Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  A red star hurtled straight up. As it hissed past them, they saw it was about the size of a fist. “Lava bomb!” said Pick.

  “Type three,” Querc elaborated. “Heads up, strangers!” But the warning was somewhat unnecessary as they were all taking their cues from Pick. He moved his stick sharply upward, using the bird beak to strike the underside of the broad brim of his hat so that it fell back off his head. It was restrained by a thong around his neck. Exposed was a tousled gray head, bald and scarred on top. He gazed intently at the sky, tracking the bomb, somewhat aided by a squawk of alarm from Corvus. Presently it began to fall. It had already darkened as it cooled. Pick took a few long strides and heaved his stick, making it spin about in midair. He caught it just below the bird head, now brandishing it like a sword, and swung it at the falling lava bomb. He caught it just before it struck the ground. It shattered into fragments that sprayed all over the place, not without posing some hazard to the eyes of the onlookers. Lyne flinched and pulled a splinter out of his forearm. “Thus glass,” Pick remarked.

  “That’s him being friendly,” Querc said. She said it in a quiet voice. Prim looked around and perceived that she was addressing the remark privately to Lyne.

  Fish were eaten. A midden of small bones out back of the hut suggested that this was far from the first time. They had rigged up a system of nets and traps that they could deploy from the cliff top, hauling the fish straight up out of the surf “already cooked,” Pick claimed, possibly in jest—it was hard to tell with him.

  Querc was of a slightly more talkative disposition. She related her story. She was Sprung. Her family were seekers and traders of gemstones who roamed about the empty southwestern quarter of the Land between Toravithranax and the Central Gulf. From time to time they would make a foray into a city to conduct business, but their dealings had become complicated enough to require, and profitable enough to pay for, training a member of the family to read and write. Querc had been chosen from what sounded like a healthy surplus of children. Off she went to Toravithranax, where she was, after a couple of false starts, accepted into the Academy. She applied herself to the tasks assigned her by the acolytes of Pestle. A year went by, then another, then three more with no word from her family. She spent the money she’d been given and began to sell off, one by one, the gemstones her mother had sewn into hidden pockets in a leather belt. Word finally reached her from a cousin in Chopped Barren that the family had fallen victim to a series of disasters that had led to their surviving remnants being pursued across the wastes by a small army of Beedles, purportedly rogues, in all likelihood supported by local Autochthons. In any event they’d split up. This cousin, having made his way at length to a comparatively safe place in a northern Bit, was writing to Querc—the only member of the clan who had a fixed address—on the assumption that various others would have already had the same idea, and done likewise, and that Querc would simply be able to tell him where they had all found refuge. But she’d heard from none of them.

  Accordingly Querc had truncated her education and let it be known that her services as a scribe were available to anyone who might have need of such. This had led to what sounded like an awkward interview with Pick, who had made a rare trip into Toravithranax in the wake of the sudden and unexplained disappearance of his previous amanuensis, “most likely blown off a cliff during a tempest.” Despite its evident drawbacks, Querc had been strangely attracted to the position. She had no fondness for the Land, and in a sense you couldn’t get farther from the Land than the Last Bit and the Newest Shiver. Oh, other Bits were farther away as the giant talking raven flew, but this felt more removed just because of its newness, the fact that it was on fire, and the fact that no one lived there except Pick. Yet it was close enough to Toravithranax that she could go there a few times a year and check to see if any further news of her family had arrived (though the tone in which Querc said this—wistful, even sheepish—hinted that she now saw that as naive). But the thing that really sold her on the job was its subject matter. Much of what Pick liked to talk about put her strongly in mind of her gem-hunting forebears and the notions they’d handed down as to how different kinds of precious stones came into being and where they might most profitably be sought. Some of which now struck her as eminently reasonable while much was completely demented. Pick had a whole picture in his mind that strung together all of the former while firmly rejecting the latter. So she had gone with him and had never regretted doing so—though, she had to admit, greater variety in food would have been nice.

  Thus Querc. Her tale-telling was interrupted several times by complications having to do with the preparation and serving of the meal, and during those interludes Prim looked about the hut curiously. From a distance it had looked far more ramshackle than it really was. That was because its roof was patched together from whatever they could find.

  But that was only the roof. Seen from the inside, it was one of the most solid edifices Prim had ever beheld. And this was because it wasn’t really built at all, in the normal sense of the word. Most of it was belowground, simply sunk into the living rock. It was a square cavity that went straight down to about the height of Pick’s head. That was divided into three rooms by stone walls. But the walls had not been built by piling one rock atop another. They were just there. The table on which they ate their fish was a stone mushroom that came right up out of the floor with no seam. Purpose-shaped niches in the walls held candles, cook pots, books. Strangest of all was that there was a drain in the floor. It was a smooth-bored tunnel in the stone floor, and it apparently led away somewhere. No hammer-and-chisel-wielding Beedle could have carved that. Yet there it was, and neither Pick nor Querc showed any hesitation about throwing stuff into it. Olfactory evidence suggested that it terminated at length in some place that was very hot. Prim had never seen anything remotely like it. The only analogy she could come up with was that if one were to begin with a block of ice, cut from a frozen lake in the far north, and shape it by plunging in red-hot irons, one might produce forms such as these.

