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They'll try to billow through their onetime sleeves
And point to your heart as in a lost and found.
The dead will know it, if you love much longer,
And whistle you near through the shuddering leaves.
- Amit Majmudar, "Rites to Allay the Dead"
The light is shaky around him. The ground tips. The walls of the Void ripple like things half-real as he hurtles from cliff to cliff to cliff, catching himself on his fingernails, feet scrabbling for purchase inches away from a howling fall into nothingness. The fresh mark on his hand burns with the strain of it.
Corvo isn’t afraid.
He’s not afraid of the fall, or the wildness, or the way the world is unraveling around him; he’s been sleepwalking through such an unraveling for quite a long time.
It’s quiet in the Void. The announcements have stopped.
He shiver-blinks through the tableaus the Outsider has set for him as quickly as he can. He doesn’t wish to look at them. Does not wish to see Jessamine, lying in a wide spray of red; does not wish to see Burrows bent over a burning map of the city she loved; does not wish to see Emily’s letter to him, flung over the empty air, lost, someone yanking at her arm and leaving bruises around her wrist –
Corvo trips. Falls. Rushes toward a ground that doesn’t exist, and the only prayer he manages is don’t let me wake up.
He doesn’t.
He blinks past the frozen Emily who looks like she is just about to speak, who never will. And now the scenes are sharper, more recent, and his eyes are on the path ahead of them so he sees them only in flashes. Fire eating at a painted canvas. A red coat, a slash of darker red. White flowers and white ashes, falling, falling, falling –
He catches himself on his hands and knees, the white shock rattling up through his teeth. Cool fingers close around his wrist. The Outsider pulls him back up. His black eyes crinkle up at the corners and there is something half-hidden in his other hand, something small, something dripping, and Corvo makes a small whine of a sound and shrinks away.
*****
He wakes with a start.
He’s curled tight on his side, eyes wide open. Everything is as before. The light in the attic of the Hound Pits is not changeable and unchanging and blue. The floors do not tilt. The roof does not leak and there is not bucket to catch the leak and the water in the bucket is not dripping upward in a steady, echoing tattoo. Outside he can hear seabirds, the Wrenhaven, the drone of a distant ship. The hollow sound of the wind. It’s not yet dawn; the sounds are mostly silence, the city is holding its breath.
Everything is as before – except for the fact that his left hand itches and burns as if there are insects nesting under his skin.
And on the desk –
Corvo gets to his feet. Gooseflesh rises on his skin, but it has nothing to do with the cold. He’s always cold, lately, has stopped noticing it in lieu of more serious pains. He does not look at his hand. He does not trace the design there, and he tries not to think about how familiar the instability of his dream had been, how the Outsider had sighed and murmured of possibilities ripped asunder and it was so difficult to bring you here. Corvo pads to the desk. He picks up the Heart.
It is small in his hand, and it gives tiny flutter at his touch, gears clicking. It looks very breakable and very raw against his skin. He sets it down, furtively scrubs his hands in the washbasin and wipes them on his old-new Lord Protector’s coat. He picks it up again, delicately, dearly wishing he could wash the scars from his hands as easily as he can the grit and sewer-slime and blood under his fingernails; he doesn’t want it stained, he doesn’t want it to know.
I am not, says the Heart, an innocent thing.
The voice is soft and familiar and bright and somehow not, a light with all the lightness sucked out of it. The hair rises on Corvo’s nape. This is not a voice he wants to guide his way in the dark. He slips the Heart in his left breast pocket. It is small, and it fits there without disrupting the line of his uniform. It beats and beats like little fists against a little locked door.
*****
It’s too quiet, here.
There are gaps in the floorboards at the Hound Pits. Corvo can move light enough, with magic and with well-trained step, that they do not creak under his feet. And it is early in the morning and the world is still silent and holding its breath and so it is easy to hear the lesser sounds of the pub, easy to put his ear to a gap in the floor and hear the voices drifting up from two stories below.
“Yes,” Havelock is saying, muffled, “of course it would have been easier –”
If Corvo closes his eyes he can imagine them: Pendleton stiff and snappish in a chair, Havelock pacing. Empty glasses on the desk, a haze of cigar smoke floating over them and drifting upwards with their words.
“Corvo was easy to predict, before.” Pendleton’s voice is strained and waspish and strangely relieved. “Now we have nothing to offer him. He won’t do it.”
“He might. One of the Boyles is sleeping with Burrows. It’s a fair excuse. Once the Boyles are out of the picture – you said your family has the next-best claim? A… second-cousin?”
