Free Assassin's Creed: Black Flag by Oliver Bowden Page B

the end stopped and listened. If I was right, Tom Cobleigh would be lying in wait at the other side. If I was wrong, I could expect a knife in my belly.
    I held my breath, then risked a peek around the side of the outhouse.
    I’d judged right. There was Cobleigh at the far corner. His back was to me and in his fist was a raised knife. Waiting for me to appear, he was a sitting duck. I could have reached him in three quick strides and slipped my blade into his spine before he had a chance to fart.
    But no. I wanted him alive. I wanted to know who his companions had been. Who was the tall, ring-wearing man able to stop Julian from killing me?
    So instead I disarmed him. Literally. I darted forward and I cut his arm off.
    Or, that was the intention, at least. My inexperience as a swordsman was all too obvious, or was it simply because the sword was too blunt? Either way, as I brought it down two-handed on Tom Cobleigh’s forearm, it cut his sleeve and burrowed into the flesh, but didn’t sever the arm. At least he dropped the sword.
    Cobleigh screamed and pulled away. He grabbed at his wounded arm, which jetted blood across the wall of the outhouse and onto the dirt. At the same time I saw a movement in the darkness and remembered the noise I had heard, that possible other presence. Too late. The shadows delivered a figure into the moonlight, and I saw eyes blank behind the hood, work-clothes and boots that were somehow too clean.
    Poor Tom Cobleigh. He never saw it coming and virtually backed onto the stranger’s sword, pinned as the new arrival thrust his blade into his back and through the front of his rib-cage, so that it emerged dripping blood. He looked down at it, a grunt his final worldly utterance before the stranger flicked his sword to one side and his corpse span from the blade and thumped heavily to the dirt.
    There is a saying, isn’t there?
My enemy’s enemy is my friend
. Something like that. But there’s often an exception to the rule and in my case he was a man in a hood with a blood-stained sword. My neck was still stinging from the mark of his ring and my face still throbbed from his fists. Why he’d killed Tom Cobleigh, I had no idea and didn’t care; instead with a warrior’s roar I lunged forward and the shafts of our swords rang like bells in the quiet night.
    He parried easily. One. Two. From going forward I was already being driven back, forced to defend messily and sloppily. Inexperienced swordsman? I wasn’t a swordsman at all. I might as well have been wielding a club or a cosh for all the skill I had with the blade. With a swish of his sword-point he opened a gash in my arm and first I felt warm blood wash down my biceps and soak my sleeve, before feeling the strength seem to leak out of my sword-arm. We weren’t fighting. Not anymore. He was playing with me. Playing with me before he killed me
    “Show me your face,” I gasped, but he made no reply. The only sign he’d even heard was a slight smiling of the eyes behind the hood. The arc of his sword fooled my eyes and I was too slow—and not just a little too slow, but
far too slow—
to stop him from opening a second gash in my arm.
    Again he struck. Again. I’ve since realized that he cut me with all the precision of a medical man, enough to hurt but not permanently injure me. Certainly enough to disarm me. In the end, I didn’t feel the sword drop from my fingertips. I just heard it hit the dirt and looked down to see it on the ground with blood from my wounded arm dripping onto the blade.
    Perhaps I expected him to remove his hood. But he did not. Instead he levelled the point of his sword just below my chin and with his other hand indicated for me to drop to my knees.
    “You don’t know me well enough if you think I’m going to meet my end on my knees, stranger,” I told him, feeling oddly calm in the face of defeat and death. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll stay standing.”
    He spoke in tones deep and flat,