Assassin's Creed: Underworld Read Online Free PDF

again.
    ‘You want the knacker’s yard,’
he said simply.
    ‘Come again?’ said Abberline.
    The attendant sighed and wiped his hands on his
apron. ‘Unless this is your idea of a joke you want the bleedin’ knacker’s
yard is what I said.’
    Abberline paled, already thinking of his
encounter with the slum children and the way his cart had shook, remembering how his attention
had been arrested, cleverly, perhaps, by the kid nuzzling the neck of his horse.
    And sure enough, when he skidded to the back of
the cart and swept back the tarpaulin, it was to see that the body from the trench had gone; in
its place a dead pony.

7
    Every night The Ghost made the same journey home,
which took him along the New Road and past Marylebone Church. In the churchyard, among the
ramshackle and raggle-taggle groupings of headstones was one in particular that he would look at
as he went by.
    If the stone was upright, as it was most
evenings, that meant no message. If the stone leaned to the right, it meant danger. Just that:
danger. It was up to The Ghost to work out what manner of danger.
    However, if it leaned to the left then it meant
his handler wanted to see him: usual time, usual place.
    And then, having performed that check, The Ghost
began his five-mile walk home to Wapping and his living quarters at the Thames Tunnel.
    It had once been called one of the great wonders
of the world, and even at ground level it cut an imposing figure among the surrounding
buildings: a spired octagonal marble building acting as an entrance hall. Entering through doors
that were never shut, he crossed the mosaic floor to reach a side-building, the watch-house.
During the daytime pedestrians had to pay a penny to pass through and reach the steps down into
the tunnel, but not at night. The brass turnstile was closed but The Ghost climbed over, just as
everybody did.
    Ice had formed on the marble
steps that spiralled round the inside of the shaft, so he trod more carefully than usual as he
descended to the first platform, and then to the next, and finally to the bottom of the shaft
– the grand rotunda, more than two hundred and fifty feet underground. Once it had been
vast and opulent, now it was merely vast. The walls were dirty, the statues scruffy. The years
had had their say.
    Even so, it was still a sight to see: alcoves set
into grubby stucco walls. Inside the nooks, curled beneath sacks, slept the people of the
rotunda: the necromancers, fortune tellers and jugglers who in the daytime plied their trade to
those visiting the tunnel, the famous Thames Tunnel.
    The first of its kind anywhere, ever, the Thames
Tunnel stretched from here, Wapping, below the river to Rotherhithe and had taken fifteen years
to build, almost defeating Mr Marc Brunel and claiming the life of his son Isambard, who had
near drowned in one of the floods that had plagued its construction. Both had hoped to see their
tunnel used by horse-drawn carriages, but had been undone by the cost, and instead it became a
tourist attraction, visitors paying their penny to walk its thousand-feet length, an entire
subterranean industry springing forth to serve them.
    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
gaslamps 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
took a walk down the tunnel, and had done since it opened some nineteen years ago. Once you had
a place at the tunnel opening you didn’t leave it, not for fear that some other hawker
might steal it with you absent.
    The Ghost looked