Treasure of the Deep by Aiden James, J. R. Rain Page B

gold and a slap on the back?”
    He stared at me blankly. So did the others. Ishi shook his head and grinned. Badri laughed heartily, then sniffed the air around me...sniffing it as if I was the source of what had stunk the joint up, instead of his filthy brood of pirates. “Don’t tell me you’ve been swimming in our sewer? What a strange man you are!”
    His dumbass comment elicited only a contemptuous grin from me. However, before I could voice something just as stupid to hasten our pending execution, he reached under my sari and grabbed my wrists, bringing them close to his face until he grimaced. I was grimacing, too, my arms and hands stunk worse than earlier. I now detected foulness beyond the dead fish aroma I originally noticed. Something beyond dead...something that brought back memories of rancid port-a-potties at Fourth of July picnics as a kid.
    Shit! Literally!
    His laughter turned boisterous at the look of horror on Ishi’s face and certainly mine, too, and continued until his eyes began to tear up. Even though he was a few inches taller than me, I felt extremely tempted to reach out and pull him close, and then twist his neck until it snapped. But that’s another no-no from Nick Cain’s Looting 101, as it only works in adventure fantasies. Fantasy adventures, I might add, where two dozen pirates didn’t have assault rifles trained on the semi-good guys’ heads and midsections. We’d be dead before Aladdin here hit the ground.
    “Yes! You’ve been playing in our piss and shit, Mr. Nicholas Alexander Caine!” he crowed in amusement. The rest of the bastards laughed along with him, although I’d bet my relic collection back in Honduras that most of them understood little, if any, English. “There are other ingredients beyond what the sea brings in, too, like what’s left of the last poor bastards who trespassed, along with the uncooperative slaves we’ve discarded over the years.”
    And, just like that he grew serious again.
    A joyless, soulless, waste of a human being. He seemed to gain something new from my expression, and studied me more intently.
    “ Oh? You don’t think you’d like to be a slave?” he said, moving over to Ishi next. “This one is about the right height...like a boy who never grew up. Would you like to be my slave, little boy?”
    Ishi had stopped grinning. For his dimunitive size, Ishi was not someone I wanted to mess with. The little Tawankan was like a cornered jungle cat when pushed. Ishi said simply, “I would prefer to watch you die.”
    I grimaced. Truer words had never been spoken, but I suspected they might have just hastened our own demise. Still, I admired the little guy’s spunk.
    “ You’ve got fire, boy,” he said. “You would make a fine pirate.”
    “ I would rather slit your throat.”
    Badri chuckled and moved down the rest of the line, staring angrily at Aafreen, Kintu, and Dinesh. All three trembled, which suggested that they’d been beaten or worse—or forced to witness such heinous acts. Dinesh looked longingly toward an area above my head and to my right. I followed his gaze and my eyes widened in surprise.
    It must have been the squalor of tents and foulness in the air that prevented Ishi and me from noticing the small, gleaming marble palace rising up to the cave’s ceiling. Not quite a mini Taj Mahal, but this structure of probably less than fifteen hundred square feet came as a surprise nonetheless. White marble columns in classic white Corinthian style—likely imported—supported the building that looked as if it were partially carved into the cave itself. The sucker surely cost a king’s ransom to create. No doubt, the materials were procured by funds taken from the vast resources we had recently seen.
    A pair of lads a few years younger than Aafreen and his pals guarded the palace’s entryway. Wearing solemn expressions on their faces, I got the feeling these kids were extremely worried about the fate of the three youths facing