Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,360

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 and 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,