Chapter Text
Citizens of Dunwall rejoice: the assassin Corvo Attano, murderer of our beloved Empress, is dead. Justice has been served. Attention, citizens of Dunwall. The assassin Corvo Attano is dead.
*****
The bells ring all day.
They thunder and clang in the air above Holger Square, brash and incessant, relentless as the beating of the sea. They do not stop. They are so loud. They go on and on and on, joy pounded out in cheap brass, until Emily’s head aches and until each clang brings an answering throb of pain to her skull.
The bells rang like this when Mother died – but this time they are happy.
And they do not stop.
She curls up in the corner of her room at the Golden Cat, hands over her ears, as the headache in her skull builds and builds to the rhythm of propaganda pounding in the air. And when the Pendleton twins bang on her door at suppertime, that is all that it takes for her to burst into tears.
“You lied to me!” she shrieks, ducking back when Morgan goes to grab her arm. “You said he was already dead! You said – you said –”
“Told you,” sneers Custis. His hands are in his back pockets and his tone is bored. “She’s been hoping he’d come for her this whole time.”
(Corvo Attano is dead, drones the announcer in the air outside. Rejoice. Be at ease. Corvo Attano is dead.)
Morgan laughs at his brother’s words and goes to grab her again. His hands are not cruel, but neither are they gentle; and Emily shoves him away, burn in her throat and tears hot on her cheeks. “You lied to me,” she repeats, jaw set and shaking.
“Stupid girl,” the man snaps. He yanks her forward by the arm and roughly wipes the tears from her cheeks with the white hem of his sleeve. “Of course we lied. Everybody lies. You’d better get used to it. If you want to be any use in this world, you’d better start learning how.”
*****
Attention, citizens of Dunwall: The Abbey of the Everyman will be closed this afternoon, due to the funerals of Officer of the Watch Geoff Curnow and the five Overseers killed in action while attempting to subdue former Overseer Teague Martin. Services will resume tomorrow. Be advised that Martin, though wounded, has escaped Abbey custody and is still at large.
*****
She hears a splash in the middle of the night and scrambles to her narrow window to see a body floating downriver, naked and pale, bruises blackening the girl’s face.
It is the second one this month.
(You told someone? Madame Prudence had screamed, so loud it had echoed through every floor of the Cat. The crack of flesh on flesh was loud as a gunshot. No, that’s no excuse! No one can know the girl’s here! You useless little whore, I picked you up out of the gutter and this is how you –
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry –
Who did you tell?
I d-don’t know, he had a tattoo –
Who did you tell?!)
She had been kind, Emily remembers. Her hair had been red, and not dyed. She’d read to Emily one morning, a story about monsters from Pandyssia and a wicked witch who lived on Clavering. She had a daughter close to her own age.
She is floating down the Wrenhaven with a face gone black from being strangled.
Emily closes the window and creeps back to bed, curling up into a ball. She does not cry, even though it is night and there would be no none to see: it would still leave her with red eyes in the morning, obvious, weakness, and in any case she is sick of crying. She tells herself that she has used all her tears for Mother, and Corvo, and her dolls, and her room in the Tower, and everything else.
(She used to wonder, alone up there, what it would be like to be the princess trapped in the tower in truth. She never thought it would be this boring. She never thought it would be this awful)
There are rats moving through the rooms below. Some of them have two legs and some have four. It is late at night and the building creaks with the creak of bedsprings, constant, and the halls echo with laughter gone sharp and brittle around the edges. False.
The people here strip each other naked in narrow rooms and learn each other’s secrets, but she’s learning that it means that they have only more to hide.
*****
Be aware that demonstrations against our Lord Regent will be taken as acts of treason, and that the Watch can and will respond with lethal force. We request that you all be patient and understanding in these troubling times.
*****
There are rats in the building, and rats in the walls, and rats that run across her floor at night. Emily watches them from the safety of her bed, legs drawn up and away from the floor. Prudence likes to think she keeps a clean establishment; but there is nothing about Prudence that can ever be called clean, and the rats come every night.
Emily studies the way they move, the way they scrabble across the floor, the way they scurry and scuttle and make no more noise than a whisper.
She imitates them.
The first time she tries to escape she makes it halfway down the stairs before she is caught by a patron with the reek of whiskey on his breath. “And who are you?” he booms, lifting her up as if she is nothing. “Someone’s daughter? Someone’s niece? Unless Prudence is offering even stranger things these days –”
And Prudence appears, sudden as lightning, face twisted into a snarl where the man cannot see. She talks a pretty lie and leads him off, and once he’s gone she whirls on Emily with hand raised as if she means to strike her.
But she can’t. She can’t. Emily sets her feet and lifts her chin and tastes the lie in her mouth. “I only wanted to see –“ she begins –
“I don’t care who you are, girl, you’re in for a world of pain if you do that again. Understand?”
(She understands, alright – she understands the importance of being silent and small as a rat and not being caught).
The second time she makes it all the way to the door and pulls hard on the handle, back and forth. She works a hairpin between frame and lock and worries at it like Corvo had once mentioned to her, but the pin snaps and does nothing. Nothing at all. The door is locked. And then there are footsteps in the hall behind her, and she has to run off and slips back upstairs with her heart and bitter tears both in the back of her throat.
That is how it goes.
Emily sits on her bed with her feet drawn up and watches a white rat scurry back and forth on her floor, watching it watching her, watching moonlight glint off tiny red eyes and thinking of Prudence’s ugly red hair and red blood and doors that are forever locked.
She knows that she should kill the rat: that one bite can make her rave and weep and fall down dead. But its fur is white as her favorite clothes, and it is sleek and tiny and alone. And she has watched two young women float facedown in the river for her. If she is going to kill, Emily thinks, she is going to kill those who deserve it.
She curls her arms tight around her skinny knees and curls her fingers into fists.
In the morning the light is bright in her narrow slot of a room. It catches shining on a ripped-up section of siding in the corner. Emily bends down, dirtying the knees of her white clothes, thinking of holes where white rats live and wishing she could follow them out. The hole behind the siding is just large enough for a rat, indeed, and she bites her lip and worms her small hand in to feel her fingers close on something thin and cold. She draws it forth.
It is Prudence’s master key.
And when the morning sunlight hits it just right, it shines.
*****
Anyone with information on the missing Emily Kaldwin, heir to the Empire, is urged to come forth. The Lord Regent is prepared to offer a reward to any man who can point him to her whereabouts. Demonstrations against the Lord Regent are still considered deliberate acts of treason.
*****
She never gets to use it.
It’s late in the afternoon, a few hours before opening, and the Pendleton twins are already drunk. Overseer Campbell is there and the three of them are fighting. It is something that happens more and more, these days; and where Emily had once pressed her hands over her ears to block it out like the sound of bells, she now presses her ear to the floorboards and listens.
“The Abbey teaches that drinking leads to corruption,” drawls Campbell, dry.
Custis laughs in answer. “Piss on –”
“Perhaps we have a point,” Campbell snaps. His voice is cool where those of the twins are honeyed and slurred. “Your brother –”
“Is a miserable worm.”
“No more bite than a puppy.”
“A kicked puppy.”
“There’s a reason you don’t see him around here.”
“Doesn’t have the balls.”
“Doesn’t have any balls.”
“Probably a bastard.”
“Should have been drowned at birth.”
“We tried.”
“Would that you had succeeded,” says Campbell, and there is a crack and an oof and a curse and a yell. “You told him -!”
“We never!”
“Oh, just because you don’t have any memory of the conversation doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, you idiots, he sent Burrows an inquiry, the little worm knows she’s here and if you’d just stopped drinking and pulled your heads out of your respective asses long enough –”
And Emily never gets to hear the rest. There is an almighty crack and crash and thunder that shakes dust from the ceiling and shakes the building on its foundation. She is thrown from her bed and onto the floor, reeling, bruises blossoming on her hands and knees where they strike the floorboards. She can hear shouting from down below and the smell of smoke, black acrid, and the rats are streaming from the hole in the torn-up siding like a river and flowing out the door and down the stairs –
She follows them, running, precious key clutched tight in her hand.
