Underworld

by Oliver Bowden

  “What do you wish me to elaborate upon, m’lord?”

  There was a wheedling tone to his voice now, an unmistakable note of foreboding.

  “Who sent you?” demanded the inquisitor. He flexed his fingers in the gloves. Evie heard another unseen man chortle with anticipation of the great show to come.

  “Why, I did, milord. I came on my own two feet.”

  Now the second thug moved into view, the two of them crowding the man from Evie’s view. “Let me put his fingers through the mangle . . .”

  “Not yet.” The first man stopped his mate. “Not yet.” He turned his attention back to the prisoner. “Was it Green?”

  “Neither green, nor black nor brown,” said the man in the chair.

  “Henry Green,” said a man Evie couldn’t see.

  “Ah, Henry Green . . . who’s he?”

  Threatening now, the unseen man said, “Your very soul hangs in the balance . . . Confess or my sharp friend here will have his way. You shall return empty-handed.”

  Evie heard the distinctive sound of a knife being drawn from its sheath.

  And of course, she couldn’t allow it to be used. She flexed the fingers of her gauntlet, engaged her blade and moved into the room to confront the men.

  There were three of them. This mission was turning into quite a test of her skills, she thought. This time? Multiple opponents.

  She weighed up, she assessed, then struck, dancing in toward a grinning thug on the right but at the last second unexpectedly ducking and swiping her blade up and across the chest of a man in the middle. She rolled and came up with the blade foremost, jamming it through the breastplate of a Templar goon on the right. The remaining inquisitor, the slowest, had barely drawn his sword when Evie drew back her knee and delivered a high kick with the reinforced edge of her boot.

  Damn, she thought, watching as her opponent staggered back. The coat had impeded the height of her strike, and instead of finishing him off, she’d merely unbalanced him. At the same time he’d recovered enough presence of mind to draw his weapon and, even as she steadied herself to meet his attack, was coming forward, demonstrating a little more guile and cunning than she had originally given him credit for.

  Stupid. Stupid amateur. Evie turned her head in time to avoid the steel making contact with her face. She checked back quickly and at the same time tapped her left hand on the forearm of her right to retract the blade. Next she turned into his outstretched arm, a movement that was half dance step, half embrace but wholly deadly as she ended it with a jab to the face from her gauntlet then engaged her blade into his eye socket.

  Blood, brain and eye fluid sluiced down his cheek as he slumped to the floor. She shook blood from the blade and sheathed it, and then turned to the man in the chair, who was giving her a bemused but otherwise good-humored look.

  “Ah, thank you kindly,” he said. “I was in ever such a squeaky fix, when—what do you know?—you rescued me.”

  “Where’s the hidden laboratory?” she asked him. The men she’d just fought were taking their time to die. Gurgles, death rattles and the sound of boots scrabbling at the brick in a final, feeble burst of life were the background to their conversation.

  “Untie me, and then we can parley, my lady,” bargained the trussed-up prisoner.

  Evie climbed astride the man and pulled her fist back. His face twisted into a mixture of fear and indecision. He had seen the blade in action. He had seen Evie in action. He had no desire to be on the receiving end of either. This was a man who had been lulled into a full sense of security by a pretty face many times before and wasn’t about to let it happen again.

  “I’m pressed for time,” she said, just in case her intentions weren’t already clear. “Tell me now.”

  “It’s underground.” He swallowed, inclining his chin toward what looked like a panel of some kind in the wall of the roundhouse. “It requires a key. One of the guards nicked mine, cheeky sod.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and stood, about to leave.

  “Now untie me.”

  “You got yourself in.” She shook her head. “I trust you can get yourself out.”

  He was still calling out after her as she left. “Not to worry, my lady, I can still recall a couple of tricks from my carnival days.”

  Good luck to you, then, she thought, as she departed by a different door, now looking for another guard who might have the key.

  Thank God for the flapping mouths of Templar guards. She pressed herself into the shadows of a passageway, overhearing two of them discussing the very key she sought.

  “What are you doing? Keep that key in your pocket or else Miss Thorne will have your guts for garters.”

  “Let’s have a look downstairs, then. I want to see that artifact.”

  So do I, thought Evie Frye, as she claimed two more victims and recovered the key.

  She returned to the roundhouse, deciding to release the prisoner if and when the key worked on the panel, but too late, he was absent, chair overturned and ropes discarded on the floor. She tensed in case he was planning to leap out at her but, no, he was gone. Instead she turned her attention to the panels and was at last able to let herself into the building’s inner sanctum.

  Inside, the walls were dark and wet. They muffled the sound of the storm and yet somehow, here, it felt as though the elements were at their fiercest.

  How could that be? She remembered the lightning rod and thought of power being directed down here. Power needed for an underground laboratory, perhaps?

  Then she came upon it and she knew she was right—that she stood at the very epicenter of the storm’s channeled energy.

  The artifact was close.

  SIXTY-TWO

  The flagstones stretched away from where she stood at the door, opening out to a large vaulted, underground space where scientific apparatus on tables lay between Tesla coils and upright lightning conductors—all throbbing with a steadily intensifying energy.

