She pressed her back to the wall, hugging the shadows, watching as the guard ambled into the bedchamber before she could. She heard a clatter of shutters being closed then a thick clunk of a locking chain. The guard emerged from the chamber again and wandered back downstairs.
She paced along behind him like his shadow, creeping down the stairs in time with him to disguise her footsteps, edging up to the main entrance as he did. If he locked it while she was still inside . . . Her stomach twisted as she imagined a fourth head on the marble mantel upstairs.
Just then, the guard dropped his keys. As he stooped to pick them up, Kassandra took a further step. The boards creaked, the guard bristled, then leapt up and around in one motion. His face curled into a baleful sneer as he swung his ax level, his lips parting to shout for his comrades. The cry never came as Kassandra grabbed and threw the small knife tucked into the lip of her bracer in one stroke. It flew straight and pierced the man’s throat. He fell, pink foam bubbling from the wound. Kassandra caught his body to reduce the noise. She eyed the man for a moment, his keys, his garb, the door, the way to freedom.
* * *
• • •
The watcher stared as the guard ambled from the villa and strolled across the grounds, draped in a black cloak. He heard a few words being exchanged as the guard said something to the other posted at the gateway of the outer walls, before the guard continued on out into the countryside. A thrill of anticipation crawled through him: she was everything, everything they hoped she might be. He craned forward from his vantage point like a crow, unblinking.
* * *
• • •
Kassandra heard her own breath crash like waves within the confines of the visored leather helm. Worse, the guard she had killed and taken it from had clearly been munching on raw garlic for a year, going by the stink. She did all she could to walk in a carefree—almost bored—manner, away from the Cyclops’s estate and off into the brush, patting the flat of the stolen guard ax upon her palm. Her excuse had been simple: “I’m going to scout around outside. I’m sure I saw something out there while I was on the villa’s top floor.” The other sentry at the gate had been too weary from the midday heat to pick up on her questionable attempt at a low, gruff voice.
She walked into a stand of fir and juniper and felt the shade in there drape across her—blissful invisibility and coolness. The air was spiced with the tang of pine and the soft carpet of fallen needles felt pleasant to walk on. Up ahead, she saw a clearing with a splash of blue waves beyond. The shore. Giddiness rose in her breast like a scented smoke, intoxicating her with the oh-so-close promise of success as she stepped into the clearing.
The slow, steady sound of a pair of hands clapping halted her in her stride, sending the fear of all the Gods through her.
“Excellent, excellent,” a voice said.
Kassandra turned her head toward the figure sitting on a fallen log in the clearing’s tree line. He was a gull of a man, sporting thin brown hair combed forward, his body swaddled in a pristine white robe, streaked with a vivid silver stripe, his scrawny neck and wrists dripping with bracelets. A rich man, she realized instantly, and not of this island.
“The Cyclops of Kephallonia is seldom relieved of his hard-won treasures,” he said, his chest shaking with a chuckle.
Kassandra shivered. There was something about his tone—overly familiar, assuming. And the way he looked at her, his eyes combing her body. It was not a carnal look, but it was desirous and lustful all the same.
“Rest your hands from your ax. You have nothing to fear from me.”
Kassandra did not let her gaze waver, refused to blink, and certainly did not set down her stolen ax. Ikaros swooped down just then to perch on her shoulder, shrieking at the stranger. Like a hunter, she took in every scintilla of her peripheral vision. There were no others in the tree line, she realized. But she noticed something else: downhill, at a small inlet, a boat was moored just off a timber jetty. The hideous gorgon head on the sail stared up at her as crewmen on board hoisted it up to the spar.
“Who are you?” she said through clenched teeth.
“I am Elpenor of Kirrha,” he replied calmly.
Kirrha? Kassandra thought. The gateway to Delphi, the home of the Oracle. She felt a great urge to spit.
“I came looking for you because I heard great things about you—the Misthios of Kephallonia,” Elpenor continued.
“You have the wrong person,” she growled. “There are several mercenaries on this island.”
“None with your skills, Kassandra,” he said with the timbre of a tombstone rolling into place. “Preternatural speed of mind and body.”
