Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,391

from various locations such as the Chasm we just crossed.”

“I have no other purpose here,” Lyne offered.

“Nor I,” said Fern. “We can go to the brink of the Chasm if Mab leads the way.”

“I’ll lead the way,” said Corvus. He was swinging his beak side to side, watching with his beady black eyes as Mab flew back and forth through the Cube. “Mab is more useful here.”

With a short, slow movement of his blinding sword, Burr sliced a corner from the top of the Cube, since Mab had flown through it and reported nothing there. He used the tip of the sword to hollow out the surface, making a nut-sized depression. He repeated the procedure with another corner. The two pieces, clapped together, now made a container that crudely approximated one of the carven adamant drawers from Pick’s old sample case. Lyne and Fern borrowed as many warm clothes as the others could spare and set out with Corvus, carrying this makeshift sample holder with them. On one side of the Cube, Burr began to carve off more bits where Mab told him it was safe to do so.

On the opposite side, where the light of the angel sword would not be such an annoyance, Querc talked at length to Mard, recounting what she had learned during her years with Pick. Mard began to experiment with reaching into the Cube with the hand that was no longer material. That inability to come to grips with solid objects had seemed an important deficiency when he was trying to button his cloak or break his fall. But here and now it was enabling him to perform what for lack of a better term one would have to call magic. “Can you feel anything?” Querc was asking him. “Are there sensations in that hand?” Mard insisted it was altogether numb, as if it weren’t there at all. “But you can open and close it, can you not?” Querc asked.

Mard withdrew his hand from the stone and made it clench into a fist, then opened it again. So there was the answer. “No sensation, though,” he insisted. “Just tingling.”

“Tingling is a sensation,” Querc pointed out.

Some hours passed. Prim, having nothing to do at the moment, found a hollow in the rock where she could curl up and pull her cloak up over her head to block most of the light from the sword. This flared and flashed unpredictably as Burr wielded it against the Cube. Edda had boosted him onto its flat top. He was carving off bits under the direction of Mab, who seemed to have a very clear notion of where it was and was not safe to remove material. From time to time a chunk of adamant would break free, slide off, and bang into the ground, startling Prim. So this was far from the most restful nap she had ever taken.

She must, against all odds, have gone to sleep, though, because at some point she woke up. A deep boom, transmitted through the bedrock of the Knot, had been felt in her ribs and was already just a memory. It was not accompanied by a crash of severed stone from the nearby Cube. This had nothing to do with that. It was bigger, from farther away. Yesterday she might have identified it as a thunderclap. Indeed they were still within the Evertempest, the entire purpose of which was to protect this place. But this didn’t rumble and reverberate like thunder. And no sound was reaching her ears. She peeled the hood back from her head and squinted in the light as chill dry air bathed her face. The others were still at work, much as before. The shoulders and sides of the Cube had been cut down quite a bit; Burr was now standing on a pedestal just wide enough to support him. Around that the stone sloped roughly down where he had chopped it away, and the crisp base of the Cube was obscured by shards that had sloughed off. Prim shaded her eyes with one hand and lay still for a while, maintaining firm contact between her body and the living rock of the Knot. Then she felt another of those shocks. She took her hand from her eyes, raised her head, and looked at the others. None of them seemed to have noticed. Burr and Mab were intent upon their work, as Querc and Mard were upon theirs.

Where was Edda? Prim stood up, more than a little