  Too much? In the roof of the laboratory hung a series of harnesses and platforms. Lightning particles seemed to crack all around them, sparking and flashing, painting the room in a sudden glare of phosphorescent white.

  At the other end of the laboratory was what looked like a large inspection tube and in there, she could see, was the artifact. Standing nearby was Sir David Brewster with an assistant, both poring over what lay on the other side of the toughened glass, the orb-like golden Apple. Even from so far away, Evie found herself transfixed by it. Years and years of research into the Pieces of Eden and now here before her was a real one.

  Evie stood close by the doorway, but even though she was lit by the sudden lightning flashes, the men were too absorbed in their work to see her. She crept forward, still hypnotized by the sight of the Apple but able to eavesdrop on Brewster and his assistant now.

  “By Jove, under blue light it goes completely transparent,” exclaimed the scientist.

  Brewster was nothing like the man he had been before, weak and small within the dark shadow of Lucy Thorne. Now he was a man in his own domain, in command once again, and feeling confident enough to throw a few gibes Thorne’s way. “The cheek of that woman,” he shouted, over the buzzing of the lightning conductors, the hissing of the Tesla coils, the rhythmic huffing of automated bellows. “I say, I ought to seize the blasted artifact for Edinburgh.”

  “If you don’t mind my saying, that would be an exceptionally bad idea,” retorted his companion.

  “Why? It’s God’s Apple, not hers. I’d display it in public. Darwin would be vanquished. Banished in shame to the blasted Galapagos to roost with his beloved finches.”

  “Miss Thorne would have your head, and Mr. Starrick the rest,” said his colleague.

  “You know, Reynolds, it might just be worth the risk,” exclaimed Brewster.

  “Sir David, you cannot be serious.”<
br />
  “Just a wee joke, Reynolds. Once we unlock the artifact’s secret the Templars’ grip on London will be fixed. The Assassins will fall, and Darwin will be little more than a bearded memory.”

  As she drew closer, coming out into the open now where the two men could easily see her, she could see the Apple glowing. Brighter now. Lit by an increasingly heavy shower of sparks.

  It was time to make it hers.

  She engaged her blade and struck, and had seen the assistant slide off her blood-streaked steel before Brewster was even alerted to her presence. His eyes went to his dead companion then back to Evie Frye, looking at her agog, his brain trying to make sense of this sudden, unexplained appearance.

  And then Evie leapt and killed him.

  “It is time to lay down your head, Sir David Brewster,” she said, letting him slide to the floor.

  “But I have so much more to discover.”

  His eyelids flickered. His breathing ragged now.

  “Do not be afraid,” she told him.

  “I am not. God will protect me.”

  “I will continue your experiments,” she said, and saw it clearly, the path that lay before her. She would carry on with the learning that had begun in her father’s library at Crawley. She would make it her mission to locate the artifacts, to harness their power and use them for the benefit of mankind. A wind of good fortune, not ill.

  “You cannot stop Starrick,” said Brewster, his head on her knees as she knelt with him. “Miss Thorne has already found another Piece of Eden, more powerful than the last.”

  “I will take that one, too,” said Evie, never more sure of anything in her whole life.

  “We fight to gain what we cannot take with us. It is in our nature.”

  And then he died. Evie took out her handkerchief and, in a ritual passed down by their father—one he said was an homage to Altaïr’s own feather ceremony—touched it to Brewster’s wound, soaking it with his blood. She folded the handkerchief and secreted it inside her jacket.

  In the same moment everything seemed to happen at once: guards, three of them, came rushing into the laboratory. The bodies had been discovered; they knew an intruder had penetrated the facility, and they wanted blood.

  Evie stood, already engaging her blade and ready for battle, just as there came a sudden increase in electrical intensity, and the artifact seemed to bulge with a fresh influx of power—and then exploded.

  Evie was immediately below the inspection glass and protected by the plinth on which it stood. The guards, however, were not so lucky. They were peppered with flying fragments and seemed to disappear in a fog of blood mist and debris as beams, harnesses and platforms came tumbling down upon them from above. Evie scrambled to her feet and ran for the door, just as the chain reaction began, lightning conductors bursting into flame, machinery exploding with a flat whump.

  Then she was outside, grateful to be joining those who were sprinting away from the factory as a series of explosions tore it apart.

  SIXTY-THREE

  “What was that explosion?”

  She had met Jacob back at the rail yard as arranged. He, too, looked as though he had seen plenty of action in the meantime. Both were blooded now.

  “The Piece of Eden detonated and took the lab with it,” explained Evie, finishing her tale.

  Jacob curled a lip. “That magic lump of hyperbolic metal? I’m shocked.”

  She rolled her eyes. All those nights reading to him. Imparting that knowledge to him. They really, truly had been for absolutely nothing.

  “Simply because you have never valued the pieces does not . . .”

  An old argument was about to resurface until the appearance of George Westhouse. “All went according to plan?” said the elder Assassin sardonically.

  “There was a slight . . . complication,” replied Evie, shamefaced.

