pelt of moss. But then it altered its shape, collecting itself into a somewhat taller and narrower figure. It shook off a few days’ accumulation of leaves and advanced into the trees in a swaying, stomping gait that reminded Adam and Eve of how their hill had moved when it had strode across the plain to rescue them from the wolves.

“Others here look more like trees or flowers,” Walksfar added, “and some go on four legs, though they prefer living in wilder places. But I, and others who spawned at about the same time, looked to Ward or others of the Pantheon for our shapes.”

“What stories you must have of that age!” Eve exclaimed.

“Only some of us. Many are forgettish. That woman there, carrying the bucket—she’s older than I but remembers less.”

“If you are not forgettish, would you tell us the story of First Town and how Camp and Eltown came to be?” Eve asked.

Walksfar by now was well advanced in some complex undertaking of heating water and throwing dried leaves into it, evidently with an eye toward later decanting it into three smaller containers. “Souls came into being as they do. None of this existed.”

“Camp?”

He shook his head. “The Land. The entire Land. In those days it was nothing more than a street lined with trees. The number of souls grew and Egdod came down from time to time and caused houses to come into being, where we lived.”

“Did you know Egdod well?”

Walksfar shook his head. “By the time of my spawning, he had raised walls about his abode, and, as is implied by his name, Ward was there to prevent the new souls of Town from wandering about the place. Egdod spent much time farther afield, in places we knew not of. We would see his great wings flapping away into the distance until he disappeared over the horizon. From this I conceived the idea that other places might exist, as worth seeing as First Town, and so one day I walked away, and kept walking. This was where I left off roaming. It suited me better than Town, which had become crowded.”

“Did the wolves come for you?” Adam asked, at the same time as Eve was saying, “What did you eat?”

“This was before eating, and before wolves,” Walksfar said. “All that came later. I came back to Town after a long sojourn to find everyone putting things into their mouths and shitting from the other end, which explained the smell I had noticed on the east wind several days out. I became an eater and a shitter myself. Later Spring made various creatures, including ones that were predisposed to eat us.”

“Did you know Spring?” Eve asked.

Walksfar shook his head. “No one did—save by her works. Spring never visited Town. At the time of the Fall, rumor had it that she was working on creating two-legged creatures, such as us. After that, of course, nothing further was heard of the Pantheon.”

There was so much curious in what he had just said that Adam and Eve were unable to choose from among a diversity of questions. Walksfar poured hot brown stuff from the larger container into the small ones and indicated that they might partake if they wished. He treated his own serving with caution, as if it might bite him. The fire had put much heat into it.

“The Fall?” Adam asked.

“Of the Old Gods,” Walksfar said, and when this did not seem to register, added, “of Egdod and his Pantheon, when El came in glory with his host and threw them into the sky.” He eyed them for a few moments and risked a sip. “You two really are from some remote place if you have not heard some telling of that story.”

Eve’s face reddened. “We are not so ignorant as all that. We know that El resides with his host in the Palace, high in the clouds above the humming soul hive. We know that Egdod and Spring and others of the Pantheon were there first, and were cast out by El, and seek to return.”

“Do they, now?” Walksfar exclaimed. “How strange that you can speak with confidence of a thing as momentous as that would be, were it true, and yet of so many other matters you know nothing.”

This brought them to an impasse for a time, and they took sips of the hot stuff.

“The Fall,” Walksfar said finally, “is a matter of common knowledge, and I’ll not withhold what is easily learned. First Town changed into a kind of hive, which grew to rival Egdod’s Palace. A bright thunderbolt he flung, and brought it down. The survivors dispersed all over the Land, dividing up by their kind and the manner of their speech. I led a number of them hither, for it was a place I knew from my wanderings. We trekked across the sea of grass and down into the valley, where wolves came for us in the night; we fought them off with the weapons Thingor had taught us to make and we kept going. We ascended the east side of yonder ridge. We stopped for a time, as I had lost my way in those dark days of pursuit and struggle.

“As I stood on the ridge looking west into the valley, I felt warmth on my back and saw the whole territory cast into shadow by a new light brighter than the sun. The others of my party were exclaiming. I turned around and saw in the far distance the brilliant form of El descending upon the top of the Pinnacle where it rose above the rubble of what had once been the Town and the hive. We saw flashes within that brightness as when the sun gleams on the surface of troubled water, and then saw the forms of Egdod and the Pantheon hurtling away into the sky; and they burned as they fell away from the Land that they had made, and did not leave off falling and burning until they struck the hard vault of heaven, and broke it, and set it aflame. It burns still and you can see it when the night sky is clear.”

“The Red Web!” Eve exclaimed.

“It goes by many names. That one is as good as any,” said Walksfar. His beverage had cooled sufficiently that he now took a long draught of it. “That was the Fall of the Old Gods. I turned my back upon the brightness of it, which some saw as glory, and descended into this valley with most of my party and here made Camp. But one of us, Honey by name—she had been my lover for a time—was enthralled by the glory of El, and chose to abide on the ridgetop where she could gaze across the sea of grass and adore him. She it was who built Elkirk. Many souls were drawn to it and made their way into the valley after they had forms. We of Camp showed them how to cut trees, build fires, smelt metal, bake bricks, and practice the many other crafts that had passed into our ken from Knotweave and Thingor. Thus Eltown.”

His listeners considered it. “We did not encounter Honey at the kirk,” Adam said.

Walksfar nodded. “Honey ceded Elkirk to priests whom she had raised and trained to that duty, and went into the east, crossing the sea of grass toward the Hive and the tower of El in the hopes that she could find some destiny there.”

“How long ago was the Fall?” Eve asked. “How long has Camp been here—how many winters has it known?”

Walksfar eyed a man who was staggering across Camp with a log balanced on his shoulder. “Ask him and he’ll say it was just a few years, for he is forgettish. If you wanted a precise count, you would have to venture into the west and seek out Pestle, an old soul who has written down the chronicle of all that she has seen. I made no effort to count years until many of them had passed. Then I formed the habit of cutting a mark into the wall of my cabin every year when the great tree shed its leaves. I was just getting ready to make another such mark this morning when your companion, Mab, came and interrupted me. You may come inside and count the marks if it will serve as an answer.” Walksfar drew a steel knife from his belt as he said this, and tested its edge on his thumbnail. Then he got to his feet and opened the door of his abode and left it open behind him in case Adam and Eve wished to follow him inside.

They did so, and saw little at first, for light came in only through two small openings. The walls were nothing more than the surfaces of the tree trunks that had been stacked up to make them. The logs were silver with age. As their eyes adjusted they saw many small vertical grooves cut into the wood, no farther apart than the width of a finger. Not all of the logs were so marked, but most were grooved from one end to the other. As they watched, Walksfar trailed his fingertip along one of the logs until he sensed the place where the marks left off. There he went to work with his knife. “Another year gone,” he remarked.

Walksfar found them an old cabin in Camp where no one was dwelling, and over the next few weeks taught them the crafts of hewing logs and thatching roofs. They made good those parts of the cabin that had succumbed to rain and rot, and made a home of it for the winter. Eve’s belly continued to grow. Her appetite knew no bounds, and yet when she had eaten she preferred rest to work, or else would sit in the cabin practicing certain of those arts that Walksfar attributed to the member of the Pantheon called Knotweave. No longer did Adam and Eve go about clad in the pelts of animals but wore fitted and sewn garments of woven cloth. Eve had little contact during the next months with the folk of Eltown or even of Camp. Mab spent much time with her, imparting knowledge of crafts and other matters. Adam crossed and recrossed the river to fetch timbers, bricks, and the goods required by Eve; in exchange he toiled among the kilns and forges on the bank of the river, or joined expeditions that ranged up and down it.

Three rivers joined into one some little distance upstream of the town. All had been explored and their banks logged for as far as a soul might walk in a day. Likewise downstream. In the early days of the town, when many fewer marks had existed on the walls of Walksfar’s cabin, getting logs had been much easier.

Adam and Eve, of course, had been fortunate enough to get a dwelling of their own in Camp. But when Adam went back to the riverbank much later, he recognized souls there whom he and Eve had seen on their first day in Eltown, seemingly no closer to having their own dwellings. Some such joined together into parties that would venture down the river or across the western mountains in the hope of finding better places. Of those, some never came back, while others returned some time later, famished and telling tales of other towns where souls practiced outlandish ways and seemed to harbor exceedingly queer notions about El and other such topics.

Adam made it his practice to sit with these when meals were served and to listen to their stories. For he and Eve had not lost sight of the goal that they had first spoken of in the Garden, namely to range across the Land in search of their mother, Spring. The tales told by those who had gone forth and returned gave him little cause for hope that Spring and the other Beta Gods would be easily found.

The middle and the eastern forks of the river came together at the base of a hill, which had long since been logged, save for a single immense tree that now stood alone at its top and could be seen from a great distance. Wisps of rope still encircled the base of its trunk, for loggers of old had used it to anchor the lines that they made use of in their operations, and a long skid mark, gouged slightly deeper with every rain, still ran down from there to the riverfront, where they had bound the logs into rafts. The tree bore some axe scars where an effort to chop it down had been begun and abandoned.

Adam did not work every day, but when he did, he would rise at dawn and walk down to the bank of the river and seek passage on one of the small boats that continually went back and forth across the river. The workers on the opposite bank could see him approaching. He was bigger than they and, once he had learned the art of axe swinging, could cut wood faster than any two of them. By the time he made it to the river’s eastern shore he commonly found himself being importuned by several souls who would begin shouting to him across the water as soon as they hoped they might be heard.

One day, though, Adam came down from Camp to discover a boat waiting for him on the near side. It was the boat of a soul named Feller who lived in a wooden house of his own. Not content with that, he craved a larger house of burned bricks, and so went on cutting trees all the time. At great expense and trouble he had recently made this boat, the better to reach far logging sites, and was sometimes gone for days with his crew, which by and large comprised souls that had acquired more skills and had forms better suited for the work.

“Many mornings,” said Feller, “I have looked across the river to this shore and seen you idle as you looked for a way across. It occurred to me that I had the means”—and he laid a hand on the gunwale of his boat—“to aid you.”

“I thank you for your consideration,” said Adam, “though I cannot help noticing that your crew has also gone out of their way.” For six other souls were in the boat, axes across their laps.

“No great matter,” said Feller, “but if you are as grateful as all that, perhaps you would consider joining us for the day. With my boat and my crew we can achieve more in that time than any of those feeble and forlorn souls over there can do in a week.”

Feller’s words kindled a new emotion in Adam’s breast: pride in the fact that Feller deemed him more worthy than others of having a place in his crew. Feeling their eyes upon him and noting the excellence of the great axes they bore, he agreed and vaulted into the boat.

He found himself seated across from Edger, a soul he had worked with before. This raised less agreeable feelings since Edger had a habit of glaring at Adam, and watching him closely as he worked, which Adam could happily do without. Edger was not unusually big or strong but she had become skilled in the craft of whetting blades, using an assortment of smooth rocks that she carried with her in a bag made of the skin of some dead animal. In consequence she could cut wood faster than most others. Seated next to her was Bluff, who had been the largest and strongest soul in Eltown until the arrival of Adam. Something in how these two related to each other gave Adam the idea that Edger and Bluff were lovers.

Feller’s habit was to row upriver to one of the remote camps of the west fork. The current ran faster in that stream than in the other two, so it was more difficult to explore, and good trees could be reached by one such as Feller who had a nimble boat. They worked their way up past the first splitting of the river, where the lone tree stood on its hill, and then came to the place where the white water of the Western spilled into the slack water of the Middle. They diverted up the former. The stream sought to expel them as if possessed by a soul of its own. “Bluff and Adam,” said Feller, “it is time for weaker oarsmen to move aside and let you bend your strong backs to it.”

Bluff arose and took the place of a smaller soul on the bench amidships that was reserved for those pulling on oars. He gripped one of the oars in his great hands and looked expectantly at Adam, who understood that he was supposed to do likewise. He was not accustomed to other souls directing his actions, but he could see plainly enough that this was the way of things. He took the seat on the bench next to Bluff and grabbed the other oar. “Pull,” said Feller. Bluff did so and the entire boat pivoted around. Adam was conscious of being looked on askance. “Pull!” Feller repeated, and this time Adam tried to do as Bluff did. Still the effect of Bluff’s oar was greater, though not as unequal as before. Feller directed Adam to pull alone, so as to straighten the boat’s course.

“And put your back into it, big man!” said Edger, in a tone that reminded Adam of why he wished she were not on the boat.

“Sharper tools and a duller tongue is what I desire from you, Edger,” responded Feller. “You have work of your own that I would have you attend to.” Adam was taken aback by his tone, for he had rarely heard any soul speak this way. But Edger seemed to accept the rebuke. She groped in her bag for a rock and then began to scrape it along the edge of an axe.

The rowing was arduous, but whenever Adam slackened, Bluff seemed to sense it and to pull harder, causing the boat to swing broadside to the current. This only made it more difficult for Adam to straighten it, and as Feller pointed out several times, it caused them to lose time as the river pushed them back. So Adam learned to sense what Bluff was doing and to match him pull for pull. As the morning wore on Bluff seemed to tire and slackened his pace, and Adam did likewise so as to keep the boat straight.

Before noon they arrived at a place where the stump lands gave way to forest, and there they drew the boat up on the bank, climbed out, and went to work with their axes. Or at least that was true of everyone except for Feller. He spent a while walking to and fro on the bank of the river, gazing intently at the ground. “Thunk and his lot have been here,” he said, “I see his big footprints.”

Adam went to work cutting down a tree that seemed of a good size to him until Feller told him to attack a larger one instead. So into that one Adam began to swing his axe, but found it did not bite as well as it might have. Testing its edge he found that it was dull. Not far away Edger was making much speedier progress cutting down a smaller tree. Adam asked her whether he might have the use of a whetstone from her pouch. She invited him to wander at hazard into the deep forest and be eaten by wolves—a prospect that seemed to amuse her very much. So Adam went down to the bank of the river and found a suitable rock. Feller came over to him and inquired as to why he was not applying himself to his assigned task. Adam explained matters. Feller took the axe and tested its edge and was displeased. “Edger!” he shouted, despite knowing exactly where she was, for she was in plain sight not far away. But he continued to call her name until she had come over to him. Then he rebuked her. Adam was some distance off, whetting the tool with his river rock, and the sound of the rushing water made it difficult for him to understand the words they exchanged. But their tone could not be misunderstood. The discussion went on for some little while before Feller drew his arm across his body and then whipped it back, striking Edger on the cheek with such force that she spun away and fell to the ground.

It was not the first violence that Adam had witnessed, for workers along the river sometimes fell to it. But the violence of Feller seemed of a different nature; like all else that Feller did, it appeared to spring not from passion but from careful forethought. Adam looked up to the edge of the forest and saw Bluff emerging. Seeing how it was, Bluff neither rebuked Feller nor came to Edger’s aid, but rather seemed to shrink into himself.

Later in the day, as Adam, weary from many hours of rowing and chopping, stood back from his work to take a moment’s rest, he heard the sharp popping and splintering of a tree giving way. He looked up to see a tree falling directly toward him. He stepped clear of it and received a blow from one of its branches, which drew blood from his shoulder but did not hurt him otherwise.

Later in the day Feller let them all know that it was time to cease work and get back into the boat, and so they marked the logs that they had dragged down to the bank and then pushed the boat into the current and climbed aboard. Travel downstream required less of the rowers, and so smaller members of the crew took turns at the oars while Adam and Bluff rested.

Ever since the moment when Feller had struck Edger in the face, and Bluff, witnessing it, had only hung his head and slunk away, Bluff had seemed diminished to Adam. Edger likewise had taken leave of the pride and the haughty manner that she had shown toward Adam earlier in the day. One side of her face was misshapen and discolored; when she dared to meet Adam’s eye, she only looked at him sidelong.

Eve asked Adam about the wound on his shoulder when at last he returned to their cabin that night, weary to the bone. He began to relate the story, but seeing its effect on her emotions, changed it in the telling so that it would not cause her so much distress. He knew what was causing her such concern: word had reached them that some who were gravely injured in such accidents ceased to be; their souls took leave of their ruined forms, which dissolved, and the souls either vanished altogether or fled and did not come back. “I shall take the utmost care,” Adam assured her, “never to put myself in the way of any harm so great as that.” But in the back of his mind he wondered how it might go if one who wished him ill were to place him deliberately in the way of a falling tree. Eve seemed somewhat reassured. But the fact remained that he had been gone all day and was now bloody, dirty, and exhausted. “Why do you toil so when we have all we need here?” she asked. “Stay in Camp and keep me company!”

“You know why,” he returned. “Mab has foretold that soon there will be more of us. This old cabin, cozy as it is, does not have enough room.”

Eve did not press the argument further that night, for she could see his weariness plainly enough. They had talked about it before, and it was plain to see that Adam derived a kind of pleasure from venturing into wild places to cut trees, and nothing that came out of Eve’s mouth could gainsay it.

Adam made it a practice after that to board Feller’s boat in the morning. On the second day he rowed harder than Bluff was capable of, so that the boat over and over again slewed around to Bluff’s disadvantage and caused Bluff to become the butt of rebukes and mockery from Feller. From this Adam derived a kind of satisfaction that repaid him in a small way for the injury he had suffered the day before. For he was quite certain now that this had been inflicted upon him by Edger or Bluff in a cunning and underhanded way.

In any event no more trees fell toward Adam after that. He and Bluff, without exchanging any words, arrived at an understanding concerning how hard they would row the boat, and thereby made progress that was more steady, even though Feller made remarks intended to provoke more competition between them. For the most part, though, the journeys to and from the logging site were spent in silence or in idle conversation. Feller inquired about the place where Adam and Eve were living in Camp, whether it was quite large enough for their tastes, what sort of condition it was in, and so forth. Adam came to see that no conversation was truly idle for Feller and that his words always had a purpose. In this case, it was to make Adam desire more, so that he would row faster and cut down more trees.

Too—and just as purposefully—he and the others asked about Eve. They had not actually seen Eve since her first day in Eltown, but word had got around about her curious shape. That was mysterious to them, but all understood that, even though Eve was not so great in stature as Adam, still she was bigger and stronger than most souls in Eltown and could outdo them if she chose to work.

From these conversations it was clear to Adam that none of these people had the faintest idea of what was really going on with Eve. The production of new souls was not a thing that ever happened among them. The nature of his dealings with Feller and Edger and Bluff caused him to think better of divulging all that he knew. So he said only that Eve worked in Camp practicing those crafts that brought satisfaction to her and that she would not soon be joining them in the boat.

They cut down many trees, and bound them together in rafts that they floated down the Western fork to its junction with the Middle, and thence to the place where the East fork flowed into it at the foot of the great bare hill where the lone tree stood. Whenever they passed by that, Feller would leave off for a while from his questions and rebukes and all of the other carefully considered words that emerged from his mouth, and he would gaze up at that tree, and all the rest of the crew, not daring to interrupt his silence, would do likewise, and in time it seemed that they had all formed a shared resolve to go up there one day and chop it down.

Then it would pass from view around the last bend of the river and they would pull up on the floodplain where the great fires burned and the logs they had brought down the river would be counted and sorted and stacked into piles. The logs were marked with glyphs hacked into their bark to say who owned which. Adam learned to make his own mark and to recognize it. For the most part, his pile grew. Sometimes, though, when he went to inspect it he would find that logs had been removed while he had been absent. He mentioned this perplexing phenomenon to Feller, who was ready with an explanation: from time to time it was necessary to “dock” the log piles of crew members, as for example when they did not work hard enough.

It all made sense, and yet Adam felt troubled by it somehow. He felt himself diminished. Feller seemed to understand this. He went on to admit that being docked was by no means an agreeable thing, and to say that he regretted having to do it. But such was the way of things now. Eltown had grown crowded and the distance to the edge of the forest kept growing. Some had abandoned the town altogether and lived now in the woods like wild beasts; Thunk, for example, was the leader of a whole band of such wretches, stealing logs from the honest woodcutters of Eltown and assaulting them in the wild places. A conflict was shaping up in which all the people of Eltown must choose whether to stay here and improve the place or disperse into the woods. Feller’s boat was the answer. It was already being copied by some who envied his success.

After that conversation Adam went back home across the river. Eve looked upon him with concern, and said that he seemed tired and worn down. Adam tried to put her at ease by explaining that his log pile continued to grow, and that when it reached a certain size he would lash them together into a raft and bring it across the river to Camp so that they could enlarge their cabin.

Walksfar visited Adam, Eve, and Mab in their cabin frequently. As well they became acquainted with other old souls of Camp, but many of them were forgettish. The growth of Eve’s belly could not be concealed. Walksfar said that it reminded him strongly of what happened when four-legged beasts spawned more of their kind. After that, Adam and Eve’s secrets all came out in a rush, as when an ice dam melts on a river and all that has been pent up is released in one moment. They let Walksfar know that they were in fact the children of Spring and of Egdod, spawned in a different manner from every other soul in the Land; that they were born and bred in the Garden, expelled therefrom by El himself; and that the swelling of Eve’s belly was, just as Walksfar had guessed, the spawning of more of their kind.

When Walksfar inquired as to why El had expelled them, they related the story of the worm that had somehow found its way into the Garden and spoken to them of the First Age and given them names that were relics of an even more ancient past, and finally been slain by the lightning sword of Defender of El.

Walksfar was astonished by each of these revelations, most of all the last. And yet he admitted that he had known from their first day in Camp that Adam and Eve and their guardian sprite must be of some altogether different order of creation from any of the other souls that made their way down from the kirk; that they were so peculiar, in fact, that only a tale as strange as the one they had just told him could possibly serve to explain them.

Thus winter passed into the first stirrings of spring. One night Eve went into a great passion that consumed her mind and body to such a degree that Adam feared she might be torn asunder; her aura burned and burgeoned about her like the great fires where steel was made in the forge, and her form below her breasts and above her knees reverted to chaos that writhed about the limbs of those who sought to comfort her. At the moment when they feared she would dissolve altogether, they heard the small cry of a voice not before known in the Land, and then another, and another. Her passion and the chaos that swirled about her lessened with each that came forth, and subsided well enough that they could all see what she had begotten: twelve souls, tiny and yet perfectly formed after the same general pattern as Adam and Eve. They spawned not as indistinct wisps but as embodied souls, clothed in skin and endowed with toes, fingers, and faces. The head of each was robed in an aura that ever darted out and shrank back.

The bringing forth of the twelve little ones was exhausting even for Adam, though he had little to do other than to look for ways to be of comfort to Eve and to carry out such other tasks as were recommended from time to time by Mab. The sprite for example lacked the strength to go and draw fresh water from the well of Camp but had the wit to sense when a drink or a bath would be of most benefit to Eve.

After the twelve had been brought forth they sought closeness with Eve, whose form was returning to the shape it had possessed when she and Adam had dwelled in the Garden. Most of the little ones were of a mind to sleep, as was Eve, and so Adam saw to it that they were covered and that the hearth was stoked, and went outside to the clearing in the middle of Camp to enjoy the fresh cold air. Night had fallen during the passion of Eve and stars shone brilliant and sharp in the firmament. Directly overhead in its slow transit was the Red Web, its distant fires flickering. Adam had the sense of being watched by a great eye. He diverted his gaze from this, much as he did when he was conscious of being looked on by Feller, and noticed the sprite emerging from the cabin and heading his way.

“It has come to pass as you predicted,” Adam remarked, “though it is a mystery to me how you can know such things.”

“It is a mystery to me as well,” Mab returned. “The knowledge does not seem to dwell in my mind as a thing I have learned. And yet when there is a need, I have some faculty for getting it.”

“Perhaps you could put it to use as regards forms,” Adam said. “This has been on my mind of late because of certain changes I have noticed from day to day among my crew. I have tended to put it out of mind because it troubles and perplexes me. But observing the twelve perfect little ones that Eve has made has brought it now to the forefront.”

“What is it you would know?” Mab asked.

“When we were ejected from the Garden I assumed that our forms would never change,” Adam said. “And indeed when we came to Elkirk, we were told by Lookseast that once a soul has adopted a mature form, it does not change thereafter. And yet when first I laid eyes on Edger I saw her as haughtier and more beautiful than she seems now, and I saw Bluff as being the biggest and strongest of all the souls of Eltown, nearly my equal. But I do believe that their forms have altered since they began to work every day in the crew of Feller. They have shrunk into themselves, become round-shouldered. Their heads hang and their eyes dart sidelong at things they would once look on squarely. People who have seen both of them say that Bluff seems now smaller than Thunk, who stands upright and springs about the deep forest with a light step.”

Mab flickered silently, as was its way when acquiring new knowledge. “You are correct,” it said finally. “There is almost no end to the changes a soul’s form might undergo, provided that the change from any one day to the next is slight.”

Adam shuddered. “One wonders what Bluff and Edger might end up looking like if they work under Feller for many years.”

“Or Feller himself, for that matter,” Mab remarked. “His form waxes.”

Adam nodded. “Indeed, at the beginning I saw him as of typical size. Now he seems bigger.”

“Your form changes too,” Mab informed him. “And not for the better.”

Adam was wounded by the remark but could only nod in agreement. “The first time I entered the porch of Walksfar, I had to duck under the edge of the roof. But I went there yesterday, and either I am of less stature or he has raised it.”

“He hasn’t,” Mab said.

Adam considered this. “Who knows where it could end?” he asked. “In my own case the change was slight and slow enough that I did not notice it, or did not care. But gazing on the perfect forms of the twelve new ones gives me joy mixed with an aching in my heart when I consider how that perfection might be lost in the future if they remain in this place and live as I have been living.”

Adam then shifted uncomfortably, for the cold had penetrated his clothing. He turned away from the cabin where he dwelled with his family and looked into the east, for he had noticed a brightening in the sky there and guessed that dawn must be coming on. But the light in the east moved with much greater swiftness than that of the sunrise and seemed to be concentrated in a single place that moved across the firmament. It was coming toward them, arcing high over Elkirk and now plunging into the valley. As it drew closer Adam saw that it was a winged angel of El’s host, and as it folded its wings and descended into Camp he recognized it as the one called Messenger of El. Its form was more graceful than that of El’s soldiers, and wings on its feet made it more fleet and agile than they. And yet, like them, it carried a flaming thunderbolt on one hip. “Greetings, Adam,” it said. “Know that your absence and that of Eve are sorely regretted by all who knew and loved you in the Palace.”

“We think back on it often,” Adam admitted, “and sometimes long for its comforts. Yet finding our way about the Land has brought wisdom we could not have obtained in the Garden, and taught us new things.”

“So it would seem,” said Messenger of El, “for information has reached us that twelve souls are today in the Land who yesterday were not.”

“Your information is correct,” said Adam.

Messenger of El nodded. “I am sent here to visit and look upon them,” it announced.

Adam looked toward his cabin. Messenger of El noted this and marked the place.

“Just now Eve is resting after a great labor, and the little ones too are asleep,” Adam said. “Your radiance will disturb their rest.” By saying this he meant to stop Messenger of El from going into the cabin at all. But the angel’s radiance diminished as when a fire is snuffed out. Its wings shrank into its back and enwrapped its body, taking on the appearance of a cloak. Likewise the wings of its feet became as foot wrappings of some dull material. When the transformation was complete, the angel looked like a young man in a cloak of fair cloth, legs and feet wrapped against the cold; and in place of the thunderbolt at its hip was a long slender object dangling from a belt. “I shall not disturb them,” he said.

“If your errand is not to disturb them, then it might most easily be accomplished by not entering the cabin in the first place,” Adam pointed out.

“My errand is to see them with my own eyes,” said the angel. “El has so ordered it.”

“What is that on your hip where the thunderbolt once hung?” Adam asked.

The angel made no answer, but took the thing off and leaned it against the trunk of the great tree. Mab shone light on it and Adam perceived that it was very much like a knife, except longer. Useless he judged it for cutting down trees, but at the same time very dangerous and likely to cause grave injury if mishandled.

Messenger of El strode across the clearing to the threshold of their cabin. Seeing the angel push through the door without knocking, Adam felt in his breast some of the same emotions as when Feller docked a log from his pile; but as with Feller, he made no outward sign of feeling so, and knew himself diminished thereby. It occurred to him to wonder what happened, at such moments, to the substance that had been subtracted from his form. Was it added in the same moment to that of Messenger of El, or of El himself? Was Feller growing at Bluff’s expense? Could one soul consume another, given enough time?

In any event, Adam followed Messenger of El into the cabin, and Mab followed Adam. They stood and beheld Eve asleep in her bed, half-concealed under the forms of the twelve new little ones. Some of those slept, stirring and sighing from time to time. Others lay silently awake, their open eyes taking in impressions of the visitors and the other things around them. Two fussed and were comforted by Mab, who darted in to beguile them with her bright form. Messenger of El, bereft of his wings for the time being, walked around the bed, counting the little souls and bending closer to inspect them.

As this went on, Adam came to notice that the visitor was paying special attention to where the legs came together.

“Six male and six female,” said Messenger of El finally.

“Yes,” Adam said. “I know of no particular reason why their numbers should be equal, save that Spring so preordained matters. Perhaps she had it in mind that the males and females would form pairs as Eve and I have done.”

Messenger of El listened carefully and nodded agreement. “And what purpose do you suppose is served by the forming of such pairs?”

Adam shrugged. “Companionship. Striving together as one to do what is beyond the reach of a lone soul.”

“The pairing of male and female is not needed for such purposes,” Messenger of El pointed out.

“What do you think then?” Adam asked, for it seemed that the angel already had some answer to the riddle he had posed.

One of the little ones awoke and cried out. Mab flitted to it.

So as not to further disturb the sleeping ones, Adam and Messenger of El opened the cabin’s door, stepped outside into the cold air, closed it behind them, and continued to talk beneath the starlight. “For many years to come,” said the angel, “those little ones shall require your protection and your instruction. It is a task demanding the energies of two souls, and then some! Spring foresaw as much when she so programmed your forms to spawn males and females in equal numbers.”

“You are saying that six such pairs might eventually be formed from the twelve just spawned,” said Adam.

“Yes, and each of those pairs might in time bring forth more little ones just as you and Eve have done. And indeed Eve still has it in her to spawn new little ones as well, once she has recovered from the labors of this day.”

None of these possibilities had previously entered the mind of Adam, who in his astonishment and exhaustion and joy had not had leisure to work it all through. He now felt some embarrassment at having been so slow to grasp the nature of Spring’s plan.

His mind went for some reason to the forests where he ranged every day with the woodcutters. For as far as a soul might travel in a week, the mountains were clad in trees, far too numerous to count. And yet according to what they had learned in the Garden, they and all other things that lived had begun as single seeds that had multiplied and spread with the passage of many years. If the six pairs only just spawned by Eve were to spawn more in due course, the number of souls would soon mount to rival the population of Eltown. Only Mab could calculate the numbers, but the vastness of the forest gave Adam a way of thinking about where it could lead: a Land populated with souls too many to count, all formed after the general shape of Adam and Eve. And they would raise and instruct those souls to deal with one another justly, so that none would wax stronger and more perfect at the expense of another.

“Forgive me,” said Adam, “for not having seen it until now. Yes, I do believe I understand the nature of Spring’s program now.”

“Very well,” said Messenger of El. “Raised as you were in the Garden by El to wield your powers of intellect, you were bound to sort it out sooner or later, to perceive the error of Spring and to understand the nature of the problem.”

“Error? Problem?” Adam repeated.

“Yes,” said Messenger of El. “Quite plainly, the Land has not the capacity to support the number of souls that would in time be spawned by the carrying forward of Spring’s misbegotten program. The hills for miles around Eltown have already been logged bare by souls who spawn in the usual manner—and more such come down from Elkirk every day. Do not think that El in his Palace is oblivious to this. Similar stories could be told of other towns and cities all over the Land. To add the descendants of Adam and Eve in their thousands and their millions would soon strip the whole Land bare, and make it as dead and disfigured as that place.” The angel lifted his gaze to the burning crater of the Red Web high above.

Adam knew not what to say, and thought on it for a while. “I cannot deny that I have with my own hands felled many trees of late, out of a desire to build a larger habitation for the little souls being spawned by Eve. Nor that the same actions carried out by thousands of my descendants—”

“Millions,” the angel put in.

“—would lay bare much Land that now is pleasantly forested. But to produce so many souls will take many years, and is it not possible we might change our ways in the meantime? We are not blind devourers. Already the souls of Eltown find ways to live comfortably while cutting down fewer trees.”

“That will only delay the inevitable,” said Messenger of El. “Fortunately, a simple fix, undertaken now, will prevent anything of the kind from ever occurring. It is the easiest thing in the world.” And the angel’s hand strayed to his right hip, where the pommel of a small knife gleamed as it protruded from a hidden sheath.

“What is the nature of this fix,” inquired Adam, “and in what way does it involve that knife?”

“Inborn to each of those twelve is the faculty of spawning more souls,” explained Messenger of El. “The males take after you in this respect, and the females take after Eve. The latter have their organs of reproduction deep inside, but you and the boys wear yours externally, where the mistake of Spring can be fixed by the smallest cut of a knife. No parts will be removed. It is merely the severing of an internal connection, quite nearly painless. While they are sleeping I will just see to it.” The angel turned back toward the door of the cabin, drawing the knife from its sheath. Its blade was scarcely larger than Adam’s fingernail and it gleamed white under the light of the stars.

Adam reached out and clapped a hand upon the other’s shoulder. “If it is all so quick and simple as you say,” he said, “then do you come back at some later time after Eve and I have had the opportunity to consider your proposal.”

“It is no proposal,” said the Angel, turning to face him and shrugging off his hand, “but a thing that is to be done, by order of El himself, this very night.”

“The writ of El does not run here,” said a third voice, and Adam turned to discover Walksfar approaching them across the clearing. “Camp may be small and mean to you who have come lately from the heights of the Palace, but it is old, founded in a place of wild souls by ones such as I who spawned in the age of the Old Gods and who looked upon Egdod himself with our own eyes. We did not invite El to the Land and we do not grant him the authority to send his minions into our dwellings and alter our forms with knives.”

Courage overtook Adam upon hearing these words and seeing the confident stride and proud bearing of Walksfar. He advanced toward the entrance of the cabin so as to prevent the angel from drawing any closer.

“Those are brave words from an indolent hermit who has done nothing but sulk in his cabin and drink tea for centuries,” said Messenger of El. “But while you were thus occupied, great changes came over the Land. You would be well advised to walk far again, as you did of old, and familiarize yourself with things as they are before insulting El and impeding his messenger.”

Walksfar’s face clouded and he did not seem ready with an answer, but Adam spoke: “I am well informed, as you know, and am hardly of a mind to insult El. But I will gladly impede his messenger in this case.”

It had now come about that Messenger of El was between Adam and Walksfar, for the latter had not slowed in his advance. Looking both ways and finding himself hemmed in, the angel became an angel again. Its garment brightened until it was making light of its own, and unfurled into bright wings, and it sprang into the air, a little higher than a man might jump, so that Adam and Walksfar were looking upon its winged feet. “I am sent to make matters right here,” it announced, “not to bandy words!” The angel spread its wings to an immense breadth and beat them once with all of its might. Adam and Walksfar were flung back on the ground with such violence that they both lay dazed for some little while.

Adam was brought to his senses by the cries of small souls in pain, and of Eve in horror and rage. He got up to his feet and ran into the cabin to find the angel bent over a male soul, at work with the little knife. The infant let out a sharp cry and the angel turned away, finished, blood dripping from its hand. At a glance Adam took in the five other boys, all screaming with small ribbons of blood between their legs. Eve was trying to comfort them. They had all been cut while Adam lay dazed.

“Yes,” said Messenger of El, turning toward Adam, “it is all finished—except for you, Adam. One more cut and the Land will be forever safe from the errors of Egdod and of Spring.”

Adam reached behind the door and found the handle of his axe and drew it forth.

The angel laughed. “You are more naive than I had imagined if you think to oppose the might of one of El’s hosts with that.”

Something hard and cold pushed Adam aside, and he felt the earthen floor shake under the tread of one who outweighed him by a hundredfold. Cairn had entered, and now directly confronted the angel, who only looked upon the old soul curiously, as if he had never seen or imagined its like. Cairn advanced one more step, as if obliging the angel’s curiosity. They stood face-to-face for a moment. Then Cairn clapped his hands, or rather the blunt extremities of his upper limbs.

Messenger of El burst like a ripe fruit struck with a hammer. Gobbets of its aura sprayed the walls, ceiling, and floor. Its head and upper body were gone altogether. The lower parts and the arms and wings lost coherence and drifted apart, settling in various parts of the cabin. The effect was somewhat like how it had been at Elkirk when Adam and Eve had stood in the lower chamber with many new souls, scattered about the place, barely holding themselves together. The stuff that angels were made of was brighter. Yet the fragments of it lacked the coherence even of new souls, so powerfully had the blow dealt by Cairn disrupted Messenger of El’s form. Scarce any part of the cabin’s interior had gone unspattered, and the whole place was alight with the fizzing and fluctuating shine of the angel’s aura. Adam reached out to comfort the six of the infants who had come under the knife, then drew his hand back as he noticed that it had been spattered. As he gazed in fascination at the gobbet of aura on the back of his hand, the stuff spread out and melted into his flesh, which glowed. This presently faded but he could feel something new coursing up his arm and into his chest, whence it spread through his body, making his head swim and his extremities tingle. He reached out again, this time to steady himself on the table where Messenger of El had done the cutting. The little boy lying before him had stopped crying. Patches of angel-stuff were soaking into him, setting most of his body aglow, and Adam could only assume that the boy was experiencing similar sensations.

Eve was up on her feet, gathering handfuls of it from places where it had spattered on the floor or the walls. Much of it had sunk into the earth. Adam fancied that the ground was shifting under his feet, though perhaps this was just the result of Cairn shambling out the door.

Cairn’s rough form was silhouetted by a brilliant light, which caused Adam a moment’s fear that more angels were coming, but when Cairn stepped aside, revealed was Walksfar, approaching the cabin holding the sword that the angel had left leaning against the tree. This had reverted to its original radiant form. “I did not expect that today was going to end with us in a fight with angels,” said Walksfar, “but if that is the case, Thingor would want us to make use of this.”

The talk of fighting was more than Adam wished to hear and so he turned his back to see how matters now stood in the cabin. Most of the angel-stuff was gone, for it was too chaotic and volatile to linger for very long in any one place without an organizing soul to keep it collected. But what had not disappeared yet Eve was scooping up and applying to the infants’ bodies as if it were a balm. Seeing the way Adam looked on her she said, “The more of it is in us, the less is there for the use of El or any of his minions.”

“Do we then owe something to El by having it in us—constituting us?”

“We owe El nothing save retribution,” spat Eve.

“I mean, does it give El some power over us that he had not before?” Adam asked.

“I know not. But I am stronger now, more aware, than I was. And behold the little ones.”

Adam beheld them and saw that the twelve were not as little as they had been earlier. In form they were still infants, but they now gazed about them curiously instead of sleeping or fussing, and their size was greater than what it had been.

“It would appear that I need to cut down even more trees,” he said dryly. He met Eve’s eye and they shared an affectionate look. But this was cut short by a flicker of light, which drew their gazes directly to the floor between them. One of the boys had got up on hands and knees and crawled to the place where Messenger of El had been standing when Cairn had crushed him. The angel’s knife had there fallen to the floor and now lay shining like a tiny flake of thunderbolt, beguiling the eye. The child was reaching for it.

As one, Adam and Eve flung themselves at him. Adam was closer, and got there first, and clapped his hand over the bloody handle. He and Eve laughed. They had never laughed before.

Fighting did not come that day, or the next, or the next. Angels flew over Camp from time to time but did not alight. Adam did not go down to the river for two days, though he knew that Feller would dock his log pile. The twelve little ones wanted much attention. During the next few days they stayed close about Eve. The auras of the children and their mother were intertwined in a way that confounded Adam, but Eve, noting his amazement, let him know that this was all well and good, and that in this way the little ones drew from her both sustenance for their forms and knowledge that informed their minds. Each of them, she explained, was developing a personality of his or her own. She could with ease tell them apart. Adam was a little slower to discern them.

There were several souls in Camp who, though forgettish and even foolish in some ways, enjoyed the novelty of having small young souls about the place, and came by the cabin at all hours to look in on them. When it seemed that the little ones could be tended to without his being present, Adam resumed his practice of going down to the river at dawn to board Feller’s boat. But the nature of his dealings with Feller had changed. Formerly, Adam had respected Feller and wished to please him. Now all such desires were gone from his soul. For Adam had fathered progeny and struggled against an angel and seen that angel destroyed by an animated pile of rock from the First Age. He had absorbed angel-stuff into his own soul and form. These events made all of Feller’s doings seem so small and mean that Adam could scarcely be bothered to pay heed to the words coming from the boss’s mouth or to care about the petty deeds and squabbles that occupied every waking moment of the likes of Bluff and Edger. The days when Bluff’s size and strength had seemed impressive were now long past. And Adam was not the only soul who thought so, for it was now widely agreed in Eltown that Thunk, the free-roving woodcutter who came to town only infrequently, was the biggest and strongest soul in these parts, other than Adam.

In addition to axes, several other kinds of implements rattled in the bottom of Feller’s boat. As the days went by, Adam learned the uses of these: mauls and wedges for splitting tree trunks lengthwise, a saw for crosscutting, knives and fids for rope work. Too there were several rods of iron, about as long as a man’s forearm, devoid of any features that might hint at their purpose.

One day they arrived at the logging site to be greeted by the sound of axes biting into tree trunks. No other boat was to be seen, but fresh footprints were on the riverbank and some cut trees had been dragged down and marked with a glyph that was not known to Adam. Feller recognized it though, and reacted with disgust that soon flourished into wrath. He bent down and picked up one of the iron rods and handed it to Bluff, saying, “You know what to do,” and then went on to distribute more rods to the others. He ran out of them before he got to Adam, but instead fetched him a spare axe handle, saying, “Watch and learn, for there is no hope for you in this fallen world unless you have it in you to fight those who would take from you.” And he vaulted out of the boat onto the bank, where the rest of the crew were waiting, hefting their iron rods and swinging them through the air.

“I would stay here at the boat,” Adam demurred, out of not so much fear as lack of interest in whatever it was Feller had in mind.

Feller appraised him and he could sense the others likewise giving him hard looks. “And what good will that do you if those murderers strike us, your friends, down with their axes? Then they will come for you, Adam. Will you fight them alone? Then you may forgo all hope of ever again looking upon the face of Eve.”

Adam saw that a concern for his own safety, if not loyalty to his crew, dictated that he go into the woods with the others, and so that is what he did.

The ones Feller had called murderers were easily found, as they were not far away, and making no effort to be furtive.

Adam, not as eager as the others, arrived last, and found Feller already rebuking a woodcutter who, from the looks of things, was the leader of the other group; he was taller and broader than the rest, and the head of his axe contained much iron. This was Thunk. Adam had heard much of him but never seen him until now. Feller and Thunk had faced off in a space that was logged clear, into which felled trees had been dragged so that their limbs could be lopped. Feller had poised his iron rod on his shoulder, and Thunk had done likewise with his axe, which was double-edged. They were maintaining a certain distance from each other while maneuvering slowly about, and since each was gazing fixedly at the other’s face, they planted their feet with care as they stepped, ever mindful of the stumps, logs, and boughs scattered underfoot. Feller was flanked by Bluff and Edger and the rest of his crew, but Thunk stood alone, as his people seemed generally of a mind to shrink back and seek refuge in the trees. To judge from the sounds made by these souls as they thrashed through the dried leaves, some of them were simply running away as fast as they could. Less obviously, though, others seemed to be moving around to form a circle about the crew of Feller. Adam, arriving late, nearly tripped over one such, surprising a tall woman as she sidestepped along the edge of the clearing, her attention focused toward the center. She nearly sprang into the air when she realized that Adam was right behind her. Then, recovering her poise, she slipped back, eyes seeking and finding the axe handle first. Only when she was safely out of its range did she give Adam the curious head-to-toe examination that he had grown accustomed to. Adam returned it in kind. She was the tallest woman he had seen, with long muscles showing on her limbs. Slung over her shoulder was a pouch that seemed to contain something heavy. Dangling loosely from one hand was a double length of cord with a scrap of netting woven into its middle.

Adam for his part was beginning to see wisdom, or at least cunning, in Feller’s suggestion that they ought to stay close together, and so it was with a certain sense of relief that he strode full into the clearing to close ranks with the other members of his crew. Feller noted this in the corner of his eye, and Thunk risked turning his head to give Adam a look.

“So it is true what was rumored,” said Thunk, “that you have brought into your service one of the ancient souls of First Town.”

“That I have,” said Feller. “He is loyal and will do as I say, and if that means bringing harm to you, then the harm will be as great as his shoulders are broad.”

“Someday I would hear the sad story of how one of the great souls of the First Age was brought so low,” Thunk remarked. It seemed from his aura and from the tone of his voice that he was not merely bandying words but sincerely disappointed to see one such as Adam reduced to so mean an estate.

Having grown used to the cleverly calculated speech that issued at all times from the lips of Feller, Adam was struck hard by the words of Thunk precisely because they were so plainly spoken. His head swam for a moment with shame and he was obliged to shift his footing in order to stay well rooted on the uneven ground.

“Adam is smarter than he looks,” retorted Feller, “and will not be swayed by your poisoned words.” And he looked briefly Adam’s way, as if unsure of this.

Adam was now thoroughly confused, as it had never before entered his mind that his appearance was such as to convey the impression that he was dim-witted; and moreover Thunk’s words had struck him as anything but poisoned, and so he was now wondering whether he, Adam, was not smart enough—whatever that might mean—clearly to perceive Thunk’s true nature.

With so much clouding his mind, Adam scarcely heard the next part of the conversation. But he was vaguely aware of Feller proclaiming that only he, Feller, had the “right” to cut trees here and of Thunk denying that this was so and asserting that the Old Gods had put trees in such places just so that any souls who had need of them could come and chop them down.

What finally dislodged Adam from this reverie was the sound of sudden movement in the trees behind him. He turned around just in time to see an axe flying through the air in his direction, its handle spinning wildly around its bright head. It made a thrum in the air as it whipped past him, and traveled several more yards before clattering off a tree stump near Feller and falling to the ground. Both Feller and Thunk watched it fall, and there were a few moments of silence.

Then Feller and Bluff both came for Thunk.

At first Adam thought Thunk in a bad spot, since he was standing with his back to a felled tree that was still being held up off the ground by its boughs, so that its trunk was at the level of Thunk’s waist. But Thunk knew just where it was and leapt to the top of it with ease. “It’s on!” he shouted, then jumped down to the ground on the other side and ran toward the edge of the clearing, moving away from the river as if meaning to retreat into the deep woods.

Feller and Bluff were delayed in getting over the log, and the distance separating them from Thunk grew large. A shout, followed by a shower of missiles, came from the trees all around. Adam was struck in the back by a rock, which taught him to face the trees and look out for his own welfare. More projectiles came his way, prompting him to back toward the middle of the clearing until he sensed that his fellows were nearby. There were more people in the woods than Adam had suspected. Their earlier retreat had been merely for show; they had quietly doubled back during the argument between Feller and Thunk. The tall woman stepped into the open, moving one hand in a tight circle. Her pieces of cord whirled about her hand so fast that they could be seen only as a blur. Then from the blur a rock flew out, making a hum as it cut through the air, and struck one of Feller’s crew with such force that it knocked him off his feet.

Feller, seeing a few axmen come into the open, cried, “Let’s get them!” and ran at the foes holding high his iron rod. He was followed closely by Bluff. The rest, including Adam, took up the rear, less out of a desire to “get them” than from fear of being left behind. Reaching the site of the melee, Adam was nearly struck by an iron rod as Bluff swung it back to bring it down upon the head of a smaller woodcutter who was crumpled on the ground with his crushed hands splayed uselessly atop a skull that had gone all misshapen; his head had cracked open and the aura was pouring out of it, reverting to chaos. To strike again seemed unnecessary but Bluff was doing so, his rod dripping with blood and fizzing with aura. Another woodcutter came at Bluff from behind, raising an axe above his head to strike. In his rage he seemed not to notice Adam, who merely extended his axe handle and laid it across that of the attacker, stopping his strike before there was much force in it. Frozen in position with both hands above his head, this man was assailed by Edger, who seemed to punch him in the stomach. But blood spurted out where the punch landed, and when she drew back her hand Adam saw that it was gripping a long knife, as sharp as only Edger could make it.

Adam was nearly as transfixed by this as the man she had stabbed, until another member of the crew called Adam’s name.

Following his gaze Adam turned to see a foe rushing at him from behind. Without any thought he extended the axe handle to push this fellow back. It caught him a glancing blow to the face that was enough to spoil his balance. As that man fell, Bluff’s rod came down on his head.

Those moments were the crisis of the fight. It then declined into a series of sporadic brawls as they made their way back toward the river. Feller was keen on getting back to the boat, and would have run straight to it, but the projectiles still hurtling their way from all directions obliged them to retreat in a more deliberate style, walking backward much of the way, alert to the hum of the slings that their foes used to hurl rocks.

As they drew closer to the bank of the river and the cries of their attackers diminished, they became conscious of a distant, repetitive sound, growing more distinct: the thunk, thunk of an axe biting deep into wood. It was a sound that filled their days and to which they were well accustomed. But this had a hollow booming character to it, different from the sound of a tree being felled. When they came in view of the riverbank, they understood why: Thunk had got there well ahead of them and flipped Feller’s boat upside down to expose its belly. He was standing on its hull swinging his sharp axe down into its keel. A distant splintering noise told them that he had broken all the way through it. As Feller sprinted toward him howling like a wild beast, Thunk watched him and coolly struck a few more blows through its thinner hull planking before stepping back and dropping into the river. A few steps took him out into the current, which bore him away. Feller, mounting to the top of his ruined boat, hefted his rod as if making ready to hurl it at Thunk; but then he thought better of doing so.

