Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,390

could do nothing but shake her head and turn up her palms.

Edda must have known about the Cube! They looked to the giantess.

“Corvus,” she said, “you have me at a disadvantage. What is this thing? Other than a cube of adamant sitting in the Knot for no apparent reason.”

“Proof,” Corvus said (he was perched, naturally, on top of the Cube), “of the reality of the other plane of existence of which I have spoken repeatedly in the past.” Then, because he couldn’t resist rubbing it in, “Oh, I have seen you roll your eyes when I speak of the other plane of existence. I know you think—”

“It’s not that anyone thinks you’re crazy,” Prim said. “It’s just that the other plane of existence is just a lot of made-up stories until you can present some kind of, uh . . .”

“Proof,” Corvus said. “Behold.”

“This doesn’t prove it,” Lyne said. “Seems like something Pluto might have put here to amuse himself.”

Prim braced herself for a retort in a bitter or vindictive tone from the giant talking raven. Instead he gave a bird shrug. “Fair,” he said. “You’ll be singing a different tune, though, when Querc melts away the adamant to reveal what is embedded in this thing.”

“You’ve known this was waiting for us all along,” Prim surmised, while Querc was busy clapping her hands over her face and shaking her head in dismay.

“It was put here long ago by an entity on the other plane of existence. Hidden away where no one would find it unless they knew exactly where to look. Sealed in adamant so that only a Lithoplast, guided by an incorporeal sprite, would know what to do.”

“My sword could cut it,” Burr pointed out in a mildly offended tone. He was gazing at Querc, who still seemed notably lacking in self-confidence. Lyne had put his arm around her shoulders and was mumbling some kind of presumably encouraging words into the side of her head.

“It may come to that,” said Corvus, “but I don’t wish to damage what is inside.”

“It’s not just a matter of knowing what to do, and how to do it,” Querc explained. “Certain things are needed.”

“Can you be a little more specific?” Mard inquired politely.

“Well—going back to the very beginning—according to Pick, chaos came first. When it began to take on those patterns that embodied or enacted thought, it became what we call aura.”

Mard shouldered his cloak back and looked down at his aura hand. “So aura is chaos, but . . .”

“Patterned chaos,” Querc said. “Like a wave moving across the water, which is water plus something: a shape that retains its character even while it propagates through the stuff of which it’s made.”

“How does aura become form, then?” Mard asked. To him it was a very personal question at the moment.

Prim, not wishing to stare, glanced away. But this only brought Mab into view. And what was Mab if not an extraordinarily focused bit of aura? As if to make that very point, Mab flew into the cube and popped out the other side a moment later.

“The very first of all solid things was adamant,” said Querc. “Which seems quite different from chaos. But really it is just one configuration of chaos that happens to be stable. Egdod found it very early, and made the Land out of it, and as long as the Land—and later the Firmament—remained nothing more complicated than adamant, they could be reshaped—”

“Through Lithoplasty. I understand,” said Mard. Leaving unspoken the fact that he was really trying to find out how he might get his hand back.

Hand, and arm. For he used his good hand now to pull his sleeve back, well above his elbow. Flesh had retreated and aura had advanced well above the place where the sword of Elshield had cut into him.

Querc sighed. “It is old magic, not understood or practiced much since the First Age. Pick knew it. We of this age are confined for the most part to fixed forms, bounded by our own skins. In the Before Times, forms were more fluid and many had auras that reached beyond their forms.”

“I saw it among the high Autochthons of Secondel,” said Prim.

“And Pick could do it,” said Lyne. “We saw his aura reach out from his head beneath the Overstrike.”

“I, unfortunately, cannot,” said Querc. “Which is where Mard might come into the picture. But first, there is another thing. In Pick’s sample case were bits of chaos and so on that he had collected