‘And you desire my help?’

‘My forces on their own are weak - your condottieri would be a great asset to my cause.’

‘This is something I will have to discuss with Mario.’

‘He will not refuse me.’

‘And nor will I.’

‘By helping me you will not just be doing me a good deed, you will be taking a stand against the forces of evil against which we have always been united.’

As they spoke, Mario appeared. ‘Ezio, Contessa, we are gathered and await you,’ he said, his face unusually serious.

‘We will talk more of this,’ Ezio told her. ‘I am bidden to a meeting which my uncle has convened. I am expected to explain myself, I think. But let us arrange to see each other afterwards.’

‘The meeting concerns me, too,’ said Caterina. ‘Shall we go in?’

6

The room was very familiar to Ezio. There, on the now-exposed inner wall, the pages of the Great Codex were arranged in order. The desk, usually littered with maps, was cleared, and around it, on severe straight-backed chairs of dark wood, sat those members of the Assassin Brotherhood who had gathered at Monteriggioni, together with those of the Auditore family who were privy to its cause. Mario sat behind his desk, and at one end sat the sober, dark-suited man, still young looking, but with deep lines of thought etched into his forehead, who had become one of Ezio’s closest associates, as well as one of his most unremitting critics: Niccolo Machiavelli. The two men nodded guardedly at one another as Ezio greeted Claudia and his mother, Maria Auditore, matriarch of the family since his father’s death. Maria hugged her only surviving son hard, as if her life depended on it, and looked at him with shining eyes as he broke free and took a seat near Caterina and opposite Machiavelli, who now rose and looked questioningly at him. Clearly there was going to be no polite prologue to the matter in hand.