Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,174

While the Palace was shrouded in fog and mist, he went to the fourth corner and tried once again to erect a tower there, and found it easier. Too, he added more rooms to the front of the Palace: an antechamber between the Gatehouse and the main room, where he fancied that Speaksall might lodge and do the work of talking to other souls, and a tower above the Gatehouse where Freewander could perch if she found it to her liking.

When the fog cleared and the people of Town could gaze up at the new form of the Palace, changes were thereby wrought in their minds, but somehow it was easier this way; Egdod did not have to do the work of it, for the world was simply telling them all what was there and what was not. As a further trial of this idea, he waited until night, when the people of Town were wont to go inside their houses. He went down to the park and found no one there to watch. Just to be sure of that, he drew a mist around the place, then returned to the ill-formed stump of rock he had left there earlier. With ease he was able to draw the stone up out of the grass and shape it into a little tower that echoed the shape of the ones he had made at the corners of his Palace.

After this matters became more settled, for a time, in both Town and Palace. Speaksall took up residence in his antechamber, and Freewander made her home in the new tower above the Gatehouse.

Summer passed into fall. Egdod made a practice of walking down the Street from time to time and strolling in the Park to observe the doings of the souls who now frequented it, but also to be observed by them. He came to recognize more souls who had distinguished themselves in some way. There was one who liked to perch on the top of the little tower in the middle of the Park and simply look about for days at a time; Egdod named her Long Regard and made her a chamber in the top of the Palace’s fourth tower, the one that most directly overlooked Town. Another had made his house extraordinarily complicated and handsome; Egdod named him Thingor and afforded him an outbuilding attached to the Palace’s side wall, where he could work on the making of new things away from the stifling gaze of other souls.

Egdod taught Freewander the art of flying great distances and showed her how to pierce the storm wall surrounding the Fastness. This became extraordinarily fierce as winter set in, but Freewander’s supple body and nimble wings were equal to it. Thingor, by contrast, was a poor flyer whose wings got smaller and smaller the less he used them. Egdod carried him to the Fastness from time to time, and left him there for weeks at a stretch to better it. There Thingor learned new arts of fashioning things from diverse metals, sheets of transparent rock, and novel varieties of stone, all of which he discovered in the deranged underpinnings of the Knot, where Pluto had thought it good to place them. Thingor quarried those minerals from the depths with the help of other souls whom Longregard had made note of in Town for their interest in delving and shaping the earth.

Egdod, for his part, spent many days in the Garden striving to achieve a thing more difficult than any he had ever attempted since he had first brought himself forth out of the chaos.

Seeing the souls moving about in the Park from high above had put him in mind of another one of those almost-memories. He was growingly certain that the world in which he had lived before he had died had been inhabited by creatures that moved about of their own volition. In this, they were unlike trees and grass and flowers, which lacked the power of movement except when stirred by the wind. But neither were they like souls. They belonged to an order that lay somewhere between. The notion had been in his mind for a long time, and he had sensed that the Land was not complete without such beings. But it was so ill formed that he had made no headway with it until he had stumbled upon the notion of clustering flowers together into beds—a project that Freewander had made her own once Egdod had seeded the general