Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

by Neal Stephenson

  “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—”

  “My neck is fine,” she admitted. “Would you like to know what I see?”

  “Sure,” he said, not really sounding all that sure.

  “The sharpest, clearest sparks of red fire. Not the flickering of something that burns but the steady glow of lava. A big one in the middle where Egdod fell. Scattered about it, smaller ones where the rest of—” She was about to say “us” but substituted, “—the Pantheon landed. Hundreds of scintillas—the lesser souls who Fell in Egdod’s wake. But then in the dark places between, crevices like fiery roads—like the Newest Shiver, you might say—and along them palaces, houses, fortresses of black adamant gleaming by firelight.”

  “Wow,” Mard said. “It sounds like you fell asleep and dreamed it.”

  “You’re the one who dreams. I’m the one who sees.”

  Mard sat up and shifted away. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his arms, so he crossed them in front of his body.

  “Chilly?” she asked.

  “Maybe a bit.”

  He needed an out. She provided one. “You know, Querc over there has been alone with her grief for years. I’m just getting acquainted with mine. I was reflecting yesterday how little time has really passed since Brindle sacrificed himself for the Quest. A fortnight at most?”

  “It’s true,” Mard exclaimed, a bit hastily. “No question about it.”

  “If I see weird things in the sky, maybe it’s because I’m looking through tears.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry, Prim!”

  “Don’t be,” she said, “but do be patient.”

  After dawn, a brief walk over comparatively level ground brought them to an arresting rock formation. The steepness of the rocks they’d climbed yesterday had hid it from the sea. Only Corvus could have directed them here. Prim already knew what it was called, because she’d heard Corvus and Pick talking about it: the Overstrike. As she saw the actual thing, the name made perfect sense. It was probably just the upper reach of the crack they had climbed up yesterday—a fault that, she was beginning to understand, might run all the way from the north to the south coast of the Asking. As had been obvious yesterday, it was not an active, moving Shiver but a thing that had occurred a very long time ago and then become still and dead. Consequently its lower reaches were so full of rubble, gravel, soil, and opportunistic plants that it required some squinting and head-cocking and use of the imagination to understand its nature. Up here, however, it could not have been more obvious. The crack was not vertical but heeled over at an angle about halfway between vertical and horizontal. The width of it—the gap between the two opposing faces—might have been twenty paces. They approached it on its lower side, and the nearer they came to the edge of the actual split, the more its opposite face loomed above them. They passed into its shadow, which in this climate was always a welcome relief. But it made them aware that the opposite face was now jutting out above them, so that any loose stone that might be dislodged from the sharp brink would fall on their heads.

  A smooth and featureless ramp of stone descended into darkness. It was strewn here and there with loose pebbles and maculated with patches of white shit from colonies of birds that had built hivelike nest complexes on the under-surface of the crack’s overhanging face. Which—as they saw, when their eyes adjusted—was absolutely featureless. Other than those hanging birds’ nests, nothing was up there for their eyes to gain purchase on. It was as if the under-surface of the Overstrike did not even exist; it was a night sky without stars.

  “Adamant. It is what everything was at the dawn of the First Age,” said Pick, after he had given them a good long time to behold it, “after Egdod had conferred on the Land a general shape, and lit stars on the Firmament, before Pluto had come along to look after the particulars. He told me once, long ago, that there were parts of the Land unchanged since Egdod’s First Pass. Pluto knew those must be seen to eventually. But he had left them untended to in places that were so remote and unfrequented that he did not think it would matter. More important was to make good those parts of the Land that were seen and trodden and worked by souls every day.”

  “And there are other such unfinished places in the Land?” Prim asked.

  “Many. All of them as difficult to reach as this one,” said Pick.

  “Otherwise Pluto would have done them up,” Lyne guessed, “so that ordinary souls would never see such strange holdovers of the Before Times.”

  “Just so,” said Pick.

