Chapter II
The 'Cracked Bowl' the tanners had referred to was a tangled nest of streets on the inner edge of the Old Port District. They sloped downward the further in Billie went, as if the neighbourhood was a beggar hunching over on itself. The buildings here were a mix of hastily built tenements and patched-up brick buildings that had survived the plague years. All they were missing was the roaming packs of garishly-dressed thugs, and Billie would have felt right at home. She kept to the shadows, the knowledge that she was in someone else's territory prickling at the back of her mind. You can take a girl out of the gutter…
The tanners had given Billie an address for their friend Grimble, but half the streets were missing signs. She pursed her lips and pressed onward, heading deeper into the warren. Eventually, after sacrificing a few Coin to a helpful boy in a flat cap (who she strongly suspected had taken down the signs himself), Billie found her way to a townhouse with cracked steps and shuttered windows. She banged on the door.
"An' who are you?" The man who opened it was nearly as broad as she was tall. He wore the shabby overalls of a worker, but there was distrust in his eyes as he took in Billie's appearance.
"I'm looking for Grimble."
"Not what I asked." He folded his arms across his barrel-like chest, and Billie caught a whiff of tobacco smoke and cheap whiskey.
"I'm Deirdre Beck," she said, thinking fast.
"Bullshit," Grimble spat, and slammed the door. Billie kicked out and planted her foot against it before he could close it all the way. The impact sent a jolt up her leg, but she kept her expression hard.
"I need you to tell me where I can find the Storyteller."
"You won't get shit from me, strikebreaker! Piss off!" He raised his hand, and Billie's instincts took over. She ducked as he tried a clumsy backhand, and jabbed her fingers into his throat. He swung again, trying to grab her arm, but all he got was a handful of her coat sleeve.
They never take the missing arm into account, Billie thought, sliding out of her coat and sending Grimble stumbling backward with a well-timed kick to the belly. He landed on his back, and she wasted no time in cracking his head against the floorboards, hard enough to knock him out, but not to do any permanent damage. Probably.
Now what? Billie retrieved her coat and struggled back into it, letting the door close behind her with a click. Grimble's hostility aside, this was her only lead. She cast her gaze around, taking in the weathered furniture and the man's shabby possessions. In her thieving days, she would have done a sweep, uplifting anything she could sell on the black market. This place looked hardly worth the bother, though.
She patted him down though, partly for old time's sake and partly to teach him a lesson for taking a swing at her. Disappointingly, all he had was a tobacco tin and a folded sheet of paper. She pocketed the tin and shook out the paper, then went still as she saw the words printed on it - WORKERS RIGHTS.
It was the flyer the two old sops had mentioned, printed with the same bold letters and crisp white paper as the one Billie had taken from the girl down by the docks. But there was no address, no name, just a crudely-drawn map of some unidentifiable cluster of streets. It didn't even have any street names or markers - a safety measure, she guessed, in case a member of the Watch managed to get their hands on it. The only way for someone without contacts to work out the location would be to scour a map of the city and hope to match the two up.
Billie Lurk didn't need a map, though - she had spent her childhood with a birds-eye view of the city. She left the unfortunate Grimble and his house behind as she returned to the narrow streets, pamphlet in hand, and began to look for a way to reach the rooftops.
•:•:•:•:•:•
Cooper's Row was devoid of life. The empress' birthday festivities were winding down now, or, depending on where you were, just getting started. Monty shivered and rubbed her hands together to stave off the evening chill, and tried not to think about how she could be warming her feet in a pub instead of freezing her arse off. She would have been, too, if she wasn't banned from every taphouse in the district. Agitator, they'd called her. We don't need your lot in here, stirring up trouble. And how were the working men and women supposed to organise when even the pubs were scared shitless of the strikebreakers and the Watch? Pah, they could keep their illusion of impartiality. They were as bad as the scabs, the lot of them.
Monty only had a handful of flyers left. She knew she shouldn't waste them - ink and paper were a precious commodity when everything had to be smuggled through the city by Ames' network, but the old lady wouldn't pay her if she didn't hand out the whole stack. She needed the coin, too - with the days growing shorter and the nights colder, Monty was in dire need of new blankets, a new coat, new boots… new everything, really.
