Dishonored--The Veiled Terror

by Adam Christopher

  And who knew what powers his strange knife possessed?

  Billie blinked away the colors, and took a careful step sideways. Woodrow watched her. He swept the bright blade of the knife from side to side, cutting the empty air between himself and his two opponents. Behind the serving counter, Jacko was rolling his shoulders, ready to deal with this new level of annoyance from a problem customer. The key, Billie understood, was to get Woodrow out in one piece. This section of Wyrmwood district was close to the relative safety of Dunwall proper, and while it was a little rough and tumble, venturing into the stores and markets that occupied this end of Mandragora Street was hardly considered a dangerous pastime. Indeed, enough of Dunwall’s reputable citizenry gave this part of the district their custom that it was in the interests of the businesses here—legitimate or otherwise—to keep the area clear of crime and violence. In fact, it was up to them entirely, given that the City Watch refused to patrol here.

  Or, to put it another way, a drug-addicted former Overseer threatening people with a weird knife was bad for business.

  Woodrow seemed unsure what to do next. It was clear that his desperation for Addermire Solution had driven any kind of logical decision-making out of his head. But even armed as he was, he couldn’t take out Jacko—and he certainly couldn’t take out both him and Billie.

  Could he? Billie watched the knife again, wondering what it was and where it had come from. Almost without conscious thought, she flexed the fingers of her black shard arm, ready to summon her own Void-touched weapon into being.

  Then she stopped herself, and fast. The power of her arm, like her eye, had become unpredictable, unreliable. Summoning the Twin-bladed Knife would either bring the weapon into her hand or send a bolt of pain shooting through her body, so intense that she would be lucky if she woke up before the week was out.

  Now was not the time to experiment. She would have to rely on her natural abilities, as she had done for nearly a year, to help the apothecary, if she was to get what she had come for. Behind her, she heard Jacko crack his knuckles.

  Time was up.

  The apothecary walked over to one side of the serving counter and swung a hinged portion of it up, stepping through as he did so. At this, Woodrow jerked into life, pressing himself against the shelf behind him, knife held in his outstretched arm. As the countertop banged shut, he jumped in fright, the sudden movement sending the shelves rocking, dislodging a few tins, which bounced harmlessly on the flagstones. Two large glass jars shattered, sending their contents—some kind of light, dried flower—puffing up into the air, filling the store with a cloying, sweet smell of decay.

  “All right, all right, you’ve really done it this time, my son,” said Jacko, rolling the sleeves of his white coat up, revealing a set of dark, complex tattoos covering both his forearms. The designs might just be decorative, or perhaps they were a set of ancient runeshapes which he believed would protect him and his business. “I’ve had enough for one morning. I’ve a business to run, and now you really do owe me for damages incurred.”

  Jacko took a step forward, and Woodrow swung with the knife, the blade flaring in Billie’s eye. There was still at least two yards between the two men, and the action did nothing to arrest Jacko’s progress as he marched forward, ready to throw the errant customer bodily out of the store.

  That was when Woodrow let out a sound that was somewhere between a scream of rage and one of grief. He stood tall and turned the knife on himself, slashing the blade down his chest before tearing the remains of his jacket off, exposing his white chest. Then he adjusted his grip on the knife’s makeshift handle and stabbed the point just under his collarbone. Crying out with the effort, he began carving lines into his flesh.

  Jacko paused, brow knitted in confusion. He stepped back, just as Billie moved forward to help him. They looked at each other in confusion, then Jacko turned back to Woodrow.

  “You will not bloody well bleed all over my floor too!” said Jacko, shaking his head, his huge hands curling into fists. “You little piece of excreta, I’ll bottle your liver and sell it for gout, you little—”

  Jacko froze. Billie stared at him, wondering what the problem was, and then saw the muscles in the apothecary’s neck were rigid, the tendons standing out like cables, as he shook, frozen in place.

  Just then, the Sliver flared again, the burning pain spreading out over her whole face. Billie gasped as the pain took hold. Through the roaring of the blood in her ears, she heard something else.

