Off to the sides that surrounded the open space in the center, though, everything was cutting edge technology. Cal saw screens alive with strange illustrations, blinking lights, and a sense of focus that dredged up another word to describe the strange scenario: Laboratory.
What, then, did that make him?
A third orderly jogged over to join the two who still held Cal tightly by each arm. This one slid a heavy canvas belt around Cal’s waist, and he glanced down to see it lock into place with a clink. Was it the meds, or did it look like the buckle formed the letter A?
His self-preservation instinct kicked into panic mode. A chain was a chain, be it of links of metal or a belt with a shiny letter on it, and he looked up frantically to see Sofia regarding him evenly. There was no explanation in those cool blue eyes.
“Are the blades prepared?” she asked. It took Cal a second to realize that she wasn’t speaking to him, but to one of her attendants standing over a collection of monitors and keyboards in the alcove area.
“Right here,” a young bearded man said. He moved from the twenty-first century back to the fourteenth by stepping from his monitors to one of the display cabinets and handing something off to two orderlies, or lab assistants, or whatever the hell they were.
“And we’ve confirmed their provenance?” Sofia continued.
“They definitely belonged to Aguilar, recovered from his burial site.”
Burial site? Who the hell were these people, grave robbers?
Sofia had told him to trust her, that everything would make sense. And so he’d stepped down from the ledge, literally and figuratively, and for that gesture of trust he’d been shot with a dart like he was some kind of animal and literally dragged into this church-like place where nothing at all made any kind of sense.
Each of the lab assistants now carried some kind of glove or gauntlet, and the two men gripping Cal’s arms tightened their grasp as the leather things were shoved onto Cal’s hands.
He looked up at Sofia, groggy, alarmed and seriously out of his depth.
“What are these?” he grunted, trying—futilely—to resist. They were leather, and smelled old, and somehow familiar.
“These relics and your DNA will allow us embodied access to your ancestral lineage,” Sofia replied.
“What?” Cal knew all the words, but in combination they made no sense. Sofia resumed speaking to her assistants, but she never took her eyes from Cal’s.
“Assume final preparations. Our regression: Andalusia, 1491. Record everything.”
Screens sprang to life, and Cal’s darting eyes caught images, blueprints, spidery scrawls of data over in the alcoves. Everything was as far beyond his comprehension as an airplane was beyond a cat’s.
“Arm’s ready,” one of Sofia’s assistants told her.
Arm?
Cal heard an ominous hydraulic whirring sound from overhead. The drug had left his system now, and so it was with perfect clarity that he beheld a massive mechanical device, the light from the domed ceiling glittering on its shiny surface. It spiraled downward, humming with deceptive gentleness, undulating and unfolding itself like a robotic snake awakening from slumber, until a U-shaped end was revealed.
It dipped down behind Cal and clicked gracefully into position. The arm. Such it was, and its two-pronged hand now gripped Cal firmly about his waist.
Total abject terror surged through him. His bowels clenched, threatening to let loose, but somehow he overruled the crippling fear long enough to gasp, scared but also furious, “What is this?”
She looked at him with that angel’s face, and then lowered her gaze, unable to meet his eyes. She said with what sounded like genuine regret, “I’m sorry, Cal. This is not how I like to do things.”
“Then don’t do it!”
Something inside him, something deep and primal, told him if she was able to do what she intended to, he would never be the same.
Sofia lifted her blue eyes, regarding him with a mixture of sorrow and implacability. “Insert epidural.”
Ten tiny points of metal settled down on Cal’s neck, like the legs of some mechanical insect. But before he could jerk away, something sharp, long, and blindingly painful jabbed into the base of his skull.
He screamed.
Cal had fought. He had killed. He had almost been killed several times. He had run from police, been shot, stabbed, beaten within an inch of his life.
But never had he felt anything as painful as this.
Not a hospital. Not a lab.
A torture chamber.
And then, as swiftly as it had descended, the pain receded, not entirely, but enough for Cal to gulp in air and gasp, uncomprehending and furious, “What do you want from me?”
Sofia gazed at him, calm, in control. “Your past.”
“My past…?”
Bizarrely, he thought of the song that had been playing on the beat-up old radio on that afternoon thirty years ago: Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”
I’m going insane, he thought. Crazy.
Cal looked down at Sofia, now in pure, primal panic mode. She seemed to sense it, for her voice and manner changed. “Listen to me carefully, Cal. You are about to enter the Animus.”
The word jolted him in a way she could not have anticipated. As a teenager, he’d known about expensive software put out by the company that would later be known as Abstergo Entertainment. He’d heard the rumors about how they were developing games based on memories of someone’s ancestors, gleaned from lucky Abstergo employees, presumably sitting comfortably in ritzy offices, who spent time in a semi-legendary apparatus called the Animus that looked like a whiz-bang recliner.
When Cal had been in and out of juvie halls and foster homes, he’d mastered the art of stealing the software right out from under the noses of store employees and selling them to kids with too much money and too few real threats in their lives, who got to experience knife fights and violence vicariously rather that getting their own hands and noses bloody.
