The Return of Daud Page 16

  As he knelt on the floor, he found himself doing just that, his right hand creeping closer toward it, fingers outstretched, reaching for the shadow world beyond the mirror’s horizon. In the mirror he saw something—someone—moving, far away, walking toward him across a desolate landscape of metal and ash. It was a young man: dark hair, dark eyes, his arms folded, his very being radiating sheer, unbridled arrogance—

  That was when he heard the sound. Footsteps, running, and relatively close. Daud looked up, ready to see Norcross and his bodyguard arrive from their secret panic room.

  What he saw instead was a figure dressed in a black suit, the tail of his coat flying as he bounded across the tower lobby and raced down the stairs.

  It must be one of the intruders—disturbed by Daud, and now taking their window of escape.

  Daud stood and reached out with a roar, transversing the gap between where he was kneeling and the top of the tower stairs in the blink of an eye. Ahead, he could hear the intruder leaping down the stairs as he fled. Daud wasted no time. He moved down the stairs, bouncing from the curved exterior wall of the tower as he rematerialized in split-second intervals down the side of the staircase. He traveled past the man in black, arrived at the bottom of the tower and quickly turned and transversed back up into his quarry’s path.

  His forearm connected with the man’s throat, throwing him backward onto the stone stairs. Before the intruder had even touched the stairs, Daud grabbed the man under the armpit and shifted back up and around the tower staircase three times, reappearing in the tower room in a hurricane of debris. He felt a shard of glass pierce his face, the blood running down his beard and into the corner of his mouth. He licked at it, tasted copper, and then with one arm threw the intruder up into the air. Daud moved forward, traveling just a couple of feet, and caught the man’s suspended body by the neck once more before throwing him into one of the shattered display cabinets. The man rolled his head, blinking away dust. He was battered, but alive.

  Just as Daud intended.

  He transversed the short distance across to the man and grabbed him by the lapels of his coat. Daud’s tight grip tore the man’s shirt, revealing a large tattoo on his exposed chest—a hollow triangle, with a cross emerging from one side. Daud peered at it with a frown. The symbol was unusual, perhaps marking the intruder as part of a gang. Daud ignored it and pulled the man’s face up to his own.

  “Where have you taken it?” he roared.

  The man screwed up his face, his arms swimming uselessly as he struggled to get away. Daud did nothing but tighten his grip.

  “Listen to me,” Daud snarled. “You’ve taken something I need. The Knife. Where. Is. It?”

  The man squinted at his attacker and began to laugh, which sounded like more of a choking cough as his fingers feebly pulled on Daud’s hand.

  Daud snarled and relented, letting go. The intruder dropped back into the ruined cabinet and rolled onto his side, feeling his neck as he sucked in great lungfuls of air.

  Grabbing him by the jacket again, Daud drove his fist into the man’s stomach, then as his victim wheezed for breath, he pulled him up until they were nose to nose.

  The man tried to focus on Daud’s face. He laughed. “You’ll never find it.”

  Daud’s lips curled into a snarl. “I can make your death fast or I can make it slow. You choose.”

  The man laughed again, and Daud let him drop to the floor. This was getting him nowhere. He needed the information, and he was going to get it—and he knew how to get it. All he needed was something sharp.

  He reached down and picked up the largest shard of glass he could see—the fragment of black mirror. Although it was large and awkward to hold in one hand, the edges were wickedly sharp.

  Good enough.

  Hefting the makeshift weapon in one hand he moved back to the fallen man. He could extract a great deal of information out of a person with a blade. He knew a thousand ways of keeping the man alive while cutting the answers out of him, one by one.

  He could have given Alonso a few pointers downstairs.

  Daud stood over the man—and then stopped. His interrogation subject was staring, not at him, but at the mirror, his eyes wide, his forehead creased in apparent concentration. Then he began shaking his head, slowly at first, then with more and more energy, all the while his eyes locked on what Daud assumed was the man’s own reflection in the mirror.

