Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

i.

“You owe me.”

Dr Alexandria Hypatia sighs. She should have known Meagan Foster would be back to collect, sooner or later, washing up at her door like seaweed after a storm.

“I’m not taking patients at the moment.”

“Good. More space. I’ll be back for him in a few weeks… got a few things to handle in the meantime.”

Another sigh. She owes the smuggler too much. For her time aboard the Dreadful Wale and other things. Pandyssian orchids, northern spices, oxrush oil, and extract of agarwood. She remembers… no, don’t think about that now.

“What’s his name?”

“Doesn’t have one. I’ve tried him on a couple, but nothing’s stuck. The kid’s been through… a lot. Got captured by the Eyeless gang — doesn’t talk much, but he’s not stupid. Just needs time, you know, to get his bearings. We’ve all been there.” Foster’s dark eye is unsparing.

Something about that eye — or is it two of them? — strikes her as odd… like there’s another woman just as familiar, but out of reach, standing behind the one she sees. Does everyone have a Grim Alex, a shadow self, waiting to be set free? It’s probably just the unsettling eyepatch. It glints red in the thin winter light.  

Foster is still talking: “…Can’t you put him with the others?”

The doctor tucks a stray lock of hair neatly behind her ear.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

ii.

They told Vera it was too cold to swim. She swam, he remembers, every day she was here. She liked to observe her painted toes move through the water, round and red, like beads of blood. He can’t feel his toes. Perhaps they are elsewhere?

The inventor sits in a wicker lounge chair drinking soup — sweet Bastillian tomatoes, roast peppers, garlic, and onions — and watches him float, hanging in the water like the inventor’s missing fingers in their jar of formalin. Upstairs, he has a room and a balcony with pale stone and paler winter sky. Sometimes he thinks about jumping off that little balcony, just to see what would happen. At night he can hear the whales in the bay. Or perhaps he dreams them… or they dream him. It’s hard to tell the difference in the dark. He floats.

Addermire is once more a place for lassitude and hush-a-bye secrets. He remembers when the island was the sole preserve of nesting gulls. He remembers the masons who lost their lives in its construction. He remembers every delicate, bewildered, bird-bone hope its denizens left at the altar Vera built. It took her so long to stop biting the orderlies.

She told him the secret to getting out was nail-polish and afternoon tea. He doesn’t think it will be the same for him. Outside, the sun masquerades as the moon, a lonely pearl lost behind grey clouds. He doesn’t know what day it is, but the season is written in his bones.    

He traces his name at the bottom of the shallow pool. A ghost’s kiss on slimy tiles. Nothing happens. A catch of song comes to him and he opens his mouth to sing. Water rushes in. Breaking the surface, spluttering, he doesn’t know why his lungs hurt. The leviathan is still here. Long-dead-not-dead. And lo’ it whispers in silence. He’s part of it the way Delilah wanted to be part of him. A lingering piece of a god. A lingering piece of himself.

The inventor crouches beside the water.

“I know you…” The statement turns into an inquiry. “Don’t I…?”

“You do.”

“I thought so.” Kirin Jindosh struts around the pool. “If I had my silvergraph we could take a picture… you look different, less – um — it was, I was about to say… it’s cold, don’t you think? Five degrees down, commence. Did your mother read you Bertie the Bird?”

“I remember many things,” he answers, turning onto his back, spreading his arms wide, and closing his eyes. “But not my mother.”

“I like the illustrations. Something… something about the skull…”

Such an interesting decision little Emily made. An age of wonderous advancement, stillborn in this inventor’s damaged mind. He doesn’t care. Kirin Jindosh is even less interesting than Antonin Sokolov. Wonders past and wonders present, making magic out of butchery or butchery out of magic are both tricks as old as time.

He dips his head under the water again. Learning, like a child, when to shut his mouth and breathe out through his nose. When he surfaces, Jindosh’s face hangs above him still, like a cat watching a carp.

“Am I… in the Void?” the inventor asks, staring at his jaw. No… his jawbone. Those keen eyes see through skin to the interior mechanisms of flesh. His body is merely a set of component parts to this man. Relics, no… machines waiting to be created.

“The Void draws from this world and this world from it. It is always here and always apart. You are in it, but it is not in you.”

Brown eyes flicker. Jindosh doesn’t notice that his answer turned the question inside out. “I was going to say… something.” Long fingers twitch together like an anxious spider. “Did we meet at Aramis Stilton’s?”

“Yes and no. A little Tyvian girl told me about you. You crafted her a toy out of wood, brass, cats, and a few drops of whale oil a day.”  

“You look different. Wrong… pigment? I expected… manganese oxide… or burnt umber and ultramarine? Sokolov used to say charred human bones made the perfect black. Would you like —uh — why are you here?”

“I am learning how to be human again.”

“Oh. Would you like to see my…? It was… um… aren’t you cold?”

“I am not ready to be warm.”

“Can you tell me… how…? I was going to say. Hm…” Jindosh, frustrated, paces the marble tiles. “No, no… commence testing!”

He waits. He understands what it is to be fractured.

iii.

“Thanks.”

The Duke of Serkonos gives her a crooked smile and takes a cigar. Dr Hypatia half expects him to ask for a light but, of course, he has a flunky for that.

“You really ought to give those up.”

“I like them.” He waves his attendants out of her office with a waft of tobacco.

“You wouldn’t like them half so well if you saw what they’re doing to your lungs. Trust me, I’ve autopsied enough smokers.”

“Bah, no worse than silver dust.”

Their new Duke has a keen sense of irony. 

He takes the railcar to visit her once a month. The fancy ducal one with velvet upholstery and silver gazelles. Every time he’s asked her for a smoke and been vaguely perplexed when she doesn’t have one. Last week she gave in and bought a box of Cullero’s best to keep in her desk draw, in spite of her principles, resigned to slowly poisoning him out of politeness.

“I hear you’ve taken in Kirin Jindosh.” He takes another puff and smoke curls out his nostrils. “I suppose you want to dive for the few pearls that might be floating about in that addled brain?”

Perhaps he’s not so different from Luca Abele, after all, thinking only of uses and never people.

“I know what it is…” Her voice breaks slightly and she hates that, showing weakness in front of this man. “What it is to lose who you are.” Idle thoughts, alchemical formulae, memories, and purpose – all snatched away. She admired Jindosh even if she couldn’t condone his actions. “He… can never be who he was but, with help, maybe he can become someone else.”

The Duke’s raises his eyebrows and his hard, beady little eyes stare. She braces for his bark of a laugh or a filthy insinuation. But he just sits there, enjoying his cigar. When he speaks, it’s to change the subject entirely: “I need you to make me something to imitate seasickness.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. I don’t mind if it tastes vile.”

“You aren’t planning some kind of nasty practical joke, are you?”

The Duke rolls his eyes. He captures Luca Abele so perfectly it’s sometimes hard for her to separate him from the voice she found on her audiograph: It’s time to play. Make this one messy. The good doctor’s due for a trip to Dunwall. Give the people of the Empire fodder for their nightmares.

“Nothing like that. I need it in a few weeks.”

“Oh. Yes, I… well, I suppose I could make something. But surely any apothecary could furnish you with an emetic?”

“I don’t trust the palace quacks and I don’t want to be shitting myself the entire voyage.”

“You’re leaving Serkonos?”

He smirks. “The Empress has invited me to Dunwall.”

Empress Emily Kaldwin. A young woman with a mask over her face. Kind. Beautiful. Ruthless. “Are you sure it’s… wise to accept the invitation?”

“I spied a lass from Gristol, ‘twas good I had my pistol.” The Duke’s smirk deepens as he hums a few more bars of the popular song. “Are you concerned for me, doctor? I’m touched.”

“I’m concerned for Serkonos,” she says quietly. She respects this man, but he unsettles her. What does she know about him, after all? Nothing. Another doppelgänger. If it weren’t for the prisoner she’s charged to watch over, she’d guess that the Duke had been taking the same concoction she was, living two lives. One good, one bad. No, she can never like this man. Not after everything his shadow did to her. “You’ve done a lot of things, Your Grace, but you haven’t secured the succession.”

“I’m working on it, doctor, don’t worry.”

iv.

“I told you, someone needs to remind him to eat!”

Billie shouts at the orderly and slams the door. Hagfish stew out of a tin. It’s been sitting on the table for… he doesn’t know how long. It could be centuries. Cheap stuff, mostly whale guts, but it was hot once. In the kitchen. Inside the whale. The spice makes him sweat. Stretching out under the blanket, his body seems to whine like a nest of bloodflies.

