Kenway - Bart Assassination

Me, I was going for a swim.
It isn’t easy to swim from one ship to another, especially if both are involved in battle. But then most are not gifted with my determination. I had the cover of the half-light on my side, not to mention the fact that the crew of the Fortune already had enough to contend with. When I climbed aboard I found a ship in disarray. A ship I was able to pass through virtually undetected.
I took my fair share of scalps along the way, and I’d cut the throat of the first mate and killed the quartermaster before I found Black Bart, who turned to face me with his sword drawn. I noted, almost with amusement, that he had changed his clothes. He had put on his best bib and tucker to meet the English: a crimson waistcoat and breeches, a hat with a red feather, a pair of pistols on silk slings over his shoulders. What hadn’t changed were those eyes of his. Those dark eyes that were surely a reflection of the blackened, corroded soul inside.
We fought, but it was not a fight of any distinction. Black Bart Roberts was a cruel man, a cunning man, a wise man, if wisdom can exist in a man so devoid of humanity. But he was not a swordsman.
‘By Jove,’ he called as we fought. ‘Edward Kenway. How can I not be impressed by the attention you’ve paid me?’
I refused him the courtesy of a reply. I fought on relentlessly, confident not in my skill – for that would have been the arrogant Edward Kenway of old – but in a belief that I would emerge the victor. Which I did. And at last he fell to the deck with my blade embedded in him, pulling me into a crouch.
He smiled, his fingers going to where the blade was stuck in his chest. ‘A merry life and a short one, as promised,’ he said.
‘How well I know myself.’ He smirked a little. His eyes bored into me. ‘And what of you, Edward? Have you found the peace you seek?’
‘I’m not aiming so high as that,’ I told him, ‘for what is peace but a confusion between two wars?’
He looked surprised for a second, as though thinking me incapable of anything other than grunts and demands for gold or another tankard. How pleasing it was that in his final moments Bartholomew Roberts witnessed the change in me, knew that his death at my hands was not driven by greed but by something nobler.
‘You’re a stoic then,’ he laughed. ‘Perhaps I was wrong about you. She might have had some use for you after all.’
‘She?’ I said, puzzled. ‘Of whom do you speak?’
‘Oh … She who lies in wait. Entombed. I had hoped to find her, to see her again. To open the door of the temple and hear her speak my name once more. Aita …’
Mumbo-jumbo. More bloody mumbo-jumbo.
‘Talk sense, man.’
‘I was born too soon, like so many others before.’
‘Where’s the device, Roberts?’ I asked him, tired now – tired of his riddles, even at the end.
From his clothes he pulled the skull and offered it to me with fingers that shook.
‘Destroy this body, Edward,’ he said as I took it and the last of life seeped from him. ‘The Templars … If they take me …’
And he died. And it was not for him, nor for the peace of his soul, that I tossed his body overboard, consigning it to the depths. But so that the Templars would not have him. Whoever – whatever – this Sage had been, the safest place for his body was at the bottom of the sea.

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, Chapter 63