Chapter Text
i.
“We’re concerned about you.”
Alexandria looks up from her cup of Pandyssian coffee. The scent reminds her of the trip she took to that vast continent in her youth, so far from this bleak winter morning, back when she was only a graduate student.
Cyrille crosses his arms and leans back in his chair. “Alexandria…”
The shutters rattle as the wind intensifies, driving the rain sideways to strike under the eaves. Winters in Karnaca aren’t as cold as in the northern isles but the winds can be as vicious, as deadly, as snow or ice. The rail cars aren’t running today and, although she could have bribed a boatman to brave the waves, it feels wrong to put someone else’s life in danger just to get to work. Still, she isn’t comfortable abandoning a patient.
The storm should have struck yesterday when she’d strapped a docile Kirin Jindosh down like the corpse of the Alchemical Man, stitched together by a mad philosopher and brought to life with lightning and whale oil. It was only five milligrams but the restraints had been necessary in case the serum triggered an adverse reaction.
His response came before she’d even administered the dose.
No… please… no…! You don’t know… w-what you’re doing – anything! I’ll give you anything you want! Don’t do this… so… so much will be… be… what’s happening? No, I’ll give you… I have… you… please!
Alexandria hadn’t pulled the levers but she was the one who’d sent the young empress to that strange mechanical mansion. She hadn’t even considered the inventor’s fate. Even if Emily had asked, she'd had no sympathy to spare for the cabal who’d used her so abominably, piling murder upon murder. Imprisonment, banishment, death – she wouldn’t have cared. Jindosh had been dangerous and near amoral in his quest for scientific progress.
But now… she couldn’t bear to watch that once brilliant mind grope hopelessly for some gleaning of what once was. The Duke would have let him to wither away to nothing in that vast house of mirrors or kill himself trying to activate one of his clockwork soldiers. Called it mental instability. Suicide. No, if there was a chance of helping him, she had to take it.
Bloodfly Fever dulled the brain. Her solution had been created to increase the higher functions.
“I’m fine. It’s nothing, really.”
Cyrille looks sceptical, and about to say so, when the oven door creaks and the scent of Caroline’s panes dulces wafts from the kitchen. They both inhale deeply. The aroma anchors Alexandria, pulling her back to her friends’ apartment.
“They just need to cool,” Caroline says, joining the table and patting Alexandria’s arm. She trembles slightly and her friends exchange a worried glance. “You deserve a holiday,” Caroline continues, “I know you’re still upset about the Addermire Solution.”
“Please, I don’t want to talk about it…”
She’d used the excuse of the Duke’s departure to give the staff a holiday. Just a small dose, enough the stimulate the synapses. Nothing too dangerous. Not if she was careful.
“No one could have produced a perfect formula under the conditions the Duke forced on you! You still helped a lot of people… including me.”
“I…”
It had all been tied up so neatly. The serum, the murders…
You can’t just cover everything up, she’d all but shouted at the Duke. What she… what I… did in Dunwall. Poor Vasco…
Doctor Vasco has been awarded Grand Medal of Merit for his services combating the bloodfly concern. Nothing extraordinary in a physician dying of the disease he’s trying to cure. The pension will please his family. As for the Dunwall murders, they’re not my problem. Frankly, even if they happened in Karnaca, it wouldn’t make a difference. There’s no proof it was you and I’m not of a mind to provide it.
You don’t understand. Long term exposure to the serum… it isn’t safe!
Then say so. The Duke shrugged his broad shoulders. I locked you up and forced you to rush its development. People trust you, doctor. Don’t waste that.
“It’s not your fault.” Caroline’s voice draws her back to the cosy apartment. Coffee, cake, the sound of rain, and two worried friends. “The Duke was the one who stopped paying the smoke-flashing crews. You couldn’t have saved everyone even if the Addermire Solution had worked perfectly. Vasco was—”
Alexandria flinches, thunder booms and, high above them, the wind pipes sing. Cyrille flips through his audiograph collection, choosing a recording. “What about some Shan Yun?” he asks the two women loudly, holding up the card with a wink. “Caro has a crush on him.”
“Not anymore!” Caroline shakes her head. “I still can’t believe our tickets weren’t refunded when he cancelled his last show – all that money down the drain! Why don’t you choose something we can tap our feet to?”