In the distance, Karnaca is full of false stars. Some flame and others burn cold. He can hear the gulls overhead, a ship horn booming in the harbour, and one of the doctors, off duty, crooning over a guitar. Plucking out beauty on goat intestines.   

“It’s freezing up here.” Billie shuts the window and draws the curtains.

“Don’t…” he mumbles. “I like the view.” His throat is buzzing and his head is heavy with bloodfly eggs. It feels like his whole body is about to hatch into a thousand tiny creatures. Or maybe that’s just what a body is. It’s hard to tell. He hasn’t had one for a very long time. 

“You stupid little shit…”

His new name. Little shit. It’s what Billie calls him, anyway. Like the mothers in the old black city, calling their children home by crude, insulting nicknames, afraid that if he heard their real names he would steal them away. Little shit. She holds the insult over him like a charm, protecting them both.   

“Here, drink this.”

The tea is hotter than his throat. Honey, lemon, and bergamot. His hands are shaking.

She holds him.

“I shouldn’t have left you behind.”

“Where were you?” He hasn’t had to ask that question in four-thousand years. He’s always known. With his eyes open, he feels blind, fumbling around in the dark.

“Nowhere special. Just a few odd jobs in the Dust District.” She strokes his hair with her good hand. He knows what it should feel like. A press of gentle heat, fingers sliding across the scalp. But it has never been his hair, his scalp, his warmth… just other people’s thoughts sliding across his awareness. She sighs. “I didn’t kill anybody, if that’s what you’re asking.”

He shakes his head. I know you didn’t. He may not be able to follow her with the eyes of the Void, but he can still see into her heart.

“I’m thinking of getting another boat. Nothing special. A guy I know in Campo Seta offered me a good price for an old trawler and I’ve still got a few favours to call in. I’m too used to going my own way to stay in one place for long. What do you think about being a cabin boy?” His youthful appearance amuses her. He feels like an old man in the body of a boy. Ashes in a fleshy urn. She pulls the blanket up around him. “You used to never shut up and now you hardly speak.”

“I wasn’t talking to you.” He rests against her shoulder, feeling cold despite the sweat on his brow. “You were listening to me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You asked me once why I didn’t speak to everyone who prayed to hear my voice. My words were always there, echoing through the Void. I didn’t choose you, Billie. You chose me.” 

“Finish your stew.”

v.

“Delilah…”

The Duke never opens the door. He doesn’t want to see what Luca Abele has become. Dr Hypatia ensures the prisoner is provided with all the necessities it’s safe to grant him. Officially, the man behind the iron door is Armando. The young man who dreamed of studying law in Dunwall. The body-double who went mad. 

It’s always the same whispers.

Delilah, Delilah, Delilah…

He imagines her name scrawled all over the walls and the floor. A wild, bearded man praying to a dead witch for deliverance. Well, she came back once before. He imagines himself, rapping on that same door, screaming for help that never comes.  

He never understood what Luca felt for her. The witch. The Dark Empress. Towards the end of that fatal summer, the arsehole talked of no one else. He’d have had sex with that creepy statue if he could. Some of the courtiers whispered that it was the delirium of black magic, but like calls to like, and dark to darker still. It could have been true love.

Back then, he’d thought it was funny. He’d been sealed so tightly within himself that he’d relished any opportunity to see Luca Abele humbled, no matter how petty – dragged down to level of his false twin. He was – and is – forced to share in the man’s malice, his venality, and his excesses. But, unlike Luca’s other lovers, he’d never been forced to bed Delilah. Her words were Luca’s strictures, her body his sacrament, and somehow above the cruel games he played with everyone else. 

Love has been beaten out of the man standing outside the door. At least, that’s what he prefers to believe. He’s seen what happened when he fell for one of Luca’s bedmates. He might be indulged for a small while, but his leash was too damn short for anyone to come to know him. He hardly knew himself. Even now, trapped in the role of the Duke, such liaisons are artificial at best. Still, he longs for it, aches for a passion all his own.

He lets his new advisors take the credit for the recent changes and continues the arsehole playboy act. What’s the old phrase? Make haste slowly. That shitty little moustache was the first thing to go. He’s building a new winter palace in Cullero. It’s an expensive waste of money but, with less funds at his disposal since the new mining laws (he’s done all the sums), it’s progressing very slowly and gives him a chance to get some work done away from Karnaca and all the toadies who knew Luca so well.

In some ways, it really is him behind that iron door, grown so small that all the thoughts and feelings that belong to him alone can fit inside a tiny cell. Standing in front of it once a month keeps him from going mad. I am the Duke of Serkonos. The man inside that cell is my prisoner.

Delilah, Delilah, Delilah…

“She can hear him,” a hoarse voice comments from the end of the corridor.

A pale youth stands there in cotton bedclothes, not quite a boy and not quite a man. His grey eyes are bleary and his nose is pink and swollen. Black hair greasy with sweat. A thin trickle of snot runs over his lip and drips off his chin. The youth doesn’t seem to notice.

“You think so?” the Duke asks, tapping ash off the end of his cigar, keeping his voice casual and resisting the urge to take a step back from the sick youth.

“On still nights, I can hear him crying from my room upstairs. She never answers.”

“Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“Maybe.” The youth crosses him arms. “I wanted to talk to you about Emily.”

“Do you know who I am, young man?”

A skinny finger points to the name painted above the iron door in capital letters: ARMANDO ROSSI.

The Duke blinks and carefully reverses his question. “Who are you?”

“Nobody. Everybody.” The youth sneezes, shivering, and wipes his face with his sleeve. “Once, anyway. Now… I know more than most, that’s all.”

“You’re one of Doctor Hypatia’s patients, I suppose?” Hopefully the youth didn’t have one of those rare Pandyssian diseases the good doctor was so interested in. Is this callow creature about to blackmail me?

“She’s very kind, but she can’t help me.”

Oh.

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

Dying before you’ve had a chance to live. Poor kid. He hoped it wasn’t contagious. Looking at him, the Duke has a queasy sense of déjà vu from… a painting, perhaps, or a snatch of dream? What was he doing down here, anyway?

“The choices Emily made… they were fascinating to observe. I’m curious about her future.”

“Are you referring to the Empress?” he asks, sounding pompous even to his own ears.

Emily Kaldwin. His own witch. Her fine features hidden by the scarf across her face. He’d kept one of the posters. Her eyes, full of rage, the oh-so-familiar gaze of a beautiful creature pressed almost beyond endurance. He was naked when she found him. Sitting in the Duke’s bath smoking a cigarette on a hot evening. The air was full of steam and perfume. Even without clothes, it would have been impossible for an untrained eye to tell the difference between his body and Abele’s. Muscle, fat, flesh, and bone. He’d lost count of the alterations that had been made because Luca gained a few pounds, cut his knee, or broke his arm.

He’d like to think he felt her presence, but he didn’t notice anything until there was a knife at his throat and a soft voice warning him to stay very still. A nightmare come to life, come for death. Another man might have lost himself in that gilded cage, treated like prize bull, but he always knew how it was going to end: a well-deserved knife in the wrong back. Probably still would. Luca might be locked away but he was still living with the man’s sins.

The grey eyes stare at him as though the youth has forgotten how to blink. “Do you know another Emily?”

“Look here, pipsqueak, you can’t speak to me like–”

“Can I come with you?” the kid interrupts him. “I would like to see her again. And Corvo. Before I leave with Billie. She says we’ll be gone a long time. I think she’s right.”

“THERE YOU ARE, YOU LITTLE SHIT!”

The Duke flinches away from the anger in the voice. A one-eyed, dark-skinned woman in a shabby red coat is storming towards them. The young man merely turns, leaning against the wall, and watches her bear down on him with a vague expression, as though interested seeing in what she’ll do next. His bodyguards, drawn by the shout, follow on her heels, their weapons ready.

She comes up short when she sees the Duke, giving him a stiff, reluctant bow and glancing sideways at the guards before grabbing the kid’s arm. “Your Grace. ‘Scuse me. We were just leaving.” And, sotto voce, in her charge’s ear: “You should be in bed.”

“I’m not a child, Billie.” Expressionless, he doesn’t struggle at all, limply resisting her authority. “I wanted to speak to Armando and he’s not coming back to Addermire before he leaves for Gristol.”

How the fuck does the kid know all this? Has Dr Hypatia given away his secrets? There is no time to think, no time for games and niceties now. Hopefully, his guards think the youth came to talk with the prisoner, not him. His life – so many lives – depends on it.

“Arrest them, please, Captain.”

“At once, Your Grace!”

The woman looks like she’s going to put up at fight but, rather than reaching for the daggers at her belt, she wraps her arms around the young man, shielding him with her body. Mother and son? They’re both short with thin, pinched faces and close-cropped black hair.

