“The only purpose of the money,” said Fern, “is to do away with any need of making awkward explanations to my crew.”

“Swab would follow you anywhere, I’ll bet.”

“Yes,” said Fern, “but even Swab needs to eat.”

The wind faltered, and shifted round in a way that was less favorable. Fern diverted farther from shore lest the next galley catch them becalmed. This got them into “a bit of weather” that seemed to the landlubbers nothing short of apocalyptic. How terrible, Prim wondered, must the thing that killed Fern’s family have been if this was but a poetic figure of it? Parts of Silverfin that seemed quite material had to be dismantled and remade. The thing might have gone badly had Corvus not been able to fly up high and supply information about where they were, and how best to bend their course back to shore while remaining out of sight of the last outpost that the Autochthons had bothered to construct. Thus when the Asking next hove into view, they were looking at a part of it deemed so remote and inhospitable that El didn’t really care whether Sprung went and attempted to live there.

In the next day they spied only two things that looked like river mouths, but there was very little greenery around them; they looked instead like avalanche scars.

None of these drawbacks seemed to make much of an impression on Pick. And for reasons that could only be guessed at, Corvus had all but ceded the leadership of the Quest to him. So they dropped anchor into a cove, deep enough to accommodate Silverfin’s keel, sheltered enough to prevent its being flung against the rocky shore by wind or wave. They let their little longboat into the water. Mard and Lyne, deeply tired of being hot, stripped off their shirts, thinking to dive in and swim to shore, an easy stone’s throw away, but Swab told them not to, on the grounds that she had better things to do with her time than go over every square inch of the swimmers’ exposed flesh with red-hot tweezers.

Rett and Scale produced kegs of fresh water from down in the hold and took them ashore so that they could be decanted into canteens and skins. They also had hammocks, and nets to go over them, and curious funnel-shaped tin collars to tie round each hammock rope to prevent unspecified creatures from crawling down them in the nighttime. Mard and Lyne, already thwarted from swimming, had fancied that they would hike practically naked, but Pick, after a vigorous half hour of roaming about the beach killing things with his stick, let it be known that the lads would be worse than useless unless they wrapped heavy canvas around their legs all the way up to the groin, reinforced below the knees with gaiters of the thickest sort of leather.