This was the Animus? This monstrous thing, this grasping, implacable arm out of someone’s depraved and deeply buried nightmare—this was the source of a kid’s video game?
Sofia continued, pulling his attention back to her. “What you are about to see, hear, and feel are the memories of someone who has been dead for over five hundred years.”
Cal abruptly realized that as she spoke, Sofia had been slowly, deliberately backing away from him. Fresh fear shot though him and he reached out imploringly to her, the only one here who had seemed to truly want to see him as a human being; the one who had put him into this arm.
“Wait a minute!” he pleaded, but it was too late. He was suddenly hoisted into the air as if by a giant, as if this whole ordeal was nothing more than some sort of twisted carnival ride. The arm had him, and moved him about with casual, absolute power, and Callum Lynch dangled as helpless as a ragdoll in its implacable metal grip.
“You must understand that you can’t change what happens, Cal,” Sofia said, raising her voice to be heard above the whirring of the arm. “Try to stay with the images. If you attempt to change anything, or try to break away, this could be dangerous for you. Stay with the memories.”
Since that awful day when he had walked in on his mother’s still-warm corpse, had watched his father, blood dripping from the blade which had slain her, approach him with the intent of killing him as well, Cal had been determined to never, ever, let anyone have control over him. He had even managed to retain some sense of autonomy, a sense of self, in prison.
But here, the arm, and the angelic but unreachable woman who manipulated it, had ripped that away from him in seconds. And Cal had a dreadful premonition that somehow, they would be stripping him of more than he even knew he had.
More mechanical whirring. The arm maneuvered him about as Sofia called out instructions that meant nothing to him, but would influence everything.
“Engage scanner!” ordered Sofia.
Myriad lenses shoved themselve
s into his face, one after the other, their “eyes” irising open and closed as they observed—what? Other devices that looked like things out of a mad scientist’s wet dream descended, moving slowly with ominous clicking sounds.
Cal tore his gaze away from the machines, looking down at the humans below and the screens they gazed upon.
“Scanner reading memories,” one of them called to Sofia. She stood a good twenty feet below Cal now, her oval face upturned to him.
“Status?” she asked of her team, though her eyes were still locked with Cal’s.
“Monitoring blood flow and neural activity… DNA match identified.”
Sofia, bathed in blue light, smiled up at Cal. “Stay with it, Cal,” she urged again, and despite everything she had allowed to be done to him, Cal felt that she was on his side.
“Scanning DNA chains, searching for timeframe.”
The arm moved Cal with surprising gentleness now, languidly lifting and lowering him, turning him to face into one strange piece of equipment, then the other. He was calming down now, growing used to the sensation, though his heart was still racing and his breath came quickly.
“First memory match locked,” the assistant announced.
“Ego integrity?” Sofia inquired.
“Optimal.” This time, a female voice responded.
“Attempt synchronization,” Sofia ordered. She was still gazing up at him, and he saw concern furrow her brow. For him? No, more likely for the project.
“First ancestral link is complete. We’ve found Aguilar.”
Without any intention of doing so, Cal abruptly flicked first one wrist, then the other. Blades hidden inside the gauntlets shot forward. He stared at them, stupidly.
“Ego integrated.” The female assistant’s voice; floating to his ears, seeming distant, somehow.
He wanted to close his eyes for some reason, though that seemed like the wrong thing to do. A few heartbeats later, he gave in, letting his eyelids flutter closed.
A strange calm descended.
“Synchronization achieved,” said the male voice.
Then her voice, musical, like a breath of summer air in its peaceful joy. “There!”
There, yes. A still point, where there was nothing that had come before, nothing that would come afterward. It was… blissful.
Slowly Cal opened his eyes, as peaceful now as he had been terrified when he closed them.
“Commence regression,” said the angel.
“Regression in progress.”
And then Cal was dropped.
The stone floor rushed up to meet him, and his stomach churned violently.
The floor suddenly seemed to open up, engulfing him in a fiery, churning tunnel of blinding light. Then, so quickly Cal couldn’t even begin to close his eyes against it, the light dimmed, grew dusty, and he was looking down on a great city painted in hues of gold and tan and bronze.
He observed everything—more than he knew his eyes could reasonably take in, and as he moved smoothly over the landscape, he was reminded suddenly, peculiarly, of the eagle that had flown over him on that day so long ago, when he had tried and failed to jump his bike across the gulf, when his biggest worry was how to explain to his parents the damage he’d done to the bike and himself.
When his life had been shattered.
Then that memory, and all that was Callum Lynch, retreated, surrendering to the vastness that was spread out before him, in the vision of the eagle.
CHAPTER 5
SIEGE OF GRANADA, SPAIN
1491
From above, the events of man seemed like nothing at all, certainly nothing compared to the whipping wind and the powerful upthrusts of the Sierra Nevada mountains. But if one dropped closer, diving down as the eagle did, one could see the small, repeated shapes of dwellings, and the uprising of structures that had more of the mountain in them than the hearthfires: a mighty fortress wall, following the silvery curve of the river, and upon its bridges and ramparts and streets was battle and blood and death.
