The Return of Daud

by Adam Christopher

  The High Oracle and her Sisters waited. They would have no rest, no food, no water, until the Ritual of Prophecy was complete.

  Another hour.

  And then Sister Kara gasped, taking a huge, gulping breath as though surfacing from a deep, cold pool of water.

  On the High Oracle’s left, Sister Hathena jumped, startled. She glanced at the High Oracle, her eyes wide and afraid behind the see-through veil.

  Yes, thought Pelagia. She can sense it too.

  Interference.

  The High Oracle watched Sister Kara, the young novice rising and falling, rising and falling on her knees. Pelagia felt Sister Hathena’s veiled eyes on her, and suspected that any fear she had sensed earlier was now gone. In its place, she thought she could feel a growing anger as Hathena realized Pelagia’s plan.

  Yes, she knew she had broken all protocol and tradition by selecting Kara to read the prophecy. And yes, she also knew there were reasons why such traditions existed. The Ritual of Prophecy was not just difficult; it was potentially dangerous for the untrained. Without such training—years of it—the naked mind could wander far into the labyrinth of the Void, following visions and songs that came not from the depths of the future, but from the depths of the prophet’s own subconscious.

  Without such training, a mind could get lost forever.

  Pelagia knew it was a risk. So did the others. But what the others didn’t know was that the risk was worth it. The future of the Order was at stake. And Pelagia Themis was the High Oracle, and the High Oracle’s word was the law.

  She pushed the guilt away, ignored Sister Hathena’s stare, and focused on the disciplines of the Oracular Order, reciting the Seven Strictures to herself to clear her senses. Then, her emotions back under control, Pelagia lifted her chin and spoke, the first sounds recorded on Sister Beatris’s audiograph in many, many hours.

  “Tell us, Sister,” said Pelagia quietly. “Tell us, child. Tell us what you see. Let the Prophecy speak through you. Let the future become clear in the eye of your mind.”

  Kara opened her eyes. Pelagia could see the girl’s eyes through her red veil—they were glazed, unfocused. Kara had done it, finally.

  Kara shuddered. “I see… I see…”

  Kara gasped. Two other Sisters in the circle jumped, but Pelagia ignored them. Hathena hadn’t taken her eyes off the High Oracle.

  “Tell us, Sister,” said Pelagia. “Divine the prophecy and let it be known to us all.”

  “I see…”

  “Speak, Kara, speak.”

  Kara gasped again, rising up on her knees. Now Sister Beatris exchanged a glance with Sister Hathena, Beatris’s thumb hovering over the audiograph lever. Pelagia didn’t take her eyes from the dais, but she waved at the Sister.

  “Let the recording continue, Beatris. We are close. We are very close.”

  “Oracle,” said Hathena, turning on her cushion. “Oracle, this is not right. We must stop.”

  Pelagia hissed, ignoring her. She rose up onto her knees to address the novice on the dais.

  “Kara, speak! Tell us what you read, Sister.”

  Kara gasped a third time, then dropped onto her cushion, her legs folded awkwardly under her. She turned her head, twisting it sideways like a hound listening for its master’s voice. Pelagia watched as the muscles at the back of Kara’s jaw bunched as the young novice ground her teeth. Kara began to pound her fists into her legs, blood trickling from between her clenched fingers as her nails dug deep into her palms.

  “Focus, Kara. Focus!”

  Hathena shook her head and stood up, clearly unconcerned with breaking protocol. “High Oracle—Pelagia—stop this! Stop this. Now.”

  Pelagia stood. “Kara, hear me—”

  That was when Kara screamed. Then she stood, and…

  And she laughed.

  “I see it!” Kara lifted her arms up, her face split by a wide grin. “I can see it!”

  By now the other four Sisters, until then as still and as silent as the black marble slabs behind them, became restless, first looking at each other, then at the High Oracle, then back at their Sister on the dais.

  “Tell us, Sister!” said Pelagia. “Read the prophecy.”

  “I…” Kara lowered her arms and bent her head again. She leaned forward, craning her back, twisting her neck around. “I see… I see…”

  “Tell us.”

