Assassin's Creed: Revelations (20 page)

“
Mia cara
,” he was saying to her, “the strings of Fate have drawn us together. Two Italians, lost and alone in the Orient. Do you not feel the
magnetismo
?”

Sofia, bored and annoyed, replied: “I feel many things,
Messere
—nausea, above all.”

With a sense of déjà vu, Ezio thought it was time to make his move. “Is this man bothering you, Sofia?” he asked, approaching.

Duccio, fuming at this interruption, turned to face the newcomer. “Excuse me,
Messere
, but the lady and I are—”

He trailed off as he recognized Ezio. “Ah!
Il diavolo
in person!” His left hand went involuntarily to his right arm. “Stay back!”

“Duccio, what a pleasure to see you again.”

Duccio didn’t reply but stumbled away, tripping over the cobblestones as he did so, and crying, “Run,
buona donna
! Run for your life!”

They watched him disappear along the jetty. There was an awkward pause.

“Who was that?”

“A dog,” Ezio told her. “He was engaged to my sister, many years ago.”

“And what happened?”

“His
cazzo
was engaged to six others.”

“You express yourself very candidly.” Sofia sounded mildly surprised by Ezio’s use of the word “dick” but not offended.

“Forgive me.” He paused for a moment, then asked: “What brings you to these docks?”

“I took a break from the shop to collect a package, but the customs people here claim that the ship’s papers are not in order. So, I wait.”

Ezio glanced around the well-guarded harbor, getting a sense of its layout.

“It’s such a bother,” Sofia continued. “I could be here all day.”

“Let me see what I can do,” he said. “I know a few ways of bending the rules.”

“Do you now? Well, I must say I admire your bravado.”

“Leave it to me. I’ll meet you back at your shop.”

“Well then”—she rummaged in her bag—“here is the paperwork. The parcel is quite valuable. Please take care of it—if you manage to get it away from them.”

“I will.”

“Then—thank you.” She smiled at him and made her way back toward the city.

 

 

Ezio watched her go for a moment, then made his way to the large wooden building that held the customs offices. Inside, there was a long counter and, behind it, shelves containing a large number of packages and parcels. Near the front of one of the lower shelves closest to the counter he could see a wooden map tube with a label attached to it: SOFIA SARTOR.

“Perfetto,”
he said to himself.

“May I help you,” said a portly official, coming up to him.

“Yes, if you please. I’ve come to collect that package over there.” He pointed.

The clerk looked across. “Well, I’m afraid that’s out of the question! All those parcels and packages have been impounded pending paperwork clearance.”

“And how long will that take?”

“I wouldn’t like to say.”

“Hours?”

The clerk pursed his lips.

“Days?”

“That all depends. Of course, for a consideration . . . something might be arranged . . .”

“To hell with that!”

The clerk became less friendly. “Are you trying to impede me in my duties?” he barked. “Get out of the way, old man! And don’t come back if you know what’s good for you!”

Ezio swept him aside and bounded over the counter. He seized the wooden map tube and turned to leave. But the clerk was frantically blowing a whistle, and several of his colleagues, some of them members of the heavily armed dockyard guard, responded instantly.

“That man!” yelped the clerk. “He tried to bribe me, and when that failed, he resorted to violence!”

Ezio took a stand on the counter as the customs men surged forward to grab him. Swinging the weighty wooden map tube round, he cracked a few skulls with it and leapt over the heads of the rest of them, running toward the exit and leaving confusion in his wake.

“That’s the only way to deal with petty officialdom,” he said to himself, contentedly. He had disappeared into the twisting labyrinth of streets north of the docks before his pursuers had had time to collect themselves. Without Sofia’s papers, which he still had safely stowed in his tunic, they’d never be able to trace her.

THIRTY-THREE

Toward noon, he entered the bookshop west of Haghia Sofia.

She looked up as he came in. The shelves were far more orderly now than they had been when he’d first visited. In the back room, he could see her worktable, with his map from the cisterns neatly laid out alongside a number of thick books of reference.

“
Salute
, Ezio,” she said. “That was a lot quicker than I expected. Any luck?”

Ezio held up the wooden map tube and read from the label: “
Madamigella Sofia Sartor, libraia, Costantinopoli.
Is that you?”

He handed her the tube with a smile. She took it gladly, then examined it closely, her face turning sour. “Oh, no! Look at the damage! Did they use this to fight off pirates, do you suppose?”

Ezio shrugged, a little sheepishly. Sofia opened the tube and withdrew the map within. She inspected it. “Well, so far, so good.”

Taking it over to a table, she spread it out carefully. It was a copy of a map of the world.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” she said.

“Indeed.” Ezio stood next to her, and they both pored over it.

“It’s a print of a map by Martin Waldseemüller. It’s still quite new—he only published four years ago. And look—here on the left! The new lands
Navigatore
Vespucci discovered and wrote about only four or five years before the map was drawn.”

