The Final Game

By: P M Charles

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

They stopped sending assassins after him. That was when he should have been afraid.

Malek al-Aswad has spent a lifetime tearing holes in the machine. Templar, then Assassin, then a ghost with a quill and a knife, burning the ledgers of men who bought and sold wars. He exposed the Merchant Lords. He walked the courts of kings. He went into the archives and dragged out what the Dominion had spent four hundred years unwriting.

And now the Veiled Hand does not want him dead.

It wants him at the table.

In a citadel cut into a mountain, twelve figures in undyed robes wait with their ledgers open. They do not deny what they have done. They itemise it. Beneath a ceiling painted with the night sky as it hung over the world's first murder, the First Curator turns a brass orrery with a surgeon's hands and explains the shape of Malek's whole life to him. Every death he prevented. Every empire he broke. Every rebellion the system needed, and got, exactly on schedule.

You are not an exception. You are a function. You always have been.

The worst of it is the arithmetic. It holds.

Elias waits on a ruined throne above Acre with two ledgers and no apology. In a city with no masters left, Isabella of Montferrat holds a fragile compact together with nothing but patience and the terror of what follows if she lets go. And in a monastery scriptorium, a chronicler paid in stolen pigment has been ordered to write the true and final account of the Assassin Malek, so that the stories will finally stop.

Malek can destroy the machine. Or he can take the seat and run it better than anyone who came before.

Every man who ever sat down was certain he would be the exception.

The Final Game is the fourth book in The Assassins' Order, a historical thriller series of blades, ledgers, and the hidden war beneath the Crusades. For readers of Bernard Cornwell, Robyn Young, and Umberto Eco.