and her lover, Lord Cecil Somerset. She and I did our best to kill each other, too, but in the end I was wounded and she was insane, and the only solace I had from that nightmare was the likelihood that the wilderness would swallow her up and I’d never see her again.
Time and distance had let me believe that.
Now, as inexorably persistent as the Rite itself, she was back.
One might expect trauma to rob her of her prettiness and harden her features. Instead, she was as physically alluring as ever, an ocean goddess of tumbling hair, green eyes, pursed lips, and a cleanliness out of all proportion to her environment: Venus, emerging from the sea. Had she been primping before she swung aboard? There was an eerie changelessness about her that made me suspect some pact with the devil, so perfect was her skin, so athletic her grace as she whirled on deck, so bright her maniacal eyes. She was immortal, I feared, an Antaeus who only grew stronger with every defeat.
Aurora Somerset was the reason I’d reformed.
“I thought you’d tired of me,” I managed. She’d had nearly a year to dream up fresh torments, and Lord knows the girl had a better imagination than I did. I felt sick at what this reunion would lead to.
She walked to me, cutlass lifted like a serpent’s silver tongue to hover under my chin as the ship rolled in the waves, her lips curled in a twist of faint contempt, her eyes intense as a jaguar’s, while her dog eyed me for breakfast. “You’re a hard man to forget, Ethan Gage. So durable. So ruthless. So careless. So stupid. I’ve been following you, anticipating you, marveling at you, and got that signet ring I discovered into the hands of the French and Fouche with the expectation they would turn to the wayward American to determine what it means. You are ever so predictable! Well, you can give the ring back. And now you’ve brought company!” Her eyes danced with calculation as she eyed my savants, and I didn’t know if she was dreaming of bedding them or torturing them. Probably both. “You read something in North America that brought you to Thira, and now you’ve found something, I’m betting, that I and my allies are looking for.”
“Allies?
I’d managed to annoy her. “More than you know.”
“You must mean the lunatic Egyptian Rite.”
“That, and the Tripoli corsairs, our newest comrades. Their bashaw saw the advantage of ancient secrets long before Bonaparte and Fouche.” She nodded to the assembly of pirates, as motley a bunch of thieves and miscreants as can be found outside a parliament. They had the hygiene of sewer rats and the disposition of a wounded bull, but then I’m used to bad company. She turned to Dragut. “What did they find?”
“A manuscript, my lady.” So our captain had been in her employ from the beginning: ready to pluck us from pursuit in Venice and from caves at Thira. This rendezvous had been planned for months. Why get dirty when Ethan Gage will crawl through the mouth of Hades for you?
“A manuscript? What does it say?”
“I wouldn’t presume to read it before you.” He pointed. “The American has it.”
“Where is it?” she demanded of me. “Give it up!”
“Your manners haven’t improved since our last time together.”
“Or your impudence! Come, turn it over! The ring, too!”
Her monster of a dog started barking with the volume of a wolf pack, and I flinched despite myself. Why do people insist on bringing along their pets? I considered trying to hurl the parchment into the sea, but given what it said, what was the harm? “Here: What you’ve followed me for seven thousand miles for. It might improve you.”
There is something to be said for the upbringing of the high bred. She was, it seemed, literate in Latin. Apparently young ladies of the English nobility learn more than just shooting and sadism. She read for a moment, her pirates shuffling like a restless classroom, and then looked at me in disbelief. “Are you trying to make me a fool?”
“That’s all we found, Aurora. Dig down yourself if you don’t believe me, but the ancient rooms under Akrotiri were as empty as a beggar’s stomach. Except for this. I hoped it was a treasure, too—this is hardly what I came for—but I could have saved myself the trouble by simply buying a preacher’s pamphlet outside the Palais Royal. If there was ever anything of value down there, I suspect Knights Templar took it centuries ago. We’re both chasing ghosts.”
She stood a moment, debating whether to believe me. Finally she threw the parchment at my feet. I picked it up. It was, I supposed, a souvenir of Thira. She kept the ring. “Very well. And, yes, a wasted trip for you and your friends, but not necessarily for me.” She turned to her shipmates. “We’ll sell them as slaves!”
To that they gave a hearty cheer, which meant they got a share from hocking us. Everybody loves a profit.
“Where’s his gun?” she then asked. There was some discomfort among Dragut’s men as my longrifle—the same one that had killed Cecil Somerset—was brought out. “That weapon is mine,” she snapped. “You can have the others.”
“It’s scuffed and nicked but a fine piece,” one of the pirates objected. “It’s ours to take, not yours, under Barbary law.”
“It slew my brother. Give it over.”
The sailor, with the scars of more than a few fights, wasn’t about to buckle easily to this woman’s whim. He turned to his captain. “Hamidou, we captured them! She has no right!”
Dragut was shaking his head.
And as the poor sailor turned back in anger, debating just how truculent to be, Aurora’s monster dog sprang. It was a blur of black, snarling like a lion, and the man was down yelling as the dog bit his hands and face, pinning him with furious weight. The rifle skittered away but no one dared touch it; the other pirates instinctively jumped back. The poor victim writhed, his thrashing arm trying to get to his knife while the other hand clawed at the dog’s face, but then the hound got past his guard and plunged his snout at the poor devil’s throat. Its big black head thrashed as if it had been given a rag doll, and blood from a severed artery made a jet that shot three feet in the air. Men were at once shouting, pleading, betting, and laughing, ill-bred ruffians that they were.
The pirate twitched and jerked a final time, and died. A red pool spread like a blot.
“Sokar, heel!”
The mastiff backed off, jaws foamy with blood and saliva. It was growling, looking at me with its yellow eyes.
Trembling slightly, Dragut stooped to pick up my rifle and gave it to the demented woman. “His weapon, my lady.”
She hefted it with the same air of possessive ownership I remembered from America, ignoring the baleful looks of the dead man’s friends. “We set course for Tripoli,” she told Dragut. And then back to me. “We’ll talk again, after you’ve time to ponder your situation while locked in the hold. And if you don’t renew our partnership, then Omar the Dungeon Master will make sure that this time, now that I truly own you, you’ll not hold anything back.”
“Omar the what?”
“He’s one whose name is best not spoken aloud,” Dragut said, and shoved me toward the xebec’s shallow hold. “Or ever experienced.”
He turned to the others. “The blunderbuss and dueling pistols are mine!”
Piracy and slavery might seem an odd base for an economy, but in fact have worked so well for the Barbary States (so-named for the barbarians who occupied North Africa after the fall of the Roman Empire) that they’ve had little incentive to develop anything else. Why work when you can steal with impunity? By raiding the weakest fringes of the Mediterranean Basin, the Barbary corsairs keep city-states like Tripoli supplied with cheap male labor and pretty harem women. Their richest captives can be ransomed off to buy whatever else is needed. The ships and towns of the most powerful nations such as Britain, France, and Spain are avoided out of wary fear: in 1675, the
