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He is the Lord Protector, still, after all they’ve done and lied to him. They can never truly strip that title away. The may carve away the fat from his bones, the symmetry of his face, his fingernails, the stretches of his skin that had never before been scarred – but they can never take that from him.
He is the Lord Protector, and he does not need the fire of a branding iron to tell him he has failed.
Coldridge Prison is no place for him, does not suit him, despite the profusion of shadows in which he works so well. He is a man who is used to action, movement. He paces. The chains they have given him allow him to walk nearly the length of his cell, just short of the door, just short of the light from the hallway outside.
It is always dark in prison.
He learns to count the hours by hunger and thirst and the days by the fresh scars on his skin.
It is sometime in the third month, then, sometime in the small hours, when he wakes to find the darkness staring back at him.
“My dear Corvo,” says the figure in the shape of a man. The inflection on dear is soft, familiar. It is the cadence he knows from the torture chamber, the soft soothing sound of please just sign the confession and I will stop. He braces against imagined pain.
“Is this what you imagined?” says the figure. “Coming home after those months at sea? Is this the kind of welcome you dreamed of?”
“Who are you?” he asks. His voice is a rasp. It is disuse only. Never fear.
The figure clasps its hands behind its back, and in the thin light he thinks he can see it smile. The rest of the face is dark, so dark. “Your freedom,” it says, so quiet. “If you want me to be.”
The smile on its face is thin and crooked and that is all he can see, the rest is so shadowed. He looks for the gleam of eyes and finds none. “Step into the light.”
He thinks he hears a laugh as the figure does, a half-step back – and then he is alone again, and the whale-oil lamp on the wall outside the cell flares high with a pure, unearthly blue.
*****
The boy who knows only fear and loneliness knows one better than the other. Fear and him are wed, intimately so, and he does not even know what it is like to live without the prickle of skin and the taste of metal in his throat. He does not understand how the rest of the world survives without constantly watching their shadow.
But he does not know loneliness, not truly, because of all the rats in the city there is one who will rest curled up beneath his collar.
It is white where the others are black. He decided, long ago, that this meant it was an outcast. Different. Frightened. Like him. He feeds it scraps of bread he cannot spare, and when he sleeps it curls atop his narrow chest or in the hollow between chin and throat. Tiny, warm, and white.
And so, when the man with black eyes appears before him and asks him what he wants, it is not so hard to answer. The man smiles like there is a fishhook caught in his lip. He takes the boy’s hands in his own and lifts him high, high, and the boy does not even notice when one of his own hands begins to burn; does not even notice when his little white friend slips from his pocket and vanishes into the dark.
“You will never know fear again,” says the black-eyed man. He sets the boy down and touches his face, one side after the other, tracks beneath his eyes like tears. “You will never know fear, and every man in this city will be so afraid of you. I promise.”
*****
He is Corvo Attano and he will not sully his name by signing it on their traitorous confession, and the weeks stretch long, and he wastes to a shadow in the back of his cell.
His knuckles are broken and bloody, now, and the walls are streaked with red, because the guards have taken to giving him news. It comes along with each meal, sometimes instead of so that he has horror and outrage to sustain him through the night instead of water and bread. He grows thin. He grows sharp. Hungry. He begins to dream of eel or wine or apple; he begins to dream of revenge. He dreams of things he cannot ever have.
They tell him of neighborhoods fallen to the rats and weeping, of Sokolov’s new inventions that stalk the streets, of the rise and wealth of the men who come down every week and ask him to confess.
They tell him that Princess Emily has gone missing.
He turns his hands over, listens to the chains clink, inspects the broken skin and bruises with his heart beating painfully hard and a sour taste in the back of his throat. He was once the Lord Protector. If I were free, he thinks –
“Yes?”
Chains rattle as he backs against the wall of his cell, eyes on the figure that appears before the door in a swirl of smoke. It is smiling, still. It is as if no time has passed. “What do you want?” he snaps.
“Shouldn’t I be asking you?”
