Assassin's Creed: Underworld

Book 8: Assassin's Creed

by Oliver Bowden

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction; Media Tie-In

Synopsis

In Victorian era London, a disgraced Assassin goes deep undercover in a quest for redemption in this novel based on the Assassin's Creed™ video game series.

1862: With London in the grip of the Industrial Revolution, the world’s first underground railway is under construction. When a body is discovered at the dig, it sparks the beginning of the latest deadly chapter in the centuries-old battle between the Assassins and Templars.

Deep undercover is an Assassin with dark secrets and a mission to defeat the Templar stranglehold on the nation’s capital.

Soon the Brotherhood will know him as Henry Green, mentor to Jacob and Evie Frye. For now, he is simply The Ghost...

An Original Novel Based on the Multiplatinum Video Game from Ubisoft

Release date: December 1, 2015

Publisher: Ace

Print pages: 464

Sample

GHOST TOWN

ONE

The Assassin Ethan Frye was leaning on a crate in the shadows of Covent Garden market, almost hidden by the tradesmen’s carts. His arms were folded across his chest, chin supported in one hand, the soft, voluminous cowl of his robes covering his head. And as the afternoon dwindled into evening he stood, silent and still. Watching. And waiting.

It was rare for an Assassin to rest his chin on his leading hand like that. Especially if he was wearing his hidden blade, which Ethan was, the point of it less than an inch from the exposed flesh of his throat. Closer to his elbow was a light but very powerful spring mechanism designed to deploy the razor-sharp steel; the correct flick of his wrist and it would activate. In a very real sense, Ethan was holding himself at knifepoint.

And why would he do this? After all, even Assassins were not immune to accidents or equipment failure. For safety’s sake the men and women of the Brotherhood tended to keep their blade hands clear of the face. Better that than risk ignominy or worse.

Ethan, however, was different. Not only was he practiced in the art of spying—and resting his chin on his strongest arm was an act of deception designed to fool a potential enemy—but he also took a dark delight in courting danger.

And so he sat, with his chin in his hand, watching and waiting.

Ah, he thought, what was this? He straightened and shook the rest from his muscles as he peered through the crates into the market. Traders were packing up. And something else was happening, too. The game was afoot.

 

 

TWO

In an alleyway not far from Ethan lurked a fellow by the name of Boot. He wore a tattered shooting jacket and a broken hat, and he was studying a pocket watch lifted from a gentleman not moments ago.

What Boot didn’t know about his new acquisition was that its erstwhile owner had intended to take it to the menders that very day, for reasons that were shortly to have a profound effect on the lives of Ethan Frye, Boot, a young man who called himself The Ghost and others involved in the eternal struggle between the Templar Order and the Assassin Brotherhood. What Boot didn’t know was that the pocket watch was almost exactly an hour slow.

Oblivious of that fact, Boot snapped it shut, thinking himself quite the dandy. Next, he eased himself out of the alleyway, looked left and right, then made his way out into the dying day of the market. As he walked, his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets, he glanced over his shoulder to check he wasn’t being followed and, satisfied, continued forward, leaving Covent Garden behind and entering the St. Giles Rookery—the slum they called Old Nichol. The change in the air was almost immediate. Where before his bootheels had rung on the cobbles, now they sank into the ordure of the street, disturbing a stink of rotting vegetable and human waste. The pavements were thick with it, the air reeking of it. Boot pulled his scarf over his mouth and nose to keep the worst of it out.

A wolfish-looking dog trotted at his heel for a few paces, ribs visible at its shrunken belly. It appealed to him with hungry, red-rimmed eyes but he kicked it away and it skittered then shrank off. Not far away, a woman sat in a doorway wearing the remnants of clothes tied together with string, a baby held to her breast as she watched him with glazed, dead eyes, rookery eyes. She might be the mother of a prostitute, waiting for her daughter to come home with the proceeds and woe betide the girl if she returned empty-handed. Or she might command a team of thieves and cadgers, soon to appear with the day’s takings. Or perhaps she ran night lodgings. Here in the rookery the once-grand houses had been converted to flats and tenements, and by night they provided refuge for those in need of shelter: fugitives and families, prostitutes, traders and laborers—anyone who paid their footing in return for space on a floor, who got a bed if they were lucky, and had the money, but most likely had to make do with straw or wood shavings for a mattress. Not that they were likely to sleep very soundly anyway: every inch of floor space was taken, and the cries of babies tore through the night.

