“So-we sneak in, free your men, and lead them out through here?”
“Exactly…”
Ezio tried the door. It didn’t budge. He turned to Dilara with a disappointed smirk, feeling sheepish.
“I was going on to say, after you unlock it from the inside,” Dilara concluded, drily.
“Of course.”
“Come with me.”
She led the way to where they had sight of another, larger gate, made of a huge circular stone that could be rolled open and closed in a stone track. It opened as they watched. Soldiers emerged and formed ranks before marching off on patrol.
“The main entrance is there, at the foot of that hill. But it is well guarded.”
“Wait here,” said Ezio.
“Where are you going?”
“I need to get a feel for this place.”
“You’ll need a guide.”
“Why?”
“It’s a warren. You see those towers?”
“Yes.”
“Ventilator shafts. And water conduits. There are eleven floors of the city, and they go down three hundred feet.”
“I’ll manage.”
“You’re an arrogant man.”
“No. I am cautious. And I am not unprepared. I know this place was made by Phrygians fifteen hundred years ago, and I know a little of its geography.”
“Then you’ll also know what’s down there: an underground river system at the very bottom, and above it, on ten more levels, churches, schools, shops, stores, stables even; and room for fifty thousand people.”
“Big enough to conceal a garrison, in fact.”
Dilara looked at him. “You’ll need a guide,” she repeated.
“I need somebody here.”
“Then go with God,” she said. “But be quick. As soon as the patrols have all come out, they’ll roll the gate closed again. With luck, you’ll be able to get in with the supply wagons over there. I’ll wait by the west gate.”
Ezio nodded and silently took his leave.
He blended in with the local Byzantine people, who seemed less than happy with the new military presence in their midst, and managed to pass through the gate, walking alongside an oxcart, without difficulty.
The torchlit interior illuminated yellowish beige walls of soft volcanic rock, besmirched with the soot of ages, and yet the air was fresh. The streets-if you could call the broad, grimy corridors that-were alive with soldiers and citizens, jostling one another as they went about their business, and Ezio made his way among them, penetrating ever deeper into the underground city’s interior.
At last, on the second level belowground, he came upon a spacious hall, with a barrel-vaulted roof and decorated with faded frescoes. He made his way along one of the galleries and looked down on the figures in the main room twenty feet below him. The acoustic was good, and he was easily able to hear what the two men there were saying to one another.
He had recognized them immediately. The portly figure of Manuel Palaiologos, and the gaunt one of Shahkulu. Near them, a group of guards stood at attention. Ezio noted a broad tunnel leading off westward-possibly a route to the west gate Dilara had shown him earlier.
“How soon before my soldiers are trained to use those guns?” Manuel was asking.
“A few weeks at most,” replied the dour Turkmeni.
Manuel looked thoughtful. “The main Janissary force will know I have betrayed them by now. But do they have the resources for retribution?”
“Doubtful. The sultan’s war with Selim commands most of their attention.”
Manuel began to laugh-but his laugh quickly turned to coughing and gagging. “Ah!” he gasped. “What the hell is that smell? Have the ventilators been blocked?”
“Apologies, Manuel. Perhaps the wind has changed. Some of the Ottoman prisoners we took a week or so ago turned out to be… so fragile. We had to put them somewhere after they met with their unfortunate… accident.”
Manuel was almost amused by this but also worried. “Shahkulu, try to moderate your anger. I know that the sultan humiliated your people. But there is no need to spit on men who are below us.”
“Humiliated my people!” Shahkulu shouted. “He tried to crush us as if we were so many roaches! That is why I sided with Ismail of Persia and took the name ‘Shahkulu’-servant of the Shah. Under that name, I will prevail against whatever the Seljuks try to throw against the Turkmen people, and those of us who follow the Safavid, and the law of Shia.”
“Of course, of course-but nevertheless, get rid of the evidence,” said Manuel, taking his leave, a scented handkerchief pressed to his nose.
