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  He clenched his fists, and his muscles felt the absence of the hidden-blades, which had for so long stood him in such good stead.

  But he had an idea of where they’d stowed his weapons, after they’d ambushed him and overpowered him and brought him here. A grim smile formed on his lips. Those troops, the old enemy—how surprised they’d been that such an old lion could still have so much fight in him.

  And he knew this castle. From charts and diagrams. He had studied them so well that they were printed on his mind.

  But here he was, in a cell in one of the topmost towers of the great fortress of Masyaf, the citadel that had once been the stronghold of the Assassins, long since abandoned, and now fallen to the Templars. Here he was—alone, unarmed, hungry, and thirsty, his clothes grimy and torn, awaiting every moment the footfall of his executioners. But not about to go quietly. He knew why the Templars were there; he had to stop them.

  And they hadn’t killed him yet.

  He kept his eyes on the eagle. He could see every feather, every pinion, the fanned rudder of the tail, speckled black-brown and white, like his own beard. The pure white wingtips.

  He thought back. He traced the route that had brought him there—to this.

  Other towers, other battlements. Like the ones at Viana, from which he had flung Cesare Borgia to his doom. That had been in the year of Our Lord 1507. How long ago was that? Four years. It might as well have been four centuries, it seemed so distant. And in the meantime, other villains, other would-be masters of the world, had come and gone, in search of the Mystery, in search of the Power, and for him, a prisoner at last, the battle to counter them had gone on.

  The battle. His whole life.

  The eagle wheeled and turned, its movements concentrated. Ezio watched it, knowing that it had located prey and was focusing on it. What life could there be down there? But the village that supported the castle, crouched low and unhappy in its shadow, would have livestock, and even a scrap of cultivated land somewhere nearby. A goat, maybe, down there among the tumble of grey rocks that littered the low, surrounding hills; either a young one, too inexperienced, or an old one, too tired, or one that had been injured. The eagle flew against the sun, its silhouette momentarily blotted out by the incandescent light; and then, tightening its circle, it hung, poised, at last, hanging there in the vast blue arena, before it swooped down, crashing through the air like a thunderbolt, and out of sight.

  Ezio turned away from the window and looked around the cell. A bed, hard dark wood, just planks on it, no bedding, a stool, and a table. No crucifix on the wall, and nothing else except the plain pewter bowl and spoon which contained the still-untasted gruel they’d given him. That, and a wooden beaker of water, also untasted. For all his thirst and hunger, Ezio feared drugs that might weaken him, render him powerless when the moment came. And it was all too possible that the Templars would have drugged the food and drink they gave him.

  He turned around in the narrow cell, but the rough stone walls gave him neither comfort nor hope. There was nothing here he could use to escape. He sighed. There were other Assassins, others in the Brotherhood who knew of his mission, who had wanted to accompany him, even, despite his insistence that he travel alone. Perhaps, when no news came, they would take up the challenge. But then, perhaps, it would be too late.

  The question was, how much did the Templars already know? How much of the secret did they already have in their possession?

  His quest, which had now come to such an abrupt halt at the moment of its fruition, had begun soon after his return to Rome, where he had bid farewell to his companions, Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli, on his forty-eighth birthday, Midsummer Day. Niccolò was to return to Florence, Leonardo to Milan. Leonardo had spoken of taking up a pressing offer of much-needed patronage from Francis, heir apparent to the throne of France, and a residence in Amboise, on the River Loire. At least, that was what his letters had revealed to Ezio.

  Ezio smiled at the memory of his friend. Leonardo, whose mind was ever teeming with new ideas though it always took him a while to get around to them. He thought ruefully of the hidden-blade, which had been shattered in the fight when they’d ambushed him. Leonardo—how he missed him!—the one man he could have really trusted to mend it. But at least Leonardo had sent him the plans he’d made for a new device, which he called a parachute. Ezio had had it constructed back in Rome, and it was packed with his kit, and he doubted if the Templars would make much sense of it. He would put it to good use as soon as he got a chance.

