She turns around. She watches as he pulls off the mask, grabbing it by the can-shaped respirator. His short hair is slicked back. The heavy scar runs down the right side of his face from forehead to jaw. His eyes are bright but cold.
She stands tall. She doesn’t break his gaze. She doesn’t make a sound.
“You followed me,” he says. “Found this place, and now you’re not begging or running for your life.”
She lifts her chin, and takes a step forward. “There is nowhere to run,” she says, “and I’m not very attached to it, to tell the—”
The words die in her throat. The man reaches toward her, palm up, waiting for her to take his hand, to join him. Except…
Except he is not the man she followed. Gone is the hooded jacket, the heavy gloves, the thick belts crisscrossing the barrel chest. The man who now stands before her is small and slim, his hair black and shiny, the bangs jagged over his forehead. His face is lit by a blue light that comes from nowhere.
His eyes are a bottomless, unfathomable black.
He laughs. She falls to her knees. Behind him, the room dissolves and she can see the infinite smoky nothing orbiting the world of hard, metallic rock on which he stands.
She knows him; she knows this place.
The Outsider stands in the Void, offering his hand.
“Our business is not yet finished, Billie Lurk,” he says.
She feels the creeping cold before she hears the crackling, the sound of splintering wood, of ice splitting on the surface of a lake.
Billie looks down, and watches as the black metallic stone shifts underneath her, moving up her legs, enclosing them, transforming her flesh and bone into the stuff of the Void itself. The rock moves up her body, inch by inch.
She reaches out to the Outsider, but her hand and arm are already made of Void stone.
She screams, and the world goes dark. The only thing she can hear is the Outsider’s laugh.
1
DUNWALL, GRISTOL
4th Day, Month of Wind, 1853
Billie Lurk woke with a start, her heart pounding in her chest, her breath steaming in the cold air of the small room she—temporarily, at least—called home.
She sat up, and shoved the blankets off her. Despite the chill air, she was too hot, her skin slick with an oily sweat. As her heart rate settled, she rubbed her face and blew out her cheeks.
The dream, again.
She lay back and closed her eyes, stretching her muscles, which were stiff and sore from another night on the hard mattress. The memory—the immediacy—of the dream began to fade, and she began to relax.
It was the same each morning, and had been for weeks now. She’d lost count of the number of times she had awoken suddenly, yanked out of her nightmare in a kind of blind terror that, thankfully, abated as soon as she came to her senses.
The dream. Okay… no, it wasn’t, strictly speaking, the same dream every time. But there was a sort of formula, a pattern to them—the dreams pulled on long-buried memories, throwing her back into her past, showing her slices of her personal history she would rather not revisit. But each time, events in the dream began just as she remembered them: same people, same places, same snatches of conversation—although she knew not to rely on those parts.
And, each time, just where she didn’t expect it, something would change. The memory twisted, events in her past unraveling into nightmares.
Nightmares featuring one central character.
The Outsider.
Billie sighed, and flung the rest of the blankets off the bed before swinging her legs over the side. She leaned her elbows on her thighs for a moment, and stared at the bare floorboards as she counted, just to be sure she really was awake, just to be sure the Outsider didn’t appear right there in front of her, in a puff of smoke, laughing as he always did in the dream. She knew she was awake because her right arm, the one that wasn’t flesh and blood but instead a twisted collection of Void-stone shards held together by some arcane magic, started to ache with a bone-deep chill—which was ironic, considering there was no bone in the limb. But ache it always did after the dreams, and Billie knew that the increasingly intense throbbing pain would soon be joined by a headache, one that started behind the thing in her head that wasn’t her own eye, but which was a sliver of one that had belonged to some divinity long since departed.
She took a breath and stood. The morning air was cold—in fact, the room was freezing, but she had little choice in her lodgings. She didn’t know how long she was going to stay in Dunwall, but what little money she had left she had to guard closely. The corner room in the attic of a tavern in one of the less salubrious neighborhoods of Dunwall was pure luxury compared to some of the places she had once called home. Here, she had a roof over her head and a narrow single bed and a rickety, lopsided table beneath a small leaded window that didn’t close properly. Billie ducked her head under the sharp angle of the ceiling that jutted down beside the bed and pushed the window open. The stiff hinge protested with a harsh squeal, and the cold morning air wafted in over her skin. It felt warmer than the chill in her arm, and she angled her shoulder, taking a moment to enjoy the sensation.
Yes, the dreams were different each time. And she didn’t normally dwell on them—bad dreams were a part of life now, not just for her, but for everyone, right across the Empire of the Isles—but this one was… well, it was different different.
This one was the first time she had dreamed of Daud.
The Knife of Dunwall. Leader of the Whalers. The man who had saved her, so many, many years ago, granting her a new life, one she had enjoyed before she very nearly threw it all away—only to be saved by him a second time.
Daud, her mentor. Her friend.
