Arise, Black Vengeance - Free Kindle Book

Arise, Black Vengeance 
by Steven Prizeman 


“I woke with blood in my mouth and the ocean in my ears. A fist clenched in my stomach. I raised myself on an unsteady arm and puked myself hollow – seawater and sand puddling beneath me. Then I collapsed and lay shivering, staring at a frowning sky that spat rain in my face like a scorned beggar. Madre de Dios – I was alive!”

He’s hunting for the man who betrayed his father.

The fate of empires is in his hands.

He believes the Spanish Inquisition are the good guys.

He’s twelve.

When Francisco Trujero wakes on a corpse-strewn beach, a boundless sea at his feet, he finds he is the sole survivor of the battle between his father’s galleon and a squadron of Barbary corsairs. But even before he has time to grieve for his fallen crewmates, he realises that the desolate island on which he finds himself holds terrors of its own. Assailed by mocking voices on the wind, pursued across the dunes by a ravening man-monster, he finds he is on an isle of dangerous outcasts and spirits that whisper unseen among the trees.

Staying alive is task enough, but Francisco must find help to fulfil his father’s mission: to carry secret messages from the Inquisition between Venice and Spain and forge a military alliance strong enough to withstand the mighty Turkish Ottoman Empire that has invaded Cyprus and threatens Italy.

But those secret messages are in his sunken ship.

Pinning his hopes on the ingenuity of the exiled alchemist Prospero and his brilliant daughter Miranda, Francisco becomes confident that he can assemble an unlikely crew to help him achieve his goal and wreak vengeance on those who wronged him. But someone, it seems, already believes Francisco knows more than he should and death dogs his footsteps, while supernatural powers are unleashed that even Prospero cannot comprehend.

Soon these companions – and their entourage of abominations – find themselves at the heart of a deadly web of head-spinning intrigues, with more at stake than they can possibly imagine. But the ever-more-determined Francisco is sure of two things: this business can only end on the point of a sword. And there will be blood.

Spanning the Mediterranean at the most turbulent time in a troubled history, this is a lice-to-madrigals take on the Renaissance – with added magic, for the hell of it.