The Pirate Prince (34 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Lazar stomped down the gangplank with Vicar a step behind him, holding a torch that cast a circle of light in the blackness. They had taken only a few steps when Lazar felt the rickety dock begin to shake. Footsteps pounded toward them. Suddenly two dozen Moorish cutthroats came rushing out of the hot, dry African night.

Vicar breathed an expletive.

“
Marhaba
, my brothers,” Lazar barked, blade drawn. “
Assalamu ’alaykum
.”

This drew them up short. The first of their number approached slowly, his dirk pirouetting in little deadly circles at the level of Lazar’s heart. Lazar watched the man warily, appreciating the finesse even the lowliest of them possessed when it came to weapons.

“It is
The Whale
!” one of their company cried in excitement from the back. A few of the others went to the bow to squint at his ship’s figurehead.

“It is so,” they called to the ones making a thorny hedgerow of weapons around him.

“
Shaytan
pasha? Is it truly you?” the first one, with the dirk, said, frozen, suspicious under his grimy turban. His black eyes were wary.

Lazar gave a wan smile. “Seven trades and no luck,” he replied.

The man cried out and whirled around to the others, ragged robes spinning, then turned back to him.

“Peace of God be with you, my brother! My brothers,” he cried, “it is the mighty Devil of the West! He has returned!
Ahlan wa sahlan, Shaytan
. Welcome back! His Lordship will be overjoyed.”

“
Ahlan beek
. I’m sure he will,” he murmured, and shook the man’s outstretched weapon hand. He followed the handshake by touching his hand over his heart as the Moor had. It showed sincerity. “Blessings upon you, brother. Have I had the honor of meeting you before?” he asked mildly.

The swarthy man stepped too close to him with a broad, white-toothed grin. Lazar grimaced inwardly. He’d forgotten about that. They always had to stand nigh bloody on your toes when they talked to you. He forced himself not to back away in spite of the disdain rising in his throat.

“You know me not, Shaytan pasha,” he explained, “but I, of course, have heard the legends of your great deeds so that, forgive me, I feel I already know you well. I am Hamdy, son of Ibrihim the Ugly. Let us take you and your men to His Excellency.”

“
Shukran
,” Lazar said with a nod of thanks. Then he followed the Barbary corsairs over the dead, dry ground to the palace of their sheik.

“It is a miracle,” Hamdy was saying, shaking his head. “His Lordship in his wisdom predicted you would come the very day we heard of your mighty battle at Ascencion!”

“Did he?” Lazar said lightly.

He watched the glittering sand give way softly under his boots. He remembered scorpions. The road to Malik’s fortress was lined with desert rocks, here and there a few scrubby palms. The terrain was dead and bleak on all sides. The sea below seemed dead, too, as it washed the bone-white shore.

He looked up and saw the outline of the building under the moon, poised on a field of blue like one of Judas’s silver coins.

Memories crashed back. He tried to stop them. He reached for his flask and drank it dry, knowing he’d need its liquid courage. There was a bitterness in his mouth that all the rum in the world could not wash out. God knows he’d tried.

He was thirteen
….

He walked up the road behind the Moors, mesmerized by the regular, easy swing of their dirty, flowing robes. He gripped the hilt of his sword, knowing it could not save him.

“Are you all right?” Vicar murmured beside him.

Lazar realized he was shivering. He was thinking of the time, four years ago, when he had returned to Al Khuum for vengeance on Malik. Molded by Wolfe and the wreaking of death, newly made captain of his first ship, puffed up with pride by the way he’d snuffed out every man who’d been part of the mutiny at Antigua, he thought himself quite fearless and hoped to exorcise once and for all the demons that still screeched in his head.

He had failed.

His old friends among the Janissaries, Malik’s creatures now body and soul, had beaten the devil out of him with their usual, good-natured brutality, leaving him to come to his senses on his ship, bruised and humiliated. They had expected just such an attempt from him for a long time, it turned out. They knew him better than he liked. No one was surprised, and Malik was not even frightened. Everyone laughed at him.