  According to the old stories, there was a precedent for this in the creation of the Palace, the Pinnacle, and First Town by Egdod and those who came after him. For that matter, the Land itself must have been created somehow, and the usual explanation was that Egdod had done it simply by flying around and willing it into existence. If they had come upon a hut such as this one in the middle of the Land, Prim might have explained it by supposing that Egdod or Pluto had made it thus for some long-forgotten reason, and left it there, and Pick had happened upon it. But the Last Bit was supposed to be new land.

  “Lithoplast” was a word that Prim had heard Corvus use in obscure late-night conversations with both Brindle and Edda. Part of it meant “rock” and part of it had to do with shaping. At the time, she had not been able to make heads nor tails of it. She wondered now if it might be a word for a particular sort of person.

  Corvus was almost offensive in his lack of curiosity about Querc. He had got a fish of his own by diving into the ocean and grabbing one and dragging it up here. So, laced all through Querc’s narration were rude noises of rending, disemboweling, cracking, and gulping. But he minded his manners and hopped closer when Pick—loosened up, somehow, by Querc’s story—began to speak.

  “I am not Pluto,” he began.

  The confused silence that followed was so obvious that even Pick was moved to explain himself. “Sometimes when strangers such as you seek me out in the way you have done, it is because they think I am Pluto.”

  “Pick, let me set you at ease, as far as that sort of thing is concerned,” Corvus said. “We are well informed, even by the extraordinarily high standards of the landed nobility of Calla. In particular Prim and I have both seen remarkable things. I think that between us we have a clear-eyed view of how matters stand. Let me assure you that none of us would ever make such a gross error as to confuse you with the long-exiled member of the Pantheon known as Pluto.”

  “I have met him, tho
ugh,” Pick offered, in a mild tone of voice that would not ordinarily be used to deliver such remarkable news.

  The next silence was even longer. Apparently not even Corvus could offer a comeback. It was left to Mard—in some ways the most naive, and most content-to-be-naive, member of the party—to respond. “Wow! How’d that work, since Pluto is in exile up in the sky, and you live in the Land? Are you one of the old souls of First Town, who knew the Pantheon before El hurled them out?”

  “Not quite that old,” said Pick. “I did live in First Town for a brief time before Egdod blew it up, and saw the Pantheon from a distance. But by that time they had already grown remote from the doings of common souls such as I, and Pluto of course was ever the least sociable of the Old Gods.”

  “By process of elimination, then, your claim is that you met Pluto . . . after he was exiled? You traveled up to the Red Web?” Lyne was the one to ask this, and he did so in a skeptical tone.

  “Yes and no,” said Pick. He crossed his arms and looked Corvus straight in the eye.

  “That’s all I needed to hear,” said Corvus. “Let’s go.”

  “We’ve only just begun to hear Pick’s story!” Prim protested. “We can’t just walk away from him now.”

  “They’re coming with us,” Corvus explained.

  “Where do you imagine we will be going in one another’s company?” Pick inquired.

  “Oh, you know,” Corvus answered.

  Abandoning the hut, though extraordinary, was apparently not unprecedented, for Pick had procedures. These were unfamiliar to Querc and so it could be guessed that Pick had not abandoned it recently. A perfectly circular crack in the floor turned out to encompass a stone disk about a hand’s breadth in thickness, which Mard and Lyne with some difficulty pulled up and rolled out of the way to reveal a cylindrical cavity about half as deep as a person was tall. Like every other feature of the hut not improvised from beach-wrack, this just was, and showed no sign of having been chiseled out or built up through any discernible process. Pick took some stuff out of it and put other stuff into it. What he put into it consisted of items likely to be damaged by water or fire: mostly notes in Querc’s hand, and blank paper, and old books. What he took out of it consisted of even older books and a thing he denoted the sample case and that Mard, Lyne, Prim, and Querc—who took turns carrying it—soon called That Fucking Box. All of which was still in the future when they replaced the stone disk and sealed it around the edges with mortar that Pick whipped up from water, sand, and various powders taken from sacks and clay urns around the property, one of which was labeled BONES.

  Having seen to that, they simply walked away. All of this happened, apparently, as a result of a private side conversation between Pick and the giant talking raven that took no longer than it did for the junior members of the Quest to clear the table and do the washing up. It took place out of earshot, which, around here, with the wind and the surf and the seething and gnashing of the Newest Shiver, wasn’t saying much. In short, Corvus did not seem to have lost any of his knack for talking strange persons (supposing Pick was even a person) into going along on the Quest. Thinking back on the case of the late Brindle Calladon—who had agreed to the idea ostensibly just because he thought Quests were the sort of thing Calladons and Bufrects ought to do—Prim guessed that Corvus must have had some way of getting people to see why the Quest was a good thing for them. What that might mean in Pick’s case she dared not even guess at.

  51

  Pick was very firmly of the opinion that the Quest’s odds would be boosted immeasurably by a little excursion to the Asking—the long peninsula that, south of here, reached far out to the southwest for no discernible reason other than the folkloric one that Egdod, as he flew that way, was asking himself what if anything might lie out in that direction.

