Assassin's Creed Odyssey (The Official Novelization)

by Gordon Doherty

  “I am not a Spartan, not anymore,” she whispered in reply.

  He made a guttural noise of disgust. “How can you say that? Do you know how many hold your family in esteem?” he said, gesturing at the lance.

  “Held,” she said. “My family is broken, like my spear, and scattered all across Hellas.”

  Brasidas’s broody look took on new depths as he pinched his bottom lip in deep thought, then shook his head. “I never believed what they said about that night . . . on Mount Taygetos.”

  “So you believe in me, the famous blood that runs in my veins?”

  He hesitated, then straightened. “Aye.”

  “Then let us work together. We wait for his guards to disperse, then we strike—kill this bastard.”

  They settled in silence. Hours passed, and eventually the Monger dismissed all but three of his men. With the remaining trio, he dragged out a planning table and started to go over the approach they should take into the mountains tomorrow. “Across the bluffs, from edge to edge, agreed?” he asked the man nearest to confirm.

  “Yes, Master,” said the guard.

  “Agreed?” He looked to the next nearest.

  “We’ll find Anthousa and those Hetaerae bitches. They will work for you or they’ll burn.”

  “Agreed?” he asked the third.

  “It will be done.”

  Then the Monger looked up, toward the grain sacks. “Agreed?”

  Silence.

  Kassandra felt an awful twist in her stomach.

  “I asked you a question, Brasidas. Do you approve of my plan?”

  Kassandra felt ice slide across her flesh. She and Brasidas shared a look, just before the sacks forming a roof over their small hide were torn away, the Monger’s other nine men grinning down at them, bows nocked and trained.

  “Well, well, well,” the Monger growled, seeing Kassandra in there with Brasidas, “it seems that my prize has doubled.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The shackles were heavy—and strong enough to hold a bear. The Monger wrenched them tight, drawing Kassandra’s last free limb taut and pinning her tightly to the table in the same way the poor man had been bound a short while ago. The close heat of the crucible by the table’s side seared her skin.

  Nearby, the Monger’s guards held the kneeling Brasidas in a maw of spears, his wrists roped together.

  “You think I did not know you were in there, Brasidas?” The Monger chuckled, flicking a finger at the now-dismantled sack pile. “I could smell you. I could hear you. Why didn’t I have you killed earlier? Well, I like to let my victims build up a little hope before I put them to a terrible end. Makes it all the more distressing for them, you see. I will rope you by the ankles and dip your head in the molten pool tonight. By all the Gods, I cannot wait to hear you begging for my mercy,” he said, smacking his lips together and rumbling with laughter.

  He turned to Kassandra, lifting a poker from the crucible, grinning down at her. “For you, it will be much, much slower. I knew all along you were coming here. I thought I might have to hunt and catch you, but no, you walked right into my lair. I will burn and peel you until you cry out—not for mercy, but with an oath to serve me, to serve my group.”

  “Fuck you,” Kassandra said flatly.

  The Monger’s face fell, and he lowered the glowing poker onto her thigh. The pain was indescribable. White-hot agony consumed her. She heard a shrill scream and barely realized it was her own. She heard the shackles clanking even tighter as her body convulsed, smelled the horrific stink of her own flesh cooking, and tasted blood as she bit deep into her tongue.

  The warehouse shuddered once again as he pressed the rod into her, this time against her flank. She felt the blackness of unconsciousness rise up as if to save her, but shook her head to stay awake, knowing that if she passed out, she would waken in the den of the Cult, or never again. As she thrashed, she saw the Monger draw a freshly heated spike from the molten cauldron and bring it toward her face. The heat stung her cheeks and nose even from a hand’s-width away. When he brought the sharp, white tip to a finger’s-width from her eyeball, she felt the surface of her eye shrivel, a blinding pain shooting through her head. “Listen . . . listen. Here comes the pop!” the Monger purred in glee.

