Assassin's creed : Black flag - Bowden Oliver. Страница 43

It turned out that the ale, the sanctuary and the good company wasn’t the only reason we’d been graced with the presence of Charles Vane and Calico Jack.

“The word is, the Cuban governor himself is fixing to receive a mess of gold from a nearby fort,” said Vane when we’d availed ourselves of tankards and lit our pipes. “Until then, it’s just sitting there, itching to be took.”

And that was how we found ourselves laying siege to Porto Guarico . . .

 • • •

Well, the fight had been bloody, but short. With every man tooled up and our black flags flying, we brought four galleons to the bay and hammered the fortress with shot, just to say we’d arrived.

Then we dropped anchor, launched yawls, then waded through the shallows, snarling, shouting war cries, our teeth bared. I got my first look at Blackbeard in full flight, and he was indeed a fearsome sight. For battle he dressed entirely in black, and the fuses in his beard coughed and spluttered so that he seemed to be alive with snakes and wreathed in a terrifying fog.

There are not many soldiers who won’t turn tail and run at the sight of that charging up the beach towards them, which is what a lot of them did. Those brave souls who remained behind to fight or die, they did the latter.

I took my fair share of lives, my blade on my right hand, as much a part of me as my fingers and thumbs, my pistol blasting in my left. When my pistols were empty I drew my cutlass. There were some of our men who had never seen me in action before, and you’ll forgive me for admitting there was an element of showmanship in my combat as I span from man to man, cutting down guards with one hand, blasting with the other, felling two, sometimes three, at a time; driven, not by ferocity or blood-lust—I was no animal, there was little savagery or cruelty to what I did—but by skill, grace and dexterity. There was a kind of artistry to my killing.

When the fort was ours I entered the room where Laureano Torres sat smoking his pipe, overseeing the money count, two soldiers as his bodyguards.

It was the work of a moment for his two soldiers to become two dead soldiers. He gave me a look of scorn and distaste as I stood in my Assassin’s robes—slightly tatty by now but still a sight to see—and my blade clicked back into place beneath my fist while the blood of his guards leaked through the sleeve.

“Well hello, Your Excellency,” I said. “I had word you might be here.”

He chuckled. “I know your face, pirate. But your name was borrowed the last time we spoke.”

Duncan Walpole. I missed him.

By now Adewale had joined us in the treasure room, and as his gaze went from the corpses of the soldiers to Torres, his eyes hardened, perhaps as he remembered being shackled in one of the governor’s vessels.

“So,” I continued, “what’s a Templar Grand Master doing so far from his castillo?”

Torres assumed a haughty look. “I’d rather not say.”

“And I’d rather not cut yer lips off and feed ’em to ya,” I said cheerily.

It did the trick. He rolled his eyes but some of his smugness had evaporated. “After his escape from Havana we offered a reward for The Sage’s recapture. Today someone claims to have found him. This gold is his ransom.”

“Who found him?” I asked.

Torres hesitated. Adewale put his hand to the hilt of his sword and his eyes burned hatefully at the Templar.

“A slaver by the name of Laurens Prins.” Torres sighed. “He lives in Kingston.”

I nodded. “We like this story, Torres, and we want to help you finish it. But we’re going to do it our way using you and your gold.”

He had no choice, and he knew it. Our next stop was Kingston.

THIRTY-NINE

So it was that some days later Adewale and I found ourselves roasting in the heat of Kingston as we shadowed the governor as he made his way to his meeting with Prins.

Prins, it was said, had a sugar plantation in Kingston. The Sage had been working for him but Prins had got wind of the bounty and thought he could make the sale.

Storm the plantation, then? No. Too many guards. Too high a risk of alerting The Sage. Besides, we didn’t even know for certain he was there.

Instead we wanted to use Torres to buy the man: Torres would meet Prins, give him half the gold and offer the other half in return for the deliverance of The Sage; Adewale and I would swoop in, take The Sage, whisk him off, then prise out of him the location of The Observatory. Then we would be rich.

Simple, eh? What could go wrong with such a well-wrought plan?

The answer, when it came, came in the shape of my old friend James Kidd.

At the port, Torres was greeted by Prins, who was old and overweight and sweating in the sun, and the two of them walked together, talking, with two bodyguards slightly in front of them, two behind.

Would Torres raise the alarm? Perhaps. And if he did, then Prins surely had enough men at his command to overpower us easily. But if that happened, Torres knew that my first sword slash would be across his throat and if that happened, none of us would see The Sage again.

The funny thing is, I didn’t see him. Not at first. Instead it was as though I sensed him or that I became aware of him. I found myself looking around, the way you do if you smell burning when you shouldn’t. What’s that smell? Where’s that coming from?

Only then did I see him. A figure who loitered in a crowd at the other end of the pier, part of the background but visible to me. When he turned his face, I saw who it was. James Kidd. Not here to take the air and see the sights by the look of him. Here on Assassin business. Here to kill . . . who? Prins? Torres?

Jaysus. We kept close to the harbour wall as I led Adewale over, grabbed Kidd and dragged him into a narrow alleyway between two fishing huts.

“Edward, what the hell are you doing here?” He writhed in my grip but I held him easily. (I’d think back to that later—how easily I was able to pin him to the hut wall.)

“I’m tailing these men to The Sage,” I told him. “Can you hold off until he appears?”

Kidd’s eyebrows shot up. “The Sage is here?”

“Aye, mate, he is, and Prins is leading us straight to him.”

“Jaysus.” He pulled a frustrated face but I wasn’t offering him a choice. “I’ll stay my blade for a time—but not long.”

Torres and Prins had moved off by then and we had no choice but to follow. I followed Kidd’s lead, on-the-spot Assassin training in the art of stealth. It worked like a dream. By staying at a certain distance we were able to remain out of sight and pick up on snippets of conversation, like Torres’s getting peeved at being made to hang on.

“I grow tired of this walk, Prins,” he was saying. “We must be close by now.”

As it turned out, we were. But close to what? Not to Prins’s plantation, that much was certain. Ahead was the dilapidated wooden fencing and odd, incongruous arched entrance of what looked like a graveyard.

“Yes, just here,” Prins answered him. “We must be on equal footing, you see? I’m afraid I don’t trust Templars any more than you must trust me.”

They stepped inside and we loitered.

“Well if I’d known you were so skittish, Prins, I’d have brought you a bouquet of flowers,” Torres said with forced humour, and with a last look around, he entered the graveyard.

Prins laughed. “Ah, I don’t know why I bother . . . For the money, I suppose. Vast sums of money . . .” His voice had trailed off. With a nod we slipped inside the cemetery, keeping low and using the crooked markers as cover, one eye on the centre where Torres, Prins and his four minders had congregated.