There is another crack and crash and she almost loses her footing again.
“Naval bombardment,”she can hear Custis cursing, imagine the spittle flying from his mouth. “Look out the window – who owns that ship? Who the hell owns that ship? How dare -!”
BOOM.
And the third shell rips into the seaward side of the building with a shriek of splintering wood.
Custis goes suddenly silent. Cut off. Emily runs, key biting into her palm –
She runs straight into the arms of a man who catches her tight and claps a huge hand over her mouth.
“Don’t scream,” he hisses into her ear. Dragging her away, her feet fighting for purchase on the floorboards. “I’m a friend. Name’s Martin. We’ll get you out of here, Emily, I promise, I promise –”
She can see out of the corner of her eye that he’s got a black patch over his eye like a pirate, that half his face is scored by a sword-slash from ear to eye, can feel that he limps and lists hard to the left – “that’s our ship in the harbor,” he’s saying, and his words are tight and so is his smile but the flash of his teeth looks almost delighted, “not the way we planned, but Havelock pulled it off.” And her heart soars and she thinks of pirates and princesses and daring rescues and adventures far at sea –
And then there is a thunder and a burst of smoke that has nothing to do with the ship at all.
And there is a spray of blood in her face, hot.
It’s not like the gush of blood from a hole straight through Mother’s chest. That had been brilliant red, dark and thick. This is as fine and as light as mist.
The hands holding her are suddenly limp and suddenly gone, and Martin tumbles to the floor, and Emily looks and wishes she hadn’t.
He doesn’t –
He doesn’t have much of a head anymore.
Her stomach turns over. She bends double and is violently sick all over the blood-slick floor. The smoke burns the back of her throat when she inhales and she can do nothing but hang there limp when Campbell walks up and grabs her by the collar to lead her away. His hand is surprisingly gentle, but the pistol is still clutched tight in his fist.
“Need to tell Burrows that his time’s up,” he mutters, barely audible over Emily’s shudder-sob breathing and the sound of the Cat burning around them. He turns his head and spits. “So much for that.”
*****
The immediate area surrounding Dunwall Tower will be closed today in preparation for the coronation. Be reminded that tomorrow is a holiday. The interregnum is over. Long live Empress Emily Kaldwin the First. Long live the Empire.
*****
They all look at her with eyes made of glass.
They reveal nothing. Their faces are blank. Their eyes are mirrors, reflecting only her own stumbles and stutters and mistakes back to her, and it slowly dawns on Emily that they are not watching her at all. That she is something to be dressed in pretty clothes and trotted out and dandled before the throne.
A show.
A sham.
A lie.
(If you try to tell them that Corvo didn’t kill your mother, Burrows had told her, face calm and serious and fingers steepled together over the ocean of his desk, there will be nothing on this earth that will save you. We will stop giving you Elixir, and you know what will happen then. He’d smiled, then, an expression that tried to be kind and that ended up looking like it was carved from ceramic. It’s nothing personal, Emily, it’s only that Corvo’s the story they know. And it makes a better story. Do you understand?
Yes, she’d said.
As if Elixir were not bitter enough already. As if everything were not bitter enough already.)
Emily stands before the court and signs a pretty sheet of paper with a pretty little lie that tells the official story, the names Jessamine Kaldwin and Corvo Attano and Hiram Burrows couched in fancy terms and long legal words she does not know. Her signature is scrawled, unsteady, a child’s hand, but the court applauds like thunder.
They would applaud even louder, she thinks, if she were a trained seal.
The door to the throne room shuts tight behind her to block out the noise, but she can still hear it beating in her head like the bells that ring in celebration as Burrows leads her up the stairs to the very top of the tower.
“Your old room,” he says. “Isn’t it nice to be back?”
And Emily gives him a pretty little lie, too.
He shuts the door and leaves her there, alone at last for the first real time since they’d dragged her straight from brothel to tower and scrubbed the mist of blood from her face and bleached her clothes and put on their little coronation show. Emily stands there in her old room. Turns in a slow circle. It is exactly as she left it nearly a year ago; it is as if she had never left at all. Even all of her dolls are there, each and every one.
They are soft and plush and forgiving.
Their stitched smiles are stiff and happy.
Their button eyes are round, and empty, and oh so shining.
Emily picks up the doll that had been her favorite and hugs it for a moment. Its eyes are black and blank as the Void. And no matter how hard she holds it, its smile does not move. It is as if no time has passed. As if nothing has changed.
She stands there for a long time.
And then she goes to the window and opens the latch and throws each and every doll into the sea. And then, and only then, does she curl in a ball in the corner of the bed with her arms around her skinny knees and finally, finally allow herself to truly cry.
*****
Due to continuing dire shortages, rations of Sokolov’s Elixir will be restricted to one half-dose per family unit each week. Failure to pick up your assigned ration is grounds for investigation.
*****
“There are rats in the tower,” she tells Sokolov over dinner. “I saw a white one run across the throne room.”
“There are rats everywhere,” the man grouses, staring sullen-eyed into the empty circle of his glass.
He does that a lot these days.
She supposes that he’s enjoying the state of the city just as much as she is.
It has been well over a year, and Emily can count the days that she’s stepped outside the high white walls of Dunwall Tower on one hand. “Can’t I go out more?” she asks the Regent, slipping into the door of his office without knocking just because she knows it will annoy him. “Mother always liked to let the people –”
“It’s not safe,” he snaps. “We can’t have you catching the plague.”
“You give me Elixir every day.”
Burrows sniffs, turns away to fuss at the map of the city on the wall. Whole sections are dark or blocked out in red, the domain of Weepers. “There might be another assassination attempt,” he replies. He sounds bored.
Emily grins at his back, knowing that he’ll hear it in her voice even if he cannot see. The edges of the grin are sharp. She scuffs a toe against the floor and puts an innocent note in her voice, a note that she hasn’t used in honestly for a year. “I thought the assassin was dead,” she says. “I thought you chopped his head off.”
And Burrows laughs and laughs.
But that is all she gets from her request, no matter how man times she repeats it: the sound of the Regent’s laughter, bitter as her smile. The walls remain high and impassable. The gates remain shut. The months roll on, and the plague grows and gnaws at the borders of the city. And while they tell her of this neighborhood and that district fallen to sickness and death, they are only concepts to her. Abstract. Sections of a map of a city she’s never really seen.
When she tries to wheedle and sneak her way out the front gate, her breakfast arrives the following morning with its dose of Elixir conspicuously absent. The point is made. There are no more attempts. She understands.
She is a false Empress over a domain that she can never touch.
She wonders if Mother ever felt this way. She wonders if ruling is always like this.
She wonders whose fault it is, precisely – the fault of a man who ran a sword through her mother so that it came out red as weeping, the fault of the man who swung another sword and cut off her father’s head to the beat of bells. Or the fault of the man who grew rich off corpses and did nothing as it happened, merely stood by so still and vulture-thin and silent, as he now stands behind her throne.
She wonders what would happen if all these men were dead.
*****
This is a warning and a reminder that the gang calling themselves the Whalers are not to be approached at any costs. Citizens living in districts under their control can petition the Watch for relocation. The following districts are now considered hostile territory…
*****
Burrows is, she admits, at least partially right: the white walls of Dunwall Tower mark the borders of the safest place in the city. The nobility, in a quiet and desperate sort of way, is fighting to get in. She is not sure which lure is the strongest: the ability to influence her, or the opportunity to bow and scrape for the Lord Regent’s favor, or the chance to wheedle and beg a dose of Elixir straight from Sokolov’s hands before it has gone through taxes or the hands of those who might contaminate it with water or worse.
The Tower becomes a sanctuary for those who are best at begging and wheedling and lying.
It is no coincidence, then, that these men become her tutors.
Campbell brings in a junior Overseer to instruct her in religion and morality. The man has no patience and little sense, Emily finds, because when she asks “what does the Abbey say about liars?” he waffles and hmms and cannot even give her the courtesy of a proper and hypocritical answer. She resolves, overnight, to nod and smile and never listen to a word he says.
