Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Stephenson, Neal

  The map, as improved by Edda’s needle and thread, agreed with what they could see off to port: a place along the sere coast of the peninsula where a stream flowed out from its stony guts and limped all the way to the ocean without drying up. Or so it might be guessed from the color of the surrounding landscape, which was a somewhat greener shade of brown than what stretched to either side of it. Straddling the outlet was an orderly arrangement of low buildings, and a single high watchtower, made of sun-dried mud bricks. A stone mole protected a moorage, above which several bare masts protruded. Between them and it, a galley was crawling like a many-legged insect across a simmering pan of water. All of it was military, for there was no settlement and no commerce here. The galley was going through the motions of trying to intercept Silverfin so that it could be boarded and inspected. It would fail. The entire point of keelsloops was that they could go faster than such galleys, provided there was wind. And along this coast that was almost always the case. Yesterday they had outrun two such, and Fern said that tomorrow they would have to outrun one, maybe two more. Beyond that they would be so far out on the Asking that the Autochthons didn’t bother maintaining such outposts.

  “It seems—I don’t know—expensive,” Prim remarked. “I may be just a barbarian princess, but even I can see that it doesn’t add up.”

  Corvus performed his bird shrug, a small gesture magnified by huge wings. “Each of those outposts has only a few expensive-to-maintain Autochthons. There’s plenty of fish. As to other necessities, they are resupplied by ships out of Secondel. Almost all of the souls are Beedles, purpose-grown to live in such places and to row boats. They grub in the muck for clams and seaweed. It’s worth it, even if you do no more than take seriously the reason they claim.”

  “What reason is that?” Querc asked.

  Prim knew. “To keep Sprung out.” She rested her hand on the part of the map that showed the Bits and Shivers. “We mostly live up here.” She tripped over the “we” since, as she had to keep reminding herself, she wasn’t actually Sprung.

  She swept her hand a short distance south and a little to the west. It now lay on the north coast of the Asking—the same coast they could see over the boat’s port rail. “If you don’t mind sailing out of sight of land for a few days and trusting to the mercy of the sea, you can make that voyage easily, far out of sight of the watchtowers of Secondel and Toravithranax. Fetching up on the shore of the Asking, you’d perish of thirst in a few days—”

  Querc nodded. “Unless you landed where a river reached the sea—but that is where the Autochthons have made their watchposts.”

  “They have to guard the river mouths,” Prim concluded, “lest Sprung settle there, and once again get a foothold on the Land and begin to populate it.”

  Seeing someone in the corner of her eye she turned and met the eye of Mard, who, having been dismissed by Fern, had come round to listen. He blushed, averted his gaze, and slunk away like a man who had murdered his own father. She could not for the life of her work out why, until she later saw Lyne flirting with Querc. Then she understood it was because she had uttered the word “populate,” which implied having babies.

  Apparently, the upshot of the meeting that Fern had just convened and concluded was that Mard and Lyne were off duty for a bit. Accordingly, they began to swordfight. Mard was swinging the sword that Prim had acquired by killing Delegate Elshield on the quay at Secondel. Rusting away in a storage locker belowdecks were a number of other weapons, mostly shorter cutlasses, much less glorious than Elshield’s but wieldy enough to be used against it in practice. Part of Prim wanted to resent the way that the young men—and particularly Mard—were assuming a kind of ownership over the sword. If circumstances had been different, she might have laid claim to it more forcefully. But be it never so magnificent, it could never be anything more than a token for Prim. Knowing she had another way to kill, she could never be as fascinated by it as Mard and Lyne were, and was happy to let them get good at using it. Querc, who was obviously quite taken with Lyne, went to watch them play.

