Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,385

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