“I killed your brother,” the woman says calmly. “I can kill you too.”

“Delilah,” cracks a hopeful voice from behind the door. “You’re here at last, Delilah…!”

The Duke drops his cigar, pressing its stubby, smouldering remains into the floor with the heel of his boot.

“Take them away.”

Chapter Text

i.

Kirin is whole only in his dreams. Equations, schematics, wonderous contraptions – perfectly realised only in moments of slumber or inattention, snatched away like gasps of breath, no… soap bubbles, floating towards him and vanishing when he attempts to grasp them upon waking.

He remembers his mother raising her hands from the sink to blow bubbles over him and his older brother. He laughs, measuring that slow expansion and sudden pop: surface tension breaking into sticky delight on his fingers. Bubbles. Yes, he –

Blood. The surface tension of blood is 22.8 dynes lower than water. Bubbles of blood foam on Sokalov’s chapped lips. The man is laughing at him. Cracked, wheezing, laughter bubbling out of his leathery body, wracked with pain –

No. He doesn’t want to think about pain (7 units, optics and anatomy, maximum current: stop, please, I’ll give you anything, you don’t know, you don’t know—).

What doesn’t he know?

People are living inside him. Sometimes he can hear their voices. Or is it just his own voice? Ghosts. How to calculate how many…? They stretch like a string of water molecules, breaking –

Oh.

Is it breakfast time?

He has not soiled himself in the night. The maid is pleased.

How is he?

It looks like one of the quiet days, doctor. He’s sitting there like an oyster. No trouble. He talked to that young man yesterday, though. Seems to like him. Got out of his chair and everything.

Black eyes. No… grey?

The Outsider. Had that been real? If only he could remember…

“Sokolov was obsessed with him,” he says. “Stupid, superstitious old man. He used to say…”

What did he say? It was something… something… what was it, where was it…?

Anton Sokolov said a lot of things. I doubt even he could remember them all.

She said that. The woman. The doctor. Hypatia – yes, that was her name! The idiot alchemist who accidentally turned herself into a monster. The one who used to sniff his equipment. Bizarre. But none of it matters as long as she’s useful to the Duke. Abele promises to let him dissect her when the time comes.

“Fatuous blockhead.”

What, Sokolov? She’s laughing now.

“No, Abele...”

He’s not useful anymore. Is that why he’s here and not at home? Is some – some ignorant crony living in his house? Abele has no use for broken things. No, no, no…!

Let’s not waste words on the Duke. She turns his wicker chair towards the window. Look what a beautiful morning it is.

Grey. Faint tinges of pink. He clenches his fist into a sextant and holds it out towards the eastern horizon. Sunrise at Karnaca’s southern latitude takes only 2 minutes and 36 seconds. Based on the sluggish position of the sun, the winter solstice is almost due. The Month of Darkness nears its close.

When did he come here? The air had been hot and the damp. The house creaked... its mechanisms need extra oil in the Month of Rain. His servants, they… they would not listen. Then – then…?

Ahem.

The sky rumbles, clearing its throat.

Good morning. This is the Duke of Serkonos.

The woman sighs. Outsider’s eyes, what is it now?

Stilton, the only one of you lazy ingrates who’s worth anything, has suggested to me that my people need more opportunities for cultural education. Well, who better to oversee such a thing than your Duke? Last night I attended a concert by the Saggunto Civic Orchestra. Afterwards, I went out to dinner and… nevermind that. Anyway, they played this piece about a bird at sunrise. Beautiful. It brought a tear to my eye, let me tell you, and not just because I’d already had a few glasses of King Street brandy. Right, so –

The air crackles, thunder rolling across the harbour, and Kirin has no trouble imagining Luca Abele’s sweaty fingers fumbling with the audiographic receiver.

Yes, as I was saying, this is, um…

Hushed, nervous whispers traverse the grey sky.

The Lark at Dawn by… someone from Morley. I can’t be expected to pronounce a name like that on only a few hours sleep. Anyway, this is for all the little people who make this great city trundle along. Stop saying I never do anything for you.

Above the crisp notes of the wind, and the white noise of the sea mixing with loudspeaker static, a tuneful quivering begins. He looks up at the woman. Can she hear it too?

Music. He’s forgotten. How is it possible to forget music?

Ninety people. A full orchestra. 180 hands weaving together delicate intervals to create an invisible tapestry that spreads over Karnaca at roughly 343 metres per second, filling the city with sound.

And he… he is lost in mathematics made audible. Forget the dreary winter dawn. This is the bright red birth of the cosmos in G major. The ghost of his water engine peals in his ears. He once used salt water to create music… how had it worked, why… why can’t he remember?

This… this marvel turns music into water.

It leaks down his cheeks.  

ii.

“What the fuck…?” Billie groans, stretching out her legs on the stone slab. Her back aches.

The Outsider, sitting cross-legged on the cold floor of their cell, tilts his head thoughtfully but says nothing, listening to the music. He’s still wearing the nightclothes given to him by the Institute. Rats whisper to each other in her dead lover’s voice, unnerved by this disturbance in the quiet hours that usually belong to them. They’ve gathered around their not-god in a little semi-circle, tails twitching.

He’s from the dark place. Cold and old-old-old.

Old ones told us of him… chittering like us. One of us. First one. Only one.

Soft young flesh, but dry and dark… we don’t understand, we listen.

It’s an old song. One of the pieces Sokolov used to play on his audiograph (a souvenir from his days as Dunwall’s Royal Physician), but she’s never heard it like this, blasted from every loudspeaker in Karnaca. The old man would love it. The rats, the music, the fucking Outsider humming along. The whole thing. She wonders where he is now. Knowing Anton, he’s probably found some cushy place to while away the long Tyvian winter with wine and song. There’s a thought: at least she’s in a Serkonan cell and not a Tyvian prison camp.

“Urgh.”

She shakes her head and rubs sleep out of her eyes, hating how creaky she feels, how strange her life has become. But then, who’s she kidding? It’s only the last few years, living Meagan Foster’s life, that haven’t been a railcar wreck. A clean slate. Nobody ever gets one of those. You can paint over rust, but it never lasts long.  

The kid sneezes.

“Come share the blanket, you little shit.”

I’m no good at this. Did Daud feel this out of his depth when he took me in? Billie swings her stiff legs around and makes room for him on the slab.

“Oh. Yes. I’m… cold.”

Those eyes know too much, see too much. He told her she’d done something impossible, but she’s starting to think that travelling to the centre of the Void and breaking him free was the easy part. His face is bruised. He keeps tripping up, misjudging distances, forgetting to eat… forgetting he’s human and no longer the black stuff of the Void.

The rats scamper off as he stands and crosses the small cell to sit beside her. She’d always imagined him tall and broad-shouldered, built like a nobleman who’s never suffered an empty belly, but he’s small and narrow like her. One of us. She smiles.

He leans his head against her shoulder and places a hand on her right arm. It flickers from metal to air to skin and back again, flesh and prosthesis guttering like a candleflame under his fingers. The world has scabbed over, but he can’t seem to stop picking at it, can’t stop being a god any more than she can stop being a murderer.

There’s a fragment of a dead god in her eyepiece. What could some cultist, some witch, do with his eyes, his heart – or just a lock of that black hair?   

“What… are you thinking?” he asks slowly, still unused to the question.

“Nothing important.” She jerks her arm away. “Do we really have to wait for the Duke to get around to questioning us? I’d rather miss that appointment if it’s all the same to you.”

He stares at her. “You always have a choice, Billie.”

What will you leave behind when you walk away?

“You know I’m not leaving you behind. Just… tell me you have a plan and we’re not here just to satisfy your curiosity.”

“Things whisper through the Void. I can’t tell the future, but I can – I could – see how things… accumulate. Patterns. How one consequence flows from another. Some whispers take shape, recollections sculpted into new truths by the minds that give them meaning... at least, until they’re forgotten altogether. What happened to Deirdre changed you, Dunwall, Serkonos, the Empire… everything.”

It’s a well-baited hook, but she’s not biting: “I’m not hearing a plan.”

“I used to search for those moments, hang them like baubles, and watch what flowed in their wake. Then I realised that history doesn’t matter. It’s thoughts, intentions, choices, that are interesting. And I wonder—”

“If you say what will you do, I will hit you.”   

“You were the one who suggested that Emily speak to the Duke’s body double.”

“Don’t put this on me.”

“Your friend said he was a nice guy. Don’t you want to see how it’s all turned out?”

She sighs. “You’re not, urgh… look, you can’t just wander around poking into people’s lives anymore. Haven’t you heard what curiosity did to the cat?”

