Mrs. Devlin broke away from her husband and studied the scene.
“Whether the coup is our problem or not,” she said, “Isuggest, Mr. Devlin, that we return to the League at our earliest convenience and make our report.” She leaned on the windowsill and cocked her head. Down below, one of the guards was talking to the officer, and both men were now looking up at the Suicide Hall. Mrs. Devlin shrank back from the glass, in case she had been spotted. “And I suggest that moment is now,” she continued. “The soldiers appear ready to search this building.”
Mr. Devlin joined her. “Then I do believe I agree with you, my dear.”
“How confident are we in our projection?”
“He will extract the information he wants. Daud is both ruthless and efficient. Jack is tough, but young. She will yield eventually, and he will be on the trail of the artifact once more.”
“Which means he’ll go after the Collector.”
“He most certainly will.”
“Which means he will have to head north,” Mrs. Devlin said. “How very thoughtful of him.”
“How convenient.”
“Delightfully convenient.”
Mr. Devlin clicked his heels again and held out his arm. “Shall we?”
Mrs. Devlin took her husband’s arm and gave him a little bow. “We can go out through the cellar. Use the sewer tunnel. If we assume Dunwall is now blockaded, we should be able to get to Ranfurly before they close that dockyard.”
Her husband crinkled his nose. “The sewer, my dear?”
Mrs. Devlin shrugged. “Needs must, my darling heart. Needs must.”
“In which case,” said Mr. Devlin, reaching for the cigarillo still burning in his wife’s hand, “I’m going to need all the help I can get.”
She let him take it, and he inhaled deeply, holding thesmoke in his lungs for as long as possible before exhaling. He shrugged. “I suspect we are going to smell much worse in the very near future.”
Mrs. Devlin laughed. “Come now. We have our report to make to the League.” She turned and headed for the door.
“They will be pleased, won’t they, Mrs. Devlin?”
His wife looked over her shoulder. “The League?”
“No, Wyman.”
Mrs. Devlin smiled again. “Oh yes. Wyman will be very pleased indeed. And even more so once we present them with Daud’s head on a pike.”
10
YOUNG LUCY’S GRAVE, GRISTOL
18th to 20th Day, Month of Earth, 1852
“Spirit of the Deep, Siren of the Dreams.
I walked for hours along the coast, leaving Dunwall behind me until the lament of the waves drowned all other feeling. I wept, knowing you would not come to me, my love.
You rule my dreams, where I behold with senses I do not possess in waking life the dark splendor of your home in the deep. There the ocean rests on your back like a sleeping child on his father’s shoulders.
In these sleepless nights of despair, you appear to me not as the mighty leviathan, but as a young man, with eyes as black as the Void.”
—SPIRIT OF THE DEEP
Excerpt from a longer work of fiction
Eat ’Em Up Jack led Daud silently through the night, slipping out of the barricades around Dunwall and heading into the dark countryside. They traveled swiftly and in silence, Jack not speaking until they reached the first of what Daud deduced was the Sixways’ series of safe houses and waypoints, part of their infamoussmuggling route that allowed illicit treasures to vanish. Daud let Jack work as she spoke to the landlord of a forlorn, empty inn balanced on a hillside in the middle of nowhere miles to the southwest of Dunwall, keeping to the shadows while Jack and the bewhiskered landlord spoke in low voices, the landlord sometimes glancing in his direction, sometimes nodding at Jack, all the while with a stern expression on his face.
They rested at the inn for several hours. Jack retired for some much-needed sleep just as dawn began to break. Daud stayed awake, as did the landlord, who sat in front of the door of the backroom, guarding his boss and watching Daud in silence.
At dusk, Jack emerged. The landlord gave her provisions—enough for two, although he never spoke a word to Daud—and they left as soon as it was dark enough. The country was rough, and the sky was heavy with clouds, obscuring the moon. But it was safer than traveling during the day.
Jack led and Daud followed. They walked through woods, across fields, through villages shut up for the night. Eventually, Jack stopped at a house and vanished inside, leaving Daud out in the deserted street. She came out a short while later and they moved on, coming to another small farming town—Fallibroome, perhaps?—where Jack spoke to a militiaman on the gates, who led the pair up onto the wall, skirting the market square before dropping down onto rocky hillside on the other side of the settlement.
Daud understood Jack was now on a mission of her own. She had had the heart cut out of her criminal empire, and as they moved from waypoint to waypoint, Daud knew she was spreading the word, telling her agents not just of the massacre in Wyrmwood Way, but of her plansto rebuild. She was telling everyone to be ready.
They spent the next day in the deep green gloom of an ancient wood. They ate together in silence. Jack slept and Daud kept watch. Their conversation may have been non-existent, but they had at least come to some kind of unspoken agreement.
At twilight, they resumed their journey, and after a few more hours of walking they emerged from the woodland and found themselves on a high bluff overlooking the sea. There, below them, was the coastal village of Young Lucy’s Grave. It was cradled by steep cliffs on three sides, the fourth open to a narrow harbor, home to a tiny fishing fleet that faced the crashing waves, the vicious tide funneled between two sheer faces of black rock.
“We’re here,” said Jack. Daud looked down at the village and nodded. Jack watched him a moment, her eyes
