"Why were you looking for us then, Niccolò?" she asked, knowing that he wouldn't have done that kind of thing without a reason that at least made sense to him.
"Cesare, unsettled by both our growing success in general and Aeon's presence in particular, has sent for one of his chief tacticians, in order that he might recover from the losses our people have been causing him," Niccolò said, seeming rather dourly amused by the prospect.
Maria could fully see why, since there was little chance that even one of Cesare Borgia's elite would be able to make the man in black so much as blink. Still, it would be troublesome for the rest of them, having another Borgia lackey running around within the environs of a city they were trying to restore freedom to. Of course, Niccolò wouldn't have come to find them if he hadn't had some kind of a plan to get rid of the man.
"Cesare has sent along a horse and an outrider," Niccolò continued, and then proceeded to detail the appearance of both men. "I trust neither of them will be a problem for either of you?"
"Ma certo," Ezio said, stepping up to Niccolò's side for a moment as the pair of them conferred in low tones, and then turning to make his way back up and out of the Brotherhood's Headquarters once more.
"Was that all you wanted to say, Niccolò?" Maria asked, fully prepared to find something that she could do herself if such ended up being the case, in the end.
~AC: Bro~
As he made his way out into the open air of Roma once again, Ezio quickly called up his second-sight so that he would be more easily able to determine just when and from where Cesare's tactician was going to be coming from. Yes, he'd gotten a description of the man when Machiavelli had set him on his trail, but as to the descriptions of the outrider or the horses the pair of them would be riding, Machiavelli had been the first to admit that he hadn't had much of an idea on that front.
In light of that, it was simply easier to make use of his second-sight for such a thing; Machiavelli had even been in favor of such an idea, himself.
Once he'd managed to locate the man and his small entourage – smaller than he'd honestly been expecting from any of the Borgia, but then it was possible that Cesare was either attempting to sneak the man into Roma under the cover of the swiftly-falling darkness, or else that he was simply beginning to run out of men after he'd sent so many of them to their deaths against the Brotherhood – Ezio carefully hitched up his horse, and then swiftly made his way up into the trees that lined the path they were taking. Specifically, the one that Cesare's man and his entourage were soon to pass under on their way to their present destination. The destination that they were never going to reach.
In the end, however, the battle that he was forced to engage in proved a bit more involved than he'd been expecting – it seemed that the man Cesare had wished brought to him truly had earned the mantle of tactician, though Ezio had admittedly faced better in his time – and he came away from it more bloodied than he'd been for quite some time. It almost seems as though I've gone back to when all of this began, he mused, feeling a pointed sort of melancholy as he made his way back down into the tunnels.
He'd have to make a stop at the Rosa in Fiore, to clean up and see about having his clothes mended – something he hadn't needed to do in quite some time, which again brought up a perverse sense of nostalgia – and then he'd probably be best served getting what rest he could. As he continued on his way through the tunnel that would take him back to the brothel that Mother and Claudia had taken over the management of – though Claudia took care of most of the day-to-day things, and Ezio found that he still wasn't quite sure how he felt about such a thing – Ezio found himself wondering just what it was that little Maria was up to at the moment.