Assassin's Creed: Underworld (23 page)

The slippage caused the surrounding banks to move.
And though the tunnel held, the makeshift roof above the carriage was dislodged and came
tumbling, clattering and crashing to the carriage below. The roof cracked and gave, showering
those inside with splinters and it gave The Ghost just the chance he needed. He wrenched himself
free of the punishers.

‘Ethan,’ he called, and crashed
through the door into the adjoining carriage, where Mrs Pearson sat screaming and terrified with
her hands over her head and then at the sight of The Ghost screamed even more loudly.

He yanked open the carriage door, leapt out on to
the platform – and almost barged into Ethan Frye.

‘Kill him,’ called Cavanagh with a
voice that sounded as though it had been dragged from the very pits of hell. ‘Kill them
both.’

The two punishers burst out of the carriage door,
blocking the way forward, oncoming navvies behind. Other Hardy reached into his suit jacket,
hand appearing with a revolver aimed at The Ghost.

Unwavering, The Ghost met him, wishing he had a
blade but settling for the toughened edge of his bare foot instead, seeming almost to pivot in
the air as he leapt, knocking the revolver away with one kick, then wrenching
the man’s head back with a strike to the chin from his trailing foot.

The weapon spun away and the two men both
sprawled to the deck, but The Ghost was the first to react, kicking again but this time to the
underside of Other Hardy’s chin and hearing a crunch in return that meant he was either
dead or out for the count. The Ghost wasn’t too bothered either way.

At the same time Ethan had the pleasure of
Smith’s company. The second punisher had drawn a long-bladed dirk and came forward
slashing haphazardly, with not a cat in hell’s chance of besting the Assassin. Sure
enough, Ethan stepped smartly away, and felt the reassuring tickle of the mechanism on his
forearm as his blade engaged before he buried it in the man’s neck.

Suddenly the earthquake seemed to increase in
intensity and at the same time Cavanagh stepped out of the carriage and on to the platform in
front of them. His knife was still buried in the train driver but he had no need of it now. Not
now he had the artefact. It glowed and seemed to pulse in time with the tremors.

Twenty feet away, Ethan and The Ghost exchanged a
fearful look as Cavanagh held the artefact before him, as though proffering it to the gods, and
there was a great moan of traumatized wood, and then a sudden increase in the deluge from above.
In the distance came the screams of spectators terrified by the sudden earthquake – an
earthquake that was increasing in intensity now as behind the glowing artefact, Cavanagh’s
face split into a maniacal grin, his eyes changing, until the man who had spent his
life burying his humanity in favour of ambition and corruption had no more
humanity left.

He hadn’t noticed Marchant edging closer to
him.

He didn’t see that Marchant had retrieved
the pearl-handled knife from the body of the train driver.

‘Crawford Starrick sends his
regards,’ shouted the clerk above the crashing of the shaft around them, and then buried
the knife into Cavanagh’s armpit.

The director’s eyes widened in pain and
shock and incomprehension at the sudden turn of events. Straightaway the artefact’s
rhythmic pulse faded as he sank to his knees with his suit front already gleaming darkly with
blood. He looked from Marchant to the two Assassins, then fell forward. And perhaps in that
final moment a little of himself returned, enough to ponder on the evil he had done, before he
left this world with a wet choking noise as his lungs filled and he drowned in his own blood,
and The Ghost hoped that the unnamed sepoy was there to greet him in hell.

The navvies swarmed on to the platform behind
them as Marchant snatched up the artefact – and Ethan Frye leapt forward to relieve him of
it, all of which happened in the split second before a falling piece of timber ignited the gas
supplies on the roof of one of the carriage, and the Metropolitan Railway’s brand-new
enclosed carriage burst into flames.

Ethan and The Ghost dived for cover, flinging
themselves into the tunnel. Behind them was fire and pandemonium and noise, and then after a
moment, during which the after-effects of the explosion died down, they heard Marchant screaming
at the navvies – ‘Get them! Get after them!’ – and they took to their
heels, heading west, back towards Paddington.

