Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,317

Until recently they had been traversing wolfish country, where even the creatures that weren’t wolves tended to come equipped with a remarkable array of horns, tusks, and claws. In such places Burr liked to advance to the head of the group. Brindle liked to bring up the rear. Remarks he’d made along the way suggested he was afraid of being attacked from behind by unspecified creatures who—or so it could be guessed—were extraordinarily quiet in their movements and patient in their approach to hunting. But there hadn’t been much excitement so far. Everything that had come at them had done so from the front and found itself on the wrong end of Burr’s spear. A few times Prim had taken up her bow and nocked an arrow, just in case, but not let any fly.

At no point during even the most thrilling encounters had Burr actually shown signs of excitement, or exhibited the least reluctance to keep forging ahead, and so it was strange that he now stopped, in an open space with no wild beasts of any kind in evidence, and no obstructions. A stone’s throw away, off to their left, a couple of mounts were eating grass, bending their necks to crop it from the ground and then bobbing back up to eye them curiously as they chewed.

“No walls, really,” Burr pointed out. “No weapons. Livestock out in plain sight, unafraid.”

“Yes indeed,” Mard said, “it seems very safe.”

“Why?” Brindle asked. Rhetorically. “That’s what Burr is asking himself.”

Mardellian hadn’t considered that angle. Neither had Prim.

“Well,” Mard guessed, “you know, we haven’t seen what’s inside the cottage yet.”

“Bread baking, to judge from the fragrance,” Prim said.

“It could be full of armed Autochthons.”

“It’s not,” said Brindle, and nodded at Burr. The man-at-arms, after giving the cottage only a quick look, had turned his back on it and was now surveying the sweep of dark hills that enclosed the valley and the pair of snowcapped peaks at its head, between which they had passed yesterday.

“You see—” Brindle began.

But Lyne, impatient with the lesson, cut him off. “We’ve been making our way through her defenses ever since we came down the pass and spotted that wolf up on the ridgeline, staring at us.”

“We’re . . . surrounded?” Mardellian asked.

Burr reversed his grip on the spear so that it became more walking stick than weapon. The party spread out to stroll across the pasture seven abreast: On the left flank, the young men Anvellyne and Mardellian, on loan from the clan Bufrect. Then Weaver, who seemed to be vaguely attached to House Calladon. Brindle, its patriarch, walked in the middle. To his right was Prim. Well off to the right was Burr, who preferred keeping his spear arm free of flesh-and-blood obstructions. In the open space between him and Prim, Corvus hopped along, occasionally flying for short bursts when he fell behind or needed to clear one of the stone walls that divided the pastures.

In spite of Corvus’s words, Prim had been holding out for something in a gigantic vein. But as they drew closer to the cottage it became undeniable that it was in no way of unusual size. Not cramped, for certain, and of a somewhat rambling character, as bits had been added on from time to time. One could make out foundation stones of wings that did not exist anymore. These erupted from the ground like rows of teeth from gums. Those must have been relics of ancient sections of the cottage that Edda had built, lived in for a time, and got rid of—or simply allowed to disintegrate with the passage of time.

She wasn’t tiny, at least. She opened the door to greet them and was revealed to be about as tall as Burr. Her hair was white, full and long, braided down her back. She wore an apron streaked with flour, which she took this opportunity to give a brisk shake. The breeze caught the loose flour and bore it gently away. The flour caught the light as it drifted, and beguiled Prim’s eye, for the shape that it took and the manner of its movement was just like that of clouds in the sky when they drifted overhead on a summer’s day. This impression was so strong that it seized her mind entirely for a few moments, during which she could think of nothing save various times in her past life when she had gazed out her window or lain in the grass looking up at clouds.

She did