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

“Who are you?” she said through clenched teeth.

“I am Elpenor of Kirrha,” he replied calmly.

Kirrha? Kassandra thought. The gateway to Delphi, the home of the Oracle. She felt a great urge to spit.

“I came looking for you because I heard great things about you—the Misthios of Kephallonia,” Elpenor continued.

“You have the wrong person,” she growled. “There are several mercenaries on this island.”

“None with your skills, Kassandra,” he said with the timbre of a tombstone rolling into place. “Preternatural speed of mind and body.”

She reached up to prize the stinking leather helm from her head and tossed it into the nearby grass, her hidden braid of hair spilling loose across her chest. “What do you want with me? Speak plainly, or I will lodge this ax in your chest.”

Elpenor laughed, his bony body shaking with amusement. “I want to offer you a vast sum of wealth, Kassandra. More than twice the value of that obsidian eye you took from the Cyclops.”

She moved a hand to her purse, checking the eye was still there. It was. Twice as much again? Such riches would allow her to pay off the Cyclops, then buy a good home for Phoibe. More, it would break the chains of poverty that kept her on this island. She could go anywhere, do anything. The notion thrilled her with terror and wonder. Then, when she saw how he rapaciously eyed her bare arms again, she stiffened and stared down her nose at him. “I do not lie with men for money. Besides, you are old and I might break you.”

Elpenor cocked an eyebrow. “It is not your body I want, not in that way, at least. I come to offer you a bounty, in return for a head.”

“You already have a head of your own,” Kassandra sneered.

Elpenor half smiled. “The head of a warrior. A Spartan general.”

Kassandra felt the world shift under her feet.

“They call him the Wolf,” he said.

Kassandra steadied herself, ignoring the streaks of sweat stealing down her back. “Generals bleed like all other men.” She shrugged. “Spartans too, despite their misplaced conceit.”

“So you accept the contract?”

“Where is he?”

“Across the sea. In the most coveted land in the Greek world.”

Kassandra’s eyes narrowed. She followed his gaze, past her shoulder and off to the east. She thought of the haze out at sea and the constant train of Athenian galleys, tacking around into the Gulf of Korinthia, to bolster the siege of… “The Megarid? He’s in the Megarid?”

Elpenor nodded. “In the tug-of-war between Sparta and Athens, the city of Megara and its narrow strip of land are the rope. Athens wants the twin ports to complete its naval noose around Hellas. Sparta wants the land to use as a bridge into Attika.”

Kassandra took a step back and spluttered. “So he’s inside the Athenian blockade?”

“The Wolf and his troops marched overland from Lakonia, and are now headed for Pagai, Megara’s western port.”

“Why do you want him dead?” she asked.

“The war rages and… the Wolf is on the wrong side.”

She shot him a cold look. “How do I know you are on the right side?”

He lifted a purse from his robe and shook it. The thick clunk of drachmae sounded from within. “Because I am the one paying you.” He tossed the bag of coins toward her. She plucked it from the air, pleasantly surprised by its weight. “Do as I ask, Misthios, and you shall have ten times this.” He smiled in a way that drained all humor from his eyes.

She glared at him. “I’ll need a boat to run and pierce that blockade. Give me yours and I will accept,” she said, flicking her head toward the gorgon-head galley. In truth she had only once before been to sea as a misthios—circling Kephallonia in a rotting old trade cog to bring stolen hides to one of Markos’s contacts.

“My sails cannot be seen in the vicinity when it happens, Misthios,” Elpenor said with an air of finality.

“But without a boat, the contract is void. Athens wore down all of her allies’ fleets years ago—forced them to pay into the treasury of the Delian League so she could swell her own navy. There are few seaworthy galleys left in private hands, and none on Kephallonia that would be fast enough to cut through a blockade.”

Elpenor’s nose wrinkled. “Is it too much for you, Misthios? Have I overestimated your skills?” When she hesitated to answer, he rose and turned from her, taking a step toward the trees and the track leading downhill toward his boat.

“Nothing is too much for me, old man,” she called after him. “You’ll have the Wolf’s head in good time.”

He halted, looking back over his shoulder with hooded eyes. “Good. Come and find me at Pilgrim’s Landing in Kirrha, once it is done.”

She trekked along the shoreline, heading back toward Markos’s vineyard. The strange Elpenor’s parting words danced around in her thoughts like a falling sycamore seed. Right now, that all seemed misty and unreal. Kirrha, she had never been to. The Wolf, she had never met. Beyond Kephallonia’s coastal waters, she had not ventured. Not for twenty years. What a fool, she chided herself. Why can’t you learn to say no to suspect contracts? Markos and his wretched schemes and now this death trap of a job. She laughed aloud and the sound surprised her. “This Wolf is safe. I will never get off this damned island.”

She trudged on for a time. After a while, she rounded a rocky cape and came to the pale sand of Kleptous Bay. She stopped to fill her drinking skin by a coastal brook, then lifted it to slake her thirst, but it never reached her lips.

“I swear I uttered not a word of a lie. Please do not take her from me!”

The cry sailed across the bay, the voice ragged and desperate.

She fell to her haunches and shielded her eyes from the sun. At first, she saw just white, foaming breakers, wheeling seabirds, and a few wild goats chomping on marram grass. It was only on a second sweep that she spotted the trireme lodged on the shoreline, farther up the bay, the stern in the sand and the fore bobbing in the water. It was smaller than the Athenian war galleys and Elpenor’s gorgon-head boat, but it looked slender and well crafted, painted black near the keel and red around the rails. The stern rose into a curving scorpion tail and the rostrum sported a glinting bronze ram, eyes painted on either side.

“The Adrestia is everything to me,” the voice wailed.

“ Adrestia ,” Kassandra whispered. The Goddess of Retribution… and the name of this ship? Shivers streaked down her back as she cycled the name over and over in her head. The Adrestia , the Adrestia , she mouthed, clicking her fingers, unable to recall why the name seemed familiar.

There was movement too, all over the decks. Tiny shapes of men. Bandits, tying kneeling crewmen, beating those who tried to rise. There was one older man, bent double thanks to the giant holding his head over a large clay pot. The pinned fellow writhed and struggled in vain. She heard the gurgling, forlorn cry again. “Gods, spare me, spare my ship!”

The cry ended in a frantic gurgle as the giant plunged the wretch’s head into the pot, water and foam spewing up from the edges. Now her vision grew eagle-sharp, and she saw the giant for who he was, and realized where she had heard of the Adrestia before. Markos’s words echoed in her mind:

The Adrestia is one of the last galleys left on the island. The Cyclops is on the hunt, and that ship is his prey.

Barnabas cried out in vain, bubbles roaring past his ears as his breath escaped, the dull moan of his underwater pleas sounding strange and otherworldly. His hands, bound behind his back, were hot with blood where the ropes had chewed into the skin. The water surged up his nose and flooded his mouth, pushing into his throat like a serpent. This was the worst part: when the air was gone from his lungs, when his body screamed for him to suck in a fresh breath, while the Cyclops’s viselike, meaty hand held him here, denying him. Flashes of white were followed by black splodges like squid ink, growing, spreading, joining, stealing away his vision. This was it, he realized. This time, the Cyclops would not bring him up for air. Charon the Ferryman would have him. Inside, he wept, and from the pits of memory, his well-lived life played out in flashes, like a sputtering torch. He saw the sandy island on which he had been marooned as a young sailor—saw the swell of the ocean that morning when he had been dying of thirst… saw the glistening, gargantuan thing that had arisen from the waves. Sun madness, his rescuers had claimed, dismissing his tale.