Assassin's Creed: Underworld (30 page)

Crawford Starrick couldn’t remember when he
had last partaken of his beloved tea. His usually ordered life had taken on a distinctly chaotic
tinge. The stress was beginning to show.

Not only had Lucy Thorne been stymied in her
efforts to find the Shroud, largely due to the interruptions of Evie Frye, but the other Frye
twin – it hurt Starrick to even think his name,
Jacob
– had also been
causing trouble. Templar agents were falling beneath his blade; plans the Order had spent years
laying in place were being undone. Starrick had come to dread the knock on his office door, for
every time one of his men arrived it was with more bad news. Another member of the Order dead.
Another scheme confounded.

Now he raised his head from his hands and
regarded the nervous scrivener who sat on the other side of his untidy desk, patiently awaiting
his dictation. Starrick took a deep breath that was indistinguishable from a sigh and said,
‘Take this down, then I want it sealed until you receive further orders.’

He closed his eyes, composing himself, and began
his dictation: ‘Miss Thorne. You supplied me with the means to secure London’s
future. The city thanks you. The Order thanks you. I thank you. But the Shroud can be worn by
only one. Therefore, I hereby dissolve this partnership. I promise to endow
you with an income into your old age, but that is the most I can do. May the father of
understanding guide you.’

There. It was done. Starrick sat listening to the
scratch of the secretary’s pen as his words were duly transcribed.
Yes
, he
thought,
the Shroud can be worn by only one
, and he found himself relaxing almost
sleepily in the knowledge that it was his destiny to be
the one
.

A knock at the door startled him from his
absorption and straightaway he felt his jaw clench, reality intruding with the promise of more
bad news, further havoc wreaked by the junior Frye club.

In that regard at least, he was not disappointed.
‘What is it?’ he snapped.

Entering, an assistant looked nervous. One hand
fiddled at his collar, loosening it. ‘Miss Thorne, sir …’ he said in a
faltering voice.

‘What of her?’

‘I’m sorry, sir. She’s
dead.’

One thing his associates had learnt – or
been forced to learn – was that you never knew with Starrick what he was going to do next.
The two attendants held their breath as his shoulders rose and fell heavily and his hands went
to his face as he absorbed the news.

All of a sudden he peeked through his fingers.
‘Where is the key?’ he said.

The assistant cleared his throat. ‘There
was no key found on her body, sir.’

Starrick’s fingers closed as he
contemplated this new
and even more unwelcome development. Next his
attention went to a bowl on his desk that he began to turn over in his hands. His face was
reddening. His men knew what was to come. One of his outbursts. And sure enough, the room was
filled with his frustrated shriek, his hair, usually so neat with pomade, in disarray as the
bowl was lifted high, about to be dashed to the tabletop, until …

The shriek died down. With exaggerated care,
Starrick placed the bowl on the table. ‘The Shroud will be mine,’ he said, to
himself more than his men. ‘Even if I have to raise hellfire to do it.’

‘Please tell me again where we’re
going,’ said Evie, as she and Henry passed through iron gates and towards a set of benches
at the opposite end of a leafy square.

In truth, she had been enjoying the walk. Time
spent with Henry was a blissful antidote to the killing that had become so routine in her life.
Her father had always warned her against becoming inured to it. ‘A killing machine is a
machine, and we Assassins are not machines,’ he said, making her promise never to lose her
empathy. Never to forget her humanity.

At the time she had wondered how that could ever
happen. After all, she had been brought up to respect life. How on earth could she fail to be
moved by the taking of it? But of course the inevitable had happened, and she had discovered
that one way to cope with slaughter was to shut herself off from it, disallowing access to those
parts of her brain that wanted to reflect upon it. And more and more she found it a simple
process to do that, so that sometimes she worried she’d lose all sense of her true self in
her own survival mechanism.

Henry was a means of pulling back from all that.
Her feelings for him helped Evie to centre herself, and his reticence to take up arms served to
remind her that there could be another way. He had told her about his life before
he met her. She knew that he had once been where she was now and had returned
from it. His was a tattered soul but nevertheless intact. He was an example of how it could be
done.

Still, now came the next phase of their mission
to retake London, and whatever her feelings for Henry they would have to wait. Restoring the
Brotherhood was her main priority.