‘I have something to tell you,’ said
Ethan as they ran. They pounded in between the train tracks in total darkness, sharpened senses
leading them along the tunnel as fast as they dared, until they found themselves beneath the
steam hole at Leinster Gardens, where they pulled themselves up to safety. Sure enough the gang
of navvies ran right below them. They didn’t even look up.

For a moment there was silence as both men tried
and failed to make sense of what had just happened.

‘What do you have to tell me?’ asked
The Ghost, his shoulders rising and falling as he kept his breath – dreading what he was
about to hear.

Ethan sighed. ‘This is all my fault,’
he said. ‘I was warned.’

‘What do you mean,
“warned”?’

Ethan told The Ghost about Ajay and watched
sorrow cripple the man’s features.

‘How could you?’ said The Ghost at
last.

Ethan was desolate. ‘I
judged it for the best.’

‘You judged wrong.’

Again there was a silence, broken by Ethan, who
said softly, ‘Was I the only one to make an error of judgement? How were they able to
identify you, Jayadeep?’

The Ghost flashed him a furious look.
‘Anything I did was born of a desire to help my fellow man. Isn’t that the right
way? Isn’t that the Assassin way?’

‘It is. But if you excuse yourself on those
terms then you must excuse me, because I did what I did for the good of
all
men.’

‘You were as obsessed with that artefact as
he was.’

‘If so, then I was obsessed with making
sure it didn’t fall into the wrong hands, and now we’ve seen it in action I know I
was right to be.’

The Ghost had been promised lightshows or a
pretty talisman from the artefact. Instead he had witnessed something different altogether.

‘Well, it’s in the wrong hands
now,’ he said.

‘Not for long.’

From below them came a shout. ‘Come on,
mates. We’re to get to the tunnel.’

‘The coast will be clear soon,’ said
Ethan, drumming his hands on the dirt in frustration, ‘but the artefact will be halfway to
Starrick by now.’

The Ghost wasn’t listening. Let Ethan
fixate on his artefacts. He no longer cared. He was thinking about the order they’d just
heard. ‘The tunnel’. The Templars knew about Maggie – they knew that through
her was a way to get to him, and through him a way to Ethan, and maybe
just
having the artefact was not enough. They meant to smash the Assassins as well.

‘I have to go to Maggie.’

‘I have to go after the artefact,’
said Ethan. ‘Just as your conscience dictates you must go to the tunnel, so I must go
there.’

‘You should go after your precious
artefact,’ said The Ghost, and then took to his feet.

It was a distance of some six miles from
Leinster Gardens to the Thames Tunnel, plus the Templar men had a head start and were travelling
by carriage, but The Ghost was fast and he was determined, and he knew the route well, and he
made it within the hour.

Even so, he was too late. Wagons were already
arranged around the octagonal marble entrance hall of the tunnel shaft. Figures were milling
about, some of them holding lit flares and lamps. He saw other figures running, heard screaming
and the unmistakable sound of coshes and truncheons being used in anger and the shouts of pain
to match. The residents of the tunnel were accustomed to having their refuge invaded but not
with such violence, not with so much malice or single-minded purpose.

And the purpose?

To take Maggie.

But he wasn’t going to let them do that. At
this, he wasn’t going to fail.

Pandemonium reigned but through a forest of
bodies The Ghost saw Other Hardy. The last surviving punisher stood at a carriage with his
revolver in one hand and the other at his
injured face, shouting orders.
‘Bring the woman, bring the old woman.’ There was no sign of Marchant, and The Ghost
guessed Ethan was right: the artefact was on its way to Crawford Starrick.
Best of luck,
Ethan. You made your choice.

