Underworld Read online

  The Ghost moved from the entrance hall to the black mouth of the tunnel itself, its two arches pointing at him like the barrels of pistols. It was wide and its ceiling high, but the brickwork pressed in and each footfall became an echo, while the sudden change in atmosphere made him more aware of the gloom. In daytime, hundreds of gas lamps banished the darkness but at night the only illumination belonged to the flickering candles of those who made the tunnel their home: traders, mystics, dancers and animal handlers, singers, clowns and street dealers. It was said that two million people a year take a walk down the tunnel, and had since it opened some seventeen years ago. Once you had a place at the tunnel opening you didn’t leave it, for fear that some other hawker might steal it with you absent.

  The Ghost looked over the slumbering bodies of the tradesmen and entertainers as he passed by, his footsteps ringing on the stone floor. He peered into alcoves and passed his lantern over those sleeping under the arches of the partition that ran the length of the tunnel.

  A strict hierarchy operated inside the tunnel. The tradesmen took their places at the mouth. Farther along, the derelicts, the homeless, the vagrants, the wretched, then even farther along the thieves, criminals and fugitives.

  Come morning time, the traders, who had a vested interest in making sure the tunnel was free of vagrants and as sanitary as possible, were enthusiastic in helping the peelers clear out the tunnel. The blaggers and fugitives would have departed under cover of darkness. The rest of them, the vagabonds, beggars, prostitutes would come grumbling and blinking into the light, clutching their belongings, ready for another day of surviving on nothing.

  The Ghost’s lantern played over a sleeping figure in the gloom of an alcove. The next alcove was empty. He swung the torch to illuminate the arches of the tunnel partition and they too were vacant. He sensed the miserly light receding behind him, the glow given off by his lantern so very meager all of a sudden, dancing eerily on the brick.

  From within the darkness had come a scuttling sound and he raised his light to see a figure crouched in a nook ahead of him.

  “Hello, Mr. Bharat,” said the boy in a whisper.

  The Ghost went to him, reaching into his coats for a thick crust of bread he’d put there earlier. “Hello, Charlie,” he said, handing it over. The boy flinched a little, far too accustomed to the slaps and punches of grown-ups, then took the bread, staring at The Ghost with grateful eyes as he bit into it, cautiously at first.

  They did it every night. The same flinch. The same caution. And every night The Ghost, who knew nothing of his background, just that it involved violence and abuse, smiled at him, said, “See you tomorrow night, Charlie, take care of yourself,” and left the boy in his alcove, his heart breaking as he made his way farther into the tunnel.

  Again, he stopped. Here in another alcove lay a man with a leg broken from a fall on the icy steps of the rotunda. The Ghost had set the leg and he held his breath against the stench of piss and shit to check that his splint was still in place and that the leg was on the mend.

  “You’re a fine lad, Bharat,” said his patient, in a growl.

  “Have you eaten?” asked The Ghost, attending to the leg. He was not a man of delicate sensibilities but even so—Jake was ripe.

  “Maggie brought me some bread and fruit,” said Jake.

  “What would we do without Maggie?” wondered The Ghost aloud.

  “We’d die, son, is what we’d do.”

  The Ghost straightened, pretending to look back up the tunnel in order to take a lungful of uncontaminated air—relatively speaking. “Leg is looking good, Jake,” he said. “Another couple of days and you might be able to risk a bath.”

  Jake chuckled. “That bad, eh?”

  “Yes, Jake,” said The Ghost, patting his shoulder, “I’m afraid it’s that bad.”

  The Ghost left, pressing farther on into the tunnel, until he came to the last of the alcoves used for sleeping. Here was where he and Maggie stayed. Maggie, at sixty-two, was old enough to be his grandmother, but they looked after one another. The Ghost brought food and money, and every night he taught Maggie to read by the light of a candle

  Maggie, for her part, was the tunnel mother, a rabble-rousing mouthpiece for The Ghost when he needed one, an intimidating, redoubtable figure. Not to be trifled with.

