Нил Стивенсон - Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“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 a shaft, thick as Burr’s thigh, oriented vertically within the Cube. Below a certain level this broadened and ramified into an extraordinarily complex tracery, the very look of which made them all glad that Burr’s sword had not come anywhere near it. Even the most talented sculptors of the faraway Teemings, working with their finest chisels, could not have freed this thing from the stone in which it had been embedded without damaging its finer convolutions, some of which were no bigger than hairs.

“It is plainly enough a key,” Edda said to Corvus, as the work proceeded. “Which means it must purport to be the key. You brought me here because only I can carry something that heavy. This all makes sense, to a point. But it is perfectly well-known to all learned persons that El destroyed the key to the Fastness. As Lyne was pointing out the other day, for El to have done otherwise would have been utmost folly. The merest glance at the complexity of that object makes it obvious that no copy or counterfeit is possible. So there is something to this whole matter that reaches beyond my understanding. I who was born in Camp to Eve, and saw Cairn kill Messenger of El, and drank the angel’s stuff into my form, and have dwelled in the Land ever since and been all over it, have no ken of what goes on here.”

“I myself am somewhat amazed, and cannot give sure answers,” said Corvus. “But I have known that Cube and key were here for longer than you, and so I have had a little more time to ponder such questions. Suppose that the other plane of existence is real, and that it was preexisting. Which is to say that the Land was born out of it, much as you were born out of Eve. It follows that in that other plane are powers or faculties of creation that somehow account for the whole story of the Land’s coming into being, and underlie every aspect of what we take to be real. Moreover that plane is populated by souls who know of us and our doings, and who from time to time may for reasons we cannot even speculate on choose to effect changes to the Land—but to do so without violating what makes the Land coherent. If you accept those premises, can you not accept that an object that once existed in the Land, having been crafted to a purpose by El, and used and then utterly destroyed by El, might be brought into existence again? Not by any craft of any soul who dwells here, but by one on the other plane of existence, wielding powers the nature of which we cannot begin to understand? The only way that I can explain the existence of this key is to suppose that all of those things are the case. And moreover that my purpose in crossing over from that plane into this one is to see that key being turned in the lock on the Fastness.”

At a certain point the key simply toppled over, forcing Mard and Querc to jump out of the way. It was entirely free now of the matrix of rock in which it had been embedded. Some of its crannies were still plugged up with adamant, but Mard, having got the hang of this, could melt that away easily enough. Edda walked to it, bent down, hooked both arms under the shaft of the key, and tried to move it in an exploratory way, getting a sense of its balance. At Mard’s request she rolled it over to expose a part of it that needed his attention. One by one, though, he polished off those lingering traces. A few clots of adamant clung to the decorative work of the key’s handle, where presumably it wouldn’t make a difference. But the part that was meant to go into the lock seemed perfectly clean. It was the most complicated object any of them had ever seen, like a hundred mazes made out of smaller mazes, wrought in solid iron and brazed together. Encircling the delicate and complicated parts was a protective shroud of thicker metal—this explained why nothing important had been damaged when the key had fallen over. The shroud would have served its purpose perfectly well had it been square or cylindrical in cross-section, but of course it had innumerable grooves and protrusions, clearly meant to go one way, and only one 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.