Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,350

Prim and I have both seen remarkable things. I think that between us we have a clear-eyed view of how matters stand. Let me assure you that none of us would ever make such a gross error as to confuse you with the long-exiled member of the Pantheon known as Pluto.”

“I have met him, though,” Pick offered, in a mild tone of voice that would not ordinarily be used to deliver such remarkable news.

The next silence was even longer. Apparently not even Corvus could offer a comeback. It was left to Mard—in some ways the most naive, and most content-to-be-naive, member of the party—to respond. “Wow! How’d that work, since Pluto is in exile up in the sky, and you live in the Land? Are you one of the old souls of First Town, who knew the Pantheon before El hurled them out?”

“Not quite that old,” said Pick. “I did live in First Town for a brief time before Egdod blew it up, and saw the Pantheon from a distance. But by that time they had already grown remote from the doings of common souls such as I, and Pluto of course was ever the least sociable of the Old Gods.”

“By process of elimination, then, your claim is that you met Pluto . . . after he was exiled? You traveled up to the Red Web?” Lyne was the one to ask this, and he did so in a skeptical tone.

“Yes and no,” said Pick. He crossed his arms and looked Corvus straight in the eye.

“That’s all I needed to hear,” said Corvus. “Let’s go.”

“We’ve only just begun to hear Pick’s story!” Prim protested. “We can’t just walk away from him now.”

“They’re coming with us,” Corvus explained.

“Where do you imagine we will be going in one another’s company?” Pick inquired.

“Oh, you know,” Corvus answered.

Abandoning the hut, though extraordinary, was apparently not unprecedented, for Pick had procedures. These were unfamiliar to Querc and so it could be guessed that Pick had not abandoned it recently. A perfectly circular crack in the floor turned out to encompass a stone disk about a hand’s breadth in thickness, which Mard and Lyne with some difficulty pulled up and rolled out of the way to reveal a cylindrical cavity about half as deep as a person was tall. Like every other feature of the hut not improvised from beach-wrack, this just was, and showed no sign of having been chiseled out or built up through any discernible process. Pick took some stuff out of it and put other stuff into it. What he put into it consisted of items likely to be damaged by water or fire: mostly notes in Querc’s hand, and blank paper, and old books. What he took out of it consisted of even older books and a thing he denoted the sample case and that Mard, Lyne, Prim, and Querc—who took turns carrying it—soon called That Fucking Box. All of which was still in the future when they replaced the stone disk and sealed it around the edges with mortar that Pick whipped up from water, sand, and various powders taken from sacks and clay urns around the property, one of which was labeled BONES.

Having seen to that, they simply walked away. All of this happened, apparently, as a result of a private side conversation between Pick and the giant talking raven that took no longer than it did for the junior members of the Quest to clear the table and do the washing up. It took place out of earshot, which, around here, with the wind and the surf and the seething and gnashing of the Newest Shiver, wasn’t saying much. In short, Corvus did not seem to have lost any of his knack for talking strange persons (supposing Pick was even a person) into going along on the Quest. Thinking back on the case of the late Brindle Calladon—who had agreed to the idea ostensibly just because he thought Quests were the sort of thing Calladons and Bufrects ought to do—Prim guessed that Corvus must have had some way of getting people to see why the Quest was a good thing for them. What that might mean in Pick’s case she dared not even guess at.

51

Pick was very firmly of the opinion that the Quest’s odds would be boosted immeasurably by a little excursion to the Asking—the long peninsula that, south of here, reached far out to the southwest for no discernible reason other than the folkloric one that