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

That was when the fire parted like drapes. Behind Brasidas, a shadow walked, head dipped. For a moment, she thought it was an avatar of Ares… and then the figure raised its head. Deimos?

“Brasidas, behind you!” she cried, rushing forward with all her strength.

Brasidas’s wild and confident mien faded as he swung to his rear. Deimos’s spear flashed up like a lightning bolt, and Brasidas’s shield crumpled under the mighty blow. With an adroit swirl, Deimos brought the lance streaking down. Brasidas’s spear swung to block, but he was too slow. In the scudding smoke, she saw the two shapes shuddering… then Brasidas toppling to one side. His body rolled off downhill through a carpet of blazing heather.

Kassandra staggered to a standstill, her feet where Brasidas had stood a heartbeat ago, Deimos before her. Her brother cocked his head this way and that, like a predator eyeing strange prey. His gold-and-white armor was streaked with black smoke and running with blood and his face was demonic, uplit by the flames. His expression flashed with madness and he leapt for her.

Kassandra threw up her shield to take the blow. His sword bit deep, breaking the bronze coating and crumpling the timbers below. She tossed the ruined shield down. Deimos’s spear lashed for her again. She parried and struck back. Sparks flew as they hammered blow after blow like this until, exhausted, she caught his next strike on the tip of her Leonidas spear. The pair strained, shaking, vying for supremacy. Around them, ancient trees groaned and fell over in great whooshes of fire and smoke. When she edged his spear slightly to one side, she saw Deimos’s confident glower waver for a moment. But it was like a fuel to his madness, and with a roar, he pushed back, swatting her lance aside. She rolled clear of his follow-up swipe and stood, backing away.

“You came here to die?” Deimos spat, striding toward her, spear trained on her.

She felt her heels meet the edge of the small hill and stopped.

“Do not make it so easy for me,” he growled. “At least put up a fight.”

“I came here to bring you home.”

She saw it again: the flicker of uncertainty in his face.

“That’s right. Mother wants you to come home… to Sparta.”

She saw a mist pass across his eyes now, as if the words had thrown him into the distant past. But the mist faded, and his lips curled into a mockery of a smile. “You don’t understand,” he said, jabbing a finger down at the smoldering earth, sweeping his hand around the blazing cage of trees. “Battle is my trade, and the fields of war my estate. I live only to take the heads of my enemies. This is my home… and your grave.”

She saw his body tense, saw him lunge for her, felt her knees soften into a crouch. She leapt clear of his strike and brought the lance around, the flat whacking him on the temple. Stunned, he staggered back from her, then crumpled in a heap.

She stepped forward, sinking to one knee, cradling him. When she touched his chest, his pulse thundered under her palm. “And now, I will take you home… to Mo—”

Her words ended when a terrible groan sounded from above. She looked up just in time to see a huge pine, roaring in a fury of flames, swing down upon her and Deimos like an executioner’s ax.

Blackness.

The blackness lasted for an eternity. And then she awoke to the crack of a barbed whip.

“Up, bitch ! If you’re fit enough to mutter in your sleep, then you’re fit enough to walk for yourself.”

Her head ached and it felt as if she had not sipped water for a year. She felt herself being pulled upright from a stretcher of some sort, but she could not bear to prize open her eyes. A thick nausea rose from her belly and she longed to lie down again, but ropes were wrenched around her wrist, then yanked taut, hauling her along in a dazed shamble. She pried open one eye now: seeing the blinding daylight of what looked like Arkadian countryside—frostbitten, the woods golden. A great serpent of Athenian soldiers marched for miles ahead, along with a wagon train and a pack of mules. It was to one of these sumpter beasts that her wrists were roped. She noticed many other Spartan prisoners tied likewise. They wore rags and thick scars and burn welts, their hair filthy and tousled.

“Aye, bitch, you lost,” cackled the toothless Athenian slave driver.

She had no sooner looked at him than he lashed his whip across her back. She heard just a ringing in her ears, felt her jaw lock open in a soundless scream, one knee touch the ground, before the slave driver grabbed her by the hair and pulled her up. “If you fall again, I’ll hack off your legs and leave you for the wolves.”

By her side, she saw one of the Tegeans walking, roped like her. “We came close to saving the trapped men,” he whispered. “Had we arrived a little sooner, we might have succeeded. But the island was a death trap that night. Those who were not captured were left to burn alive. It was a shameful defeat for Sparta, and one that will echo over all Hellas. Where men once feared to even speak of the Spartans, now they will laugh and mock them.” He let out a long, weary sigh. “The worst of it is that Sparta offered peace in return for our release.” He gestured up and down the prisoner column.

“Peace?” Kassandra whispered. “Then why do we head north, away from Sparta.”

“Because Athens rejected the proposal. They say that Kleon whipped the people up into a frenzy, convincing them that now was the time to drive home the advantage, to abandon the last vestiges of Perikles’s defensive strategy and to crush Sparta under their heel like an insect.”

She closed her eyes. The Cult had the Athenian victory they wanted. They were back in firm control of the war… of the world. “You and your men fought well,” she said to the Tegean. “Your efforts will never be forgotten.”

“Memories won’t feed my wife and three girls,” he said quietly.

On they went in silence. Kassandra heard the familiar cry of an eagle at times, and she knew that Ikaros was tracking her, watching over her. Stay away, old friend, she thought. It is not safe.

After a month of marching—the Athenian army and the slave train camping with impunity in Spartan-allied territory as they went—they returned to Attika, crunching over the autumnal frost to march through Athens’s land gates to a storm of petals and singing. Now she understood the sheer magnitude of the defeat at Sphakteria.

All around the streets, Spartan shields were mounted like trophies. The lost shields of the fallen and captured at Sphakteria—whisked here before the prisoners themselves. The ultimate shame for the famous warriors of the Hollow Land. There were Tegean shields up there too, and the man beside her sighed in despair as he noticed this. “Eternal infamy,” he whispered.

The whips cracked as they were led through the city streets. The decay of the plague had long since been eradicated, she realized, seeing crowds where the heaped corpses had once been. Rotting vegetables whacked down on them along with showers of spittle and torrents of jeering and cursing. As they walked through the agora, a woman ran out from her house and hurled a bucket of still-warm sewage over Kassandra and those near her.

At the agora mouth, where the Long Walls led off to the coast and Piraeus harbor, naval crewmen waited, and were given groups of Tegean prisoners. “They’ll take us to the colonies,” the Tegean said. “To work us like dogs in the hot fields, our ankles chained. Or to live in the darkest pits of the silver mines—where men go blind and most kill themselves after a few years.”

She watched as the Tegean was dragged off with fifty other prisoners and driven like a mule down toward the harbor. Slowly, the many hundreds of prisoners were taken away. The slave handlers then approached her and the small cluster of Spartans remaining. He wagged a filthy finger at her. “You… I have a fine fate in store for you. Every day will be worse than the last,” he enthused.