  Wasn’t it? He remembered the feeling he had when he looked into it: the sense of depth, the spinning giddiness of vertigo that threatened to overwhelm him, like he was about to plunge into an abyss.

  Daud crouched down, adjusting his grip on the shard to hold it like the object it was—a mirror. He tilted it this way and that, pointing it toward the man’s face. In the gloom the mirror reflected what little light there was, forming a dull spotlight on the man’s face—a spotlight that was reddish orange, that couldn’t possibly be the reflection of the bluish glow of the room.

  Could it?

  The man sucked in a breath, tears gathering at the corners of his eyes. His lips moved and thick ropes of saliva dripped down onto his chin and his chest.

  “No, no, no…”

  Daud tilted the mirror; the light moved, the man’s eyes followed. He repeated the motion, and the man’s eyes moved with it again, like he was mesmerized.

  Daud whispered, “Where is the Knife?”

  The man shook his head, frowning like he was trying to remember. Then he lifted a hand, reaching slowly for the mirror.

  Daud moved the glass out of the man’s reach, and the man flinched. Then he shook his head again, his mouth forming something. Daud wondered what it was the man could see in the glass. He had no idea what the mirror was, or where it had come from, but Norcross had clearly placed some value on it, putting it on a plinth next to the Twin-bladed Knife. Was it something else salvaged from the factory in Dunwall? Perhaps another kind of artifact—one, like the Knife, that was linked to the Void?

  Or even to the Outsider?

  Daud returned his attention to his questions. “Where is the Knife?” he asked again, his voice calm and level.

  Finally the man managed to speak properly. “Karnaca,” he said. “Serkonos, Karnaca. It will be kept in a safe place.”

  Daud fell into a crouch, careful to keep the mirror pointed at his victim.

  Daud wracked his brains. Why Karnaca? Who were these people? What did they want with the Knife? They’d known that Norcross had it—more than that, they’d known exactly where to go, ignoring the rest of his collection and heading straight for the tower room. Not only that, they were a formidable gang, having overcome all of Norcross’s guards with apparent ease.

  He frowned, every possibility that came to mind was troubling.

  Then the intruder cried out, his eyes wide. “No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I… no, keep back! Keep away!”

  He fainted, slumping back into the cabinet, his head rolling against his chest. Daud clicked his tongue, and reached forward to check the man’s pulse. It was there, slow but steady.

  Daud’s gloved fingers curled around the edge of the mirror shard in his other hand. He held it low, out of his range of sight, but even now, he felt the urge to lift it, to stare into it, to try to see what the man had seen.

  He glanced down and caught a glance of something orange, like flames, as the surface of the mirror flashed in his peripheral vision. He stood, quickly stuffing the shard into his tunic.

  Karnaca. The thieves were already ahead of him and that advantage would only grow with each passing hour—Daud wasn’t entirely sure where Morgengaard Castle was, and he could spend a week wandering the countryside, trying to pick up the gang’s trail.

  No, he would have to go to Karnaca directly. If the Knife was there, then that is where he would find it. But there was still unfinished business to attend to within the walls of the castle. If he was going to cleanse the world of the Outsider, he might as well cleanse it of another brand of evil.

>   He had to kill Maximilian Norcross.

  It wouldn’t take long.

  20

  GALLERY TEN, THE NORCROSS ESTATE, SOMEWHERE IN SOUTH-CENTRAL GRISTOL

  26th Day, Month of Earth, 1852

  “Sometimes I ask myself, without these gifts, would I be a man to fear? Would I be called the Knife of Dunwall, with my name whispered through the markets and the alleyways, the high towers and drawing rooms? I’d like to think so, but it really doesn’t matter. As long as I bear this Mark, I’ll use whatever craft I have to force my will on the world. The harder trick is undoing what I’ve done.”

  —COBBLED BITS OF BONE

  Excerpt from a journal covering various occult artifacts

  Daud headed back down to the entrance hall of Morgengaard Castle, through the service door and down the stairs into the passage that led to the processing room. He didn’t know where Norcross’s safe room was, but he’d seen the collector and his bodyguard take the left-hand path from the preparation room, so that was a start.