  Beyond this point few people dared to tread. Beyond this point was the darkness, and it was no coincidence that this was where The Ghost had made his home. He stayed here as a kind of border guard, protecting those who slept in the tunnel from the miscreants and malfeasants, the lawbreakers and fugitives who sought shelter in its darker regions.

  Before he arrived the outlaws would prey upon those who lived in the tunnel. It had taken a while. Blood had been spilled. But The Ghost had put a stop to that.

  EIGHT

  On the night that The Ghost had first met Maggie, he had been taking his route back home—if you could call it “home,” his lodging, his resting place—at the tunnel.

  Occasionally, as he walked he let his mind drift back to his real home, Amritsar in India, where he had grown up.

  He remembered spending his childhood and adolescence roaming the grounds of his parents’ house then the “katras”—the different areas of the city itself. The memory can play tricks on you—it makes things seem better or worse than they really were, and The Ghost was fully aware of that. He knew he was in danger of idealizing his childhood. After all, how easy it would be to forget that Amritsar, unlike London, had not yet acquired a drainage system and thus rarely smelled of the jasmine and herbs that he recalled so vividly. He might forget that the walled streets that loomed so large in his recollections had played host to characters as unsavory as anywhere else in India. Possibly the sun didn’t really bathe the entire city in warm golden light all day and all night, warming the stone, making the fountains glimmer, painting smiles on the faces of those who made the city their home.

  Possibly not. But that was how he remembered it anyway, and if he was honest that was how he preferred to remember it. Those memories kept him warm in the tunnel at nights.

  He was born Jayadeep Mir. Like all boys, he idolized his father, Arbaaz Mir. His mother used to say that his father smelled of the desert and that was how The Ghost remembered him too. From an early age Arbaaz told Jayadeep that greatness lay ahead of him, and that he would one day be a venerated Assassin, and he had made this future sound as thrilling as it was inevitable. In the comfortable confines of his loving parents’ home, Jayadeep had grown up knowing great certainty.

  Arbaaz liked to tell stories just as much as Jayadeep loved to hear them, and of all the stories Arbaaz would tell, Jayadeep had liked the tale of how he met his mother best of all. In this one, Arbaaz and his young mute servant, Raza Soora, had been trying to find the Koh-i-Noor diamond, the Mountain of Light. It was during his attempts to retrieve the diamond from the Imperial Palace that Arbaaz became involved with Pyara Kaur, granddaughter of Ranjit Singh, the founder of the Sikh Empire.

  The Koh-i-Noor diamond was what they called a Piece of Eden, those artifacts distributed around the globe, which were the sole remnants of a civilization that preceded our own.

  Jayadeep knew of their power because his parents had seen it for themselves. Arbaaz, Pyara and Raza had all been there the night the diamond was activated. They had all seen the celestial light show, and talking of what they’d witnessed, his parents were candid about the effect it had upon them. What they’d seen made them more devout and more fervent in their belief that such great power should never be wielded by their enemies, the Templars. They instilled that in the boy.

  Back then, growing up in an Amritsar painted gold by the sun and being mentored by a father who was like a god to him, Jayadeep could not have conceived of a day when he might be named The Ghost, huddled in a freezing dark tunnel, alone in the world, venerated by nobody.

  Traini
ng had begun when he was four or five years old, but although it was physically demanding work, it had never seemed like a chore to the boy; he never complained or played truant, and there was one very simple reason for this: he was good at it.

  No. More than that. He was great. A natural from the day he was handed his first wooden training blade, a kukri. Jayadeep had a gift for combat such as had rarely been witnessed in the Indian brotherhood. He was extraordinarily, almost supernaturally fast in attack, and more than usually responsive in defense; he could boast tremendous powers of observation and anticipation. He was so good, in fact, that his father Arbaaz felt impelled to call upon another tutor.

  Into the boy’s life came Ethan Frye.

  Meeting Ethan Frye was among The Ghost’s earliest memories, this tired-looking, melancholy man, whose Western robes seemed to hang heavier on him than those of his father.