Ma’alish
, they had said. Never mind. It’s in the past. It’s not that serious.

On that day four years ago, he’d realized, to his astonishment, that they had not all been affected the same way he had by Malik’s torments. They had no idea what it had done to his spirit, how the hatred and the evil of Al Khuum had warped him—and he was too proud to let them know.

He looked up, startled, to find himself in the gold and marble salon he knew so well, with its crimson, pillow-strewn divans and silk-hung walls and marvelous tiles. And there, on the magnificent golden throne, was Sayf-del-Malik: black-eyed, unmoving, beautiful, and deadly as a shark. The Sword of Honor.

Two fingers obscured his mouth as he gazed at Lazar in thought.

Every muscle in Lazar’s body went taut. That slow, razor scrutiny was something he would never forget. Eons could not erase it.

“So,” Malik said, dropping a hand languidly to the arm of the gilded throne. His eyes flickered with desert heat. “My young falcon has returned to my gauntlet. He soars in the heavens, but still he knows his true master. Malik will always be your master,” he murmured, the heat of his black stare sharpening to unbearable intensity. “Won’t I, Lazzo?”

Allegra was frantic, pacing the deck as she watched Lazar and Vicar go off down the dock, surrounded by heathen cutthroats who jabbered in a tongue she could not begin to comprehend. The group went up the road that ran parallel to the white, moonlit beach until they disappeared over a ridge at the cluster of distant ragged palm trees.

She whirled around to face the somber, silent crew, but the men turned away from her pleading gaze. She knew they had to sense the danger, but she saw they would not disobey their orders. She had never felt so helpless in her life.

Farther out in the bay, the six other ships rode at anchor, waiting. In two hours they would open fire on the fortress and the desert town if Lazar was not back with the signet ring in his possession. She wanted to kill him for not taking anyone with him except Vicar. Proud, obstinate man!

“I can’t take this,” she said to the air. She tried to pray as she stood there but had no patience for it.
I have to do something
.

She smelled Bernardo before he came to stand at the rails next to her. The hostility between them remained as strong as before, but she had grudgingly admitted that the Ascencioner’s devotion to Lazar was unshakable.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he growled.

She turned to him. “I’ve got to help him. I’m going mad.”

“Can you use a weapon?”

“I can try,” she vowed.

“Come on.”

Lazar looked his old tormentor in the eye, aware of nothing else around him. “I’ve come for what you stole from me.”

“Stole—what’s this? Am I a thief, Lazzo? Surely I never took anything that you were not eager to give,” he murmured, touching his tongue to his dry lips.

Lazar reached for his pistol at the insult, but six sword points surrounded his throat before he could pull it out of the holster.

“
Diir baalak
.” Malik laughed, chiding him softly. “Be careful of the devils you wrestle, my rash young friend, lest they overpower you. But look at you! A devil in your own right already, and you, not yet a man of thirty summers. My, my, so young, and already your powers of destruction exceed my most hopeful calculations. You might be interested to know,” He said over steepled fingers, “Genoa has thirty ships out looking for you. And the new governor of Ascencion has put a price on your head—a Viscount Domenic Clemente, I believe. A thousand louis d’or. Yes, my friend. These are dangerous times.”

Lazar glanced behind him, unsurprised to find the corsairs blocking his way out.

“Come, come, you’re worth much more to me than that, Lazzo. Why the worried looks? I have not betrayed you.” Malik accepted a cup of coffee from a servant and sipped it. “After all, were I to hand you over to them, I should never have the pleasure of your company again.”

“Nor shall you.”

Malik’s smile was a mocking curved blade. “No? I do wish to protect you and your men, of course, but these ruffians of mine, they are creatures of such avarice, and this prize for them seems effortless. Such a swift ship…such a fine crew. Genoa would pay handsomely, I think, for the pleasure of seeing them hanged. But you, my wicked boy, you I should keep for myself at all costs.”