  If he got a chance.

  He steeled himself against dark thoughts.

  But there was nothing to do, no means of escape, until they came to get him, to hang him. He would have to plan what to do then. He imagined that, as so often in the past, he would have to extemporize. In the meantime, he’d try to rest his body. Still fit, he’d made sure of that in training before this journey, and the journey itself had hardened him. But he was glad—even in these circumstances—of the chance to rest after that fight.

  It had all started with a letter.

  Under the benevolent eye of Pope Julius II, who had aided him in his vanquishing of the Borgia family, Ezio had rebuilt and restructured the Assassins’ Brotherhood in Rome and established his power base there.

  For a while at least, the Templars were in abeyance, and Ezio left the running of operations in the capable hands of his sister Claudia; but the Assassins remained vigilant. They knew that the Templars would regroup, secretly, elsewhere, insatiable in their quest for the instruments by which they could at last control the world in accordance with their somber tenets.

  They were bested for the moment, but the beast was not dead.

  Ezio drew comfort and satisfaction from the fact—and he shared this dark knowledge with Machiavelli and Leonardo alone—that the Apple of Eden, which had fallen into his care, and which had caused so much anguish and death in the battle for its possession, was buried and hidden deep in the vaults below the Church of San Nicola in Carcere, in a secret sealed room whose location they had marked only with the sacred symbols of the Brotherhood—which only a future Assassin would be able to discern, let alone decipher. The greatest Piece of Eden was safely concealed from the ambitious grasp of the Templars—as Ezio hoped, forever.

  After the damage wrought to the Brotherhood by the Borgias, there had been much to retrieve, much to put in order, and to this task Ezio had devoted himself, uncomplainingly, although he was far more inclined to open air and action than to poring over papers in dusty archives. That was a job more suited to his late father’s secretary, Giulio, or to the bookish Machiavelli; but Machiavelli was busy commanding the Florentine militia these days, and Giulio was long dead.

  Still, Ezio reflected, if he hadn’t saddled himself with the responsibility for what was to him a dreary task, he might never have found the letter. And if another had, that person might not have guessed its significance.

  The letter, which he’d found in a leather satchel, brittle with age, was from Ezio’s father, Giovanni, to his brother Mario, the man who’d taught Ezio the art of war and initiated him into the Brotherhood three long decades earlier. Mario. Ezio flinched at the memory. Mario, who had died at the cruel and cowardly hands of Cesare Borgia in the wake of the battle of Monteriggioni.

  Mario had long since been avenged, but the letter Ezio found opened a new chapter, and its contents proffered him the chance of a new mission. It was 1509 when he’d found it, and he’d just turned fifty; he knew that the chance of new missions seldom came to men of his age. Besides, the letter offered him the hope and the challenge of closing the gates of opportunity on the Templars forever.

  Palazzo Auditore

  Firenze

  iv febbraio MCDLVIII

  Dear Brother—

  The forces against us are gathering strength, and there is a man in Rome who has taken command of our enemies who is perhaps the greatest power you and I will ever have to reckon with. For this reason,
I impart to you, under the seal of utmost secrecy, the following information. If fate should overtake me, ensure—with your life, if necessary—that this information never falls into our enemies’ hands.

  There is, as you know, a castle called Masyaf in Syria, which was once the seat of our Brotherhood. There, over two centuries ago, our then Mentor, Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad, greatest of our Order, established a library deep beneath the fortress.

  I say no more now. Discretion dictates that what else I have to tell you of this must be in conversation and never written down.

  This is a quest I would have longed to accomplish myself, but there is no time now. Our enemies press upon us, and we have no time except to fight back.

