Free Apotheosis of the Immortal by Joshua A. Chaudry Page B

shouted.
    “Your mission is over; now train me.” Elijah pinned him with a stare.
    Hassan huffed and turned his back, running his fingers through his hair and taking a deep breath. “I can’t train you here; we must go back to Alamut. It is a long journey.” His eyes had softened, and Elijah could see he was getting tired. “We have to cross the sea.”

Chapter 15
     
    Elijah had never been on a ship before, and the trip was miserable. It seemed to last forever, especially since he was nauseous most of the time. After finally arriving on shore near Antioch, it didn’t take them long to steal a pair of horses and make their way to Qadmus, the nearest Assassin stronghold. They were welcomed there, given food and a bath.
    The next morning they left for Alamut. After another arduous journey, they finally arrived at a fortress near the Caspian Sea. The fortress was located at the end of an almost vertical path near the top of a two thousand meter-high ridge in the Elburz Mountains. This fortress, where Elijah would learn the art of weaponry, seemed nearly impenetrable.
    Hassan began his lessons right away. The first weapon Elijah learned was the short sword. Elijah proved to be a keen student of the martial arts and Hassan agreed to further his training. He soon learned the dagger and then the sword and dagger in combination. Along with poison, paranoia, fear, and the art of a well-polished tongue, these were the most common weapons of the Assassins of Alamut; every soldier was trained extensively in these arts.
    Elijah trained night and day, never sleeping. When Hassan was away on a mission, Elijah worked tirelessly to master the most recent techniques that had been shown to him. Soon he began to study on his own and even develop his own style of fighting.
    He was given his own bedchamber, which he rarely entered; the sands of the training grounds had become his new home. When he wasn’t there, he was poring over the wealth of knowledge in Alamut’s famous library. Quickly surpassing his mother’s sporadic lessons in reading and writing, he practically inhaled the library’s vast array of contents, easily absorbing new languages and arcane subjects. He read all the books on warfare, fighting techniques, and weapons training first. From there, he moved to history, religion, alchemy, astronomy and the seven liberal arts.
    Once he had bled those sections dry he moved on to the mechanical arts. He studied agriculture, hunting, navigation, weaving, and medicine before he found a section on blacksmithing. He studied metalworking extensively, determined to make his own weapons. Then he practiced constantly, until satisfied he was proficient enough to cast the weapon he believed shamed all others, a weapon that seemed to have been forgotten by time.
    Many of the old books he had read cataloged weapons that had been used in different ages and cultures around the world. There was one that seemed to leap from the page every time to catch his eye. It was a thick, curved iron sword with a single edge; it could be used to thrust like a straight sword, but it could also be used to hack with nearly the strength of an axe. It was called a kopis .
    The kopis was a one-handed sword used by the ancient Spartans, and a truly vicious-looking weapon. “…the quintessential adornment of a truly bad man.” The book read like King Leonidas was the devil himself, commanding a legion of three hundred demonic minions. The book was written by a Roman, so the hateful aspect vexed Elijah. Throughout his studies of history, the Greeks seemed to have been the only peoples who ever gained and held Rome’s respect.
    Still, he knew every sword was only a fashioned hunk of metal; the truth of its virtue and vice lay only in the strength of its molding and composition, the character of the forge, the sharpness of the edge—and the distribution of the weight, which was key to the weapon’s balance and to the fierceness of its blow. The only other