Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,353

seriously the reason they claim.”

“What reason is that?” Querc asked.

Prim knew. “To keep Sprung out.” She rested her hand on the part of the map that showed the Bits and Shivers. “We mostly live up here.” She tripped over the “we” since, as she had to keep reminding herself, she wasn’t actually Sprung.

She swept her hand a short distance south and a little to the west. It now lay on the north coast of the Asking—the same coast they could see over the boat’s port rail. “If you don’t mind sailing out of sight of land for a few days and trusting to the mercy of the sea, you can make that voyage easily, far out of sight of the watchtowers of Secondel and Toravithranax. Fetching up on the shore of the Asking, you’d perish of thirst in a few days—”

Querc nodded. “Unless you landed where a river reached the sea—but that is where the Autochthons have made their watchposts.”

“They have to guard the river mouths,” Prim concluded, “lest Sprung settle there, and once again get a foothold on the Land and begin to populate it.”

Seeing someone in the corner of her eye she turned and met the eye of Mard, who, having been dismissed by Fern, had come round to listen. He blushed, averted his gaze, and slunk away like a man who had murdered his own father. She could not for the life of her work out why, until she later saw Lyne flirting with Querc. Then she understood it was because she had uttered the word “populate,” which implied having babies.

Apparently, the upshot of the meeting that Fern had just convened and concluded was that Mard and Lyne were off duty for a bit. Accordingly, they began to swordfight. Mard was swinging the sword that Prim had acquired by killing Delegate Elshield on the quay at Secondel. Rusting away in a storage locker belowdecks were a number of other weapons, mostly shorter cutlasses, much less glorious than Elshield’s but wieldy enough to be used against it in practice. Part of Prim wanted to resent the way that the young men—and particularly Mard—were assuming a kind of ownership over the sword. If circumstances had been different, she might have laid claim to it more forcefully. But be it never so magnificent, it could never be anything more than a token for Prim. Knowing she had another way to kill, she could never be as fascinated by it as Mard and Lyne were, and was happy to let them get good at using it. Querc, who was obviously quite taken with Lyne, went to watch them play.

Fern came forward for a look at the map. She spent as much time staring at this thing as Prim. This had been a little disconcerting at first given that Fern was supposed to know where she was going. She shouldered her way into the position most advantageous for peering at the part that depicted the Asking. She did not quite shove Prim out of the way but just kept sidling closer and closer, so that it seemed easiest for Prim to move. As Fern gazed at the map, Prim gazed at Fern, taking in the ridges and whorls of her scars. The skipper was quite unbothered to be looked at in this way.

Prim wondered if that was part of the point of having such adornments. People were going to look at you anyway. Might as well give their eyes something to do.

What then did Fern see in the map? She seemed to be looking not at the coastline of the Asking itself, but at the open sea to its south. Prim had never paid much notice to that part of the map; it was just a featureless expanse of animal hide that had been dyed blue.

Or was it? Fern was gazing at it much longer and more intently than made sense for a featureless expanse.

“What do you see?”

Fern reached out with a scarred, weathered hand, dripping with rings, and brushed a part of the map where the dye had set unevenly. “Just the ghost of a memory, perhaps,” she said. “I was of a big family. The youngest. From here.” She indicated a river delta on the south coast. “We booked passage on a vessel bound for Toravithranax.”

“All the way around the Asking?”

Fern looked at her. “Yes, for the family was too large to attempt the crossing of the desert.” She glanced at Querc as if to hint at why: people like