The Magus Conspiracy, page 16
part #1 of Assassin's Creed: The Engine of History Series
Pierrette could hardly hear what came next, over the banging of the workmen in the other part of the room. It sounded like “fumigated mercury,” but that couldn’t be right.
“Any chemist,” said the long-suffering colleague. “Here, give it to me, you get on with telling the boys to down tools while we take this one. It’ll add a bloody week to the time, I hope you know.”
“The client is well aware this will require changes, and is also well aware that once those changes are in place, the construction will be faster and simpler. They are to be at Bousquet-Lang by the twenty-eighth.”
“If they need to be in Paris by the twenty-eighth, we’ll have to work through bloody Christmas,” grumbled the man with the clipboard.
His colleague spoke to him privately, softer, causing Pierrette to lean over the railing to hear.
She leaned so far over that the catwalk started to swing and creak on its chains. One of the men looked up and yelled, “Oi, you! You’re not meant to be in here!”
Pierrette considered trying to pretend she was, in fact, meant to be there. A client? No good. She wasn’t exactly dressed the part, in her dowdy brown dress and old straw hat. (Every member of the Aurora Troupe had been making economies in recent years.) She didn’t know what she was talking about or even where she was. A messenger? But from whom? A silly woman who’d lost her way? That at least had the virtue of being true, by one way of looking at things, but it meant she’d have to turn and leave now, and she would never again get a chance to take one of those casings.
And that would simply not do.
She’d lifted Ada Lovelace out of a crowd when she was nineteen. Surely, she could grab an inanimate object away from a startled worker. But in the circus, she’d had ropes and hoops to work with. In the factory, there was just this metal catwalk.
It creaked alarmingly as it swung.
Pierrette ran to the other side, then back again, and repeated the move, rocking it like a boat. The supervisor was yelling more now, but what could he do? Someone blew a whistle – damn, that would bring guards, proper trouble. The catwalk was swinging more and more, nearly over the heads of the workers now, the chains complaining mightily. It wasn’t meant to take this kind of movement. But just a few inches more, and then she could hang down by her knees, grab the casing, flip back up, step onto the walkway that led out of here, and run.
It would have been a perfect plan – if the catwalk hadn’t come off its chain while Pierrette was dangling by her knees.
Luckily, the workers were spooked enough by the creaking catwalk suddenly falling toward them at an angle that they all stepped out of her way. She grabbed the casing, which was slippery, and heavy too, damn it, and flipped to land on her feet. It wasn’t easy to judge the distance or angle, so she landed too hard on one ankle, and cringed as she ran toward the closed door. As she tried to lift the latch with her free hand, a guard was on her, out of nowhere.
And out of nowhere, she swung the heavy iron casing at him. It made sickening contact, and he went down. She yanked the latch up with her left hand, kicked the door open, and ran out into a foggy Birmingham autumn day. She could hardly believe what she’d just done.
•••
By the time Pierrette arrived back at the theatre, with the strange iron dome in her hand, she’d made up her mind. She had to leave England, that very night. She could be out of Birmingham within the hour, and over the Channel by this time tomorrow.
The sooner the better, because the police wouldn’t take long to find her name. She was already known to some people in the ironworks, and she’d been seen there yesterday. And she wasn’t sure how far the excuse of her small stature and sex would go, given that her circus act was known throughout the city.
The troupe would lie for her in an instant, say she had been with them the whole time, but it might not work, and she wouldn’t ask it of them in any case.
Besides, she now knew where the weapons were headed: to Paris. To something called Bousquet-Lang.
Tillie Wallin was upset. She was practically a woman now, and had grown up so much over the last year and a half, with her father still ill and the troupe living its relatively quiet new life. Ariel had said, when they settled in Birmingham, that it might be good for Tillie to finally be in one place for a while, to make some friends. But Jovita had said that staying in one place was prison if you weren’t used to it, and she was proven right. Tillie didn’t make friends outside the troupe. She spent her time helping Nell with the accounts, taking care of her father, and practicing her riding. She was the most precise and talented rider Pierrette had seen, in any troupe, in any city. But she didn’t seem happy.
