Assassin's Creed Odyssey (The Official Novelization)

by Gordon Doherty

  He saw the shapes of masks under the pair’s cloaks, and of swords too. Even take a hired thug, Thucydides had beseeched him. But no, he had known better.

  “How will it end for me?” he said, annoyed by the tremor of fear in his voice.

  “Chrysis will decide,” said the turnip-headed one.

  The long-haired one added: “There is a hornet hive up on the hill where she waits. Have you seen a man die from the stings of an angered swarm?” He laughed.

  Hippokrates clenched both hands into fists, fighting off his rampaging fear. There would be a short time of pain, then the release of death. That was all. Or . . . he glanced down at his basket. One vial of hemlock in there, enough to end things on his own terms. His heart crashed as he lifted it, breaking the clay seal, moving it toward his lips . . .

  And then a thick splash of dark red matter blinded him.

  With a yelp, he staggered backward, the vial and his basket falling. He pawed the filth from his eyes, realizing it was all over his face and clothes too. He stared at the long-haired one’s swaying body: the neck was a wet, red stump and the head was gone. The turnip-headed one was crouched like a cat, head switching this way and that until he saw the shape in the trees, heard the burr of the sling, and launched himself to one side to avoid the next bullet-stone.

  With a growl, Turnip-head threw up one arm—strapped with a small bronze shield. “You’ll die for that, brigand,” he yelled into the woods. Another bullet spat forth but Turnip-head was swift, angling his arm to catch the missile on the shield. “You’ll run out of bullet-stones before long, and I’m going nowhere!”

  That was when she emerged. Like a tigress slinking from her den, draped with worn leathers, a bow across her back, the sling in one hand, hanging slack. She dropped it, then took out a strange half lance and fell into a poise that matched Turnip-head’s.

  * * *

  • • •

  Kassandra watched him circle and could tell that he had been a warrior before he had been a Cultist, as lithe as he was ugly. He mock jabbed a few times, chuckling at her reactions. “You?” he purred. “Well, I came for the healer, but I might just have secured an even greater prize today.”

  “The same prize Hermippos crowed about before his boat became two smaller boats?” she shot back. “Before he drowned, screaming?”

  “Hermippos was an oaf. A lumbering elephant. I am a scorpion,” he hissed, dropping low and spearing out with lightning speed. Kassandra, having seen his intentions at the last moment, planted a foot on a boulder and sprung over his attack. Sailing over his misshapen head, she speared down, the Leonidas lance splitting his crown and cleaving deep into his brain. A thick soup of black blood and pinkish matter spewed from the cloven skull, and Turnip-head slumped onto the dell floor with a final sigh.

  She landed with a side roll, leaping up to face the corpse, only trusting that he was dead when she saw the ruined head for herself. A snap of ferns behind her brought her swinging around to face the healer. He stumbled and made to run.

  “Stop! Sokrates sent me,” she called after him.

  He slowed and turned back. “Sokrates? My friend sent you?” he started, only to grow wide-eyed, looking up and past her shoulder.

  Kassandra’s head swung too: on the hillside above the dell, Ikaros swooped and darted. The woman with the white streak up there swiped at him as he attacked her, and then she fled.

  “Chrysis?”

  “You know her?” Hippokrates asked warily.

  Kassandra’s top lip twitched as she remembered the Cave of Gaia and the praying masked one. “I know she must die. Where did she flee to?”

  Hippokrates held up both hands as if to calm a runaway horse. “I will tell you, but first we should talk. Come.”

  They returned to the bay and walked for a time among the injured and sick, Kassandra bathing and bandaging soldiers’ torn legs and shoulders while Hippokrates dealt with the less obvious ailments. She tended to a girl of Phoibe’s age who had an infected wound on her leg from an animal bite. She tied off the bandage then squeezed the girl’s arm and pinched her cheek. The girl giggled. Kassandra smiled briefly, but then thought of Phoibe on her own in Athens, felt a spike of concern and a spark of flame in her heart. Wiping away the smile and caging those emotions—weaknesses that could be the death of her on this quest—she turned to the next patient: a gaunt, groaning man, riddled with sores and drained of strength. There was no wound to clean, no snapped bone to splint. She held his hand for a time, listening to his weak words as he told her about his life as a fletcher. After a time he fell into a light sleep.

