Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,368

He had slowed. The others had piled up behind him and formed a crowd. Their silhouettes fractured the unruly light. They had stopped some yards short of the cave’s mouth. Beyond it, Prim could see between the others’ legs a flat wrinkled surface that glittered when light flashed upon it. Recent events caused her to think at first that it might be another pool of chaos, but then the sun seemed to come out for a moment. Stepping into a space between Mard and Querc she got her first good look at what lay beyond the mouth of the cave and understood with perfect clarity that it was a lake. Its near shore washed the floor of this cave directly before them.

In the middle distance, a bow-shot away, a sandbar extended across the water from their left, evidently connecting an unseen part of the lakeshore to a rocky islet that rose out of the water to a height of a few yards. It supported a few mature trees whose seeds had been carried to it by birds or wind. One of them was fully engulfed in flame. Another had been snapped off at about the height of a man’s shoulder; its upper part, still attached to the shattered stump by tortured splinters as thick as a man’s arm, was bent over and down into the water.

The light of the burning tree was weak and pale by comparison with what shone nearby. The sky beyond and above was dark, with stars visible here and there, and a faint pink glow off to their right; the dawn was coming.

She heard the din of clashing arms, and a shout. A radiant bolt swung round, leaving a meteor trail across her vision, and veered downward, only to be stopped in its course by a darker obstacle that somehow withstood the impact and whipped away from the collision as if it had drawn power from it and was now pursuing intentions of its own. The light was eclipsed for a time by a silhouette; this had arms and legs like an ordinary soul, but it also had wings.

Pick’s reason for going no farther was clear enough now; they had stumbled upon a fight, and at least one of the combatants was an angel. The prudent course was to stay well back. Prim shouldered past him, though, and strode on. She could hear, between clashes of weapons, Mard calling to her, but she paid him no heed. Her view of things improved as she neared the cave’s mouth and she saw that the angel’s opponent was Burr. He was armed not with a sword but with a long spear, which he whirled about him to block the angel’s attacks; when an opportunity presented itself he would seek to punch the angel with the spear’s heavy iron butt or slash with its sharp head.

She came full out on the lakeshore and felt the cold water soaking her boots. To her right a formation of gray stone ramped up to terminate one side of the lake in a sheer cliff. More caves were in it. To her left the stone gave way to a flat beach that not far away curved back to make the sandbar. Prim went that way, striding across the sand at first and then breaking into a run as the grunts and cries of Burr made her fear that he could not much longer hold out against the angel’s onslaughts.

Before she could get onto the sandbar, though, she drew up short in the face of a new kind of soul who had darted in to block her way. This gave off light too, though nothing like the radiance of the angel’s sword. The whole creature stood about a foot high, though she would have stood a few inches higher had her legs not terminated as stumps below the knees. What she lacked in that way she more than made up for with a set of wings that she used to dart and flicker through the air with far greater skill than Corvus could ever seem to manage. This was, in other words, the soul that had found them in the dark fault beneath the Asking and showed them the way here—wherever here might be. “Do not,” she implored Prim. “Do not exercise that power that is yours, here and now, for then El will know that you have entered into the Land, and his bright angels will descend upon us in their thousands.”

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