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She noticed it first in the Old Port District. Close to the river, as it would've been logical, but she couldn't remember if she had seen it before. Maybe. She didn't make a habit of paying attention to the rats, even on the days she carried Deirdre's trinket in the inner pocket she'd sewn for it. Too many voices, too much confusion, and nothing easy to decipher. Too much of a headache to understand, and she didn't need the reputation of the weird one who talked to the rats added to the rumours about her. The others talked enough as it was.
But she noticed it, one day as she roamed the streets in a dockworker's clothes and with an ear out for the information she'd come to collect, how the rat that crossed the street in front of her was bigger than she was used to, unafraid of people even on a mostly clean street of the most reputable part of the district. She wondered for a moment, before the noise caught up to her.
Other people had seen, too, and soon the rat was dead, pelted with whatever the crowd had at hand, and no one dared get close. Everyone had already heard of the illness ravaging the poorer districts, of how it left weeping corpses who shuffled through the streets and attacked anyone they saw. The rat catchers had earned a lot, at first, then they had begun dropping like flies. Billie wondered, at a safe distance, but she couldn't listen to the rat now it was dead, and she had no interest in catching whatever was going around. She shook her head and left, back to searching for information on the Bottle Street Gang's smuggling operation. Lizzie Stride would pay Daud a nice amount of coin if he could get her information on the competition, and a dead rat wouldn't give Billie anything useful on that.
But a week later, with Fida's eyes bloodshot and her coughing rattling her entire frame, with Rapha covered from head to toe to try and find something to save her, with everyone carefully out of the way and on edge, Billie went out again. Deirdre's trinket was in its pocket, but she took it out for a moment, holding it carefully so she wouldn't be tempted to do anything else with her hands. A formless feeling pricked her insides. She wanted to scream, to fight, to see blood cover her arms. She wanted to run, far away. She wanted a lot, and she'd look for none of it.
The slums hadn't changed since they'd been her home. Not the smell, not the grime, not the dirty buildings crowded around narrow, crooked alleys. But something had changed, because the alleys were quiet, no raised voices in animated disputes, no children laughing as they played, no one around, and many doors were painted with a red symbol. As Billie watched, a man with bells tied to his ankles pushed a cart of bodies down the streets. The only sight in the deserted alleys, he and his pile of corpses. The only sound in the dead district, the jangling of his every step.
A door opened as the man came upon it. A woman came out into the street, her clothes spotted brown with crusted blood. She was carrying a little girl, perhaps three years old, dressed all in white like she was on her way to Midearth service. A small hand, as white as her dress, swung with every one of the woman's step.
The man with the bells left his cart and stepped up to them, but the woman held out a hand. She walked up to the cart and gently, infinitely gently, put the little girl down on the pile of corpses. Then, to the man who had bent his head in respect, she said to come back that evening, for she and her other girl would be dead just like the first.
Billie watched the bloodied, glassy eyes of the little girl as the man and the cart passed under her refuge, and tried not to breathe.
The rats had changed, too, and now that she was looking for it she could see it. She found an alley a few buildings off and took Deirdre's trinket in hand. She could hear their voices, down in the dirt, the tinny cries of the small rats that scurried away from the others, that cried out in pain as the bigger ones reached them and sunk their teeth into their kin's flesh.
Billie watched for a moment as the small rats were killed and devoured, then she moved again, found another alley, one that only small rats inhabited. She blinked the Void over her sight, checked that no one and no other rat was close, then transversed down the roof.
It was time to listen.
Daud read everything without changing expression.
Billie kept her arms crossed on her chest, her fingers dug into her own coat. She'd done as she had promised herself. She'd found the information, she'd found everything she could, and she'd brought it to Daud. She'd learnt everything there was to learn, she'd made a round of the entire city to let the fury reduce to anger and smouldering ashes, she'd reread everything, and she'd convinced herself not to act on her own.
