The Return of Daud Read online

  Woodrow’s eyes widened again. “Please, just… please—”

  “What are the Overseers doing at the factory?”

  The boy gulped in air. He had stopped struggling, but Daud kept a tight grip on his neck, although he could still breathe… just.

  “Patrol,” said Woodrow. “I was on patrol at the slaughterhouse. Change of shift. You must have seen the others.”

  “Why is the factory important?”

  “I, er…”

  “Why is the factory important?”

  “Heresy!” Woodrow screwed up his face. “A black magic rite—witchcraft! Something unspeakable happened.”

  Daud narrowed his eyes. “Explain.”

  “There was a man. A stranger, from… somewhere else. Tyvia, some said. A traveler. He gathered a group of mercenaries around him and they used the factory as a base of operations.”

  “For what?”

  “He had an object. An artifact.”

  There it was. “What artifact?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Nobody knows!”

  “You’re lying!” Daud lifted the Overseer by his collar and swung him over to the edge of the gantry. The Overseer cried out and twisted his neck around to look down. There was nothing between him and the roof of the mill except two hundred feet of air.

  “Nobody has seen it!” Woodrow turned his head back around to stare up at Daud. “We only know what the Sisters of the Oracular Order have told us.”

  Daud cocked his head. “The Sisters saw it in a vision?”

  “Yes. Yes!”

  “What did they see? Speak!”

  At first the Overseer shook his head, then he nodded, spit flying from his mouth. “Some kind of weapon. That’s all I know, I swear to you. That’s all any of the initiates in my chapterhouse were told.”

  So, the stories were true. He was following the right path after all.

  Overseer Woodrow gasped, but Daud relaxed his grip on the youth’s neck. Woodrow gasped again, his chest heaving.

  “So that’s why the Overseers are here, isn’t it?” asked Daud. “This stranger brought the artifact to Dunwall. Whatever he was doing at the factory, something went wrong. He was killed and the Abbey of the Everyman think the artifact is still here. So the Overseers have spent eight months sifting through the wreckage.”

  “It’s dangerous,” said Woodrow. “Heretical artifacts cannot be allowed to exist.”

  “You never found it,” Daud said. “You’re still looking.”

  “Please! Don’t let go! Don’t let go!”

  Daud leaned down over the Overseer. “Then keep talking. What else have you heard in your chapterhouse?”

  “Now they’re saying the artifact was taken! Someone came in, after the explosion. They found it and took it. Before the City Watch had the cordon up. Before the High Overseer called us in to search.”

  Daud snarled. “Who took it?”

  Woodrow shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know. The senior Overseers don’t believe the story. That’s why they keep looking. But I’m only telling you what I heard.”

  Then Woodrow closed his eyes and began to speak, softly, and quickly, the words tumbling out without pause. “Restrict the Wandering Gaze that looks hither and yonder for some flashing thing that easily catches a man’s fancy in one moment, but brings calamity in the next.”

  “Woodrow.”

  “Restrict the Lying Tongue that is like a spark in the heathen’s mouth.”

  “Woodrow!”

  There was a crack of gunfire, a shouted warning, once, then twice.

  Daud looked up, his grip on Woodrow relaxing. The Overseer slid a few inches further toward his demise and cried out in terror before Daud caught him again. Daud frowned, peering in the direction of the sound.

  The gunshot had come from the east, somewhere toward Dunwall Tower itself, the imperial palace just a few streets away. Daud’s eye was caught by movement below; looking down, he watched as officers of the City Watch appeared from several different streets around the mill, grouped together like ants after their nest had been kicked, then ran toward the Tower.

  Hanging from his arm, Overseer Woodrow jerked into life. “Help me! Somebody, help me! Help me—”

  Daud swung Woodrow back up onto the gantry and spun him around, wrapping an arm around the man’s neck. Woodrow’s eyes bulged and he scrambled to get purchase, but it was no use. Five seconds and Woodrow stopped struggling. Ten and the Overseer was out cold, his body slumping against Daud’s chest.

  Daud let Woodrow’s unconscious form slide down against the curve of the chimney.