  “There is something strange arising in Hellas,” Hippokrates said quietly as he stroked the man’s forehead.

  “The Cult,” Kassandra agreed.

  Hippokrates laughed dryly. “Something else. This sickness. I have not seen its like before. It seems to have arisen in cramped places—settlements with too many bodies inside. And from there it has been carried to the ports, even across the open countryside.”

  “If there is a cure, you will find it,” she said firmly.

  “For I am the great Hippokrates.” He sighed.

  They took a break in the late-afternoon light, sitting on a knoll overlooking the stricken—strewn on the beach like washed-up fish. The sea wind stroked their skin as Hippokrates tore a loaf of bread in half, offering her one part along with a cut of fatty mutton and a boiled egg. She ate quickly, realizing how she had neglected such basic needs during the flight from Athens—eating just scraps here and there. She tossed some mutton to Ikaros. They ate an apple each then washed the meal down with a skinful of cool brook water. Hippokrates flicked a finger toward the small shape anchored up the coast.

  “Ah, I see your boat now. And my friend, Herodotos, is aboard?”

  “Much to his dismay.” She nodded. “My captain, Barnabas, is somewhat excitable around him. He begged me to come ashore but I couldn’t risk bringing him. I wasn’t sure what I might find here.”

  “You didn’t come here to kill Chrysis, did you?” he said, his eyes searching hers.

  “No, but I will kill her,” she said. “I came to ask you something. I’m looking for someone.”

  Hippokrates’s lips lifted at one end. “I remember your mother,” he said.

  A thrill raced across Kassandra’s skin. “How . . . how did you know?”

  He held up his apple core. “The apple does not fall far from the tree. I saw her in you the moment you emerged from those trees.”

  “So she did pass through here?”

  Hippokrates’s gaze fell to his feet. “I was so young then—I didn’t know how to help. I turned her away. But her look of determination remained—burned into my mind. It has never left me and it never will. Myrrine was fire in the shape of a woman!”

  “Do you know where she went?”

  Another sigh. “I do not. But there is a man who might.” He flicked a finger over his shoulder, inland. “The Sanctuary of Asklepios—where I used to practice—is not what it used to be. Their standards and mine have . . . diverged, shall we say. They seem to think the sick can be cured simply by sitting in their temples and libraries; good for the soul, perhaps, but not so useful when your arm is hanging off.” He shook his head as if to ward off a building diatribe. “Go there. Speak to Dolops the priest—he lives by the library. Tell him I sent you. He and his forefathers have kept a record of every soul who has passed through these lands. Myrrine was here, and so her name will be among them—her name, her ailments, where she went next . . .”

  As he described where she would find him, Kassandra felt the flickering flame within, the mere thought of Mother bringing it to life. She caged it, clasping a hand to Hippokrates’s shoulder and standing. “Thank you.”

  “Go in good health, Kassandra,” he called after her as she headed inland. “And be wary. The light is fading and—”


  “And the countryside of Argolis is not a safe place to wander,” she finished for him.

  “Quite. But there’s something else I didn’t tell you. This Dolops . . . he is Chrysis’s son.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Night fell as she forged through the woods to the song of chattering crickets, hooting owls and a lone wolf howling somewhere beyond. She spotted the spoor of a lion too, and heard the deep, throaty call of the beast, somewhere nearby in the trees. Taking care to stay downwind of the calls, she picked her way on until she saw an end to the woods, ahead.