“My brothers, yes –”
“Martin says they were keeping her –”
The Heart twitches against his chest. Its gears click, resettle. The Pendleton twins, it says in a small voice. They are not… clean… men. The room she was in had no windows. She could have been anywhere. She imagined she was on a ship adrift at sea. You were a pirate. A story. She waited for you!
Clink of a flask below, splash of liquid in a glass.
“He’ll do it,” Havelock muses. “We’ll make him. Vengeance is just as worthy a goal as putting the right person on the throne. That’s how we’ll pitch it to him. He shouldn’t be –”
And Corvo does not get to hear what he should be, or might be (few things), or was (many), because there comes a horrible metallic whine as the P.A. speaker outside the window flares to life. The sound of it is deafening. It rattles the glass in the windows. It shakes down dust. Corvo has to place a hand against the wall to keep from being tumbled off his feet.
Today is a national day of morning, drones the Announcer, as the first rays of sun begin to crawl over the horizon. The streets between Holger Square and Dunwall Tower are closed all day for the funerary procession of Emily Kaldwin, so cruelly taken from us in these dark times.
And everything is as before.
*****
Corvo is not sure how he is so light on his feet that he makes his way across the floor and onto the roof without creaking a single solitary floorboard. He feels unsteady. He feels like he is still falling. He has felt this way, moved this way, for a long time - ever since the bells in the city took up the ringing of the bells in Holder Square in the cadence that meant Emily is dead; ever since the prison doors blew open and the light outside was white and harsh and empty of her and empty of her and did not welcome him anymore.
He doesn’t know how it happened. No one is sure how it happened. Emily Kaldwin was missing and Emily Kaldwin was found and then Emily Kaldwin was dead, all in the space of a day. Plague, said some; poison, said others, served by the women who were keeping her. Many said assassination and most of those said it was the same assassin who had killed her mother. Corvo hadn’t believed until the Overseers had dragged him from his uneasy sleep in prison and stripped him down, doused him with freezing water so that he was shivering and shone a bright light into his eyes so that he was half-senseless. One of them had played horrible incessant music from a handheld organ. They’d peered and plucked at his skin and asked nonsensical questions about projection, about shadows, about dreams and darkness. How, they’d asked, how. He’d asked them the same thing.
His left hand, now, curls into a tight fist.
If he’d been the witch the Overseers had wanted, then, he could have –
Could have –
Corvo closes his eyes. Sways on the rooftop, listens to the Heart suck in a breath it does not need and whisper don’t. Whisper, she waited for you. When he opens his eyes, the world is unchanged. A light flickers in Piero’s workshop, a shadow moves in front of the light. Corvo blinks his way down.
*****
“What Havelock and Pendleton say is true,” Piero murmurs in a careful monotone. His eyes are on his work – fingers fluttering over gears and clockwork or taking notes in a scrawling expressive hand – and it takes Corvo a moment to realize he’s not talking to himself. “The lines of succession are tangled up like a fisherman’s net. The Boyle family has a claim. The Pendleton family has a claim. The youngest Pendleton defers to the claim of his brothers. A few careful murders might do great things.”
There is a whale-oil tank hooked up to machinery, casting a soft blue glow over the room. The glass of the tank is polished. Corvo catches sight of Piero’s reflection in that glass and takes a half-step back. Wets his lips.
He’s not truly afraid. He has no reason to be afraid, not of this, not at all.
“Was this always their plan?”
“Yes,” says the Outsider-who-is-Piero, “no. If Emily were alive it would have taken them longer to realize it. You would have rescued her and brought her here, and played hide-and-seek with her in the attic, and Havelock would have listened to the two of you and thought of a ship that needs to be safely steered through a storm. He would have pretended he was doing the right thing.”
Corvo closes his eyes, breathes sharply through his nose. He has a sudden and horrible urge to hit someone, but the only someone here is Piero-who-isn’t. When he opens his eyes he finds that Piero is watching him, head cocked, and the light reflects off his glasses so that his eyes seem blazing and white and unreal.
“The powers I have given you have limits,” he says steadily, and Corvo steps back from an imaginary rooftop. “I am curious to see what you will do, now that you have none.”
Piero-who-isn’t slips the notes he’s been taking into his pocket, and gathers up a few audiograph tapes from around the workshop and tucks them under his arm. He does not look at Corvo as he leaves, walking in a steady and perfectly straight line, gaze fixed ahead on things beyond the waking world.
