Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,282

right here,” it announced, “not to bandy words!” The angel spread its wings to an immense breadth and beat them once with all of its might. Adam and Walksfar were flung back on the ground with such violence that they both lay dazed for some little while.

Adam was brought to his senses by the cries of small souls in pain, and of Eve in horror and rage. He got up to his feet and ran into the cabin to find the angel bent over a male soul, at work with the little knife. The infant let out a sharp cry and the angel turned away, finished, blood dripping from its hand. At a glance Adam took in the five other boys, all screaming with small ribbons of blood between their legs. Eve was trying to comfort them. They had all been cut while Adam lay dazed.

“Yes,” said Messenger of El, turning toward Adam, “it is all finished—except for you, Adam. One more cut and the Land will be forever safe from the errors of Egdod and of Spring.”

Adam reached behind the door and found the handle of his axe and drew it forth.

The angel laughed. “You are more naive than I had imagined if you think to oppose the might of one of El’s hosts with that.”

Something hard and cold pushed Adam aside, and he felt the earthen floor shake under the tread of one who outweighed him by a hundredfold. Cairn had entered, and now directly confronted the angel, who only looked upon the old soul curiously, as if he had never seen or imagined its like. Cairn advanced one more step, as if obliging the angel’s curiosity. They stood face-to-face for a moment. Then Cairn clapped his hands, or rather the blunt extremities of his upper limbs.

Messenger of El burst like a ripe fruit struck with a hammer. Gobbets of its aura sprayed the walls, ceiling, and floor. Its head and upper body were gone altogether. The lower parts and the arms and wings lost coherence and drifted apart, settling in various parts of the cabin. The effect was somewhat like how it had been at Elkirk when Adam and Eve had stood in the lower chamber with many new souls, scattered about the place, barely holding themselves together. The stuff that angels were made of was brighter. Yet the fragments of it lacked the coherence even of new souls, so powerfully had the blow dealt by Cairn disrupted Messenger of El’s form. Scarce any part of the cabin’s interior had gone unspattered, and the whole place was alight with the fizzing and fluctuating shine of the angel’s aura. Adam reached out to comfort the six of the infants who had come under the knife, then drew his hand back as he noticed that it had been spattered. As he gazed in fascination at the gobbet of aura on the back of his hand, the stuff spread out and melted into his flesh, which glowed. This presently faded but he could feel something new coursing up his arm and into his chest, whence it spread through his body, making his head swim and his extremities tingle. He reached out again, this time to steady himself on the table where Messenger of El had done the cutting. The little boy lying before him had stopped crying. Patches of angel-stuff were soaking into him, setting most of his body aglow, and Adam could only assume that the boy was experiencing similar sensations.

Eve was up on her feet, gathering handfuls of it from places where it had spattered on the floor or the walls. Much of it had sunk into the earth. Adam fancied that the ground was shifting under his feet, though perhaps this was just the result of Cairn shambling out the door.

Cairn’s rough form was silhouetted by a brilliant light, which caused Adam a moment’s fear that more angels were coming, but when Cairn stepped aside, revealed was Walksfar, approaching the cabin holding the sword that the angel had left leaning against the tree. This had reverted to its original radiant form. “I did not expect that today was going to end with us in a fight with angels,” said Walksfar, “but if that is the case, Thingor would want us to make use of this.”

The talk of fighting was more than Adam wished to hear and so he turned his back to see how matters now stood in the cabin. Most of the angel-stuff was gone, for