Chapter Text
Arno’s head was still thick with whatever the Assassins had made him drink as Bellec marched him through the Assassin Sanctuary. His head pounded. He’d had a heel of bread that day to sop up the beer and wine he’d been at since the morning, and now with the Council’s ceremonial drug dulling his wits further, he was worried he would be sick as a dog the next day. He wasn’t sure if that was a bad thing. He had long stopped thinking that coming to this secret organisation, whatever it really was, was a good idea, but he wasn’t quite ready to cross the line of regret. If what Bellec had said in the Bastille was true, then the Assassins could help him. They could provide the tools and training he needed to gather the flailing pieces of his life so he could make something of them. It was the only thing that mattered to him, now. It was all that he had, after Monsieur de la Serre’s murder.
The walls pressed close, further compounding his headache. Arno was too stunned the think much on the fact that a veritable warren existed beneath Île Saint-Louis, much less the legitimacy it gave all that Bellec had talked of in prison. Though Bellec had spoken in length of the Assassins in the Bastille, he had been tight-lipped about their exact operations. That, he had said, was information too precious to speak of in public spaces. When Arno had pointed out that a prison was hardly the most public of places, Bellec had laughed at him and shaken his head, which had left Arno feeling stupid and angry.
“There’s always someone listening,” he said, before knocking him on his arse for the uncounted time that day.
The Sanctuary’s stone corridors reminded Arno very much of the Bastille.
They walked on. Arno glimpsed a mess hall, a chapel, an empty room with a chalk square drawn on the floor, storage rooms filled with shelves of equipment, sacks of flour, chests, but Bellec shown no interest for any of it. He soon turned into a corridor studded with heavy wooden doors, which Arno quickly realised were sleeping cells. The iron nails in the doors were black with age, their edges worn dark and smooth by centuries of hands, and he finally stopped and thumped on one. He waited impatiently for Arno to follow him inside. “This, gentlemen, is Arno Dorian. Be nice.” Before he turned to leave, Bellec muttered to Arno, “And if you don’t want to get your hide tanned, you mention nothing about the de la Serres, you understand?”
“I’m not an idiot,” Arno said in irritable reply.
“You’ve yet to prove to me otherwise.” Bellec snapped the door shut behind him, and left Arno standing in the centre of the room clutching a bed sheet and a fresh shirt. The straps of the hidden blade dug into his arm.
There were three others in the cell, and they sat up in beds pushed against the walls. A fourth one stood empty in the far corner. Arno hunched his shoulders as he made for it, his skin itching under the eyes that followed him.
“Arno, is it?” the first one he passed said. Arno gave a jerking nod in response.
“Leave him be; he’s still got the crazy in his blood, you can see it in his eyes,” another said, laying down and turning his back to the room. “Give the man some breathing space.”
“Where’s the bucket?” the third muttered. “God knows I needed it.”
“Because you’re you. Arno, do you want a bucket?”
Arno shook his head. He just wanted to sleep.
“Well, we can leave introductions to the morning,” the second man said. “But if you want the short version, Arno Dorian: welcome to your life-long service in the never-ending shit fight for the freedom of humanity, hurrahs all around!”
No one returned them. Arno unravelled one sheet from his pile of them and stepped out of his shoes. He lay down on the mattress without making it up, bundling the rest of his pile into a pillow and draping his sheet over himself. He turned his back to the room and faced the wall, exhausted, his thoughts sluggish. The others settled back to sleep.
The Brotherhood, these new people, along with everything he himself was, was a problem for tomorrow.