Assassin's Creed: Underworld (4 page)

Every night The Ghost made the same journey home,
which took him along the New Road and past Marylebone Church. In the churchyard, among the
ramshackle and raggle-taggle groupings of headstones was one in particular that he would look at
as he went by.

If the stone was upright, as it was most
evenings, that meant no message. If the stone leaned to the right, it meant danger. Just that:
danger. It was up to The Ghost to work out what manner of danger.

However, if it leaned to the left then it meant
his handler wanted to see him: usual time, usual place.

And then, having performed that check, The Ghost
began his five-mile walk home to Wapping and his living quarters at the Thames Tunnel.

It had once been called one of the great wonders
of the world, and even at ground level it cut an imposing figure among the surrounding
buildings: a spired octagonal marble building acting as an entrance hall. Entering through doors
that were never shut, he crossed the mosaic floor to reach a side-building, the watch-house.
During the daytime pedestrians had to pay a penny to pass through and reach the steps down into
the tunnel, but not at night. The brass turnstile was closed but The Ghost climbed over, just as
everybody did.

Ice had formed on the marble
steps that spiralled round the inside of the shaft, so he trod more carefully than usual as he
descended to the first platform, and then to the next, and finally to the bottom of the shaft
– the grand rotunda, more than two hundred and fifty feet underground. Once it had been
vast and opulent, now it was merely vast. The walls were dirty, the statues scruffy. The years
had had their say.

Even so, it was still a sight to see: alcoves set
into grubby stucco walls. Inside the nooks, curled beneath sacks, slept the people of the
rotunda: the necromancers, fortune tellers and jugglers who in the daytime plied their trade to
those visiting the tunnel, the famous Thames Tunnel.

The first of its kind anywhere, ever, the Thames
Tunnel stretched from here, Wapping, below the river to Rotherhithe and had taken fifteen years
to build, almost defeating Mr Marc Brunel and claiming the life of his son Isambard, who had
near drowned in one of the floods that had plagued its construction. Both had hoped to see their
tunnel used by horse-drawn carriages, but had been undone by the cost, and instead it became a
tourist attraction, visitors paying their penny to walk its thousand-feet length, an entire
subterranean industry springing forth to serve them.

The Ghost moved from the entrance hall to the
black mouth of the tunnel itself, its two arches pointing at him like the barrels of pistols. It
was wide and its ceiling high, but the brickwork pressed in and each footfall became an echo,
while the sudden change in atmosphere made him more aware of the gloom. In daytime hundreds of
gas
lamps banished the darkness but at night the only illumination belonged
to the flickering candles of those who made the tunnel their home: traders, mystics, dancers and
animal handlers, singers, clowns and street dealers. It was said that two million people a year
took a walk down the tunnel, and had done since it opened some nineteen years ago. Once you had
a place at the tunnel opening you didn’t leave it, not for fear that some other hawker
might steal it with you absent.

The Ghost looked over the slumbering bodies of
the tradesmen and entertainers as he passed by, his footsteps ringing on the stone floor. He
peered into alcoves and passed his lantern over those sleeping under the arches of the partition
that ran the length of the tunnel.

A strict hierarchy operated inside the tunnel.
The tradesmen took their places at the mouth. Further along, the derelicts, the homeless, the
vagrants, the wretched; and then even further along, the thieves, criminals and fugitives.

Come morning time, the traders, who had a vested
interest in making sure the tunnel was free of vagrants and as sanitary as possible, were
enthusiastic in helping the peelers clear out the tunnel. The blaggers and fugitives would have
departed under cover of darkness. The rest of them, the vagabonds, beggars, prostitutes, would
come grumbling and blinking into the light, clutching their belongings, ready for another day of
surviving on nothing.

The Ghost’s lantern played over a sleeping
figure in the gloom of an alcove. The next alcove was empty. He swung the torch to illuminate
the arches of the tunnel partition
and they too were vacant. He sensed the
miserly light receding behind him, the glow given off by his lantern so very meagre all of a
sudden, dancing eerily on the brick.

From within the darkness had come a scuttling
sound and he raised his light to see a figure crouched in a nook ahead of him.

‘Hello, Mr Bharat,’ said the boy in a
whisper.

The Ghost went to him, reaching into his coats
for a thick crust of bread he’d put there earlier. ‘Hello, Charlie,’ he said,
handing it over. The boy flinched a little, far too accustomed to the slaps and punches of
grown-ups, then took the bread, staring at The Ghost with grateful eyes as he bit into it,
cautiously at first.

