Chapter Text
Dunwall could nearly pass for beautiful, when viewed from the rooftops at night. It still stunk of burning whale oil and ripe sea air and sewer, but the moonlight filtering through the patchy clouds overhead cast shadows like the ocean upon the city, drowning it in watery patterns. It would always be a melancholic place full of filth and crawling with rats – both those who scurry on all fours and those who walk upon two, dressed in finery and flitting from party to party in drunken, blissful ignorance. Yet it still managed to draw one in; enticing in the chaos and darkness and rankness it held to its breast like winning cards in Nancy, beloved and secret. Corvo would never dare call it idyllic, or even pleasant, but it could possibly be construed as appealing, if one held one’s breath.
He took a deep breath anyway, in through his nose, and shifted on the slate roof tiles as the stench of the city settled on the back of his tongue. Even the odor and the salt air was more amenable than the stillness of the Tower at this time of night, when there was nothing to keep his restless heart from its tangents and longings. Longings for the sunlit shores of Karnaca, for Jessamine and the distance she was duty bound to keep, for his daughter who could never even call him “father” or fall laughing into his arms. He had found ways to spare himself, and midnight escapades into the city seemed by far the lesser vice when indulging in Jessamine’s occasional whiskey and tobacco habit was not a viable option.
A quiet racket in the alley below drew Corvo’s drifting attentions, and he leant over the gutter to glance down curiously, hoping to spy some entertainment; perhaps a young couple’s midnight tryst or the remnants of a drunken bar fight. Instead, a broad, bulky figure was lowering a limp-limbed noble to the pavement as a woman looked on, seemingly unperturbed when the man wiped a bloody blade on his victim’s velvet jacket.
“Does he have it on him?” the woman asked, peering around her companion’s shoulder as he rummaged in the noble’s pockets.
“It’s here,” he replied, voice like gravel ground into cobblestones. Retrieving a letter and tucking it inside his own red coat, he stood, but did not turn to face her. “Back to base. Full report by morning.”
“Master Daud,” she acknowledged with a fist over her heart.
Corvo thought she seemed discontented with the instruction, with the way her fists curled into the hem of the fine jacket that didn't quite fit her properly, as if borrowed from an elder sister. Still, considering the current circumstances, Corvo doubted such an assumption to be correct. He shifted to see around the ductwork he had used to scramble up to the roof from the fire escape, and when his boot scraped lightly on the slate tile, the man in the alley tensed, suddenly aware.
The man – Daud, apparently – turned and bared his teeth. “Go. Now.”
“Yes, sir,” she conceded, before vanishing in a flutter of shadow.
Startling so badly that he nearly put his hand through a gap in the gutter, Corvo sucked in a panicked breath as he came a fraction too close to toppling headfirst onto the pavement below. When he raised his gaze, the man in the red coat was crouched on the roof of the building across from his own, unsheathed knife dangling in his hand, misleadingly nonchalant.
“You’re a long way from home, bodyguard,” Daud said, with the casual confidence of a man who has already won a fight he had yet to have. “If you plan on alerting the Watch, you may want to get moving.”
“Who was he?”
When Corvo made no move to depart, Daud sighed, clearly disgruntled, and the moonlight made the silver-slick scar along his face look like mercury dripping down his cheek. “Doesn’t matter.”
The assassin’s frown was well practiced, and it amused Corvo despite his raised hackles, as he imagined that it is the same long suffering expression that he often wore himself when Emily disregarded her studies in favor of pranks and daydreams. He only permitted his amusement for a brief moment, as Daud shifted on his perch, a dangerous brand of frustration brewing in his unblinking gaze. It was, frankly, a wonder that he had yet to run Corvo through like a rat on a spit. His posture was loose and fighting-ready, shoulders broad and muscular arms straining against the confines of his coat. Daud would kill him in an instant, and could likely do so with only minor inconvenience, Corvo knew without thought – but he had not. Not yet, at least. Perhaps he felt the same sense of morbid fascination that kept Corvo crouched on the roofline, unmoving in the face of a notorious wanted killer; or perhaps the Royal Protector’s death would merely be troublesome if it came without the promise of coin.
“What quarrel did you have with that man?” Corvo asked with an aborted nod to the corpse in the alley below, slowing his movement when Daud’s grip tightened instinctively on his blade, same as his own.
