Assassin's Creed: Underworld (33 page)

At first she believed she was hallucinating.
Surely the figure in the doorway was an image projected to her in death, an out-of-focus product
of wishful thinking? She’d take it with her, she decided. Rather than the grinning,
sweating insanity of Starrick, it would be this that she carried with her from this world to the
next.

It would be Henry.

She saw his hand rise and fall. Light flashing on
silver. Something spinning across the vault towards them.

And then from Starrick came a shout of pain, and
his hold relaxed enough on her throat for her to see a knife handle protruding from his chest, a
flower of blood already spreading across his shirt.

A familiar voice. Henry. He had come. It really
was him in the doorway, resplendent in his robes, activating his blade, moving towards where
Starrick was trying but now failing to maintain his grip on the twins.

The guardian drones
, she thought, but
couldn’t say.
Henry, beware the guardians.

She saw one of them seem to shudder with fury
then shoot a bolt of energy that snagged Henry’s shoulder hard enough to knock him off his
feet and unconscious to the stone. At the same time both twins pulled themselves free, sprawling
to the floor and gasping for air even as
they arranged themselves into
defensive positions, blades at the ready.

They needn’t have worried. Starrick looked
beaten. Perhaps the guardians were still responding to him but not for much longer.

‘You’re weakening,’ shouted
Jacob in triumph. He dodged a shot from a guardian drone. ‘You cannot maintain
this.’

He was right. Blood was spreading across
Starrick’s front and the Grand Master was already deathly pale. The probes glowed more
faintly, their respective flight paths less certain.

‘The Shroud will not protect you,’
called Evie.

Starrick bared bloodstained teeth. ‘You are
wrong,’ he said. ‘The people of this city, my people, shall supply its
energy.’ Whatever power the Shroud gave him was fading now.

‘This city is bigger than you will ever
be,’ Evie told him.

She and Jacob made to attack, and when Starrick
pulled away, the Shroud fluttered off him and to the floor of the vault, releasing its host.

At the same time the guardian drones seemed to
lose their energy, as though they too knew the battle was done, and they returned to the ornate
First Civilization crate: theatregoers settling down to enjoy the show from the comfort of their
box.

Starrick sank to his knees. His shoulders slumped
and his head hung, regarding his scarlet shirt.

With Jacob covering Starrick, Evie ran to Henry,
dropping to her knees and skidding across the stone towards
him. She took
his head in her lap and felt for a pulse. It was strong. He was alive, his eyelids already
beginning to flutter.

‘Henry,’ she said, to let him know
she was near. She cradled his head for a precious moment, allowing herself a kiss. There would
be plenty more of those, she promised herself.

But first …

Evie straightened, turned and crossed to where
Jacob stood over Starrick.

The twins looked gravely at one another. There
was no honour to be had in slaying a mortally wounded man. But there was even less in letting
him bleed slowly to death on the stone.

To finish him quickly and humanely was the right
way. Their father’s way. The Assassin way.

They came forward.

‘Together,’ said Evie to Jacob and
they ran him through.

‘London will perish without me,’
gasped Crawford Starrick as he died.

‘You flatter yourself,’ Jacob told
him.

‘I would have made it into a
paradise.’

Evie shook her head. ‘The city belongs to
the people. You are but one man.’

‘I am at the very top of the order,’
said Starrick with what would be his very last breath.

‘The very top should be barricading their
doors,’ stated Jacob. ‘We are the Assassins.’

Yes, thought Evie. She cast her gaze at the
carnage in the vault and knew that, for the time being at least, the death
was done. Soon, Evie and Jacob would dab their handkerchiefs in Starrick’s blood and
then the twins and Henry would leave this vault, and knowing the Shroud’s true power they
would leave it behind, to be sealed up and left in the care of the Crown. And tomorrow London
would awaken as a city renewed and together the three Assassins would continue to bring it hope.
There would be more battles to fight, she knew. But for now …

Henry was trembling a little he noticed. But that
was to be expected. After all, it wasn’t every day that …

He composed himself and moved into the room where
Evie sat studying the bouquet he had sent her, a perplexed look on her face, and he wondered if
he were making a huge error of judgement. And if he was, how he would ever recover.

Because there was no doubting his feelings for
her. None at all. He had fallen a little in love with her the second he first saw her. Their
time together since had seen that feeling intensify into something so strong it almost felt like
sweet pain, like a precious burden – the need to see her each day, just to be with her,
breathe the same air as her; what interested her he found just as absorbing, and what made her
laugh tickled him too. Just to share a working day with her brought him more happiness than he
could remember since childhood. She wiped his soul clean of his years as The Ghost; she scrubbed
the slaughter from him. She made him feel whole and new again. His love for her was something he
marvelled at, like a rare butterfly, such was its colour and intensity.

And yet, like a butterfly, it could so easily
take flight and escape.

Certainly Henry
thought
she felt the
same way about
him, but, aye, like Hamlet said, there’s the rub; he
couldn’t be absolutely sure. All that time they had spent together researching the
artefact had brought them closer, and for him feelings of friendship and attraction had swiftly
blossomed into the love he felt now, this glorious renewal. But for her? Almost exactly a month
ago she’d rewarded him with a kiss for saving her life. Was he reading too much into what
might simply have been a hurried thank-you?