  That was when she saw the vision. In the white blur of heat, she saw something moving, behind the Monger’s dozen. Two more figures, creeping. Erinna, Roxana. Scar-faced, tear-streaked. She saw them rise and strike like leopards, one running a guard through from behind, another braining one with a cudgel. They struck down two more of the twelve before the rest reacted, and it was enough to buy Brasidas a breath of hope. The Spartan leapt up from the mouth of spears, slitting his wrist ropes on the way, grabbing one lance and tearing the throat of the holder, then kicking another away.

  The blinding white faded, and the heat too, as the Monger swung away from Kassandra to face the threat. Half-blind, she heard a thunder of fighting, heard the Monger roar, then felt the dull clunk of her chains being sheared. “Up!” Brasidas roared, dragging her from the table by her wrist, pushing her recovered half lance into her hand. She took it all in in a trice: Roxana and Erinna had not fled as she had told them to. Instead they fought with the fire of wronged souls. Six guards remained with the Monger. Kassandra leapt over to spear the flank of one guard who was locked in combat with the nearest girl, then spun to chop clean through the shin of another.

  “Go,” she shouted at the girls, stabbing a finger toward the warehouse doors. “Get back to Anthousa.”

  The girls blinked through tears, nodding and scrambling away at last, mouthing words of gratitude.

  Brasidas slew two more guards, before pressing back-to-back with Kassandra, facing the last four thugs and the enraged Monger.

  “My sword has sheared,” Brasidas gasped.

  “One weapon against five of us,” the Monger growled. “This will hurt, trust me.” He flicked a finger to his four men. “Kill them.”

  Just as the four lunged forward, Roxana—racing toward the main doors and freedom—yanked on a rope. From above two of the oncoming guards, a cargo of grain burst from an overhead silo. They vanished under the almighty purge. Kassandra blocked the strike of one of the remaining pair, then rammed her spear into his belly before turning to face the last, who tossed down his weapons and sprinted away.

  Brasidas and Kassandra turned to face the Monger now. The brute stood like a bull ready to charge, a spear in each hand, murder in his eyes. Kassandra shot Brasidas a look, holding up a wrist with a trailing length of chain dangling from the shackle there. At once, Brasidas understood, grabbing the broken chain end. The Monger charged at them and together, they rushed for him. Before he could strike, they leapt, the drawn-taut chain catching on his neck, hauling him backward. He stumbled back two, three, four steps, before his heel stubbed on the base of the brimming crucible. He pitched over and into the molten soup with a strangled cry that turned into an animal moan that filled the night along with the stink of searing meat and burning hair. The ruined mess of flesh and molten metal rose twice, like a drowning man, before the noise faded to nothing.

  * * *

  • • •

  The citizens of Korinthia woke to a dark pall of smoke. They emerged from their homes for the first time in months, nervous and shy, then confused when they heard the rumors: the dockside warehouse had burned to the ground the night before. More, all had been summoned to the theater that day. The venue had been closed ever since the Monger had taken the reins here. Slowly, they began to trust the heralds who repeated the summons. By noon, the theater was packed, with many more on the nearby rooftops and higher streets, peering in at the stage.

  Kassandra stood among the masses, exhausted, her flank and thigh wrapped in white-linen bandages, the seared flesh underneath dressed with a cooling ointment. Brasidas had left as soon as the
warehouse had been set alight—returning to Sparta to carry news of the whole affair to the two kings. He had implored her one thing: Throw the Monger’s bones into the water. Let that be the end to it.

  She smiled drily. I like you, Brasidas, but too much valor is a weakness. You don’t know the full horror of the Monger and his Cult.

  Just then an orator paraded across the stage, telling all that the city was once again free. Voices rose in confusion and disbelief, many looking around to be sure that this was not some elaborate ruse by the brute to weed out dissenters.

  Kassandra waited, waited, waited. And then . . .

  Swoosh, judder!

  A collective and horrified intake of many thousands of breaths brought silence. All stared at the grotesque meld of man and metal that had fallen from the lintel above the stage. It swayed for a time then slowed and hung at a standstill.

  Now the masses surged into wails of joy, weeping, prayer, explosions of gratitude to their unknown liberator. Kassandra felt not a crumb of pride. She noticed a shape moving through the crowd toward her.

