Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,226

time, building up the dark tower that the Pantheon were making into their new abode. When he arrived at the edge of the pit and gazed down into it, he knew directly what he saw. For Pluto had seen it before. “When I first emerged from the chaos-filled hole beneath the Knot, it was exactly thus,” he said. “As we stand here, we seem to gaze downward. But the view is the same as one sees while looking upward from the depths underlying the Knot. What we are gazing upon here is the Fastness, though it seems to be upside down. Closest to us lie its massive foundations, shaped from the rock by the hand of him who in those days was called Egdod, and stretching away from us are its walls. Farther away yet are its high towers, and deep below, as we see things, are the convoluted forms of the Knot.”

The others gathered to view it, and readily agreed that it was so. They saw it all through a swirling veil of static that sometimes coalesced into obscuring clouds and other times paled so thin that it was like looking up through clear water. But the view beyond it was always the same, and answered clearly to their recollections of the Fastness. “If this is a faithful portrait of the place as it is now, and not merely a memory of how it once was, then it is unmolested and undiscovered by El,” said Freewander.

“I believe that to be the case,” said Longregard. For Thingor in the ruins of various craters had found shards of clear crystal that he had polished to make lenses, and in the tops of the towers of the dark castle he had assembled these to make instruments pointed upward, and Longregard now devoted long hours to peering up through those devices and observing the doings of El and his minions and of the thousands of souls scattered across the Land. “El has not torn down the Fastness. But neither has he ignored it; for his minions have constructed mighty works upon what used to be the Front Yard, and walled that place up so that nothing can come out of it.”

Thingor rose up on his legs, the good one and the damaged one, and teetered on the brink of the pit. “I am of a mind to dive right in,” he said, “and return to my workshops that are now so close. Knowing what I know now, I could build them better.”

Pan—the soul formerly known as Paneuphonium—began to pound on a set of war drums fashioned from skulls, sticks of wood, and scraps of skin collected during lost battles. He had a very large penis today, but tomorrow she might decide to have breasts. Something in the sound of the drums roused the Pantheon to action. They all crowded toward the brink.

But Dodge spread one wing out to block Thingor’s view and to nudge him away. The drums of Pan fell silent. “I must ponder carefully how it is to be done,” Dodge announced. “For El and his minions see me coming whenever I draw near. I do not know how, for my disguises have been well crafted and my approaches stealthy.”

Thingor said, “From the land of the living El brought with him powers of knowing and doing that exceed ours. Or perhaps it is more fitting to say that they belong to a different order not well known to us.”

“How can you know this?” Love asked, stepping up to the very edge of the crater so that the white light shining up from the Land illuminated her face. This she had restored to its former beauty, though it was now of a different cast, reflecting all that she had suffered and learned.

Longregard urged her to silence with a look and a gesture. “I too have seen evidence of what Thingor describes.”

“Your question is not unreasonable, Love,” said Thingor, “since the events at the Feast were so brief, and passed for most of us in shock and confusion. But when I went to the storehouse of the thunderbolts I could easily discern that the undoing of the locks had been achieved by means not known to our kind.”

“Likewise,” said Longregard, “my observations tell me that the approaches to the Land are watched, but not by eyes and minds akin to ours. The seeing is done by instruments that are in no way embodied—or if they are, they make no impression on our organs