Assassin's Creed: Black Flag (27 page)

FEBRUARY 1722

And so to Africa, where Black Bart—now the most feared and infamous pirate in the Caribbean—continued to evade the British. I knew how he did it, of course, because in his possession was The Observatory Skull, and he was using it—using it to anticipate every move against him.

As I set the
Jackdaw
in pursuit of him, Roberts was stealing French ships and sailing them down the coast to Sierra Leone. His
Royal Fortune
remained at the head of his fleet and he continued sailing south-east along the African coast: raiding, pillaging, plundering as he went, constantly making improvements to his vessels and becoming better armed, more powerful and even more fearsome than he already was.

We had already come across the sickening evidence of his campaign of terror in January, when we sailed into the aftermath of not a battle, but a massacre: Roberts in
The
Royal Fortune
had attacked twelve ships at anchor in Whydah. All had surrendered apart from an English slave ship, the
Porcupine
, and their refusal to lay down arms had made Roberts so furious that he had ordered the ship boarded, then set alight.

His men flooded the decks with tar and set flame to the
Porcupine
with the slaves still on board, chained in pairs below decks. Those who jumped overboard to escape the blaze were torn limb from limb by sharks, the rest burned alive or drowned. Horrible, horrible death.

By the time we arrived the sea was awash with debris. Vile black smoke shrouded the entire neighbourhood, and smouldering in the ocean, almost up to the water-line, was the burnt-out hull of the
Porcupine
.

Disgusted by what we’d seen, we followed Roberts’s trail south, then to Principé, where he’d anchored his ship in the bay and taken a party of men ashore to make camp and gather supplies.

We waited. Then, as night fell, I gave the
Jackdaw
orders to wait an hour before attacking
The Royal Fortune.
Next
I took a row-boat to shore, pulled up the cowl of my robes and followed a path inland, led by the shouts and singing I could hear in the distance. As I grew closer, I smelled the tang of the campfire and then, as I crouched nearby, I could see its soft glow divided by the undergrowth.

I was in no mood to take prisoners, so I used grenadoes. Just as their captain was famous for saying he gave no quarter, neither did I, and as the camp erupted into explosions and screams and a choking cloud of thick black smoke, I strode to its centre with my blade and a pistol at the ready.

The battle was short because I was ruthless. It didn’t matter that some were asleep, some naked and most of them unarmed. Perhaps the men who poured tar on the decks of the
Porcupine
were among those who died at the point of my blade. I hoped so.

Roberts did not stand and fight. He grabbed a torch and ran. Behind us were the screams of my massacre at camp, but I left his crew to their dying as I gave chase, following him up—up a pathway to a guard tower on a promontory.

“Why, who chases me now?” he called. “Is it a spectre come to spook me? Or the gaunt remains of a man I sent to hell, now crawling back to pester me?”

“No, Black Bart Roberts,” I shouted back. “It’s I, Edward Kenway, come to call a halt to your reign of terror!”

He raced into the guard tower and climbed. I followed, emerging back into the night to see Roberts standing at the edge of the tower, a precipice behind him. I stopped. If he jumped, I lost the skull. I couldn’t afford to let him jump.

His arm holding the torch waved. He was signalling—but to what?

“I’ll not fight where you have the advantage, lad,” he said, breathing heavily.

He laid down the torch.

He was going to jump.

I started forward to try and catch him but he’d gone, and I scrambled to the edge on my belly and looked over, only now seeing what had been hidden from me; what Black Bart knew to be there, why he’d been signalling.

It was
The Royal Fortune,
and in the glow of her deck lamps I saw that Roberts had landed on deck and was already dusting himself off and peering up the rock-face to where I lay. Around him were his men, and in the next instant I was pulling back from the lip as muskets began popping and balls began smacking into the stone around me.

Not far away, I saw the
Jackdaw
, right on time. Good lads. I picked up the torch and began signalling to them, and soon they were close enough for me to see Anne at the tiller, her hair blowing in the wind as she brought the
Jackdaw
to bear by the cliff, close enough for me to . . .

Jump.

The chase was on.

We pursued him through the narrow rock passages of the coast-line, firing our carriage-guns when we were able. In return his men lobbed mortar shot at us and mine returned with musket fire and grenadoes whenever we were within range.

Then—
Sail ho!
—came the British naval warship the HMS
Swallow
, and with a lurch of horror I realized she was after Roberts. This heavily armed, determined warship was no doubt as sickened by the stories of his exploits as we had been. She was after Roberts too.

