Dishonored--The Veiled Terror

by Adam Christopher

  Billie sighed at the strange man. He had more in common with his fellow natural philosophers in the Academy over their heads than he knew.

  “I’ll go to Alba,” said Billie, “and see what I can do. If I can stop whatever is going on, I will. If not, I’ll gather as much information as I can and bring it back.” She waved at the array of equipment in the laboratory. “Maybe then you can do something more with this setup.”

  “A capital suggestion, young lady. Capital.” He lifted his chin and grinned at her. “I knew you were the right person for the job.”

  Billie almost laughed. “I think you mean the only person.”

  Dribner’s smile dropped, and he cleared his throat. “Yes, well, I can’t stop to talk all day. I have work to do. And so do you, young lady, so do you.”

  The pair shook hands, and as he returned his attention to the console, Billie retraced her route out of the subterranean laboratory and back up to street level.

  How things had changed. Meeting Dribner had been a huge help—in fact, it was more than she could ever have thought possible. Not only did the old man seem to know what was going on, together they had a solid plan for what to do next. He’d confirmed her fears, but had introduced a dangerous, terrifying new aspect.

  The destabilization was deliberate. The movement and spread of the rifts was no natural phenomenon.

  Someone was doing it on purpose. Why, neither she nor Dribner knew. But that someone had to be stopped, or the world would be destroyed.

  9

  ALBA, MORLEY

  17th Day, Month of Darkness, 1853

  The journey from Dunwall to Alba was a full forty days by ship, and Billie spent nearly all of that time pacing the deck of the cargo clipper, frustrated by the time it was taking to continue her mission when the future of the world was at stake.

  She laughed at that. Her mission. Oh yes, she’d found one, all right—true enough, she had considered herself to be focused on her task prior to arriving in Dunwall, but after meeting with Dribner and understanding the situation, she felt a new clarity of purpose.

  All she had to do was save the world.

  Easy.

  Dribner had been right about another thing, too—Alba’s need for labor and materials. After leaving his laboratory, Billie had secured passage on the Western Hunter, a passenger steam clipper that had been converted into a light cargo freighter, the captain seeing a larger profit shipping materials to the rebuilding city than taking people. He’d made an exception for her, once she’d offered him enough coin—more than she could afford.

  Alba was the largest city on the southern coast of Morley, and thanks to its relative proximity to Dunwall, was a major port—indeed, it was somewhat larger than Morley’s capital, Wynnedown, which, situated as it was on the northeastern coast, was far removed from the main trading routes. As the Western Hunter approached the city, they were met by a pilot boat and guided to their berth through a myriad of other vessels that crowded the harbor. Billie was the first off the vessel and headed into the city, impressed by what she saw.

  It seemed war was good for business.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in Alba, but regardless, the place was almost unrecognizable. While the port area looked largely unscathed, the remainder of the city seemed to be divided between reconstruction and devastation, new buildings and repair work sitting alongside crumbling ruins and cleared lots—it seemed that Dribner had somewhat overestimated the amount of rebuilding that had been done. For a war that had lasted a mere three days, Billie could only imagine the barrage that the town must have suffered to have caused such widespread damage. While she knew about the war—it was hard to escape news of it, no matter where she had traveled in the Isles—she didn’t know, and had little interest in, the politics of the conflict. Morley’s system of government—joint rule by a queen and a king, united in marriage not through love, but power play—seemed a little archaic to her.

  Billie walked deeper into the city, pleasantly surprised to find the weather far more agreeable than that in Dunwall, despite the time of year, the perpetual gloom of the Empire’s capital replaced by cold but clear skies, giving her a perfect view of the two objects that now dominated Alba’s skyline. She’d seen both from the deck of the Western Hunter, and had spent hours staring at them almost as soon as they had come into view. Here in the city, they were even more overwhelming—and she knew now what the big curved shadow she had seen through the rift in Dunwall was.

  It was part of a giant bridge, a causeway of truly monumental scale that soared high above the city, at least a thousand feet in the air. It looked for all the world like an iron bridge for electric rail cars, the kind common all over the Isles, but enlarged to such a degree it looked faintly ridiculous, like a child’s toy somehow dropped on top of the city. The causeway was still under construction, and unsteady-looking scaffolding stretched up to it; hundreds of workers crawled over every surface, while dozens of heavy block-and-tackle were being used to winch up more girders and ironwork to the upper levels. The causeway ended abruptly at its highest point, midway over the city, while the back half of it curved gently down, disappearing as it plunged into the second of Alba’s great wonders: a Void rift. It meant that the causeway seemed to hover almost impossibly above the city—anchored in an inaccessible other world.

  The Sliver of the Eye of the Dead God grew hotter the more she looked at the causeway. The rift was similar to the one that crossed the Tyvian tundra, although here it was much larger, rising up into the clear sky until it faded from view. It looked almost as if it were dividing the entire city in two, cutting clean through the gigantic curve of the causeway.