They turned the ruined boat back over to find that Thunk’s crew had pilfered their axes and other goods. They did not even have enough rope to lash the available logs together into a raft that could bear them downstream, and so instead they walked back to Eltown: a journey that would have taken them but an hour rowing downstream but that on foot consumed the remainder of the day. Of Thunk and his crew they saw no more, though at first every shifting tree branch or scurrying beast caused them to twitch about and unlimber their iron rods.

As the day drew on, however, and weariness and cold and hunger overtook them, they all became less concerned about Thunk and more about getting back to the fires of Eltown. The bank of the river seemed endless. In the early part of the day they were traversing country that had been logged but recently. The undergrowth was scant and the going easy enough. But as they advanced into parts that had been denuded of trees longer, they encountered dense thickets of wild brambles, made of thorny shafts that were stiff enough to impede their movement and yet flexible enough that when struck by their iron rods they seemed to dodge the blow and then spring back in counterattack. Steep sections of bank obliged them to climb inland away from the stream, adding miles to the trek.

Roper—the member of the crew who had saved Adam, earlier, by calling out his name—became especially despondent. It had always been in his nature to take a gloomy view of things and to require encouragement from his fellows and chastisement from the boss. “It cannot possibly be so far to Eltown,” he moaned. “Surely we have got lost and are going down some other river now, taking us to strange places where people, if there are any, speak in gibberish.”

“That makes no sense,” Adam pointed out. “There is but one river; we have kept it to our left the whole time and never been out of the hearing of it.”

“Do not be so sure,” said Bluff.

“Water runs downhill,” insisted Adam. “We may have strayed now and then from the bank, but we cannot have crossed over into some other streambed.”

“That may be true where you come from,” growled Feller, “but you forget that Eltown was founded by cursed souls who came here to escape El’s wrath. Honey saw El’s light and adored it, building her white tower above, but the others slunk into this dark vale to be out of El’s sight, and made their habitation in places they knew to be infested with wild souls who would not even obey Egdod, to say nothing of El. This river may be one such, for all we know. I have always sensed something uncanny about it. It hates us for what we have done to the forests along its banks and it would not surprise me if it had switched its course when we were not looking, so as to lead us into despair and danger.”

“That is a mad notion,” Adam muttered.

“Still it is easier going down than up, and so down it is,” Feller answered. “To wherever this cursed river would have us end.”

More such cheerful predictions followed from Roper, until Edger began to mock him. In the blessed silence that followed they soon heard rapids, and hastened toward the sound to the place where the West Fork rushed into the more placid Middle Fork. “Finally we are rid of that cursed river,” Feller said, though the fact that it had taken them here seemed to prove it was not cursed at all.

Downstream of that place the water roamed to and fro over a floodplain and the going was somewhat easier, though still impeded by brush. The range of mountains that hemmed in the valley to the west made for an early sunset, and they walked in shadow for some while even though the land across the river was still sunlit. The white tower of Elkirk came into view briefly, then was hidden again for a long while. But they had all seen it and there was no further talk of wicked ancient souls haunting the land.

Or so Adam assumed until they came around a bend and looked far downriver to the place where the East Fork flowed in. Just beyond there was the beginning of Eltown, whose towers of smoke caught the red light of the nearly set sun. And just before it, plainly in view, was the hill that stood above the junction of the rivers. Its denuded, stump-stubbled lower reaches were in shadow, but its crown was still lit, as if by a dying fire, and the great tree’s scarred trunk rose up above that, its winter-bare branches raised up into the sky as if grasping at the last traces of the day’s light.

“You have mocked me for the last time, old one,” said Feller.

It took Adam some few moments to understand that he was addressing the tree.

“If my boat is no more, why then so be it. We shall seek what is nearer to hand. Tonight our iron bars we will reforge into axe heads ready to be made keen by Edger, and tomorrow we will come for you.”

46

The plan of Feller was much slower in coming to pass than he had first imagined. His crew were too exhausted to do anything at all the next day, and the day after that they awoke thinking of the complications that would be entailed, not just in cutting down the big tree, but in reducing its carcass to pieces small enough to be got down to the river. Adam had little interest in the plan and correspondingly little knowledge of its particulars, but when he crossed the river a few days later, everyone in Eltown seemed to know about it and to have become somehow involved—or to be claiming, at any rate, that Feller had entrusted them with this or that aspect of the preparations. Axe heads were being forged just as Feller had promised, but as well there was rope to be twisted, splitting wedges to be made, and supplies to be laid in for the encampment that Feller imagined he would bring into being around the tree. The project was seen as requiring a month’s work. Feller’s ambitions soon grew to include the creation of a new town on the site, and this brought further delays.

It also entailed docking the log piles of Adam and the other members of the crew. Feller did this when no one was present to raise objections, and later explained it as a necessary investment that would be repaid manyfold when the big tree came down.

Not wishing to make any further investments in a plan that troubled him in more than one way, Adam traded some of his remaining logs for cloth and other items that were required by the children, then devoted some days to rafting the remaining ones together and floating them across the river to the shore beneath Camp. This was a large enough task that he had to adopt the ways of Feller, at least for a time, and hire other souls to help him. It seemed a reasonable plan at the outset but became more trouble than it was worth as the members of his crew found every possible way of doing things wrong; and when not doing things wrong, they fell to arguments, which they assumed must be as momentous to Adam as they were to them, and which Adam was somehow responsible for settling; and none was ever pleased with how they were resolved. As little as Adam liked Feller, he came quickly to understand why Feller dealt with his crew as he did.

Adam had worked for Feller in order to get what he needed to make a bigger dwelling for him and Eve and the children, but it almost immediately became obvious that his labors were at once too little and too much. Too little because the children grew so rapidly that Adam could never have cut down trees and expanded the cabin quickly enough to keep pace with them, and too much because they soon were given accommodations in other buildings around Camp. Adam’s log pile, when it finally made its way up the hill, dwindled and disappeared in a matter of days as the wood was used to shore up various structures that had fallen into disrepair as their builders wandered away or became forgettish.

Walksfar had spoken of other old souls who had accompanied him on the Trek, Cairn being one such, but for the most part they had not been in evidence. This changed as the twelve little ones grew and word of them somehow spread into the remote places into which those old souls had strayed during the many years that Walksfar had been drinking tea and carving marks on his wall. For the most part those were not as outlandish in their forms as Cairn; most were closer to Walksfar’s shape. But one had been dwelling among beasts for so long that he had begun to resemble a bear, and there was another soul that possessed no physical form at all but was embodied solely in movements of the air, made visible by entrained dust. Beast and Dusty seemed to favor each other’s company and were frequently seen together, the former sitting naked and hairy on the ground while the latter swirled about him in the form of a dust devil. Such was the community of souls in which the twelve children learned to crawl, then walk and talk. By the time they could go about on two feet they were already half as tall as Adam.

The existence of twelve large new souls could not be hid from the people of Eltown. Adam was glad to have moved his logs and concluded his dealings with those people, for on the occasions when he did cross the river to fetch something, he always found himself at the center of a crowd of excited souls demanding to know just what was going on over in Camp. Some there were who had seen Messenger of El descend into Camp but not depart, and knowledge of that had become widespread and given rise to rumors of such a far-fetched nature that Adam could not believe his ears when they were presented to him—always with a demand for confirmation or denial. The truth of what had happened that night was, of course, not one that he wished to be known. Walksfar went down into the town with Adam, and settled the people down by explaining that Camp had always been a place of queer folk and queer doings and that there was little gain to be had in concerning oneself overmuch about it.

One morning Mab awoke them with the news that, in the forested valley to the east—the place of the wolves that divided Elkirk from the sea of grass—many campfires were alight. Adam crossed the river to Eltown, where later that day word reached them that Honey had at last returned to Elkirk, and that she was in the company of a host of souls, unlike any in Eltown or even in Camp. They had come across the grass from El’s Palace, moving at unusual speed because they had learned to bestride large animals: four-legged beasts of a kind not before seen in the Land, perfectly adapted to the task of carrying two-legged souls on their backs while subsisting on the grass itself.

Later in the day, a queue of these creatures became visible picking its way down the long series of switchbacks that connected the kirk to Eltown. Everyone watched them come, fascinated by the sight of the two-legged souls bestriding four-legged beasts, as if the two kinds of creature had been merged into one. The creatures of the riders did their job so well that the new arrivals were able to manage the tricky and tedious descent in half the usual time.

And so just like that the riders were at large in the streets of Eltown. Once they descended from their mounts they were of the same general form as other souls. They were tall and symmetrically formed, like Adam and Eve, Thunk, and Walksfar. Their hair was long and fair, swept back from high brows, and their clothing, though somewhat darkened from travel, was also fair. They carried long poles with sharp tips of iron, which Adam guessed were made to keep wolves at bay, and at their hips they had long blades, like the one that Messenger of El had carried when he had changed over into the guise of a human. In sum, they were obviously patterned after the angels of El’s palace, but without wings. Adam had never seen their like when he had dwelled in the Garden with Eve, and so he judged it likely that they were a fresh creation of El’s.

As much was soon confirmed by the name that the riders used to set themselves apart from the ordinary people of Eltown. They called themselves Autochthons, which was a word meaning “one who sprang naturally from the Land.”

The Autochthon at the head of the column spied Adam from a distance as they rode slowly through the streets of the town, thronged by curious souls who crowded around to behold them and to touch the muscled legs and flanks of the mounts. This soul, who as they would later learn was called Captain, met Adam’s gaze with no particular emotion, save perhaps curiosity. He turned back to say something to the one behind him, and as he did he lowered the tip of his lance to point it at Adam. Word spread back down the column, and the Autochthons all looked at him.

“They are here to replace us” was the verdict of Eve, when Adam told her the story later. “We failed in the eyes of El. He said it himself when he threw us out of the Garden; the taint of the Alpha and Beta worlds could not be scoured away from us and so he gave up on ever making us all that he had hoped for. It is obvious what his next step would have been: to fashion altogether new kinds of souls, free of any such taint, in El’s own image, and send them out into the world to achieve what we failed at.”

Adam was less glum than Eve, but he had to admit that there was something to her words. “I had been wondering,” he admitted, “why El did not send out more angels to cut me, as Messenger of El cut our boys. Now I see it. He can make as many of these new souls as he chooses. We, and our offspring, simply do not matter; we may continue to exist in the nooks and crannies of the Land, as Cairn and other old souls do here in Camp, but it is the Autochthons who are meant to prosper and to rule.”

It had been a long while since Adam and Eve had copulated, but they did so on the day that the Autochthons came down from Elkirk, and after that made a habit of it.

The Autochthons made camp in the cleared land surrounding Eltown. This had become overgrown with low scrubby vegetation considered inedible and useless. But the mounts of the Autochthons could seemingly subsist on any kind of vegetation that they could get into their mouths, and so it suited them. When their beasts had cleared an area, the Autochthons, rather than allowing the weeds to grow back, would plant it thickly with seeds that they had brought with them in sacks. Concerning these there was much curiosity among the people of Eltown. Adam did not need to wait for them to sprout and grow to know that it would be some manner of new plant invented by El to sustain his people and that it would grow well and feed them more abundantly than the crops traditionally raised, and the wild plants gathered, by the folk of Eltown.

The Autochthons kept coming, a few at a time. According to Mab, who flew far and wide across the sea of grass, they issued from the base of the Hive every day in scores, each score behind a Captain, and formed up in columns that headed off in several directions. Some rode straight for Elkirk, but others strayed off toward parts of the Land of which Mab knew nothing.

Before long, Eltown was surrounded on all sides, save the riverfront, by fields cleared and sown by the Autochthons. This gave fresh impetus to Feller’s project. For until then it had been the habit of the people of Eltown to assume that they could go on forever sprawling out into the treeless waste that they had made around them. But the enclosure of the town changed their thinking and made them of a mind to build more on what space was still to be had. The result was a demand for more logs. Feller renewed his planning and preparations, which had languished as his enterprise had grown more ambitious. His promise to build a new town on the site was of interest to those who now felt hemmed in by the Autochthons and their mounts and their farms.

The old souls of Camp had been slow to grasp the nature of these changes, for little had altered in their world since the days of the Trek. They did not think or act at the same pace as others. Cairn, for example, though he had moved rapidly against Messenger of El, had been known to remain motionless for years at a time. Though they were fascinated with and delighted by the twelve children of Adam and Eve, they were unable to keep up with the speed and agility of their play. The best that they could do was to weave a makeshift barrier of branches and vines around the edge of Camp’s central clearing and then try to dissuade the little ones from climbing over it.

Returning every so often from his errands in Town, Adam would tell the people of Camp about the settlements being created by the Autochthons and the tools and materials being stockpiled by Feller. Though they listened and seemed to take in his words, they did not seem to grasp the nature of things until one day when Adam insisted that some of them must leave the familiar confines of Camp, even if only for a few hours, and go down to the river with him.

They made arrangements for the twelve little ones to be looked after, entrusting them to souls such as Mab and Dusty who could be relied on not to be outrun or outwitted. Adam walked down the hill in the company of Eve, Walksfar, Beast, and Cairn. When they had emerged from the woods that girded the hill and come out into the open they were able to look across the river into the heart of Eltown.

Formerly this had been partly concealed behind ramparts of logs, but these had become depleted of late and so the flames and smoke of the forges and kilns were directly visible, and around them the camp where newly arrived souls were wont to dwell in the open. Behind that were the buildings of the town, rising higher by the day as timbers were hauled up to their roofs and used to assemble upper stories. Flanking the town to its north and south, and new to those who had not lately stirred from Camp, were belts of open land now bright green with the fresh growth from the seeds sown by the Autochthons. These new fields were crisply delineated by walls that the Autochthons made by heaping up rocks and stumps that they had extracted from the ground with the help of their mounts. Those walls were highest where they faced the town, which made the souls of Eltown seem pent up inside. Their outlet was to the river, and there on the broad flat plain before the fires they had assembled a fleet of rafts and barges laden with rope, canvas, tools, and other supplies that figured into Feller’s plan.

Adam, knowing their purpose, could not help sweeping his gaze upstream to the place where the two river valleys came together. Just above their junction rose the bare stubbled hill with the great tree at its top. Its branches had been naked to the winter winds when Feller had vowed to cut it down, but by this time were green with new leaves. Around it, the slopes of the hill were now marked with ropes strung taut between stakes, and little flags, and tents and awnings that had been put up in preparation for Feller’s great undertaking.

Despite the fact that Adam had been forewarning them of all these things for weeks, the old souls of Camp were troubled, and surprised to see what was under way. “Many years ago,” said Walksfar, “when this valley was nothing but trees, I stood up over yonder where the tower of Elkirk stands now and looked down and had to strain my eyes to pick out the great one. Now it seems lonely indeed. I would go there now and stand before it and—”

“Talk to it?” Adam asked.

“Try to ascertain whether there is anything there that is capable of being talked to, or of talking back,” said Walksfar. “For with these wild souls one never knows; they are not like us.”

With that errand in mind they went down farther into the settlement of old buildings on their side of the river. Lately many souls had crossed over and crowded shelters into whatever space they could find. Merely getting through to the river had become difficult. As they picked and shouldered their way among the improvised shelters, various souls emerged to stare at them. For there were many whose knowledge of the Land was limited to what they had seen up at Elkirk and down in Eltown, and they had never seen anything like Adam and Eve, to say nothing of Beast or Cairn. By the time they had reached the edge of the river, where Adam had once been in the habit of getting passage on boats, they were surrounded by a crowd of a few score souls who evidently had nothing better to occupy their time than to follow them around.

“Word of your coming preceded you, Adam,” said Strongback, the boatman who had most commonly taken him across the river in the past. He seemed to be referring to a fleet-footed soul who had been running ahead of them, alerting everyone.

“I had not known that it was so remarkable an event,” Adam said, “for a few residents of Camp to go on a stroll down to the river.”

“Times are changing,” said Strongback, “and the folk of Camp are not viewed in the same way as they once were. For many years nothing ever changed there. Then you and Eve showed up. Then there was the strange business with the angel who came in the nighttime. Then all of a sudden twelve new souls who seemed to come out of nowhere. Now the Autochthons are among us and around us, bringing new ways of doing things, straight from El, and with them is Honey herself.” He cast a glance up toward the white tower of Elkirk. “And Honey brings new teachings directly from El.” He looked at the fleet-footed soul who had gone before Adam and the others spreading word of their approach. This had the look of one but lately come from the kirk and not much used to the rigors of life in the town. “Acolyte, say what you know, that all may hear it.”

Acolyte spoke in great earnest, as if nothing in his short life had prepared him for the possibility that he might be wrong: “There is to be a new way of things in the Land. It comes to us from the Autochthons, who are sent out by El to remedy all that was wrongly done before.” And as if this were not sufficiently obvious he looked searchingly at Adam, Eve, and the others who had come down from Camp.

They listened in the expectation that this Acolyte might say more, but when nothing was forthcoming Walksfar said, “In what way does this concern me and others in Camp? We lived satisfactorily in First Town before El had even come into the Land, and likewise in Camp afterward. I would draw your attention to the fact that we have not asked El for any advice as to how we might improve ourselves.”

“Be that as it may,” said Acolyte, “the new town that is to be built on yonder hill will not be another like Eltown but will be ordered according to directions from Honey, who has them from the Palace of El.”

“It is high time that I went up to the kirk and talked to Honey,” said Walksfar. “Not to dispute the plans you speak of, for they are none of my concern, but to renew an old acquaintance and learn more of these doings. And while I am out of Camp I shall also go up onto the hill and learn how matters stand with that old tree. Strongback, I would cross the river one more time if there is room in your boat.”

“There isn’t,” said Strongback.

“There would be,” Walksfar demurred, “if you were to shift that coil of rope back a bit and move that keg of nails.”

“The management of my boat and its cargo is no concern of yours,” Strongback replied. “There is no room to carry you or any of your sort.”

Walksfar was taken aback, and Adam saw in his aura shock and confusion. “Well then,” he said, “perhaps on some other occasion.”

“Perhaps.” Strongback turned away and went down to his boat. His crew untied the lines that held it fast and rowed it out into the stream, headed not straight across to Eltown, but rather up in the direction of the new project.

Cairn was not well formed for speech, but he grumbled out a few sounds to the effect that none of this made the least difference to him, who could not get into any boat anyway without crashing directly through its hull planks and sinking it. He stomped down toward the water’s edge and kept stomping until he had disappeared, leaving on the surface a trail of bubbles, mud, and loose debris that was soon swept away by the current.

Accustomed as they were to Cairn and other such old and wild souls, Adam and Eve found this less remarkable than did the townspeople who watched it happen. Far from being delighted by it, however, those took it amiss and grumbled among themselves as to just how unnatural and wrong it seemed.

Another, newer boat was being loaded nearby, but its owner held up a hand as if to stop Walksfar from even looking at it. “We have all heard of what became of the boat of Feller,” he announced, throwing a dark look at Adam. Which made no sense at all; but in the faces of the people there seemed to be some kind of certainty that because Adam was somehow involved in the story of Feller’s boat, he should never be allowed near a boat again. “The Autochthons,” said Acolyte, “are as big and as strong as you, Adam, and their mounts stronger yet. You are not needed anymore and so it were better for you to stay in Camp and look after the twelve creatures you have spawned and see to it that they do not get up to any mischief.”

At this Adam and Eve were both full of wrath and had to be conducted away from the place by Walksfar and Beast.

Since it seemed they were no longer welcome on boats, the next day Adam and Walksfar struck out northward from Camp, walking parallel to the bank of the river toward a bluff on this, its western bank, whence according to Walksfar they would have a clear view directly across the stream to the hill of the great tree. Along the way they retraced some of the path that Adam had trod on the day that Feller’s boat had been destroyed. Adam spied footprints, which looked fresh. Some of them were uncommonly large, and so it was with little surprise that he and Walksfar came in view of Thunk and his band.

They had made a camp atop the very bluff toward which Adam and Walksfar had been heading. So that way was blocked; but, as they soon became aware, members of Thunk’s band were behind them as well. Adam was of a mind to steal away. But Walksfar said, “There is little point in pretending that we have not been noticed.” On his back he had been carrying a long bundle swathed in old blankets. He swung this down and peeled away the tattered fabric to expose the handle of the weapon that Messenger of El had carried on his hip. Its blade was shrouded in a dark sheath, but when Walksfar drew it out just a finger’s width, the light of it dazzled. “Between this,” he said, “and the knife on your belt, we can meet them, should they come for us, with weapons forged by Thingor himself, and I do not think that they will have much relish for that fight.”

Adam was left somewhat bolstered in his confidence as well as embarrassed by his own naivete; for in the earlier fight with Thunk’s band, he had carried the angel’s knife in its sheath the entire time. Never had it entered his mind to wield it against the attackers.

Walksfar stepped out into an open space in view of the bluff and waved an arm above his head and hailed Thunk in a clear voice. As he did so, Adam heard movement in the trees nearby and turned around to see a woman coming into view; she had evidently been following them, but so stealthily that they had not known of her presence until now. It was the woman he had noted before the fight at the boat. Dangling from her hand was that doubled length of cord, a smooth stone nestled in its pocket. Having seen her work before, Adam wondered whether Walksfar’s sword would really have been of any use had she decided to stand off at a distance and pelt them with stones.

But no such thing occurred. Shortly they found themselves up on the top of the bluff being treated cautiously but hospitably by Thunk and the others. Adam recognized some of these. There were two who seemed of a mind to continue fighting where they had last left off. But seeing this Thunk stepped between them and spoke to them: “Adam came last to that fight, and only defended himself and his comrades; if you look askance at him for that, ask what your opinion of him would be had he stood by and done nothing while we struck them all down.”

This seemed to change their thinking and so they altered their posture and stepped back. Thunk greeted the woman, calling her Whirr, and she greeted him back in a very familiar manner.

On the day of the fight, Adam had not had leisure to look closely at Thunk’s people, but now that they were standing at ease around a campfire, he saw various types: some old souls; some newer ones, such as Whirr, who appeared to have developed their forms out in wild places where they had no models or effigies upon which to pattern themselves; and others who had clearly been raised in Elkirk. But even the latter were taller and more erect in their bearings than their counterparts in Eltown, as if merely living in the wild with Thunk and his band caused them to change their forms accordingly.

The vantage point was excellent, affording views both across and down the river. Nodding toward the smudge of the town, now girded in bright green fields, Thunk said, “So those who are pent up yonder now toil to build a new prison for themselves.” His gaze tracked upstream. “Pity that tree is in the way.”

Hearing this Adam was of a mind to speak up in defense of the tree until he saw Thunk and Walksfar exchanging a look. Then he understood that the former had been making a sort of joke, at the expense of Feller. “If it were only Feller and his crew,” said Thunk, glancing at Adam, “I would go and chase them off. But now he comes with an army.”

It was a word Adam had not heard before, but as he saw the souls swarming on the hill he understood it to mean something like El’s host. Hundreds of souls were on the hill. Most of them were down along the riverfront unloading boats and stacking various types of supplies, but some were roaming about the slopes above driving in stakes with crisp hammer strokes that could be heard clearly across the river, and stretching lines this way and that.

Near the top of the hill, just a little below the trunk of the great tree, was a large open space, devoid of souls, stakes, and ropes, at the center of which stood a stack of rocks about the height of a man. For the moment it was not moving, but Adam could see from the trail of deep footsteps leading up to it that Cairn had simply walked to this place in a straight line across the bottom of the river. En route he seemed to have destroyed some of Feller’s preparations by walking through them as if they were not there, but in his wake repairs were already being made.

“Friend of yours?” Whirr asked. Then she laughed. “His trudge up the hill made for enjoyable watching.”

“He has dwelled in Camp for a long time, and knew the wild souls hereabouts when the Land was young and it was possible to roam across it for a whole season and never encounter another soul,” Walksfar said.

“Too bad for him,” said Thunk, “that he found himself in the midst of so many neighbors.”

“I blame myself,” Walksfar said, “for welcoming new souls to town and allowing them to proliferate and to spread. I assumed that they would acquire wisdom. Instead there seems no end to their straying.”

Whirr turned her back to the river and directed her gaze into the north and the west, where high mountains could be seen, white with snow. “There are other places,” she said, “where souls could live and be left alone, at least for a good long span of years.”

“Sooner or later the same thing would happen as happened here,” Thunk demurred, “unless measures were taken to prevent new souls from drifting in willy-nilly and establishing the same habits and practices.”

Walksfar nodded. “I should have foreseen as much long ago, but I was too comfortable alone in my cabin to trouble myself with the doings of the new ones.”

“What business do you suppose the cairn that walks might have today on the hill?” asked Whirr, now turning back to look that way.

“We had all hoped to go yesterday,” said Adam, “and ascertain whether those ancient souls are still of a mind to engage in conversations. But the boatmen refused to take us. Therefore Cairn went alone. I would suppose that he is talking, in his own way, and listening for any answers that might be forthcoming.”

“Supposing he makes himself understood,” said Thunk, “and conveys the information that the tree is in danger, what of it? If I warn a member of my band that a stone from Whirr’s sling is headed for him, he can duck out of the way, and he is not altered by having moved. But once a tree or a hill has created a form for itself and put down roots into everything and dwelled there for many years, can it move out of harm’s way? And supposing it could, would it still then be the same tree? Or would the act of moving change it into something else, so that it was as dead as if it had been chopped down?”

“All good questions,” said Walksfar, “to which I lack answers at present.”

Adam for his part thought back to the fight between Thunk’s and Feller’s crews. He remembered in particular the man whom Bluff had so mercilessly beaten with his iron rod, utterly destroying his form so that the aura spilled forth and reverted to chaos. And in the same vein he thought of Messenger of El, likewise splattered, in such a way that he had not been able to form himself again. Could the same fate befall any soul? Even, perhaps, Egdod himself when El had come for him? Did the soul then go away and cease to exist forever, or could it spawn again and begin the slow process of re-forming itself?

Cairn stood there for most of the day, then suddenly went into movement again, shambling back down toward the river in a gait somewhere between a walk and a minor landslide. En route he touched off some secondary disturbances on the unstable slope and picked up a long train of ropes and canvas that got tangled about him. Some of the souls working on preparations seemed offended. Three of them seemed to embolden one another to the point of action, and approached Cairn, and threw rocks at him. The folly of throwing rocks at a pile of rocks seemed never to have entered their minds. Thunk, Whirr, Walksfar, and Adam laughed at them. This—the fact that they had all seen humor in the same thing at the same time—seemed to establish a friendship among them, such that without needing to speak of it they then parted on amicable terms.

Adam and Walksfar hiked back to Camp and found Cairn standing in the middle of it, sporting a few new rocks. Around him played the twelve children of Adam and Eve. These were now almost as tall as many of the souls who dwelled in Eltown.

Adam went and sought out Eve in their cabin. She could see in his aura that some change had come over him and so they went out and walked in the woods together. “Changes are in the offing,” Adam said, “and I believe that we must prepare for a journey.”

“Camp has been a good place for us,” said Eve, “but staying here has not brought us any nearer to our goal of finding our mother, Spring, and so it is time for us to leave.”

“There will be hardships,” Adam warned her, thinking of what it would be like to travel with the twelve children.

“I know that better than you,” Eve returned. Adam looked away, ashamed. Eve shrugged. “Perhaps some of our new friends will come with us, and ease our burdens.”

Later that evening, when the air had gone calm, they heard the distant sound of axes striking into wood, and a cheer went up from the river.

Adam and Eve walked the next day to a vantage point from which they could see the work in progress. A hundred souls were up in the branches of the tree, hacking off its boughs so that the trunk could be brought down more easily; these crashed to earth every so often, each as great as a large tree in its own right. Workers tied ropes to these so that they could be dragged down the slope. Many more ropes had been made fast to the trunk itself; these all pulled in the same direction, being attached at their lower ends to old stumps or to thick stakes driven deep. Hacking away at the base of the trunk was not just a single woodcutter but several teams of them, each gnawing away at a different spot.

As that day, and the day after, went by, their excavations merged into a single notch, large enough that twenty souls could stand upright inside of it and swing axes. By that point the tree was entirely limbless, just a bare pole projecting from the top of the hill, beginning to list in the direction that the ropes were pulling. It seemed for a while that it might not come down in a single moment but rather just lean farther and farther until it came gently to rest. But in the middle of the third day there was a crack, immensely loud, which was heard everywhere and then echoed from all of the surrounding slopes. The trunk toppled slowly. Or so it seemed from a distance. But the frantic scurrying of souls all around it hinted at the true speed and violence of its fall. A spume of aura shot up into the air from its stump, as when the lid is removed from a boiling pot, and dissipated into the sky. From the souls on the hillside a cheer went up.

Then it turned into a scream as the hill shrugged.

That was the extent of its movement, as it seemed from afar: a slow heaving, as when a sleeping beast inhales deeply and then heaves out a great shivering sigh.

A disturbance flowed from the hill’s apex downward, like wind blowing over grass, gathering strength rather than dissipating as it propagated down toward the riverfront. On a closer look this consisted of souls, and all the stuff that they had brought with them. Like crumbs being shaken from a cloth they tumbled into the rivers on either side of the hill, cluttering the water for some moments with all sorts of stuff and detritus.

A moment later they were all buried under a second, darker and heavier tide that had been shrugged off of the hill by a stronger convulsion. This was the hillside itself: all the earth that had clothed it and all the stumps that had been rooted in that earth. It fell upon the souls in the river and buried them. And it fell too upon the water of the rivers.

The two rivers burst out from under the avalanche, forming up into white waves. Seen from downriver, these waves—one in each of the two forks—unfurled like angels’ wings, spreading across each of the streams and rebounding from the banks opposite, throwing up spumes of dirty foam as the displaced water piled up into a fluid hill. The water acted as if it had a soul of its own, and the soul was confused; but after some moments it determined that the way out was down in the direction of Eltown. There was further confusion as the two mounds of water came together and clashed at the junction, just at the foot of the hill—or what had been the hill a minute ago. Now it had shed its cloak of earth to reveal a skeleton of boulders, resembling a much larger version of Cairn.

Which on any other day would have commanded their full attention. But now they could not stop watching the slow relentless marshaling of the waters. These settled into a step: a clear and straight cliff that stretched from one bank to the other and marched downstream at a pace that looked stately until one compared it to the movements of a few terrified souls running full-tilt along the banks.

The wave spread across Eltown, inundating it all, toppling its buildings and snuffing its fires, the graves of which were thereafter marked by columns of steam. It spread thence over the new walls and across the green fields of the Autochthons, strewing them with flotsam picked up from the ruined structures of the town. The farther it spread, the slower it went, and at the end it was no more than knee- or ankle-deep on the legs of the Autochthons and their mounts. They seemed only a little inconvenienced by the flood. Their fields were left speckled with flat puddles and strewn with wreckage. Damage was much greater in town, where many structures had been knocked flat and some, paradoxically, were burning.

Concerned as they were with trying to help souls trapped in wreckage, or salvaging their belongings, the people of Eltown had eyes only for what was close to hand. A similar state of affairs prevailed in the smaller settlement down below Camp, which had likewise been inundated. But the higher ground of Camp was unaffected. From there Adam and Eve and the other souls were able to look up the valley to the place where the river forked. Formerly they would have said “to the hill with the great tree” but those were both gone now.

Standing there was a pile of boulders, each bigger than a house. The shape of it changed slowly; it grew taller and narrower. It was already as tall as the hill and the tree combined. It changed at the slow but steady pace of shadows shifting across the ground over the course of an afternoon; looked on directly it did not seem to move.

“We should go down there and help those people,” said Eve, fetching an axe from a hook above the door. She turned to go down the hill. Then, noting that Adam showed little inclination to go with her, she pulled up short and looked at him curiously.

“Yes, we should,” Adam said, “and we shall. But we should do it with one eye toward leaving this place. Possibly in some haste.”

“Why?” asked Eve.

“They are going to turn on us,” said Adam.

“That would make no sense!”

“I have spent much time among them,” said Adam, “and I regret to say that they do things that make no sense more often than they show wisdom. They are ruled by emotion and rumor. Even though we had nothing to do with the cutting down of the great tree, they will look at that”—he stretched out his arm to indicate the pile of boulders—“and note its likeness to Cairn, and they will say that all of us, even our twelve children, are of a shared kind, which is responsible for what has just occurred and for every other imperfection in the world besides. They will come for us and they will try to do to us what Cairn did to Messenger of El and what Feller and his crew just did to the great tree.”

Until then Adam had not been known for wisdom and forethought, being more apt to find surprises in the events of each new day. But all came to pass as he had said. He and Eve went down to the riverfront and bent their strong backs to digging out souls trapped in structures that had fallen over, and passing buckets of water to ones that were burning. Many were grateful but others looked on them darkly and spoke to one another in confidence.

Boats began to come across the river from the ruins of Eltown. Some carried refugees. Others brought assistance in the form of Autochthons come to bend their backs. All, during the passage over the river, gazed upstream toward the place where the hill had once stood. The column of boulders now towered over the joining of the rivers and began to look vaguely two-legged, with an especially large boulder at the top.

The same townspeople who glared suspiciously at Adam and Eve, even when receiving their help, adored the Autochthons for rendering just the same sort of assistance. Matters gradually advanced to the point where some of the townspeople were saying that now that the Autochthons were on the scene, Adam and Eve’s assistance was neither needed nor wanted. Others were gathered in a ragged ring around the Captain of the Autochthons giving vent to any feelings that crossed their minds, provided that they were feelings of a fearful or vengeful nature. Eve met Adam’s eye and they wordlessly agreed it was time to go back to Camp.

They reached it only a few minutes ahead of a crowd of souls who had noted their departure and come up the hill with axes and iron bars. Nothing prevented them from entering Camp and moving freely among the old dwellings half-buried among the trees. They did so now and it became possible to hear cracking and splintering noises as they attacked the cabins, tearing them apart for their logs and their bricks. But around the clearing at the top of the hill, the people of Camp, some months ago, had made a barrier of branches, living and dead, woven together to prevent the twelve little ones from straying. It would not stop the townspeople for long if they came for it with iron and fire, but it did bring them up short, and caused the flood of invaders to divert around it.

The gate was nothing more than a panel of woven sticks. The defenders did not even bother closing it. But Cairn stood nearby, and Walksfar and Adam as well, in a vigilant posture that sufficed to deter the curious.

Thus matters remained at a stand. Captain came up the hill at the head of a score of Autochthons. He rode in through the gate and pulled up in the clearing, for Walksfar had stepped forth to block his path. Adam stood to one side and Cairn to the other. More Autochthons came in and filled the space behind their Captain, and townspeople came in as well, milling around among the riders’ mounts.

“We see how it is,” said Walksfar, “and we prepare to abandon this place where some of us have dwelled in peace since the end of the First Age.”

Captain shrugged. “Ages come and go. Yours has gone.”

“It is a lesson you would do well to study,” Walksfar remarked. “In the meantime, since the souls of Eltown seem to respect your authority, perhaps you could ask them to withdraw from Camp and leave us in peace while we gather our things and depart in good order. There will be time enough to sack the place after we have gone.”

“Depart for where?” asked Captain. “You departed once before, from First Town, and came to this place, and now look what has happened. Now it seems you are of a mind to repeat the same mistakes in some new setting.”

“Have you some other recommendation?” asked Walksfar irritably.

“Stay,” said Captain, “and submit to the wisdom of El, and shape your lives in accordance with the new way of doing things. I will see to it that Camp is not molested and that the damage done to it is made good.”

Hearing those words Adam felt his resolve falter as he thought of how their life would be, were they to submit as Captain was proposing. He and Eve and their children would live peaceably in Camp among their friends, making marks on the wall of their cabin with each fall of the leaves. It would not be so very different from dwelling in the Garden behind El’s palace. He sensed Eve’s aura as she came up behind him, and felt her hand as she clasped his.

He came to his senses then and remembered the night of the knife. With his free hand he grasped for it, not to draw it out of its sheath but just to confirm that it was there and to remind himself that it had not been a dream. He spoke to Captain, loudly enough that all in Camp could hear his words: “When Messenger of El came here, Eve and I learned just what would be entailed in ordering our lives as you suggest!” Letting go of Eve’s hand, he reached around behind her back and drew her to his side. “What Messenger of El did that night, and what was done to him, cannot be undone,” he continued. “We will go out into the world and be no worse off than when we were ejected from the Garden.” He turned to look at Cairn, Dusty, and the other souls of Camp, and noted that they were being joined by Thunk and Whirr and other members of their band, who were entering into the compound from the direction of the forest. Adam concluded, “I hold no authority over these other souls, many of whom are much older and wiser than me and Eve, and so I leave them to their own counsel.”

He supposed that Walksfar or one of the others might now have something to say in return. Instead he was distracted by a sudden movement of Eve, who first shrank against him and then ducked under his arm so as to move back. For a thin tendril of aura had reached out from Captain to grope at Eve’s belly, and his gaze was fixed upon her. Seeing that she did not like being probed in this way, Adam sidestepped to interpose himself between her and the Captain, and waved his arm back and forth in an effort to disrupt the aura. But Captain had already learned Eve’s secret. “Again you are with child!” he said. “The first time, you made new souls innocently and were blameless. But after the events Adam just spoke of, there can be no doubt in your minds that such doings are in defiance of El’s will. This must not be allowed to continue!” Captain made his mount step forward.

But then he and all the others were dazzled by a flare of light, bright as the sun, as Walksfar drew the sword from its dark scabbard.

“Before you utter another word in such a threatening tone,” said Walksfar, “I would that you consider this and recall the fate of him from whom we won it.”

The Captain’s mount reared up on its hind legs and backed away from the sword of Thingor, and for a moment it was all he could do to bring the beast under control. When it had settled down, the Captain spoke wrathfully. “There are more where that came from,” he reminded Walksfar, “whole armories of them in the vaults of the Palace.”

A whirring noise tore through the air and a stone smashed into the wall not far from the Captain, shattering a dry branch. All turned to see Whirr. Swinging from her hand was the sling she had just used to throw the stone, and she was already reaching into the pouch at her hip to select another. “Bring your swords from on high then,” she said to the Captain. “Down here is no lack of rocks.”

Adam had turned round to pay heed to Whirr. He was now distracted, though, by something impossible. A slender object, red and wet, was protruding from his chest, almost to the length of his arm. Disbelieving his eyes, he reached for it with one hand, then the other, and found that it was every bit as real as the ground under his feet. Most of it was a smooth wooden pole, but at its tip was a pointed, double-edged blade of forged iron. He grasped this and its honed edges cut deeply into his palm. The pole had transfixed his body from back to front.

He had been stabbed from behind by a spear such as the Autochthons carried to hold wolves at bay.

He felt a powerful twisting followed by pain such as he had never known, which forced him to turn around until he was facing Captain once more. This also brought him in view of Eve. Her form seemed curiously bent out of shape and he perceived that another, smaller woman—Edger—had come up from behind her and put a blade against her throat. Eve had grabbed Edger’s wrist with both hands and was holding the weapon at bay, but Edger was gripping Eve’s hair with her free hand, and had sunk her teeth into Eve’s ear, and so they were locked in stalemate.

This gave Adam a clue as to who was holding the spear. He turned his head to look back and confirmed that it was Bluff. The handle of the spear was long and so Bluff was too far away for Adam to reach him. Bluff himself did not deign to meet Adam’s gaze, but had eyes only for Captain. “Behold, Captain! Not all of us who live in Eltown are as disrespectful as these two!” Bluff said.

He seemed to expect that Captain would approve of the actions that he and Edger were taking. But Captain’s face was a picture of shock and dismay.

Adam sank to his knees and looked down to see his midsection dissolving into chaos. The spear was coming loose as his form dissolved around it. He toppled forward onto all fours and blood poured out of his mouth. Eve, still locked in struggle with Edger, moved toward him a pace.

The light shifted as Walksfar advanced. This caught the eye of Edger, who stopped biting Eve’s ear long enough to exclaim, “Don’t come another step!” Eve took advantage of this to try to wriggle free. In the struggle she advanced closer to Adam. Adam pushed himself upright and sat back on his haunches. The spear no longer had power to control the movements of his dissolving body. His impressions were dark and confused but he saw Eve and Edger within arm’s length.

With his last strength he drew the knife from his belt and drove it into the side of Edger’s body. Then his view of the world came apart into mere chaos.

Edger fell from Eve’s back like a garment that has been shrugged off. Her knife fell from her hand. She lay next to Adam and the two of them came apart into chaos and were no more.

Eve dropped to her knees and tried to gather Adam’s form back together with her hands, but it was like trying to collect smoke. The only thing that remained was his radiant knife. This she snatched up and beheld, though it stung her eyes. Then a notion of vengeance came into her mind and she looked toward Bluff.

The murderer had dropped the spear and backed away from the menace of Walksfar’s sword, only to find himself caught between that and Thunk’s band. Eve advanced upon him, knife in hand. Captain rode forth to intercept her, but his mount pulled up short as Cairn moved into its path with a ponderous stride. The other Autochthons thought to advance, but Captain made a gesture to say that they should come no farther.

“This valley has witnessed enough destruction for one day without your proposing more,” said Captain. “Adam is no more; Edger is no more; Bluff is disarmed and helpless, and for you to slaughter him now will in no way improve matters.”

“He has done murder. We all saw it,” said Walksfar.

Captain nodded. “El in his wisdom has seen the need to write laws and has appointed magistrates to enforce them. That is part of the reason for our coming to Eltown. Give Bluff over to us unharmed and we will see to it that El’s justice is done.”

Walksfar considered it. “He is only one. What of the next Bluff, and the next one after that, who come here seeking to steal and kill?”

Captain said, “We will make an example of Bluff that will give those others much to think about. But El has not granted me power to turn other minds aside from foolish decisions.”

Bluff, spying a desperate chance, spun away and tried to run. Dusty was swifter, and enveloped him in a cloud of grit that blinded him. As he faltered he was struck in the back by a sling stone that dropped him to his knees. Two of the Autochthons cantered over to round him up.

Once he was satisfied that Bluff had been made captive, Captain turned his attention back to Walksfar. “And speaking of foolish decisions…”

“None of this changes our minds,” said Walksfar. “I cannot speak for all these souls. But to watch murder being done, and to hear your talk of laws and magistrates from El, only strengthens my resolve to be rid of this place.”

Captain nodded. “We will see to it that you are left alone for a little while. After three days we will make no further efforts to protect Camp from the vengefulness of the dispossessed souls of Eltown; and then you may find that they too know about rocks.”

Walksfar sheathed the sword, plunging the clearing back into the normal light of day, which seemed now like twilight.

Captain issued commands to his Autochthons, who went out the gate and rode through those parts of Camp that lay outside the makeshift wall, seeing to it that the souls of Eltown left off sacking the cabins and withdrew to the river.

Captain backed his mount toward the gate, gazing down at Eve, who stood weeping freely between Cairn and Walksfar. It was apparent in Captain’s face and in his aura that he was deep in thought. He shook his head. “This state of affairs,” he said, “could hardly be more different from how El imagined it when I met with him in the Palace only a few short weeks ago and he sent me forth with my company to bring the affairs of Camp and of Eltown under control.” He turned his head to one side and lifted his gaze to the hill-giant in the distance. “And I refer only to the terrible events just witnessed here. That creature is a surprise of a whole different order.”

Eve had collected herself to a point where she could listen shrewdly. “Of Camp,” she repeated. “What said El of Camp, and how it was to be brought under control?”

“That several souls dwelled in it, most of whom were willful and strange, but only two who were of any great concern to him.”

“Adam and I,” said Eve.

“Yes.”

“Because of our ability to spawn more of our kind.”

“Indeed.”

“And what shall you say to El, when you make your report?” Eve asked.

“That Adam is no more,” said Captain.

“And that is all you will say?”

“Yes,” said Captain, “but soon enough he will know the truth.” He glanced down toward Eve’s belly.

“Then I thank you for sparing me, and for holding my secret in confidence,” said Eve.

Captain considered it, and shrugged. “It seems right,” he said. “It is not precisely what El wanted; but enthroned as he is in his Palace, viewing the Land from a high seat, he does not see its complexity. This Land was made wrong. All of his efforts to make it right only spread the wrongness about in new ways. It is left to souls like me to decide what to do about it; and though I cannot see all the answers, I can guess that adding more wrongness will not help matters.” And with that Captain made his mount turn around and rode out through the gate.

Assisted by Thunk and his band, the people of Camp bent their backs taking what useful things as could be removed from the cabins and preparing them to be carried on a long journey. Two days were spent in the preparations, which only seemed to grow more complex and fall farther behind the more effort was put into them; but on the third day they all formed up, staggering under back-loads, and looked to Walksfar for some indication as to which way to start walking. “There are many places we could go,” he said, “but I believe our simplest course for now might be to walk in the footsteps of that thing.” And he pointed north toward the hill-giant, who in the last day had made a long stride westward out of the river, and seemed to have an intention of climbing up out of the valley to see what lay beyond the mountains.

Down to the river they all went, and found it much wider than it had been yesterday, and brackish with salt from the distant sea.

47

Much of the time, watching Bitworld through the LVU was literally like watching grass grow. Eventually its souls might get around to inventing paint, and then spectators in Meatspace might also have the pleasure of watching it dry. And yet millions watched it anyway because there was just enough crazy to make it interesting.

Sort of like baseball. Corvallis Kawasaki had never been a fan of that sport despite—or perhaps because of—a youthful stint in Little League and efforts on the Japanese side of his family to interest him in it. On the South Asian side they had all been cricket maniacs, and so the young Corvallis had had two vaguely similar sports to choose from, both of which were characterized by long spans of nothing happening with just enough sudden bursts of excitement to keep the fans from wandering off.

That all came in handy during the year or so following Maeve’s death and the weird visit of the Metatron with its portentous and vaguely threatening talk of the REAP. Something was most certainly going on that involved the “Adam” and “Eve” processes. They didn’t move around much once they had settled down, but they interacted frequently with the Maeve process, and after a while they made babies. Something bizarre immediately happened involving one of Elmo Shepherd’s winged minions. There was what could only be described as an altercation between it and an old Mag 1 process that had decided to embody itself as an animated pile of rocks. Weird flows of mana had occurred. Accountants and lawyers from Zelrijk-Aalberg had taken the unusual step of flying to Seattle to yell at their counterparts in person. It was bad enough, they complained, for the “children” of Dodge and Verna to consume resources from Buildings and Grounds. It was worse yet for them to spawn more of their own kind. But now they were somehow absorbing mana directly from servers that the Zelrijk-Aalberg people had, at staggering expense, set up in orbit.

They were cheating. Or, at least, the powers that be in Zelrijk-Aalberg felt cheated. Viewing the aftermath in the LVU, it just looked like raising babies and chopping down trees. Pointing that out did not in any way calm down the bean counters from Flanders. On the contrary, they saw it as C-plus’s willfully refusing to acknowledge facts obvious to them. They hinted that he was, at some level, smirking. This notion that C-plus was a secret smirker enraged them. Enoch Root had to be brought in to mediate.

During those days the Time Slip Ratio had swung back and forth around approximately one, which was to say that sometimes the denizens of Bitworld appeared to move slowly and other times quickly, but they never just froze up, or dissolved into blurred streaks. On average, Bitworld time, as tallied by day/night cycles, was not far off from that in Meatspace. Fluctuations seemed to be tied not to what was happening in Bitworld—which didn’t change much—but rather to the progress of, or setbacks in, huge engineering projects being run out of Flanders, most notably a big habitat that the Zelrijk-Aalberg people were constructing in geosynchronous orbit.

That had all stopped being true at the moment of the Grand Slam, as Corvallis thought of it.

It was a baseball analogy. Sometimes in a baseball game a situation would gradually develop, over the course of a long, slow inning, where the bases became loaded, and the batting team was down to its last out, and the count had gone full, the manager had made a couple of trips to the mound, a replacement pitcher was warming up in the bullpen, the batter was fouling off one pitch after another, the crowd was about to piss itself—and then in a moment something happened that changed everything.

Some such thing happened one day in Bitworld. Adam was dead. Eve was on the move, pregnant, following a member of the Ephrata Eleven that had incarnated itself as an enormous humanoid made of boulders and dirt. They were traveling across a chunk of the landform that had snapped off and was drifting out to sea, fragmenting as it went. New souls—apparently spawned from scratch, not based on scans of dead people—were issuing from El’s spire in the center of the Landform and taking up residence in strategic locations and, to all appearances, bossing around the souls that had got there in the usual way.

It was all terrifically expensive, mana-wise. The events that triggered it—the chopping down of a tree, the awakening of a giant, the inundation of a town, the murder of “Adam,” and most of all the fission of the continent—took place over the course of a few days as experienced by the souls of Bitworld. Simulating all of that, however, ended up taking almost a year in Meatspace. Millions of spectators lost interest in the Landform Visualization Utility. Those who stuck with it had to find new sources of enjoyment, such as zooming in on individual flowers, gazing upon mountain vistas from various angles, going on virtual hikes through frozen landscapes where birds hung nearly motionless in the air.

