Secret of the Slaves Read Online Free Page A

extremely fragile state to require such extreme preservation measures.”
    â€œYou don’t understand, Ms. Creed,” he said. “Everyone who handles this book dies. Horribly.”
    She looked aside. A wall-sized window, waist high, opened into the cold room from the reading chamber. The book itself in its high-tech bell jar looked even more impressive closer up.
    â€œI don’t believe in curses, Sir Iain.”
    His laugh was short. “There’s nothing paranormal about it,” he said, “or not overtly so. The pages and binding are imbued with a hitherto unknown living organism that is not unlike slime molds. It attacks whoever touches it, both by means of airborne spores and by contact. The effect resembles a cross between flesh-eating bacteria and sarin gas. It isn’t pretty. And it is extremely fast acting. As well as untreatable by any known means.”
    â€œNice.” She sucked in a sharp breath. The air was cool, smelled vaguely of ozone. “How did you get it back here?”
    â€œCarefully. Very carefully.”
    She went to the workstation and sat in the chair. Reading was dead easy. A black wireless mouse controlled a cursor on the screen. She could point to icons around the perimeter of the image. When she ran the cursor over them, text tips popped up.
    â€œInteresting,” she said, frowning slightly in concentration at the huge high-definition screen. “Are these the pages it’s currently open to?”
    â€œYes,” he said, “although you can page through it. The entire volume has been digitized.”
    â€œI see. Well, it’s open to a very dramatic passage. Our author’s talking about what seems to be the end of his journey, of both the wonders and hazards he encountered—a colossal snake—had to be an anaconda. They’re one of the world’s largest. And, whoa, a golden onza. Hmm.”
    â€œYou can read that? That easily?”
    â€œI specialize in archaic Romance languages, Sir Iain.”
    â€œBut the handwriting—it’s all just spider tracks to my eyes. Worse than my handwriting, and that’s saying a packet.”
    She smiled. “As I guess I hinted earlier, this isn’t the first old Portuguese Jesuit diary I’ve looked at.”
    â€œWhat’s a ‘golden onza ’?” he asked. “It seemed to strike you as significant.”
    â€œAn onza is a jaguar. A golden onza is a particularly impressive specimen. Larger than life, you might say. Legend imbues them, some of them anyway, with incredible intelligence and sometimes outright supernatural powers.”
    â€œIndeed.”
    â€œOkay. Apparently our priest was captured by Indians, blindfolded and taken to something called quilombo dos sonhos, ” Annja said as she continued reading.
    She sat back. “ Dos sonhos translates as, ‘of dreams,’” she said. “But what’s a quilombo? ”
    He pulled a chair over next to hers and sat, leaning slightly forward, with his elbows on his thighs. “Have you heard of the Maroons, then?”
    She turned to face him. “If I recall correctly, that was a name for escaped New World slaves who fought guerrilla campaigns against recapture—sometime with pretty significant success. Toussaint-Louverture ran the French colonial overlords clean out of Haiti. Of course, I suspect they’d be called terrorists today.”
    â€œThese quilombos, I’m told, were settlements the Brazilian Maroons formed in the wilds, mostly along the coast,” he said. “Some eventually became republics powerful enough to stand off their erstwhile oppressors for centuries. A few actually maintained their independence until the Brazilian empire became the republic in 1889. Several are still around today as townships.”
    He sat back and draped an arm over the back of his chair.
    â€œThe most famous of all was the Quilombo dos Palmares in northeastern