The figure steps into the blue light of the whale-oil lamp, and its eyes are black, black, empty and black as the eyes of the dead. Corvo recoils. “I am the Outsider,” says the figure, as if it has not noticed, as if this is nothing strange or shocking, “and what I want –”
It breaks off, and there is that smile again, sickle-curved at the corner of its mouth.
“What I want is what I already have, it seems,” it says. “Someone interesting. I am quite interested in you these days. Corvo.”
The figure’s mouth curls around his name as if it is sweet.
Corvo sets his jaw. “Interesting?” he finds himself echoing, even as he thinks of childhood tales, of golden masks and white whalebone charms and whispers and litanies at night, “I’ve done nothing but sit in prison for months –”
“You have not faded. You have not given into despair. You dream of escape and duty and revenge and yet you sit and you do nothing – we can do better than that, my dear, can we not? What is it you want? What are you hungry for?”
The figure reaches a hand through the bars that are too tightly spaced for a hand to reach. The hand is thin. The hand is, for all appearances, a normal hand. It holds a loaf of bread out to him, beckoning, and he can see the steam rising from the crust and smell it – and yes, they have starved him with nothing but rumor and news for the past three days, but that is not –
The figure in the shape of a black-eyed man waves its hand and the bread becomes a key, small and bronze and shining.
“I can give you what you want,” it says, and its voice is torture-soft.
Do this and I will stop. Do this and I will make the pain go away. Do this and you will destroy your name and the pain will never, ever end – but it’s only a name, isn’t it?
Corvo.
My dear.
He sits. He says nothing. He does nothing. He is not sure which voice in his head is a memory of iron and fire and whip, and which is the hiss of white bone and black eye – just as he is not sure precisely when the other leaves and when he is alone.
*****
Piero the inventor is lonely, lonely. The nights are cold. The nights are long. If only he could find other men who do not sleep, he thinks, he could have someone to talk to without their looking askance and backing away from his babbling. If he could find the women who do not sleep he would have someone to warm his hands between her own and call him gifted, genius, great, without pity falling on her tongue.
If.
He dreams of the same skull, over and over, and all his friends fleeing from him, and the city crumbling beneath a sea of black and filthy fur.
He dreams of a boy with red eyes.
He dreams of a man with eyes that are black, so black. The man is thin. The man is starved. The man, he can see, is lonely as he. “Is this what you want, Piero?” he asks. He gestures to take in the workshop, the papers taped to the wall, the red threads mapping out conspiracy and blood. “To work? To never be bored? It is the same thing I want.”
And Piero may be mad, but he is no fool. And he knows precisely to whom he is speaking.
“I want to be appreciated,” he replies. Because appreciated is the language of a natural philosopher, conservative and safe. Because he dare not bait the Outsider with a word like love. He watches the man smile, watches blue light dance in dead black eyes.
“You will be, Piero Joplin,” says the man, and Piero knows it to be true, “you will be. You will go unnoticed by most but beloved by few, and you will work in the shadow of great men, but through your help they shall become greater. And there is one who I have chosen who will cast a very long, long shadow. And you will make his face.”
*****
He is a man of faith.
This is not precisely true, but the figure before him is not a man at all. It – he – paces the cell before him, rake-thin, ragged. Its – his – eyes are empty hollows. Corvo has seen them often enough, now, to know that they are not precisely the gaping pits that lead to the Void that the Overseers speak of. They are more like the eyes of a corpse. Wet and pitted with decay.
“Is this what you always look like?” he asks. “Is this how you always appear?”
The man with black eyes grins. “Is that an answer you really want to know?”
He sets his jaw. “I’m not accepting anything you offer me. I know what you are.”
“Do you?”
“Stop asking questions.”