  Two more gunshots sounded and more shouting, far away.

  Daud crouched on the edge of the gantry, and from inside his jerkin pulled out a small spyglass. As he focused on the commotion, he felt a rush of adrenaline, the stirring of a long-distant memory rising up from somewhere in his mind.

  Daud scanned the streets close to Dunwall Tower through the eyepiece. Soon enough he found four guards running down a wide avenue. Daud tracked them until they joined a larger group in a small square. The men pointed and shouted, the morning sun reflecting off their bandolier buckles. Some of them had their swords drawn. An officer had his pistol in his hand, and he used it to point toward the Tower. Some of the guards broke off and headed in that direction. The others milled around, looking up at the buildings around them.

  Daud lowered the eyepiece and shrank back a little from the edge of the gantry. He frowned. He didn’t know what was going on, and he didn’t care. It couldn’t be him they were after—true enough, the unexplained absence of Overseer Hayward Woodrow would probably have been noted by now, but they were on the other side of the city from Slaughterhouse Row. Whatever was happening was centered on Dunwall Tower itself.

  He looked through the eyepiece again. There were more guards now, the officer with the pistol apparently trying to organize a more structured search.

  A search for what?

  Daud twisted the eyepiece, adjusting the focus and range as he scanned the district.

  And then he saw it—the unmistakable form of someone running across a sharply angled rooftop to the west of Dunwall Tower before vanishing into the shadows. The figure was three hundred yards, three-fifty maybe, from Daud’s position.

  Daud fixed the eyepiece on the rooftops near the Tower. The shadows were black and there was no movement at all, for nearly a minute.

  And then the figure broke cover and ran.

  They were good. Daud watched as they kept to the morning shadows, the busy, crowded stone architecture of the city’s skyline providing plenty of hiding spots as the figure fled.

  Daud turned the eyepiece back to the streets. The City Watch hadn’t fired a gun in a few minutes, having clearly lost whoever it was they were trying to track. They were gathering in growing numbers, spreading out from the square, but down at street level they had no hope of finding their quarry, not when that quarry was so able, so adept.

  Daud wondered just who in all the Isles it could possibly be.

  From his position, Daud had a perfect view of the fugitive as they leapt from one building to the next, soaring across the narrow alleyways, flying directly over the heads of the guards looking for them.

  Daud watched, fascinated. The figure was small. Lithe. A child perhaps—no, older. Teenage. A runaway? Or perhaps, given their skills, a thief or a young gang pledge on the run after encountering the City Watch, proving their worth to the underworld boss they hoped to impress. Once, Daud thought, that might have been me. But now—

  Daud felt the breath leave his body. He lowered his eyepiece, as though he could see better over the distance with his naked eye, then raised it again, refocusing, twisting the barrel to zoom in and get a closer look. He struggled to follow the figure smoothly at that level of magnification.

  It couldn’t be, could it? Daud watched as the figure jumped and ran, then scaled a vertical wall, the d
ifficulty of the task not slowing them by a second.

  Slowing her. Because the escaping figure was no teenage runaway or would-be gang cutthroat. It was a young woman, dressed in fine clothes—a black trouser suit with a flash of white at the collar.

  Daud recognized her at once. Her portrait hung in every city in the Isles, her silhouette stamped into every coin of the realm.

  Emily Kaldwin: the Empress of the Isles herself.

  On the run.

  It had been fifteen years since he had last seen her in person. Daud began to laugh, quietly at first, but soon the low rumble in his chest grew and grew. He shook his head in disbelief and watched as the Empress vanished from sight over a rooftop.

  No wonder the City Watch was a flurry of activity. The Empress had, for some mysterious reason, fled her tower, and was clearly running for… what? Her life? It certainly looked that way, if her own City Watch were after her.

  But the reason for her flight would have to remain a mystery. Daud wasn’t about to get involved with anything—anything—that wasn’t connected with his mission. And besides, Emily would never accept his help, even if he was inclined to offer it.

