Dishonored--The Veiled Terror

by Adam Christopher

  Billie sighed, and rubbed her temples. She didn’t know if she had learned anything useful yet, and one mystery in particular kept coming back to mind—where had Severin and his subordinates gone? They weren’t in the telescope room. They weren’t in the workshops. There were no other exits.

  And yet Billie was quite alone in the tower.

  Of course, she had seen people disappear before, although that wasn’t quite the right way to describe it. Nearly two decades ago, when she had been a whaler, they’d used another word for the power Daud had let them share.

  Transversal. The ability to move across space in the blink of an eye, without being seen. To disappear, as it were, from one spot and reappear in another, whether it was a hundred yards down the street or a hundred feet up, balancing on the edge of a rooftop.

  Later, when the Outsider had “gifted” her the black-shard arm and the Sliver of the Eye of the Dead God, she had discovered these artifacts that were part of her granted a similar ability. Like the magic of transversal, it had been tied to the Outsider and tied to the Void. When the Outsider had fallen, her power—all of her powers, in fact—had changed, becoming unstable, unreliable, and she had grown reluctant to use them. But although she was starting to get used to the different way the Sliver worked, she hadn’t summoned the Twin-bladed Knife in months, and after the last attempt she had woken in a hunter’s cabin in a Tyvian forest with no memory of the previous week.

  Billie gave the strange machine another glance, then headed back into the first workshop she had visited. She stood in the doorway, surveying the room.

  She understood now. The Outsider had fallen, and the Void had become unmoored from the world—but it was still connected to it. It still existed, but its relationship with the world was different. Somehow, that had changed the way magic worked. That change had driven the Overseers and the Sisterhood to moonstruck oblivion, and had affected Billie’s black-shard arm and the Sliver.

  Severin had found a way to harness that new kind of magic, using the hundreds of runes that had been gathered and the rift itself, two entirely different things that were both connected to the Void—and able to draw power from it.

  That explained the sudden disappearance of Severin and his cohorts. Billie didn’t know where they had gone, but the runes and the rift certainly provided the mechanism. She thought back to Uvanov’s report to her superior. She had mentioned a hollow—a Void hollow.

  Billie knew they were reflections of other worlds, shining through the soft spots in the world where the Void touched it. But with the Void unmoored and its connection with the world unstable, the Void hollows would have changed too.

  Had Severin found a way to use them? To get inside them?

  That seemed increasingly likely.

  Billie cast her eye over the equipment on the bench, and the runes lined up on it, and noticed a folded leather object at the back of the table. She leaned over and picked it up.

  It was a belt, the same kind of heavy-duty, five-inch-wide leather piece that she was wearing now, on her uniform borrowed from the guard Blanco. The belt was missing its large, square pouches—these had been slipped off and were lying on the bench.

  Billie saw the shape and size of the pouches—and realized what they were designed to carry. Holding the belt in one hand, with her other she reached down to the one around her waist. She slid her fingertips inside the pocket. There was something there—something solid, but so light she hadn’t paid any attention to it when she had put the belt on. As her hand made contact she felt the static spark again. Her fingers curled around it and she pulled out the object that had been strapped to her this whole time. It had been seated firmly in the pouch, which had been custom-made to fit the object perfectly.

  It was a rune. Billie held it in her hand. It felt cold, and it was light, like it was made of nothing, like she could just crush it with the slightest pressure of her fingers.

  She couldn’t help squeezing it. It was solid enough.

  Real enough.

  She placed it on the bench alongside the discarded belt, and twisted her own belt around as much as she could so the second pouch was over her midriff. She pulled at the pouch buckle, cursing under her breath as the stiff leather refused to yield. Eventually she got the buckle open and yanked the second rune out.

  She stared at it for a moment, then tossed it onto the bench alongside the other one. She looked at them, unmoving, her ears filling with the rushing sound of her own blood.