"Bugger it," she huffed, rolling up the remaining flyers and shoving them down the front of her overalls. She would work twice as hard tomorrow, she told herself, and risk the Watchmen's ire on the busier streets. Ames didn't have to know the particulars.
She set off towards the ferry station, eager to get back to the safehouse. Maybe on the way she would find a pub where they didn't know her face. She knew she should stick to the main streets; they were only lighting the street lamps on main thoroughfares these days, in order to conserve Whale oil. But Monty was a Draper's Ward girl, and working as a runner for the Weaver's Guild had sent her all over Dunwall. She knew which routes were safe and which to avoid, lest she end up on the wrong side of a gangster's switchblade.
Which was why she didn't panic when she heard footsteps behind her. It was barely eight bells, and just because the City Watch had turned off the street lamps didn't mean folks didn't have homes to get to. Still, it paid to be aware of one's surroundings, so she glanced over her shoulder, expecting to see an exhausted workman, or maybe a lone Watchman on patrol.
There was no one there.
Monty's steps faltered as she glanced around. She was pretty sure she hadn't imagined the brisk tap tap of heels on stone. Her hand went to the pocket of her overalls, where she kept her little knife. Everyone had to keep a weapon on them, on Ames' orders, though they had to be able to come up with a plausible reason for carrying it if they were caught breaking the law. Monty's knife was meant for whittling wood, not fighting, but it was sharp enough to reassure her.
She spun around as the footsteps came again, this time from the direction she had been walking. She curled her fingers around her knife and crossed the road, aiming for the next corner, where the faint blue light of the Whale oil lamps promised a street with other people on it, and relative safety.
She didn't scream when the Shadow peeled away from the side of the building right in front of her, only let out a soft, keening noise, like a child. She whipped the knife from her pocket, almost dropping it as she fumbled it from its leather sheath. The Shadow rippled and flowed like water, coalescing into the shape of a person. It took a step towards her, an arm outstretched as if greeting an old friend.
Monty ran.
Her worn-out boots slapped the cobblestones as she hurtled down the street, no longer caring which way she went as long as it was away from that thing. There was a house further along, with lamplight spilling out from behind its shuttered windows. Monty flew up the front steps and raised her fist to pound on the front door, but her limbs suddenly felt as if they had lead weights tied to them. It was like trying to move through molasses. She opened her mouth to scream, but it was as if someone had clenched a hand around her throat, cutting off her voice. She turned, excruciatingly slowly, to find the Shadow standing right there on the steps. Her fingers spasmed and dropped her knife with a clatter. It bounced uselessly over the edge of the steps and into the gutter.
The Shadow had no features, but it didn't seem to be looking at her. It tilted its head to the side, as if considering something at its feet. Monty looked down, and with a spike of fresh panic, saw that it was standing on her shadow, one foot on the hand that had held her knife, the other on its throat.
The Shadow crouched, its form rippling...
...and gathered up her shadow in its hands...
...and tore.
This time, Monty screamed.
•:•:•:•:•:•
The light was fading fast, and (not for the first time) Billie missed running the rooftops as a young Whaler. She'd never worried about falling, never feared the space between one roof and the next. Daud's shared talents had let the Whalers slip through the cracks in the world, riding the currents of shadow that no one could feel but them.
Now though, with a single functioning arm, limited depth perception and only her own two legs to carry her, Billie had to wonder if it was time to put her climbing days behind her. Her bones ached with the cold, and the muscles in her good shoulder complained whenever she reached for a ledge or pulled herself up.
She still carried some resentment about her severed arm. If it hadn't been for her run-in with that spiteful Overseer in Cullero, she would have carried on with her Void-tainted, blackened limb indefinitely. It was ugly, yes, but the glances and whispers hadn't bothered her. Then again, it had marked her out as a bruja, a 'witch', so there was that.
