What was in his control was what he did now. He was here, he had made it. So now he could search for clues. Yes, the trail was cold—but he would find something.
He had to.
And true enough, the broken mix of ironwork, brick, and blocks of stone was interesting. Altogether, it occupied half of what was left of the factory floor, on the street side of the building’s shell, the half that was still mostly intact. On the other side, the river side, the entireside of the building was missing, the gaping maw open to the elements, with fingers of surviving superstructure reaching up into the dark sky and out over the dark river. Most of that side must have collapsed into the water, and while Daud could see the river was mostly clear, there was foamy wash close to the riverbank as the Wrenhaven tumbled over a fair amount of building wreckage lurking just below the surface. The river was a vital working waterway for Dunwall and clearly a great deal of effort had been made to dredge it. The recovered material had first been piled back into the factory, and then the real work had begun.
Whatever had happened, it had been big—big enough to investigate, big enough for officials to spend time moving, sorting, and cataloguing the rubble, which was neatly arranged, by material and by size, each piece daubed with a number in white paint that shone luminously in the night, reflecting back what little moonlight there was with surprising brightness.
An explosion was the official story. On the last leg of his journey, traveling east from Potterstead after landing back in Gristol, Daud had poured over every newspaper report he had managed to collect since he had linked rumor to fact, identifying the event in Dunwall as the pivot point on which his mission would succeed or fail.
The official story was straightforward enough, although it had taken some time to piece together something that felt closer to the whole picture from the myriad of different reports, each one sensationalized or editorialized depending on the newspaper, the personal whims of the journalist in question, and their targeted reading audience. But what he had managed to learn was this:
On the fifteenth day of the Month of Darkness, 1851—a full eight months ago now—there had been an industrialaccident at the Greaves Auxiliary Slaughterhouse 5, situated on the banks of the Wrenhaven River, at the far eastern corner of Slaughterhouse Row. Although the specific reason had never been disclosed, there had been an explosion, big enough to not only destroy most of the factory itself, but damage several other buildings in the district, forcing the authorities to put up a cordon—for the public’s own safety—manned by the City Watch, effectively sealing off an area of several blocks, with the ruined factory at the center.
A cordon that today, eight months later, was still in place.
Daud found that interesting. He had easily avoided the lazy patrols of the City Watch and slipped into the restricted zone to find no damage at all to any of the other buildings in the block. Which meant the barriers had nothing to do with public safety. The authorities didn’t want people seeing what they were doing.
But that was it. Nothing further was reported, save for an editorial a day later on the dangers of whale oil. The Dunwall Courier reminded readers that the extraction and refining process was difficult and not without risk. It concluded by noting that the Empress of the Isles herself, Emily Kaldwin, had called in representatives of the Greaves Lightning Oil Company to Dunwall to provide her with a full report on the incident.
He hadn’t believed it when he had first read it and, bringing it to mind again, he still didn’t. He knew two things. Firstly, that this was no whale oil explosion—the substance was unstable, true, but even a storage tank rupture couldn’t cause this much damage. And secondly, an official investigation into a simple industrial accident didn’t take eight months, no matter how inefficient Dunwall bureaucracy was.
He was in the right place. It had been here.
He straightened up and looked around, noting the newer struts and props that had been installed to support the remaining three walls of the factory, the largest segments of which still rose to a prodigious height. The ruin was being preserved, at least for the moment, until the official work was finished.
This was fine. In fact, this was better than fine. Because it had been eight months, and they were still going through the rubble, which meant they hadn’t found it. Not yet.
He still had a chance. The trail was perhaps not as cold as he had thought.
But was the factory itself a dead end? He turned and walked slowly along the rows of rubble, scanning the pieces and their numbers, willing some clue, some piece of evidence that had somehow escaped the notice of the official investigator to leap up at him. As he walked he lifted the edge of his hood a little more, then glanced up to the open sky. It had finally stopped raining, but the factory floor was now swimming in two inches of water. There were City Watch patrols out in the streets of the restricted zone, and he moved carefully, not making a sound. Not that it was difficult for him. Silence, stealth and secrecy had been his bread and butter once. And now, after all this time, it had been easy to fall back into the old ways.
Perhaps a little too easy.
He stopped and exhaled slowly, controlling his breathing and the growing feeling of doubt that was blossoming in his belly.
He was too late. It wasn’t here. Maybe it never had been. Maybe the stories were just that.
That was
