Chapter Text
i.
“You owe me.”
Dr Alexandria Hypatia sighs. She should have known Meagan Foster would be back to collect, sooner or later, washing up at her door like seaweed after a storm.
“I’m not taking patients at the moment.”
“Good. More space. I’ll be back for him in a few weeks… got a few things to handle in the meantime.”
Another sigh. She owes the smuggler too much. For her time aboard the Dreadful Wale and other things. Pandyssian orchids, northern spices, oxrush oil, and extract of agarwood. She remembers… no, don’t think about that now.
“What’s his name?”
“Doesn’t have one. I’ve tried him on a couple, but nothing’s stuck. The kid’s been through… a lot. Got captured by the Eyeless gang — doesn’t talk much, but he’s not stupid. Just needs time, you know, to get his bearings. We’ve all been there.” Foster’s dark eye is unsparing.
Something about that eye — or is it two of them? — strikes her as odd… like there’s another woman just as familiar, but out of reach, standing behind the one she sees. Does everyone have a Grim Alex, a shadow self, waiting to be set free? It’s probably just the unsettling eyepatch. It glints red in the thin winter light.
Foster is still talking: “…Can’t you put him with the others?”
The doctor tucks a stray lock of hair neatly behind her ear.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
ii.
They told Vera it was too cold to swim. She swam, he remembers, every day she was here. She liked to observe her painted toes move through the water, round and red, like beads of blood. He can’t feel his toes. Perhaps they are elsewhere?
The inventor sits in a wicker lounge chair drinking soup — sweet Bastillian tomatoes, roast peppers, garlic, and onions — and watches him float, hanging in the water like the inventor’s missing fingers in their jar of formalin. Upstairs, he has a room and a balcony with pale stone and paler winter sky. Sometimes he thinks about jumping off that little balcony, just to see what would happen. At night he can hear the whales in the bay. Or perhaps he dreams them… or they dream him. It’s hard to tell the difference in the dark. He floats.
Addermire is once more a place for lassitude and hush-a-bye secrets. He remembers when the island was the sole preserve of nesting gulls. He remembers the masons who lost their lives in its construction. He remembers every delicate, bewildered, bird-bone hope its denizens left at the altar Vera built. It took her so long to stop biting the orderlies.
She told him the secret to getting out was nail-polish and afternoon tea. He doesn’t think it will be the same for him. Outside, the sun masquerades as the moon, a lonely pearl lost behind grey clouds. He doesn’t know what day it is, but the season is written in his bones.
He traces his name at the bottom of the shallow pool. A ghost’s kiss on slimy tiles. Nothing happens. A catch of song comes to him and he opens his mouth to sing. Water rushes in. Breaking the surface, spluttering, he doesn’t know why his lungs hurt. The leviathan is still here. Long-dead-not-dead. And lo’ it whispers in silence. He’s part of it the way Delilah wanted to be part of him. A lingering piece of a god. A lingering piece of himself.
The inventor crouches beside the water.
“I know you…” The statement turns into an inquiry. “Don’t I…?”
“You do.”
“I thought so.” Kirin Jindosh struts around the pool. “If I had my silvergraph we could take a picture… you look different, less – um — it was, I was about to say… it’s cold, don’t you think? Five degrees down, commence. Did your mother read you Bertie the Bird?”
“I remember many things,” he answers, turning onto his back, spreading his arms wide, and closing his eyes. “But not my mother.”
“I like the illustrations. Something… something about the skull…”
Such an interesting decision little Emily made. An age of wonderous advancement, stillborn in this inventor’s damaged mind. He doesn’t care. Kirin Jindosh is even less interesting than Antonin Sokolov. Wonders past and wonders present, making magic out of butchery or butchery out of magic are both tricks as old as time.
He dips his head under the water again. Learning, like a child, when to shut his mouth and breathe out through his nose. When he surfaces, Jindosh’s face hangs above him still, like a cat watching a carp.
“Am I… in the Void?” the inventor asks, staring at his jaw. No… his jawbone. Those keen eyes see through skin to the interior mechanisms of flesh. His body is merely a set of component parts to this man. Relics, no… machines waiting to be created.
“The Void draws from this world and this world from it. It is always here and always apart. You are in it, but it is not in you.”
Brown eyes flicker. Jindosh doesn’t notice that his answer turned the question inside out. “I was going to say… something.” Long fingers twitch together like an anxious spider. “Did we meet at Aramis Stilton’s?”
