Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,377

own eyes and what I later heard of from other bards. But the Madness of Spring I know well. For it is a rare song in which the storyteller is part of the story.”

A few minutes later, Weaver was struck by a lightning bolt and vaporized. The surviving members of the party scarce had time to become shocked by this turn of events before the sky turned nearly black. At first some of them looked to Fern, as one who had survived a lot of strange weather, but she was too fascinated by what was going on in the sky to be of much use. Corvus was busy changing himself into human form, maybe reckoning wings and feathers would only get torn off by whatever was going to occur next. Mab seemed unconcerned; Prim had a clue as to why, which was that she might not have a body at all. But she was in some form of communication with Edda that no one else was privy to. Edda thus became the leader of the Quest, at least for now. She conducted them down a slope that they normally might not have descended in such haste. A knuckle of bedrock protruded from the soil; they barely glimpsed it before a plank of wind struck them from behind and they all fell down, went blind, and became thoroughly drenched in a few moments’ time. Completely unaffected were Edda and Mab. The latter showed the way while Edda helped the others into a niche beneath that outcropping of stone. This afforded but a little shelter, however it grew larger as Pick sculpted it and the others dug into the earth and flung it out to be snatched from the air and sluiced away by the rain.

By the time they had thereby gained some small measure of comfort and begun to feel a bit of satisfaction, the storm abated—not in the sense of slowly dying away. It just stopped, and the sky turned green. Not a muddy pea-soup green but the green of thick moss on a wet rock when a beam of sunlight strikes it. This was extraordinarily beautiful, but peculiar enough that it did not make anyone especially keen on venturing out from cover. Which was good, because when their ears adjusted—which took a little while because of the recent detonation, at close range, of Weaver—they heard something that sounded very dangerous and large.

“What is that crackling?” Querc shouted. She referred to an element of the sound that put them in mind of a pig chewing up dry acorns.

“Tree trunks snapping,” Edda said. Then, noting the effect on the others’ faces: “Oh, it is much too big to be a Vortex Wraith. This is just a tornado.”

In a way, though, this set them at ease, since if all of those snapping noises really were tree trunks, then the thing snapping them had to be terrifically enormous and hence far away.

The storm later hit one more time, as bad as the first, with an aftershock following that. Finding no lack of downed tree branches they kindled a large fire—really more of a wall of flame—just downslope of the shelter rock, and dried things out. No one was feeling proud of the distance they had covered from last night’s camp, but it was clear that they were done for the day; even if the storm had not occurred, a decent respect for the memory of their bard would have dictated a stop. As Corvus pointed out, after changing back into a giant talking raven, they needed to get used to a new set of hazards. Angels were not going to come here. Egdod himself had made the Evertempest to prevent winged souls from pestering him, and according to legend only he and Freewander could traverse these skies. Autochthons and Beedles were unlikely to pursue them into a wilderness that mad Spring had populated with creatures whose purpose was to kill Autochthons and Beedles. So the Quest could move in the open, and they could light all the huge fires they pleased, and fear other things.

“Could someone please say more about the Lightning Bears?” Querc pleaded, as it got dark—not because of a storm but because the sun went down—and the fire was raked into a more compact shape and dried clothes repacked. “Because they were mentioned in passing the other day. I know nothing of them but the name causes me a certain amount of trepidation.” To judge from the look on her