The Prince of Shadow Read Free Page A

he had dropped his rake, but he could not see it in the swirling muck. He struggled against panic and his own awkwardness to link the neck chain to his ankles, and tugged, hard, to alert the slave at the winch to pull him up. He would have given a sigh of relief when he felt the slack tighten and his body turn upside down, but to vent his emotion now would invite death at the very moment of his rescue. Then he was out of the water, hanging naked and upside down above the boat, coughing and choking, sneezing to clear the water from his nose.
    â€œWhere’s your rake?” Shen-shu, the foreman, asked. Llesho pointed below him, to the bay. He saw the pinched, anguished expressions on the faces of his shift-mates, and then the winch was lowering him again.
    â€œFind it. You are wasting time,” Shen-shu warned him, and then he was plunging headfirst into the bay almost before he could grab a breath, dropping, dropping. There it was. He had the rake in his hands, but he was exhausted, and hanging upside down, and he could not reach up to take hold of the chain above his feet, nor had he slack to tug on. Llesho wondered how long the foreman would leave him in the bay, and if he would survive. Black specks filled his vision, and the laughter of spirits in the kingdom of the dead filled his ears.
    Then Lling was beside him, and Hmishi, and they held his shoulders, trying to lift him. Hmishi pried the rake from his numb fingers and swam for the surface, and the winch grabbed his chain. Llesho was rising. Lling, at his side, breathed air from her mouth into his own, until finally they broke the surface.
    â€œDon’t fling him about!” Lling shouted as she clambered over the side of the boat. She and Hmishi took his shoulders again, as the winch released his chain. He fell, feetfirst, to the deck.
    â€œWhat did you see down there?” Lling whispered, but Llesho could only gasp like a landed fish. Rolling to his stomach, he vomited salt water over the side of the boat, and hung there, draped across the gunwales, gathering his strength with each choked breath and trying to see his future in the gentle ripples of the bay. He was so exhausted that he hardly noticed when the foreman searched his body, probing in his mouth for hidden pearls after he had done the same to the other cavities for the pleasure of a minor cruelty. “Rotten teeth!” he grunted, and Llesho realized that yes, the black pearl was real, and that perhaps the spirit had told the truth after all. His brothers were alive somewhere on the mainland. But how was he to find them?

Chapter Two
    â€œWAKE up. You need to get off the boat.” Lling shook him by the shoulder, rousing Llesho from the questions going around in his head.
    â€œI’m coming.” He bestirred himself, but found he could not control his arms or legs. The boat rocking gently beneath him seemed distant, his body not quite real except for the tight buzzing in his head.
    Hmishi offered a hand, and pulled him to his feet, but Llesho’s legs seemed to have turned to water. He stumbled, grateful for the shoulder propping him up while he made his wobbling way to the shore. Familiar hands reached for him and hauled him into the slat-sided wagon for the ride back to the slave compound. Llesho found an empty corner on the flat bottom of the wagon and curled in on himself. Lling followed, and then Hmishi, each taking up their post to either side of him. Secure in their protection, he let his eyelids fall, lulled into a shallow sleep where the afternoon puzzled itself out in his drifting mind.
    Sometimes, he knew, divers who had suffered enchantment of the deep and survived to tell of it described vivid waking dreams that came to them as consciousness fled. Llesho had not felt like he was losing consciousness while he talked to the spirit under the bay, but his mind must have been starved to convince him Lleck had appeared to him and that he had spoken with the spirit of