She paused at the edge of one roof, peering down at the courtyard below. She held up the crude map again, turning it this way and that, and made a quiet noise of satisfaction when it lined up. She'd found the place.
"Only took me most of an afternoon, too," she grumbled, looking for a way to the ground that wouldn't result in her breaking her neck.
Ten minutes later, she emerged into the courtyard - if she could even call it that - sandwiched between a cluster of buildings. An ugly tangle of pipes jutted out of the brickwork overhead, and between them, someone had strung up a dozen lanterns that cast everything in a sickly bluish glow.
There were hundreds of these forgotten pockets across the city - while the city slowly rebuilt and life returned to normalcy after the Rat Plague, for one reason or another a building or neighbourhood would be missed. An alley would be walled in or deemed unimportant. Perhaps the original owners had been wiped out by the plague, the deeds lost or stolen from their bank vaults, and no one had stepped up to claim the place. Whatever the reason, places like this had saved Billie's life after Daud cast her out of the Whalers. She'd moved from attic to hovel, never sleeping in the same place twice. It was how she had avoided her old crewmates and the thrashing they would surely have given her if they found her.
A crossbow bolt shot out of the shadows, sending a crumpled can on the wall by Billie's head skittering out of sight.
"What now?" Billie snapped, pistol already in hand as she spun away from the direction of the noise. It was an instinct that had been drummed into her years ago. A shot like that gave away the shooter's position, if you didn't let yourself get distracted. Sure enough, a young girl stepped into the lantern light, still aiming her crossbow right at Billie. She couldn't have been any older than seven or eight, but if she was worried about the firearm pointed at her, she didn't show it.
"I ent seen you round here before," she said, her diction as lazy as a dockhand's. "You're not one of ours." The crossbow looked like a standard watch-issued weapon, ridiculously oversized in her small hands.
"I'm looking for the Storyteller," said Billie. The girl considered this.
"What's a one-armed, one-eyed old lady want with the Storyteller?"
"Put that thing down before you hurt yourself, girl." Billie's arm was getting tired, and she had no interest in putting a bullet in the kid anyway. An answering growl from behind her sent a bolt of ice shooting up her spine. An angular shape slunk into her field of vision.
Wolfhound, her brain screamed at her, bringing with it memories of long evenings spent staking out mansions in the Legal District, whispering back and forth with the other Whalers, repeating tales of unfortunate gangsters who had met their end on the wrong side of those powerful jaws. Do not weep or make a sound, they'd chanted, giddy with second-hand fear, for that will bring the 'seer's hound.
The girl clicked her tongue, and the wolfhound trotted up to her and pressed itself against her side. It never took its eyes off Billie.
"I'm going to put down my gun," Billie said quietly. "Keep that thing away from me, and maybe I'll forget you called me old." Triumph flashed across the girl's face, but she waited until Billie had placed her gun on the ground and taken a step away before she darted forward and snatched it up. She expertly clicked off the safety and tucked it into the waistband of her trousers. Billie didn't protest - she had several blades hidden about her person, as well as her voltaic gun. Better to let the kid think she'd won this round, especially with the Wolfhound slavering at her heels.
"I can take you to the Storyteller," said the girl, a wicked smile spreading across her face. "For a price. Say, ten Coin?"
Billie flattened her lips. She couldn't begrudge the girl for trying - she'd have done the same thing, once. But she seemed to be redistributing her meagre fortune among the ragamuffins of Dunwall's back alleys faster than her pockets could keep up.
"Do you always shoot at people before you rob them in alleys?"
"If I'd meant to hit you, you'd be dead already," the kid retorted, scorn colouring her voice. Billie remembered what it felt like to be so confident. "Anyway, make up your mind. It's ten Coin or nuffin'."
"Fine." Billie reached into her pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. She tossed them to the girl one by one, watching as she made them disappear into various folds of her grubby clothes.
"A deal's a deal," she said, once she'd finished. "Follow me." Billie took a step forward, hesitating when the wolfhound let out a low, rumbling growl. The girl just laughed. "Oh, he's harmless, really," she said, scratching it behind its ears. "All his teeth rotted out ages ago."
