Assassin's Creed: Underworld (2 page)

Ethan Frye awarded himself a small moment of
satisfaction at the accuracy of his blade – then swept Boot’s legs from beneath him
and slammed him to the filthy cobbles. The Assassin sank to his haunches, pinning Boot with his
knees as he pressed his blade to his throat.

‘Now, my friend,’ he grinned,
‘why don’t we start with you telling me your name?’

‘It’s Boot, sir,’ squirmed
Boot, the point of the knife digging painfully into his flesh.

‘Good man,’ said Ethan. ‘Good
policy, the truth. Now, let’s you and me have a talk, shall we?’

Beneath him the fellow trembled. Ethan took it as
a yes. ‘You’re due to take delivery of a photographic plate, am I right, Mr
Boot?’ Boot trembled. Ethan took that as another yes. So far so good. His information was
solid; this Boot was a connection in a pipeline that ended with erotic prints being sold in
certain pubs in London. ‘And you are due at the Jack Simmons to collect this photographic
plate, am I right?’

Boot nodded.

‘And what’s the name of the fellow
you’re supposed to meet, Mr Boot?’

‘I … I don’t know, sir
…’

Ethan smiled and leaned even closer to Boot.
‘My dear boy, you’re a worse liar than you are a courier.’ He exerted
a little more pressure with the blade. ‘You feel where that knife is
now?’ he asked.

Boot blinked his eyes yes.

‘That’s an artery. Your carotid
artery. If I open that, you’ll be painting the town red, my friend. Well, the street at
least. But neither of us want me to do that. Why ruin such a lovely evening? Instead, how about
you tell me who it is you planned to meet?’

Boot blinked. ‘He’ll kill me if I
do.’

‘That’s as maybe, but I’ll kill
you if you don’t, and only one of us is here holding a knife at your throat, and
it’s not him, is it?’ Ethan increased the pressure. ‘Make your choice, my
friend. Die now, or later.’

Just then Ethan heard a noise to his left. Half a
second later his Colt sidearm was in his hand, the blade still at Boot’s throat as he drew
aim on a new target.

It was a little girl on her way back from the
well. Wide-eyed she stood, a bucket brimming full of dirty water in one hand.

‘I’m sorry, miss, I didn’t mean
to startle you,’ smiled Ethan. His revolver went back into his robes and his empty hand
reappeared to assure the girl he wasn’t a threat. ‘I mean harm only to ruffians and
thieves such as this man here. Perhaps you might like to return to your lodgings.’ He was
gesturing to her but she wasn’t going anywhere, just staring at them both, eyes white in a
grubby face, rooted to the spot with fear.

Inwardly Ethan cursed. The last thing he wanted
was an audience. Especially when it was a little girl watching him hold a blade to a man’s
throat.

‘All right, Mr
Boot,’ he said, more quietly than before, ‘the situation has changed so I’m
going to have to
insist
you tell me exactly who you intended to meet …’

Boot opened his mouth. Maybe he was about to give
Ethan the information he required. Or perhaps he was going to tell Ethan where he could stick
his threats. Or more likely it was to simply whine that he didn’t know.

Ethan never found out, because just as Boot went
to reply, his face disintegrated.

It happened a twinkling before Ethan heard the
shot, and he rolled off the body and drew his revolver just as a second crack rang out, and he
remembered the girl too late, his head whipping round just in time to see her spin away, blood
blooming at her chest, and drop her bucket at the same time – dead before she hit the
cobbles from a bullet meant for him.

Ethan dared not return fire for fear of hitting
another unseen innocent in the fog. He pulled himself into a crouch, steeling himself for
another shot, a third attack from the dark.

It never came. Instead there was the sound of
running feet, so Ethan wiped the shards of bone and bits of brain from his face, holstered the
Colt and flicked his hidden blade back into its housing, and then leapt for a wall. Boots only
just gaining purchase on the wet brick, he shinned a drainpipe to the roof of a tenement,
finding the light of the night sky and able to follow the running footsteps as the shooter tried
to make his escape. This was how Ethan had entered the rookery and it looked like this was how
he was going to leave, making short leaps from
one roof to the next,
traversing the slum as he tracked his quarry silently and remorselessly, the image of the little
girl seared on to his mind’s eye, the metallic smell of Boot’s brain matter still in
his nostrils.

Only one thing mattered now. The killer would
feel his blade before the night was out.

