Revelations

SIXTY-TWO

There were great vaults in the underground city-vast man-made caverns where the gunpowder and arms caches for Manuel’s army were stored. A system of block-and-tackle pulley systems for transporting powder kegs on taut ropeways from one place to another had been set up, and, as Ezio watched from a vantage point in a gallery he had reached on the Fifth Level, he saw groups of Byzantine civilians engaged in just such activity, under the watchful eye of Manuel’s renegade troops. It was a perfect opportunity, and he thanked God that their security was so slack. They were obviously confident that they were under no threat of attack, and he had moved too fast to be overtaken by the discovery of Shahkulu’s corpse and those of his fellow torturers.

He’d replaced his hidden-blade with his hookblade and reloaded his pistol. He got in among a group of workers and watched as a barrel was maneuvered down one of the ropes, between two sets of blocks and tackle. Around them, hundreds of barrels were piled on top of one another, and along the walls, wooden crates of muskets were ranged.

“Steady, now! Steady!” an overseer was shouting. “This is gunpowder, not millet!”

“Got it!” a man operating a winch called back.

Ezio surveyed his surroundings, planning. If he could manage to start one explosion in such a way that it would lead to a chain reaction along the three warehouse vaults he knew there to be…

It might just work.

As he roved between the halls, blending in with the workers, he listened carefully to their conversation, to test their mood. And in doing so, he discovered that not all Byzantines were villains. As usual, it was just the ones whose egos were too big, who were too hungry for power, who were to blame for everyone else’s misfortune.

“It could be worse, you know,” one woman was saying to a male fellow worker.

“Worse? Worse than this?”

“Better the turban of the Turk than the tiara of the Pope. At least the Ottomans have some respect for our Orthodox Church.”

“Shh-h! If anyone heard you…!” warned another woman.

“She’s crazy!” The man turned to the first woman. “Listen to yourself!”

“OK, so I’m crazy. And if you prefer forced labor, living underground like a mole, then fine!”

The man considered this. “Well, it’s certainly true that I don’t want to go to war. I just want to feed my family.”

Another man, an overseer dressed in Templar uniform, had overheard this, and put in, not altogether unsympathetically: “No one wants war, friend-but what can we do? Look at us! Look how we live! Those Turks took our land. Do you think we should just roll over without a fight?”

“No, no,” said the first man to speak. “I just-I don’t know. I’m just tired of this. We’re all so tired of fighting!”

Amen to that, thought Ezio, as he slipped away between two twenty-foot-high tiers of barrels.

Once he was alone, he broached a barrel at ground level with the point of his scimitar and, after collecting a stream of powder in a leather pouch, laid a trail down the aisle between the rows of barrels to the entrance of the second hall. He did the same thing there, and in the third hall, until the trail reached the arched door leading out of it. Then he waited patiently until all the ordinary workers had moved out of harm’s way for the night.

Only the guards remained.

Ezio made sure his retreat was assured, took up a position a few yards from the exit, unleashed his pistol, and fired into the nearest barrel. Then he turned and ran.

The titanic serial explosions that followed rocked the foundations of the underground city like an earthquake. Ceilings crumbled and fell behind him as he fled. Everywhere, there was smoke, dust, rubble, and chaos.