Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,370

islet, all trace of the angel’s form was gone. Edda was there, looking like Edda.

“Welcome to Lost Lake,” she said. “You’ll be thirsty.”

Burr was squatting on his heels, elbows on his knees, face in his hands, too tired to move or to speak. Lying on the ground next to him, barely visible in the rose glow of the northern dawn, was his spear, and its shaft was made of smoke.

“You seem to have found it,” Lyne objected, when Edda told him the name of the place.

Ferhuul did not care for Lyne’s wit. “And you seem to have popped out of a magic hole in the ground. Easy, was it?”

Footsteps, terminated by a crunching thud, signaled the return of Burr, who had come out of the woods bent under a bundle of firewood. It was all fallen dead timber, collected in silence with no use of axe or maul.

“No,” Lyne admitted, “it was not easy.”

“One day,” said Weaver, “if we all get out of this, I will combine your story of the Asking with ours of the Bewilderment, and sing it as one epic song, and I daresay that the two parts of it might contain a like number of verses.”

The East Cloven contingent had somehow managed to recruit a magical sprite, whom they addressed by the name Mab. Such a being figured into certain tellings of the tale of Adam and Eve, so if this was the same Mab, then seeking her out and persuading her to join the Quest might have been every bit as strange and perilous as what the Firkin group had got up to. Somewhere along the line they had furthermore acquired a magical spear with a shaft that appeared to be literally made out of black smoke and that was impervious to blows from angel swords. Where had that come from?

Moreover these people had crossed the entirety of the Lake Lands from East Cloven to Lost Lake. All that Prim really knew of the Bewilderment was that going there was inadvisable, because many who went in did not come out. Survivors who did straggle out to one of the chilly seaports along the Backhaul spoke not of wild beasts or lawless brigands—though those certainly existed—but of an endless maze of lakes connected to other lakes by flat streams meandering through mushy land where one could neither walk nor paddle. Bewilderment. Fish and game were plentiful, fresh water everywhere, and so a person with a few skills could live there indefinitely—they just couldn’t leave.

“Most people who come here only wish to get out,” Ferhuul said. “These lot are the only ones I have ever met who wanted to go deeper in, ever deeper, and that has presented challenges I did not come well prepared for.” He cast a look toward Edda, then glanced significantly at the place on the beach at the mouth of the cave where they had beached their canoes. It was out of the question that Edda could set foot in anything so small and frail. She must have walked, finding an overland route that somehow kept abreast of the movements of the canoes—and that had got her to Lost Lake just in time.

“Did you get any help from Mab?” Prim asked. “She was of great help to us in finding our way.”

“We only just met her,” Ferhuul said. “She haunts this place.”

He looked back over his shoulder across Lost Lake. The sun had risen an hour ago and they had taken the risk of kindling this fire. They had done so in the mouth of the cave. This afforded them some shelter as well as giving them a place into which they could retreat should they once again come under attack.

Fern had recovered the angel’s sword from the bottom of the lake by stripping off her clothes and diving deep for it. It had plunged like a dart and half-embedded itself in the stony bottom. Blinded by its brilliance, she had swum back to the surface with her eyes closed and carefully handed it hilt-first to Mard, who had found its dark scabbard discarded on the ground near the scene of the fight. Thus shrouded, the weapon was now leaning against a boulder nearby. Fern, still shivering, was squatting against the cavern wall near it, wrapped in blankets and drinking from a mug of soup Edda had given her. Absent was the usual Fernish brusqueness, the impatience that sometimes seemed like outright disdain. The passage through chaos, the angel fight, the intervention