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

“The sister’s capture has only been delayed. Where is she headed now?”

The Argolid hinterland shimmered in the summer heat. All Argives with their wits about them were indoors, sheltering in the shade of their homes or under trees. Some, however, could not afford to pass up this chance to be here at the broad bay, not while he was here. A man, slight and bald with a single surviving lock of brown hair curled at the front of his pate, walked among the hundreds who sat or lay: simple countryfolk, heads propped on their robes or on rocks, weeping, moaning; soldiers of Sparta and of Athens, clutching grievous wounds, heedless of the proximity of their foes; mothers cradling silent babies, praying, wailing. He hitched the folds of his purple exomis, set down his wicker basket and crouched by one youth—an apprentice carpenter, he guessed, going by the cuts and callused whorls on his hands. The youngster gazed into the sky, pale and lost, his lips moving slowly, trembling. His face was dotted with red sores.

“My mother and my dog wait on me back on the island of Kea. They said you would fix me,” the youngster whispered. “Travel to Argolis and the bay near Epidavros, they said. The great Hippokrates is there. He can heal anyone—bring the dead to life again.”

Hippokrates’s face creased in a tortured smile. The lad had all of the symptoms.

“All the way here I dreamed of only one thing. Of returning to them, of holding Mother in my arms again, of kissing my dog on the head, letting him lick my face.”

Hippokrates’s vision blurred with tears. There was no way home for this lad, not at this stage of the sickness. All that awaited him was a slow, horrific slide into the Ferryman’s clutches. “Here, lad,” he said, stroking the boy’s hair and holding a small vial to his lips. “Here is the cure.”

The lad shook with the effort of raising his head, then drank it gladly. Hippokrates stayed there, stroking the boy’s head, whispering comforting words to him about the journey home, about his mother and his hound. Hours passed, and the henbane numbed the boy’s body, easing his suffering. But it was no cure. Eventually, the lad’s eyes—brimming with fondness—slid shut forever.

He stood, the invisible burden on his shoulders another man heavier. All around him, dozens reached out, moaning weakly for his attentions, many with the same symptoms as the boy. So few among them could be saved, he realized. But I have to try. Please, he raged inwardly, glancing up to the skies, let me find a cure. The Gods did not answer.

He turned toward a woman whose bones showed through her sagging skin, and made to move toward her, when a pair stepped across his path and halted there like gates. He knew instantly they were not patients—neither war-torn soldiers nor countryfolk riven with the strange sickness. In their eyes he saw not hope of salvation but cold malice, glinting like jewels. One, his shoulder-length hair held back from his brow by a bronze circlet, smiled—the expression massively at odds with his eyes.

“Hippokrates,” he chirped. “We were surprised when we didn’t find you at the sanctuary inland. Is that not the place where all healers should practice?”

“Healers should practice where there are sick to heal,” he replied calmly.

The pair shared a look. He knew there and then who they were, even before he saw the lone figure watching from a hillside inland. A woman, black-haired with a white streak near one temple, her expression wintry.

“Why don’t you come with us, Hippokrates,” said the second man—a fellow with a head like a misshapen turnip. The hard look that followed underlined that it was not a question.

They led him away from the bay and inland, toward the hill. The track took them through a low dell, ringed with poplars and tinged with the musty odors of ferns and fungi, frogs croaking as they went. Charged with hubris, he had dismissed Perikles’s warnings about coming back here alone. Sokrates had implored him too. Take an escort! But to bring even a knot of active Athenian hoplites into this land would have been to spread the war here to this land—Argolis, a treacherous, age-old enemy of everyone, perched on the shoulder of Spartan lands and spitting distance across the Saronic Gulf from Athens.

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.