Sokolov instructs her, when he can be bothered, on the far-flung theories of Natural Philosophy. Astonomy and astrology and the bones of the body and the workings of the soul. For her ninth birthday he gifts her a tiny easel and a few pots of paint and a set of paintbrushes all in miniature. He stands over her shoulder and harrumphs as she paints a picture of her view out the tower.
“Promising,” he tells her, and the smile he gives her is the gift in truth.
Emily prefers drawing, but decides not to tell him.
The second picture she paints is one of her mother, which (flaws and errors and shaky lines aside) is a much more accurate representation of her, Emily thinks, than the stuffy old formal portrait that hangs on the walls of the solar. That portrait is so grey. Dead. It doesn’t look much like Mother all. It never has. It never will.
The third picture she paints is of Corvo – and before it’s half-finished she returns to her rooms one evening to find that it is gone, torn from the easel, no sign that it had existed at all.
She is furious. And she is hardly surprised.
(And when she confronts the Lord Regent about it, he pretends not to know what she’s talking about; and Emily gets sent to bed without supper for throwing a crystal glass at his head)
Sokolov can only be bothered to teach her of philosophy and painting, formally, once a week or so. But Emily sees far more of him than that. The man lives in the tower, now, what with the Whalers and Weepers encroaching on Kaldwin’s Bridge, and he takes his quiet imprisonment about as well as she – which is to say not well at all. He grumbles and complains and curses when Emily slips inside his lab and sits at his knee and pesters him with questions, but no matter what she asks he does not throw her out. It is more than she can say of anyone else in the tower.
(He does not even throw her out in the nights when she comes in late, dragging blankets, and makes herself a nest on the couch in the corner because the lights of scientific madness are warmer and brighter than the shadows in her too-large room)
“Tell me about the plague,” she begs, bouncing back and forth on her toes. “How long does it take to kill someone? How bad is it? Is anyone immune? How do you make the Elixir? Do I really need to take it every day? What happens if I –”
“Outsider’s fishy eyes, girl,” Sokolov groans, running chemical-stained hands through his wild hair.
And he tells her. Each and every thing. He likes having someone to talk to, Emily figures. He likes having someone who will listen.
The Pendletons, on the other hand, do not care if she listens at all. They simply talk. It is a necessary competition between them: all the old relationships have broken down, and the two of them need to figure out where they stand.
Treavor takes her aside one day, after a long lesson where he and Morgan had talked over each other about the workings of Parliament and societal niceties and the way to shake a hand and how to lie without lying. He pulls her into an alcove in the hall and half-bends to look her in the eye. Half-bends, only; she’s tall, these days, and only growing. “Listen, Emily,” he says, and his voice is quiet and half a sigh. “I’m not sure how much you know about what all happened that day they took you from the Golden Cat –”
“I know.” Does he think she’s stupid? She usually likes it when people underestimate her, but sometimes it is maddening. “That was the day your brother died. There was a conspiracy to get me out.”
Treavor blinks. “Yes, exactly –”
“So? Do you want me to like you better because you were part of it?” She scuffs a toe against the floor. “The old Admiral got executed. Why did Burrows let you live?”
Treavor blinks again. Eyes like a fish. And Morgan yells at him from the other room, and that is the end of that.
(He lives, Emily knows, because of the makeup of Parliament. Because Morgan needed someone to shadow him to fill the shadow of his twin. He lives because Burrows is in need of men who think nothing of conspiracy. Because he is in need of rats that actually follow his plans)
The rats in the Golden Cat had taught her how to sneak and scuttle; the rats in the shape of the two surviving Pendleton brothers are the ones who teach her how to be a rat in truth, how to worm her way through the tunnels and alleys of aristocracy. How to lie.
The Boyle sisters teach her how to do it with a smile. They are all beautiful, and nigh indistinguishable, copies of one another with hair the color of money and carefully cultivated curves. It takes Emily a while to tell them apart, and she wonders if this is by design. Most men, she thinks, will barely scratch their triple-mirrored surface.
Esma is at the tower most often, hanging in Sokolov’s shadow when she does not trail after Burrows himself, and every once in a while she takes Emily aside for tea and lessons on how to dress and how to politely stab in the back.
Lydia comes to teach her music. Emily learns quickly that she has no talent, and that Lydia finds the lessons frustrating as she. But there is something lovely in music. The keys play only what she asks them to play. The notes are always exactly the same. The instrument is one of the few things left in the tower, she thinks, that is entirely honest.
The youngest of the Ladies Boyle is Waverly, and at first she teaches Emily nothing at all. She comes by a few times every month and sneers at the paintings, stands in the middle of empty unlit rooms and sighs into the dark. She is lonely, Emily learns. Dark in the shadow of her older sisters. Half-forgotten. Emily invites her to tea in the small room in the back of the tower, and learns very quickly that Waverly’s smile is sharp and does little to light up her face.
There is a portrait of the Lord Regent hanging over the table, and Emily nods at it as she pours the tea in china cups. “So which one of you is he sleeping with?”
Waverly blinks at her and laughs. Sound like broken glass. “They were right about you,” she chuckles. Eyes Emily over the rim of her little cup. “Does it matter?”
“No.”
“You’re smarter than you look.” Her eyes turn sidelong. Emily sees the look, sips her tea to buy herself a second to think. She is (literally and not) smaller than this woman in many ways, but this is an advantage. She has no doubt that the youngest Boyle sister notices how she has been deliberately tipped off balance; she, like Emily, is a child in the shadow of others, lonely and forgotten, and she is no doubt aware of such things. Of the games they have to play.
There is a rumor in the tower that Waverly is dark in many ways despite her golden Boyle hair, and that she has a suitor that is dark as well, and that she dances on the edge of a knife. That the knife and the suitor are both named treason. Rumors, she knows, are often true. It is time to test.
Emily makes her voice innocent. “Esma teaches me manners and fashion,” she says. “Lydia teaches me music. What are you here to teach me?”
Waverly hesitates and glances at the shadows around them. Touches a hand to her throat. Touches her own hand and twists a ring off her finger, handing it out to Emily with the stone in its pale setting facing up. The setting pops open with a click and reveals a hollow space the size of a pearl. “Nothing,” says Waverly, as she presses the ring into Emily’s hand and shows her how to click the hidden compartment closed. “Nothing at all.”
*****
This is an announcement that any and all paintings by Anton Sokolov are hereby declared property of the Crown. Owners of such paintings are required to surrender them at once.
*****
It is all beginning to fall apart.
The plague gnaws away at the heart of the city like the rats gnaw meat away from bone. The neighborhoods crumble. The blockade around the harbor stands. Trade withers. The ships bearing the bodies of whales do not cease to come in, not quite, but they slow, and whale oil becomes precious.
It is hard for Sokolov to get his ingredients with traffic and trade stoppered so, and his Elixir becomes more precious than gold.
It is more precious than life itself, because it is life itself.
Burrows rails and rages alone in his office (Emily can hear him late at night, can hear things shattering against the wall and then hear him call for maids to clean it up and restore his precious order). But no matter what he does, no matter how many taxes he hikes or laws he passes, it does nothing. He can escape the plague in his white tower-walls, can hide behind the throne, can hide his debt behind the skirts of the Ladies Boyle, but he cannot escape the fact that the Crown is losing money.
And he will let her do nothing, of course. Nothing at all. The doors to Parliament shut in her face. The conversations quiet when she walks past. The men in the tower teach her many, many things, history and philosophy, etiquette and arithmetic and painting – but never anything useful. Never the cogs and underpinnings of the city, the lines of trade, the dances of foreign policy. Never governance. Not in any way that prepares her for a life of more than staring out a window.
Emily amuses herself by lingering outside the audience chamber one busy afternoon and singing, loudly. It’s not thirty seconds before Esma Boyle appears and drags her away by the ear. Apparently Tyvian diplomats do not appreciate the singing of a lonely child, even if that child is Empress. Apparently young girls should not be singing about stuffing corpses into sacks and throwing them to the plague rats. Apparently.