  “Yram da haal, yram da haelt, tilb mal, yram, yram.”

  Woodrow’s face twitched and his eyes rolled back into his head. He repeated the strange words, even as he kept working the tip of his blade in his flesh. Billie focused once more, concentrated, and staggered forward toward Jacko. He rocked on his heels as she grabbed him, but didn’t otherwise move as she used his body as an anchor, pulling herself around toward Woodrow. Her lungs heaved as her vision was once more clouded with the red and blue images coming off Woodrow’s blade.

  The crash that followed helped clear her head. Recovering, at least partially, Billie looked over her shoulder and saw that Jacko had toppled over like a felled tree. His stiffened neck muscles had, fortunately, stopped him from being brained on the flagstones, but as Billie watched he began convulsing, his eyes wide, a white foam bubbling at the corners of his mouth.

  Woodrow had slid down to the floor, his back against the shelf, blood pouring down his chest and his arm. He was still holding onto the knife, but the blade had stopped moving, the tip stuck in a cut just below his ribcage. Around him, his blood had mixed with the spilled dried flowers and was congealing into a dark, sticky mess.

  Billie took a step forward, and then another, but it was hard. Another nightmare brought to life, the endless battle against an invisible force. She could see Woodrow’s lips move as he continued to mumble.

  “Eco, lazar, lapolay, yram. Eco, lazar, lapolay, yram.”

  Billie had no idea what language he was speaking, and she didn’t rightly care. It was clearly an incantation of some kind, some crude, nascent manipulation of Void energy—helped by his knife?—that was actually managing to have an effect on the world.

  An effect that was getting stronger. The sweat broke out on Billie’s forehead as her struggle to reach Woodrow became harder and harder. The shelf behind him was shaking violently of its own volition, and from behind her she heard a series of loud cracks as the glass cases by the serving counter began to split open.

  She had seen sorcery before. It had to be connected to the knife. Billie was grateful she was strong enough to resist.

  For now, anyway.

  She gritted her teeth and found a low growl developing somewhere deep in her chest. The scream that followed surprised even her, as she leapt through the air toward the former Overseer. Woodrow, locked into a trance, didn’t see her coming.

  As soon as their bodies connected, the effects of the man’s incantation broke. For the briefest of moments Billie felt suspended in time, at just the point where her raised forearm connected with Woodrow’s chin. Then the moment passed, and Billie landed on Woodrow, the young man crumpling onto the flagstones with Billie on top of him. Immediately, Woodrow began to twitch beneath her, his spasms increasingly violent. Billie pressed down on him, willing the seizure to stop. After a few moments, Woodrow’s body relaxed, the fit passing. He sighed, his head lolling to one side, as he fell unconscious.

  “Stone me!”

  Billie climbed off the young man and turned around to see Jacko approaching. The apothecary rubbed the back of his head with one hand, the other wiping the flecks of foam from his lips, but the big man looked otherwise no worse for wear. He stood over Woodrow, looking down at the man’s twisted body.

  “I’ll tell you,” said Jacko, “I’ve had my fair share of scum come through those doors, but none of them ever carved themselves up in my shop just because I refused to extend any more credit.” He sighed, and peered down at the former Overseer
. “Here, he’s not dead, is he?”

  Billie shook her head. “No, only unconscious.”

  “More’s the pity,” said Jacko. He carefully knelt down next to the slumbering body, trying his best to keep out of the mess of dried flowers and blood on the floor. He peered at the knife, Woodrow’s fingers still loosely curled around the grip. “Odd sort of blade,” said Jacko. “Looks homemade, like he chipped it out of stone.” He shrugged. “I would have thought metal would have been better. Even someone living in the gutters could find a piece of old scrap around to make a shiv out of.”

  In Billie’s vision, the knife still bled a red and blue aura. It made the Sliver sing in her head.

  It was stone. Jacko was right; she could see it now. A shard of stone, chipped into a rudimentary but perfectly serviceable blade.

  She had a feeling she knew exactly what kind of stone it was.

  “I think it might be an artifact,” she said. “Something connected to the Void.”