  Just a tiny child, the boy had neither the inclination nor the initiative to ask about Ethan Frye. As far as he was concerned, the elder Assassin might as well have fallen from the skies, tumbled to earth like a downhearted angel come to sully his otherwise idyllic existence.

  “This is the boy, then?” Ethan had asked.

  They had been sitting in the shaded courtyard at the time, the clamor of the streets outside drifting over the wall and joining the birdsong and the soft tinkle of a fountain.

  “This is indeed the boy,” said Arbaaz proudly. “This is Jayadeep.”

  “A great warrior you say.”

  “A great warrior in the making—or at least I think so. I’ve been training him myself and I’ve been astonished, Ethan, astonished by his natural aptitude.” Arbaaz stood and walked. In the house behind him Jayadeep glimpsed his mother and for the first time, perhaps due to the presence of this gruff stranger, he was aware of their beauty and grace. He saw them as people rather than just his parents.

  Without taking his eyes from the boy, Ethan Frye clasped his hands over his belly and spoke over his shoulder to Arbaaz. “Supernatural in his abilities, you say?”

  “It is like that, Ethan, yes.”

  Eyes still on Jayadeep. “Supernatural, eh?”

  “Always thinking two or three moves ahead,” answered Arbaaz.

  “As one should.”

  “At six years old?”

  Ethan turned his gaze on Jayadeep once again. “It’s precocious, I’ll admit, but . . .”

  “I know what you’re going to say. That so far he has been sparring with me and as father and son we naturally share a bond and that maybe, just maybe, I’m exhibiting certain tells that give him the edge, yes?”

  “It had crossed my mind.”

  “Well, that’s why you’re here. I’d like you to take charge of training Jayadeep.”

  Intrigued by the boy, Ethan Frye agreed to Arbaaz’s request and from that day he took up residence at the house, drilling the boy in swordcraft.

  The boy, knowing little of what drove Ethan, was confused at first by his new tutor’s gruff manner and rough tone. Jayadeep was not one to respond to the touch of a disciplinarian, and it had taken some months for the two of them to form a tutor-pupil relationship that wasn’t characterized by sour asides (Ethan), harsh words (Ethan) and tears (Jayadeep).

  For some time, in fact, Jayadeep believed that Ethan Frye simply did not like him, which came as something of a culture shock. The boy was pretty and charismatic. He knew next to nothing of the adult world and although he remained oblivious to concepts such as charm and persuasion, he was instinctively adept at being both charming and persuasive, able to twist his family and household around his little finger seemingly at will. He was the sort of little boy that grown-ups loved to touch. Never was a boy’s hair so constantly ruffled by the men, his cheek rarely lasting longer than half an hour without one of the household women praising his smile and planting a kiss on him, inhaling his fresh, little-boy smell at the same time, silently luxuriating in the softness of his skin.

  It was as though Jayadeep were a drug to which all who met him became addicted.

  All, that was, except Ethan, who wore a permanently pensive and preoccupied expression. It was true that occasionally the light would come to him, and when it did, Jayadeep fancied he saw something of the “old” or maybe the “real” Ethan, as though there were a different Ethan struggling to peer out from beneath the gloom. Otherwise it seemed that whatever Jayadeep had that intoxicated other grown-ups simply failed to work on his tutor.

  These were the rather shaky foundations on which their tutorials were built: Ethan, in a gray study; Jayadeep, confused by this new type of grown-up, who didn’t lavish him with affection and praise. Oh, of course, Ethan was forced to offer grudging praise for Jayadeep’s skills in combat. How could he not? Jayadeep excelled at every aspect of Assassin craft, and in the end it was this more than anything that cracked open their relationship, because if there’s one thing a skilled Assassin can admire and appreciate, even grow to like, it’s an initiate with promise. And Jayadeep was most certainly that.

