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He landed out the traversal and almost immediately felt his world darken and contract. He stumbled, felt his knees give, and went down backwards. Landed on back and arms, a wave of darkness clawing its way through him. One arm snapped to his side instinctively, gripping at torn flesh and striving to keep hot warmth inside where it belonged. There was a lot of blood, he saw when he managed to make his eyes focus again. He huffed faintly. It seemed the Lord Protector had a strong arm. Or at least a ferocious one.
He felt as much as saw three of his men traverse desperately in front of him. As soon as they realised he wasn’t getting up. There were footsteps on the connecting bridge. From his office. There’d been only one other person in there. His men quailed, but raised their swords against him. It was … an incredible gesture.
It was nothing Daud could allow.
“Get away from here,” he managed, coming up on his arm and hardening his voice as best he could. “This is none of your concern.”
And, more to the point, they should be none of Attano’s. The man hadn’t killed any of them yet. To his knowledge. He was careful about collateral damage, the Lord Protector. He had a touch of the surgeon about him.
It was rather admirable, in its way.
They didn’t want to leave. He could see it, marvelled vaguely at it. They hesitated for a long moment before they traversed away. It was … a knowledge he would hold close, if this turned out to be his last few moments. As it almost inevitably must.
And then … there was only him, and the Lord Protector. Only him and Corvo Attano, the man whose life he had destroyed.
The man held back. Just a little. Just enough. He stood in the middle of the ruined floor, his sword raised defensively, breathing harshly and raggedly. Looking at Daud. He was … more stooped than Daud had realised. More wounded, or more exhausted. He wondered abruptly how much of the man’s ferocity had been rage, and how much had been sheer desperation. How much had been the raw need to put his enemy down now, before his last reserves exhausted themselves.
It was a feeling Daud himself knew intimately. Knew immediately. There was a reason he was the one on the floor. But he hadn’t been able to bring himself to be as vicious as he’d needed to be in turn. As desperate as he was. He hadn’t been able to commit to the strike.
And now there was nothing left to be done.
He did his best to get up. It didn’t work very well. He got to his knees, and that was about it, the blood seeping between his fingers where the wound had gaped at his twisting. He laughed silently at himself, and opened his mouth to … Beg, possibly. Apologise. Something. He opened his mouth.
Another voice cut across him. Another voice, an impossible voice. Attano flinched backwards, his hand flying to his own chest, to the voice in his chest, and Daud’s words died in his throat. His breath stopped in his lungs, and he stared at the man.
{Why have you brought me here?} the Empress, Jessamine Kaldwin, murmured between Attano’s clenched fingers. Her voice, unmistakably her voice. Familiar from a hundred announcements across the city. The voice of a dead woman. {Am I meant to forgive this man for what he did?}
Attano … made a noise. Some sort of a noise, breathless and torn. Daud nearly echoed him. What sort of sick horror was this? He felt his arm loosen at his side. Felt the blood between his fingers. Warm and sticky. His own blood. This time, this time, his own blood.
Attano staggered backwards. Sagged to his knees and dropped his sword. Reached up to his chest and pulled … pulled out a horror. From the air. From the Void. From his own chest. A pulsing, beating horror. Flesh and clockwork, and that voice.
Daud’s stomach lurched. It had been decades since it had last done so. But here the Outsider —and it could be no one but the Outsider— had surpassed himself.
“… Jess,” Attano whispered, and cupped the hideous thing close. He was vulnerable now, Daud realised distantly. He was crumpled and all but unarmed. It didn’t matter. Daud wouldn’t move. Couldn’t move. The thing in Attano’s hands held the whole world more still than a time stop spell. It froze everything into a horrible, echoing stillness.
{What have they done to me?} it whispered, the voice blind and bewildered, echoing dully. {What have they done?}
Daud would have quite liked to know that himself.
“Jess,” Attano said again. His voice thin and grief-stricken, stumbling over her name. “I didn’t— I’m sorry. They put me here. I … I didn’t mean to come. They took Emily. I’m sorry.”
An apology to a dead woman, all his pain and his desperation and his exhaustion in his voice. He’d washed up in a boat. Poisoned. All Daud had thought about was his own dreams, his own nightmares, this man coming for vengeance. His own life had been his only concern. But it had never been Attano’s. He’d washed up here. He hadn’t meant to come.