“I’ve heard every story in the last four-thousand years and a few of the ones that came before. Stories older than the stones that built this cell. Some of them involve cats.”

“I suppose we’ve got a few hours to kill.” Letting go of her anger is like working a sore muscle. It aches, every time, but it’s getting easier. “Why don’t you tell me one of your favourites?”

iii.

The sun, just rising above the Grand Palace, lights up the faces of the Saggunto Civic Orchestra. Arrayed around the Duke, they are intent on their instruments. It makes him wonder what it must be like to be a star, illuminating distant celestial objects; faraway mirrors pulled into unwitting orbits by your gravity. Immolating anything that comes too close. If he were a poet, or a natural philosopher, he might meditate on such a thought.

As it is, he focuses on waggling the conductor’s baton like a buffoon. He waves it about in a lacklustre fashion, studies his fingernails, and then – to everyone’s relief – hands it back to the trembling conductor.

When the music ceases, he holds up a hand to cut the broadcast.

Silence.

Then he begins to clap. After one-two-three seconds, his courtiers follow suit, heaping praise upon the musicians. The men are clad in heavy coats, while the women circle the braziers set up on the terrace, their make-up worse for wear, still in last night’s party clothes and yawning into their soiled gloves. Their voices mist in the frigid morning air.

Wonderful!

Bravo!

Well done!

Stunning!

“Alright, enough!” the Duke shouts, “all this applause is giving me a headache.” He drinks more than he should. He doesn’t mean to, but sometimes it’s hard to keep up the act without it. You squeeze out every last drop of wine you can, and then you pass into nothing. “We all agree it was a good performance.”

Everyone quiets, waiting for the blow to fall. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t enjoy their fear, just a little.

“I’ve arranged for us all to have breakfast on the terrace to celebrate this cultural milestone. What do you think, Aramis, have they earned their reward?”

Grizzled old Aramis Stilton – surely half-deaf from his youth in the mines – has somehow retained his keen ear for music. “Um. Yes, Your Grace. Certainly… to my mind.”

“Good. Well. That’s that.”

The tension dissolves into delighted relief as servants wade amongst the exhausted musicians with silver platters heavy with crab pâté, shrimp rolls, caviar, northern cheeses, spiced wine, and dried summer fruit.

Someone lights him a cigarette and, dipping a cracker into some pâté, he watches several nobles walk up to the conductor and principal violinist to ask about private concerts. When he detained them all without explanation after last night’s command performance, no one could have guessed that he had a plan to save this bankrupt municipal orchestra. In a week, the terrifying sleepless night he put them through will become just an amusing tale on their road to success. In a few years – if all goes well – broadcasting music, perhaps even entire concerts, will be commonplace in Serkonos. He intended to begin with Shan Yun, but the singer’s sudden ill health made such a thing impossible.

A dark-haired girl sidles up to him, shivering in her silk shirt, cropped jacket, and light trousers. The latest in a long line of playthings. He places a dried apricot between her painted lips and pulls her onto his knee and half inside his coat.

“Is this a scheme to have me buy you a Tyvian mink, Lily?” It sounds much more worldly than: go put on some clothes, young lady.

Her laughter is musical, her kisses are professional, and he bounces her on his knee to pass the time, enjoying her glossy tresses and feminine softness without feeling any desire to take her to bed. She feeds him some caviar and, while he chews, takes a well-earned drag on his cigarette.    

“Do you have a moment, Luca?”   

He jerks his chin up, bulldog blunt thanks to years of practice, to stare into Aramis Stilton’s careful blue eyes.

It’s a delicate little dance, letting Stilton guide him towards becoming a better ruler. It’s my duty to your father. He never met the late Duke, but he’s read books and heard Luca’s rants (it was a favourite three in the morning topic for him). Lily, bless her, makes an excellent prop.

“What?” Just gruff enough to make the man get on with it, but not so harsh as to scare him away.

“A friend of mine’s been arrested. Meagan Foster. I’m sure it’s a mistake…”

“Never heard of her.”

It’s a lie, of course. He took a break from the revels to look over her file before dawn. Hair-raising stuff, some of it, but nothing about the boy. Foster, Lurk – whoever she is – has no love for the Abeles, that’s for sure. She wasn’t lying about killing Luca’s brother Radanis. He slips a hand under Lily’s shirt and Stilton looks studiously away.

“There’s no reason you would. I met her through Anton Sokolov. A nice young woman. Not the sort to get mixed up in anything illegal.”

He’s not sure who, out of the three of them, is the best actor. Probably Lily (whose ecstasies as he distractedly plays with her cold nipples deserve a Grand Medal of Merit), but hearing Stilton call Meagan Foster a nice young woman almost makes him choke on a shrimp roll.    

“Any friend of yours is a friend of mine. You know that.”

“Thank you—”

“Still,” he interrupts, “for a silver baron, you do seem to have a lot of friends in low places.”

Lily titters.   

“I’m a man of the people, Your Grace. Your father always said—”

“Yes, yes, I know. It’s probably all the fault of some over-zealous guard trying to keep up his squad’s quota...” Slim fingers slide towards his groin and he grunts, trying to focus, slapping the girl’s hand away. He’s been looking for a casual way to broach this topic for some time.

Stilton’s lip curls. He can’t always hide just how much Luca Abele disgusts him. “You know what I think of the quota system.”

“I know.” The Duke shrugs, leaning back in his chair and adjusting his belt. “Times change. We’re no longer at war and I’m getting tired of all these complaints and petitions… set up a meeting and we’ll discuss it later.”

“And Foster…?”

He smiles. “I’ll look into it personally, Aramis, don’t worry.”

iv.

Billie’s never been inside the Grand Palace. Seen it from a distance, sure, and in pictures. There’s a little shop near Cyria Gardens that sells cheap postcards. She used to use them for dead drops. Greetings From Sunny Karnaca. Wish You Were Here. The familiar stone outcrop at the tip of Point Abele, yellowing on cheap card.

Close up, there’s nothing cheap about the Grand Palace.

Marble and rosewood. Pandyssian water lilies protected from the cold by warm water flowing from the mouths of intricate sculptures. Velvet carpets, exotic trees, and grand balustrades. A giant bronze tortoise, rearing its head to attack. It all goes by like a dream brought on by too much habberweed.  

Luca Abele is no longer the Duke of Serkonos. But it still feels like walking into a den of wolves.

One thousand rotations. Reintroducing graphite.

Or a den of clockwork monstrosities. Even worse. The sentinels in Dolores Michaels’ bank were bad enough. The machine’s polished avian head doesn’t even turn to look at the detachment of guards escorting them up yet another wide staircase. Its bladed arms are mirror bright and sharp as hell. 

“Are you sure about this?” she hisses.

The Outsider, walking calmly beside her, raises an eyebrow. “If I were, it wouldn’t be interesting.”

Little shit.

Finally, they reach the Duke’s chambers. Two doors swing open. Their guards salute the officer waiting to greet them. Looking at the sword and pistol on her belt makes Billie’s hands itch.

“The prisoners, as instructed, Captain Merquez.”

“Right. I’ll take it from here.”

Merquez runs a practised eye over her and then pales, blinking at the kid. He stares back at her coolly. Billie’s stopped trying to pick who’ll recognise him and who won’t. It takes all sorts. No one’s made any trouble so far. The Outsider walks among us. It’s so crazy, only a madwoman would say it out loud. And the Captain of the First Attachment to the Duke isn’t mad. She shakes her head and her attention snaps back to Billie.

“Aramis Stilton got you this audience,” she whispers. “He’s a good man and he went out on a limb for you, Foster.”   

Billie’s tempted to make a joke about how she could say the same thing. But the joke doesn’t make sense anymore. The Outsider smiles blandly. Merquez flinches.

“Anyway, don’t fuck this up, is all I’m saying. The Duke is… unpredictable. It’s not just your life on the line.”

“I get it. Thanks.”

The Captain nods and they pass through into what must be the Duke’s private sanctum.

Billie is expecting luxury. The tall windows looking out over the harbour. The proteas in their gilded pots. Even the grand piano. But the life-size painting of Emily Kaldwin takes her by surprise.

It’s not the Ruler of the Isles splashed across this huge canvas surrounded by sheets, brushes, sketches, pots of oil, and sacks of costly pigments. It’s the young woman she knew on the Dreadful Wale. The girl who screamed when Daud ran his blade through her mother. Blue, yellow, black, and purple – the colours of a bruise or the tattered curtains of a shrine – and as sleek and deadly as a wolfhound. The dark eyes, full of rage and grief, are unsparing.

I can’t ever forgive you for what you did.

