The Sea of the Dead

by Barry Wolverton

  Black hadn’t meant to grow so fond of Bren, and if Emily hadn’t died, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. He wouldn’t have had to think of Bren like a son, because he would’ve had a mother that was seeing to him. But David Owen, without Emily, was lost as a parent. It wasn’t his fault, really. It was all he could do to keep their leaky thatched roof over their heads. Educating Bren, helping him grow, making sure he had a chance to do something with his life . . . there was no time for that. Black had to take that on. And he knew David resented him for it.

  Black looked at David now through the inn window, saddling his horse. If he resented Black then, what must he think now? If Black had been the real influence on Bren, then it was Black’s fault Bren had run away, Black’s fault all their lives were in peril, Black’s fault they were all still a long way from home.

  “David, go get your boy,” said Black, leaving the inn. “I’ll finish loading up.”

  “Lady Barrett is with Bren,” said Ani, appearing out of nowhere. “They will meet us at the quay. Shveta has found us a boat.”

  Sean walked up as Ani was explaining this. “Wasn’t Lady Barrett with Shveta?”

  “No,” said Ani.

  Sean and Black exchanged looks, but in the end they followed Ani to the quay. If Bren wasn’t there, they could always come back and find him.

  The seaside was teeming with people, and it took a while for them to spot Shveta’s bodyguards, along with Shveta herself, near a flat-bottomed boat with a tall deckhouse near its stern and a single mainmast, flying one large sail. When they reached the gangplank, they were met by a man with no front teeth and two pistols.

  “Off you go,” said Shveta. “Vlad will take good care of you. I’ve made sure of that.”

  “Wait—I thought you were coming too,” said Black. “That was the whole reason you left Cashmere.”

  “Change of plans,” said Shveta. “Something’s come up.”

  “Where is Bren?” David Owen almost shouted.

  “And don’t tell us he’s with Lady Barrett, because I know that’s a lie,” said Sean. “I did see her, alone, not long ago.”

  Shveta shrugged and glanced at Ani, as if to ask, Should we tell them? Turning back to David she said, “Bren isn’t going with you. He’s fine, I assure you, and if you want I can even promise that he will rejoin you at some point someday. But I’ve got far more important plans for him.”

  David Owen lunged for her, but Aadarsh quickly stepped in and stopped him cold with a hand to his throat. David gurgled curses and threats, but he wasn’t getting any closer.

  “Ani and I will make sure he’s safe,” said Shveta. “Trust me, he’s a valuable young man.”

  Black felt so angry and at the same time so powerless. He couldn’t speak. Sean didn’t have that problem. He peppered Shveta with the most ungentlemanly language imaginable, and then asked, “Where is Lady Barrett? She’s not in on this, is she? She’s put Bren at risk before with her crazy schemes.”

  Shveta laughed. “I have no doubt about that. But Lady Barrett isn’t part of my schemes. She’s too much of a wild card. My companions here have made sure she won’t be a problem.”

  Black was wild-eyed now. “Dear God! You didn’t . . .”

  “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to, bub. Now, last call to board.”

  Black folded his arms. “I’m not going anywhere. None of us are.”

  Shveta shook her head regretfully. “You are, and you know it. If you force us to do our worst, you guarantee that you and Bren will never be together again. If you make it safely to Baghdad, there’s always hope.”

  Black tried to stand his ground, but his crossed arms slackened, and he looked at David. It was obvious what Bren’s father was thinking. He wasn’t afraid to die, but he was afraid of losing Bren.

  “Could be worse, right?” said Shveta.

  Black, David, and Sean turned and shuffled along the crude gangplank, past the smiling captain and onto the boat. Sean put his arm on David’s shoulder. “Bren is the most resilient lad I’ve ever met,” he said. “I promise we’ll get him back.”

  David smiled weakly. “That’s not a promise you can make,” he said.

  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.

  “You smell like puke,” she said.

  “Oh,” Bren stammered. “I, uh, got sick.”

  “My fault,” said Ani, polishing off the chicken soup. “I’m still working on the right dosage for my sleeping powder.”

  Shveta took Bren out of the small room and up through a hatch to a deck that looked all too familiar to Bren: crates and barrels; tools and supplies; sleeping hammocks crammed together to maximize space for whatever cargo they were carrying. It was all on a much smaller scale than the Albatross, but it reeked just as bad.

