Gordon Doherty - Assassin's Creed Odyssey - The Official Novelization

Alkibiades whimpered, face still contorted for more kissing, eyes still half-closed. When he realized the tryst was on hold until he answered, he shook his head as if to clear away the haze of desire. “Fled Sparta? No one flees Sparta. And alone?” He blew air through his lips. “But, let’s pretend she did. Come to Athens without a male chaperone and she’d be arrested. Thebes, Boeotia, all the rest it would be the same. If she was smart, she’d go to the one place where women can be free and independent.”

Kassandra stared at him, her hard eyes demanding the rest.

“Korinthia,” he said. “The Hetaerae of the temples are the heart of that city. Aye, they lie with men for money and gifts, but only because it is the will of the Gods. They are strong, free…” His eyes grew distant, his lips quirking with some debauched memory. “Imaginative.”

She clicked her fingers a few times in front of his eyes, breaking the spell.

He shook his head. “Anthousa is the one you should speak to. Korinthia is in her care as much as Athens is in Perikles’s…” He sighed, glancing over her shoulder at the door. “For now, anyway.”

Outside, she heard a muffled voice. Someone speaking in strained, panicked tones. Herodotos?

She stepped away from Alkibiades, deliberately brushing his groin scarf. “Thank you, Alkibiades. Perhaps when next we meet I can show you a thing or two.”

He looked her over once more with a sigh, realizing now that she would not be his conquest.

“If you see Sokrates out there, send him in, will you? I’ve had my eye on him for an age, and he keeps wriggling out of my grasp with his words—he’s like an oiled cat.”

She slipped from the orgy room and back into the andron. No Herodotos. She swung her eyes in every direction. That was when she saw him instead. He was no different from the others in his appearance: dressed well if simply in an exomis and leather sandals, mutedly chattering with Thucydides’s companions. He wore a squared beard, his thin, greasy, dark hair swept back without a parting. She would have thought nothing of him, had she not noticed the one misted eye… and the markings on each wrist: jagged, pink scars—only recently healed over. Her mind flickered with images of the last gathering she had attended—a far darker affair—and the masked cur who had sliced his own skin at the snake statue to give an offering of blood.

Do not let the fangs grow dry, go on, give offering…

Frozen with indecision for a time, she watched him. Did he know she was here? Was he here to attack Perikles? Phoibe, what about Phoibe? Her heartbeat grew rapid, like a runaway horse. She backed away into a corner of the room, pouring herself a full cup of wine from a krater. Let them gasp at how I drink it unwatered, she scoffed inwardly. I need this. She raised the cup to her lips, when a hand caught her elbow.

“Pretend to drink, but do not,” a voice said, soft but strong. “Hermippos laced that wine with poison. Drink it and you will be unconscious within a trice. Two things will happen after that. You might never awaken—and that would probably be for the best—or you will come to in a black cave somewhere, chained, at the mercy of Hermippos and his ilk.”

Her flesh crept, but she did as the voice said, “sipping” on the wine. Hermippos’s odd-eyed glances over toward her continued like a slow, steady heartbeat. When he saw her “drink,” the dimples above his beard deepened and a look of great satisfaction spread across his face.

Kassandra stepped behind a polished, red-veined marble column, into a colonnade of shadow. There, hidden from the eyes of the room, she turned to the voice. A woman in a purple stola and a golden pectoral. She was older than Kassandra, a beauty too. She wore dark tresses of hair piled atop her head, her face powdered and painted. Although her lips were marked in ochre with a kink of a smile, Kassandra saw how they were in fact set straight, humorless. Her eyes—like dark, inky wells—searched Kassandra’s, probing deep within.

“Aspasia?” she whispered.

Aspasia nodded gently. “Phoibe told me you might need my help. Well now you have it. Hermippos is here and so you can guarantee that so too are more of them. He’ll quickly realize that his poison hasn’t worked, and whatever gambit they have as a backup plan will befall you next. You need to leave this villa, leave Athens… now .” Her words were soft and gentle, but at the same time hard as a smith’s chisel striking stone.

“But I came all this way to speak with these people. I seek my mother’s whereabouts, yet still I have gathered only a few loose pieces of advice: to speak with a healer in Argolis and a temple prostitute in Korinthia. Perhaps tomorrow I will leave but tonight I must speak to—” Her words tapered off as she saw—down an unlit corridor—a pair of shadows moving into place, filling that passage like sepulcher doors.

“Die tonight and your quest is over,” Aspasia hissed, grabbing her by the biceps. “Go with what you have. Find out what you can, then return here at a safer time.”

She glanced down the corridor in the other direction. There, two more shadows moved into place.

“Come with me,” Aspasia whispered, guiding her speedily into a small antechamber and closing the door. She moved over to a panel in the wall and cranked the lever beside it. The panel slid away, revealing a web-draped stone stairway that vanished down into the acropolis’s bedrock. “This passage leads to the lower city. I have a man waiting there. He will guide you safely back to the Piraeus docks.”

“But Herodotos—”

“—is already with my man.”

“And Phoibe—”

“Will be safe here,” Aspasia barked, shoving her into the tunnel. “Now get to your boat and put to sea… Go! ”

The masked circle talked quietly. The lone lamp in the center cast their shadows on the chamber walls: titanic, crooked, inhuman. “Deimos has served his purpose. He is strong, yes, but he thrashes like a roped bull. Where is he now? None have seen him since he left the Cave of Gaia, when he smashed one of our number’s faces to a pulp.”

“He is far more valuable than the one he killed,” another snapped. “He will return to our heel when we call him.”

Footsteps echoed through the cave. Each of them looked up. Their masks were already locked in unsettling grins, but behind them, each of the Cultists grinned for real as the old messenger came in and slid to one knee, panting.

“It is done?” a Cultist whispered. “News from Athens. The sister has joined us… or she is dead?”

The messenger looked up, his wide, age-lined eyes giving away the answer. “She escaped,” the old fellow croaked. “She fled Athens on her ship. Hermippos and the other four of your number who were there to intercept her gave chase aboard two Athenian galleys but…” He stopped to gulp. “The sister’s galley was like a shark, smashing one boat in half and setting the second ablaze.”

The Cultist who had spoken stared at the old messenger for a time. All heads turned to the gaps in their circle. “So she has sent five of our members to Hades?” he said with an edge of respect.

The messenger nodded. “All aboard those galleys perished.”

The Cultist stepped forward, nodding and tapping a finger to the lips of his mask in thought. “You have done well, old man,” he said, cupping the messenger’s jaw in one hand. “You did as you were asked without fault. You whispered not a word of who you were working for, I trust?”

The old man nodded pridefully.

“Excellent work.”

He gently placed his other hand on the back of the old man’s head, then twisted it all the way to the right… then even farther. The messenger’s head locked up and he yelped. “What… what are you doing?” But the Cultist’s hands grew white, shaking with effort. The old messenger slapped and clawed at the masked man’s hands, but the Cultist strained and strained until, with a crack , the messenger’s head snapped around to face backward. The Cultist stepped back. The messenger’s head loosely rolled back to the front and then lolled—the neck hanging at a sickening angle and a shard of sheared vertebrae poking at the underside of the skin. The body flopped forward as the Cultist turned back to his circle.