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.
Part Three
* * *
Metropolis Rising
58
Cold and damp and gripped by melancholy, the Assassin George Westhouse shivered in the sidings of Croydon rail yard. Was it that a tired pall hung over all of England? Or did it hang over him? There was a storm brewing, he thought. Both literally and metaphorically.
It was February 1868, five and a half years after the wretched events at the Metropolitan line. After that, he, Ethan Frye and The Ghost had retired in failure: The Ghost to his hidey-hole in the Thames Tunnel, a self-imposed prison of regret and recrimination; George to batten down the hatches in Croydon; and Ethan to busy himself with raising the next generation of Assassin resistance – one unencumbered by the disappointment and failure that tainted their elders. A new generation with fresh ambition and enthusiasm. A new way of doing things.
What a shame, George thought, that Ethan will never see it in action.
Ethan had been just forty-three years old when he died a matter of weeks ago, but he had been ill with the pleurisy for some time before that. During many hours spent at Ethan’s bedside, George had watched his old friend wither, like fruit on a vine.
‘Find the artefact, George,’ Ethan had insisted. ‘Send Evie and Jacob for it. The future of London lies in their hands now. The twins; you and Henry – you’re the only ones left now.’
‘Hush now, Ethan,’ George said, and leaned back in his chair to hide the tears that pricked his eyes. ‘You will be here to lead us. You’re indomitable, Ethan. As unbreakable as one of those infernal trains that trundle through Croydon night and day.’
‘I hope so, George, I truly hope so.’
‘Besides, the Council has not ratified any operations in this area. They consider us too weak.’
‘I know when we’re ready better than any Council, and we are ready. Henry will provide. Jacob and Evie will act.’
‘Well, then you had better hurry up and get well and inform the Council yourself then, hadn’t you?’ chided George.
‘That I had, George, that I had …’
But Ethan had dissolved into a coughing fit so hard that the muslin cloth he held to his mouth came away speckled with blood.
‘We were so close, George,’ he said another time. He was even weaker now, becoming more frail by the day. ‘The artefact was just a few feet away from me, as far away as you are now. I almost had it.’
‘You did your best.’
‘Then my best was not enough, because the operation did not succeed, George. I ran an unsuccessful operation.’
‘There were circumstances beyond your control.’
‘I failed The Ghost.’
‘He himself made mistakes. Whether he accepts that I have no idea; whether his mistakes contributed to the failure of the operation I couldn’t say either. But the fact remains that it failed. Now we must concentrate on regrouping.’
Ethan turned his head to look at George and it was all George could do to stop himself recoiling afresh. It was true that Ethan’s achievements as an Assassin would never be celebrated along with those of Altaïr, Ezio or Edward Kenway, but for all that he had been a credit to the Brotherhood, and he was a man who even when he was downhearted exuded a thirst for life. With Ethan you always had the sense that inside was a personality at war with itself, pushing and pulling this way and that but never at rest, always questing forward.
Now, though, the skin that once glowed with life was pale and drawn, the eyes that had burned with passion sunken and dull. Ethan was no longer questing for life; he was taking the long walk towards death.
First he had suffered with the flu; then, when that seemed to have passed, came chest pains and a cons
tant hacking cough. When he began hacking up blood the physician was called, who diagnosed pleurisy. Benjamin Franklin had died of pleurisy, said the physician phlegmatically. William Wordsworth too.
Even so, the physician assured the family that pleurisy was an infection of the chest. And so long as the patient rested there was every possibility it would clear up by itself. Plenty of patients recovered from pleurisy.
Just not Benjamin Franklin or William Wordsworth, that was all.
And not the Assassin Ethan Frye, it turned out. For each passing day the pleurisy seemed to write its fate upon his skin more emphatically than the last, and to hear him cough, a crunching rattle disgorged from deep within a chest that was no longer functioning as it should, was dreadful to witness. The sound of it tore through the house. Ethan had taken a room in the eaves – ‘I’m not to be a burden to the twins while I’m ill,’ he had said – but his cough carried down the stairways to the lower rooms, where the twins shared their concern in bitten lips, downcast eyes and shared glances as they took strength from one another.
In many ways the terrible story of their father’s illness could be measured in his children’s reactions: rolled eyes when he first got ill, as though he was exaggerating his malady in order to enjoy the benefits of being waited on hand and foot, and then a series of increasingly worried silent exchanges when it became terribly apparent that he was not going to recover in a matter of days or even weeks.
After that came a period when the sound of his coughing would make them flinch and their eyes filled with tears; latterly they looked as though they wished for it all to be over, so their father’s suffering might be at an end.
He limited their trips to his bedchamber. They would have liked to have been by his bedside night and day, just as he had once sat with his beloved wife Cecily. Perhaps that experience had convinced him the sickbed of a loved one was no place to spend your days.
Sometimes, though, if he was feeling well enough, he would summon them to his room, tell them to wipe the worried looks off their faces (because he wasn’t bloody well dead yet), then issue instructions on how they were to lead a new vanguard of resistance against the Templars. He informed them he had written seeking the Council’s approval for when it was time to send the twins into action.
Ethan knew his time was short. He knew he was leaving this world. He was like a chess player manoeuvring his pieces ready for a final attack that he himself would not be around to superintend. But he wanted things in place.
Perhaps it was his way of making amends.
It infuriated him that the Council refused to give him their blessing; indeed, the Council withheld any decision on the London situation until such time as they had news of a situation worth acting upon. Stalemate.