Cyrille slides a card in, presses the button, and the sound of a guitar emanates from the machine, its festive chords mixing with the winds and percussion outside. Cyrille hums along. “This takes me back.” Sitting down next to Caroline, he takes a sip of coffee and smiles at Alexandria. “At least yesterday was sunny. We went down to docks – the Grand Guard were bribing people to give the Duke a cheer. I think they underestimated how happy we all were to see him off. Me and Caro listened to the bastard drone on about how much he hates the sea and loves Serkonos and then spent our bounty on fritters and mulled wine.”
Caroline leans against Cyrille’s shoulder. “Wouldn’t it be nice if his ship were lost in the storm…”
“Bit hard on the crew but, I can’t deny, the thought crossed my mind. Either way, he’ll be shitting himself sailing around the eastern islands in this weather.”
Alexandria allows herself a smile, thinking of the concoction she gave the Duke to simulate sea-sickness. Perhaps, if the weather is this bad, he won’t need it after all.
Caroline, the only one of them who’s worked on a whaler, rolls her eyes. “Only a fool would steer east for Dunwall in the Month of Darkness. Reefs on one side and Pandyssian gales on the other. They’ll go west round the coast and through the Bastillian Strait. Still,” she grins, “I’m glad it’s not me out there in open water during a storm with a crippling fear of the ocean.”
ii.
It’s unlucky to rename a boat. That’s what the sailors mutter as the storm tips and lifts the Pride of Serkonos and dark water crashes over its sides.
“It’s The Delilah writ in the ledger of the deep,” one growls as they huddle in their ships’ leathers. “Ol’ Black Eyes ain’t fooled by some new letters and a lick of paint.”
Billie snorts. Sailors. They told her the same thing when she’d renamed her old tub the Dreadful Wale. Not like she was going to steam round the Isles in a boat named after some fat merchant’s wife. Mind you, it wasn’t like she’d had much luck as a captain – so maybe there was something to it after all. The Delilah – hah. How many ensorcelled idiots named their fucking boats after that bitch, anyway?
She slams the door shut on the storm, shaking the rain off her coat and wiping her boots dry on the plush carpet. In the wardroom, a group of officers are smoking and playing cards. The money and whisky glasses, sliding around the table as the ship pitches back and forth, only add to the hilarity of the game. They’ve staked the Outsider a few silvers and one of them ruffles his black hair. He smiles without showing his teeth, holding his cards tentatively, as though he doesn’t know the rules to every game ever played. An empty bottle rolls onto the floor and everyone laughs.
If the kid’s out to fleece them with that innocent act, then she won’t spoil his fun. Billie heads up the corridor towards her stupidly large cabin. It’s strange to be a mere passenger. Nothing to check, nothing to fix – she’d gone up on deck to make certain everything was battened down but it had all been done already. It’s only been a week but she’s ready to stage a mutiny just for something to do.
The gilded doors to the ducal staterooms have been shut for three days, so it’s a minor miracle to see a tired-looking Captain Merquez emerge carrying what looks and smells like a chamber pot full of sick.
“How’s he doing?” she asks, leaning against the wall.
“Better than last time he made the trip to Dunwall – hold on.” The guard captain hurries to the end of the corridor, wrenches the door open, and disappears into the darkness to return seconds later with a wet coat and an empty pot. She braces herself next to Billie as the ship shifts beneath them. “Last time His Grace brought a bunch of toadies along to hold his bowl and jerk him off. I’m only playing nursemaid so the servants can get some sleep. Some quack prescribed him a syrup for seasickness and I swear it’s only making things worse.”
Billie doesn’t try to hide her amusement.
“You can take a turn if you think it’s so bloody funny.”
“I’ll pass, thanks. But I have half a bottle of Orbon in my cabin if you feel like a change of scene.”
iii.
The Duke blinks, trying to read as the ship pitches and his stomach pitches with it. He growls, tossing aside A Guide to the Nobility of Gristol, and retches into his sick bowl. It’s hard to tell if he’s genuinely seasick or if it’s all the work of Dr Hypatia’s vial of poison. Probably both. At least he’ll have lost some weight by the time they get to Dunwall and there’s no bastard with a scale yelling at him because he’s a quarter of a stone lighter than Abele.
Back in Karnaca they’ll be having a grand old time celebrating the Winter Solstice. Last year he spent the night smoking habberweed on his little balcony while Luca fornicated with countless courtiers and witches. Cruelty he can bear, but the witches scare him. Wrapped in vines and flowers, with faces like daggers, singing their strange songs in pursuit of something unknown beyond their eerie music and not caring who or what they sacrifice along the way.
