Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,348

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