Prologue

Prologue

COMPLETE DARKNESS ALL around—with all around being a seemingly small area, made up of slick stone forming a cylindrical space with no doors or windows to speak of. How did I get here, the prisoner thought to himself. His head felt like it was prepared to split itself into hundreds of smaller pieces, as if he were bashed with a sack full of rocks before he was thrown down into this…

   
   “Pit,” he blurted to himself, filling the single word with as much venom as he could muster to a room in which he assumed he was the only inhabitant.

 
   Then he suddenly noticed that his breeches were soaked. Fearing that his last moment awake before any possible onlookers may have involved an embarrassing moment of urinating himself, he sniffed the air deeply; dank and nasty, for sure, but not with the strong vinegar stench of piss, thankfully. The cuffs of his shirt were also wet, and finally it occurred to him that the floor of his cell was beneath an inch of water!

 
   “Thanks for the top notch accommodations!” he barked to the shadows around him as he took to his feet.

   Roderick Casbury—famed pirate and ladies’ man, scourge of the king, man of the people—was sitting alone at the bottom of a deep dark pit of despair. He wasn’t shackled, but then chains would just be an unnecessary expense put into a cell that was seemingly built for him alone. The walls were smooth, and no entryway made itself known to him. It was as if he was simply lowered in here (Rory would have assumed he had been dropped, but aside from a pounding headache he was otherwise in very little pain). He was truly trapped, which boggled his mind, because in all the long years of his illustrious career, Rory had never been captured.

 
   Not even once…