They were close now. So close. Since events at
the Tower the twins had struck again and again at the heart of the Templar organization. They
had hit them where it hurt most. In the wallet. After neutralizing Twopenny, Jacob had closed
down a counterfeit ring, helping to restore order to the city. Jacob had also put an end to the
activities of Brudenell, who was working for the Order by trying to prevent the passage of
legislation harmful to them.

Each successful operation had seen the
Assassins’ stature grow in the eyes of those in the East End and even beyond;
Henry’s gang grew exponentially. The Templars might have taken London by worming their way
into its middle echelons but the Assassins were reclaiming it by working their way up from the
bottom. The urchins who streamed through the streets saw the Assassins as champions and were
eager to help in any way; their elders were more cautious and more frightened but offered their
tacit approval. Henry would often return to his shop and discover goodwill gifts left on the
doorstep.

All of this was of benefit of course. But in
Evie’s mind (though not in Jacob’s) it took second place to issues of the Shroud.
Now they had recovered the key, they still
faced the problem of not knowing
where it was kept. They knew where it wasn’t – it wasn’t in the Tower of
London. But where could it be?

And so she asked Henry again, ‘Where are we
going?’

‘I found a letter from the Prince Consort
among Lucy Thorne’s research,’ he told her, ‘dated 1847.’

The Prince Consort. Prince Albert for whom Queen
Victoria mourned still.

‘1847?’ she said.

‘The year the prince began renovations to
Buckingham Palace,’ he explained.

‘You think he added a vault for the
Shroud?’ asked Evie excitedly.

Henry nodded, smiling at the same time, pleased
to bask in Evie’s approval. ‘And since no map of the palace has a room marked
“secret vault” …’

By now they were near the benches where there sat
a very singular-looking man. An Indian gentleman, he had a rounded well-fed face that made him
look boyish. Nevertheless there was a handsomeness about him. A bearing. He wore silks.
Expensive silks.

He folded his paper, placed it down and rose to
meet them as they approached. ‘Your Highness,’ said Henry with a short bow. A
somewhat begrudging short bow, if Evie wasn’t very much mistaken. ‘May I present
Miss Evie Frye. Miss Frye, Maharajah Duleep Singh.’

Evie and Singh greeted one another, before
Singh’s face became grave and he turned to Henry. ‘My friend, the plans you asked
for have been removed.’

‘Removed? By whom?’

‘Crawford
Starrick’s forces. Or someone employed by him.’

Singh saw Evie and Henry’s faces fall.
‘Yes, I thought you might recognize that name. I know where they are, but it is heavily
guarded.’

Evie threw her shoulders back. ‘That part
will not be a problem.’

Singh looked her up and down. ‘I thought
not.’

It was a short while later that Evie and Henry
were crouched on a rooftop, having raced each other to the top (winner: Evie) where they
overlooked a fortress building they knew to be a Templar stronghold.

In there were the documents they sought, taken by
Crawford Starrick, who had clearly reached the same conclusion they had.

However,
he
didn’t have the key.
They did. And now they wanted the documents.

Problem one was the guards. Henry counted
sentries at the windows of what might have been a small fortress but was well guarded. He saw
men in the window, at the gate, guarding the grounds that surrounded it.

‘We’re going to need a plan,’
said Evie simply.

‘I can provide a distraction for the guards
while you discover a way inside,’ Henry told her, and she looked at him.
‘Really?’ she said with a mix of concern and surprise, not sure if he was ready, and
then – did she imagine it? Or did he blush? ‘For you, Evie,’ he said,
‘certainly.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘once
I’m inside, I shall find someone who knows where the papers are stored.’

‘And we will meet
later,’ he told her, and then turned to leave.

‘Be careful,’ she told his retreating
back softly.

He provided just the distraction she needed. The
guards on the nearside began to disperse at the noise and she used the opportunity to scale the
wall and let herself into a first-floor window. This was the administrative centre where, if she
wasn’t very much mistaken, the plans should have been stored.

She was either very much mistaken or the plans
were elsewhere. She had a brief look around the office into which she had climbed but there was
nothing there.
Right
, she thought,
now for Plan B. Find somebody and interrogate
him
.

She went to the office door and listened
carefully for sounds from the passageway. Satisfied, she waited and then, as a lone guard made
his way past, yanked open the door, rabbit-punched him in the throat, crooked her right arm
round his neck and dragged him into the office and closed the door.