Shahkulu sullenly watched him go, then snapped his fingers at the remaining bodyguards. “You three-gather the corpses and dump them outside on the western dunghill.”
The sergeant of the guard looked nervous. “Shahkulu, I don’t have the key to the west gate,” he stammered.
Shahkulu exploded with rage. “Then find it, idiot!” he bellowed, storming off.
Left alone, the guards looked at one another.
“Who has the key? Any idea?” said the sergeant, testily. He didn’t like being called an idiot in front of his men, and he didn’t like their smirks, either.
“I think Nikolos has it,” said one of them. “He’s on leave today.”
“Then he’ll be at the market on Level Three,” put in the other soldier.
“Stuffing his face, no doubt,” groused the first man. “ Hriste mou! I’d like to run Shahkulu through with a spear!”
“Hey, hey!” said the sergeant severely. “Keep that to yourself, edaxi?”
Ezio barely heard the last words. He was already on his way to the market, one floor below.
SIXTY
Apart from the fact that its hall was deep underground, the market was much as any other-stalls selling meat, vegetables, spices-whose odors were everywhere, and even denser than they would have been in the open air-clothes, shoes-whatever the people needed. And there were little tavernas and wine shops. Near one of them, in an open space, a drunken scrap had broken out-evidently over a light-skinned whore, a bony older woman who sat elegantly on a chair at one of the wine-shop tables, clearly enjoying the spectacle.
A circle had formed around the two men who were throwing punches at one another, the bystanders egging them on with ragged shouts of encouragement. Ezio joined the circle’s outer edges:
“Give him one!”
“Hit him!”
“Kill the bastard!”
“Is that all you’ve got?”
“Blood! Blood!”
“Mangle him!”
Among the watchers, most of whom were as drunk as the brawlers, was a fat, red-faced soldier with a scruffy beard and a receding chin, holding a wineskin and roaring along with the rest of them. Ezio had already noticed the unclasped leather wallet on his belt and could see the bow of a large iron key protruding from it. He glanced around and saw the three guards from the painted hall approaching through the market on the far side.
No time to lose. He sidled up to the fat soldier from behind and plucked the key from the wallet just as his fellow soldiers hailed him by name.
Nikolos would have a lot of explaining to do, thought Ezio, as he made his way back to the Second Level and the tunnel from which the stench had emanated-the tunnel which, he guessed, led to the west gate.
SIXTY-ONE
“You took your time,” said Dilara in a harsh whisper, as Ezio unlocked the west gate from the inside and let her in.
“You’re welcome,” muttered Ezio, grimly.
But Dilara then did exactly as Ezio had expected, and retched, her hand shooting to her face. “ Aman Allahim! What is that?”
Ezio stepped back and indicated a pile of dead bodies, stacked in a broad niche just inside the doorway. “Not everyone was taken prisoner.”
Dilara rushed forward toward the heap, but then stopped short, staring. “Poor men! God keep them!”
Her shoulders dropped as her
spirits sank. She seemed a little more human, under the fierce facade she maintained. “That Turkmeni renegade Shahkulu did this, I know,” she continued.
Ezio nodded.
“I’ll kill him!”
And she ran off. “Wait!” Ezio called after her, but it was too late. She was already gone.
Ezio set off after her and found her at last in a secluded spot overlooking a small public square. He approached with care. She had her back to him and was staring at something happening in the square, still invisible to him.
“You aren’t very good at cooperation,” he said as he came up.
She didn’t turn. “I’m here to rescue what remains of my men,” she said coldly. “Not to make friends.”
“You don’t have to be friends to cooperate,” said Ezio, drawing closer. “But it would help to know where your men were, and I can help you find them.”
He was interrupted by an anguished scream and hurried up to join the Turkish spy. Her face had hardened.
“Right there,” she said, pointing.