  “Your mother sailed from here on the Siren Song,” said Anthousa, “a boat painted like living flame. She traveled to the Cyclades.”

  TEN

  The masked man threw down an iron poker—cold and bent. “The Monger failed.”

  “All others in the dark chamber stared at the iron rod.

  “He was the strongest of our circle,” one dared to speak.

  “The strongest of arm, perhaps, but not of mind,” said another.

  “Are we forgetting that we have another, fiercer than the Monger, with blade-sharp wits too?”

  “Deimos is not truly one of us though, is he? And he is too unpredictable. He roams like a rabid hound, snapping and howling.”

  “Exactly,” said the first Cultist, “so this is our opportunity to use him to the greatest effect . . . or replace him. The sister received some information in Korinthia it seems. She has spent the winter sailing through the Cyclades, fruitlessly searching that archipelago for her mother. Myriad islands, countless towns, confederacies, pirates. She still does not know of Myrrine’s whereabouts . . . or that we have her trapped. Right now she heads back to Athens seeking the wisdom of Perikles and his retinue on the matter.”

  “Athens?” said another as all the rest fell silent.

  “Yes,” said the first. “And are we not now agreed that it is time for a change of the guard in that famous old city?”

  “Aye,” rumbled the others in unison.

  “So let us send Deimos to change Athens’s fate. While he is there, he can greet the sister. She cannot defeat him. Nobody can. She will join us as his replacement, or breathe her last . . .”

  * * *

  • • •

  Throughout winter, silent snowfall tumbled across the Aegean as the Adrestia searched the Cyclades islands. Nights spent shivering in bleak bays, days hailing islanders—none of whom knew anything of Myrrine’s whereabouts—and outrunning pirates. But winter was gone and now, in the depths of summer and on the way to Athens, it had shocked the crew to waken and find the seas clouded in a heavy bank of fog—like a hot, wet shroud. Kassandra leaned over the rail of the speeding ship to peer into the gray, her eyes like slits.

  “Do not look too long, Misthios,” Barnabas advised her. “Once, I stared into the mist for fear of hitting rocks. Three days and nights, I was awake. Not a blink of sleep. I saw them then: draped on the very rocks I feared. But damn they were beautiful . . . and they sang to me—the sound as sweet as honey. I very nearly lost my wits and steered my boat toward those damned rocks . . . just to hear their sweet song in full and drink in the sight of them . . .” He gazed into the ether dreamily as he spoke, his eyes misting with tears.

  Just then, Reza wandered past. “Ha—I remember that. You nearly steered us into the rocks because you fell asleep!”

  Barnabas shot him a sour look, but Reza was already scampering away up the mast.

  Kassandra smiled, then turned back to the fog. For a moment, the gray parted and they caught a glimpse of the Attikan countryside. She stared: as before, there were the patches of ash and toppled stone where farms and estates had been razed . . . but the crimson camps were nowhere to be seen.

  “The Spartan siege is over,” Herodotos whispered.

  “For now,” Kassandra mused, knowing Stentor would not relent.

  A short while later, Reza cried from somewhere up on the fog-shrouded mast. Barnabas relayed the call to the rest of his crew, and the galley jolted and fell still.

  For a moment, Kassandra wondered if they had been caught in the clutches of one of Barnabas’s apocryphal sea demons, but the drifting, cool fog parted to reveal the stony towers and wharf of Piraeus harbor. Kassandra, Barnabas and Herodotos stared across the wharf. Nearly deserted from what little they could see: no bustling traders and hurrying slaves; no noise either, bar the sad pealing of a distant bell. Wagons sat parked at all angles as if abandoned hastily. Some were on their sides, the contents spilled and partly pillaged. Then came the smell—a stink that hit them like a slap, an insidious and potent stench of decay.

  “Gods!” Barnabas croaked, pulling a rag over his nose and mouth. “What happened here?”

  Kassandra paced down from the gangplank first and gazed around the harbor. Nobody to be seen in the drifting fog. She glanced up at the harbor walls. The few sentries up there each wore rags around their faces too.

  “Move on into the city,” one barked down at her, gesturing toward the promenade running inside the enclosing sleeve of the Long Walls. “Don’t touch anything, or anyone.”

