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 caught 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, watched sorrow cripple the man’s features.
“How could you?” said The Ghost at last.
Ethan, desolate, said, “I judged it for the best.”
“You judged wrong.”
Again a silence, broken by Ethan, who said softly, “Was I the only one to make an error of judgment? 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 artifact as he was.”
“If so, then I was obsessed with making sure it didn’t fall into the wrong hands, and now that we’ve seen it in action I know I was right to be.”
The Ghost had been promised light shows or a pretty talisman from the artifact. Instead he had witnessed something altogether different.
“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 artifact will be halfway to Starrick by now.”
The Ghost wasn’t listening. Let Ethan fixate on his artifact. The Ghost 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 artifact was not enough. They meant to smash the Assassins as well.
“I have to go to Maggie.”
“I have to go after the artifact,” said Ethan. “Just as your conscience dictates you must go to the tunnel, so I must go there.”
“You should go after your precious artifact,” said The Ghost, 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 traveling by carriage, but The Ghost was fast, and he was determined, and he knew the route well, and he made it within the hour.
But 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 Mr. 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 artifact 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 gray hair of Maggie amid a throng of bodies, some of them tunnel dwellers, some of them fighters. 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. Templars’ clubs and knives rose and fell; shouts of resistance turned to screams of pain that rebounded from the glass of the octagonal hall. 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 Mr. Hardy’s urgings seemed to have stopped and then heard a voice from behind him, saying, “Right, you little bastard . . .”
Other Mr. 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 Other Mr. 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, thought The Ghost as he broke Other Mr. Hardy’s arm, reached for the dirk that hung sheathed at the punisher’s waist and thrust it into his chest.
Other Mr. Hardy reached for The Ghost and their eyes were just millimeters 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 as he took a life.
Maggie had seen him. “Bharat,” she screeched from among the brawlers 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 over to attack.
The Ghost tossed the knife from one hand to the other, disorienting 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 valor; or perhaps the death of Other Mr. 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, then the area outside had emptied, 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 he walked toward the turnstile, climbing over, heading down toward his berth.
The rotunda was a mass of people and there were cheers for him as he descended. “Maggie?” he asked a woman he knew.
She pointed him to the tunnel. “They took her up there to safety,” she said before stealing a kiss and clapping him on the back. The tunnel dwellers kept up the cheering as he passed through the rotunda to 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. The woman saying, 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 toward the berth they shared, where she tended the fire and doled out broth and received her rightful love as tunnel mother.
She lay in the dirt. Whoever
killed her had stabbed her multiple times, shredding her smock. Her witchy gray hair was flecked with blood. Her eyes, which had 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 The Ghost as he wailed his grief and despair.
PART III
METROPOLIS RISING
FIFTY-EIGHT
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 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 would 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 artifact, 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, you had better hurry up, 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 coughing 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 artifact 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 that either. But the fact remains, 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 him you got 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 had once glowed with life was pale and drawn; the eyes that had burned with passion were sunken and dull. Ethan was no longer questing for life; he was taking the long walk toward death.
First he had suffered with the flu; then, when that seemed to have passed, came chest pains and a constant, 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, 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 exchanged 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 fill 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 that his time was short. He knew he was leaving this world. He was like a chess player maneuvering 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, then, as usual, George was lulled into sleep in the cozy 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 stood and went to the body, arranging it on the bed, pulling a sheet to beneath Ethan’s chin, 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 on either side of the bare kitchen table, a candle slowly guttering on the wood between them, 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 artifact 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 on his deathbed.
Jacob and Evie were ready. They would go into action.
FIFTY-NINE
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, she was 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.
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