  “Why have we then come here?” asked Mard, letting the sample case down onto the ground with a gentleness that in no way reflected his true feelings toward it.

  “To be elsewhere,” said Corvus. “Look, I am a bird and I do not love having rock over my head. So I’m going to get out from under the Overstrike and do what birds do.”

  “Eat worms?” Querc asked.

  “Shit all over everything?” said Lyne.

  “That’s the spirit! Now shut up and keep Pick from killing himself down there,” said Corvus, and after a few hops back down the way they had come, took off squawking into the sunlight.

  “You’re going . . . down there?” Lyne asked Pick.

  Pick unlocked the front of the sample case, which hinged down to form a table, variously burned and stained. Revealed were numerous niches and drawers, labeled in very old script such as Pestle had, according to legend, learned from the Old Gods in First Town. Prim, who knew how to read it, saw words like PRIMORDIAL ADAMANT—FROM THE LARGEST ROCK and AURIC CHAOS—PARTIALLY SENTIENT and other terms that made considerably less sense even than those.

  The general plan of action was to anchor ropes up here that Pick could use to secure himself as he descended the ramplike surface of the crack face. Up here it was strewn with stuff that had fallen on it over the centuries, but once he descended to a depth “profound enough to be worth visiting,” it would be as clean and featureless as the opposite, overhanging face, and he would begin to slide.

  “You can’t just stop there,” Mard objected.

  “What do you mean?” Pick asked. He was uncoiling, and inspecting, a very long rope.

  “‘Begin to slide.’ Then what?”

  “Keep sliding?” Lyne guessed.

  “At increasing velocity?” Querc offered.

  “But, to where?” Mard demanded. “Where would you stop?”

  “Better to ask whether,” Pick said. “Careless as he was, I see no reason to assume that Egdod bothered to supply every hole in the ground with a bottom. Tedious work, that. Not his way.”

  This left the younger members of the expedition in silence as they went about their work—though the vision of Pick’s falling into a bottomless chasm did have the salutary effect of making them very keen about sound knot-work and proper anchoring of rope ends. They more and more avoided the lip of the fault.

  At some length Pick approached the sample case and opened a drawer labeled PURE CHAOS, which had been noticed and remarked on by the others but which perhaps understandably they had been reluctant to open. They crowded around to look. It was full of a nothing that made the upper face of the Overstrike, featureless as that was, seem like something. The drawer itself was not dovetailed wooden planks but hewn from black stone—the primordial rock that Pick referred to as adamant. Its outer surface was barely visible; when he pulled it open, its inner surfaces could not be seen at all. With very close attention they could see fluctuations of light and dark, and hear a dull hiss. It reminded Prim somewhat of aura she had seen around Delegate Elshield and in the cells of the Hive. But that had been radiant and had moved in ways that, though unpredictable, bespoke a kind of sense. This stuff was to that as a rotting corpse was to a
living animal.

  Aura reached out from Pick’s head like a beetle’s pincers, converged on the drawer, and pinched off a bit of the chaos about the size of a nut. He closed the adamant drawer. The sample of chaos moved with him, suspended in front of his face at arm’s length, enveloped in a swirling pattern of aura. He moved now with the gliding, cautious gait of a servant who is carrying a brimful glass of rare wine on a slippery tray. He made his way to the brink, where Querc passed the rope around his body in a very particular manner, enclosing him in a kind of sliding hitch that would enable him to control his descent with a single hand. In his other, no surprise, he held his pick. He backed slowly away from them over the brink of the fault, moving with care as he planted each foot—he had taken his boots off—on the surface below and behind him. In this manner he gradually receded from their view, his form growing smaller and less distinct, until all they could see was the glow of his aura. That too became small and faint. The only way they could be sure he was still in and of the Land was the rope, ever tense, but twitching, and occasionally traversing from side to side.

  He was down there for a long time, which might have made the day tedious had Corvus not come flying in with dire tidings: “Beedles! A whole galley-load. I must warn Fern.”