She’s seen the burning colours of Delilah’s portraits, the reflections of distorted dreams, and the exacting surfaces of Anton’s intellectual compositions with their fancy titles. This is something else.    

A stocky man in paint-covered overalls – presumably the artist – walks over, wiping his thick fingers with an oily rag.

“What do you think?”

The Duke of Serkonos finishes cleaning his hands and tosses the rag onto the parquet floor. Billie’s mind is still playing catch-up.

“I like it,” the Outsider says.  

The Duke shakes his head. “It’s not finished. There are… imperfections. But then, you’ll have seen my subject more recently. Who better to ask than two royal spies, eh?”

“We’re not spies.” Her voice comes out hoarse.

He makes an offhand gesture and the guards begin to file out.

“I understand how the game is played. I have my own people in Dunwall. But the Empress promised me a free hand in Serkonos…” 

The doors close.

“… And what happened to Armando. It’s sad, I have to admit, but these things happen. I can’t have a lunatic with a face like his running about the city spouting nonsense.”

The Outsider nods, crossing his arms, still gazing up at the painting. “Play a role for long enough and it changes who you are.”

“Yes. Poor man. But he’s safe at Addermire and well-cared for… and if Her Majesty has questions, she can ask them herself instead of sending her lackeys to intimidate me.”

“Listen, Armando, I’m no one’s lackey. Not for a long time.”

The kid gives her a sideways glance with those knowing grey eyes – what about Daud? – and she ignores him.

The Duke’s lips tighten. “They never did catch the bitch who murdered my brother. She probably died in the plague, but I could never bring myself to lift the price on her head… a matter of principle, you understand.”

“Oh, I understand, you dirty sack of shit.”

“Tell me about your friendship with Aramis Stilton.”

“No.”

“What about… Delilah Copperspoon?”

“I’d say I knew her about as well as you did, Your Grace.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Really?”

The anger’s all for show. He doesn’t care about her past one way or the other. He’s toying with her, trying to figure out what she was doing at the Addermire Institute. Just because he has the Duke’s ugly mug, just because he acts like the Duke, it doesn’t mean he thinks like the Duke. She grits her teeth. Emily Kaldwin’s stare keeps throwing her off.

“Look.” She takes a deep breath. “I know what this looks like. But it’s not like that. My friend, he’s going through some adjustments. Dr Hypatia was doing us a favour. Yes, I know your secret because I worked with… the woman who helped you.” She gestures at the painting. “But it was a one-time job.”

The Duke’s attention shifts towards the kid. “What about you? You asked if I would take you with me to see your Empress.”

“Seriously?” Billie bites back an oath. “That’s what this is about?”

The Outsider is sitting on the piano. His bare feet rest on the ivory keys and he strikes a few soft notes with a filthy toe. “She bore my mark once. But that doesn’t make her mine.”

The look of frustration on the Duke’s face is comforting. It’s nice to know she isn’t the only one who wants to strangle him.

v.

This pool is bigger than the one at Addermire. Its warm waters flow upwards from a deep crack in the earth, propelled by the same forces that raised Shindaerey Peak. Ancient heat, spilling through into this world from the mouth of a bronze stingray, warming the wrought-iron columns that surround the sunken bath.

His breaths come easy in the steam and his limbs itch as water bites into numb flesh. He could lie here for centuries. Or at least until the winter solstice is done and this part of the world starts to inch its way back towards the sun. He remembers, will always remember, pain. But illness, hunger, and exhaustion are such old nightmares they hardly seem real.

Four figures, as discreet as their crimson uniforms allow, watch him float. They don’t know whether they’re here to guard him, protect him, or just make sure none the Duke’s treasures find their way into his pockets. One of them clutches a bone charm (it will keep you safe, his lover said, and the guard wears it even though he doesn’t believe in such things). It buzzes like a bee in a bottle.

Armando, Emily, Billie, Corvo, Deirdre, Radanis, Luca… they’re all knotted up inside his head and he can’t unpick the threads. Choices. He’s stumbling forward into intricacies he can no longer untangle. They’ve made it look so easy, all these years, deciding who they are and what they will do. When he was alive (you are alive, Billie says, you’re here with me) there weren’t many choices and, soon enough, none at all.

He never chose who listened to the words beneath the silence. But he chose who bore his name. He is Delilah. He is Daud. He is Corvo. He is Emily. He is…

He’s not Billie. He never was. He gave her the gifts of the one who came before, whose absence still pulls at the world’s seams. The one whose echoes taught him to sing. In another place, another choice, a runaway Pandyssian girl born in the month of Hearths could have been brought to Karnaca with painted eyes to listen to his absence and wonder whose lonely anguish came before her own. But she’s a woman now, with names and wounds anchoring her to this world too fully for the Void to accept such a sacrifice. She found another beggar girl, she found her knife in Radanis Abele, she found a home in the Flooded District, and then in Karnaca. She belongs.

He’s not Billie, but she could have been him. Once.         

Who is he?

Luca’s latest toy, no doubt. Lily didn’t last long, did she?

They never do.

His face looks familiar. I think I met him once at a party.

Oh, do you know his name?

It wasn’t that sort of occasion, darling. You remember Dolores Michaels, the banker who committed suicide?

How could I forget? She lost me half a million.

We-ell, she used to throw the most amusing parties, even if they were on the wrong side of town. Names weren’t part of the festivities.

They talk and he listens. And he listens too to the conversations in the trophy room that isn’t here. Instead of stark stone walls, there are wooden panels bedecked with guns and stuffed animal heads. Radanis Abele, neither as cruel a ruler as Luca nor as good a leader as Armando might become, never destroys his ancestral home. But it doesn’t matter, either way. Palaces – things – hold no interest to him.

Billie told the Duke he was a clairvoyant captured by the Eyeless Gang when he was a child. It’s not the truth but it isn’t a lie. And now Armando wants…?

It’s hard to tell, sometimes. Billie hides behind anger. The new Duke hides behind the old one. But, when he stood close to the rumpled silks of the Duke’s circular bed, he didn’t have to look at the months of anguish that went into that painting to know whose name stirs Armando’s thoughts like the Sirhrocco Currents hurtling down the Wind Corridor.

He was with her when she came here, bearing her mother’s soul in muscle, sinew, metal, and glass, dreading that final goodbye. She pulled Karnaca back from the brink and, even as she shed her own disguise, gave Armando a mask he could never take off. He knows why she’s invited the new Grand Duke to her capital, but he very much doubts she has any notion as to why Armando has decided to accept the humiliations in store for him at Dunwall Tower.

Emily, Emily, Emily…

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

Chapter Text

i.

She’s stopped dreaming. The nonsensical bric-a-brac of sleep and the sharp clarity of nightmare both vanish upon waking. There’s no voice in the darkness, no ironic commentary on her daytime choices, no void-song whispers from the deep.

Emily is alone.

On the Dreadful Wale she often woke to find her fingers dug into the valves of her mother’s heart, held tight against her own. What I wouldn’t give to just hold your hand in mine one more time.

Her chambers have been redecorated. The sheets, carpets, drapes – all new – but Alexi’s blood still coats the spotless floor. Wyman’s soft breaths, nuzzling into her back, aren’t the gentle sway of a ship or the hot nights of a city far away.     

Another dawn in Dunwall.

She thinks about Delilah, traversing an ocean of dreams to conquer Pandyssia. Maybe I’m the one trapped in a prison of my own making.

Wyman rolls over in bed, short red hair every which way, and brushes a hand over Emily’s thigh. Warm, possessive fingers settle on her hip.

“Have you talked to Corvo about that yet?”

Emily, tracing her absent mark with her thumb, flinches like a child caught picking her nose.

Wyman can’t understand why two people marked by the Outsider can’t just talk to each other about it and Emily’s endless refrain of it’s complicated doesn’t help.

“It’s complicated,” she reluctantly explains, for what seems like the hundredth time. “Look, the… he’s like – having a god in your head, it isn’t comfortable. There are the powers, the heresy, but that isn’t what it’s like from the inside.”

She pauses, trying to summon words to describe that lightless stare. The sensation of being pinned under a microscope and having a god dissect your soul.

Closing her eyes, she speaks into her pillow, unable to meet Wyman’s gaze: “He knows everything about you. Everything. Things you wouldn’t share with anyone – things you’ve buried so deeply within yourself even you don’t remember what they are.”

“Your father still feels guilty about what happened.”

Royal Protector. It’s all in the title.

The fact that she’d accepted the Outsider’s mark was a fraught topic to say the least. If she had mixed feelings about having an ancient god in her head for a few months, who knew what it was like to have known the Outsider for years?

There are some things it’s better you don’t know.

