Page 232 of Dragon Slayer

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GIURGIU

Vlad received a missive from Matthias Hunyadi that read:May the sun shine upon your health and good fortune. It was a pre-arranged code between them, one that meant the Ottomans had intercepted one of their messages.

“Well,” Vlad said, folding the parchment. “They’re onto us.” He felt a grin threaten. “At least, they think they are.”

“Beg pardon, your grace?” the vizier in front of him said, brow furrowing. Mehmet had sent a special delegation, fronted by the bey of Nicopolis, Hamza Pasha, who waited now upon Vlad’s answer to an agreement proposed by the sultan. Matthias’s letter had arrived in the midst of the negotiations, and had Vlad believed such things possible, he would have called the timing poetic.

“Nothing,” Vlad said, refocusing on the man. “So, let us review. Mehmet wishes to meet, face-to-face, in Constantinople, so that we may negotiate the terms he’s laid here.” He gestured to the parchments strewn across his desk.

“Yes, your grace.”

“Though he’s asking for thirty-thousand gold ducats, and no less than five-hundred boys for his Janissary Corp. Yes?”

“Correct. But numbers are, after all, negotiable.”

“Of course.” A dagger lay on the desk, in plain view, and when Vlad traced his fingers idly along the desk’s edge toward it, Hamza’s eyes followed the movement, throat bobbing as he swallowed. Sometimes he loved having a reputation. “Hmm. I would rather start negotiations now. Here.” He snapped his fingers to get his scribe’s attention. “Draft a missive to the sultan, from Hamza Pasha himself. Tell him that I will meet, but that I won’t come to Istanbul. It must be a point between our thrones, respectively. Somewhere along the river would be amenable. But be sure to emphasize that I am most willing to bargain with him. It shall be a pleasure to see him in person once again.”

“Yes, your grace.” The quill began to scratch.

“As for you,” he said to Hamza. “Malik, put him in irons. Him and his entire party.”

The vizier’s eyes flew wide. “Your grace–”

“And confiscate all their baggage. I need their clothes.”

~*~

“There’s a very good chance we’ll all die,” Malik said, matter-of-factly.

Vlad adjusted his turban, tucked a stray piece of hair back into it. “That’s what makes it a good plan: it’s too crazy for anyone to expect it.”

“You’re not wrong on that,” Cicero said.

They marched forward, surrounded on all sides by Vlad’s best mercenaries, and trailed by cavalry, all of them dressed rather haphazardly in Turkish garb. Ahead, the fortress gates awaited his trickery.

Giurgiuwas an island fortress, built out into the Danube river; built by Vlad’s father, in fact, at his personal expense. It had been in Ottoman hands since ’47, which was exactly why Vlad, writing as Hamza Pasha, had suggested it. His mother might think him foolish for being so hell-bent on revenge, but he wasn’t stupid, and never had been. He knew that he was outmanned in every sense of the word. He would have to outsmart Mehmet.

He walked now, his own sword fitted into a pilfered Turkish sheath at his hip, to the barred gates of the fortress, dressed as his own enemy, and approached the captain of the guards on duty there.

“Ho, there!” the captain called, raising a hand to stop them. He cast a critical look across Vlad; gaze flickered briefly to Cicero’s eye patch, conspicuous with his hair bound and secured in a tight crimson turban. “We’re awaiting Vlad Dracula’s party. Where have you come from?”

Theyhad beenexpecting Vlad’s party. Bits of the costumes they all wore had been plucked from the corpses of the would-be ambushers that Vlad and his men had killed several miles back down the road.

Vlad, dressed in Hamza Pasha’s finest kaftan and armor, lifted his chin to a regal angle and spoke in perfect Turkish. “Dracula knows about the ambush. His party re-routed, and they’re approaching now from the other direction. I need to send a message to the sultan. I need more men.”

“More…men?” He glanced all the way down the line, toward the stamping horses of the cavalry. “But…”

“Open the damn gate, you fool.”

The captain hesitated a moment longer, but then he turned and barked a command, and there came the thumping of the big double gates being unbarred from the other side.

Malik whistled softly, just for Vlad to hear, impressed.

Cicero barely suppressed a chuckle.

The gates swung open.

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