  “Should we extract Pick?” Mard asked.

  Corvus was already beating his wings hard, building speed out into the open sky. “No point!” he squawked.

  Prim ran down into the open and retraced the path they’d taken earlier today until she could get a clear view down to the cove where Silverfin had anchored. No Beedles were in sight, but the keelsloop, apparently having been warned by Corvus, had weighed anchor and struck the sunshades. Canvas was beginning to unfurl from mast and boom, but mostly what was moving the boat at this point was oar power.

  “Not much of a breeze today,” Mard remarked. He had been only a few paces behind.

  Prim and Mard stood there and watched for a time. Silverfin inched her way out into the open sea and unfurled all the canvas at her disposal. She steered into a northwesterly course, away from land. Prim understood that this was not an attempt to go anywhere in particular, but to harvest as much speed as they could from the wind available.

  Then at last they saw what Corvus had seen much earlier: a galley, a small one with a single bank of oars on each side. Probably two dozen oars all told. From this high vantage point they could just barely make out the forms of the Beedles pulling on those oars. Above them, running right up the vessel’s centerline, was a catwalk connecting a poop deck at the stern to a foredeck at the bow, and those were populated by others, armed and ready for war—or so they could guess from the flashes of light that gleamed from their midst.

  Mard let out a long breath. “Impossible,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There is no way Silverfin can escape from this.”

  They watched the pursuit a while longer. It was obvious that Mard was right.

  “That galley must have followed us,” he said.

  “Keelsloops don’t normally just stop and wait to be caught up with,” Prim guessed.

  “Why would they?” Mard agreed. “But we did. And somehow they knew. They got wind of the fact that we were here to be caught.”

  “The water!” Prim explained, as the thought came to her. “The fresh water, and the other stuff we left on shore—”

  “We have to go get it, while there’s time!” Mard agreed. And without any further discussion they were off, descending yesterday’s climb in skidding, sliding, pell-mell style.

  Meanwhile the pursuit of Silverfin unfolded slowly. Though the disparity in speed between the two vessels was obvious, Silverfin had been given a decent head start by Corvus’s warning, and even Beedles could only row for so long at top speed. Mard and Prim frequently lost view of one or both vessels as their descent took them into various gullies and chutes. The two of them descended faster, and the pursuit at sea went slower, than they had feared. Presently they found themselves on a ledge just above the cove. There they stopped for a few minutes to watch the culmination of the chase. From here details could not be made out. But Mard had explained how galleys were equipped with grappling hooks and spiked, hinged bridges that could be dropped onto the decks of vessels they wished to board. They clearly saw the two ships come together and merge into a single dark knot on the water, some miles out. From that point forward, they could do little more than imagine what might be happening to Fern and her crew as armed Beedles poured across those boarding ramps. Invisible at this distance, but presumably there, must have been Corvus, high enough to be out of the range of Beedles’ arrows. Perhaps later they would hear the melancholy tale from him. In the meantime it behooved them to fetch the casks of drinking water and other valuables they had left on the shore, and move those inland. For if those Beedles had gone to the trouble of following them this far, it stood to reason they might come ashore and hunt around for any stragglers.

  That was what they were now. Stragglers. Prim remembered some of the grimmer parts of Querc’s story. She hoped Querc was still down beneath the Overstrike, not seeing any of this.

  “A sail. It is definitely a sail!” Mard announced, just as Prim was turning her attention to the last phase of the descent. He’d mentioned it previously, but with less confidence. Prim looked out and thought she could see a white triangle bobbing up and down on swells.

  “Do you know what they did?” Mard asked. It seemed a rhetorical question and so Prim just waited. “Fern saw it was hopeless and so gave Silverfin up as a decoy. The Beedles boarded the keelsloop, yes. But Fern’s in the longboat. They’ve raised sail. They are putting some distance between them and the galley.”

