Dishonored--The Corroded Man

  Contents

  Cover

  Available from Titan Comics

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Part One: The Sleeping City

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Interlude

  Part Two: The Witchcharms

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Interlude

  Part Three: The Masquerade

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  Interlude

  Part Four: The Black Mirror

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  The Gripping New Comic Book Series!

  Available from Titan Comics

  Dishonored: The Wyrmwood Deceit by Gordon Rennie, Andrea Olimpieri, and Marcelo Maiolo

  DISHONORED: THE CORRODED MAN

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783293049

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783293070

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: September 2016

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Editorial Consultants:

  Harvey Smith

  Paris Nourmohammadi

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  © 2016 Bethesda Softworks LLC. Dishonored, Arkane, ZeniMax, Bethesda, Bethesda Softworks and related logos are registered trademarks or trademarks of ZeniMax Media Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  PROLOGUE

  SOMEWHERE NEAR UTYRKA

  Month undetermined, 1849—1850

  “Contrast this with the prisons of Tyvia, located in the tundra at the center of that nation-state. At some of the labor camps in Tyvia, there are literally no walls. A prisoner exhausted from hard labor and without tools is unlikely to survive the harsh climate or the hungry packs of hounds that rove the frozen wastes. In fact, Tyvian prison authorities make it known that any prisoner is free to leave at any time. In all of recorded history, no one has made the remote walk across the snow and ice to the nearest city.”

  — PRISONS OF THE ISLES

  Extract from a report commissioned

  by the Royal Spymaster

  The Prisoner stopped at the edge of the precipice and gazed out over the land ahead, the trailing edge of his heavy black woolen greatcoat flapping in the stiff wind that screamed out of the glacier valley in front of him. The gale was so loud he could barely think, let alone contemplate the complexity of the task ahead.

  There was no time to dally, no time to waste. There was work to be done.

  He had come this far—too far to fail, too far to give up—but at the same time, not far enough. Too close to his captors, to his tormentors. He knew he had to keep going and he knew that there was nobody in the world who could stop him, except himself.

  The Prisoner adjusted his black traveller’s hat, pulling the wide brim down tight over his face to stop it cartwheeling away in the wind, and he looked out at what lay before him. This was the howling wind and the snowy wastes and the cold sun that burned with a flat, dead light.

  This was the tundra.

  This was Tyvia.

  The Prisoner turned, letting the chains he carried over one shoulder slip off into the snow. At the other end of the chains was a bundle of black cloth, curled into itself, shaking in the snow. If the shivering thing was whimpering, or crying, or begging for forgiveness, the Prisoner couldn’t hear it over the wind.

  This thing had once been a guard at Utyrka, the labor camp. Now the Prisoner’s own captive, he was numb—numb from the cold, numb from the journey, numb from the knowledge that his story was coming to an end and that soon he would be one with the Void. Because the guard had not been a good man, and he knew it. He knew also the fate that would befall his untethered self once the Prisoner had finished his cruel business in the hard snows.

  His end would come soon, but not yet.

  The Prisoner still had need for him. He hefted the chains in his gloved hand, twisting, pulling, just a little. The shivering wreck rose to his knees but no further, and shuffled forward but remained bowed, his head buried in a dozen orbits of his scarf, the huge collar of his black greatcoat upturned. It was the same kind the Prisoner wore, the standard issue of the Tyvian military, designed for unpopular tours in the harsh icebound interior of the country.

  The Prisoner had taken his coat from another guard at the camp—one of three captives and the first to die, there in the camp, before they had even walked out onto the snowy plain. The second had died two days into the trek, and the Prisoner still had that captive’s chain bound around his waist, the thick steel collar now hanging from his belt.

  The Prisoner had needed three men, so he had taken three. The first, for his clothes—the heavy winter uniform of the Tyvian army supplementing the ragged wardrobe the Prisoner had worn for years and years without ever taking off. Now he wore the fur-lined greatcoat, the hat with the wide brim to shade from the glare of the dead winter sun, the scarf woven from the pelt of the tundra’s saber-toothed black bear. And over his eyes, the first guard’s snow goggles, two discs of polished red glass nearly as big as the saucers off which the guards at the camp sipped their hot, imported Gristol tea.

  That first guard was dead. It had been necessary. He hadn’t wanted to surrender his uniform, so the Prisoner had taken it by force. It was of no consequence. There was no one else alive at the camp for the man to guard.

  Not anymore.

  As the Prisoner had picked over the dead guard’s clothing, the other two he had captured—chained at the neck, shackled like the pigs they were—had knelt on the hard ground and watched in silence, their minds spinning over distant horizons as their new master got dressed for the long journey ahead. Then the Prisoner had yanked the chains and led his two captives away, their heads bowed, their lips moving as they murmured deliriously, stumbling through the snow behind him.