  She parted a wall of ferns to peer across the grounds of the great, weathered sanctuary: even clothed in night’s shroud, the landscape was wondrous. Three low mountains stood like sentinels around the area, one bearing the majestic Temple of Apollo, another the birthplace of the legendary Asklepios himself. In the clearing between the mountains, houses of marble were dotted, linked by broad avenues and fine, peaceful gardens. There was a long, majestic portico, within which hunched old priests shuffled; a gymnasium, a small temple, a library, and the abaton hall itself—where the sick lay—uplit by gently crackling torches; a theater cut into the hillside and a smattering of simple priestly residences. A low orphic chant came and went in the night air, sailing from within one temple.

  She quietly stepped out into the clearing and made for the priest’s home near the library building. Dolops nearly fell from his chair when she entered. She had half expected him to yell, but he did not make a sound. Instead, he stared at her, his face gray and drawn, his wispy hair unkempt. Glancing around his room, she noticed strange writings on the walls, brushed on crudely, the same words over and over: Why, Mother, why? Let them live! But no sign of Chrysis?

  Still feeling a creeping sense of unease, she sat opposite him and explained why she had come, who had sent her. His alarm faded a little, especially when he heard Hippokrates’s name.

  “I’m looking for any clue at all about a woman named Myrrine, please,” she repeated.

  His throat bulged as if he were swallowing a plum stone. But after a time he rose, took up a torch and beckoned her, ever silent, into the night. They came to the open ward near the portico. Here, stone tablets were piled high or serried in ranks like hoplites. She frowned, horror-stricken, when he gestured to one. What was this, a tombstone? But he handed her his torch and gestured for her to crouch. She fell to her haunches and passed the torch across the face of the stone. Not a tomb slab, but a record of a patient—just as Hippokrates had claimed. She scanned the inscribed words.

  Diodoris came here in the spring with only one eye. In the night, as he slept in the abaton, the Gods came to him, applied ointment to his empty socket and thus he awoke in the morning with two hale eyes!

  She arched one eyebrow, just managing to halt a laugh of disbelief. The next stone read:

  Alas! Thyson of Hermione was blind in both eyes . . . until the temple hound licked his organs and he rejoiced, blessed with sight again.

  “Organs?” Kassandra mused over which organs these might be.

  On and on the colorful stones went: men who swallowed leeches whole so the creatures would eat away their inner diseases; the man who was bitten by a wolf and cured by the fangs of a viper; Asklepios’s inventive treatment for dropsy—which involved cutting off the patient’s head, draining it of the built-up fluids then setting it back in place.

  She felt her eyes grow dry and tired as she read the ever-more-ludicrous treatment records. Eventually, she noticed the night veil lighten in the east. Had she been reading for so long? She made to rise from her haunches, when she caught a flash of a word on a nearby tablet that changed everything.

  Sparta.

  She fell to her knees, eyes scouring this stone. Most of the surface had been hurriedly scratched out.

  . . . of Sparta . . . came here with child. Sought . . . pity from the gods.

  She rose. “Who defaced this stone?”

  Dolops’s face paled in fear again, as it had done when she had first stepped into his home.

  Tired and sore, her patience snapped. “By all the Gods, will you just tell me? I have traveled across Hellas and this half-ruined stone is all I have. Please, tell me!”

  His lips parted. The breath halted in her lungs . . . and she saw why he did not speak. The gnarled, ragged stump of gray and black was all that remained of his tongue. It had been recent too, she realized, going by the rawness of the cauterization wounds. “I’m sorry, I . . . I didn’t realize. Look, I need something, something more than this half message. Help me, please.”

  He stared at her, eyes wet with tears, then gazed past her shoulder.

  Kassandra’s heart thumped as she turned. Nothing. Just the southern border of the Asklepion vale. Then, out there, far beyond . . . she saw it. A pinprick of light in the wooded darkness there.

  “The answer lies there?” she asked.

  He nodded once, sadly.