“Yes and no. A little Tyvian girl told me about you. You crafted her a toy out of wood, brass, cats, and a few drops of whale oil a day.”
“You look different. Wrong… pigment? I expected… manganese oxide… or burnt umber and ultramarine? Sokolov used to say charred human bones made the perfect black. Would you like —uh — why are you here?”
“I am learning how to be human again.”
“Oh. Would you like to see my…? It was… um… aren’t you cold?”
“I am not ready to be warm.”
“Can you tell me… how…? I was going to say. Hm…” Jindosh, frustrated, paces the marble tiles. “No, no… commence testing!”
He waits. He understands what it is to be fractured.
iii.
“Thanks.”
The Duke of Serkonos gives her a crooked smile and takes a cigar. Dr Hypatia half expects him to ask for a light but, of course, he has a flunky for that.
“You really ought to give those up.”
“I like them.” He waves his attendants out of her office with a waft of tobacco.
“You wouldn’t like them half so well if you saw what they’re doing to your lungs. Trust me, I’ve autopsied enough smokers.”
“Bah, no worse than silver dust.”
Their new Duke has a keen sense of irony.
He takes the railcar to visit her once a month. The fancy ducal one with velvet upholstery and silver gazelles. Every time he’s asked her for a smoke and been vaguely perplexed when she doesn’t have one. Last week she gave in and bought a box of Cullero’s best to keep in her desk draw, in spite of her principles, resigned to slowly poisoning him out of politeness.
“I hear you’ve taken in Kirin Jindosh.” He takes another puff and smoke curls out his nostrils. “I suppose you want to dive for the few pearls that might be floating about in that addled brain?”
Perhaps he’s not so different from Luca Abele, after all, thinking only of uses and never people.
“I know what it is…” Her voice breaks slightly and she hates that, showing weakness in front of this man. “What it is to lose who you are.” Idle thoughts, alchemical formulae, memories, and purpose – all snatched away. She admired Jindosh even if she couldn’t condone his actions. “He… can never be who he was but, with help, maybe he can become someone else.”
The Duke’s raises his eyebrows and his hard, beady little eyes stare. She braces for his bark of a laugh or a filthy insinuation. But he just sits there, enjoying his cigar. When he speaks, it’s to change the subject entirely: “I need you to make me something to imitate seasickness.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. I don’t mind if it tastes vile.”
“You aren’t planning some kind of nasty practical joke, are you?”
The Duke rolls his eyes. He captures Luca Abele so perfectly it’s sometimes hard for her to separate him from the voice she found on her audiograph: It’s time to play. Make this one messy. The good doctor’s due for a trip to Dunwall. Give the people of the Empire fodder for their nightmares.
“Nothing like that. I need it in a few weeks.”
“Oh. Yes, I… well, I suppose I could make something. But surely any apothecary could furnish you with an emetic?”
“I don’t trust the palace quacks and I don’t want to be shitting myself the entire voyage.”
“You’re leaving Serkonos?”
He smirks. “The Empress has invited me to Dunwall.”
Empress Emily Kaldwin. A young woman with a mask over her face. Kind. Beautiful. Ruthless. “Are you sure it’s… wise to accept the invitation?”
“I spied a lass from Gristol, ‘twas good I had my pistol.” The Duke’s smirk deepens as he hums a few more bars of the popular song. “Are you concerned for me, doctor? I’m touched.”
“I’m concerned for Serkonos,” she says quietly. She respects this man, but he unsettles her. What does she know about him, after all? Nothing. Another doppelgänger. If it weren’t for the prisoner she’s charged to watch over, she’d guess that the Duke had been taking the same concoction she was, living two lives. One good, one bad. No, she can never like this man. Not after everything his shadow did to her. “You’ve done a lot of things, Your Grace, but you haven’t secured the succession.”
“I’m working on it, doctor, don’t worry.”
iv.
“I told you, someone needs to remind him to eat!”
Billie shouts at the orderly and slams the door. Hagfish stew out of a tin. It’s been sitting on the table for… he doesn’t know how long. It could be centuries. Cheap stuff, mostly whale guts, but it was hot once. In the kitchen. Inside the whale. The spice makes him sweat. Stretching out under the blanket, his body seems to whine like a nest of bloodflies.
In the distance, Karnaca is full of false stars. Some flame and others burn cold. He can hear the gulls overhead, a ship horn booming in the harbour, and one of the doctors, off duty, crooning over a guitar. Plucking out beauty on goat intestines.
