The Sword and the Sorcerer (18 page)

“Why, yes! How did you know?”

“He’s our captain, that’s why, you pretty wench!” He kissed her on the lips and slapped her playfully on her behind. “But, damn his beloved hide—now we must fetch him from your dog-king!”

“You mean—he’s been captured?”

“Not only captured, peach blossom—but if Cromwell has his way Talon will be crucified tonight.”

Elizabeth gasped, closing her tiny fists in anger. “No! He’s too pretty! He’s too good! He’s too brave! We mustn’t let that happen!”

“Precisely what we have in mind, sweet,” Morgan interjected, aiming one of his roguish smiles at her.

Ishmael gently took one of her hands into his own. “You must know the layout of the castle as well as anyone.”

Elizabeth smiled coyly. “Not only that—but I’ve recently become acquainted with secret passages going in and out of the castle.”

The three men exploded with cheers and rapturously encircled the two pretty girls with their arms, showering them with kisses, squeezing them and caressing them.

“Let’s give Cromwell and his dogs,” Darius exclaimed, “entertainment he’ll never forget!”

EIGHTEEN

n the egg-shaped mirror on a marble dressing table Alana studied her reflection, as the two slave girls brushed her long, loose dark hair and finished her makeup. The lids of her almond-shaped eyes were tinged with Nile green and outlined with charcoal black. The juice of the cherry stained her full lips the color of dark blood. And after hours of having her soft round shoulders and jutting breasts rubbed with ointments and creams they rode above her low-cut brocaded dressing gown smoother and creamier than she ever remembered them being.

In short, Alana never recalled looking more beautiful or, ironically, more unhappy. What was the point of resembling a radiant princess in a painting when the man who would benefit from it the most was also the man she most despised—while the man she now knew she loved was bound in chains and awaiting execution?

Word had circulated quickly of the young stalwart’s capture, as well as the escape of her brother. And though her heart sang with joy at news of Mikah’s freedom, the next second it quivered and cried when she learned of her new love’s terrible fate.

Piling grief upon grief, as the late afternoon sun waned the black hour when Cromwell would force her to marry him drew nearer—with the even more repugnant hour approaching when the evil king would try to pluck her virgin’s ruby, the very jewel she had hoped to present to the same gentle yet fierce giant below.

Cromwell burst into Alana’s chambers without announcement, dismissing the slave girls with a brusque wave of his hand. He strode to her as if he already possessed her and stooped to plant a kiss on one of her bare shoulders. But Alana evaded the move by bolting upright and spinning out of his reach. He sneered. The rejection vexed but excited him too. He backed her into a corner from which she could not escape.

Alana’s skin crawled. He looked at her as if she did not have the soft yellow gown on. And the thought of those steely hands and that cruel mouth ravishing her body made her want to retch.

Cromwell reached to pat her cheek and she recoiled again.

“Is that the way to treat your husband-to-be?” he mocked. The lecherous grin, narrowed eyes and curly tarnished gold hair made him look like an aging satyr.

Alana struggled with the urge to spit in his face. Then she marked the swelling bulge under his short white tunic and smiled. Why not? It could conceivably make him reevaluate whether he should risk bedding her.

Alana puckered her lips invitingly and pushed herself against him, slipping her fingers inside the top of his open tunic and toying with the swatch of hair on his chest. She even cooed a little.

Cromwell was at once tremendously aroused but cautious too. Was this some female wile?

“You’re right, Titus. I’ve been stupid and ungrateful. What woman would not give her all to be your queen!” And with this outpouring of contriteness she began to grind her hips and tease his flexing shaft with the pressure of her silky womanhood. “Take me, my lord—now!”

Cromwell crushed her to his chest and began to rain kisses on her neck and shoulders, his hands gliding possessively over the lush curves of her body. He had just come from the concubines but the unexpected wantonness of this delicious beauty enflamed him once again. Perhaps she had weighed the advantages of being his queen and found them irresistible. Perhaps she had heard of his prowess as a lover from the slave girls and burned to ascertain it. Whatever the cause of her turnabout, she obviously lusted for him now—as he madly lusted for her!

As he attacked her like a ravenous wolf, Alana slowly worked one of her long legs between his and gently nestled it under his crotch, rubbing to stimulate him even more.

“After tonight . . .” he huskily said, between bites and kisses of her flesh, “you will be my queen! And soon you’ll be the queen of the entire world! Oh, your mouth drips with honey! I will make love to you now as no other could!”

“With what!” she shouted into his ear, ramming her knee into his crotch.

Cromwell shrieked and staggered back, his face white and twisted with agony. When the sharpest of the shooting pains subsided he began to slap and chase Alana about the vast chamber, holding his groin with one hand all the while. Equally as bad as the pain was the treacherous bitch’s howling laughter and glowing contempt for him. Another clutch of pain stopped his pursuit and he leaned against the wall, glowering.

“Love me or not, you will be my queen—whore! And you will learn to beg me to stick my shaft into your sheath!”

“Ha! A cold day in hell that will be! Nothing will force me either to bed or to marry you!”

It was too humiliating to let this harlot see him doubled up with pain on the eve of their wedding night. And he would have her tonight even if he had to have her tied down in bed.

“Nothing, eh?” he snarled, limping toward the door. “Not even the life of your brother?”

Alana’s heart stood still for a moment. Cromwell had touched the right button. For Mikah she would do anything—and she could tell by the sneer on Cromwell’s face as he left her that he knew it too.