Ferocity. Desperation. The need to put his enemy down before his strength failed. The only way out of Rudshore was through Daud. And Attano’s daughter was gone.
A wave of dizziness washed over him. Guilt? Or just blood loss? Daud honestly wasn’t sure.
The Heart was. The thing in Attano’s hands. It throbbed gently. A sweet, sickening pulse.
{So tired,} it whispered. Pale echoes of an Empress’ voice. {So tired, my love. Task after task, always one step too far ahead. What have they done to you? To both of us?}
It didn’t … It couldn’t look at him. At anyone. It was a hideous, malformed thing. It had no eyes. But Daud felt it anyway. Felt the weight of its gaze. Its judgement. Saw again a man slumped upright in a cage. Poisoned. Saw his stoop, his weariness, his exhaustion. The dazed terror in blank brown eyes. Forced to fight yet again. Forced to struggle and survive.
And to spare those who forced necessity on him.
Daud closed his eyes. Sagged downwards, enough to be more sitting than kneeling. In truth, he gave some thought to just lying back down again. Just loosening his hand and letting nature take its course. Take the decision out of the Lord Protector’s hand. He’d been about to beg, hadn’t he? Before the Empress had made her presence known. He’d been about to ask for his life. Offer remorse. Restitution. Apology. The evidence of his change of heart, maybe, the precious life he had saved. As though those things mattered. As though they changed anything he had done.
The other two paid him no mind. Even when he’d managed to open his eyes again, sinking back against the wall to watch them. They were alone in their own little world, their little bubble of love and horror and grief. Attano brought his cupped hands up towards his chest.
“There’s no time, Jess,” he murmured, soft and hoarse. “I’m sorry I brought you here, but there’s no time. We have to go. They’ve taken her. I have to go.”
The Heart didn’t answer. For long enough that Daud began to wonder if it was going to. And then, almost too quietly to be heard, it whispered again.
{My love. The bright-eyed, wary boy from Serkonos. The candidates swore an oath to protect the Empress. Every one. The only promise she believed was yours.}
She said it softly. Gently. As though it wasn’t just about the cruellest thing she could have said. Attano flinched. Full-bodied. Hunched over the Heart like it had gut-shot him. Daud, slumped across the way, did exactly the same, his hand spasming against his wound. He hissed, half blind with pain and wonder, stunned by her cruelty. But she carried on.
{You would have been happier without that promise. Betrayal is the course of Empire. Burns on your skin. Poison in your veins. Without end. You did not have to endure. The Empress was always fated to die. There was sunshine in Karnaca. You did not … have to suffer.}
Softly. Hesitantly. An … apology. Or a benediction. Permission. Daud sucked in a breath. Attano raised his head, and stared blindly down at her for the longest moment.
And then …
“… Yes,” the Lord Protector whispered. Fearsomely, ferociously. His fingers locked white together as they fought not to tighten desperately around her. “Yes, I did. Always. Always, Jess. I—”
He cut off. Strangled, barely able to shape the words. She pulsed gently in his hands.
{Tender heart,} she whispered sadly. {And so they use you for it. You will not turn away. But she would not have loved you any other way.}
Attano panted. Holding tight around her. It was strange. A lifetime of scouting out marks, prying into all the hidden spaces of people’s lives, the better to pry them from their casings like pearls from a krust, and Daud had never felt more like a voyeur. He was beginning to feel very tired. Very sleepy. It was such a sad, tawdry vision to part on.
{His hands do violence,} she murmured softly. {But there is a different dream in his heart.}
… Fitting enough for Attano, he supposed. A blade built to shield, and unable to in the end. All violence, and all of it bent to preserve. More the surgeon than the assassin.
There was something odd about the sentence, though. Something odd about her tone. A begrudging, uneasy acknowledgement. Not for Attano, surely?
And then Daud looked up, and it wasn’t the heart Attano was looking at. Nor Attano, where the weight and sensation of her judgement fell.
They were looking at him.
He blinked back at them. His thoughts, his attention, all felt very far away. His voice even further. But there was … something he’d meant to say. Something they needed. What was it?
Ah. Yes. Rudshore. The only way out. That’s right.
“… There’s a key,” he managed roughly. “Above the desk. The sewer gate. Take you along the shoreline, to … wherever your daughter’s gone.”