“It’s freezing up here.” Billie shuts the window and draws the curtains.
“Don’t…” he mumbles. “I like the view.” His throat is buzzing and his head is heavy with bloodfly eggs. It feels like his whole body is about to hatch into a thousand tiny creatures. Or maybe that’s just what a body is. It’s hard to tell. He hasn’t had one for a very long time.
“You stupid little shit…”
His new name. Little shit. It’s what Billie calls him, anyway. Like the mothers in the old black city, calling their children home by crude, insulting nicknames, afraid that if he heard their real names he would steal them away. Little shit. She holds the insult over him like a charm, protecting them both.
“Here, drink this.”
The tea is hotter than his throat. Honey, lemon, and bergamot. His hands are shaking.
She holds him.
“I shouldn’t have left you behind.”
“Where were you?” He hasn’t had to ask that question in four-thousand years. He’s always known. With his eyes open, he feels blind, fumbling around in the dark.
“Nowhere special. Just a few odd jobs in the Dust District.” She strokes his hair with her good hand. He knows what it should feel like. A press of gentle heat, fingers sliding across the scalp. But it has never been his hair, his scalp, his warmth… just other people’s thoughts sliding across his awareness. She sighs. “I didn’t kill anybody, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He shakes his head. I know you didn’t. He may not be able to follow her with the eyes of the Void, but he can still see into her heart.
“I’m thinking of getting another boat. Nothing special. A guy I know in Campo Seta offered me a good price for an old trawler and I’ve still got a few favours to call in. I’m too used to going my own way to stay in one place for long. What do you think about being a cabin boy?” His youthful appearance amuses her. He feels like an old man in the body of a boy. Ashes in a fleshy urn. She pulls the blanket up around him. “You used to never shut up and now you hardly speak.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.” He rests against her shoulder, feeling cold despite the sweat on his brow. “You were listening to me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You asked me once why I didn’t speak to everyone who prayed to hear my voice. My words were always there, echoing through the Void. I didn’t choose you, Billie. You chose me.”
“Finish your stew.”
v.
“Delilah…”
The Duke never opens the door. He doesn’t want to see what Luca Abele has become. Dr Hypatia ensures the prisoner is provided with all the necessities it’s safe to grant him. Officially, the man behind the iron door is Armando. The young man who dreamed of studying law in Dunwall. The body-double who went mad.
It’s always the same whispers.
Delilah, Delilah, Delilah…
He imagines her name scrawled all over the walls and the floor. A wild, bearded man praying to a dead witch for deliverance. Well, she came back once before. He imagines himself, rapping on that same door, screaming for help that never comes.
He never understood what Luca felt for her. The witch. The Dark Empress. Towards the end of that fatal summer, the arsehole talked of no one else. He’d have had sex with that creepy statue if he could. Some of the courtiers whispered that it was the delirium of black magic, but like calls to like, and dark to darker still. It could have been true love.
Back then, he’d thought it was funny. He’d been sealed so tightly within himself that he’d relished any opportunity to see Luca Abele humbled, no matter how petty – dragged down to level of his false twin. He was – and is – forced to share in the man’s malice, his venality, and his excesses. But, unlike Luca’s other lovers, he’d never been forced to bed Delilah. Her words were Luca’s strictures, her body his sacrament, and somehow above the cruel games he played with everyone else.
Love has been beaten out of the man standing outside the door. At least, that’s what he prefers to believe. He’s seen what happened when he fell for one of Luca’s bedmates. He might be indulged for a small while, but his leash was too damn short for anyone to come to know him. He hardly knew himself. Even now, trapped in the role of the Duke, such liaisons are artificial at best. Still, he longs for it, aches for a passion all his own.
He lets his new advisors take the credit for the recent changes and continues the arsehole playboy act. What’s the old phrase? Make haste slowly. That shitty little moustache was the first thing to go. He’s building a new winter palace in Cullero. It’s an expensive waste of money but, with less funds at his disposal since the new mining laws (he’s done all the sums), it’s progressing very slowly and gives him a chance to get some work done away from Karnaca and all the toadies who knew Luca so well.
In some ways, it really is him behind that iron door, grown so small that all the thoughts and feelings that belong to him alone can fit inside a tiny cell. Standing in front of it once a month keeps him from going mad. I am the Duke of Serkonos. The man inside that cell is my prisoner.
Delilah, Delilah, Delilah…
“She can hear him,” a hoarse voice comments from the end of the corridor.