One had appeared on the edge of his balcony, naked but for the oxrush flowers in her red hair, sipping a glass of wine. She wasn’t a beauty but, somehow, she didn’t need to be beautiful to entrance. Her body was wilderness made flesh.
Oh… hello darling, didn’t realise this spot was taken.
Please yourself, he’d grumbled, willing her to go away so that he could let the weed do its work and drift somewhere soft and warm.
The witch tipped her head back, looking at him upside down. If you share some of that habberweed I’ll tell you what secrets your future keeps.
I don’t have a future.
Mm… no, I’d sense it if you were about to die. Tonight, the Void is closer to our world than at any other time. It heightens our powers. She finished her wine, tossed the glass over the side, and reached out a hand. C’mon, I’m desperate for a smoke.
Reluctantly, he handed over his pipe only to gasp in pain as she grasped his wrist and dug a sharp nail into his skin. Then the crazy bitch let go, took a deep drag on his pipe, and slowly licked his blood from her fingernail. Yeah, tastes like a future to me, darling… kids n’ everything. Regular pillar of the establishment you turn out to be – fuck, you’re ugly and boring – guess there’s no accounting for taste.
He didn’t care about the witch’s insults or the fact that she flitted off with his pipe. Children. Back then, he’d thought it meant that Luca might one day let him go or be killed by someone smart enough to recognise the real duke. Now it meant little Abeles sired by a nobody from the Aventa District. And marriage changed a man – didn’t everyone say so? Luca hadn’t cared how ridiculous his passion for Delilah had made him appear. He loved as he did everything: heedless of consequence and thinking only of himself.
Such all-consuming love feels impossible for a man like the Duke but he’s more that capable of acting the lovesick swain, the groom changed for the better. He weighs every gesture, every word. His body is a theatre. Even with his head spinning and his mouth fouled with bile. A loyal crimson-clad guard stands in the corner of the room, watching over him. Watching. Always watching.
Going to Dunwall is a gamble and the Duke is not a gambler. It curdles his gut more than the awful syrup or the wash of the sea. He closes his eyes. In the darkness, he allows himself to doubt.
What if he’s wrong, what if the Empress has him torn apart by the hounds baying for Luca’s blood?
iv.
The game is almost laughably simple. There are fifty-two cards and every card played eliminates possible combinations from the players’ hands. A universe that folds and shuffles its way to a finite conclusion in less than half an hour. He wins the first few hands effortlessly. Don’t do anything weird. Billie’s words ring in his head. After that, he makes sure to lose enough of his winnings to keep the table happy. Beginners’ luck.
This game, the cigars, the liquor – each carries its joys, its despairs, its deaths. The faces around the table don’t know where the cards are any more than they can see the colour of their lungs. He breathes in poison, gulps it down, feeling the grip of the Void as strong as the moon’s hold on the ocean. It wants. Tonight there is no sacrifice, only a mouth with a pulled tooth calling him home.
“It’s almost midnight,” someone says and, for a moment, the cards are forgotten. “Can you feel that?”
“What?”
“The storm – it’s calmed.”
“No,” he tells them. “We’re in its eye.”
“It’s bad luck to be at sea tonight,” one of them says, making the sign of the Everyman. The ancient symbol of the many. The firelit circle. And, just as he gets up to leave – he’s never been one to stay where he’s not wanted – someone starts to sing.
Before the Great Burning, before the wars…
He’s heard the chant in so many tongues and tunes, felt it carved into cliffs and inked on skin.
A time of nothing but hills and shores…
Nothing came afterwards: vaster than any human mind could hold. The others join in and he stills as they sing, frozen and unable to speak. Someone slaps him on the back – not singing is bad luck! – as though providence will be moved by his voice, as though it could save him.
The smoke of cities and fields of rye…
They sing because they are afraid, not of him, but of the silence that will one day come for them, casting fearful glances at the darkness beyond the light of dead trees, dead whales, as though their world were not built on death. The cards in their hands. The soft wool beneath their feet. Their glistening boots. No songs, no void-bound outcast, can alter that.