They did it every night. The same flinch. The
same caution. And every night The Ghost, who knew nothing of the boy’s background, just
that it involved violence and abuse, smiled at him, said, ‘See you tomorrow night,
Charlie. Take care of yourself,’ and left the boy in his alcove, his heart breaking as he
made his way further into the tunnel.

Again he stopped. Here in another alcove lay a
man with a leg broken from a fall on the icy steps of the rotunda. The Ghost had set the leg and
he held his breath against the stench of piss and shit to check that his splint was still in
place and that the leg was on the mend.

‘You’re a fine lad, Bharat,’
growled his patient.

‘Have you eaten?’ asked The Ghost,
attending to the leg. He was not a man of delicate sensibilities but even so – Jake was
ripe.

‘Maggie brought me some bread and
fruit,’ said Jake.

‘What would we do
without Maggie?’ wondered The Ghost aloud.

‘We’d die, son, is what we’d
do.’

The Ghost straightened, pretending to look back
up the tunnel in order to take a lungful of uncontaminated air – relatively speaking.
‘Leg is looking good, Jake,’ he said. ‘Another couple of days and you might be
able to risk a bath.’

Jake chuckled. ‘That bad, eh?’

‘Yes, Jake,’ said The Ghost, patting
his shoulder. ‘I’m afraid it’s that bad.’

The Ghost left, pressing further on into the
tunnel, until he came to the last of the alcoves used for sleeping. Here was where he and Maggie
stayed. Maggie, at sixty-two, was old enough to be his grandmother, but they looked after one
another. The Ghost brought food and money, and every night he taught Maggie to read by the light
of a candle.

Maggie, for her part, was the tunnel mother, a
rabble-rousing mouthpiece for The Ghost when he needed one, an intimidating, redoubtable figure.
Not to be trifled with.

Beyond this point few people dared to tread.
Beyond this point was the darkness, and it was no coincidence that this was where The Ghost had
made his home. He stayed here as a kind of border guard, protecting those who slept in the
tunnel from the miscreants and malfeasants, the lawbreakers and fugitives who sought shelter in
its darker regions.

Before he had arrived the outlaws would prey upon
those who lived in the tunnel. It had taken a while. Blood had been spilt. But The Ghost had put
a stop to that.

On the night that The Ghost had first met Maggie,
he had been taking his route back home – if you could call it ‘home’, his
lodging, his resting place in the tunnel.

Occasionally, as he walked, he let his mind drift
back to his real home, Amritsar in India, where he had grown up.

He remembered spending his childhood and
adolescence roaming the grounds of his parents’ house and then the ‘katras’
– the different areas of the city itself. Memory can play tricks on you – it can
make things seem better or worse than they really were, and The Ghost was fully aware of that.
He knew he was in danger of idealizing his childhood. After all, how easy it would be to forget
that Amritsar, unlike London, had not yet acquired a drainage system and thus rarely smelled of
the jasmine and herbs that he recalled so vividly. He might forget that those walled streets
which loomed so large in his recollections had played host to characters as unsavoury as
anywhere else in India. Possibly the sun didn’t really bathe the entire city in golden
light all day and all night, warming the stone, making the fountains glimmer, painting smiles on
the faces of those who made the city their home.

Possibly not. But that was how he remembered it
anyway, and if he was honest that was how he preferred to
remember it. Those
memories kept him warm in the tunnel at night.

He was born Jayadeep Mir. Like all boys he
idolized his father, Arbaaz Mir. His mother used to say that his father smelled of the desert
and that was how The Ghost remembered him too. From an early age Arbaaz told Jayadeep that
greatness lay ahead of him, and that he would one day be a venerated Assassin, and he had made
this future sound as thrilling as it was inevitable. In the comfortable confines of his loving
parents’ home, Jayadeep had grown up knowing great certainty.

Arbaaz liked to tell stories just as much as
Jayadeep loved to hear them, and best of them all was the story of how Arbaaz had met his wife,
Pyara. In this one, Arbaaz and his young mute servant, Raza Soora, had been trying to find the
Koh-i-Noor diamond, the Mountain of Light. It was during his attempts to retrieve the diamond
from the Imperial Palace that Arbaaz became involved with Pyara Kaur, granddaughter of Ranjit
Singh, the founder of the Sikh Empire.

The Koh-i-Noor diamond was what they called a
Piece of Eden, those artefacts distributed around the globe that were the sole remnants of a
civilization that preceded our own.

Jayadeep knew of their power because his parents
had seen it for themselves. Arbaaz, Pyara and Raza had all been there the night the diamond was
activated. They had all seen the celestial lightshow. Talking of what they’d witnessed,
his parents were candid about the effect it had upon them. What they’d seen had made them
more devout
and more fervent in their belief that such great power should
never be wielded by their enemies, the Templars. They instilled that in the boy.