Leave them to it? No. I couldn’t allow them to sink the
Fortune
. Roberts had The Observatory Skull with him. I couldn’t risk its sinking to the bottom of the sea, never to be seen again.

“There is a device within that needs taking,” I told Anne. “I have to board her myself.”

Carriage-guns boomed in the morning, the three ships locked in combat now, the
Jackdaw
and
Swallow
with a common enemy but not allies. We came under fire from all sides, as British shot peppered our gunwales and shook our shrouds. I gave Anne the order to make haste away.

Me, I was going for a swim.

It isn’t easy to swim from one ship to another, especially if both are involved in battle. But then, most are not gifted with my determination. I had the cover of the half-light on my side, not to mention the fact that the crew of the
Fortune
already had enough to contend with. When I climbed aboard I found a ship in disarray. A ship I was able to pass through virtually undetected.

I took my fair share of scalps along the way, and I’d cut the throat of the first mate and killed the quartermaster before I found Black Bart, who turned to face me with his sword drawn. He had changed, I noted, almost with amusement. He had put on his best bib and tucker to meet the English: a crimson waistcoat and breeches, a hat with a red feather, a pair of pistols on silk slings over his shoulders. What hadn’t changed were those eyes of his. Those dark eyes that were surely a reflection of the blackened, corroded soul inside.

We fought, but it was not a fight of any distinction. Black Bart Roberts was a cruel man, a cunning man, a wise man if wisdom can exist in a man so devoid of humanity. But he was not a swordsman.

“By Jove,” he called as we fought, “Edward Kenway. How can I not be impressed by the attention you’ve paid me?”

I refused him the courtesy of a reply. I fought on, relentlessly, confident not in my skill—for that would have been arrogant, the Edward Kenway of old—but in a belief that I would emerge the victor. Which I did, and at last he fell to the deck with my blade embedded in him, pulling me into a crouch.

He smiled, his fingers going to where the blade was stuck in his chest. “A merry life and a short one, as promised,” he said. “How well I know myself.” He smirked a little. His eyes bored into me. “What of you, Edward? Have you found the peace you seek?”

“I’m not aiming so high as that,” I told him, “for what is peace but a confusion between two wars?”

He looked surprised for a second, as though thinking me incapable of anything other than grunts and demands for gold or another tankard. How pleasing it was that in his final moments, Bartholomew Roberts witnessed the change in me, knew that his death at my hands was not driven by greed but by something nobler.

“You’re a stoic then.” He laughed. “Perhaps I was wrong about you. She might have had some use for you after all.”

“She?” I said, puzzled. “Of whom do you speak?”

“Oh . . . She who lies in wait. Entombed. I had hoped to find her, to see her again. To open the door of the temple and hear her speak my name once more Aita . . .”

Mumbo jumbo. More bloody mumbo jumbo.

“Talk sense, man.”

“I was born too soon, like so many others before.”

“Where’s the device, Roberts?” I asked him, tired now—tired of his riddles, even at the end.

From his clothes he pulled the skull and offered it to me with fingers that shook.

“Destroy this body, Edward,” he said, as I took it and the last of the life seeped from him. “The Templars . . . If they take me . . .”

He died. It was not for him, nor for the peace of his soul, that I tossed his body overboard, consigning it to the depths. But so that the Templars would not have him. Whoever—
whatever
—this Sage had been, the safest place for his body was at the bottom of the sea.

And now, Grand Master Torres. I’m coming for you.

Arriving in Havana a few days before, I’d found the city in a state of high alert. Torres, it appeared, had been warned of my imminent arrival and was taking no chances: soldiers patrolled the streets, citizens were being searched and forced to reveal their faces, and Torres himself had gone into hiding—accompanied, of course, by his trusty bodyguard, El Tiburón.

I’d used The Observatory Skull. Under the watchful eye of the Assassin Bureau Chief, Rhona Dinsmore, I took a vial of Torres’s blood in one hand and the skull in the other. As she watched me work I wondered how I might look to her: Like a madman? A magician? A man using ancient science?

“Through the blood of the governor, we can see through his eyes,” I told her.

She looked as intrigued as she did doubtful. After all, I wasn’t sure of it myself. I’d seen it work in The Observatory, but in images conjured up in the chamber by Roberts. Here I was trying something new.