While many of these people were unfit or unwilling to work, many more had occupations. They were dog-breakers and bird dealers. They sold watercress, onions, sprat or herring. They were costermongers, street sweepers, coffee dealers, bill stickers and placard carriers. Their wares came into the lodgings with them, adding to the overcrowding, to the stench. At night the houses would be closed, broken windows stuffed with rags or newspaper, sealed against the noxious atmosphere of the night, when the city coughed smoke into the air. The night air had been known to suffocate entire families. Or so was the rumor. And one thing that spread about the slums more quickly than disease was rumor. So as far as the slum dwellers were concerned, Florence Nightingale could preach as much as she liked. They were going to sleep with the windows sealed.

You could hardly blame them, thought Boot. If you lived in the slum, your chances of dying were great. Disease and violence were rife here. Children risked being suffocated when adults rolled over in their sleep. Cause of death: overlaying. It was more common at weekends when the last of the gin had been drunk and the public houses emptied, and mother and father felt their way home in the soupy fog, up the slick stone steps, through the door and into the warm, stinking room where they at last laid down their heads to rest . . .

In the morning, with the sun up but the smog yet to clear, the rookery would ring to the screams of the bereaved.

Deeper into the slum went Boot, where tall buildings crowded out even the meager light of the moon and fogbound lanterns glowed malevolently in the dark. He could hear raucous singing from a public house a few streets along. Every now and then the singing would grow louder as the door was thrown open to eject drunkards onto the street.

There were no pubs on this street, though. Just doors and windows wadded with newspaper, washing hanging from lines overhead, sheets of it like the sails of a ship, and apart from the distant singing just the sound of running water and his own breathing. Just him . . . alone.

Or so he thought.

And now even the distant singing stopped. The only sound was dripping water.

A scuttling sound made him jump. “Who’s that?” he demanded, but knew immediately it was a rat, and it was a pretty thing when you were so scared you were jumping at the sound of a rat. A pretty thing indeed.

But then it came again. He whirled and thick air danced and eddied around him, and it seemed to part like curtains and for a moment he thought he saw something. A suggestion of something. A figure in the mist.

Next he thought he heard breathing. His own was short and shallow, gasping almost, but this was loud and steady and coming from—where? One second it seemed to be ahead of him, the next from behind. The scuttling came again. A bang startled him, but it came from one of the tenements above. A couple began arguing—he had come home drunk again. No, she had come home drunk again. Boot allowed himself a little smile, found himself relaxing a bit. Here he was, jumping at ghosts, scared of a few rats and a pair of old birds quarreling. Whatever next?

He turned to go. In the same moment the mist ahead of him billowed and striding out of it came a figure in robes who, before Boot could react, had grabbed him and pulled his fist back as though to punch him. Only instead of striking out, his assailant flicked his wrist and with a soft snick a blade shot from within his sleeve.

Boot had squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them it was to see the man in robes behind the blade that was held steady a millimeter from his eyeball.

Boot wet himself.

 

 

THREE

Ethan Frye awarded himself a small moment of satisfaction at the accuracy of his blade—then swept Boot’s legs from beneath him and slammed him to the filthy cobbles. The Assassin sank to his haunches, pinning Boot with his knees as he pressed his blade to his throat.

“Now, my friend”—he grinned—“why don’t we start with you telling me your name?”

“It’s Boot, sir,” squirmed Boot, the point of the knife digging painfully into his flesh.

“Good man,” said Ethan. “Good policy, the truth. Now, let’s you and me have a talk, shall we?”

Beneath him the fellow trembled. Ethan took it as a yes. “You’re due to take delivery of a photographic plate, am I right, Mr. Boot?” Boot trembled. Ethan took it as another yes. So far so good. His information was solid; this Boot was a connection in a pipeline that ended with erotic prints being sold in certain pubs in London. “And you are due at the Jack Simmons to collect this photographic plate, am I right?”