  That’s why there were so many in the storeroom. Every guard of the Leviathan Corporation was carrying two runes on them. There were hundreds of company employees. They needed hundreds of runes. The other workshop, the one filled with crates—that wasn’t a storeroom; that was just a repository, a temporary holding room for runes that had been brought in, checked and catalogued in the laboratory, then packed, ready for distribution to the Leviathan guards. Somewhere out in the construction site, the corporation must have an entire warehouse full of the artifacts.

  Severin and the others hadn’t disappeared. They had traveled—transversed, somehow—using the runes.

  She had to follow them. She had to figure out how the runes worked.

  Billie raced out of the workshop and up into the telescope room, skidding to a halt in the center of the chamber. It was still empty, as she expected, but… something was different. She wasn’t sure quite what, for a moment, and then she realized.

  The sounds had changed.

  Before, the noise of the construction zone had been a steady rumble, punctuated by hammering, the clanking of the cranes, and the rattle of chains. Now, that had been replaced by something else—a kind of whirring, the sound steady, mechanical, waxing and waning like a rail car passing by at speed. She could also hear whistles, and the tinny, crackling sound of voices amplified through loudspeaker systems. And something else, a rhythmic crunch that, if Billie didn’t know any better, sounded like hundreds of boots stamping.

  She moved to the slot in the wall and looked out, unable to stop herself gasping in surprise.

  The Void rift was gone. She could see the other half of the quarry, with the great causeway curving high overhead and passing down beyond the horizon ahead of her. Here, the causeway was complete—there were no scaffolds, no cranes, no signs of any kind of construction. Below, this half of the quarry floor was a mostly flat, wide-open space boxed on two sides by more of Leviathan’s prefab huts. Here, people were marching in formation—hundreds of men, their simple uniforms augmented by black metal breastplates, their heads covered by bucket-like helmets. They were soldiers—all armed, all on parade, following the orders of their commander, who stood on a raised platform at one side of the parade ground, barking orders into a microphone, his words echoing out across the site.

  Then the loud whirring sound appeared again, a sudden noise from above. Billie ducked, instinctively. Her jaw dropped as a machine flew overhead, passing over the observatory dome, cruising out to the far side of the plaza. There, it paused in midair, turned about its axis, then lowered itself at a snail’s pace to land next to what Billie could now see were a half-dozen more machines just like it, lined up on a raised platform. The machines looked like rail cars, the wheels replaced with large angled panels that were narrow and louvered, like huge window shutters. On top of the car section was a large cylinder, like a scaled-up whale oil tank, supported on four tall struts. As Billie watched the machine land, she saw the louvers move, opening and closing, the panels repositioning constantly as a set of three wheels dropped from the bottom of the machine. As it touched down, the vehicle sagged under its own weight, and Billie noticed a squat, square chimney in the center of the roof, directly beneath the huge tank, belch a cloud of yellow smoke that rose up and apparently entered the tank, the underside of the cylinder open in a series of wide slots that ran the length of the machine.

  Immediately, more black-uniformed guards ran out from one of the nearby buildings and clustered around the machine, looping th
e wheels with chains fixed into the ground, while a door slid open in the side and the crew jumped out. While she was watching this, there was another loud whirr from somewhere above, and Billie looked up as another flying machine came in to land. Now Billie knew what she was looking at, she could see how the giant tank was being fed by the yellow smoke from the machine’s chimney.

  She stepped back from the telescope slot, trying to process what she was seeing.

  Flying machines. Machines that flew.

  Flying. Machines.

  She felt cold and dizzy. She had no idea what was happening down there, but she did know one thing.

  She wasn’t in Alba anymore.

  She was in the Void hollow.

  14

  THE VOID HOLLOW

  17th Day, Month of Darkness, 1853

  Billie left the telescope room and headed back down toward the atrium. But halfway around the curve of the stairs, she stopped.

  She wasn’t alone in the tower anymore. There were people working in the laboratories.