  She took him through a second hatch that led to the deck of the barge, which gave Bren a chance to look around. The landscape was an ocean of golden grain,
a bright contrast to the murky river. The barge itself was barely moving, and he quickly saw why: it was being towed. On the shore were a dozen men dressed in burlap rags and sackcloth, ropes attached to the front of the barge pulled tight across their bodies.

  “They have to pull the boat the length of the river?” Bren asked, astonished.

  “They work in shifts,” said Shveta. “It’s only a couple of thousand miles, give or take.”

  “But there is a mast and a sail!” said Bren.

  “And they work splendidly going downstream,” said Shveta. “The Volga current is far too strong to sail upstream. Shouldn’t you know that since you claim to be an expert sailor?”

  “I never said I was an expert,” said Bren.

  They continued walking, to the back of the barge and into a deckhouse that had been turned into a makeshift navigation room that was surprisingly well decorated for a cargo barge.

  “I had them change it all up for me,” Shveta explained. “If I’m going to spend the next month on this tub I need a little something more than vodka and a chamber pot.”

  “A month?” said Bren, slumping. He didn’t even want to think about where he was supposed to live during that time.

  “A month to sail the Volga,” said Shveta. “Then we still need to go north, through Novgorod, all the way to a tiny little frozen village called Murmansk.”

  “Why?” said Bren. The only consolation he could think of was that maybe he would have time to plan his escape.

  She smiled at him, her white teeth sparkling more than the ruby on her forehead. “Sit down, my child. I’ll tell you. Are you sure you don’t want something to eat?”

  Bren wanted to say no. But he was starving. Even prisoners had to eat. “Fine,” he said.

  Shveta nodded to Ani, who left the room muttering something that sounded like Make up your mind. The mandala was on a small table between them.

  “I believe your father was right,” said Shveta, and Bren opened his mouth to ask again where his father was exactly, but Shveta stopped him. “I’ll come to that. But your father is safe, and so is the string bean and the mouthy redhead.” She redirected his attention to the mandala.

  “Have you ever heard of the Well of Wisdom?”

  Bren shook his head.

  “I believe you,” said Shveta. “This time.”

  She did that thing again that unnerved Bren—she folded her arms across each other so they disappeared up her bright-yellow silk sleeves, making it look as if she were preparing to become a blinding force of light and energy. Without meaning to, Bren squinted.

  “Remember I told you about natural magic, the kind that comes from understanding the oldest language, the true names for things and their meaning?”

  “Yes,” said Bren, through clenched teeth. He was determined to let Shveta know that he resented being put through this. “You said the language was lost, just like with the Eight Immortals.”

  “Through neglect and human selfishness,” said Shveta. “Yes. But that wasn’t the only reason. Some of the language was hidden.”

  “By whom?”

  “No one knows for sure. One story blames a destroyer-god, an enemy to humankind. Another credits a wise man trying to save humans from themselves by taking away a power they had no control over. A third makes a trickster the hero of the story.”

  “That’s a lot of stories,” said Bren. “What makes you think any of them are true?”

  “Two things,” said Shveta. “One, a belief that natural magic was real—is real. And that the Lost Words of Magic can be recovered.”

  “But why—” Bren started to ask, when Shveta closed her eyes, lifted her head, and started mumbling something he couldn’t understand. Bren looked up as well, and to his horror, the ceiling was writhing with snakes. He shut his eyes, praying it was an illusion, but when he did, the snakes fell, collapsing on the table, the floor, on Bren . . . he jumped up and ran for the door, pulling snakes off his shoulders, but it was locked. Just when he thought he would die of fright, Shveta spoke again and the snakes were gone.

  “It’s called the Rain of Serpents,” she said calmly. “One of the six supposedly mythical Hindu weapons.”

  “Please don’t show me the others,” said Bren.

  “I don’t know them,” said Shveta. “That’s the problem. Come, sit back down.”

  Bren obeyed, and Shveta pointed to the center of the mandala.

  “This is the other reason,” she said. “A Tibetan painting, possibly hundreds of years old, that happens to look just like a European map your father knows. You see, there is another legend, about a group called the Nine Unknown . . .”

  Bren flinched. A conversation flashed across his mind . . . a conversation he didn’t remember having.

  “These nine supposedly guard nine books containing all the knowledge of the world,” she continued. “Once upon a time, I thought that one of these books must contain the Lost Words of Magic.”

  “And now?” said Bren.

  “Now, I believe that this book merely reveals where those words are hidden. There may be more than one story about how the words were lost, but all have them ending up in the same place.”