  The Empress was out of sight now, but she had moved with considerable skill and grace. It was obvious that her athleticism as she escaped across the rooftops was down to more than twice-weekly fencing lessons.

  She had to have been trained.

  Daud laughed again. Of course. Corvo Attano. Royal Protector and Emily’s father. The pair had been busy in the last decade and a half, the Empress perhaps convincing her father to train her to defend herself if ever the Royal Protector could not. And after the murder of her mother, Empress Jessamine, and her kidnapping, Daud didn’t blame her.

  He blinked, his mind flashing back to that day fifteen years ago. To the assassination and the reckoning with Corvo Attano. The fight that had ended with Corvo banishing Daud from Dunwall.

  Daud didn’t know how Corvo had found the strength to spare him. He should be dead. And perhaps he wished that Corvo had been… what? Stronger? Weaker? Which was the better decision, the moral choice? To banish him or kill him? Daud had murdered Empress Jessamine Kaldwin—Corvo’s lover—and although he had only been a hired mercenary, following the orders of Hiram Burrows, his actions had nearly brought about the end of the Empire itself.

  Maybe he’d deserved death. Sometimes he’d certainly wished for it. Corvo had given him a second chance, but as Daud spent the years afterward wandering the Isles, searching for a purpose and a new life, he felt like what time he had left remaining was just wasting away.

  Until he found his mission.

  He glanced back to the rooftops as Emily reappeared by the small industrial dock on the riverside. She carefully stepped along a narrow outflow pipe, then at the end dived off into the water, breaking the surface a few yards later as she headed for the single ship in port, a battered steamer called the Dreadful… something. It was too far to read and the angle of the sun was all wrong.

  Daud sighed. He told himself that whatever was going on was none of his business. The world could split in two. The Empire of the Isles could fall into the sea. None of it mattered. He could not—and would not—deviate from the mission.

  Find the Outsider.

  Kill the Outsider.

  And to do that he needed the Twin-bladed Knife. It had been here, in Dunwall, at the factory. The Overseers were still looking for it.

  Daud looked down at the body of Overseer Woodrow as he lay huddled against the chimney. The young man was gently snoring, his lips quivering, his eyes flickering behind closed lids. The Overseer would be missed, yes, but someone would find him up here, on the almost impossible to reach platform.

  Eventually.

  Daud cocked his head. Perhaps the story Woodrow had heard in his chapterhouse was right. Perhaps the reason why the Overseers hadn’t found the knife was because someone had found it before them.

  Heretical artifacts were rare, but not unknown, the black market trade in them—along with bonecharms and other more common objects touched by the black arts—could be surprisingly busy. And if the stories of the reappearance of the Twin-bladed Knife had reached Daud on the other side of the Isles, then its existence would be common knowledge here in Dunwall, if you knew whom to ask.

  And as it happened, Daud did, because if you were interested in the heretical and the arcane, there was just one place to go. It was a place he hadn’t visited in a long time—even as a Whaler, he had had no cause to enter the territory, and he knew that most of the other gangs of Dunwall felt likewise.

  But it was a place to find answers and a place to pick up the trail.

  Wyrmwood Way.

  And once he got there, Daud knew exactly who he had to see.

  3

  THE STREETS OF DUNWALL

  18th Day, Month of Earth, 1852

  “With regard to Section 5, subsection 1, paragraph 4, clause 7B, officers of the City Watch are obliged to report to their posts upon enaction of Special (Executive) Orders, Protocol 6, thus authorizing the establishment of cordons and restricted zones of access; further, that upon enaction of Special (Executive) Orders, Protocol 7, the City Watch shall be empowered to enact and enforce a curfew, the parameters and limits of which shall be at the discretion of the commanding officers, upon the orders received through the City Watch Command, the Royal Protector, and/or the Imperial Throne of the Empire of the Isles, whomsoever has been declared to occupy such positions of state.”

