Affixed to the front of the envelope was a sticker on which had been printed the words TO BE OPENED ONLY BY ZULA FORTHRAST (OR THE CURRENT DIRECTOR OF THE FORTHRAST FAMILY FOUNDATION).

“Do I even need to open this?”

“I think you can consider it another of your symbolic duties,” Corvallis said. “But if it’s not Pluto donating his brain to science, then I’ll go and lay down on that contraption myself.”

Chapter 32

Chapter 32

Egdod took wing and flew far away into the mountains, seeking out a curious place that he remembered from past visits. The windings of four different rivers, converging toward the middle of the Land from outlets widely spaced along the coast, had necessitated the raising of several ranges of mountains to keep them separately channeled and to account for the direction of their flows. He had got himself into trouble thereby, and ended up with a kind of knot where all of those ranges had come together and got involved with one another in a way that he sensed was wrong. Between them were strange gaps where the water did not know what course it should take. One range failed to match up with another, forcing him to leave vertical walls in some places and bottomless gorges in others. It was the only such place in the whole Land: the place into which all of the wrongness had been concentrated and focused as he had expelled it from everywhere else. He had squeezed it now into an area not much larger than that occupied by Town, street, and Palace, but the more he reduced its extent the greater did its absurdities become. He had despaired of ever fixing the Knot and had even considered leaving it in its current state and simply raising a great wall about it so that no soul could ever come in and see there the sum of all Egdod’s mistakes. He did not now do this, but instead flew into an especially tortured convolution in the land. Here, a range of mountains skirted a chasm that had no bottom. In its depths, frank chaos could still be seen: the only place in the whole world, as far as he knew, where any vestige of it remained.

This place could not be reached by walking. Flying to it was difficult, and as he went along, he purposely made it more so by shrouding it in cascades of icy water and causing the wind to crash against it with nearly as much force as the waves of the ocean did against the rocks of the coast.

Thus had Egdod found refuge from others’ eyes by going to a place where no other soul could look upon him.