She could have scampered down to that in a few moments. Finding a path suitable for Edda might take a little longer. Turning her head she saw Lyne, Mard, Fern, and Querc exploring a possible route under the illumination of Mab. From habit she knew to look for Burr either ahead of or behind the main group—wherever he judged danger to be greatest. Indeed she now picked him out clambering over the rubble wall below, ghostly in predawn sky-light. He would soon reach the bridge. Meanwhile Prim could feel each of Edda’s footfalls as she made her way. She soon would turn right, toward the Fastness, where Burr had gone left toward the bridge.

But as well she sensed other, deeper disturbances, like the one that had awakened her earlier. Those had first begun when Lyne and Fern had descended to the Chasm and scooped up their sample of chaos. Since then they had come irregularly. But now a series of them came all at once in rapid succession, causing loose stones to skitter down from the slope below her.

A great being was on the move down there. It could only be one of the wild souls left over from the very beginning of the Land.

A thing like a grappling hook reached up from below and caught on the bridge just where it was anchored to the rim. A succession of booms ensued, and then the Chasmian—it could only be the Chasmian—got a second hook-hand planted on the cliff edge. Head, then shoulders appeared, and then the whole thing came up out of the deep at once. It must have planted a foot on the bridge’s arch and used that to vault up. First one knee, then the other, came down like thunder on the snowy ground of the Chasm’s rim. It was on all fours. Then it rose up, got its feet under it, and stood.

Prim had never actually laid eyes on a hill-giant, unless you counted the sleeping one upon whose back the Calladons had, according to legend, constructed their estate. She had read enough books and seen enough depictions to know that the Chasmian was something made after the same general pattern. Perhaps Spring during her madness had rounded up one such who had been enslaved by El and made to do blacksmith’s work. Indeed once the Chasmian had drawn himself up to his full height he stepped over the rampart with a single stride and went on an aimless stroll among the dark forges, and reached down with one of his claws to touch the flat top of the great stone anvil.

But hill-giants were put together out of ordinary stones. Between those was earth. Soil covered them like flesh when they stopped moving for more than a few falls, and in the soil grew grass and flowers and trees. If the Chasmian had been that kind of hill-giant at the beginning, one could guess that his vegetation had been burned off by the heat of the forge as he toiled for El, or frozen by the cold of the Knot when he was allowed to rest. When El had broken the bridge and abandoned it here, the giant must have been nothing more than boulders mortared together by sand and clay, clothed in ice.