Нил Стивенсон - Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

And he feared Prim. He feared the power that was hers enough that he had tried to kill her once already.

Did El know—could he know—that they had a key to the Fastness? It must have lodged in that cube of stone for a long time. Had El known of its existence, he’d have destroyed it. They had only got it free of the Cube this morning. But El had been following them across the Stormland for days . So it could not be the case that the knowledge of the key had drawn him here.

Sophia had drawn him here. Even at the Quest’s outset, El had somehow known that a person of interest would be passing through Secondel and had alerted Elshield. The death of Elshield and of several others must have confirmed what he had perhaps suspected, or feared: that Sophia was abroad in the Land and knew her power. He had made a second attempt to catch her at the Asking, but she had vanished. And at almost the same instant, one of his angels had died at Lost Lake. El must have known of Pluto’s system of chaos tunnels and must have guessed that Sophia had made use of one. He had gone to Lost Lake and followed their trail. Now he was here, raining boulders against the Chasmian’s shield while advancing one step at a time across the remade bridge. The Chasmian was giving almost as good as he got, lashing out with his claw to attack while shouldering his shield to defend. His weapon did not seem able to penetrate the sphere of aura that surrounded El.

As Prim watched, its claw faltered in midstrike and fell like an amputated hand into the gorge. The Chasmian was soon able to replace it with a discarded piece of ironmongery, a huge tong that must have been used once to hoist a crucible. But while he was doing so, El advanced, at last putting the bridge behind him and setting foot on the near side of the Chasm. Prim had the presence of mind to guess that El might now take advantage of his foe’s disordered state to aim more attacks at her, and she was correct; looking up she saw several more rocks fall loose from the Overhang and come her way. Seen, they were easily avoided.

She was more worried about the party on the front steps of the Fastness. Preoccupied as they were with the key and the lock, they wouldn’t know that El had crossed over and would not be looking for incoming rocks. But El did not seem to be sending any their way. Which confirmed in her mind that El might not even have known about the key. He might have been asking himself why Sophia had gone to such trouble to come here, where her one power was of no use; but his only thought was to get to her and kill her.

So she ascended the stair again, all the way to the flat top of the stone anvil, and put her back to the Fastness and walked north to the very edge, making sure that El could see her. She could actually feel his gaze upon her when he had a moment to take his eyes away from the Chasmian. She felt almost close enough to look him in the eye and kill him. But he knew her power and would keep his distance. By standing here and merely staying alive, she could keep him at bay. She could keep El from reaching, or even knowing about, the ones behind her with the key. So there she stood, observing the fight and standing sentinel for anything El might throw her way.

He was finding more opportunities to do so. From time to time he would absorb a blow from the Chasmian that would nearly reduce him to formless aura, but he had the power to regenerate before his foe could wind up to deliver another. The Chasmian took somewhat longer to reorganize its form when El had disrupted it. Balancing this was the fact that the Chasmian had an infinite reserve handy of the two things of which it was made: rocks and chaos. At one point a flying boulder laid it out flat on the brink of the gorge, right next to the bridge, so that Prim feared it would slide off and sink into the chaos below; but instead the chaos came to it, and replenished what it had lost, and the boulder that had struck it down became part of its form. Thus the battle raged back and forth, and Prim dared not go back to the other edge of the anvil to see how Edda was getting along. But she did notice a conflagration of Lightning Bears up on the glacier, seemingly headed toward the bridge; and in their midst was a darker form that she took at first for an Autochthon, since it was riding a mount.

But the bears would have annihilated any such. They were not there to fight the rider. They were escorting it. Escorting her .

El seemed aware of this. Prim could very nearly read his mind. He wanted no part of fighting the Chasmian while being trapped between Death and this personage on the galloping mount. He made himself larger, and in a few moments’ time delivered such a barrage upon the Chasmian, from all directions, as to derange it completely. It collapsed to a disordered pile of rocks and chaos, most of which avalanched down into the gorge. Prim sensed it was not dead. It would always come back. But in the time it would take for it to reorganize itself, El could attend to other matters. He glanced toward Sophia for a few moments, then turned his back to her; faced the bridge; and brought it down with a gesture.

Prim had learned to look up when El might be in a position to attack her. She did so now, and saw nothing. But she did get dizzy, as sometimes happened when looking up, and this time it was enough to drop her to her knees. She felt a pain in her breast and tried to put her hand to the spot, but it was interrupted by something hard.

She looked down to see that she had been transfixed by a black arrow. It had gone straight into her chest. It had come, she understood, from El; he had conjured it into being and launched it at her during that brief glance. Its shaft was already enshrouded in her aura as her body began to dissolve around it.

She fell over on her side. With her eyes half-open she could see the rider gallop down to the bridgehead and rein in her horse at the bridge that was now again broken. Behind her a pack of Lightning Bears was coming in off the glacier.

It now seemed for a little while that the world consisted entirely of noise. She had heard many loud noises of late, what with all of the Evertempest’s thunder and the clamorous boulder duel between El and the Chasmian. Those were but clicks and whispers compared to the sound that came now from the direction of the Fastness. It was so loud that it startled El, and the rider across the gorge, and her Lightning Bears. Prim, before her vision dissolved into chaos, had at least the satisfaction of seeing El turn around, and astonishment come over him. It was such a distinct reaction that she had to turn her head and see what he was seeing: the Fastness unbound, its iron dome rocking from side to side where it had been shrugged off, and chains and hasps still avalanching down all round it. Perched on the top of the castle was a figure nearly as great as the Chasmian, but of human form.

Or so it seemed until it spread its wings.

Egdod saw at once that the tempest he had laid over the Knot in ancient times had served its purpose and was no longer of use to him, and so with a wave of his hand he stilled it. In the calm air that followed he spread his wings and took flight, but glided only a short distance to the top of the stone anvil, where Sophia lay dying. He took her dissolving form up into his arms as a mother takes up a baby, and gathered her into his chest.

“Once again our time together is all too brief,” said Sophia to Egdod, though she had lost the power of forming words and could only speak through the connection of their auras.

“The sweeter for that,” Egdod returned. “Know that your sacrifice was not in vain. The Quest is complete.”

“Edda will need rest,” she said, her aura growing very faint.

“She has come to a good place for resting,” said Egdod, “as have you.”