From below he heard the boots of the shooter
clopping and splashing on the cobbles and Ethan shadowed him quietly, unable to see the man but
knowing he’d overtaken him. Coming to the edge of a building, and feeling he had a
sufficient lead, he let himself over the side, using the sills to descend quickly, until he
reached the street, where he hugged the wall, waiting.

Seconds later came the sound of running boots. A
moment after that the mist seemed to shift and bloom as though to announce this new presence,
and then a man in a suit, with a bushy moustache and thick side whiskers, came pelting into
view.

He held a pistol. It wasn’t smoking. But it
might as well have been.

And though Ethan would later tell George
Westhouse that he struck in self-defence it wasn’t strictly true. Ethan had the element of
surprise; he could – and should – have disarmed the man and questioned him before
killing him. Instead he engaged his blade and slammed it into the killer’s heart with a
vengeful grunt and watched with no lack of satisfaction as the light died in the man’s
eyes.

And by doing that the Assassin Ethan Frye was
making a mistake. He was being careless.

‘My intention had
been to press Boot for the information I needed before taking his place,’ Ethan told the
Assassin George Westhouse the following day, having finished his tale, ‘but what I
didn’t realize was that Boot was late for his appointment. His stolen pocket watch was
slow.’

They sat in the drawing room of George’s
Croydon home. ‘I see,’ said George, ‘At what point did you realize?’

‘Um, let me see. That would be the point at
which it was too late.’

George nodded. ‘What was the
firearm?’

‘A Pall Mall Colt, similar to my
own.’

‘And you killed him?’

The fire crackled and spat into the pause that
followed. Since reconciling with his children, Jacob and Evie, Ethan was pensive. ‘I did,
George, and it was nothing less than he deserved.’

George pulled a face. ‘Deserve has nothing
to do with it. You know that.’

‘Oh, but the little girl, George. You
should have seen her. She was just a tiny wee thing. Half Evie’s age.’

‘Even so …’

‘I had no choice. His pistol was
drawn.’

George looked at his old friend with concern and
affection. ‘Which is it, Ethan? Did you kill him because he deserved it, or because you
had no choice?’

A dozen times or more Ethan had washed his face
and blown his nose, but he still felt as though he could smell Boot’s brains. ‘Must
the two be mutually exclusive? I’m thirty-seven years of age and I’ve seen more than
my fair share of kills, and I know that notions of justice, equity and
retribution play a distant second to skill, and skill subordinate to luck. When Fortune
turns her face to you. When the killer’s bullet goes elsewhere, when he drops his guard,
you take your chance, before she turns away again.’

Westhouse wondered who his friend was trying to
fool, but decided to move on. ‘A shame then that you had to spill his blood. Presumably
you needed to know more about him?’

Ethan smiled and mock-wiped his brow. ‘I
was rewarded with a little luck. The photographic plate he carried bore an inscription
identifying the photographer, so I was able to ascertain that the dead man and the photographer
were one and the same, a fellow by the name of Robert Waugh. He has Templar associations. His
erotic prints were going one way, to them, but also another way, to the rookeries and alehouses,
via Boot.’

George whistled softly. ‘What a dangerous
game Mr Waugh was playing …’

‘Yes and no …’

George leaned to poke the fire. ‘What do
you mean?’

‘I meant that in many ways his gamble of
the two worlds staying separate paid off. I saw the slums afresh today, George. I was reminded
of how the poor are living. This is a world so completely separate from that of the Templars
that it’s scarcely believable the two share the same country, let alone the same city. If
you ask me, our friend Mr Waugh was perfectly justified in believing the paths of his disparate
business enterprises might never cross. The two worlds in which he operated were poles apart.
The Templars know nothing of the rookeries. They
live upriver of the factory
filth that pollutes the water of the poor, and upwind of the smog and smoke that pollutes their
air.’

‘As do we, Ethan,’ said George sadly.
‘Whether we like it or not, ours is a world of gentlemen’s clubs and drawing rooms,
of temples and council chambers.’

Ethan stared into the fire. ‘Not all of
us.’

Westhouse smiled and nodded. ‘You’re
thinking of your man, The Ghost? Don’t suppose you have any thoughts about telling me who
The Ghost is or what he is doing?’

‘That must remain my secret.’

‘Then what of him?’

‘Aha, well, I have formulated a plan,
involving the recently deceased Mr Waugh and The Ghost. If all goes well, and The Ghost can do
his job, then we may even be able to lay our hands on the very artefact the Templars seek the
Piece of Eden.’

John Fowler was tired. And cold. And by the look
of the gathering clouds he was soon to be wet.