It was not long after those epochal events at the
palace that he had found her in her study one day. She sat with one leg pulled beneath herself,
leaning forward, arms on the tabletop, a pose he knew well, and he was sure that she blushed a
little at the sight of him as he entered the room.

(But then again, on the other hand, maybe she
didn’t.)

He’d placed his still-empty herbarium on
the tabletop before her and watched her eyes go from her own reading to its cover.

‘A herbarium?’ she said. ‘Are
you collecting flowers for someone?’

‘Only myself,’ he replied.
‘I’m told it’s something of a British pastime. Did you know they all have
symbolic meanings?’

‘I had heard something of the sort,’
she said.

‘Of course you have. Unfortunately,
I’ve had no time to fill the book.’

‘I’m sure I can find some samples, if
you’d accept my help.’

‘I would appreciate that. Thank you, Miss
Frye.’

And so they had, building up an impressive
collection together over the weeks, searching for the meaning of
their own
relationship just as surely as they deciphered messages in flora.

‘Mignonette: your qualities surpass your
charms,’ she said one day, as they pored over the now-bulging herbarium.

‘I’m not entirely sure if
that’s meant as a compliment. “Love-in-a-mist”, that’s a pretty
name.’

‘Alternately called “devil in the
bush”’

They looked at each other and laughed.

‘Narcissus: self-love,’ she said,
pointing it out. ‘I should buy a bouquet for Jacob.’

‘Unkind, Miss Frye,’ laughed Henry,
but pleased – pleased the twins were reconciled – and pleased that she was able to
see Jacob with a little more perspective.

‘
Amusing as this all is, I really
should get back to work. If you need me …’

‘I’ll send a bouquet,’ he
said.

‘Of Irises.’

‘“A message.”
Indeed.’

And so he had. He had assembled a delightful
nosegay of iris, snowdrop, strawberry flower and red tulip, each of them well chosen, selected
to say something he himself was finding it so hard to express. The man in the mirror scoffed at
his indecision and uncertainty.
Of course she feels the same way. She kissed you at the
vault.
The man who stood before it couldn’t be so sure.

‘A message …’ he watched her
say, as her fingertips went to the snowdrop and strawberry, ‘of hope.
Perfection?’

Next she went to the red tulip. More perplexed
still. Unable to decipher the meaning behind this one.

And in the doorway Henry
took a deep breath, cleared his throat and said, ‘… a declaration of love.’

She turned to see him there and stood from her
seat, crossing to where he stood.

Falling over his words, he said, ‘I …
Miss Frye, you must know that I hold you in the highest esteem … and regard. And I wonder
if you would do me the honour of … If you would, give me your hand … in
matrimony.’

Evie Frye took Henry’s hands, looked up
into a face she loved with eyes that were misty with tears.

And, yes, he knew she felt the same.

Frederick Abberline: police officer, later
promoted to sergeant

Ajay: Indian Assassin, custodian at The
Darkness

The bodyguard: an ex-soldier who sees the
error of his ways

Boot: a terrible pickpocket and an even
worse courier

Sir David Brewster: scientist and
Templar

James Thomas Brudenell: Templar,
Starrick’s lieutenant

Cavanagh: director of the Metropolitan
Railway, Templar

Benjamin Disraeli: politician

Mary Anne Disraeli: wife of Benjamin

Rupert Ferris: head of Ferris Ironworks,
Templar

John Fowler: chief engineer for the
Metropolitan Railway, responsible for the construction of the world’s first underground
line

Ethan Frye: Assassin and mentor to
Jayadeep Mir, father to Evie and Jacob

Evie Frye: Assassin and twin to Jacob,
daughter of Ethan

Jacob Frye: Assassin and twin to Evie, son
of Ethan, head of the Rooks

Catherine Gladstone: wife to William

William Ewert Gladstone: Chancellor of the
Exchequer

Hardy: one of Cavanagh’s strongarms,
a punisher

Other Hardy: one of Cavanagh’s
strongarms, also a punisher

Leonard Hazlewood: private detective

Pyara Kaur: wife to Arbaaz Mir, mother to
Jayadeep

Kulpreet: Indian
Assassin, custodian at The Darkness

Colonel Walter Lavelle: Templar

Maggie: a friend of The Ghost and
‘mother’ to the unfortunates of the Thames Tunnel

Marchant: site manager at the Metropolitan
Railway

Arbaaz Mir: Indian Assassin, father to
Jayadeep

Jayadeep Mir aka The Ghost, Bharat Singh
and Henry Green: Assassin undercover agent

Charles Pearson: Solicitor of London and
the ‘father’ of the London Underground

Mary Pearson: wife to Charles

Aubrey Shaw: police officer

Duleep Singh: maharajah and Assassin
contact

Smith: another of Cavanagh’s
strongarms, and the third punisher

Crawford Starrick: Templar Grand
Master

Lucy Thorne: Templar, expert in the
occult

Philip ‘Plutus’ Twopenny: the
governor of the Bank of England, Templar

Robert Waugh: pornographer with links to
the Templars

George Westhouse: Assassin

Special thanks to

Yves Guillemot

And also

Alain Corre

Cover art: Hugo Puzzuoli & Grant Hillier