Running past a series of minor skirmishes
outside, The Ghost burst into the octagonal hall. Over by the watch-house, the commotion was at
its most heated. He saw the grey hair of Maggie amid a throng of bodies, some of them tunnel
dwellers, some of them strongarms. She was shouting and cursing loudly as Templar thugs
attempted to manhandle her over the turnstile. The tunnel people were trying to save her but
they were ill-equipped to do so. Templar clubs and knives rose and fell, and shouts of
resistance turned to screams of pain that rebounded from the glass. The Ghost thought he saw the
private detective Hazlewood somewhere among the great mass of people but then the face was gone.
A second later he realized that Other Hardy’s urgings seemed to have stopped and then
heard a voice from behind him, saying, ‘Right, you little bastard …’

Other Hardy was right-handed. He was armed with a
Webley that pulled to his right.

The Ghost took both factors into consideration as
he ducked and wheeled at the same time, going inside Hardy’s gun arm and pleased to hear
the air part a good six inches away from his head a half-second before he heard the blast. There
was a scream. One of the Templar thugs fell and that was one less man to deal with, he thought
as he broke Hardy’s arm, reached for the dirk that hung sheathed at the punisher’s
waist and then thrust it into his chest.

Other Hardy reached for The
Ghost and their eyes were just inches apart as The Ghost watched the light of life die in the
other man’s eyes – and he experienced a wave of something that was part sickness and
part despair, a great hollowing out inside him as he took a life.

Maggie had seen him. ‘Bharat!’ she
screeched from among the brawl at the turnstile, and Templar thugs turned away from the
commotion, saw The Ghost standing over their boss as he slid lifelessly to the mosaic floor, and
moved closer to attack.

The Ghost tossed the knife from one hand to the
other, disorientating the first thug who came forward. Brave man. Stupid man. He died in
seconds, and now The Ghost had two blades, the dirk and a cutlass, and used them both to open
the throat of a second attacker, then spun, jabbing backhand with the cutlass and opening the
stomach of a third. He was an expert swordsman, skilled in the business of death. He took no
pleasure in it. Simply, he was good at it.

By now Maggie had been reclaimed by the tunnel
people and taken back to the sanctuary of the steps, and perhaps the Templar thugs knew the game
was up; perhaps seeing three of their comrades fall so quickly at the hands of the barefoot
Indian lad had made them decide that discretion was the better part of valour; or perhaps the
death of Other Hardy took whatever spirit they had left, because a cry went up, ‘Time to
go, mates, time to go,’ and the beatings stopped as the thugs streamed out of the hall and
headed for their carriages.

In a matter of moments the hall had emptied and
then
the area outside had too, and the tunnel was no longer under attack.

The Ghost stood with his shoulders rising and
falling as he caught his breath. He let the dirk and the cutlass fall to the floor with a dull
clang that reverberated around the room, and then he walked towards the turnstile, climbing over
and heading down the steps.

The rotunda was a mass of people and there were
cheers for him as he descended.

‘Maggie?’ he asked a woman he knew
and she pointed him along the tunnel.

‘They took her up there to safety,’
she said, before stealing a kiss and then clapping him on the back.

The tunnel dwellers kept up the cheering as he
passed through the rotunda and into the tunnel itself, leaving the press of people and the shock
and excitement of the battle behind.

He had already decided that he no longer belonged
to the Brotherhood; nor would he ever speak to Ethan Frye again. Let the Assassins and Templars
fight it out among themselves. He would stay here, with his people. This was where he belonged.

A thought occurred to him.
They took her up
there to safety
.

Who had taken her to safety?

He remembered seeing the face of the private
detective in the melee. He broke into a run. ‘Maggie!’ he screamed, dashing up the
tunnel towards the berth they shared, where she had tended the fire and doled out broth and
received her rightful love as tunnel mother.

He found her there.

She lay in the dirt.

Whoever had killed her had stabbed her multiple
times, shredding her smock. Her grey witchy hair was flecked with blood. Her eyes that so often
blazed with fury and mirth and passion were dull in death.

They had pinned a note to her chest.
We
consider the debt settled
.

The Ghost sank to his haunches and held Maggie.
He took her head in his lap and the tunnel dwellers heard his cries as he wailed his grief and
despair.