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Corvo knew as soon as he saw the sign that this had been a terrible mistake.
“Whitecliff Whale Watching”, it declared in bold letters scoured near-barren by the relentless salt spray. A hut that looked hardly fit to weather a single squall nestled up against the looming cliffside, as though itself taking shelter from the howling winds. Across the pale sludge that passed for a beach, a pier slick with algae jutted presumptuously out into the churning surf, and at its end bobbed a skiff little grander than a dinghy.
Corvo had sailed around the easternmost point of Gristol several times now, and never had it been more clear why most ships gave these cliffs a wide berth. As if the towering fingers of rock dotting the nearby waves weren’t enough, every time a stray gust caught the crumbling clifftop far up above, a scattering of fine scree pelted down to join the sand below. It seemed a miracle the whole thing hadn’t yet collapsed into the sea.
If it were up to him, Corvo would turn tail and head right back up the narrow path. But as usual, it wasn’t up to him.
“Millennia ago, before even my time, these shores were but the floor of another, even greater ocean. Those cliffs, born from the deaths of millions upon millions of its tiny inhabitants. Now, the sea chips away at them, taking back a little more every year. In a few centuries, there’ll be nothing left but water.” The Outsider gave Corvo a look that made the wind feel just a little less biting. “You take me to such nice places, my dear.”
Even though he was mortal now, it was hard to forget sometimes that the young man who stood beside him was several thousand years his elder, despite appearing otherwise. It didn’t help that the former god had retained his knack for saying precisely the most unsettling thing at any given moment.
“Let’s just get this over with,” Corvo sighed. Former god though he may have been, the Outsider’s whims rivalled even Emily’s at her most precocious. But when he’d looked at Corvo with those fathomless green eyes and told him that he’d very much like to see a whale—a live whale—in person, Corvo simply couldn’t refuse. Not that he’d ever been able to, really.
“Trip for two, eh?” The one-eyed man leered at them from the other side of a sliding panel that had taken Corvo several loud raps to coax open. “Sixty coin.”
Corvo stared the proprietor down. He had to be at least seventy, if not older, missing most of his hair and several yellowed teeth in addition to the eye. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “That pile of junk looks about ready to capsize. You expect us to pay sixty coin for a trip straight to the Void?”
“Sixty coin,” the man repeated. “And another sixty. In case of damages. You get that back if you return me boat un-capsized.” He smiled widely.
“If we do die, Corvo, we won’t be needing that coin anyway,” the Outsider mused unhelpfully.
“Your friend’s got the right of it, he does,” the old man agreed. “Want to see the whales, or not?”
Corvo scowled and reached for his purse. “At this price, I expect you to be the best damn boatman in the Isles.”
The proprietor smiled even wider. “Oh, I ain’t going with you. Seen the weather out there? You want a guide, that’ll be another sixty.”
Corvo sourly dropped a hundred and twenty coin onto the narrow counter. “We’ll be fine.”
As the old man scooped up the coin and handed over a grubby engine key, his single eye squinted towards the Outsider. “Say... don’t I know you from somewhere?”
The Outsider’s face remained utterly blank. “That depends. Which name is it you go by these days?”
Corvo hastily pulled the former god away before he could utter another word.
The pier was as treacherous up close as it had looked from a distance. Between the algae, the sea spray, and the finger’s length of water he had to bail out of the skiff, Corvo was already half-drenched by the time they finally set out. The Outsider had taken up a perch at the stern of the little boat, after having watched Corvo make ready without lifting a finger to help. If that had been Emily, Corvo would’ve reprimanded her, but with the Outsider it was different somehow. Sometimes Corvo got the impression he’d forgotten that he was more than just an observer to this world, now. That the idea of being able to do things was still something he hadn’t quite reckoned with.
Corvo could live with that. Four thousand years stuck in the Void warranted a little bit of leeway, after all.
“Before even your time?” he wondered as the skiff chugged valiantly out of the choppy waters of the cove, passing beneath the towering white cliffs.
The Outsider looked past the rocks to the churning greenish water. “Dear Corvo, I’m hardly the oldest thing in this world or the next.”
Far past the point where the waves began to crest, he saw a great dark shape rise briefly and sink beneath the surface. Even from this distance, he could tell just how vastly it dwarfed their tiny vessel. The only whales he’d seen in the flesh before had been those carried in on trawlers, dead or close to, and like most, he’d been raised on tales of their greatness and ferocity. His left hand clenched instinctively, despite it having been but an ordinary hand for nearly a year now.
Cool fingers brushed the faded Mark, sending a tingle up Corvo’s spine. “We’ll be fine,” the Outsider said. With the wind tousling his hair and the hue of the sea reflecting in his eyes, he looked strikingly... human.
The skiff rattled on until they were well free of the cliffs. The sky, already a mottled overcast, grew steadily darker and tiny flecks of rain mingled with the cold ocean spray. If a storm caught them out here, they might well be finished, whales or no. Corvo was about to suggest they turn back when the Outsider became very still. “Stop here,” he said.