“The quarrel was not mine,” Daud replied, and Corvo could hear his patience fraying like strands splitting in a thread.
Corvo hummed to himself simply when Daud neglected to elaborate, the assassin’s scarred face neutral save the aborted twitch of what might have been a snarl of disapproval. Frowning down at the pavement once more, Corvo debated alerting the City Watch, but current circumstance was too damning for his own good, and he quickly abandoned the notion. Should the Royal Protector of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin, First of Her Name, be found skulking around on rooftops in the middle of the night in the accidental company of a wanted heretical assassin who would surely use whatever mystical gift he possessed to vanish like smoke, the situation would raise more questions than he was prepared to answer. Resigning to the absurdity of coincidence, Corvo studied Daud once more, who had inexplicably remained unmoved in the long moments since he last spoke.
There was something primal in Daud’s presence, something that made one’s stomach churn and hair stand on end in frightful awe, like standing beneath the belly of a trussed up leviathan on a whaling ship. It resonated in Corvo as well, as something outside of prey looking its killer in the face.
Corvo met Daud’s steely gaze. “You’re a witch?”
“No.”
“Are you certain?”
Daud snorted at that, and Corvo ventured that to be as close to expressing amusement as he ever came. “More certain than you.”
Several long moments passed in awkward, creaky silence while Corvo filtered through the myriad questions that rattled behind his schooled expression, debating which would be least likely have him end up with a heretic’s sword in his throat. But the stillness of the night was broken by a harsh gust of wind that tore between the crowded buildings, howling like some Pandyssian beast. The mottled shadows of the clouds creeping overhead plunged Corvo into isolated darkness that struck with a brutal chill. He squinted against the momentary gale, wrinkling his nose to the stench of whale oil refineries and vomit and salt, the ocean air not sweet like he remembered of Karnaca.
His distraction was sliced short by Daud’s voice, prominent and coarse and not hindered by any distance between them. Corvo glanced up at the man towering over him, red coat caught in the wind, and his pulse throbbed in his throat, wariness flooding his body like adrenaline despite his carefully neutral stare.
“Go back to your Tower, Royal Protector, before this city eats you alive,” Daud grated, looking derisively down at Corvo.
And before any coherent thought could pass from Corvo’s brain to his lips, the assassin was gone in a rush of peeling shadows. Rising to his feet with a reprehensible lack of grace, Corvo gazed out across the rooftops in search of a flutter of crimson in the dark, seeing nothing but chimneys spouting smoke into the stillness of the night. With the rush of astonishment still singing in his veins, like the dizzy headiness of white tobacco inhaled too sharply, a guttural farce of a laugh punched out of his belly, harsh and unpracticed.
Daud was by far the most interesting security threat he had yet had the misfortune of encountering, and Corvo was loathe to say that he nearly enjoyed the man’s crass brutality, for he knew that it lie dormant within his own self as well. It was a trait he passed to Emily, in one way or another, as she shared his instinctual knack for fighting and for all things morbidly fascinating; and Corvo could not help but think that if given the chance, Emily would adore Daud. In his presence she would feel the same wretched stirring in her belly that her father could feel now, writhing like eels in a bucket, wanting for a fight with a persistence that he had not felt since the Blade Verbena. It was the sickening combination of fear and awe and primitive instinct that made one swing at shadows in the dark, fighting an enemy beyond comprehension. He allowed himself to savor the old familiarity of it for a moment, before schooling himself back into his usual cold discipline. The Royal Protector was boasted as the most skilled fighter in the Isles, after all, though suddenly Corvo felt as if that title had been challenged, not with violence, but with an even more telling lack thereof.
Daud – the Knife of Dunwall, the heretic, Corvo gathered from the wildly inaccurate wanted posters pasted like wallpaper all over the city – was dangerous. It was a great benefit that Corvo now had an accurate face to put to the name, as scarred and dangerously stately as it was, and he decided that it would be pertinent to keep a close watch on him. A very close watch.
Armed with a new directive, Corvo swung down onto the fire escape, starting once more back to the heartless, stony edifice of Dunwall Tower.