“There are six ships in your harbor that will open fire on Al Khuum if I have not returned in two hours’ time.”

Malik laughed. “Of course there are.”

Lazar stared at him. “I am not bluffing. Give me back the signet ring. That’s all I want. It is rightfully mine.”

The bey’s black eyes glittered as he gestured a man toward the door to investigate his claim. “Even if you are telling the truth, we both know your men are too devoted to open fire while you’re here.”

Lazar shrugged, but his bravado was wearing thin. “Give me back the ring, or we’ll find out.”

“I daresay I shouldn’t require even one hour of your time, Lazzo,” he said with an intimate smile. “Do you remember the games we used to play?”

Oh, he remembered. That simple, soft-spoken question did more to shake loose his careful self-control than the legion of corsairs blocking his exit, and Malik knew it.

Suddenly the curse of this place was becoming too much for him. The very smell of it was beginning to overpower him.

Vicar broke in smoothly, his voice like a razor’s edge. “Why, Your Radiance, what pious man would so threaten his brother’s son? Allah be praised.”

Malik sat back in the golden chair and joined his hands lightly, a smile on his lips, fury in his eyes. “How noble you are to protect your young friend, Doctor Southwell, but Captain Wolfe is long dead, and I daresay the slave can speak for himself. He learned to fight among my Janissaries, you know, my jackals of the desert, so surely he need not cling to your coattails, if he is a man. Are you a man, Lazzo?”

Lazar’s head was down. He was frozen with shame, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.

Malik laughed at his helplessness, as he had when he was a boy in chains, unable to defend himself.

“Is this, then, the great Sword’s hospitality?” Vicar replied icily.

Lazar only half heard them arguing. His gaze traveled, panicked, over the marble floor.

Why had he come here? Why had he thought himself invincible? What illusion of wishful thinking had made him think this scheme would work? He hated the desert. He didn’t have to be here. He wanted to scream, to disappear. He wanted to gouge out those insidious black eyes, but he couldn’t move.

When he looked up, he saw that one of the Moors had a knife pressed to Vicar’s throat.

In a rage beyond thought, he spun past the sword points around him and, pulling out his pistol in fluid motion, fixed the steel barrel on the back of the man’s skull.

He ordered him in Arabic to drop his weapon and was obeyed.

Malik laughed softly.

Lazar whirled on him, and his voice shook with the wrath of seven hundred years of royal command. “Return what you stole from me!”

“Well, well.” Malik chuckled, obscuring his mouth again with two fingers, caressing him with his gaze. He considered for a long moment, then handed the coffee back to the fair-skinned slave. He flicked his wrist and produced, like a magician from his sleeve, the signet ring.

“Could it be this trifle you seek?” The sheik held up the ring between his thumb and forefinger, a weighted O of gold and onyx, with a ruby that sparked like fire in the lion’s eye. “Perhaps if you provide me with the proper amusement, you may have it back.”

Heart pounding, Lazar flicked his fingers around his pistol, and he swallowed hard while the edges of his control began to fray with insane rage. He was fairly certain at that moment he would not leave alive this time, and he was beginning not to care. He could not submit to the unclean ordeals Malik would put him through. This time he would fight to the death, and so be it.

“We have much to discuss, you and I,” Malik told him softly.

“No. Forget it,” he ground out.

With an impatient snap of his fingers, Malik caused the Moors to take hold of Lazar by the arms.

“Let him go, you heathen bastards!” Vicar cried savagely, struggling against the turbaned man who held him. Another man lifted the butt of his gun and struck Vicar out cold.

Lazar shouted as Vicar went down, shaking off the clinging Moors like a bull routing a pair of dogs.

Seeing this, Malik clapped his hands twice to summon the Janissaries. “Now then,” the sheik said, eyes aglow. “To the games.”