Again Boot nodded.

“And what’s the name of the fellow you’re supposed to meet, Mr. Boot?”

“I . . . I don’t know, sir . . .”

Ethan smiled and leaned even closer to Boot. “My dear boy, you’re a worse liar than you are a courier.” He exerted a little more pressure with the blade. “You feel where that knife is now?” he asked.

Boot blinked his eyes yes.

“That’s an artery. Your carotid artery. If I open that, you’ll be painting the town red, my friend. Well, the street at least. But neither of us want me to do that. Why ruin such a lovely evening? Instead how about you tell me who it is you planned to meet?”

Boot blinked. “He’ll kill me if I do.”

“That’s as may be, but I’ll kill you if you don’t, and only one of us is here holding a knife at your throat, and it’s not him, is it?” Ethan increased the pressure. “Make your choice, my friend. Die now, or later.”

Just then Ethan heard a noise to his left. Half a second later his Colt sidearm was in his hand, the blade still at Boot’s throat as he drew aim on a new target.

It was a little girl on her way back from the well. Wide-eyed she stood, a bucket brimming full of dirty water in one hand.

“I’m sorry, miss, I didn’t mean to startle you.” Ethan smiled. His revolver went back into his robes and his empty hand reappeared to assure the girl he wasn’t a threat. “I mean harm only to ruffians and thieves such as this man here. Perhaps you might like to return to your lodgings.” He was gesturing to her but she wasn’t going anywhere and just stared at them both, eyes white in a grubby face, rooted to the spot with fear.

Inwardly Ethan cursed. The last thing he wanted was an audience. Especially when it was a little girl watching him hold a blade to a man’s throat.

“All right, Mr. Boot,” he said, more quietly than before, “the situation has changed so I’m going to have to insist you tell me exactly who you intended to meet . . .”

Boot opened his mouth. Maybe he was about to give Ethan the information he required, or perhaps he was going to tell Ethan where he could stick his threats, or more likely it was to simply whine that he didn’t know.

Ethan never found out because just as Boot went to reply, his face disintegrated.

It happened a twinkling before Ethan heard the shot, and he rolled off the body and drew his revolver just as a second crack rang out. He remembered the girl, his head whipping round just in time to see her spin away, blood blooming at her chest and her bucket dropping at the same time, dead before she hit the cobbles from a bullet meant for him.

Ethan dared not return fire for fear of hitting another unseen innocent in the fog. He pulled himself into a crouch, steeling himself for another shot, a third attack from the dark.

It never came. Instead there was the sound of running feet, so Ethan wiped the shards of bone and bits of brain from his face, holstered the Colt and flicked his hidden blade back into its housing, then leapt for a wall. Boots only just finding purchase on the wet brick, he shinned a drainpipe to the roof of a tenement, finding the light of the night sky and able to follow the running footsteps as the shooter tried to make his escape. This was how Ethan had entered the rookery and it looked like this was how he was going to leave, making short leaps from one roof to the next, traversing the slum as he tracked his quarry silently and remorselessly, the image of the little girl seared onto his mind’s eye and the metallic smell of Boot’s brain matter still in his nostrils.

Only one thing mattered now. The killer would feel his blade before the night was out.

From below he heard the boots of the shooter clopping and splashing on the cobbles and Ethan shadowed quietly, unable to see the man but knowing he’d overtaken him. Coming to the edge of a building and feeling he had a sufficient lead, he let himself over the side, using the sills to descend quickly until he reached the street, where he hugged the wall, waiting.

Seconds later came the sound of running boots. A moment after that the mist seemed to shift and bloom as though to announce this new presence, and a second after that the curtains parted and a man in a suit, with a bushy moustache and thick side-whiskers, came pelting into view.

He held a pistol. It wasn’t smoking. But it might as well have been.

