Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,378

face, she was forcing herself to understate, as much as she could, the force of her emotions on this topic. Prim, who sometimes found Querc annoying, and who was frankly jealous of the intimacy the girl shared with Lyne, suddenly felt empathy for her. In Querc’s mind, the Quest might have been done and dusted when they had performed the prodigious feat of descending into a fault in one part of the Land and popping out of a cave somewhere else to watch a giantess kill an angel. And really, what sane soul wouldn’t be satisfied, after all of that, with going home and living a quiet life?

No one had really explained anything about the remainder of the Quest, to which the epic proceedings heretofore were, as she was now seeing, just minor preliminaries.

“Bears get bigger and lighter in color as you go to colder places,” Corvus said, as if speaking to a child. “In the far north they are white, and really huge. In the mountains of the Knot they are made out of lightning, and correspondingly huger. We will come nowhere near any Lightning Bears. They live on the glaciated heights where the Shifting Path leads—for some definition of ‘leads’—to the Precipice. We are going to avoid all of that thanks to your boss and mentor.”

Mab hurled herself at Corvus, passed all the way through his head, and came out the other side. En route she must have inflicted some punishment, for “And Mab” Corvus added in haste.

“How about the Vortex Wraiths?” Querc asked. “Are we going to avoid them as well? And what the hell are they?”

Edda’s fall of white hair shifted in the firelight as she turned her unfathomable eyes on the young scribe. Prim had learned the knack of not gazing directly on Edda unless she had the time and the desire to get lost in what she saw. She knew that Edda’s hair right now was a mountain waterfall lit by the orange rays of a stormy dawn. All well and good, but not to the point at this particular moment. “An attempt that Spring made, while she was completely out of her mind, to imbue parts of the Evertempest with some level of intelligence by combining them with souls,” Edda explained. “It didn’t work. It’s like combining oil and water—the two always separate before long.”

“But are they still around? Thousands of years later?”

“The souls who became involved in this experiment of Spring’s were changed by it. It turns out that they rather enjoyed being incarnated as disturbances of the wind. That is the only form they are desirous of having—even if they can only have it for a few minutes at a time. So they haunt the Stormland, formless and very nearly invisible, and they wait.”

“For what?” Querc asked. “Victims? Those must come along rarely.”

“Opportunities to take forms,” said Edda. “Typically when a great whirlwind descends out of the Evertempest and they can draw strength from it.”

“So there might be some around now? Because that just happened, did it not?”

“Yes,” said Edda, “but there aren’t. Not this time. We’d know.”

“What would you suggest we do,” Mard inquired, “should a Vortex Wraith come along on a future occasion?”

“Lie flat and cover your head. I’ll take care of it,” said Edda.

“Can anything kill you, Edda? Are you afraid of anything?” Querc asked. It seemed that Edda’s matter-of-fact answers were calming her down.

Prim now made the mistake of looking at the giantess, and toppled into her. For Edda was looking Prim’s way. One eye was obscured by the cataract of her hair, but the other’s pupil was the eye of a mile-wide tornado into which Prim plummeted as if she’d been dropped into it by a god. She heard Edda’s voice as if it came not from her lips but from the earth all round. “Yes. Most certainly.”

And then Prim came to, and it was obvious that she was just sitting around the campfire with other members of the Quest. Several of those were looking at her strangely and she had the sense she’d lost the thread of the conversation.

“Time for bed,” she said.

The next day they walked across the stretch of country where the tornado yesterday had snapped off all those trees. The disaster had raised a question in the mind of Pick, who had been debating it with Mard and Lyne: if tempests like that were a frequent occurrence round here, how could there be any forests left standing? Why wasn’t the whole region