She reached up to prize the stinking leather helm from her head and tossed it into the nearby grass, her hidden braid of hair spilling loose across her chest. “What do you want with me? Speak plainly, or I will lodge this ax in your chest.”
Elpenor laughed, his bony body shaking with amusement. “I want to offer you a vast sum of wealth, Kassandra. More than twice the value of that obsidian eye you took from the Cyclops.”
She moved a hand to her purse, checking the eye was still there. It was. Twice as much again? Such riches would allow her to pay off the Cyclops, then buy a good home for Phoibe. More, it would break the chains of poverty that kept her on this island. She could go anywhere, do anything. The notion thrilled her with terror and wonder. Then, when she saw how he rapaciously eyed her bare arms again, she stiffened and stared down her nose at him. “I do not lie with men for money. Besides, you are old and I might break you.”
Elpenor cocked an eyebrow. “It is not your body I want, not in that way, at least. I come to offer you a bounty, in return for a head.”
“You already have a head of your own,” Kassandra sneered.
Elpenor half smiled. “The head of a warrior. A Spartan general.”
Kassandra felt the world shift under her feet.
“They call him the Wolf,” he said.
Kassandra steadied herself, ignoring the streaks of sweat stealing down her back. “Generals bleed like all other men.” She shrugged. “Spartans too, despite their misplaced conceit.”
“So you accept the contract?”
“Where is he?”
“Across the sea. In the most coveted land in the Greek world.”
Kassandra’s eyes narrowed. She followed his gaze, past her shoulder and off to the east. She thought of the haze out at sea and the constant train of Athenian galleys, tacking around into the Gulf of Korinthia, to bolster the siege of . . . “The Megarid? He’s in the Megarid?”
Elpenor nodded. “In the tug-of-war between Sparta and Athens, the city of Megara and its narrow strip of land are the rope. Athens wants the twin ports to complete its naval noose around Hellas. Sparta wants the land to use as a bridge into Attika.”
Kassandra took a step back and spluttered. “So he’s inside the Athenian blockade?”
“The Wolf and his troops marched overland from Lakonia, and are now headed for Pagai, Megara’s western port.”
“Why do you want him dead?” she asked.
“The war rages and . . . the Wolf is on the wrong side.”
She shot him a cold look. “How do I know you are on the right side?”
He lifted a purse from his robe and shook it. The thick clunk of drachmae sounded from within. “Because I am the one paying you.” He tossed the bag of coins toward her. She plucked it from the air, pleasantly surprised by its weight. “Do as I ask, Misthios, and you shall have ten times this.” He smiled in a way that drained all humor from his eyes.
She glared at him. “I’ll need a boat to run and pierce that blockade. Give me yours and I will accept,” she said, flicking her head toward the gorgon-head galley. In truth she had only once before been to sea as a misthios—circling Kephallonia in a rotting old trade cog to bring stolen hides to one of Markos�
��s contacts.
“My sails cannot be seen in the vicinity when it happens, Misthios,” Elpenor said with an air of finality.
“But without a boat, the contract is void. Athens wore down all of her allies’ fleets years ago—forced them to pay into the treasury of the Delian League so she could swell her own navy. There are few seaworthy galleys left in private hands, and none on Kephallonia that would be fast enough to cut through a blockade.”
Elpenor’s nose wrinkled. “Is it too much for you, Misthios? Have I overestimated your skills?” When she hesitated to answer, he rose and turned from her, taking a step toward the trees and the track leading downhill toward his boat.
“Nothing is too much for me, old man,” she called after him. “You’ll have the Wolf’s head in good time.”
He halted, looking back over his shoulder with hooded eyes. “Good. Come and find me at Pilgrim’s Landing in Kirrha, once it is done.”
* * *
• • •
She trekked along the shoreline, heading back toward Markos’s vineyard. The strange Elpenor’s parting words danced around in her thoughts like a falling sycamore seed. Right now, that all seemed misty and unreal. Kirrha, she had never been to. The Wolf, she had never met. Beyond Kephallonia’s coastal waters, she had not ventured. Not for twenty years. What a fool, she chided herself. Why can’t you learn to say no to suspect contracts? Markos and his wretched schemes and now this death trap of a job. She laughed aloud and the sound surprised her. “This Wolf is safe. I will never get off this damned island.”