Ezio followed the direction of her finger and saw, in the square, a number of Ottoman prisoners seated on the ground, their hands bound. As they watched, one of them was thrown to the ground by Byzantine guards. There was a makeshift gallows nearby, and from it another Ottoman hung from his wrists, with his arms bent behind him. Near him stood Shahkulu, instantly recognizable despite the executioner’s mask he wore. The man screamed as Shahkulu delivered blow after blow to his body.
“It’s Janos,” Dilara said to Ezio, turning to him at last. “We must help him!”
Ezio looked closely at what was going on. “I have a gun, but I can’t use it,” he said. “The body armor he’s wearing is too thick for bullets.” He paused. “I’ll have to get in close.”
“There’s little time. This isn’t an interrogation. Shahkulu is torturing Janos to death. And then there’ll be another. And another. ..”
She winced at each blow and each scream.
They could hear the laughter and the taunts of Shahkulu’s men.
“I think I can see how we can do this,” said Ezio. He unhooked a smoke bomb from his belt. “When I throw this, you go around to the right. See if you can start cutting the bonds of your men under cover of the smoke from this bomb.”
She nodded. “And Shahkulu?”
“Leave him to me.”
“Just make sure you finish the rat.”
Ezio pulled the pin from the bomb, waited a moment for the smoke to start to gush, and threw it toward the gallows with a careful aim. The Byzantines thought they had made sure of all the opposition and were not expecting an attack. They were taken completely by surprise.
In the confusion, Ezio and Dilara bounded down the slope and into the square, splitting to right and left. Ezio shot down the first guard to come at him and smashed another’s jaw with the bracer on his left forearm. Then he unleashed his hidden-blade and moved in fast toward Shahkulu, who’d drawn a heavy scimitar and was standing his ground, twisting to the left and right, unsure of where the attack would come from. The moment his attention was diverted, Ezio leapt at him and plunged his blade into the top of his chest between the jawline of the mask and his body armor. Dark blood bubbled forth around his fist as he kept the blade where it was.
Shahkulu fell, Ezio holding on to him and falling with him, ending up kneeling over the man, whose struggles were losing their violence. His eyes closed.
“Men who make a fetish out of murder deserve no pity,” Ezio said, his lips close to the man’s ear.
But then Shahkulu’s eyes sprang open in a manic stare, and a mailed fist shot to Ezio’s throat, gripping it tightly. Shahkulu started to laugh crazily. As he did so, the blood pumped out faster from his wound, and Ezio rammed the blade in harder and twisted it viciously as he did so. With a last spasm, Shahkulu thrust Ezio from him, sending him sprawling in the dust. Then his back arched in his death agony, a rattle sounded in his throat, and he fell back, inert.
Ezio picked himself up and cleaned his blade on Shahkulu’s cloak. Dilara had already cut some of her men free and Ezio was in time to see her throw herself on the back of the last, fleeing Byzantine survivor, bringing him down and slicing his throat open in one clean movement. She jumped back from the kill, landing like a cat, and turned to her rescued troops.
Ezio gave Shahkulu’s body a kick, to be sure, this time, that he was dead. Dilara was pulling her men to their feet.
“Bless you, Dilara,” said Janos, as she cut him down.
“Can you walk?”
“I think so.”
Ezio came up. “Was yours the detachment that brought the guns for Manuel?”
She nodded.
“Then they must be destroyed.”
She nodded again. “But most of them don’t actually work. The gunpowder’s real enough though-we couldn’t fake that.”
“Bene,” said Ezio. He looked at the Ottomans standing round him. “Get yourselves out of sight until you hear the explosions, then run!”
“Explosions?” said Dilara. “If you do that, all hell will break loose. You will panic the entire city.”
“I’m counting on that,” replied Ezio. “The explosions will destroy whatever good guns there are, and as for the panic, it can only help us.”
Dilara considered this. “All right. I’ll take my men to a place of safety. But what about you?”
“After the explosions have gone off, I’m going after Manuel Palaiologos.”