  The second guard had been taken for another purpose altogether.

  Food.

  Not food for the Prisoner, nor for the third captive, but for the wolves the Prisoner knew would be tracking them as soon as they left the safety and light of the camp’s outer perimeter. After crossing that boundary they had walked for two days through snow that was sometimes hard-packed, other times waist-deep. The going was slow.

  The wolves were fast. In the hard winter, in the Months of Darkness, of High Cold, of Ice, this was their world, their domain, and outside of the Tyvian prisons that dotted the frozen plains, man was a trespasser—though, for the wildlife, not an unwelcome one.

  On the contrary. Tho
se trying to escape—the fools who thought they could make it, who took the mocking invitations of the guards to just walk out—were most welcome indeed. Food was scarce, and in this frozen world the wolf packs were hungry.

  * * *

  In the trek from the camp, the Prisoner found evidence aplenty of previous flights of freedom. Such dreams, such attempts were all the same—ill-conceived, desperate. Impossible. Because the prisons of Tyvia were all the same. Each was a labor camp in the wilderness, in the tundra.

  They varied in size, ranging from small camps of a few dozen convicts to prisons that were more like small towns. They varied in function, too. Those convicted of lesser offenses were doomed to nothing more than the harvest of lumber—still a task that would break most men, for the wood of the forests was as solid as Dunwall granite. The trees themselves were petrified by the cold, becoming nothing but tall, vertical shafts of permafrost.

  But the lumber camps were not penitentiaries, not in the mind of the Prisoner. They were something far lesser—merely “correctional” facilities, the inhabitants of which might even one day return to the warmth of civilization, albeit as shadows, as ghosts of their former selves, their fight, their rebellion, worked out of them.

  The other prisons were different. Quarries for rock-breaking or, as at Utyrka, mines sunk deep into the tundra, where salt was wrested from an impenetrable, frozen darkness in the earth.

  To be sentenced to those camps was to disappear. Death would be preferable, but there was no such statute in the Tyvian law books. Indeed, to be sent to prison wasn’t even considered a punishment, according to the twisted logic of the High Judges, the quasi-military tribunal who ruled over the isle with an iron fist. To be sent to the camps was, in their words, to be granted freedom.

  Because the prisons had no walls.

  They had guards, certainly. The Prisoner pitied the poor bastards who were themselves sentenced to long tours out in the frozen wastes, but at least the guards could go home again when their time was up. The guards were there to run the camps—to keep order, to keep the work going, to punish those who did not fulfill their quotas, whether it was lumber or salt or broken rock. But they were not there to prevent escape.

  Escape, the High Judges said, was impossible, because the camps were not prisons. There were no walls, no gates, no fences. The “prisoners” were not shackled or manacled or locked in, at night or in the day. In fact, the prisoners were free to leave—everyone in the camp was a free man, pardoned by the state, permitted with full authority to return home, to their families and their towns and their villages and their causes.

  Of course, escape was impossible. The prisoners knew it. The guards knew it. The High Judges knew it, but their hands were clean, their consciences clear.

  Because every man was a free man.

  * * *

  The Prisoner and his two remaining captives came across the first body just a mile from the lights of the camp. Half of it was missing. It lay face down in the snow, arms outstretched, the thin cloth covering the back torn wide open, exposing perfect, unmarked flesh as white as Morley alabaster and just as hard, frozen forever.

  What had become of the lower half of the man could not be known. This close to the camp, the would-be escapee would have died of the cold rather than been killed by wolves. Although, if the winter had been particularly bad, it was possible his legs had been taken by a desperate animal venturing closer to human habitation than it would normally risk, probably scared off by the lights and the guards before it could do more than gnaw off the lower limbs. The cold had preserved the rest of the body perfectly. He could have been lying there a day, he could have been lying there fifty winters.

  The body was just the first. Indeed, it was said from the top of Utyrka’s north tower, on a clear day you could see frozen cadavers lying even closer to the camp than this one. But the Prisoner had never climbed the north tower to see.

  Now there wasn’t a tower to climb. Not any more.

  Soon after they found a second body. Then a third. Then more. For a time, the Prisoner and his two chained companions followed a virtual trail of corpses, each as cold as the ice, each looking as though the walker had just lain down for a while in the snow and had not gotten up again.

  Some were intact. Others were just parts.

  At the end of the second day, the Prisoner slaughtered the second captive and butchered the body with a knife that had a golden hilt and a wicked, double blade. As he did so, the last surviving captive sat in the snow at the end of his chain and watched with glazed eyes, such was the magic that held him. Then the Prisoner laid out the red meat and wet bones for the wolves. It didn’t look like much, spread out on snow stained crimson under the cold sun, and the bones were a waste, but it would be enough. Free from the threat of wolves, he and his last captive would have time to reach the glacier valley.

  To reach his escape.