  She crept down the remainder of the stairs, her senses alert for anyone who might be coming her way. As she approached the final bend of the staircase, she had a clear view of the atrium and saw it was empty. But the workshop doors were all open. Creeping forward, Billie could see people working on the runes inside the workshop on her right—there were at least four people, but it sounded like more. A couple of them were talking to each other as they worked, comparing some of the notes from one of the many journals, while the other two that were in Billie’s line of sight were sitting on the high stools, hunched over their work like master watchmakers, peering down through the multitude of magnifying lenses as they worked on the runes with delicate tools.

  Billie pulled back, safely out of sight, and considered her next move. That the source of the Void rift destabilization was here, she was now certain—it was the work the Leviathan Company was doing, with their collection of artifacts.

  But Billie knew that the runes themselves were almost beside the point. They were just a tool—whatever Severin and his company were doing, whatever power they had managed to unlock from the artifacts, it was less a question of how, than of why.

  And what was the Leviathan Causeway itself really for?

  Billie listened for a few more moments, but the workshop staff continued with their work, with no apparent indication that anyone was leaving anytime soon. Billie turned and went back up the short spiral of stairs into the telescope room. As soon as she entered the chamber, she felt the Sliver grow warm, and the pain behind her eyes started up again as she looked toward the slot in the wall at the swirling red and blue sky. It was impossible to tell if it was day or night; the whole sky looked as though it were a Void rift itself. She moved to the opening in the wall and looked down once more at what should have been the causeway construction zone—or the edge of it, abutting the Alba rift. But what she saw was something entirely different: the vast military base, full of soldiers and strange machines that could fly.

  That she was inside a Void hollow was certain—another world, a reflection of her own, created by the shearing apart of the two dimensions. The perfect hiding place for Severin to build a secret army. The man himself had said they were at war, and Billie had found his base of operations.

  By now the marching parades had stopped, and the open space that stretched between the control complex and the far wall of the crater was largely devoid of activity. On Billie’s left was the row of berthed flying machines—six of them, each chained down, anchored through heavy loops fixed into the stone platform. There were three soldiers working on one of the machines, two of them shoveling what looked like coal from a large sack that sat on a wheeled cart into a large circular drum, which was itself sitting on a square platform that appeared to have descended from the rear of the flying machine on a toothed ratchet mechanism. As Billie watched, the two soldiers stopped shoveling, gestured to each other, then stood back, while the third grabbed hold of a chain hanging from the underside of the machine and began to pull. The platform—and the barrel—slowly began to rise up into the machine. As Billie watched, the Sliver grew increasingly hot, and a yellowish aura appeared around the barrel and the half-empty sack—the same aura she had seen around Woodrow’s Void-stone knife, back at the apothecary in Mandragora Street more than a month ago.

  It couldn’t be—could it?

  While the platform was hoisted up into the back of the flying machine, the two men who had been shoveling tossed their tools onto the wheeled cart, and then walked around to the opposite side of the machine. When they didn’t appear around the louvered slats that projected from the bottom, Billie realized they must have climbed inside the vehicle, presumably to complete the fueling process.

  Billie stood back, arms folded, a frown on her face. It wasn’t coal the machine ran on. But it burned something else. She thought back to the overheard conversation between Severin and Uvanov. They had talked about fueling, and yield of what they had called voidrite.

  Or, as Billie more simply knew it—Void stone.

  So, that was it. The Leviathan Company was preparing for war, building a fleet of flying warships fueled by burning Void stone, hidden inside a vast Void hollow, accessible only to those carrying the requisite runes.

  But the question was, was all this activity responsible for destabilizing the rifts? Had Dribner been wrong about it being deliberate? Billie knew she had more to investigate.

  She reached down to the first of the two pouches on her belt, then hissed between her teeth as her fingers closed around nothing. Of course, she had left her own runes in the workshop—in the workshop in the other place.