The Watch guards at the gates saluted lazily as he passed through the first checkpoint unhindered, his back brutally straight and long stride full of purpose. It was an innocent deception that kept their questions at bay, even if Corvo knew well of the whispers they shared about him in the locker rooms over irredeemably bitter cups of coffee. Attano was out again last night; you think he’s grown bored of giving it to the Empress? one would ask, too eager. Void, no. If anything she’s tired of having some dark-skinned savage between her legs and finally put him in his place, another would reply. His place should be in a gutter somewhere. The Empress deserves a proper Gristolian man at her side, a third would chime in as he proudly puffed his chest. Or at her back, someone else would growl suggestively, drawing loud guffaws and jeers from his companions.
Corvo never needed to hear any more, he knew what was said in parlors over tea as often as in back alleys, passed between friends like the last cigar. Years ago it was hurtful and riled him in defense of Jessamine’s honor, but his Empress was made of tougher stuff than himself, and she had quickly put an end to his snarling indignation. It merely took one snide comment from a noble in Parliament early in her reign to prove that she was forged of steel, and Corvo quickly ceased to feel insulted on her behalf. There were still times when it wore her thin and she sought comfort in his whispered offers of violence against her abusers – silken, murderous words pressed into her hair, against her skin, falling from his lips like whale song with the promise of depravity. Jessamine never accepted, even if the offer riled her to drag her nails along his scalp and sink her teeth into his lip and dig her heels into his back. It was the only violence she could manage, but it was enough to set her free if only for a little while, even if it left her mortified and appalled with herself in the morning.
The thought of her mettle was often the only thing that kept him from snarling at the smirks that were shared as he passed; like the pointed glances the guards now bored into his back, his footsteps light but steady on the carpeted floor. Corvo wandered past Emily’s room on the way to his own and found it quiet, though he couldn't resist the urge to duck inside.
The governess seated in the corner glanced up from the book in her lap, offering a soft greeting. He nodded in response, taking quiet steps to Emily’s bedside and admiring her sleeping form with a gentle exasperation that he never would have fathomed he would have the chance to know. Sprawled in the center of the bed with her mouth hanging open, she had managed to kick her blankets off in her sleep, and he tugged the wayward linens back up to her chin. Emily snorted in half-hearted protest and flopped gracelessly onto her side, and Corvo sighed as he turned to leave.
“Her Highness was persistent that we read before bed and asked for you, but she was asleep as soon as she touched the pillow,” the governess offered in a conspiratorial whisper, halting his escape. “We never even made it so far as choosing a story.”
Corvo shook his head in wry amusement, musing that he never had minded that the governesses entertained scandalous theories regarding Emily’s parentage behind the backs of himself and Jessamine. It made them lenient when his mask of professional concern for Emily lost enough of its opacity for his fatherly worry to shine through. They never seemed to mind, sometimes treating him like some poor thing to be coddled, even if they would never show such tenderness to Emily. Corvo assumed that it was simply the curse of the governess to be nervous in nature, contradictory, and overbearing.
“Good night,” he offered in lieu of a reply, slipping out the door and into the hall.
The crack beneath Jessamine’s bedroom door was dark, but flickering light shone tellingly from underneath the door of her office, and Corvo knocked softly in a distinctive rhythm. Her beckoning answer was nearly instantaneous, and her smile was weary when he granted himself entrance.
“Corvo,” she hummed as he leant over the back of her chair, pressing his cheek against hers sweetly. “Have you been out?”
There was faint teasing accusation in the question, so Corvo chose to ignore it. “What are you working on?”
“Documents. Regarding the plague.”
“Nasty business.”
“Undoubtedly.”
They fell into an easy silence, swaying together as Jessamine perused a stack of reports, the quiet familiar and unburdened. Their relationship had changed in recent years, the heat and passion smothered by duty and the invisible strain it imposed upon their shared parenthood. While their bond was still strong, the love still ever-present and tangible, it manifested now in friendship, a companionship not physical, but dire in the absence of anything else. Perhaps they were closer now, with Emily between them, even with the rigor of youth and desire long faded.
“You seem pleased with yourself,” Jessamine broke the quiet, setting her pen aside. “What trouble have you caused?”
“Trouble?”
Jessamine pursed her lips and leant to study him over her shoulder, and Corvo did his utmost to look passive and unassuming, his Royal Protector's blank façade sliding seamlessly into place. There must have been something in his gaze that she could still pick out from his pretending, because she sighed and rubbed at her tired eyes with one finger, lightly smudging her makeup.