He was dead now, of course. It had been a year now, more or less, but this was the first time she had dreamed of him. She didn’t know whether she should be grateful for that or not. Because since the death of Daud, and the fall of the Outsider, dreams were not the same. They were dangerous things, powerful enough to drive a person out of their mind. That she had gotten off so lightly was something she didn’t take for granted, although she knew it was probably because of the Green Lady she habitually took now. Word of the effectiveness of the herb had spread, and the price had been rising steadily over the last few months. Another expense Billie had to be very careful with.
As for the other man in the dream—well, he was there, each and every night. Billie didn’t know if other people dreamed of the Outsider. It was hard to know, now, given that the nightmares, so widely reported in the days and weeks that had followed Billie’s journey into the Void, had faded from public interest. When everybody was plagued with the same disease, nobody wanted to read about it.
Billie thought that was fair enough.
And she also knew that dreams were dreams and that Daud was dead and the Outsider was gone, and that he wasn’t coming back, no matter what he said to her each and every night while she slept.
Billie leaned out of the window, breathing in the fresh air. Finally, she began to feel the cold, but as she reached to close the window, the clouds parted and a shard of morning sun pierced the gloom of the city, spotlighting her small corner of it. For a moment, Billie closed her eyes and enjoyed the warmth on her face and pretended she was someone else, somewhere else. Her headache began to ease, and as she absently flexed her magical right arm, the dull ache began to leave it too.
Then she opened her eyes, squinting into the light. The city of Dunwall stretched out in front of her, the densely packed, angled slate roofs shining from the night’s rain. It was, she had to admit, remarkably pretty, and as she leaned farther out and inhaled deeply, she smelled earth and stone, and she smelled water and…
Billie grimaced, and then she pulled back into the room and laughed, one hand pressed firmly against her nose.
Oh, yes, that was the Dunwall she remembered.
Then the laughter died in her throat and she stood by the window, staring out at the
view, and she wondered how long the beautiful, ugly, sparkling, fragrant city had left to live.
2
DRAPERS WARD, DUNWALL
4th Day, Month of Wind, 1853
One month. That was how long Billie had been back in Dunwall, and after a year on the road, it already felt like a lifetime. But it also felt like a homecoming, and—for now, anyway—she enjoyed the relative stability. The capital of the Empire was where she had done most of her growing up, where she had learned the skills needed to survive. After so long away, she had to admit that she had felt Dunwall calling to her.
Standing in the doorway of the Lucky Merchant pub, the down-at-heel tavern that she was calling home, Billie wrapped the heavy Tyvian greatcoat around her and did up the double row of buttons almost to the neck, before pulling the huge collar up around her ears. The wet mornings in the city were cold, and the sun always seemed to take an age to warm the granite and slate of the place. And besides, Billie hadn’t really felt warm—properly, comfortably warm—since…
Well, not since that day, when she entered the Void and changed… everything.
From the pocket of the greatcoat, she took a large eyepatch of black leather and slipped it over her head, adjusting it so it covered the Sliver of the Eye of the Dead God that was still embedded in her right eye socket. Since the fall of the Outsider, the Sliver hadn’t fallen silent, exactly, but the powers it once granted had faded, the magic sleeping, slow to stir when she called upon it, so she didn’t. Having the arcane object in her skull didn’t impede her at all—she could still see perfectly well with it—and, even without the eyepatch, it didn’t attract the same kind of attention it used to, not since a small proportion of the population had started to modify their own bodies, desperate to find a way to stop the dreams. In her travels over the last year, she had seen men with the shattered fragments of bone charms pierced through their skin like fish hooks, seen women with weird tattoos covering their faces, as if the hieroglyphs—most likely random shapes half-remembered from runes, their protective properties a fiction created by the backstreet artists who offered to ink their unwitting client’s skin for a healthy weight of coin—would protect them from their night terrors. Among the more aristocratic classes, there had even been a fashion for embedding gemstones in the skin, the shiny, cut facets of emerald and ruby arranged in geometric patterns over the cheeks, arms, hands.
Billie found some modifications more repulsive than others, but she also used it to her advantage, the Sliver going mostly unnoticed during her travels. Although sometimes it attracted comment, usually from those carrying their own strange marks, who took the glowing red gem in her eye socket as a more extreme—and therefore more interesting—modification. But today, she could do without any attention and without the distraction, particularly where she was heading. The mission was hard enough, and Billie needed the anonymity more than anything, at least for now.
Mission. Mission.
Billie rolled the word around inside her head as she walked through the city. Was it really a mission? True enough, she had come back to Dunwall with a specific purpose in mind, but calling it a mission seemed a little… well, it seemed a little pretentious. Daud would have called it a mission, she thought, chuckling into the collar of her greatcoat.
Ah, Daud. Hardly a day had passed since the fall of the Outsider that hadn’t brought him to mind. She took solace in that. It was as if he was with her, by her side as she traveled the Isles. She remembered the tales of his life after his exile from Dunwall on the orders of the Royal Protector, Corvo Attano—the stories he told of his years of wandering, searching for some kind of meaning and purpose to a life he now found… unmoored. He’d found that purpose. It was one that consumed him, became him, leading him on a quest of his own, where eventually he would find his way back to Karnaca. There Billie had found him, freed him, helped him. The master and the apprentice, together again, on one final mission, one last time.