Though Ethan would later tell George Westhouse that he struck in self-defense, it wasn’t strictly true. Ethan had the element of surprise; he could—and should—have disarmed the man and questioned him before killing him. Instead he engaged his blade and slammed it into the killer’s heart with a vengeful grunt and watched with no lack of satisfaction as the light died in the man’s eyes.

And by doing that the Assassin Ethan Frye was making a mistake. He was being careless.

*   *   *

“My intention had been to press Boot for the information I needed before taking his place,” Ethan told the Assassin George Westhouse the following day, having finished his tale, “but what I didn’t realize was that Boot was late for his appointment. His stolen pocket watch was slow.”

They sat in the drawing room of George’s Croydon home. “I see,” said George. “At what point did you realize?”

“Um, let me see. That would be the point at which it was too late.”

George nodded. “What was the firearm?”

“A Pall Mall Colt, similar to my own.”

“And you killed him?”

The fire crackled and spat into the pause that followed. Since reconciling with his children, Jacob and Evie, Ethan was pensive. “I did, George, and it was nothing less than he deserved.”

George pulled a face. “Deserve has nothing to do with it. You know that.”

“Oh, but the little girl, George. You should have seen her. She was just a tiny wee thing. Half Evie’s age.”

“Even so . . .”

“I had no choice. His pistol was drawn.”

George looked at his old friend with concern and affection. “Which is it, Ethan? Did you kill him because he deserved it or because you had no choice?”

A dozen times or more Ethan had washed his face and blown his nose, but he still felt as though he could smell Boot’s brains on himself. “Must the two be mutually exclusive? I’m thirty-seven years of age, and I’ve seen more than my fair share of kills, and I know that notions of justice, equity and retribution play a distant second to skill, and skill is subordinate to luck. When fortune turns her face to you. When the killer’s bullet goes elsewhere, when he drops his guard, you take your chance, before she turns away again.”

Westhouse wondered who his friend was trying to fool, but decided to move on. “A shame, then, that you had to spill his blood. Presumably you needed to know more about him?”

Ethan smiled and mock-wiped his brow. “I was rewarded with a little luck. The photographic plate he carried bore an inscription identifying the photographer, so I was able to ascertain that the dead man and the photographer were one and the same, a fellow by the name of Robert Waugh. He has Templar associations. His erotic prints were going one way, to them, but also another way, to the rookeries and alehouses, via Boot.”

George whistled softly. “What a dangerous game Mr. Waugh was playing . . .”

“Yes and no . . .”

“Well, he was bound to meet a sticky end sooner or later.”

“Quite.”

“And you were able to divulge all of this postmortem?”

“Don’t look at me like that, George. I’m fully aware I was lucky, and that on any other day my impetuous killing of Waugh might have had unfortunate consequences. On this day it did not.”

George leaned to poke the fire. “Before, when you said ‘yes and no’ that Waugh was playing a dangerous game, what did you mean?”

“I meant that in many ways his gamble of the two worlds staying separate paid off. I saw the slums afresh today, George. I was reminded of how the poor are living. This is a world so completely separate from that of the Templars that it’s scarcely believable the two share the same country, let alone the same city. If you ask me, our friend Mr. Waugh was perfectly justified in believing the paths of his disparate business enterprises might never cross. The two worlds in which he operated were such poles apart. The Templars know nothing of the rookeries. They live upriver of the factory filth that pollutes the water of the poor and upwind of the smog and smoke that pollutes their air.”

“As do we, Ethan,” said George sadly. “Whether we like it or not, ours is a world of gentlemen’s clubs and drawing rooms, of temples and council chambers.”

Ethan stared into the fire. “Not all of us.”

Westhouse smiled and nodded. “You’re thinking of your man, The Ghost? Don’t suppose you have any thoughts about telling me who The Ghost is or what he is doing?”

“That must remain my secret.”

“Then what of him?”

“Aha, well, I have formulated a plan, involving the recently deceased Mr. Waugh and The Ghost. If all goes well, and The Ghost can do his job, then we may even be able to lay our hands on the very artifact the Templars seek.”

 

 

FOUR

John Fowler was tired. And cold. And by the look of the gathering clouds he was soon to be wet.