  Kassandra’s flesh crept. Phoibe? she mouthed, struck with a sudden need to know that Phoibe was unharmed amid this strangeness. The cage around her heart began to tremble, the flame within rising. “Stay with the ship,” she called back to Barnabas, watching from the rail with Ikaros sitting next to him.

  Herodotos stepped over by her side. “I’ve been on that boat for long enough. I’m coming with you. Besides . . . something is badly wrong here.”

  “We speak with Perikles and Aspasia and then we leave,” she agreed as they set off through the gray mist and along the promenade. In the thick fog, she thought she could see the ethereal outline of bulky shapes lining the roadsides, ahead. The shanty huts of the refugees, she guessed. There was a strange mix of sound coming from that direction: a drone of flies and a plaintive chant. Weeping too. “One of them has to know where in the Cyclades I should look for my mother. If I was to search every one of those islands it would take me many years. I couldn’t ask Barnabas and his crew to do th—”

  She fell silent and stopped in her tracks, Herodotos too. Ahead, the mist swirled and parted: the roadside shapes she had seen were not shanty huts. Those ramshackle shelters were gone. In their place were serried piles of dead, as far as the mist would allow them to see. Hundreds . . . no, thousands of cadavers. Some were soldiers, but most were simple people and animals: children, old ones, mothers, dogs and horses too. Gray, staring faces, eyes shriveled or pecked out by crows, jaws lolling; skin broken, partly rotted or riddled with angry, purulent sores; a dangling detritus of limbs, hair, dripping pus, blood and seeping excrement. The farther they went, the higher these piles became, like earth ramparts—almost as high as the Long Walls themselves—and they lined the way as far as the eye could see. The drone of the flies grew deafening. Carrion hawks picked their way across the feast, pecking and tearing stinking, putrefying flesh from the topmost corpses.

  “The Spartans found a way inside the walls?” Herodotos croaked.

  “No,” Kassandra realized, seeing the sores on some of the dead. “Much worse. It is the sickness. Hippokrates foresaw this.”

  They edged carefully along the way, wary of every outstretched, rotting arm or leg.

  “A sickness, aye, that makes sense,” said Herodotos sadly. “The Spartan
s could not break down Perikles’s mighty walls. But this pestilence rose within. Too many people crammed in such a small space for so long. The Spartans are gone, but the true enemy now runs riot in the streets.”

  They came to the city proper and found more grim corpse heaps in each corner of the agora. Men and women shuffled past with cloths on their faces, bringing fresh dead to add to the piles. The reek here was overpowering, and now Kassandra had to draw her cloak around to cover her nose and mouth, Herodotos doing likewise.

  A hunched woman dropped the body of a young girl on the pile then staggered away, sobbing.

  Phoibe! Kassandra gasped inwardly, momentarily mistaking the corpse’s face for that of her dear friend.

  “How many?” Herodotos croaked to the hunched lady, gesturing to the piles.

  “Nearly one in every three now rests upon these towers of bones,” she said. “I am the last of my family . . . and I feel the fever rising within me. I have asked my neighbor to place me on the heaps when my time comes, but then he too is weak and wracked with delirium. Our armies are crippled by this sickness, and now even the mercenaries and allies are refusing to come here for muster. This plague spares no one.” She sighed.

  A troop of citizen hoplites hurried past nearby, cutting across the market square.

  “Trouble?” Kassandra asked the woman.

  “Always. Kleon seeks to use this plague like a lever, to make the acropolis hill his own. While his people die around him, he gathers militia and buys the loyalty of citizen soldiers.”

  The mention of the acropolis brought the eyes of Kassandra and Herodotos to the Pnyx hill, silhouetted by a sad gray finger of light that barely penetrated the fog. The mighty Parthenon and the towering bronze statue of Athena were counterbalanced by the jagged, unfinished walls of the Temple of Athena Nike. Worse, they saw clouds of flies and vultures up there too, hovering in the air above more corpse heaps. They wished the woman well then climbed the rock-cut stairs to the acropolis plateau and approached Perikles’s villa.