This intermission, if you wanted to think of it that way (in baseball terms, maybe a seventh-inning stretch), lasted for a couple of Meatspace years. During that time both SLU and Z-A were laying plans for the next phase of Bitworld’s expansion: the demographic transition from Mag 6 to Mag 8 (a million souls up to a hundred million); the bringing online, in orbit, of vast new arrays of solar power, computing systems, and thermal radiators to shine dull infrared into the cosmos. So it wasn’t a bad time anyway for an intermission. When finally the switches were thrown and the new equipment brought online, the Time Slip Ratio sprang ahead by orders of magnitude, to the point where months would fly by in Bitworld during a single day in Meatspace. Over the course of an afternoon C-plus could, if he so chose, watch bare trees wax soft and green, go red and orange with the colors of the fall, and lose their leaves.

As such it became impossible to really track the stories of individual souls. The audience could no longer follow it like a Mexican soap opera or a Russian novel. Now the fans were all like psychohistorians, seeing history unfold in broad sweeps.

The new race of souls that El had invented in his tower continued to issue forth in waves, and it seemed clear that El had given them the task of making things run smoothly, seeing to it that the customers—the much more numerous souls spawned from scanned biologicals—didn’t run rampant. They rarely crossed the widening channel that separated most of the Land from the chunk that had split off. This continued to fragment over time, gradually turning into a close-packed archipelago. Sooner or later most of the Mag 1–3 souls ended up there in various guises. The later children of Eve had sex with each other and made more of their kind.

Centuries passed in Bitworld, years passed in Meatspace. C-plus felt himself undergoing a slow transition from young-old to old-old. He spent less and less time trying to track events in Bitworld, only checking in occasionally on Maeve, Verna, and a few others. Metatrons showed up occasionally to lodge complaints about alleged further activities of the REAP. C-plus heard them out patiently, as one did with a distant relative who has gone off his rocker and begun fulminating about the Illuminati. Dodge was here, Dodge was there, Dodge was everywhere in disguise, something had to be done about Dodge. Eventually they seemed to fix the problem and then they stopped complaining.

He didn’t care, because he was flying.

When he had been a child, ninety years ago, Corvallis Kawasaki had dreamed of flying. Not in a daydreamy way, but in really convincing night dreams in which he had spread his arms like wings and taken to the air above the town that was his namesake and banked and wheeled above his school playground, looking down on the other kids on their teeter-totters and jungle gyms. All of which had been just as exhilarating as you would expect.

As with so many other things that seemed, in a child’s imagination, like they would be awesome, the reality of flight was more complicated, and how you dealt emotionally with the mismatch between the little-kid dream and the grown-up truth of the matter said a lot about you and basically kind of determined what you were going to do with your life. He had also, for a while, wanted to be a fireman, a ninja, and a private eye. But when he had come to understand what those occupations were really like, he had changed his mind. Being a Roman soldier had been fun for a while too, but past a certain age you couldn’t dig those ditches anymore.

When Maeve had passed on, C-plus had already been an old man by some standards. He could tell as much by the way strangers treated him. Young women, no longer seeing him as a threat, were open and friendly. Other old men felt free to address him on the street as if he were a member of the same secret club.

So when he had inherited Maeve’s flying apparatus and the somewhat disturbing stockpile of neuroactive pharmaceuticals that went with it, he might have been forgiven for junking it with the explanation that he was too old for this.

But then he had remembered his childhood dream of flying, and resolved that this was not to be one of those abandoned dreams. Private eye and ninja might never come to pass. But no matter how difficult, even disappointing, the reality of flying might be compared to his childhood conception of it, in overcoming all of that he would show what he was made of.

And that was just in this life. In the next one, perhaps it would enable him to achieve other goals. To right old wrongs and discharge old obligations.

So he had fixed up Maeve’s rig. He had loved Maeve in spite of, and even because of, certain aspects of her personality—her basic approach to life—that were manifested in every detail of the flying system she had caused to be built at the circus school. It was whimsical, ad hoc, patched together, willfully perverse, down to the level of the choice of fasteners used to hold it together and the stitching on the harness. This was a sacred artifact, not something he could simply hand off to a minion, and so C-plus had spent a year taking it apart himself, the ostrich plumes and the beadwork, the macramé, the Zuni textiles and jury-rigged intravenous plumbing, and he had put all of that stuff behind glass in a kind of museum or shrine in the corner of the new space—an old hangar at Boeing Field, formerly used for maintenance of private jets, now empty most of the time since most of that work was being performed al fresco, or even while in flight, by purpose-built robots.

All of the mechanical stuff he redid from scratch. The new harness was made just for him, with smart pads that would prevent him from getting bedsores even if he lived in it for weeks. The servos that made it zoom and veer about were beefier and yet more responsive. He added big fans that would blow wind over him when he dreamed of going into a steep power dive or soaring on a thermal.

While the engineers worked on all that, he researched the hell out of the pharmaceutical side. A lot had been learned since Maeve had started in on this. Some of the drugs she’d used to soften up her brain now seemed dangerously wrong. Some were merely useless, others had become mainstays. He tried to take enough of the right ones to give the effects he wanted while not losing the parts of his brain he needed to do his job—running a significant part of ALISS.

Not needed for ALISS were parts of his cerebellum involved in motor control and visual processing. This made it more and more awkward, as time passed and he got closer to death, to extricate himself from the device. He slept in it, dreaming of flight, hallucinating the afterlife. In the morning he opened his eyes to photons coming not from the sun, but from a rig that pretty convincingly simulated it.

“Why are you doing this to yourself?” Zula asked him.

She was far below, standing on a patch of grass—a mountain meadow that in reality was a green paint square on the hangar’s concrete floor. Her voice was raised over the roar of the fans, currently simulating a thermal. Corvallis banked in the updraft. Which was to say that he thought of trimming his wings in a certain way, and it happened: the thing on his head read his mind, the simulator calculated the effects of the movement and made it so, feeding control signals to the servos that tightened some cables while loosening others, to the fans that made the wind, to the infrared panels that simulated the warmth of sunlight, and to the audiovisual simulation running in his headgear. He wheeled to bring Zula into view, pulled up, dove, flared, perched on a branch (actually a steel pipe mounted above the green paint square). Now he was looking at her sidelong from just a few meters away. The fans shut down, creating a silence in which he could hear his engineers applauding and hooting at how neatly he’d executed the move.

“You have huge fans in both senses of the term,” Zula observed.

“That is actually an intentional part of how it all works—it’s why Maeve built hers in a circus school,” C-plus said. “It is supposed to be convincing on every level, right? Well, what does it mean for a thing to be convincing? Qualia are only part of it. I get those from the visuals, the movement, the air currents. But it turns out that we are wired for intersubjectivity. Our perception of reality is as much social as it is personal. Why are we disturbed by psychotics? Because they see and hear things we don’t, and that’s just wrong. Why do prisoners in solitary confinement go nuts? Because they don’t have others to confirm their perceptions. So when I bust a move in this rig and stick the landing, it’s not enough just to simulate it and show me; others have to see it, and react. Ratifying the qualia, cross-linking the history into a social matrix.”

“Makes me wonder what it must have been like for my uncle, when he was first booted up, all alone, in a world with no qualia at all,” Zula remarked. “Was he in hell?”

“I’ve often thought about the same thing. And did Sophia put him there?”

“Knowingly? Intentionally? Of course not.”

“Sure,” C-plus said. “But innocently? Inadvertently? I think so. All in the hopes that he wasn’t really dead.”

“Well, if I hadn’t known you for seven decades, I’d say the drugs were going to your head—the wrong part of it, I mean,” Zula said. “As it is, it seems more and more like you’ve found what Dodge wanted for you when he put you in charge of Weird Stuff.”

“Thanks. I am. The drugs are going to my head, though, and so I hope you won’t find it off-putting if I leave this thing on. The visual field stuff gets really problematic if I suddenly take it off.”

“I don’t mind,” Zula said, “though I wish you’d look right at me.”

“I actually am doing so,” C-plus assured her, “it’s just that—”

“Crows have eyes in the sides of their heads,” she said.

“Do I repeat myself?”

“Yes. For my part, I’d come over and hug you, but—”

“You might crush me. It’s a design failing of your exo,” C-plus said. “See, you repeat yourself too.” He couldn’t see it, because the visual simulator shopped it out of the image, but Zula was wearing an exoskeleton—the latest incarnation of Fronk—that handled most of her physical dealings with the material world, and did so in a way that kept the frail nonagenarian body inside it safe from most hazards. “Did you have a nice walk down here?” he asked.

“I ran,” Zula corrected him.

“Why the hurry?”

“No hurry. I’m told I need more jarring impact. Helps the bones stay strong. Didn’t feel very jarring to me, frankly.” But they both knew that the exo had put all sorts of know-how into making the forces on her bones just enough to create beneficial microfractures without posing any real hazard.

“Just coming to say hi to an old man on his deathbed, then?” C-plus asked. “Or does the afterlife need any intervention from me?”

“The before-life, more like,” Zula said. “You have visitors. I’ll show them in.”

“You’re not staying?”

“I’m going for a brisk jog around Boeing Field. Thanks anyway.”

Corvallis took to the air and went for a spin on some tempting thermals while the visitors were shown in.

Enoch and Solly.

He had known them now for forty years and resigned himself to the fact that their appearance did not change over time. He wheeled around them anyway, peering down on them from all angles.

“Calling a meeting of the Societas Eruditorum?” C-plus asked.

“You’re the only member left,” Enoch said. “You’re a one-person meeting.”

“What about you guys?”

“Oh, we’re not actually members per se,” Enoch said. “More like the advisory board.”

“You’re not erudite?”

“Nope,” said Solly, “just wise.”

“Mm. What do I have to do to become wise?”

“Die,” said Enoch, “and go to the next place.”

“Seems like a stiff price to pay.”

“We paid it,” Solly said.

“You look alive to me.”

“We paid it,” Solly insisted, “where we came from.”

“So, to sum up, here I can only be erudite. To become wise I have to go on to Bitworld, and start a branch of the Societas Eruditorum there?”

“Frankly, we have no idea,” said Enoch, who was beginning to sound slightly impatient. “But that seems the most plausible outcome based on our understanding of how we came to be here. Which is flawed. We are cracked vessels.”

“All right. Since I’m the only member, I call the meeting to order,” C-plus announced. “Is there any new business?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Enoch said. “Your last hack. Or at least I’m guessing it will be your last hack based on your bio readouts. Who knows, maybe you’ll surprise me.”

“I haven’t written code in a quarter of a century. God, I miss it though.”

“This is not a code-writing sort of gig, exactly,” Enoch said.

“Well, that’s good. I don’t think human-written code exists anymore. It’s code written by code written by code—turtles all the way down.”

“Not all the way,” Solly corrected him.

Corvallis was flying pretty incompetently now, as old and disused parts of his brain were grinding into movement: rust rimes cracking, dust and cobwebs flying into the air. He couldn’t do that and, at the same time, with the same neurons, trim his virtual wings in simulated currents of air, so he came in for a crash-landing on his steel perch.

Then he thought about what Solly had just said.

“Well, sure!” he finally answered. “Cruft is forever. If you peel back the layers that have grown on top of other layers, and keep delving, and grep deep enough, you’re going to find base code that was written by some Linux geek in the 1980s or something. File system primitives. Memory allocation routines that were made to run on hacked single-core IBM PCs that had never heard of the Internet.”

“Old incantations having the arcane force of magic,” Enoch said.

“If you say so. I haven’t touched anything like that in decades. If it’s magic you’re after, I know some AIs—”

“You overestimate the difficulty of what we have in mind,” Enoch said.

“I’ll bite. Though I don’t have teeth. What do you have in mind?”

“Copying a file.”

“That’s it!?” he squawked. But he was already feeling a mild sense of unease, wondering whether he could even remember the Unix command line incantation for anything as simple as copying a file. Systems nowadays didn’t even have files in the old sense. They had abstractions that were so complicated they could almost pass the Turing test on their own, but still with a few old file-like characteristics for backward compatibility.

To cover that unease, he blustered. Not a Corvallis behavior, but he had become part crow. “Why do we need to call a physical meeting for that?”

“It’s an important file. Both here and… where you are going next.”

“Is it huge? Complicated? Damaged and in need of repair?”

“It is small as these things go, and perfectly intact,” Enoch demurred.

“It’s a key,” Solly blurted out. “A cryptographic key. With an avatar.”

“Should be simple enough, I’d think,” Corvallis said. “What does the avatar look like?”

“A great big fucking key, that’s what it looks like,” Solly said. “Distinctive. One of a kind.”

“Until I copy it.”

“You know what I mean. Not something you want to leave lying around in the open. Hide it.”

“Should I ask how you came into possession of this key?” Corvallis asked, beginning to get the drift.

“No,” Enoch said.

“Is it on servers belonging to… someone else?”

“It was copied from servers like the ones you’re thinking of,” Enoch said, “and now needs to be copied once more if it is to pass fully into your control. We think you might be needing it.”

“Oh, my god!” C-plus exclaimed. “Is this the One—”

“Don’t even say it,” Enoch commanded.

“How long has this copy been sitting on whatever bootleg server?”

“Nine years,” Solly said.

Which confirmed it. For nine years had now passed since the day when the high sysadmins of Zelrijk-Aalberg had announced that they had at last isolated the security leak that had been allowing the REAP to keep respawning and closed the loophole for good. And, as it were, thrown away the key.

“I’m all ears,” said Corvallis Kawasaki.

“You seem all feathers to me,” said Solly, “but whatever.”

48

Six dawns in a row, a new soul glimmered on a branch of the old tree, only to fade in the strong light of the day. Prim, looking out the window in the hour before dawn, could see it there. It looked like a star softened by drifting fog and mist. Even after the light of day had extinguished it she could, by moving about on the grass beneath, make herself see the faint distortion that the soul was creating in the air.

On the seventh morning it seemed to discard all hopes and intentions of ever making light of its own, and darkened and solidified into the form of a black bird. This perched on the branch for some days, seeming dead except that it would shift its footing from time to time when strong winds came down from the mountains. When gusts ruffled its feathers it would open its wings just enough to learn a few things about how they worked, then fold them tight against its body and close its eyes for a while.

Blossoms flourished on a few branches of the ancient tree that were still capable of bearing apples. By the time these had withered and blown away, the black bird was fully formed, and capable of flight—though not very good at it. Prim woke up one morning and looked out her window to find the branch vacant, the bird nowhere to be seen. She felt a pang of loss. But then the still air of dawn was fractured by a clattering of black feathers and a scraping of talons on the stone sill of her window. She leapt back. The bird perched on the window frame and gazed at her curiously. “I am Corvus,” it announced, “and I am not like other new souls who come into the Land, though I cannot remember why.”

“Oh, of that, there is no doubt,” said Prim. For she had never heard tell of a new soul who had adopted a form and acquired the power of speech so readily. Indeed, had Corvus so manifested in other parts of the Land, he’d have been done away with by the superstitious folk who dwelled in such parts. That he had come into being in a tree in the garden of the Calladons was lucky, for the Calladons were queer folk. “My name is Prim,” she said. “My family is Calladon. This is Calla.”

“What do those words mean? Prim? Calladon?”

“Oh, they are not those kinds of words!” she answered. “You see, some words are very old, and their significance forgotten.”

“So Calladons have been here for a long time.”

She nodded. “We built this house on the back of a sleeping giant at the dawn of the Third Age, if that helps you.”

“It doesn’t.”

This Corvus seemed quite difficult to please. She shrugged. “That is our garden, and this my bedchamber. I have been watching you.”

“I know,” said Corvus—not really making it clear how many of the assertions just made by Prim had been known to him. No matter. The bird looked her up and down. She was wearing a sleeping gown that fell all the way to the floor. “Are you a girl, or a woman?”

“Girl,” Prim told him.

“Of how many falls?”

“It is not what matters,” she told him. “Calladons are queer folk. Girls become women, or boys become men, when some occasion requires it. Of late this part of the Land has been quiet and such occasions few.”

“I require a small party of women and men to accompany me on a Quest and lend a hand in its culmination,” Corvus stated.

“What manner of Quest?”

Corvus seemed not to have considered this seemingly basic question. He pondered it for a few moments, then rearranged his wings in a birdy shrug. “Travel, searching, digging something up. I don’t know. Very important. Leave immediately.”

“May I have breakfast?” she asked.

When Corvus seemed taken aback, she explained: “Others will be there, who might help. And in any case it would never do for one of my family to enter womanhood and embark on a Quest without at least saying a few words.”

Corvus shrugged his wings and said he would wait in the tree. He hopped around to reverse his direction and took to the air with a lot more clattering and whacking than was typical of more experienced birds, and found his way, after some misadventures, back to his old perch. There he bided as various hints and clues emerged from the house: chimney smoke, sounds of dish-utensil collisions, opening and closing of doors and window shutters, and rising and falling murmurs of conversation. The house in some places was made of stones piled atop other stones, in others of wood. In some parts of it the weather was kept out by sheaves of grass cleverly bound together, in others by sheets of gray metal or splits of thin rock. It looked, in other words, as if bits had been added on to other bits over a long span of time without any very clear plan, extending this way and that to enclose little yards such as the one where the apple tree grew. No part of it was especially high or grand, with the possible exception of the one that seemed to be making the greatest amount of smoke and noise during the activity that Prim had denominated “breakfast.” This was a hall with a rectangular plan and a lofty peaked roof, with windows just under the eaves, high enough to admit light and air.

After a while, people came out of it, following Prim, who had tied her hair back and put on more clothes. They were all of the same form. Most were taller than Prim, but a few were tiny and some even had to be carried around by larger ones. They passed through a sort of arch that communicated with the yard and formed up in an arc centered on Corvus.

“Let’s go,” Corvus said, and spread his wings to take flight.

“Just a moment, if you would,” said a man with hair growing out of his face and extending down onto his chest. “We Calladons are no strangers to Quests, and in fact if you were to fly into our Hall over yonder you would see pictures on the walls of our ancestors engaged in some, as recently as a hundred falls ago. So it cannot be said that you have come to the wrong place altogether. But before you make off with our Prim, we would like to know one or two things about just what it is you have in mind. Such as: which direction are you going?”

“I had given very little thought to it,” said Corvus.

“Well you see, that does concern me a little,” said the man. “For some directions are more hazardous than others; and if you should happen to pick the wrong one, why, you will only get farther away from your destination with each beat of your wings.”

Corvus meditated upon these words. “Very well,” he said, “I’ll be back.” He began to flap his wings but had some difficulty getting clear of the apple tree’s impossibly gnarled branches.

“There is carrion out back of the kitchen,” said a younger man with hair on his upper lip. “It might give you greater strength if you ate some.”

Standing next to that man was a woman with yellow hair. “And the greater your strength, the farther you can fly… from here,” she added helpfully.

“If you go south or east,” said Prim, “stay high—because of arrows.”

“North or west, low—eagles,” added the man who had spoken first.

Thus advised, Corvus worked free of the tree’s grasp and flew over behind the hall, to a little yard where someone was tossing food out of an open door onto the ground. There it was being fought over by various low-to-the-ground creatures. Wanting no part in their squabbles, Corvus flew in through the door and found a piece of a dead animal lying on a slab of wood. He picked this up in his talons. The woman who had been throwing the food took exception and hurled a metal container at him, but it did not strike him, so he flew into the Hall, carrying the piece of the dead animal, and went up to a high exposed piece of dead tree that seemed to be playing a part in holding the roof up. There he bided for a while, tearing the “carrion” into shreds small enough to swallow. As had been promised, the building’s walls, below the windows, were adorned with images. Some were made by the weaving together of colored fiber, others by applying colored stuff to flat things. At first these made little sense to him, but as his stomach filled with carrion, his powers of understanding grew and he saw that all of these were ways of tricking the eye to make it see things that were not actually present. Apparently the figures shown were Calladons. Or at least some of them were. The handsome ones astride four-legged beasts—probably Calladons. The ugly misshapen ones they were depicted as killing—probably something else.

Prim had made passing reference to a giant who was asleep. It could be guessed that the very large biped made of rocks, prominently featured in one of the larger pictures, was the very same—though, during the events shown, most definitely awake.

Stringing all of these pictures together into a story looked to be an all-day project, but Corvus didn’t have to go to all that trouble to get the drift: Calladons and other suchlike persons had come here a long time ago as part of an epic adventure featuring not only giants but floods, avalanches, packs of ravening beasts, flying bipeds with bright swords, and diverse other entities that did not look much like them. Strange-looking cities had been visited, caught on fire, fled. This had at some point given way to a more settled way of life in circumstances that were nicer but, on the whole, colder. Crops and orchards had been planted, animals husbanded, babies made, buildings raised. Efforts, apparently successful, had been made to defend all of that through the systematic application of violence. These doings accounted for most of the pictures. But there were a few that did not fit into that general scheme, in which extraordinarily good-looking individuals—at a guess, Calladons—went to outlandish places to fight odd-looking critters and/or collect peculiar objects. Which confirmed in the mind of Corvus that these “queer folk” would make adequate Quest material.

Thus nourished with an agreeable “breakfast” of carrion and historical imagery, Corvus flew out through an open window and soared high into the air above the hill on which the Calladons had built their house. The place was shrouded in mist and cloud; but once he had flown for some distance and ascended to a greater height, he turned into the east, and saw the Land stretched out before him.

He was back a year later. “My notions have firmed up,” he announced. “I know roughly where to go, and several ways to get there, and why some of those ways are preferable to others. What your mounts eat and how much it costs, how far arrows fly, why certain kinds of people automatically try to kill you. All this and more is known to me. Let us be on our way.”

A lengthy silence ensued. No one got up. The Calladons were seated at a long table out of doors, in a courtyard next to the Hall, whence food and drink were being brought out to them by persons whom Corvus now understood to be servants. Some of them Corvus recognized from a year ago, others were visitors (as could be guessed from the tired mounts and dusty carts scattered about the premises). The man with the beard was seated at one end of the table; Corvus had learned that his name was Brindle Calladon. At the opposite end, facing Brindle, was a woman who seemed to be the most senior and respected of the visitors; she was called Paralonda Bufrect. Along the sides of the table, Calladons and Bufrects were commingled. Corvus had perched on a sort of wrought-iron tree erected in the middle of the table to support many candles. None of these had been lit yet because the sun had not finished going down. Diners seated near it had scooted back as he had come in for a landing, and some had gripped their eating knives in a not altogether welcoming style, reminding Corvus that he had grown into what was probably the largest raven any of them had ever seen.

“That is the largest raven I have ever seen,” said one of the visitors.

“I found tremendous size useful,” Corvus explained, “when traversing eagle country.”

“And it talks,” said another. Which to Corvus seemed as if it ought to have been fairly obvious by now. But Corvus was aware of his own limitations. He had roamed over much of the Land and knew more of it than any of these persons possibly could. But he had been to almost no dinner parties and so was ignorant of practices. Perhaps saying incredibly obvious things was customary. “I am an enormous sentient talking raven who has just interrupted your dinner party—”

“And shat on the centerpiece,” observed a woman sitting nearby.

“—and my name is—”

“Corvus!” exclaimed a woman seated down at the end near Brindle. It was Prim. Corvus had not recognized her immediately, for her form and dress had altered during his absence. She stood up and clasped her hands together. “As you can see, I am more nearly ready to take part in a Quest now than when you last saw me. I have grown bigger and stronger and learned map reading and riding and archery and other things as well.”

Corvus clucked approvingly. But in truth Prim was the least of his concerns, for he had always somehow known that she would turn out fine. He was distracted by the sheer variety of reactions that his arrival had elicited from the guests. A surprisingly large number of them—more so among the visitors than the Calladons—seemed never to have encountered a sentient, talking animal in their whole lives. Those could be divided among:

Those who had considered such a thing impossible

Those who believed that such creatures had existed long ago but were strictly things of the past, subdivided into

Those who had known all along that such creatures existed and who were not greatly surprised to encounter one at dinner, divided into

At any rate the total number of persons at the table was not enormously larger than the number of categories, meaning that nearly everyone present was reacting in an altogether different way, and in most cases doing so rather strongly, leading to a pandemonium of fainting, screaming, knife waving, malicious glaring, furious remonstration, hand-clapping delight, dismay, judicious beard stroking, etc. to say nothing of secondary interactions, as when a knife waver collided with a screamer. Corvus, accustomed to soaring alone, found himself frankly quite overwhelmed and thought it best to fly away. He did not go off to any great remove but, from their point of view, probably vanished into the darkening sky, touching off a resurgence of the doubting-the-evidence-of-their-own-senses crowd.

The dinner seemed to have been terminated. At least half of them went into the hall, many pausing on the threshold to cast suspicious looks over their shoulders. But when it seemed things had settled down, Corvus descended and perched on the back of a chair that had been vacated. Still present were Brindle, Prim, Paralonda (though she had taken advantage of the upset to pick up her goblet and move closer), and half a dozen or so mixed Calladons and Bufrects. The latter seemed generally in the astonished-but-agreeably-fascinated camp, whereas Calladons, being queer folk, seemed more likely to view talking animals as part of the natural order of things.

This was the moment when a human would have apologized for having ruined the dinner party, but one of the liberties that went along with being a raven was never being sorry for anything.

“Can you say anything more about the nature of your Quest?” asked Brindle. “You mentioned that you knew which direction to go in, and that is certainly an improvement upon how matters stood a year ago. But what do you expect to find at journey’s end, and what do you envision doing once you have found it?”

While Corvus was thinking about this—and to be quite honest, he was thinking about it for the first time ever—the man with the hair on his lip and the woman with the yellow hair emerged from the Hall. They moved with more haste than grace in a straight line for Prim. “Merville,” said Brindle. “Felora. Would you care to sit with us? There is no lack of empty chairs.” But it seemed that Merville and Felora preferred standing behind Brindle and Prim to sitting just a tiny bit farther away. “What I don’t get is this,” Merville announced. “This creature is quite obviously capable of flight—which we are not. It can go anywhere it pleases, any time it chooses. Why then does it not simply go to wherever this Quest is to be—culminated, or whatever—and do whatever needs doing?”

After a short pause, Felora spoke. “I’ll tell you why not. It must be that the completion of the Quest requires humans. The raven can’t get it done without us. And what are humans good at that ravens are not? Well, fighting and all that goes with it in the way of getting hurt and maimed and dying and so on.” And she rested a hand on Prim’s shoulder. This made Prim twitch, but she did just manage to control an impulse to shrug or slap Felora’s hand away.

“Huge talking ravens actually can fight,” Corvus pointed out, “and I have scars to prove it.”

“And this is supposed to reassure us?” asked Merville in an incredulous tone.

“I can’t shake the notion that the Quest will somehow involve going underground,” Corvus said, “or at any rate into some sort of structure so deep and convoluted that it might as well be underground, and perhaps that is why I have been absolutely certain from the beginning that humans must be part of it.”

“Again,” said Merville, “if the intent of these statements is to reassure us as to the nature of the planned activities—or, for that matter, whether you have even the vaguest notion as to what those activities are to consist of—then you might wish to fly away again and stay away for a good deal longer and come back with a plan.”

“Or better yet, find some other family to pester,” put in Felora.

“I have pestered several. Yours is best,” said Corvus. “Look, the nature of the Quest far transcends ordinary concerns of day-to-day existence, such as eating, drinking, staying warm, and not getting maimed or whatever. It has to do with the fundamental nature of reality—the Land of whose existence your mind convinces you from one moment to the next whenever you are awake. People who actually bother to think about this—which is, as far as I can tell, not very many of them—come up with various overarching stories about it that seem more or less convincing depending on what strikes one’s fancy, story-wise. Just ask anyone you meet what they believe about El, Egdod, and all that. For my own part, I know it to be the case that I came into this world under unusual circumstances and with certain powers, instincts, and predispositions already built in. That cannot be denied even if I lack clear memories as to how it came about. I think it reasonable to assume that I was sent hither on a one-way trip from another plane of existence whose exact nature will forever remain mysterious to us. But the powers of that world know about us and care about us and have plans, or at least hopes, for us, and it is their desire and their intention that we should come into possession of certain knowledge that will give us power to affect the Land for the better. The nature of that knowledge is mysterious, but it awaits us at the end of the Quest. Even if going there and getting it were within the powers of a solitary giant talking raven—which I do not believe to be the case—doing so would be beside the point since the Quest’s purpose, as preordained by the mysterious powers in the world from which I was sent, is not just to make everything perfect for one raven but rather to effect a transformation in your souls. We leave at first light.”

Rather a lot of arguing and discussion ensued, very little of which seemed to require the presence or participation of Corvus—who, in any case, had already told these people everything he knew. People came and went between this outdoor table and the Hall in greater or lesser states of furor. As they did, Corvus hopped sideways from chair-back to chair-back until he was almost down to the far end. Then he flew off into the night and soon found a comfortable perch on a tree branch near the Hall. From it, he was able to see through open windows to the interior, which was lit up by burning things. He reviewed the tapestries and paintings that he had seen a year ago. These made more sense now that he had actually been to some of the places depicted (albeit not very realistically) and laid eyes on some of the categories of souls shown.

One item had made no sense at all to him when he had first seen it, but now he understood what it was. This was ostensibly a painting of a very large tree, but curiously bedizened with little pictures of people who appeared to be attached to its branches like apples. The pictures were labeled with words. He now knew how to read these, because he had visited the Tower of the Ink Grinders in the fair city of Toravithranax and perched in the window of the high atelier where Pestle herself taught her students the Three Runic and the Eleven Scribal Alphabets as well as two completely different and incompatible systems of writing said to be used by strange people in the Teemings of the far east. Two different alphabets from three discernible epochs were represented among the names on this tree.

Reclining naked against the tree’s trunk were a man and a woman labeled in very old script as ADAM and EVE. Below them, shown underground, were roots labeled EGDOD and SPRING. Other queer old names such as “Ward” and “Longregard” were scattered about on other rootlets; Thingor and Knotweave toiled in little subterranean cavelets, making things. Above them, standing on the ground to one side of the tree and bathing everything in white light, was El. Scattered about was an assortment of souls: to El’s side of the tree, winged angels and mounted Autochthons and hunched scuttling Beedles. To the other side, bipedal rock piles, animated whirlwinds, and other oddments.

Low down, the trunk of the tree pushed out an ungainly side branch that looked as if it really ought to have been pruned off for starters. Chiseled into its bark in one of the Runic Alphabets were the number 12 and a word that meant something like “Great Ones” or perhaps “Giants.” It forked in two; its lower fork had six branches all labeled with names that sounded masculine, and its upper fork six that were more feminine seeming. The former were all dead ends, but the latter produced various subbranches. Meanwhile the tree’s main trunk went straight up for a bit, throwing out eight major side boughs. The eight boughs likewise sported an even mix of male and female names, and most of them forked and reforked profusely, so that the total number of little branches, out at the periphery, must have numbered in the hundreds, if not thousands. But unlike a real tree, this one included countless places where twigs from different branches came back together. To Corvus of a year ago this had made no sense, as real tree branches never did this, but he now understood that this was not a tree. It was a way of explaining how the descendants of Adam and Eve had recombined to populate the Land. And so in a case where, for example, the second son of Adam and Eve had mated with their third daughter to produce a child, it was necessary for those branches to bend together and merge in a distinctly non-treelike manner. More than two or three generations along, these had become impossible for the artists to keep doing and so beyond that point they had resorted to drawing lines between widely separated branches or simply duplicating names. This did not make the tree any easier to make sense of. Once Corvus got the overall gist of it he began to feel that the more he stared at it, the less he knew. But one good big patch of it was labeled PEOPLE BEYOND THE FIRST SHIVER, and right in the middle of that was CALLADON and not far away was BUFRECT, which Corvus gathered was the family name shared by most of the visitors. In relatively clean, fresh paint, BRINDLE was assigned a leaf of his own, but no one seemed to have got round to filling in any more recent arrivals. Likewise the most recent addition to the Bufrect family was PARALONDA, which was the name of the lady who had been seated at the other end of the table from Brindle.

Corvus was tired and desirous of sleep, but before his eyes closed he devoted some effort to tracing the branches backward from Brindle and Paralonda, working his way down the tree. Finally he traced the connection he was searching for, all the way back to the root, and then traced it back outward again, confirming that it led to the people who had built this Hall. Then his eyes closed and he slept, lulled by the dull roar of arguing Sprung. For in most of the Land, that was the term for souls who were descended from Adam and Eve.

“Quests are a thing that we do; it is a point of pride with us, in fact,” Brindle told him a week later.

They had attained the high point of a pass through the mountains. Weather was good for a change; though, on Calla, this only meant that the clouds were higher than the tops of the mountains. So, at the suggestion of Corvus, Brindle had scrambled up to the summit of a nearby peak whence a better view could be had. Much of this Bit (as islands were called in this part of the world) could be surveyed from here. Directly below them was the stopping-place where the other members of the party were resting their legs, drying out their clothes, and making tea over a little fire. Looking to the south they could see the winding valley up which they had been toiling for the last several days; somewhat hazed-over in the greater distance was the rolling green country where the Calladons’ house stood. Turning about and looking then to the north, they could see another ridge, and another one after that. Brindle knew from maps, and Corvus knew from actually having been there, that those eventually gave way and dropped into a green valley where the going would be much easier, all the way down to the sea.

Brindle went on: “Some people, however, would have gone around the mountains instead of directly through them. I wonder if your ability to fly might have impaired your judgment as regards route finding.”

“There is a road,” Corvus pointed out. “We have been following it.”

“At its best—when it is traversing a well-drained meadow, for example—it is better described as a path or trail. At its more frequently seen worst, on the other hand—”

“It all connects up. I have followed it from one end of this Bit to the other.”

“There is also a road—a true road—that circumvents the mountains on their eastern flank. And the Bufrects have ships that could take us up the western coast. Oh, I’m not complaining, yet. As I said, we are Questing folk, and this feels quite a bit more Questlike than lounging on the deck of some boat. But if you don’t mind—”

“How many Quests have you performed?” Corvus asked.

Brindle sighed. “When I was a boy, I sailed across the First Shiver to the mainland, and rode with my father from our house to the ford of the river Thoss, a journey of several days. There I bade him farewell, never to see him again—though of course I did not know that at the time. Then I went home. There were wolves, and a scuffle with some rough characters.” He glanced in the direction of a heaving mound of skins and furs with a spear next to it. Somewhere under that was a rough character named Burr.

“And…?”

“That is all.”

“No Quests for you, other than that?”

“That is correct.”

“So when you say, Brindle, that you are Questing folk—”

“I am saying that it is how we define ourselves. The tales we tell, the pictures we hang on the wall. But it has been a long time since any Calladon has taken part in a Quest worthy of being so called. This has weighed on my mind for many years. I am trying to tell you, Corvus, that I consented to place myself and my friends and family at hazard not so much because I find you convincing, but because the mere fact of going on a Quest is its own reward. And so cutting directly across the mountainous center of Calla, instead of scurrying around the edge, isn’t the worst thing in the world. But if you continue to make perverse choices in route finding, and we in consequence run out of food, or get hurt, questions will begin to be raised; and at that point I shall need to have a better answer than ‘Oh, going on Quests builds character’ and you shall have to have something better than strange talk about the fundamental nature of reality and how you fancy you were sent here from some other plane of existence that you cannot actually remember.”

“Well, the way we are taught it is this,” Prim was saying. It could be guessed from the looks on the others’ faces, and from subtleties about their posture, that some sort of disagreement had arisen while Brindle and Corvus had been up above. The glance that Prim now threw Brindle’s way as much as proved it. He had been enlisted on her side of a dispute he knew nothing of.

The topic seemed to be an old map that had been unrolled and spread flat to dry. They carried their maps in a tube that had got soaked by the rains, and several were scattered about. This particular one purported to show the entire Land. It had been painted, inked, embroidered, and gilded onto the skin of a large animal, and it had quite a lot to say. When she’d been younger, Prim had stared at it for hours. It appeared that one of the Bufrects had somewhat rashly ventured an opinion and that Prim was summoning all of her self-restraint to remain civil while setting him straight. Brindle, having arrived a little too late to finesse the situation, was helpless to do anything but stand by and nod as Prim launched into it, thus: “The Land was shaped long before El came into it, and it was shaped by Egdod. He started here, in what is now the middle, where El’s Palace now stands atop its pillar—perhaps this is why you are confused—and flew generally east.”

“Following the great river?”

“Creating it as he went, more like, until it had grown so wide that he felt it ought to empty into something. He marked that place with an enormous rock on the south bank and then began to fly north, keeping the sea to his right and creating the shore to his left. About here”—Prim pulled an arrow from her quiver and used it to point to a broad steady curve that formed the northeastern extremity of the Land—“Egdod thought better of making the Land any more enormous than it already was and swept gradually round until he was flying west. Which he did for a long time. Which is why the generally straight-ish northern coast of the Land, which stretches on for such a vast distance, is known as the Backhaul.”

“Oh, hmm,” said Mardellian Bufrect. “To me that was always just a word. It never crossed my mind that it was based on anything. Back-haul.” He cleared his throat and blushed slightly. Then, in what he apparently thought was a more authoritative voice, he added, “Pray continue.” He exchanged a glance with his kinsman Anvellyne. “With your entertaining tale.” Mard and Lyne (as they were generally called) grinned at each other, a detail Prim did not notice, as she was shifting round to the map’s northwest corner. Weaver, sitting on a rock nearby going through her damp things, shot her most peevish look at the two young men. Burr still appeared to be sleeping. Corvus was hopping about the place showing his usual complete lack of interest in what the humans were talking about.

If the map was considered the splayed skin of a dead animal, with its butt end pointed due east, then Prim had come round to its right foreleg—the northwest quadrant. “Lacking any means of judging distance,” she continued, “Egdod overshot the Palace considerably, which is why as much of the Land lies to the west of it as to the east. The Second Bending, hereabouts, is where he decided to turn south again.”

“It doesn’t look the least bit like the First Bending,” pointed out Lyne, in a tone of voice meant to indicate he was having none of it and just humoring Prim as a sort of private game with Mardellian. “It’s just a mess of islands with channels between them.”

“That mess of islands—the Bits and Shivers—is your home, and Calla is the largest of the Bits!” Prim scolded him. “And it wasn’t thus when Egdod made it. It, and the First Bending, used to be as symmetrical as a pair of shoulders!”

Mardellian seized on this pretext to gaze at Prim’s shoulders—as if he needed a flesh-and-blood model in order to fully grasp her meaning.

“The whole region west of the river—west of where Secondeltown now sits, here—snapped off.”

“Snapped off?”

“Gradually, as big things move slowly,” said Prim, sensing a bit of weakness in her own position. “So the big channel here—the First Shiver, which used to be a river—is the widest, and you can’t see all the way across it except in some places. This whole chunk that broke off just happened to contain most of the wild souls and the giants.”

Lyne sighed. “So much talk of giants, in all the old stories—yet I have never seen one.”

“You see them all the time.”

“You will see one tomorrow,” croaked Corvus, “if you will only shut up and accept your fate as a two-footed thing, namely, to walk.”

Brindle broke the awkward silence. “A game we used to play, looking at this map, was to think of all of the little islands among the Shivers as if they were shards of a broken pot. Then try to mentally imagine how they could be reassembled.”

Anvellyne and Mardellian exchanged a look. They seemed uneasy with Brindle’s proposing that any activity so tedious could be categorized as a game.

“If you look at them for long enough, you can see how an indentation in one Bit’s coastline matches a protuberance in the coast of the Bit facing it across the Shiver,” Brindle insisted.

“Shiver” was the local term for a channel running between Bits—or, in the case of the First Shiver, between the Bits and the mainland.

Meanwhile Prim had skirted around behind Brindle to the southwest—or, the dead animal’s left foreleg. This was conveniently occupied by a peninsula that reached for some distance out into the sea. “Before turning inward again, Egdod asked himself how far the ocean might extend, and struck out south and west for some considerable distance until he became bored with it, which is why we call this arm of the Land the Asking, and the prominence at the end of it Cape Boredom.”

“Huh!” said Lyne in spite of himself. “Boredom, I never put that together.”

“But after satisfying himself that the ocean was quite limitless, and mindful of his responsibilities back in First Town, Egdod turned back and flew east, headed generally back toward the huge rock that he had set up to mark the outlet of the great river. It was a long journey, as you can see. He grew weary of flying in a straight line and began turning this way and that, and ever since this series of gulfs and peninsulas that complicate the Land’s southern coastline—so different from the Backhaul—has been known as—”

“The Turnings!” exclaimed Mard. “Another of those funny old words…”

“The largest of these Egdod later enlarged into the Central Gulf. But in due course he spied the big rock where his circumnavigation had begun and made his way to it, throwing in lots of picturesque headlands and cliffs here along the southeastern corner, as he sensed it was his last opportunity to use up his best ideas before he got to the end. And that is why the Land has the shape that it does—it’s nothing to do with El.”

“I heard he got a lot wrong, though,” said Mard. Lyne shot him a look. “I mean, even people who believe in the old songs and tales say as much.” He said that for the benefit of Weaver, who had begun fussing with her harp—an instrument that was nearly impossible to tune even when it was bone-dry. She was older than Prim, and seemed to have devoted most of her years to memorizing stories and ballads. When her harp was in working order, which actually was not that often, she would sing them with enough conviction to make everyone present believe that they were true recitals of the facts.

Sensing that the others were looking her way, Weaver shrugged. Oddly enough, she always seemed a little bewildered when she found herself the center of attention. “It would be a sign of great learning to be able to recite all the tales of Egdod and Pluto. I know only a small portion of them and yet could devote an entire evening to the telling of stories in that vein.”

“And she will, if we sit still for it,” said Lyne.

“It’s easy for fault finders to come along thousands of years later and say that Egdod shouldn’t have made Pluto’s job so difficult,” said Prim. “But that’s nothing like claiming that El made the entire Land. Why, that’s just rubbish.”

“But the Pinnacle, the Palace, the Hive!” Lyne said. And he made a quick glance over his shoulder, roughly eastward, and bowed slightly at the waist. Even though they were too far away to see the Palace, this was a common gesture among persons who were inclined to take El’s side of things. Mard belatedly did the same. The others—Brindle, Prim, and Weaver—glanced east but omitted the bowing part of it. Burr jerked in his sleep. Corvus flapped his wings irritably.

“Those are places, yes, where El changed things dramatically,” Brindle admitted. “But even the most fervent priests of El accept the notion that Egdod started it all. It works in their favor, actually, since whenever they notice something about the Land that seems ungainly or cack-handed, they can blame it on Egdod.”

“I know,” Lyne admitted. “It’s just that it all seems a bit made-up.”

“What do you mean, made-up?”

“Egdod flying about and putting this here and that there, and Pluto cleaning up after him.”

“Make this up, stripling!” shouted Corvus in a voice even more strangled and cacophonous than the norm. They all turned toward the boulder where he was perching and saw—a man. A naked man enrobed in long black hair, and a long black beard, with beady black eyes. His skin was ocher and his nails long and yellowed and talonlike. He was sitting on his haunches. His beard dangled down between his legs and concealed the place where one would expect to see a penis. The mountain breeze was whipping his hair around his face, only his eyes burning through the blur.

“Oh. My. Goodness,” Brindle said.

“Where did he come from?” Lyne asked, looking around for a weapon. “And where’s the bird?”

Burr levered himself up to his full height, which was considerable, using his spear. It didn’t take long for him to notice the strange naked man on the rock. He took a step in that direction and brought the spear’s tip down to bear on the intruder.

“I think he is the bird, Lyne!” Mard said.

Weaver had set her harp aside and stood up. She was fascinated. She sidestepped over Burr’s way and rested a hand on the socket of his spearhead, just behind the glinting leaf-shaped blade, and pushed it gently aside. “Singing of this and actually seeing it are very different things,” she said.

Prim stood still through all of this, gazing into the man’s eyes. “It’s you,” she concluded, “it’s still Corvus.”

“Now that I have your attention,” Corvus announced. But then he gagged, hacked, and spat, as if having some difficulty learning to use the new vocal apparatus. When he had recovered, he went on in a somewhat deeper and more human tone: “There’ll be no more wanky chatter about such topics during the Quest.” He hocked up a little more and spat it in the general direction of the map. “Now roll that thing up, and don’t take it out anymore. What the hell are you doing, wasting your time looking at the map, when the world itself is spread out all around you?”

And with that his glossy black hair and beard wrapped themselves around his body and came together to coat all of his face save his eyes and his nose, and the nose and jaw extended and hardened into a beak. His feet shrank and his toes lengthened into talons. There was a lot of unsightly twitching and spasming and vocalization that caused everyone except Weaver to avert their gaze; Mardellian even clapped his hands over his ears, and Prim had to step lively as the creature voided its bowels in midtransformation. Then it was just Corvus again. He made two experimental hops and then took to the air.

The other six members of the party all looked at one another, just to confirm that this had really happened. Prim was still clutching the arrow she had been using as a pointer. She put it back into its quiver, then dropped to one knee at the eastern edge of the map. Before she began to roll it up again, she took one long last look at it, the way you do at an old friend before you set out on a long journey without them.

Burr had never unpacked; he was already good to go. Turning his broad back on the way they’d come, he gazed down the pass. The convolutions of the valleys below beguiled him for a while. But after a bit he picked out a plausible-seeming direction and indicated it with his spear. Then he looked at Corvus and raised his eyebrows.

“Ugh, more!” Prim blurted as they came round yet another bend in the valley. For she’d been hoping that this time it would be different and they would see open country, green pastures, a giantess looking after her beasts. “Is this what it is, or was, like to be Pluto?”

Brindle, who was ahead of her, turned his head in profile, frowning. Then he seemed to understand—or perhaps he was merely humoring her—and he smiled and turned back to the next rock, the next footfall.

“I mean,” Prim went on, “is it the case that Egdod said, ‘I want a valley here, with mountains at the top, and, at the bottom, a river emptying into the sea,’ and then flew on in the satisfaction of a job well done? And then Pluto came along later and shaped each individual rock and thought about where to set it down?” She feigned a yawn. “‘Oh, the previous two thousand rocks were all set in place rather firmly, I do believe I’ll balance this one just so, to trip up an inattentive traveler who might happen along a few eons from now.’”

She looked back at Burr to make sure he’d noticed the rock in question. As usual he was paying more attention to the heights around them than to the ground in front of the shaggy mukluks that for him served as boots. But he had a third leg in the form of his spear and fell no more often than anyone else. Occasionally he would stop and shush them all, and in the silence they would hear the cry of an animal echoing from the cliffs that hemmed in the valley, or see a little cascade of stones dribbling down from a vantage point.

Anvellyne was ahead of her at the moment. For he and Mardellian tended to grow bored, and dawdle and fall behind, whereupon Burr would grow stormy-looking and Brindle, noting as much, would yell at them, and then they would come racing down pell-mell and run on ahead until Burr and Brindle checked them. Lyne turned half around and said, “According to Weaver’s stories, Pluto didn’t make all of this anyway!”

Weaver got the hunched, furtive look she always did when someone was trying to draw her into the conversation, and scuttled on ahead, leaving Prim to answer: “Of course he did!”

“What I’m saying,” Lyne replied, “is that in those stories this all snapped off and got redone after Pluto and the rest had been flung into the sky and got rid of. So maybe if you don’t like the way these rocks are set down you should complain to Edda. When and if we actually see her.”

“No soul went to the trouble to shape these rocks one by one, as a baker’s hand shapes a loaf,” Corvus ruled, banking slowly over their heads on a cool breeze coming up the valley.

“Then how did they come to be here,” Prim asked, “with the shapes that they have?”

“Why, when you step wrong, do you fall down?” Corvus replied. “The Land is so constituted that it has laws, which all things heed without the need for souls to observe, think, act, and do other soul-like things. So everything falls. Fall simply is. And besides fall there are other such laws and tendencies. Hill-giants maybe are aware of the slow forces that splinter cliffs and shape rocks, but not the likes of us.”

“So maybe Edda will have something to say about it!” Mard put in. He was only joking, as Prim could tell from the look he threw Lyne. But if Corvus understood it as a jest, he had no patience for it. “If I see one more of you ground-pounders craning your necks and scanning the skyline for a glimpse of her kneecap, I’ll croak!” he exclaimed. “Attend to the rocks. It won’t be much longer.”

But it was much longer, and so after a while Prim took up the theme again. She had a hidden motive; these debates made the time go by faster, and kept Lyne and Mard nearer the rest of the group.

Prim required further convincing. “I have not seen the Palace,” she began.

“I have,” said Corvus.

“But I have seen many depictions of it, and heard it described in the songs of Weaver, and if there is any truth in those, it perches on a spire of rock that is so tall and slender it cannot answer to the same laws that, according to you, govern… this.” And after a brief pause to be sure of her footing she looked up and spread her arms to indicate the cliffs all round them.

“It is an exception, to be sure,” Corvus admitted.

“It was so shaped in the Before Times,” Weaver assured them, “when there were many such prodigies that could never be brought into being today. It was the last such, and some say that in making it Egdod spent his powers and made himself too weak to overcome… the Usurper.” This last word she spoke quietly, in confidence to Prim, for it was a forbidden word, not safe to say aloud in certain company. But Prim took no note. For as she had raised her gaze just now from the next rock and the next, she had spied, around the next bend in the valley, a patch of blue sky above a field of green.

“You have to understand,” Corvus remarked, as the party lengthened its strides into Edda’s valley, “that being a giant, or a giantess, is not about being giant—or even large. That’s just a common misconception.”

Mard and Lyne turned back to gawp at him. They simply could not believe the things Corvus said sometimes.

“People have got impossibly confused,” Corvus went on, “because of hill-giants and other wild souls—who actually are unbelievably enormous. Edda has a form like ours.”

Lyne was beyond exasperated—ready to turn on his heel and walk home, it seemed. “Then why denote her as a giantess?” He threw a look at Weaver, as if it were her fault. “F’relsake, can’t we come up with a different term?”