  Well, no matter. Without runes she was stuck, but returning to Alba was simply a matter of acquiring some more. Billie put that second on her list of priorities—because first, she wanted to learn as much about Leviathan’s plans as she could. There was a chance here to gather more information than she would have thought possible, not just about what the company was doing with the rift, but even its plans for war. If she could learn as much as possible, and bring the particulars back to Dunwall, then surely there was a chance to save the world.

  Billie moved back to the slot in the wall. She watched as the soldiers who had been working on refueling the flying machine reappeared, the three of them now pushing their cart away, leaving a trail of yellow flashes bleeding in their wake—an aura that Billie knew only she could see.

  If they were using Void stone to fuel their machines, that meant they had access to it—real, physical access to the Void that allowed them to harvest—to mine—the actual fabric of the place. Perhaps that was the cause of the rift destabilization? That sounded like reasonable logic.

  Billie had to find the mine.

  ***

  Billie left the telescope room, made for the atrium. She didn’t pause as she walked past the open workshop doors, heading toward the main stairs that led down from the tower of the former Royal Observatory. She kept her pace steady, but her footfalls soft—she might be disguised, but there was still no particular need to draw any unnecessary attention to herself.

  It worked. The noise from the workshops continued unabated as she moved past them, through the doors, and down to the main block of the control complex.

  Everything was the same as it had been back in… well, Alba. Of course, she was still there, in theory. This place was different, but the same, another version of the city, or at least a part of the city.

  Billie didn’t let up the pace as she retraced her steps through the corridors. The place was as busy as it had been before, filled with Leviathan guards all going about their business, none of them paying her the slightest bit of attention. That was the advantage of the monumental scale of the operation—she was, literally, lost in the crowd.

  And that suited her just fine.

  Once she was past the main doors of the control complex, she followed a zigzag path cut into the hill. It was only once she had reached the quarry
floor and found a quieter route running between two prefab huts that she took the opportunity to assess her surroundings.

  It was, in most ways, exactly like the construction zone in Alba, except there were no workers and, as far as Billie could see—and hear—there was no actual construction. The causeway soared above, and it looked complete, the bridge-like structure arcing up from the quarry’s horizon to the west, and here, above the camp, it ended in a large, flanged platform, hundreds of feet in the air. Above, the opaque sky swirled with deep blues and reds, blending but never mixing, like oil paint floating on water.

  The Sliver tingled in her head, like she was touching the terminal of a full whale oil tank. For a moment—but only a moment—she longed for some Green Lady to dull the sensation.

  Then she turned, scanning her surroundings. As she had suspected, there was no Void rift of any kind within the Hollow. The military base occupied the full, unbroken circle of the crater-like quarry, with the Royal Morley Observatory right in the middle.

  Billie made for the parade ground, and the landing area for the flying machines she had seen from the tower. Once there, she skirted the edge, sticking to the roadway that ran alongside the prefab huts, keeping to a brisk, determined pace—there were Leviathan guards around, all of whom looked like they were heading somewhere important, although, like her, they all seemed to be wearing the plain black uniforms. Of the more heavily armored soldiers, she saw no sign.

  Billie reached the landing platform without being challenged. She ducked around the angled panels of the closest machine, putting it between her and the buildings that skirted the parade ground. She could use its cover to take a closer look—without, she hoped, being noticed.

  The flying machines were certainly impressive. The six docked here were identical, and much bigger than she had estimated from her view from the tower, each perhaps half the size of her old ship, the Dreadful Wale. Billie walked slowly down two facing rows, the Sliver itching in her head as she watched the yellowish trails rise out of the chimneys and into the slots on the underside of the huge tanks that sat atop the machines. When she reached the vehicle she had seen being refueled, the hazy aura of the Void stone hung around the rear of the machine like a fog, and trailed off faintly in the direction she had watched the soldiers wheel the empty cart. It was the perfect trail for her to follow.