  “I see shadows,” Kara said, her voice now a harsh, sibilant whisper. “Many shadows, blue and dark. I see light, blue and bright. I see… there is a path, a way forward, but it is blocked. There is a curtain. A veil. A veil of blue. The veil… it moves. I can see… hands? I can see hands. There are many hands. They move behind the veil. Pushing. Clawing. Pulling at the veil, reaching out, reaching out…”

  “Yes, Kara,” said Pelagia. “Reaching out. Reaching for you! Go to them, Kara. Go to them!”

  “Oracle!” Hathena broke the circle, walking over to Pelagia and looking down at her. “Pelagia, there is heresy at work. I felt it! Stop this, before Kara is lost.”

  Pelagia paid no heed. On the dais, Kara twisted on her cushion, rising and falling, her breathing becoming faster, shallower. She clenched and unclenched her hands, smearing the white of her tunic with blood.

  “I see a veil… I see a veil… I see a veil. The hands that reach… The hands that reach…”

  A thin line of blood spilled from Kara’s nose. She didn’t appear to notice as the blood ran down, around her mouth, staining her top teeth.

  Hathena spun around. Before Pelagia could stop her, the Sister had stepped up onto the dais in front of Kara. The novice didn’t seem to notice she was there, she just kept bobbing and weaving.

  “I see a veil… I see a veil. The many hands!”

  Hathena knelt down so she was on the same level as Kara and grabbed the novice’s wrists. She pulled Kara’s hands toward her, but Kara fought against her, the two women locked together in what looked to be an equal struggle. Finally Hathena let go and fell back down the dais steps, landing in front of Beatris, knocking the horn of the audiograph recorder. She pushed herself up on her hands.

  “Kara, listen to me! Find the path and come back to us! There is no prophecy. Come back and rejoin your Sisters.”

  “The many hands… The many hands… The blue light that is blue…”

  Hathena stood and, tearing the red veil from her face, she turned, looking around the circle.

  “What’s the matter with you all? Will nobody help me?”

  The others exchanged glances but didn’t move. Hathena moved back to the High Oracle, standing directly in front of her.

  “High Oracle, please. Stop this!”

  Pelagia looked over Hathena’s shoulder at Sister Kara writhing on the dais, whispering heresies as blood continued to run from her nose—and now her mouth, her ears, even her eyes.

  She had found out what she wanted. Her fears were confirmed. And now the Ritual of Prophecy was killing Kara.

  Pelagia’s hand dropped to her belt, her fingers playing over the pommel of the ceremonial mace carried by all of the Sisters of the Oracular Order.

  Hathena glanced down, then backed away, shaking her head. “No. Pelagia, no, you can’t—”

  The High Oracle stepped forward, lifting her mace from her belt. With her other hand she pointed at Beatris. “Enough! Stop the recording.”

  Beatris operated the recording lever. The machine stopped with a heavy clunk.

  Hathena opened her mouth to speak, but Pelagia pushed past her, her shove sending the Sister careening to the floor. The High Oracle mounted the dais. The mace in her hand felt suddenly very, very heavy.

  Kara didn’t even know she was there. She had calmed, and was now kneeling, her head upturned, her lips moving, although she didn’t speak.

  The other Sisters stood. Hathena was shouting, but Pelagia blotted the sound out, reciting the Seven Strictures inside her head, over and over and over again.

  The prophecy was being interfered wi
th. Someone had found a way, somehow, to influence the visions, to despoil the power of the Sisters of the Oracular Order.

  It had to be some kind of witchcraft. There was no other explanation.

  Heresy.

  Then the High Oracle swung her arm back, raising the mace. Behind her, the others in the circle called out—Hathena included. She pushed herself up from the floor and dived toward Pelagia, grabbing the High Oracle’s arm, yanking it back with enough force to send both of them falling to the floor. Pelagia’s mace clattered away across the stones; she struggled to rise, but Hathena was faster, shoving the High Oracle away as she scrambled back to where Kara had collapsed onto the embroidered cushion, her curled body wracked with sobs.