Corvo didn’t argue. He let the motor die with an unceremonious sputter, and then there was only the sound of the wind and the waves lapping at the hull.
A shadow passed under their boat. Moments later, the tiny thing bucked and rolled as a mound of glistening blue-grey surfaced and then withdrew. When an enormous tail followed only a few metres away, Corvo heard the Outsider’s small gasp of excitement.
Another whale rose up, and then a third. Corvo thought he spotted more dark shapes below them too.
How they didn’t capsize immediately with the leviathans circling and surfacing all around, Corvo had no idea. But though their skiff rocked tremendously at times and was doused more than once by an errant wave, they remained miraculously unscathed. When he’d stopped tensing up at every near pass, Corvo finally turned his attention to the Outsider.
The former god had his back to him, perched precariously on the lip of the boat. He appeared unbothered by the pitching of the small deck.
“Can you hear them, Corvo?” he said softly. “They’re singing.”
Corvo paused, half-full bail bucket in hand. He’d been so preoccupied with staying afloat that he hadn’t noticed what had become of the waters themselves. The choppy waves they’d faced since leaving shore were all but gone, and even the wind had let up. In their place was an eerie stillness, the only motion around them the movement of the great whales.
And... they were singing. A strange, haunting noise emanated from below. Corvo wasn’t quite sure if he was hearing it, exactly, or if he was feeling it reverberate through the water, through the skiff, through his very being. The whales had ceased their chaotic motions, he could now see. Instead, they circled, the boat at their centre, and their song swelled.
He knew this song, Corvo realized. It was the sound that had accompanied each of his visits to the Void, faint and yet ever-present. It should have been off-putting, discordant, but instead there was an odd... comfort to the leviathans’ harmonies. He found himself lost, for a moment – it could have been an hour, for all he knew – staring out at the whales and their slowly-turning gyre.
Something shook him out of his trance—a small splash, barely audible beneath the song. It took Corvo too long—far too long—to glance over at the Outsider, who’d barely spoken a word this whole time.
The stern was empty. The former god was nowhere to be seen.
***
The Outsider drifted.
It was as he’d done before, for countless hours, years, centuries, even. Sometimes he was somewhere, sometimes he was everywhere, and sometimes he was nowhere at all.
And there was the song. The song that twined its way between worlds, encircling him, calling his name. He’d missed that song.
There was a pressure all around him too, familiar like the embrace of black stone. He’d grown used to that, had learned to tuck it away along with all other feelings, ‘till nothing remained but emptiness, drifting.
But there was something else, this time—something that loomed over him unlike anything he’d experienced before.
The Outsider opened his eyes.
Blue-green light undulated on all sides, casting myriad patterns over the hulking shape that drifted with him, almost within arm’s reach. The leviathan regarded him with a solitary baleful eye as it circled closer.
‘Beautiful’ had never come to mind when he’d thought of the creatures before. Back then, they had only been fascinating, and sometimes, company of a sort.
But they were, he now saw, truly wondrous. How could the humans have thought them monsters? He reached out, and his fingers brushed the smooth hide of the whale, tracing each minuscule ridge and bump. It was the most remarkable thing he’d felt since—
The looming sensation intensified, and he felt a white-hot bolt of pain lance through his chest. He gasped, and a dozen bubbles of air poured out as the water poured in.
Ah, yes, he remembered faintly. Breathing. It was always the little things that slipped his mind, nowadays.
He tried to move his limbs, to claw his way up toward the surface, but it was next to useless. The nearby whale finished its circuit and then moved on, disappearing into the gloom. The rest of its kin followed suit, and the song trailed off into discordant notes until it, too, vanished.
The Outsider’s vision grew dim. This was not his world any longer, and his mortal heart knew it, pounding in vain to fight off the inevitable.
Was this to be his final end? Part of him could not help but think of the irony.
Rough hands grabbed him under the arms, and he felt himself dragged upwards, just as the darkness overtook him.
***
The Outsider looked so very pale and fragile as Corvo hauled him bodily over the side of the boat. How he’d wished, as he’d plunged after the boy, that he could’ve had his powers back. It would have been so easy to leap into a hagfish and give chase; would have taken only seconds to blink safely back to the surface with his charge in tow. Instead he’d felt painstakingly slow, fighting his way through the murky water with hands naturally unsuited to the task. Perhaps too slow, he feared.
Then the Outsider coughed and retched, spewing seawater all over the deck.
“Ah, Corvo,” he said weakly. “You’re looking a little worse for wear.”
The former god was soaking wet, shivering; lying in a puddle of his own vomit. And, he was smiling.
Corvo couldn’t decide whether to laugh or to scream. So he simply started up the skiff and turned them around without a word.
