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

8
    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 in 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 and then the ‘katras’
– the different areas of the city itself. Memory can play tricks on you – it can
make 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 those walled streets
which loomed so large in his recollections had played host to characters as unsavoury as
anywhere else in India. Possibly the sun didn’t really bathe the entire city in 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 toremember it. Those
memories kept him warm in the tunnel at night.
    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 best of them all was the story of how Arbaaz had met his wife,
Pyara. 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 artefacts distributed around the globe that 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 lightshow. Talking of what they’d witnessed,
his parents were candid about the effect it had upon them. What they’d seen had made them
more devoutand 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.
    Training had begun when he was four or five years
old, but although it was physically demanding work it had never seemed like a chore; he had
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 been rarely witnessed in the Indian Brotherhood. He was extraordinarily, almost
supernaturally, fast in attack, and more than usually responsive in defence;