Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,373

now. Any of you is welcome to come with me.”

They all looked at him. After a few moments, he shrugged. “The only reason people like Weaver know enough of Lord Stranath to sing songs about him is because one of his company ‘turned tail and ran home’ when that struck him as intelligent. Such a moment has now arrived for me. You are all mad. I have seen all I care to see of angels and such. Farewell, and please look me up in East Cloven if you make it out, and sing your songs.”

No one else showed interest in the Bewilderment. So once they had helped Ferhuul go on his way, paddling north in the stern of his canoe, they began the journey south. From here all was mountain and storm; but, for now, they knew which way to go.

53

When El came in glory and flung Egdod, and the Pantheon, and the old souls loyal to them, into the outer darkness, they kindled red fires on the blackness of the Firmament where they struck it,” said Weaver. “Not wishing that El and all the other souls of the Land should gaze upon their humiliation every night when the Red Web rose in the eastern sky, Egdod drew a veil of smoke and steam across its face. What goes on behind that veil is ever a mystery to us.”

The campfire had burned down to red coals, glowing clear and sharp in the night. Weaver was attempting to draw a poetic contrast between them and the Red Web, which was putting in an appearance above the eastern horizon just as she said. It was going to be a fleeting appearance, since its arc would soon take it behind the eternal storm looming to the south.

Querc, Mard, and Lyne were looking back and forth between the embers of the fire and the constellation as if Weaver’s point made all kinds of sense to them, but to Prim the two did not look much different: both were clear and crisp as the lightning bolts that occasionally fractured the thunderheads. She saw no benefit in pointing this out.

Mard, perhaps remembering their uneasy conversation on the Asking, glanced at her. When she pretended not to notice, he gave her a more searching look. Then a huge bolt illuminated the whole camp for a moment with sharp blue-white light. She looked back at him and he glanced away.

Querc rose to the bait. “Growing up in the southern desert I heard songs and tales of these parts,” she said, “but many scoffed that they were superstitions of frostbitten northerners.”

“You are about to walk into one of those superstitions,” said Weaver. “Some call it the Madness of Spring.”

“I saw the phrase once, in an old book I was copying,” said Querc, “and remembered it because of its strangeness. But that is all I know of it.”

“Strange indeed,” said Weaver. “I shall say more of it tomorrow, as we are marching into it.”

“I think we’re already there,” Mard said. “When I was gathering firewood, I’m fairly certain a tree tried to kill me—and a squirrel put him up to it.”

“Singing that song would wake everyone up,” said Weaver, showing what some members of the Quest might have considered uncharacteristic consideration for those of her traveling companions who were fond of peace and quiet. “Tomorrow. The point is, be careful of anything that is alive.”

“This is one of those songs that begins right in the middle,” said Weaver the next morning, after they had got under way and found a solid marching rhythm. Or, in the cases of those who didn’t march, settled into a flight pattern apparently meant to scan the path ahead of them while keeping an eye peeled for airborne threats. Corvus was of the view that no force in the Land short of a battalion of angels would dare take them on; but he was nervous anyway, and would be until they got beneath the Evertempest, after which he would be nervous for different reasons.

At some point between Cloven and Lost Lake, Weaver had modified her kit. During the journey’s first phase, from the Hall of the Calladons to West Cloven, she’d been carrying a couple of flutes and a harp that required so much tuning that it was useless. Those were gone now, and in their place she had an instrument called a Road Organ. Though to refer to it as a single instrument was to understate its ambition, for it comprised several devices that