  —ADDENDUM TO SECTION 5, NOTES ON EXTRA-ORDINARY COMMAND AND EMERGENCY PROCEDURES

  Extract from the City Watch Operational Manual (twenty-seventh revision)

  The journey across Dunwall from the Tower District to Wyrmwood Way had been an interesting one, and had taken Daud far longer than he had intended, even though he’d traveled in the open for the most part. Daud had decided to forgo the shadows and rooftops and had stuck to the streets. It had become clear soon enough that with all the commotion, nobody was going to stop him, or even give him a second look.

  Dunwall was in uproar. The initial activity of the City Watch as they tried—and failed—to pursue their own Empress had quickly spread into a city-wide mobilization, the streets filled not just with guards but Overseers too. In contrast to the slight panic of the City Watch, the Overseers moved through the streets with a sort of austere calm, their masks a menacing presence as they lurked in smaller numbers among the increasing numbers of ordinary citizens who were now taking to the streets, as word of what was happening in Dunwall Tower coursed through the city like a fire. The information was sketchy, incomplete, and in parts contradictory, as news of this kind always was this soon after the event in question had taken place.

  There had been a coup. The Empress had been deposed—some said she was dead, some said she was in hiding. Daud, at least, knew the truth, although as he made his way through the crowds he kept his mouth firmly shut, listening to the gossip swirl around the crowds like gnats dancing in the summer sun, but contributing nothing himself.

  This had nothing to do with him. He existed apart, an observer—no, an outsider, he realized, not without a small sense of irony.

  Daud tried to move off the main avenue, his progress becoming slower as the crush increased, but he found most alternative routes cut off by City Watch and Overseers as they began to funnel the crowds into more easily controlled spaces. That was logical and didn’t surprise him.

  What did surprise him was the discovery of a third faction of quasi-military officials, helping—no, commanding—the others. They were dressed in uniforms of baggy beige pants and short-sleeved tunics that were a blueish-green for most, a darker red for a couple of others, in each case contrasting with the white leather belts and bandoliers that crossed them. They all wore tall white caps with a short brim at the front and a longer one shielding the back of the neck. On the front of the caps was a silver badge, signifying the authority for whom these strangers worked.

  Daud knew the
uniforms and knew the badge. He had known them his entire life. They were the Grand Serkonan Guard, a long way from home, but here in Dunwall, in the middle of a coup, and apparently in quite some numbers. And, more importantly, it was the red-coated veterans who appeared to be giving the orders—to their own men, and to the Dunwall City Watch and even the Overseers as well.

  That, Daud thought, was interesting. Whatever had gone down at the palace, clearly the Duke of Serkonos himself, that pig Luca Abele, had something to do with it.

  Daud watched as officers of the Grand Serkonan Guard conferred with their counterparts of the City Watch and the Overseers, as more members of each faction began assembling in the narrow street behind them. They were about to move on the crowd, with the intention of driving them back inside, and no doubt ordering a curfew. But they would need to act fast—it had taken Daud two hours to get just this far, and the crowds showed no signs of shrinking. In no time at all, things would turn ugly, the spontaneous gatherings of concerned citizens a powder keg. Daud knew what would happen next. The crowds would riot, and the authorities—whoever was in charge now, perhaps Duke Abele himself—would order a crackdown. It would be bloody and violent. Daud had to get out; this sudden instability threatened his plans. He had to get to Wyrmwood Way, get any and all information he could about the Twin-bladed Knife, perhaps even find the artifact itself, if it was still in the city after all this time. And if not, he needed to discover where it had gone, who had it now, and what he needed to do to get it for himself.

  The scrum of citizens began to surge. Daud could sense the atmosphere changing as people began to notice the guards gathering. Curiosity, confusion—even a little excitement—had given way to uncertainty, to fear.

  It was going to happen, and soon.

  He slipped from the storefront, skirting the crowd, giving him a clear path down the street. Farther away, the crowd thinned, and the side streets and alleys seemed free of guards.

  This is not my problem.

  Ahead of him a group of City Watch marched forward. They seemed uncertain, jumpy. Daud didn’t blame them—they probably knew as much, or even less, about what was going on than he did, and were no doubt less than happy to be under the command of the Grand Serkonan Guard. Daud didn’t want to risk any confrontation; he had wasted enough time already.