I needn’t have worried. The red of the blood in the vial seemed to bathe the inside of the skull and its eyeholes burned scarlet as the skull first began to glow, then display images on its polished dome. We were looking through the eyes of Governor Laureano Torres, who was looking . . .

“That’s . . . That’s by the church,” she said, amazed.

Moments later I’d been in pursuit, followed Torres as far as his fort, where the trap had been sprung. At some point a decoy had taken Torres’s place. It was he who fell beneath my blade, and there, waiting for me beneath the walls of the fort, implacable, silent as ever, was El Tiburón.

 • • • 

You should have killed me when you had the chance,
I thought. Because whereas on the last occasion he’d bested me, it was a different Edward Kenway he’d met in battle on that occasion; things had changed in the meantime—
I
had changed—and I had much to prove to him . . .

So if he’d hoped to beat me easily, as he had before, he was disappointed. He came forward, feinting then switching sides, but I anticipated the move, defended easily, hit him on the counter, opened a nick in his cheek.

There was no grunt of pain, not from El Tiburón. But in those cloudy eyes was just the merest hint, the tiniest glimmer of something I hadn’t seen last time we fought. Fear.

That gave me a boost better than any shot of liquor, and once again I came forward with my blades flashing. He was forced onto the back foot, defending left and right, trying to find a weak spot in my attack but failing.
Where were his guards?
He hadn’t summoned them, believing this would be an easy kill.

But how wrong he was, I thought, as I pressed forward, dodged to my left and swiped back-handed with my blade, opening a gash in his tunic and a deep cut in his stomach that began gushing blood.

It slowed him down. It weakened him. I allowed him to come forward, pleased to see his sword strokes becoming more wild and haphazard, as I carried on harrying him. Small but bloody strikes. Wearing him down.

He was slow then, his pain making him careless. Again I was able to drive forward with my cutlass, slash upwards with my hidden blade and twist it in his stomach. A mortal blow, surely?

His clothes were ragged and blood-stained. Blood from his stomach wound splattered to the ground, and he staggered with pain and exhaustion, looking at me mutely, but with all the pain of defeat in his eyes.

Until at last I put him down and he lay, losing precious life-blood, slowly dying in the heartless Havana sun. I crouched, blade to his throat ready to plunge it up beneath his chin into his brain. End it quickly.

“You humbled me once, and I took that hard lesson and I bettered myself . . .” I told him. “Die knowing that for all our conflicts, you helped make a soldier out of a scoundrel.”

My blade made a moist, squelching sound as I finished it.

“Leave this life for a lasting peace, down among the dead,” I told his corpse, and left.

Desperate, Torres had fled. With a last throw of the dice, he’d decided to seek out The Observatory for himself.

I took the
Jackdaw
in pursuit, my heart sinking as with each passing hour there was no sighting of Torres, and with each passing hour we grew closer to Tulum. Would he find it? Did he already know where it was? Had he found another poor soul to torture. An Assassin?

We came around the coast of Tulum, and there was Torres’s galleon at anchor, smaller consorts bobbling by her sides. We saw the glint of spyglasses and I ordered hard port. Moments later black squares appeared in the hull of the Spanish galleon and sunlight shone dully off gun-barrels before there was a thud and a puff of fire and smoke, and balls were smacking into us and into the water around us.

The battle would continue but it would have to continue without its captain and also—as she insisted on coming with me—its quartermaster. Together Anne and I dived off the gunwale into bright blue water and swam for shore, then began the trek up the path to The Observatory.

It wasn’t long before we came upon the first corpses.

Just as the men on the galleon were fighting for their lives against the onslaught of the
Jackdaw
, so the men with Torres had been doing the same. They had been ambushed by the natives, the guardians of The Observatory, and from up ahead we could hear the sounds of more conflict, desperate shouts as the men at the rear of the column tried in vain to frighten off the natives.

“This land is under the protection of King Philip. Tell your men to disperse or die!”

But it was they who would die. As we passed through the undergrowth a short distance away from them I saw their terrified, uncomprehending faces go from the monolithic edifice of The Observatory—where had
that
come from?—to scanning the long grass around them. They would die like that: terrified and uncomprehending.

At the entrance to The Observatory were more bodies but the door was open and some had clearly made it inside. Anne bade me go in; she would stand guard, and so for the second time, I entered that strange and sacred place, that huge temple.