  So as the years passed, and master and pupil sparred in the shade of the courtyard trees, discussed theory by the fountains, and put their teachings into practice in the streets of the city, it was as though Ethan began to thaw toward his young charge, and when he spoke of taking the boy from wood to steel there was an unmistakable note of pride in his voice.

  For his part, Jayadeep began to learn a little about his reflective mentor. Enough, in fact, for him to realize that “glum” was the wrong adjective, and that “troubled” was more accurate. Even at that age he was remarkably intuitive.

  What’s more, there came a day when he overheard women in the kitchen talking. He and Ethan were practicing a stealth exercise on the grounds of the house, and Ethan had commanded him to return with information obtained using covert means.

  When The Ghost thought about this years later, it occurred to him that sending a small child to gather covert information was a plan fraught with possible pitfalls, not least that the child might learn something unsuitable for young ears.

  Which, as it turned out, was exactly what happened.

  As he later learned, Ethan was—despite outward appearances—prone to making the odd rash and hasty decision as well as being possessed of what you might call a sense of mischief. Thinking back, Ethan’s instructions for the exercise were perhaps the first time Jayadeep saw an outward manifestation of this in his tutor.

  So Jayadeep went on his exercise and two hours later joined Ethan at the fountain. He took a seat on the stone beside where his master sat looking pensive as usual, and did not acknowledge Jayadeep, as was his custom. Like everything else about Ethan, this had taken Jayadeep time to get used to and getting used to it was a process that involved moving first from being offended to then being confused and lastly accepting that his lack of warmth was in its own way a measure of the familiarity the two of them shared, these two men so far apart in age and culture, one of them an experienced killer, the other training to be one.

  “Tell me, my dear boy, what did you learn?” asked Ethan.

  Ethan’s calling Jayadeep “my dear boy” was a relatively new development. One that pleased Jayadeep, as it happened.

  “I learned something about you, Master.”

  Maybe then Ethan regretted sending his young charge on this particular assignment. It’s difficult to imagine that he planned it, but then who can say what was in Ethan Frye’s mind. Who can ever say? The boy had no way of knowing, but as an eager pupil and as one who had been schooled in observation he naturally watched his tutor closely for signs that he might have caused offense or stepped over a line.

  “This was tittle-tattle you overheard was it, son?”

  “Tittle-tattle, Master?”

  “Tittle-tattle means gossip—and as I’ve always told you, gossip can be a very powerful information tool. You did well to glean what you could
from what you overheard.”

  “You’re not angry?”

  A certain placid look had crossed Ethan’s features. As though some feeling of internal turmoil were being laid to rest. “No, Jayadeep,” he said, “I’m not angry with you. Pray tell me what it was that you heard.”

  “You might not like it.”

  “I don’t doubt it. Go ahead anyway.”

  “The women were saying that you had a wife in England but that she died giving birth to your two children.”

  It was as though the courtyard stilled as the boy awaited his master’s response. “That’s true, Jayadeep,” said Ethan after a while, exhaling through a sigh, “and when I tried to look at my children, Evie and Jacob, I found I could not. Invited back to India, I suppose you would have to say that I fled, Jayadeep. I fled my home in Crawley and my children to come here and swelter in the sun with you.”

  Jayadeep thought of his own mother and father. He thought of the love and affection they lavished upon him, and his heart went out to these two children. He had no doubt they were looked after, but even so they lacked a father’s love.

  “But not for much longer,” said Ethan, as though reading Jayadeep’s mind. He stood. “I’m to return to England, to Crawley, to Jacob and Evie. I shall see to it that you move on to steel; I shall satisfy myself you will be ready in combat, then I will return home and there, Jayadeep, I shall do what I feel I should have done in the first place: I shall be a father to my two children.”

  Ethan’s words rang with a significance that Jayadeep, for all his preternatural intuition, failed to pick up on. In his own way, Ethan was confessing to Jayadeep that his friendship with the boy had awakened a parental instinct unseen since his wife had died. In his own way, Ethan was thanking the boy.

  Jayadeep, though, had heard the word “combat.”