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It is not that he is afraid of dreaming. It’s not that he closes his eyes and opens them on a world gone tilted, city streets uprooted and lampposts thrown helter-skelter and bathing everything in whale-oil blue. He does not walk in the Void. He does not know its secrets. If he does not sleep, or if he sleeps poorly, it is not because he speaks to a black-eyed man in his dreams.
He doubts it would make much difference to the Overseers, anyway.
He finds himself humming as he climbs, little snatches of everyday-life song that die away each time he looks at the mark on his hand. He is not sure if this is something supernatural, or if it is only that the man who used to sing that song has changed and tilted and uprooted into something else.
He is sure, however, that the city streets seem darker without music. That the shadows cast from the bright manor windows seem longer. Down below, a man in a golden mask grinds a handheld organ and men in other masks swirl around him – insects, wolves, monsters.
(There are no men in masks of rats. There are no masks of skulls. There are no masks of a man with black eyes. He is not welcome there; and neither is he).
*****
The heart, Piero speaks into the mouthpiece, is a curious thing.
Query: If I keep a woman alive for a year and slowly increase the pressure on every inch of her body, will her body acquire the humors of a whale?
Will sorrow affect her body the way it affects the body of a whale?
He has seen the heart that Corvo keeps, that the man pulls out when he believes that others are not looking. He has seen him bend to it as if it whispers secrets in his ear.
Piero slips into the room where Corvo dreams one night and slips it from his pocket, takes it down to the lab to study it under glass. It is a marvel of engineering and magic.The stitches that broke it open and sewed it together are not crude. The clockwork mechanism is very fine.
What is remarkable, he says, is that to the casual observer there is nothing mechanical about it at all. Let us disregard the gears and wires for a moment. It does not hiss or grind or click. The timbre of its beats has nothing of clockwork. The only metal about it is the metal scent of blood.
It does not beat. It pulses like a wound.
What is not remarkable, he says, is that it is still warm. I can keep the heart of a woman alive for years on electricity alone. It will perform most excellently. This is nothing new.
Query: If I cut the heart from a woman who died in sorrow, and another from a woman who died in love or lust or joy, will they perform the same?
*****
The face on the wanted posters is not accurate. Neither is the skull.
The face of Corvo Attano, according to the artist who works for the Watch, is sharp and clean and handsome. If his hair is long it is only in the fashion of the aristocracy. If his eyes are dark it is only because Attano is a murderer and murderers, everyone knows, have dark eyes. Maybe even solid black.
There are several inaccuracies.
The face on the posters is missing the new scar that runs from cheek to chin, the faint shined marks from sparks that had leapt up from red-hot irons. The face on the posters is not hollow enough. Nor starved enough. The eyes are not dark enough.
There are also several inaccuracies regarding the skull of a mask; but these can be forgiven, as the men who see the mask rarely do so long. Still, Dunwall knows the mask better than it knows his face. When he took off the mask in the attic of the brothel he was surprised that Emily recognized him.
He wonders if Jessamine would recognize him.
He dreams, that night, of her touching the scar that runs down the side of his face like a tear in the flesh or a tear. Her fingers are cold. The blood on them is sticky; and when he wakes, his almost-face is staring at him from the wanted poster he hung in jest beside his bed, and the heart on the desk beneath it shudders on and on.
*****
The oil of a whale, Piero speaks into the mouthpiece, varies from specimen to specimen, just like the arrangement of tentacles around the mouth, the ratio of teeth to baleen inside, the placement or absence of the fourth and six fins, the color of the skin, the sound they make when they die.
The oil of one whale can contaminate or influence the oil of another by proximity alone. This is one of the reasons that trans is not stored in quantities larger than ten or twenty liters. This is well known.
The state of one body influences another. The oil of a whale that died in sorrow is strong enough to turn light into a weapon. This is all well known.
The state of the body influences the soul. This can be quantified and qualified. This is true.
*****
The first time he takes possession of a man he makes him walk into the sea. He is thrown out of his body in a rush and finds himself stumbling backward against the surf as the man chokes and flails and drowns. It is an ugly thing.
He stumbles back against the shore with the taste of seawater in his mouth and the dead man’s panic beating at his throat.
He had three children, the heart tells him when he holds it to his ear. The first cried tears of blood, so he locked the three in the cellar. He tells himself it was the only thing to do. He tells himself that he is still a good man. In the past weeks he’d fallen in love with a maid and made plans to propose to her. The ring is silver. The ring is very beautiful. He tried to forget the sound of little hands on the basement door. He has stopped looking at his face in the mirror.
