The Second Generation

Palin laid his head on the floor, resting his cheek on the staff’s cool wood. Shutting his eyes, he slipped away into another world—a world of small creatures in brown robes, who lifted him up and ran away with him....

Chapter Two A Realty Bad Hangover

The world heaved and shivered, and Palin’s stomach heaved and his skin shivered in agreement, misery loving company. Rolling over on his side, he was violently sick, and he wondered as he lay on whatever it was he was lying on—he couldn’t open his eyes to see; they felt all gummed together—how long it would take him to die and end this suffering.

When he could be sick no more and when it seemed that his insides might actually stay inside, Palin lay back with a groan. His head was beginning to clear a little, and he realized suddenly, when he tried to move, that his hands were tied behind his back. Fear shot through his muzzy brain, its cold surge blowing away the mists of the dwarf spirits. He couldn’t feel his feet, and he dimly realized that cords tied around his ankles had cut off his circulation. Gritting his teeth, he shifted his position slightly and wiggled his toes inside his soft leather boots, wincing as he felt the tingling of returning blood.

He was lying on a wooden plank, he noticed, feeling it beneath him with his hands. And there was a peculiar motion to the plank, it was rocking back and forth in a manner most unsettling to Palin’s aching head and churning stomach. There were strange noises and smells, too—wood creaking, an odd whooshing and gurgling, and, every so often, a tremendous roaring and thudding and flapping above his head that sounded like a stampede of horses or, Palin thought with a catch in his throat, his father’s description of attacking dragons. Cautiously, the young mage opened his eyes.

Almost instantly, he shut them again. Sunlight streaming through a small, round window pierced his brain like an arrow, sending white-hot pain bouncing around the backs of his eyeballs. The plank rocked him this way and that, and Palin was sick again.

When he recovered sufficiently to think he might not die in the next ten seconds—a matter of extreme regret—Palin braced himself to open his eyes and keep them open.

He managed, but at the cost of being sick again. Fortunately or unfortunately, there was nothing left inside him to lose, and it wasn’t long before he was able to look around. He was on a plank, as he had surmised.

The plank had been built into a curved wooden wall of a small room and was obviously intended as a crude bed. Several other planks lined the walls of the oddly shaped room, and Palin saw his two brothers lying unconscious on these, bound hand and foot as he was. There was no other furniture in the room, nothing but a few wooden chests, which were sliding along the wooden floor.

Palin had only to look out the small, round window on the wall across from him to confirm his worst fears. At first, he saw nothing but blue sky and white clouds and bright sunlight. Then the plank on which he was lying dropped—it seemed—into a chasm. The wooden chests scraped across the floor, running away past him. Blue sky and clouds vanished, to be replaced by green water.

Shutting his eyes once more, Palin rolled over to ease his cramped muscles, pressing his aching head against the cool, damp wood of the crude bed.

Or perhaps he should say “berth.” That’s the nautical term, isn’t it? he thought to himself bitterly. That’s what you call a bed on a ship. And what will they call us on the ship? Galley slaves? Chained to the oars, subject to the overmaster with his whip, flaying the flesh from our backs....

The motion of the ship changed, the sea chests skittered along the floor in the opposite direction, sky and clouds leapt back into the window, and Palin knew he was going to be sick again.

“Palin ... Palin, are you all right?”

There was an anguished tone in the voice that brought Palin to consciousness. Painfully, he once again opened his eyes. He must have slept, he realized, though how he could have done so with this throbbing in his head and the queasy state of his stomach he had no idea.

“Palin!” The voice was urgent.

“Yes,” said Palin thickly. It took an effort to talk; his tongue felt and tasted as though gully dwarves had taken up residence in his mouth. The thought made his stomach lurch, and he abandoned it hurriedly. “Yes,” he said again, “I’m ... all right....”

“Thank Paladine!” groaned the voice, which Palin recognized now as Tanin’s. “By the gods, you looked so pale, lying there, I thought you were dead!”

“I wish I was,” Palin said feelingly.

“We know what you mean,” said Sturm—a very subdued and miserable Sturm, to judge by the sound.