The Barbary Pirates

technology, yes, but even more they wanted to persecute every man and woman who had ever snubbed them. How sublime to be convinced that everyone who disagreed with you was your inferior! How satisfying to deem yourself a chosen race, without need for the scruples of lesser men! It was audacious and ludicrous, and yet what if we did find some death ray from old Archimedes? What if my own nation’s small navy was about to burst into flame because I, Ethan Gage, was helping this menagerie of megalomaniacs along? I dare not do it, except that little Harry was clinging to my neck, eyes instinctively wide at these robed conspirators. And then there was the dark snuffing shape of the attack dog Sokar padding in the shadows. How could I get us safely away?

By playing along until chance offered escape.

“We’re going to return to Syracuse,” Aurora said. “Dionysus will lead a parade of penitents, our own Egyptian Rite army, into the city to aid us. They’ll pose as pilgrims coming to celebrate the Feast of the Assumption, when Mary rose into heaven. Hamidou will have the new ships ready and bring them to the city at the precise moment. We’ll break the mirror loose, even if we have to bring the entire duomo down to do so.”

“You’re going to blow up a church during a Catholic holiday?”

“Just part of it, as quietly as possible.”

“This is balmy, Aurora. Give it up! Even if it’s there, you can’t get at it, or you’ll be sunk if you do.”

“We’ll get at it. You already suggested a way to get past the castle’s guns so that your child is not stung with flying splinters. You can plot the details with Hamidou while we conduct the Ceremony of Baal here. Then you’re going to help me steal the fire of Barbary.” Her eyes gleamed. “We’ll erect it in Tripoli, Ethan, on Karamanli’s ramparts, and when it is ignited by the sun we’ll have taken the first step toward world harmony!”

She turned from me to start readying some age-old occult ritual, the Muslim pirates eyeing this blasphemy with disquiet.

Harry whispered in my ear, “I want Mama.”

“So do I, son. So do I.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Once more I was breaking into a church in the middle of the night, committing so many sins on this quest that I feared I’d find the mouth of Hades in the most literal and unpleasant way. In addition to common sacrilege, I was assisting pirates and fanatics, I had dragged my son into the worst kind of danger, I was betraying the interests of my country, and I had gone back on my pledge to my three friends to keep our map secret. And this was my record when trying to do the right thing. If I ever consciously turn to infamy, my soul will be so threadbare that it won’t fill in a gale.

We used a bar to break in through a side door of the duomo from the Via Minerva, Aurora’s monstrous dog coming with us this time on an iron chain. Other Rite members passed through the city’s dark streets like a procession of pilgrims and then hid in the shadows of the duomo’s vestibule, crouching to wait by its twisted pillars entwined with carved grapevines.

Inside, the church nave seemed even higher and plainer in the midnight gloom, while the silver altar of Saint Lucia glowed like ice in starlight. Every footstep seemed like a transgression, every foot-step a heresy. The dog’s huffing wheeze was like an invasion of older beasts from demon times. We crossed to the chapel and the door that had led us upward. Its lock was still shattered, but a wooden bar had been nailed to close it.

Dragut took out a pry bar and pulled, the nails a shriek in the night.

Suddenly there was a shout. “By the grace of God, stop!”

An elderly priest was hurrying toward us from the shadows of the main altar, half dressed and agitated. One arm was lifted either in supplication or anger, and his shouts echoed in the vast space.

“What are you doing, blasphemers?”

Aurora froze for only a moment. Then: “Sokar, strike!”

The dog’s chain was dropped and the animal whipped away, running silently at the frantic holy man dashing toward us, its metal tether skipping on the floor. I tried to cry warning but Dragut’s hand clamped over my mouth. The dog leaped, a blur in the dark, and then the priest yelled and went down, sliding backward on the stone floor as the animal’s momentum carried them toward the sacristy. There was a savage snarling, muffled screams, and the sounds of bones snapping under powerful jaws. The priest thrashed wildly, his agony muffled by the animal’s gnawing of his head, and then the poor man was still. The dog trotted back with a self-satisfied growl, its jaws bloody.

Little Harry clung, terrified.

“That’s not a dog, it’s a monster.” My voice was shaking. “You’re damned for all eternity, all of you.”

“Sokar protects an older, finer religion. It is men like that who will be labeled sacrilegious and eliminated.”

“That’s it.” Sokar was snuffling as Osiris patted his head. “I quit. I’ll have nothing to do with this. I resign, before we all go to hell.”

“You can’t resign, or I’ll sic my dog on your son. You know you can’t quit, not now and not ever. You’re one of us, and the sooner you help us the sooner we can leave Syracuse so nobody else has to die.”

“Aurora, please!” I groaned.

“Someday you’ll see the beauty of our desecration.”

There was a click as Dragut held one of Cuvier’s pistols to my head, to reinforce the point, and a growl as Sokar shook his massive head, blood and spittle flying.

“We’re all partners, now,” the pirate reiterated.

For a band of sybarites, perverts, addled mystics, and amateur magicians, the Egyptian Rite proved frighteningly efficient at rigging the demolition of a sacred chapel. With the priest dead, Dragut opened a main door and Aurora’s confederates swept in like a silent tide, pulling ropes, gunpowder, and wrecking tools from under their robes. Directly beneath the dome was a small shelf running around its circumference, high above the chapel. The heretic monks daringly crawled out on this, oblivious to the thirty-foot drop, to string ropes and place charges of gunpowder. A web of stout line was tied horizontally to form a net to catch whatever was blown free. This was no attempt at delicate surgery; it was a quick snatch and run before the good citizens of Syracuse realized we were sabotaging their principal place of worship. Banks of votive candles were lit to provide lurid illumination. The work was done in choreographed silence. There was a last scramble up, fuses were unreeled to the chapel floor, and the hooded men waited for her order, each holding a candle.

Aurora walked to the middle of the chapel, looked upward at the placed gunpowder, and pirouetted beneath the dome and its dark angels, arms outstretched as if to catch the mirror herself.

“Now!”

The fuses were lit, sparking and smoking, and the Rite members backed into the main nave. Aurora was the last to come. Points of fire danced upward toward the chapel dome and a low hum rose up from those assembled, a hivelike chant.

“What if you destroy the mirror as well?”

“Our readings say it’s sturdy as a shield. Besides, there’s no other way. We don’t have the men to seize and hold this city while we chip it out.”

“This won’t just wake the town, it will wake the dead.”

“Then they can wave good-bye to a relic they didn’t even know they possessed.”

The light from the fuses disappeared, and there was a moment of suspense while we waited. Then a staccato roar as the circle of charges went off. Even Sokar jumped. Plaster and stone erupted downward, destroying the grimy angels in the ceiling, and a stinking cloud of smoke and dust rolled out from the chapel into the main church. Then, with a screech, something clanged and fell.

We ran through the choking fog and peered upward. Through the haze a disk vast and round was lying on the net of ropes that had been strung across the chapel. It was bronze, twenty feet in diameter, and bright where its metal had scraped as the mirror came loose.

My heart hammered. Two thousand years after Archimedes was slain by a Roman sword, his most terrifying invention—or was it a copy of an even earlier invention—had suddenly been rediscovered.