Longregard urged her to silence with a look and a gesture. “I too have seen evidence of what Thingor describes.”

“Your question is not unreasonable, Love,” said Thingor, “since the events at the Feast were so brief, and passed for most of us in shock and confusion. But when I went to the storehouse of the thunderbolts I could easily discern that the undoing of the locks had been achieved by means not known to our kind.”

“Likewise,” said Longregard, “my observations tell me that the approaches to the Land are watched, but not by eyes and minds akin to ours. The seeing is done by instruments that are in no way embodied—or if they are, they make no impression on our organs of vision and might as well be incorporeal. The minds behind those eyes are not minds such as ours, but more akin to those of bees, deriving their intelligence from the manifold interactions of a hive.”

“To bewitch such sentinels is no small undertaking,” said Dodge, “but lodged in my memories of the world of the living are some notions that may be of interest here. Chief among these is the back door. I put it to you that the Knot is a back door to the Land, and that El is unlikely to consider it as anything other than a flaw left in its convolutions by an unskilled maker. Perhaps it will even gratify his pride to leave it unchanged as a testament to the insufficiencies of Egdod. It remains only for me to devise a manner of passing through this gate and abiding in the Fastness without being perceived by the invisible eyes or recognized by the teeming mind that El has set running in the Land to warn him of my approach. Leave me therefore in solitude here that I may consider the problem.”

The others of the Pantheon then withdrew, leaving him alone on the rim of the pit. Or so he supposed for a time, until he became aware that another was lingering nearby. Raising his head he saw Daisy, or Sophia, hovering above and before him. Of all those who had been hurled down against the hard Firmament she had been altered least, as something in her lightness of form and agility of mind had enabled her to collect herself during the long fall and to light adroitly on the black shell of stone. She seemed therefore a kind of angel in this place. Not a brilliant angel but, like the others, a dark one. Whether by accident or design, she was treading air in such a place that the bright and distant Land appeared above her head.

Dodge rebuked Sophia for not leaving him in peace, but there was no heat or conviction in his words and Sophia let them fly by her like so many dead brown leaves carried away on a gust.