SIXTY-TWO
There were great vaults in the underground city-vast man-made caverns where the gunpowder and arms caches for Manuel’s army were stored. A system of block-and-tackle pulley systems for transporting powder kegs on taut ropeways from one place to another had been set up, and, as Ezio watched from a vantage point in a gallery he had reached on the Fifth Level, he saw groups of Byzantine civilians engaged in just such activity, under the watchful eye of Manuel’s renegade troops. It was a perfect opportunity, and he thanked God that their security was so slack. They were obviously confident that they were under no threat of attack, and he had moved too fast to be overtaken by the discovery of Shahkulu’s corpse and those of his fellow torturers.
He’d replaced his hidden-blade with his hookblade and reloaded his pistol. He got in among a group of workers and watched as a barrel was maneuvered down one of the ropes, between two sets of blocks and tackle. Around them, hundreds of barrels were piled on top of one another, and along the walls, wooden crates of muskets were ranged.
“Steady, now! Steady!” an overseer was shouting. “This is gunpowder, not millet!”
“Got it!” a man operating a winch called back.
Ezio surveyed his surroundings, planning. If he could manage to start one explosion in such a way that it would lead to a chain reaction along the three warehouse vaults he knew there to be…
It might just work.
As he roved between the halls, blending in with the workers, he listened carefully to their conversation, to test their mood. And in doing so, he discovered that not all Byzantines were villains. As usual, it was just the ones whose egos were too big, who were too hungry for power, who were to blame for everyone else’s misfortune.
“It could be worse, you know,” one woman was saying to a male fellow worker.
“Worse? Worse than this?”
“Better the turban of the Turk than the tiara of the Pope. At least the Ottomans have some respect for our Orthodox Church.”
“Shh-h! If anyone heard you…!” warned another woman.
“She’s crazy!” The man turned to the first woman. “Listen to yourself!”
“OK, so I’m crazy. And if you prefer forced labor, living underground like a mole, then fine!”
The man considered this. “Well, it’s certainly true that I don’t want to go to war. I just want to feed my family.”
Another man, an overseer dressed in Templar uniform, had overheard this, and put in, not altogether unsympathetically: “N
o one wants war, friend-but what can we do? Look at us! Look how we live! Those Turks took our land. Do you think we should just roll over without a fight?”
“No, no,” said the first man to speak. “I just-I don’t know. I’m just tired of this. We’re all so tired of fighting!”
Amen to that, thought Ezio, as he slipped away between two twenty-foot-high tiers of barrels.
Once he was alone, he broached a barrel at ground level with the point of his scimitar and, after collecting a stream of powder in a leather pouch, laid a trail down the aisle between the rows of barrels to the entrance of the second hall. He did the same thing there, and in the third hall, until the trail reached the arched door leading out of it. Then he waited patiently until all the ordinary workers had moved out of harm’s way for the night.
Only the guards remained.
Ezio made sure his retreat was assured, took up a position a few yards from the exit, unleashed his pistol, and fired into the nearest barrel. Then he turned and ran.
The titanic serial explosions that followed rocked the foundations of the underground city like an earthquake. Ceilings crumbled and fell behind him as he fled. Everywhere, there was smoke, dust, rubble, and chaos.
SIXTY-THREE
Ezio reached the great chamber on the Second Level at about the same time as Manuel, who stumbled in, surrounded by a large force of crack guards. Ezio concealed himself behind a buttress, watched, and waited. He was going to finish things tonight if he could. And he’d seen that Manuel was holding the missing Masyaf key-the one the Templars had unearthed beneath the Palace of Topkapi. If he had that with him, then the would-be next emperor of Byzantium must be planning his escape.
“What the hell is going on?” bellowed Manuel, half in anger, half in fear.
“Sabotage, Manuel,” said a Templar captain at his elbow. “You need to take cover.”
A crowd of bawling, panicky people had filled one end of the chamber by then. Ezio watched Manuel as he stuffed the key into a satchel he had slung around his corpulent body, and elbowed the Templar officer aside. “Get out of my way,” he snapped.
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