  Fern came forward for a look at the map. She spent as much time staring at this thing as Prim. This had been a little disconcerting at first given that Fern was supposed to know where she was going. She shouldered her way into the position most advantageous for peering at the part that depicted the Asking. She did not quite shove Prim out of the way but just kept sidling closer and closer, so that it seemed easiest for Prim to move. As Fern gazed at the map, Prim gazed at Fern, taking in the ridges and whorls of her scars. The skipper was quite unbothered to be looked at in this way.

  Prim wondered if that was part of the point of having such adornments. People were going to look at you anyway. Might as well give their eyes something to do.

  What then did Fern see in the map? She seemed to be looking not at the coastline of the Asking itself, but at the open sea to its south. Prim had never paid much notice to that part of the map; it was just a featureless expanse of animal hide that had been dyed blue.

  Or was it? Fern was gazing at it much longer and more intently than made sense for a featureless expanse.

  “What do you see?”

  Fern reached out with a scarred, weathered hand, dripping with rings, and brushed a part of the map where the dye had set unevenly. “Just the ghost of a memory, perhaps,” she said. “I was of a big family. The youngest. From here.” She indicated a river delta on the south coast. “We booked passage on a vessel bound for Toravithranax.”

  “All the way around the Asking?”

  Fern looked at her. “Yes, for the family was too large to attempt the crossing of the desert.” She glanced at Querc as if to hint at why: people like Querc’s family might have attacked them? Then she shifted her attention back to the map. She kept stroking, with the tip of her index finger, that irregularity in the dye, as if she could bring it to life; or maybe it was alive to her. “Somewhere around here it took all of my family.”

  “What took all of your family?” Prim asked. “Why, that’s awful!”

  Fern just tickled the map as if it could yield up an answer.

  “A storm?” But Fern’s language had hinted at something with a will. “Or . . . a big fish? A . . . sea creature?” She’d been about to say “monster” but didn’t want to sound stupid.

  “You’re thinking wrong,” Fern said. “Trying to make it out to be a normal thing of this world.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s not what it was at all,” said Fern. She was firm on that, but in her mood was a quiet hopelessness that Prim—or anyone—would understand. “You see, I have sailed these seas for many hundreds of falls and seen many storms and many big fish. This was not of the normal order of things, this one that took my family.”

  “Is it possible—” Prim began.

  “That my seeing of it was wrong because done through a child’s eyes? That is what everyone says.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “‘Storm,’ ‘maelstrom,’ ‘beast,’ ‘monster’ . . . those words are not wrong, though. Provided you use them only as poets say ‘my lover’s lips are a flower’ or some such.”

  “But this was more—a thing unto its own kind,” Prim said.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve been looking for it ever since.”

  “Yes.”

  “I believe you,” said Prim. “From a distance once I saw the Island of Wild Souls.”

  “And you were raised on the back of a sleeping giant.”

  “Corvus told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s why you agreed to join the Quest. Not for the money.”

  “The only purpose of the money,” said Fern, “is to do away with any need of making awkward explanations to my crew.”

  “Swab would follow you anywhere, I’ll bet.”

  “Yes,” said Fern, “but even Swab needs to eat.”

  The wind faltered, and shifted round in a way that was less favorable. Fern diverted farther from shore lest the
next galley catch them becalmed. This got them into “a bit of weather” that seemed to the landlubbers nothing short of apocalyptic. How terrible, Prim wondered, must the thing that killed Fern’s family have been if this was but a poetic figure of it? Parts of Silverfin that seemed quite material had to be dismantled and remade. The thing might have gone badly had Corvus not been able to fly up high and supply information about where they were, and how best to bend their course back to shore while remaining out of sight of the last outpost that the Autochthons had bothered to construct. Thus when the Asking next hove into view, they were looking at a part of it deemed so remote and inhospitable that El didn’t really care whether Sprung went and attempted to live there.

  In the next day they spied only two things that looked like river mouths, but there was very little greenery around them; they looked instead like avalanche scars.