Apparently, it is all beginning to fall apart. And Emily can do nothing. She has no power. She can neither help nor hinder the city’s slow collapse at all. This, the Regent has assured.
And so.
The paintings are Emily’s idea (after she notices Esma ooing and awing over Sokolov’s latest; after she sees the woman reach into her purse and give him more money for it than she’d ever dream to pay in tax alone; after a Parliament brat mentions that the only things that foreigners are willing to buy are things that cannot carry the plague). She catches Burrows and Sokolov both over breakfast one morning, as the latter pours a little vial of the day’s blood-red elixir into the glass of the former. She crosses her arms and gives them her plan in simple, flat words.
Burrows sniffs.
Sokolov grumbles and looks utterly outraged – but Emily keeps talking, and eventually the outrage turns to a smile. And she knows that she has won.
The income from gathering the paintings scattered over the city and selling them to foreign buyers is nothing. Everyone knows this. It will only keep the Crown afloat another week. But it buys Emily, at least, a small measure of respect. She hoards it as dearly as the Elixir they give her every morning.
The paintings come in slowly. So slowly. There is a day, then, when the Crown seizes control of the house of an art dealer who died in some sort of electrical accident at the re-built shack of the Golden Cat on Clavering, and there are eight or ten of them at once. Emily trails after Sokolov’s shadow as he comes down to look at them, peeling the shrouding white sheets away and clucking his tongue.
(The Pendletons appear halfway through and stand on either side of Sokolov, hurling carefully-timed volleys of carefully-timed coordinated jabs, until he surrenders the painting of them and their deceased brother without accepting a single cent. She sees them share a look as they haul it away. It contains more emotion than she thought the pair was capable of combined)
Emily has lived her entire life with the aristocracy, of course, and she recognizes every single subject of the paintings. Or close enough. Sokolov is happy to point out the ones she does not, and Emily gets to listen to him spend five minute waxing poetic on the beauty of a woman named Vera Moray, fresh from mysteries in the heart of darkest Pandyssia and with the power and charm to wrap the nobility of Dunwall around her slender pinky finger. The man is more animated than she has ever seen him, waving his hands as he talks (beard wagging, eyebrows about to take flight from his face), expounding upon the history and circumstance of each and every canvas that his hands have touched. He is happy to explain them all to her. Each and every one.
All but one.
“Who’s that?” she asks, peering out from under Sokolov’s arm and pointing. The man in the painting is tall, viewed from below. He looms. His coat is the color of blue ash and his hand is stiff and clawlike, overlarge, and scars score his face until it is ragged as the bark of a twisted tree. He seems to look at her. Emily feels the hair stand up on the back of her neck, smells blood on the air, and she cannot remember why. “That man? Who is he?”
“No one,” Burrows snaps across the room before the Royal Physician can answer. “Someone who’s dead now.”
“He had to have been someone, or Anton wouldn’t have painted him.”
“He’s a crime boss. Unimportant. Paid a lot of money for this, that’s all. He’s no one.”
Emily squints to read the title before the painting is covered and whisked away. Daud, it says. Daud and the Parabola of Lost Seasons.
She vaguely recognizes the name from a wanted poster of years ago, but cannot place it more than that. And parabola is a word that has come up in Sokolov’s lessons. Just once or twice. She does not know what it means, exactly; just that it has to do with curves, and arcs, and things that circle back.
*****
Attention: due to whale oil shortages, the City Watch will be cutting back security. While the same checkpoints are still in place and will be rigidly enforced, the Walls of Light and Watchtowers at the following locations will be decommissioned…
*****
The tower is not like the Golden Cat. It grows deathly quiet at night. She can hear more than voices from below and the rats scuttling in the walls. She can hear the world outside.
As the months go on, the electrical hum of Sokolov’s inventions fades from the air. The lights of the city outside become lesser. Blue gives way to candlelight once more, then fires to red flame and smoke. The shuddering steps of Tallboys in the night become replaced by the sound of shouting. And weeping. Always, always weeping.
The riots are getting ever closer to the white walls of their sanctuary. Emily watches, now, as the funerals of the wealthy begin to crop up like patches of weeds in a walled-in garden (Shaw, White, a nervous man named Brisby whose death saw all three Ladies Boyle appear at the tower next morning in a riot of color and brittle-sharp laughter, making demands). She is not sure which of the deaths are due to fever and madness and eyes running red, and which are due to fire and mobs that broke their bodies on the street. She only knows that it does not matter.
The borders that Burrows has set up to keep the chaos contained are breaking down.
He fears the plague, Emily knows (as she sits up in the dark twisting Waverly Boyle’s ring around and around on her finger). He fears it more than insurrection or rebellion. More than hunger or fire or debt. It is the monster he has made.
He does not say as much, of course. He was the Spymaster and is far too clever to confess. But if every man in the tower teaches her things, Burrows is the one who teaches her how to see. He leads by example. He was the Spymaster, and Emily learns from him, and she can read the guilt and fear of rats in the flicker of his eyes.
She knows.
“How do you make the Elixir?” she asks Sokolov one night when the sound of riots is loud outside. “How does it work?”
The man pauses in picking his teeth, looking at her out of the corner of his eye.
“Why would a girl like you want to know that? Want to become a chemist, eh?”
Burrows told me not to say, is what he really says. You are to stay dependent on us. Burrows does not want you to fend for yourself.
(It is the same answer she’s gotten from every man and woman from the tower when she’s asked about the scar-faced man in the painting. Closed doors. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.)
In the end, Sokolov does not tell her. Not the recipe. Not enough.
But it is enough.
Each day, when she visits Sokolov to pester him with questions, Emily is careful to take an extra half-vial of Elixir and stow it inside her pocket. She prizes up a floorboard in her room and keeps them there: a stockpile against the day when Burrows decides that he does not need her Kaldwin name and grows tired of keeping such a little girl dependent on him.
Each day, in Sokolovs lab, she steals a small pinch of white powder from one of the many vials on his workbench. She is careful, ever careful. It is not poison. It is not the blood of rats. It will not contaminate the Elixir. It is something as untraceable as water, and with the same effect.
It will nullify it.
Emily proposes to Burrows that she do as her mother once did: that she join him for breakfast each day on a particular porch on the seaward side of the tower, where the air is pleasant, where they can sip their tea and talk of things personal and political. She is old enough, she says. She is Empress in name if not in truth. It will be good, she says, for her to know at least a few small workings of the realm she is supposed to rule.
And she is getting older. And Burrows has some sense. And he relents.
And so each day, when they drink their morning Elixir from tiny glasses and sit on a porch where there are no witnesses around to see, Emily is careful to slip the contents of her ring into the red of the Lord Regent’s dose and watch him drink it down.
*****
Citizens are urged not to fall for counterfeit Elixirs. The only sure defense against the plague comes from the hands of the Royal Physician. Piero’s Spiritual Remedy is a not a substitute.
*****
Days pass, and turn to weeks, and lengthen into months. Burrows grows pale, though whether from nerves or illness Emily cannot tell. She watches him carefully. He does not slump or sniff or cough. His skin does not turn grey and crater with pocks. His eyes most certainly do not run red.
But where he was once merely paranoid, she now fears that he is halfway mad.
There comes a night when the tower is loud. The mob has surged up against the white walls like water licking at a failing levee, and the smell of smoke is high in the air. The nighttime rages with shouts, screams, sporadic bursts of the Watch’s gunfire. The guards in the halls speak in hushed voices about evacuation plans, explosives to clear the gate of civilians or boats with doused lights slipping down the lock and out to sea in silence.
(“Don’t you idiots understand symbolism?” she hears Sokolov complain to the guards as he passes by her stair. “There can be no evacuation. If the Empress abandons the tower she abandons Dunwall. If Duwnall is lost the Empire is lost. Pah. The Lord Regent, though, he can do as he likes.”)
Emily slips from her room like a rat and winds her way down to the floor above the Lord Regent’s study. She presses her ear to a vent to hear him raging in the room below.
He is not, however, raging about the screams of rage that hang like bloody flags in the air.
