Assassin’s Creed®

by Oliver Bowden

  Six we tried in succession, each one more encouraging than the last. But none worked.

  And then – the world ended.

  The last statement was made in so simple and matter of fact a tone that Ezio was taken aback by it. He saw Menrva, heavy-hearted, and Uni, angry – look on as Tinia put into action a complex mechanism which triggered the great doors of the place to close, and seal themselves shut. And then …

  Then, a great wave of indescribable power hit the upper vault of heaven, and lit up the sky like ten thousand northern lights. Ezio seemed to be standing amidst hundreds of thousands of people, in an elegant city, all looking up at the supernatural display above them. But the light breeze which played on them changed from zephyr to storm and then to hurricane within less than a minute. The people looked at one another in disbelief then panic, and scurried away to safety.

  The sky, still ablaze with waves of green fire, now began to crackle and spark with lightning. Thunder rolled and crashed, though there was not a cloud to be seen, and bolts smashed from the heavens onto trees, buildings and people alike. Debris flew through the air, destroying everything in its path.

  Next, a colossal tremor caused the ground to shudder. Those left in the open lost their footing and were struck down by rocks and stones, carried like balls of paper by the wind, before they could rise. The earth shook again, more violently this time, and the screams and cries of the afflicted were drowned by the crack of lightning and the deafening scream of the gale. Survivors in the open strove to find shelter, some fighting to keep their balance by clinging to the sides of whatever buildings still stood, as they clawed their way along.

  But, amidst the general devastation, great temples stood firm, untouched by the catastrophe around them, bearing tribute to the technical ingenuity of those who had built them. But another great tremor rippled the ground, and then another. A broad highway split in two along its length, and people fled from the growing abyss which cleaved it. The sky by now was on fire, arcs of lightning rushing from one horizon to the other, and the upper reaches of the firmament seemed about to implode.

  Then it appeared to Ezio that he saw the earth from afar again, engulfed in a gargantuan solar flare, trapped in a web of gigantic fireballs, and then, unthinkably, the world shifted from its axis, rolling over … The elegant city, the refined, sophisticated collection of tall buildings and manicured parks, was riven with gaping wounds as the earth split and cracked under it, ripping down previously untouched edifices and smashing them to pieces. The few people in the remains of the streets screamed, one last despairing cry of agony as the shift in the earth’s poles left the planet’s surface vulnerable to the deadly radiation of solar flares. The last structures were swept away like houses of cards in the wind.

  And then – just as suddenly as it had started – all became quiet. The northern lights ceased just as a candle’s flame dies when a man blows it out and, almost immediately, the wind calmed. But the devastation was complete. Almost nothing had been spared. Fires and smoke, darkness and decay, held illimitable dominion over all.

  Through the miasma, Tinia’s voice came to Ezio. Or to someone like him. Nothing was certain any more.

  Listen. You must go there. To the place where we laboured … Laboured and lost. Take my words. Pass them from your head into your hands. It is how you will open the Way. But be warned. Much still remains in flux. And I do not know how things will end – either in my time, or yours.

  The dust storms were clearing, the molten lava was cooling. Time accelerated as tiny shoots broke through the ground and re-established themselves. The entrance to an underground vault opened, and people of the First Civilization emerged, and they, in turn, began to rebuild. But their numbers were few and did not increase. Over many centuries they diminished, until there were only a few hundred left, then a few dozen, then none …

  What they had rebuilt was claimed by the conquering forests. Their new buildings disappeared in their turn, devoured by time. A low-hilled, richly forested landscape enveloped those great expanses not covered by plains. And then, people – but different from the First Comers. Humans now. Those whom the First Comers had created as slaves would now, free, become their heirs. Some indeed had been taken as lovers by the First Comers and from them a small line of people with more than human powers had emerged. But the true inheritors were the humans. The first in this unknown land were men and women with deeply tanned skins and long straight black hair. Proud peoples who hunted strange, dark brown, wild cattle, riding bareback on tough ponies, using bows and arrows. People who lived in separate tribes and fought one another but with little bloodshed.

