Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,382

tail and followed it. Pick came up behind Prim and reported all clear. She dropped her bow, ran down the little slope, and helped Lyne drag Mard up, both his good and his hurt leg simply trailing behind him on the ground. But he seemed to be bleeding much more heavily from his left arm.

In a short while, all the party had gathered round the fire, which Querc had made so enormous they could hardly come near it. The woods all round were ringing with the cries of wolves. Prim did not speak their language but she guessed its import: “Invaders have come!”

“It would seem more efficient,” Lyne pointed out, “if we could somehow get Spring’s various creations to understand that we are on Spring’s side and trying to bring about changes that Spring herself would probably approve of.”

Edda was somewhat preoccupied sewing Mard’s arm up. But she was often at her most conversational while busy with needle and thread.

“Is it going to make her angry,” Prim asked, “perhaps to the point of going mad again, that we are going to have to fight and hack our way through?”

“Spring isn’t troubled by death,” said Edda. “On the contrary.”

“Where is she?” Querc inquired. “Did she ever take settled form again? Is she roaming around somewhere?”

“Probably the Eye of the Storm,” said Edda. “A place in these parts where she went with Eve, when Eve found her, and turned her away from the path of madness.”

Prim had avoided this until now, but finally forced herself to go and look at Mard’s arm. She had to know how bad it was. She expected wolf bites. Which indeed she saw; but the big wound that Edda was sewing up had been inflicted by a blade.

“It is a self-inflicted wound,” Mard admitted. “I pivoted round, thinking to help Lyne, and judged poorly the timing of it, and my arm came into the way of my sword already descending.”

At this news Prim was silent.

“You know not what to say,” Edda observed. “For such mishaps—though they happen all the time—are never recorded in legends and songs. The hero who falls because of a cramp in his hamstring is not sung of.”

More might have been said in that vein had Corvus not flown in and let them know that it would now be necessary to abandon nearly everything they had been carrying and run away.

They had been aware for some time that the howling of the wolves had been noted by other, larger, more solitary beasts; but they were not afraid of those. Several members of the expedition appeared to know that Prim could kill anything. Even if she elected for some reason to withhold that power, it was difficult to imagine anything standing up to Burr. So Prim was inclined for a moment to suppose it was only Corvus’s sense of humor at work. But only for a moment. His startling pronouncement had caused everyone to go still. And in that stillness they sensed the approach of something that seemed to come on like rain, in that it affected the whole of the forest instead of being in any one place. Supposing it was even alive, it must have been too numerous and spread out for even Death to be of much use against it.

“Mard can’t exactly run,” Lyne objected. For his kinsman had suffered bites to his legs as well as the cut to his arm. But Edda was already knotting a bandage over her unfinished seam. She slung Mard over her back as if he weighed approximately as much as a chicken, and in a few long strides vanished into the forest southbound.

The threat consisted of insects. From any distance greater than a stone’s throw—not that stones would have been any use—they simply looked like smoke. As Prim saw when they were overtaken by a lobe of that “smoke,” they could take to the air in an ungainly combination of leaping and fluttering, and the wind was their friend. As she learned when one landed on her arm, they could bite off freckle-sized scoops of flesh.

Corvus had insisted that they carry nothing but weapons (useless now, important later?) and firebrands, and that they run upwind. They did not have to run for more than an hour before they encountered a rising slope where going was difficult because of undergrowth and low branches. There the insects caught up with them and did damage and made going very disagreeable indeed with their propensity for attacking eyes, ears,