Chapter Text
He'd declared himself ready for what would come. He hadn't expected that to be nothing at all. Corvo was imprisoned in a cell that would never hold him, and then he was gone, leaving Daud to wait and listen for his footsteps. He had to come. Daud held the only key.
Except he didn't. The key was gone. So was his belt-pouch—but that was a later discovery. Upstairs, his chests had been meticulously ransacked. His diary lay open on his bed.
Daud got the message. He turned to his desk, where a different book lay. A travel guide.
Time to find a boat.
Three nights later he woke from dreamless sleep to the feeling of eyes watching him. Decades of instinct had his sword in his hand and his feet on the ground before he saw the spectre of death crouched on his windowsill. His bones already knew who it would be. Corvo had come to tie up loose ends.
He raised a hand to prepare a transversal, but Corvo didn't stop moving when the rest of the world did. Nor did he attack: he merely turned his head, lifted his own hand, and vanished.
Daud landed in front of where he'd been, sword drawn, and leapt up to the sill. Corvo hadn't gone far; he was perched on a crumbling pillar, left hand smoking through the glove he wore now. He hadn't had it when he'd washed up half-poisoned. Perhaps the experience had taught him caution: but given this tableau, unlikely.
Corvo's right hand was empty, raised in a gesture of truce. When Daud paused, Corvo tilted his palm up, and swept his hand east. Toward the Tower, where, according to the latest announcements, little Emily Kaldwin now sat on her mother's throne. An invitation.
Perhaps the poison had turned his brain.
Daud grimaced, looked down at his stocking-clad feet, and grimaced again. Corvo folded in his arms to rest on his knees, apparently content to crouch like an ill-placed gargoyle until Daud made up his mind.
Well. Daud never had been able to abide a mystery.
They passed over the rooftops, past the unsuspecting eyes of Daud's sentries, down to the river. A boat waited there, with an elderly boatman, who gave them a respectful nod each and asked nothing except, “Ready to go, sirs?”
Corvo gave no verbal answer, nor a returning nod, just made himself a huddled pile of cloth and steel in the stern. Daud looked at him, looked at the boatman, shrugged, and stepped aboard. He sat on the side, trying to keep an eye on both of them.
Corvo was the one noble in the city who would have no need of Daud's services. If that was what was at the end of this trip, Daud was going to be so disappointed.
(Was this what the black-eyed bastard felt like all the time?)
The boat pulled up some distance from the Tower. Corvo's mask tipped upward, and then he was gone. When the boatman made no comment at this display of uncanny power, Daud took his cue and followed Corvo.
It was a familiar route: the one he'd taken on the day he'd killed an empress. Little wonder Corvo had it mapped out. Doubtless it would be crass to wonder aloud if Corvo planned to do anything about the holes in the Tower's security. Perhaps, if Daud survived the night, he'd mention it later. Perhaps not. He'd saved the Empress' daughter from living death... her fate should not still be his concern.
It didn't sound convincing in his head, as they dropped down onto a high balcony. Through the glass doors Daud could see two people; through the Void, he saw four more, but they were sentries at posts facing outward, not poised to break in with swords drawn. Corvo looked at him—or at least, the mask turned in Daud's direction—and then stepped inside.
He would be damned if a child could make him nervous, no matter her mother. Daud followed.
Little Emily had screamed and kicked and bit when they'd taken her, until they'd knocked her out with a lowered dose of sleep poison. It had availed her nothing, save a bruise when Billie slapped her. Spoiled, Daud had thought at the time. Unconquerable, he thought now, as Emily Kaldwin, Empress of the Isles, sat with perfect stony decorum and glared at her mother's killer.
The other person in the room was the Watch Captain, Curnow, standing silently by the door. Older fellow; Daud assessed him in an instant and dismissed him. The girl sitting at the head of the table commanded all attention.
“Daud,” said Emily. She sounded like she was tasting his name and found it bitter. “You killed my mother.” My mother. Not, the Empress.
“Yes, Your Majesty.” He would not apologize. It would mean nothing, be nothing except an insult. And he'd done too much to this girl already.
“Corvo says you regret it. He says it broke you, and now you're sorry and you want to leave Dunwall and stop being a murderer.”
So Corvo did talk. Daud had been starting to wonder.
Emily's eyes narrowed. “I think that if you were really sorry, you wouldn't want to run away. You'd try to make up for it. That's what Mother always said.”
Empress Jessamine the Just. Too damned kind, too damned trusting—but not, for all that, unwise. When Daud managed to speak, his voice sounded like he'd swallowed a bucket of river-sand. “I can never fix what I've done.”
A trip up-river and a witch imprisoned in the Void were nothing against a world destroyed.
“That doesn't excuse you from trying,” said Emily, with the cold rage of an empress and the naive grief of a child missing her mother.
Daud knew what that did to a child. Very quietly, he asked, “Do you need an assassin, then, Empress?”
Her nose wrinkled. “No. I'm not going to solve my problems by killing people. You have lots of practice being sneaky; you can do something useful with that. Something else. Find out secrets for me.” She stared him down, challenge in those dark eyes. “So? Do you mean it or not?”
Daud bowed his head. He could not do otherwise.