Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,365

he said to Mard and Lyne, “I know you want to.”

The young men dutifully picked it up between them, carried it up to the brink, and one-two-threed it out into the blackness.

Then they took turns descending the rope into the fault. The slope became steeper the farther you went down. They went down to the point where it became a nearly vertical cliff. The waning light of the day, filtering down from above, was of little use at such depth. Pick had rocks that glowed in the dark, but their light seemed to penetrate little more than a hand’s breadth.

Their gathering place was a ledge, about a foot wide, that was not visible until you found it with your feet. They all had to wait there until the last of them—Corvus, still in human form—had descended the rope. The final length of this had been doubled over a peg that Pick had driven into the rock some distance above. When Corvus let go of one end of the rope he was able to pull the whole thing around and off the peg.

“That should give Harrier some trouble should he decide to follow us!” Pick chortled.

No one bothered pointing out the even greater difficulties it would pose for them, should they ever be of a mind to go back. But going back would not have ended well. So they went forward—which meant following the ledge in a direction that took them generally away from the sea. They would all have fallen off the ledge and into the crack in a very short time had Pick not provided a hand rope, fixed to the rock with iron pegs.

Above, Harrier must have suspected something. Or perhaps he simply grew impatient and broke his promise. For they heard the marching chant of the marines, punctuated by clashing of cutlasses on shields, echoing from the ceiling of the Overstrike even as the faint light of dusk still shone on its dangling skeins of birds’ nests. It was not possible for them to see up to the brink, which was to their advantage, but they heard the march of the Beedles grow very loud and then falter as a demand for silence made its way up and down the line. After that, nothing but indistinct talking, and the occasional tock-tock-tumble of a stone being projected experimentally over the brink.

“Can they follow us?” Prim—who was second from the rear—asked Corvus, who was behind her. For during her tour of Elkirk she had seen all the different varieties of Beedles that the Autochthons were capable of producing, and she knew that there were many who spent their whole lives down in mines.

By way of an answer, Corvus leaned back, trusting the hand rope, and shone the faint light of his glow-rock at the ledge behind him.

There was no ledge behind him.

Prim’s feet had been upon it only moments before, but now the surface was featureless. Likewise when Corvus passed the next of those iron rope-pegs he was able to draw it out of the stone as if it were thrust into sand. He handed it to Prim, who passed it on up the line. Some time later they went by the same peg again, fixed firmly into the stone. But ahead of them were no sounds of drilling or hammering. Pick, the Lithoplast, was shaping the adamant fore and aft.

Things in the rear became noisy for a time as Harrier’s marines apparently carried many rocks up and rolled them over the brink to kill anyone they supposed to be clinging to the face of the crack below them.

They collected as close together as they could and pressed themselves against the face of the stone, extinguished or hid their lights, and waited. They could hear dimly the Beedles talking far above, and they could distinctly hear boulders rolling and bounding down the slope, picking up terrific velocity before hurtling by. Some seemed to approach directly, as if they would score a direct hit, but those caromed from some kind of overhanging brow that apparently jutted from the cliff directly above them. This held, and made the stones leap far out into the darkness. Prim did not for a moment suppose that it was a natural feature. Pick had prepared it as a refuge. They used it as such until hours had passed since the last hint of light, sound, or falling rocks from above. Then they risked making some noise and lighting some candles.

They moved on into the night