Billie marched on down the streets of Dunwall. Here she was, on her own mission. She wondered if she was just repeating the cycle of exile, journey, return, following the same path Daud had taken, not because she had found a purpose of her own but because it was the only thing she really knew.
No, that wasn’t it. She really did have a mission, she told herself as she crossed into Drapers Ward. It was still early, the city only just starting to wake up, but already the merchant stores that lined the streets of this area were bustling with activity as shops were opened, blinds were raised, and barrels and carts were wheeled out onto the cobbles, the finest wares available in Dunwall showcased for all to peruse. Billie passed two neighboring shops, both with aproned workers outside furiously scrubbing in silent competition to see whose doorstep was the cleanest. Nobody paid Billie the slightest bit of attention. The streets were quiet but far from empty, and she walked with purpose, collar high, head down, hands thrust into the pockets of the greatcoat acquired on her last trip to the frozen northern Isles. If the merchants and traders of Drapers Ward had suffered a bad night of terrors, none of them showed it. Perhaps, like Billie, they had all discovered the benefits of chewing Green Lady.
Of course, not everybody could afford the herb, and even if they could, it didn’t always work. For Billie, it dulled the dreams but also dulled her mind, and while she wasn’t entirely sure that was ideal, it was better than succumbing fully to the night terrors. For those who hadn’t found some kind of balm, herbal or otherwise, she couldn’t imagine how they functioned.
Because the dreams were getting worse. Billie had wondered, at first, whether the effects of Green Lady were simply fading as her body became tolerant of the herb. But she had spent a month now listening to the chatter in the pubs and shops of Dunwall, eavesdropping on tales told by sailors fresh off the ships that docked at the many ports that lined the Wrenhaven River, reading the newspapers—especially those imported from Morley and Tyvia, where the editors were looser with their language than the Dunwall press. It seemed that, indeed, the situation was getting worse, not better.
It had started almost as soon as Billie had returned from the Void. Stepping back into the world felt… different. It wasn’t anything you could see—the sea and the sky and the ground were all still where they were supposed to be. She remembered the sense of relief she felt when the world was still where it was supposed to be. But after a while, she realized that something had changed.
It was just a feeling, nothing more, but Billie knew she was different—existing apart from the world, somehow, through no fault of her own—so she trusted her instincts. For some weeks after her return, Billie stayed in Karnaca, and each night she slept like she had never slept before.
And then the dreams started. They didn’t worry her, not at first. She had been a dreamer all her life, and nightmares were not unusual. But the dreams she’d had before were nothing more than a consequence of the life she had led, most likely. An inconvenience that occasionally woke her but which was soon forgotten.
When the screams started, she knew something was wrong.
But the screams were not hers. They were coming from somewhere else, drifting in through the windows she kept open on the hot and humid Karnacan nights. And they were not the screams of violence, the shouts and cries and wails that were paired with pain and torment, sounds associated with acts of crime, or, conversely, the heavy hand of the Grand Serkonan Guard. Billie had lived her kind of life long enough to know those kinds of screams only too well.
These were screams of fear, the sound of a pure, primal terror. The first night, as she jerked up in bed, heart pounding, ripped from a nightmare of her own, she had thought they were just a part of her own dream world. But on the second night, she heard them when she was awake, and then she heard them again and again, night after night, as she sat by the window, watching Karnaca.
It seemed that nearly everybody in the city was dreaming, their nightmares becoming night terrors, the visions so real, so awful, that they sent people running out fr
om their homes and into the streets. After a few more nights, Billie had stayed up, waiting for the cacophony, and had then gone out to investigate, but all she found were dazed residents of the city wandering around in the dark, meeting fellow dreamers, exchanging bewildered conversations, some even breaking down in each other’s arms. Soon, the Grand Guard began increasing their night patrols, doing their best to guide confused people back to their residences. Billie trailed the patrols, listening to their conversations, and from them she learned that Karnaca was not the only city affected by the terrors of the night. It was, at least according to rumors if not official reports, happening all over the Empire, from Tyvia to Morley, from Gristol to Serkonos.
So, yes, something had happened. The world had changed, and Billie knew it was, if not her fault, exactly, then a very real consequence of her actions.
The Outsider was gone, and the world had changed.
That was when the Sliver of the Eye of the Dead God began to burn. It was subtle at first, an irritation Billie had hardly even noticed, but over the next days and weeks, the pain slowly grew, eventually becoming so bad, so intense, it felt as though her head was being crushed in a vise. The pain came and went, but she never knew when it would be at its worst, although drawing on the power of the Sliver certainly didn’t help, and even then she didn’t know whether the artifact’s fading, erratic abilities would be available for her use.
Chewing Green Lady seemed to help, although to take the edge off the pain as well as dull the dreams meant she was chewing rather a lot of it. But it was better to be functional, at least, rather than spending days in dark rooms, wishing the pain away, trying not to fall asleep in case the night terrors came, unchecked.
But her supply of the herb was running low, and before she could return to her mission, she had to restock. Fortunately, Dunwall was one of the best places to get it.
Dishonored--The Veiled Terror Page 2