“Corvo, my dear, you have reeked of smugness since you walked through that door.”
At his dissatisfied frown, she waved him over to one of the plush chairs on the opposite side of her absurdly expansive desk. Conceding to sit, Corvo still squirmed uncomfortably until he was perched on the very edge of the seat, close enough to rest his elbows on the desktop. Excessive comfort had never ceased to sit ill in his belly, especially given the tendency of his peers to languish in the spoils of the Empress's favor. Corvo had always felt that comfort bred complacency that allowed for trouble, and when his sole purpose for living was preserving the life of the Empress of the Isles, he would rather endure discomfort than allow any such trouble to befall Jessamine.
“Tell me,” she said, offering her hand. He took it gently and they both pretended that her words were not an order, but he had never been capable of refusing her anything, and so he sighed and hung his head, resting his cheek against his bicep. Jessamine idly rubbed some warmth back into his fingers, chasing off the winter chill, and waited for him to find his voice.
“I met someone interesting tonight, while I was… on patrol.”
Jessamine pursed her lips at him, but allowed the lie. “Someone interesting? A good sort of interesting or a bad sort of interesting?”
“Both? I think?”
“Oh?” her voice lilted curiously, a hint of suggestiveness in the arch of her brow. “Well you know, Corvo, it's what, 25 Ice? There’s just five months until Fugue.”
“Void, Jess,” he huffed. “No, no. You know I wouldn't—”
“Corvo,” she interrupted gently, slender fingers tapping against the callouses on his palm, counting out a rhythm only she knew. Her smile was pitying, and it made Corvo’s stomach churn.
“Jess.”
“Twenty years you’ve been in Dunwall, and you’ve not had one friend aside from me. You haven’t even tried, my love,” she reminded him, patting at the back of his hand. “You’ve shut yourself away inside the Tower and sold yourself to duty; you’ve convinced yourself that’s all you need. I know that’s why you disappear in the dead of night. You’re looking for something and you don’t even realize what it is.”
Corvo groaned, leaning back in his chair and pulling his hand free to rub at the stubble along his jaw. Jessamine’s gaze was forceful and pointed on the side of his face, and he rocked his head back against the chair, studying the ceiling in avoidance of the accusation he knew was true. He was stubbornly silent for a long while, until eventually her patience wore thin.
“Tell me,” Jessamine suggested again, and when Corvo dropped his gaze she was smiling at him softly, dark hair removed from its severe twist and spilling over her shoulder.
Groaning, he sat up to straighten his shoulders and pointedly ignored her pleased smirk.
“I was on a rooftop in the Distillery District, watching Bottle Street—,” he began.
“Bottle Street, again?” Jessamine tutted. “One day some thug will see you and knock you right down onto someone’s balcony.”
“Jess,” Corvo warned before continuing, her impatient frown scarcely affecting his pace. “There was a man pulling his knife from a noble’s chest, and a woman looking on. A subordinate of his, I’d wager.”
Jessamine’s eyes had gone wide with horrified astonishment, and her voice dropped low and serious when she next spoke. “An assassination? Who was the victim?”
“I do not know. They stole a letter from his coat.”
“Who was the killer?”
“Daud.”
“The Knife of Dunwall,” she breathed. Daud was an urban legend in his own right, he and his Whalers the sort of ghost story told to keep children on their best behavior, despite the tangible carnage strewn haplessly in his wake. It was not uncommon for the name of the Knife to be whispered like a curse; and he might as well have been one, given the way it tumbled like a gasp from the Empress’s lips. “Did you see his face? The Watch has been hoping for a proper description to put on the wanted posters for years, yet no one has seen him plain; nor the faces of his heretic mob, for that matter.”
“I did see. We spoke, though but briefly.”
The breath that Jessamine sucked through her teeth bode for a scolding, and Corvo loosened his shoulders in apparent nonchalance.
“Corvo, you foolish man, you confronted him?”
“Not intentionally, I assure you,” he grumbled in reply, averting his gaze in embarrassment. “He could have killed me if he wanted to, with those Void powers of his, could have nudged me right off that roof. But he didn’t, Jess.”
“Perhaps. But what if you’ve made yourself a target?” she pleaded, leaning across the desk to grasp his hands once more. “He may yet come for you.”