Whenever he clams up it sends her right back to the Hound Pits Pub, furious at the conspiracy of adults who refuse to tell her what’s going on.

“Em, you have to talk about it at some point – he might be missing him too.”

“He’d probably be relieved,” Emily snaps, even as she recognises the truth in Wyman’s words.

Are you feeling more comfortable, Majesty?

At least the black-eyed bastard isn’t here to laugh at her.

ii.

The Month of Darkness, true to its name, seems to have leached all the colour from the world. Black ice, grey sleet, and white snow have devoured Dunwall. It’s the coldest winter since the reign of Emily’s grandfather. At least, that what it says in the reports she’s received from the Academy of Natural Philosophy.

Tyvian fashions have taken over Gristol as the aristocracy abandon their greatcoats for heavy furs.

Leaning back in the royal carriage, careful not be seen, Wyman sniggers at crowd outside parliament.

“Look at them, a little snow and they’re shuffling around like giant hedgehogs as though we’re in Tyvia. Forget Dabokva, they couldn’t survive a winter in Morley.”

Emily pulls on the shuba given to her by the Tyvian Presidium and rolls her eyes at Wyman’s teasing. The silk-lined sable coat, still faintly scented with packing herbs, embraces her like a second lover. She leans in for a kiss, breathing in the bloom of Wyman’s cologne.

“What are your plans?”

Wyman shrugs, adjusting a glove. “Lord Peacroft invited me to join him on a tour of the Royal Academy. I’ve seen it all before, of course, but – knowing him – he’ll be high as Kaldwin’s Bridge, so that’ll provide some amusement.”

“Want to swap?”

It’s an old joke.

The Empress doesn’t seem real when Wyman looks at her. Those perceptive blue eyes reduce the crown to dockside vaudeville – a garish illusion where only they know the trick. It would be insolent, except it’s how her lover sees the whole world. A Fugue Feast sensibility that allows Wyman to lounge in her carriage as lithe and disdainful as a cat, licking a painted lip, and dressed like a dandy.

“No thanks, I’ll leave Parliament to you. One idiot with no grasp on reality is enough for me.”

“Very funny.”

“Lady Brimsley’s hosting a séance tonight for the Winter Solstice.” Wyman’s smile is symathetic. “It’s sure to be diverting. The password is leviathan. Care to join me?”

“I’ll think about it.”

Callista tells her she ought to marry “Lord Wyman”.

But that’s complicated too.

iii.

Corvo Attano never liked Parliament House. Jessamine once told him the building was fashioned after Castle Morgengaard and its cavernous, crenelated austerity certainly testifies to the idea. Yet looking at it now, scorched black by fire, its massive gabled roof cracked like an egg and hedged about with scaffolding, he finds himself nostalgic for its heavy-handed ugliness. He’s been told that witches set it on fire – dancing and singing in Parliament Street as it burned – like something out of a nursery rhyme.

So many changes in just a few months.  

Parliament, the Abbey, and now the Outsider – he can’t claim to like any of them, but he’s lived with all three for so long that their absence unsettles him. Rivers change over the course of many lifetimes and eventually all cities tumble down.   

Emily, tight-lipped and sardonic, seems to take it all in her stride.

“Corvo.”

She nods and he falls in step beside her. He wants to talk to her about what she did – or didn’t – do in Karnaca. He wants to apologise, again, for failing to predict the coup.   

“Your Majesty.”

Maybe they’re too alike, two river krusts, needing someone else – Jessamine, Wyman – to glean the pearls within.

A labyrinth of freezing corridors, rigged up and tarpaulined like a whaling ship, guards what’s left of the ancient debating chamber. Draughts catch and swell the tarpaulins and, above them, shadows shift along broken beams. The sound of hammers intermittently splits the air. Members, petitioners, lords, and clerks crowd in, while servants and workmen edge around the nobility, careful not to catch anyone’s eye – pushing past each other like salmon swimming upstream.

He can’t hear their heartbeats. He can’t sense the thousand silhouettes, great and small, moving through this great wounded beast of stone. Shoving past the crowd, forcing them to make way for Emily, he feels like a blind man fumbling in the dark.

The absence of magic aches like a wound.

Strange how there’s always a little more innocence left to lose.

The new Prime Minister, Lord Estermont – ludicrously dressed in what looks like a wolf’s pelt over his morning coat – motions Emily aside before the session.

Limping, lisping Estermont, though only a few years older than Corvo, gives the impression a strong wind might do him in. Mild-mannered and silver-haired, the youngsters call him “old-fuddy-duddy” but he got the game leg duelling Morgan Pendleton over a disagreement with the old Pendleton voting bloc over foreign policy. There was a rumour he was once engaged to the notorious Breanna Ashworth (probably scuttlebutt put about by Estermont’s enemies… but you never could be sure).

Either way, the man had guarded his family and fortune through the plague after his father had been eaten by rats. And he’d survived Delilah’s short but bloody reign – so he must be cleverer than he looked. 

“Majesthey.”

Estermont kisses Emily’s hand, his thin lips pressing the glove that hides the Outsider’s mark.

The mark he’s lost.

“I thought it beth to acquaint Your Majethey with the unpleathant mood in the houth wegarding the coming vithit of the Duke of Therkonoth to Dunwall. There ith, ah – a feeling that Your Majethey’s wenowned clementhy thould not extend to Luca Abele.”

“My lord, we discussed this.” Emily frowns.

“Yeth.” Estermont shrugs. “I’m afraid people want thom-one to thuffer for what happened. The Duke ith… ahem, wather a large target for thuth feelingth.”

“You’re suggesting I depose the Duke?”

“I, Your Majesthey?” Estermont coughs delicately into a silk handkerchief. “Thertainly not. No, no… only, there are thoth who plan to propoth an… alternative candidate.”

The politician’s sharp blue eyes glance sideways at Corvo.

“A loyal Therkonan… thom-one above weproach.”

“No,” he hears himself growl. “I’m needed here.”

“Of courth, of courth…” The Prime Minister smiles blandly, showing rather yellowed teeth, and makes him a courtly bow.

 “I promised the Duke that I wouldn’t interfere in Serkonan politics.” Emily’s frown deepens.

“A pwomise given to a twaitor thorley maketh no claim on Your Majesthey’s honour.”

“I…” Emily glances up at him anxiously, his little girl suddenly visible in her adult eyes. “I can’t deny I’ve summoned Duke Abele to Dunwall to question his loyalty to the crown. The reports I’ve had of his recent actions… well, they do not fill me with confidence.”

The conversation seems oddly rehearsed.

His daughter’s unease.

Lord Estermont’s unctuous pleasantries.

“No.”

“Corvo–”

“NO!”

It’s extremely unprofessional for a Royal Protector to walk out on his Empress in front of her Prime Minister. The sort of thing old Euhorn Kaldwin would call damned cheek and cause for dismissal. Nevertheless, that’s what he does, only just resisting the urge to scale the scaffolding and escape via the roof.

When you are near, my heart is at peace.

He can’t leave Emily. He can’t. And yet, he can’t escape the notion that Emily has already left him. He grew up in Karnaca, it’s true, but there’s no little apartment in the Dust District awaiting his return. His mother and sister are long gone. Emily isn’t a girl anymore. She took back her throne while he slept in a prison of stone.

Everyone says she looks like Jessamine (and everyone thinks she looks like him) but she reminds him most of his older sister Beatrici, as wild and wandering as the Sirhrocco, who left for Morley before he joined the Grand Guard.   

Duke of Serkonos?

Fuck.

iv.

“It’s all over town,” Lady Brimsley whispers as Wyman lights her cigarette. “They say the Empress is planning to make Lord Attano the new Duke of Serkonos.”

Adelia Brimsley, the daughter of two notorious eccentrics, is Wyman’s second favourite lady in Dunwall. After a disappointing afternoon with Lord Peacroft, Adelia’s invitation to keep her company before the party was too good to pass up. Dark hair and darker eyes. Just Wyman’s type, except –

“Well,” she asks, raising an elegant brow and exhaling smoke, “is it true?”

“You know I can’t stand imperial politics.”   

Adelia smirks. “But you are partial to the willowy imperial figure…”

“Who isn’t? At least we don’t have to look Abele’s ugly mug on our coins – Lord Attano would be a distinct improvement there.”

“How true,” Lady Brimsley sighs, tapping her cigarette over a silver ashtray. “He looks like Lady Alderdice’s bulldog, you know… the one with the awful collar that ate its own excrement at her garden party. It was her last entertainment before the coup… wait, you spent the summer in Morley, didn’t you?”

Where were you when it happened?

I was planting an apple orchard.

