Dishonored--The Corroded Man

by Adam Christopher

  She felt better. Not a lot, but she felt better.

  It looked as if they were getting some answers from Rinaldo, who seemed very keen to cooperate. And whatever Rinaldo had had in his pocket, Corvo seemed to know what it was. She thought she could hear something else in his voice, a change, husky and echoing from behind his mask. It wasn’t fear—the Royal Protector was never frightened—but something else. A quiet, but deep, concern.

  Whatever the little thing was, it was important.

  There was a creak from somewhere above. Emily looked up. The upper levels of the mansion seemed to be just as rotting as this floor, which made sneaking around difficult. Even for someone as experienced as her.

  As experienced as Galia.

  The boards above were broken and gappy, and in this part of the house the roof itself had partially collapsed, allowing moonlight to stream in. Moonlight, which cast a brief, flitting shadow that moved across as Emily looked up and watched Galia hopping across the gap.

  Trying not to put a foot through the rotting floor herself, Emily stood and began to look for a way upstairs.

  * * *

  The upper floor of the house was even more difficult.

  The room she had been in, with the collapsed ceiling, was easy enough to navigate, the moonlight providing ample illumination as she skirted the holes in the floor. But beyond, the next room was in darkness, almost as though something—a large tree, perhaps—had fallen onto the roof, plugging any gaps and blocking the windows on the moonlit side of the house.

  Emily began to pick a path around the edge of the room, then discovered there was a door in the wall. It led to a smaller room that looked mostly intact and was, importantly, better lit. Here the window was free of debris—and of glass—and the moonlight streamed in, almost as bright as day.

  The room was square and empty, save for a series of old packing crates piled around the space, and what seemed to be a painter’s easel folded against one wall, along with a high stool. Perhaps the room had been used as a studio of some kind by the house’s previous owner. The easel didn’t have anything on it, although down by its legs there rested an empty rectangular wooden frame, the canvas that once stretched across it long having succumbed to the elements.

  Emily had no idea what had gone on at Brigmore in the past. All she knew were rumors and whispered stories from years ago, none of them remotely believable. But the fact that the house had been abandoned for so many years suggested that, perhaps, people were more than a little wary of its history.

  She cautiously stepped into the room, aware she was well lit by the moon, aware that the corners of the chamber were comparatively dark, the spaces behind the packing crates very handy spots from which to launch an ambush.

  As though confirming her thoughts, there was a sound.

  Emily spun around and saw a puff of inky nothing evaporating before her eyes. Then another movement, in the corner of her eye, the tingling sensation running up and down her arms. She spun around again, and was rewarded by a puff of darkness on the other side of the room as Galia blinked around the periphery.

  Toward the window.

  Emily didn’t think, she just acted. She flicked her wrist and the ingenious foldable crossbow she’d taken from the Whalers armory unfolded into her hand. She lifted it, bringing it to bear on the naked window frame just as the image of Galia briefly solidified from nothing.

  Emily fired, the crossbow bolt thudding into the wall. Galia was gone, only to puff back into existence on the other side of the chamber. Emily spun to see the Whaler shoving the lid off one of the packing cases and yanking something out—a sheaf of old, damp papers.

  Emily fired again, in rapid succession, studding the packing case and the wall behind it with the small, deadly bolts. She was too slow—Galia had moved already, and fast.

  Feeling a rush of air around her, Emily turned on the balls of her feet, firing the crossbow until its bolt quiver was empty. Galia was doing it deliberately, she realized, blinking once, twice, three times around the room, trying to disorient her opponent.

  Then something hit her in the stomach.

  Emily doubled over, her throat filling with a hot and bitter liquid, the air escaping her lungs. She staggered and collapsed into a sheet-covered armchair that shattered under her sudden weight, the crumbling wood turning to splinters. She looked up, coughing, to see Galia crouched in the window, her face still obscured by the mask, the papers sticking out of her tunic as she surveyed the ruined garden.

  Then she turned. Emily tried to pull herself upright.

  Galia was gone.

  Emily scrambled to the window. The garden was still lit by the bright light flooding out of the interrogation room on the ground floor. She saw the form of Galia, sprinting into the woods and vanishing into the darkness. The leader of the Whalers had a head start, but Emily had a fair idea of where she was going.

  Emily retrieved the crossbow bolts from the walls and the packing cases, and reloaded the quiver. Then she left the room, heading back out, returning to the garden and the woods via the branch of the great tree growing into the structure of the floor below.

  * * *

  The Whaler’s base of operations was deserted and quiet, the entire company of gangsters having gone to the raid at Brigmore. Emily didn’t know if any had survived their encounter with the united street gangs, or had managed to escape capture, but none had yet made it back to the slaughterhouse.

  Except for Galia.

  Emily had caught up with her easily as she skipped across the rooftops of the city. Galia, to her surprise, stuck to the streets, avoiding patrols and citizens alike by hiding in the shadows, using her conventional stealth abilities rather than her supernatural ability to transverse across space.

