Lucinda pulled him up, stepping close, so close her body pressed against his.
“Challis, you have served me well.”
“Yes, mistress.”
“You have done all I have asked of you.”
“Yes, mistress.”
“Without question.”
“Yes, mistress.”
“Then hear me, Challis. I have but one final task for you.”
“Anything, mistress! Anything at all.”
Lucinda looked down at him. Caitlin joined her side.
“I was hoping you would say that,” said Lucinda. She lifted her hands, her nails growing into long, curved claws as Caitlin did the same.
Challis’s dying scream echoed across the chasm and bounced off the towering walls of Kirin Jindosh’s mansion, before fading out over the city in the early morning.
30
THE VOID
Time immaterial
“You ask what the Void looks and feels like, if it can be measured like a real place. Here’s my answer: Don’t concern yourself with such matters. It is as real as anything I’ve ever experienced, but if you understood it, you’d know that such a statement makes as little sense as saying that I have been dead.
The Void is unspeakable. It is infinite and it is nowhere, ever-changing and perpetual. There are more things in the endless black Void, Kirin Jindosh, than are dreamt of in your natural philosophy.
Leave aside things beyond your reach, and be content that you are gifted with more insight than the common man.”
—LETTER FROM DELILAH TO KIRIN JINDOSH
Surviving fragment, date unknown
Stone, and ash, and the cold dark.
Daud looks around. He smells rust and corrosion. He tastes metal and the sharp sour tang of electricity.
He is standing on rock, gray and dark and ancient. Gray clouds swirl above in an infinite nothing thatsurrounds him, surrounds everything. This nowhere, this no place.
This Void.
“Tell me, Daud, is this really how you thought it would be? Is this how you thought your story would end?”
Daud turns and looks at him, the young man, his hair dark and short, his eyes small and black. The young man stands with his arms folded, his back to a rising glow, like an early morning sunrise. Except in the Void there is no sun, there is no morning, and the light is cold and bright and blue.
The Outsider watches Daud, his expression unreadable, as he paces, circling Daud like a painter circling his easel.
Daud stands, watching. He says nothing.
“You think you are alone, Daud? You think you are the only one who is in pain? Running from a past you cannot forget, the memory of evil deeds a fire inside your mind—a fire that, no matter how hard you try, you cannot extinguish, not fully. The embers will always be with you, burning in the eternal night of your being.”
Daud clenches his fists. He begins to walk, turning a circle, following the Outsider, keeping pace.
“I have watched the world for four thousand years,” the Outsider says. “Can you even imagine that length of time? If you could, it would drive you from your senses.”
Daud lifts his chin and speaks. “Is that why you do it, then?”
The Outsider stops walking and stares at Daud, his arms tight around his body, his black eyes reflecting an orange light from long ago. He cocks his head.
“Perhaps I have underestimated you.”
Daud takes a step closer to the monster, to the source of so much turmoil, so many sadistic acts. But then the stones of the Void move, the architecture of the nothingnessshifting, and the Outsider stands farther away, on a slab of rock that floats in the blue-black expanse.
“You call yourself the Outsider,” Daud says, “but that’s not the truth, is it? You don’t observe. You meddle.”
Daud holds up his hand, presenting the back to the Outsider. On his skin, the Mark flashes blue and white.
Daud thinks he sees the Outsider flinch, but he is not certain.
“How many have there been? How many have you branded with your mark? How many have become your tools—your property? How many have done your work for you, interfering with the world for your entertainment? How many have lived and died for you?”
“You still do not understand.”
Daud takes another step forward. His hand is still raised.
“What’s it all for? Tell me that much. What do you want—what do you really want?”
The Outsider cocks his head once more, and then he is there, in front of Daud, just an arm’s reach away.
“You know, you were always one of my favorites,” he says, and he begins his pacing again. “You’re right. There have been many—so many names, so many lives. But lives that are so brief, fluttering out like a dying flame even before you realize how very short the time you have is.”
He turns and steps toward Daud, who feels the Outsider’s black eyes boring into his own.
“But you, Daud. You were different. I thought maybe you were the one. But perhaps I was wrong. Doubtful, but possible. In four millennia anything is possible, I suppose.”
Daud grinds his teeth. He pulls in air through his nose—impossible air in this impossible place. He feels the Mark glow on his skin.
The Outsider’s eyes flash, his expression flickers again.
This time Daud is sure of it.
The Outsider is afraid.
Afraid of him.
“You weren’t wrong,” says Daud, and now the Outsider frowns, and he moves, as though to take a step back before reconsidering and holding his ground.
“I’m the one,” Daud says. “The one who’s going to kill you. Of that, I’m certain.”
The Outsider turns back to Daud.
“Daud, the Knife of Dunwall, one of the greatest assassins of his age. It is true that I will die, but it will not be by your hand.”
Daud rolls his neck.
“We’ll see about that.”
He leaps forward, arms outstretched, a growl emerging from deep in his chest.
The Outsider shrinks back, stumbles.
Daud falls.
He sees a light.
A blue light, shining, bright, as bright as the rising sun,