Sure enough, he felt the first drops of rain
tap-tapping on his hat, and the engineer clutched his leather-bound tube of drawings more
tightly to his chest, cursing the weather, the noise, everything. Beside him stood the Solicitor
of London, Charles Pearson, as well as Charles’s wife Mary, both flinching as the rain
began to fall, and all three stood marooned by mud, gazing with a mixture of forlornness and awe
at the great scar in the earth that was the new Metropolitan line.

Some fifty yards in front of the trio the ground
gave way to a sunken shaft that opened into a vast cutting – ‘the trench’
– twenty-eight feet in width and some two hundred yards long, at which point it stopped
being a cutting or trench and became a tunnel, its brickwork arch providing a gateway to what
was the world’s very first stretch of underground railway line.

What’s more, the world’s first
operational
stretch of underground railway line: trains ran on the newly laid rails
night and day, pushing wagons heaped with gravel, clay and sand from unfinished sections further
up the line. They chugged back and forth, smoke and steam near suffocating the gangs of navvies
working at the mouth of the
tunnel, who shovelled earth into the leather
buckets of a conveyor that in turn brought the spoil to ground level.

The operation was Charles Pearson’s baby.
For almost two decades the Solicitor of London had campaigned for a new line to help ease the
growing congestion in London and its suburbs. The construction of it, meanwhile, was John
Fowler’s brainchild. He was, quite apart from being the owner of remarkably luxuriant
whiskers, the most experienced railway engineer in the world, and thus had been the obvious
candidate for chief engineer of the Metropolitan Railway. However, as he’d told Charles
Pearson on the occasion of his employment, his experience might count for naught. This was,
after all, something that had never been done before: a railway line beneath the ground. A huge
– no, a
gargantuan
– undertaking. Indeed, there were those who said that it
was the most ambitious building project since the construction of the pyramids. A grand claim,
for sure, but there were days that Fowler agreed with them.

Fowler had decided that the majority of the line,
being of shallow depth, could be dug using a method known as ‘cut and cover’. It
involved sinking a trench into the earth, twenty-eight feet in width, fifteen feet deep. Brick
retaining walls were built into it, three bricks thick. In some sections iron girders were laid
across the top of the side walls. Others were made using brickwork arches. Then the cutting was
covered and the surface reinstated, a new tunnel created.

It meant destroying roads and houses, and in some
cases building temporary roadways, only to have to rebuild
them. It meant
moving thousands of tons of spoil and negotiating gas and water mains and sewers. It meant
forging a never-ending nightmare of noise and destruction, as though a bomb had detonated in
London’s Fleet Valley. No. As though a bomb was detonating in the Fleet Valley every day
and had done for the last two years.

Work continued overnight, when flares and
braziers would be lit. Navvies laboured in two major shifts – the change signalled by
three tolls of a bell at midday and midnight – and smaller duty-shifts when men would move
between tasks, swapping one back-breaking and monotonous job for another, but working, always
working.

Much of the noise came from the seven conveyors
used on the project, one of which was erected here: a tall wooden scaffold built into the shaft,
towering twenty-five feet above them, an agent of dirt and ringing noise, like hammer blows on
an anvil. It brought spoil from further along the excavation, and men worked it now, gangs of
them. Some were in the shaft, some on the ground, some dangling like lemurs off the frame, their
job to ensure the passage of the conveyor as giant buckets full of clay were hoisted swinging
from the trench.

On the ground, men with spades toiled at a
mountain of excavated earth, shovelling it on to horse-drawn wagons, four of which waited, each
with a cloud of gulls hanging over it, the birds swirling and dipping to pick up food,
unconcerned by the rain that had begun to fall.

Fowler turned to look at Charles, who appeared
ill – he held a handkerchief to his lips – but otherwise in good humour. There was
something indomitable about Charles
Pearson, reflected Fowler. He
wasn’t sure if it was resolve or lunacy. This was a man who had been laughed at for the
best part of two decades, indeed, from when he’d first suggested an underground line.
‘Trains in drains’, so the scoffing went at the time. They’d laughed when
he’d unveiled his plans for an atmospheric railway, carriages pushed through a tube by
compressed air.
Through a tube
. Little wonder that for over a decade Pearson was a
fixture of
Punch
magazine. What fun was had at his expense.

Then, with everybody still chortling at that,
there came a scheme, Pearson’s brainchild – a plan to build an underground railway
between Paddington and Farringdon. The slums of the Fleet Valley would be cleared, their
inhabitants moved to homes outside the city – to the suburbs – and people would use
this new railway to ‘commute’.