It is not the first time he has debated throwing the heart into the gutter or garbage or ocean.
There are things he does not want to know.
But there are also things he needs to know, as strongly as he needs warmth or wine or bread. He is almost certain he could find his way to hidden shrines and charms of bone without the tether-line of a pulse to guide him. But he needs that voice. It is so familiar. It is like something he heard in a dream.
He clutches the heart, feeling it beat, beat, beat against his pulse, as the scent of the sea rises as high and strong and salt as blood.
*****
I am convinced, says Piero, in the small hours of the morning when the light is soft and blue as smoke and mirrors, that Corvo knows.
*****
In the night he hears Calista tell the princess of her mother’s funeral. There were flowers, she says. Thousands upon thousands of flowers.
He wonders if any of them were white.
A protector who stalks in shadows and works where he is not seen must find secret ways for the guard and the guarded to speak. This had been one of them – though it had not been anything but theirs, not something that could sound alarms or open hidden doors (or send the entire watch away).
If there were white flowers in crystal vases on the breakfast table, it meant something that was theirs alone. A secret in a palace of conspiracies and secrets. It meant that he’d lose her that day, that she’d go ahead of him, to one of the places he’d mapped out (thinking of assassination) that had no windows or shadows for prying eyes. Only an empty white courtyard on one end and the wide unwatching expanse of the sea on another.
One time Jessamine had left no vase, no formal warning, just vanished like the Outsider himself and left the petals drifting in a trail through every room. They’d drawn him like a tether-line, a fish on a hook, the beat of a heart.
It is not, now, that he is afraid of dreaming because in his dreams the petals turn red, or because the black-eyed man whispers to him over and over that you cannot save her, you cannot save her, you cannot save her.
It is only that he dreams of a white courtyard and a white balcony for her to lean against as his arms encircle her waist. Of her fingers running down the scar from cheek to chin.
It is only that he dreams that her fingers and her lips are live and warm.
*****
Query: if I take the heart of a woman who died in pain and sorrow, and the heart of a woman who died in love or lust or joy, and lay them side by side, will they begin to synch? Will the whispers of one influence the beats of another?
Query: If I hold the heart of the woman who died in sorrow in my hands, and I place it to my ear to search for whispers like I search a seashell for the sound of the sea, what will that do to me?
*****
The color of the light filtering in through the frosted windows of the pub in the Hound Pits has not changed, he’s sure, for fifty years. It’s not that he’s been here before. It is not, even that the heart has told him. It is simply something he knows – that the city may crumble and weep around him but there are some things that do not change, can never change.
The rich will always wear masks, even when they do not, and the poor will always beat at the door.
The rats will always strip a man to bone as white as the bones of a whale.
The throat will always be cut, and the sack will always be thrown in the river, and the men will always sing the same song as they pull the anchors up from the deep in the morning. The song is always the same, even if he is no longer the kind of man who sings it.
He is still a man, he is fairly certain. It does not matter if he can also live inside fish and hounds and rats; the mark on his hand can only do so much. He is simply not sure what kind of man he wishes to be.
He sits in a shaft of light in a dusty pub that has not changed, and he pays with the same coins as other men, and he eats tinned eels and pickled onions and dark bread that taste the same as they always have (richer after prison, perhaps; he has found that everything after prison is either more or less than it was before). The eels are salt. The onions are sweet. The bread is dense and made with bad flour. The beer is flavored too strongly with honey and far too strongly with brine. The table at which he sits is tilted to one side and scarred and the light does this place no favors. It is just another pub. He is just another man.
(The face on the wanted posters is still not accurate).
Things are what they seem to be. The men here are men. The women are women. The world has changed and not changed. He notes the way the freckles break like firework-sparks across the face of one of the servants, touches the heart in his coat pocket, finds himself hearing a whisper of where she works, how good she is, what she desires.
He wonders what the heart would say if he turned it on himself.
*****
Query: if I cut out the heart of a woman and keep it alive for a year with gears and wires and machinery, and the soul of the woman lives on in the heart, can it still feel? Where does the awareness end?
Which are the first emotions to decay?
Hypothesis: jealousy. Possessiveness. Bias. The passage of time and the experience of riding around in one’s coat pocket must grant a wider perspective.