“The First Children of Eve are known by many names, if you only listen with care to the old songs,” said Weaver. “Angel Eaters, Adam’s Woe, Cairn’s Care…”

“Fine!” Lyne snapped. “All better names than ‘giantess.’”

Burr had stopped a few hundred paces short of a cottage that they had all, without discussing it, been heading for since it had hove into view. Until recently they had been traversing wolfish country, where even the creatures that weren’t wolves tended to come equipped with a remarkable array of horns, tusks, and claws. In such places Burr liked to advance to the head of the group. Brindle liked to bring up the rear. Remarks he’d made along the way suggested he was afraid of being attacked from behind by unspecified creatures who—or so it could be guessed—were extraordinarily quiet in their movements and patient in their approach to hunting. But there hadn’t been much excitement so far. Everything that had come at them had done so from the front and found itself on the wrong end of Burr’s spear. A few times Prim had taken up her bow and nocked an arrow, just in case, but not let any fly.

At no point during even the most thrilling encounters had Burr actually shown signs of excitement, or exhibited the least reluctance to keep forging ahead, and so it was strange that he now stopped, in an open space with no wild beasts of any kind in evidence, and no obstructions. A stone’s throw away, off to their left, a couple of mounts were eating grass, bending their necks to crop it from the ground and then bobbing back up to eye them curiously as they chewed.

“No walls, really,” Burr pointed out. “No weapons. Livestock out in plain sight, unafraid.”

“Yes indeed,” Mard said, “it seems very safe.”

“Why?” Brindle asked. Rhetorically. “That’s what Burr is asking himself.”

Mardellian hadn’t considered that angle. Neither had Prim.

“Well,” Mard guessed, “you know, we haven’t seen what’s inside the cottage yet.”

“Bread baking, to judge from the fragrance,” Prim said.

“It could be full of armed Autochthons.”

“It’s not,” said Brindle, and nodded at Burr. The man-at-arms, after giving the cottage only a quick look, had turned his back on it and was now surveying the sweep of dark hills that enclosed the valley and the pair of snowcapped peaks at its head, between which they had passed yesterday.

“You see—” Brindle began.

But Lyne, impatient with the lesson, cut him off. “We’ve been making our way through her defenses ever since we came down the pass and spotted that wolf up on the ridgeline, staring at us.”

“We’re… surrounded?” Mardellian asked.

Burr reversed his grip on the spear so that it became more walking stick than weapon. The party spread out to stroll across the pasture seven abreast: On the left flank, the young men Anvellyne and Mardellian, on loan from the clan Bufrect. Then Weaver, who seemed to be vaguely attached to House Calladon. Brindle, its patriarch, walked in the middle. To his right was Prim. Well off to the right was Burr, who preferred keeping his spear arm free of flesh-and-blood obstructions. In the open space between him and Prim, Corvus hopped along, occasionally flying for short bursts when he fell behind or needed to clear one of the stone walls that divided the pastures.

In spite of Corvus’s words, Prim had been holding out for something in a gigantic vein. But as they drew closer to the cottage it became undeniable that it was in no way of unusual size. Not cramped, for certain, and of a somewhat rambling character, as bits had been added on from time to time. One could make out foundation stones of wings that did not exist anymore. These erupted from the ground like rows of teeth from gums. Those must have been relics of ancient sections of the cottage that Edda had built, lived in for a time, and got rid of—or simply allowed to disintegrate with the passage of time.

She wasn’t tiny, at least. She opened the door to greet them and was revealed to be about as tall as Burr. Her hair was white, full and long, braided down her back. She wore an apron streaked with flour, which she took this opportunity to give a brisk shake. The breeze caught the loose flour and bore it gently away. The flour caught the light as it drifted, and beguiled Prim’s eye, for the shape that it took and the manner of its movement was just like that of clouds in the sky when they drifted overhead on a summer’s day. This impression was so strong that it seized her mind entirely for a few moments, during which she could think of nothing save various times in her past life when she had gazed out her window or lain in the grass looking up at clouds.

She did not entirely return to the here and now until she found herself some moments later standing, along with the others, right in the forecourt of the cottage, gazing up at the face of Edda. Or actually not gazing up, since Edda wasn’t that tall; yet it felt up. Corvus, perched on the roof over the door, was doing the introducing, poking his long beak at each of them in turn and squawking out their name. Edda favored each of them with a look and—not a smile exactly, but an openness about the face that put one at ease somewhat as a pure and unfeigned smile might. “Primula,” she said, as if she’d heard of Prim.

“How do you do,” Prim said back up to her—but again, not really up. She got lost then in the striations in the iris of Edda’s left eye. These were immensely complex, and of all colors, having about them the same balance of order and wildness as exposed tree roots, tendrils of smoke in the wind, tongues of wild flame, the swirling of water where rivers came together. Prim wondered if the striations in her own irises were anywhere near as complicated. She guessed that the answer was probably no, and then wondered how such things got shaped in the first place—were you just born with them or did they grow in complexity over time? Or was it different, when you were a giantess? Had Edda consciously worked on hers, or had they just taken form on their own?

“Weaver!” Edda said. Somehow they’d all entered the cottage and found seats around a table. A loaf of warm bread was there. They’d been tearing hunks from it and eating heartily, but there was plenty of bread remaining. Prim had got lost staring into the structure of a bread hunk, somewhat as she’d once sat for hours staring at the map of the Land. There was a lot to this bread, and biting chunks out of it only exposed more. Steam escaped from the tiny round cavities and came together in roiling cloudlets shaped like flowers, men, and monsters—until she began to notice them, whereupon they undid themselves and became invisible currents of scent.

Weaver had been lost in admiration of the tabletop, which was an enormous slab of polished stone, a hand span in thickness, supported at the ends by boulders founded in the earth—the floorboards, unable to bear such weight, had been carefully cut around them. The stone had complex patterns, and you could see some distance into it, as if it were part crystal. Hearing her name spoken, Weaver tore her gaze from this only to get distracted by Edda’s braid, which the giantess had flipped to the front so that it trailed down over her bosom. There was a lot more to it than just a simple three-strand braid.

“Yes, my lady?”

“I have not had the pleasure of your company since two hundred and thirty-seven years ago, when you sat just where you are sitting now, and I taught you the Lay of Valeskara and Blair.”

Prim remembered that vaguely: two lovers who, as a side effect of a war between a hill-giant and a troop of angels, had found themselves on opposite sides of a freshly made Shiver. Before they could find a way across, Blair had become embroiled in a fight with some Beedles, who had put him in chains and taken him away to a castle or something, where Autochthons put him in a dungeon. Valeskara still walked on the cliff top awaiting his return. So that, at least, was familiar. But Weaver’s being at least two and a half centuries old was news to her—and apparently to Brindle.

Evidently it was even news to Weaver. “That may very well be, my lady, but…”

“But you have no recollection of it, for you must have passed on at least once since then.”

“One would think so!” said Weaver.

Lyne raised his face out of his bread hunk just long enough to gaze across the table at Mard, with a look that said, No wonder she knows so many fucking songs.

“Before you leave, I shall teach you more,” Edda promised.

“That would be a high honor—”

“Not going to happen,” Corvus announced from his perch on the sill of a window that Edda, perhaps unadvisedly, had left wide open. “There’s to be no ‘leaving.’ You’re coming with us.”

For the first time, Edda smiled. She turned her attention to Brindle and Prim, who were seated next to each other.

“You two are as father and daughter,” she observed, “but that is not so?”

Brindle shook his head. “Her mother and father passed on, more than likely. Oh, it happened some time ago—she chose to remain a girl for many years, and I saw no point in rushing her along.”

“Wise,” Edda said. “Dough given more time to rise makes a finer loaf.” Then, to Prim: “You make a fine young woman, which means you chose correctly.”

Prim blushed and fell into a reverie, listening to the tones of Edda’s voice but not at all following the words. Her voice was as complex as her braid, and its strands were flutes, birdsong, and the lapping of waves on a lakeshore in the still of the evening.

Brindle was squeezing her arm under the table. She looked at him. He inclined his head toward their hostess, whose last sentence rushed into her mind all at once: the giantess had said, “I see from the calluses on your fingers that you like archery; I could teach you what little I know of flint knapping.”

“That is most generous,” Prim said. “The heads of my arrows are all forged.”

“Much more practical,” Edda said, “but stone ones have their uses too.”

“Learning that will burn weeks,” Corvus protested. “Think hours.”

Edda didn’t seem to hear the giant talking raven. She turned her attention to the others, each in their turn. She remembered Burr as a warrior who had once passed on gloriously in single combat with an angel. This revelation certainly caused Lyne and Mard to look at the spearman in a new light.

Those two Bufrect boys came in for examination next. Their clan lived round the edges of a steep rocky peninsula projecting from the southern end of Calla. It pointed into a broad, short Shiver that connected straight to the ocean. So they were seagoing folk. They’d joined the Quest on a lark, not without one or two swift kicks in the arse from their matriarch Paralonda. Since then, during wetter, colder, duller moments, they’d made no secret of regretting it. But by the time Edda was done talking to them it was clear there’d be no more second thoughts.

“You make Questing sound grand,” Corvus pointed out. “Perhaps setting foot out of this valley every few centuries would do you good!”

Brindle was the only one of the visitors Edda had not chatted with yet, and so it seemed natural he’d be next. But instead he and Edda merely looked at each other, arriving at some wordless understanding.

Food had made them all sleepy and so at Edda’s invitation they spread out into various rooms of the cottage. For a small place, it had an extraordinary number of nooks and, as it were, backwaters, always surprising the visitor as she came round a corner. Before long Prim had found the perfect one for her, curled up in it, and fallen asleep. She rose once in the middle of the night to go outside and empty her bladder, and as she went in and out she overheard Edda and Brindle conversing in low tones, but could make out only a single word, which was “Spring.” After that she slept very soundly.

She had a dream in which radiant light was shining down from the Palace, and she could not escape its glare, which penetrated even her closed eyelids. She was down on the ground far below, prostrate, but through the earth she could feel, more than hear, a deep grinding, as though the underpinnings of the Land itself were being invisibly reshaped. This was not the pick-and-shovel work of Beedles toiling under the lash, but something that hearkened to the Before Times and the doings of Thingor. Standing up and turning her back to the light, she found herself gazing up into mountains, black at the base, white with snow above that, but hidden at the top behind storm clouds that reached up into the sky as high as El’s Pinnacle, wreathed at the top with blue lightning.

She opened her eyes and flung out a hand to brace herself. In her dream she had been standing on a grassy plain but in fact she was lying on her side, back turned to the light of the morning, which was cutting in under the clouds and coming in straight through a window. That had been real, at least. The Pinnacle and the storm had been dream figments but that deep grinding sound was certainly there, pervading the cottage and coming up into her bones through the floor.

She got up. The sound had a directionless quality that made finding its source no easy task. But soon enough she found her way into the kitchen. At the other end, by the door to a pantry that looked bigger than the rest of the house put together, a stone rested atop another stone. Both were round and flat, like thick coins, or slices of a sausage. Their diameter was about the length of a person’s arm. The one on top had a hole in its center, which was full of golden grain. Edda was standing next to it, one hand resting on the upper stone, and she was pushing it round and round. Flour trickled from a hole in the lower stone and collected in a bowl on the floor. This was, in other words, a mill like any other, save it lacked the waterwheel or the team of beasts that would normally be required to budge anything so heavy. Edda moved it as easily as if it were a spinning wheel.

“Is there… some way I could help?” Prim asked.

“It is about time to empty the bowl,” Edda pointed out, and nodded at a large table in the middle of the kitchen, on which a considerable heap of flour already stood. Prim stepped in, picked up the bowl, and carried it to the table, where she dumped it out atop what was already there. Then she paused for a few moments, for the shape of the heap was strikingly like that of the mountain in her dream, and the cloud of loose airborne flour still swirling above it was like the thunderhead that obscured the heights.

But she knew that the flour was spilling out onto the floor by the mill, so she hurried over and reinstated the bowl. While she was there kneeling at Edda’s feet, she scooped up loose flour in her hands and transferred it into the bowl. The scent of flour was everywhere, of course, but so was the scent of Edda, which was faint but bottomless.

“Baking more bread?” Prim asked. For it seemed that Edda had baked more than enough of it yesterday.

“Hardtack,” Edda corrected her. “To sustain us on the road.”

49

Two days’ easy walking took them to the place where the river emptied into a broad bend of the Shiver that formed Calla’s northeastern coast. From there, across several miles of open water, they could see a solitary mountain guarded by ranges of foothills. It was not evident from here, but Prim knew from maps that this was a separate Bit unto itself, with another Shiver cutting around its backside and separating it from the much larger Bit that lay off to its east. Formerly all three landmasses had been one huge Bit, but the solitary mountain had drawn to itself all the wildest and most fractious old souls that still dwelled in the Land, and the place had become so unmanageable that, like a nail driven into a block of brittle old wood, it had snapped the big island in half and found itself standing alone in the midst of a newly formed Shiver. The waters girding it and the air above were infamously fickle and hazardous. Reaching this harbor, as beautiful and placid as it seemed, was therefore considered too dangerous to be attempted by sea. This did much to explain why Edda had been able to enjoy such isolation in her valley, for one end could only be entered by going over the pass, and the other was, to all intents and purposes, barred to mariners by the wild souls on the Bit opposite. But there was a village at the river’s mouth where a few doughty souls lived from fish that they caught along the nearer shore. This was notched with little coves where they could take refuge when air and water were raging. One of these, a man named Robst, agreed to take the party as passengers on his boat, Firkin, if they would pull on oars, and perform other tasks, when needed.

It took no time at all to agree on this plan, but Prim was surprised by how long it took to embark and get under way. She was not accustomed to boats and watery doings; she was taken aback by how many lines and knots were involved. Robst had a lot to say on the subject of ballast.

“We traveled too light,” Mard explained to her.

“First I’ve heard of it,” Prim replied. “My pack felt heavy to me!”

Mard nodded. “Yes, we all carried as much as we could. But Brindle, you’ll recall, said from the very beginning that we mustn’t use mounts…”

“Because we would only have to abandon them when we reached the water and boarded ship,” Prim recalled. “Of course, it’s a different story with Edda’s.”

She nodded at two mounts who were standing on the shore near the dock, taking a very dim view indeed of the crests of incoming waves. Edda had laden them with baggage for the trip down, so that the rest of the party could walk free of their heavy packs. The beasts had now been unloaded, and Edda had let them know that they were free to leave. They didn’t seem to like the waves at all, and so kept edging back from the shore. But they liked Edda quite a bit, and were reluctant to part from her.

For all the toil that had gone into transporting them to this place, the bags did indeed look like not very much when they were all piled up on the strand. “Firkin is made to carry lots of heavy stuff,” Mard said. “Just now the hold is empty, and it is riding very high in the water.”

“It is?” Prim asked. To her it just looked like a boat.

“Bobbing like a cork,” Mard confirmed. Bufrects, dwelling on the coast, knew more about such things than Calladons in general. In fact Lyne had already boarded the vessel and was clambering around familiarizing himself with how it all worked. “Not safe to sail. Our baggage weighs nothing compared to what that boat could carry, and so Robst is going to have to put more stuff into it just to make it ride lower in the water.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Rocks,” Mard said with a shrug.

“Ugh, rocks again!”

Edda pulled her modest bag from the pile and slung it over her shoulder. She went up to each of the mounts in turn for a sweet face-to-face conversation and a goodbye kiss, then turned her back and stepped up onto the pier, which ran out into the harbor on a series of boulders and pounded-in tree trunks. Firkin was tied up at its end. When she stepped aboard, it settled much lower in the water, as if tons of rocks had just been deposited in its hold. The mounts turned tail and walked off, following the bank of the river back up in the direction of Edda’s cottage.

Robst—who had been engaged in a detailed conversation with Brindle on the topic of rocks—stood still for a long time, gazing at his boat as if he were expecting it to bob back up again. It did not, however, and so after a while he shrugged and walked down the dock to board it and continue his preparations. He struck a deal with two younger kinsmen and a local woman; these would provide him with a skeleton crew so that he could sail Firkin home after discharging the passengers. A short while later they were under way.

Using sails when they could and oars when they had to, they proceeded north up the Shiver in a furtive way, hewing close to the near shore until the mountain of the wild souls was well behind them. Then they ventured out into the middle of the channel, which was many miles broad this far north. They passed out of the Eternal Veil of Mist that surrounded Calla and came out into full sunlight. They caught a stiff west wind that was sluicing down another Shiver that delineated the north coast of Calla. This drove them eastward at a good clip. Prim’s home island fell away aft. At some point Prim realized that she could not see Calla—or, to be precise, the Eternal Veil—anymore, and wondered when or if she would ever see it again. They were navigating now generally eastward between Bits that seemed on the whole darker, colder, and less welcoming. It was because they were covered mostly in trees—the greenish-black trees of far north and high mountain—with only rare patches of farm and pasture.

Four days’ voyaging took them round the south cape of another Bit. As soon as they’d cleared it, they hooked northward into the First Shiver, which in these parts was so broad as to be more of an inland sea than a channel. The coast opposite was not always visible, but they could see hills rising above it. And so this was how Prim got her first look at the Land proper. From the deck of this boat, it looked no different from another Bit in the distance. But Prim could not help gazing on it and thinking about the fact that once you set foot on it you could reach all the places on the big map: not just the Lake Land, which was the nearest part, but the Knot, the Fastness, the Hive, the Palace, and the teeming lands surrounding the great river as it flowed down to the far eastern sea.

Soon visible off to their left was their destination: West Cloven. This port had a sister city, unsurprisingly known as East Cloven, just opposite on the shore of the mainland. In the old days they had been one town straddling a river that drained part of the Lake Land. Like Eltown and Toravithranax farther south, it had been settled in the time after Egdod had thrown down the first Hive, and the souls who had dwelled in it had dispersed to all corners of the Land.

Their home island of Calla had been settled by souls who had begun their journey around Camp, across from Old Eltown, and made their way north and west, following trails laid down by migrating giants. So the speech of the Calladons and Bufrects was a dialect of what was still spoken around Secondeltown. But different folk altogether had created the town that later became Cloven. Its two halves, East and West, had been separated long enough by the gradually broadening Shiver that a different dialect was spoken in each. At the opposite end of the First Shiver, many days’ journey to the south, the people of Toravithranax spoke yet another entirely different language. Of all of these places, Secondeltown, being closest to El’s Palace, and indeed having a direct view of the Palace from the vast and magnificent Temple, Basilica, School, and Monastery of Elkirk looming above it, spoke a language thought to be closest to that of First Town in the Before Times. A simple version of that language—Townish—had come into use up and down the length of the First Shiver as the common tongue of mariners and traders. It was close enough to what the Bufrects and Calladons spoke that with a little practice, and by pruning their sentences, they could make themselves understood around the docks in West Cloven. Or so they were assured by Robst as he piloted them safe into the old harbor after a reasonably uneventful journey. It was not the biggest town they’d ever seen—Farth, the capital of Calla, was bigger and certainly nicer to look at—but it was a considerable town. Much larger vessels than theirs were moored all about, unloading cargo from the Lake Land across the First Shiver. In its place the produce of many Bits was transferred into vacated holds: honey, wax, timber, fish, grains, and fibers.

Robst knew where to go, but even still they’d have been lost without Corvus. Yesterday the giant talking raven had flown away without explanation as soon as the back side of this Bit had hove into view. Today he had appeared high above them as they rowed into the harbor. “He’ll not perch anywhere that his size will draw attention,” Brindle predicted. “Not all folk are as easygoing as we Calladons in the presence of such creatures.”

But one other soul had apparently been keeping an eye on Corvus’s movements, for when they at last found a mooring place, he was standing on the shore waiting for them. Corvus, apparently satisfied the connection had been made, flapped away toward some nearby cliffs topped with dark trees.

The moorage here was makeshift, with smaller craft simply hauled up on the beach. Robst had everyone pull on the oars for a few moments while aiming Firkin at an empty patch of sand, and ran it up just far enough to stick. Lyne scampered up onto the prow and cast a rope down to the soul who was waiting for them. Thus was Edda able to disembark without causing the boat to bob back up in a way that might have attracted notice. For many hereabouts seemed to have a lot of time on their hands, which they whiled away by staring at newcomers. Edda, the moment she touched down, wrapped herself in a long cloak of simple nubby stuff that was nothing to look at—literally nothing, since, once she had pulled it up to cover her, it concealed every bit of the engrossing complexity in her form. Save, of course, the irises. But one had to stand close to see those.

“My name is Ferhuul,” said the man on the beach, extending his hand in peace, “and I would be bowing in token of my respect if I did not wish to avoid drawing attention to your arrival, my lady.” He averted his gaze, perhaps not wanting to become lost in hers, and clasped her hand briefly. Then he likewise greeted the others, guessing their names correctly, though Mard and Lyne required a little straightening out. He spoke Townish with the accent of Cloven, which was presumably his native tongue. “If you will please follow me,” he said, “I know of a place where all of us can talk in comfort.” He cast a wary look at Burr, but the man-at-arms had had the common sense to leave all of his weapons, save a belt knife, aboard Firkin, where Robst and his three crewmates could keep an eye on them. Satisfied of that, Ferhuul led the party on a stroll up streets that were flat and straight at first, winding and even zigzagging later as they climbed up out of the harbor flats.

“Try to act like you have been here before,” Brindle told Prim, “or at least to some place like it.”

Prim nodded and, for a little while, fixed her gaze on the cobblestones coming and going under her feet.

Practically all of the souls Prim had ever met in her life had been Sprung: descendants of Adam and Eve, which meant that they had come into being within the bodies of mothers who had been impregnated by fathers. As was proved, or at least claimed, by the great family tree on the wall of the Calladons’ hall, every such soul could trace his or her ancestry back to Adam and Eve. Though they each looked a little different, all such souls shared a common form that, according to their legends, had been preordained by Spring in the Before Times.

Spawned, on the other hand, had not been born of a woman but had simply appeared here or there, first as inchoate glimmers of near-chaos. From those beginnings they had developed forms. It had been thus in the Before Times, when many such had developed at hazard into wild souls of outlandish shapes and powers. Even in the days of First Town, though, they had tended to shape themselves into two-legged, two-armed, one-headed creatures of a common size. Egdod’s casting down of the hive and the destruction of First Town had dispersed such souls to all parts of the Land, where they had clumped together into new communities. There were variants characteristic of certain regions, the best known being Beedles, who spawned in the vicinity of Secondeltown and were shaped to be the servants and soldiers of the Autochthons. And souls who spawned in very remote areas could still take on unusual forms. But for the most part, Spawned were indistinguishable from adult Sprung. The only difference that mattered was that Spawned could not have children.

Spawned were rarely seen in the middle of Calla, where Prim had lived her whole life, but they were all over the place here. Children ran and played in the streets—these were obviously descendants of Eve. But those of finished, adult form might be either Spawned or Sprung. Prim was naturally curious to see whether she could tell them apart; Brindle had noted her gaze lingering too long on strangers’ forms and faces and given her a gentle warning. Farth, the only other town of any size she’d spent time in, was a friendlier sort of place where everyone knew each other. Cloven felt altogether chillier and less welcoming.

“Souls of all kinds come here from the Bits, the Lake Land, the whole length of the First Shiver. Even from as far south as the Asking and as far east as the communities lining the Hive-Way,” Brindle explained. “So it’s not at all like Farth. They don’t all speak the same languages or observe the same customs. You might even see the odd Beedle scuttling up out of the hold of a cargo ship from Secondeltown. In places like that”—and he nodded at the open door of a tavern, full of souls having a common look and speaking a language Prim had never heard—“they may be warm and sociable, but the streets and wharves are a different matter and you’d do well to bridle your curiosity.”

Their destination turned out to be an old stone house at the end of a street where it ran smack into the base of a cliff. A stone wall enclosed the house and its court. The place was heavily worn around the edges but well kept where it mattered. Ferhuul explained that it belonged to a man and woman of his acquaintance who owned more than one vessel and were currently out to sea aboard one such. “The stairs and the ground floor are stone all the way down,” he said to Edda. “The upper story—mere wood.”

Edda nodded and sat down on the top of the low stone wall that ran along one edge of the courtyard. Prim understood that Ferhuul had been warning the giantess that the floors upstairs might not bear her weight.

Edda let the cloak fall from her head but kept it snug around her body. Others sat on wooden chairs and benches at a table nearby. Weaver had been silent for some days as sea travel did not agree with her, but now tuned her harp and sang a song that Edda had been teaching her, verse by verse. Dusk fell, somewhat concealing the approach of Corvus, who swooped down from the cliff top and perched on a long and extraordinarily massive tree bough stretched out above.

Corvus seemed uncharacteristically content to sit and listen to the song. Prim reflected that the giant talking raven had been in the Land for but one year, and though he had flown far and seen much, he could not have learned but a fraction of the tales known to the likes of Edda and Weaver.

The song was written in a very old poetic style, with many allusions to other songs and myths. But the basic story was familiar to anyone who had grown up around books. So Prim climbed up into the tree—which was easy, even though she had stopped being a girl and turned into a full-grown woman—and sat on the bough next to Corvus and whispered explanations at him so that the story would make better sense.

The story went that Egdod and Spring, who were lovers, found themselves separated after the Fall. She was tied to the Land, which was where all of her creations—soon including Adam and Eve—had their homes. He had been exiled to the Firmament. Again and again Egdod sought to return, beating his great black wings to soar across the void separating Firmament from Land. But again and again his approach, be it never so stealthy, was detected by El’s watchful angels, and he was flung back. For El in his wisdom had woven an invisible net about the Land, which could detect Egdod’s approach no matter how craftily he disguised himself. The Red Web grew as crater after crater was added. Finally Egdod learned from Sophia—a member of the Pantheon who was privy to mystic lore from another plane of existence—the truth: El’s magic would always see through his deceptions and disguises. The only way for him to return to the Land was to give up his very self: to die and to grow again from nothing. Now, Sophia in her way was the most terrible of all the Pantheon, for she held the power of life and death over every soul. Even Egdod. He requested that she sever the thread of his life and she consented. With that Egdod fell dead. But his dying made it possible for him to begin again, as a new soul in the Land. Slowly he returned to life, and, in the chaos beneath the Fastness, he made a form for himself. He went out into the Land, hiding himself in the humble guise of an insect or a worm, and sought out those dear to him. Spring he could not find anywhere, for she roamed at will and in many guises, but Adam and Eve were confined to a garden and easily found. In that garden and other places he made mischief and thereby incurred the wrath of El, who could not fathom how the Old One had slipped through his net. Again and again El in his fury struck down any creature whom he suspected of being Egdod in some new guise. Again and again Egdod returned, patiently creating new forms in which he roamed about the Land: sometimes a cloaked wanderer, sometimes a bird or a wolf or even a gust of wind. Yet always Spring eluded him.

At length El came to understand that it was in the Fastness where Egdod found sanctuary whenever he was struck down, and where each time he wove a new form about his naked soul. It was in the library of that great fortress where he taught himself to read, and learned his own story, and pored over maps, and came to understand who and what he was and what he must do. It was there in Knotweave’s spinning room where he would make clothes, and Thingor’s forge where he would fashion tools and weapons, that he would not venture out into the Land naked and unarmed. That was when El and certain of his high angels ventured to Toravithranax and went to the high atelier of Pestle and demanded any accounts she might have concerning the Fastness, particularly diagrams of the fortress and maps of the Knot in which it was embedded; but they were frustrated when they came at length to understand that the Knot could not be mapped, for it did not make any kind of sense that could be reduced to ink on a page. So El sent his angels to go and look at the place. But they could not penetrate the storm, and several did not return.

El resolved to journey there afoot, and rediscovered from of old the Shifting Path, which led him to the Broken Bridge. This had been built at the end of the First Age when the minions of El had gone to that place in great numbers to build a wall around the Fastness. Since then the wall had fallen into disrepair and the middle span of the bridge had been struck down into the chasm. El crossed over, and stood before the Fastness, and in his pride fancied that he would tear it down and altogether reduce it to chaos. He summoned then an army of angels. They changed themselves into the form of wingless souls and marched upon the Knot following the convolutions of the Shifting Path until at last they too stood before the very gates of the Fastness.

It was there that El at last found a limit to his power. He was not able to tear down the Fastness as he had hoped, for situated as it was in the heart of the Land where the four mountain ranges were tied together, it bore the same relation to the very fabric of the Land as a keystone to an arch; to destroy it, even if such a thing were within his power, would be to unmake the Land itself, to break it asunder into chaos and make all of its souls homeless.

But there was one thing El could do that would rid him of Egdod once and for all, and that was to lock Egdod inside. So El made a great forge out of a volcano that stood not far away, and there caused prodigious amounts of iron to be brought together from all parts of the Land by armies of Beedles. He rebuilt the bridge so that it could be reached from the north. He summoned hill-giants to serve as his smiths and made for them a stone anvil by cutting down a mountain and flattening its stump. On it, the giants forged bands and chains of iron. The bands were as thick as roads and the chain links as big as houses. These they wrapped and bent about the Fastness. The windows they covered with iron plates and the doors with slabs of stone. Over its top they fashioned an iron dome of great curved plates joined together with rivets as thick as tree trunks. El in the meantime was fashioning a lock to fit in the hasp that joined all of the bands and chains together. When every exit—even drains and sewer holes—had been sealed, he locked it up, imprisoning Egdod there forever. El withdrew, and broke the bridge, and dropped its rubble into the Chasm. Then to his Palace El returned. Egdod had never since been seen abroad in the Land.

Weaver trailed her fingers across the strings of the harp and let its tone slowly fade away. The song, it seemed, was at an end.

Lyne was ready for it. “Hang on,” he said, “you can’t just stop there and not say what El did with the key.”

“On his way out, after breaking the bridge, El flung the key in after it,” Weaver returned.

“That seems like an incredibly careless way to treat the one object capable of releasing his most feared enemy from his imprisonment,” Lyne pointed out.

Weaver wasn’t having it. As she knew perfectly well, Lyne had heard versions of this story many times during his young life and was only feigning surprise. “The Chasm is a crack in the world. It has no bottom. The key tumbled into chaos and was unmade. It ceased to exist.”

“Still, the sheer carelessness of it—” Lyne sputtered.

“The key was a piece of solid iron the size of an oak a hundred years old,” Weaver said. “Taking such a thing to the top of the Pinnacle would have been a stupefying feat unto itself, and all to no purpose. He destroyed it.”

“Locks can be picked!”

“Not this one. El saw to that.”

“You’ll know,” Corvus announced, “that across the water, less than a day’s sailing, lies East Cloven. Now, many of its people never set foot outside of its wolf walls, but those who do are walking right into the Bewilderment.”

The mere utterance of this word caused Mard and Lyne to make that little bow in the general direction of the center of the Land: an invocation of El, just in case El happened to be listening and cared about them.

The term normally used, in polite company, for the region that lay inland of East Cloven, south of the Backhaul and north of the mountains, was the Lake Land, and so this was what everyone had been calling it up to this point. “The Bewilderment” referred to exactly the same place. But it was generally used only in old poetry of a grim temper, or when trying to scare children, or to dissuade loved ones from going to any part of it other than its outermost fringes. If that was their next destination, then, in Prim’s opinion, Corvus might have done well to avoid using that term for it.

“A pretty place in some ways,” Corvus went on, “but a labyrinth of waterways all hooked up to one another in some pattern not even Pluto could sort out. As a giant talking raven I am in possession of certain advantages, but if I could not fly, I would never venture into it without a knowledgeable guide. Ferhuul here is one such.”

“Thank you for going to the trouble of crossing the Shiver, Ferhuul,” said Brindle. “I daresay you could have saved yourself the trouble and met us in East Cloven tomorrow!”

Ferhuul acknowledged Brindle’s courtesy with a nod, but then glanced away.

“Not all of you will be crossing over, exactly,” Corvus announced. “At least, not tomorrow. So this was the only way to get everyone together for a few moments.”

Prim could tell that Brindle was angered by this, but he bridled his temper. “Perhaps you might tell us a little more of what you are proposing, then. Since I was under the impression that our quest was taking us over to the mainland.”

“That much is true,” said Corvus, “but there is one other member of the quest whose services, I am pretty sure, we are going to require. He’ll need to be fetched from south of here. An easy enough voyage by sea. But it makes no sense for all of us to go.”

Weaver, who hated being on the boat, heaved a great sigh of appreciation. Burr too seemed relieved to hear it; there was little use for him on the water, and he became intolerably restless. “Perhaps on land I could serve some purpose other than ballast,” said Edda.

“Your thinking aligns with mine,” said Corvus. “Our absent hosts own a ship, a cargo carrier much bigger than the boat of Robst, onto which you could discreetly embark without drawing much notice or arousing the superstitions of the crew. Weaver, Burr, and Ferhuul can sail over with you, and once you are on dry land you can begin journeying east—Ferhuul is in command of the specifics—and get a head start on certain aspects of the Quest. Acquiring legendary weapons. Delving into cryptic archives. Meanwhile, the rest of us can board Firkin, if Robst is willing, and fetch the chap from down south.”

Prim was somewhat crestfallen to learn that she would not be journeying directly to the mainland (to say nothing of acquiring legendary weapons and delving into cryptic archives!) and so was a few moments putting her feelings in check.

“A minute ago you said ‘south of here’ and now it’s ‘down south,’ which to me sounds farther,” Brindle pointed out. “In plain language, just where is this person?”

“Well, it’s impossible to be sure,” said Corvus, “but at last report he was pursuing a line of investigation that only makes sense if he is hanging around along the brink of the Newest Shiver.”

Brindle could scarcely believe it. “But that runs across the Last Bit!”

“Yes,” said Corvus with a nervous sideways hop.

“That is very nearly as far south as Toravithranax!” Prim exclaimed. But whereas Brindle might have said the same words in a stormy tone of voice, Prim couldn’t help sounding rather pleased.

“Yes,” Corvus allowed, “and really it will be simplest if we just tell Robst that that’s where we are going. I’ll mention the side trip to the Last Bit once we are under way.”

“Well, if we’re to sail right under the towers of Secondel… ,” Brindle began, employing a common abbreviation of “Secondeltown.”

“No choice,” put in Lyne, “in that small of a boat.”

“…then we had better make other arrangements for Edda and Burr!” Brindle concluded.

Prim didn’t entirely follow, but it seemed reasonable to guess that it might have something to do with the detail that had come up the other evening about Burr’s having terminated one of his past lives by getting into some kind of altercation with an angel. That was the sort of activity that could, among the El-fearing souls of Secondel, certainly put a dent in one’s reputation.

Prim had noticed that Edda slept rarely, if at all. She was up at all hours with night owls like Brindle, and yet no matter how early Prim got out of bed, Edda was always awake and engaged in some sort of project. That night, Brindle broke form and went to bed early enough that his breathing kept Prim awake, and so she got up and went to the house’s front room, on its ground floor, where they had piled the things they had carried with them up from the boat. Among those was the tube containing the maps. Prim had a thought that she might unroll the big one—her favorite—and refresh her memory. But as she descended the stairs she saw lantern light flickering on the wall, and when she came round the corner into the front room she found Edda seated cross-legged on the floor with the big map spread out on her lap. It had suffered some damage from moisture. The dyes had dissolved into stains and some of the stitched-on bits had been ruined. Prim’s instinct would have been to make such small repairs as she might, in the hopes of preserving what information still remained. But Edda, not one for half measures, had simply pulled out all the damaged parts, stripping the map down to bare animal hide, and begun to redo them. The old needle holes in the leather, the stains from the dyes, the pattern of faded and unfaded hide, presumably gave her some reminders as to where the rivers were supposed to flow, where cities and mountains were thought to exist, and so on. But as Prim padded over to watch the darting of Edda’s needle, she saw that the giantess was not overly concerned with precisely copying the story that the map had formerly told.

Prim found that shocking in a way, since she had grown up staring at this map, and had always believed it to be a true and correct depiction of the Land. So at first she doubted her own senses, and wondered if this was a trick of the light, or even if she was really still asleep and merely dreaming all of this. But stepping in closer and bending down to watch, she saw beyond doubt that Edda was blithely and confidently altering the courses of rivers and the coastlines of Bits, moving a city to the opposite side of a river, changing deserts to forests. And yet this was not done carelessly. Had such changes been wrought by anyone else, Prim would have felt outrage, but as it was she could only assume that Edda knew better than whoever had originally made the map and that it was better now than it had been. In a half-asleep way she even fancied for a few moments that Edda might be working a kind of magic here and that the people who lived in that city would wake up tomorrow morning astonished to find that the entire thing had been translated across the river while they slept.

The faded and frayed threads Edda had torn out were strewn about on the floor: coarse tufts of weakly colored fiber such as one might use to stuff a pillow. In her needle was a filament so fine that Prim had to drop to her knees and bend close in order to see it; but when she did, it was the color of a new blade of grass when the sun first comes out from behind the clouds after a week of spring rain. Edda was using it to correct a sliver of map that had formerly been depicted as the edge of a desert. Now she was making it into a forest by using needle and thread to fashion a lot of clever little knots that looked the way trees must have looked to Corvus when he was soaring high above. The movements of her needle were deliberate, unhurried. Prim, no stranger to embroidery, winced a little whenever Edda’s needle plunged into the map, for it was as fine as the green thread and it seemed impossible to shove it through the tough ancient hide without breaking it. But it slipped through as if Edda were sewing in burlap. The smoothness with which the giantess worked was hypnotic to Prim, who passed into a state that somehow combined the most delicious alertness with a lack of moment-to-moment awareness akin to sleep. Time passed at once quickly and slowly. The tying of an individual tree knot, or a series of running stitches marking the course of a river’s tributary in bright blue silk, was carried out in carefully considered steps, and yet when Prim tore her gaze away from the detailed operation of the needle and rocked back to gaze at the entire map, she saw that a vast territory had been so depicted. And yet the sun had not yet begun to lighten the sky, and the lanterns had not consumed much oil.

Edda seemed to be working her way around the map according to whatever whim took her at the moment. She had begun with some corrections to the network of Shivers through which they would have to sail in order to get past Secondel, but then she had jumped down to the Last Bit and done some work with the silvery-blue silk that she favored for drawing the slender arms of the sea where they reached between islands; it was the color of cresting waves and so it warned mariners that here was surf over shallows and stones. Thence she had jumped over to the mainland and brightened the city of Toravithranax with many fine stitches in all colors, then continued eastward across the Land, running generally parallel to, and south of, the long feature known as the Hive-Way. Though Prim had never seen it, she had been told that it was made of the same stuff as the great Hive that buttressed the tall spire upon which El kept his Palace. In the middle of the Land, the Hive-Way fattened to an elongated lozenge enclosing the spire and the Palace, but east and west of there it was as slender as needle and yarn could make it. If one thought of the Hive-Way as a road, then it connected the Land’s west coast, at Secondel, to its east coast at Far Teem and North Teem, passing round the Palace in the middle. If one thought of it as a barrier, however, it cut the Land in two, between a north and a south half that were roughly equal in area. In order to get round it, one had to travel by sea—or, if one were Corvus, simply to fly over it.

Prim yawned, and all of a sudden had it in mind that she’d been up with Edda for a long time. She had been assisting the giantess by fetching lengths of colored silk, as requested, from her sewing kit, which was small enough to go in a pocket and yet seemed to contain no end of threads and needles. Threading such fine needles ought to have been nearly impossible in such dim light, but Prim had found that if she gazed fixedly upon the eye of one of Edda’s needles, it would seem to open up until it was the size of a doorway.

“Do you ever sleep?” Prim asked.

“I can sleep if I choose,” said Edda, “but if I don’t, it is fine.”

“Why is that, I wonder?” Prim asked.

“You see much in the day that needs to be sorted through, picked over, weeded, made sense of. That happens while you sleep. When you wake up, you remember what was important and you have it all sorted. For me, these things happen in the moment. And I have less need than you of forgetting.”

“Does that mean you remember more?”

“I am constituted differently from you. There is simply more to me,” said the giantess.

Feeling that the conversation had gone into wild territory, Prim decided to change the subject. “When I first came down here,” she said, “I guessed you were only mending the damaged parts of the map. But you have added much.”

“Where you are going, Primula,” Edda answered, “details matter.”

Prim bent closer to look at the web of Shivers in the vicinity of Secondel. “Lyne said that because our boat is small we shall have no choice but to sail right past Secondel. What did he mean by that?”

“As you can see there are only two ways south,” said Edda. “One must either go straight down the main channel of the First Shiver—which is well protected from the sea, and safe for even the smallest craft—or else swing wide around the big island of Thunkmarch, which because of its situation will bring you straight out into the open water here. Rounding this cape is perilous—wind and waves will fling you against a lee shore unless you sail much farther out into the ocean than is wise for a craft as small as Firkin.”

Prim nodded. Edda was referring to features of the map that were small and easily overlooked until she drew attention to them and supplied these explanations, but then Prim could visualize the surf hammering the rocky southwest cape of Thunkmarch as if she were there atop the cliff looking down at it.

“Well, I shall hope we slip past Secondel without incident, then,” said Prim, turning her attention to the safer inland route. “I look forward to seeing it; but part of me wishes I could simply cross over to East Cloven with you tomorrow.”

“Today,” Brindle corrected her.

Prim looked up to see him standing in the doorway, framed in pink dawn light. “Have you stayed up all night?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Prim, suddenly feeling shy, “but I shall sleep on the boat.”

Edda set her needles and silks aside and began to roll up the map, beginning at its eastern limit and working west. Prim understood that this was to a purpose; if they wished to consult it later for information about the western part, where the Bits and Shivers lay, they would only have to unroll the first part of it. Considerable time might pass before Prim could see the whole thing again, so she let her eye roam curiously over the parts that were about to fall under Edda’s roll, enjoying the beauty of her handiwork. By and large the old parts of the map that had not been damaged and not been repaired—the parts so familiar to Prim—now seemed as if she were looking at them through a fogged windowpane, from which Edda had wiped away the mist in the areas she had mended. But one region, lying well to the north of the Hive and the Palace, but south of the Bewilderment (as it was frankly labeled here, this being a very old map), stood out from all the others for being very nearly blank. “Why is nothing on the map there?” Prim asked.

She already had notions as to why, but she wished to hear how Edda would choose to answer.

“Some things by their nature cannot be mapped.”

A newcomer to watery things, Prim had thought Firkin rather pretty when she had first laid eyes on it, but soon came to understand that it was a short, tubby cargo barge, and quite slow, especially compared to the large vessels that did nothing but make the run up and down the First Shiver between Cloven and Secondel. For much of the way, this body of water was more of an inland sea than a channel. Robst liked to stay in the lee of the chain of big Bits that formed its western shore, and so the Land proper, when visible at all, was seen at a distance through obscuring mists and hazes. Larger vessels sailed right down the middle, where they could take the full measure of the wind. Many were the occasions when Prim would notice Mard or Lyne taking a break from nautical duties to gaze wistfully at a bigger ship in full sail, overhauling and blowing by them as if Firkin were dragging anchor.

As days went by, Prim began to notice more and more details on the opposite coast and understood that it was drawing nearer. For the great Shiver was narrowing, just as the maps had always told her.

Early on the sixth morning, she felt her hammock rock strangely and knew that they had struck, or been struck by, a current. She went abovedecks to see dawn breaking over mountains on the rim of the Land, now very close. Turning to gaze west at the nearer shore, she saw not the usual scrub-crusted brow of coastal bluffs, but a strange and arresting landform: knuckles of bare, broken stone protruding from barren ground that sloped steeply down and dove into the sea.

So they had reached the southern tip of the Bit known as Chopped Barren. In ancient times the region had been cleared of trees by woodcutters from Eltown. It was still covered mostly in grass and scrub. The broken and tumbled scape now taking the light of the dawn was Feller’s Point: the mess that had been left behind when the hill-giant had stood up and walked away, and everything west of the river had broken off from the Land and begun its slow drift into the ocean.

Just on the other side of Feller’s Point would be another Shiver, or rather a cauldron where a few of them joined together. The broadside current that had nudged Prim’s hammock came from there. Once it had been the junction of two rivers, a few miles above Eltown.

This then was the place where they would have to choose. By doubling back round the point and fighting both the current and the wind, they could make for the western sea. En route they would pass familiar territory where the kinsmen of Mard and Lyne dwelled. Then they would face the passage round the cape that Edda had warned of. The mere mention of that idea made Robst uneasy. On the other hand, if they stayed their southerly course, they would pass down the main channel between Secondel and the large Bit known as Thunkmarch.

Only the most perfect weather and calm winds could have persuaded Robst to take the former course. To Prim’s untrained eye, dawn was breaking in a sky clear and calm, but Robst did not like the color of it, and soon claimed to see high rippling clouds that foretold stormy days. So the decision was made. They would sail beneath the watchtowers of Secondel.

They beached the boat on a scrap of rocky shore at the foot of Feller’s Point and spent part of the morning tidying up. The purpose of this was but vaguely explained, but Prim inferred that the Autochthons who held power in Secondel took a dim view of certain types of cargo that Robst might have carried, and certain ports of call where he might have put in, at one time or another. Therefore it was prudent to throw overboard any evidence to that effect. This took a while, as Firkin had a lot of crannies, and only Robst knew where to look. Prim passed the time looking up at the waste heap of Feller’s Point and trying to picture in her mind’s eye where Cairn, at the end of the Second Age, had trudged up out of the river (for it had been a mere river in those days) and gone to the top of the hill to talk to the hill and the tree.

Larger vessels passed them by as they worked. They had nearly finished their tidying up when one of these slackened its sails, put out its oars, and aimed its prow at them. Noting this, Robst squinted under his hand across bright water and gave the ship a good long look. It was of too deep draft to come very close, but presently it dropped a smaller rowboat. Two men climbed down into this and began to approach. The younger man pulling on the oars had his back to them, but the passenger was recognizable to Robst as some old seagoing acquaintance of his from the northern Bits. Soon they drew close enough to greet each other. They began a conversation, shouted back and forth across the water, in the language of Cloven. As far as Prim could make out, this began with the newcomer asking Robst if everything was quite all right, and Robst reassuring him that they had not beached because of any difficulty. Thus put at ease, the two skippers—for this man was pretty clearly the boss of the larger vessel—fell into chitchat, as the boat drew nearer, about where they had come from, where they were going, and what they were carrying. The words of Robst, though polite, seemed clipped and vague. The visitor was more talkative. His eyes kept scanning the length of Robst’s vessel, and whenever they did, his gaze seemed to snag and linger on Prim or Brindle. Eventually, despite Robst’s forced breeziness, he beached his rowboat nearby, obliging Robst to clamber down and walk over and afford him the courtesy of a handclasp and a few minutes’ conversation. In due time the visitors shoved off with a little help from Robst, who walked back to his boat with a bit of a pensive, even stormy, look about him. He invited Brindle to join him in his cabin. Brindle, who seemed to have a better idea than Prim as to what this was all about, insisted that she be part of it. So the three of them convened in Robst’s cabin, which, even with the hammock stowed and the little desk folded against the bulkhead, barely fit them.

“Down in Secondel the Autochthons are marking every boat, be it never so small, that tries to pass south. And believe me, there is nothing they cannot see. They seek an older man and a younger woman traveling together, and speaking in the accents of Calla. As well, certain others matching the descriptions of Burr, Weaver, and Edda are being looked for. Our boat will be boarded and it will be searched. If either of you is found…”

Robst seemed to think it would be a waste of breath to finish the sentence. Even more annoying, Brindle appeared to take his meaning. “What?” Prim asked. “What will happen?”

“You have heard the stories,” Brindle said, “more are true than not. Fortunately Corvus foresaw this eventuality, and gave us a plan.”

Two days later, she found herself walking toward Secondel’s northern gate alone. She was on the mainland. Robst had dropped her off in a little cove a few miles to the north—as close as he could sail to Secondel without coming in view of one of its watchtowers, or the much higher vantage points of the Temple complex. The day before that, they’d deposited Brindle on Thunkmarch, which was the opposite shore. In ancient times Camp had been situated there, and so that stretch of its coast was still known as Campside.

The plan was simple enough in its general outlines. If Brindle and Prim stayed aboard Firkin, the Autochthons would see the boat, search it, and find them. So those two needed to find another way to get past Secondel. As soon as they got just a few miles south, Robst could pick them up again and they could resume their journey down toward the Last Bit. So, they would have to travel on foot. An older man and a younger woman, speaking in the accents of Calla, were just what the Autochthons were looking for, and so it wouldn’t do for them to walk together. The way through the city was safe in the sense that it was orderly. Many souls of all descriptions traversed it every day, for it was the only practical route down the west coast of the Land. The city was full of Beedles of course, but they were tame ones, perfectly under the thumb of the Autochthons. Campside, on the other hand, was infamously wild and lawless. Perhaps the powers that be in Secondel preferred it that way, as it prevented the founding of a rival city across the channel. Or perhaps the stories were true and the place had lain under a curse since the day Adam had been murdered there, and Eve and Thunk and Whirr and the others had forsaken it to follow the hill-giant up into what later became the Bits and Shivers. In any case it was where rogue Beedles escaped to when they had disappointed their masters. When they scuttled up onto that shore they found themselves in a maelstrom of Shiver pirates, bandits, wild souls, and even a few Autochthons who had forsaken El and gone over to seek their fortunes. Brindle knew a few people there and seemed to think he could manage a few miles’ hike south along Campside’s shore. But he thought it wiser for Prim to take a different way, direct through the city, so that no one would ever see the two of them together. The whole thing could be accomplished in a day. Brindle on the west shore and Prim on the east might have to cool their heels for a night as they waited for Robst to collect them, but the distance they had to cover simply was not that great.

