Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,176

its center was the dark wet fold in the earth from which the spring emerged.

Longregard bated as they passed through the innermost ring of trees, and held her distance as Egdod kept walking toward the spring.

“Welcome, Egdod,” said the voice from the spring. “What is it you would give life to?”

Egdod, not trusting his power of speech, stretched out his hand with the tiny pair of glass and metal wings perched on the tip of a finger.

The spring’s rushing grew and filled the grove with a sound that put him in mind of the hiss of chaos, but he knew that in it was much greater order, the product of a cunning that had dwelled patiently in this place for nigh as long as Egdod had been here. He knew now that the soul that dwelled in the spring had been gathering her powers for as long as he had. But they were powers of a different order.

The tip of his finger fizzed. He gazed at it to see an aura streaming in from all directions. The sensation was akin to what he had felt when the aura of Ward had touched his knee, but again with less of chaos and more of a sort of order that it was beyond his powers to understand. It focused and sharpened and he saw that it was caused by a rapid vibration in the wings, which were now moving of their own accord. Gazing at them more closely he saw that they had been transformed, and were no longer the glass and metal constructions that Thingor had so laboriously wrought, but even finer and lighter, and made of different stuff. Joining them together was a narrow body. As he looked on, this sprouted legs, and at one end a tiny head, and at the other a sharp tail that curved under.

He sensed that it was about to fly away and so he closed his thumb over the top of it so that he could hold it in place and better examine it. But as he did so the sharp tail penetrated his fingertip and caused a sensation that made him jerk his hand back. The creature took flight and hovered for a moment in front of his face, then drifted away and settled upon the purple blossom of a flower that had emerged from the soil by the mouth of the spring.

There was a form in the water, akin to the ones that Egdod and the other souls had adopted, but without wings. She seemed to have been reclining in the flow of the stream, but now rose to a seated position, letting the water flow around her buttocks and legs, but with her body and head and arms up where Egdod could see them.

“The name of it is Pain,” Spring said, glancing at Egdod’s hand, which he was still holding out away from his body as if to distance himself from it.

“I begin to remember it,” Egdod said.

“If you make a practice of summoning forth new kinds of creatures that can act of their own volition, you will suffer more, as bad and worse,” Spring predicted, now looking Egdod directly in the eye.

“It is nonetheless worth doing,” Egdod said, “though I lack the power of doing it myself.”

“To nurture that power has been my work here,” Spring said. “But I do not possess the art of devising clever shapes into which life can be breathed.”

“Together we shall do it, then,” Egdod proposed.

“You may make a place for me in your Palace and I shall dwell there from time to time,” Spring said, “when it suits me to adopt a form such as yours. But if you look about and do not see me there, it is because I am here.” As she said the last words, her voice became a rush of wet noise and her form dissolved into a hill of water that collapsed and surged down out of the Grove. Then it was gone from the place, but Spring, he knew, remained here.

Part 6

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This is not an ordinary business meeting,” Elmo Shepherd announced through the impassive face of his Metatron. “Do not be deceived by its mundane aspect: the conference table, the pitcher of water, you men and women in business attire. We are doing eschatology here. Practicing it the way some people do yoga.”

Corvallis actually didn’t think it seemed so mundane. Yes, it was a fairly conventional conference room in the offices of ONE. But the table was