  None of these drawbacks seemed to make much of an impression on Pick. And for reasons that could only be guessed at, Corvus had all but ceded the leadership of the Quest to him. So they dropped anchor into a cove, deep enough to accommodate Silverfin’s keel, sheltered enough to prevent its being flung against the rocky shore by wind or wave. They let their little longboat into the water. Mard and Lyne, deeply tired of being hot, stripped off their shirts, thinking to dive in and swim to shore, an easy stone’s throw away, but Swab told them not to, on the grounds that she had better things to do with her time than go over every square inch of the swimmers’ exposed flesh with red-hot tweezers.

  Rett and Scale produced kegs of fresh water from down in the hold and took them ashore so that they could be decanted into canteens and skins. They also had hammocks, and nets to go over them, and curious funnel-shaped tin collars to tie round each hammock rope to prevent unspecified creatures from crawling down them in the nighttime. Mard and Lyne, already thwarted from swimming, had fancied that they would hike practically naked, but Pick, after a vigorous half hour of roaming about the beach killing things with his stick, let it be known that the lads would be worse than useless unless they wrapped heavy canvas around their legs all the way up to the groin, reinforced below the knees with gaiters of the thickest sort of leather.

  None of them were, as a rule, complainers. They had, after all, agreed of their own free will to go on a Quest. Unlike Brindle, they were still alive. And unlike Querc, they hadn’t suffered much hardship—just moved around quite a bit. Nevertheless, the next morning, having all spent a sleepless night listening to airborne things whining and ground-based things gnawing, they were in a low mood as they sat round the cook-fire. And they had not ventured more than a few yards from the shore.

  “I do sometimes wonder what Spring was thinking when she created certain types of things,” Prim said, scratching at a red swelling on her arm that she hoped was nothing more than an insect bite.

  “This is nothing,” Pick scoffed. “Your ancestors Adam and Eve were pursued by wolves—and they were the very children of Spring!”

  “Granted,” Mard said, “but I’m not sure how that answers Prim’s question.”

  “It’s more like you have only reasked it in a more pointed way,” Querc put in. She was more bedraggled than had been expected by Prim, who’d hoped and assumed that the scribe would perk up and flourish in her native desert environment. That she hadn’t did not seem to bode well for those who were new to it.

  “It has to suck this badly,” said Corvus, “in order for everything to make sense.”

  “What do you mean, ‘make sense’?” Fern demanded. She had slept on the boat—a good idea—but come ashore for breakfast. “Nothing makes sense.” And she looked out toward the ocean.

  “Oh, but it does. You might not like it. And this might lead you to question things, even to say, ‘This is senseless!’ But whenever I think that, I take a closer look, and lo, it does make sense, from end to end and top to bottom. Because it must. Because if it didn’t, the whole thing would split open and fall to pieces in an instant.”

  “What whole thing?” Lyne asked. “What are you even talking about?”

  “The Land. All of it.”

  “You’ll see,” Pick said, “you’ll see.”

  “I look forward to it,” said Corvus. “Now, let’s get going before the sun gets any higher.”

  Back at home, Prim had been on many hikes in the interior of Calla where the going had seemed slow, even difficult at times, and yet when you reached a high place from which you could turn round and look back, you were astonished by how far you had come.

  This was not like that at all. Half a day’s strenuous scrambling had left them exhausted and bloody. In some pitches they had to leave That Fucking Box behind and haul it up on a rope later. When they at last crawled up out of the long crack to a place where they could look down, they saw Silverfin at anchor in the blue pool directly below them, seemingly so close that they could throw stones and hit its deck. Which they were tempted to do, since Fern—who had decided not to join them on the climb—and her crew were comfortably dozing under the shade of stretched tarpaulins. But the effort of throwing rocks would have made them hotter than they already were and so instead they scuttled across an open ramp of hot stone to a place where they could shelter from the afternoon sun in the shade of a cliff. Pitching a tarpaulin of their own, they made themselves as comfortable as they could and tried to catch up on some of the sleep they had failed to get last night. When the sun got low and the air finally began to cool, they broke camp and hiked until it was full dark, coming at last to a site that Corvus had picked out from above. They ate their rations and then found it impossible to sleep.