Sure enough, he felt the first drops of rain tap-tapping on his hat, and the engineer clutched his leather-bound tube of drawings more tightly to his chest, cursing the weather, the noise, everything. Beside him stood the Solicitor of London, Charles Pearson, as well as Charles’s wife, Mary, both flinching as the rain began to fall, and all three stood marooned by mud, gazing with a mixture of forlornness and awe at the great scar in the earth that was the new Metropolitan Line.

Some fifty yards in front of the trio the ground gave way to a sunken shaft that opened into a vast cutting—“the trench”—twenty-eight feet in width and some two hundred yards long, at which point it stopped being a cutting or trench and became a tunnel, its brickwork arch providing a gateway to what was the world’s very first stretch of underground-railway line.

What’s more, the world’s first operational stretch of underground-railway line: trains ran on the newly laid rails night and day, pushing wagons heaped with gravel, clay and sand from unfinished sections farther up the line. They chugged back and forth, smoke and steam nearly suffocating the gangs of unskilled laborers working at the mouth of the tunnel, who shoveled earth into the leather buckets of a conveyor that in turn brought the spoil to ground level.

The operation was Charles Pearson’s baby. For almost two decades the Solicitor of London had campaigned for a new line to help ease the growing congestion in London and its suburbs. Its construction, meanwhile, was John Fowler’s brainchild. He was, quite apart from being the owner of remarkably luxuriant whiskers, the most experienced railway engineer in the world, and thus had been the obvious candidate for chief engineer of the Metropolitan Railway. However, as he’d told Charles Pearson on the occasion of his employment, his experience might count for naught. This was, after all, something that had never been done before: a railway line beneath the ground. A huge—no, a gargantuan—undertaking. Indeed, there were those who said that it was the most ambitious building project since the construction of the pyramids. A grand claim, for sure, but there were days that Fowler agreed with them.

Fowler had decided that the majority of the line, being of shallow depth, could be dug using a method known as “cut and cover.” It involved sinking a trench into the earth, twenty-eight feet in width, fifteen feet deep. Brick retaining walls were built into it, three bricks thick. In some sections iron girders were laid across the top of the side walls. Others were made using brickwork arches. Then the cutting was covered and the surface reinstated, a new tunnel created.

It meant destroying roads and houses, and in some cases building temporary roadways, only to have to rebuild them. It meant moving thousands of tons of spoil and negotiating gas and water mains and sewers. It meant forging a never-ending nightmare of noise and destruction, as though a bomb had detonated in London’s Fleet Valley. No. As though a bomb was detonating in the Fleet Valley every day and had for two years.

Work continued overnight, when flares and braziers would be lit. The workers labored in two major shifts—the change signaled by three tolls of a bell at midday and midnight—and smaller duty shifts when men would move between tasks, swapping one backbreaking and monotonous job for another but working, always working.

Much of the noise came from the seven conveyors used on the project, one of which was erected here: a tall wooden scaffold built into the shaft, towering twenty-five feet above them, an agent of dirt and ringing noise, like hammerblows on an anvil. It brought spoil from farther along the excavation, and men worked it now, gangs of them. Some were in the shaft, some on the ground, some dangling like lemurs off the frame, their job to ensure the passage of the conveyor as giant buckets full of clay were hoisted swinging from the trench.

On the ground, men with spades toiled at a mountain of excavated earth, shoveling it onto horse-drawn wagons, four of which waited, each with a cloud of gulls hanging over it, the birds swirling and dipping to pick food from the earth, unconcerned by the rain that had begun to fall.

Fowler turned to look at Charles, who appeared ill—he held a handkerchief to his lips—but otherwise in good humor. There was something indomitable about Charles Pearson, reflected Fowler. He wasn’t sure if it was resolve or lunacy. This was a man who had been laughed at for the best part of two decades, indeed, from when he’d first suggested an underground line. “Trains in drains,” so the scoffing went at the time. They’d laughed when he unveiled his plans for an atmospheric railway, carriages pushed through a tube by compressed air. Through a tube. Little wonder that for over a decade Pearson was a fixture of Punch magazine. What fun was had at his expense.