  Pelagia stood and pulled the veil off her face. “Hathena, you dare to interfere!”

  Hathena wrapped her arms around Kara. She regarded Pelagia over the top of Kara’s shaking head. “You were going too far, High Oracle.”

  Pelagia paused, the silence in the Cloister of Prophecy disturbed only by Kara’s weeping. As Pelagia stepped up onto the dais and looked down at the novice, Hathena pulled her even closer.

  Nobody spoke, nobody moved. Then Pelagia turned and pointed at Beatris. “Destroy the audiograph recording, immediately. Burn it!”

  Beatris, shaking, began pulling the punch card reel from the machine. The High Oracle turned back to Hathena, the two women looking at each other as time seemed to stretch out to eternity.

  Then Pelagia said, “We had to know, Sister.”

  Hathena stared at her. “There had to be another way.”

  “The future of the Sisters of the Oracular Order hangs in the balance,” said Pelagia. “We cannot allow the Ritual of Prophecy to be interfered with.” She looked at the other Sisters, cowering from their leader. “There is heresy at work,” she said. “And we must work to fight it.”

  She turned back to Hathena, then took a deep breath. “But I must thank you, Sister. Perhaps I allowed myself to be overcome. Look after Kara. You may suspend your duties until she has recovered. I must meditate on my actions and consider a better way forward.”

  Hathena held her gaze for a moment, then she nodded. Pelagia turned and marched out of the chamber without another word.

  After she was gone, Hathena glanced over to the corner of the Cloister of Prophecy, where the High Oracle’s mace lay. As Kara’s weeping began to subside, Hathena shifted her position, only now uncurling her fingers from the grip of her own mace on her belt.

  PART ONE

  THE KNIFE OF DUNWALL

  1

  GREAVES AUXILIARY WHALE SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5, SLAUGHTERHOUSE ROW, DUNWALL

  18th Day, Month of Earth, 1852

  “He’d looked into Jessamine Kaldwin’s eyes at the moment her life slipped away. And in that moment a thought occurred to him: he’d made a mistake. He’d been misled. That kind of thinking was useless. She was just as dead, whether he regretted it or not. But he’d seen his true face reflected in her eyes; seen himself for what he really was. Not a renowned assassin, not some great shaper of history. Just another playing piece in an unknowable game.”

  —THE KNIFE OF DUNWALL

  Excerpt from a penny novel, Chapter 3

  He knelt on the hard, wet floor of the ruined slaughterhouse, glanced around at the neatly ordered piles of rubble, and sighed. He pushed the top of his deep hood back a little and tugged absentmindedly on the bottom of his jerkin, wet from the night rain. He pulled at his beard with a gloved hand.

  Daud considered his situation, and he sighed.

  So, this was it. Weeks—months—of traveling, of crisscrossing the Empire. Months of following rumors and whispers, of listening to stories with no endings, of seeking out strange cults, chasing leads that led nowhere. Months of searching, scrambling for what little information there was, grasping at the threads, pulling them gently, as though they would break in his grasp. This was it: a pile of rubble in the cavernous, burned-out shell of a whale oil factory in an unsavory quarter of the wettest bloody city in all the Isles.

  It was the right place; he was just far too late. The stories were true—something had happened in the factory. Something vital to his mission. But whatever calamity had reduced the Greaves Auxiliary Slaughterhouse 5 to a broken shell, it had happened months ago.

  All that time and effort wasted. The factory had been important, but now it was a dead end.

  Daud stood, planted his hands on his hips, and tilted his head as he regarded the nearest rubble pile, as though viewing it from a different angle would somehow make any kind of difference at all.

  No. It was not a wasted effort. This was not a dead end. He told himself that, over and over. Yes, he was visiting the scene months after the event, but even he couldn’t bend time that far. That was out of his control.

  What was in his control was what he did now. He was here, he had made it. So now he could search for clues. Yes, the trail was cold—but he would find something.

  He had to.