“Why won’t he be dead?” he spits, and there is the sound of a cabinet full of glass breaking. “I paid him, three times what his fee was I paid him, I set up quarantines to give his little gang dominion over far too much of the city. And now he wants more?” Sound of paper ripping, map of Dunwall fluttering to the floor. “I should have had him killed as soon as the job was done. Years ago. Yes. Maybe had Corvo do it. Send a murderer to kill a murderer. If he’d be dead there’d be no loose ends. I can’t have loose ends. I’ve come too far. Too. Far.”
Another burst of gunfire outside, spit and spark. Another crack of a man’s head getting blown to bloody mist. An answering crash from below. A bang as Burrows throws open the window. “Make them shut up!”
Emily keeps a hand pressed tight over her mouth to keep from making any noise. She has no idea who or what he speaks of. But the breaks and catches and creaking hinges in his voice form the cadence of a man who is mad, or getting close.
She cannot work with madness. It cannot be planned or bought or manipulated. It is not something that can be played like the predictable strings of a harpsichord, and this worries her.
And so.
The following morning the sun is bright, and the smoke is nearly gone from the air, and they meet for breakfast as usual and sit across from each other on a white-draped table. Burrows is pale and Emily is pale; though the reasons, she expects, are different. One is exhaustion. One is nerves.
She thinks of the way her mother looks in the painting, face set and steel in her spine. And she swallows hard to calm herself.
Emily reaches across the table for an apricot tart. And when her hand is positioned just so over the Lord Regent’s tiny dose of red Elixir she stops, pauses, deliberate, clicks the ring open and holds it there, just shy of tipping the powder down. She watches the way the last of the color drains from Burrows’s face and she catches his eye with her own.
“Don’t call the guards,” says Emily. Her voice is simple, but all the innocence is gone from it. She is twelve, and it is the first time she has spoken to Burrows as a young woman and not as a girl all dressed in white. “It’s not poison.”
The man’s throat moves in his skinny neck. Up and down. The fear is naked on his face and reedy in his voice. “How long?”
“Months. It’s only luck you haven’t gotten sick.”
(Luck; and the fact that when she’d gone to the Abbey to speak before the rioting crowd the month before, Burrows had stayed behind for fear that the mob would tip and tear apart his armored car).
And Emily lets him know, with the set of her spine and the glint in her eye, that she is a girl who would allow him to get sick. That she would watch and do nothing as blood began to run from his eyes like the tears she does not allow himself to shed. She watches Burrows gather himself. It is a struggle. Watches him draw a thin breath and fold his hands before him on the table in the attitude of one negotiating.
“What do you want?”
She pauses as if she needs to consider. As if she has not rehearsed this moment in front of the mirror many times.
“Three things. I want you to stop hiding start trying to cure the plague.” She thinks, with a pang, of the Elixir she has stored in her room gone to waste, of the way that she will no longer be able to easily tell how closely they are keeping her leashed. But she also thinks of the sound of fire and riots in the night. Curing the plague will cure the city. Open up trade again. Fill the coffers and quiet the streets. Cement (she tries not to wince) the Regent’s shaky hold on the crown. Whatever social change or great cleansing he’d hoped to implement by letting it fester is finished. She tells him as much, and sees him nod.
“And?”
“I want you to tell me who that man in the painting was. I want to know why you’re afraid of him.”
The Regent’s lips grow tight and white, but he does not object. At least not with words. Not something nearly so set and stone. “And the third?”
“I want to be sure that what happened to my mother can never happen to me.”
There are many ways that Hiram Burrows can interpret that request, and Emily’s heart beats high in her throat and she watches the man consider. She wonders which one he will settle on.
*****
Any and all scientists, researchers and natural philosophers are ordered to report to Dunwall Tower at once to join the Royal Physician in finding a cure for the plague. This is a matter of utmost importance.
*****
Emily is tall for her almost-thirteen years, but Dr. Galvani towers over her. He is a huge man in every way, and when he picks her up and roars a greeting she feels like a doll. Crushable. “Finally!” he booms in her face, voice flavored with a Serkonin accent that has clearly been kept deliberately through the years, “thank you, little Empress, for allowing me this chance! Working together, we will have the plague cured in no time, you will see!”
“Put her down, Galvani,” Treavor Pendleton snaps from around the corner. “She’s your Empress. And I’m aware it’s a challenge but do keep quiet, we can hear you in half the tower.” He sighs. His fingers play around the long neck of a small glass bottle in his hand. “I wish that Piero fellow were still alive. He’d probably be able to help even more. Actually had his own version of Elixir which, if I remember correctly, tasted better.”
Sokolov pauses in frowning at the rat specimens that Galvani has brought long enough to frown even more at all three of them. “I would not work with Piero. Not now, not ever.” His great eyebrows draw together. “He is dead?”
“Dead when the Watch raided the Hound Pits all those years ago. Along with the rest of the servants. Poor man.”
“Pah. And his work?”
“Gone.” Treavor gives an eloquent shrug. “Washed into the sewer, probably.”
“Pah. A waste.”
*****
All uninfected persons are required by law to present themselves at designated locations to be vaccinated against the plague. Failure to comply is an act of treason. Rejoice, citizens of Dunwall, for the reign of terror of the rat has come to an end.
*****
Vaccination is not cure. The streets are still segregated between the immune and the dying. There are still fires in the night, and the newspapers spin horrible stories of healthy loved ones clinging to pock-marked and claw-curled hands as they burn together. Emily is paraded around the city to give speeches, comfort the grieving and the condemned alike, spin a message of hope. She lends her voice to the announcements that hang in the air over Dunwall – and while she speaks, her hands are clenched in white-knuckle fists, and she wonders how many of the plague-cleansing fires are the Regent’s fault.
It takes a long time before the fires quiet, before it is safe to go out in cars that are not armored, before the poor cease beating on their doors and the seas open again and the world begins to right itself.
It takes precisely that long, then, for Burrows to complete his third promise.
Emily prides herself on seeing all the inner workings of the tower and holding secrets close. Still, it is not what she expects.
*****
Please report the location of any and all surviving infected loved ones to the City Watch. Do not believe lies and slander. They will be well taken care of.
*****
At fourteen, Emily is nearly as long of leg as her mother was at thirty. She finds that she can fit into many of Jessamine’s old clothes that have been kept carefully preserved and mothballed in the dark of some closet. They need some alterations, of course. The jackets need to be taken in. She does not have half of the curves that Jessamine displays in the portrait that hangs in the tower.
It is not that she’s underfed, especially not with trade open and the city flowering around them. It is nerves. Stress. It is (Emily decides) that her body is stubbornly trying to cling to a childhood it never had.
Waverly Boyle has curves enough for both of them, though, and greets the almost-Empress with a smile and kisses her on both cheeks. “You look lovely, your majesty,” she coos. “You’re growing up so fast.”
The compliment rings true. This is not what makes Emily smirk. “How can you tell?”
It is, after all, so dark down in the tower’s dungeon.
Waverly chuckles, steps around her to trim a lamp that does little to brighten the gloom of the walls around them. The dark seems fitting, after all; there are things and shapes and stains in this place that Emily is not sure she wishes to see. “Hiram insisted we meet here,” the youngest Boyle complains. “He doesn’t want anyone thinking you’re unladylike, the miserable man.”
“That miserable man is probably listening to us right now.”
“I have more money than he knows what to do with, so I can say what I like. I suppose we should consider it a kindness that he shipped that horrible Executioner off to Coldridge for the day. Men. What they consider kindness is often basic human decency.” Waverly arches a pale and perfectly-groomed brow. Catches Emily’s eye in the gloom. “I am still here to teach you nothing, understand.”
“Of course.”
“It is, after all, worth nothing for a woman to defend herself against murderers and madmen.” Waverly reaches into the hem of her jacket and shows Emily the knife that rests in the lining there, how it unfolds, fits the girl’s smaller hands around the whalebone handle and shows her how to hold on. “Survival,” she says, “is not something we are supposed to know.”