  She turned away from Dolops and fell into a speedy run. Ikaros swooped down from the portico roof, coming with her. She plunged into the trees, surged through the undergrowth and barely blinked as she went, lest she lose sight of that strange beacon. At last she saw what it was: a small, round, forgotten shrine—dedicated to the healer, Apollo Maleatas. It was topped with a cone of red tiles and ringed by columns clad in lichen and moss, some listing and cracked. From within, she heard the gentle crying of a baby. Confused, she crept over to the temple entrance and felt the heat of the orange bubble of candlelight on her skin as she stepped through the doorway. Inside, a woman was crouched, back turned, the crying baby in her arms, before an old drape and an ancient stone altar. Flower petals were scattered across the floor. For a moment, Kassandra’s heart flame rose and touched every part of her. It couldn’t be, could it? “M . . . Mother?” she croaked.

  The woman rose and turned to her. “Not quite,” Chrysis said through a cage of teeth and a shark’s smile. She held a dagger over the baby’s chest.

  Kassandra’s heart froze.

  “Though I could be your mother, if you so wished? My real son, Dolops, is an idiot. I presume it was he who betrayed me?”

  Kassandra said nothing.

  “Your real mother came here—I realize you’ve worked that out now,” Chrysis continued.

  “With a child,” Kassandra panted, seeing Chrysis, the dagger and the baby in an even bleaker light now. “What did you do to them? What did you do!”

  “The baby lived, and this you know also,” Chrysis purred, taking a step toward her. “Deimos is my boy now—despite some of my group complaining about his animal behaviors.”

  “And my mother?”

  Chrysis’s smile deepened. “I still remember the night she brought me my child. The sad, pathetic thing, crying in the rain. Ah, had I only known then that Myrrine had two children . . . but, here you are. My family is complete.”

  Kassandra stared at her, head dipped like a bull ready to charge. “Where. Is. My. Mother?”

  “I let her go. Bereft, she was, that I could not save little Alexios.”

  “But you said . . . but . . . you lied to her? You told her Alexios had perished?”

  “She entrusted him to my care, you see. Alexios was a remarkable child. The Spartans tried to kill him, but I saved him, raised him. Gave him all the best teachers in art and war. He is mine, as are all the children Hera brings to me.”

  Kassandra’s veins flooded with ice. “What are you?”

  Chrysis set the baby down on the altar by the candles and took another step toward her. “You know what I am. You know what my group are. Now, for the puzzle to be complete, we just need you to join us as Deimos has. So, Kassandra . . .” She leaned in to whisper in her ear, the breath hot and wet, “Will you let me be your mother?”

  Kassandra’s entire body convulsed in horror. She thrust Chrysis back. Chrysis flailed
, then brought her dagger around to point at Kassandra. But when Kassandra drew her spear, Chrysis’s eyes flared and she backed away. With a roar, she swept an arm across the altar, knocking the candles and the now-screaming baby to the ground. The hanging drape went up with a whoosh as did the petals and dry bracken on the shrine floor. Chrysis backed out of the rear exit, laughing. “You cannot catch me, Kassandra, else the babe will die in the flames. You wouldn’t want another baby to be lost because of your poor choices, would you?”

  Kassandra stood there, torn in two by the dilemma. But a trice was all it took for her to know what was right. The monster, Chrysis, could wait. She plunged into the flames, scooping up the baby, throwing the folds of her exomis around the mite then staggering from the rear exit herself. Coughing, retching and spitting, she fell to her knees, smoke-blackened, eyes stinging. Chrysis would be long gone, she realized. So when she looked up and saw the Cultist standing just a pace ahead, back turned, she froze.

  And then Chrysis fell onto her back, her face cleaved with a woodsman’s ax.

  Dolops walked silently over to the shuddering corpse of his mother and plucked the ax free. He moved his lips silently, speaking to her one last time: I’m sorry, Mother . . . but now you are gone, the young ones can live.

  With that, he took the babe from Kassandra in his free arm and wandered quietly back through the woods toward the Sanctuary of Asklepios.

  NINE

  The masked man stormed across the center of the chamber, his robes flailing in the wind of his stride. He reached the center of the circle and hurled the garment down. All stared at it—torn crudely and stained dark brown with dried blood.