“And I will defend you to my last.”
“It’s not me that I’m concerned about, Corvo!”
Corvo shrank into his silence, rattled by her outburst and the weary sigh she pulled from her bones. Truthfully, he had not considered his own wellbeing in years, only that of his charges, of Emily and his beloved Empress. He attempted to muse on the thought, but it felt ill-fitted like overlarge shoes or gloves cut too small, and so he dismissed it with a startling urgency while attempting his best to appear properly scolded.
Still, Daud had not set his blade to Corvo’s flesh, and Corvo felt that perhaps there was something there to be exploited, some modicum of indifference that would keep the Knife at bay. It was utterly impossible for a man like Daud to not have intelligence on every gang and wayward noble, every foreigner and highwayman in Dunwall; it was intelligence that Corvo himself could use, given the Spymaster’s propensity for secrecy even within the ranks of the Empress’s most trusted advisors. Ignorance would not permit Corvo to keep Jessamine safe, and Burrow’s derision for low-born Serkonans in positions of prominence would not allow that snake of a man to acknowledge such an oversight. Daud could be useful, and Corvo told Jessamine as much, though he neglected to mention the tingle of morbid enjoyment he felt in the man’s company.
“Considering his occupation, he’s likely one of the most well informed men in Dunwall. The potential in such an alliance is incredible.”
The Empress sighed, heavy and conceding, and met his gaze. “Just be careful, Corvo. Men like that are volatile, and if the rumors are true an army of shadows kills at his behest.”
“On my honor. Though I admit that ‘volatile’ does not seem fitting,” Corvo grinned mildly, immensely pleased with himself, and Jessamine narrowed her gaze in suspicion.
Leaning forward once more, she searched his face for something with the determination of a wolfhound on the scent.
“Tell me.”
*****
Daud managed to make an obscene racket as he returned to his quarters, his boots heavy and clanging against the scaffolds that teetered over the Flooded District. He could see Billie slinking about in his office awaiting his return, and he nearly groaned at the sight of her there, inescapable. Thomas was by her side, leaning against a low bookshelf and glaring absently at nothing – his presence a blessing from the Outsider if he ever deigned to bestow one – as Daud clambered in through the window with practiced ease.
“Sir,” Thomas said, straightening and nodding brusquely.
Daud grunted dismissively in response as he shed his gear in clattering flurry of overzealous distaste, blades and bullets rolling asunder as they struck the battered floor. His typically foul mood was more bitter than usual, and he could not bear to tolerate any catalysts to worsening it. Not after the Royal Protector’s unnerving, quiet defiance.
“Get out.”
“It seems Galia was successful. Looks like Hampton’s little wife will be sitting pretty now that the cheating bastard is gone,” Billie interjected, unmoving as she folded her arms over her chest. “Shame about the witness.”
“What?” Thomas choked, blue eyes wide with concern. “Master Daud… I’ll see to it, if you wish. Give the order, sir.”
“You wouldn’t stand a chance against him, boy,” Daud snapped as his fist bore down on the top of his cluttered desk. “Even unmarked, he’s out of your league.”
Thomas shrank a bit at the blatant criticism, unfair as it may have been, but his spine remained as unerringly rigid as ever. If he had not had the misfortune of falling into the Whalers’ ranks, Daud thought absently, Thomas would have made a spectacular soldier, an officer, even. Ribbons and medals upon his breast would have suited him more than oiled leather and glassy-eyed masks and murder for profit, though his talent for death was greater than most his age. Daud nearly felt a flicker of remorse for the dejection painted across the young man’s face, but he quashed the sensation like a rat in a pantry.
“Who?” Billie asked, and the shift in topic allowed a bit of the scarlet embarrassment drip out of Thomas’s cheeks.
Rubbing at his brow, Daud leaned against his desk. “The Royal Protector. Sitting up on a damn rooftop.”
“Oh,” Thomas breathed unhelpfully.
Daud could feel Billie’s searching gaze heavy against the side of his face, scrutinizing and plucking away little bits of his patience as pills from wool. It was apparent that whatever she saw there was disappointing, at best, and she sighed before speaking once more.
“You could have killed him yourself, Daud. Having the Royal Protector gone would make our lives much easier when we take that job. If he's as impressive as you seem to think he is, it’ll be easier to get to the Empress with him out of the way.”