“They work fast, these Germans,” said Ezio. “I see he’s named the new lands after Vespucci’s Christian name—Amerigo.”

“America!”

“Yes . . . Poor Cristoforo Colombo. History has a strange way of unfolding.”

“What do you make of this body of water—here?” She pointed to the oceans on the far side of North and South America. Ezio leaned forward to look.

“A new ocean, perhaps? Most of the scholars I know claim the size of the globe has been underestimated.”

Sofia sounded wistful. “It’s incredible. The more we learn about the world, the less we seem to know.”

Quite taken with the thought, they both fell silent for a moment. Ezio considered the new century they were in—the sixteenth. And only near its beginning. What would unfold during it, he could only guess; and he knew that, at his age, he would not see very much more of it.

More discoveries, and more wars, no doubt. But essentially the same play repeating itself—and the same actors, only with different costumes and different props for each generation that swallows up the last, each thinking that it would be the one to do better.

“Well, you honored your promise,” said Sofia. “And here is mine fulfilled.”

She led the way to the inner room and picked a piece of paper up from the table. “If I am correct, this should show you the location of the first book.”

Ezio took the paper from her and read what was on it.

“I must admit,” Sofia went on, “my head is swimming at the prospect of actually seeing these books. They contain knowledge the world has lost and should have again.” She sat at the table and cupped her chin in her hands, daydreaming. “Perhaps I could have a few copies printed to distribute myself. A small run of fifty or so . . . That should be enough . . .”

Ezio smiled, then laughed.

“What’s there to laugh about?”

“Forgive me. It is a joy to see someone with a passion so personal and so noble. It is . . . inspiring.”

“Goodness,” she replied, a little embarrassed. “Where is this coming from?”

Ezio held up the piece of paper. “I intend to go and investigate this immediately,” he said. “
Grazie
, Sofia—I will return soon.”

“I’ll look forward to that,” she replied, watching him go with a mixture of puzzlement and concern.

What a mysterious man,
she thought, as the door closed after him, and she returned to the Waldseemüller map, and her own dreams of the future.

THIRTY-FOUR

Sofia’s calculations had been correct. Hidden behind a wooden panel in an old, deserted building in the Constantine District of the city, Ezio found the book he was looking for.

It was an ancient but well-preserved copy of
On Nature
, the poem written over two thousand years earlier by the Greek philosopher Empedocles, outlining the sum of his thoughts.

Ezio lifted the book from its hiding place and blew the dust from the small volume. Then he opened it to a blank page at its front.

As he watched, the page began to glow, and within the glow, a map of Constantinople revealed itself. As he looked closer, and concentrated, he discerned a pinpoint on the map. It showed the Maiden Tower, the lighthouse on the far side of the Bosphorus, and, as Ezio peered closer still, a precise spot there, within the cellars built into its foundations.

If all went well, this would be the location of the second key to Altaïr’s library at Masyaf.

He made his way in haste through the teeming city to the Maiden Tower. Slipping past the Ottoman guards and crossing over in a “borrowed” boat, he found a doorway from which steps led downward into the cellars. He held the book in his hand and found that it was guiding him. Guiding him through a maze of corridors lined with innumerable doorways. It didn’t seem possible that there could be so many in such a relatively confined space. But at last he came to a door, identical to all the others but through whose cracks a faint light seemed to emanate. The door opened at his touch, and there, on a low stone plinth before him, a circular stone had been placed, slim as a discus and, like the first he had discovered, covered with strange symbols, as mysterious as the first set, but different. The form of a woman—a goddess, perhaps—who looked vaguely familiar, indentations that might either have been formulae, or possibly notches that might slot into pegs—maybe pegs within the keyholes in the library door at Masyaf.

As Ezio took the key in his hands, the light coming from it grew, and grew, and he braced himself to be transported—he knew not where—as it engulfed him, and whirled him back down centuries. Down 320 years. To the year of Our Lord 1191.

Masyaf.

Within the fortress, a time long ago.

Figures in a swirling mist. Emerging from it, a young man and an old. Evidence of a fight, which the old man—Al Mualim—had lost.

He lay on the ground; the young man knelt astride him.

His hand, losing its strength, let go of something, which rolled from his grasp and came to rest on the marble floor.

 

 

“You held fire in your hand, old man,” he was saying. “It should have been destroyed.”

“Destroyed?” laughed Al Mualim. “The only thing capable of ending the Crusades and creating true peace? Never.”

“Then I will destroy it.”

 

Within the Great Keep at Masyaf, Altaïr stood alone with one of his captains. Near them, laid out in honor on a stone bier, was the body of Al Mualim, peaceful in death.

“Is it truly over?” the Assassin captain was saying. “Is that sorcerer dead?”

Altaïr turned to look at the body. He spoke calmly, levelly. “He was no sorcerer. Just an ordinary man, in command of—illusions.”

He turned back to his comrade. “Have you prepared the pyre?”

“I have.” The man hesitated. “But, Altaïr, some of the men . . . they will not stand for such a thing. They are restive.”