She teaches her how to angle the knife, the points on a man’s body where blood is closest to the surface and where a cut may shock and startle, shows where a man might strike or smother or hold her and how to twist her way free as slippery as an eel. She teaches her that these motions must just come, before thought or second guessing, as quick as breath. “Jessamine should have known this,” she says flatly, adjusting her rumpled golden hair while they pause for a moment. “Hiram should have seen that you learn some of it years ago. You’ll not be walking the streets alone, of course, but the nobility can be just as vicious as common thugs.” She steps up, catches Emily by the collar in a mockery of an embrace, nods in approval as the girl fake-kicks up. “Who would you need to use that against?”
Emily thinks of her mother braced backwards over the balcony and the smell of blood on the morning air. “Assassins.”
“No. Aristocrats.”
Emily makes a small and noncommittal sound. Everyone says that parties and balls are little more than genteel bloodbaths; now that she is getting old enough to begin attending them in truth, she can see if this extends beyond mere metaphor. She touches a hand to her throat. Thoughtful. “Can you teach me a Tyvian choke-hold?”
Waverly knows no such thing. But Waverly meets with her once or twice a week, now, in the depths of the dungeon on days when the Executioner has been sent away and where there are no men to see what the Empress is learning. She teaches her how to use her knees and elbows and knife to threaten or flee, how to throw off the grip of a man who sees her only as her body or her name. As a prize or a tool.
And in winter, when the dungeon shadows grow long and chill and sea-storm blue, Waverly brings a lady’s walking cane and shows her how to hit.
And when Emily begins to speak of such things (of practicing with wooden sticks with Corvo; of the first assassins who dropped them on the floor when killed, if only Jessamine had thought to pick one up), Waverly brings a gentleman’s sword.
Waverly does not know how to use it; or, at least, not well. Emily assures her that it does not matter. She is a small thing and the odds that she will ever lay hands on such a sword are slight. It is only, she says (thinking of the smell of blood and the sound of steel scraping past bone) that she needs to know the feel of it. The weight.
The way it sits in the hand.
The way it sits in the mind.
*****
Please note that the luxury taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and whale oil will not be repealed until further notice.
*****
“I want,” she tells Burrows, sitting down at breakfast with her fingers laced together and the silver and pearl of Waverly’s ring in full and careful view, “to have a say in governing my Empire.”
Burrows makes a small noise into the bone circle of his teacup (it is fitting, Emily things, that all the deadliest conversations of her life have begun and ended over tea; it is such a civilized setting). “You look lovely this morning, your highness,” he murmurs. “Those were your late mother’s clothes?”
“Yes.”
“I recall she always loved that particular shade of spring green. She though it made her look young.”
“There was a similar suit in the exact shade of blue as a Wall of Light,” Emily replies. The Boyles and Pendletons both have taught her to play this game. “Would that make me look my age? Or would you read that as a threat?”
Burrows sniffs. His eyes flick down to her ring. “Isn’t that what this is?”
“No,” she lies.
(Then again, it is not a threat. It is more like a demand. She has listened to the man break the expensive glass of cabinets and display cases in his office while the riots raged outside; it takes a great deal of restraint not to copy him and throw steaming tea in his face).
The Lord Regent tilts his head, first to one side and then the other. It is makes him look even more like an oversized vulture. His tone is bored. “You will be given leave to govern on your own when you are sixt-”
“I am fifteen, Hiram.”
“And you are not ready.”
“That’s not my fault,” Emily snaps. “You’ve blocked me at every turn. You give me tutors in every field except governance. You refuse to let me even see this city except for when you trot me out to correct your mistakes. I’m no less of a puppet than I was when I was eight. When I’m sixteen, will you cede me any power at all?”
“What would you have me do? Hand the realm over wholesale to –” flick of eyes down to her pale suit, curl of lip “ – a green little girl? Because I have used her name and title to fix my mistakes, yes, while I ruled in her stead? Because I am not perfect? I am doing my best, Emily.”
No, is what he says. He has taught her how to read people from the tilt of their head and the light or lack thereof behind their eyes, so this is what she reads. No. Never.
Emily finds, when she sips to curb the urge to scream, that all sweetness and savor has gone out of her tea. It is as if sugar has been turned to salt. The taste is almost blood. She thinks of poison, and is unnerved by how badly she wishes to dismiss it out of hand and how she cannot dare. “When I turn sixteen,” she says, voice even, “all the official files and records will be open to me. You can legally deny me nothing. Are there things you don’t want me to see?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“We cured the plague two years ago. Is there a reason you still won’t tell me who that man in the painting is? Daud? I had three demands, Hiram, not two.”
“You’re being petty and paranoid.”
“No. You are. Like always. Which one are you more afraid of – him or me?”
The instant she sees the Lord Regent’s knuckles and lips go bone-china white, Emily knows that she has misspoken.
Which are you more afraid of? she should have asked – Me? Or the mob that will come and tear the flesh from your bones the moment of my death?
*****
Attention: The immediate area surrounding the Golden Cat on Clavering Boulevard is off-limits to civilians while the establishment is under investigation.
*****
It is not like the Cat. It is not like all the years before. There are no fires and murders in the night. The streets are deathly quiet. Emily lies awake in bed as she lay awake in her narrow slot of the room at the Cat those seven, eight years ago. She listens, as she once did, to the rats that scurry through the walls and across the floor.
Some have two legs and some have four.
And she knows all their faces now (except this man named Daud, whose face is all she knows, face and name and half-remembered smell of blood, this man that Burrows will not allow her to see). She knows all their faces and all their motivations. She knows them far, far too well.
Burrows is simple. He desires order. He desires the power to lock and frighten everything into its proper place. And Emily’s childhood now seems to belong to a girl she never was, but it contains hazy memories of dirt-skinned knees and drawings where their should have been lessons, play sparring matches with Corvo, games of hide-and-seek among the pillars that now surround her mother’s grave. Of paintings of Corvo and glasses thrown at the Regent’s head and a twisted whaler’s song sung loud outside the audience chamber door.
Burrows desires order; and she has always been, Emily knows, a quietly rebellious child.
She sits up in bed and draws her knees to her chest as she had when she was a girl, watches the shadow of a rat grow large and monstrous on the floor as its owner runs back and forth on her windowsill outside.
Burrows has done such a good job protecting her from rats. From plague. He has done that, at least. He has made her the princess in the tower, safe. Precious. Protected.
Her twelfth birthday is several years gone and he has not, Emily realizes with a horrible jolt, ever raised the issue of a Royal Protector.
The sound of her shuddering breath is loud in the still and empty little room.
Because yes, there are justifications. Yes, if she were to bring it up again he would hem and haw that the position was obsolete, that spies served better than swords, offer up Corvo’s name like a shield. And yet – and yet –
She rises from bed all at once, goes to the window and throws it open, letting night wind clatter around the room and fill it with the salted scent of the sea. The rat on the windowsill squeaks in protest and flees. She watches it scrabble up the carved side of the tower, up and over the stone flourish above her and out of sight, fur shining bright in the moonlight. Up and over and gone.
I want to be sure that what happened to my mother can never happen to me.
He has not yet delivered on one promise. She cannot expect him to keep his word on another.
Emily considers the notched white stone of the window-frame around her and balcony above her, intricately carved and curved and steady. The white fur of a vanishing rat. The white blank face of the moon and the light it casts. She looks down: the guards mill black as ordinary rats below, and their eyes are down as they search and search for men who wish to get in and do her harm.
(Men, Waverly has taught her, are not like women and have not learned to look. And one of the places they do not look is up)
She considers.
And she takes a deep breath, kicks off her shoes, steps up and curls her bare toes over the curve of the windowframe and reaches her small hands up to the ledge above.
She does not go far, that first night. The guards move past in steady patrols that keep her frozen and she is afraid, so afraid, of falling. But the next night she does the same. And the next. She marks the way with a rope snuck from the dungeon far below, and there comes a night when she can pull herself up breath by careful breath until she can see all the roof of Dunwall Tower spread out like a sea before her. Shining. And she can see the path of balconies spidering over the face of the tower toward the ground, the path of arches and battlements to the gate; and she can start planning a way forward. And down. And out.