Back then, growing up in an Amritsar painted gold
by the sun and being mentored by a father who was like a god to him, Jayadeep could not have
conceived of a day when he might be named The Ghost, huddled in a freezing dark tunnel, alone in
the world, venerated by nobody.

Training had begun when he was four or five years
old, but although it was physically demanding work it had never seemed like a chore; he had
never complained or played truant, and there was one very simple reason for this: he was good at
it.

No. More than that. He was great. A natural from
the day he was handed his first wooden training blade, a kukri. Jayadeep had a gift for combat
such as had been rarely witnessed in the Indian Brotherhood. He was extraordinarily, almost
supernaturally, fast in attack, and more than usually responsive in defence; he boasted
tremendous powers of observation and anticipation. He was so good, in fact, that his father felt
impelled to call upon another tutor.

Into the boy’s life came Ethan Frye.

Meeting Ethan Frye was among The Ghost’s
earliest memories: this tired-looking, melancholy man, whose Western robes seemed to hang
heavier on him than those of his father.

Just a tiny child, the boy had neither the
inclination nor the initiative to ask about Ethan Frye. As far as he was concerned, the elder
Assassin might as well have fallen
from the skies, tumbled to earth like a
downhearted angel come to sully his otherwise idyllic existence.

‘This is the boy then?’ Ethan had
asked.

They had been sitting in the shaded courtyard at
the time, the clamour of the streets outside drifting over the wall and joining the birdsong and
the soft tinkle of a fountain.

‘This is indeed the boy,’ said Arbaaz
proudly. ‘This is Jayadeep.’

‘A great warrior you say.’

‘A great warrior in the making – or
at least I think so. I’ve been training him myself and I’ve been astonished, Ethan,
astonished
by his natural aptitude.’ Arbaaz stood, and in the house behind him
Jayadeep glimpsed his mother, seeing the two of them at once. For the first time, perhaps due to
the presence of this gruff stranger, he was aware of their beauty and grace. He saw them as
people rather than just his parents.

Without taking his eyes from the boy, Ethan Frye
clasped his hands over his belly and spoke over his shoulder to Arbaaz. ‘Supernatural in
his abilities, you say?’

‘It is like that, Ethan, yes.’

Eyes still on Jayadeep. ‘Supernatural,
eh?’

‘Always thinking two or three moves
ahead,’ answered Arbaaz.

‘As one should.’

‘At six years old?’

Ethan turned his gaze on Jayadeep once again.
‘It’s precocious, I’ll admit, but …’

‘I know what you’re going to say.
That so far he has
been sparring with me and as father and son we naturally
share a bond and that maybe, just maybe, I’m exhibiting certain tells that give him the
edge, yes?’

‘It had crossed my mind.’

‘Well, that’s why you’re here.
I’d like you to take charge of training Jayadeep.’

Intrigued by the boy, Ethan Frye agreed to
Arbaaz’s request and from that day he took up residence at the house, drilling the boy in
swordcraft.

The boy, knowing little of what drove Ethan, was
confused at first by his new tutor’s gruff manners and rough tone. Jayadeep was not one to
respond to the touch of a disciplinarian, and it had taken some months for the two of them to
form a tutor–pupil relationship that wasn’t characterized by sour asides (Ethan),
harsh words (Ethan) and tears (Jayadeep).

For some time, in fact, Jayadeep believed that
Ethan Frye simply did not like him, which came as something of a culture shock. The boy was
handsome and charismatic. He knew next to nothing of the adult world and although he remained
oblivious to concepts such as charm and persuasion he was instinctively adept at being both
charming and persuasive, able to twist his family and household round his little finger,
seemingly at will. He was the sort of little boy that grown-ups loved to touch. Never was a
boy’s hair so constantly ruffled by the men, his cheek rarely lasting longer than half an
hour without one of the household women praising his smile and planting a kiss on him, inhaling
his fresh little-boy smell at the same time, silently luxuriating in the softness of his skin.

It was as though Jayadeep
were a drug to which all who met him became addicted.

All, that was, except Ethan, who wore a
permanently pensive and preoccupied expression. It was true that occasionally the light would
come to him, and when it did Jayadeep fancied he saw something of the ‘old’ or maybe
the ‘real’ Ethan, as though there were a different Ethan struggling to peer out from
beneath the gloom. Otherwise it seemed that whatever Jayadeep had that intoxicated other
grown-ups simply failed to work on his tutor.