  After trailing her quarry for a while, Emily knew why. Galia appeared to be sick, or hurt, or both. At one point, she did use her blink ability, crossing from one shaded part of a narrow street to the other in order to avoid a couple giggling in the doorway of a tavern. Almost as soon as she had rematerialized, the Whaler had bent over and yanked her mask up before vomiting in the gutter.

  She didn’t blink again, after that.

  The heat of the factory floor was still intense and surprising. Once inside, Galia pulled her mask off and threw it to the floor as she headed for the metal staircase. She yanked her hood back and ran her hand through her thick thatch of greasy blonde hair.

  Emily ducked behind a big metal cauldron on wheels, and watched Galia climb up to the control room. Glancing up, she saw the strange man in the coat standing by the windows. He seemed to be watching the empty factory.

  She headed along the factory wall to another set of stairs leading up to the multi-level gallery, across from the control room. She had to get closer, though. Climbing to the office level, she padded along the grating on her toes, her progress silent, undetectable.

  And then she stopped.

  Across the factory from where she now crouched, the man in the coat came out onto the gallery in front of the control room. He moved to meet Galia, who was now making slow progress, pulling herself up the multiple flights of stairs with some difficulty.

  For Emily, the only way forward was the metal walkway, yet between her and the factory office was an open section that was far too well lit. Standing as he was outside of the office, facing her direction, the man in the coat would see her, and easily.

  Galia reached her boss and the pair began talking.

  Emily looked around for options. There were higher gallery levels, and more stairs that led up to the same fire escape door she had come through before. That gave Emily a choice. Looking up at the slaughterhouse ceiling, Emily saw it was supported by a crisscross lattice of girders that stretched across the entire building, built to support the sliding cranes that moved the whale frames around.

  The metalwork looked passable, but dangerous—one false move, and she would plummet two hundred feet to the factory floor below. But she could reach it from the t
opmost platform. All she needed was to jump across a ten-foot gap, and then she could move across to the control room. In fact, she would be right above it.

  Time was pressing. She took a deep breath and headed up. Within a few moments she was at the top platform, roughly level with the ceiling’s framework. She looked down over the gap—the factory floor was a long way down, and there was little room to get a run-up. In any event, that would have been too noisy on the rattling metal gallery.

  Emily rolled her neck, rolled her shoulders. She remembered her training, the hours—the years—of practice. This was what it was all for. She took two steps back, and then darted forward, throwing herself across the gap.

  Her hands met the edge of the girder.

  She pulled.

  One hand slipped off. Emily swallowed a gasp and, for a second that stretched into an eternity, she swung out over the gap, supported by only the fingers of her right hand, her legs wheeling through nothing.

  Grimacing, she pulled with all her might, lifting herself just a fraction, but enough for her other hand to find purchase. Then she pulled with both arms and slid forward onto the girder on her stomach, twisting around so her body was parallel to it. The girder itself was perhaps a foot wide and the same deep, but it was solid and unmoving, and didn’t rattle like the stairs and platforms.

  She clung onto the girder, counting the seconds in her head, feeling the sickening thud of her heart in her chest.

  Ignoring the height, she lifted herself up and looked ahead and down, toward the control room a couple of hundred yards ahead of her and a hundred or so feet below. The man in the coat and Galia were still talking, the Whaler kneeling in front of him.

  Emily got up. The girder’s span was about ten feet before another girder intersected it at a right angle, forming a larger—safer—platform. Emily was short on time, but she thought she could make it across fairly quickly.

  At a half crouch, arms out only a little for balance, she ran to the first frame intersection, paused, then headed to the next. In a few short moments she had crossed the factory floor and was nearly directly above the pair talking on the gallery. She fell back into a crouch and leaned forward to listen to what they were saying.

  “They were waiting for us,” Galia said.

  “How many?”

  “Enough. More than enough. We matched for numbers, but…”

  “But?”

  Galia shook her head. “They weren’t City Watch. They looked like a street gang—one of the old ones, back from the days of the Rat Plague. The Bottle Street Gang, or the Hatters. Maybe both.” She rubbed her face. “The Dead Eels, too. Oh, I don’t know.”

  “No matter.”

  “No matter?” Galia pulled herself to her feet. “What about all this? You just lost your entire workforce.”

  The man in the coat tilted his head, like he was thinking it over.

  “You escaped.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Others got away. They will return soon.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “Do you trust me, Galia?”

  “What? Trust you? After all this, you ask if I trust you?”

  The man in the coat ignored her. “Did you get what I needed?”

  At this, Galia paused. “They were exactly where you said they would be.” Then she pulled the documents out of her tunic and handed them over. The man in the coat took them with one hand, and he held the other out, palm up, as if he was waiting for something else.

  Galia swung her shoulder bag around from her back and pulled open the flap. She paused, then reached inside.

  “This isn’t going to be enough. We were supposed to empty the entire tomb.”

  As Emily watched, Galia pulled out a skull. It was missing the jawbone, but was otherwise intact. It looked old, dusty. She placed it in the man’s open hand. He lifted it, turned it around to look into its empty sockets.

  “No,” the man said, his voice a sibilant hiss from behind his scarf. “You have done well, Galia. You have done very well.”

  “Is… is this enough?”

