Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,394

way, into a matching keyhole.

Mab flew in and out of it for a while, inspecting parts so deep in its convolutions that they could not even be seen by anyone else. She directed Mard where he needed to reach with his aura hand in order to dissolve the last few clinging bits of rock. When she pronounced the work finished, Mard and Querc backed well clear of the thing as Edda stepped forward, bent her knees, got an arm under the key’s shaft, and heaved it up onto her shoulder.

Then for the first time since meeting the giantess at her home on Calla, Prim saw in her face signs of distress. Edda was feeling what ordinary souls felt when they shouldered a burden so heavy as to raise the fear that their strength was not equal to it. “Let us be on our way, crow,” she said. “In the soles of my feet I sense things moving it would be well for us to avoid.”

They walked for perhaps an hour. Not because the distance was so great but because Edda needed to plant each foot with deliberation. Sometimes she went the long way round when footing was uncertain.

The air began to move in ways suggesting that they were leaving behind the sheltered convolutions of the Knot and approaching a more open area. All of them, seeing how Edda labored under her burden, felt a natural impulse to go to her and lend a hand, as anyone would if they saw their mother bent under the weight of a log, and in danger of losing her footing. But those considerate feelings were useless here; none of them had strength to help the giantess, and by going to her they could only get in her way and risk grave injury. So instead they scampered ahead, scouting for shortcuts or for places where loose gravel might put her at hazard.

It was on one of those scouting-ahead runs that Prim surmounted a fold in the bedrock and felt icy wind in her face and saw, revealed all at once below her, the entirety of the Broken Bridge. As well she could see much of the open space on the near side of it, which on maps was called the Anvil Plain. Formerly, according to the most ancient legends, it had been the Front Yard of the Fastness. It was beginning to collect light now from the eastern sky, which had brightened to the point where stars were dissolving into it. Turning her head to the west, she saw the Red Web a hand’s breadth above the horizon, and wondered if the eyes of the Pantheon might be upon her at this moment.

She could from this perch have drawn an arrow, aimed north, let it fly, and watched it arc down several long moments later at the place where the bridge gripped the bedrock of the Knot. From there it reached far out across the Chasm to the nearer of the two gatehouses. The opposite—which she had seen earlier from another vantage point—resumed on the far side of the break and led to the top of the glacier. This was alive with silent distant lightning, as if the whole fury of the Evertempest had been poured down upon one small target. The light shattered her vision and obliged her to instead look down at closer things. “This way!” she called to those coming up behind her. “But you’ll need to find another path round.” It was out of the question for Edda to climb what she had climbed.

The Chasm was not a straight ditch; it forked and curved like a canyon. Beyond the near terminus of the Broken Bridge, a branch of it split off and curved aside toward the Knot. Running parallel to that was a road, meandering somewhat, but on the whole cutting south across the Anvil Plain. Its first few paces were exposed to the sky and buried in snow, but beyond that it cut through an old rampart of stones and ducked under the shelter of the mountain range and so ran over bare ground. It was too cold here for any plants to grow. Instead of vegetation the road ran among scraps of iron, slag heaps, unfinished chain links, rusted and broken-down wagons, and mounds of coal next to forges that eons ago had gone cold and dark. For El’s legions clearly had not seen any point in tidying up after themselves when they had completed their great work and