These were the rather shaky foundations on which
their tutorials were built: Ethan, in a grey study; Jayadeep confused by this new type of
grown-up, who didn’t lavish him with affection and praise. Oh, of course Ethan was forced
to offer grudging praise for Jayadeep’s skills in combat. How could he not? Jayadeep
excelled at every aspect of Assassin craft, and in the end it was this more than anything that
cracked open their relationship, because if there’s one thing a skilled Assassin can
admire and appreciate, even grow to like, it’s an initiate with promise. And Jayadeep was
most certainly that.

So, as the years passed, and master and pupil
sparred in the shade of the courtyard trees, discussed theory by the fountains, and then put
their teachings into practice in the streets of the city, it was as though Ethan began to thaw
towards his young charge, and when he spoke of taking the boy from wood to steel there was an
unmistakable note of pride in his voice.

For his part, Jayadeep began to learn a little
about his reflective mentor. Enough, in fact, for him to realize that
‘glum’ was the wrong adjective, and that ‘troubled’ was more accurate.
Even at that age he was remarkably intuitive.

What’s more, there came a day when he
overheard the women in the kitchen talking. He and Ethan were practising a stealth exercise in
the grounds of the house, and Ethan had commanded him to return with information obtained using
covert means.

When The Ghost thought about this years later, it
occurred to him that sending a small child to gather covert information was a plan fraught with
possible pitfalls, not least that the child might learn something unsuitable for young ears.

Which, as it turned out, was exactly what
happened.

As he was later to learn, though, Ethan was,
despite outward appearances, prone to making the odd rash and hasty decision, as well as being
possessed of what you might call a sense of mischief, and thinking back, Ethan’s
instructions for the exercise were perhaps the first time Jayadeep saw an outward manifestation
of this in his tutor.

So Jayadeep went on his exercise and two hours
later joined Ethan at the fountain. He took a seat on the stone beside where his master sat
looking pensive as usual, choosing not to acknowledge Jayadeep as was his custom. Like
everything else about Ethan, this had taken Jayadeep time to get used to, and getting used to it
was a process that involved moving first from being offended to being confused and lastly
accepting that his lack of warmth was in its own way a measure of the familiarity the two of
them shared, these two men so far apart in age and culture – one of them an experienced
killer, the other training to be one.

‘Tell me, my dear boy,
what did you learn?’ asked Ethan.

Ethan calling Jayadeep ‘my dear boy’
was a relatively new development. One that pleased Jayadeep, as it happened.

‘I learnt something about you,
master.’

Maybe then Ethan regretted sending his young
charge on this particular assignment. It’s difficult to imagine that he had planned it,
but then who can say what was in Ethan Frye’s mind. Who can ever say? The boy had no way
of knowing, but as an eager pupil and one who had been schooled in observation he naturally
watched his tutor closely for signs that he might have caused offence or stepped over a line.

‘This was tittle-tattle you overheard was
it, son?’

‘“Tittle-tattle”,
master?’

‘Tittle-tattle means gossip – and, as
I’ve always told you, gossip can be a very powerful information tool. You did well to
glean what you could from what you overheard.’

‘You’re not angry?’

A certain placid look had crossed Ethan’s
features. As though some feeling of internal turmoil were being laid to rest. ‘No,
Jayadeep,’ he said, ‘I’m not angry with you. Pray tell me what it was that you
heard.’

‘You might not like it.’

‘I don’t doubt it. Go ahead
anyway.’

‘The women were saying that you had a wife
in England but that she died giving birth to your two children.’

It was as though the courtyard stilled as the boy
awaited his master’s response.

‘That’s true, Jayadeep,’ said
Ethan after a while, exhaling
through a sigh. ‘And when I tried to
look at my children, Evie and Jacob, I found I could not. Invited back to India, I suppose you
would have to say that I fled, Jayadeep. I fled my home in Crawley and my children to come here
and swelter in the sun with you.’

Jayadeep thought of his own mother and father. He
thought of the love and affection they lavished upon him and his heart went out to these two
children. He had no doubt they were looked after, but even so they lacked a father’s love.

‘But not for much longer,’ said
Ethan, as though reading Jayadeep’s mind. He stood. ‘I’m to return to England,
to Crawley, to Jacob and Evie. I shall see to it that you move on to steel; I shall satisfy
myself you will be ready in combat, and then I will return home and there, Jayadeep, I shall do
what I feel I should have done in the first place: I shall be a father to my two
children.’

Ethan’s words rang with a significance that
Jayadeep, for all his intuition, failed to pick up on. In his own way Ethan was confessing to
Jayadeep that his friendship with the boy had awakened a parental instinct unseen since his wife
had died. In his own way Ethan was thanking the boy.

Jayadeep, though, had heard the word
‘combat’.

And it was some time after that – in fact,
once the boy had made the transition from wood to steel, that Ethan discovered the boy had a
weakness. A serious weakness.