  Things were not as he had left them. The processing machine had been rolled against the far wall and the three-needled hoses that had been pumping chemicals into the body of the woman now dragged on the floor. The woman was gone, the steel table on which she had been shackled sticky with dark, thick blood.

  He had no interest in the woman—she had tried to kill him, after all—but there was something about Norcross’s design for her that didn’t sit well with Daud. Despite his past actions, he had lived almost his entire life by a code of discipline. True enough, it was the code of death, that of a trained killer. But even so, a desire stirred within him.

  He needed to kill the monster of Morgengaard Castle.

  The left-hand passage was pitch black. Daud looked around the preparation room, lit only by the processing machine’s whale oil tank.

  He yanked the tank free of its moorings and held it in front of him as he exited the room. Its blue glow was bright but the light didn’t travel far. But, paired with Daud’s preternaturally acute eyesight, it was enough.

  The passage curved back and forth and soon split into other paths, all featureless, identical, service tunnels beneath Norcross’s reconstructed fortress. Fortunately, Daud had a trail to follow: blood, and lots of it, streaked across the white stone floor, shining and black in the blue glow of the whale oil tank.

  Eventually he came to a large vaulted chamber, the ceiling disappearing up into darkness. Ahead of him were two arched black doors. They were not quite closed—through a half-inch gap, a yellowish light shone.

  Daud pushed the door open, and froze in his tracks.

  The room was a basement gallery, windowless, lit by the ever-present light globes that hung from the high ceiling—more here, perhaps, to compensate for the total lack of natural light. But now the globes were dark, the yellowish light instead coming from the two square lanterns on the floor in the middle of the room.

  Daud looked around, his jaw set.

  The gallery was full of people. Most of them were on metal racks, their limbs pinned in place. Daud counted ten bodies on each side, with another two rows fixed to the walls above. Sixty corpses in total, hanging on display. They were all dressed, they all had their eyes open, and their skin shone with a waxy quality.

  But that wasn’t the true horror of Norcross’s secret gallery. In the space between the racks, occupying the central display area of the gallery, were a series of low daises. On each stood the rest of Norcross’s collection of people. Like the ones in the racks, these subjects were clothed, but they were also posed, the bodies arranged in groups as scenes, frozen in time. Three members of the City Watch took aim at a fleeing thief. A gangster—a Hatter—slit the throat of a victim. An aristocratic couple gave each other a loving look as they walked hand-in-hand. A mother handed her two children to their governess.

  The people, they were real. Daud knew that. He walked toward the nearest, drawn to the hideous tableau. This one showed two factory workers—whalers—wiping the sweat from their brow as they worked on something that wasn’t there. They looked like they could just spring to life at any moment. The low angle of the yellow light from the lanterns illuminated the display from below, if anything making the corpses look even more lifelike.

  The dark secret of Norcross’s collection—the real secret—wasn’t the heretical artifacts in the tower room. It was this.

  This was an altogether different sort of crime.

  “I knew you would like it.”

  Daud turned and walked to the center of the chamber, where the two lanterns had been placed. Sitting cross-legged between them was Norcross, and draped across his lap was the stiff and bloodied body from the preparation room, her dead eyes staring up at the collector as he stroked her cheek.

  The collector was smiling, his eyes glittering in the lantern light as he looked around. “Do you know, I have examples from every corner of our fair Isles here. Of course, it took a long time to complete the collection—well, I say complete, but is a collection ever complete, hmm?”

  Daud said nothing. He just clenched his fists by his sides, the leather of his gloves creaking loudly.

  Norcross looked down at the head in his lap. He traced the line of the woman’s jaw with a finger. “They’re all dead, you know. Every last one. And it is such trouble getting the right kind of staff. You can’t just hire any mercenary. I have certain secrets that must be kept from prying eyes, and sometimes money isn’t enough to keep mouths shut. Do you know what they took?”

  Daud nodded, but still he didn’t speak. Norcross returned his attention to the body in his lap. He began to hum something—a lullaby, one Daud recognized from his own childhood in Serkonos.