  Then more people came. Paler people, whose clothes were different and covered them more fully. People who came on ships from Europe, across the Mare Occidentalis. People who hunted down the others and drove them from their lands, establishing in turn their own farms, villages and, again at last, towns and cities to rival those of the lost civilization, which had disappeared into the earth many millennia before.

  Mark this and remember. It is never your choice to give up the fight for justice. Even when it seems that it can never be won, that all hope is lost, the fight, the fight ensures the survival of justice, the survival of the world. You live balanced on the edge of a cliff, you cannot help that. Your job is to ensure that the balance never tips too far to the wrong side. And there is one more thing you can do which will make certain that it never does: you can love.

  Ezio clung to the desk. Next to him, Altaïr still sat in his chair. Nothing had moved on the desktop, not a sheet of parchment had stirred, and the stump of candle burned with a steady light.

  He did not know how he had got from the recess to the desk, but now he retraced the few steps. The Apple still rested on its pedestal within the alcove, cold and dead. He could hardly make out its contours in the gloom. Its dust-covered box, he noticed, lay on the desktop.

  He gathered himself together, and crossed the great chamber again, making for the corridor which would lead back to the sunlight, and to Sofia.

  But at the entrance to the great library, he turned once more. Far away now, as it seemed, he looked for one last time at Altaïr, sitting for eternity in the ghost of his library.

  ‘Farewell, Mentor,’ he said.

  78

  Reaching the outer doorway, Ezio found the lever by the lintel and pulled it. Obediently, the green door slid down into the ground. And there was Sofia, reading a book, waiting for him.

  She smiled as he emerged, and stood, and came to him and took his hand.

  ‘You came back,’ she said, unable to disguise the sheer relief in her voice.

  ‘I promised I would.’

  ‘Have you found what you sought?’

  ‘I have found – enough.’

  She hesitated. ‘I thought …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought I’d never see you again.’

  ‘Sometimes our worst premonitions are the least reliable.’

  She looked at him. ‘I must be mad. I think I like you even when you’re being pompous.’ She paused. ‘What do we do now?’

  Ezio smiled. ‘We go home,’ he said.

  Part Three

  * * *

  O Light Eternal, in yourself abiding,

  Known to yourself, and by yourself, alone –

  Thus, you can love, and smile upon yourself:

  Your knowledge self-sufficient, and within.

  – Dante, Paradiso

  79

  Ezio was quiet for much of the journey back to Constantinople. Sofia, remembering Selim’s dire warning, questioned the wisdom of his returning there at all, but he merely said, ‘There is still work to be done.’

  She wondered about him – he seemed so withdrawn, almost ill. But when the golden domes and white minarets once again appeared on the northern seaboard, his spirits lifted, and she saw the old gleam back in his dark grey eyes.

  They returned to her shop. It was almost unrecognizable. Azize
had modernized it and all the books were ranged neatly on their shelves in impeccable order. Azize was almost apologetic when she handed Sofia back the keys, but Sofia had mostly noticed that the shop was full of customers.

  ‘Dogan wishes to see you, Mentor,’ Azize said, as she greeted Ezio. ‘And be reassured. Prince Suleiman knows of your return, and has provided you with a safe-conduct. But his father is adamant that you should not remain long.’

  Ezio and Sofia exchanged a look. They had been together a long time now, six months at least, ever since she had insisted on accompanying him on his journey to Masyaf – a request which he’d agreed to, to her surprise, with no objection at all. Indeed, he had seemed to welcome it.

  With Dogan, Ezio made sure that the Turkish Assassins had a firm base in the city with Suleiman’s tacit agreement and under his unofficial protection. The work had already started of purging the city and the empire of any last trace of renegade Ottomans and Byzantines, who were now leaderless, following the deaths of Ahmet and Manuel, and the Janissaries, under Selim’s iron hand, knew no more dissent within their ranks. There was no need of any, since their preferred prince had made himself their king.

