Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,357

middle where Egdod fell. Scattered about it, smaller ones where the rest of—” She was about to say “us” but substituted, “—the Pantheon landed. Hundreds of scintillas—the lesser souls who Fell in Egdod’s wake. But then in the dark places between, crevices like fiery roads—like the Newest Shiver, you might say—and along them palaces, houses, fortresses of black adamant gleaming by firelight.”

“Wow,” Mard said. “It sounds like you fell asleep and dreamed it.”

“You’re the one who dreams. I’m the one who sees.”

Mard sat up and shifted away. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his arms, so he crossed them in front of his body.

“Chilly?” she asked.

“Maybe a bit.”

He needed an out. She provided one. “You know, Querc over there has been alone with her grief for years. I’m just getting acquainted with mine. I was reflecting yesterday how little time has really passed since Brindle sacrificed himself for the Quest. A fortnight at most?”

“It’s true,” Mard exclaimed, a bit hastily. “No question about it.”

“If I see weird things in the sky, maybe it’s because I’m looking through tears.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Prim!”

“Don’t be,” she said, “but do be patient.”

After dawn, a brief walk over comparatively level ground brought them to an arresting rock formation. The steepness of the rocks they’d climbed yesterday had hid it from the sea. Only Corvus could have directed them here. Prim already knew what it was called, because she’d heard Corvus and Pick talking about it: the Overstrike. As she saw the actual thing, the name made perfect sense. It was probably just the upper reach of the crack they had climbed up yesterday—a fault that, she was beginning to understand, might run all the way from the north to the south coast of the Asking. As had been obvious yesterday, it was not an active, moving Shiver but a thing that had occurred a very long time ago and then become still and dead. Consequently its lower reaches were so full of rubble, gravel, soil, and opportunistic plants that it required some squinting and head-cocking and use of the imagination to understand its nature. Up here, however, it could not have been more obvious. The crack was not vertical but heeled over at an angle about halfway between vertical and horizontal. The width of it—the gap between the two opposing faces—might have been twenty paces. They approached it on its lower side, and the nearer they came to the edge of the actual split, the more its opposite face loomed above them. They passed into its shadow, which in this climate was always a welcome relief. But it made them aware that the opposite face was now jutting out above them, so that any loose stone that might be dislodged from the sharp brink would fall on their heads.

A smooth and featureless ramp of stone descended into darkness. It was strewn here and there with loose pebbles and maculated with patches of white shit from colonies of birds that had built hivelike nest complexes on the under-surface of the crack’s overhanging face. Which—as they saw, when their eyes adjusted—was absolutely featureless. Other than those hanging birds’ nests, nothing was up there for their eyes to gain purchase on. It was as if the under-surface of the Overstrike did not even exist; it was a night sky without stars.

“Adamant. It is what everything was at the dawn of the First Age,” said Pick, after he had given them a good long time to behold it, “after Egdod had conferred on the Land a general shape, and lit stars on the Firmament, before Pluto had come along to look after the particulars. He told me once, long ago, that there were parts of the Land unchanged since Egdod’s First Pass. Pluto knew those must be seen to eventually. But he had left them untended to in places that were so remote and unfrequented that he did not think it would matter. More important was to make good those parts of the Land that were seen and trodden and worked by souls every day.”

“And there are other such unfinished places in the Land?” Prim asked.

“Many. All of them as difficult to reach as this one,” said Pick.

“Otherwise Pluto would have done them up,” Lyne guessed, “so that ordinary souls would never see such strange holdovers of the Before Times.”

“Just so,” said Pick.

“Why have we then come here?” asked Mard, letting the sample case down onto the ground with a gentleness that in no way