She trudged on for a time. After a while, she rounded a rocky cape and came to the pale sand of Kleptous Bay. She stopped to fill her drinking skin by a coastal brook, then lifted it to slake her thirst, but it never reached her lips.
“I swear I uttered not a word of a lie. Please do not take her from me!”
The cry sailed across the bay, the voice ragged and desperate.
She fell to her haunches and shielded her eyes from the sun. At first, she saw just white, foaming breakers, wheeling seabirds, and a few wild goats chomping on marram grass. It was only on a second sweep that she spotted the trireme lodged on the shoreline, farther up the bay, the stern in the sand and the fore bobbing in the water. It was smaller than the Athenian war galleys and Elpenor’s gorgon-head boat, but it looked slender and well crafted, painted black near the keel and red around the rails. The stern rose into a curving scorpion tail and the rostrum sported a glinting bronze ram, eyes painted on either side.
“The Adrestia is everything to me,” the voice wailed.
“Adrestia,” Kassandra whispered. The Goddess of Retribution . . . and the name of this ship? Shivers streaked down her back as she cycled the name over and over in her head. The Adrestia, the Adrestia, she mouthed, clicking her fingers, unable to recall why the name seemed familiar.
There was movement too, all over the decks. Tiny shapes of men. Bandits, tying kneeling crewmen, beating those who tried to rise. There was one older man, bent double thanks to the giant holding his head over a large clay pot. The pinned fellow writhed and struggled in vain. She heard the gurgling, forlorn cry again. “Gods, spare me, spare my ship!”
The cry ended in a frantic gurgle as the giant plunged the wretch’s head into the pot, water and foam spewing up from the edges. Now her vision grew eagle-sharp, and she saw the giant for who he was, and realized where she had heard of the Adrestia before. Markos’s words echoed in her mind:
The Adrestia is one of the last galleys left on the island. The Cyclops is on the hunt, and that ship is his prey.
THREE
Barnabas cried out in vain, bubbles roaring past his ears as his breath escaped, the dull moan of his underwater pleas sounding strange and otherworldly. His hands, bound behind his back, were hot with blood where the ropes had chewed into the skin. The water surged up his nose and flooded his mouth, pushing into his throat like a serpent. This was the worst part: when the air was gone from his lungs, when his body screamed for him to suck in a fresh breath, while the Cyclops’s viselike, meaty hand held him here, denying him. Flashes of white were followed by black splodges like squid ink, growing, spreading, joining, stealing away his vision. This was it, he realized. This time, the Cyclops would not bring him up for air. Charon the Ferryman would have him. Inside, he wept, and from the pits of memory, his well-lived life played out in flashes, like a sputtering torch. He saw the sandy island on which he had been marooned as a young sailor—saw the swell of the ocean that morning when he had been dying of thirst . . . saw the glistening, gargantuan thing that had arisen from the waves. Sun madness, his rescuers had claimed, dismissing his tale.
Suddenly, it all changed. The water roared and then fell away as the meaty hand wrenched his head up. His soaked tresses of long hazel, white-shot hair and beard swinging like octopus arms, spraying water in every direction. The crystal clarity of the air seemed deafening, and his head ached at the brightness of the sunlight. Blinking, retching and gasping for air, he stared up at the giant holding him, the lone eye staring down at him in return.
“Your loose lips are turning a little blue, Barnabas,” the Cyclops rumbled with laughter.
“What I said,” Barnabas coughed, “was meant as no affront to you. I swear to the Gods.”
“Too much talk of Gods,” the Cyclops sneered, his grip on the back of Barnabas’s head tightening again. “Time for you to go meet one of them, old man. Hades awaits you!”