  As for the Templars, their power bases in Italy and now in the east broken, they had disappeared. But Ezio knew that this volcano was dormant, not extinct. His troubled thoughts turned to the Far East – the Orient – and he wondered what the knowledge imparted to him by Tinia and the ghostly globe might mean for the undiscovered continents – if they existed – far away across the Western Sea.

  Dogan, though lacking Yusuf’s élan, made up for this by his organizational skills and his complete devotion to the Creed. He might make a Mentor one day, Ezio thought. But his own feelings seemed to have been cut adrift. He no longer knew what he believed, if he believed in anything at all, and this, with one other thing, was what had preoccupied him during the long voyage home.

  Home! What could he call home? Rome? Florence? His work? But he had no real home, and he knew in his heart that his experience in Altaïr’s hidden chamber at Masyaf had marked the end of a page in his life. He had done what he could, and he had achieved peace and stability – for the time being – in Italy and in the east. Could he not now afford to spend a little time on himself? His days were growing short, he knew, but there were still enough of them left to reap a harvest. If he dared take the risk.

  Ezio spent his fifty-third birthday, Midsummer’s Day, 1512, with Sofia. The days permitted him by Selim’s visa were growing short in number. His mood seemed sombre. They were both apprehensive, as if some great weight were hanging over them. In his honour she had prepared a completely Florentine banquet: salsicce di cinghiale and fettunta, then carciofini sott’olio, followed by spaghetti allo scoglio and bistecca alla fiorentina; and afterwards a good dry pecorino. The cake she made was a castagnaccio, and she threw in some brutti ma buoni for good measure. But the wine, she decided, should come from the Veneto.

  It was all far too rich, and she’d made far too much, and he did his best, but she could see that food, even food from home, which had cost her a fortune to get, was the last thing on his mind.

  ‘What will you do?’ she asked him.

  He sighed. ‘Go back to Rome. My work here is done.’ He paused. ‘And you?’

  ‘Stay here, I suppose. Go on as I have always done. Though Azize is a better bookseller than I ever was.’

  ‘Maybe you should try something new.’

  ‘I don’t know if I’d dare to, on my own. This is what I know. Though—’ she broke off.

  ‘Though what?’

  She looked at him. ‘These last few months – almost a year now – I have learned that there is a life outside books.’

  ‘All life is outside books.’

  ‘Spoken like a true scholar!’

  ‘Life enters books. It isn’t the other way round.’

  Sofia studied him. She wondered how much longer he’d hesitate. Whether he’d ever come to the point at all. Whether he’d dare. Whether he even wanted to – though she tried to keep that thought at bay – and whether she’d dare prompt him. That trip to Adrianopolis without him had been the first time she’d realized what was happening to her, and she was pretty sure it had happened to him as well. They were lovers – of course they were lovers. But what she really longed for hadn’t happened yet.

  They sat at her table for a long time in silence. A very charged silence.

  ‘Azize, unlike you, has not sprung back from her ordeal at Ahmet’s hands,’ said Ezio, finally, and slowly, pouring them both fresh glasses of Soave. ‘She has asked me to ask you if she may work here.’

  ‘And what is your interest in that?’

  ‘This place would make an excellent intelligence centre for the Seljuk Assassins.’ He corrected himself hastily. ‘As a secondary function, of course, and it would give Azize a quieter role in the Order. That is, if you …’

  ‘And what will become of me?’

  He swallowed hard. ‘I – I wondered if …’

  He went down on one knee.

  Her heart was going like mad.

  80

  They decided it would be best to marry in Venice. Sofia’s uncle was vicar-general of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in the San Polo district, and had offered to officiate. As soon as he realized that Ezio’s late father had been the eminent banker Giovanni Auditore, he had given the marriage his whole-hearted blessing. Ezio’s connection with Pietro Bembo didn’t do any harm either, and though Lucrezia Borgia’s former lover couldn’t attend, being away in Urbino, the guests did include Doge Leonardo Loredan and the up-and-coming young painter Tizian Vecelli, who, smitten by Sofia’s beauty, and jealous of Dürer’s picture of her, offered, for a friendly price, to do a double portrait of them as a wedding tribute.

