Free Salamaine's Curse by V. L. Burgess Page B

rattle away and pulled up the rough wool blanket folded at his feet.
    Porter was wrong. It wasn’t over yet. Tomorrow, he thought, as he closed his eyes. He’d figure everything out tomorrow.

CHAPTER EIGHT
M AYDAY!
    A shrill bell pierced the silence. Tom clenched his teeth in irritation and attempted without success to block out the noise.
    Just two more minutes,
he thought, burrowing deeper into his bed. He shrugged his blanket over his shoulder and rolled over, only to suddenly realize two strange things: his bed was swaying, and coarse rope rubbed his cheek where his pillow should have been.
    For a moment, he could make no sense of where he was. Then it hit him. He wasn’t in his dorm room at the academy anymore, but on Umbrey’s ship, the
Purgatory.
His eyes flew open and he sat up, shaking off the foggy cloud of sleep that held him in its grip. Next to him, Porter’s hammock was empty.
    He glanced around the room. The other hammocks were full, but the occupants looked different from the shadowy glimpses he’d had of the men who’d been sleeping last night. A crew shift, he guessed.
    He slipped out of his hammock and hunted around until he found the bathroom. The space consisted of a small stool and rough table with soap, a water pitcher, and wash basin. He understood how those items might be used to clean himself, but he didn’t understand why that was all there was to the room. He looked around blankly. For a desperate moment, he considered waking one of Umbrey’s crewmen to ask him where the toilet was, but the idea was too mortifying to seriously entertain.
    The words
The Necessary,
scrawled across a hatched portal in the floor, caught his attention. He cautiously eased open the door and found himself staring, through a small opening perhaps ten inches beneath him, at the ocean. No plumbing or drains to worry about here. Evidently everything was immediately flushed out to sea. Now
that
was definitely something he hadn’t read about in any history book.
    He finished and soaped up, splashed water on his face, rinsed his mouth, and tugged his fingers through his hair. Once the basics had been taken care of, he realized how hungry he was. He climbed up to the main deck. A mild sun shone directly overhead, making it near noon, he noted with surprise. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d slept so late. No wonder he was famished.
    Umbrey spied him and waved him over. “’Bout time you got out of bed. I was beginning to think you’d tumbled overboard.”
    As there was no reply he could possibly make, Tom ignored the comment, choosing instead to say hello to Willa, Mudge, and Porter, who stood beside Umbrey on the quarterdeck. Their greetings were friendly enough, but Tom couldn’t help noticing the quiet tension that ran through the group.
    He turned his attention to the surrounding sea. A shroud of heavy mist rose from the surface of the water, giving it a sinister, swamp-like appearance. The horizon was dotted with a series of small, rocky islands, through which the
Purgatory
carefully navigated. Free-floating masses of algae, some of them thick enough to support a man, drifted past. Tom had been in a decent mood when he woke up, but no longer. The creepiness of the place sent a wave of dread through him.
    â€œIs this the Cursed Souls Sea?” he asked.
    Umbrey shook his head. “The Straits of Dire.” He rapped a knuckle on the map mounted beside the ship’s wheel. “We’re here, between northeastern end of Aquat and the Cursed Souls Sea. If we make it through, we’ll continue on.”

    If
, Tom noted, not when.
    Willa rubbed her hands over her arms, as though warding off a chill. “We’re passing through the trade route,” she said.
    The trade route. Tom mulled over her words, thinking of the vast cargoes of goods that left Asia aboard enormous ships bound for Europe. “You mean, like spices and