The Sea of the Dead by Barry Wolverton

Author:Barry Wolverton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

17

THE WELL OF WISDOM

The rocking of the boat woke Bren up. He tried to sit up and immediately felt sick, so he lay back down, but it was too late. Up it came, the contents of his stomach, in a great volcanic eruption of chunky liquid.

He would have to clean that up.

No, wait. He wasn’t in Map, working at the vomitorium.

The paiza! He had swallowed it. It was the only way—if he showed it to the admiral they would just take it and not let him come along. He had to trick them. Now the admiral would be furious!

He heard footsteps. It was that awful first mate, van Decken! Bren panicked . . . he had to find the paiza. He reached out with both hands, looking for it frantically, but all he came up with was handfuls of . . .

“What are you doing?” came a girl’s voice. “You can’t put that back, you know.”

Bren looked up. “Mouse? Is that you?”

“Why do you keep calling me that?”

Ani squatted down next to Bren. He didn’t recognize her at first, until she pulled the hair away from those strange green eyes.

“Let me out of here,” he said weakly.

“Out of where?” said Ani.

Bren looked around him. No bars. He wasn’t in the brig. But the floor was definitely rocking. “Where am I?”

“You’re on a barge, on the Volga River,” said Ani. “Here, I brought you soup. It will make you feel better.”

Her face was right in front of his, and slowly it came back to him . . . the small pile of green powder in her hand, the cloud of dust. He drew back suddenly.

“What did you do to me? Where’s my father?”

“I knocked you out, and your father is on another boat, going south.”

“What? Why?”

“You really should eat this,” said Ani, pushing the bowl closer to him. “It will help relieve the effects of the drug.”

Bren pushed the soup back at her, sloshing a third of it out of the bowl. That’s when he heard more footsteps, this time the steady, confident stride of someone in charge. The door to whatever room they were in opened.

“He won’t eat the soup,” Ani said to Shveta.

“You should eat the soup,” said Shveta.

“Did Ani put something in it?” said Bren.

“Yes. Chicken, I think,” said Shveta.

Bren stared at the bowl. He was starving, but he couldn’t eat now. It would make him look weak.

“I’ll feel just fine as long as you don’t poison me again.”

“Suit yourself,” said Ani, who picked up the bowl and began to eat noisily. Bren’s stomach growled.

“You want to know what’s going on?” said Shveta. “Come with me. I’ll fill you in.”

She extended one of her heavily bangled arms to him. She was like one of those goddesses they had seen in the tapestries at Leh reaching down from another plane of existence. Bren took her hand, and she lifted him up, pulling him close. He stared into her bottomless brown eyes, which, unlike Ani’s, made him want to dive right in and forget his troubles.

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