Little things, the breaths of a human life, but precious to those who took them. They fought by the thousands, with sword and bow and arrows, with daggers and spears, with fire and faith. Smoke rose in grim plumes, and what sunlight penetrated to the streets below caused steel helms to gleam.
Horses and men thundered through the streets while archers desperately tried to pick them off from above. Banners of now-filthy white cloth were torn and tattered, but the red cross embroidered upon it could still be seen.
Below the eagle’s wings, too, was the great palace known as the Alhambra. Moorish soldiers fought desperately to protect the palace, while its sultan stared somberly down at the furor below him, then raised his eyes to the mountains beyond, where a great treasure was hidden in a small village, many of its buildings still burning, and where the strangest of protectors stood ready to recover it.
***
“Our mission is the boy,” Benedicto, the Mentor, had told them a few hours earlier. “We have been betrayed. The Templars may not find his hiding place, but if they do, they’ll trade his life for the Apple. Sultan Muhammad will have no choice.”
Few words, but enough. No one on this mission was inexperienced, and they all knew the incalculable preciousness of the thing they sought. Aguilar de Nerha, however, suspected that the words were directed at him in particular.
He knew that in the few months since he had formally joined the Assassin Brotherhood, he had performed well. He had followed the orders of the Mentor, and not taken matters into his own hands. He had proven himself trustworthy, developing a calm head to overrule his impulsive heart and brain. The very fact that he was being allowed on this mission was testament to how well he was regarded.
The Assassins were well aware that Master Templar Tomás de Torquemada was behind the Templars’ drive to obtain the Apple. And when the short, intense Grand Inquisitor was involved, two things were inevitable. One, innocent people would die horribly to advance the Templar cause under the guise of “religious purity.”
And two, at some point, somewhere, the Templar black knight Ojeda would surface.
The scout who had reported the Templars’ approach had informed that the company consisted of over two dozen mounted soldiers and a pair of wagons. One carried several barrels; containing what, the scouts could not venture a guess. The other was a large, empty cage.
The meaning was clear. The Templars were intending to present the prince to his father as if he were no more than a trapped animal.
The company was commanded by a familiar face—General Ramirez. Ramirez cut an elegant figure, with his scarred visage, long gray hair, and spear-straight posture. He served the Templars with his considerable military skills and gift for strategy, and Torquemada valued him.
And with Ramirez, the scout reported, his eyes flickering to Benedicto, was Ojeda.
Benedicto had not batted an eye, nor had he said anything to Aguilar. But the younger Assassin knew that the proximity to the monster who had captured his family and given them to Torquemada to burn was bound to trouble the Mentor. It was not unreasonable for Benedicto to fear that Aguilar might be tempted to forget that their mission was one of rescue, not revenge.
Aguilar understood that. He would not forget.
But he also knew that if fate presented him with the opportunity to slay Ojeda with his own hands while the Assassins rescued Prince Ahmed, he would take it in a heartbeat.
They began the long climb down, leaping from crag to crag, finding foot and handholds where no others possibly could, moving swiftly toward the village where the enemy was already present and had set fire to some of the outlying buildings as a means of intimidation. Now, the Assassins blended in effortlessly with the throng that stood, frightened and uneasy, awaiting the approach of the Templars. It was one of the tenets of the Creed: Hide in plain sight.
The Assassins separated, threading their way in different directions as the company of Templars galloped up. In the vanguard were
a cluster of soldiers, hard-eyed men in armor and red cloaks who carried weapons ranging from spears to swords to crossbows.
Some remained atop their horses, watching the crowd with the advantage of height. Others dismounted and took positions among the gathering crowd of villagers, ready to quell any semblance of discontent.
After the soldiers came their commander. The legendary General Ramirez was dressed in an elegant, elaborate red velvet tunic worn over his armor. He cut a dramatic figure, but Aguilar had no eyes for him. All his attention was on the mountain of a man who waited, his face as expressionless as if its owner had indeed been kin to stone, while the general slid off his mount.
Aguilar understood now why he had gotten the nickname of the “black knight.” From his topknot and braided hair to the toes of his boots, everything Ojeda wore was as black as night; as black, Aguilar thought with a surge of anger, as his heart.
The well-tooled leather around Ojeda’s thick neck and broad shoulders was battle-marred, the embroidered cloak pale with yellow dust. His broad chest was covered with leather armor, the silver studs and glints of chainmail the only things that caught the light. Ojeda wore not gauntlets but bracers that dwarfed those that encircled Aguilar’s lower arms, also of exquisitely tooled black leather.
Even the horse upon which he rode matched his rider. The stallion’s black coat was dulled with dust, but the thick mane and tail, powerful build and proud carriage spoke of excellent breeding. Like Ojeda, the beautiful Andalusian horse wore black armor. His head was protected by a second skull of ink-hued plate, and the leather that draped his body was adorned with sharp protruding iron triangles.
Together with a handful of his men, Ramirez strode into a simple stone house. Ojeda remained outside with the bulk of the red-cloaks, not saying a word or making a move, but causing terror with his simple, silent presence. It was no wonder he was so valued by Torquemada. Gray smoke mixed with yellow dust, causing Aguilar’s eyes to sting. He blinked, clearing them, ignoring the pain as his training had taught.
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