Corvo stands in the center of the office. He can hear voices in the distance, Piero and Samuel. Thrum of Samuel’s boat motor. The whale-oil tank purrs. On the table, gleaming, lie several clockwork explosives like the one left in Coldridge.
The Heart twitches in his pocket but does not speak.
It says no word until Corvo turns, on a garret-roof several city blocks away, and watches the Hound Pits blossom into orange and red and gold. Look, it cries, fireworks!
*****
He rushes through the city, falling from rooftop to rooftop, chimney to balcony to crumbling gutter-edge. If he stops, if he looks down or (Outsider help him, help him) looks ahead, the words of the Announcer on the air will settle around him like choking weeds. As long as he keeps moving, they stream out behind him like red banners. They don’t have to touch him. As long as he keeps moving, he doesn’t have to be moving toward anything; and the Heart will keep laughing in his pocket, delighting at the speed, delighting at the sensation of falling and Corvo catching himself, catching it -
He rushes through the Void, falling.
Scenes blossom around him. The streets build themselves before his running feet.
He chases Emily’s funeral procession, but it moves too fast for him to follow. The people throw white flowers and they are brown and rotten sludge under his feet by the time he reaches them.
Emily is sitting on the floor of the Hound Pits, cutting tea doilies out of newspapers, the knees of her stockings scraped raw.
Emily is balancing on Corvo’s feet and dancing with him in a small and windowless room that might be the cabin of a ship, her papers and pencils forgotten on the floor. She’s smiling. She’s reaching up. She peels the skull away from his face.
Emily is falling to her knees. Her hands are curled uselessly around the sword that’s sprouting out from just under her breastbone. It’s cutting her palms. She doesn’t seem to notice. Her mouth is open in a little o but her eyebrows scrunch together and it’s something like anger on her face. She is an Empress, this is not fair, and her eyes are wild and furious and there is something within them, something behind them like looking down a well, and Corvo is falling falling falling –
He jolts awake. It’s night. He’s curled, collapsed, on a filthy mattress in an abandoned apartment off Clavering Boulevard. The echoes of the funeral bells are hanging on the air. The last of the petals from the procession have long since been swept away before they even had time to truly touch the ground, much less fade, much less rot.
*****
Vengeance, Havelock had said, before Corvo had set a clockwork explosive underneath his room, is just as worthy a goal as putting the right person on the throne.
“Do you have goals, Corvo?” murmurs a voice out of the dark. The shadows of the Tower water lock are vertical and thickly hung. It is not hard to imagine the Outsider hanging here, incarnate, suspended, where the air smells of metal and stone and salt. “Do you have dreams beyond turning all of Dunwall into her funeral pyre? Everything you dream of is fixed, unchanging. I am beginning to wonder if the Heart that I gave you is merely a replacement for your own.”
Corvo doesn’t look up.
Of course he has goals. They are short. If he looks beyond them, if he looks toward a world where everyone who has had a hand in Emily’s death lies in ashes along with her –
His brain hits the logic of that, trips, and the Heart stirs in his pocket and whispers please don’t.
There are nights when he’s not sure why it seems to want him alive. There are nights when he’s not sure if he still is.
He clears the water lock. It’s a clear night. Seachlights sweep back and forth over the Tower grounds in wide swaths of silver. The Lord Regent is here, says the Heart. Its voice is very small, as ever. He is counting. He is always counting. It is like a clock ticking and ticking. It shivers. He didn’t know.
Corvo frowns.
He reaches into his pocket and touches two fingers to it. It’s very wet, very alive, and as ever it seems to quicken at his touch. He didn’t know, it repeats, only the flowers knew. That morning, the roses the one of the girls had left for her blossomed. It wasn’t the season. Emily looked at them and thought of fairy-tales and thought – would have thought –
It quiets. It beats. Corvo steps forward, unsteadily as ever. Shiver-blinks forward across the roof.
The gazebo where the Empress died is an empty wound amid the awful renovations that have infested the tower, white and spare. The wind howls among the pillars the way it howls in Corvo’s dreams. The air tastes of cold. The space where Jessamine should be is a ripped-open hole in the world, falling, and the wind whirls around him – and the Heart, softly, begins to cry.
She was not supposed to be there, it says. I am not supposed to be here. Why is it so lonely? Where are you?
Corvo cups its small little self in both his hands, but he can do nothing at all.
Where are you?
Corvo?
Mother?
