Assassin's Creed: Revelations Read Free Page B

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