  Your Brother Giovanni Auditore

  With this letter was another sheet of paper—a tantalizing fragment, clearly in his father’s handwriting but equally clearly not by him—a translation of a much older document, also there with it, on parchment that accorded very closely with that on which the original Codex pages, uncovered by Ezio and his companions nearly thirty years earlier, had been written:

  I have spent days with the artifact now. Or has it been weeks? Months? The others come from time to time, offering food or distraction; and though I know in my heart I should separate myself from these dark studies, I find it more and more difficult to assume my normal duties. Malik has been supportive, but even now that old edge returns to his voice. Still, my work must continue. This Apple of Eden must be understood. Its function is simple. Elementary, even: dominion. Control. But the process . . . the methods and means it employs . . . THESE are fascinating. It is temptation incarnate. Those subjected to its glow are promised all that they desire. It asks only one thing in return: complete and total obedience. And who can truly refuse? I remember my own moment of weakness when confronted by Al Mualim, my Mentor, and my confidence was shaken by his words. He, who had been like a father, was now revealed to be my greatest enemy. Just the briefest flicker of doubt was all he needed to creep into my mind. But I vanquished his phantoms—restored my self-confidence—and sent him from this world. I freed myself from his control. But now I wonder, is this true? For here I sit—desperate to understand that which I intended to destroy. I sense it is more than just a weapon, a tool for manipulating men’s minds. Or is it? Perhaps it’s simply following its design: showing me what I desire most. Knowledge . . . Always hovering at the edge. Just out of reach. Beckoning. Promising. Tempting . . .

  The old manuscript tailed off there, the rest lost, and, indeed, the parchment was so brittle with age that its edges crumbled as he touched it.

  Ezio understood little of it, but some of it was so familiar that his skin tingled, even his scalp, at the memory.

  It did again, as Ezio recalled it, sitting in his cell in the prison tower at Masyaf, watching the sun set on what might be his last day on earth.

  He visualized the old manuscript in his mind. It was this, more than anything, that had determined him to travel east, to Masyaf.

  Darkness fell quickly. The sky was cobalt blue. Stars already speckled it.

  For no reason, Ezio’s thoughts turned to the young man in white. The man he’d seemed to see in the lull in the fighting. Who had appeared and disappeared so mysteriously, like a vision, but who had, somehow, been real, and who had, somehow, communicated with him.

  THREE

  Preparations for his journey had taken Ezio the rest of that year and spilled into the next. He rode north to Florence and conferred with Machiavelli, though he did not tell him all that he knew. In Ostia, he visited Bartolomeo d’Alviano, who had filled out with too much good food and wine but was as ferocious as ever though he was a family man now. He and Pantasilea had produced three sons and, a month ago, a daughter. What had he said?

  “Time you got a move on, Ezio! None of us is getting any younger.”

  Ezio had smiled. Barto was luckier than he knew.

  Ezio regretted that there was no time to extend his journey farther north to Milan, but he had kept his weaponry in good order—the blades, the pistol, the bracer—and there was no time, either, to tempt Leonardo into finding yet more ways of improving them. Indeed, Leonardo himself had said, after he’d last overhauled them, a year earlier, that they were now beyond improvement.

  That remained to be seen when they were next put to the test.

  Machiavelli had given him other news in Florence, a city he still set foot in only with sadness, so heaped was it with memories of his lost family and his devastated inheritance. His lost love, too—the first and, he thought, perhaps the only true one of his life—Cristina Vespucci. Twelve years—could it really be so long since she had died at the hands of Savonarola’s fanatics? And now another death. Machiavelli had told him about it, hesitantly. The faithless Caterina Sforza, who had blighted Ezio’s life as much as Cristina had blessed it, had just died, a wasted old woman of forty-six, forgotten and poor, her vitality and confidence long since extinguished.

  As he went through life, Ezio began to think that the best company he’d ever truly have would be his own.

  But he had no time to grieve or brood. The months flew by, and soon it was Christmas, and so much still to do.