*****
He moves like a gale through Dunwall Tower, and he is gone and moving again before the blood from Hiram Burrows’ throat has time to soak the blood-red carpets. The Outsider leaves no explosives for him, this time, and Corvo does not wish him to.
He stops for a few hours, finally, in a wreck of a room on the other side of the river. It is no better or worse than any other room in Dunwall. The food is rotting on the shelves. Weepers thump against the floor under his feet. There’s a rusty audiograph player on the desk, next to a stack of books on horticulture, and Corvo slumps into the chair and manages to feed the stolen tape into it before sleep drags him under. The sound of Burrows’ confession fills the room.
In Corvo’s pocket, under the Heart, sits the paper he’s stolen from the same safe and the name of where he must go next. Corvo sleeps, and the Heart beats (quickly, rabbit-like, alive), and it leaves a fine patina of blood upon the page. Red as the carpet on which Burrows had died, red as the fire that took the Hound Pits.
Red as the coat of the man that Corvo sees in the Void, again, and the blood his sword, and Emily’s hands scrabbling at the sword and trying to shove it backwards out of her body. Corvo walks a careful circle around the scene in the Void, hands curled tight into fists. His breath comes sharp and cold through his nose.
He studies Daud’s face. The way he hadn’t even taken the time to look Emily in the eye. Unlike her mother, he’d stabbed her from behind. Corvo studies the scene, learns it, despite the way it makes his stomach turn over and the hair prickle on the back of his neck, because this is a man he needs not just kill but murder: the spray of blood on the air, the flare of the mark on Daud’s gloved hand. The pencils scattered under Emily’s feet. The room where they are standing, where she had died, is small and windowless. It might be the cabin of a ship. It might be anywhere; it is possibility itself. There is one of her drawings on the wall, half-finished, a picture of Emily herself on the throne with a crown upon her head; and there are roses on the dresser, thorns sharp, flowers in full bloom, the full deep red of Daud’s coat and coals and blood.
*****
Don’t, says the Heart, as Corvo crouches on the rail above and watches Daud bend over his desk and expose the back of his neck.
Don’t, it says – because it would be an easy kill, an easy fall, but Corvo has moved so quickly through the commerce building that there are Whalers still patrolling the walkways and the halls outside. One of them would hear, many of them would come running. And he cannot – will not – fight off all of them at once.
It would be a quick fall and a very quick death.
Don’t, says the Heart. She waited for you.
He cups a hand against it, watches Daud with narrowed eyes.
It should be quick. Corvo has no need to speak to this man. Or, rather, he has no need to speak to him about Jessamine. He understands the necessity of doing a job. It was all he was, once, before Daud had ripped it away from him, before he’d had nothing in his heart but the void and the fall.
He realizes that he has not thought of Jessamine’s death, of Jessamine, for days.
He understands doing a job.
But Emily –
The Heart is shivering under his hand. Gears scraping the calluses on his fingers. He tried. It sounds so confused. He tried as… you… would have tried. The witch turned three seconds too early. The fire was purple, eating at the canvas. The broken glass on the ground looked like snowflakes. Its voice twists. Ugly. Jagged. He should be dead. He should be burning.He came so close.
Don’t, orders the Heart, as Corvo thinks of leaping down and opening Daud’s throat and not caring if the Whaler’s burst in the glass doors after him. She is still waiting for you.
*****
His sword drips onto the rotten wooden floors, and his coat drips a trail behind him, and his footsteps leave an off-kilter trail of slime and slimy water. Brigmore Manor is half sunk into the Wrenhaven. It is a dead thing, and everyone within it is dead.
“Except, perhaps,” says a voice from a slime-green shadow under the stairwell, “her.”
Corvo turns away from the Outsider, climbs the stair, blinks upward when a step gives way beneath him. All without a second thought.
He just needs to keep moving.
He has moved for two days, unsleeping. He has not even had time to wipe Daud’s blood from his sword; he’d glanced down a few hours ago to discover that it had dried there. The man Corvo had been before would have been horrified, if only for the sake of the steel. But the Outsider is right, and that man died somewhere in Coldridge Prison, and there is only one heart in this whole building that still and truly beats.
The halls echo with ghosts. Roses twine around each and every surface, but the flowers that were once red are withered and gone.
