Oliver Bowden: Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Leonardo brought him back from his musings.

“I don’t know if he knows where Cesare is. But he’s called Gaspar Torella, and he was Cesare’s personal physician. He’s got some ideas I think are interesting. Shall we go and see him?”

“Any lead is a good one.”

Dottor Torella received them in a spacious surgery on the Aventine, whose ceiling was hung with herbs but also with strange creatures—dried bats, the little corpses of desiccated toads, and a small crocodile. He was wizened, and a little bent in the shoulders, but he was younger than he looked, his movements were quick, almost lizardlike, and his eyes behind his spectacles were bright. He was also another Spanish expatriate, but he was reputed to be brilliant and Pope Julius had spared him—he was, after all, a scientist with no interest in politics.

What he was interested in, and talked about at length, was the New Disease.

“You know, both my former master and his father, Rodrigo, had it. It’s very ugly indeed in its final stages, and I believe it affects the mind and may have left both Cesare and the former Pope affected in the brain. Neither had any sense of proportion, and it may still be strong in Cesare—wherever they’ve put him.”

“Do you have any idea?”

“My guess is somewhere as far away as possible, and in a place he could never escape from.”

Ezio sighed. So much was surely obvious.

“I have called the disease the morbus gallicus —the French disease,” Dr. Torella plunged on enthusiastically. “Even the present Pope has it in the first stage and I am treating him. It’s an epidemic, of course. We think it came from Columbus’s sailors and probably Vespucci’s, too, when they came back from the New World—they brought it with them.”

“Why call it the French disease, then?” asked Leonardo.

“Well, I certainly don’t want to insult the Italians, and the Portuguese and the Spanish are our friends. But it broke out first among French soldiers in Naples. It starts with lesions on the genitals and it can deform the hands, the back, and the face, indeed the whole head. I’m treating it with mercury, to be drunk or rubbed on the skin, but I don’t think I’ve found a cure.”

“That is certainly interesting,” said Ezio. “But will it kill Cesare?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then I must still find him.”

“Fascinating,” said Leonardo, excited by yet a new discovery.

“There is something else I’ve been working on,” said Torella, “which I think is even more interesting.”

“What is it?” asked his fellow scientist.

“It’s this: that people’s memories can be passed down—preserved—from generation to generation in the bloodline . Rather like some diseases. I’d like to think I’d find a cure for my morbus gallicus ; but I feel it may be with us for centuries.”

“What makes you say that?” said Ezio, strangely disturbed by the man’s remark about memories being passed on through many years.

“Because I believe it’s transmitted, in the first instance, through sex—and we’d all die out if we had to do without that.”

Ezio grew impatient. “Thank you for your time,” he said.

“Don’t mention it,” replied Torella. “And by the way, if you really want to find my former master, I think you could do worse than looking in Spain.”

“In Spain? Where in Spain?”

The doctor spread his hands. “I’m a Spaniard; so is Cesare. Why not send him home? It’s just a hunch. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific.”

Ezio thought, It’ll be like looking for a needle in a haystack…But it may be a start.

Ezio no longer kept the location of his lodgings secret. But only a few knew where they were. One of them was Machiavelli.

Ezio was awakened by him at four in the morning. A deliberate, urgent knocking at the door.

“Niccolò! What are you doing here?” Ezio was instantly alert, like a cat.

“I have been a fool.”

“What’s happened? You were working in Florence! You can’t be back so soon.” But Ezio already knew something grave had happened.

“I have been a fool,” said Machiavelli.

“What’s going on?”

“In my arrogance, I kept Micheletto alive.” Machiavelli sighed. “In a secure cell, to question him.”

“You’d better tell me what’s going on.”

“He has escaped! On the eve of his execution!”

“From that place? How?”

“Over the roof. Borgia diehards climbed to it in the night and killed the guards. They lowered a rope. The priest who confessed him was a Borgia sympathizer—he is being burned at the stake today—and smuggled a file into his cell. He sawed through just one bar on the window. He’s a big man, but it was enough for him to squeeze out and climb up. You know how strong he is. By the time the alarm was raised, he was nowhere to be found in the city.”

“Then we must seek him out, and”—Ezio paused, suddenly seeing an advantage even in this adversity—“having found him, see where he runs. He may yet lead us to Cesare. He is insanely loyal, and without Cesare’s support his own power is worthless.”

“I have light cavalry scouring the countryside even now, trying to hunt him down.”

“But there are certainly small pockets of Borgia diehards—like those who rescued him—willing to shelter him.”

“I think he’s in Rome. That’s why I’ve come here.”

“Why Rome?”

“We have been too complacent. There are Borgia supporters here, too. He will use them to make for Ostia, and try to get a ship there.”

“Bartolomeo is in Ostia. He’s fed up, but no one will escape him and his condottieri there. I’ll send a rider to alert him.”

“But where will Micheletto go?”

“Where else but Valencia—his hometown.”

“Ezio—we must be sure. We must use the Apple, now, this minute, to see if we can locate him.”

Ezio turned and, in the bedroom of his lodgings, out of sight of Machiavelli, drew the Apple from its secret hiding place and brought the box that contained it back to his principal chamber.

Carefully he drew it out of its container with gloved hands and placed it on the table there.

He concentrated. The Apple began, very slowly at first, to glow, and then its light brightened until the room was filled with a cold illumination. Next, images, dim at first and indistinct, flickered onto the wall and resolved themselves into something the Apple had shown Ezio before—the strange, remote castle in a brown, barren landscape, very old, with a massive outer barbican, four main towers, and an impregnable-looking square keep at its center.

“Where is that rocca ? What is the Apple telling us?”

“It could be anywhere,” said Machiavelli. “From the landscape, Syria perhaps?”

“Or,” said Ezio as, with a sudden rush of excitement, he remembered Dr. Torella’s words, “Spain.”

“Micheletto can’t be in Spain.”

“I am certain he plans to go there!”

“Even so, we don’t know where this place is. There are many, many castles in Spain, and many similar to this one. Consult the Apple again.”

But when Ezio once more consulted the Apple, the image remained unchanged: a solidly built castle on a hill, a good three hundred years old, surrounded by a little town. The image was monochrome. All the houses, the fortress, and the countryside were an almost uniform brown. There was only one spot of color, a bright flag on a pole on the very top of the keep.

Ezio squinted at it.

A white flag with a red, ragged cross in the form of an X .

His excitement mounted. “The military standard of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella—of Spain!”