‘Ezio, are you all right?’

‘Th … th … there was a fight - with the Pope, with Rodrigo Borgia. I left him for dead.’

Ezio trembled violently. He could not help himself. Could it be real? Minutes earlier - though it seemed like one hundred years ago - he had been involved in a life-and-death struggle with the man he most hated and feared - the Leader of the Templars, the vicious organization bent on the destruction of the world Ezio and his friends in the Brotherhood of the Assassins had fought so hard to protect.

But he had beaten them. He had used the great powers of the mysterious artefact, the Apple, the sacred Piece of Eden vouchsafed to him by the old gods to ensure that their investment in humanity did not vanish in bloodshed and iniquity. And he had emerged triumphant.

Or had he?

What had he said? ‘I left him for dead?’ And indeed Rodrigo Borgia, the vile old man who had clawed his way to the head of the Church and ruled it as Pope had indeed seemed to be dying. He had taken poison.

But now a hideous doubt gripped Ezio. In showing mercy, mercy which was at the core of the Assassin’s Creed and which should, he knew, be granted to all but those whose life would endanger the rest of mankind, had he in fact been weak?

If he had, he would never let his doubt show, not even to his uncle Mario, leader of the Brotherhood. He squared his shoulders. He had left the old man to die by his own hand. He had left him with time to pray. He had not stabbed him through the heart to make sure of him.

A cold hand closed over his heart as a clear voice in his mind said, You should have killed him.

He shook himself to get rid of his demons as a dog shakes off water after a swim. But still his thoughts dwelt on his mystifying experience in the strange vault beneath the Sistine Chapel in Rome’s Vatican; the building from which he had just emerged into the blinking, unfamiliar sunlight.