  The night sky in these parts seemed to hold ten stars for every one that they could see in Calla. Lying out under them one had the feeling of trying to sleep on the stage of an amphitheater while a thousand eyes watched.

  The red constellation that some called Egdod’s Eye was wheeling over them, higher in the sky than they ever saw it at home. It was the first time Prim had got a really good look at it since certain facts had been brought to her attention in Secondel. As a girl she had seen it as a place of myths and legends: where Egdod and the rest of the Old Gods were said to be building a counterpart to the Land from which they had been exiled. Not wishing to pursue such work in view of El, they had drawn a veil of smoke over it.

  So much for the myths. But if it really was true that Prim was one and the same as Daisy, or Sophia, then it meant that she had actually been there in a previous life. Felt its hard blackness in her bones as she had impacted upon its surface, digging a crater that burned and glowed even now, one of an irregular constellation of flickering flame-colored stars, like so many distant campfires on a darkling plain—

  “What do you see?” It was Mard, also craning his neck to look up at the sky. “I see Knotweave’s Loom.” It was a well-known constellation. So familiar that to point it out seemed a childish gambit for starting a conversation. She hadn’t heard him coming, but now that his voice and his presence—he took a seat on the ground quite close to her—had brought her back to the here and now, she heard a giggle—a giggle!—from Querc on the other side of some low scrubby bushes, and Lyne’s low voice saying something indistinct that made Querc giggle again.

  So if Mard was being a little clumsy, it was because having a chat about stars wasn’t really why he was here. He scooted even closer—so close that unless Prim moved away, any shift in her position would bring them into contact.

  The last thing he was expecting was probably an answer to his question. “The Firmament,” she said.

  It took him a moment to place the reference. According to old books of myths—stuff read only by young children and elderly scholars—that was the shell of black adamant that formed the vault of heaven, pocked with god craters and veiled from the Land. It was usual to speak of the Red Web, Egdod’s Eye, the Fire Nebula, the Crimson Veil, but not of the theoretical abstraction that lay behind it. But with a moment’s reflection Mard got the idea. “It is awfully high in the
sky here,” he said. He reached up and, somewhat theatrically, squeezed the back of his neck. “Gives me a crick in the neck just looking at it. Easier to lie down.” He did so, somehow in the process managing to shift even closer to Prim. “The rock is still warm,” he remarked, brushing it next to him with his hand.

  Prim wondered if Mardellian Bufrect had the faintest idea how badly she wanted to lie down alongside him and stop looking at—and having this inane conversation about—the sky. But a question had come up that needed answering. “Now that you are warm and comfortable—”

  “Not as much as I could be.”

  “—what do you see when you look at the Red Web from this most excellent of vantage points and most convenient of positions? Surely in your whole life you have never viewed it with so many advantages.”

  “I see . . . the Red Web!” Mard answered. He was not precisely frustrated yet, but perhaps a little dismayed that his lame opening about Knotweave’s Loom seemed to be developing into an actual conversation about astronomy. That’ll teach you, Prim thought.

  “Describe what it looks like. I have a crick in my neck, I can’t look right at it.”

  “Well, you know, it’s like a campfire when a kettle is boiling on it on a cold night, a proper full rolling boil, making a great cloud of steam that obscures your view. It glows from the light of the flames that you know are beneath it, and from time to time as the steam swirls and dances you may get a glimpse of a red-hot coal or a lick of fire—but then it’s hidden again and you wonder if you really saw it.”

  “Well described,” she said. “I can almost see in my mind’s eye what you are seeing.”

  “If you make yourself comfortable here,” he suggested, patting the ground next to him, and considerately flicking a pebble away, “you can just look at it. I might even be able to help you with that crick in your neck. I’m good at—”