  Jacko turned his head over his shoulder to look at Billie. His lips were pursed, but his eyes were wide with interest.

  “You reckon so?”

  Billie shrugged. “He was getting the power from somewhere. That was no ordinary sorcery.”

  “That it wasn’t,” said Jacko, rubbing the back of his head again. He began peeling Woodrow’s fingers off the knife. “Still, there’s no accounting for stupidity. If he was so desperate for Addermire’s he could just have paid me with this.” The knife freed, Jacko examined it, turning it over carefully in his hands. “There’s a good trade in artifacts these days.” He held it up. “Nice. Very nice.”

  Billie glanced down at Woodrow. The young man was still bleeding, the pool growing beside his body. “How long has he been a customer?”

  Jacko was still admiring his new acquisition. “Mmm? Oh, a few months now,” he said. “The amount of Addermire Solution he got through, I figured he was buying on behalf of a whole group of them. Y’know, more Overseers. He never said, but I didn’t ask any questions and his money was as good as anybody’s. And trust me, I wasn’t complaining. Addermire Solution is, shall we say, a rare vintage indeed, with a price to match.”

  Billie frowned. “Bought using money stolen from the Abbey, I presume?”

  Jacko just shrugged. “What do I care? Coin is coin. Platinum is platinum. Although with the Abbey dissolved, trade in their ingots is outlawed, so you have to be careful with them.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the back of the shop. “But I have my own crucible. Can never get it hot enough to completely melt the things, but enough to soften it so as I can stamp it into new molds.” He turned the knife over in his hand, then used it to point at Woodrow. “Except then he ran out of it.”

  “And you gave him credit?” That didn’t sound like the usual kind of business practice for a storekeeper in Wyrmwood, even one at the more polished, if not quite respectable, edge of the district.

  “Well,” said Jacko, spreading his hands, “he was a good customer and all. I’d made a tasty profit from him, and he said he had more money. I wasn’t going to turn off that particular stream of revenue, know what I mean?”

  “Except he didn’t come back with any more money,” said Billie.

  “Ah, no, that he did not. And yes, perhaps I was stupid. I didn’t see him for a while, and then he started coming in, and he was begging now. At first he seemed to understand what ‘no’ meant, but each time he came in, he got more and more desperate. I mean, look at the state of him! He never looked that bad. Bloody addicted to that stuff, I reckon.”

  Jacko turned and stepped back behind the counter, inspecting the cracked glass of the cabinets.

  “Bloody hell, what a palaver.” He whistled through his teeth. “Still, he’s paid for the damages.” Jacko tossed the knife end over end in one hand, then he stopped and looked back over his shoulder. “Here, is he still bleeding over my bleeding floor?”

  “He is.”

  “Well now,” said Jacko, bending down to retrieve something from beneath the counter. He emerged a moment later, holding a bundle of crepe bandage and a handful of colored cleaning cloths. “I suppose I should patch him up before I throw him out. A customer bleeding on the doorstep is not a good look, and I do still happen to be an apothecary.” He paused. “Here, thanks for the help, lady. I’m assuming you came by for something in particular. Give us a hand again and maybe I can arrange a bit of a discount.”

  With that, he tossed the bundle to Billie. She caught it, then sighed, and knelt on the ground and began to unwind the bandages.

  As she worked, she thought back to the incantation—and she thought about the knife. It was an artifact, certainly, but not an ancient one. Woodrow had made it himself, carving a knife out of a shard of stone—very unusual stone.

  Void stone.

  Billie got to work dressing Woodrow’s wound. She was happy for Jacko to keep the knife—this was his shop, after all—but that didn’t stop her wondering how Woodrow had got the stone.

  Perhaps things were far worse than she’d feared.

  4

  WYRMWOOD DISTRICT, DUNWALL

  4th Day, Month of Wind, 1853

  The world was ending. If anything, Billie was now more sure of that than she had been even an hour earlier, having just witnessed Woodrow’s primitive, but effective, supernatural manipulations. That, and the fact that he’d had in his possession a piece of Void stone large enough to make a knife, meant that things were not just bad—they were getting worse.

