Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,352

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.

This topic was quite literally on the table in the sense that Prim had taken advantage of the spotlessly clear weather to unroll the big map. The table, like everything else that mattered aboard Silverfin, was bolted in place. She and Querc had been looking at it and Corvus was looking at them. They were up at the front end. Abaft, where the tiller was, Fern was meeting with her crew, including Mard and Lyne.

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