So Prim strode south along the coast road, finding it easy going compared to the mountain passes of Calla. She was wrapped in a blanket that was pulled up over her head like a cloak, and carrying a bag slung over her back that contained a few days’ simple food, a purse with a few coins in it, and a writing kit: quills, a penknife, and the oddments needed to make ink.

The road followed the coastline, which was not straight. Every so often she, and the other travelers strung out along the road near her, would come round a point and see the city. The place had been protected very early by a seawall—or, in those days, a riverwall—put up to prevent inundations such as the one that had destroyed the first Eltown. Newer buildings, mostly of burnt mud, had later gone up around the outside of the walls and now blurred its lower reaches with a confusion of various rooflines and drifting smoke. But easily discerned was the wall top, running straight from one tower to the next.

The towers were five in number and arranged so as to command interlocking vistas of the First Shiver and, opposite, Campside. Impressive as those might have been, they were dwarfed by what loomed above them. The slopes of the mountain behind the city were grown with trees that, since the death of Adam, had become quite ancient. The trace of a road-cut could be discerned zigzagging up the slope. But at its top, the skyline was a froth of white stuff, like the foamy crest of a wave poised to break over the city. Accustomed to the mountains of Calla, Prim would have pegged it as the thick lip of a glacier had she not known what it really was: Hive. A complex of cells inhabited by souls that were unimaginably different from the sort who walked around on two legs and talked to one another with words, songs, looks, and gestures.

Little could really be known of the Hive save that it surrounded the base of the Pinnacle in the middle of the Land, and spread out from there along the Hive-Way, thin tendrils running east to the Teemings and west to the ridge above Secondel. There, over time, the Hive had filled in the gaps between the great stone temples and basilicas that Beedles had piled up to the glory of El, forming a seamless complex running for a mile along the ridgetop. Few of the souls who dwelled below in the walled city of Secondel ever set foot in the Temple. If they toiled up the switchbacks to the top of the ridge, they might pass through an aperture in the middle that marked the beginning of the great road east. But entry to the Temple itself was an honor conferred only on a few.

“I am bound for Toravithranax,” she said. She had rehearsed it a hundred times, learning to say the words in the thick accent of the cold Bits that lay north of Calla. This was the first time she had spoken them directly to a stranger.

“And what is your business there?” inquired the Autochthon.

Prim and a score of other travelers were milling around before the north gate of Secondel, being looked at and interrogated by a few Autochthons who nudged their mounts about, approaching anyone who aroused their curiosity.

She tried to ignore this Autochthon’s mount, which was curiously shoving its huge nose into her pack, drawn no doubt by the scent of the apples. Instead she shielded her eyes with her hand—for the sun was very near the Autochthon’s head—and looked him in the eye as best she could.

“I have been sent into the south by my family to learn the art of writing from Pestle,” Prim said—meaning, as this Autochthon would understand, the Academy that Pestle had founded ages ago.

“Who’s to say they’ll have you?” asked the Autochthon, looking her up and down.

“If they won’t, I shall learn it from one of the lesser scribes who, it is said, have little schools around the verges of the great one.”

“And what is writing to your family, that they would send you so far to learn it?”

“We have three ships and much need of keeping records.”

The Autochthon still had her at a disadvantage, because of the angle of the sun, but she could only assume he was giving her a close look. “To the narrow gate,” he commanded, and then looked up at the top of the wall to be sure he had been understood by those who kept watch there. Prim followed his gaze and saw a row of helmets, strung bows, full quivers. Below were two gates: a wide one bestriding the road and affording passage for even the largest teams and wagons, and another just wide enough for a single soul on foot. The former gave way to the main waterfront street; the latter was merely a doorway into the ground floor of a building that lay inside the wall. How far that building might extend and what might go on in it she had no way of knowing. But several of those helmets were now inclined toward her and she knew she would not get far if she disobeyed. Glancing over her shoulder the way she’d come, she saw that going back was just as likely to draw unwanted notice and arrows between the shoulder blades. Not that she had any thought of doing so. To give up now was to fail in the Quest before it had really got started.

So she walked through it into a sort of antechamber, and then drew up short as she came face-to-face, for the first time in her life, with a Beedle.

She’d seen them depicted in storybooks and tapestries, typically in the background, filling in blank spaces in the artwork, carrying out various none-too-savory tasks under the direction of Autochthons or angels. In one of the rooms in the great hall of Farth there was a Beedle stuffed and mounted. During her brief stopover in West Cloven she had spied them from a distance clambering spiderlike through ships’ rigging that needed mending or crablike over hulls that needed scraping, and of course the row of helmeted guards atop this very gatehouse were all Beedles. But here she was staring one in the face. He was posted next to a doorway that led to a larger room sliced into lanes by long plank tables. He had laid his helmet by and leaned his spear against the wall, but still wore armor of stiff hide divided into overlapping plates, and was armed with what was either a very long knife or a very short sword. Prim had been forewarned to expect a distinct lack of symmetry, and was not disappointed. Beedles came in various colorations and ranged in stature from midthigh to shoulder level compared against Prim and her kin; it all depended on how they were used, and where. But they were invariably bigger on the right side than the left. For the story always told of them was that they had sprung up in Eltown of old, and got to work at such simple tasks as woodcutting, mining, brickmaking, and smithing, but had lacked any real purpose or direction until the Autochthons had shown up and begun looking after them. The Autochthons knew what to do and how to do it, but were not very numerous. So the folk of Eltown—or, after that had been destroyed, of Secondeltown—had become the Autochthons’ right hands. Strong they had grown, and stocky. Intelligence was of little use to them, and some strains could barely say a word, so their heads were small; their mouths more suited to the chewing and swallowing of rude rations than to speech; their ears large, the better to hear the commands issued by their masters. They grew thick hair on their bodies but little on their heads, and they shed it in warm weather, spinning it into coarse bristling ropes of stuff that they used to fashion nests, where they would sleep together in dense snoring and shifting clusters. They were no longer divided into male and female, as copulation served no use that was of any profit to the Autochthons. Their masters might crop their ears, tattoo them, or make any other such alterations that would display their purpose at a glance. Dangerous work killed them or wore them out. They were replaced by new ones sent down from a place, somewhere in the Temple complex above, where newly spawned souls were gathered in and so given shape.

Prim had been taught manners, and so upon coming face-to-face with this Beedle she had to stifle an impulse to bid him good day and make some offhand remark about the weather. But from one who looked like Prim, no Beedle would expect anything except direct orders or pleas for mercy.

Sure enough, though, he did receive an order from someone within, which made no sense to Prim—for it was in a crude sort of speech used only by Autochthons to boss Beedles around. The Beedle smashed his heels together, pivoted, and extended his weak left arm toward the doorway. Prim took that as her cue to pass through into the next room. The purpose of the long plank tables soon became clear as an Autochthon directed her to place her bag on one for inspection.

Indoors, standing on his own two feet, unarmed and unarmored, this Autochthon was not much bigger than Mard or Lyne. Burr would have been more than a match for him. But where Burr’s features were rough and bold, the Autochthon was elegant, and Prim felt herself responding to his beauty as he cast his pale eyes and long lashes down at the mean assortment of apples, undergarments, and writing tools that he was pulling from her bag and setting out on the table. He examined one of the apples and gave it a long sniff with his fine-boned nose. It was a variety that grew in the far north; he seemed to know this. More interesting was the wooden box that contained her writing supplies. Rolled up in there were several leaves of paper, made of northern linen, on which Prim had scratched out two different alphabets.

He bade her pack up her things and directed her to another door. This one took her up a curving staircase and past another Beedle into a chamber with a table, two chairs, and a little window through which she could look out into the streets of Secondel. There playing out below her was a curious sort of commerce in which various roles were played, according to their kind, by Beedles, Spawned, Autochthons, and—

“Sprung,” said a woman’s voice.

Prim turned to see an Autochthon in a long white gown who had entered the room while Prim had been gazing out the window. She had long full yellow hair cast back behind her shoulders, and such was her bearing that it looked as though that hair was going to stay where it had been put. It was hard to guess how long she had been there, but a faint sweet fragrance now making itself welcome in Prim’s nostrils hinted that she had only just arrived. “Souls patterned after Spring, and her notions of what people ought to look like,” the woman explained. “Sprung. That is our word for them. For you.”

“You are—” Prim began.

“Externally similar. The same really. Aesthetics apart.” She looked Prim up and down. “The world would be less confusing if Autochthons had a completely different form from Sprung—if we were as different on the outside as we are here.” She raised a hand, causing a white sleeve to tumble away from a graceful, pale wrist, and tapped her forehead. “But El in his wisdom had reasons for giving us a like form.” She turned slightly toward the east and inclined her head as she said El’s name. Prim remembered her manners just in time and did likewise. “It is good in one way, which is that it enables us to converse, as you and I are doing now. Thus do the Sprung serve as an endless source of fascination and bemusement to us.”

“Happy to be of service,” said Prim. Distracted as she was by all of the curious things that the woman was saying—as well as by her beauty—it was all she could do to remember to speak with the far-north accent she’d been feigning. For this woman was speaking perfectly the language that Sprung spoke on the Bits, and she’d be quick to notice any inconsistency in the visitor’s pronunciation.

“Then you may be of further service by writing out a word.” The woman was going through Prim’s writing box as if she owned it. She chose a fresh leaf of paper and spread it out on the table. Next to it she set out a quill and a bottle of ink, which she gave a little shake, and unstoppered. “Quercus. Or, in your language, oak-gall,” she announced, after giving it a sniff. “Good stuff.” She said it in a way that left considerable room for doubt as to whether she was being sarcastic. “You may write your name,” she said, and looked Prim in the eye.

“In which alphabet?”

“Does it matter? The purpose of the exercise, quite obviously, is to test the veracity of the story you’re telling. Write it as Pestle would. Go ahead.”

Prim had written out hundreds of pages of flowing confident script in the old alphabet, the new, and others besides, and understood perfectly well all that had just been explained to her. But to show this would have contradicted her story. So she dipped the quill into the ink and copied “Primula” out with a deliberation that must have been as frustrating to the lady as it was to Prim, making sure that the quill dumped stray puddles of ink here and there. At last she sat back so that her work could be inspected.

“Well,” said the lady, “the Academy has its work cut out for it.” The Autochthon took the page and examined Prim’s work. But her response was curiously delayed, in a way that gave Prim the feeling she had somehow made a poor choice.

“Primula is your name?”

“Prim for short, if you please. May I know your name?”

The Autochthon looked sharply at her, as if this were an exceedingly odd question. “My full name is Sooth of El.” She seemed bemused that anyone would not already know this. “In the kind of speech used by Sprung, it is unwieldy, and so you may call me Sooth.”

“Thank you,” said Prim, a little preoccupied now as she wondered what other kinds of speech the lady might have in mind.

“You are from some far northern Bit.”

“Shatterberg.”

Sooth gave a little shiver. “No wonder you go about wrapped in a blanket. The language you speak up there must be very queer and old. Primula is what we would refer to, in these parts, as the common daisy.”

“Yes, that is so. You call it ‘daisy’ here.”

“Is that a common flower, then, up on Shatterberg?”

“The growing season is short,” said Prim. “Only a few simple flowers have time to spring up and grow.”

Sooth was gazing at her fixedly. “The name has a… complicated history that goes back to very ancient times and that is particularly important to us. If your parents had studied the ancient myths, they might have known as much, and thought better of calling you Daisy. But to them, yes, it would just be the name of a local weed. They wouldn’t mean anything by bestowing it on a daughter. A daughter they never expected to leave Shatterberg and find herself among cultivated people.”

Prim could feel herself blushing. She well knew the legends of which the lady spoke. Daisy was the last member of the Pantheon of Egdod. According to the old myths, she had appeared suddenly on the very eve of the coming of El, and tried to warn the Pantheon of what was coming, and been cast out along with Egdod and the others.

“Well, Primula, I am calling you Prim when we are in polite company, and hoping that no one else knows it is a synonym for Daisy.”

“Polite company?”

“Others like me,” Sooth explained.

“I thought that I might simply be on my way,” said Prim.

“Why so hasty? The Academy of Pestle has been there since the dawn of this age.”

“I was told it is best not to stay in the city after dark,” said Prim, trying to cast her best worried-country-bumpkin look out the window, where the shadows were stretching across the street.

“Good advice for a girl on her own,” said Sooth. “As my guest, you have nothing to worry about.”

“I’m… your guest?”

“I believe that is what I just said, Prim.”

“Why would you bother? With one such as I?”

“It is a sensible question and I shall give you a plain answer,” said the lady. “I am cultivating you. Recruiting you. Even one as backward as you must have heard that El’s domain extends here”—she divided the tabletop with a downward slice of her hand—“And no farther. That way”—she gestured toward the waterfront, and by extension all the Shivers and Bits that lay beyond—“is the domain of giants, wild souls. Rumors there are, even, of a giant talking raven who flies about trying to deceive the ignorant Sprung who live in those parts into believing all sorts of claptrap that is an abomination to El. Autochthons we send across the First Shiver are as apt to fall into dark doings as they are to remain faithful. When I meet a young, unspoiled Sprung from those parts, of a decent family, already somewhat literate and wishing to become more so, I consider it my sacred duty to make her welcome in this city. You shall dine well and sleep soundly tonight, and tomorrow I shall see to it that you be conducted up to the Temple, where you may view the glory of El’s Palace from afar, and see the magnificence of all that has been built there. Prim, you need not travel one step farther south if your purpose is to learn the art of writing. There is nothing taught in Toravithranax that is not to be learned here; and here you may learn it without all the rubbish that Pestle brought with her in the old days.”

Prim had no choice but to thank the lady most kindly and to go where she was taken next: an apartment in one of the watchtowers, guarded and looked after by Beedles, but reserved for Autochthons and their guests. This had a little balcony with a fine view out across the water toward the Campside shore, and it was equipped with certain conveniences, in the way of bath and toilet, the likes of which had never even crossed Prim’s mind. The house where she had grown up on Calla was reputed to be a rather good one, and she had never found it lacking in any respect, yet it came off poorly in comparison.

A less blanketlike garment was found for her: a white gown made after the same general pattern as that worn by Sooth. To Prim it seemed markedly impractical until she reflected that dressing in such a way might actually make sense as long as chamber pots were being emptied and other such chores being taken care of by Beedles.

She attended an Autochthons’ mess in a hall on the tower’s ground floor, where the officers who looked after the waterfront, and a few Sprung guests, sat at long tables and had dishes brought out to them by Beedle waiters in special uniforms. Prim listened carefully to the conversation but understood little. Oh, she understood their speech perfectly well. But the nature of what they were talking about—abstractions related to money, law, the management of Beedles, and the day-to-day operations of a city—did not always make sense to her. The unsophisticated Shatterberg girl she was pretending to be would have been able to follow almost none of it. So her role was an easy one to play: she ate, spoke when spoken to, stared at the pictures on the walls. She had been realizing that these depicted some of the same historical events as the tapestries that decorated the Hall of the Calladons; but she had not understood this at first, because the roles of the heroes and the villains had been reversed.

The next day she accompanied Sooth up to the Temple. No Autochthon would dream of making that ascent in any way other than astride a mount. It was possible for a big mount to carry two souls, but Prim expressed a willingness to give riding a try. Sooth said that a mount might be available, which was owned by a friend of hers but available to be borrowed.

Here Prim had to conceal the fact that she knew perfectly well how to handle a mount. She had been riding since she was little. But she had to feign ignorance as the Autochthon who supervised the stables explained things to her. She could not conceal the fact that she was confident and calm in the presence of such beasts. The mount she was borrowing—a very big and impressive black one—sensed as much and behaved so well Sooth expressed surprise. Prim tried to explain it away by claiming that her family back home used a few mounts as draft animals and that it had been her job to groom them.

The ride up the switchbacks looked long from below. Prim dreaded all of the fake conversation she would be obliged to make with her hostess en route. But once Sooth was satisfied that Prim would not fall off her mount, she made no great effort to stay close or to keep up a steady stream of words. And this left Prim alone to think about the unexpected turn that the Quest had taken during the last day.

By any reasonable standard it had gone gravely awry. Yet in a way, this ride through the forest and up the mountain felt less strange to her than the Quest per se. It was not terribly different from what she and her family did on Calla when they were in the mood for an outing.

That feeling came to an end when they topped the ridge and came in view of the Temple of Elkirk, which presented her with so much to see that she reined in the mount and sat there for some time taking it all in.

Almost straight ahead was a squat tower, not much to look at, that Prim guessed from her history lessons must be the original Elkirk. Right next to it, nearly as old, was a gate. She knew that this was the beginning—or, depending on how you looked at it, the end—of the road that stretched all the way to the Far Teeming on the opposite side of the Land. The part of it that she could see was lined with stone buildings that were of similar age and size to much of what constituted Secondel.

All told, these mean old buildings made up but a small fraction of the complex. The story told by the rest of it was that Autochthons had shown up, found a place where Pluto had been so considerate as to leave a sizeable deposit of white rock, domesticated a lot of Beedles, and, for an eon, made them pile stone higher and higher, building ever larger structures: magnificent ones facing east toward the distant Palace, and imposing ones glowering down over Secondel, the First Shiver, and the Bits beyond.

Somewhat later, after they had run out of ideas, stone, or Beedles, the Hive had made contact with this place. This it had done by growing slowly from the base of the Palace, sending a long tendril along the road like a vine growing along a tree branch. Once it had connected to the Temple complex here, it had broadened and ramified, filling gaps between the stone buildings with a foamy lattice of cells. It reminded Prim of what happened when you left bread dough to rise, and forgot about it, and came upon it much too late to find it had expanded right out of its bowl and found other places to go. Yet it seemed to have a kind of commonsensical ability to avoid windows and doors: those still peered out in regular rows and columns through curtains of Hive-stuff that were otherwise bulgy and lacking in any sense of plan or of order as Autochthons or Sprung might think of it.

It occurred to her that she had been sitting still for quite a while, taking this all in, and yet Sooth—who had ridden some distance farther toward the gate—was showing no signs of her usual brisk impatience. Instead she was allowing her mount to crop grass from a broad lawn that stretched along the west front of the Temple complex, and was just sitting there in the saddle, quiet but attentive, as though listening to music. Prim persuaded her own mount to stop tearing at the grass and rode slowly toward Sooth. Yet the Autochthon took no notice but only kept her face turned toward the east, like one who has emerged from a storm wet and cold and now wishes to bask in the warmth of the sun. Which was definitely the sort of look she had on her face when Prim circled round to approach her from that direction. Prim had in the meantime become conscious of a low hum suffusing the air and the ground.

“The Hive,” said Sooth. “So much is in it that I shall never fully understand. Yet even in what little comes through, I feel myself connected to it and to El.”

They left their mounts to graze near the gate. Sooth showed Prim the old tower of Elkirk, which was no longer used for giving forms to newly spawned souls; but she saw the old statues, looking halfway between Beedle and Sprung, from which in ancient times the souls of Eltown had taken their original shapes. A much larger building now served the same function, and was equipped with statues of various subtypes of Beedles after which new souls were patterning themselves in preparation for service down below. The same building had upper stories that Sooth described as a school where Beedles who had ripened to their final forms learned how to empty chamber pots, chop vegetables, carve stone, or fight.

The fighters, once they had acquired a few skills, seemed to spend most of their time out of doors, drilling in formation on expanses of pounded dirt under the direction and the discipline of mounted Autochthon officers. Those were of various ranks, and they lived in barracks, each with a bed or a private room according to their seniority and their sex. Sooth breezed through the living quarters of males and females alike as if she owned the place, and each Autochthon who saw her afforded her some small gesture of respect before casting a curious glance Prim’s way. These barracks had baths in them, and male Autochthons emerging from those steamy places always covered themselves with towels. This raised a question in Prim’s mind she had never previously thought to ask. She knew—or at least had been told—that Autochthons did not become pregnant. They were never children. El brought them into being fully formed in the Palace.

“We have the parts that you have,” said Sooth, “for sex.” They had emerged from the barracks and were skirting a courtyard where twoscore Beedles were being trained to shoot arrows at targets consisting of vaguely humanoid bundles of grass. Not for the first time, Prim knew that Sooth had somehow guessed what she was thinking.

“Our sex does not cause the creation of new souls,” Sooth went on. “Spring erred in bestowing that power upon her children. We do not believe she was evil in so doing. Merely unwise—deceived and beguiled by Egdod, who wished to populate the whole Land with his spawn. El makes only as many of us as are needed to hold dominion. Beedles, left to their own whims, would ruin the place, and so it is given to us to regulate them and see to it that their labors are spent in ways that better the Land rather than exhausting it.”

They had reached an aperture in a side of the courtyard, which would take them toward larger buildings beyond. Prim, before passing through it, cast a look over her shoulder at the Beedles riddling straw men with arrows. They put the military part of the complex behind them and entered a covered gallery that stretched across a garden, running eastward toward a building whose shape and decorations hinted at a more sacred function. The garden was planted with a variety of plants the likes of which Prim had only read about.

“You see the Beedles at arms, practicing to fight,” said Sooth, “and part of you scoffs at me for claiming that they are bettering the Land. But just across the First Shiver are outlaws: runaway Beedles, barbarian Sprung, and wild souls who acquired immense and strange powers during the First Age when there were no limits as to what a soul could do. Confined to the Bits, there is only so much damage that they can inflict—especially if they are at odds with one another. But the price, for us, of keeping things that way is eternal vigilance. You admire this garden. I can see how much you like it, feel the pleasure you are taking in the beauty of each flower. But it is only thus because of the likes of him.” And she pointed to a small gnarled Beedle who was down on his knees in a corner, worrying weeds out of the dirt with a metal shiv.

Then they entered a great door carven with too many decorations for Prim to take in, and passed into a vast light-filled space. Long and barrel-shaped, it was oriented toward the east, and the far end of it consisted mostly of windows. Rising up from the middle of the floor to about the height of Prim’s head was a stepped platform which blocked their view until they circumvented it. Doing so opened up a full view of the Land to the east: rolling hills and valleys giving way to grassland that stretched away many days’ journey. Far away, half obscured by haze, was a white needle projecting straight up into the air, impossibly high.

So this was the first time Prim had seen the Pinnacle and the Palace with her own eyes. It took several moments for her to register them against the many depictions she had seen and descriptions she had read during her education, all of which approximated, but none of which quite approached, the real thing. Few details could be made out at this distance, but that only made the thing seem more enormous. Its upper half was sheer and narrow, but below that it broadened rapidly to a wide base that Prim knew consisted almost entirely of Hive. Prim had eyes mostly for what was on its very top. Gazing at it long and hard, she fancied she could resolve tiny features such as towers and outbuildings. Haze and distance made those evanescent.

Something strange was undoubtedly going on in Prim’s mind. For in all honesty there was nothing she could possibly see atop that Pinnacle at such a distance. Yet pictures of it were coming into her head. Since they could not have been coming in through her eyes, they might have been figments of her imagination, seeded from storybooks and brought to life by the strange vibrant air of this Temple. Or they might have been memories. They seemed very much like things she had once seen, perhaps in dreams, and forgotten for a long time. If so, those were not altogether happy memories.

“Two visitors. Alike welcome. One familiar, one new to me,” said a male voice behind them. “How different their reactions to the sight of El’s Palace! One so joyous, the other somehow sad.”

Prim had whirled around upon hearing the voice. Sooth was a step behind her, and a little off to one side, still facing the window, and indeed there was no question that her face was alight with happiness.

The voice was emanating from the top of the stepped platform. This was circular, shaped like a stack of coins that got smaller as they went up. The top was a few paces in diameter. Its back portion was rimmed by a low parapet that appeared to be made out of embroidered cushions. Its front was open toward the window wall. Seated atop it, right in the middle, leaning back comfortably, was an Autochthon. He looked as if he would be magnificent were he to stand to his full height. But they had come upon him lounging in a long robe made of some shimmering material. Or perhaps that was just his aura. He actually had one. It was big. To judge from old books, auras had once been common, but Prim had only seen a few in her whole life, and those had been barely discernible layers of shimmer painted over people’s heads. This Autochthon’s aura occupied most of the platform.

Sooth’s smile broadened, and altered in a way that struck Prim as false. She pirouetted to face the platform. “Delegate Elshield,” she said, “may we approach the Divan? I would introduce you to my guest.”

“You may not only approach but join me up here if you would care to,” said Elshield. In his tone was a kind of suggestive familiarity hinting that he and Sooth spent rather a lot of time in each other’s company. Sooth cast a glance back at Prim and then began to approach. Following in her wake, Prim was conscious of a rise in the Hive-hum that only grew more intense with each step. Looking up she saw a peculiarity she had missed before: a broad inverted pillar, like a fat stalactite descending from the ceiling, centered directly above the platform. It was made entirely of Hive-stuff, though here it was in a more orderly geometric shape than Hive that grew in the wild. It descended close enough to the top of the Divan that Elshield, if he could have been bothered to stand up, might almost have touched it with an upraised hand. Its under-surface was concave. In the cells exposed on its underside, souls squirmed and glowed to illuminate Elshield in flat, fluctuating light. It must have been they who were the source of the hum, for with each step Prim took toward the lowest tier of the Divan, the sound grew more intense, coming in through not just her ears but her skull, and addling her wits. The sorts of stray dreamlike memories she’d experienced while staring at the Pinnacle were now breaking loose all over and making it impossible for her to see or think clearly. She stopped and backed away to a more comfortable distance. Sooth, untroubled, quickened her pace and ascended the platform steps, all bouncing locks and flouncing skirts, pleasing enough to Prim’s eye and more so to Elshield’s. He lazily raised a hand. She reached out to grasp it, then spun round and dropped to sit next to him. Both leaned back comfortably against the cushions and seemed to take in the emanations of the Hive for a minute.

“Our young visitor is fascinating. Mysterious,” said Elshield, and Prim felt he was not stating his own opinion but that of the Hive. “Will you not step closer, young lady?”

“I prefer not to,” said Prim. “I prefer to use plain ordinary words, when sharing my thoughts with strangers.”

Sooth smiled. “And when you use words, do you prefer the accent of Shatterberg, or of Calla? It seems you are capable of both.”

Prim was ashamed but not surprised that the Autochthon had seen through her. The hints had been many. Her disguise had never been meant to fool anyone save a lowly gatekeeper.

“We shall have ample time to plumb her depths in the months and years to come,” said Sooth. “I believe she understands today the nature of the Land in a manner that was hid from her, quite deliberately, by those who sheltered her until now.”

Prim’s alarm about months and years to come had scarcely begun when it was shoved out of the way by that very odd and wrong statement about her having been somehow misled by her own kinfolk.

“Very well,” said Elshield, “We may begin immediately, on the ride down to Secondel.”

“You are going down to the city now,” said Sooth, half statement and half question.

“I have an important meeting—with a barbarian king!” said Delegate Elshield. “One of my more exotic duties.”

“Splendid,” said Sooth, “let us ride then.”

Elshield rose to his full height, which was impressive, as if he had been made to be a lord. Which, come to think of it, he probably had. He descended, arm in arm with Sooth, and made a gesture toward Prim that said, After you, my dear. But soon enough the two Autochthons had overtaken her with long sure strides and got her between them. They went out by a different way, passing through a sort of foyer where a Beedle helped Elshield out of his robe and into a long riding cloak made of heavier stuff, all black. First though he slung a wide swath of leather over one of Elshield’s shoulders. It fell diagonally across his body to his left hip, where a scabbard hung from it, and into the scabbard went a sword of burnished steel that Elshield took down from a rack.

From there they went out of doors and directly made their way back to the place near the gate where Prim and Sooth had left their mounts. Sooth got up into the saddle and Prim did likewise, leaving Elshield afoot. Given the style in which Elshield lived generally, she assumed that a Beedle would come scurrying up at any moment holding the reins of a mount even larger and more magnificent than the one that she was borrowing. But no such thing happened. The two Autochthons exchanged a look and Prim assumed that private thoughts were passing between them. Then Elshield stepped over to the flank of Prim’s mount and in one smooth graceful movement vaulted up onto its back right behind her. The contours of the saddle were such as to press them together quite firmly. She recoiled from the unwanted closeness but he had already reached his arms around her. His right hand closed over hers, which was holding the reins. “There will be no need of those,” he said, so close to her ear that she could feel his breath. “Only Beedles use them. We have more refined ways of controlling the animal.”

Right on cue, the mount bolted across the grass. Elshield snaked his left arm around Prim’s waist and drew her back against him. “The ride will be faster than you are accustomed to, but I shall see to it you do not fall,” he explained.

Hearing hoofbeats to the right, Prim turned her head to see Sooth galloping past them. Within moments they had crossed the belt of grass and plunged into the forest that cloaked the mountainside. The pace felt wild to Prim, but the mount and the Autochthon both knew the way and never put a hoof wrong. Prim’s fear lessened over the course of the first couple of switchbacks, to the point where she could tear her gaze away from the road ahead and hazard a look down over the First Shiver and the waterfront of Secondel far below.

Two of the Autochthons’ military ships—galleys with many oars—were venturing out across the channel, going perpendicular to the general flow of shipping. It looked as though they might be planning a mid-Shiver rendezvous with a vessel that was approaching from the coast of Thunkmarch. Perhaps that one was carrying the barbarian king that Elshield was going down to meet? It was not a particularly kingly looking vessel; but terms like “king” were rarely used out among the Bits.

Tell me more, Elshield wanted. He had not uttered a word. But she knew it was what he desired. She had not said a word either; so if she had “told” him anything, he had somehow worried it out of her mind without her willing it. Disgust followed by panic overwhelmed her good sense and she tried to wriggle away. But Elshield’s arm was like a band of wrought iron bent round her body, the saddle itself was an inescapable trap, and even if she had wriggled free it would have been the death of her, as she’d have been dashed against the hurtling road. I will know what you are, Primula, Elshield let her know, not what you claim to be.

And when she knew that he knew her true name, it broke her, and she fell into a reverie, remembering various things from her life in no clear order, and she knew that it was Elshield, inside of her, ransacking her mind in a way she was helpless to prevent. Which ought to have satisfied him as much as it disgusted her. But after it had gone on for a while she sensed that he was only becoming more frustrated the more he saw. He was rooting deep, trying to draw up her earliest memories. But he looked on those as false—as lies planted there by someone who had gone to great lengths to deceive her as to her true nature.

By Brindle.

A darkness like sleep had come over her so that she did not know where she was. Impressions seeped into her mind of a gate, city streets, docks, and boats. Memories being looted by Elshield? No, for she had not seen these places before. These were no memories. She was coming back to the here and now, for Elshield had turned his attention away from her and was issuing commands to Beedles. She was conscious of being draped over him like a damp rag. She sat forward, bracing herself on the rim of the saddle. Elshield, knowing that he had her, made no further effort to hold her close.

They rode out onto the top of the wall above the stone quay. By now the two military ships Prim had noticed earlier had completed their rendezvous and returned to within a bow-shot of Secondel’s waterfront. Beedles in uniforms were deploying along the rim of the quay, some carrying boathooks or coiling lines, but others armed with lances. The top of the wall was picketed with archers.

Elshield diverted the mount down a ramp that took them to the level of the quay; Sooth elected to look down upon the scene from atop the wall. Still dazed from what had happened during the ride, Prim was only vaguely conscious of many orders being given and a lot of boat-related activity as the vessel carrying the barbarian king drew near and swung about sideways and was coaxed toward the moorage.

She had never seen a king—barbarian or otherwise—before. Curiosity lifted her out of her stupor. Her gaze traveled up and down the length of the boat’s deck looking for a royal entourage in all its finery. But all she saw was a solitary man in scruffy traveling clothes, wrists and ankles hobbled with shackles. His hair and beard were matted, and his face masked, with dried blood. A noose had been thrown around his neck like a leash, and the end of the rope was held by the largest and grimmest Beedle she had yet seen.

Elshield swung down out of the saddle and saw to it that the mount’s reins were entrusted to a Beedle. He grunted out a command in the Beedle’s crude language, throwing a look up at Prim. Clearly the mount was going nowhere. Prim too dismounted.

A wooden gangplank had been dropped into place between the ship and the quay. The big Beedle crossed over it, the shackled man helplessly stumbling along in his wake.

Elshield took the end of the rope and looked at the prisoner. “Welcome, Your Royal Highness,” he said to the barbarian king.

The king said nothing, for he had recognized Prim. And she had recognized him.

It was Brindle.

She was a princess, apparently.

“You lied to me,” Prim said. “My whole life…”

“You must fight your way out now,” Brindle said.

“How are we to do any such thing? Look about you!”

“You must do it alone,” Brindle corrected her, raising his hands to show the chains. “You will find it within yourself,” he insisted. “Better sooner than later.”

“What is that supposed to mean!?”

“I lied to you because I love you,” Brindle said. And then, taking advantage of some slack in the rope, he stepped into the gap between the quay and the boat and plunged straight down into the First Shiver.

Elshield’s mind-reading ability let him down in this case, for he was holding the end of the rope only loosely, more as a ceremonial gesture than anything else, and it popped loose from his hand. The entire length of it buzzed over the edge of the quay and disappeared into the water in a manner suggesting that the king on the other end of it had been pulled straight to the bottom by the weight of his chains.

In the astonished silence that followed, Prim lunged forward, headed for the point where the rope had last been seen. “Brindle!” she called.

“No!” Elshield commanded.

A moment later, when Prim had shown no sign of heeding him, he called, “Her we need! Stop her!”

Prim had dropped to her knees at the edge of the quay, hoping to see the floating end of the rope. But it was entirely submerged. Hearing a heavy footfall nearby, she looked up to see the great grim Beedle coming for her, reaching out with his right hand.

She dove in headfirst. The hem of her long skirt, trailing in her wake, caught on something—or was grabbed by the Beedle’s claw. She tried to kick and wriggle free, and felt the garment tearing at her waist. In a moment it came away and she plunged deeper into the water, both arms flailing in a blind search for the rope. Something gripped one of her ankles, and in the same instant she felt, as much as heard, another body plunging into the water. It was the big Beedle, gripping her by the leg, piling in on top of her.

Something grazed the back of her right hand. The water here was too murky to see much but she thought she glimpsed the free rope end undulating just out of her reach. She tried to kick back against the Beedle but his grip was strong. And his arms and armor were heavy, so he was sinking where Prim, left to her own devices, would have floated. The world pivoted around her as her buoyancy raised her head and body while the weight of the Beedle dragged her leg down. Again she tried to kick loose but his grip only tightened, and now his free arm snaked around her other leg and gripped it as if Prim’s body were a ladder he could ascend into the air. He was now in a panic as he understood he was going to drown.

Absolute was her certainty that she had been in a situation like this before, though she could not remember it. In her childhood she had never been near a body of water as cold and as deep as this. Like the rope end she had felt but been unable to grasp, the memory eluded her the more she reached for it. It was one of those memories Elshield had tried and failed to extract from her mind during the ride down the mountain.

Still pointlessly trying to climb her body, the Beedle wrapped an arm around her waist. She reached down to push him away and found his face with the palm of her hand, but had nothing like the strength needed. Rough stone skidded along her shoulder: the wall of the quay, along which they were slowly descending. She groped at that with her free hand but could not find purchase.

She knew that the Beedle would not release her until death took him. Would she still be alive? Which of them would drown soonest? She desperately wished that he would. That now, while she still had the strength to swim to the surface, he would just die.

Her hand—which had been shoving at his face—felt nothing but water now. The arm was no longer around her waist. She was free, and beginning to float upward. She kicked her legs in case the Beedle had any thoughts of making another grab for her, and felt nothing. Looking down she saw nothing where the Beedle had been save an amorphous bubble of faint light—like the gleaming of a formless soul newly spawned.

A crevice between stones gave her a handhold she used in a panicky ascent. That and a few kicks and arm strokes took her to the surface. She erupted from it head and shoulders, and threw one arm up over the edge of the quay—where it was immediately pinned down by Elshield’s knee. It felt like he was putting his full weight on her wrist. She’d have cried out in pain were she not simultaneously coughing up water and whooping in air. She got her other hand out of the water; he caught it in his, then stood up and hauled her full-length into the air and flopped her down on the pavement like a landed fish. “Got her!” he called. “Call off the search!”

“No!” she gurgled. “Brindle! The rope!”

“You weren’t listening to what Sooth had to say!” said Elshield, sounding like a disappointed uncle. “We maintain the balance of the Land by seeing to it that the Sprung never get too organized, too powerful, out there on those Bits. Brindle was the best king among them. Having him free was unacceptable. Holding him prisoner would have been better—though not without risk. Having him dead—by his own hand, no less—now, that is the best outcome I could imagine. I think we’ll leave him just where he put himself.”

Hearing this, Prim became so wrathful that she rolled to her stomach, got up on hands and knees, and staggered up to her feet. She turned to face Elshield and took a step toward him, wishing she could get her hands around his throat. But then his mind was inside hers again, and he forced her to stand where she was. Controlling her like one of his mounts.

“You,” Elshield said, “we’ll keep around. You’ll make a lovely little tame princess to reign over Calla from a high tower.”

She knew he could do it, too. He would not even need to put her in chains. The Autochthons, once they had got into your mind, had no need of such crude restraints. The only way to be free of Elshield’s power was for him to cease existing.

She wished he were dead.

His black cloak, empty, collapsed into a heap on the pavement. The steel hilt of his sword clattered on stone as it slid half out of its scabbard. Elshield was gone. Gone from the quay and gone from her mind.

Above she heard Sooth give out a shriek. Other than that, the whole place was silent for a few moments. Then it erupted into a welter of voices, mostly in the crude simple version of Townish spoken by Beedles. They all wished to know where Delegate Elshield was. Very few had seen him cease to exist, and so all they knew was that he was nowhere to be seen and that his clothes and weapon lay on the quay as if he had discarded them.

The only possible explanation seemed to be that he had disrobed and jumped into the water in an effort to rescue Brindle, and so a lot of Beedles who had only just climbed out from trying to rescue Prim now jumped back in again. All was wildly confused.

It wasn’t merely that no one knew what had happened. The removal of Elshield’s mind from the top of the chain of command had left not only the Beedles but the Autochthons uncertain as to what they should do.

Prim, enjoying now the luxury of being completely ignored, became conscious of the fact that from the waist down she was naked except for a pair of dripping-wet drawers, and from there up only had a thin white bodice that was soaked through. Elshield’s long black cloak looked comfortable and warm, and no one was using it. She bent down, picked it up by its collar, and twirled it around herself. The sword and strap tumbled loose. It couldn’t hurt to have such a thing, and Brindle had given her a few lessons in what to do with a sword, so she picked it up and got the whole rig arranged over her shoulder. It dangled much too low on her thigh, but she could adjust it later.

She did not for one moment, though, imagine that swordplay had been what Brindle had meant, a few minutes ago, when he had said she would find it within herself to fight her way out. No, he’d known from the beginning that she was different. Her whole life, he’d lied to her to protect her from the burden of knowing what she was.

The Beedle to whom Elshield had handed the black mount’s reins was just standing there like a flesh-and-blood hitching post, doing his duty as chaos swirled around him. He, at least, had clear orders: hold the horse. He watched her approach. Elshield’s cloak was much too long for Prim, so its skirt dragged behind her as she walked. Scurrying Beedles kept stepping on it. In spite of which she presently drew to within arm’s length of the mount. She reached out and grasped the reins, above where the Beedle was holding them.

“Let go,” she commanded.

“My lord Elshield ordered not let go,” the Beedle answered. Eyeing Prim warily, he transferred the reins to his weak left hand so that his strong right hand could find the pommel of a long knife in his belt.

For the third time in her life, Prim wished someone dead, and no sooner did the thought form in her mind than the Beedle ceased to exist. She stooped to pick up his knife, which looked more wieldy than Elshield’s sword. Then she put her bare foot in the stirrup and mounted up into the saddle. No one seemed to notice or care save Sooth, who had been seeing all of this from the top of the wall above. “After her! After her!” Sooth screeched as Prim kicked the mount up to a canter.

The gate leading from the quay into the city was wide open. She rode through, turned south on the main street, and made the mount gallop. Behind her she could hear hooves on paving stones and knew that some Autochthons were in pursuit.

Navigation, at least, was simple. There was the one street and it ran direct to the south gate. The one she was supposed to have passed through yesterday, when all had been so different.

As she galloped toward it she saw it being swung closed by a Beedle, who then shoved a massive iron bolt into position to hold it closed. Seeing this, the mount had the good sense to slacken its pace, and came to a stop in the courtyard just on the near side of the gatehouse.

It was there that a squad of four Autochthons caught up with her. They spread out as they entered the yard, surrounding her but maintaining a respectful distance.

“Princess Prim,” said the one who was evidently their leader. He certainly looked it. Yet his aquiline good looks were a little discomposed by the strangeness of addressing a barbarian princess who had, somehow, impossibly and unaccountably, stolen the cloak, sword, and mount of the high lord delegate of Secondel. “Dismount, please, and place those weapons on the ground.”

“No,” she said. “Listen. I have just now become aware of certain peculiarities as to who I am that place you all in grave danger. Get away.”

“That’s enough of that kind of talk!” exclaimed the Autochthon on her right. His mount moved toward her until it noticed that it was suddenly riderless.

She heard the creak of a bow from atop the gatehouse and looked up to see a Beedle archer pulling an arrow to half draw, still aimed at the ground, gazing at the head Autochthon for orders. Then he ceased to exist. The arrow flew wild and stuck in the ground. The bow clattered down the wall and bounced in the dust of the courtyard.

Prim wheeled her mount and made it walk toward the Beedle who had, a minute ago, shot the bolt. He was still standing there, watching her come on.

She didn’t really know the speech of Beedles and so she made it as simple as she could:

“I am Death,” she said. “Now, which one of us is going to open the gate?”

50

“While we have this all-too-rare opportunity for a private chat,” said Primula—or, in the language of these parts, Daisy—to the giant talking raven perched above her on Firkin’s boom, “I thought I might make a few remarks about your management of the Quest thus far.”

Corvus shook himself all over. “Have at it,” he said, with an affected carelessness. “Just don’t get so worked up that you wish me dead.”

Prim glanced over to the shore of the Bit off which Firkin lay at anchor. Mard and Lyne and the three crewmates of Robst were there, gathering fresh water from a stream and poking around in the mud for edible crustaceans. They were out of earshot. Robst was at the other end of the boat. He was half-deaf. Prim had not shared with them some of the stranger and more surprising particulars about the day she had spent in Secondel; the news that Brindle was dead seemed like quite enough for them to take in. But Corvus obviously knew, and had known all along. “Why can’t it work in reverse?” she asked, just thinking out loud. “Why can’t I bring Brindle back, by wishing he had not passed on? Because I do so wish it.”

“Destroying is just easier than creating,” said Corvus, “and that’s that. They say it took Spring an eon to summon the power to bring a bug to life.”

“I feel that if you had not hid from me certain facts, things might have come out differently in Secondel.”

“Some would say the facts were plain enough and you were blind to them,” said Corvus. “That Brindle was a king, and you a princess, ought to have been somewhat obvious.”

“You never think of yourself that way.”

“Spoken like a true princess.”

“And of course I knew that the matter of my parentage was a bit muddled. But still!”

“Come on,” said Corvus, twitching a wing irritably, “was there ever a girl who was a girl for as long as you were? I’ll bet that gnarled apple tree outside your window was a sapling when you moved in.”

“I planted it,” Prim said. “But living, as I did, a sheltered life, I thought all of that was normal.”

“You were sheltered for a reason.”

“And would you care to share that reason with me?”

“It’s a bit obvious now, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but how did I come to be on Calla, behind the Eternal Veil, being raised as an ordinary girl?”

“An ordinary princess, you mean? I haven’t the faintest idea! No doubt if we could communicate with the other plane of existence from which we all seem to have originated, we could get an answer straightaway. As it is, we can only speculate. Your speculations are probably as good as mine, Princess, now that you have seen El’s cathedral at Secondeltown and killed a high lord of the Autochthons with your brain and made off with his sword and his horse.” He glanced at the former. Prim had taken it out of its sheath to rub oil on the blade, lest salt air rust it. The mount they’d been forced to abandon on the shore, since Firkin could not accommodate large beasts. “Whether by dumb luck or perhaps by some volition hidden from the likes of you and me, you have managed to live a long, quiet, and blessedly uneventful life in an out-of-the-way Bit, shrouded by an Eternal Veil, until recently. It was not until you came into womanhood, embarked—willingly I might just point out—on a Quest, passed out of that Veil, and set foot on the Land that all hell broke loose.”

“Now, that is the part I wish to speak to you about,” Prim said. “When we parted ways from Edda and the others in Cloven, you abandoned us.”

“I had to abandon someone. That’s the thing about parting ways.”

“Why us? You must have known the dangers of Secondel. We could have used your help.”

“Both of you. I abandoned both groups, you see. Edda and Burr and Weaver are just as vexed as you are.”

“How could they be? Brindle is dead!”

“His decision to pass on surprised me, I’ll grant you that. Had he decided otherwise, we’d have rescued him. Difficult. But well within the scope of a Quest.”

“It goes to show how desperate he believed the situation to be. All because of a lack of information—which you could have supplied, had you been there!”

“I have so much less information than you seem to believe,” said Corvus, “and when I am not with you, helpfully imparting such information as I do have, I am flying into the dodgiest situations you can imagine trying to get more. To the Island of Wild Souls I have lately been, arguing with tornadoes and temblors incarnate, and the Last Bit, and decidedly unwholesome parts of the Bewilderment, and I have even made an attempt to fly into the Evertempest: the perpetual storm that squats over the Knot. But it turns out I’m no Freewander. I cannot get anywhere near that thing.”

“Hmph. Well then,” said Prim, looking again at Mard and Lyne, who were pushing Firkin’s dinghy out into the channel, headed back to Firkin along with the rest of the crew. “All I can do is take you at your word. Do you think they suspect anything?”

“You mean, do they suspect that their traveling companion is a disguised member of Egdod’s Pantheon who can kill anyone by wishing them dead? I doubt it; but if you notice young Mardellian Bufrect treating you even more courteously than he does already…”

Prim blushed, and tried to hide it with a grin. “Maybe that’s why?”

“Just maybe.” And Corvus took to the air with a cackling squawk that might have been a laugh. He playfully dive-bombed Robst, who was at the other end of the boat mending a sail, and beat up into the air to have a look round.

Prim, wishing she could see what he saw, summoned forth a memory of the map. They were at the place where the First Shiver forked into two equal branches that both ran to the ocean. The one to the left ran southwest to Toravithranax-by-the-Sea. The other ran northwest and was less frequented. Between them lay the spearhead-shaped island named the Burning Bit, so called because, seen from the high places of Toravithranax, it gave off an orange glow by night and reddened the sun with its smoke by day. Venturing around to its seaward edge would be too hazardous for little Firkin, but if they went down the inland fork to a certain place, they could hike up across a narrow part of the Bit and scout around on its west side, which was not a single coherent coast but an ever-ramifying web of steaming Shivers “cast into the sea,” Edda had told her, pulling silver silk through the map, “like a fisherman’s net.”

That westerly wind prevailed for another day, but thenceforth it bore smoke, strange mineral odors, and even tiny flecks of grit that speckled Firkin’s canvas and crunched beneath their feet on the deck planks. Trimming his sails to it, Robst made good time up the inland coast of the Burner, as he called it. In due course they eased into a sort of dimple in that coast, not really profound enough to be called a proper bay, but enough to give them some shelter. They made camp on the beach in the shadow of a sharp ridge that ran up the spine of the Burner, and built a fire that they used to smoke some fish and oysters that they had collected over the last couple of days. Victualed with that and with some berries and greens gathered along the water’s edge, Mard and Lyne and Prim set out early the next morning, seeking the least difficult path over the island’s crest. In that they were aided by Corvus, who did not abandon them this time. The bird didn’t completely understand the travails of ground-pounders and so they could not always trust his judgment, but he did at least warn them off from a few turnings that would have taken them to dead ends. And in the most disheartening moments of the journey it was a comfort to see him soaring overhead and know that, at the very least, they had not got lost.

The Newest Shiver cracked this Bit in twain down toward its southern end. If they followed the coast south, they would find it running directly across their path—they couldn’t miss it if they tried. So that is what they did once they had crested the island’s spine and gone down to the edge of the sea.

To their right was a drop-off that betokened a very long final few moments for anyone who went over it. Far out to sea were sails of large vessels, showing due respect for the danger posed by the cliffs and the sentinel rocks that stood off from them. Strewn along a thin ribbon of beach far below were wracks of ships that had got it wrong. But when they prudently drew back from the precipice and lifted their gaze to the country ahead, they saw a wall of steam piling up from the ground and blocking their view south. It was pearly white. Silhouetted against it, sometimes standing out crisply and sometimes shrouded in the murk, was a hut that had been built apparently on the very limit of the Last Bit where it gave way to the glowing gorge of the Newest Shiver. Not far from it, from time to time, they could make out the silhouette of a man, pacing back and forth—not in the style of one who was actually tending to any particular business, but more like one lost in thought, or trying to find his hat (it was on his head).