And that’s the simple truth. It can’t be bent or massaged into something more flattering or less mundane. But no matter how many times Emily says it doesn’t matter, that it’s enough, the blame comes back – her kind words infected with Wyman’s self-loathing.

When Emily was fighting for her life, and the White Tower was strewn with the dead and dying, Wyman was attending to all the humdrum minutiae of a grand estate. It was three days later when a rider came down the Fraeport road with a letter summoning Wyman to attend the King in Wynnedown. Weeks before a letter came from Emily. Don’t try anything reckless, and don’t come back to Gristol.

Trust me.

Then a wisecrack about not wearing any pants. Same old Emily.

Only… she isn’t the same.

Wyman knows what it is to create yourself anew every day. And metamorphosis is writ deep in Emily’s eyes. It was only supposed to be four months apart, so why does it feel like centuries?

“Lord Wyman?”

“Hm?”

“I said, have you tried sanguine infusions?”

“No… should I?”

“Oh, it was all the rage in Karnaca – ever been to the Spector Club? No? Well, anyway, it was all the rage until everyone who had anything to do with it turned up missing or dead. I thought it might add a little spice to tonight’s proceedings, what do you think? I’ve hired a few girls from the Golden Cat. It is the Winter Solstice, after all.”

v.

Even when her mother was still alive, Emily had heard the rumours about the Brimsleys and their strange parties. Corvo once told her that he’d met Mace Brimsley and his wife in the Flooded District, left for dead. People said the couple had been protected from the plague by bathing in their nephew’s blood, as though that were the sort of thing that impressed the Outsider. She smiles, picturing his deadpan expression as she gives the doorman the password.

Inside, it’s a funereal masquerade, everyone cloaked and masked in black – since a traditional Winter Solstice party included attempted arrest by the Abbey of the Everyman. The hall is draped like a shrine, its chandeliers shrouded in purple silk. Hidden behind a curtain, a quartet play In the Month of Darkness. The supernatural ambiance is slightly ruined by the guests’ laughter and the tower of crystal glasses, filled to the brim with sparkling wine, set up on a black tablecloth.

Taking a glass and wandering into the next room, Emily wonders what the Outsider would think of this tacky celebration of his ritual murder. Right up until the end I thought I’d find a way to escape. I fought but the ropes only cut my skin, so I went limp. Then the knife touched my throat and I knew I’d waited too long.

A woman, naked but for her mask, reclines on a chaise lounge. A tube – filled with what looks like blood – hooks into her arm and connects her to a fully dressed man sitting in an armchair beside the chaise.

They say it’s the latest thing from Karnaca.

Hmph. I’d stick to whale-bathing if I were you, much healthier.

Certainly, if you can stand the smell. I haven’t the constitution for lying neck-deep in putrefying blubber, no matter how much you insist it cured your gout.

Sanguine infusions heighten the senses. I tried it last week and had to order the servants to remove all the cut flowers from the house.

Have you heard the latest rumour about Lord Attano?

Not wanting to hear whatever it is they have to say about her father, Emily ducks into the next room... which proves to be a mistake. She’s shooed out on the insistence that no one is allowed in the “orgy room” unless they’re prepared to disrobe (and she really isn’t in the mood).

It had been late when she left the Tower and Corvo still hadn’t come back. Knowing him, he's planning to spend the Winter Solstice on some snowy rooftop – alone. Lord Estermont shouldn’t have pushed the issue. Yes, they’d talked about alternate candidates for the dukedom and, yes, her father had figured prominently on that list. But only if Armando was misusing his newfound power.

She hadn’t been sure about coming tonight but, even if the evening turned out to be a disappointment, it was still pleasant being an anonymous guest – just for a little while. It felt like, ever since she returned to Dunwall, there hadn’t been any time when she could just be Emily without the Drexel Lela Kaldwin tacked on like increasingly large rocks.

I promised them I’d be a better ruler. No more shirking my duties. No more nightly escapades. She’d been so sure of herself at first. Now it feels like she’s drowning in the confines of the imperial circlet. Again.

A footman passes her a votive candle as she walks into the next room, dark but for the flickering candles illuminating an impassive circle of masks. Curious, Emily takes her place in the circle, squinting in the gloom. Is Wyman behind one of those blank, black faces?

“It’s almost midnight,” someone hisses excitedly, only to be shushed into silence.

Look, my girls know what’s expected at a private party like this, says loud a voice from the next room, but what are you doing with Pearl?

She’ll be well compensated.

Double it or I’m taking her back to the Cat right now.

I could buy a Pandyssian whore outright for that!

The masked figures study their candles intently, pretending to be taken up with heretical contemplation instead of eavesdropping on the intense negotiation in the next room.

Eventually, an accommodation is reached and a woman – presumably Pearl – is led out from behind a curtain. She’s wearing a blindfold instead of a mask, her nakedness painted with runes. Emily hopes she won’t have to intervene. Surely Wyman wouldn’t have invited her to anything truly foul?

More candles are lit, revealing a chair in the centre of the room. Pearl sits in it, unmoving, as eerie patterns are chalked around her on the marble floor.

“O, Spirit of the Deep!” a female voice suddenly cries, making everyone jump. “Siren of Dreams! Mighty Leviathan! Speak to us, your outcast children, on this night of your death and rebirth!”

A figure steps forward, holding a glinting knife aloft. Emily tenses, ready to spring between the robed figure and Pearl.

But it’s the wielder’s own blood that strikes the courtesan’s forehead, streaking down her cheeks like tears.

Silence.

Then Pearl screams. Head jerking upwards, she stumbles forward like a new-born foal. And Emily feels stupid for being taken in by all the theatre. It’s just a show, just–

The blinded face stares straight at her, arms open in welcome, bare feet hovering a few inches off the floor.

Painted lips smile.

“Hello Emily.”

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 just 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 and 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…

No longer bound to stay and listen, he finds the will to leave. 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 the 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, are you?”

“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 the captain’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 the butcher’s block.

“We are 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.

The net breaks and he spins back, 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’s 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.

It’s 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 as the noise drills 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 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 and 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. Heartbeat pulsing in his ears, he stills like a child in his mother’s arms, 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 just 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.”

Chapter Text

i.

The machine is switching to alternative override.

Something is broken. Or – no – that is how Jindosh would phrase it. The wind-rattled, storm-addled inventor who can no longer summon his knowledge of physics, architecture, and meteorology to convince himself safe from the deafening violence of sea and sky. Say rather, then, that he remembers. It calls to him like the boy in the pool, speaking in a voice that Jindosh – sifting for facts like a beggar panning for gold – cannot hear. The common man. He laughs, his path unfolding like the halls of the inventor’s house as he peels off his soiled clothes, opens the shutters, and steps naked onto the balcony.

He carries Jindosh within him like blackened schematics, still screaming, locked away in the Assessment Chamber like washed-up Anton Sokolov. But he does not hate the inventor. A thin line of ants trickle past him into the room and, when he puts down a finger to block their path, two crawl onto his hand. Jindosh is delighted. Can I keep them? The insects cast about, confused, on his knuckles.

He slaps at them, smearing the tiny black bodies against his skin, and their insides smell sharp. Formic acid, Jindosh mutters, found in ants, stinging nettles, and the giant Pandyssian cat moth. It’s possible to synthesise… But the thought slips away. He stamps on the rest, not wanting to hear the names of the inventor’s pet beetles, or descriptions their green shells, but unable to keep wholly apart from his rambling preoccupations. The maid let me keep them in a jar.

If only he could tell him to shut up, to stop settling for what he was given – from Abele, from the orderlies, from that stupid doctor – and embrace the feel of the rain on his upturned face.

Will you bring the music back? It’s a child’s voice, lost and helpless, and it hurts like a blade twisting in his gut.

His body is whole, but he’s wounded in a way that neither he nor Jindosh can explain. Lightning strikes Addermire and Jindosh cries out but cannot scream, slapped into silence like the unruly child he’d once been. Triggering electrostatic discharge. Stand clear. But the flash of blue fire and deep clap of thunder do not torment him as they do the inventor. He remembers symbols drawn in whale oil and the world beyond the colour of lightning. We have torn reality to allow a piece of the void to pass through it. Buffeted by the storm, a shiver ticks over his spine and yet he does not feel cold. Something has been taken out of him too. There is a hole, like the hole in the world, whistling through his chest.     

Bring back the music, Jindosh begs, as though he were capable of ordering the universe to suit his crippled passenger. Now he is the older brother and all he can do is mumble a few words. A feast or a famine, a nail or a screw. His pitch is off by three cycles per second. The knowledge falls out of Jindosh’s head and into his. It was a street song, born in the fetid heat of the Month of Harvest, and he hums another few bars – trying to recall the rest of the lyrics. 