He sprawled to the floor, gagging with the pain
of the rabbit punch and scarcely able to believe the sight of his assailant. In a second Evie
was standing astride him and he stared up at her with terrified eyes, babbling. ‘I swear,
miss, I do not know where they’ve taken him.’

Her one hand held his collars, gauntlet fist
drawn back, ready to threaten him with another even more painful blow, but checked herself.
Taken him?

‘Taken who?’ she snapped.

‘The man dressed like you. The guards
dragged him off …’ the guard said.

Damn
.
‘Henry.’ She gathered herself. ‘The plans you stole. Where are
they?’

He shook his head furiously. ‘I don’t
know anything about that.’

She believed him, and with a quick jab of the
gauntlet left him unconscious. Now she had a decision to make. Continue her search for the
plans? Or rescue Henry?

Except, there really was no decision.

Outside in the street, Evie got her first break
when she ran into one of Henry’s urchin informants.

‘They’ve got him, miss,’ she
was told. ‘They took Mr Henry. We couldn’t stop them. They dragged him off in a red
carriage. They won’t get far, though. One wheel looks like it was about ready to fall off.
You can see the cart tracks. It looks all wobbly like.’

She thanked him and thanked her lucky stars that
the Assassins could count on the support of the people. Let the Templars try to track a carriage
through the streets of London without the eyes and ears of the populace to aid them. Just let
them try.

And so she followed the tracks made by the
carriage, weaving her way quickly through the crowded streets, just a fast-moving face in the
crowd until she came close to Covent Garden, where she found the carriage abandoned.

She dashed on to the piazza, hoping to catch
sight of Henry and his captors, but there was no sign of them. A trader nearby was looking her
way with an admiring glance, so she hurried over – time to use her feminine wiles.
‘Did you see some men get out of that carriage?’ she asked him, with the sweetest
smile she could manage.

He simpered. ‘Yes, they pulled someone out.
Dead
drunk, he was. They carried him into the churchyard. Maybe he wanted a
quiet place to sleep it off?’

Next to him was a stall selling oils.
‘Yeah,’ called the trader, doffing his cap at Evie, ‘I saw them dragging
someone out after the wheel fell off. They said he’d hit his head. Not sure why they
needed to take him into the church, but that’s where they went.’

Both were directing her attention across the
piazza to the familiar portico piers and columns of St Paul’s Church at the west end.
Despite the tall buildings on every other side, it still loomed over the square. On any other
day it would have been impressive, a sight to behold. Now, however, Evie looked at it and saw a
mausoleum. She saw dread.

She thanked her two admirers, crossed the square
and went to the churchyard at the back, glancing at the equally impressive portico at the
church’s rear as she threaded her way through the dark churchyard, quickly at first, and
then with more caution when she heard voices in the near distance.

She was at the back of the churchyard now, where
the undergrowth was thick and untended, when she came across what she could only describe as a
Templar encampment. In the middle of it was Henry trussed to a chair, guards standing over him.
With a jolt of shock she thought they might have killed him. His head lolled on his chest. On
second thoughts there was nothing about the way they were talking that suggested he might be
dead.

‘Why did you bring him here?’ one of
the men was saying.

‘The man is an
Assassin,’ replied his colleague. ‘We didn’t want him getting away before you
had a chance to question him, now, did we?’

The first guard was anxious and jumpy about
something. ‘He was more secure where he was before. I told you not to come
here.’

‘It can’t be helped. Now, wake him
up.’

It was while the second guard was trying to shake
Henry awake that Evie made her move, dashing out of the shadows with her blade drawn. She made
short work of her opponents. She had no desire to prolong the fight even for the sake of her
enemy’s dignity or her own pride. She merely finished it, quickly and ruthlessly.

How different she was to the callow Assassin who
had first embarked on this mission.

Only when they lay at her feet did she go to
Henry, rushing to untie him.

‘Did they hurt you?’ she asked
him.

He shook his head. ‘I’m fine. Listen,
they sent someone back to move the architectural plans. Do you have them?’

Now it was her turn to shake her head.

‘My capture has undone your plans,’
he said as they made their escape. ‘I’m sorry.’

Disconsolate, they made their way back to
base.