So, when Pierrette announced that she had to leave them for a little while, to travel to southern France, Tillie took it badly.
“It’s my aunt,” Pierrette pleaded, hating the lie. She had no aunt that she knew of. There was no letter from France, asking Pierrette to come for the dying old lady’s final moments.
Meanwhile, a very real old man was sorry to see her go. Pierrette knew that Major Wallin would worry, that she was leaving the troupe without its final act. Birmingham in the winter of 1857 was not London in the summer of 1851; there were no other performers who could fill in. And when Major Wallin worried, his daughter’s face showed it.
“Listen, Tillie, you can do the pyramid with Hugh and Jovita. Move Hugh to the end, make that his final trick, and it will close out the show nicely. It’s good to change things up every so often. I’ll bring you back something pretty from France, will I?”
“I don’t want anything from France.”
“For Adolphus, then. Some pretty bows for his hair.”
“Adolphus doesn’t want anything either. And what will Sabine do, with you away?”
“You can ride her and brush her for me. I won’t be away for long, Tillie. Believe me, I have to do this.”
•••
She had to hope that when the police came around, as they surely eventually would, the troupe would tell them the truth: that she had left England. But she wasn’t going to southern France. She was going to Paris.
Pierrette took a twelve-car locomotive from Birmingham to Euston Station in London, and the stagecoach to Dover from there. The coach was crowded, and at one point, a man tried to help her with her hatbox, though she hadn’t asked for help, and the look on his face when he felt its weight made her smile every time she thought of it afterwards. At the time, she did a very good job of keeping a straight face, and acting as though there was nothing strange in her hatbox at all, certainly not a cast iron dome that she suspected was a weapon.
At every stage, she very deliberately did not look at any policemen.
After a smooth ferry crossing, she took a train from Calais to Paris, on a line that had been under construction when the troupe left France. Almost ten years ago. She walked out of the Gare du Nord into a vast new boulevard, lined with cream-colored buildings, where before there had been a medieval jumble. Napoleon III, as he called himself now, had been remaking Paris, cutting new streets through the old neighborhoods, to make sure that his troops would have access, as rumors had it. Streets she had known as a child were gone. Everything was familiar and yet unfamiliar. It was a relief to speak French in the streets and hear it spoken back, after all this time. But she felt as gutted and altered as Paris was.
The streets where her parents had fought and died had been erased from the map.
A map. That’s what she needed. She needed to find something or somewhere called Bousquet-Lang.
But first, a place to put down her things, including the blasted heavy hat box. A place to stay. The practical consequence of the tearing down of poor neighborhoods to build fancy boulevards was that lodgings were hard to find. Pierrette eventually took a room in a small, poorly decorated hotel. It was cold in Paris the week before Christmas, and the room had no fire and the wind whistled through the window. But what could she do? Paris was expensive.
Chapter Fifteen
Simeon stood on the top of the opera house, looking down at the Rue le Peletier like a man watching a show on stage, with the statues beside him his fellow audience members. It was eight-thirty in the evening, and he was in darkness, while the street below glowed with gaslight. The night was just cold enough to make Paris more beautiful. The rays of light caught white steam billowing from the horses’ noses, and they stamped their marks on the sparkling gray flagstones. The streetlamps caught the frost on the bare trees. The narrow street was filled with people stepping out of carriages, dressed in furs and felt.
As for Simeon, he was dressed in a tailcoat and top hat like the rest, although in truth he would have been more comfortable on the rooftops in his hooded cloak, darkness or not. But he didn’t know where the attack would come from, outside the opera or inside it. He patted his jacket pocket, where there was one ticket, for his usual box. The performance tonight was a mix of songs from various operas, including “Bal Masqué”, which was about the assassination of the Swedish king in an opera house, and from “William Tell,” an opera about a Swiss folk hero who had become an icon of the revolutionaries of 1848. All in all, an odd selection – or perhaps not.