  “Don’t the Beedles have a longboat of their own?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. But it would have no advantage in speed. In a sailing contest, my money’s on Fern.”

  “Could the galley not just disentangle itself from Silverfin and swoop down on them?” Prim hated to keep asking questions in such a negative vein, but she was having some difficulty understanding why Mard was so very pleased by this turn of events. She began to descend the last few hundred yards toward the cove. After a bit, he followed her. “I suppose it depends on which they want more: the vessel, or the crew,” he answered.

  Prim chose not to answer out loud: They have both. They can simply camp out on the shore and wait for us to run out of drinking water. And when Fern and her crew join us, that will only happen all the sooner.

  She was too optimistic, as it turned out. The Beedles were not content merely to wait on the shore. They sent hunting parties inland.

  The way it went the rest of that day was that Mardellian and Prim, after a brief water break on the shore, began moving the casks of water, and such weapons as they had, inland—which meant uphill. Lyne showed up and helped. He let them know that Querc was still looking after the rope beneath the Overstrike and that Pick was still doing whatever he had gone down there to do.

  Silverfin’s longboat sailed into the cove and ran up on the beach. In it were Fern, Swab, and Scale. Rett had died en route from an arrow wound. Scale had suffered a crushing injury to one leg when it had got pinched between Silverfin and the galley as they rolled together. He could not climb. They left him down below while they worked on carrying supplies uphill. They had intended to go back down and fetch him later, but at some point they noticed that he had put out to sea again in the longboat—presumably in the hope that he might sail it up the coast to some safe harbor.

  They worked all night carrying the goods up to the high camp near the Overstrike. When dawn broke they were not surprised to see the Beedles’ galley anchored in the cove below, and a column of smoke rising from the sea in the distance where they had scuttled Silverfin.

  Their hopes—if that was the right term for a prospect so dismal—that they would simply be left alone while they ran out of water were dashed when Swab staggered into camp with an arrow in her back. A lot of squawking a
nd screaming not far distant was suggestive of a Beedle-vs.-giant-talking-raven fight, and soon they had a blind Beedle on their hands—Corvus had seen him shoot Swab, and taken his eyes out.

  The Beedle died because he would not stop screaming and Prim wanted him dead. That she had killed him was not obvious to the others, who found it puzzling when he ceased to exist. Yesterday she had tried to use her power on the Beedles in the distant galley, but it hadn’t worked—she couldn’t just kill a whole ship full of anonymous victims miles away; it seemed to be more of a face-to-face transaction.

  Everyone in the camp was now going armed. Mard had belted the great sword of Elshield around his waist. Lyne had taken out a sword of his own: a family heirloom that he had brought from home and kept packed in his baggage until now. It was not much less magnificent than the one Mard carried. Given the circumstances, however, he was paying more attention to his bow and arrows. Fern was strapped with a cutlass and a dagger. Prim, like Lyne, had a bow strung and a quiver at her hip. But only because it would seem odd not to. She could kill all of the Beedles, she knew, one by one, and they could simply take the Beedles’ galley. But none of her companions, save Corvus, was aware of that. And so, once they had made sure no additional Beedle snipers were anywhere nearby, they turned their attention to the arrow lodged in Swab’s body. This had gone in her back, up high between spine and shoulder blade, and passed most of the way through her body. It had broad, vicious barbs, so deeply embedded that Fern ended up deciding that the only way to get it out was to push it all the way through and out the other side. And this she did after giving Swab a potion from her medical kit that in theory would dull the pain. To judge from the way Swab reacted, it didn’t work very well. Watching the operation from Swab’s front, Prim saw the flesh begin to bulge outward beneath the collarbone. Then the highest part of the bulge lost its form. A lesion appeared on the skin, and it was made of chaos. The point of the arrowhead erupted from its center and then the whole thing came through easily. Once the barbed head had been removed, Fern was able to pull the shaft out of Swab’s back. Blood came from the wound. They bound it up as best they could.