  Billie left the apothecary’s store with a small pouch of Green Lady and a much lighter purse of coin. The discount Jacko had ended up offering, even as Billie helped him throw Woodrow’s bandaged form into the alleyway out the back of the store, didn’t add up to much, but Billie had found the unexpected information she had gathered to be worth the trip on its own.

  As she headed north from Wyrmwood Way, back toward the mighty Wrenhaven River, Billie refocused her attention on her mission, the reason she was in Dunwall in the first place. She had been here a month and had achieved little; now, a chance encounter in the apothecary’s store had given her the final piece of the puzzle, and she had enough information to act.

  Because there was something far worse going on in the world than a plague of nightmares and the resurgence of strange sorceries. These were just symptoms of something much larger.

  The world was being pulled apart.

  It had started shortly before the dissolution of the Abbey of the Everyman, and Billie had her suspicions that the two events may well have been connected. Because what arcane rituals had the High Overseer and the High Oracle enacted within the walls of that sacred building, in their attempt to repair the damage that Billie herself had done? The Outsider had fallen, and had left a vacuum in his place. For the Abbey and the Sisterhood, their very existence depended upon that black-eyed bastard.

  What lengths would they go to in their efforts to replace him? To restore a new divinity to the Void?

  It was nothing more than a suspicion, but Billie was willing to put a fair amount of weight behind it. Because it was just before the Empress announced the Dissolution that the first Void rifts appeared.

  Billie had seen the first one in Tyvia, out on the tundra, as she made the arduous trek between Meya and Pradym, chasing a rumor. At first, she thought it was an uncharted glacier, but as she got closer, she realized the huge wall that cut across the snowy wasteland wasn’t made of Tyvia’s famous blue ice—in fact, it wasn’t a solid wall at all. Instead, it shimmered like a jagged curtain of light, undulating through the landscape. It stretched up as far as she could see, and seemed to extend from horizon to horizon. It was impossible to see through it, although it didn’t seem to be quite opaque.

  It was similar in some ways to the Void hollows Billie had seen, but the sheer scale of the phenomenon was beyond anything she had ever experienced, and while it wasn’t a hollow—there was nothing to see beyond it or through it, just deeper and deeper layers
of wavering, shattered blue light—Billie had enough experience of the arcane and of the Void itself to recognize it for what it was.

  It was a crack. A fissure in the very fabric of reality—a rift between this world and the Void. The fall of the Outsider had somehow pulled the two parallel dimensions apart, the barrier between them sliding like a fault line.

  The rift was beautiful. It danced in Billie’s eyes, the Sliver burning hot in her head, clouding her vision with red and blue sparks until she could barely see the real world. She had fallen to her knees, then, as the pain coursed over her body. She had closed her eyes, concentrating, pushing the power of the Sliver out of her mind as she struggled to focus on what was here, now, all around her. Snow. Ice. Rocks. The world, the real world.

  That was when she heard it. A faint vibration, a buzz like a whale oil tank. She looked up, her vision now clear, and she saw that the rift was actually moving toward her. The progress was infinitely small—just a few millimeters in the space of a minute or so. At that rate, it would take months, if not years, to reach civilization.

  But it would reach it eventually.

  That was when Billie realized how much danger the world was in. It hadn’t just been changed by the fall of the Outsider; it had been damaged—physically.

  Billie turned around and headed back to Meya. From there, she traveled by sea to northern Gristol. By the time she arrived, people were already talking about it, retelling the stories of travelers and traders who had encountered weird glowing cracks in the sky, holes in the world. Most were as big as your hand. Some were as big as a house.

  Billie knew they could get a great deal bigger than that.

  Billie headed south, chasing reports, seeking out stories. She found more Void rifts, although none as large or as devastating as the one out on the Tyvian ice. But as time went on, the stories grew. Eventually, the newspapers picked them up; but the sensationalized reports had been countered by official statements from the Academy of Natural Philosophy in Dunwall, which insisted the Void rifts were a natural atmospheric phenomenon.