She beckoned for Billie to follow, and crossed the courtyard with the wolfhound trotting after her. She fumbled with a key on a cord around her neck, and opened the door into a building that Billie had assumed was abandoned. Up a flight of stairs was an open space that must have been a series of apartments before the Rat Plague. The inside walls had been roughly knocked out, and the space was filled with rows of seats, all facing a white sheet tacked onto one wall. A dormant projector sat in the centre aisle.
"Don't gawk," said the girl, already halfway up the next flight of stairs. Wordlessly, Billie followed. If the Storyteller really was her Boy, she wondered just what kind of people he had gotten involved with.
Upstairs was a hallway with peeling wallpaper. The doors on each side were all closed, but the unmistakable smell of paint hung in the air. The girl stopped at an apartment door at the far end and rapped on it in a brisk, military-style pattern. A few seconds later, there came the sound of deadbolts, and the door opened a crack. She leaned in and whispered something, and the door swung open to reveal a dimly-lit room with bare floorboards, and black sheets tacked up over the windows.
A small crowd of people were huddled around a lit stove. Some were sitting on scrounged-up furniture, others had settled for upturned crates or even a threadbare rug. They all turned to stare openly at the newcomer. Billie fought the urge to run.
Behind the door was a square-jawed man with the flattened nose of a pugilist. "Who've you brought to us this time, Jennie?" he said, rubbing his knuckles. "An ally? Or a spy?"
"Worse," someone else groaned. "A tourist. " There was a chorus of ragged laughter, but the girl - Jennie - rolled her eyes.
"Shut your pie holes. She says she's a friend of the Storyteller."
"A likely story," jeered one of the others. He spoke in the clipped, educated tones of an overseer. Seeing the wolfhound pad over and lie down beside him, Billie suppressed a shiver. "The Storyteller doesn't have friends," he continued, turning back to the stove.
"Acquaintance, then," Billie snapped, her patience worn to shreds. She took a few steps into the room, noting the way the man at the door stiffened, but ignoring him. "Crewmate. Traveling companion. Call it whatever you want. Just tell me where to find him."
"He's not here," said a woman, rising from a battered armchair, her greying hair catching the firelight. She looked familiar to Billie, but she couldn't place her. "Off enjoying the festivities, I imagine," she added, her voice tinged with something like scorn. By the Void, Billie knew that voice. "But Foley is correct. The Storyteller doesn't socialise. And he's never mentioned any friends. So that begs the question; why are you really here?"
"Maybe she's with the strikebreakers," rumbled the man at the door, and Billie felt the missing pieces slide into place.
"You're Abigail Ames," she said to the grey-haired woman, her pulse quickening. They had met only once, and the years hadn't been kind to either of them. To her relief, Ames showed no hint of recognition. "You're the one stirring up all the workers." Ames smoothed her hair, its auburn tint more obvious now Billie knew to look for it.
"You understand my caution, then."
"I nabbed her gun," Jennie offered from somewhere behind Billie.
"I'm sure you did, you grubby little goblin," said Ames mildly, but her eyes were hard. "Langley, pat her down."
"Yes'm." The big man at the door edged toward Billie, who swallowed hard. If he found all the weapons hidden on her...
"Wait," said a slightly breathless voice, and every head in the room turned as a familiar figure appeared in the doorway.
Nearly two years. That was how long Billie had spent away from Dunwall and her Boy, first making the long trip back to Karnaca and then dedicating herself to tracking down every last member of the Eyeless cult. Those two years had chiseled away the soft edges of his false youth. He had filled out a little, and lost his waifishness - but not the haunted look that had made people lean instinctively away from him.
"You don't have to do that. She's a friend."
Told you so, Billie wanted to say, but she was too busy grinning at The Boy to really care. His storm-grey gaze took her in, from the silver streaks in her hair to the new lines around her eyes. Then, as his associates goggled at each other, he stepped forward and clasped her gloved hand in his pale one. When he spoke, it was in a whisper only Billie could hear.
"Welcome back, Billie Lurk."