Oliver Bowden - Assassin's Creed - Renaissance

Pleased with himself, he emerged from a group of girls, himself the very model of one of the young male house-servants. Paola smiled and clapped her hands, and the others joined in the applause.

But the work didn't end there.

'Now that you have learned to blend into a crowd,' Paola told him on the morning of the following day, 'I am going to show you how to use your new-found skill - in order to steal.'

Ezio baulked at this but Paola explained, 'It is an essential survival skill which you may need on your journey. A man is nothing without money, and you may not always be in a position to earn it honestly. I know you would never take anything from anyone who could not afford to lose it, or from a friend. Think of it as a blade in a penknife, which you seldom use, though it's good to know it's there.'

Learning how to pick pockets was a lot harder. He would sidle up to a girl successfully enough, but as soon as his hand closed on the purse at her girdle, she would scream 'Al ladro!' and flee from him. When he first managed to draw some coins out successfully, he stayed where he was for a moment, triumphant, then felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. 'Ti arresto!' said the manservant who was playing the role of a city watchman, grinning; but Paola did not smile. 'Once you've stolen from someone, Ezio,' she said, 'you mustn't linger.'

He was learning faster now, though, and was beginning to appreciate the need to acquire the skills he was being taught as necessary for the successful accomplishment of his mission. Once he had successfully fleeced ten girls, the last five without even Paola noticing, she announced that the tutorial was at an end.

'Back to work, girls,' she said. 'Playtime's over.'

'Do we have to?' the girls murmured reluctantly as they took their leave of Ezio. 'He's so cute, so innocent.' But Paola was adamant.

She walked with him alone in the garden. As always, he kept one hand on his pouch. 'Now that you've learned how to approach the enemy,' she said, 'we need to find you a suitable weapon - something far more subtle than a sword.'

'Well, but what would you have me use?'

'Why, you already have the answer!' And she produced the broken blade and bracer which Ezio had taken from his father's strongbox, and which even now he believed to be safely stowed in his pouch. Shocked, he opened it and rummaged. They were indeed gone.

'Paola! How the devil - ?'

Paola laughed. 'Did I get them? By using the same skills I've just taught you. But there's another little lesson for you. Now you know how to pick a pocket successfully, you must also learn to be on guard against people with the same skill!'

Ezio looked gloomily at the broken blade, which she'd returned to him with the bracer. 'There's some kind of mechanism that goes with them. None of this is exactly in working condition,' he said.

'Ah,' she said. 'True. But I think you already know Messer Leonardo?'

'Da Vinci? Yes, I met him just before -' He broke off, forcing himself not to dwell on the painful memory. 'But how can a painter be of any help to me with this?'

'He's a lot more than just a painter. Take him the pieces. You'll see.'

Ezio, seeing the sense of what she was telling him, nodded his agreement, then said, 'Before I go, may I ask you one last question?'

'Of course.'

'Why have you given your aid so readily to me - a stranger?'

Paola gave him a sad smile. By way of an answer, she drew up one of the sleeves of her robe, revealing a pale, delicate forearm - whose beauty was marred by the ugly, long dark scars which criss-crossed it. Ezio looked and knew. At some time in her life this lady had been tortured.

'I, too, have known betrayal,' Paola said.

And Ezio recognized without hesitation that he had met a kindred spirit.

It was not far from Paola's luxurious House of Pleasure to the busy back streets where Leonardo's workshop was, but Ezio did have to cross the spacious and busy Piazza del Duomo, and here he found his newly acquired skills of merging into the crowd especially useful. It was a good ten days since the executions, and it was likely that Alberti would imagine that Ezio would have left Florence long since, but Ezio was taking no chances, and nor, by the look of the number of guards posted in and around the square, was Alberti. There would be plain-clothes agents in place as well. Ezio kept his head well down, especially when passing between the cathedral and the Baptistry, where the square was busiest. He passed by Giotto's campanile, which had dominated the city for almost one hundred and fifty years, and the great red mass of Brunelleschi's cathedral dome, completed only fifteen years earlier, without seeing them, though he was aware of groups of French and Spanish tourists gazing up in unfeigned amazement and admiration, and a little burst of pride in his city tugged at his heart. But was it his city, really, any more?

Suppressing any gloomy thoughts, he quickly made his way from the south side of the piazza to Leonardo's workshop. The Master was at home, he was told, in the yard at the back. The studio was, if anything, in a greater state of chaos than ever, though there did seem to be some rough method in the madness. The artefacts Ezio had noticed on his earlier visit had been added to, and from the ceiling hung a strange contraption in wood, though it looked like a scaled-up skeleton of a bat. On one of the easels a large parchment pinned to a board carried a massive and impossibly intricate knot-design, and in a corner of it some indecipherable scribbling in Leonardo's hand. Agniolo had been joined by another assistant, Innocento, and the two were trying to impose some order on the studio, cataloguing the stuff in order to keep track of it.

'He's in the back yard,' Agniolo told Ezio. 'Just go through. He won't mind.'

Ezio found Leonardo engaged in a curious activity. Everywhere in Florence you could buy caged songbirds. People hung them in their windows for pleasure, and when they died, simply replaced them. Leonardo was surrounded by a dozen such cages and, as Ezio watched, he selected one, opened the little wicker door, held the cage up, and watched as the linnet (in this case) found the entrance, pushed its way through, and flew free. Leonardo watched its departure keenly, and was turning to pick up another cage when he noticed Ezio standing there.

He smiled winningly and warmly at the sight of him, and embraced him. Then his face grew grave. 'Ezio! My friend. I hardly expected to see you here, after what you've been through. But welcome, welcome. Just bear with me one minute. This won't take long.'

Ezio watched as he released one after another of the various thrushes, bullfinches, larks and far more expensive nightingales into the air, watching each one very carefully.

'What are you doing?' asked Ezio, wonderingly.

'All life is precious,' Leonardo replied simply. 'I cannot bear to see my fellow creatures imprisoned like this, just because they have fine voices.'

'Is that the only reason you release them?' Ezio suspected an ulterior motive.

Leonardo grinned, but gave no direct answer. 'I won't eat meat any more either. Why should some poor animal die just because it tastes good to us?'

'There'd be no work for farmers else.'

'They could all grow corn.'

'Imagine how boring that'd be. Anyway, there'd be a glut.'

'Ah, I was forgetting that you're a finanziatore. And I am forgetting my manners. What brings you here?'

'I need a favour, Leonardo.'

'How can I be of service?'

'There's something I... inherited from my father that I'd like you to repair, if you can.'

Leonardo's eyes lit up. 'Of course. Come this way. We'll use my inner chamber - those boys are cluttering everything up in the studio as usual. I sometimes wonder why I bother to employ them at all!'