No eyes or voices beyond the sky…
He finds the will to leave. No longer bound to stay and listen. I’m free. His jaw works its way through the word. Free. Part of him didn’t believe it until tonight. His name has cut the Void loose, left it luffing like a sail trying to catch the wind. He can hear the prayers. It wants him to hear. Wants him back. O Spirit of the Deep, a woman cries – far away and down his spine – calling out to the one who came before.
Siren of Dreams. Mighty Leviathan. Their rites have mingled like rain and sea spray streaking down his face. He offers up unbound hands to the sky and almost loses his balance on the slippery deck. So many voices on the wind. Once, he heard all of them with perfect clarity. Now they bleed together. Blood and bone. Words and wants.
Speak to us, your outcast children, on this night of your death and rebirth!
He can see the dark eyes behind her mask, drawn to his altar not for gain or revenge but to know again the burn of his name on her skin. Emily. And – through her – Corvo, curled tight on an icy rooftop, too proud to ask for what had been so unaccountably withdrawn. but waiting and hoping for a sign.
A vessel has been prepared and he reaches for it, blindly, feet stepping on empty air.
v.
Billie rolls over, stroking Merquez’s thigh. The captain’s olive skin is softer that she expected for someone with such a hard-bitten face. Not that Billie minds – with two eyes, and only a few scars, Merquez is doing better than her – these days, she can’t stand being with anyone who isn’t as old and jaded as she is.
“So, how’d you get to be the captain of the Duke’s bodyguard?”
Merquez shrugs and leans in for a kiss. It’s a long time before their rum-splashed lips part and she curls comfortably against Billie’s back. “A lot senior officers died over the summer.”
“Bloodfly Fever?” Billie asks casually, as though she doesn’t know exactly what happened in Karnaca in the Month of Harvest.
“Some of them. Others were murdered… or shot for incompetence.”
“You’re not scared you’ll be next?”
Merquez’s steady breath warms the nape of her neck. “I’m good at what I do and I’m not so loyal to the Duke that I’ll take a hit I won’t survive.”
“It’s a nice philosophy until someone gets you with a spring razor.”
“Is that how you lost your eye?”
“No.”
“You aren’t one of those occult weirdoes who sacrifice their own eyes?”
“No!”
“Just asking. You know, with the company you keep.”
It’s the first time Merquez has mentioned him. She shies away from the kid – pretending he doesn’t exist, which is no mean feat on a boat. Billie sighs. “Look, it’s—”
An alarm sounds.
Billie tenses and Merquez dives off the bed, fumbling for her trousers. The lingering tonic of Merquez’s body against her own makes Billie reluctant to follow. It’s not her job.
A bell rattles beneath the whine of the alarm and faint voices cry out. Man overboard! Man overboard!
Shit.
vi.
Pearl screams and stumbles forwards. It isn’t right – there’s no anchor, no ropes binding him – he’s cold. Naked. The girl’s eyes are covered but he can see though the glyphs on her painted skin and the flickering candles of those gathered. Then the tide takes him and they are caught, as one, in the spell.
“Hello Emily.”
And, because people are people, masked faces turn and gasp – it’s the Empress! – and they go down on their knees, not for him and the wonder that is Pearl, but for Emily Lela Drexel Kaldwin, the summit of all earthly ambition. Empress of the Isles. He glides forward, uncaring, takes a breath through Pearl’s lungs, and all the lights go out.
Someone faints and, in the distance, a siren blares.
“I missed you,” she whispers as he takes her hand, fingering the space between what is and what was. The ghost of a name and a summer in Karnaca. “Why did you go?”
She asked – he knows – the same thing of her mother, casting stones in the Wrenhaven like so many prayers. She asked it of the sky and the mud-stuck rune she freed to tuck under her pillow. Too young to want any answer he or it could give. Time repeating the same unending pattern of love and loss. An eternity on a butcher’s block.
“We are all made by the things that are taken from us.” It’s not meant to be a rebuke but Emily’s eyes harden and he knows it’s not the answer she’s looking for. Every street kid, every desperate wretch pushed to the edge, they all wanted you to speak to them. Why didn’t you?
Because it wouldn’t make a difference. And the darker the secrets they gained from his mark, the less of a difference it would make. Only a few could ever really alter their fates – with or without his name on their hands. And, even then, they were haunted by The World as it Should Be.
He touches her cheek. “We’ll see each other—”
But something is wrong.
Pearl falls to the floor, smudging the chalked sigils, casting up seawater.
