Dishonored--The Veiled Terror

by Adam Christopher

  “I agree with the urgency of the situation, sir,” said the pale woman as the bearded man released the door, allowing it to swing silently closed on well-oiled hinges. “But if we are to proceed to the next phase, we need to double our yield of voidrite if we are to have sufficient fuel.”

  The red-headed man paused at the base of the stairs, one hand on the rail, one foot on the bottom step. He was staring ahead; Billie pulled herself back into deeper shadow, but the man wasn’t looking at her. His mouth twitched, and his eyes narrowed behind his glasses. When he spoke he didn’t turn around. His voice was a steady monotone, devoid of any expression or inflection that might reveal what he was thinking.

  “Then see to it, Uvanov. Voidrite yield is your own personal responsibility.”

  Uvanov lowered her gaze to the floor.

  “Yes, Mr. Severin.”

  Severin spun around to face his subordinate. “Please do not make me regret my decision to entrust that responsibility to you.”

  Uvanov didn’t look up.

  “No, sir. Of course not, sir.”

  Severin took a step closer. As Billie watched, the other two tensed as their boss confronted his subordinate.

  “Remember, Uvanov, that we are at war.”

  “Yes, Mr. Severin.”

  “And war requires sacrifices, Uvanov.” Severin glanced at the other two. “From all of us. We stand at the pivot point of history. The fate of the world lies in our hands. Do not forget what all of this is for.”

  Then Uvanov looked up. She held her chin high.

  “No, Mr. Severin. I apologize, sir.”

  Severin snapped his gaze back to Uvanov. His voice remained unchanged in tone or volume.

  “We will proceed to the next phase. Increase the yield.”

  Uvanov gave a sharp nod and snapped the heels of her boots together.

  “Yes, Mr. Severin.”

  Severin turned around and stood on the first stair. Then he stopped.

  “Threefold, Uvanov.”

  Behind her boss’s back, Billie saw Uvanov’s throat bob as she swallowed, and then she looked at her companion. The dark woman shook her head, very slowly.

  “We will require another intake of workers into the Hollow,” said Uvanov.

  “Then see to it,” said Severin.

  Uvanov snapped her heels together again. “At once, sir.”

  “Come,” said Severin. “We are expected.”

  With that, he skipped up the steps. After a pause, his two subordinates and the guard followed. Billie waited until their footsteps faded, then swung out from under the stairs. She looked up, in the direction they had gone.

  So, that was Severin, the mastermind behind the Leviathan Causeway.

  Billie didn’t understand what they had been talking about—Severin had said they were at war, and that the fate of the world was in their hands? Billie didn’t like the sound of that at all.

  But there was one word that echoed around her mind.

  Hollow. Uvanov had said the word hollow.

  Billie went up the stairs, padding softly on her toes.

  She had to discover what was going on.

  13

  CONTROL COMPLEX, LEVIATHAN CAUSEWAY, ALBA

  17th Day, Month of Darkness, 1853

  The stairs narrowed as they went up into the main column of the Royal Observatory tower, then twisted and became a tight, circular spiral; Billie caught up with Severin and the others, and kept herself a couple of turns below them, close enough to listen—not that she learned anything. Severin spoke only in single words as he listened to reports given by Uvanov and the other woman. Sector 5 was ahead of schedule. Sector 3 reported the loss of two workers, having apparently fallen from the causeway. The list went on—nothing in any detail, just a fairly standard, if light, overview of the day’s progress. At the top of the stairs, the four passed through another set of glass doors. Billie edged along the wall, and, keeping low, leaned around to peer through the glass. She watched as Severin led his group through an arch-topped entrance at the far side of a circular atrium, beyond which she could see the curve of another, smaller staircase. According to the sign above the archway, this led to the MAIN DOME. There were four other doors leading from the atrium, spaced around the curved walls, each signposted as a workshop.

  She’d found Control.

  Billie waited by the doors, watching and listening, but there were no sounds from beyond. It seemed that she and Severin’s group were the only ones in the tower, and the Leviathan guards weren’t coming out from the control room anytime soon.

  Billie stood, slipped through the glass doors, and padded over to the archway opposite. There she waited for a moment, glancing around, straining her ears, but there was no sound from the four workshops.

  Nor was there any sound from above.

  Billie headed up the stairs.

  At the top was another archway, this one blocked by a wooden door banded in iron that looked more decorative than practical. There was a large keyhole. Billie pressed her ear to the door, but heard nothing. Then she ducked down to the keyhole and looked through. It afforded a clear view of the circular chamber beyond.

  Billie’s breath caught in her throat. She stood, counted for a beat, weighing up her options. Then she grabbed the handle and pushed the door open.

  The room beyond was large and circular, the chamber that crowned the tower. The domed ceiling was, like the exterior, covered in gold leaf, but here it was further embellished by a map of the night sky, inlaid with glittering gems. The walls of the chamber curved around from the entrance, forming two perfect arcs. Opposite the main door, a large slot was cut into the wall, the opening starting near the floor and curving up into the dome, almost reaching the apex. It was clearly where the observatory’s telescope had been fitted; indeed, the floor at the center of the room was cut with a series of channels and divots, a clear indication of where the mechanism of the scope had originally been bolted.

