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He is twelve, young enough to still believe in the inherent goodness of man, when he is led away from his peers at the schoolyard: ‘Daud,’ the men had said, their faces twisted into worried visages, ‘Daud, your mother – ’ and he had followed, willingly – warily.
Yet all the caution of a twelve year old boy is nothing against the guile of fully-trained men, and the strike, when it comes, is more than enough to send him into darkness. When he wakes, he fights the ropes that bind him, stupidly, futilely, and his shouts are muffled by the gag shoved in his mouth; he can feel splinters digging into his arms where he lies on the floor, and the men watching him, waiting, jeer.
He fights – he fights with all the strength and righteous indignation that his little heart can muster, and the only reason he doesn’t fear is because of his innocence, for (he believes), the worst that could happen to him is death.
He does not fear nor fully understand death. He is young – young and foolish.
There is the sound of a door slamming open; the laughter of the men slows, quiets, stops. Soon the only noise in the room is the sound of Daud’s struggles mingled with the heavy boots that step close to him, that make the floorboards underneath Daud’s cheek rattle with their tread.
The man – the boss – kneels and presses the flat of his hand inexorably into the center of Daud’s back and pushes, and it crushes the breath out of Daud’s lungs and cuts off his struggles for their lack of air underneath the creak of his ribs, and the man does not stop until black spots dance in front of Daud’s eyes and his lungs burn.
When the man relents, finally, too long seconds later, he tells Daud calmly, gently, flatly, exactly what he and his men will do to his mother if he disobeys, the words filtering down to Daud through the ringing in his ears, and Daud feels, for the first time, true fear slip into his heart.
He goes with the men when they untie him, and they shove him into the back of a covered cart and wagon with more of their company, and Daud holds his chin high and packs away the memories of his mother, and clenches his jaw so hard it hurts.
He never learns what she did, after that day. The men of the company crowd in one morning when Daud is thirteen and laugh and tell him that his mother had died, facedown and half naked in the gutter, her body caked in filth, all her magic unable to save her. Daud is silent, for he knows the rumors of his mother’s magic had been nothing more than that – rumors – and that her ‘magic’ had had just as much root in the mashing of plants as the coin tricks he’d demonstrated to his peers in the schoolyard had had with sleight of hand. These men lie, and he tells this to himself over and over against their taunts.
They had taken him to be a petty thief, but when Daud hits his first growth spurt, the boss takes away his lockpicks and hands him a knife. Daud soon learns that he cannot defeat the boss: his efforts are harsh, unsubtle, and for all that the boss seems a brute, he has not survived so long by being a fool. He is cruel to his men, but he gets the job done, and after Daud’s sixth failed attempt to kill him, he takes his own knife to Daud’s face, carves a line into it from eyebrow to underneath the collarbone, just skirting the pulse of blood in Daud’s neck.
The threat doesn’t need words – they both know that it could have taken Daud’s eye, his throat.
Daud stops trying to kill the boss after that and pops the stitches for their placement too many times to count, and the wound heals deep and twisted and ugly to match the set of Daud’s lips and brow.
He learns.
He watches the others and learns how to tread soundlessly, catlike, and he grows and grows and rises up the ranks, and he is quiet – oh so quiet – with his mouth turned down into a scowl and his scar lurid on his face. Daud, the son of a witch, learns how to steal lives, and soon the men who’d laughed at him bow respectfully to him instead, averting their eyes, and Daud feels nothing at the sight save a dull pain in his chest for the memory of his mother and the quiet schoolyard he’d been claimed from.
When Daud is sixteen, their company travels to Dunwall.
The rock of the ship’s deck is comforting underneath Daud’s feet and here, out on the waves, he can feel some of the raw tension bleed out of his shoulders.
He doesn’t smile (he never smiles now), but he lingers more over the memories he’d told himself to forget and remembers how he and his mother had always been happy, even on the road as often as they had been.
(He tries to not remember the way that his mother’s face would go shuttered, pained, as the whispers of ‘witch’ grew louder and louder; the way her mouth would finally tighten with resolve; the way she would pack up the contents of their rooms, pick up Daud, and leave for another home, one where no-one knew what she’d done and how her belly had swelled with child after she had sailed herself back into harbor at the helm of the pirates who had captured her months before, her hair unbound and wild and her skin scarred and crusted with sea salt.)
Daud kills for their boss, takes the contracts and men handed to him and murders like a scythe through grain, leaving heavy heads felled on the ground in his wake; he gains a reputation even in filthy, wretched Dunwall for being more wretched, more vicious than the rest. He tells himself it’s good, to be feared as he is. It ends trouble before it can even begin.
Then there is the girl.