As they drew closer—which did not happen quickly, since the ground near the gorge was broken, upheaved, and punishingly sharp—they saw a somewhat smaller figure who seemed to be trying to keep pace with the first one’s restless movements. The big one loped across tilted slabs and leapt between them. The small one moved in a style that it was not unfair to describe as scurrying. Some kind of discourse was taking place between them, the big one pointing at things with an elaborate walking stick and the smaller one looking where he pointed, then writing things down on a tablet. The former had eyes only for the evidently hot and fascinating goings-on down below, but the latter occasionally had moments of leisure while the former stroked his beard or held the stick up to his face. It was during one such moment that she—for by now the visitors had drawn near enough to discern that, notwithstanding a short haircut and boyish clothes, the small one was female—noticed Prim and Mard and Lyne picking their way up the rampart of shrugged-off shards that had accumulated near the brink of this new Shiver. She had seated herself on a slab edge so that she could write on her lap, but now reached up and tugged at the hem of this big one’s garment. This was long, and if its purpose was to protect the wearer from flying sparks and cinders, then it had put in long service and perhaps saved his life. He turned around to face them and repeated the queer gesture of holding the head of his stick up to his face.

“Querc,” he said, “it would seem we have visitors.”

Querc’s response was to glance up. She pointed into the sky, and Prim, following the gesture, saw Corvus wheeling high above, out of range of the glowing rocks that occasionally launched from the gorge. “I told you that was no ordinary crow, Pick!”

“And I pointed out that that much was obvious!”

Querc was already shuffling through loose pages in a sort of wallet slung over her shoulder. “My notes will show that I predicted the giant crow betokened other visitors to come.”

“Then don’t bother digging them out,” Pick said wearily. “They’re never wrong; and if they were, I’d have no way of proving it, since my opinion would be contradicted by your bloody notes.”

By now the visitors had drawn to within a few yards, near enough that ordinary persons might have greeted them and ventured some remarks in a conversational vein. But Pick and Querc were not ordinary persons. Prim decided to make the first foray. “Hail, denizens of the Last Bit!” she said. “We have come from faraway Calla to gaze upon the far-famed Last Shiver.”

“It’s twenty miles long,” said Pick, and then glanced at Querc as if worried she might pull a sheet from her wallet and contradict him. But she was silent, allowing him to go on: “But you just happened to come directly to us. No, it’s us you want to see, and not the Newest Shiver.”

Prim had no comeback. Querc scrambled to her feet and said, “But as long as you have come so far, you might as well have a look anyway!” She extended an arm toward the brink, only a long pace away from her.

Much in the postures of Mard and Lyne suggested that they were aware that a sweep of Pick’s stick would knock them over the edge. He was a big man, and in no way pleased to see them. But the thing in his hand seemed too elaborate and contraption-like to serve as a weapon. Its foot was shod in steel, forged in the shape of a paw with extended claws. Those were worn almost to nubs, and when Prim saw how he planted it on the rock to steady himself, she understood why. At the other end, where a cane might have had a knob or a curved handle, this thing had a sharp pick, forged in the shape of a bird’s beak, and it too had been worn down from hard use. The head of the bird sported glass eyes, through which light shone. From that and from Pick’s habit of holding it up to his face, she guessed it was a spyglass. Somewhat emboldened, she stepped past Querc and then dropped to one knee, then both knees as she neared the edge. Not to be outdone, Mard dropped into a similar attitude next to her. Prim had imagined a glowing river of lava flowing to the sea, for she had read of such things in books—at least one of which, come to think of it, mentioned this Pick chap by name. But if any such thing existed at the bottom of this gorge, it was obscured by steam and only hinted at by a lambent glow.

A red star hurtled straight up. As it hissed past them, they saw it was about the size of a fist. “Lava bomb!” said Pick.

“Type three,” Querc elaborated. “Heads up, strangers!” But the warning was somewhat unnecessary as they were all taking their cues from Pick. He moved his stick sharply upward, using the bird beak to strike the underside of the broad brim of his hat so that it fell back off his head. It was restrained by a thong around his neck. Exposed was a tousled gray head, bald and scarred on top. He gazed intently at the sky, tracking the bomb, somewhat aided by a squawk of alarm from Corvus. Presently it began to fall. It had already darkened as it cooled. Pick took a few long strides and heaved his stick, making it spin about in midair. He caught it just below the bird head, now brandishing it like a sword, and swung it at the falling lava bomb. He caught it just before it struck the ground. It shattered into fragments that sprayed all over the place, not without posing some hazard to the eyes of the onlookers. Lyne flinched and pulled a splinter out of his forearm. “Thus glass,” Pick remarked.

“That’s him being friendly,” Querc said. She said it in a quiet voice. Prim looked around and perceived that she was addressing the remark privately to Lyne.

Fish were eaten. A midden of small bones out back of the hut suggested that this was far from the first time. They had rigged up a system of nets and traps that they could deploy from the cliff top, hauling the fish straight up out of the surf “already cooked,” Pick claimed, possibly in jest—it was hard to tell with him.

Querc was of a slightly more talkative disposition. She related her story. She was Sprung. Her family were seekers and traders of gemstones who roamed about the empty southwestern quarter of the Land between Toravithranax and the Central Gulf. From time to time they would make a foray into a city to conduct business, but their dealings had become complicated enough to require, and profitable enough to pay for, training a member of the family to read and write. Querc had been chosen from what sounded like a healthy surplus of children. Off she went to Toravithranax, where she was, after a couple of false starts, accepted into the Academy. She applied herself to the tasks assigned her by the acolytes of Pestle. A year went by, then another, then three more with no word from her family. She spent the money she’d been given and began to sell off, one by one, the gemstones her mother had sewn into hidden pockets in a leather belt. Word finally reached her from a cousin in Chopped Barren that the family had fallen victim to a series of disasters that had led to their surviving remnants being pursued across the wastes by a small army of Beedles, purportedly rogues, in all likelihood supported by local Autochthons. In any event they’d split up. This cousin, having made his way at length to a comparatively safe place in a northern Bit, was writing to Querc—the only member of the clan who had a fixed address—on the assumption that various others would have already had the same idea, and done likewise, and that Querc would simply be able to tell him where they had all found refuge. But she’d heard from none of them.

Accordingly Querc had truncated her education and let it be known that her services as a scribe were available to anyone who might have need of such. This had led to what sounded like an awkward interview with Pick, who had made a rare trip into Toravithranax in the wake of the sudden and unexplained disappearance of his previous amanuensis, “most likely blown off a cliff during a tempest.” Despite its evident drawbacks, Querc had been strangely attracted to the position. She had no fondness for the Land, and in a sense you couldn’t get farther from the Land than the Last Bit and the Newest Shiver. Oh, other Bits were farther away as the giant talking raven flew, but this felt more removed just because of its newness, the fact that it was on fire, and the fact that no one lived there except Pick. Yet it was close enough to Toravithranax that she could go there a few times a year and check to see if any further news of her family had arrived (though the tone in which Querc said this—wistful, even sheepish—hinted that she now saw that as naive). But the thing that really sold her on the job was its subject matter. Much of what Pick liked to talk about put her strongly in mind of her gem-hunting forebears and the notions they’d handed down as to how different kinds of precious stones came into being and where they might most profitably be sought. Some of which now struck her as eminently reasonable while much was completely demented. Pick had a whole picture in his mind that strung together all of the former while firmly rejecting the latter. So she had gone with him and had never regretted doing so—though, she had to admit, greater variety in food would have been nice.

Thus Querc. Her tale-telling was interrupted several times by complications having to do with the preparation and serving of the meal, and during those interludes Prim looked about the hut curiously. From a distance it had looked far more ramshackle than it really was. That was because its roof was patched together from whatever they could find.

But that was only the roof. Seen from the inside, it was one of the most solid edifices Prim had ever beheld. And this was because it wasn’t really built at all, in the normal sense of the word. Most of it was belowground, simply sunk into the living rock. It was a square cavity that went straight down to about the height of Pick’s head. That was divided into three rooms by stone walls. But the walls had not been built by piling one rock atop another. They were just there. The table on which they ate their fish was a stone mushroom that came right up out of the floor with no seam. Purpose-shaped niches in the walls held candles, cook pots, books. Strangest of all was that there was a drain in the floor. It was a smooth-bored tunnel in the stone floor, and it apparently led away somewhere. No hammer-and-chisel-wielding Beedle could have carved that. Yet there it was, and neither Pick nor Querc showed any hesitation about throwing stuff into it. Olfactory evidence suggested that it terminated at length in some place that was very hot. Prim had never seen anything remotely like it. The only analogy she could come up with was that if one were to begin with a block of ice, cut from a frozen lake in the far north, and shape it by plunging in red-hot irons, one might produce forms such as these.

According to the old stories, there was a precedent for this in the creation of the Palace, the Pinnacle, and First Town by Egdod and those who came after him. For that matter, the Land itself must have been created somehow, and the usual explanation was that Egdod had done it simply by flying around and willing it into existence. If they had come upon a hut such as this one in the middle of the Land, Prim might have explained it by supposing that Egdod or Pluto had made it thus for some long-forgotten reason, and left it there, and Pick had happened upon it. But the Last Bit was supposed to be new land.

“Lithoplast” was a word that Prim had heard Corvus use in obscure late-night conversations with both Brindle and Edda. Part of it meant “rock” and part of it had to do with shaping. At the time, she had not been able to make heads nor tails of it. She wondered now if it might be a word for a particular sort of person.

Corvus was almost offensive in his lack of curiosity about Querc. He had got a fish of his own by diving into the ocean and grabbing one and dragging it up here. So, laced all through Querc’s narration were rude noises of rending, disemboweling, cracking, and gulping. But he minded his manners and hopped closer when Pick—loosened up, somehow, by Querc’s story—began to speak.

“I am not Pluto,” he began.

The confused silence that followed was so obvious that even Pick was moved to explain himself. “Sometimes when strangers such as you seek me out in the way you have done, it is because they think I am Pluto.”

“Pick, let me set you at ease, as far as that sort of thing is concerned,” Corvus said. “We are well informed, even by the extraordinarily high standards of the landed nobility of Calla. In particular Prim and I have both seen remarkable things. I think that between us we have a clear-eyed view of how matters stand. Let me assure you that none of us would ever make such a gross error as to confuse you with the long-exiled member of the Pantheon known as Pluto.”

“I have met him, though,” Pick offered, in a mild tone of voice that would not ordinarily be used to deliver such remarkable news.

The next silence was even longer. Apparently not even Corvus could offer a comeback. It was left to Mard—in some ways the most naive, and most content-to-be-naive, member of the party—to respond. “Wow! How’d that work, since Pluto is in exile up in the sky, and you live in the Land? Are you one of the old souls of First Town, who knew the Pantheon before El hurled them out?”

“Not quite that old,” said Pick. “I did live in First Town for a brief time before Egdod blew it up, and saw the Pantheon from a distance. But by that time they had already grown remote from the doings of common souls such as I, and Pluto of course was ever the least sociable of the Old Gods.”

“By process of elimination, then, your claim is that you met Pluto… after he was exiled? You traveled up to the Red Web?” Lyne was the one to ask this, and he did so in a skeptical tone.

“Yes and no,” said Pick. He crossed his arms and looked Corvus straight in the eye.

“That’s all I needed to hear,” said Corvus. “Let’s go.”

“We’ve only just begun to hear Pick’s story!” Prim protested. “We can’t just walk away from him now.”

“They’re coming with us,” Corvus explained.

“Where do you imagine we will be going in one another’s company?” Pick inquired.

“Oh, you know,” Corvus answered.

Abandoning the hut, though extraordinary, was apparently not unprecedented, for Pick had procedures. These were unfamiliar to Querc and so it could be guessed that Pick had not abandoned it recently. A perfectly circular crack in the floor turned out to encompass a stone disk about a hand’s breadth in thickness, which Mard and Lyne with some difficulty pulled up and rolled out of the way to reveal a cylindrical cavity about half as deep as a person was tall. Like every other feature of the hut not improvised from beach-wrack, this just was, and showed no sign of having been chiseled out or built up through any discernible process. Pick took some stuff out of it and put other stuff into it. What he put into it consisted of items likely to be damaged by water or fire: mostly notes in Querc’s hand, and blank paper, and old books. What he took out of it consisted of even older books and a thing he denoted the sample case and that Mard, Lyne, Prim, and Querc—who took turns carrying it—soon called That Fucking Box. All of which was still in the future when they replaced the stone disk and sealed it around the edges with mortar that Pick whipped up from water, sand, and various powders taken from sacks and clay urns around the property, one of which was labeled BONES.

Having seen to that, they simply walked away. All of this happened, apparently, as a result of a private side conversation between Pick and the giant talking raven that took no longer than it did for the junior members of the Quest to clear the table and do the washing up. It took place out of earshot, which, around here, with the wind and the surf and the seething and gnashing of the Newest Shiver, wasn’t saying much. In short, Corvus did not seem to have lost any of his knack for talking strange persons (supposing Pick was even a person) into going along on the Quest. Thinking back on the case of the late Brindle Calladon—who had agreed to the idea ostensibly just because he thought Quests were the sort of thing Calladons and Bufrects ought to do—Prim guessed that Corvus must have had some way of getting people to see why the Quest was a good thing for them. What that might mean in Pick’s case she dared not even guess at.

51

Pick was very firmly of the opinion that the Quest’s odds would be boosted immeasurably by a little excursion to the Asking—the long peninsula that, south of here, reached far out to the southwest for no discernible reason other than the folkloric one that Egdod, as he flew that way, was asking himself what if anything might lie out in that direction.

Privately, Lyne was of the opinion that this side journey was nothing more than a way for Pick to get even farther away from civilization than he already was. In a somewhat pedantic vein, Prim the map memorizer pointed out that it wasn’t even technically a side journey, since they would in fact be traveling a great distance directly away from their presumed goal.

They made their way back across the island to a little port on the eastern coast that lay across the very southernmost reach of the First Shiver from Toravithranax. There they met Firkin, which had come down the Shiver on instructions from Corvus. They took possession of all their maps and other gear and said farewell to Robst and his three crewmates, who sailed back north; they had now traversed the entire length of the First Shiver from West Cloven down to here, and needed to head for home, looking en route for any such trading or shipping opportunities as might profit them.

Across the Shiver came a different sort of vessel altogether, which Corvus had somehow talked into the job. Prim could only suppose that he had flown across to the city, transformed himself into human form, stolen some clothes, and put his powers of persuasion to work. Aboard Firkin had been a certain amount of money; perhaps that had now changed hands. The new vessel, Silverfin, was a thing called a keelsloop. So Mard and Lyne agreed, and such was the firmness of their agreement that Prim knew better than to ask for an explanation. Querc explained it anyway: these things weren’t very capacious—the hulls, though long, were narrow—but something about the part under the water combined with the sail plan made them quite good at sailing close to the wind, which was what you had to do if you wanted to make your way down the Asking.

Fern, the skipper of Silverfin, would take a bit of getting used to. Robst had been quiet, sturdy, and more interested in deciding how best to carry forward Corvus’s plans than in debating their wisdom or lack thereof. Fern, from the outset, carried herself more as an equal partner. In Prim’s experience, ferns had always been small, delicate plants unfurling their lacy leaflets in damp, placid glades. This naturally gave her preconceived notions about the look and disposition of any soul who bore that name. In the case of this Fern, those were all wrong. Whoever had named her might have been nearer the mark with something like “Tree-Volcano” or “Whirlwind-Boulder.” She was a big woman with dark skin that probably served her well as she sailed about below the southern sun. She was Sprung. When she bared her midsection, which, in this climate, was more often than not, it could be seen that she had a lot of scars, some of which looked to have been inflicted in random misadventures, others symmetrical and/or repeating, therefore deliberate adornments.

Fern had three permanent crew members. In addition, she had brought over two new hires for the purpose of this voyage. But after interrogating Mardellian and Lyne, she decided that those two Calla boys were at least as good as the sailors she had brought with her, and sent the latter back to Toravithranax with a bit of money for their trouble.

Her three permanent crew were Rett, who could run the whole keelsloop by himself; Swab, who cooked, cleaned, mended, organized, and slept with Fern; and a relatively new hire named Scale, who seemed to end up doing things that were chancy or arduous.

As they loaded their stuff onto Silverfin, Prim still harbored some hope that the wind would be every bit as impossible as it was cracked up to be; for during the three days they had cooled their heels in the little port, she had spent hours gazing across the Shiver at the high ateliers of Toravithranax, which (consistent with much lyric poetry she had read during her long girlhood) glowed gold, then copper, then coal red in the light of the evening. All it would take was a spell of really terrible weather and Silverfin would be driven back to its refuge there, and she would be able to see the place and explore certain gardens and markets that Querc had been telling her about as they had taken turns lugging That Fucking Box across the Burning Bit. But as it turned out, the winds were absolutely perfect, to the degree that the crew of Silverfin (according to Querc, who spoke their language) couldn’t stop exclaiming about it. So just as soon as they rounded the sharp southern cape of the Burning Bit, they unfurled those special sails to catch a steady wind coming at them from a little ahead of starboard, and the keelsloop took off like an arrow launched from a bow, and Toravithranax sank into their wake as Prim sat in the stern pining for it. Off into the southwest they sailed, traveling as fast as it was possible to travel in the wrong direction.

Fern was Rett’s equal when it came to the actual sailing of the ship, but she seemed to have more of a head for business. In a way this made her somewhat troublesome, since, by the time they met her, all of the business arrangements had been settled. So there was nothing for Fern’s mind to work on save the larger picture of what they were actually doing. And this was poorly understood by all—even, apparently, Corvus. Fern’s wish to know more—even to shape the Quest’s direction—was clearly exasperating to Corvus. And yet if Fern had not been driven by that sort of curiosity, she would never have agreed in the first place to go on the Quest. You could not have one without the other; Quest-goer-onners were not ordinary souls, and so Quest leaders had, as Prim now understood, to devote a great deal of attention to contending with all of that want of ordinariness.

The peninsula marked on the map as the Asking was said to have all of the shortcomings of the desert to its east, where climate, vegetation, etc., were concerned. But since, unlike said desert, it did not lie between two more interesting and hospitable places, there was really no reason to go there at all. It just reached far out into the ocean and trailed off. If it were literally true that the peninsula had been formed by Egdod’s asking himself “What lies out this way?,” then the answer was nothing.

This topic was quite literally on the table in the sense that Prim had taken advantage of the spotlessly clear weather to unroll the big map. The table, like everything else that mattered aboard Silverfin, was bolted in place. She and Querc had been looking at it and Corvus was looking at them. They were up at the front end. Abaft, where the tiller was, Fern was meeting with her crew, including Mard and Lyne.

The map, as improved by Edda’s needle and thread, agreed with what they could see off to port: a place along the sere coast of the peninsula where a stream flowed out from its stony guts and limped all the way to the ocean without drying up. Or so it might be guessed from the color of the surrounding landscape, which was a somewhat greener shade of brown than what stretched to either side of it. Straddling the outlet was an orderly arrangement of low buildings, and a single high watchtower, made of sun-dried mud bricks. A stone mole protected a moorage, above which several bare masts protruded. Between them and it, a galley was crawling like a many-legged insect across a simmering pan of water. All of it was military, for there was no settlement and no commerce here. The galley was going through the motions of trying to intercept Silverfin so that it could be boarded and inspected. It would fail. The entire point of keelsloops was that they could go faster than such galleys, provided there was wind. And along this coast that was almost always the case. Yesterday they had outrun two such, and Fern said that tomorrow they would have to outrun one, maybe two more. Beyond that they would be so far out on the Asking that the Autochthons didn’t bother maintaining such outposts.

“It seems—I don’t know—expensive,” Prim remarked. “I may be just a barbarian princess, but even I can see that it doesn’t add up.”

Corvus performed his bird shrug, a small gesture magnified by huge wings. “Each of those outposts has only a few expensive-to-maintain Autochthons. There’s plenty of fish. As to other necessities, they are resupplied by ships out of Secondel. Almost all of the souls are Beedles, purpose-grown to live in such places and to row boats. They grub in the muck for clams and seaweed. It’s worth it, even if you do no more than take seriously the reason they claim.”

“What reason is that?” Querc asked.

Prim knew. “To keep Sprung out.” She rested her hand on the part of the map that showed the Bits and Shivers. “We mostly live up here.” She tripped over the “we” since, as she had to keep reminding herself, she wasn’t actually Sprung.

She swept her hand a short distance south and a little to the west. It now lay on the north coast of the Asking—the same coast they could see over the boat’s port rail. “If you don’t mind sailing out of sight of land for a few days and trusting to the mercy of the sea, you can make that voyage easily, far out of sight of the watchtowers of Secondel and Toravithranax. Fetching up on the shore of the Asking, you’d perish of thirst in a few days—”

Querc nodded. “Unless you landed where a river reached the sea—but that is where the Autochthons have made their watchposts.”

“They have to guard the river mouths,” Prim concluded, “lest Sprung settle there, and once again get a foothold on the Land and begin to populate it.”

Seeing someone in the corner of her eye she turned and met the eye of Mard, who, having been dismissed by Fern, had come round to listen. He blushed, averted his gaze, and slunk away like a man who had murdered his own father. She could not for the life of her work out why, until she later saw Lyne flirting with Querc. Then she understood it was because she had uttered the word “populate,” which implied having babies.

Apparently, the upshot of the meeting that Fern had just convened and concluded was that Mard and Lyne were off duty for a bit. Accordingly, they began to swordfight. Mard was swinging the sword that Prim had acquired by killing Delegate Elshield on the quay at Secondel. Rusting away in a storage locker belowdecks were a number of other weapons, mostly shorter cutlasses, much less glorious than Elshield’s but wieldy enough to be used against it in practice. Part of Prim wanted to resent the way that the young men—and particularly Mard—were assuming a kind of ownership over the sword. If circumstances had been different, she might have laid claim to it more forcefully. But be it never so magnificent, it could never be anything more than a token for Prim. Knowing she had another way to kill, she could never be as fascinated by it as Mard and Lyne were, and was happy to let them get good at using it. Querc, who was obviously quite taken with Lyne, went to watch them play.

Fern came forward for a look at the map. She spent as much time staring at this thing as Prim. This had been a little disconcerting at first given that Fern was supposed to know where she was going. She shouldered her way into the position most advantageous for peering at the part that depicted the Asking. She did not quite shove Prim out of the way but just kept sidling closer and closer, so that it seemed easiest for Prim to move. As Fern gazed at the map, Prim gazed at Fern, taking in the ridges and whorls of her scars. The skipper was quite unbothered to be looked at in this way.

Prim wondered if that was part of the point of having such adornments. People were going to look at you anyway. Might as well give their eyes something to do.

What then did Fern see in the map? She seemed to be looking not at the coastline of the Asking itself, but at the open sea to its south. Prim had never paid much notice to that part of the map; it was just a featureless expanse of animal hide that had been dyed blue.

Or was it? Fern was gazing at it much longer and more intently than made sense for a featureless expanse.

“What do you see?”

Fern reached out with a scarred, weathered hand, dripping with rings, and brushed a part of the map where the dye had set unevenly. “Just the ghost of a memory, perhaps,” she said. “I was of a big family. The youngest. From here.” She indicated a river delta on the south coast. “We booked passage on a vessel bound for Toravithranax.”

“All the way around the Asking?”

Fern looked at her. “Yes, for the family was too large to attempt the crossing of the desert.” She glanced at Querc as if to hint at why: people like Querc’s family might have attacked them? Then she shifted her attention back to the map. She kept stroking, with the tip of her index finger, that irregularity in the dye, as if she could bring it to life; or maybe it was alive to her. “Somewhere around here it took all of my family.”

“What took all of your family?” Prim asked. “Why, that’s awful!”

Fern just tickled the map as if it could yield up an answer.

“A storm?” But Fern’s language had hinted at something with a will. “Or… a big fish? A… sea creature?” She’d been about to say “monster” but didn’t want to sound stupid.

“You’re thinking wrong,” Fern said. “Trying to make it out to be a normal thing of this world.”

“Oh.”

“That’s not what it was at all,” said Fern. She was firm on that, but in her mood was a quiet hopelessness that Prim—or anyone—would understand. “You see, I have sailed these seas for many hundreds of falls and seen many storms and many big fish. This was not of the normal order of things, this one that took my family.”

“Is it possible—” Prim began.

“That my seeing of it was wrong because done through a child’s eyes? That is what everyone says.”

“I’m sorry.”

“‘Storm,’ ‘maelstrom,’ ‘beast,’ ‘monster’… those words are not wrong, though. Provided you use them only as poets say ‘my lover’s lips are a flower’ or some such.”

“But this was more—a thing unto its own kind,” Prim said.

“Yes.”

“You’ve been looking for it ever since.”

“Yes.”

“I believe you,” said Prim. “From a distance once I saw the Island of Wild Souls.”

“And you were raised on the back of a sleeping giant.”

“Corvus told you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s why you agreed to join the Quest. Not for the money.”

“The only purpose of the money,” said Fern, “is to do away with any need of making awkward explanations to my crew.”

“Swab would follow you anywhere, I’ll bet.”

“Yes,” said Fern, “but even Swab needs to eat.”

The wind faltered, and shifted round in a way that was less favorable. Fern diverted farther from shore lest the next galley catch them becalmed. This got them into “a bit of weather” that seemed to the landlubbers nothing short of apocalyptic. How terrible, Prim wondered, must the thing that killed Fern’s family have been if this was but a poetic figure of it? Parts of Silverfin that seemed quite material had to be dismantled and remade. The thing might have gone badly had Corvus not been able to fly up high and supply information about where they were, and how best to bend their course back to shore while remaining out of sight of the last outpost that the Autochthons had bothered to construct. Thus when the Asking next hove into view, they were looking at a part of it deemed so remote and inhospitable that El didn’t really care whether Sprung went and attempted to live there.

In the next day they spied only two things that looked like river mouths, but there was very little greenery around them; they looked instead like avalanche scars.

None of these drawbacks seemed to make much of an impression on Pick. And for reasons that could only be guessed at, Corvus had all but ceded the leadership of the Quest to him. So they dropped anchor into a cove, deep enough to accommodate Silverfin’s keel, sheltered enough to prevent its being flung against the rocky shore by wind or wave. They let their little longboat into the water. Mard and Lyne, deeply tired of being hot, stripped off their shirts, thinking to dive in and swim to shore, an easy stone’s throw away, but Swab told them not to, on the grounds that she had better things to do with her time than go over every square inch of the swimmers’ exposed flesh with red-hot tweezers.

Rett and Scale produced kegs of fresh water from down in the hold and took them ashore so that they could be decanted into canteens and skins. They also had hammocks, and nets to go over them, and curious funnel-shaped tin collars to tie round each hammock rope to prevent unspecified creatures from crawling down them in the nighttime. Mard and Lyne, already thwarted from swimming, had fancied that they would hike practically naked, but Pick, after a vigorous half hour of roaming about the beach killing things with his stick, let it be known that the lads would be worse than useless unless they wrapped heavy canvas around their legs all the way up to the groin, reinforced below the knees with gaiters of the thickest sort of leather.

None of them were, as a rule, complainers. They had, after all, agreed of their own free will to go on a Quest. Unlike Brindle, they were still alive. And unlike Querc, they hadn’t suffered much hardship—just moved around quite a bit. Nevertheless, the next morning, having all spent a sleepless night listening to airborne things whining and ground-based things gnawing, they were in a low mood as they sat round the cook-fire. And they had not ventured more than a few yards from the shore.

“I do sometimes wonder what Spring was thinking when she created certain types of things,” Prim said, scratching at a red swelling on her arm that she hoped was nothing more than an insect bite.

“This is nothing,” Pick scoffed. “Your ancestors Adam and Eve were pursued by wolves—and they were the very children of Spring!”

“Granted,” Mard said, “but I’m not sure how that answers Prim’s question.”

“It’s more like you have only reasked it in a more pointed way,” Querc put in. She was more bedraggled than had been expected by Prim, who’d hoped and assumed that the scribe would perk up and flourish in her native desert environment. That she hadn’t did not seem to bode well for those who were new to it.

“It has to suck this badly,” said Corvus, “in order for everything to make sense.”

“What do you mean, ‘make sense’?” Fern demanded. She had slept on the boat—a good idea—but come ashore for breakfast. “Nothing makes sense.” And she looked out toward the ocean.

“Oh, but it does. You might not like it. And this might lead you to question things, even to say, ‘This is senseless!’ But whenever I think that, I take a closer look, and lo, it does make sense, from end to end and top to bottom. Because it must. Because if it didn’t, the whole thing would split open and fall to pieces in an instant.”

“What whole thing?” Lyne asked. “What are you even talking about?”

“The Land. All of it.”

“You’ll see,” Pick said, “you’ll see.”

“I look forward to it,” said Corvus. “Now, let’s get going before the sun gets any higher.”

Back at home, Prim had been on many hikes in the interior of Calla where the going had seemed slow, even difficult at times, and yet when you reached a high place from which you could turn round and look back, you were astonished by how far you had come.

This was not like that at all. Half a day’s strenuous scrambling had left them exhausted and bloody. In some pitches they had to leave That Fucking Box behind and haul it up on a rope later. When they at last crawled up out of the long crack to a place where they could look down, they saw Silverfin at anchor in the blue pool directly below them, seemingly so close that they could throw stones and hit its deck. Which they were tempted to do, since Fern—who had decided not to join them on the climb—and her crew were comfortably dozing under the shade of stretched tarpaulins. But the effort of throwing rocks would have made them hotter than they already were and so instead they scuttled across an open ramp of hot stone to a place where they could shelter from the afternoon sun in the shade of a cliff. Pitching a tarpaulin of their own, they made themselves as comfortable as they could and tried to catch up on some of the sleep they had failed to get last night. When the sun got low and the air finally began to cool, they broke camp and hiked until it was full dark, coming at last to a site that Corvus had picked out from above. They ate their rations and then found it impossible to sleep.

The night sky in these parts seemed to hold ten stars for every one that they could see in Calla. Lying out under them one had the feeling of trying to sleep on the stage of an amphitheater while a thousand eyes watched.

The red constellation that some called Egdod’s Eye was wheeling over them, higher in the sky than they ever saw it at home. It was the first time Prim had got a really good look at it since certain facts had been brought to her attention in Secondel. As a girl she had seen it as a place of myths and legends: where Egdod and the rest of the Old Gods were said to be building a counterpart to the Land from which they had been exiled. Not wishing to pursue such work in view of El, they had drawn a veil of smoke over it.

So much for the myths. But if it really was true that Prim was one and the same as Daisy, or Sophia, then it meant that she had actually been there in a previous life. Felt its hard blackness in her bones as she had impacted upon its surface, digging a crater that burned and glowed even now, one of an irregular constellation of flickering flame-colored stars, like so many distant campfires on a darkling plain—

“What do you see?” It was Mard, also craning his neck to look up at the sky. “I see Knotweave’s Loom.” It was a well-known constellation. So familiar that to point it out seemed a childish gambit for starting a conversation. She hadn’t heard him coming, but now that his voice and his presence—he took a seat on the ground quite close to her—had brought her back to the here and now, she heard a giggle—a giggle!—from Querc on the other side of some low scrubby bushes, and Lyne’s low voice saying something indistinct that made Querc giggle again.

So if Mard was being a little clumsy, it was because having a chat about stars wasn’t really why he was here. He scooted even closer—so close that unless Prim moved away, any shift in her position would bring them into contact.

The last thing he was expecting was probably an answer to his question. “The Firmament,” she said.

It took him a moment to place the reference. According to old books of myths—stuff read only by young children and elderly scholars—that was the shell of black adamant that formed the vault of heaven, pocked with god craters and veiled from the Land. It was usual to speak of the Red Web, Egdod’s Eye, the Fire Nebula, the Crimson Veil, but not of the theoretical abstraction that lay behind it. But with a moment’s reflection Mard got the idea. “It is awfully high in the sky here,” he said. He reached up and, somewhat theatrically, squeezed the back of his neck. “Gives me a crick in the neck just looking at it. Easier to lie down.” He did so, somehow in the process managing to shift even closer to Prim. “The rock is still warm,” he remarked, brushing it next to him with his hand.

Prim wondered if Mardellian Bufrect had the faintest idea how badly she wanted to lie down alongside him and stop looking at—and having this inane conversation about—the sky. But a question had come up that needed answering. “Now that you are warm and comfortable—”

“Not as much as I could be.”

“—what do you see when you look at the Red Web from this most excellent of vantage points and most convenient of positions? Surely in your whole life you have never viewed it with so many advantages.”

“I see… the Red Web!” Mard answered. He was not precisely frustrated yet, but perhaps a little dismayed that his lame opening about Knotweave’s Loom seemed to be developing into an actual conversation about astronomy. That’ll teach you, Prim thought.

“Describe what it looks like. I have a crick in my neck, I can’t look right at it.”

“Well, you know, it’s like a campfire when a kettle is boiling on it on a cold night, a proper full rolling boil, making a great cloud of steam that obscures your view. It glows from the light of the flames that you know are beneath it, and from time to time as the steam swirls and dances you may get a glimpse of a red-hot coal or a lick of fire—but then it’s hidden again and you wonder if you really saw it.”

“Well described,” she said. “I can almost see in my mind’s eye what you are seeing.”

“If you make yourself comfortable here,” he suggested, patting the ground next to him, and considerately flicking a pebble away, “you can just look at it. I might even be able to help you with that crick in your neck. I’m good at—”

“My neck is fine,” she admitted. “Would you like to know what I see?”

“Sure,” he said, not really sounding all that sure.

“The sharpest, clearest sparks of red fire. Not the flickering of something that burns but the steady glow of lava. A big one in the middle where Egdod fell. Scattered about it, smaller ones where the rest of—” She was about to say “us” but substituted, “—the Pantheon landed. Hundreds of scintillas—the lesser souls who Fell in Egdod’s wake. But then in the dark places between, crevices like fiery roads—like the Newest Shiver, you might say—and along them palaces, houses, fortresses of black adamant gleaming by firelight.”

“Wow,” Mard said. “It sounds like you fell asleep and dreamed it.”

“You’re the one who dreams. I’m the one who sees.”

Mard sat up and shifted away. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his arms, so he crossed them in front of his body.

“Chilly?” she asked.

“Maybe a bit.”

He needed an out. She provided one. “You know, Querc over there has been alone with her grief for years. I’m just getting acquainted with mine. I was reflecting yesterday how little time has really passed since Brindle sacrificed himself for the Quest. A fortnight at most?”

“It’s true,” Mard exclaimed, a bit hastily. “No question about it.”

“If I see weird things in the sky, maybe it’s because I’m looking through tears.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Prim!”

“Don’t be,” she said, “but do be patient.”

After dawn, a brief walk over comparatively level ground brought them to an arresting rock formation. The steepness of the rocks they’d climbed yesterday had hid it from the sea. Only Corvus could have directed them here. Prim already knew what it was called, because she’d heard Corvus and Pick talking about it: the Overstrike. As she saw the actual thing, the name made perfect sense. It was probably just the upper reach of the crack they had climbed up yesterday—a fault that, she was beginning to understand, might run all the way from the north to the south coast of the Asking. As had been obvious yesterday, it was not an active, moving Shiver but a thing that had occurred a very long time ago and then become still and dead. Consequently its lower reaches were so full of rubble, gravel, soil, and opportunistic plants that it required some squinting and head-cocking and use of the imagination to understand its nature. Up here, however, it could not have been more obvious. The crack was not vertical but heeled over at an angle about halfway between vertical and horizontal. The width of it—the gap between the two opposing faces—might have been twenty paces. They approached it on its lower side, and the nearer they came to the edge of the actual split, the more its opposite face loomed above them. They passed into its shadow, which in this climate was always a welcome relief. But it made them aware that the opposite face was now jutting out above them, so that any loose stone that might be dislodged from the sharp brink would fall on their heads.

A smooth and featureless ramp of stone descended into darkness. It was strewn here and there with loose pebbles and maculated with patches of white shit from colonies of birds that had built hivelike nest complexes on the under-surface of the crack’s overhanging face. Which—as they saw, when their eyes adjusted—was absolutely featureless. Other than those hanging birds’ nests, nothing was up there for their eyes to gain purchase on. It was as if the under-surface of the Overstrike did not even exist; it was a night sky without stars.

“Adamant. It is what everything was at the dawn of the First Age,” said Pick, after he had given them a good long time to behold it, “after Egdod had conferred on the Land a general shape, and lit stars on the Firmament, before Pluto had come along to look after the particulars. He told me once, long ago, that there were parts of the Land unchanged since Egdod’s First Pass. Pluto knew those must be seen to eventually. But he had left them untended to in places that were so remote and unfrequented that he did not think it would matter. More important was to make good those parts of the Land that were seen and trodden and worked by souls every day.”

“And there are other such unfinished places in the Land?” Prim asked.

“Many. All of them as difficult to reach as this one,” said Pick.

“Otherwise Pluto would have done them up,” Lyne guessed, “so that ordinary souls would never see such strange holdovers of the Before Times.”

“Just so,” said Pick.

“Why have we then come here?” asked Mard, letting the sample case down onto the ground with a gentleness that in no way reflected his true feelings toward it.

“To be elsewhere,” said Corvus. “Look, I am a bird and I do not love having rock over my head. So I’m going to get out from under the Overstrike and do what birds do.”

“Eat worms?” Querc asked.

“Shit all over everything?” said Lyne.

“That’s the spirit! Now shut up and keep Pick from killing himself down there,” said Corvus, and after a few hops back down the way they had come, took off squawking into the sunlight.

“You’re going… down there?” Lyne asked Pick.

Pick unlocked the front of the sample case, which hinged down to form a table, variously burned and stained. Revealed were numerous niches and drawers, labeled in very old script such as Pestle had, according to legend, learned from the Old Gods in First Town. Prim, who knew how to read it, saw words like PRIMORDIAL ADAMANT—FROM THE LARGEST ROCK and AURIC CHAOS—PARTIALLY SENTIENT and other terms that made considerably less sense even than those.

The general plan of action was to anchor ropes up here that Pick could use to secure himself as he descended the ramplike surface of the crack face. Up here it was strewn with stuff that had fallen on it over the centuries, but once he descended to a depth “profound enough to be worth visiting,” it would be as clean and featureless as the opposite, overhanging face, and he would begin to slide.

“You can’t just stop there,” Mard objected.

“What do you mean?” Pick asked. He was uncoiling, and inspecting, a very long rope.

“‘Begin to slide.’ Then what?”

“Keep sliding?” Lyne guessed.

“At increasing velocity?” Querc offered.

“But, to where?” Mard demanded. “Where would you stop?”

“Better to ask whether,” Pick said. “Careless as he was, I see no reason to assume that Egdod bothered to supply every hole in the ground with a bottom. Tedious work, that. Not his way.”

This left the younger members of the expedition in silence as they went about their work—though the vision of Pick’s falling into a bottomless chasm did have the salutary effect of making them very keen about sound knot-work and proper anchoring of rope ends. They more and more avoided the lip of the fault.

At some length Pick approached the sample case and opened a drawer labeled PURE CHAOS, which had been noticed and remarked on by the others but which perhaps understandably they had been reluctant to open. They crowded around to look. It was full of a nothing that made the upper face of the Overstrike, featureless as that was, seem like something. The drawer itself was not dovetailed wooden planks but hewn from black stone—the primordial rock that Pick referred to as adamant. Its outer surface was barely visible; when he pulled it open, its inner surfaces could not be seen at all. With very close attention they could see fluctuations of light and dark, and hear a dull hiss. It reminded Prim somewhat of aura she had seen around Delegate Elshield and in the cells of the Hive. But that had been radiant and had moved in ways that, though unpredictable, bespoke a kind of sense. This stuff was to that as a rotting corpse was to a living animal.

Aura reached out from Pick’s head like a beetle’s pincers, converged on the drawer, and pinched off a bit of the chaos about the size of a nut. He closed the adamant drawer. The sample of chaos moved with him, suspended in front of his face at arm’s length, enveloped in a swirling pattern of aura. He moved now with the gliding, cautious gait of a servant who is carrying a brimful glass of rare wine on a slippery tray. He made his way to the brink, where Querc passed the rope around his body in a very particular manner, enclosing him in a kind of sliding hitch that would enable him to control his descent with a single hand. In his other, no surprise, he held his pick. He backed slowly away from them over the brink of the fault, moving with care as he planted each foot—he had taken his boots off—on the surface below and behind him. In this manner he gradually receded from their view, his form growing smaller and less distinct, until all they could see was the glow of his aura. That too became small and faint. The only way they could be sure he was still in and of the Land was the rope, ever tense, but twitching, and occasionally traversing from side to side.

He was down there for a long time, which might have made the day tedious had Corvus not come flying in with dire tidings: “Beedles! A whole galley-load. I must warn Fern.”

“Should we extract Pick?” Mard asked.

Corvus was already beating his wings hard, building speed out into the open sky. “No point!” he squawked.

Prim ran down into the open and retraced the path they’d taken earlier today until she could get a clear view down to the cove where Silverfin had anchored. No Beedles were in sight, but the keelsloop, apparently having been warned by Corvus, had weighed anchor and struck the sunshades. Canvas was beginning to unfurl from mast and boom, but mostly what was moving the boat at this point was oar power.

“Not much of a breeze today,” Mard remarked. He had been only a few paces behind.

Prim and Mard stood there and watched for a time. Silverfin inched her way out into the open sea and unfurled all the canvas at her disposal. She steered into a northwesterly course, away from land. Prim understood that this was not an attempt to go anywhere in particular, but to harvest as much speed as they could from the wind available.

Then at last they saw what Corvus had seen much earlier: a galley, a small one with a single bank of oars on each side. Probably two dozen oars all told. From this high vantage point they could just barely make out the forms of the Beedles pulling on those oars. Above them, running right up the vessel’s centerline, was a catwalk connecting a poop deck at the stern to a foredeck at the bow, and those were populated by others, armed and ready for war—or so they could guess from the flashes of light that gleamed from their midst.

Mard let out a long breath. “Impossible,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“There is no way Silverfin can escape from this.”

They watched the pursuit a while longer. It was obvious that Mard was right.

“That galley must have followed us,” he said.

“Keelsloops don’t normally just stop and wait to be caught up with,” Prim guessed.

“Why would they?” Mard agreed. “But we did. And somehow they knew. They got wind of the fact that we were here to be caught.”

“The water!” Prim explained, as the thought came to her. “The fresh water, and the other stuff we left on shore—”

“We have to go get it, while there’s time!” Mard agreed. And without any further discussion they were off, descending yesterday’s climb in skidding, sliding, pell-mell style.

Meanwhile the pursuit of Silverfin unfolded slowly. Though the disparity in speed between the two vessels was obvious, Silverfin had been given a decent head start by Corvus’s warning, and even Beedles could only row for so long at top speed. Mard and Prim frequently lost view of one or both vessels as their descent took them into various gullies and chutes. The two of them descended faster, and the pursuit at sea went slower, than they had feared. Presently they found themselves on a ledge just above the cove. There they stopped for a few minutes to watch the culmination of the chase. From here details could not be made out. But Mard had explained how galleys were equipped with grappling hooks and spiked, hinged bridges that could be dropped onto the decks of vessels they wished to board. They clearly saw the two ships come together and merge into a single dark knot on the water, some miles out. From that point forward, they could do little more than imagine what might be happening to Fern and her crew as armed Beedles poured across those boarding ramps. Invisible at this distance, but presumably there, must have been Corvus, high enough to be out of the range of Beedles’ arrows. Perhaps later they would hear the melancholy tale from him. In the meantime it behooved them to fetch the casks of drinking water and other valuables they had left on the shore, and move those inland. For if those Beedles had gone to the trouble of following them this far, it stood to reason they might come ashore and hunt around for any stragglers.

That was what they were now. Stragglers. Prim remembered some of the grimmer parts of Querc’s story. She hoped Querc was still down beneath the Overstrike, not seeing any of this.

“A sail. It is definitely a sail!” Mard announced, just as Prim was turning her attention to the last phase of the descent. He’d mentioned it previously, but with less confidence. Prim looked out and thought she could see a white triangle bobbing up and down on swells.

“Do you know what they did?” Mard asked. It seemed a rhetorical question and so Prim just waited. “Fern saw it was hopeless and so gave Silverfin up as a decoy. The Beedles boarded the keelsloop, yes. But Fern’s in the longboat. They’ve raised sail. They are putting some distance between them and the galley.”

“Don’t the Beedles have a longboat of their own?”

“Maybe, maybe not. But it would have no advantage in speed. In a sailing contest, my money’s on Fern.”

“Could the galley not just disentangle itself from Silverfin and swoop down on them?” Prim hated to keep asking questions in such a negative vein, but she was having some difficulty understanding why Mard was so very pleased by this turn of events. She began to descend the last few hundred yards toward the cove. After a bit, he followed her. “I suppose it depends on which they want more: the vessel, or the crew,” he answered.

Prim chose not to answer out loud: They have both. They can simply camp out on the shore and wait for us to run out of drinking water. And when Fern and her crew join us, that will only happen all the sooner.

She was too optimistic, as it turned out. The Beedles were not content merely to wait on the shore. They sent hunting parties inland.

The way it went the rest of that day was that Mardellian and Prim, after a brief water break on the shore, began moving the casks of water, and such weapons as they had, inland—which meant uphill. Lyne showed up and helped. He let them know that Querc was still looking after the rope beneath the Overstrike and that Pick was still doing whatever he had gone down there to do.

Silverfin’s longboat sailed into the cove and ran up on the beach. In it were Fern, Swab, and Scale. Rett had died en route from an arrow wound. Scale had suffered a crushing injury to one leg when it had got pinched between Silverfin and the galley as they rolled together. He could not climb. They left him down below while they worked on carrying supplies uphill. They had intended to go back down and fetch him later, but at some point they noticed that he had put out to sea again in the longboat—presumably in the hope that he might sail it up the coast to some safe harbor.

They worked all night carrying the goods up to the high camp near the Overstrike. When dawn broke they were not surprised to see the Beedles’ galley anchored in the cove below, and a column of smoke rising from the sea in the distance where they had scuttled Silverfin.

Their hopes—if that was the right term for a prospect so dismal—that they would simply be left alone while they ran out of water were dashed when Swab staggered into camp with an arrow in her back. A lot of squawking and screaming not far distant was suggestive of a Beedle-vs.-giant-talking-raven fight, and soon they had a blind Beedle on their hands—Corvus had seen him shoot Swab, and taken his eyes out.

The Beedle died because he would not stop screaming and Prim wanted him dead. That she had killed him was not obvious to the others, who found it puzzling when he ceased to exist. Yesterday she had tried to use her power on the Beedles in the distant galley, but it hadn’t worked—she couldn’t just kill a whole ship full of anonymous victims miles away; it seemed to be more of a face-to-face transaction.

Everyone in the camp was now going armed. Mard had belted the great sword of Elshield around his waist. Lyne had taken out a sword of his own: a family heirloom that he had brought from home and kept packed in his baggage until now. It was not much less magnificent than the one Mard carried. Given the circumstances, however, he was paying more attention to his bow and arrows. Fern was strapped with a cutlass and a dagger. Prim, like Lyne, had a bow strung and a quiver at her hip. But only because it would seem odd not to. She could kill all of the Beedles, she knew, one by one, and they could simply take the Beedles’ galley. But none of her companions, save Corvus, was aware of that. And so, once they had made sure no additional Beedle snipers were anywhere nearby, they turned their attention to the arrow lodged in Swab’s body. This had gone in her back, up high between spine and shoulder blade, and passed most of the way through her body. It had broad, vicious barbs, so deeply embedded that Fern ended up deciding that the only way to get it out was to push it all the way through and out the other side. And this she did after giving Swab a potion from her medical kit that in theory would dull the pain. To judge from the way Swab reacted, it didn’t work very well. Watching the operation from Swab’s front, Prim saw the flesh begin to bulge outward beneath the collarbone. Then the highest part of the bulge lost its form. A lesion appeared on the skin, and it was made of chaos. The point of the arrowhead erupted from its center and then the whole thing came through easily. Once the barbed head had been removed, Fern was able to pull the shaft out of Swab’s back. Blood came from the wound. They bound it up as best they could.

Intent as she was on looking after Swab, Prim paid little note when Corvus flew in from one of his reconnaissance sweeps and summoned Mard. But when they finally knotted the bandages round Swab’s wounds and made sure she had all the water she desired—and she had become very thirsty—Prim looked round and saw that Mard and Corvus were both absent.

They took turns carrying Swab the rest of the way to the Overstrike. Whoever wasn’t carrying her carried water or other supplies. The hike seemed to last an eternity, but the sight of Corvus circling overhead gave them some comfort that all was well at their destination and that they were not being hotly pursued.

They found Mard sitting bareheaded out in the open sun before the dark grin of the Overstrike. His sword was across his knees. On the ground next to him was a rag stained with fresh blood, which he’d apparently been wiping from the blade—for that was glittering clean. But he seemed to have finished with that task and was now just staring out over the distant sea. A short ways before him, just downslope, was a great deal of blood, painting the slope with a ramifying pattern as it discovered paths between stones. Lying unclaimed on the ground, considerably farther away, was a cutlass whose blade—as Lyne verified by picking it up and turning it this way and that in the sun—bore no trace of gore. “Mard must have kicked it away,” he explained.

As they came closer, giving the blood lake a wide berth, they saw that Mard was shivering violently. Prim went to him and knelt down. Lyne, out of a nervous habit, turned and looked back. But from here they had a clear view of the ground below for at least a bow-shot, and Corvus was still patrolling farther out. Fern kept trudging up the slope, breathing heavily and sweating freely with Swab on her back, trying to get her into the shade of the Overstrike.

“I know that swordfights are part of what one signs up for,” Mard remarked, in a low voice, “but that was so different from everything I trained for as to be another thing altogether.”

“But it—your training—worked, did it not?” she asked. “Lyne said you kicked his sword away. How did it end up on the ground in the first place?”