“No—” Barnabas’s half plea ended with a splash and a mouthful of water. Back into the briny abyss, the darkening vision, the burning lungs. This time he saw his first mission as a triearchos, when he had led his crew to an island in search of an ancient treasure. They had found nothing but a labyrinth of caves. They wandered for days in those dark, underground passages, lost. They found no treasure. But Barnabas had seen something, one night, while all the others slept. It was a . . . creature. Well, it was a shadow at least: of a huge beast, broad of shoulder, with horns, watching them as they slumbered. As soon as he had seen it, it vanished. The mists of his dreams? That’s what his men had said when he tried to tell them about it, but later he had found the faint tracks and the markings of cloven hooves. He sucked in a lungful of water, felt his body slacken as the life seeped from him. The struggle was almost over. Then . . .
“What’s wrong, you old bastard?” the Cyclops hissed as he ripped Barnabas back from the pot again. “Are your Gods silent? Or did they tell you to go away?”
The bandits watching the tied crew exploded in laughter. “Finish it!” one cheered.
Barnabas felt the Cyclops’s hand tighten on the back of his head again. He did not bother to suck in a breath, knowing it would only make his end more lasting and painful. “Why did you not come to my aid?” he whispered skyward. The next thing he saw was the water in the pot rushing up toward him . . .
“Let him go,” a voice struck from across the bay.
The Cyclops’s hand froze. Barnabas stared at the pot water, his nose a finger’s-width from the surface. With his head locked like that, he rolled his eyes to the side. What he saw sent a shiver of awe through him. She walked across the bay with a swagger, tall, lithe and strong, wearing a hunter’s bow, an ax and a strange half lance. Her chiseled features seemed to be set hard, her eyes shaded under a baleful brow; and on her shoulder sat the most wondrous sight. An eagle. A bird of the gods. Tears gathered in Barnabas’s eyes. Who was this daughter of Ares?
“I will not ask you again, Cyclops,” she boomed, loose sand swirling around her like a mist.
The one-eyed giant shook with rage, then a low growl spilled from his lips, before he tossed Barnabas aside like a used rag.
* * *
• • •
The Cyclops of Kephallonia stared down at her from the boat’s stern, his long-ago mutilated face and the pitted hole that once housed his right eye pinched in a look of permane
nt anger. His oak-like limbs were tensed, glistening with sweat, his torso bulging beneath his bronze-studded leather thorax.
“Misthios,” he drawled, his scooped-up tail of black hair whipping in the wind like a living flame as Kassandra came to a halt twenty paces from the boat. “Misthios!” he shouted again in disbelief.
Kassandra shuffled to stand, feet apart, shoulders square, Ikaros bracing on her shoulder. Radiate power, Nikolaos growled in her mind. What she hoped the Cyclops and his men could not see was that her hands shook like the plucked strings of a lyre. But she had to face him—after years of avoiding this brute and his thugs, she had to face him, to end his stranglehold over her, Phoibe and Markos . . . over all Kephallonia. And to get that damned boat.
“What are you doing here?” the Cyclops boomed. “I asked my men to bring you to me in ropes.”
“They are dead. I came alone, to face you . . . Cyclops.”
The Cyclops bashed a fist upon the rail there. “Do not call me that,” he roared, then waved four of his men toward her. They vaulted over the rail and landed on the shore, spreading out to either side of her.
As they paced toward her, Kassandra’s mind whirred. “Have you only one ear as well as one eye, Cyclops? I said I came to face you, not your thugs.”
The Cyclops’s lips twitched, then he flicked a finger to direct his four men. “Tear her legs so she can never walk again, then drag her aboard and I will take her head once I have finished drowning this old sot.”
As he half turned back toward Barnabas, she plucked the obsidian eye from her purse and lifted it up to catch the sun. “Look what I found in your home.”
The Cyclops swung back to face her, his good eye growing moonlike. He rumbled with an evil, low laugh. “Oh, you will pay dearly for that . . .” He and his remaining six men dropped down from the boat, stalking out around her like a noose. Ten men and the Cyclops? Bravery and folly oft ride in company, Nikolaos hissed. Fight wisely, never overcommit.
Assassin's Creed Odyssey (The Official Novelization) Page 4