Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,193

of a wax hive or a mud nest that is erected in a tree, with winding internal passageways and clusters of cells in which souls could live. Even at this remove, Egdod could hear on the wind a low hum that was being made by many of those souls speaking in consonance. It seemed that their habit of emulating the speech of bees, which had so puzzled Speaksall, had driven the words from their mouths and rendered them deaf and dumb to the old ways of talking. No strain of melody nor pulse of rhythm informed it, for they had forgotten music as well.

“These are very considerable changes,” Egdod said, “and I find it strange that no one of the Palace came to the Fastness to make me aware that such things were afoot.”

“It began slowly, then came on with a suddenness in the last few days,” said Longregard. “Freewander sought you there but was told that you had gone on a long journey. In the time since, the height of the Tower has more than doubled. The humming can be heard at all hours, for those souls no longer go into their houses of an evening, but stay together in the myriad cells of the Tower and join their voices into that weird song and combine their auras as well.”

“I shall ponder what to do about this,” Egdod said, “but in the meantime I am of a mind to build this hill and this Palace higher. For I do not like having yon Tower of a height equal to my abode, as I require silence and privacy in order to go about my work of bettering the Land.”

Egdod then flew away and sought out the wild soul whose form was the west wind, which often brought clouds and rain. At Egdod’s bidding, this one brought down a heavy storm that enshrouded the hill and the Palace. Thereby concealed, Egdod raised the hill to twice its former height, and made the walls and towers of the Palace grow higher as well. When the storm cleared in the morning, however, he saw that the state of things had not improved so much as he had fancied; for the storm had not washed the upper part of the Tower away, and during the hours of darkness the souls had built it up even higher.

“How can it be that a thing made of mud can rise to such a height and withstand the fury of the storm?” Egdod asked Greyhame in the morning.

Greyhame answered, “Not only mud is it made of, but of the souls themselves. As the bees exude wax to make their hives, these souls put something of themselves into the stuff of the Tower, weaving their very auras into it. As long as they remain conjoined there by this mingling of their souls and the singing of the bees’ speech, the Tower will stand and grow.”

“What drives them to do this?” asked Egdod. “True, I told them last year at the feast of the apples that they ought to emulate the bees rather than swat them, but they cannot have understood my words to mean such wrongful alterations in their way of being.”

“They are all souls like you, Egdod,” Greyhame returned, “and as such they are heir to the boredom and frustration that once drove you to make the Land. But they are not equal to you in their powers to shape their world, and so they make do with what they have, which is the workings of their own minds and the meager capabilities of their own forms.”

Egdod took to the air and went down the street and flew around the tower for a time, gazing into its tortuous passageways of packed mud in such places as they were exposed to view, sensing the hum of the souls through its gray walls. The sound of it waxed and waned, and disturbances in it propagated up and down. In it Egdod sensed a savor of that mutual pleasuring that Warm Wings had brought knowledge of and that most members of the Pantheon had now known. But whereas they had done it two by two, now it seemed that all of the souls were doing it with all of the others at once.

That night Egdod summoned not just the west wind but the other three as well, and called down a storm of great violence. In the midst of it he built the hill and the Palace taller yet, thinking thereby