Acre lacks the grandeur of the great cities and the long, sacred chambers of the desert; but beauty makes its home with venom, and sunlight visits the sea beyond the coastal walls like a golden serpent, grinning and spitting from the dark spaces between waves.

Disgusting. Acre, the cripple squatting by the water's edge; Acre, the viper's nest.

He presses it with harsh judgements because it accepts him so readily, because it never seems to catch him at his work.

Acre is home to his own kind; Acre shows him what he would have been if Masyaf had not made something of him first.

Altaïr preys on soft, dark spaces and shies from the fountain squares, the tiered public quarters, the hot intersections where children sit on the stone steps of mock holy places built by the Europeans, breathing dust while they play with iron coins. He dislikes tokens of the wretched kingdoms that exist beyond the red mountains and long wastes, stretched like insolent lions beneath a mercenary sun. He is unnerved by children.

Vials of poisonous herbs press his stomach, hidden a clever fold of the leather girdle. All over his body, he has blades in their oiled sheaths pressing him like tongues. Al Mualim says that he must be conscious of these things; they give him an affected gait, betray him as someone well-loved and dangerous. Though concealed, they can mark him.

He is no stranger to the congested streets, but even he must tread carefully here. In a labyrinth of smoke and bones, it can be difficult to tell an open hand from a fist. Accidents happen. So does murder. He keeps to the harbourfront whenever possible, lets the distant gulls have his back and tries not feel the weight of all that water dragging down on the lip of the world. Tortured lights lunge over the coastal walls, cast up through a haze of seafoam.

He never forgets how much he hates the ocean.

One day, cleared by the Bureau to kill at his own discretion and filled with an odd, inexplicable hatred for the way that the Lionheart's knights pervert the white-and-red of his own Initiate, he makes thirteen landings before noon. Most of the dead are no less than Knights Templar, stewards of the city for their English king. He cuts their throats with the springblade hidden at his wrist and lets them watch the blood snake away between the sandy cobbles in a sluggish, burning slither.

At the last perch, he surfaces from a dullness of the mind to find himself holding not a fistful of torn cloth or hair but a slick cutlet of flesh. This is somehow startling and he is not sure what to do with it. The meat is clean, the ground is filthy; he cannot simply throw it down. It would be wasteful, ignorant. He only wants to hide the scrap, and all the bodies with it. To leave them lying is not enough. He wants them to disappear.

He eats the little piece of the Templar's neck without thinking. Does not taste anything.

Flanked by the corner of the sidestreet, he is suddenly aware that he stands over a fresh corpse in the heat of the afternoon. People walk by on the main thoroughfare, several paces distant and open to the light. A few of them glance at him; then they pretend to have sun-dazzled eyes, and they walk away.

Acre, he remembers, is home to his own kind.

Sheltered in the ruins of an old dockside pavilion, he sits back on his heels and licks his stub finger thoughtfully. Tastes blood.

The strays of the city slink from the soft membranes cast out at twilight. He watches as they sniff the salted wind and skitter like wary shadows before hunger finally devours suspicion and they pitch themselves from the sewers and alleys, brazen, to feed until they are heavy with flesh.

The moon rises. He feels a certain sense of satisfaction.

"You are not my brothers," he says to them, softly. "But when you are hungry, I will feed you."

They look at him with burning eyes in the dark. They greet him with the whisper of teeth unsheathed.

We are always hungry, say the starving dogs and the filthy cats and the mice and the crows and the creeping specks of disease on them all. Can you keep a promise to the bonelickers, the sickly weak, the bodies underfoot? Can you crawl, eagle?

And Altaïr thinks: Eagle of the earth. Home is a cage made from the gray roots of a fig tree hanging over the cliffs.

He thinks: Yes.

All that remains goes to the ocean, like a sacrifice. Scraps of fabric bearing emblems and rank will be pulled out of the harbour by morning. He is glad that they will learn about their dead through fishermen and traders.

The next day is overcast and the sea lies sated, a flat slate wiped of its glyphs. Altaïr climbs a watchtower and kills the lone sentry on detail. He settles himself with his back to the water and the edge of the world; he ignores the subtle tilt to his perception because that is only Acre, slipping toward oblivion; and he looks instead for the white cliffs guarding Masyaf, imagining that he can see them raised against the vague stroke of the horizon, pale as the shoulders of a wary gyrfalcon as it sights blood in the grass.