He thought vaguely of adding some apology, but … it wasn’t their first concern. Nor should it be. This, this was the only apology that would matter. The only thing of meaning he might still offer. Attano hadn’t chosen to come here. And Daud would no longer bar his way out.
They stared at him for another moment. And then the Heart pulsed once more in Attano’s hand.
{The choice is yours, my love. The dead cannot answer the living. But she loved your tender heart. She would forgive you anything.}
Attano made another noise. Another wounded, breathless huff. But he smiled, faintly, and pressed her back into her chest. Gathered her in, until her heart rested beside his once more. Then he knelt for another moment. Bowed over. Gathering himself, gathering the dregs of strength remaining to him. Daud watched him. In idle curiosity, mostly. And distant admiration. The man gathered himself eventually to his feet.
And moved, not towards the office or the sewers, but towards Daud.
Alarm fluttered to life. Some vague memory of it. Daud tipped his head back to watch him come. Attano reached into his coat, and Daud had a second to worry before he remembered that the man had already dropped his sword. Then what …?
Elixir. A red vial clutched in his hand as he crouched before Daud. What?
“… You’ll need stitches, I think,” the man murmured hoarsely. Glancing over the still-seeping wound on Daud’s side, looking quickly away again, with something almost like shame. “This will only tide you over. But your men should wake up soon. The ones not already listening.”
“… What?” Daud said. Because, honestly, he might as well.
Attano winced, just faintly, and instead of answering reached out his spare hand to tug lightly on Daud’s wrist. The one not held limply to the wound. When Daud didn’t manage to do anything more than stare at him, he grimaced, and pushed the vial carefully into Daud’s hand.
“I need to go,” he said roughly. His fingers were warm and trembling on Daud’s wrist. “I won’t come back. You need to drink this before you fade. Have someone … put you back together. I never intended to fight. Exhaustion … doesn’t make for the best stealth.”
“… What?” Daud said again. Because he didn’t have anything else. Because he had no idea what was happening here. Or what … what Attano meant.
Attano closed his eyes. Gathered shreds of strength from a well that had long since run empty. He shook his head, and lifted Daud’s hand and the vial up along Daud’s chest.
“There’s sunshine in Karnaca,” he said, opening his eyes again, and it would have been nonsensical, would have been the opposite of enlightening, if the preceding conversation hadn’t been etched so deeply, desperately firmly into Daud’s memory. An offer, closed to Attano, that he opened to someone else. “I didn’t come here to kill anyone.”
And then, while Daud kept staring at him, helpless to do anything else, he curled Daud’s fingers more firmly around the vial, and drew carefully away from him. Stepped away, wary and exhausted on his feet, and moved to gather up his sword and make his way back into the building. To the office, presumably. To the key. To, eventually, his daughter.
Daud stared sightlessly into space for another minute. And then he lifted his other hand, sticky and crusted, from his side, and popped the top off the vial.
“… Thomas,” he called, when he’d drained it dry. Softly. Almost uncertainly. But the man was there almost before he’d finished speaking. Maskless. Tugging it off his head with rough, shaking impatience. He stared down at Daud, pale and wide-eyed, and Daud couldn’t help but stare back. At the expression in the boy’s face. Terror, and loyalty, and numb, wide-eyed wonder. Thomas had been one of the ones who’d tried to protect him. Daud still didn’t know what to do with that.
It wasn’t the point, though. Not right now. Not yet. He’d deal with it … later.
“Find someone to follow him,” he said, heaving himself clumsily to his feet. Staggering, almost falling, and feeling something flinch inside him when Thomas instantly stepped in and took his arm. Supported him. Daud shook his head, ignoring it. Pushed himself carefully straight. “A volunteer. Make sure … Make sure he gets where he’s going alive. Make sure he gets what he needs.”
It wasn’t done. What Attano was doing. What he’d been forced to do. And maybe that was none of Daud’s business. Maybe that was something Attano would never want him near.
But he’d refused for himself the offer he’d given Daud. Out of love, out of loyalty. Out of a need and a choice to see someone else safe. A lover, a mother, a daughter. He’d turned away, and given the choice instead to someone who really, really didn’t deserve it. There was nothing in that decision that Daud could understand, but there was something he could emulate. As small … as small a payment as it might be.
There’s sunshine in Karnaca, Attano said. You don’t have to suffer. You don’t have to endure.
Yes, Daud thought, curling his hand around an empty vial. Yes, Lord Protector, I do.