Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,371

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.