Perhaps I should ask him.
*****
He perches on a balcony above the gardens of the Ladies Boyle and he watches the guests mill about below, the masks of beasts, the gowns of white and black and red. Fireworks burst in the sky. Every once in a while, at a moment carefully picked to awe and startle, confetti falls and swirls around like rain. It is white as the petals of white flowers.
He is, after all, just a man; and there is blood on his coat, and the smell of the sea, and there are spots of rust on his mask, and the mask itself is still in the shape of a skull. He can hardly pass for a guest.
Except the guests do not even pass for guests: they are savage and beautiful animals in human skin.
(He wonders if any of them know what it is like to look through the eyes of fish and hound and rat. He finds himself studying the backs of hands)
(He finds himself wondering if any of them know what it is like to be men and not beasts, to know the taste of the sea in a dead man’s mouth and the light in a commoner’s pub that never changes. What would they do, he thinks, if he raised his hand and summoned the rats and brought the outside world in?)
(What will they do if their world is uprooted and turned upside down? What will they do without masks?)
He clenches his hand and shivers down. The world tilts on its side, uprooted, inverted, the Void rushing around him - and he comes to walking among them like nothing has changed at all.
*****
Hypothesis: the desire for revenge.
*****
The parties and galas that Jessamine threw had been regal and lovely as she herself. There had been no fireworks filling the air with the smell of smoke, no bursts of confetti to startle or bursts of fire to remind the guests of fear. The music had been sweet. It had not come from the hands of a gold-masked Overseer and sought to keep the dark away.
Jessamine had been regal and lovely and beautiful, and he had turned himself into a shadow and trailed her from room to room. Assassins and protectors both, as a rule, do not mingle with the guests.
(So what does that make him now?)
She’d dispensed with the flowers, once, and worn a gown that was white, white, white – and he’d followed her through salon and ballroom and garden to a corner that was all shadows. Where there was no one to see when he pushed the collar of her gown aside and pressed his lips to the heat of her white skin.
She’d never let him mark her. We all must wear masks, she’d said. Fingers twining in his hair.
(We all must wear masks, whispers the heart in a voice that he knows so well. The man in the wolf mask wishes to kill you. The man in the mask of empty skin is hollow inside, and wishes to fill the hole with a woman that no one else can touch)
He’d kissed at her pulse until it raced, until he could know and count its beat as closely as he knew his own.
*****
Hypothesis: the first emotion to decay is love.
The last emotion to decay is love.
*****
The Boyle in the black dress speaks barely two words to him. She stares sidelong at the skull-like curves of his mask, makes him worry about wanted posters.
The Boyle in the dress that is the peculiar red of heart’s blood scorns him and plays the harpsichord with such a verve and thunder that he leaves the room reeling. The Overseer trails him, discreetly, as he stumbles to one of the many banquet tables to catch his breath. He is a man, he reminds himself. Some things never change. He is only a man. His hand is unmarked. His eyes are not black. The wanted posters are not accurate. The name he signed in the guestbook still belongs to him. He is only a man, a man, a man.
The Boyle in the white dress is the one who loves his mask. She is bold or drunk enough, at last, to touch his face that isn’t a face. He cannot feel her fingers as they run from cheek to chin.
That is how he knows.
Her dress is white, white, horribly white. And when he follows her upstairs and she begins to peel it away he can see the teeth marks that the heart had warned him about, red on white skin. Burrows marks everything he touches. Burrows hurts everything he touches.
(She had never let him mark her).
Her dress is white, her skin is white, and the sudden spray of blood is shocking dark wet red.
She was happy, says the heart. Its voice is tinged with sorrow. He cradles its pulse in his hands as he watches the red soak the last of the white away. It was a drunken and thin and desperate happiness. But she died happy. I know you could not give that to her.
And he does not need to ask who the her is. Just as he does not need to touch to feel the warmth and cadence of its pulse. He may be just a man, but there are some things that are certain and some things that he knows; even though he can slip out a window and vanish like a ghost, even though the world tilts upside down for an instant as he vanishes as his life itself has tilted, even though the ghost in his pocket beats, beats, beats like sea on shore.
*****
I am convinced, says Piero, alone in his workshop where the whale-oil lamps glow blue as the Void, that Corvo knows; and judging from the way he cradles her heart close to his ear, I am reasonably sure that he loved her.
Therefore, he still loves her.
Some things never change.