  * * *

  The Prisoner had examined the first three frozen bodies, just to be sure in his own mind that they weren’t suitable. While he had expected to find the frozen cadavers, he hadn’t expected that any of them would fit his needs. His examinations confirmed this. The flesh was hard, though pliable under his twin-bladed knife, but the bones beneath were unusable, the matrix of ice crystals within disrupting any reservoirs of power they may once have held.

  Useless.

  What he needed was the bones of a man—living bones, from a living man. To escape the tundra, to return to the world, he required a very particular sort of magic. This was why he had brought the third captive. The second had been brought for his flesh. The third had been brought for his bones.

  The Prisoner looked out at the glacier valley before him. The precipice on which he stood was a sheer drop of a thousand feet or more, the cliff-face a shocking black scar of bedrock in what had been, so far, an uninterrupted wasteland of blinding white, ground and sky alike, the horizon merely a dirty gray smudge that flickered and moved in the corner of his eyes.

  Beyond the precipice was a deep, wide valley, the floor hard-packed snow, the walls a jagged jigsaw of giant blocks of ice, their sides vertical and a deep, translucent blue, as if the glacial crags were made not of ice but of sapphire.

  It was, some said, one of the wonders of the world, a landscape of untold beauty. The ice field had been explored and illustrated for hundreds of years, but even the engravings that could be found within the precise geographical tomes housed at the Academy of Natural Philosophy in Dunwall could never do justice to the sheer, breathtaking majesty of the landscape.

  The landscape that was the key.

  His fur scarf pulled high, the wind tugging at the wide brim of his hat, the Prisoner turned his red-glassed eyes from the valley to his last captive, bundled behind him in the snow. The wreck of a man lifted his head. Maybe he could sense that the moment was now, even as his addled mind swam in a sea of confusion, of madness. Another effect of the Prisoner’s magic—the magic that allowed him to walk out of the camp, and would allow him to walk out of the tundra, to walk back to the world, to civilization.

  To revenge.

  As the last captive stared at his own reflection in his master’s snow goggles, he moved his mouth as if to say something, but no words came out. Kneeling in the snow, the captive, the former camp guard, swayed, from side to side, as if held in the thrall of his own distorted image. But his eyes were unfocused, his pupils small, the bare skin of his face worn red raw by the cold and by the wind that screamed and howled and screamed again.

  Behind his scarf, the Prisoner smiled.

  The magic, the aura, was holding.

  His escape was near.

  With his free hand, the one not wrapped in the end of the chain leash, he reached across his body, sliding his gloved hand beneath the heavy flap of his greatcoat. Even before he touched the knife he could feel the warmth radiating from the twin blades. Indeed, he thought, perhaps the greatcoat, the hat, the scarf, perhaps they were all unnecessary. Perhaps he hadn�
��t needed to kill that guard, just to take his clothes.

  No matter. And besides, he had enjoyed the first guard’s death. There was a satisfaction there—a small one, but a satisfaction nonetheless. Perhaps because it was the first tiny sliver of revenge, the first act of war against his oppressors.

  The first death of many more to come.

  The Prisoner pulled the knife from his belt, and immediately the swooning captive’s eyes found the blades and focused keenly on them, watching as they shone with a golden light, taking the cold light of the sun and spitting it back as something else entirely—an electricity that sparked behind the eyelids, the reflection of a fire, of a Great Burning that ended one world and started another, uncountable years ago.

  The knife was warm in the Prisoner’s hand and that warmth spread up his arm, through his body. It felt as if he was sinking into one of the rare, natural volcanic springs that periodically interrupted the tundra, the springs that provided the camps with their heat and their power.

  Then he lifted the golden knife, placing the tip of the twin blades in the hollow of his captive’s throat.

  “The people of Tyvia thank you for your service,” he said.

  The captive looked at him, all understanding absent from his glazed eyes. And then the Prisoner pushed, and the white snow was stained with something hot and red.

  SOMEWHERE IN THE CITY OF DUNWALL

  7th Day, Month of Rain, 1851

  “Young Lady Emily is undisciplined, I’m afraid. Here within Dunwall Tower, she receives instruction from the finest tutors known in the Isles, yet her mother spoils her and she spends most of her time lost in imagination, wasting her time drawing, or asking Corvo to teach her to fight with wooden sticks. The girl might rule the Empire some day; every moment spent at play is a moment wasted.”

  — FIELD SURVEY NOTES: THE ROYAL SPYMASTER

  Excerpt from the personal memoirs of

  Hiram Burrows, dated several years earlier

  As she pushed off from the rooftop ledge behind her, three thoughts ran through her mind.

  One, that the ledge opposite was much farther away than she had estimated, and that there was a more than fair chance she was going to fall short and tumble to what was most likely a painful and unpleasant death, dashed against the cobbles of the street four stories below.