She wasn’t supposed to be home yet, and the blood of her parents is still wet on his blade, but she holds a sharp kitchen knife leveled at him in both inexperienced hands; the tip doesn’t waver even as her eyes fill with unshed tears and a burning, all-encompassing rage.
“I know you,” she says. “They knew you would come.”
She lunges. His men leap for her.
And Daud moves, and three of the men who had laughed at the young Daud, half a decade removed from this day, die with his blade in their backs.
She gouges him, in the end, takes a chunk out of his side and nearly breaks the tip of the knife off against one of his ribs, and he knocks her unconscious and gently lowers her body to the floor before – escaping.
The rest of his men have already fled, scattered in fear before him, and he lingers for long minutes, listening to the girl wake, drag herself to her cold parents’ sides, and weep herself ragged.
Daud hides, because he knows that he is a traitor to the men who had trained him, now, and his fever dreams are not dreams and are filled with an absolute blue like whale oil and a Void-eyed youth younger than him who stands amidst a disjointed tableau of the room in which he’d left the girl, the temporary base he had been using, and nothing.
He wakes up with the taste of salt heavy on his tongue and his hearing echoing like listening through waves and a mark burnt like a brand into the flesh on the back of his left hand.
He is nothing. He is everything. He is seventeen and Marked, and he leads the City Watch and the Abbey to his former boss’ door and holds him still underneath the Outsider’s power until the hounds are baying at his heels and leaves him there, alone, to face his fate.
When he realizes he’s free – truly free – he has to sit down for a long moment, calm his breathing and think of anything but the messy, visceral thrill of power that had thrummed through him as he’d disappeared in front of his tormentor’s eyes. It wouldn’t be a kind death – there were too many contracts, too much evidence, for it to be quick – and, somehow, that feels better than just killing could ever have.
Fascinating, a voice whispers like whalesong, like the rattling of knucklebones in a cup, and Daud can’t help his shaky laughter in response, nor the way his voice breaks in the middle of it. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until they burst too-bright not-colors in the darkness and tries desperately to remember the sound of his mother’s voice. It has been five years and more since her son disappeared – and there is no future for the child she had known anymore save that of the blade, Daud thinks.
He tells himself that that’s not true, and stands, determined to prove it but unsure how.
He travels, waits, watches, and learns. He applies to the Academy of Natural Philosophy on a whim under a false name, studies texts that he steals from the untouched libraries of nobles, and performs perfectly on the entrance exams. He enters, studies the anatomy and physiology of the human body, learns chemistry, engineering, law, and devours books by the handful. His peers despise him.
He quits after a few seasons. It had been worse than his years of training, somehow, enduring the whispers and sidelong looks, the sabotage of his notes and research, the casual contempt of his professors.
He keeps traveling. He meets people, establishes connections, and runs out of money. He starts doing odd jobs, or stealing, and then one of the contacts that he’s made tells him that there is a mark on the head of one Sir Antony – two thousand gold on sight if brought to the right people.
It’s the easiest money Daud has ever made.
He hones his craft; he returns to the blade, and he finds the first man who would become a Whaler in the remnants of a mercenary band Daud had been paid to eliminate. Daud discovers that he can gift a portion of his powers to another – and just about laughs himself sick when Rulfio transversals straight off of a rooftop, overshooting by a good five yards, and lands ass-first in a canal from two stories up.
(Rulfio tells him, years later, that it would be the first and last time he would hear Daud laugh like that.)
He collects more people, teaches some the blade, others his powers, even others poisons; the ones he can’t teach settle into their own roles – one designs the wrist crossbow that all of them soon adopt, along with the specialty ammunition that arms it.
Daud is not a kind master. He is twenty three and has seen and killed too many to ever be a kind man, now, but he does what he can. He makes sure all his men are well-trained and come of their own free will, are kept fed and strong. He and they kill for coin, nameless, until their faces become too familiar in their success; then they don masks and continue to kill, dubbed Whalers and Daud the Knife of Dunwall.
He is thirty and the Outsider does not speak to him anymore; his dreams are no longer filled with the whispers of the Void or the Outsider’s voice. Daud has become boring – predictable. He can’t say he cares.
There are rumors of plague in the city, and he tells his Whalers to fasten their masks tight, to not be careless, and as the bodies pile higher in the streets, Daud receives a contract to kill the Empress Jessamine Kaldwin.
He accepts.
And then – oh, and then it all falls apart, and for the first time in a long time Daud thinks of Serkonos, of his mother and her smile and of the coin tricks he’d demonstrated to his peers, bronze turning his fingers metallic like the red blood that pools underneath his hand.
He laughs. It is not a kind sound.
He is forty two and his story will end soon – one way or another. He cannot say he cares.
And that is a lie – the same as so much else he has told himself – and so he stays silent and drowns.