The journey back to shore was mercifully uneventful. The storm that had been threatening to build on their approach had passed them by to vent its fury someplace else, and even the clouds overhead were thinning, giving way to slivers of a deep yellow evening sky. With the way the weather had been, it was easy to forget that it was nearly summer.
The Outsider sat at the back of the boat once again, huddled under Corvo’s coat. He looked more pathetic than Corvo had ever seen him, which made it all the more difficult to admonish him for doing quite likely the stupidest thing Corvo had ever witnessed anyone do.
“I’m sorry, Corvo,” he said, and to his credit, the Outsider did for once appear genuine. “It was not my intention to frighten you.”
Corvo looked across the water, toward the pale cliffs and the faintest shadow of the city beyond them. “Do you miss it?”
He didn’t look around, but he could feel the intensity of the Outsider’s gaze at his back. It was a long time before the former god finally spoke.
“I miss the songs of whales echoing through the Void. The stories rats tell to each other in dark and secret places. There are beasts that no human eye has ever seen, living deeper beneath the waves than even light can touch. There are things I wish I could experience again, Corvo. But no, I don’t miss being a god.” The Outsider paused, and Corvo felt the boat shift a little. “Do you?”
Corvo kept his eyes fixed firmly ahead. He forced himself to relax his left hand, which had clenched itself into a fist.
He sighed. “All the damn time.”
They spent the rest of the trip in silence as the clouds slowly parted overhead.
The proprietor of Whitecliff Whale Watching seemed less enthused about the return of his boat than Corvo would’ve expected.
“Deposit, you say? What was that, then, twenty coin?”
“Sixty,” Corvo replied through gritted teeth.
“Ah, now that can’t be right. I’d never charge more’n twenty for damages. Why, for sixty coin I coulda bought a whole new skiff!” The old man smiled infuriatingly. “Or, thereabouts.”
“Sixty coin,” Corvo repeated. He was not particularly thrilled to be haggling with this bastard over a handful of copper, but the Outsider would never let him live it down if he allowed himself to be fleeced. And he’d surely tell Emily the moment they returned to the capital, which would only make matters worse. He drew himself up and gave the man his frostiest stare. “And be grateful I don’t have this sham of an operation shut down by Imperial decree.”
“Don’t be so hard on him, Corvo,” the Outsider chimed in. “I’m certain he needs the money more than you do.”
The old man nodded emphatically. “How about them whales, eh? Right fearsome bastards up close. Won’t catch sights like that from your ordinary trawler, I’ll say.”
The former god’s expression remained as neutral as ever. “You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Willard? Or have you been going by One-Eyed Bill again?”
Corvo had rarely seen a man go so pale so fast. "How did—you can’t—
The Outsider leaned across the counter. “Just let him keep it, Corvo. He’s not going to find another job—not after what happened on the Lucky Hagfish.”
One-Eyed Bill stumbled backwards as though he’d been struck, frantically pulling out handfuls of coin. “Here! Here. Take it—take it and go! I didn’t see youse, we never spoke, there weren’t no whales and no deposit neither!”
He slammed shut the panel and left them there in the growing dusk, a hundred and twenty coin scattered across the weathered planks.
***
Corvo had insisted on leaving half the coin behind, much to the Outsider’s amusement. He’d watched the man pinch the smallest irons from fetid channels of sewer muck, but give the Lord Protector a question of principle and his attitude towards almost anything was liable to shift.
It was one of his qualities that the Outsider adored most.
They sat together on a grassy ridge high above the crashing waves, their decision to take a pause after the climb up from the beach an unspoken, mutual thing. The sky had cleared and the last vestiges of sunlight cast swathes of vivid yellow and pink over the horizon.
It was strange—he’d seen countless thousands of sunsets before. But there was something to them now that they’d once lacked, an aspect which, frustratingly, he could no longer find the words to describe.
“I hope this was all worth it.” Corvo had kicked off his boots and was wringing the seawater from his socks. “Because you won’t catch me ever doing it again.”
The Outsider had barely noticed his own waterlogged socks until this very moment, when the unpleasantness of the situation suddenly struck him. He did as Corvo had, and let his feet sink into the soft grass instead.
“My dear Corvo,” he began, savouring the phrase he knew always made the other man squirm. “That was, without a doubt, the greatest day of my mortal life. How could I ever ask you to improve upon perfection?”
The Lord Protector gave him a look of fleeting incredulity. Then he threw back his head and laughed. The Outsider enjoyed the moment, though he did not join in Corvo’s mirth. He had, after all, been completely serious.
They sat there, together, as the breeze dried their socks and the stars began to appear. If he listened hard enough, the Outsider felt he could almost hear the faint calls of the leviathans, echoing up the cliffs. Beautiful and haunting and... separate from him.
His fingers tingled with the memory of the whale’s smooth hide. Then he reached out his hand to find Corvo’s, all rough calluses and still damp from tending to his clothes.
The whales were beautiful, and their song was not for him. But that was okay.
He had other things to be fascinated with.