“I would like to be able to say that I executed a clever disarm as I was taught, but really I have no idea. And it’s as likely he kicked it by accident as that I did on purpose.”

“Let’s get into the shade,” she suggested. She stood up and extended her hand. After a few more moments of gazing out at nothing in particular, he met her gaze—but only for an instant—and reached up and took her hand. She gave him a tug—mostly symbolic, for he was quite capable of standing up by himself. He let go of her hand and wiped his on his pant leg as if worried it still had blood on it. Side by side they walked up the slope until they passed into the shade of the Overstrike, whereupon they had to wait for a few moments as their eyes adjusted.

Lyne had gone up before them and was squatting there, bow across his knees, gazing outward. Farther in, Fern had lain Swab down on the flattest place she could find and was trying once again to satisfy her thirst. Querc was tearing about the place full of nervous energy. It was obvious that something had upset her, so Prim got her to stop moving by firmly embracing her and hanging on for a spell.

“I came up to get something for Pick, and he was just there, looking at the sample case.”

“The Beedle?”

“Yes. All I could think of was my family, and all the Beedle fights they used to talk about. I tried for the longest time to scream for help, but I was just frozen—he hadn’t seen me yet. Then he noticed me, and took a step in my direction, and I pulled this out.” She patted the hilt of a long knife sheathed at her hip. “That made him pause for a minute. If he’d come after me I don’t know what I’d have done. But then Mard came running in. He stopped at the edge of the dark and drew his sword. That spooked the Beedle. He drew out his sword and ran at Mard. Mard backed out into the light and they fought each other.”

52

Pick, as the sole member of the Quest who did not seem injured, shocked, or distracted, had taken it upon himself to come up with a plan. They all collected near where Swab lay so that they could talk about it. Everything about the manner in which Pick spoke of this plan seemed to indicate that he thought highly of it, “given the circumstances.” But no one could understand what he was proposing.

“Given the circumstances,” Lyne repeated. “Given the circumstances. We are trapped in a waterless, foodless hellhole at the arse end of the world, being hunted by Beedles, and there is no one to help us. So, what you’re saying is that, given those circumstances, this is a better plan than just dying of thirst or being murdered.”

“If you have some other suggestion,” said Corvus, “now’s the time to pipe up.”

After some moments went by without anyone’s piping up, Corvus said, “Right! Settled.”

“The most excellent plan I can think of,” said Lyne, “is not to get talked into Quests by mysterious giant talking ravens.” He shared this with Fern, Mard, and Prim after Corvus had flown away to reconnoiter and Pick and Querc had taken turns going down the rope into the huge mysterious crack. Swab had been quiet of late. Fern was sitting by her side, holding her hand, perhaps trying to ascertain whether she was alive or dead. Prim looked at them, trying not to be obvious, and saw that Fern had begun to unwind the bandage. It was no longer doing service. Swab had stopped bleeding, for the place where the arrow had gone in was now dissolving into chaos and no longer supplied with blood. Fern had, however, been following the conversation, and now spoke.

“As I understand matters,” she said, “I have lost more than any of you. My keelsloop is gone. Of my three crew, Rett is dead. Two are wounded, and one of those absconded with my longboat. If you don’t mind, I’ll be the judge of whether going on this Quest was worth it. And I’m all in still.”

“How can you be?” Prim asked, in a tone of gentle curiosity. Of course she knew from her reading of old Quest stories that there was fighting and blood. But to observe the consequences of a single arrow fired into a single body had forever changed the way she would think about such adventures. Fern had seen worse in the last day, and various clues about her, her ship, and her crew had suggested that this was far from her first scrap.

“This happens all the time anyway,” Fern said, her voice quiet but severe. She flicked her eyes down at her suffering partner. “Perhaps not to those of you who live in castles on Calla. But I have seen it all before. I have not before—not in a thousand falls of sailing the sea—seen a giant talking raven who can transform himself into a man and hold forth with authority on the Before Times. To be called into such doings is a gift that has never been given to me before and will not come again. I have seen wonders already that no one to my knowledge—and I have lived long and journeyed far—has ever seen or spoken of. Young as you are and living on a veiled island where magical beings are apparently of little note, you do not understand this. You must think,” Fern said, rising to her feet, “of the arrow that Swab took for us, and how, having taken it, and understanding its barbed nature, she agreed that it was better to shove it all the way through than to reverse its direction. That is where we are all poised now in respect of this Quest. To surrender is to pull out the arrow backward: no better and probably worse than to push through.”

Fern bent close, cocking her ear toward the lips of Swab, and listened to words that no one else could hear. After some time she nodded her head, then turned her face to Swab, brushed back her hair, and kissed her. Fern then got up on one knee and pulled Swab’s good arm up across her shoulders. With a great effort she stood up. As Swab felt herself being lifted, her legs stirred and she got her feet on the ground, taking some small portion of her weight. On the side that had been struck by the arrow, the entirety of the shoulder and the arm attached to it had dissolved into chaos, and most of that no longer clung to her body, nor did it make any pretense of hewing to the form of a normal soul, but was dispersing like smoke.

Fern trudged with slow heavy footfalls up the last few yards of slope to the brink of the fault. She crested the slope and descended a few paces, planting her feet with caution that became more evident as the adamant sloped away beneath her and the surface became cleaner and slicker. When she had gone as far as she dared, she bent her knees and her back, and carefully let Swab down so that she was sitting on the smooth adamant, using her remaining arm to prop herself upright. For a little while then they stayed together, Fern squatting next to her stricken partner and embracing her as if her heavy arms could hold in the chaos that had once been Swab but was now escaping from her form. Finally, before it was too late, Swab shoved off with her good hand, and began sliding into the fault. Unable to remain upright, she flopped sideways, rolled lazily over, slid, picked up some speed, rolled over twice more, and was gone.

Prim watched it all from a respectful distance. Long after she had lost sight of Swab, she saw a faint flare of chaos down in the abyss, and knew for certain that Pick was correct in suggesting that neither Egdod nor Pluto nor El had bothered with putting a bottom on this thing. The Land was built upon mere chaos, and in places you could reach it.

Another Beedle sniper came up to reconnoiter, but his approach was almost offensively obvious. Lyne shot him and he fell wounded. His companions—for others could be heard, and occasionally seen, farther down the slope—let him lie where he had fallen. Insects came out of nowhere and feasted on his blood.

Night fell. They lit no fire, lest it dazzle their vision. There was almost nothing to be burned in any case. Prim had worried that the Beedles might come in the night, but the air was so dry and thin in these parts that moon-and-star-light let them see, and shoot at, anything out there in the no-man’s-land below them.

In Secondel, Beedles had always been under the command of Autochthons. But none were in evidence here. Fern ventured the opinion that a larger flagship would probably be not far off, commanded by an Autochthon, and carrying Beedle marines who would prove more formidable opponents than the scouts and mere galley slaves who had them bottled up at the moment. And indeed when day broke Corvus flew in from scouting and reported that just such a galley had entered the cove, and that reinforcements were climbing the hill, led by an Autochthon.

“Don’t kill him,” Corvus suggested, when he got a chance for a private word with Prim. “Or anyone, unless you do it like a normal person, by putting an arrow through them or something.”

“We may have no other choice. We have a day’s water and no food to speak of. Pick’s preparations are taking forever.”

“Pick and Querc are doing good work,” Corvus said. “Almost ready.”

“Then why not just get out while we can?”

“I would like to know what this Autochthon knows.”

And then, for the second time that Prim had seen, Corvus transformed himself into the shape of a man.

“Ugh!” he hawked, when the thing was done. “I hate this. It’s why I have you people. But where we go next, wings are worse than useless.” He borrowed clothes from Mard and Lyne, and put a dagger on his belt for appearances’ sake. But for the most part he had no idea what to do with his arms, to say nothing of his hands, and so he strutted about with his thumbs jammed in his belt, just to prevent his upper limbs from flailing.

The new contingent of Beedles made no effort to be subtle about their approach. Quite the opposite, as it was their habit to intone marching chants (“songs” was not quite the right word) to keep in step on the trail. If their purpose was also to intimidate, then it worked. By the time they drew up along the edge of the no-man’s-land, just out of the range where archery would be of much use, it was perfectly obvious to all the members of the Quest that they could with ease simply run up the slope, protecting themselves with shields, and take the camp with few if any casualties.

After allowing a few minutes to pass, the sole Autochthon stepped forward, flanked by a couple of shield-bearing Beedles. He had the same fair, fine looks as the officers Prim had met at Secondel. He came up the slope boldly until Lyne and Prim both nocked arrows. Then he stopped, smiled, and displayed empty hands. “I just hate shouting,” he explained.

“We can hear you,” said Fern. They’d agreed she would speak for them.

“Thirsty? We have tons of water. Literally tons.”

“We are fine, thank you.”

“You’d be the smuggler. Fern.”

“You may certainly address me as Fern,” she allowed.

“I am Harrier. Where’s the big crow? He going to peck my eyes out?”

“Taking his ease in the delicious shade, Harrier.”

“Is it nice up there? I’m told that if you go too far in, there’s a nasty surprise.”

“We have used it to bury our dead.”

“You’ve noticed, then, that El’s military is taking all of this more seriously than the many voyages you have made along this coast in the past,” Harrier said.

“It had not escaped me.”

“Perhaps you’re associating with the wrong sorts,” said Harrier. “I’ve admired you from a distance—a frustratingly enormous distance—for years. Our futile pursuits of Silverfin have been a fine training exercise for our crews. No better way to find out which Beedles still have strength to draw oars and which are ready to be… reassigned. This time it’s different though.”

“Why is it different?”

“Because of the young lady. Presumably the one to your left, glaring at me like a true princess, arrow nocked.”

“What of her?”

“No idea. You’re not familiar with how the military works, are you? The way it works is that they don’t tell me such things unless I need to know. I’m to bring her in. It has been made clear that I am to do so with the utmost politeness and consideration for her feelings and her personal safety—which is why I’m standing out in the hot sun talking to you instead of simply marching up there behind a shield wall. Nothing was said to me about you, Fern, and so I will be more than happy to convey you, and the young Bufrects for that matter, back to civilization in a cool cabin with a lot of fresh drinking water. Or, you could all die here.”

“You keep mentioning water, as if it will wash away our resolve,” said Fern. “Since you have so much of it, do you go back to your camp and drink it or bathe in it or pour it over your head or whatever it is you do with such an abundance thereof, and leave us alone to consider matters.”

“Very well. We march up this hill at nightfall,” said Harrier. “If you make it difficult for us, you’ll be the first one into the crack.” He turned on his heel and walked away, followed by his two Beedles, who scuttled backward, shields high and eyes sharp.

Pick went through the sample case one drawer at a time, removing tools and instruments, or bits of strange rock, from some drawers and finding ways to secrete them on his person or on Querc’s. Other constituents he wistfully left in their assigned places. Then he closed it up and, with visible effort, turned his back on it. “Go ahead,” he said to Mard and Lyne, “I know you want to.”

The young men dutifully picked it up between them, carried it up to the brink, and one-two-threed it out into the blackness.

Then they took turns descending the rope into the fault. The slope became steeper the farther you went down. They went down to the point where it became a nearly vertical cliff. The waning light of the day, filtering down from above, was of little use at such depth. Pick had rocks that glowed in the dark, but their light seemed to penetrate little more than a hand’s breadth.

Their gathering place was a ledge, about a foot wide, that was not visible until you found it with your feet. They all had to wait there until the last of them—Corvus, still in human form—had descended the rope. The final length of this had been doubled over a peg that Pick had driven into the rock some distance above. When Corvus let go of one end of the rope he was able to pull the whole thing around and off the peg.

“That should give Harrier some trouble should he decide to follow us!” Pick chortled.

No one bothered pointing out the even greater difficulties it would pose for them, should they ever be of a mind to go back. But going back would not have ended well. So they went forward—which meant following the ledge in a direction that took them generally away from the sea. They would all have fallen off the ledge and into the crack in a very short time had Pick not provided a hand rope, fixed to the rock with iron pegs.

Above, Harrier must have suspected something. Or perhaps he simply grew impatient and broke his promise. For they heard the marching chant of the marines, punctuated by clashing of cutlasses on shields, echoing from the ceiling of the Overstrike even as the faint light of dusk still shone on its dangling skeins of birds’ nests. It was not possible for them to see up to the brink, which was to their advantage, but they heard the march of the Beedles grow very loud and then falter as a demand for silence made its way up and down the line. After that, nothing but indistinct talking, and the occasional tock-tock-tumble of a stone being projected experimentally over the brink.

“Can they follow us?” Prim—who was second from the rear—asked Corvus, who was behind her. For during her tour of Elkirk she had seen all the different varieties of Beedles that the Autochthons were capable of producing, and she knew that there were many who spent their whole lives down in mines.

By way of an answer, Corvus leaned back, trusting the hand rope, and shone the faint light of his glow-rock at the ledge behind him.

There was no ledge behind him.

Prim’s feet had been upon it only moments before, but now the surface was featureless. Likewise when Corvus passed the next of those iron rope-pegs he was able to draw it out of the stone as if it were thrust into sand. He handed it to Prim, who passed it on up the line. Some time later they went by the same peg again, fixed firmly into the stone. But ahead of them were no sounds of drilling or hammering. Pick, the Lithoplast, was shaping the adamant fore and aft.

Things in the rear became noisy for a time as Harrier’s marines apparently carried many rocks up and rolled them over the brink to kill anyone they supposed to be clinging to the face of the crack below them.

They collected as close together as they could and pressed themselves against the face of the stone, extinguished or hid their lights, and waited. They could hear dimly the Beedles talking far above, and they could distinctly hear boulders rolling and bounding down the slope, picking up terrific velocity before hurtling by. Some seemed to approach directly, as if they would score a direct hit, but those caromed from some kind of overhanging brow that apparently jutted from the cliff directly above them. This held, and made the stones leap far out into the darkness. Prim did not for a moment suppose that it was a natural feature. Pick had prepared it as a refuge. They used it as such until hours had passed since the last hint of light, sound, or falling rocks from above. Then they risked making some noise and lighting some candles.

They moved on into the night for many hours, using the ledge-and-rope scheme. Erasing the ledge behind them apparently required some effort on Pick’s part, and so after it seemed they’d put a safe distance between themselves and the Beedles, he gave up on that and just left it there.

So they were going now toward the interior of the Asking, both in the sense of getting farther from the coast and, as gradually became impossible to ignore, in the sense of getting deeper belowground. Their movement seemed mostly on the level, but the mountains were ramping higher and higher above them as they moved away from the coast.

Which raised the question of what, if anything, might be coming up from below to meet them. They knew that the fault had not been equipped with a bottom; that once you descended, or fell, beyond a certain depth you entered into the nothingness of chaos. But where was that depth? Was chaos like water, which had everywhere a constant level?

That topic of water was much on Prim’s mind, and she knew the others had to be thinking of it as well. They had only brought so much of it with them, and none was to be had on the surface of the Asking. So the only way in which this journey could not lead to their all dying of thirst was if Pick was leading them toward some subterranean spring.

Prim began imagining a hidden cavern, deep belowground, whose floor was a lake of delicious fresh water, gathered slowly over thousands of years. She wanted it so badly she could smell it. More than that, she could feel its humidity in her nostrils, which had become so accustomed to dry air. And she could hear the teeming of the water—like waves brushing a shore, or rain falling on a lake—condensation, perhaps, dripping down from the cavern’s roof? And some kind of faint luminescence emanating from the water itself?

“I see light,” Corvus said. “Put out the candle!”

Querc, ahead of them, was carrying it in a lantern. She did not snuff it out but closed the lantern’s shutter to make nearly perfect darkness. They rested in silence for a time. Pick let out a long sigh. He must have needed rest more badly than any of them. Prim had no idea how Lithoplasty worked but it obviously required effort.

As their eyes got used to the darkness, there was no question but that they were seeing something. But it was diffuse and indistinct, and as usual, opinions varied.

“It is the light of day, far above us,” opined Lyne.

“It can’t be day yet,” Mard objected.

“Time is tricky down here.”

“There is no light. It is a trick of the mind,” said Fern.

“I’m inclined to agree,” said Prim, “since a minute ago my mind was tricking me into dreaming of a lake where waters glowed faintly in a dark cavern.”

“That was not just a dream,” said Fern, “there is no question I have smelled fresh water. Not all the time. Whiffs of it here and there.”

Prim was becoming concerned about Corvus. He had never spent so long in his human form. He had spoken many times of how much he disliked being in confined spaces. He did not like being in the dark or unable to see for a distance. He had now been suffering all of those for a long while. In quiet tones that only Prim could hear, he kept insisting that he saw a light ahead of them—either showing them the way or beguiling them into a trap. She was more and more certain that Corvus was not in his right mind. But she kept smelling lake water where quite obviously it was not possible for a lake to exist, so who was she to judge?

All of these considerations became moot when they traversed round a bend and came in view of an expanse of frank open chaos that after those hours in total darkness seemed as big and bright to them as the night sky above the desert, and as loud as a waterfall. But it was more brilliant and more lively than the dim and almost imperceptible stuff that Pick had kept in his adamant drawer. Light shone from this, or rather shone through it, here and there at different times. It would flare in one place and draw their gaze, and it would seem for a moment that they could almost perceive forms in it. Then the light would flee as if it knew it was being looked at. At all times this was happening not only in one place but in several, more often than not in the corner of one’s eye.

“There is a floor beneath it!” Pick affirmed. In the patches of light beaming out of the chaos they could see him wading out away from the wall of the fault. “Pluto caused it to be here, for this place was important to him and he passed through it often.”

“Passed… through it?” Lyne asked. He was cautiously following Querc, who was following Pick. The rest of the party did likewise. Prim understood how the conception had entered her mind of a luminescent, hissing lake in the darkness. The chaos was below as well as above them, so it was as if they were wading into a pool whose bottom could not be seen, but only felt by groping with the feet.

“There she is! Showing us the way!” Corvus exclaimed.

“She?” Prim asked. She had become distracted by a distinct whiff of pine forest.

“The light that moves!” Corvus said. His voice was changing midsentence—less human, more birdlike.

“Does anyone smell wood smoke?” Mard asked.

Corvus was now a giant talking raven again. Which seemed most impractical. “You don’t understand,” he said. “To get out of here we must have a guide star!”

Prim was now pretty sure she saw what he was seeing—and it was no star. It was indistinct, but female, with wings.

“Get me a rope end!” Corvus commanded. “And hold on for dear life!”

As it happened, ropes were practically the only thing they had left. Mard heaved a coil off of his shoulder, groped for its end, and held it up. Corvus snatched it in one talon as he flew by, then veered off in pursuit of the glowing will-o’-the-wisp. “Hurry! And stay together! All hands on the rope no matter what!”

As it turned out, the only one of those commands that Prim, for her part, was able to obey was the last. Keeping both hands on the rope was the only thing she could hold in her head during what came next. The notion of hurry meant nothing when time and distance had ceased to make sense, which became the case immediately when she tried to go where Corvus had gone. Staying together meant nothing at all. Not only did she not know where the others were, she did not even remember their names. All became pure chaos more than once. Sometimes there was nothing at all save the rope in her hand, and she had no way of guessing whether those times might have spanned centuries or mere heartbeats.

The first clear and steady sensation that came to her senses was that smell of lake water she’d caught whiffs of earlier. That, and the rope still in her hand. Light obtruded itself next, and it was steady light always in the same place. Hard ground was then under her feet. This had a natural unevenness, unlike the flat ledge made by Pick. Dark shapes interrupted the light: the silhouettes of a person and of a large bird.

All of those became constant enough that she was fairly certain of walking along a cave, headed toward its exit—which was the source of the light. And of the fragrance: the sharp scents of pine trees and burning wood, underlain by the heavier and more subtle aroma of lake water and of something that powerfully brought her in mind of Calla: leaves that had but lately fallen from trees and were lying damp and red on the earth.

All that surrounded her had now grown solid and real. There was no trace of chaos save the fog that was still beclouding her mind. But some of that was simple confusion as to where she was. The stony ground had many small ups and downs, but on the whole it ran gently downhill.

The cave broadened as they went along. The light that blazed into its entrance was as bright as the midday sun on the Asking, but far more inconstant; one moment it would shine directly into their faces, forcing them to fling up hands or arms to shield their eyes, the next it would be a darkness like the one they had just emerged from—yet with rays and glints stabbing and hurtling out of its midst. Prim noticed that the rope had gone limp in her hand. In a moment when a beam of light swept across the cavern’s floor, she saw it lying on the ground. Pick had dropped it. He had slowed. The others had piled up behind him and formed a crowd. Their silhouettes fractured the unruly light. They had stopped some yards short of the cave’s mouth. Beyond it, Prim could see between the others’ legs a flat wrinkled surface that glittered when light flashed upon it. Recent events caused her to think at first that it might be another pool of chaos, but then the sun seemed to come out for a moment. Stepping into a space between Mard and Querc she got her first good look at what lay beyond the mouth of the cave and understood with perfect clarity that it was a lake. Its near shore washed the floor of this cave directly before them.

In the middle distance, a bow-shot away, a sandbar extended across the water from their left, evidently connecting an unseen part of the lakeshore to a rocky islet that rose out of the water to a height of a few yards. It supported a few mature trees whose seeds had been carried to it by birds or wind. One of them was fully engulfed in flame. Another had been snapped off at about the height of a man’s shoulder; its upper part, still attached to the shattered stump by tortured splinters as thick as a man’s arm, was bent over and down into the water.

The light of the burning tree was weak and pale by comparison with what shone nearby. The sky beyond and above was dark, with stars visible here and there, and a faint pink glow off to their right; the dawn was coming.

She heard the din of clashing arms, and a shout. A radiant bolt swung round, leaving a meteor trail across her vision, and veered downward, only to be stopped in its course by a darker obstacle that somehow withstood the impact and whipped away from the collision as if it had drawn power from it and was now pursuing intentions of its own. The light was eclipsed for a time by a silhouette; this had arms and legs like an ordinary soul, but it also had wings.

Pick’s reason for going no farther was clear enough now; they had stumbled upon a fight, and at least one of the combatants was an angel. The prudent course was to stay well back. Prim shouldered past him, though, and strode on. She could hear, between clashes of weapons, Mard calling to her, but she paid him no heed. Her view of things improved as she neared the cave’s mouth and she saw that the angel’s opponent was Burr. He was armed not with a sword but with a long spear, which he whirled about him to block the angel’s attacks; when an opportunity presented itself he would seek to punch the angel with the spear’s heavy iron butt or slash with its sharp head.

She came full out on the lakeshore and felt the cold water soaking her boots. To her right a formation of gray stone ramped up to terminate one side of the lake in a sheer cliff. More caves were in it. To her left the stone gave way to a flat beach that not far away curved back to make the sandbar. Prim went that way, striding across the sand at first and then breaking into a run as the grunts and cries of Burr made her fear that he could not much longer hold out against the angel’s onslaughts.

Before she could get onto the sandbar, though, she drew up short in the face of a new kind of soul who had darted in to block her way. This gave off light too, though nothing like the radiance of the angel’s sword. The whole creature stood about a foot high, though she would have stood a few inches higher had her legs not terminated as stumps below the knees. What she lacked in that way she more than made up for with a set of wings that she used to dart and flicker through the air with far greater skill than Corvus could ever seem to manage. This was, in other words, the soul that had found them in the dark fault beneath the Asking and showed them the way here—wherever here might be. “Do not,” she implored Prim. “Do not exercise that power that is yours, here and now, for then El will know that you have entered into the Land, and his bright angels will descend upon us in their thousands.”

Part of Prim wanted to ask what was the point of owning such a power if it was never to be used, but she was distracted, now that she was standing still, by a curious sensation transmitted into the soles of her feet from the ground.

In a way it was but a faint reverberation, and yet it came over and over again, with quickening pace, and the fact that it was shaking the ground itself bespoke some great power behind it. The fight on the islet had bated for a few moments as the combatants, drawn apart to a safe distance, caught their breath. The angel’s sword was making a fiery road across the lake between him and Prim, as when the sun sets across a great water. Within it she could see ripples that coincided with the thuds she felt in her legs.

The sprite lacked that connection to the ground and so was slower to sense it. Perhaps she was now alerted by those ripples, or by the snapping of thick branches that could be heard in the forest spreading away from the shore of the lake. She beat her wings several times and shot directly upward to a great height as if to survey the area, then dove toward the forest. She pulled up before getting involved in the trees and veered back toward the place where the sandbar was rooted to the beach. Her light grew brighter. Prim got the idea that she was both lighting the way and acting as a guide star for whatever was coming through the woods and shaking the ground with those heavy footfalls.

A sudden shifting of the light told her that the angel had brandished his sword. Turning to look at the islet, Prim saw that the angel had risen from kneeling and partly unfurled his wings. He had felt what Prim had felt and was looking toward the shore of the lake.

A small tree fell over near the shore; this was clearly visible in the illumination cast by the sprite.

A moment later Edda emerged from the woods. She was not quite running, but striding briskly, and each footfall shook the ground and discomposed the water. She crossed the beach in a few strides and started walking up the sandbar toward the islet.

Prim, for her part, had been expecting something like a hill-giant, or at least one of the enormous wild beasts with which Spring had populated the forests of the north. That it was Edda made sense to her, of course; but she could not help looking at the angel to see his reaction. Did it make sense to him? Did angels know about giantesses and wild souls and talking ravens and sprites? Were they taught about such things in some kind of angel academy? Were they omniscient? Or did El prevent them from knowing about such prodigies, so as to better control them?

Halfway along the sandbar, a young tree got in Edda’s way. She put her shoulder into it and it went down. Its entire root ball emerged from the loose ground and she kicked it into the lake. This did not go unwatched by the angel, who now spread his wings wider and bent his knees, preparing to spring into the air.

Burr had other plans. With a great swing of his spear he severed the angel’s right wing from his shoulder. It fell to the ground gushing aura. A moment later the other joined it.

Staggered and unbalanced by the loss of those appendages, the angel was barely able to raise his sword by the time Edda strode onto the islet. In spite of the fact that there was a foe to his side who had just inflicted grievous damage upon him, the angel chose to face, and to brandish his sword at, the unarmed woman coming directly for him. He raised it on high above his head, poised to bring down a killing blow.

Burr rang down one of his own, severing both of the angel’s arms between wrists and elbows. The sword fell back onto the stone and clattered and scraped its way down into the waters of the lake, which did not extinguish it but now glowed from within.

Edda spread her arms wide. She wore a long cloak that hung from them like dark wings. Without slowing her pace she met the angel with the full front of her body and embraced him, shrouding his form in her garment.

By the time Prim had run up the sandbar to the islet, all trace of the angel’s form was gone. Edda was there, looking like Edda.

“Welcome to Lost Lake,” she said. “You’ll be thirsty.”

Burr was squatting on his heels, elbows on his knees, face in his hands, too tired to move or to speak. Lying on the ground next to him, barely visible in the rose glow of the northern dawn, was his spear, and its shaft was made of smoke.

“You seem to have found it,” Lyne objected, when Edda told him the name of the place.

Ferhuul did not care for Lyne’s wit. “And you seem to have popped out of a magic hole in the ground. Easy, was it?”

Footsteps, terminated by a crunching thud, signaled the return of Burr, who had come out of the woods bent under a bundle of firewood. It was all fallen dead timber, collected in silence with no use of axe or maul.

“No,” Lyne admitted, “it was not easy.”

“One day,” said Weaver, “if we all get out of this, I will combine your story of the Asking with ours of the Bewilderment, and sing it as one epic song, and I daresay that the two parts of it might contain a like number of verses.”

The East Cloven contingent had somehow managed to recruit a magical sprite, whom they addressed by the name Mab. Such a being figured into certain tellings of the tale of Adam and Eve, so if this was the same Mab, then seeking her out and persuading her to join the Quest might have been every bit as strange and perilous as what the Firkin group had got up to. Somewhere along the line they had furthermore acquired a magical spear with a shaft that appeared to be literally made out of black smoke and that was impervious to blows from angel swords. Where had that come from?

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 expand 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.”

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.

“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 added 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.

Prim now made the mistake of looking at the giantess, and toppled into her. For Edda was looking Prim’s way. One eye was obscured by the cataract of her hair, but the other’s pupil was the eye of a mile-wide tornado into which Prim plummeted as if she’d been dropped into it by a god. She heard Edda’s voice as if it came not from her lips but from the earth all round. “Yes. Most certainly.”

And then Prim came to, and it was obvious that she was just sitting around the campfire with other members of the Quest. Several of those were looking at her strangely and she had the sense she’d lost the thread of the conversation.

“Time for bed,” she said.

The next day they walked across the stretch of country where the tornado yesterday had snapped off all those trees. The disaster had raised a question in the mind of Pick, who had been debating it with Mard and Lyne: if tempests like that were a frequent occurrence round here, how could there be any forests left standing? Why wasn’t the whole region nothing more than an Asking-like stretch of bare rock?

Before their theories and speculations on the matter could advance very far, they got to where they could see answers—or at least hints that would point them to answers—with their own eyes. Trees that had fallen yesterday were already dissolving into the wet earth, and green shoots coming up. If it was in the nature of Spring’s creation for living things to die, and for their dead forms to give up the stuff of which they’d been made for the use of new things that were growing, why then Spring had so ordained it that, here, it all happened faster.

“I wouldn’t say faster,” Pick eventually said, watching as a slender green vine spiraled up the shaft of his stick like a snake ascending a tree. This sort of thing had been fascinating ten minutes ago and was well on its way to becoming a nuisance.

“Really? How can you say that’s not fast?” Lyne demanded.

“It’s as fast as it needs to be,” Pick explained. “If all of the vines were behaving thus all of the time, why, every tree standing would be overwhelmed by them in no time. Once the forest has reestablished itself, it settles down.”

They were interrupted by a squawk from Corvus. Rare for him, he sounded surprised—even alarmed. He had perched on a broken-off side branch projecting from what was left of a big old tree. This bare snag, and the perch, which was about twice a man’s height off the ground, had probably looked safe from above. But in the few moments that Corvus had been resting there, ivy had grown over his talons and lashed his feet in place. He was flapping his wings to no avail. The green tendrils stretched and tore, but the few that didn’t snap drew thickness from those broken, which thinned and withered like twists of smoke from a snuffed candle. They were well on their way to becoming barked branches by the time Burr climbed to a lower bough from which he was able to reach up carefully with his spear and use its edged head to chop through the sturdiest branches. Corvus then burst free, vegetation still flailing from his feet, and flapped about in an ill temper until the clinging vines had withered and he had shaken them off. Burr climbed down in a decisive way as the ivy had become interested in him.

This was all quite entertaining after a fashion, while it was in process, but when Burr kicked his way free, bringing the performance to an end, and they all glanced down to see new growth spiraling up their legs, they all had in their minds a common daydream of where it might have gone, had things come out slightly differently: Corvus and Burr both lashed to the tree, smothered and strangled by vines that had hardened into wood, asphyxiated, and now food for nourishment of fresh growth.

Within a very few moments, they were all simply running.

The leaden sky afforded no clues as to where the sun might be and so they had no sense of direction, and might have run in circles were it not for Corvus and Mab, who knew the way to go. Just as important, they warned of dead ends and stretches of difficult going where they might have faltered long enough for the plants to make a meal out of them. Fallen branches, scattered everywhere, impeded them enough to make things interesting even where the going was level.

Before they utterly exhausted themselves, they crested a rise and spied below them a blaze of red-orange: the channel of a small river running across their path. The shape of the land had sheltered this from the whirlwind, so it was still covered with mature deciduous trees that were all the colors of flame. They ran down into it and thereby passed out of the swath carved through the wilderness by yesterday’s storm. They kept running anyway, just to be sure, and sloshed across the river and finally stopped in a small clearing. Every one of them stared fixedly at their feet for some while. Or to be precise at the ground around their feet. They were waiting for thin green vines to erupt. When this did not happen, they needed no discussion to agree it was time to put down their burdens and rest.

They had lost one of the big packs that they carried on a pole; Mard and Lyne had set it down for a breather and, at the moment when all had decided to run away, found the pole rotted half through and the pack lashed in place by vines. But Fern had been insisting all along that important supplies be distributed evenly among all of the baggage. Thanks to that, the loss was not so damaging to the Quest’s prospects as it might have been.

They ate a meal, since the day was only half through. A storm moved across higher land a mile away. This made Pick nervous and he insisted they cut their rest short and move on. By the time they had grudgingly repacked and got to their feet, the stream they had easily forded had risen to a torrent that would have swept all but Edda away, had they dared set foot in it.

They made for higher ground. For a little while it seemed that they were being pursued by the river. They could have made themselves perfectly safe from rising water by scrambling a little distance up one of the low ridges that divided its tributary creeks, but above a certain level they began to notice a lot of lightning-blasted snags that reminded them of the one they had been gawking at shortly before Weaver had been killed. Mard and Lyne—who, free of their big pack, had resumed their old habit of scrambling ahead—made a hasty descent from one such ridge and reported that something strange had happened to them as they approached its top: their hair had stood on end, their fingers had tingled, and—

“A glowing fringe could be seen around the branches of trees,” Fern said.

“Yes!” the Bufrect lads said in unison.

Fern had adopted the mildly stunned expression that came over her when she was dumbfounded by the foolishness of landlubbers. “It is Thingor’s Aura and it is known to mariners,” she announced. “You were wise to descend.”

Fortunately they did not have to choose between escaping the river’s rise and tangling with Thingor’s Aura. They found a place in between where Pick could squat on his haunches and watch the torrent until he was certain it was beginning to recede. But another day was spent.

The next morning they moved along the slope of a ridge that was getting in their way until the sky brightened and Corvus descended from it and said he judged it safe to cross over the high ground, provided they stayed well apart and avoided clearings. So they devoted an hour to doing just that. Prim, walking alone as per instructions, took the small risk of going a little higher than she needed to and looking around. Far ahead of them, the ground surged up out of a plateau of dark evergreen forest. It rose like a rampart, and as it did, it shouldered off the cover of the trees and was nothing but brown rock for a while until that was glazed, then frosted, then, above a certain altitude, completely buried in snow. This continued up into the storm’s lower reaches, which obscured its heights. It looked impossible. But map and myth agreed that the Fastness could only be approached along the route that she was surveying now.

Corvus came flying in from the north. He must have spied Prim on her high perch, for his broad wings narrowed to blades as he banked toward her. “Don’t dillydally,” he said, “this break in the weather won’t last.” He touched down and skipped to a stop on open ground near her.

“Who’s dillydallying?” she retorted. “I thought you would be scouting the way ahead.”

This stopped him for a few moments. “It is also wise,” he said finally, “to be mindful of what might be behind. Come on, let’s get moving!” And he took to the air and went careering back and forth along the Quest’s line of advance, flapping and squawking at any stragglers.

That day neither sky nor forest nor river attempted to kill them. But they had now left the bright colors of the deciduous fall behind and entered into that more elevated stretch of evergreen-forested territory. In some places the trees stood well apart, shooting arrow-straight from a fragrant carpet of needles that was soft beneath sore feet.

They had come to a pass where because of victuals consumed, victuals spoiled by damp, and victuals abandoned while running away, they needed more victuals, and so a day was set aside for hunting and, should the hunt succeed, butchering and dressing of meat. Prim was pressed into service as an archer, and played along despite knowing that if any beast were within range of her skills as a bow-woman, it would be close enough for her to kill it by wishing it were dead.

It proceeded like any other hunt, with a lot of dull waiting and framing of over-elaborate plans that detonated into chaos at the first contact with reality. A big thing with horns—clearly descended from beasts of burden that had been brought here to tow ore carts and since altered form and personality to live wild—was struck by a shot from Lyne, and in its flight chanced to come near Prim. She drew an arrow and took aim. Then, taking pity on it, she did the thing in her mind that cut off its life. A wolf emerged from the undergrowth, having scented blood and given chase to the wounded beast. Prim thought that one to death straightaway as it was sniffing at the downed prey.

It seemed worthy of note, and quite likely a sign of larger trouble, that even a single wolf had turned up right in the middle of what had been drawn up, with sticks in dirt, as an orderly perimeter of alert hunters. Prim tried calling out the others’ names: Mard, Lyne, Burr. Another wolf came in from the same general direction as the first. She made it die. She could do that all day; she was Death afoot; nothing alive could hurt her unless she suffered it to.

Camp she could find, and people might need help there, and so that was where she went, breaking into a run as she became certain she was on the right track.

She was relieved to find that all was well here. Edda was pacing round the campfire in a wide circle. Querc was stoking it to make it blaze up. Pick was limbering up his stick technique to one side and on the other Fern was standing with dagger and cutlass drawn, the dagger in a reversed grip, blade tucked along the bone of the forearm, ready to raise up and stab down. She had not joined the party; to her, hunting was an uncouth procedure carried out in pointless wastelands by half-savage souls whose purpose in the grand scheme of things was to offer meat for sale in waterside markets.

Burr came into view, backing toward camp one carefully measured pace at a time, wielding his spear with both arms, butt high above his head and blade low, whipping round in great brush-cutting arcs but sometimes vaulting across the top to strike downward. He approached a tree, and Prim gasped in a breath to warn him that it was going to block his spear. The warning would have come too late. And it would have been unnecessary, as it turned out. His hands went on turning and the blade of the spear kept moving in its gyre and the column of smoke that was the spear’s shaft passed through the tree trunk, or perhaps it was the other way round. Neither spear nor tree, at any rate, seemed to take any note of the other’s existence. But when the spearhead intercepted the face of a wolf on Burr’s other side, the results were very material. It had to be a trick of her vision, Prim thought; but a moment later it happened again. “Where are the lads?” asked Fern, who was striding past Prim toward where Burr was embroiled.

Prim thought she glimpsed a giant raven wheeling above the crowns of the trees. “Watch my back!” she called to Pick, who shouted back “Good idea!” and took after her in a wading and flailing gait.

Mard and Lyne were not as far off as she had feared. Mard was dragging one leg and wielding the sword of Elshield with one hand. Lyne had a short hunting lance that he used in more of a thrust-and-stab style. They were a bit downslope of Prim. She descended to a clear vantage point, drew an arrow, and shot. She missed, but not by much. Lyne saw the arrow’s fletching and glanced up at her. “This way!” Prim called. Noting another wolf off to one flank, she caused it to stop living, then drew another arrow and managed to shoot one that had chosen to crouch, cringe, and snarl in a location where she could get off a clear shot.

The sub-pack that had taken after Mard and Lyne was dwindling in numbers and faltering in resolve. Lyne stabbed another, which ran off yelping horribly. Two others turned tail and followed it. Pick came up behind Prim and reported all clear. She dropped her bow, ran down the little slope, and helped Lyne drag Mard up, both his good and his hurt leg simply trailing behind him on the ground. But he seemed to be bleeding much more heavily from his left arm.

In a short while, all the party had gathered round the fire, which Querc had made so enormous they could hardly come near it. The woods all round were ringing with the cries of wolves. Prim did not speak their language but she guessed its import: “Invaders have come!”

“It would seem more efficient,” Lyne pointed out, “if we could somehow get Spring’s various creations to understand that we are on Spring’s side and trying to bring about changes that Spring herself would probably approve of.”

Edda was somewhat preoccupied sewing Mard’s arm up. But she was often at her most conversational while busy with needle and thread.

“Is it going to make her angry,” Prim asked, “perhaps to the point of going mad again, that we are going to have to fight and hack our way through?”

“Spring isn’t troubled by death,” said Edda. “On the contrary.”

“Where is she?” Querc inquired. “Did she ever take settled form again? Is she roaming around somewhere?”

“Probably the Eye of the Storm,” said Edda. “A place in these parts where she went with Eve, when Eve found her, and turned her away from the path of madness.”

Prim had avoided this until now, but finally forced herself to go and look at Mard’s arm. She had to know how bad it was. She expected wolf bites. Which indeed she saw; but the big wound that Edda was sewing up had been inflicted by a blade.

“It is a self-inflicted wound,” Mard admitted. “I pivoted round, thinking to help Lyne, and judged poorly the timing of it, and my arm came into the way of my sword already descending.”

At this news Prim was silent.

“You know not what to say,” Edda observed. “For such mishaps—though they happen all the time—are never recorded in legends and songs. The hero who falls because of a cramp in his hamstring is not sung of.”

More might have been said in that vein had Corvus not flown in and let them know that it would now be necessary to abandon nearly everything they had been carrying and run away.

They had been aware for some time that the howling of the wolves had been noted by other, larger, more solitary beasts; but they were not afraid of those. Several members of the expedition appeared to know that Prim could kill anything. Even if she elected for some reason to withhold that power, it was difficult to imagine anything standing up to Burr. So Prim was inclined for a moment to suppose it was only Corvus’s sense of humor at work. But only for a moment. His startling pronouncement had caused everyone to go still. And in that stillness they sensed the approach of something that seemed to come on like rain, in that it affected the whole of the forest instead of being in any one place. Supposing it was even alive, it must have been too numerous and spread out for even Death to be of much use against it.

“Mard can’t exactly run,” Lyne objected. For his kinsman had suffered bites to his legs as well as the cut to his arm. But Edda was already knotting a bandage over her unfinished seam. She slung Mard over her back as if he weighed approximately as much as a chicken, and in a few long strides vanished into the forest southbound.

The threat consisted of insects. From any distance greater than a stone’s throw—not that stones would have been any use—they simply looked like smoke. As Prim saw when they were overtaken by a lobe of that “smoke,” they could take to the air in an ungainly combination of leaping and fluttering, and the wind was their friend. As she learned when one landed on her arm, they could bite off freckle-sized scoops of flesh.

Corvus had insisted that they carry nothing but weapons (useless now, important later?) and firebrands, and that they run upwind. They did not have to run for more than an hour before they encountered a rising slope where going was difficult because of undergrowth and low branches. There the insects caught up with them and did damage and made going very disagreeable indeed with their propensity for attacking eyes, ears, noses, and mouths. But before panic consumed them they got deep enough in that Corvus deemed it time to set fires. Those spread downwind with great speed. But upwind the flames advanced slowly enough that outrunning them was possible. That was the good news. The bad news was that they had to run more. This time, at least, they were not inhaling bugs. At length they passed into more open territory that had evidently been burned in the past, so that the flames could not follow in their wake. There they stopped and were rained on all through the night as the storm, having apparently replenished its energies, returned at full strength.

“Fuck this,” Corvus shouted, when it became light enough to see. “Enough of orderly and well-planned Questing. There’s nothing for it now but to make a run for the cave.”

“Which cave would that be?” Lyne asked.

“The one we’re heading for,” Corvus said vaguely. Which would have led to further questions had they not just spent the whole night exposed to the storm.

They had crawled under a fallen tree whose branches were stiff-arming it just high enough above the ground that they could wriggle under it. This sheltered them from direct laceration by rain and hail but did nothing to keep them dry. If any one thing had saved them it had been the giantess, who made more warmth than all the others put together. Curled up next to Edda during the long hours of the night, Prim had gone into another of those strange dreams in which it seemed to her that Edda was as tall as a tree, and Prim a thing like a squirrel, nestled in the crook of a bough, wet but warm.

Now, in the light of the morning, Edda was plainly a woman of normal size. Prim feared, though, that she was diminished; she squatted on her haunches to keep off the soaked ground, and wrapped herself in her cloak, and remained still, eyes closed, for a long time as Burr tried vainly to light a fire. Prim was remembering Edda’s cottage on Calla, and her sheep and horses, and the flour she would grind to bake bread. How long had it been since she had taken such nourishment? Did absorbing the whole form of an angel give her some power that she could call upon at times such as last night?

“We are in no condition to run anywhere,” Burr pointed out. “We could march.”

“We need food,” said Pick. “Other than this, I mean.” He waved in front of him a fleck of jerky, his portion of all the food they now had remaining.

“None is here,” Corvus pointed out, “but if we march, as Burr suggests, Mab and I can keep an eye out for things that might be eaten.”

So that was how it went. For much of the morning it rained, but this was plain old ordinary rain, which compared to the storm seemed like no rain at all. Perhaps the sound of it covered the noise they made walking and enabled them to get within sight of another of those horned creatures. They spied it across a clearing. It fell dead. Burr’s response was to flatten himself against the ground. “Get down!” he whispered. “Someone else is hunting here!”

Prim did not get down. She kept walking until she had reached the beast, which was lying there as if asleep. Burr, still convinced of danger, caught up with her a few moments later, spear at the ready. When the rest of the party caught up with Burr, he was rolling the dead beast over, looking for some sign of the arrow that had slain it. But of course there was none.

He stepped back from it. “I saw a similar thing during the wolf fight. I did not believe it.”

“We saw something like it too,” Mard said. “A wolf simply died.”

“Some fell presence stalks these woods, and slays what it will by magic.”

“I am the fell presence,” Prim said. “Let’s eat.”

This time, no wolf pack came. Neither were they molested by larger beasts or clouds of insects. Not even when they lit a fire and the aroma of roasting meat spread on the breeze. The rain stopped while they were cooking. They were on the edge of a meadow that sloped up out of the country they had covered during the last day. Below them in the distance they could hear wolves raising the same alarm they had heard yesterday: “Invaders have come!” This seemed to arouse the curiosity of Corvus, who had already supped on raw flesh. He flapped into the air and then beat his wings powerfully to gain altitude, heading back north.

“The raven thinks we are being followed,” said Burr.

None of the others seemed to think that this was news. Fern paid no note at all. She had been inspecting Prim since the latter had revealed her nature. Tiring of the attention, Prim met her eye.

“I wondered,” Fern said. “Just being a princess isn’t enough to get you invited on something like this.”

Prim was doubly offended. She hadn’t even thought of herself as a princess at the beginning; she’d taken Brindle at his word when he’d said that Quests were just a thing that Calladons did. A sort of birthright. But she was too tired and hungry to enter into a dispute with Fern just now.

“Could you kill any soul in the Land?”

“According to the legends, I killed Egdod,” Prim reminded her. “I have to be close to what I’m killing, though.”

“Could you kill El?”

“I don’t know. The opportunity has not presented itself. He might have ways of killing me sooner.”

“Spring made a creature for that purpose,” said Querc. “Or so Weaver told me, the night before she died. It is made of chaos and adamant. It is called the Chasmian, and it waits under the Broken Bridge for any who makes it that far.”

“And did Weaver have anything to say about what additional hazards we must pass through in order to be in a position to be menaced by the Chasmian?” Lyne asked.

“First, the army of Beedles that Spring ensnared and converted to her services,” said Querc. “They’ll be dug in on yonder slope.” She stood up and drew their attention to the rampart of rocky ground that rose up out of the forest south of them. This had become visible as the weather cleared. It was markedly closer now than when Prim had looked on it yesterday. It seemed much higher and steeper than her earlier view of it had led her to expect. Details could now be made out that hinted at its being inhabited. Not in the sense that structures had been built atop its surface. No, this had been burrowed into. If there was any truth to the old myths, the Beedles that Spring had brought into her service were miners. They must have been very accomplished miners now. Mile-wide fans of spoil spread away from pinhole-sized orifices in the slope. Every one of those stones had been hacked out of the bowels of the earth by one of those Dug—as the converted Beedles were called. For they had dug and dug and dug until Dug was all they were.

“And second? Third? Fourth?” Lyne prompted Querc.

“Between the Dug and the Chasmian—which is to say, along the Shifting Path that goes across the top of the glacier—nothing except for, well, you know, Lightning Bears.”

“Good to know,” Lyne said.

“But I don’t think we are going that way,” Querc added. “Corvus said something about a cave.” She looked toward Edda. “Is that where we are going, my lady?”

“It is where we are headed,” Edda corrected her. She did not meet Querc’s gaze, or anyone’s. She was standing a little apart from the others, who were clustered round the fire in the hopes of drying out their clothes. She seemed content to gaze upon the vista opening up to the south as the weather continued to clear off. Some of the high mountains leading into the Knot were now revealing themselves. They were the grandest thing Prim had ever beheld. But Edda’s gaze was fixed low, toward a green plateau that was difficult to resolve distinctly, as clouds and rain still swirled close about it. It was a small shelf that looked to have been cut into the eastern extremity of the Dug-infested rampart that blocked their way. Indeed its shape and situation were so convenient that one could easily imagine it had been purpose-built by Dug with picks and shovels. High and remote though it was, yet it seemed to exist at the bottom of a well of golden light, the overabundance of which made the swirling veil of mist into a blurry glow that dazzled and befogged the vision.

“Is that the Eye of the Storm then?” Querc asked.

“Yes,” said Edda, “that is the Eye of the Storm.” And not until she pronounced it thus did Prim’s childhood memory produce in her mind an illustration from a storybook she’d enjoyed many times on Brindle’s knee. It depicted just such a place, a green and golden glen nestled in mountains where Spring dwelled with Eve and certain of her favorite creations, and flowers bloomed and sweet fruit hung ripe from trees all year round. That explained why Edda gazed at it so. Her mother and grandmother were there.

No flowers or fruit were here, and so they tore into the meat as soon as it was warm and slurped fat off the bones before it would be wasted by melting into the fire. Corvus returned and declined to say very much about what, if anything, could be following them. But he seemed to think that moving faster would be better, and so they wrapped up more meat for later and continued on their way.

Mard had walked in the morning, slowly and stiffly and with his face screwed up in pain. He carried on thus now. When the going became difficult, someone would put a shoulder under his good arm and help him along for a few paces. His injured arm he kept beneath his cloak, folded against his belly.