“Answer mine.” The man with black eyes stops pacing, turns on his heel, stands before him. “The Abbey is a cult that lives only to loathe me and love itself,” he says, words so soft. “They teach that I am a monster. They teach that I exist only to take. They lie. I am a creature of exchange. I bargain. I broker. I like you because you have the potential to be interesting, my dear, and I would like you to be. I will give you things in return. I will give you the power to blow the door off this cell, to walk away in the skin of a guard, to scurry away in the skin of a rat, to slip through the Void and through the wall as if they are nothing at all. I will do this because I believe you can keep me from being bored. I do so love a show.”
He leans forward. Touches his face. Corvo has nowhere to recoil, no space to be surprised that the hand only feels like a hand. “I expect you to be better than this, Corvo,” says the man. “I know you can give me that. What do you want in return?”
“I want you to leave.”
He smiles. His teeth are the color of bone. “Do you?”
*****
Thaddeus Campbell keeps the skeleton of an Outsider shrine in the basement of his chambers, in a hidden room that stands in stark opulent contrast to the white walls of the Abbey. He goes downstairs and shuts the door and looks at it at night. Every night.
He debates, every night, whether he should smash the shrine to pieces and set it alight in an inferno of blue fire; or whether he should get on his knees before it and ask for power. The question of the shrine hangs heavy around him when he eats, when he sleeps, when he works, when he worries his fingers at the Heretic’s Brand and imagines it searing flesh. He does not know what he wants.
Either way, it stinks of corruption.
He does not care.
*****
He is a man.
The rumors that swirled around the palace were often false but just as often true, and he was at the heart of them more often than he would have liked. The men of court hid their humanity behind their masks and titles, and the Lord Protector and the Empress were no exception. Their titles outlined one relationship between them. Service. Professionalism. A distance no greater or less than the space a man needs to draw his sword.
Behind closed doors, their hands and mouths and bodies outlined quite another.
It has been five months since he felt the blood of the Empress soak into his skin, and five months may be enough time for a Lord Protector to cease mourning his charge and move on; but it has only been five months, and she was never only his Empress, and it is not enough.
The moments he hates the most, of course, are the moments when she is just a woman and he is just a man alone in the dark.
But.
It has been five months.
He hates that he does this – that his mind can reduce the woman he loved into something far less than the sum of her parts, into the individual memories of sensation and heat and skin on skin. It is a disservice to her memory. It is a disservice to her. But –
He is just a man.
He is nothing less. He is certainly nothing more.
“Is this what you want?” says the Outsider, and Corvo’s eyes snap open. The man has appeared, quite suddenly and silently, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the little cell. His head is cocked like a bird’s. Corvo starts and begins to move to cover himself and the man raises a hand, stops him. “Is this how you want to remember her?”
Corvo tenses back against the wall, pulse hammering, the no plain on his face.
He watches the Outsider shift. He watches his head tilt to the other side like the head of a bird, or a rat. Watches him move by careful and casual increments until he is no longer cross-legged but lightly balanced on his toes, and then his knees. “My dear,” he repeats, “is this what you want?”
He means the walls of the prison close and stagnant around them; he means staining the memory of Jessamine with blood or seed or both; he means –
“Revenge,” says Corvo, flat. And it is an answer. And it is not precisely yes or no.
The Outsider’s eyes are fixed on the point on his throat where he can see his pulse beat and beat.
“Revenge cannot solve everything,” he says. Voice so, so soft. “And I am not the Abbey's devil. I am not cruel. I do not give my Mark to those who do not ask for it.”
There is a question in those dead black eyes.
Corvo does not move.
He thinks, wildly, (as the man who is not a man moves forward) of the teachings of the Abbey, of things beyond man’s knowledge that seek only to destroy, of whales that live in the unknowable deep that have teeth that are not teeth and tentacles blossoming around their mouths like flowers –
But the mouth is just a mouth. Corvo bites his lip to keep from crying out at the shock of it, the heat. A cry would draw the guards. He draws blood from his lip instead. And the man who is not a man moves on him, over him, down, suction and heat and a tongue tracing just so and –
And he is just a man, he cannot keep his hips from arching up –
He twists his fingers through his chains rather than curl them in the other’s hair.