  “The lab exploded,” said Jacob with an arched eyebrow at his twin sister. You want somebody to blame, there she is.

  “You derailed a train,” George Westhouse reminded him.

  “Oh, he did, did he?” said Evie.

  Jacob shrugged. “Well, the train derailed and I happened to be on it. I killed my target.”

  So. Rupert Ferris, of Ferris Ironworks, an organization that as well as being in Templar hands employed child labor, was dead.

  “Brewster is also no more,” said Evie.

  “Then, all in all, a successful mission, in spite of you two,” said George.

  “What about London?” said Jacob. Evie glanced at her brother. For her the events of the evening had been an epiphany, a signpost for the way forward. Was the same true of Jacob?

  “What about it?” asked George cautiously.

  “We are wasting time out here,” said Jacob, indicating the rail yard around them, the suburbs. The city of London was close to here—yet so far out of reach.

  “You know as well as I do that London has been the domain of the Templars for the last hundred years. They are far too strong yet. Patience.”

  Ethan had thought differently, remembered George, seeing his friend’s belief alive and well and living with the twins.

  “But the Templars have found a new Piece of Eden,” said Evie.

  George shrugged. “Sir David is dead; they do not know how to use it. The Council shall guide us, sound advice that your father would have seconded. I shall see you back in Crawley.”

  The twins watched George leave with sinking and somewhat resentful hearts. Fires that burned bright had been comprehensively doused by George and his invocation of the Council. What they both knew, of course, was that their father would certainly not have agreed with the remote Assassin elders. And what they both knew was that they had no intention of abiding by either George Westhouse or the blamed Council.

  A train clattered slowly past and blew its whistle.

  “What’s stopping us?” said Jacob nodding at it. “London is waiting to be liberated. Forget Crawley.”

  “Father would have wanted us to listen . . .”

  “Oh, Father. You could continue his legacy in London.”

  “Freeing future generations from a city ruled by Templars. You know, Jacob Frye, you might just be right.”

  “Then, shall we?”

  “Yes, let’s.”

  With that, the two of them ran and boarded the train, bound for London.

  There, they decided, they would meet Henry Green, a man about whom they had no knowledge. “The Assassin watching over London,” was what they had been told.

  They knew nothing of his true history.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  After what had happened at the Metropolitan Line, The Ghost had stayed in the Thames Tunnel for over a year.

  There he had continued to provide a reassuring presence for the other tunnel dwellers, though in truth he did little but act as a figurehead. Most of the year was spent sitting or lying in his alcove, grieving for Maggie and for the other innocent lives lost in the failure of the operation to retrieve the Piece of Eden. He cursed the age-old hunt for trinkets, scorning Assassins and Templars and their obsessions with baubles.

  Ethan had come to him in the tunnel, but The Ghost had dismissed his old mentor. He had no desire to see Ethan Frye.

  George came, too, and explained that the Brotherhood needed a man in the city. “Another undercover operation if you like, Jayadeep. Something more suited to your talents.”

  The Ghost had chuckled at that. Hadn’t Ethan Frye said the very same thing to him years ago in Amritsar? Something suitable for his talents. Look how that had turned out.

  “You would be required simply to establish an identity as a cover, full stop,” George had said. “There’s no infiltration involved. Quite the reverse. We want your cover to be just tight enough to avoid detection but not so tight that you can’t begin to assemble a network
of spies and informants. You are to be a receptacle, Jayadeep. A gatherer of information, nothing more. You have a way about you.” George had indicated along the tunnel. “People trust you. People believe in you.”

  The Ghost raised his head from where his arms were crossed over his knees. “I am not a leader, Mr. Westhouse.”

  George hunkered down, grimacing as his old bones complained but wanting to sit with Jayadeep, an unknowing echo of a time when, in The Darkness, Ethan had done the same thing.

  “You won’t be a leader, not in the traditional sense,” said George. “You will be required to inspire people, just as we know you can already do. The Brotherhood needs you, Jayadeep. We needed you before and we need you now.”

  “I failed the Brotherhood before.”

  George gave a short, impatient snort. “Oh, do stop wallowing, man. You’re no more to blame than Ethan, or I, or a Council that seems intent on allowing the enemy to rise unchecked. Please, do me this one favor. Will you at least think about it?”

  The Ghost had shaken his head. “I am needed here in the tunnel more than in any war.”

  “This tunnel will shortly cease to exist,” George told him. “Not like this, anyway. It’s been bought by the East London Railway Company. Look around you, there’s nobody here. There are no more pedestrians, no more traders to serve them, and none but the most desperate come here to sleep. There’s just you and a few drunks sleeping it off until they can go home to their wives and tell lies about being robbed of their wages. They did need you once, you’re right. But they don’t need you anymore. You want to offer your services to your fellow man, then devote yourself to the Creed.”

  The Ghost had deferred. He had continued to brood until, as the months wore on, he was visited again.

  It was strange, because The Ghost had spent so many nights in this very tunnel dreaming of them and dreaming of home that when his mother and father appeared to him he assumed that this, too, was a dream; that he was having an awake dream, hallucinating the image of Arbaaz and Pyara standing there before him.