parapet, could gaze straight down into the void.
The pit of chaos, for its part, was not an isolated hole in the ground, but rather a wide spot in a long sinuous crack that ran all through the underpinnings of the Knot. In some parts it was so narrow that one could step over it with a long stride, in others it was as wide as a great river. In general, though, the farther one went from the Fastness, the narrower it got, until some distance away the ground simply closed over it. Beyond that, Egdod supposed, it might run and ramify beneath other parts of the Land. But this was of concern only to Pluto, who knew how to navigate it, and could use it to travel from one part of the Land to another more rapidly than even Freewander could fly on her swift wings.
Because of the mountains—not just their great height but their nonsensical convolutions—it was not possible to walk to this place from the south. Those coming from east or west would be forced to swing around and make their final approach from the north, where a land route did exist—provided one was willing to traverse many miles of high, difficult, storm-blasted territory. Egdod had always looked upon this as a defect—the only flaw in the otherwise perfect system of defenses surrounding the Fastness. It was too late to change it. But the chasm—the chaos-filled crevice that cut directly beneath the ledge—did form a convenient bight a short distance to the north, running roughly east-west so that any unwanted visitors trying to approach over land would have no choice but to cross it. Egdod had broadened this to a canyon with nearly vertical sides. No soul who lacked wings could jump over it and no builder could bridge it.
Or so Egdod had always convinced himself, until he came in view of the place and saw that it had been bridged.
North of the Fastness, twin abutments of solid stone sprang from the opposing sides of the chasm, directly across from each other. In these parts Pluto had never bothered to convert adamant to new types of stone, as he knew that Egdod would only tear up and redo his work anyway, and so these new growths were likewise of solid adamant, smooth and gracefully curved. They narrowed as they reached toward each other across the chasm. They did not touch in the middle. The gap between their tips had been filled by a trestle of wood: whole tree trunks apparently felled from the forests of the Stormland to the north and dragged here, then pegged and lashed together.
In this way the Stormland to the north had been connected to the Front Yard, which was Egdod’s name for the scrap of flat stony ground that lay between the northern front of the Fastness and the edge of the chasm. He didn’t know why it was called the Front Yard; the name had come to him once as he sat on the Front Porch (as he called the northern steps of the Fastness) and gazed across it.
In any case the Front Yard had been a private and inviolate part of the Land until now. So Egdod was more dumbfounded than enraged to see that it had been invaded by souls who were streaming across the bridge. They were moving in both directions, to and fro. Those moving south, toward the Fastness, carried stones. Those returning northward were empty-handed. As soon as the rock carriers crossed over into the domain of Egdod, they fanned out across the Front Yard and soon came to a place where a low wall of rubble made an arc across the ground. The arc grew slightly higher with every stone that was dropped upon it. Having unburdened themselves, the stone carriers immediately turned about and moved back as quickly as their legs could carry them to fetch more rocks.
It was the most astonishing sight Egdod had ever seen since he had first become conscious in the sea of chaos that preceded the Land. And perhaps it was good that he was so utterly dumbfounded, for otherwise he would have wheeled and dove into the open courtyard of the Fastness and seized as many thunderbolts as he could carry and begun hurling them at everything he saw. As it was, astonishment gave him pause, and in that pause he thought, and in that thinking devised a subtler plan.
He veered sharply into a bank of storm clouds. Longregard