Assassin's Creed: Underworld (21 page)

It was evening and with her breath held, Evie
Frye crouched outside her father’s study as he sat with George Westhouse; the two men were
talking in such low voices that she could barely hear them through the door. She tucked her hair
behind her ear as she strained to listen.

‘Tomorrow then, Ethan,’ George was
saying.

‘Yes, tomorrow.’

‘And if all goes well, then the artefact
…’

‘They’re close, they say.’

‘Well, logic dictates they must be. After
all, the tunnel is built.’

‘There are dozens of service tunnels,
re-routed sewer pipes and gas mains still to install. There’s plenty of digging to be done
yet. Besides, who’s to say the burst sewer in the Fleet Valley wasn’t their
doing?’

‘True …’

Just then there came a knock on the front door
downstairs that startled Evie, and she stood quickly, slightly disorientated, before smoothing
herself down and then going to answer it. They had no servants. Ethan would not have allowed it,
believing the very idea of retaining servants went against the tenets of the creed. And so it
was that young Evie Frye answered her own front door.

There on the step stood a young Indian man
wearing a
brown suit. He was handsome, she thought, and yet there was
something about him that offset his good looks, a wild and hunted expression that he fixed on
her, regarding her from the grey lower steps with eyes that didn’t really see her.
Nevertheless, when he proffered a letter he said her name. ‘Evie Frye.’

She took it, a folded piece of paper. On the flap
was written:
For the attention of Ethan Frye
.

‘Tell him that Ajay came,’ said the
man on the doorstep, already turning to leave. ‘Tell him Ajay said he is sorry and that he
will see him in the next life.’

Rattled, Evie was glad to close the door on the
strange, haunted man – then rushed to her father’s room.

A second later the household was in uproar.

‘
Jacob
,’ called Ethan,
storming out of his study with his forearm extended, buckling his hidden blade at the same time.
‘Arm yourself, you’re coming with me. Evie, you too. George, come on, there’s
no time to waste.’

He had unfolded the letter in a burst of panic,
only to find a note written in code they had no time to translate. But Ajay – the man with
the cryptic apology … Surely this was not the same Ajay who stood guard at The Darkness?
Because if that man was in London then Ethan should have been informed … But then again,
who else could it be?

All four of them came bursting into the street,
Ethan still buckling the blade, holstering his revolver and pulling on his robes at the same
time, the two children thrilling to the sight of their father in action.

‘Which way did he go, darling?’ said
Ethan to Evie.

She pointed. ‘Towards
the Broadway.’

‘Then we’re in luck. There are sewer
works on The Broadway; he will have to turn on to Oakley Lane. Evie, Jacob, George, get after
him. With any luck he’ll take George to be me and not suspect I’ve worked my way in
front of him. Go.
Go
.’

The two young Assassins and George took off in
the direction of the Broadway. Ethan ran for a wall that belonged to an opposite neighbour, and
with a leap and a fast tap-tap of his boots, almost as though he were kicking the wall in
mid-air, was on top and then over it.

In front of him stretched the garden, and gazing
along it, he experienced a brief moment of involuntary garden jealousy. He’d always
wondered what size garden the neighbours had and here was his answer. Bigger. Twice the size of
his own. Keeping to the shadows, he ran its length and then at the bottom, where even the
gardeners feared to tread, he drew his hidden blade to hack at the undergrowth. Succumbing to
the foliage at the back was a wall, but he scaled it easily before dropping to a passageway on
the other side.

All was quiet. Just the ever-present drip-drip of
water. He strained to hear, picking out sounds from the distant surrounding city, until it came
to him, a faraway rhythmic thud of running feet to his right.

Excellent
. Ethan set off, darting
quietly along the passageway to the end and then waited in the shadows, listening again. The
running feet were closer now. Good. Ajay had seen his pursuers and was taking evasive action.
All his attention would be concentrated on what came from behind.

Drainpipe, loose brick, window ledge – and
then Ethan was on the roof of the adjacent building, framed against the moonlit sky but knowing
his quarry was unlikely to look upwards. He was almost directly above the running footsteps in
the alleyway below and he sprinted ahead, dashing to the end of the tenement then jumping to the
pitched roof of the next.