They have some significance, he knows, if only he could remember. He looks back at the nurse lying sprawled beside the inventor’s bed. The machine has detected a lifeless body. He doesn’t know her name, but has counted her ribs – there are twenty-four – and let Jindosh draw his broken equations in her blood. The walls of Dunwall, did they help her at all? Another strand of verse settles on him like a feather drifting to the floor. For our Emily they were good for a fall.

The inventor cringes at the name but he repeats it, testing it like a formula, finally seeing her – Emily – the one who broke the world. Playback indicates a young woman, armed. He cannot create. He is not the man Jindosh is in their dreams. But he knows how to pick things apart. The inventor knew only as much swordplay as he needed to program his clockwork sentinels, but he ripped the nurse apart as easily as Jindosh tears the legs off his favourite insects.

Emily did this. Emily who lives in Dunwall. Playback for unambiguous enemy. He will kill her.

But first he needs more serum.

ii.

“Get out.”

Captain Merquez scowls at the lieutenant he’s convinced to share a cigar with him. The guard glances between them, unsure who to obey. The Duke snorts, feigning impatience, and jerks his chin in the direction of the cabin door. The air is cloyed with whiskey, tobacco, whale oil, the citrus of his bath salts, and the faint reek of vomit. The bathwater tips this way and that as the Pride of Serkonos battles the waves, but the Duke’s copper tub is bolted to the floor. The lieutenant stumbles against the doorframe, almost knocking into his tight-lipped captain on the way out, and a lick of soapy water hits the Tyvian rug. 

Merquez shuts the door, securing their privacy with the bolt, and the Duke – naked but for his medallion of office – leans back and puffs languidly on his cigar. “Care to join me, captain?”

She refuses to dignify the offer with a response, as he’d known she would. He chose Merquez to command his elite cadre of bodyguards because she was a serious-minded woman with a clean record. The corrupt lickspittles, at least those who’d survived Emily Kaldwin, he’d demoted or transferred one by one. There was only so much that could be done to combat the rot in Karnaca, but a few strategic executions within the Grand Guard had let his soldiers know that times had changed.

The ship levels out and Merquez straightens, standing very still in the centre of the room. Her olive skin glows gold in the lamplight and sweat glistens on her upper lip.

“You’re not the Duke.”

Now he feels naked. Luca Abele’s shamelessness ripped away to reveal – what? He narrows his eyes, fingering the damp gold of the medallion, and blows a smoke ring. Merquez glances at the circle slowly dissipating above him and, as her focus shifts back to the man in the bathtub, he makes his decision.

“People can change, you know.”

“Not that much.” She snarls out the words, stalking forwards like a wolfhound.

“Not all at once. But, over time, it can happen to best… or the worst of us.”

The ship dips sharply and Merquez flings out her arms to keep her balance. “You…!”

“When things turn out for the best,” he says softly, cool and steady, and sets aside his cigar. “You don’t question your good fortune. You accept it and move on.” The Duke shrugs with a confidence he does not feel. “Pass me a towel.”

She stares at him, a dog who does not know what to do when her prey will not run, and tightens her jaw. Then, like a clockwork soldier, she walks stiffly over to the bed and picks up a towel and his garish dressing-gown. Perhaps he does not need to stand up and disconcert her with his nakedness, as Luca would have done?

“Armando.” Merquez whispers like a magic spell.

“Armando went mad.” He laughs, not knowing whether he’s talking about the man imprisoned in Addermire or the one trapped in flesh that no longer belongs to him. I have nothing. Nothing of my own. “Poor moonstruck fool.”

He rules all of Serkonos except his skin. But Luca stole his body first. They cut his hair, fed him blood sausage and apricot tartlets to made him a match for the porcine Abele, and dressed him in the Duke’s clothes until even he couldn’t tell the difference anymore. My face is not his face, he used to chant like a witch’s song, my voice is not his voice. But even his paintings were no longer his own. The memory of that arsehole and his friends, laughing at the childish scribbles Luca claimed belonged to his double, still made his blood boil. But he’s not a naïve student any more, ripped from the Royal Conservatory and cast into the bloodfly nest Luca called a court. He’s the Duke.

She hands him the towel and he can’t stand the pity in her eyes.

“I won’t tell anyone.”

“No,” he agrees, “you won’t. Because I chose you for this. Someone with a spine to head my elite guard – and one in the pay of Aramis Stilton – who won’t stand for the abuses Captain Almeida used to let slide. You didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, so why should anyone else?”   

“Stilton thinks—”

“I know what the old man thinks,” he interrupts, standing up and wrapping it around his waist, “he thinks he’s getting through to me where my father never could. He thinks Delilah’s defeat has been… humbling… and I’m finally starting to take things seriously.”

“Tonight just keeps getting fuckin’ weirder…” Merquez sits down heavily on the stool her subordinate vacated.

Careful not to slip, the Duke climbs out of the tub and passes her his tumbler. She drains the whisky in one grateful gulp, while the ship tilts and he grips the edge of the bath. His dripping body makes no difference to the soaked carpet and, embarrassed, he wraps himself in the thick tasselled robe without drying his skin.

“Serkonos isn’t a machine,” he growls out, shocked by the anger in his voice, “to be fixed in a day. It needs time to heal – we all do – and, if I die, there’ll be a swarm of titled hagfish ready to tear the country apart. Six years of cruelty and misrule can’t be undone so easily… but I will do it.”    

The captain sets down the empty glass, staring narrowly up at him. Then she kneels in front of the Duke and kisses his hand.

“Your Grace.”

iii.

The crew have turned against her. Muttered oaths follow Billie as she heads down to the lower deck to check on her charge. But the guards come down hard on anyone cursing her in their presence. At first she’d thought it was because Merquez had her back, but then she’d realised that they were probably just used to the Duke’s fascination with witches and assumed he was fucking her. Thanks, Abele, you piece of shit. They’d started calling the Outsider her demon child, getting around the problem of her Pandyssian skin and his fish-belly pallor by imagining she’d brewed him in a cauldron.

If only they knew the truth, she thought wryly, then they’d really have something to give them nightmares.        

Wrapped up in two blankets, and the oilskin she’d given him for good measure, he’s sitting on his bunk reading a book taken from the communal library in wardroom.

“Timeless Children’s Rhymes,” she read aloud. “Really?”

“I’ve never read a book before.” His voice is listless, unconcerned. “But I remember the songs – though words and rhythms both shift over time. This one is about a man who turns into a fish, although his name has changed and the author has taken out the verse about him swimming up a mudlark’s—”

“Yeah well, it wouldn’t be a cautionary tale if they printed the dockside version.” She shakes her head and climbs up beside him. “What happened?”

“According to this, he swam around, up and down, drinking from the river, crying why me—”

“I’m not talking about the rhyme, you little shit!” She takes a deep breath, willing herself to keep calm. “Answer me honestly. Did you jump?”

“I… don’t remember.” He shakes his head, as though that were the most troubling thing. “I could hear them, so many demanding voices, and a few wove a net of sigils, candlelight, and song on the skin of a pearl and – for a moment – it held my weight.” He looked at his knees as though ashamed. “I wanted to see Emily.”

“And did you?” she couldn’t help but ask.

“Yes. But only for a moment. Like the fish in the poem, I cannot return to what I was. Because of you I am neither what was sacrificed, nor what came of that ritual, but an ancient thing made new.” He lays aside the children's book, as casually cryptic as ever. “Tonight, the teeth of the Void bruise the flesh of this world and its jaws yearn to swallow me whole.”

“It… wanted you to drown?”

“The Void is much older and stranger than you can ever know. It wants,” he corrects her patiently, “that is all.”

“What about what I – what you want?”

“I… I just wanted to see…” His grey eyes are very human in the lamplight. “I used to see everything.”

“If only old Black-Eyes were watching you right now,” Billie says, forcing the humour as her heart clenches, “he’d tell you that observing people and never making a decision for yourself is pretty damn boring way to live.”

Something in him cracks and she wishes she could take the words back. There are lines running down his face and it takes her more time than it should to realise they are tears on his frozen features. “I waited too long.” He shakes his head, trembling beneath the blankets, blinking, his broken voice a world away from the Outsider’s eerie composure. “I never had a choice, I—”

“I’m sorry,” she mutters, cutting him off, “shit, I’m sorry.”

He reaches for her and she doesn’t flinch, wrapping her arms around the man Daud once told her to kill. He used to terrify her – hell, he still does – but now she’d rather die than let him go.

“It’s never taking you back,” she tells him, with steel in her voice, “I promise.”