A pale youth stands there in cotton bedclothes, not quite a boy and not quite a man. His grey eyes are bleary and his nose is pink and swollen. Black hair greasy with sweat. A thin trickle of snot runs over his lip and drips off his chin. The youth doesn’t seem to notice.
“You think so?” the Duke asks, tapping ash off the end of his cigar, keeping his voice casual and resisting the urge to take a step back from the sick youth.
“On still nights, I can hear him crying from my room upstairs. She never answers.”
“Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
“Maybe.” The youth crosses him arms. “I wanted to talk to you about Emily.”
“Do you know who I am, young man?”
A skinny finger points to the name painted above the iron door in capital letters: ARMANDO ROSSI.
The Duke blinks and carefully reverses his question. “Who are you?”
“Nobody. Everybody.” The youth sneezes, shivering, and wipes his face with his sleeve. “Once, anyway. Now… I know more than most, that’s all.”
“You’re one of Doctor Hypatia’s patients, I suppose?” Hopefully the youth didn’t have one of those rare Pandyssian diseases the good doctor was so interested in. Is this callow creature about to blackmail me?
“She’s very kind, but she can’t help me.”
Oh.
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
Dying before you’ve had a chance to live. Poor kid. He hoped it wasn’t contagious. Looking at him, the Duke has a queasy sense of déjà vu from… a painting, perhaps, or a snatch of dream? What was he doing down here, anyway?
“The choices Emily made… they were fascinating to observe. I’m curious about her future.”
“Are you referring to the Empress?” he asks, sounding pompous even to his own ears.
Emily Kaldwin. His own witch. Her fine features hidden by the scarf across her face. He’d kept one of the posters. Her eyes, full of rage, the oh-so-familiar gaze of a beautiful creature pressed almost beyond endurance. He was naked when she found him. Sitting in the Duke’s bath smoking a cigarette on a hot evening. The air was full of steam and perfume. Even without clothes, it would have been impossible for an untrained eye to tell the difference between his body and Abele’s. Muscle, fat, flesh, and bone. He’d lost count of the alterations that had been made because Luca gained a few pounds, cut his knee, or broke his arm.
He’d like to think he felt her presence, but he didn’t notice anything until there was a knife at his throat and a soft voice warning him to stay very still. A nightmare come to life, come for death. Another man might have lost himself in that gilded cage, treated like prize bull, but he always knew how it was going to end: a well-deserved knife in the wrong back. Probably still would. Luca might be locked away but he was still living with the man’s sins.
The grey eyes stare at him as though the youth has forgotten how to blink. “Do you know another Emily?”
“Look here, pipsqueak, you can’t speak to me like–”
“Can I come with you?” the kid interrupts him. “I would like to see her again. And Corvo. Before I leave with Billie. She says we’ll be gone a long time. I think she’s right.”
“THERE YOU ARE, YOU LITTLE SHIT!”
The Duke flinches away from the anger in the voice. A one-eyed, dark-skinned woman in a shabby red coat is storming towards them. The young man merely turns, leaning against the wall, and watches her bear down on him with a vague expression, as though interested seeing in what she’ll do next. His bodyguards, drawn by the shout, follow on her heels, their weapons ready.
She comes up short when she sees the Duke, giving him a stiff, reluctant bow and glancing sideways at the guards before grabbing the kid’s arm. “Your Grace. ‘Scuse me. We were just leaving.” And, sotto voce, in her charge’s ear: “You should be in bed.”
“I’m not a child, Billie.” Expressionless, he doesn’t struggle at all, limply resisting her authority. “I wanted to speak to Armando and he’s not coming back to Addermire before he leaves for Gristol.”
How the fuck does the kid know all this? Has Dr Hypatia given away his secrets? There is no time to think, no time for games and niceties now. Hopefully, his guards think the youth came to talk with the prisoner, not him. His life – so many lives – depends on it.
“Arrest them, please, Captain.”
“At once, Your Grace!”
The woman looks like she’s going to put up at fight but, rather than reaching for the daggers at her belt, she wraps her arms around the young man, shielding him with her body. Mother and son? They’re both short with thin, pinched faces and close-cropped black hair.
“I killed your brother,” the woman says calmly. “I can kill you too.”
“Delilah,” cracks a hopeful voice from behind the door. “You’re here at last, Delilah…!”
The Duke drops his cigar, pressing its stubby, smouldering remains into the floor with the heel of his boot.
“Take them away.”