Flattening himself to the shingles he looked down
into the street below and watched as a figure in a brown suit hurried into the alleyway,
throwing a look behind himself at the same time.

Ethan’s robes fluttered as he swung to the
lip of the roof then let himself down to the cobbles below, where he took a seat on a crate and
rested his chin in his hand as he awaited Ajay’s arrival.

Ajay didn’t see anything until it was too
late and then was brought up short. Ex-Assassin though he was, he still thought like one, and he
instantly appraised the situation and drew his kukri on the run, taking note of Ethan
Frye’s position and posture – his body at rest, his leading hand hanging down by the
side. And seeing an opponent who was too relaxed and too vulnerable to attack on his weaker
side, it was to that flank that he directed his attack – fast and, if his assessments were
correct, then decisively.

But, of course, his assessments were not correct.
They were based on assumptions that Ethan had anticipated, and as Ajay’s kukri flashed
towards him, the older man’s hand shot out from beneath his chin, his blade engaging at
the same second. There was a ring of steel as Ajay’s sword was blocked in mid-air, and
then a scream of pain as Ethan completed his move with a downward slash that sheared off half of
Ajay’s hand and took the blade away from him.

The kukri dropped to the stone, along with a
chunk of Ajay’s hand. In pain and disorientated as he was, he acted on instinct, ducking
and spinning and kicking his sword back up the alley as he dived away from another attack.

Ethan came to his feet and took a few steps up
the alleyway, still reeling from the shock of recognition –
Ajay,
it is Ajay, how the hell did he get here?
– just as the other man reached his
weapon, stumbled and with one hurt and bleeding hand clutched to his chest, snatched it up from
the cobbles with his good one.

‘This is a fight you can no longer
win,’ called Ethan. The other three had appeared in the alley behind them and Ajay heard,
turning to see his exit barred and then swinging back to face Ethan again, knowing, surely, that
all was lost.

‘Why did you come to my door? Why did you
attack me?’ Ethan took two steps forward threateningly. ‘I don’t want to hurt
you any more, but I will, if I have to.’

Again Ajay glanced behind him and back at Ethan,
and then he stood up straight with his shoulders thrust back, and through a last wretched sob
that bubbled up from some place of inner pain said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry to
you and I’m sorry to Kulpreet, and I’m sorry for everything I have done.’

And then he drew the blade across his own
throat.

Later, when the children had gone to bed with the
image of a choking, gurgling man painting the cobbles scarlet with his own blood still fresh in
their heads, George and Ethan had retired to the study. Both were shaken by what had happened
and troubled by the questions for which they had no ready answers, and so it was that they drank
two glasses of Ethan’s best Highland whisky before either of them even said a word.

(Which, having crept down from upstairs, Evie was
there to overhear …)

‘A new development then,’ said
George.

‘You could say that.’

‘Damnedest thing.’

Ethan stared off into nothing. He was thinking
that he needed to send word to Amritsar first thing. Tell them they might be short an Assassin
– and what news of Kulpreet?

He said, ‘I suppose, on the bright side, it
prepares the twins for their blooding.’

George gave a dry laugh as his friend’s
eyes came back to him. ‘This letter –’ he held out the document –
‘shall we decode it?’

A short while later they sat at the study desk
with the document and several Assassin codebooks open in front
of them. And
the translation. Ajay’s note had read:
Position compromised, must abort. A
friend.

‘“A friend” who’s lying
out there somewhere not far from Oakley Lane.’ George set down the letter. The body would
be discovered soon. At any moment the two Assassins expected to hear the sound of a
peeler’s rattle.

‘The man out there died of shame,’
said Ethan.

Outside Evie crouched, listening, thinking of
Ajay, who had died of shame. She knew from her readings that in the annals of Assassins there
was another, Ahmad Sofian, who had taken his life by the same means and for similar reasons.

‘Shame. Indeed. It would seem so,’
George was saying. ‘A traitor to the creed. But how much has he told our enemy? What does
he even know to tell them? You’ve always been scrupulous with the information you’ve
given me; I can’t imagine what he could have told them.’