  “Thrown down the Well of Wisdom,” said Bren.

  “You got it, bub. And the story I’ve heard since I was a girl was that the Well was a mouth at the top of the world, which if you live in these parts, means the Himalayas.”

  Bren suddenly remembered the time Yaozu had called the Tibetan Plateau the “Roof of the World.”

  “But perhaps that assumption was wrong,” said Shveta. “Maybe this is the top of the world. The North Pole.”

  Bren reached out to smooth down the curled edges of the mandala. It looked remarkably good for having been part of his clothing for months.

  “So I did steal this from the League of Blood?”

  “Ah, now we come to the best part of my theory,” said Shveta, wagging a finger triumphantly. “I don’t think you stole this at all. I think you inherited it.”

  Bren was already so weak from hunger, sickness, and anger at being kidnapped that he almost fainted. “You think I’m one of the Nine Unknown? Please don’t rain snakes down on me, but that’s ridiculous.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” Bren didn’t know how to answer. It seemed so self-evident to him that he was nothing special. And the ledger of bad decisions he had been making for the past couple of years certainly contradicted any claim to wisdom he might make.

  “Just because the League of Blood is all Himalayan monks doesn’t mean the knowledge-keepers have to be,” said Shveta. “As far as I know.”

  “Then why did they try to kill me?” said Bren.

  “Good question,” Shveta admitted. “I’m sure babies don’t come into the world with Mystical Knowledge-Keeper written on their forehead. It’s probably something the League has to figure out, too. Perhaps chasing you was a test.”

  Bren lay his head down on the table. He just wanted to go home. Shveta pulled his head back up by the hair.

  “I’m quite serious about all this.”

  “What is it you want?” he pleaded.

  “To remake the world,” she said.

  Bren didn’t have a response to that. He only had to look at her to know she was dead serious. “So what am I supposed to do?” he said. “I seem to know less about all this than you do. Here, take the tangka, or mandala, or sacred book, or whatever it is. You don’t need me!”

  “You’re the key to all this,” said Shveta. “I know it, and you will know it too, eventually.”

  “You’re going to send me to the North Pole?” said Bren.

  Shveta smiled. “Don’t look so glum, bub. You’re not in this alone. Ani and I will be going with you. Don’t you like a good adventure?”

  “Not anymore,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  18

  GHOST CAT

  Bren’s trip up the Volga wasn’t very adventurous, but it wasn’t dull, either. Each of t
he towns where they stopped to trade was a stew of men and women from both East and West. Along the southern part of the river he met Khazars and Arabs, Greeks and Turks, dealing horses and swords, olives, figs, and honey. When they entered the great plains of Eastern Europe, surrounded by endless miles of golden wheat, Bren met the Volga Bulgars, who traded furs of beaver, fox, and bear for some of the precious caviar, which Bren thought was a really terrible deal for the Bulgars.

  And at every stop, his heart raced as he looked for the chance to escape, to return down the Volga and try to catch back up with his father, Mr. Black, Sean, and Lady Barrett. Shveta had finally answered his questions, sort of, about what had happened to them. She had assured him they were safe, and that she had made it clear to them that their best chance of a family reunion was to return to Britannia safely.

  But would Bren return to Britannia safely? He believed Shveta wanted him alive, but so what? She was determined to go somewhere no one had ever gone. There was no way she could guarantee Bren’s safety. At the same time, he could find no opening to escape. Ani seemed to be there at every turn, not just marking his steps but reading his mind. If he was stuck with them, he might have to swallow his anger and help them, for his own sake.

  Surprisingly, Bren traveled in relative comfort, thanks to Shveta. He didn’t have to join the poor Volga boatmen who trudged along the shore, towing their barge upriver whenever there wasn’t enough wind. He didn’t have to do any work at all, in fact. It was nothing like the Albatross, except for the one thing—a one-eyed crewman with a salty tongue who reminded him fondly of his old master, Mr. Tybert. This man, who went by the name Scratch, wasn’t a navigator (not that a barge needed one). He was what they called the “pole man”—the one who went to the side of the barge with a huge wooden pole to push them free should they get bogged down in mud or garbage or vegetation in a shallower part of the river.

  The one time Bren saw him called to duty, it seemed that it was the dozen men on shore yoked to the barge who really freed it. But what did he know about river navigation? He imagined that if he asked Scratch about it, Scratch would probably cuff his ear like Mr. Tybert used to do.