  “It is, it is,” he said. “More would have been better, but there is enough material here to craft the charm I require, especially as I now have these parchments from the house. The previous occupant knew much about sorcery that will be useful.”

  Then he dropped his hand and he jerked his head up, his red-glassed eyes scanning the ceiling.

  Emily stifled a gasp and ducked down, flattening herself against the iron girder. Had she been heard, or seen? She held her breath, her ears alive for any sound.

  “What is it?” Galia asked, following his gaze.

  Emily could hear the man in the coat breathing heavily behind his scarf.

  “Perhaps nothing,” the man whispered. “Or perhaps something else entirely.”

  Emily stared at the black metal of the girder. She heard the two move on the gallery below, and then the man spoke again.

  “You have done well, Galia. We can proceed.”

  Galia muttered something. Emily took the chance and peered around the girder. The two below had turned, their backs to her, and were talking in low voices.

  Then Emily felt the blood rush in her ears. She felt her heart kick. She felt awake, alive, ready for action. She could take them. It was perfect. They had their backs to her. There was ample space between the girders to drop down, right on top of them. They wouldn’t even know it was coming.

  She could stop this. She could stop this right now.

  Emily pulled herself into a crouch and slinked farther along the girder. The crossbow was no use to her now, but the Whaler’s uniform she had borrowed had come with something else.

  She pulled the knife from her belt. It couldn’t have been more perfect.

  And then…

  And then she hears laughter and she hears screaming and the lightning flashes.

  And then she sees Corvo separating High Overseer Khulan’s head from his body and the warm blood arcs across the throne room.

  And then she hears someone call out, asking for more, more, more.

  The voice belongs to Emily, Empress of the Isles. She commands and Corvo listens and now he has another in his grip.

  The Royal Executioner looks up and grins at the Empress, and the Empress laughs and the lightning flashes and the blade in Corvo’s hand flashes as he runs it across the throat of the screaming noble in his grip.

  The noble is Wyman. Dead.

  And Corvo laughs.

  And Emily, too.

  Emily stood up on the girder. The slaughterhouse disappeared in a collapsing tunnel of darkness as she passed out.

  She toppled sideways, falling, falling.

  15

  GREAVES AUXILIARY WHALE SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5, SLAUGHTERHOUSE ROW, DUNWALL

  12th Day, Month of Darkness, 1851

  “I have postulated here that time itself is an illusion, not so much the inevitable decline of a system from order into chaos, but merely an additional aspect of space, the nature of which is not immediately obvious. If a solid object is said to occupy a space by virtue of its length, breadth, and volume, can the same object be not said to likewise occupy the measureable dimension of ‘duration?’”

  — THE HUNGRY COSMOS

  Excerpt from a larger work on the movement

  of the spheres by Anton Sokolov

  When Corvo saw Emily fall he was down on the floor of the slaughterhouse, examining the chains of the huge frame that had been welded and bolted together next to the churning vat of what looked like molten glass.

  He’d seen her running through the woods from Brigmore Manor, recognizing his own daughter immediately—the way she moved, the way she leapt down the big tree that touched the house and then sprinted into the woods—despite the Whaler’s outfit she appeared to be wearing. He had followed her, leaving the cooperative Rinaldo in the safe hands, not of Slackjaw and his men, but of Jameson, with instructions to get him straight back to the Tower.

/>   The strange bonecharm was still in Corvo’s pocket. That, he couldn’t let out of his possession. He needed to study it, examine it. And he would need the High Overseer’s help in figuring out just what kind of weird charm it was.

  On the way to the slaughterhouse he’d kept out of sight. That Emily had left the Tower was not a surprise—but that she was dressed as a Whaler certainly was.

  And she was following a trail, chasing something. Something that had to be important.

  He had watched from the shadows of the slaughterhouse as Emily climbed the gantry and jumped up onto the girder framework suspended from the ceiling. That had been sloppy. Emily must have known it, because after nearly missing the jump, she then crossed the roof supports carefully and with cautious ease.

  From down on the floor, Corvo could see the two targets—the Whaler and the man in the coat. Emily was a lot closer to them than he was.

  Good. She was learning. True enough, Corvo knew he should be angry with her, but he felt a pride within him—that she was out there, using her training, the Empress working hard to defend her own city, like no ruler before her ever had.

  And then she had fallen.

  Corvo acted instinctively. He leaped forward, the Mark of the Outsider burning on his hand as he called on the Void to rush into their world, the swirling eddies of two different, incompatible dimensions allowing time itself to be frozen, just—from Corvo’s point of view—for a few short moments. The effort was immense and he couldn’t keep it up too long. He had three vials of Addermire Solution with him, but that was all.

  Emily’s body froze in mid-air, the whole factory suddenly rendered in flickering black and white. Corvo gritted his teeth with the exertion, then blinked up to the platform above his head to reach the second level of the factory.

  He spun around, sighted the girders in the ceiling. Too high. Instead he focused on the next gallery level above. Level three. Good enough for now.

  He blinked, then gasped for air as he materialized on the gallery. He already felt heavy, slow. He turned to check on Emily. She was still suspended, a butterfly caught in amber, but already he could feel the drain. Any moment now he would need to release his hold on time and she would hit the factory floor.