  The Assassin Brotherhood had paid Sofia a generous price for her bookshop. Under it, in the cistern Ezio had discovered, the five keys of Masyaf were walled up and sealed. Azize, though sad to see them go, was also overjoyed at her new profession.

  They stayed several months in Venice, allowing Sofia to acquaint herself with her scarcely known homeland, and to make friends with her surviving relatives. But towards New Year, Ezio began to grow restless. There had been impatient letters from Claudia in Rome. Pope Julius II, long the Assassins’ protector, was approaching his sixty-ninth birthday, and ailing. The succession was still in doubt, and the Brotherhood needed Ezio there to take charge of things in the interim period that would follow Julius’ death.

  But Ezio, though worried, still put off making any arrangements for their departure.

  ‘I no longer wish to be part of these things,’ he told Sofia in answer to her enquiry. ‘I need to have time to think for myself, at last.’

  ‘And to think of yourself, perhaps.’

  ‘Perhaps that too.’

  ‘But still, you have a duty.’

  ‘I know.’

  There were other things on his mind. The leader of the North European branch of the Brotherhood, Desiderius Erasmus, had written to Claudia from Queens’ College, Cambridge, where the wandering scholar was for the present living and teaching. He wrote that there was a newly appointed Doctor in Bible at Wittenberg, a young man called Luther, whose religious thinking might need watching, as it seemed to be leading to something very revolutionary indeed – something which might yet again threaten the fragile stability of Europe.

  He told Sofia of his concern.

  ‘What is Erasmus doing?’

  ‘He watches. He waits.’

  ‘Will you recruit new men to the Order if there is a shift away from the Roman Church in the north?’

  Ezio spread his hands. ‘I will be advised by Desiderius.’ He shook his head. ‘Everywhere, always, there is fresh dissent and division.’

  ‘Isn’t that a feature of life?’

  He smiled. ‘Perhaps. And perhaps it is not my fight any more.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like you.’ She paused. ‘One day, you will tell
me what really happened in that vault under Masyaf.’

  ‘One day.’

  ‘Why not tell me now?’

  He looked at her. ‘I will tell you this. I have come to realize that the progress of mankind towards the goals of peace and unity will always be a journey – there will never be an arrival. It’s just like the journey through life of any man or woman. The end is always the interruption of that journey. There is no conclusion. There is always unfinished business.’ Ezio was holding a book in his hands as he spoke – Petrarch’s Canzoniere. ‘It’s like this,’ he continued, ‘death doesn’t wait for you to finish a book.’

  ‘Then read what you can, while you can.’

  With a new determination, Ezio made arrangements for the journey back to Rome.

  By that time, Sofia was pregnant.

  81

  ‘What took you so long?’ Claudia snapped, then pulled him to her and kissed him hard on both cheeks. ‘Fratello mio. You’ve put on weight. All that Venetian food. Not good for you.’

  They were in the Assassins’ Headquarters on Tiber Island. It was late in February. Ezio’s arrival back in Rome had coincided with the funeral of Pope Julius.

  ‘Some good news, I think,’ Claudia went on. ‘Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici is going to be elected.’

  ‘But he’s only a deacon.’

  ‘Since when has that stopped anyone from becoming Pope?’

  ‘Well, it would be good news, if he gets it.’

  ‘He has the backing of almost the entire College of Cardinals. He’s even chosen a name – Leo.’

  ‘Will he remember me?’

  ‘He could hardly forget that day back in the duomo in Florence when you saved his father’s life. And his own, by the way.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ezio, remembering. ‘The Pazzi. It seems like a long time ago.’

  ‘It is a long time ago. But little Giovanni is all grown up now – he’s thirty-eight, would you believe? And a tough customer.’