*****
Curfew is still in effect in the following districts…
*****
She is late to their lesson one afternoon (she’s been late all day, after a night spent climbing towards a gap and a jump toward the gate and freedom), and Waverly looks up annoyed from where she’s perched elegantly on a spindle-backed chair that she’s hauled down to the dark of the dungeon. She looks terribly out of place here, as ever. Impeccably styled, her golden hair bright contrast to the blood on the walls, all female curves in a place of hard lines and the echoes of screams. There are rats around her feet, white and black, and they startle away when Emily approaches. The other woman does not seem to notice. Or care.
“Hiram has been talking about finding suitors for you,” says the youngest Boyle mildly. “And to think, just yesterday you were a skinny little thing who only wanted to know where her dolls were.”
“He will never find suitors for me.” Emily’s voice is sullen. The scuff of her foot on the uneven floor is the gesture of a child, and she knows it, and she hates it. “He’ll –”
“He will nothing.”
Emily cannot tell, not with the mix of gloom and perfect paint that shadows and shades the woman’s face, if the crisp note of nothing is denial or deliberate lie. If the flick of the other woman’s eyes toward the ceiling is a warning. It unnerves her. She is usually ever so good at reading people.
She rubs her left ankle with her right foot, the gesture of a child, as she watches Waverly Boyle reach into her pocket and draw forth the ruins of a breakfast tart and scatter the crumbs on the floor. The rats swarm over them. Sleek. White and black and whisking everything away.
“You could…” Emily begins, wonder and worry and the word plague on her tongue.
Waverly smiles. “We’re all immune, aren’t we?” She throws a bit to a rat that is white as the stones of the tower. “They’re not so disgusting up close, no?”
Emily murmurs something in agreement, and they watch the rat as it scurries away, and Waverly takes one look at her face and sits her down and does not speak of self-defense. They speak. Trivial things only. Fashion and gossip and the workings of Parliament and politics far away (more information than Burrows dares give her in a month). The details and trappings of Emily’s sixteenth birthday, barely a week away, the day when she will take up the full mantle of Empress in truth.
(Emily imagines herself shoved against a banquet table and bleeding out red against a spotless tablecloth)
That night, she climbs high. She maps the guard patrols below and goes farther than she ever has, keeping the gate and the city lights in her sights. Her hands are rubbed raw on stone. But the lights in the distance hold a ship, and the ship will take her away, and she can live out her childhood dreams of being no one on the wide dark sea. Not a princess in a tower. Just pirates and magic and everything she dreamed of as a girl. She climbs and climbs and climbs.
And she reaches a gap that is at least twenty meters across, with a fall into a long black chasm of crashing sea. And she can go no farther.
The moon is a low sliver in the sky by the time she returns to her open window and her childhood room. Her first night back in the tower is foremost in her thoughts: all of her stupid dolls tumbling into the sea. They did not break upon the water. They were swallowed down and gently taken whole. But she is human, heart and bone and blood – and if she were to take that jump it would shatter her like glass.
For the first true time since that night in this room years ago, Emily curls in a ball on her bed and cries.
*****
Attention, Officers of the Watch: report all suspicious boat traffic in the vicinity of the Flooded District. Repeat, report all suspicious boat traffic in the Flooded District.
*****
She can hear shouting coming from the Lord Regent’s office.
She can only hope the shouting is not about her.
It’s two voices, only, and the second is not one she recognizes. Male and harsh. The curtains are drawn over the frosted glass door, and so she can see nothing. Emily presses her ear to the hinge, not caring if she is caught by a guard or Burrows or whoever this man is, because it is three days to her sixteenth birthday and the day when she will either be the Empress in truth or dead.
(There is the possibility, of course, that she will be neither: that Burrows will block her power as he does today and she will continue on as a shadow of her title. Emily has decided that this will not happen. The fall from the roof of the tower is long. It is not a possibility at all)
She presses her ear tight to the gap between wall and door, and she listens as she has been taught.
“Call off the Watch,” the stranger is saying, and his voice is level where the Regent’s is shrill. “Call off your Overseer dogs. Tell them to stop arresting my men and give me full control over the districts I already hold. I’ll keep the people in check for you.”
“I’ll not be threatened by thugs.”
“You’d know if I was threatening you, Hiram.” Sound of hands on the table, hard. “Call off the Watch.”
“Absolutely not. And don’t pretend this desire to rule half the city is due to a sudden attack of philanthropy.”
“Outsider forbid I have a heart.” The man’s voice is bitter, salt-sharp, and Emily winces against the door. “Call off the Watch and leave us in peace and I will use the Whalers to keep the peace. Yes. I will. Or keep slaughtering us and I’ll –”
“Get out.”
“After all your hard work, you’d risk me telling –”
“Out!”
Emily springs to the side and lounges against the bannister not an instant before the door slams open and the man steps out. She can hear the leather of his gloves creak as his hands curl into fists, and his face is tight, his face is –
His face is scored with scars like the bark of a gnarled winter tree, and his coat is red and not the color of ash, and the years have added lines of silver to his hair. But it is the same, it is the man from the painting, the parabola circles back, and Emily feels her back go stiff and feels each and every hair stand up on the back of her neck and she does not know why. She makes a noise, or something, she must, because Daud looks at her. His eyes are as empty and studiously blank as the eyes of a shark. She feels as if she is being skewered. She feels as if she is being run through.
He bows.
“Your highness,” he murmurs. Short. Hint of bitter still lacing his voice. The bow is perfunctory. He takes her small hand in his too-large one, pale against black glove, and the kiss that he gives the back of that hand is perfunctory too. Emily snatches her hand back as if she has been burned, forgetting all courtesy, but apart from a slight flicker in the eyes the man does not seem to notice.
(She sees Burrows watching from his office behind them, sees him turn sharp on his heel and vanish into the rooms behind, waving for a guard)
“Who are you?” Emily snaps.
And her voice, for the first time, is the voice of an Empress. Ice and cold.
“No one.” He gestures for her to walk down the stairs toward the door with him and Emily does, she does, because she feels like a minnow caught in the gaze of a shark and because this man holds the answers to the demand that Burrows will not grant her. Because she can smell blood on the air. Or maybe it is merely the sea through the tall tower windows. “They’ve called me a crime boss,” he goes on, scorn heavy on the words. “Or a monster.”
“Sokolov doesn’t paint monsters,” is what she finds herself saying (because the bitter in this man’s voice is sharp enough to cut). “I’ve seen the painting of you.”
“Yes, well. You’ve also seen the painting of the Regent.”
And it is fear, maybe, nerves, the utter absurdity of it all – but Emily laughs aloud.
The sound jangles in the empty air of the tower like bell-chimes. Daud grins. It cannot be called a true smile, not at all, more of a sideways slash of his mouth. “She said that about you,” he mutters, then raises his voice. “So how does the little Empress like her cage?”
And Burrows might hear, yes; but Emily cannot shake the fear of what will happen if she lies to this man, and she does not falter in the slightest. “The gilded part suits me just fine.”
“Foolish.”
She opens her mouth to ask for an explanation, all Empress indignance. But the questions lodge in her throat and come tumbling out, why is Burrows afraid of you phrasing itself as “what were you yelling about?”
“More foolishness.”
And Emily realizes that the bitterness that this man wears like armor has eroded every last thread of artifice from him, sure as the gnawing waves of the sea. If he wears a mask, ever, at all, it is not the kind of mask that can be found at court. He will not lie to her. He will not lie to her.
And she realizes (with a tumbling soaring swoop in her chest and the inexplicable taste of blood and wrongness in her mouth) that what he means by foolish is that he will tell her the truth.
Take me with you, she wants to shout as they approach the wide and looming doors to the courtyard. Take me with you, take me to a ship where I can get away from all this, I don’t care if they call you a monster, I am sick of being lied to, I am sick of being called a fool because I am young and not because I am, I am the princess in the tower and I have waited far too long for rescue to care what face that rescue wears, I am sick of deception and games and politics and masks –
As Daud lays his gloved hands flat against the tower doors to push them open, all the words are brilliant on her tongue.
