Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,392

stiff, and found the giantess off to one side, sitting on a natural bench in the rock. She was leaning a little to one side, gazing down as if the stone were a window, resting the palm of one hand upon it like a mother checking the pulse of a child’s heart.

So Prim wasn’t just imagining things. Which did not answer the question of what was shaking the foundations of the Knot so.

It seemed a natural topic of conversation. But before Prim could go and take it up with Edda, she heard voices approaching, one of which had the distinctive harsh timbre of a giant talking raven. Corvus came into view first, and not far behind him were Fern and Lyne. The latter was bearing in his hands a heavy thing all wrapped up in cloth.

“Easier than expected,” he announced, dropping to one knee and setting his burden down near what a few hours ago had been a cube. He began carefully to unwrap it.

“We found a stair,” Fern explained, “that some Lithoplast, I suppose, had made in the face of the cliff that descends into the Chasm. It took us right down to where the Land gives way to chaos.”

Lyne had exposed the two fragments of adamant that Burr had earlier cut off and whittled into a makeshift container. These were clapped together, but when Lyne carefully shifted the top one, they could all see chaos within. “Scooped it up like water into a ladle,” he said. After he had handed the sample to Querc, Prim went to him and Fern—who seemed great friends now that they had been on an adventure together—and asked, “Did you see, or hear or feel, anything moving—perhaps just beginning to move—in the depths of the Chasm?”

“You’ve seen chaos,” Lyne answered. “When is it ever not moving?”

“I mean not its usual fluctuation but something coherent and purposeful. With a mind,” Prim explained.

“No,” Lyne said, and his sincerity was plain.

Prim’s gaze shifted to Fern. “Nothing small,” she said. “What I am asking about would be like the thing that took your family in the southern ocean.”

Fern froze up in the way Prim had sometimes seen men do when they were getting ready to lose their temper. But no such outburst came. “I understand,” she said, after swallowing a bite of food. “You’re saying it might be too big to notice.”

“Something like that, yes.”

Fern was now gazing off at nothing in particular. Lyne, either bored or uneasy, ambled off toward Mard and Querc. Edda by this point had boosted them to the top of what had been the Cube and was gradually becoming more of an irregular obelisk as Burr cut away at it.

“I understand the nature of your question,” Fern said. But that was all she said for now.

Something in chaos was infectious and could break down adamant or other solid forms. Normally adamant was proof against it. That was the whole point. It was why Egdod had brought it into being: so that he could make something permanent in the ocean of chaos. But Egdod had done so when he had been a formless swirl of aura. What he had done could be undone. Chaos could infect adamant, or anything solid, when directed to that purpose by the will of a soul. If that soul were embodied in a solid form, it would suffer the same fate even as it was performing the work. This was why Pick had used his aura, not his hands or any physical tool, when going about such tasks.

Destroying was a thousand times easier than building up. For Mard the neophyte to convert chaos to adamant—to say nothing of more complex things—would not have been possible. But melting adamant into chaos was a simple trick easily learned.

And so what transpired over the next few hours was that Mard and Querc, working together with her knowledge and his aura, and beginning with the sample that Fern and Lyne had fetched to them, melted away the adamant. Mab told them which parts of it to remove. It became chaos and dissipated like smoke, and what was left of the Cube seemed to dissolve like a chunk of ice left in the sun.

What began to emerge from it was a thing made out of iron. The first part to be exposed was a sort of handle, ornately carved with symbols that put Prim in mind of the decorations on the Temple complex of Elkirk. Below that for some distance was nothing but