  Billie could only stare in awe as she walked around a city that was bustling with people—citizens getting on with their lives, visitors earning their coin by helping to rebuild. The whole place felt alive, every street busy, as though this was just another large, prosperous city in the Empire… just one that was sliced in half by a mysterious, arcane phenomenon that nobody apparently paid any heed to, in case it drove them out of their minds. The locals she recognized from their blonde hair and trim, conservative clothing. Outsiders were easy to spot, with their rather more assorted clothing, together with a fair amount of tattoos, piercings, and other arcane body modifications. For the moment, Billie kept her eyepatch on, but she didn’t feel out of place at all.

  After a couple of hours’ wandering, Billie paused in a town square, allowing herself a moment of observation and planning. She bought some food from a market stall and sat on a bench with her back to the causeway, enjoying for a moment the sudden release of pressure inside her skull as the Sliver faced away from the rift. She ate slowly and watched people for a while.

  As she had thought, there were two other kinds of people about, different to the regular citizenry.

  The first were the Royal Morley Constabulary—the local equivalent of the Dunwall City Watch, although here they had authority across the whole country, and could be found in every city, town, and village on the island. They were dressed in forest-green jackets with white leather bandoliers, white pants tucked into high black boots, and peaked caps, the crowns of which were bright scarlet. They came and went in patrols of two or three.

  The other group, she didn’t recognize. Their uniforms were black and devoid of any insignia or other distinguishing mark. Their jackets had high collars, with buttons running from chin to waist that were hidden behind a folded seam of cloth. Their pants were black and their boots were black and the sharp garrison caps they all wore were black.

  Whoever they were, they looked military. Billie racked her brain, trying to identify the uniforms, but she couldn’t come up with anything. As far as she knew, the Royal Morley Constabulary also doubled as this country’s armed forces. But it was more than likely that one of the consequences of the Three-Day War had been an expansion, probably a reorganization, of the military in Morley. The presence of so many of the black-uniformed guards was
perhaps to be expected—and it made no difference to Billie. She didn’t intend to get involved with local affairs if she could help it.

  Billie turned on the bench to face the rift, but her attention was drawn back to the causeway. How impossibly huge it was. It was certainly a fascinating sight.

  And not just because of the scale of the operation. There was also the fact that the causeway intersected with the rift itself. Despite that, work seemed to be continuing, which was in itself surprising. The sheer amount of physical labor engaged on the project boggled the mind, and she couldn’t guess what the causeway was actually for.

  But she was determined to find out.

  10

  LEVIATHAN CAUSEWAY, ALBA

  17th Day, Month of Darkness, 1853

  The early dusk was beginning to fall by the time Billie reached the area immediately surrounding the base of the causeway, the daylight fading with surprising swiftness at these northern latitudes. This close to the site, where it had suffered most from the war, the nature of the city had changed rather dramatically. The once proud stone architecture of Morley’s grandest city had been reduced first to rubble, and then to empty lots as the demolition teams had gone to work, leveling entire blocks to prepare the ground for what had yet to be built. Between these lots, the old cobbled streets were still mostly intact, an echo of the past now suddenly out of place, although still well used by the construction gangs and their carts and other vehicles, which formed the steady traffic that Billie did her best to blend in with.

  From here, Billie could see the other object from her rift vision—the tower of the Royal Morley Observatory, the golden dome of which rose above what little skyline was left here, silhouetted against the gently undulating wall of the huge rift behind it. Somehow, the tower had survived, possibly the only piece of recognizable architecture left in this quarter.

  As Billie made her way onwards, she saw the empty lots and cleared building sites were starting to be filled with other things—prefabricated huts and shacks that stood on temporary foundations of wooden pallets, and between them, stacks of building materials: wood, iron, stone, brick, gravel. Some of the materials seemed to match the scale of the great causeway, with impossibly large iron girders stacked in ordered towers, portable cranes hard at work transferring them to the loading beds of electric rail cars, which zipped from here to the causeway site on temporary tracks that had been laid over the cobbled streets.

  By now, there were no ordinary citizens about. This was the realm of the laborer, nearly every man and woman dressed in dusty work clothes as they carried out their tasks. The rest were the black-uniformed guards. Although nobody seemed to have noticed Billie, or had paid her any particular attention if they did, she was aware she stood out. If she was going to get right up to the causeway construction—right up to the rift itself—she was going to have to blend in a great deal better.

  After another half-hour of walking—the site now a dense township of the prefab buildings, the roads almost too busy with construction traffic—Billie stopped. She could go no farther—at least, not as she was.

  Ahead of her, the road was closed off by a large double gate set into a high iron wall. A handful of black-uniformed men were loitering by the gate, and they glanced in Billie’s direction as she read the sign that arched over the closed portal.

  LEVIATHAN COMPANY

  CAUSEWAY PROJECT SECTOR 2 GATE A

  NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT PASS

  Leviathan Company—the organization, Billie guessed, that the black-uniformed men worked for. They did seem to be patrolling the streets and watching the workers, more like guards than supervisors.

  By now the men at the gate were all scrutinizing her, their conversation over. Billie gave them what she hoped was a friendly nod, then turned on her heel and headed back the way she had come.

  If she was going to get through the gate, she needed a pass.