NINETEEN

o men who had spent their lives at sea or on horseback, being put in dungeons was more abhorrent than being flayed with barbed whips. Airless and sunless mousehole cells drive such men mad. And when such confinement is coupled with the smarting that comes from having had an important mission aborted, men in these situations are apt to turn on each other. Which is exactly what happened to Morgan and his pirates and Talon’s mercenaries. It was not an hour after Cromwell’s overwhelming numbers of Klaws had caught them raising an army and had thrown them into the castle’s dungeons when these two factions began to rant and rave at one another—bandying accusations, blaming each other for their predicament and exchanging oaths and threats of retaliation.

Fortunately Cromwell’s guards had seen fit to segregate the seamen and mercenaries in separate cells, otherwise they would have been at each others’ throats.

“Whose idea was this blasted campaign!” Eric growled to no one in particular in the cell.

“It was these iron-brained landlubbers!” Morgan spat out between bars to the cell opposite them. “If we had taken another route—as I wanted to—and not waited for the slave girl to show us the way, we wouldn’t be in these bloody roach- and rat-infested dungeons now!”

“Up yours!” Darius shouted from the mercenaries’ cell. “And shut your yap or I’ll wind these leg-chains around your scrawny neck!”

“If these gates weren’t between us,” Morgan flung back, “you’d be swimming in your own gizzards!”

All the men in both cells now rushed to the bars and began a relentless barrage of profanity and insults at each other. Soon they were throwing any object they could get their hands on across the walkway—tin plates and cups, broken stools, and even a few dead rats. In the midst of this volley of hurled objects and viturperation they rattled their cages unceasingly, the din reverberating through the gloomy, dank dungeons until Verdugo, the Royal Torturer, flung open the big iron door at the opposite end and came storming to their cells, where he stood shaking his clublike fists at the rioters.

“Shut up, vermin! Or I’ll rip your tongues out!”

Now that the quarrelsome factions had a mutual and better enemy they transferred their spleen to him, vilifying him with every dirty word they could think of.

“Quiet, I said! I have a message for you from the king.” He looked from one cell to the other. “Who’s your leader?”

“I am,” Darius spoke up.

Morgan had to bite his tongue to keep from challenging that assertion. But he was more interested in hearing what words the hairless bear had brought from the king than bickering any more with Darius.

“The king, in his boundless goodness, makes you a proposal. Tell us who sent you to invade the castle and he will show you mercy.”

Darius’ answer was to spit in Verdugo’s face. The torturer thrust his bearish hands through the bars for Darius’ throat but Darius stepped back in time. He proceeded to jeer and laugh at Cromwell’s now anger-crazed henchman, as did the rest of the motley crew. Verdugo paced back and forth in front of the cells with his hands held out, opening and closing them, as if he were crushing eggs or skulls. “Laugh while you can, filthy pigs, for soon you will have no tongues at all!”

Verdugo turned to the two Klaws standing by the open door and beckoned them, a savage grin now cutting across his lardish face.

To their horror the prisoners watched the same guards drag into the dungeon two badly tortured but familiar figures—Ishmael and the slave girl Elizabeth. The men were too outraged by this pitiful sight to speak. Ishmael, his face battered to a pulp, was totally unconscious, while Elizabeth was only dimly aware of what was happening to her. One look at the area where blood had stained her robe was sufficient to tell she had been violated, God knew by how many men. And her pretty face was now swollen with purplish welts.

The guards deposited the victims directly in front of Morgan’s cell. Elizabeth stretched her hand toward the cell for some loving human contact and Morgan reached through the bars and clasped it, his eyes filling with tears. The poor girl reminded him of his sister.

“No!” the seamen and mercenaries cried out in unison when Verdugo rested the tip of his sword on the small of the girl’s back.

“Tell us who sent you,” Verdugo screamed at the prisoners in general, “or the bitch dies here and now!”

Morgan never could stand seeing any woman suffer. And to have to witness this already half-dead girl suffer more pain was too much for him to bear. It was the need to save Talon’s life that had inspired their rescue mission, not some mysterious person Verdugo kept referring to. But it was clear that if Verdugo did not get some positive response to his question the blade would pierce the dear girl’s back. He was about to give Talon’s name when Elizabeth, reading his purpose, laboriously lifted her head and, with the last ounce of her energy, shouted, “Tell him nothing! I am already dead!”

Before Morgan, Darius or anyone else could intercede Elizabeth pushed herself off the ground into Verdugo’s sword, crying out like a little girl as the blade went through her back and out her stomach, the gleaming tip of the sword sticking out of her abdomen like a tiny diamond.

The girl’s heroic sacrifice chilled the enraged mercenaries and seamen into a seething silence.

As Verdugo withdrew his blade from the girl’s body Ishmael regained consciousness long enough to see what had happened and to make an ineffectual tackle for Verdugo’s legs—just before the hairless lout rammed the sword right through the center of his face.

Verdugo sneered, pleased with his quick reflexes. But when he looked at the prisoners he was nearly knocked over by the intensity of their collective hate for him. He had the feeling that if he remained here another second the scorching hate in their eyes would burn the flesh off his bones.

TWENTY

achelli had just left the king in his private chambers and was on his way to the War Room, where Cromwell’s chief generals waited for them. They would have to finalize the strategy for tonight without the king’s presence. He had been in a foul mood and delegated Machelli to oversee the conference in his place.