  And true enough, the broken mix of ironwork, brick, and blocks of stone was interesting. Altogether, it occupied half of what was left of the factory floor, on the street side of the building’s shell, the half that was still mostly intact. On the other side, the river side, the entire side of the building was missing, the gaping maw open to the elements, with fingers of surviving superstructure reaching up into the dark sky and out over the dark river. Most of that side must have collapsed into the water, and while Daud could see the river was mostly clear, there was foamy wash close to the riverbank as the Wrenhaven tumbled over a fair amount of building wreckage lurking just below the surface. The river was a vital working waterway for Dunwall and clearly a great deal of effort had been made to dredge it. The recovered material had first been piled back into the factory, and then the real work had begun.

  Whatever had happened, it had been big—big enough to investigate, big enough for officials to spend time moving, sorting, and cataloguing the rubble, which was neatly arranged, by material and by size, each piece daubed with a number in white paint that shone luminously in the night, reflecting back what little moonlight there was with surprising brightness.

  An explosion was the official story. On the last leg of his journey, traveling east from Potterstead after landing back in Gristol, Daud had poured over every newspaper report he had managed to collect since he had linked rumor to fact, identifying the event in Dunwall as the pivot point on which his mission would succeed or fail.

  The official story was straightforward enough, although it had taken some time to piece together something that felt closer to the whole picture from the myriad of different reports, each one sensationalized or editorialized depending on the newspaper, the personal whims of the journalist in question, and their targeted reading audience. But what he had managed to learn was this:

  On the fifteenth day of the Month of Darkness, 1851—a full eight months ago now—there had been an industrial accident at the Greaves Auxiliary Slaughterhouse 5, situated on the banks of the Wrenhaven River, at the far eastern corner of Slaughterhouse Row. Although the specific reason had never been disclosed, there had been an explosion, big enough to not only destroy most of the factory itself, but damage several other buildings in the district, forcing the authorities to put up a cordon—for the public’s own safety—manned by the City Watch, effectively sealing off an area of several blocks, with the ruined factory at the center.

  A cordon that today, eight months later, was still in place.

  Daud found that interesting. He had easily avoided the lazy patrols of the City Watch and slipped into the restricted zone to find no damage at all to any of the other buildings in the block. Which meant the barriers had nothing to do with public safety. The authorities didn’t want people seeing what they were doing.

  But that was it. Nothing further was reported, save for an editorial a day later on the dangers of whale oil. The Dunwall Courier reminded readers that the extraction and refining process was difficult
and not without risk. It concluded by noting that the Empress of the Isles herself, Emily Kaldwin, had called in representatives of the Greaves Lightning Oil Company to Dunwall to provide her with a full report on the incident.

  He hadn’t believed it when he had first read it and, bringing it to mind again, he still didn’t. He knew two things. Firstly, that this was no whale oil explosion—the substance was unstable, true, but even a storage tank rupture couldn’t cause this much damage. And secondly, an official investigation into a simple industrial accident didn’t take eight months, no matter how inefficient Dunwall bureaucracy was.

  He was in the right place. It had been here.

  He straightened up and looked around, noting the newer struts and props that had been installed to support the remaining three walls of the factory, the largest segments of which still rose to a prodigious height. The ruin was being preserved, at least for the moment, until the official work was finished.

  This was fine. In fact, this was better than fine. Because it had been eight months, and they were still going through the rubble, which meant they hadn’t found it. Not yet.

  He still had a chance. The trail was perhaps not as cold as he had thought.

  But was the factory itself a dead end? He turned and walked slowly along the rows of rubble, scanning the pieces and their numbers, willing some clue, some piece of evidence that had somehow escaped the notice of the official investigator to leap up at him. As he walked he lifted the edge of his hood a little more, then glanced up to the open sky. It had finally stopped raining, but the factory floor was now swimming in two inches of water. There were City Watch patrols out in the streets of the restricted zone, and he moved carefully, not making a sound. Not that it was difficult for him. Silence, stealth and secrecy had been his bread and butter once. And now, after all this time, it had been easy to fall back into the old ways.

  Perhaps a little too easy.

  He stopped and exhaled slowly, controlling his breathing and the growing feeling of doubt that was blossoming in his belly.