“I haven't accepted anything yet, Lurk,” he growled in reply, eyes going narrow in frustration.
Lifting one shoulder dismissively, Billie watched him with the sort of gaze that made one’s spine tingle when there was a dark doorway at one’s back. Daud struggled to ignore her as he shuffled through papers on his desk, looking for the evening’s missive from Rulfio on the progress of Sokolov’s latest security prototypes, before deciding to get whatever it was Lurk wanted with him over and through.
“Thomas, you’re dismissed,” Daud said on the tail end of a sigh, frowning when the young man straightened at being addressed. “I have an assignment for you tomorrow. See me after morning patrols.”
“Yes, sir,” Thomas nodded, apparently pleased that he was no longer the target of Daud’s derision. His gaze lingered for a long moment, studying something in the weary planes of Daud’s scarred face before bowing with a crisp salute. “Goodnight, Master.”
Grunting and waving a dismissive hand, Daud turned to Billie as soon as Thomas had vanished in a billow of the Void. “Spit it out, Lurk.”
“It’s not like you to spare a witness, Daud, let alone not notice one hovering right above your head, regardless of who it might be,” she began, cocking one hip to the side as she forged bluntly onward like a blood ox in a stampede. “You may have some purpose, but from where I stand, leaving the only man on this bloody rock capable of posing a threat to us alive when he practically dropped into your lap is just foolish. Though, as always, I defer to your judgement.”
She finished grandly, voice dripping with the type of pointed, challenging insubordination that Daud typically valued in her as his second in command, but now it merely left him gritting his teeth until his jaw creaked ominously. Billie had grown more brazenly oppositional in recent months, in small increments between broad bouts of stoic acceptance of his every order. It flagged something suspicious in the back of his mind that he quashed violently, chalking her fickleness up to testing the limits of her power as his most trusted agent and nothing more.
“Tell me, Lurk,” he replied, voice harsher than intended but sufficient to make her straighten her spine on instinct. “If we were to accept a commission to, say, murder an Empress, would it not be more foolish to disregard the opportunity to wring information from that same Empress’s bodyguard?”
Billie shrugged one shoulder again, feigning indifference, but Daud could tell from the taut line of her jaw that she had understood him perfectly well. It was not often that he would mince words and languish in excessive discussion, but occasionally it was immensely satisfying to turn the tables on those who would. The novices thought they knew him, thought he was predictable the same as Billie did. Yet he was in his position for a reason, had held Dunwall hostage under the heel of his boot for years, and any who would forget would be reminded with a reprimand at best and a knife to the neck at worst.
“If you plan on wearing that color,” Daud gestured at her crimson coat, sneering, “then you had damn well start thinking and earn it. Now get out of my office.”
“As you wish, sir,” Billie replied with less insolence than before but with a healthy new helping of bitterness, vanishing after a weak salute.
Alone, Daud groaned and slumped back in his chair, rubbing his gloved hands over his face as the weight of silence threatened to drag him through the floorboards and into the murky waters of Rudshore below. Perhaps electing to spare the Royal Protector was foolish, especially considering that he had done so with the end of requiring himself to actually spend time with the man, to seek him out. He would not be too difficult to find, as reports had come from Aedan, Quinn, and Vladko that the Royal Protector had been seen skulking around various districts during the underbelly of the night. What drew him out of the safety of the Tower and away from the Empress’s side Daud had yet to reconcile, but it was a fortunate coincidence that they had stumbled upon each other. And stumbled they had, as the Royal Protector looked about as stunned by the oversight as Daud had felt, at least judging from what little he could decipher from the little fractures in his carefully crafted stoicism.
Still, there was a curious glimmer in those whiskey warm eyes of his, a promise of violence and a quiet confidence that reminded Daud of teenage back alley brawls in Batista, from when he cut his knuckles on teeth and had yet held no assassin’s blade. It was remarkable and infuriating that the Royal Protector did not so much as flinch when faced with the Knife, holding his gaze like a challenge that sat low in Daud’s gut. He had grown weary in recent years, but the Royal Protector’s defiance had woken him somehow, rattling something loose in his placidly complacent head. He would be trouble, and Daud knew it even as he dug his own grave out from under his feet.
Corvo Attano.
Damn him to the Void.