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

The citizens of Korinthia woke to a dark pall of smoke. They emerged from their homes for the first time in months, nervous and shy, then confused when they heard the rumors: the dockside warehouse had burned to the ground the night before. More, all had been summoned to the theater that day. The venue had been closed ever since the Monger had taken the reins here. Slowly, they began to trust the heralds who repeated the summons. By noon, the theater was packed, with many more on the nearby rooftops and higher streets, peering in at the stage.

Kassandra stood among the masses, exhausted, her flank and thigh wrapped in white-linen bandages, the seared flesh underneath dressed with a cooling ointment. Brasidas had left as soon as the warehouse had been set alight—returning to Sparta to carry news of the whole affair to the two kings. He had implored her one thing: Throw the Monger’s bones into the water. Let that be the end to it.

She smiled drily. I like you, Brasidas, but too much valor is a weakness. You don’t know the full horror of the Monger and his Cult.

Just then an orator paraded across the stage, telling all that the city was once again free. Voices rose in confusion and disbelief, many looking around to be sure that this was not some elaborate ruse by the brute to weed out dissenters.

Kassandra waited, waited, waited. And then…

Swoosh, judder!

A collective and horrified intake of many thousands of breaths brought silence. All stared at the grotesque meld of man and metal that had fallen from the lintel above the stage. It swayed for a time then slowed and hung at a standstill.

Now the masses surged into wails of joy, weeping, prayer, explosions of gratitude to their unknown liberator. Kassandra felt not a crumb of pride. She noticed a shape moving through the crowd toward her.

“Your mother sailed from here on the Siren Song ,” said Anthousa, “a boat painted like living flame. She traveled to the Cyclades.”

The masked man threw down an iron poker—cold and bent. “The Monger failed.”

“All others in the dark chamber stared at the iron rod.

“He was the strongest of our circle,” one dared to speak.

“The strongest of arm, perhaps, but not of mind,” said another.

“Are we forgetting that we have another, fiercer than the Monger, with blade-sharp wits too?”

“Deimos is not truly one of us though, is he? And he is too unpredictable. He roams like a rabid hound, snapping and howling.”

“Exactly,” said the first Cultist, “so this is our opportunity to use him to the greatest effect… or replace him. The sister received some information in Korinthia it seems. She has spent the winter sailing through the Cyclades, fruitlessly searching that archipelago for her mother. Myriad islands, countless towns, confederacies, pirates. She still does not know of Myrrine’s whereabouts… or that we have her trapped. Right now she heads back to Athens seeking the wisdom of Perikles and his retinue on the matter.”

“Athens?” said another as all the rest fell silent.

“Yes,” said the first. “And are we not now agreed that it is time for a change of the guard in that famous old city?”

“Aye,” rumbled the others in unison.

“So let us send Deimos to change Athens’s fate. While he is there, he can greet the sister. She cannot defeat him. Nobody can. She will join us as his replacement, or breathe her last…”

Throughout winter, silent snowfall tumbled across the Aegean as the Adrestia searched the Cyclades islands. Nights spent shivering in bleak bays, days hailing islanders—none of whom knew anything of Myrrine’s whereabouts—and outrunning pirates. But winter was gone and now, in the depths of summer and on the way to Athens, it had shocked the crew to waken and find the seas clouded in a heavy bank of fog—like a hot, wet shroud. Kassandra leaned over the rail of the speeding ship to peer into the gray, her eyes like slits.

“Do not look too long, Misthios,” Barnabas advised her. “Once, I stared into the mist for fear of hitting rocks. Three days and nights, I was awake. Not a blink of sleep. I saw them then: draped on the very rocks I feared. But damn they were beautiful… and they sang to me—the sound as sweet as honey. I very nearly lost my wits and steered my boat toward those damned rocks… just to hear their sweet song in full and drink in the sight of them…” He gazed into the ether dreamily as he spoke, his eyes misting with tears.

Just then, Reza wandered past. “Ha—I remember that. You nearly steered us into the rocks because you fell asleep!”

Barnabas shot him a sour look, but Reza was already scampering away up the mast.

Kassandra smiled, then turned back to the fog. For a moment, the gray parted and they caught a glimpse of the Attikan countryside. She stared: as before, there were the patches of ash and toppled stone where farms and estates had been razed… but the crimson camps were nowhere to be seen.

“The Spartan siege is over,” Herodotos whispered.

“For now,” Kassandra mused, knowing Stentor would not relent.

A short while later, Reza cried from somewhere up on the fog-shrouded mast. Barnabas relayed the call to the rest of his crew, and the galley jolted and fell still.

For a moment, Kassandra wondered if they had been caught in the clutches of one of Barnabas’s apocryphal sea demons, but the drifting, cool fog parted to reveal the stony towers and wharf of Piraeus harbor. Kassandra, Barnabas and Herodotos stared across the wharf. Nearly deserted from what little they could see: no bustling traders and hurrying slaves; no noise either, bar the sad pealing of a distant bell. Wagons sat parked at all angles as if abandoned hastily. Some were on their sides, the contents spilled and partly pillaged. Then came the smell—a stink that hit them like a slap, an insidious and potent stench of decay.

“Gods!” Barnabas croaked, pulling a rag over his nose and mouth. “What happened here?”

Kassandra paced down from the gangplank first and gazed around the harbor. Nobody to be seen in the drifting fog. She glanced up at the harbor walls. The few sentries up there each wore rags around their faces too.

“Move on into the city,” one barked down at her, gesturing toward the promenade running inside the enclosing sleeve of the Long Walls. “Don’t touch anything, or anyone.”

Kassandra’s flesh crept. Phoibe? she mouthed, struck with a sudden need to know that Phoibe was unharmed amid this strangeness. The cage around her heart began to tremble, the flame within rising. “Stay with the ship,” she called back to Barnabas, watching from the rail with Ikaros sitting next to him.

Herodotos stepped over by her side. “I’ve been on that boat for long enough. I’m coming with you. Besides… something is badly wrong here.”

“We speak with Perikles and Aspasia and then we leave,” she agreed as they set off through the gray mist and along the promenade. In the thick fog, she thought she could see the ethereal outline of bulky shapes lining the roadsides, ahead. The shanty huts of the refugees, she guessed. There was a strange mix of sound coming from that direction: a drone of flies and a plaintive chant. Weeping too. “One of them has to know where in the Cyclades I should look for my mother. If I was to search every one of those islands it would take me many years. I couldn’t ask Barnabas and his crew to do th—”

She fell silent and stopped in her tracks, Herodotos too. Ahead, the mist swirled and parted: the roadside shapes she had seen were not shanty huts. Those ramshackle shelters were gone. In their place were serried piles of dead, as far as the mist would allow them to see. Hundreds… no, thousands of cadavers. Some were soldiers, but most were simple people and animals: children, old ones, mothers, dogs and horses too. Gray, staring faces, eyes shriveled or pecked out by crows, jaws lolling; skin broken, partly rotted or riddled with angry, purulent sores; a dangling detritus of limbs, hair, dripping pus, blood and seeping excrement. The farther they went, the higher these piles became, like earth ramparts—almost as high as the Long Walls themselves—and they lined the way as far as the eye could see. The drone of the flies grew deafening. Carrion hawks picked their way across the feast, pecking and tearing stinking, putrefying flesh from the topmost corpses.