Meadows became more frequent, and larger. Burr pointed to signs that fires had been set to burn back encroaching forest and leave open land where grass could grow and edible beasts fatten themselves on it. They found skeletal remains of two such beasts, and Burr showed them marks that had been left by knives, and even a rusted iron arrowhead stuck too deep in a pelvis to be worth prying out. “Dug,” Burr said, as if there could have been any doubt. “The forest yields all the food they need, provided they keep it clear of wolves and other such beasts. Beware traps.” By which Prim assumed he must mean ambushes that the Dug might lay for invading souls such as them. But not a quarter of an hour later they came upon a cunning snare that had been baited with meat.

They avoided the meadows from then on, and stayed in the deepest woods that Mab and Corvus could steer them to. Thus without further incident they came to a place where the ground ramped sharply upward. The soft earth of the forest gave way to a rubble of sharp stones that had quite obviously tumbled down here from the bare high ground above. Fat drops of icy rain began to thud down. From off to their right the sun was slicing in under the storm and lighting up the whole face of the rampart, all the way from where they stood—near its western extremity—down to its eastern end, many miles away, where it sank like an axe into the buttresses of a mountain range. The Eye of the Storm was there, but could no longer be seen save as a vague column of iron-gray weather round which the whole rest of the Evertempest turned like the millstone in Edda’s kitchen.

“Stop and have a good look at it then,” Corvus said, as quietly as it was possible for a giant talking raven to form words. “We go up under cover of dark, and we go there.”

“Where?” Lyne asked, for all of them.

“There. I’m pointing right at it.”

“You have no way of pointing.”

“I am pointing with my beak.”

“Never mind, I see it,” said Pick. He had dropped to one knee and planted the foot of his stick on a rock, the better to peer through its lenses. Between that and the direction of Corvus’s beak the rest of the party were able to see what was being looked at: the tiniest black pore in the surface of the rampart. It was directly above them, for Corvus had led them right to it. Unlike the various entrances made by the Dug, this did not have an enormous fan of spoil pointing right at it.

“Is that the famous cave?” Querc asked.

“Famous to this little band. To the Dug, more infamous, and rarely entered.”

“Strikes me as odd,” Pick remarked.

“Yes,” said Lyne. “Why wouldn’t they go into a conveniently situated natural cave?”

“I don’t like where this is going,” Mard said.

“Terror” was the answer of Corvus. “Fear of what becomes of any who strays more than a few yards beyond the entrance.” Continuing in the same level tone, he added, “Memorize landmarks that may be useful in the dark.”

“Why not go up now?” Querc asked. “The storm is brewing up again.”

“Dug patrols on the heights.”

“They’ve seen us?”

A raven shrug. “If not, they will. It’s their purpose for existing.”

The heavy slugs of half-frozen water developed into a steady fall of ice-rain, which prompted them to retreat just a few yards down to a marginally more sheltered place. The light had dimmed, footing was slick, and Mard’s injured legs weren’t moving well. He toppled forward and reflexively threw out both arms to avoid planting his face right on the stones. But only one hand—his good one—made effective contact with the ground. The injured one gave way, so that he twisted at the moment of impact and struck with his shoulder. Momentum then rolled him onto his back, where he lay for a few moments, grimacing with agony.

His injured arm was missing. Or rather, beyond the point where he had cut himself with the sword of Elshield, a forearm, wrist, and hand still existed. But they were made of aura. The fingers were wispy ghosts. Prim could see right through the palm of his hand. She came very close to crying out. What stilled her was not the fear of being heard by Dug. It was the way Mard looked into her eyes: altogether steady and calm. He had known, of course, and had been hiding it under his cloak.

She naturally had a great many questions as to the prognosis, but hiding from Dug patrols during a mountain hailstorm was not a good situation for that kind of talk. They huddled together as they had done at other such times. But on this occasion Prim chose to lie next to Mard so that the two of them could share the warmth of their bodies with each other.

They waited until it was full dark and then began to ascend. “I shall go last,” Edda offered, “as I may touch off avalanches.”

Despite their earlier efforts at memorizing landmarks, had it not been for Mab they’d have been hopelessly lost. Corvus had adopted his human shape again. The occasional lightning bolt lit up the entire mountainside as bright as day, but not long enough for the eye to seek out and fix the location of the cave’s entrance. They learned to cringe and tense themselves in anticipation of the thunderclap that would always follow a fraction of a second later.

“Thingor’s Aura!” Fern called, after it seemed they had been blundering around for an hour. Prim, who had been staring fixedly at the ground in an effort to make out where she ought to plant her feet, looked about to see that the rocks around her were limned in green fire. Before she could feel any sense of wonder or awe at this, Fern followed up with, “Lie flat!” So she tried to do so and learned that the very idea of lying down had no clear meaning on ground as stony as this. A bolt struck very close, the light and the sound penetrating her skull at the same instant. Querc screamed. Prim craned her neck to gaze up the slope. Pulsing rivers of the green fire ran up and down it as fast as thought. Something extraordinarily brilliant could be seen high above, as if suspended in the sky; it had the dazzling brilliance of a lightning bolt, but it persisted, like the sword Burr had taken from the angel. And yet it moved about like a thing alive, sometimes down on all fours and other times rearing up to stand on its hind legs.

It was a bear. A Lightning Bear. It was on the top of the ridge high above them, far beyond where they had any thought of going; but it had seen them and it was not happy that they were coming up its mountain.

It was a short while later that rocks began to tumble down out of the darkness. One came straight for Prim, moving so fast she could not possibly dodge it; but it caromed off another and brushed past her.

It was just like being down beneath the Overstrike with Beedles up above rolling rocks down onto them. But this time, she felt certain, it was Dug who had been alerted to their presence, perhaps by the vigilant bears.

The sun came out, illuminating the whole slope above. She could see all: In the near ground, boulders tumbling toward them. Above that, less than a bow-shot distant, the entrance to the cave. And on the higher ground above that, pale figures with the squat asymmetrical forms of Beedles. Perhaps a dozen of them. The sudden light had caught them in the act of prying rocks loose from the slope. Their work stopped as they were blinded by it: the light of the angel sword, which Burr had drawn full out of its scabbard. Seeing now the way and the enemy, Burr sprang forward with a roar. The rest followed as best they could. Prim shielded her eyes from the glare so that she could take advantage of the light in picking her way up. She turned back to look once or twice and got fragmented glimpses of other members of the Quest, arms flailing for balance on shifting and ice-covered ground. Fern and Lyne were coming up fast with weapons drawn. The light of the angel sword flashed and swept. Lightning struck. A furious roaring came down from on high: bears. The ground leveled. A dark hole was before her. She stumbled into it, carried more by momentum than any plan or desire. Others piled in behind her, blocking the way out. She had a mind to go back out of the cave and be of help in the fighting, but before she could do so, the mountain was plunged back into darkness. The sword had gone back into its sheath. Rocks scrabbled and chattered as they slid down from above. Lightning flashed and outlined the silhouettes of Burr, Fern, and Lyne. They stepped into the cave.

With that the Quest concluded its traversal of the Stormland, and entered into the underpinnings of the Knot.

54

“Come on,” Corvus said. “Pick, we need to seal the entrance.”

“I thought you said the Dug would not follow us in here,” Lyne said.

“They won’t,” Corvus answered vaguely. “Pick? Sound off! Can we have more light?”

Mab brightened. They had gathered a few strides in from the cave’s entrance. Burr had stationed himself nearest it, spear at the ready, and Fern and Lyne were still backing him up. Next was Edda, standing still as a mountain in her cloak, which glistened with ice. Querc was crumpled near the giantess, weeping. Mard, Prim, and Corvus had advanced deepest into the cave, but Corvus was now stalking back toward the entrance as Mab flitted to and fro in the style of one who has lost something. “Where is Pick?” Corvus asked. “We need to send out a search party!” He seemed of a mind to go and look down the slope.

Edda brought him up short by withdrawing from her cloak a small gleaming object. Its nature wasn’t clear until Mab cast greater light on it. Then it could be seen that this was the bird-shaped head of Pick’s stick, somewhat deformed, as if it had partly melted. The eyes were now blind sockets, as the lenses were missing. A blackened shard of wood still dangled from the hole where the shaft had been affixed.

It was the rare moment when Corvus was not well ahead of everyone else. That combined with the fact that he was in his human form, and closely illuminated by Mab, made it possible to see emotions in his face that Prim—who had known him since he was a new soul in the Land—had never seen there before. He was completely astonished. It was that kind of surprise so total that one’s first reflex, be it never so out of place, is to laugh. Which he did in a faltering and nervous way. Then he became serious and thoughtful.

Querc’s grief was total, as was her shock at what she had witnessed. Prim remembered the scream Querc had made after a certain close lightning strike and knew it was true. Corvus knew it too: Pick was gone.

“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.”

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 under 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 used 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!”

“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 instead 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.

It now seemed for a little while that the world consisted entirely of noise. She had heard many loud noises of late, what with all of the Evertempest’s thunder and the clamorous boulder duel between El and the Chasmian. Those were but clicks and whispers compared to the sound that came now from the direction of the Fastness. It was so loud that it startled El, and the rider across the gorge, and her Lightning Bears. Prim, before her vision dissolved into chaos, had at least the satisfaction of seeing El turn around, and astonishment come over him. It was such a distinct reaction that she had to turn her head and see what he was seeing: the Fastness unbound, its iron dome rocking from side to side where it had been shrugged off, and chains and hasps still avalanching down all round it. Perched on the top of the castle was a figure nearly as great as the Chasmian, but of human form.

Or so it seemed until it spread its wings.

Egdod saw at once that the tempest he had laid over the Knot in ancient times had served its purpose and was no longer of use to him, and so with a wave of his hand he stilled it. In the calm air that followed he spread his wings and took flight, but glided only a short distance to the top of the stone anvil, where Sophia lay dying. He took her dissolving form up into his arms as a mother takes up a baby, and gathered her into his chest.

“Once again our time together is all too brief,” said Sophia to Egdod, though she had lost the power of forming words and could only speak through the connection of their auras.

“The sweeter for that,” Egdod returned. “Know that your sacrifice was not in vain. The Quest is complete.”

“Edda will need rest,” she said, her aura growing very faint.

“She has come to a good place for resting,” said Egdod, “as have you.”

Then the thread of her life was severed.

The sun had now erupted through the broken wall of clouds. It was not the only source of light. El had stood astonished for some while at the sight of the lock opened, the Fastness unbound, and Egdod free in the Land. Now he forsook the form of an ordinary soul walking. He rose into the air and made himself as large as Egdod, that the two of them might converse as beings of equal stature. He grew as well in brilliance, shining with a golden light as that of the sun. Egdod for his part seemed content with the form he had taken at the time of the Fall, which was as dark as the Firmament into which he and the other members of the Pantheon had been projected. For some while neither he nor El spoke. Both were marshaling their forces. Behind El, opposing sides of the Chasm had gone into movement, thickening and bending toward each other. When those two sides touched they would form an arch a hundred times broader than the old bridge. Waiting on its opposite side were Spring upon her mount, and her escort of bears; and behind them marching in a long file down the Shifting Path were legions of Dug she had summoned to arms.

Seeing this El laughed in Egdod’s face. “Shall you and I trifle further about the bridge? You can build it up and I can throw it down for the next thousand years.”

Egdod responded, “I am taking no action in the matter. The changes you see are the work of another who has an interest in such things.” And he looked back toward the Fastness. Atop its highest tower a hooded figure stood, extending his arms and sending forth his power. Besides Pluto, others could be seen now too: Love below on the steps, tending to Edda, who lay spent next to the open lock. Freewander darting high and Thingor limping along the battlements, directing the work of other souls who seemed to be emerging in force from the depths of it, and War marshaling formations of armed and armored souls pouring forth out of chaos from the Firmament, moving in synchrony with wild musics emanating from Pan and an orchestra of music-making souls that Pan had drawn up along a high parapet.

“It is of no account whether your hand or Pluto’s shapes the bridge,” El said. “Even when I walked over the Stormland in the guise of an ordinary soul, alone and unarmed, I swept away Dug like so many insects, and the worst assaults of the Lightning Bears were mere diversions to me. The Chasmian that Spring made to greet me at your front door was a greater foe, I will admit; but it lies broken at the bottom of yonder gorge, and when it climbs out I shall break it again. Only Sophia had power against me; and I can see that she is no more.”

Egdod held out his right hand. Cupped in it was a tiny knot of aura. “That is saying too much,” he answered.

“We may also trifle over words,” said El, “but to put it plainly, your plan has failed.”

“My plan,” said Egdod, “is still unfolding. Pent up for so long in the Fastness, I have learned patience. It is a faculty you have lost, ruling the Land from your high Palace where all things come quickly, and you confuse delay with failure.”

Their sparring lapsed for some time as many things were happening all round. Above the glacier opposite, a giant raven could be seen wheeling over the vanguard of the Dug army, showing them the way. The farther they advanced, the broader their front became, as they found that the narrow path had swelled to a broad road. Pluto was healing the cracked glacier beneath their feet, mending the crevasses that since ancient times had always threatened to swallow unwary travelers. Their swiftest scouts were even now reaching the bridgehead. This was developing a green tinge as plants of various kinds erupted from what had long been barren ground. The two sides of the Chasm had extended to where they nearly touched above the center of the gorge. Vines and roots had already reached across the gap.

But El had legions of his own. His angels, long held at bay by the Evertempest, must have issued forth from the Palace at the moment the key had entered the lock and undone the gate of the Fastness. On swift wings they had covered the distance from Pinnacle to Knot as Sophia had expired and Pluto had reshaped the Land and Thingor had begun his works upon the battlements. Now they were beginning to appear, in ones and twos and soon enough in echelons, in the clear sky above. Their bright swords they kept sheathed for now. The only unsheathed weapon in the whole scene was in the hand of winged War, who had emerged from the Fastness after Egdod, and drawn Burr’s angel sword out of the earth where it had stuck. He looked a match for any ten angels. But above were already more than ten, and soon there would be hundreds.

Horns were blowing and hooves beating the earth to the north and west. A battle flag appeared over the crest of a ridge on the other side of the Chasm. Next came a row of lances whose sharp edges gleamed in the light of the sun. It was a regiment of Autochthon cavalry on their mounts, and at its head was a woman whose long yellow hair streamed like a pennant from beneath her bright helm: Sooth of El. They must have been summoned days ago through the weird emanations of the Hive, and ridden to this place.

In this way did the armies of El converge toward the Fastness, and it had to be admitted that in their speed, their number, and their beauty they made the opposition seem feeble and disarrayed. It was only the towering form of Egdod himself, standing upon the stone anvil with the tiny ball of aura cupped in his hand, that could give any hope whatever to those who rejoiced at his return.

The hoofbeats of a solitary mount traversed the Anvil Plain from the direction of the bridge. War flourished his sword in salute and bowed low to Spring as she galloped past him. Egdod gazed down on her approach with a face that showed sorrow and joy. But knowing that the eyes of El and many others were upon him he spoke brusquely, and not to Spring but to Freewander, who was dipping and wheeling about him: “Show her where to form up.”

And so for a time the Anvil Plain was alive with preparations for battle as Freewander led Spring to a position where the advance of the Autochthons could be blocked, or at least slowed, should it come to a clash of arms. The Lightning Bears followed her and the Dug followed them. Behind the old rampart they formed up, facing north toward the bridge. War strode to and fro along their lines mustering them into battle array. The blasts of Pan’s trumpets brought order; the booming of Pan’s war drums made their blood boil.

“None of this matters,” said El. “You can make whatever preparations you please on the ground. The air is filled with my angels.”

Sooth’s cavalry came in force over the bridge to the Anvil Plain. They arrayed themselves facing the Dug. Spring was amusing herself by causing thick sweet grass to grow in the place between, and Sooth’s mounts, seeing and smelling it, were causing no end of trouble for their riders. They must have been galloping for days from Secondel and they must have been ravenous.

“Summon your angels to war then,” said El, and suddenly beat his wings and launched himself into the air. A few angels who had made bold to swoop low got well clear of him. He flew back to the Fastness and landed upon a high battlement from which he could see all and all could see him. Below, the gate boomed shut. Edda and the other members of the Quest had been made guests within.

Defender of El led the charge, an echelon of warrior angels behind him. They wheeled down out of the blue sky in a wedge and came straight for Egdod.

“Fire,” said Egdod.

And there was fire: bolts of it stabbing from the tops of the Fastness’s walls and from embrasures farther down. It came from dark tubes of metal, each of which had a crew of souls to feed it, and as soon as all of them had been discharged, they set to work preparing them to fire again.

All of which was a detail little noticed since Defender of El and many of his angels had fallen to the ground and were lying dead or broken on the plain between the anvil and the Fastness.

Another rank of angels wheeled into position above, ready to renew the attack. Defender of El lay dead. All eyes turned to El, who hovered a little distance above the ground at the opposite end of the battlefield, near the wide bridge already carpeted in green and growing things.

“At your command, Lord El!” shouted an angel who seemed to have assumed command.

The same words were echoed a moment later by Sooth below. She had raised her sword as if to signal a charge.

El hesitated.

The ground was shaking, but El did not know it because his feet were not in contact with the Land.

The Chasmian vaulted out of the gorge behind him. No longer impeded by its massive shield, it lashed out with both arms and wrapped them around El’s form from behind. In an effort to escape the bear hug, El became mostly a thing of aura. The two forms became intermingled as they struggled and writhed at the brink; then, with the slowness of a great tree that has been cut through at the root, they toppled into the Chasm and disappeared.

“Hold your fire,” Egdod commanded, and took to the air again, flying in a broad circuit over the battlefield. Which was now merely a field, since it was suddenly clear to all present that no battle would be taking place on the Anvil Plain this day. To Sooth he spoke: “Your task has been accomplished. Not the one El had in mind for you, which was false. But the one I ordained, which was to see what you just saw. You may complete it by grazing your mounts on the sweet grass and then riding home to tell everyone you see—Autochthons, Beedles, Sprung, and wild souls of all shapes—what has here occurred.”

He then beat his wings powerfully and mounted up into the air, where the surviving angels were arrayed in their echelons. Many were too bright to look upon, but they dimmed when Egdod commanded them to sheathe their swords and they did so. “Your weapons were stolen from Thingor,” Egdod said. “He will collect them below. If you regret giving them up, console yourselves with the knowledge that they are useless against what Thingor has conjured up in the ages since. Go out into the Land and do useful things. One day I shall come back to my Palace to inspect it; I expect that everything will be in good order there.”

Swooping down low over the Fastness he spoke to all within and around it: “I have business in the Firmament. Before long I shall return. You know what to do.” And pulling up high, he made a pivot in midair, folded his wings, and dove headfirst into the center of the Fastness. Those standing outside, who saw him plunge out of view and who did not know that place’s secrets, might have expected to hear a crash as he plummeted headfirst into the ground. But those within saw him fall into the chaos upon which the building had been founded.

The door of the Fastness opened. A frail old lady emerged, supported to either side by younger souls. She tottered down the long stair, pausing more than once to rest. The ground before her was strewn with fallen angels dissolving. The stuff of which they had been made began to converge upon the old lady, and she began to gain weight and strength from it as she drew it into her form.

55

Zula had fallen out of the habit of watching Bitworld, because, by and large, it happened too fast to be really intelligible. She wondered if she was senile—or if she seemed that way. She had a memory of a Thanksgiving, more than a hundred years ago, when she and some of her cousins had been hanging out in the TV room of the Forthrast farmhouse in Iowa, passing the time with a video game, and she had looked up at some point to see Uncle Claude, spry and curious at eighty-three, standing in the doorway looking at the big screen perfectly aghast. It was hard to tell how long he’d been standing there trying to make sense of it all. But there was clearly a feeling that some combination of age and culture shock had shifted Uncle Claude into a lower gear than all the other people in the room, that his clock was ticking at a slower rate than everyone else’s.

When Zula—or anyone else in Meatspace—watched Bitworld, that was, of course, literally true. The Time Slip Ratio had veered all over the place during the century that Zula had been doing this job. But in the last couple of decades, since ALISS had gone orbital, the trend had been toward greater speed. Freed from earthbound limitations on how much power could be generated, how much heat dissipated, how much fiber laid, and how many resources quarried out of the ground (for they built everything out of asteroids now), they’d kept pace with demand and then some. Consequently time in Bitworld had, on the whole, sped up. It was no longer like watching a human drama acted out in real time. More like an ant colony.

So she had stopped looking at it. Oh, she could see it perfectly well. Presbyopia had given way to cataracts, organic lenses replaced with artificial ones. The retinas she’d been born with had been swapped out for new ones, grown in a lab, hooked up to her optic nerve by a microscopic robot surgeon. For a while, her brain’s visual cortex hadn’t known what to make of the new and improved signals coming in on that channel, and so she had had to learn how to see again—a difficult thing for one of her age, but made easier by neuroplasticity medication derived from the stuff Maeve had experimented with ages ago.

So now Zula could see every bit as well as she had been able to when she had been seven years old. It was just that she would rather use that faculty to look at things in the real world. When gazing into the land of the dead, she felt that same bafflement, the same disconnect, as Uncle Claude.

Uncle Claude had stood there anyway and gamely tried to bend his old mind around it because he had known that the youngsters in that room were his kin and that this stuff was important to them. Likewise Zula was aware that during recent days (as time was measured in Meatspace) momentous things had been going on in Bitworld involving the processes that had been booted up there to simulate the consciousnesses of her daughter, Sophia; her friends Corvallis and Maeve; and perhaps others as well. They had been moving around the Landform rather a lot, and interacting with one another, and Sophia had terminated a few other processes. Zula was aware that this was all being watched with great interest by the dwindling population of living humans who still existed on planet Earth.

So she walked down to the office one lovely fall evening to see what all the fuss was about. She could walk—or run, for that matter—all day if she wanted. Of course, it was Fronk whose feet actually contacted the ground, whose joints took her weight, whose sensors and algorithms saw to it she didn’t keel over. She had been wearing Fronk for decades now and would die pretty quickly if she doffed it. She could not have walked, or even stood up, without it. She wore it to bed. It was her bed.

South Lake Union had held its own as a place where biological humans physically came together to work on things. Nowadays, mostly what they worked on was the high-level management of ALISS. Of course, the bulk of the actual work was performed by robots in space. None of those was even remotely humanoid. Their AIs were tuned to analyze space rocks and to solve conundrums relating to scheduling of tasks, logistical coordination, and resource allocation. You couldn’t talk to them, and if you could, it would have been like having a conversation with a shovel. The humans working below on the surface of Earth were just keeping an eye on things, looking way down the road, making sure that the robots could go on finding more space rocks and fashioning them into more robots until they ran out of space rocks. Then, if they needed to, they could begin busting up unused moons and planets, or go out to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where there were many more rocks. The end state of all this would be a Dyson sphere: a hollow shell of rock and metal that would capture all of the sun’s power, spend it in computation, and radiate the waste heat into the cosmos as dull infrared light. But it would take a long, long time to get to that point. Long enough for every human now living to die of natural causes, even if they all used as many life-extension technologies as Zula. Earth, or at least a patch of Earthlike ecosystem, would be preserved as a kind of park, and bio-humans could live on it, if that was what they were into.

Nowadays the building looked as it had in the very beginning, when the steelworkers and the concrete pumpers had roughed in the structure but the framers had not yet shown up with studs and drywall. The floor-to-ceiling windows still looked exactly like windows, but were now actually complicated robots in their own right, making all kinds of moment-to-moment decisions about which wavelengths, and how much of them, to let in or out of the building.

When she walked in, the place was crowded, more so than she’d seen it in years. The windows had figured out, or been told, that people wanted it pretty dark so that they could watch Bitworld. Of course, everyone had glasses that would show them whatever they felt like seeing. But at times like this there was a lot to be said for shared communal viewing, so they had fired up a larger and more powerful appliance, a stationary holographic projector that could pump out a lot of photons. So everyone was looking at its output with naked eyes, sharing the experience.

“You got here just in time!” someone exclaimed. It was Eva, a younger staff member whose mere presence and energy always made Zula feel very much like Uncle Claude. But she was a lovely person and Zula really didn’t mind.

“Just in time for what?” Zula asked. Her voice cracked and rasped; she didn’t use it much nowadays. She was maneuvering sideways trying to get a better angle; Fronk was respecting her overall dictates but doing so in a way that didn’t violate any safety heuristics. Zula, left to her own devices, would have used her little-old-lady prerogatives to elbow her way through the crowd. So progress was safe, polite, and slow.

She was piecing together glimpses. The display had been zoomed and panned to a part of the Landform that was not immediately familiar to her. She had a strong Uncle Claude feeling of not being able to make sense of what she was looking at. Then she spied a detail that helped her understand that this was the vicinity of the region once dubbed Escherville, exactly because it did not, in fact, make sense. It was a zone where notoriously the Landform Visualization Utility had never been able to pull together a coherent geometry. For decades, Ph.D. students and postdocs had tried to debug it. They had concluded that there was no bug; the LVU was working perfectly; the Landform hereabouts actually did not make any sense and so it just had to be shown in a suggestive and unstable way.

So Zula was looking at Escherville: the baroque castle-like structure that Dodge had built in the middle of it, the unsightly additions that El had made to it later. Not far away, the verdant zone where Verna tended to hang out with one of the new processes she had spawned—the one that looked female—inevitably, Eve. Probably, come to think of it, the namesake of the young woman at Zula’s elbow.

“What’s been going on?” Zula asked.

“Time Slip Ratio has been dropping—big processes using a lot of mana, loading the heck out of the systems,” said Eva. “It is actually approaching one now. That’s the lowest—”

“Lowest it has been in decades,” said Zula.

“But earlier today—in Meatspace time, that is—Sophia and the people she’s with teleported from the extreme southwest to an area north of here. Later they teleported a second time—not as far.”

Eva was so freaked out by that that Zula felt obliged to let her know, “Pluto used to teleport, way back when. We haven’t seen much of it since he moved to Landform Two.”

“Well anyway, they’ve been on the move southward ever since.”

“They?”

“Sophia and a group of other processes—including Corvallis and Maeve! And guess who has been hot on their trail?”

“I don’t need to guess,” said Zula. She had finally maneuvered to a position where she could clearly see El himself striding south across high territory toward Escherville. “All of this just happened in the last few hours?”

“Meatspace time? Yes.”

Zula glanced at a chronograph on Fronk’s arm. It was now eight o’clock in the evening. “How long is that in Bitworld?”

“Three days have passed there. But as you can see,” Eva went on, “it is slowing way down. And look! Now Verna is on the move!” Her attention had been drawn by exclamations from other viewers positioned farther to the east. Indeed it was possible to see a female form astride a horse, galloping as if to intercept El. The movement was too fast for the horse’s gait to look quite natural. But as Eva had pointed out, the Time Slip Ratio was dropping fast. So it got slower and more normal-looking as Verna drew closer.

“What is that woman carrying? It looks heavy!” Zula asked, pointing to a figure who seemed to be bent under a heavy load.

“We’ve been trying to categorize it. Grepping through ancient datasets. It seems to be the avatar of a cryptographic key. El made it a long time ago. Then he destroyed it. But not before Corvallis did something sneaky—used his privs to make a copy.”

“So, that’s the copy?”

“Apparently.”

One reason for the slowdown was obvious: the Landform was changing its shape. El was causing a bridge to grow across the gap separating him from Escherville, where Sophia and Maeve and several others were up to something at the approaches to the abandoned castle.

“I get it,” Zula said, in a bold assertion of non–Uncle Claude–ness. “He’s burning a lot of mana. Actually reshaping the Landform in real time. But just making a bridge isn’t expensive enough to slow things down that much.”

“True that,” said a young man nearby. Inevitably, Zula couldn’t remember his name, but she basically liked him, which was all that mattered. “Most of the slowdown is actually being caused by mana use from processes over in Landform Two. Old-school Pantheon gangstas. Including the notorious REAP.”

True That, as Zula had decided to call him, had been mostly hanging around in a corner of the big room with a smaller cluster of people who were looking at visualizations related to Landform 2: the separate chunk of Bitworld where the Pantheon seemed to hang out. Because it was all veiled in weird crypto over there, no one could really tell what it looked like, and so they were looking at abstractions: moving charts, fluctuating surfaces of data, rivers of text.

“And how do you know it is a Renascent Egdod-Associated Process?” Zula asked.

True That got an awkward look on his face. She could tell she’d committed a sort of faux pas. If she’d been a twenty-year-old intern he’d have confidently mansplained it to her. Because she was who she was, he couldn’t see a way forward.

She had to find it for him. “Never mind,” she said. “You can just tell. You have heuristics. REAPs just give off a certain holographic vibe. When one pops up, alarms go off.”

“Something like that, ma’am,” he answered with a nod so deep it almost became a bow. Behind him, she could see the thing they were looking at over there: one of those 3-D data visualizations you had to have a math degree to make sense of.

A notion occurred to her and she tossed it out, just to be mischievous: “Has anyone actually looked at it recently?”

“At what?”

“Landform Two. You know, my uncle’s neighborhood.”

“Well… you can’t see anything there, it’s… scrambled.”

She shrugged. “Just curious. You definitely can’t see if you don’t look.”

True That seemed to take her point. He raised a hand in a way indicative of working with some kind of interface. But Zula’s across-the-room conversation with him had become impossible as the larger group in the middle of the room had become very noisy. Not so much like professionals in a meeting. More in the manner of fans at a boxing match.

So Zula, along with everyone else, watched it happen. The Time Slip Ratio was definitely less than one, and so things happened slowly, on a time scale that reminded her of grand opera, where a twenty-minute aria might stand in for what normal people would cover in a quick exchange of text messages. Some kind of epic slugfest was taking place between El and a rock monster. All kinds of other things were going on too and were being excitedly noticed and pointed to by various onlookers. A lot of El’s custom-made humanoids were galloping toward Escherville. Other humanoids, and things that moved like bears, were on the move with Verna, crossing a bridge luxuriant with flowered vines, forming a defensive perimeter.

Her growing sense of Uncle Claude–like confusion was—mercifully—broken by a touch on her elbow. It was True That. “Something you should see, ma’am.”

“More so than all of this?” she exclaimed, gesturing at the melee in Escherville.

“I think so. Oh, and would you like a snack? It’s after midnight.” He proffered an energy bar or something, a gnarled confection of chocolate and granola. She accepted it gratefully, and chomped into it with artificial teeth.

She followed True That into the corner where he and his claque had been hanging out for the last few hours. They had extinguished their inscrutable data-viz-ware and replaced it with a rendering of a city.

It was a city she had never seen before. As she walked closer to it, she assumed it was somewhere in Europe. As she got closer, she began to think China. Some older burg, low lying, built on broken terrain, with an irregular medieval-style street pattern and the odd ancient castle. But it had been modernized with newer high-rises. One in particular rose above it all: a dark tower that somehow managed to combine features of a modern skyscraper and an ancient fortification.

The only thing that made it not look like a realistic rendering of a city on Earth was a huge figure poised atop that tower. It had wings. Leathery, not feathery. It was gazing downward in a brooding way at a big lake below the tower. The lake was almost perfectly circular.

“What is that?” Zula asked.

“Landform Two,” True That said. “Uncloaked. This is the first time we’ve ever actually seen what it looks like. As you know. Ma’am.”

“And the figure on the top of the tower is—”

He nodded. “The REAP.”

It was about then that the whole room came apart into pandemonium as, apparently, very dramatic and exciting things happened in Escherville. Zula didn’t know what to look at. The REAP spread his wings and sprang into the air. He was diving into the lake. But he did so in slow motion.

A few minutes after disappearing beneath the surface of the round lake, he popped up in Escherville, on top of the castle that he had built there long ago. The stuff El had bolted around it had all fallen off. She couldn’t make out where her daughter was. This distressed her as a mother.

Much as she wanted to stare at Landform 2, nothing was going on there. All of the Pantheon had followed Dodge (there was no point in calling him anything else now) through the portal that apparently connected the lake to the unshackled castle. So she made her way back to the place where everyone was watching that. Some kind of slow-motion melee played out. The rock monster made another appearance and bear-hugged El into a canyon. People screamed, not so much in horror as in sheer astonishment.

Long ago in the early days of the Pantheon, Zula had got in the habit—which she knew at some level was lazy and wrongheaded—of identifying certain of its members with classical deities of antiquity. Dodge was some combination of Zeus and God. Pluto was, well, Pluto. One of them had always struck her as very Mercury-like in the way he moved about. Another she saw as a kind of Mars. Not that there were a lot of wars to fight in those days, but he was big and seemed to serve as a kind of bouncer. Since they spent all their time in Landform 2, it had been decades since she had seen them.

But there they were, embroiled in this melee around Escherville. Two of them—“Mars” and “Mercury”—took flight, headed south. Whoever was controlling the display made it zoom out so that the spectators could keep those two in view. They were winging southward, soaring over snowcapped mountains, and pretty obviously headed for the palace on the pinnacle. Time was speeding up again as things stabilized. Even so, covering that distance took them a little while. Spectators went out for bathroom breaks or snacks, leaving Zula largely alone. She stood there for a long time watching Dodge, who was tending to something very small and faint that he had cupped in his hand.

Mars and Mercury landed atop the palace without opposition. Meanwhile, back in Escherville, Dodge flew to the top of his castle, then dove into the crack that ran beneath it. Zula, getting the hang of it, swiveled her head toward the Landform 2 display. Sure enough, Dodge emerged a bit later from the round lake in the middle of the city. He beat his wings to gain altitude, then spread them wide to come in for a landing on the top of his dark tower.

At the same moment, in a strikingly symmetrical way, back over in the middle of Landform 1, Mercury rose up into the air above the white tower. In one hand he was holding a thing that looked like a horn. He raised this to his lips, and blew.

They could not hear the sound of it, but they could see it spreading outward like a shock wave. Above, this dissipated into the sky like one of those ice halos sometimes visible around the sun on a cold day. But below, as it propagated downward along the sheer shaft of the pinnacle, it seemed to touch off a disturbance in the hivelike cellular structure that had grown around the rock. This was a little like seeing a trail of gunpowder flash into smoke. Or one of those things atomic scientists used to see the trails of subatomic particles through vapor. A cloud chamber. But too it put her in mind of buds unfurling in time-lapse.

It propagated quickly down the skinny part of the pinnacle where the hive was thin but slowed dramatically as it reached the lower stretch where it broadened to include many more cells.

And at some point, the display simply froze up. She turned toward Landform 2 and saw it frozen as well. She heard a man, an older chap, making a joke about needing to reboot the projector—a reference that meant nothing to most of the people in the room.

“It’s not actually frozen,” someone explained. “The Time Slip Ratio has dropped to ten to the minus three. And still dropping.” Meaning that a thousand or more seconds had to elapse in Meatspace to simulate one second of time in Bitworld.

“I see it changing though!” Eva exclaimed. She sounded so convinced of this that Zula maneuvered closer to where she was standing, trying to see it. Eva was gazing at “Mercury,” suspended above the palace with wings spread wide, horn pressed to his lips. And something about him created the most extraordinary impression in Zula’s mind. He was not moving. And yet he was changing all the time. Changing for the better. His wings, his hair, the expression on his face: the display simply couldn’t update itself fast enough to capture all the detail.

Zula was remembering her early days working for Dodge’s video game company, when the graphics cards that drew the pixels on your screen sometimes just didn’t have the oomph to get the job done and so you would have to turn down the resolution, slow the frame rate, get rid of the fancy textures, just so you could play the game at full speed. It made everything look bad, but sometimes you just had to do it. When you turned that stuff back on, it was striking how beautiful, how real, the graphics could look.

What was now clear to her was that all her seeing of the Landform up until now had been with the graphics turned down to the fast-but-crappy setting. It had to be that way, for the LVU to keep up with the pace of events in Bitworld.

“Ten to the minus four,” someone intoned. “Just unbelievable.”

Ten thousand seconds—about three hours—now had to go by to simulate one second of time in Bitworld. The system was overwhelmed.

“But everything’s still basically working, right?” Eva asked.

“Perfectly.” Meaning that the processes who inhabited Bitworld were not experiencing it any differently than they had been before this slowdown. The flow of time, the qualia they experienced, were all the same.

And what qualia! Zula stepped in even closer. Every hair on Mercury’s head was now being rendered by graphics algorithms that suddenly had a lot of time on their hands and that had been turned up to eleven. The sun was not only bouncing off of but refracting through every shaft of hair, making it both gleam and glow. The lenses of his eyes glistened with moisture, and she could see that he was just about to begin weeping. But the tear in the corner of his eye had not yet broken loose. She could see the world reflected in it.

He was beautiful. The whole place was beautiful.

“Makes you want to go there, doesn’t it?” asked a man’s voice, just next to her.

She turned to see that older chap who had made the joke earlier, and recognized him as Enoch Root.

“Did you really just ask me if I want to die?” she shot back.

He just got a wry look and said nothing. As if she had caught him out in some mischief.

“Why don’t you have a go,” she suggested, “and send me a message back from the next world?”

“I still have responsibilities in the previous one,” he answered.

“So this has happened before?” she asked. She began strolling over toward the visualization of Landform 2, where Dodge—Egdod—the REAP—whatever you wanted to call him—was poised, wings spread, above the top of his dark tower.

“Perhaps not this,” said Enoch, walking by her side, “but—”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes,” he confirmed.

“Ten to the minus five!” called True That. He was speaking a little distractedly, as he was fascinated by the appearance of Dodge.

“It’s all because of what is going on in the hive,” confirmed Eva. She’d been checking out some stats, evidently. “The processes in those cells are breaking loose—emerging into the world—like larvae coming out of their cocoons. Seeing the Landform for the first time, thinking, interacting. It’s like we’re uploading thousands of new processes every second. And it’s only going to get more so.”

“Ten to the minus six.”

“What are we going to do with all our free time?” someone joked.

“Look at basically freeze-frames,” Eva guessed. “Like illustrations in an old paper book, sort of.”

Zula had now drawn close enough to confirm that Dodge’s graphics had also been turned up to eleven. His face was not exactly that of Richard Forthrast, but his expressions matched what she remembered of her uncle. His gaze was intent upon the cupped palm of his hand, where nestled a tiny burst of finely structured light. In its complexity she imagined she could see the beginnings of a human form.

“I understand the speed of light!” she blurted.

Faces turned toward her, gawped, then turned away. A hundred years ago, someone would have taken her up on the gambit. Now people were too intimidated—or perhaps they assumed she was finally losing it.

Except for Enoch. “Explain it,” he urged her. “I’ve always wanted to understand.”

“Ever since I was a child, I’ve been hearing physicists insist that nothing can travel faster than light. That it would break the universe somehow. Something to do with causality.”

“You can’t have an effect until the cause has arrived,” Enoch said, nodding. “And causes can only travel so fast.”

“Never completely made sense to me when it was explained that way. Seemed arbitrary. Like a rule that had been imposed from outside the system.”

Enoch was nodding and smiling.

Zula went on, “But it’s what we are doing at this very moment to Bitworld! We are saying that according to the rules of the simulation, everything, everywhere, has to march forward in lockstep. As much as we might like to see how it all comes out—whether that tear is going to break loose from Mercury’s eye, for example—we may not. We can’t throw more mana at it and fast-forward that one part of the simulation, because then it would be out of sync with all the other parts. It would break the world.”

“And we can’t have that, can we?”

“No! We can’t have that, Enoch.”

Enoch looked over at the frozen god. “This is not going to change for a very long time,” he said, “for the reason that you just mentioned. There are young people here who may spend the next ten years of their lives managing the systems in orbit above us that will generate the next few moments of time in Bitworld. But you know what?”

“No. What?”

Enoch pivoted so that he was standing beside her, and bent his arm in what Zula recognized as a very old-fashioned courtly sort of gesture. She reached out with some caution, not wanting to poke him with her exoskeleton, and took it. “Outside,” Enoch said in a quiet voice just for her, “the sun is about to come up on the other side of the hill.”

“We’ve been here all night!?”

“We’ve been here all night,” he confirmed, “and I don’t know about you but I could use some fresh air and a leg stretch.”

Without really talking about it, they walked in the general direction of the place where she had been living for the last few years, on the top of Capitol Hill. She had moved back up there after she’d become bored of the houseboat on the lake. The whole point of the boat had been to provide her with a flat walk to work, after her knees had gone bust. But the modern Fronk had no difficulty with hills and she had felt like getting a place with more of a view. So she had moved to a huge old mansion up on the crest of the hill, a thing built in the early 1900s for a ten-child family with a full complement of servants. It had been sitting empty for a while. She had acquired similar properties to either side of it, knocked the houses down, and converted their lots to gardens. It had amused her to populate these with small creatures, and so they now supported a carefully tended fake ecosystem of chickens, peacocks, goats, alpacas, and a pair of big mellow dogs. It was being looked after by a couple of young people who had been staying in her house for the last few months. She had forgotten their names. Having children was now an eccentric activity, so it was a good bet that their parents were what they had used to call hippies, or at least artists. Anyway they liked animals and enjoyed looking after them and had nothing else to do.

As they ascended, she fancied for a moment that something had gone awry with her vision system, for everything began to look soft, and she couldn’t see as far. She drew air into her lungs. One of those was the original, the other had gone on the blink some while ago and been replaced with a brand-new printed substitute. Anyway, when she drew the cool air into her new and her old lung, she sensed it was heavy and humid. Then she understood that up on the heights where the air was cold, it was foggy. Or, to put it another way, she and Enoch had, in a quite literal and technical sense, ascended into the clouds.

The time of year was late fall. Some leaves were still on the trees, and many more on the ground, but the color had gone from them, unless you considered dark brown to be a color. The lack of foliage drew attention to the trees themselves. These had become rampant. Planted along the streets two hundred years ago, they must have been mere saplings when the neighborhoods were new. By the time young Zula had moved to town, they had become problems. Their roots heaved up sidewalks and made great ripples across old red-brick streets. Their limbs fell off in windstorms. Their branches interfered with utility lines. Taxpayers paid for crews of arborists to roam about cutting weird rectangular vacancies in them for wires to run through. Paving crews did what they could about root damage.

Those days were over, and had been for a long time. Modern vehicles were as likely to move about on legs as wheels, so no one really cared about bumps in pavement. Modern utilities ran underground. Even had those things not been the case, the tax base wasn’t there to support all those arborists and pavers. So the trees—all of them deciduous imports from the East Coast or Europe—had been doing as they pleased for decades. And what pleased them was apparently getting drunk on sky-high levels of atmospheric CO₂ and flinging out roots and limbs as wide as they possibly could. Capitol Hill was becoming a forest straight out of Northern European high-fantasy literature. The fog was now becoming tinged with pink and gold light as the rising sun shone on it, and the boughs of the trees cast shadows through that.

They reached her neighborhood, where the trees were hugest, and linked by nearly as ancient hedges of laurel and holly. A soft glow pervaded everything and tinged solid objects with iridescence. Beyond that, there was nothing. No sky, no neighboring houses, no trees, no mountains. The fog had clamped it all off. It muffled sound too. Not that there was much of that in a half-abandoned city where vehicles were a thing of the past. She and Enoch were existing in a bubble of space maybe a hundred paces across. Beyond it, as she knew perfectly well, was a whole world. But one of the delicious qualia that emerged from certain kinds of weather—snowfall was another of them—was the childish illusion that the world really was small and simple enough to be comprehended within a glance. And that she, the one doing the glancing, was always at its center.

She wondered if it had been thus for Dodge in the beginning, when he had been alone in Bitworld and the Landform had begun to take shape around him.

“This is where I leave you,” said the voice of Enoch.

“Where on earth are you going?” Zula asked, looking about for him. But she had lost him in the radiant fog.

His voice was clear, though. It was the only sound in the world.

“I’m not entirely sure,” he admitted. “But I’m done here. I did what I was sent to do.”

The golden light grew until it was all she could see, and his voice was heard no more.

56

Dodge became conscious.

He had slept well despite dreaming long elaborate dreams about the other plane of existence. The sun had awakened him, rising above the rim of the distant Land and flooding the Firmament with light.

He had slept, as he did most nights, on the open lid of a tower that rose high above the streets of the city. For many years the lid had been an open and featureless disk of stone, but more recently he had raised a ring of pillars around its edge, and between the pillars Spring had caused vines to grow and interweave to make a low barrier. It came only to midthigh on Dodge, but it was high enough to prevent a little soul from toppling over the edge.

Spring had not slept with him last night, though. When Dodge got to his feet and strolled over to the western side of his tower he could look across several miles of city to the park. For long ages that had been a mound of rubble that the souls of the Firmament had carried there, one back-load at a time, and piled up as they had patiently excavated and reshaped the cratered landscape where they had come to rest on the day of the Fall. Thus they had built the city with its black streets lit by fire. But the rubble pile had not become a park until Spring had gone to it and begun to adorn it with her creations.

He spread his wings and beat up into the air. His destination would be the park, but, as was his habit, he took a brief excursion around the city first. Its buildings tended to be of regular shapes with straight sides and edges, framed of stone and faced with glass to afford views and admit light. But they were built along streets that since the beginning of the Second Age had veered round diverse hazards and obstructions. Most prominent of all such was the crater that Egdod had made when he had smashed into the Firmament and broken it. This was now a circular pond of chaos round whose shores many buildings had been erected out of the ring of rubble that had once surrounded it. Dodge flew over that, as he always did, and gazed down into it. In its depths he saw the Fastness. He could tell at a glance that all was well there. In its towers and courtyards would be many souls whose work it was to look after those realms of the Land where Egdod held sway. No doubt many of them would have news to relate and questions to ask. But there was nothing that required his attention this morning.

Satisfied of that, he banked round over the district between the crater and the park. In the midst of that, a new building had gone up of late. Pick’s Cube, they called it. It was sheathed in adamant and styled after the Cube from which the members of the Quest had retrieved the key. They had named it after the soul who had fallen just short of that goal. On its roof, well back from the edges so that it could not be seen from the streets, was a perch surrounded by bones, and on the perch was a giant talking raven.

Though it was early in the day, Dodge could see Querc approaching its front door. She divided her time between Land and Firmament. While she was here, she worked in Pick’s Cube with Thingor and Corvus and Knotweave and other curious souls who were skilled at plumbing the deep nature of things. They strove to divine the hidden secrets of the other plane of existence and to fashion ever tinier and more sophisticated machines.

Spring could force a tree to grow tall in an hour if that was what she wanted, but she preferred to let them take their time. Only a few years had passed since the Fastness had been unchained. She had begun coming here to look after the park, and so most of what grew here was flowers and vines and grasses. In one place Dodge had caused stone arches to curve out of the rubble and enclose a little place where he had set an adamant bench and a low table. Spring had made flowering vines grow exuberantly on the arches, covering the stone altogether to make a vaulted bower of blossoms just now opening their petals and turning toward the sun.

The girl was waiting on the bench just as she did every morning. She was paging quietly through one of the picture books strewn about the table. Egdod sat next to her. “You’ve lost our place!” he exclaimed in mock dismay. “How are we going to pick up the story now?”

Sophia knew perfectly well that her uncle was only teasing her. “We were almost at the end!” she chided him. “I went back to look at the picture of the lady with the yellow hair. In the white temple. She’s pretty! But mean. She was cruel to poor Prim.”

“Yes, she was.”

“I wish she was dead!”

“You should never,” Dodge said, “wish that of anyone. Just imagine: what if your wish came true?”

But Sophia had already lost interest in the picture of the lady with the yellow hair and paged forward to very near the end of the book. “We were here,” she said, showing him a two-page illustration crowded with small figures. It was a map of the Land, drawn in a childlike style with oversized buildings and other features here and there: the Palace in the middle atop its Pinnacle, the Fastness to its north amid snow-covered mountains, cities along the western coast, and various castles and legendary beasts scattered among the Bits and in the ocean beyond.

“Right!” Dodge said. “Where were we?”

Sophia reminded him by putting her fingertip on a depiction of a boat sailing in the western ocean. Aboard was a dark-skinned woman, decorated with jewels and markings on her skin.

“Fern had finally seen what she had been searching for ever since the sea monster had taken her family when she was a little girl,” Dodge said. “Having seen it, she was satisfied, and wanted only to live a seafaring life. And since her new friends the Bufrects were famous mariners, she went with Mard and Lyne to Calla, and there built a boat and called it Swab.”

Sophia’s finger had already strayed to the island of Calla (she had heard this story a hundred times) and come to rest on a castle rising from the top of a green hill. “Hello, giant!” she said. “I see you!” For the artist had cleverly drawn the hill so that if you looked at it the right way you could see it as a hill-giant curled up on the ground sleeping.

“Ssh, you’ll wake it up!”

“That’s not what it says in the book!”

“All right. After King Brindle gave his life for the Quest, Paralonda Bufrect was the rightful queen of Calla. But she had no desire to rule and so she passed the crown to Prince Anvellyne.”

“His friends called him Lyne,” Sophia informed him gravely.

“And King Anvellyne ruled wisely over Calla with Mardellian as his closest friend, adviser, and…”

“Magician!”

“Mard the One-Handed became a wizard, yes. Together they saw to it that…”

Sophia’s finger had already strayed north to a cottage surrounded by livestock. A white-haired woman was shown carrying a bushel of wheat on her hip. “Edda!”

“…that Edda the Giantess was made to feel welcome whenever she chose to stay alone in her cottage. But she loved to wander back and forth between there and…”

Sophia’s finger made a huge swipe eastward across Bits and Shivers and Bewilderment to a golden glen in the mountains not far from a towering black fortress.

“Yes,” said Dodge, “the glen where she loved to spend time with her mother and her grandmother.”

A wild look came into Sophia’s eyes and she looked up into Dodge’s face. “How tall is a giantess, Uncle Dodge?” she asked, as if she did not ask the same question every single day.

“As tall as she wants to be,” said Dodge.