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

But a hand rested on her shoulder. “Stop: the purebred Spartiates are to be kept here as prisoners. As a guarantee against a Spartan assault on the city. They will be billeted in the wheat-grinding houses and there they will work their fingers to the nub. But this one? She comes with me.”

“Yes, General,” the slave handler agreed, backing away and bowing obsequiously.

Kassandra felt a sudden rising of hope… until she turned around.

Kleon grinned at her, his red locks swept back and his beard combed to a point. His face was bent with malice, and she saw a shape under his cloak. The shape of a mask. “You’re one of them?”

“The darkest of them all,” he whispered.

Two pairs of guards’ hands grabbed her by the shoulders and a sharp blade dug into the small of her back. Purposefully, they drove her away from the harbor route and toward the other side of the agora. She eyed the shadowy, sorry jail.

Where souls are sent to be forgotten, Herodotos whispered from memory.

“No,” she croaked, fighting feebly. “No!”

Months passed in that cage of stone. She could see nothing of the outside—just the moving rectangle of sunlight that hit the floor from the jail’s tiny ceiling grille and crawled across the cell at an agonizing pace. She would stare for hours through the cell’s iron-bar gate, watching the hay on the floor of the corridor. Every so often, a breeze would steal in from the exterior door, gently stirring the strands of hay on the floor. Movement. Something.

The sounds of life were an even bigger torment, the bustle of the agora fading over the winter, then rising with the heat as spring came and then summer. Sweltering days passed where she saw nothing, nobody, just the daily opening of a wooden hatch on the exterior door and the appearance of a filthy hand setting down a bowl of thin wheat porridge and a single cup of brackish water onto the floor of the corridor, close enough for her to reach from her cell gate.

Kleon had explained nothing when he had cast her in here. He did not need to. She worked it out the moment she heard the lock clicking and the chains settling into place. She was to be a reserve, no more. A replacement, should the Cult need a new champion. Yet why would the Cult need to change anything? They had the world all but in their palm. But what was left of the Cult? Was it not now just Kleon and a handful of others? She had lost count of the number of those masked bastards she and Myrrine had killed in these last years, but of the forty-two she had witnessed in the Cave of Gaia, almost all of them had been slain.

They haunted her at night, when Athens fell quiet. She dreamed of their masked faces, standing around her filthy bed of hay, staring down at her, those wicked smiles unfaltering. By day, she tried to keep her mind at bay by leaping for the ceiling grille and grabbing the iron bars, then hauling herself up then lowering down, over and over, catching glimpses of clouds rolling by high above. Her shoulders, back and arms stayed strong and thick thanks to this, but she longed to run—to speed across the countryside, feel the wind on her face, smell the scent of summer meadows… anything but the shit-stink of the agora in summertime.

It was like a ray of sunlight when she awoke in the middle of one night to hear a new inmate being dragged into the adjacent cell. The stone wall meant she could see nothing of him, but she drank in the sound of every word as if each syllable was a treasure.

“Tell me where you found it. Where? ” one unseen guard roared, underlining his last word with what sounded like a backhand slap across the new inmate’s mouth. The sound of teeth landing and scattering across the ground was followed by a dull whimper. “I… I don’t know. I was shipwrecked, and so I was lost. How can I tell you if I don’t know?”

“Well we’ll beat you into a pulp every day until you remember,” cackled a second guard.

When the guards had left, she whispered to the fellow. “Who are you?”

“Please, don’t speak to me. If they hear, they will come in and beat me.”

“Why?”

“Because they enjoy it. And to wring from me a secret I cannot give to them.”

“They will not hear us speaking. At night, the guards stand nearer the tavern end of the agora.”

Silence for a time, then: “I… I found something they seek,” he said.

“They—you mean the Cult?”

He seemed reticent. “Yes, the masked ones,” he croaked. “The Athenian guards act under their orders.”

“Why don’t you tell them what they want to know?”

“Because if they find the carvings, then the world will burn.” He caught his last word. “I have said too much.”

He fell silent for the rest of that night. Days passed, and each one began with the inmate’s being beaten by the guards. When the guards left, she tried to comfort him with simple conversation, but he would be too busy muttering to himself, chanting over and over.

The following day, Kassandra heard the guards beating him again. “Cough up your secrets, dog,” they sneered as they broke his fingers, one by one. Kassandra hugged her knees to her chest and closed her eyes, wishing it to be over for the poor man as quickly as possible. As the guards left, one called back at him: “It’ll be your toes tomorrow.”

He whimpered quietly to himself. “Dear Photina, I pray you are well, that Demeter blesses the soils of Naxos to keep you well fed, that Ariadne blesses the grapevines… Dear Photina, how I miss your touch… Sweet Photina, it has been years since last we were together, but…”

Kassandra’s eyes blinked open, realization dawning. “Your wife is Photina of Naxos?” she said, thinking of Barnabas’s brief love on the island.

Silence.

“And you are Meliton, the seafarer.”

Another short silence, then: “The guards told you that, did they? Are they paying you to question me now?”

“You spoke with Herodotos once,” she continued, “told him of the time you were shipwrecked on Thera… of the carvings there, the lost knowledge of Pythagor—”

Shhh! he hissed. “Very well, we can talk, but promise me you will not say his name aloud—for it will be the death of us both.”

They talked that day and into the evening, Meliton recounting the story of Thera, eulogizing Herodotos and reinforcing the historian’s fears that the lost wisdom be found by the Cult. That night, when they both fell asleep, her new friend was taken from her. The guards stomped into the adjacent cell in the darkness. She heard Meliton wail, heard them thrashing him, then heard the crunch of a stamping boot breaking his skull, the wet sputter of his brains bursting across the floor and finally the hiss of his legs trailing as they dragged his smashed corpse outside.

Isolation, once again.

As the seasons wore on, through heat and cold, she began to see the masked shades again. In her dreams as before, but this time in the waking hours also. Deimos too. They would stand and stare from the edge of her vision as she repeated thousands of sit-ups, leaps, squats and balancing exercises. Every so often, she imagined that she held the Leonidas spear in her hand, and she would swish around, streaking the make-believe weapon through the imagined ghosts, scattering them. This became such a habit that she took to laughing when she saw them, shrieking with delight when she made them vanish.

One morning, she awoke to the sound of scratching. A rat, she guessed. No, it was coming from up above. She squinted at the small rectangle of light in the grid overhead, seeing a feathery mass shuffling about up there. For a moment, her heart skipped a beat. Ikaros? But with a flurry of wings and before she could be sure it was him, the bird was gone, and a small object thumped down on her forehead. She yelped, then caught the small clay disk as it bounced. Her eyes combed the surface of the disk over and over, and the words inscribed there. Be ready, it stated. She looked up at the grid again. For what?