The English Assassins had lost all track of Orsini and so Simeon had been watching for him in every working men’s bar in Paris. He’d even grown his beard, to fit in better. But he’d seen no sign of him. He had seen other signs, though. Letters in Amira’s favorite newspapers about the need for nations to rise through republicanism. Sidelong glances in the darkest corners of the bars when someone mentioned the upcoming performance of the opera, at which the emperor and his wife were planning to appear.
The emperor knew well enough that he was always at risk of assassination – every ruler was. A few years before, the tyrannical Duke of Parma had died in agony, twenty-three hours after being stabbed in the abdomen with a poignard by two hooded figures. The queen of Spain had recently been saved from a gunman while she was riding in her carriage. The savage King of Naples had died not long after getting the business end of an assassin’s bayonet.
Simeon felt no sympathy for any of them. That King of Naples had bombarded the city of Messina for hours after it had already surrendered, to punish it for rising against him. His men had raped and killed old people and children. He deserved that bayonet. But Simeon was looking for patterns, from as high up as he could get. Ultimately, he was looking for the Magus.
Why a bayonet? Why a poignard? If these had been actual Assassins, they would have done a better job, as Amira said drily. The Brotherhood was careful with its blades; it wasn’t interested in starting wars, or replacing one tyrant with another.
Where was this terrible weapon of Ada’s? When would it appear?
Out of the corner of his eye, Simeon caught sight of the imperial carriages arriving. Over on the Boulevard des Italiens, he could see the glint of military helmets and lances, the occasional flutter of pennants. This emperor, who had survived three assassination attempts himself, rode in a carriage that had steel plates built into it. So the attack would likely come when the emperor was out of the carriage, walking into the opera house.
Simeon scanned the crowd, looking for the gleam of a gun, a knife, or whatever monstrosity the Magus might have designed. From this angle, in the darkness, and with everyone wearing a hat, it would be hard to spot Orsini’s face. But he kept his eye out for a person with their hand in their pocket who might be Orsini. That made it harder; there were all kinds of fur wraps, cloaks, greatcoats. It would be the matter of a moment to draw a weapon and fire when the moment came. He paused to peer at the buildings around him, where someone might be waiting with a rifle. Nothing.
His fellow Assassins found his focus on political leaders strange, he knew. They had enough to occupy them with the Templars; Escoffier was convinced their numbers were converging on Paris to look for an artifact. But Simeon felt he could see patterns shaping, that he could half-understand them, even without the benefit of any Precursor Eye. He could smell a storm coming in on the January winds. If it happened today, Simeon would be ready, unlike that winter’s day in Vienna when Libenyi had lunged at another emperor.
And if it really was Orsini, he’d surely be caught and hanged, just as Libenyi had been. He’d very likely fail – imagine trying to get a shot off in the darkness, in a crowd, at a moving target. Or trying to get close enough to the emperor to slip a knife into something vital. Unlikely, on the whole. And if the weapon was some type of explosive, a grenade maybe, surely Orsini wouldn’t use it in a crowd like this. No, the most likely outcome was another quixotic failure that would accomplish nothing but Orsini’s arrest and capture. If the Magus was behind this, he was not the scientific wizard Ada had imagined.
Simeon glanced north, where he could just see the roof of the neoclassical Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. It looked like a Roman temple, as did the home of the stock exchange, the Palais Brongniart, over to the south. In between, the new boulevard with its apartment blocks was still fronted with scaffolding.
The imperial cortege had turned the corner now, into the street, and the crowd had noticed. Everyone was turned to see them. The lancers in front, and the imperial guards. Three carriages. The emperor would be in the final one. It would be a few minutes, once they’d stopped, time for the guards–
A sharp bang, and a white light from below. The blast wave slammed into Simeon, and he slipped, grabbing on to one of the statues. A bomb, after all. The carriages hadn’t even come to a halt before the device went off. There was screaming – a horse, and then a human.