The witches are long gone, as Daud had said they would be. There had been red dribbling from the corner of his mouth as he spoke. Go, he’d spat, you asked why. Go look if you don’t believe me. Ask your friend in the dark. There had been red staining his teeth. Corvo had wanted to recoil. Had when Daud gave a raw sort of laugh. If things had gone differently you might have been thanking –
Then Corvo had put his blade through his mouth and he’d died, and the Whalers had each taken a half-step back from the watchful circle around him. Eyed him through expressionless glass eyes. He’d watched them blink away, one by one, obeying Daud’s final shouted command.
He’d wanted to chase. Hunt them down, one by one, over rooftops and city streets and quarantine lines and oceans and years. But he is so tired, and even though –
(Don’t, cries the Heart)
He is so tired.
He has not slept for days.
Corvo blinks and flits his way through empty and echoing halls, drawing rooms where the scent of smoke and powder and tea still lingers, ballrooms where dead bones rise up and lunge at him with snapping teeth. He can feel the Outsider watching him in every waterlogged corner, every veil-thin curtain or portrait where mildew has eaten the eyes, but the being says nothing. And the Heart, gratefully, is silent.
The studio is exactly where Daud said it would be.
The scorch marks are black and all-consuming. The designs and runes on the floor are all but completely obscured. There’s a constellation of glass by the portrait. The remains of a broken lantern. It glitters. The glass had been purple. The fire it caused must have been horrific, animate. There is nothing left but the bones of an easel and a few wispy scraps of canvas. No paint. A portal into emptiness.
Corvo picks up the soot-black metal frame of the lantern. Looks at it. Sets it down. He is a poor witch. He does not have the magic to make it burn again. There is no magic that can set this aright. There is no magic that can reawaken things that are dead.
The manor is silent around him, as if it is holding its breath.
He can think of nothing else to do, and so he sinks slowly and unsteadily to the floor and waits for the answer that will not come. The Outsider does not appear. The Heart says nothing, even when he draws it out. Corvo falls asleep that way, slumped against the easel, as the Heart whispers a bitter litany of so close, so close, so close against his fingertips that is too quiet for him to hear.
*****
The scene re-forms around him.
Time, in the Void, jitters and jerks like a puppet on a string. Corvo sees a woman, painting, humming under her breath. Her eyes are beetle-black, glittering and hard. This is the woman whose name Daud had hurled like a curse. Corvo watches her smile with small, white, sharp teeth.
Time ripples and Corvo blinks and runs madly through the air until he is here again, the same room, a different month’s light upon the walls. He watches her lift a lantern that is all the color of the Void and step through the painting, into the Void that she has painted therein.
Another blink, and Daud is in her place. The painting melts into color before him. He hears a sound, whirls, and as he startles back and moves to throw the witch’s blow aside his left arm goes wide and the lantern hits and bursts and flames upon the easel –
(And far away, in a room that might be anywhere and so can be a portal to nowhere, roses burst into blossom. A little girl looks up with Delilah Copperspoon’s eyes.)
A soft hand touches Corvo’s shoulder.
“You are a creature of patterns,” says the Outsider. He sighs. He sounds disinterested, moreso than usual. Disappointed. “I thought little Emily’s death would unshackle you.”
Corvo shakes his head. He’s not sure if the being’s words make sense, but he’s long past caring. He is so tired. “No such thing.”
“Of course not.” The scene begins to melt around them both. Daud is gone, the witch is gone, the fire is gone, until it is only Delilah’s painting and the long howling portal to the Void, unburnt. “After all,” the Outsider goes on, “I gave you the Heart of a living thing.”
And then he is gone.
The Void whispers around Corvo with a sound like the leaves of an ancient tree in the wind. He touches the canvas. The paint is still wet. The light in the painting is all sucked down to a single point. Falling. Corvo presses, gently, and his fingers sink in –
Falling -
*****
And deep in the twisting halls of the Void, the wind hisses through the leaves of a twisted, solitary tree with a sound like the waves of the waking world. The tree is very much alone. The outcropping of rock on which it stands is wholly alone, and empty of all but a few tufts of grass and white rocks and broken pillars. There are small places where a child might hide, or run, or play, but there are no playmates but the wind and the sound of her own voice.
Emily Kaldwin sits at the base of the tree with her arms wrapped around her knees, grass-stains upon her white stockings. The white of her blouse is stained red-black under her breastbone; the stitching, underneath, is thick and ugly. Her skin is pale. Her lips are faintly blue. Her chin is trembling but her eyes are flat and glittering and hard.
She stares out across the wide expanse of nothing that is her Empire.
A noise, and she looks up; and a smile breaks across her face as quick as lightning.