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

“Why here, Mother?” She sighed absently, wondering why Myrrine had asked to meet her at the tomb come midday. Brasidas and Myrrine were to leave Sparta tomorrow also. They had arranged to travel to neighboring Arkadia over the spring and summer, Mother having found evidence suggesting the Archon of Arkadia was a Cultist too. If he was, then he could surely be “convinced” to betray the identity of the rogue Spartan king.

She stepped inside the ancient tomb. Myrrine was kneeling by a lit sconce under the solemn, ascetic statue of King Leonidas, naked bar helm, spear and shield. Kassandra knelt beside her mother.

“Leonidas was Sparta’s last true hero,” Myrrine said. “We would all be under the Persian yoke were it not for his courage.”

“What has that to do with me and my journey north—where Greek will slay Greek?”

“Do you know why Leonidas went to the Hot Gates, despite the odds?”

“Because he was strong, heroic, unlike me,” Kassandra snapped.

“Hold out your spear,” Myrrine said calmly.

Kassandra narrowed her eyes suspiciously, but did as asked. “The last time anyone asked me to do this was when Herodotos—”

Myrrine moved the spear toward the statue and a jolt of lightning shot through Kassandra.

I was in the Kings’ Hall—but it seemed different: the ancient thrones brighter, less worn… and empty.

“Sparta will not go to war. The Pythia has spoken,” screamed a skeleton of a man behind one throne. An ephor, I realized. The four others bayed in agreement. Some of them wore or clutched those foul masks. Kneeling in their midst was a shriveled old hag, muttering, rocking. She recognized the diaphanous robes, the dripping trinkets. The Pythia! They had the Oracle at their heel like a dog!

The lone figure at the foot of the throne-plinth steps, back turned to me, broadened. “All of this talk about the Pythia! The Pythia! Well the Pythia says only what you tell her to say. She has been your puppet for far too long. The time has come to cut her strings.”

“Oh, Leonidas, the days of heroes are over. You think your blood makes you special? If we opened your veins it would spill to the ground and disappear through the cracks. You are no one.”

I realized where I was now, and when.

Leonidas lifted his spear and pointed it at the ephor. “Nothing, am I? Step down and face me; you are more than welcome to find out.”

Now the Oracle stopped muttering and lifted her ancient head. She placed a gentle hand on Leonidas’s spearhead, pushing it down. “Why do you fight certainty, Son of the Lion? Xerxes will unite us. He will bring Order to Chaos.”

My blood ran cold. Why were the Oracle and the ephors asking the Spartan King and his army to meekly stand aside for Xerxes, King of Kings, Master of Persia, and his vast armies?

The ephor’s face peeled open in a gleeful grin. “You see? Defy the Pythia and everything you stand for will fall.”

Leonidas stared at them all for a time, then swung on his heel. “Prepare the men,” he thundered as he strode away from the plinth. “If Xerxes wants Sparta then he will have to go through me.” He passed through me like a wraith, and in a flash of white, it was over.

She found herself on her knees beside Myrrine.

“You see?” Mother said. “Leonidas went to war to save Sparta from Persia… and from the Cult.”

“They were here, weeded into Sparta’s foundations, even then?”

“Even then,” Myrrine confirmed. “Our return to Sparta has allowed me to find out much. All of it grim. But now you must go north, Kassandra. Think not of Archidamos or the past. Simply survive… and find the proof we need—to tear the black roots of this vile weed from our homeland for once and forever.”

The lonely clop of the gelding’s hooves lulled Kassandra into misty reveries of the past—of the recent few years and the storm of war she had been drawn into, and of the older times, still lodged in her heart like rusting hooks. Suddenly, she heard the clopping of many hooves and looked up, startled. But the Boeotian hills were deserted—just gray scrap and green brush, shimmering in the early-summer heat. The valleys were growing high around her, she realized, and the ghost riders were merely echoes of her own mount. I’m nearly there, she realized, eyeing the path ahead that rose into the mountains, silvery and magnificent against the cobalt sky. She smiled, seeing Ikaros gliding up there, her forward scout. No sound from him—a good sign. She slid an apple from her saddlebag and crunched through it absently, the cold, sweet flesh pleasant. She slowed a little to slide forward and feed the core to the gelding. That was when an odd thing happened. The echoes of the beast’s hooves slowed in a strange way—as if the echoes behind her had taken a little too long to slow. Her back, slick with sweat, prickled with a sense of unease. She twisted in the saddle to look back whence she had come. But now, with the gelding at bay, there was no sound other than the frantic chatter of the cicadas, the playful gurgle of a stream and the hollow drumming of a woodpecker in a pine grove.

She sneered with a confidence she did not feel, then set off on her way again. The whole time, the echoing hooves sounded… wrong. For every part of the remaining journey, she rested one hand inside her cloak, upon the haft of the broken lance.

But the phantom echoes never took the shape of any real threat, and by late afternoon, she beheld the argent peak ahead: Mount Helicon. She spotted a ring of spears up on a plateau, and the red-cloaked sentries and white tents within. She moved her hand from her spear and to the hide scroll, then clicked her tongue to gee the gelding into a canter uphill toward the camp entrance. When the two Spartiates flanking the gate saw her, they swung their spears level and raised their shields, murder in their eyes. She drew the scroll as if it were a weapon. They saw the markings on it and let her through.

She dismounted, tethered her gelding near a feeding trough, then set off on foot. As she moved through the soldier tents, she combed her gaze across every detail, using her peripheral vision to take it all in. All I need is the smallest of clues, Archidamos. All will know you are one of the masked ones, and your false reign as King of Sparta will end. The Cult will surely crumble too. Eventually, she came to the command pavilion—an off-white tent a little larger than the rest, with the sides rolled up so the many Helots and soldiers could come and go with news and refreshments to fuel what looked like frantic talks. She saw the Spartan commander standing over a table, shoulders broad and head stooped, sweeping over a map again and again. The others around him cawed and brayed with contradictory advice. For a moment, she felt sympathy for the leader… and then he looked up.

She halted in her tracks. “Stentor?”

Stentor’s face paled, then his cheeks glowed red, and his lips grew thin as a blade. He stepped away from the table, swept the nearest adviser from his path and strode over to her.

“I did not realize it was you who was in command of—”

Whack!

His knuckles caught her square on the mouth and a white spark struck through her head. A moment later, she realized she was on her back, head spinning. “ Malákas! ” she groaned, then saw her attacker perched over her, his face ablaze with fury, his sword drawn. A crowd had gathered. At once, her daze vanished and she rolled back, drawing the scroll and shaking it. “I’m here to help you, you idiot!”