Throughout it all, the man does not close his eyes. They watch him. Black and pitted and rotten damp as the eyes of a dead thing. They watch.
*****
The boy who will grow to be the man who will call himself Daud wants power, only. He has spent too long pressing his nose to windows and watching the wealthy dine upon pyramids of cakes that are round and golden and plentiful as coins. He wishes, only, for the power that comes from food and money; for the power that comes from splashing children like him with gutter-water as mechanized carriages roll by; for the power of silks and satins and status that can bring children like him to their knees.
The man who appears before him that night is not dressed in silk. Nor satin. He wears tattered rags like him. His eyes are black. The boy who will be the man who will be called Daud finds, for once, that he does not have to crane his neck to see them.
“You want power?” asks the black-eyed man. “You shall have it. I can see all your days, and I can see that you will do such things with it. I swear to you, a day will come when you will stand before the Empress, and she will bow before you and tremble at your very feet.”
*****
He is a ghost.
He is a shadow.
He is a skeleton in the shape of a man.
He has spent six months in Coldridge Prison, and it suits him less than ever, and he is wasted and wrecked and pale and each and every one of those months is written in scar upon his skin.
“I want,” he says, tongue passing out over dry cracked lips, “to get out. I want to kill the men who did all this. I want to do worse than kill them. I want to take everything from them like they took it from me.”
“That won’t give you your life back,” says the black-eyed man, gently, from his place on the floor of Corvo’s cell.
“I know,” he says. He breathes. Sharp through his nose. “I want my life back.”
“You wish that this had never happened?”
It is only when he hears the chains clink that Corvo realizes he has shaken his head. “I wish that she had never died.”
*****
Vera Moray has always wanted things. Such things. Gold and gowns and jewels, clever little clockwork trinkets and glittering combs for her hair, such things! She had wealth and needed no more of it; she had beauty and needed no more of it; she had a husband and then suitor after suitor after suitor, but needed and needs none of them, not even when her beauty and her wealth are stripped from her and she tumbles down into the gutter.
Because she has him.
Him!
And oh, he brings her such things! She is an old woman and her bones ache, but she has her beauty preserved in a lovely cameo that is dearer to her than her own heart. She has a good house and a boy who comes to keep the troublesome men away (such a lovely face, the boy has; he is such a lovely boy, such a good boy). And she has a man who looks after her. Such a suitor. Better than anything she could have dreamed, she who always dreamed so high.
He came to her one night and took her hand in his. And he took her dancing, out in the Panddyssian heat with her skirts kicked high and the firelight shining in his dark dark eyes. She’d felt so young again. She’d felt so powerful.
And she has not seen him for a long time, but oh, she will. She will! He will always come back to her. He will always provide for her. Her black-eyed man. He has given her the birds, her beauties, her wonderful birds with ruby eyes and fur of black and white. Oh, birdies! He is coming! He is coming, she knows it, she knows it. He will always love her. It is the only thing she wants. Oh, listen, oh my birdies! He is coming!
*****
He is.
It does not matter how he finishes that thought, anymore, because it is the dawn before his execution and the only way it can finish is dead.
“I have a gift for you,” says the black-eyed man. Corvo raises his head to see him holding something in his cupped hands. He offers them toward Corvo like a man offering water to the dying.
He looks down.
The heart is perfect. The stitches and staples that hold it together are small and shining, and he can look through a pane of glass to see the clockwork inside one of the chambers, gold, tightly wound and gleaming.
He plucks it from the other man’s hands and holds it in his own. It covers his fingers in a fine patina of blood. Red and sticky. Fresh. And it beats in perfect time, on and on and on; and its flesh against his skin is warm.
He holds it for a long time. He holds it until the beat begins to slow, lulled, calm, and does not know or care if the whisper of when you are near my heart is at peace that he hears is an echo or a lie.
“You asked,” says the man with black eyes. His voice is very quiet. He smiles.
And because Corvo keeps her heart clutched tight in his right hand, he takes the left and holds it hard.