‘Put it this way, George, if you and Ajay
had got together then you might have been in possession of most of the facts. But one without
the other? No chance.’

‘Even so, you must inform your Ghost at
once.’

Ethan chewed the inside of his cheek
thoughtfully. ‘I’m not sure. I know The Ghost. He will err on the side of caution
and abort the mission.’

‘Well, that’s what the note says to
do.’ George leaned forward, his face clouding with incomprehension. ‘I’m not
quite sure I can believe what I’m hearing, Ethan. If you inform The Ghost and he decides
to continue with the operation then he is guilty of rank and dangerous optimism at best, and a
tendency to suicide at worst. If he
aborts he will be doing the right
thing; the course of action we would recommend if we were thinking with our heads instead of our
desires. Either way, we must tell him so he is able to choose.’

Ethan shook his head. His mind was made up.
‘I trust The Ghost. I trust him to look after himself. Most of all, I trust him to recover
the artefact.’

‘Then you must also trust him to make the
right decisions.’

‘No, George. I’m sorry, I can’t
do that.’

From far away came the familiar clacking of the
peeler’s alarm.

And so it came to pass. A day of great excitement.
The Metropolitan Railway had placed an advertisement in the previous evening’s newspapers
to announce that tonight was a new beginning for the railway: Charles Pearson was to take a
journey on the reopened stretch of line between King’s Cross and Farringdon Street. Not
only that but he would be making the journey in
an enclosed carriage
, said to be the
last word in underground railway luxury. Other railway dignitaries would be present, said the
notices, and members of the public were also invited to witness this grand occasion – just
so long as they stayed on the right side of the picket fence.

And the public would come. Despite the excavation
turning their lives into a living hell of noise and mud, closing roads and businesses alike,
despite the fact that it had made thousands of already poverty-stricken Londoners homeless yet
had had no discernible impact on the well-to-do, and despite the fact that it was over a year
behind schedule and that the cost was now estimated at £1.3 million.

They would come.

A team of carpenters had been employed to build a
set of steps down into the shaft at King’s Cross. Unlike Gladstone’s inaugural trip
from Bishop’s Road four months
before, the underground station at
King’s Cross had yet to be built. Next year it would be constructed as an adjunct to the
ten-year-old mainline station, with gables at either end, as well as pavilion roofs and
parapets. What were currently cuttings acting as makeshift boarding points would be fashioned
into proper platforms with stairways, ticket offices, kiosks set into the walls and footbridges
at each end.

But for now, it was little more than an ugly hole
in the ground, and to accommodate railway top brass and their wives, the steps were built, and
the cuttings were laid with planks to best approximate a proper platform, and instead of the
flares that the men had used for night work, there were to be lamps strung along the top of the
trench, as well as inside the shaft.

It all added to the celebratory air. When the
bell tolled three times at midday it was to signal the change, but on this occasion there was no
next shift waiting to take over. The men were welcome to take their leave. They could stay and
watch, of course, just so long as they stayed on the right side of the fence, but they were also
welcome to spend their free time supping ale in pubs called the Pickled Hen or the Curious
Orange or the Rising Sun, or with their families; it was up to them. Either way, for the first
time in two years there would be no clamour of tools in north-west London, no rattle of steam
engines, no swinging leather buckets silhouetted against the skyline. No constantly grinding
conveyor.

Not that navvies were to be absent from the site.
‘We want the bigwigs seeing proper workers, not that bloody
rabble,’ Marchant had said, and so a squad of ‘pretend’ workmen had been
drafted in. At first glance this new group of thirty or forty navvies looked the part as they
milled about in time-honoured navvy fashion, but a closer look revealed that they were smarter
and more serious-looking than their regular counterparts. What’s more, as they stood
awaiting the arrival of the dignitaries, there were no jokes or laughter, no lolling around or
snatching each other’s caps and setting up impromptu games of cricket. The Ghost knew that
these powerful-looking navvies were more than mere decoration. They were Templar men.

As day became night he knew one other thing too.
Not only could he not take the life of an innocent man; he could not allow it to be taken.