As I stepped inside I remembered the last time, when Roberts murdered his men rather than let them be unbalanced by what they saw in The Observatory. Sure enough, just as I crept into the vast entrance chamber, terrified Spanish soldiers were fleeing screaming, their eyes somehow blank, as though whatever life in them had already been extinguished. As though they were corpses running.

They ignored me and I let them go.
Good. They’d distract the guardians of The Observatory on the outside.
I pressed onwards, climbing stone steps, passing along the bridge chamber—more terrified soldiers—then towards the main control chamber.

I was halfway there when The Observatory began to hum. The same skull-crushing sound I’d heard on my first visit. I broke into a run, pushing past more frantic soldiers trying to make their escape and dashing into the main chamber where stone crumbled from the walls as The Observatory seemed to shake and vibrate with the droning noise.

Torres stood at the raised control panel, trying to make himself heard above the din, calling to guards who were either no longer there or trying to make their escape, trying to negotiate the stone that fell around us.

“Search the area. Find a way to stop this madness,” he screamed with his hands over his ears. He turned and with a lurch saw me.

“He’s here. Kill him,” he shouted, pointing. Spittle flew. In his eyes was something I’d never have believed him capable of: panic.

“Kill him!”
Just two of his brave but foolhardy men were up to the challenge, and as the chamber shook, seemingly working itself loose around us, I made short work of them. Until the only men left in the chamber were Torres and me.

Then the Templar Grand Master cast his eye around the chamber, his gaze travelling from the dead bodies of his men back to me. The panic had gone now. Back was the Torres I remembered, and in his face was not defeat, nor fear, nor even sadness at his imminent death. There was fervour.

“We could have worked together, Edward,” he appealed with his hands outstretched. “We could have taken power for ourselves and brought these miserable empires to their knees.”

He shook his head as if frustrated with me, as though I were an errant son.

(N
o, sorry, mate, but I’m an errant son no longer.)

“There is so much potential in you, Edward,” he insisted, “so much you have not yet accomplished. I could show you things. Mysteries beyond anything you could imagine.”

No.
He and his kind had done nothing for me save to seek the curtailment of my freedom and take the lives of my friends. Starting with the night in Bristol when a torch in a farmyard was flung, his kind had brought me nothing but misery.

I drove the blade in and he grunted with pain as his mouth filled with blood that spilled over his lips.

“Does my murder fulfil you?” he asked weakly.

No, no it didn’t.

“I’m only seeing a job done, Torres. As you would have done with me.”

“As we
have
done, I think,” he managed. “You have no family anymore, no friends, no future. Your losses are far greater than ours.”

“That may be, but killing you rights a far greater wrong than ever I did.”

“You honestly believe that?”

“You would see all of mankind herded into a neatly furnished prison, safe and sober, yet dull beyond reason and sapped of all spirit. So, aye, with everything I’ve seen and learnt in these last years, I
do
believe it.”

“You wear your convictions well,” he said. “They suit you . . .”

It was as though I’d been in a trance. The noise of The Observatory, the rattle of stone falling around me, the screams of the fleeing troops: all of it had faded into the background as I spoke to Torres, and I only became aware of it again when the last breath died on his lips and his head lolled on the stone. There was the noise of a distant battle, soldiers being ruthlessly despatched, before Anne, Adewalé and Ah Tabai burst into the chamber. Their swords were drawn and streaked with blood. Their pistols smoked.

“Torres awakened The Observatory something fierce,” I said to Ah Tabai. “Are we safe?”

“With the device returned, I believe so,” he replied, indicating the skull.

Anne was looking around herself, open-mouthed. Even partly destroyed in the wake of the rockfall, the chamber was still a sight to see. “What do you call this place?” she said, awe-struck.

“Captain Kenway’s folly,” said Adewalé, shooting me a smile.

“We will seal this place and discard the key,” announced Ah Tabai. “Until another Sage appears, this door will remain locked.”

“There were vials when I came here last,” I told him, “filled with the blood of ancient men, Roberts said. But they’re gone now.”

“Then it’s up to us to recover them,” said Ah Tabai with a sigh, “before the Templars catch wind of this. You could join us in that cause.”

I could. I could. But . . .

“Only after I fix what I mangled back home.”

The old Assassin nodded, then as though reminded of it, he removed a letter from his robes that he handed to me.

“It arrived last week.”

They left me as I read it.

I think you know the news it contained, don’t you, my sweet?