  The telescope was gone. There were no other exits from the dome, no windows aside from the slot. Through the slot she could see the Void rift, and Billie felt the Sliver grow hot and begin to tug her bodily toward the shimmering wall of blue and red light.

  The room was also entirely empty. Of Severin, Uvanov, and the two others, there was no sign.

  Billie was alone.

  ***

  Billie backtracked into the central atrium of the Observatory tower, moving carefully, silently, listening for any movements, any sounds of life at all. But no, it was as she thought—she was alone in the tower. The telescope room was empty, as were the four workshops—now. Nobody else had come up the stairs since she had followed Severin’s group, and certainly nobody had left.

  Severin and his subordinates had just vanished into thin air.

  Billie turned and trotted back up the steps and into the telescope room. She stood in the doorway and looked around, casting her gaze over every surface of the chamber. White walls. Gold dome with bejeweled sky. Pale stone floor. The marks of the old telescope fitting. The slot in the wall. The Void rift beyond.

  That was it. There was no furniture. There were no doors. No windows. Billie made a circuit of the room, running her hand over the smooth walls, just in case there was a secret panel or door—not that there was anywhere to go or to hide.

  Nothing.

  When she reached the slot in the wall, she leaned out, as far as she could, ignoring the pressure building inside her head. Directly in front was nothing but the shifting wall of the rift, stretching out in both directions. If she leaned out and down, she could see the iron wall at the base, keeping the workers away from the lower portion of the rift. On either side of the observatory hill were the legs of the causeway, the mammoth construction straddling the control complex. Looking up, she could see the causeway arching hundreds of feet above the observatory’s golden dome, emerging from the rift like the prow of a ship cresting some gargantuan ocean wave.

  There was certainly no way out via t
he slot in the wall. The room was empty. Billie was alone. Severin, Uvanov, and their companions had gone.

  Billie clicked her tongue in irritation, and considered her options. The room was empty; she had to accept that. But equally strange was the fact that the telescope room was, supposedly, the master control room. And yet, there was nothing in it. If Severin was using his corporation to conduct experiments on the rift as well as to build the causeway—destabilizing the rift itself—then he certainly wasn’t doing it here.

  Billie slipped out of the chamber and returned to the lower level. She looked around. Four observatory workshops—now used as four research laboratories for the Leviathan Corporation.

  Billie headed for the first door. It was unlocked, the handle turning smoothly, silently. She stepped inside.

  The room beyond was circular, much like the telescope room, although the space was smaller and the walls only formed a partial arc, the wall connecting the workshop to the atrium being flat.

  But it was certainly a laboratory, complete with workbenches and high stools. The surfaces were covered with a dizzying array of glassware, held in a complex framework of shining copper. The room was lined with cupboards and workbenches. Again, there were no windows. There was a door to Billie’s left, the wood elegantly curved to match the turn of the wall itself. Next to the door was a stack of packing crates, their straw stuffing poking out from underneath lids that had been levered open and then left resting slightly ajar. There were more crates on the other side of the room, a pyramid of three next to the main workbench. The uppermost crate was empty, the lid leaning at an angle against the legs of the workbench. The objects that had been packed were lined up beneath an array of equipment.

  A pulse of adrenaline coursed through her body. Her human eye went wide, while the Sliver of the Eye of the Dead God hummed in her head, her vision sparking blue and red and yellow, creating an aura as she looked over the artifacts lined up on the bench.

  Billie moved over to the workbench, scanning the objects. They were runes. There were three on the bench, another three nestled in straw in the open crate. They were roughly circular, about an inch and a half thick, their ivory forms wrapped in thin strands of silver and leather. Where the yellow-white surfaces were exposed, she could see they were covered with scrimshaw. One was placed under a magnifying lens on an articulated arm. There was an open leather wrap of tools beside it that looked more suited to the workshop of a watchmaker or master jeweler.

  Billie shoved the top crate to one side, allowing access to the box beneath. The lid of this one has been partially levered; she gripped the edges and pulled. The loosened nails slid free with ease, and, ignoring the noise it made, she let the lid clatter to the floor.

  More runes. Three on the top layer, and it looked like there was room for at least another six in the box—nine per crate, and Billie counted six crates in the room, plus the opened one.

  More than sixty runes.

  Billie shook her head, trying to understand. She went back to the bench, and, moving the magnifying lens on its arm, peered down at the artifact that someone had clearly been inspecting. Under the lens, the carved whale ivory of the rune was brought into sharp relief. Billie could see the grain of the ivory, and the blackened lines of the scrimshaw, magnified in enough detail to see the marks of the knife that had carved it, who knew how many years ago.

  She stepped back, took a breath, and looked over the workshop again. There was a stack of bound papers on the next bench; walking around, she pulled the top notebook toward her and flipped it open. Inside, written in a tight hand, were notes on one of the runes, the comments filled out into a pre-printed form headed LEVIATHAN COMPANY. On the facing page was a life-size sketch of the rune in question.