And Emily never gets the chance to say them.
There is a man on the other side of the doors. And like all men in the tower, it is a man that Emily recognizes – though not one that she knows well. He is always sent away when she is sent to his domain. And she realizes, now, that what she told Daud was a lie: that Sokolov does paint monsters, for she has seen the painting of this man and imagined, oh, how she has imagined his sword cutting off Corvo’s head to the thunderous sound of the bells.
The Executioner makes no noise. No preamble and no game. His sword is real, no rapier-wit, and he simply lunges. Emily leaps to the side, scream tearing from her throat –
And the lunge is not for her
And Daud is no longer there.
And the guards do not come running, it is as years before, the white courtyard is empty and blank and there is not a single guard in sight –
She is a child again and she presses back flat against the wall as the Executioner whirls when his blade finds nothing in the air, as Daud steps out of the air behind him and catches the slicing sword with his own. Turns it aside. His eyes are cold, cold. Blank as the eyes of a shark. Dark. His lip is curled and it is contempt she reads in his face, and fury, and the face of the Executioner burns with some sort of righteous religious rage, the clang and crash of sword beats loud as bells and just as quick and quicker –
Far too fast –
Emily is frozen, and time itself seems frozen around her. The wind is dead in the air and the roar of the sea is dull and distant and it is only these two men before her who move, flickering fast around each other in and out of emptiness, and their swords silver the air around them in a cage that is not gilded at all.
She cannot move.
Cannot move, cannot even scream (this time, not that she wants to), can only watch as it happens over again. The Executioner falters. The catch and glance of his sword is all wrong, slow, and Daud’s own shears down, and the man knifes over in pain as blood spurts red red red from a bone-deep gash in his shoulder. And Daud catches him. Hand wrapped hard around his throat. Shoves him brutal and quick and efficient to brace him against the door. Shoves the sword in. And out. Red.
Emily cannot hear, but she knows that sound. She knows the sound of a sword as it stabs past spine and rib and as her own scream hangs panicked on the morning air.
She knows.
As before, she can only watch as the man who murdered her mother steps into the air and vanishes. This time she sees him reappear; this time she sees him flicker into existence at the far end of the courtyard, glance back, kick the cover off a manhole and vanish down into the dark. There is not even a trail of blood to mark the path that he has taken. The cover slams back down into place. She is the only one who sees. It is the same, again, all over again.
And when the world begins again, this is what happens.
The tower springs to life. The guards are there again. The Executioner makes low and keening wordless sounds as he dies, as blood seeps out to flood the marble floor. It soaks her shoes as Emily steps past him and marches up. She leaves a bloody trail of tiny footprints up the stairs until she reaches the balcony where Burrows lords over it all, hunched as a vulture. He is unmoving, and his eyes are slitted in fury no lesser than that which burns on Emily’s tongue along with the taste of blood in the air. “Why didn’t you tell me?!” she screams at him. She stamps her feet. The blood she tracks on the carpets disrupts his precious order. “Why didn’t you tell me?!”
*****
The Distillery District and surrounding areas are on lockdown following an incursion by the gang known as the Whalers. Anyone moving in said districts, or in the Flooded District, will be shot on sight.
*****
Jessamine’s grave is the most peaceful place within the bounds of the tower. The groundskeepers make sure it stays beautiful – that the stone is clean and pale, that the ivy twines up the pillars close as an embrace. The view is always lovely, but it is doubly so on nights like this: when the mist hangs low over the distant city and blurs the distant lights so that they look more like magic than ever, floating, and the moon glints silver on the tops of waves.
Those waves are far below, and the fall is long. Not quite as long as the drop into darkness in the gap between tower-roof and freedom. But long enough.
Emily sits on the low wall, toes dangling over, and considers the fact that she has no desire to leap at all. Not anymore.
None.
Not even after her outburst had whipped the tower into rumor, sent whispers of mad, hysterical, uncontrollable, unreliable catching through the city like wildfire. It is the night before her sixteenth birthday – and on the morrow Emily will learn that Burrows will never surrender the rule to a woman that he has branded a little girl. Not after what she had screamed. Not after what she knows.
(You knew! she’d shouted, after the curtains were drawn and the doors were locked so that the world outside heard only the shouting and not the truth. You knew! You lied! You worked with him. The man who killed my mother. You hired him. Didn’t you. Didn’t you? It was you!
It was, Burrows had replied, cool, a necessary lie.)
It is not, Emily thinks, that she wishes to leap (though Burrows would undoubtedly thank her, at least until the mobs came howling for his blood). It is not that she wishes to stop. No. She wishes to travel to a far distant corner of the isles where Empresses nearly never visit, and she wishes to sip her tea with no fear of it being poisoned and no suspicion that the man across from her flavors every word with deception, and she wishes to pick up the paper and read of Burrows dead and the city of Dunwall burning.
He has worked so hard to make sure she never had a hand in the rulership of this Empire. This only means that she does not care.
It has only assured that there is bitterness now where there once sat apathy or acceptance, hard as armor and red as blood or a man’s red coat – where once she’d wanted to fall, now she wants to stand on high and watch it all come screaming down.
Emily sits on the edge of the cliff and imagines the pretty lights of the city in the fog turned red with destroying fire. Swings out her toes over the empty air and watches them flash back and forth, the sea below her so far down. Down and down and down.
She has searched the way up for an escape, and found only a too-wide chasm leading to a long fall; and while the fall, clearly, is not the way out, perhaps it is not as wrong as she thinks.
She considers.
And then she returns to her room and packs. Quietly. She takes only the things she will need for a trip across the city to the gateway of the docks. A whale-oil lamp that clips to her jacket, small and blue. A knife that slips inside the seam. Coin. A key to the tower that can be used to buy or bribe her way to sea; or that can be thrown into the sea as the ship pulls away from the tower and toward the southern sky.
And she stands in her room with her hair tucked back behind her ears and her mother’s clothes hemmed and tailored tight to her small frame, and she turns in a slow circle.
There is art all over the walls here, accumulated over long years. There are shaky drawings and paintings of the view from the tower, of the red-haired woman at the Golden Cat, of a fanciful leviathan breaching and upending a shipful of sailors into the ocean. There is a portrait of the two Pendleton brothers standing far apart with arms slung over shoulders and wide negative space between them, and a portrait of the three Ladies Boyle in matching suits of black and white and heart’s-blood red. A charcoal drawing of Sokolov hunched and contented over his work. A child’s sketch of a man with an eyepatch and a slash across his face, grinning. A portrait of Waverly with a small and secret smile.
There are no paintings of Burrows (by choice) and none of Corvo (not so much); and there are many, many paintings of Jessamine. The lines get more solid over the years, the proportions and the shadows become correct, the title at the foot of the frame changes from Mummy to Mother to things more professional. Jessamine changes, as well. In some of the later portraits she begins to look like the Sokolov painting. In one of them there is a shade of Waverly Boyle in her face.
In one of them she looks precisely how Emily remembers her, and the red is as red as red can be.
Emily stands in the center of her room with all her precious drawings staring back at her from the walls. And she does not touch them. They belonged to a little girl who dreamed of being Empress. They belonged to a little girl they never allowed her to be.
She locks the door behind her when she leaves.
She nods to guards as she passes, murmurs pretty lies about fresh night air and walks to clear her head. She has spent long enough watching from the roof of the tower, now, that she knows all their patrol routes. The places they look. The places they do not. And so it is in one of these spaces where they do not watch that Emily creeps her way across the courtyard, small and scuttling as the rats she’s studied so well, and lifts up the manhole cover through which Daud had vanished.
And she vanishes as well.
Down into the dark.
The cover clangs shut behind her, loud as a slamming door; but she can see ledges looping downwards into further darkness, and the lamp on her hip lights the way.
On the morrow, Emily will turn sixteen and Burrows will be required to abdicate the rule. On the morrow, Dunwall will awake to discover that it has no Empress. The chaos will come again. The city will weep and riot and burn. And on the morrow, Emily will be on a ship to Morley or Pandyssia or Serkonos. And she will not be looking back.