  ***

  Billie headed back down the cobbled street, then turned down a side road and followed the line of the iron wall until she reached a more built-up zone of the city, where there were several original stone buildings still standing among the temporary structures of the Leviathan Company. Among them was a tavern, the Golden Tulip, which was the only structure with any signs of life, the rest of the area apparently shut up for the night.

  The tavern was small and heaving, and the air was hot and full of noise, every man and woman in the place enjoying the warmth and the company after a hard day’s work. Billie walked in and vanished immediately into the crowd. It took her a good few moments to squeeze her way to the bar. As she pushed past the other patrons, she saw they were all workers. There were no black uniforms in sight.

  The woman behind the bar had her long gray hair in a tight plait that was wound into a circle on the top of her head, her skin the same deep brown as Billie’s. She nodded at her new customer as she chewed a wad of tobacco. Billie pushed the sudden craving for Green Lady from her mind and ordered a rum, before moving along the bar to find a corner slightly less crushed with drinkers. Once installed, she leaned back against the polished wood and sipped her drink, all the while aware of the pull of the Sliver of the Eye of the Dead God, dragging her focus in the direction of Alba’s huge Void rift.

  The rift—with the causeway running right through it. If anyone was conducting experiments, destabilizing the rift deliberately, that seemed like a good place to start looking. And to do that, she had to get on the other side of the iron wall. And to do that, she needed two things.

  A disguise.

  A pass.

  Thinking through her options, Billie continued to sip her drink and watch the crowd. The patrons came and went, mostly in large groups, perhaps corresponding to the end of shifts at the construction site. The iron wall was still some distance from the causeway itself, so it seemed likely that some, if not all, of the workers here had the requisite pass to get through the gate and to their work section.

  Billie began to eye up likely targets.

  “Here for the sign-up, I take it?”

  She turned at the voice. The barwoman had moved over to her, and was sipping on her own pint glass of water as she watched the patrons. The sleeves of her shirt were rolled up to her biceps, revealing a set of intricate tattoos, the ink a deep blue against the dark of her skin, the shapes seeming to mimic the scrimshaw of a bone charm. The barwoman noticed Billie looking, and gave her a conspiratorial twitch of the head. Billie raised her glass and took a sip before speaking.

  “I am.”

  The barwoman smiled. “I have to admire your dedication.” Her accent was broad, familiar to Billie from her childhood. “Like me, I think you’ve come a long way.”

  Billie said nothing. She just sipped from her glass of rum.

  The barwoman laughed. “Hey, don’t get me wrong, I know how it can be. Work is work. Trust me, I know! But you’re the earliest arrival. Most don’t get in until the day before. The next sign-up is not for two days—so you’re early, which means you’re keen, or that the journey north was faster than it usually is.” She took a swig of her water and leaned on the bar next to Billie. “They’ll like that. And you’ve made a good decision. Leviathan pay very well, so I’ve been told. Very well indeed.”

  Billie sipped her drink. “You’ve not been tempted yourself?”

  The barwoman laughed again. “They don’t pay that well! But I was lucky in other ways. My husband was a local—he was killed in the war but our pub survived, and now it does a fine business catering to the likes of yourself.” She shook her head and grinned. “So no, I’m not tempted. You earn your coin over the wall, and you come back and spend it here, and we’ll both be happy. Another?”

  Billie drained her glass and accepted the offer. “Maybe you can help me out,” she said, as the barwoman refilled her glass from a bottle of Karnacan spiced blue rum. “What can you tell me about the causeway?”

  “Well, what is there to know? It’ll make history, it will. The Leviathan Cause
way, the first direct link between Morley and Gristol, right? And then maybe even beyond. Link every isle in the Empire, one day.” The barwoman slid Billie’s glass along the bar. “Maybe even get as far as Karnaca, eh?”

  Billie picked up the glass and took a large sip as she processed what the barwoman was saying.

  A direct link between Morley and Gristol—and beyond? It was true that Alba was more or less the closest point to the neighboring isle, but still, the distance the bridge would have to cover was enormous. And, despite the intense activity around it, it clearly had a very long way to go.

  The barwoman served a trio of new customers, then returned to Billie’s corner.

  “Of course, then the rift appeared. Not that it stopped Leviathan. If anything, they’ve been working a whole lot harder, ever since.”

  Billie nodded. “When was that?”

  “Oh, had to be a year ago now.”

  “Seems like the rift would be a problem. It cuts right across the causeway.”

  The barwoman sighed. “Aye, well, there’s a mystery for you—”

  She looked up as the tavern’s door opened, and a large group of workers filed in, crowding the already full bar even more. The barwoman turned to Billie and winked. “Better get back to it,” she said, before moving away to serve her customers. “Good luck!”

  Billie raised her glass again, then went back to watching the patrons.

  A few minutes later, she had selected her target.

  Finishing her drink, Billie slid out of the tavern and into the dark, unlit street. She found a spot with a clear view of the door.

  She waited. People came and went.

  Billie waited some more.

  A half-hour later, the door opened, and a worker staggered out. He was a youngish man, well built but slight. He wore a long gray hooded cape, the garment wrapped around his shoulders and buttoned down the front, reaching down to his knees. He got his bearings, took a deep draw of the cool night air, and then headed down the cobbled street.