And he’s spinning back as the net breaks. Lost in a heaving spill that rushes through the Void and spits him out into frigid darkness and a body starved for air. His limbs are numb with cold and, beneath the water, he is as blind as Pearl. The world aches to drag him down, for him to die again – unseeing – on this night of all nights.
Someone is singing.
Its an ancient song that first sounded long before he was born. He wonders if, as he dies, he will finally meet the one who came before.The only being who might know what this moment, so long delayed, truly means.
The last breath is knocked from his lungs and he feels himself borne upwards by a force stronger than the Void itself.
vii.
The alarm is deafening.
The Duke opens his eyes, glaring around his opulent stateroom, the noise drilling into his aching head. The guard has gone to the door to shout at one of the ships’ officers, who shakes his head fervently, disavowing all responsibility.
“You!” the Duke roars, flinging aside the covers, not caring that, but for his medallion of office, he’s naked from the waist up. He pauses, clutching his stomach, fighting down nausea as he points at the officer. “What the fuck is going on?”
“I – sir, I…”
Useless. He pushes them out of the way, trailing exclamations of “Sir, it’s not safe!” and “Your Grace!”
The source of the commotion is up on deck. People are screaming, lanterns swing wildly, and someone is pulling frantically on the ship’s bell. Several of his guards are leaning over the rail, firing into the churning sea. Merquez is ordering them to reload. Foster is yelling at them to stop. The ship shudders beneath him as her hull strikes something large. He runs to the side, careless of the danger, needing to know.
He’s only ever seen whales in books, on tins, and strung up on distant ships. Far away or rendered no bigger than the size of his palm. A harmless drawing. The safe scent of a lamp burning through the night.
This is none of those things. Its immense head knocks against the hull, as dark and slick and vast as the ship’s deck, roaring open, keening. A massive tail lifts out of the black water only to slap back down with a force that could capsize the ship. The powerful bulk that connects the two is hidden beneath the roiling waves, but there nonetheless. The idea of whales as soft, blubbery, flees from the sight of a true leviathan intent on drowning them all.
Someone yanks him back from the edge, wrapping a coat around his shoulders and pinning him down. He stills like a child in his mother’s arms, his heartbeat pulsing in his ears, gasping in terror. All those speeches about the horrors of the deep. Who’s laughing now?
“STOP IT!” Foster screams, climbing onto the railing – her booted feet precariously balanced – and kicking aside the rifles. One goes off and Captain Merquez tries to grab her leg. Foster dodges, faster than the eye can see, slipping slightly on the wet metal. She holds up a gloved hand, her dark face fierce and her false eye gleaming crimson. “IT’S TRYING TO GIVE HIM BACK!”
“Sir, you need to get below!” a guard shouts in his ear as the ship lurches sideways. The grip on his waist tightens and he stumbles, looking up in time to see Foster fall backwards into the sea.
Resisting all efforts to stuff him back inside – and forgetting Luca Abele – he bellows at them to save her and anyone else who might have gone over the side. But the order fails completely in the chaos. Yanking a rope from a pair of unresisting hands, he tries to throw it in after her but the wind hurls it back. The whale leaps, clearing the sea completely, water slewing off its fins, something dark trapped in its red maw like a rotten tooth.
The leviathan hits the water with a force that smashes into the ship like an arc pylon. His knees scrape the deck and he clings desperately to the rail as icy waves roar over the side. He’s still screaming like a madman when they pry his fingers free of rope and rail and drag him back, stripping away his sodden clothes and plying him with towels and brandy. It burns his throat. The world ceases to spin. Merquez holds the bottle to his lips, even though she’s just as soaked and exhausted as he is, staring at him as though she’s never seen him before. Tears streak down his face as he closes his eyes, shivering back into the privilege of his rank, even though all he wants to do is comfort her and pass the bottle round.
“He’s alive!” someone calls and he opens his eyes.
In the middle of the deck, Meagan Foster crouches over the body of the nameless young man he suspects must be her son, beating his chest until his flaccid lips choke up seawater. She rolls him over as he retches, holding him tenderly, and the Duke realises that she too must be a witch to fall and return in an instant.
He gets up, waving his attendants away, and moves closer. What will he overhear – some magic spell to bring the dead back to life?
“I told you,” she gasps out, wrapping the youth in her arms. “You shitty… black-eyed… bastard. You’re going… to live.”