  Daud left the hidden gallery with the flames from the smashed whale oil tank licking at his heels. When he closed the great double doors, the last thing he saw was Norcross’s lifeless eyes staring at him, from where the infamous collector lay, next to his final victim.

  21

  THE EMPIRE’S END PUBLIC HOUSE, PORTERFELL, GRISTOL

  4th Day, Month of Harvest, 1852

  “They met in secret and spoke in whispers, their huddled forms cloaked against the night, their heads bowed low, so as almost to touch.

  But then there was betrayal, as terrible and as cold as the snows of Tyvia. Each man had a dagger—the blades long and silver and hidden no longer! Together, the instruments of death were raised. Together they fell, as did the men, their bodies sliding to the earth in a silence that was befitting their craft. The men would not move again, their secrets safe to the very grave!”

  —THE NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS

  Extract from a popular penny novel

  “Unusual, perhaps a little heavy, but not without some, shall we say, primitive charm.”

  “I think the word you are looking for, my dearest Mrs. Devlin, is naiveté.”

  “Ah, yes, Mr. Devlin, how right you are. Unusual, perhaps a little heavy, but with a certain kind of—” she waved her cigar in the air, drawing a figure of eight in blue smoke over the table “—naiveté.”

  Sal walked over to the Devlins as they sat at a corner table in the Empire’s End, underneath a portrait of Emperor Alexy Olaskir, two tankards of ale in front of them. Immaculate as ever, the husband and wife were clad in matching suits woven out of dense Morley wool cloth, the fabric patterned with an alarming red-and-green plaid. They looked entirely out of place, two aristocrats slumming it for their own pleasure. Sal gritted his teeth as he joined them, half-heartedly wiping the table with a cloth in case anyone was paying attention. The pub was as busy as always, the shifts of the fishing warehouses and markets around the establishment staggered, providing Sal with a steady stream of customers.

  Mr. Devlin pointed at his tankard. “Don’t look so unhappy, landlord. I’d suggest you have a drink, but this ‘ale,’ as they call it, is not entirely to be recommended. I can see why your establishment leans more toward the smokable. Quite commendable, actually, given the outrage
ous olfactory assault of this horrid little town.”

  Sal ignored them, as he had been ignoring them for days now. Then he turned as a woman entered the pub, glanced around, and headed straight for him. “Daud. He’s been sighted.”

  Sal nodded. “Go on.”

  “He’s got passage to Karnaca, aboard a whaling trawler, the Bear of Tamarak. It left Potterstead this morning.”

  Mrs. Devlin raised one eyebrow. “A whaling trawler? How quaint. I didn’t think many were still running these days.”

  Her husband blew a smoke ring. “I’ve heard tell that pods of the creatures have returned to the seas near Pandyssia. It would be a lengthy expedition, one final roll of the dice for the oil trade perhaps.” He nodded at the messenger. “But you say it is going to Karnaca?”

  “To pick up more crew, yes.”

  Mr. Devlin winked at Sal. “So our quarry scuttles back to his nest, eh?”

  Sal considered the options. Karnaca was a long way away—what was Daud doing? Had he acquired the artifact from Norcross? Or did the search continue?

  Mrs. Devlin glanced at the messenger, the distaste obvious on her face, then she looked at Sal. “I suggest we leave at once.”

  Sal nodded. “If he’s on a whaler, the journey will be slow. Take a clipper to Bastillian. You’ll find plenty of transport there. You should reach Karnaca before him.”

  “Oh, you’re not coming?”

  “Wyman hired you, not me. I took an oath out of my love for the Empire. Which means I have a pub to run.”

  Mr. Devlin smirked. “How quaint.”

  Sal managed to control his annoyance. “Just find him,” he said. “And kill him.”

  Mrs. Devlin raised her tankard. “To the death of the enemy!”

  Sal returned to the comfort of the bar, happy at least that the unpleasant pair would be out from under his roof soon enough.

  INTERLUDE

  THE ROYAL CONSERVATORY, KARNACA