  Privately, Lyne was of the opinion that this side journey was nothing more than a way for Pick to get even farther away from civilization than he already was. In a somewhat pedantic vein, Prim the map memorizer pointed out that it wasn’t even technically a side journey, since they would in fact be traveling a great distance directly away from their presumed goal.

  They made their way back across the island to a little port on the eastern coast that lay across the very southernmost reach of the First Shiver from Toravithranax. There they met Firkin, which had come down the Shiver on instructions from Corvus. They took possession of all their maps and other gear and said farewell to Robst and his three crewmates, who sailed back north; they had now traversed the entire length of the First Shiver from West Cloven down to here, and needed to head for home, looking en route for any such trading or shipping opportunities as might profit them.

  Across the Shiver came a different sort of vessel altogether, which Corvus had somehow talked into the job. Prim could only suppose that he had flown across to the city, transformed himself into human form, stolen some clothes, and put his powers of persuasion to work. Aboard Firkin had been a certain amount of money; perhaps that had now changed hands. The new vessel, Silverfin, was a thing called a keelsloop. So Mard and Lyne agreed, and such was the firmness of their agreement that Prim knew better than to ask for an explanation. Querc explained it anyway: these things weren’t very capacious—the hulls, though long, were narrow—but something about the part under the water combined with the sail plan made them quite good at sailing close to the wind, which was what you had to do if you wanted to make your way down the Asking.

  Fern, the skipper of Silverfin, would take a bit of getting used to. Robst had been quiet, sturdy, and more interested in deciding how best to carry forward Corvus’s plans than in debating their wisdom or lack thereof. Fern, from the outset, carried herself more as an equal partner. In Prim’s experience, ferns had always been small, delicate plants unfurling their lacy leaflets in damp, placid glades. This naturally gave her preconceived notions about the look and disposition of any soul who bore that name. In the case of this Fern, those were all wrong. Whoever had named her might have been nearer the mark with something like “Tree-Volcano” or “Whirlwind-Boulder.” She was a big woman with dark skin that probably served her well as she sailed about below the southern sun. She was Sprung. When she bared her midsection, which, in this climate, was more often than not, it could be seen that she had a lot of scars, some of which looked to have been inflicted in random misadventures, others symmetrical and/or repeating, therefore deliberate adornments.

  Fern had three permanent crew members. In addition, she had brought over two new hires for the purpose of this voyage. But after interrogating Mardellian and Lyne, she decided that those two Calla boys were at least as good as the sailors she had brought with her, and sent the latter back to Toravithranax with a bit of money for their trouble.

  Her three permanent crew were Rett, who could run the whole keelsloop by himself; Swab, who cooked, cleaned, mended, organized, and slept with Fern; and a relatively new hire named Scale, who seemed to end up doing things that were chancy or arduous.

  As they loaded their stuff onto Silverfin, Prim still harbored some hope that the wind would be every bit as impossible as it was cracked up to be; for during the three days they had cooled their heels in the little port, she had spent hours gazing across the Shiver at the high ateliers of Toravithranax, which (consistent with much lyric poetry she had read during her long girlhood) glowed gold, then copper, then coal red in the light of the evening. All it would take was a spell of really terrible weather and Silverfin would be driven back to its refuge there, and she would be able to see the place and explore certain gardens and markets that Querc had been telling her about as they had taken turns lugging That Fucking Box across the Burning Bit. But as it turned out, the winds were absolutely perfect, to the degree that the crew of Silverfin (according to Querc, who spoke their language) couldn’t stop exclaiming about it. So just as soon as they rounded the sharp southern cape of the Burning Bit, they unfurled those special sails to catch a steady wind coming at them from a little ahead
of starboard, and the keelsloop took off like an arrow launched from a bow, and Toravithranax sank into their wake as Prim sat in the stern pining for it. Off into the southwest they sailed, traveling as fast as it was possible to travel in the wrong direction.

  Fern was Rett’s equal when it came to the actual sailing of the ship, but she seemed to have more of a head for business. In a way this made her somewhat troublesome, since, by the time they met her, all of the business arrangements had been settled. So there was nothing for Fern’s mind to work on save the larger picture of what they were actually doing. And this was poorly understood by all—even, apparently, Corvus. Fern’s wish to know more—even to shape the Quest’s direction—was clearly exasperating to Corvus. And yet if Fern had not been driven by that sort of curiosity, she would never have agreed in the first place to go on the Quest. You could not have one without the other; Quest-goer-onners were not ordinary souls, and so Quest leaders had, as Prim now understood, to devote a great deal of attention to contending with all of that want of ordinariness.

  The peninsula marked on the map as the Asking was said to have all of the shortcomings of the desert to its east, where climate, vegetation, etc., were concerned. But since, unlike said desert, it did not lie between two more interesting and hospitable places, there was really no reason to go there at all. It just reached far out into the ocean and trailed off. If it were literally true that the peninsula had been formed by Egdod’s asking himself “What lies out this way?,” then the answer was nothing.