With his hands still on the statue’s head, Simeon swung down onto the balcony and perched on the railing, ready to leap down at Orsini. The street had been transformed into a battlefield after hours of carnage. Bodies on the ground, soldiers trying to get to their feet. Blood and broken glass catching the light. Horses rearing in their traces.
All three carriages had stopped now. There was at least one carriage window blown out – not enough to account for all the glass; some must be from the building. Where was Orsini? Had he planted it somehow? Thrown a grenade? Simeon had never seen a grenade with that kind of light, that kind of sound.
Oh, Ada, he thought.
He heard a clattering of hoofbeats over to his left and swung his attention to see what it was – probably just a horse desperate to get away, but it might have been Orsini. Had he been on horseback?
The horse was as dark as the night, dressed in military regalia, and the rider on it wasn’t Orsini – but it wasn’t a soldier either. A small figure in a smart hat – a woman? But riding astride, her skirts pulled up to her thighs. She was galloping straight up a builder’s ramp, toward a tower of scaffolding. Maybe the horse really was a runaway; it must have had a soldier on its back not long ago. It clattered onto the wooden ramp – good God, the woman was controlling it, but why was she leading it up into that rickety–
He realized who it was. The circus performer, Pierrette Arnaud.
As she urged the horse up the ramp he spotted a second figure halfway up the scaffolding, silhouetted against the sunset, holding something like a football.
No, not a football.
Simeon jumped to the cobbles, ignored the shock from the hard stones, and ran for the scaffold.
Pierrette’s horse slammed into the figure, and the bomb flew into the air. Simeon reached for it and dove, landing so hard he lost all his breath, but he was alive, with a cold metal sphere in his hands, so heavy he could barely grasp it. He scrambled to his feet, groaning from the pain, and screamed something incoherent but unmistakable at the man who had now pulled Pierrette off the frightened horse.
By the time Simeon reached her, she was lying motionless on the ground, with blood at her temple, and the man was gone.
Chapter Sixteen
Pierrette woke up in semi-darkness, lying on a sofa that was slightly too narrow even for her small frame. There was a paraffin lamp on a table by her feet, and a thin wool blanket keeping her body relatively warm, but her nose and fingertips were freezing. Her head ached and she felt as though she might vomit.
She turned her head and saw Simeon Price, sitting on a wooden chair, his arms crossed, glaring at her.
“I like the beard,” she croaked.
He said nothing. Behind him, a cavernous room stretched. There were more lamps, and they caught a brightly tiled floor. No daylight.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Noon, Friday. You slept right through the night, until now. How’s the head?”
She moved her finger up to touch the spot that hurt the most, felt dried blood and pain, and cringed. “Not good.”
“I had a doctor in to see it last night, when you were out. I don’t know how much you remember. He gave you laudanum and you’ve been sleeping since.”
“And where exactly am I?”
“Somewhere away from prying eyes. Anywhere with a doorman or a nun or a nurse, they’d have called the police, and given your behavior last night, it seemed very likely they’d hang you as a participant, along with Orsini and his accomplices. Except, of course, for the one you knocked off the scaffolding.”
She remembered that well enough. The bomb in his hand, the same shape as the device hidden in her hat box. And she remembered Simeon catching it – good God, that had been close. They might both have been killed. She shivered.
“After that – when I fell – the horse. Is it–”
“That particular horse is all right, and deserves a medal. Those spikes on one side of the bomb: I think they’re pins that trigger the detonation, so me catching it in the way I did saved our skins. I can’t say the same for some of the other horses on the road last night. Several people are dead. I don’t know how many are wounded – dozens, I’d guess. Four men were arrested, one of whom I know. One of whom I was trying to save. To stop. But I couldn’t get to them in time, after your little stunt. The emperor was all right tucked up in his iron carriage, and his wife just has a scratch.”