  At last, early in the New Year, on the Feast of St. Hilary, he was ready, and a day was set for his departure from Rome, via Naples, to the southern port of Bari, with an escort organized by Bartolomeo, who’d ride with him.

  At Bari, he would take ship.

  FOUR

  “God go with you, brother,” Claudia told him on his last morning in Rome. They had risen before dawn. Ezio would leave at first light.

  “You must take care of things here in my absence.”

  “Do you doubt me?”

  “Not anymore. Have you still not forgiven me for that?”

  Claudia smiled. “There is a great beast in Africa called the elephant. They say it never forgets. It is the same with women. But don’t worry, Ezio. I will take care of things until you return.”

  “Or until we have need of a new Mentor.”

  Claudia didn’t reply to that. Her face became troubled. She said: “This mission. Why do you go alone? Why have you said so little of its import?”

  “ ‘He travels fastest who travels alone,’ ” Ezio quoted by way of reply. “As for details, I have left our father’s papers in your keeping. Open them if I do not return. And I have told you all you need to know of Masyaf.”

  “Giovanni was my father, too.”

  “But he entrusted this responsibility to me.”

  “You have assumed it, brother.”

  “I am Mentor,” he said, simply. “It is my responsibility.”

  She looked at him. “Well, travel safely. Write.”

  “I will. In any case, you won’t have to worry about me between here and Bari. Barto will be with me all the way.”

  She still looked worried. Ezio was touched that the tough woman his sister had grown up to be still had a tender spot in her heart for him. His overland journey would lead him through Italy’s southern territories, and they were controlled by the Crown of Aragon. But King Ferdinand hadn’t forgotten his debt to Ezio.

  “If I’m after action,” he told her, reading her thought, “I won’t get any until I set sail. And my course leads pretty far to the north for me to have to worry about Barbary corsairs. We’ll hug the Greek coast after Corfu.”

  “I’m more worried about your completing what you’re setting out to do. Not because I’m worried about you personally—”

  “Oh really? Thank you for that.”

  She grinned. “You know what I mean. From all you’ve said, and Santa Veronica may hold witness that you’ve told me little enough, a good outcome is important for us.”

  “That’s why I’m going now. Before the Templars can regain strength.”

  “Seize the initiative?”

  “That’s about it.”

  She took his face in her hands. He looked at her one last time. At forty-nine, she was still a striking
ly beautiful woman, her dark hair still dark and her fiery nature unquenched. Sometimes he regretted that she had not found another man after the death of her husband, but she was devoted to her children and her work, and made no secret of the fact that she loved living in Rome, which, under Pope Julius, had once again become a sophisticated international city and an artistic and religious mecca.

  They embraced, and Ezio mounted his horse, at the head of the short cavalcade that was accompanying him—fifteen armed riders under Barto, who was already mounted, his heavy horse pawing the dust, impatient to be gone, and a wagon to carry their supplies. For himself, all Ezio needed was in two black leather saddlebags. “I’ll forage as I go along,” he’d told Claudia.

  “You’re good at that,” she’d replied with a wry grin.

  Raising his hand as he settled into the saddle, Ezio wheeled his horse, and, as Barto brought his own steed alongside, they made their way down the east side of the river, away from the Assassins’ Headquarters on Tiber Island, toward the city gates and the long road south.

  It took them fifteen days to reach Bari, and once there, Ezio bade leave of his old friend hastily, in order not to miss the first available flood tide. He took a ship belonging to the Turkish merchant fleet managed by Piri Reis and his family. Once installed in the after cabin of the large lateen-sailed dhow, the Anaan—a freighter on which he was the only passenger—Ezio took the opportunity to check—once again—the essential gear he had taken with him. Two hidden-blades, one for each wrist, his bracer for the left forearm, to deflect the blows of swords, and the spring-loaded pistol that Leonardo had made for him, along with all his other special armaments, from ancient designs found in the pages of the Codex of the Assassins.