  Billie flipped through the notebook. Each pair of pages was the same—a completed form, a sketch of the rune that was being described. She flipped through the rest of it—dozens of pages, dozens of runes, each one different, each one described in detail.

  Billie reached the end and tossed the notebook back onto the bench. There was a shelf of more journals on the wall above the bench. Picking a book at random, she found it was another volume of notes—another catalogue of runes. Trying a third, she found the catalogue continued, the numbers apparently sequential from the preceding volume.

  It was staggering. The Leviathan Company, for some reason, had a huge cache of runes—hundreds, easily. She hadn’t even considered before that so many even existed. Where Leviathan had acquired them, Billie could only speculate, although the fact that they had them was perhaps less surprising now than it would have been just a few years ago. With the dissolution of the Abbey of the Everyman, and the destruction of the Oracular Order, the Overseers and the Sisterhood no longer had a monopoly on heretical artifacts. It was likely that both institutions had accumulated a vast number of magical objects in an attempt to keep them out of the hands of others. But now they were gone, who knew what had managed to get out into the world before the Imperial authorities had clamped down on it, gathering the objects for themselves?

  And there was the Norcross collection, which had been one of the things that had brought her to Alba in the first place. If Professor Dribner was right, some of that collection—the part that hadn’t been salvaged by Sokolov—had ended up here, in Morley.

  Billie slowly paced the room. Well, Dribner might be right on that point. Either the Norcross cache had indeed been taken to Morley—by the Leviathan Company—or they had collected artifacts from the ravaged Abbey and Sisterhood… or both.

  But for what purpose, Billie had absolutely no idea.

  Her pacing brought her to the curved door. Billie paused, listening at the wood, just in case. But all was silent beyond. She opened the door.

  The second room was the same size and shape as the first, but this one was not being used as a laboratory. Here, the workbenches and equipment were missing, and the whole space was taken up with more packing crates, stacked on heavy-duty metal shelving that had been bolted into the walls, the black iron pins cracking the white finish of the observatory walls.

  Billie gave up trying to count the crates—there were dozens in the room, all sealed. She gave one an experimental tug, but it was nailed firmly shut. The crates were all stenciled with the word LEVIATHAN, but aside from that, there were no other markings, no suggestion of the contents.

  Billie took a deep breath, and focused. Lowering her chin, she let her vision blur, her attention shifting from one world to the next. The Sliver of the Eye of the Dead God hummed inside her head as she willed it to work, and she felt the pressure grow behind her temples.

  Then the world flipped around in front of her, washing out in a bright blue light that threw everything in the room into a series of flickering outlines.

  Everything except the contents of the crates. The runes crammed inside glowed yellow, shimmering like coals in a fire. The entire room was filled with them, hundreds of them, packed away, awaiting examination and cataloguing.

  Billie let out her breath, and let go of the power. Her vision shook and flipped back to normal, and she was surrounded by the packing crates again.

  She stood for a moment, waiting for the pain to ease. She was getting close, she knew it. Because if Severin was doing something to the rift, something that was destabilizing it, then it made sense that he was using runes. They were a source of great magical power, after all, and now that the Outsider had fallen and that power had changed… well, who knew what a rune was capable of. The way they were being studied, catalogued, it seemed that the Leviathan Company hoped to find some use for them.

  Or perhaps they already had.

  There was only one other door in the storeroom. Once again, Billie was cautious before proceeding, listening at the door, looking through the keyhole before opening it. It led back out to the Observatory tower atrium, which was still empty of people. She headed for one of the two doors on the other side of the atrium, and found herself in another laboratory set up
like the first, a place where the runes were sorted, studied, catalogued.

  In the fourth, and final, workshop, Billie found the great telescope from the main dome—or what was left of it, anyway. The scope had been disassembled, the curved copper panels of its casing propped up against the walls. The two circular mirrors from the telescope, each more than three feet in diameter, had been placed on stands, the reflective sides facing each other, while in the center stood two lenses, each half as wide as the mirrors, again placed on stands, so that all four surfaces were aligned. Billie approached the setup cautiously and peered around the edge of one of the mirrors. The area between was brighter than she had expected, thanks to the alignment of the mirrors. She saw herself reflected into infinity.

  She jumped back, and spun around.

  She had seen something—someone. They had been standing behind her, their image distorted by the curve of the telescope mirror, but still clear before it shattered into gray and blue light.

  But the small workshop was empty. She was alone with the device. She stood still, listening, but the only sound she heard was the chaotic rumble of the construction site that surrounded the control complex below.

  Billie turned back to the device and, keeping her distance this time, walked around it, examining it. Whatever it was, it wasn’t connected to any power supply—there were no cables, no whale oil tanks, and while there were two whale oil terminals set into the far wall, both were empty, the doors open.

  But she knew exactly what she had seen—another Void hollow.

  Billie took a step back. She had no idea what the device was, and she wished Dribner could see it. Maybe he would understand it. Dribner’s own contraption had used lenses and mirrors, although nothing on this scale. Here, while the device was much larger, there was no window available to point it toward the Void rift, which was about two hundred yards away on the other side of the workshop’s outer wall.