One evening, George visited him. As usual they conversed for some time and then, as usual, George was lulled into sleep in the cosy warmth of the eaves. He awoke with a start, as though some sixth sense were prodding him back into consciousness, to find Ethan lying on his side with both hands across his chest, his eyes closed and mouth open, a thin trail of blood running from his mouth to the sweat-soaked sheets.
With the heaviest heart imaginable George went to the body, arranging it on the bed, pulling a sheet to beneath Ethan’s chin, and using his handkerchief to wipe the blood from his friend’s mouth. ‘I’m sorry, Ethan,’ he said as he worked. ‘I’m sorry for slumbering when I should have been here to help guide you into the next world.’
He had crept quietly downstairs to find the twins in the kitchen. Evie and Jacob had taken to wearing their Assassins’ attire, as though to acknowledge that it was they who would carry the torch from now on, and they had both been wearing them that night, their cowls raised as they sat either side of the bare kitchen table, a candle slowly guttering on the wood between them, in the same wordless dialogue of grief that had enveloped them for weeks.
They held hands, he noticed, and regarded one another from under their cowls, and perhaps they already knew, perhaps they had felt the same energy that had prompted George awake. For they had turned their gaze upon him in the kitchen doorway and in their eyes was the terrible knowledge that their father was dead.
No words were said. George simply sat with them and then, as dawn broke, left for home to attend to the task of notifying the Council that one of the brothers had fallen.
Condolences arrived at the house, but in accordance with Assassin tradition the burial was an unremarkable, quiet occasion, attended by George, Evie and Jacob alone – just three mourners and a priest who consigned Ethan to the grave. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
For some time they seemed to exist in a state of limbo. Until news had reached George that the Metropolitan artefact was close. He had no time to seek the Council’s approval for an operation to retrieve it; they probably would have demanded more detailed information anyway. And he knew exactly what Ethan’s wishes were. His friend had imparted them to him.
Evie and Jacob were ready. They would go into action.
59
And so in the Croydon rail yard belonging to Ferris Ironworks, a darkened world of smoke-belching locomotives, clanking carriages and complaining brakes, George met the twins for the first time since their father’s funeral.
As ever, he was struck by their looks: Jacob had his father’s charisma, the same eyes that appeared to dance with a mix of mischief and resolve; Evie, on the other hand, was the mirror image of her mother. If anything even more beautiful. She had a tilted, imperious chin, freckled cheeks, exquisite, questioning eyes and a full mouth that all too rarely split into a wide smile.
Jacob wore a top hat. Evie’s cowl lay across her shoulders. Their clothes were free-flowing and customized in the right places: long three-quarter-length belted coats open over discreetly armoured waistcoats and boots with noise-proofed soles and subtle steel toe-caps. On their forearms were the gauntlet-blades with which they were both expert (Evie even more so than Jacob, according to Ethan), their fingers snug in hinged steel protectors that doubled as knuckledusters.
As the air crackled with the threat of the oncoming storm, George had watched them move through the rail yards to where he crouched behind one of the train cars. Thanks to their looks and garb you could hardly hope to see two more striking figures. Yet their father had taught them well. Just as he himself was a master of hiding in plain sight, so too were his offspring.
They greeted one another, sharing something unspoken of Ethan. George had notified them by letter of the job at hand, warning them what it would entail. Before he died, Ethan had told the twins very little about the Piece of Eden that had been the focus of his failed mission in 1862. After all, it was not exactly a glorious episode in the history of the Brotherhood. They knew it was a uniquely powerful object and not to be underestimated. Beyond that was scarcely anything to be said before the job began.
It was to be their blooding.
They hunkered down. Jacob, his top hat perched at its usual rakish angle, was the more brash. His edges were rough, his patience short, and when he talked it was with the growling voice of the streets. Evie was the more thoughtful and cultured of the two. An outer softness belied a steel within.
‘The iron ships from here,’ said George, indicating the works. ‘The Templar running things is Rupert Ferris, and our target one. Target two is Sir David Brewster, who’s got his hands on the bauble. Think you can handle it?’
The twins were young and keen and fearless, and maybe, thought George, turning to find that they had both climbed to the top of a carriage, they would also be cunning.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said wit
h a smile, ‘the unstoppable Frye twins. See them nightly at Covent Garden.’
Evie gave him a don’t-worry look. ‘George, honestly, I’ve studied the plans of the laboratory and have every route covered.’
‘And I’ve got all I need right here,’ said Jacob, engaging his blade.
He turned at the sound of a train whistle.
‘Jacob …’ said George.
‘I’ll extend your regards to Ferris,’ he replied. He and Evie were watching the train as it trundled through the siding towards them. They crouched on the roof of their own rail car, ready to spring forth.
‘Evie …’ said George warningly.
‘Chat later, George, we’ve a train to catch,’ said Evie and then the two of them made their leap, landing with all the grace and stealth of predatory wildcats on the roof of the passing train. A wave to George and the mission had begun.
‘May the creed guide you, you vagrants,’ George called to them, but didn’t think they’d heard. Instead he watched them go with a strange mixture of emotions: envy for their youth, grace and balance. And concern that Ethan was wrong – that the twins were not yet battle-ready. Not for an operation of this magnitude.
But most of all, hope – hope the two incredible young Assassins could turn the tide in their favour.
60
‘Poor man, more afraid than ever. The years have not been kind,’ said Evie to Jacob, shouting above the roar of the locomotive.
Assassin’s Creed® Page 248