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

Take it!

She took a step forward, then halted. It was the slightest of sensations that stopped her: a smell of something incongruous. Behind the odor of metal and polish a scent of… death, decay. Her eyes rolled left and right. The stonework just inside the left edge of the doorway was scarred, as if a mason had been chipping at it to make a grid of dots. The right edge of the doorway was clad in cedar wood, not stone. Her eyes narrowed. Dropping to her haunches, she held out her bow and reached over the threshold of the room carefully. With a gentle dunt, she pressed the bow’s tip down upon the first floorboard inside the room.

With a whoosh , the cedar panels to the right of the doorway suddenly exploded with movement and a gust of disturbed air. She fell back, snatching her bow to her chest as a mass hurtled across the doorway and crashed against the stone on the left with a metallic clank and a shower of sparks. As she rose, she beheld the contraption: a bed of iron spikes, the full height of the door, that would have ripped her apart had she set foot on that floorboard. She stared at the forlorn corpse of Skamandrios, entangled in the spikes. He was more skeleton than flesh, just leathery rags of skin dangling from the bones. A spike had pierced his temple, another his neck, several his chest and limbs. “At least it was quick for you, Shadow,” she said flatly.

The trap was wedged in place and the way into the strongroom blocked. She stepped back, vexed, then heard the dull chatter of two guards outside, drawing closer to the villa.

“The sun grows strong. I’ll tend to the horses in the stable, you lock up the villa,” one said to the other. “Master will be back tonight and he’ll not be happy if the rooms aren’t cool enough for him.”

A moment later, she heard their footsteps on the lower floor and the steady clunk and click of doors and windows being closed over and locked.

No time, Kassandra realized, her breath quickening. She had to get out, but she could not leave without getting the eye. She closed the door to hide the sprung trap, then looked all around the upper landing. No other way into the strongroom. She thought of the oculus on the ceiling—perhaps she could climb up onto the roof and drop into the chamber that way? No, the opening was too small even for a child to fit through. Her thoughts spun in a thousand different directions until they settled on the first room again. Why would a rich, power-hungry thug like the Cyclops have a bare room in his villa? she mused, glancing around to confirm that every other part of the place—upstairs at least—was bedecked with trophies and finery. She came before the first room’s open door and tapped her way in with her bow. No traps. Inside, she turned to face the wall shared with the strongroom and eyed the shabby, doorless cupboard with suspicion. Placing a hand on either side of it, she edged it as quietly as she could to one side and stared at the wooden hatch it revealed. Heart surging with anticipation, she twisted the handle and crawled inside the golden room, wracked with suspicion that every movement might bring a hidden blade scything down upon her or send her toppling into a concealed pit of spikes. But there was nothing more. She reached out to pluck the obsidian eye from the plinth, feeling the cold weight of it in her hand, knowing that it would pay off her troubles and Markos’s. As she moved back out onto the landing and toward the bedchamber and the climb back down the ivy, elation began to swell in the pit of her stomach, and then she heard a sigh.

“Just the bedchamber and that’s the upstairs done,” the guard mumbled to himself through the opening in an old leather helm that covered most of his face.

She pressed her back to the wall, hugging the shadows, watching as the guard ambled into the bedchamber before she could. She heard a clatter of shutters being closed then a thick clunk of a locking chain. The guard emerged from the chamber again and wandered back downstairs.

She paced along behind him like his shadow, creeping down the stairs in time with him to disguise her footsteps, edging up to the main entrance as he did. If he locked it while she was still inside… Her stomach twisted as she imagined a fourth head on the marble mantel upstairs.

Just then, the guard dropped his keys. As he stooped to pick them up, Kassandra took a further step. The boards creaked, the guard bristled, then leapt up and around in one motion. His face curled into a baleful sneer as he swung his ax level, his lips parting to shout for his comrades. The cry never came as Kassandra grabbed and threw the small knife tucked into the lip of her bracer in one stroke. It flew straight and pierced the man’s throat. He fell, pink foam bubbling from the wound. Kassandra caught his body to reduce the noise. She eyed the man for a moment, his keys, his garb, the door, the way to freedom.

The watcher stared as the guard ambled from the villa and strolled across the grounds, draped in a black cloak. He heard a few words being exchanged as the guard said something to the other posted at the gateway of the outer walls, before the guard continued on out into the countryside. A thrill of anticipation crawled through him: she was everything, everything they hoped she might be. He craned forward from his vantage point like a crow, unblinking.

Kassandra heard her own breath crash like waves within the confines of the visored leather helm. Worse, the guard she had killed and taken it from had clearly been munching on raw garlic for a year, going by the stink. She did all she could to walk in a carefree—almost bored—manner, away from the Cyclops’s estate and off into the brush, patting the flat of the stolen guard ax upon her palm. Her excuse had been simple: “I’m going to scout around outside. I’m sure I saw something out there while I was on the villa’s top floor.” The other sentry at the gate had been too weary from the midday heat to pick up on her questionable attempt at a low, gruff voice.

She walked into a stand of fir and juniper and felt the shade in there drape across her—blissful invisibility and coolness. The air was spiced with the tang of pine and the soft carpet of fallen needles felt pleasant to walk on. Up ahead, she saw a clearing with a splash of blue waves beyond. The shore. Giddiness rose in her breast like a scented smoke, intoxicating her with the oh-so-close promise of success as she stepped into the clearing.

The slow, steady sound of a pair of hands clapping halted her in her stride, sending the fear of all the Gods through her.

“Excellent, excellent ,” a voice said.

Kassandra turned her head toward the figure sitting on a fallen log in the clearing’s tree line. He was a gull of a man, sporting thin brown hair combed forward, his body swaddled in a pristine white robe, streaked with a vivid silver stripe, his scrawny neck and wrists dripping with bracelets. A rich man, she realized instantly, and not of this island.

“The Cyclops of Kephallonia is seldom relieved of his hard-won treasures,” he said, his chest shaking with a chuckle.

Kassandra shivered. There was something about his tone—overly familiar, assuming. And the way he looked at her, his eyes combing her body. It was not a carnal look, but it was desirous and lustful all the same.

“Rest your hands from your ax. You have nothing to fear from me.”

Kassandra did not let her gaze waver, refused to blink, and certainly did not set down her stolen ax. Ikaros swooped down just then to perch on her shoulder, shrieking at the stranger. Like a hunter, she took in every scintilla of her peripheral vision. There were no others in the tree line, she realized. But she noticed something else: downhill, at a small inlet, a boat was moored just off a timber jetty. The hideous gorgon head on the sail stared up at her as crewmen on board hoisted it up to the spar.