The shrine was in the back of the barn up on what was left of the hayloft. It was built out of a stack of flat slate blocks that had been salvaged from the collapsing structure of the main farmhouse. The stubby remains of ancient, rotten candles littered the haphazard construction, and on the largest slate block, which formed a sort of altar, there was the mummified remains of something organic—dried leaves and sticks and something else equally desiccated—and scratched into the dark surface of the stone was a refrain that brought memories rushing back to Daud’s mind.
THE OUTSIDER WALKS AMONG US!
Daud spent the night in front of the altar. At first he kneeled in front of it, then, realizing what he was doing, he turned his back on the shrine and sat on some of the slate stacks. As the hours slowly slipped by, Daud found himself calling into the night, asking the bastard Outsider to show himself and admit what he had done.
If the Outsider heard him, there was no reply.
After another hour, Daud took the shard of black mirror from his tunic and, taking a deep breath, turned and balanced it on the altar. He stared into the glass, willing the Outsider to show himself, but all he saw was his own reflection in the moonlight that shone in through the barn’s broken roof.
Daud pocketed the mirror, destroyed the altar, and left before dawn.
Arriving in Potterstead, he first went to one of his caches, long hidden in the years spent wandering the Isles aimlessly after Corvo had exiled him from Dunwall. The cache, secreted in a bricked-up culvert underneath a bridge, had remained undetected, and included another pouch of Overseer platinum ingots, twelve in total. It was a lot of money to carry, but he wanted to make sure that nobody asked him any questions about the next part of his journey.
Then he scouted Potterstead harbor, and saw it—a huge whaling ship of the kind that he had thought retired years ago. It was an expensive hulk, a relic from the earlier days of the whale trade. It had been patched up, and the crew was still in the process of cleaning and repair when Daud found the captain discussing business with the harbormaster. The ship had been exhumed from dry dock in the Tyvian city of Tamarak and had set off from the northern isles to hunt whales off the Pandyssian Continent. But first it was scheduled for a shakedown run, which included the maintenance stop at Potterstead after the first leg of the journey, and another stop at Karnaca, where it would pick up more crew.
Daud paid the captain one ingot, and the harbormaster another—probably a half- or even a full-year’s wages for each, Daud thought. Neither asked any questions after that, and the Bear of Tamarak steamed out of Potterstead harbor that afternoon, with one extra crewman whose name didn’t appear on the roster.
During the nearly three-week journey south, Daud worked alongside the others. There were seven crew plus the captain, the bare minimum required to pilot the ship and begin the laborious task of cleaning and repairing the tools of the ship’s primary function—the harpoon guns, the winches, the whale frames and their complex craneand gantry systems. Daud and the crew worked hard, stripping chain and cable, disassembling mechanisms and reassembling them. It was laborious, but Daud felt invigorated, alive with his purpose, his determination to complete his mission more acute than ever.
While the crew slept, Daud trained. The ship was gigantic, and with a skeleton crew working mostly on deck, the vast innards of the vessel became Daud’s private domain. In one of the cargo holds he began to build a gymnasium for himself out of scrap and bits of broken machinery removed during the repairs. He built four makeshift mannequins, with multiple arms and panels Daud could punch and kick, the combat practice sharpening his already formidable skills. He built multilevel scaffolds and platforms, towering frames holding horizontal bars. At night he leapt, and ran, swinging from poles and bars, jumping, rolling, jumping again from platform to platform.
The sound of his training echoed in the huge hollow chambers of the Bear of Tamarak. Once—just once—he saw the captain appear through a bulkhead door high up in the wall of the cargo hold, watching him work. When Daud stopped and looked up at him, the captain nodded, and then disappeared.
When he wasn’t training or working, Daud spent much of his time in the cabin the captain had allocated him, an officer’s room, away from the bunks of the main crew. Here Daud slept deeply, his body tired from his work aboard the ship, or he practiced various meditation techniques he had learned across the Isles, focusing his mind, readying himself for the tasks ahead.
It was all time well spent. As the ship neared its destination, Daud felt calm and rested, despite his exertions.
The ship skirted the west coast of Serkonos, riding thefast ocean current that arced around the southernmost landmass of the Empire of the Isles, and as the city of Karnaca came into distant view, Daud deemed himself ready to face the Outsider. He wondered if the Outsider felt it too, if he was watching him and somehow nudging events toward their conclusion. In moments of doubt, it felt as though Daud had no free will but was merely following the contours of the universe, his life hurtling with inevitable finality toward the ultimate confrontation.
In his cabin, Daud cut his hair with a cut-throat razor and slicked it back with a smear of grease made of