A sudden injection of money from the Great
Western Railway, the Great Northern Railway and the City of London Corporation, and the scheme
became a reality. He, the noted John Fowler, was employed as chief engineer for the Metropolitan
Railway and work began on the first shaft at Euston – almost eighteen months ago to the
day.

And were people still laughing?

Yes, they were. Only now it was a jagged,
mirthless laugh. Because to say that Pearson’s vision of the slum clearance had gone badly
was to put it mildly. There were no homes in the suburbs and as it turned out, nobody especially
willing to build any. And there’s no such thing as an undercrowded slum. All those people
had to go somewhere, so they went to other slums.

Then, of course, there was the disruption caused
by the
work itself: streets made impassable, roads dug up, businesses
closing and traders demanding compensation. Those who lived along the route existed in an
eternal chaos of mud, of engines, of the conveyor’s iron chime, of hacking picks and
shovels and navvies bellowing at one another, and in perpetual fear of their foundations
collapsing.

There was no respite; at night fires were lit and
the night shift took over, leaving the day shift to do what men on day shifts do: drink and
brawl their way through to morning. London had been invaded by navvies it seemed; everywhere
they went they made their own – only the prostitutes and publicans were glad of them.

Then there were the accidents. First a drunken
train driver had left the rails at King’s Cross and plummeted into the works below. Nobody
hurt.
Punch
had a field day. Then almost a year later the earthworks at Euston Road had
collapsed, taking with them gardens, pavements and telegraph wires, destroying gas and water
mains, punching a hole in the city. Incredibly, nobody was hurt. Mr Punch enjoyed that episode
too.

‘I’d hoped to hear good news today,
John,’ shouted Pearson, raising his handkerchief to his mouth. A finicky thing, like a
doily. He was sixty-eight to Fowler’s forty-four but he looked twice that; his efforts
over the last two decades had aged him. Despite his ready smile there was permanent tiredness
round the eyes, and the flesh at his jowls was like melted wax on a candle.

‘What can I tell you, Mr Pearson?’
shouted Fowler. ‘What would you like to hear other than …?’ He gestured over
the site.

Pearson laughed. ‘The
roar of the engines is encouraging, that’s true enough. But perhaps also that we’re
back on schedule. Or that every compensation lawyer in London has been struck dead by lightning.
That Her Majesty the Queen herself has declared her confidence in the underground and plans to
use it at the first opportunity.’

Fowler regarded his friend, again marvelling at
his spirit. ‘Then I’m afraid, Mr Pearson, I can give you nothing but bad news. We
are still behind schedule. And weather like this simply delays work further. The rain will
likely douse the engine and the men on the conveyor will enjoy an unscheduled break.’

‘Then there is some good news,’
chortled Pearson.

‘And what’s that?’ shouted
Fowler.

‘We will have –’ the engine
spluttered and died – ‘silence.’

And for a moment there was indeed a shocked still
as the world adjusted to the absence of the noise. Just the sound of rain slapping on the
mud.

Then came a cry from the shaft:
‘
slippage
’, and they looked up to see the crane scaffold lurch a little,
one of the men suddenly dangling even more precariously than before.

‘It’ll hold,’ said Fowler,
seeing Pearson’s alarm. ‘It looks worse than it is.’

A superstitious man would have crossed his
fingers. The navvies were taking no chances either, and the gangs on the crane scrambled to
ground level, swarming the wooden struts like pirates on rigging, hundreds of them it seemed, so
that Fowler was holding his breath and willing
the structure to hold the
sudden extra weight. It should. It must. It did. And the men emerged shouting and coughing,
carrying shovels and pickaxes, which were as precious to them as their limbs. They gathered in
knots that would divide along regional lines, every single one of them caked in mud.

Fowler and Pearson watched them congregate in the
expected groups – London, Irish, Scottish, rural, other – hands shoved into their
pockets or wrapped round them for warmth, shoulders hunched and caps pulled tight against the
rain.

Just then there came a shout and Fowler turned to
see a commotion by the trench. As one the navvies had moved over to look and now surrounded the
lip of the shaft, staring at something inside the cutting.

‘
Sir!
’ the site manager
Marchant was waving at him, beckoning him over. He cupped his hands to shout. ‘Sir. You
should come and see this.’

Moments later Fowler and Pearson had made their
way across the mud, the men parting to let them through, and they stood at the top of the trench
looking down – past the struts and buckets of the silent conveyor to the lake of muddy
water that had formed at the bottom and was already rising.

Bobbing in it was a body.