Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,389

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