Then, with everybody still chortling at that, there came a scheme, Pearson’s brainchild—a plan to build an underground railway between Paddington and Farringdon. The slums of the Fleet Valley would be cleared, their inhabitants moved to homes outside the city—to the suburbs—and people would use this new railway to “commute.”

A sudden injection of money from the Great Western Railway, the Great Northern Railway and the City of London Corporation, and the scheme became a reality. He, the noted John Fowler, was employed as chief engineer for the Metropolitan Railway Company and work began on the first shaft at Euston—almost two years ago to the day.

And were people still laughing?

Yes, they were. Only now it was a jagged, mirthless laugh, because to say that Pearson’s vision of the slum clearance had gone badly was to put it mildly. There were no homes in the suburbs and as it turned out, nobody especially willing to build any. And there’s no such thing as an undercrowded slum. All of those people had to go somewhere, so they went to other slums.

Then of course there was the disruption caused by the work itself: streets made impassable, roads dug up, businesses closing and traders demanding compensation. Those who lived along the route existed in an eternal chaos of mud, of engines, of the conveyor’s iron chime, of hacking picks and shovels and workers bellowing at one another, and in perpetual fear of their foundations collapsing.

There was no respite; at night fires were lit and the night shift took over, leaving the day shift to do what men on day shifts do: drink and brawl their way through to morning. London had been invaded by unskilled laborers, it seemed; everywhere they went they made their own; only the prostitutes and publicans were glad of them.

Then there were the accidents. First a drunken train driver had left the rails at King’s Cross and plummeted into the works below. Nobody hurt. Punch had a field day. Then almost a year later the earthworks at Euston Road had collapsed, taking with them gardens, pavements and telegraph wires, destroying gas and water mains, punching a hole in the city. Incredibly, nobody was hurt. Mr. Punch enjoyed that episode, too.

“I’d hoped to hear good news today, John,” shouted Pearson, raising his handkerchief—a finicky thing, like a doily—to his mouth. He was sixty-eight to Fowler’s forty-four but he looked twice that; his efforts over the last two decades had aged him. Despite his ready smile there was permanent tiredness around the eyes, and the flesh at his jowls was like melted wax on a candle.

“What can I tell you, Mr. Pearson?” shouted Fowler. “What would you like to hear other than . . . ?” He gestured over the site.

Pearson laughed. “The roar of the engines is encouraging, that’s true enough, but perhaps also that we’re back on schedule, or that every compensation lawyer in London has been struck dead by lightning. That Her Majesty the Queen herself has declared her confidence in the underground and plans to use it at the first opportunity.”

Fowler regarded his friend, again marveling at his spirit. “Then I’m afraid, Mr. Pearson, I can give you nothing but bad news. We are still behind schedule and weather like this simply delays work further. The rain will likely douse the engine and the men on the conveyor will enjoy an unscheduled break.”

“Then there is some good news,” chortled Charles.

“And what’s that?” shouted Fowler.

“We will have . . .”

The engine spluttered and died . . .

“. . . silence.”

. . . and for a moment there was indeed a shocked still as the world adjusted to the absence of the noise. Just the sound of rain slapping on the mud.

Then came a cry from the shaft: “Slippage!” and they looked up to see the crane scaffold lurch a little, one of the men suddenly dangling even more precariously than before.

“It’ll hold,” said Fowler, seeing Mr. Pearson’s alarm. “It looks worse than it is.”

A superstitious man would have crossed his fingers. The workers were taking no chances either, and the gangs on the crane scrambled to ground level, swarming the wooden struts like pirates on rigging, hundreds of them it seemed, so that Fowler was holding his breath and willing the structure to hold the sudden extra weight. It should, it must. It did. The men emerged shouting and coughing, carrying shovels and pickaxes, which were as precious to them as their limbs.

Fowler and Charles watched them congregate in the expected groups—London, Irish, Scottish, rural, other—hands shoved into their pockets or wrapped around them for warmth, shoulders hunched and caps pulled tight against the rain, every single one of them caked in mud.

Just then there came a shout and Fowler turned to see a co