She owed Daud at least that much. He'd know how to do what had to be done. She knew she was too angry to formulate a real plan.
Daud put the last file down. He picked the audiograph card up, turned it in his fingers. She watched him as he dug the audiograph machine they'd found in what had become his office when they'd come to the flooded district, as he checked that everything was set properly, as he fed the card into the machine.
The Royal Spymaster's voice filled the room, and Billie watched Daud as words she'd already heard fed her fury again, as her oilskin creaked when her fingers tightened even more on it.
Daud's expression didn't change as Lord Burrows detailed his plan to eradicate misery from Dunwall. It didn't change as the audiograph continued, as it laid out everything that the files had already confirmed to him. It didn't change as the Lord Spymaster lamented the spread of the illness that was beginning to reach the richer districts.
Billie watched him, and she cursed him for being able to keep his face so devoid of reactions.
The audiograph ended with a click. Daud turned the machine off. His expression was still the same.
Billie's anger crested.
Billie was there, weeks after her trip to the slums, when Bertram received word of his sister's death, bitten by a rat she had been hunting, put down as soon as she had begun bleeding from her eyes. Daud was there too, watching without an expression as Bertram broke down. He had loved his sister, sent her a part of his share to help raise her kids, especially after her husband had died at sea. Billie watched as Jordan sat besides Bertram, as she let him cry on her shoulder, as one of the kids got closer, then the others. Bertram had loved talking about his sister, about her kids, and there was no one of them who hadn't had to suffer at least a tirade on them.
Daud had a booklet on his desk, when he sent for Billie an hour later, written by that doctor that lived on Clavering, and a few books with gilded covers, no doubts stolen from some natural philosopher or another, maybe Sokolov himself. Daud's contempt for him was no mystery, Sokolov's security sorely lacking even with all his new inventions. Billie didn't wonder when he'd got them; she knew that Daud did a few jobs on his own, telling not even her, from the money that appeared whenever food was scarce or Rapha needed a specific medicine for someone. And the books, always a new book whenever she got a glimpse to the shelves above his bed.
The refineries in Rudshore had been abandoned when the river had invaded the district two months ago, Daud said as soon as she had closed the door, and their equipment would still be there, unguarded. The masks would still be there, unguarded.
He was still been wearing the cloth over nose and mouth that Rapha had forced on him and Fida even though she'd pronounced them healthy two weeks before. No one yet knew how long someone could pass the plague on after healing from it, and Rapha hadn't wanted to risk spreading it. She had counted them incredibly lucky, but Billie had caught her frowning. An improbability, Rapha had admitted when Billie had cornered her, because Fida had almost died of a way less serious illness shortly after arriving in the Empire. Even if Daud's Mark protected him from the plague as it did from poisons, Fida should not have survived.
In Daud's office, Billie nodded. Refinery masks protected against whale oil vapours. They'd protect against the plague, she added. It was a decent plan. They'd be safer, and if they also took the thick oilskin whalers used they'd be more secure against rat bites.
Daud nodded, approving her idea. She'd take Thomas and Feodor, see which refineries hadn't been broken into, then he'd send someone else to do the rest.
Billie thought of the files she'd been collecting in her hiding place, far from base, where no one would go snoop, but held her tongue. She needed the full picture, not just some natural philosopher's hunch, before she could suggest another way to keep everyone safe. Her hands itched for her blade, but Daud had also taught her to know everything before using it.
She'd wait. She had to.
"Well?" she snapped. There it was, proof. All the proof she'd collected over two months, all the risks she'd taken to find each and every piece of evidence all across the city, in safes and locked offices and guarded manors. All the proof that detailed the Lord Spymaster's plan, the arrival of the plague, the death running rampant in the poorer districts and attacking the rest of the city.
Proof of what had killed a third of their fences and half of their contacts in the poorer districts, of what had killed Bertram's sister and all her kids save one. Proof of what had killed Leonid, even if it hadn't been the plague to stop his heart.
Daud didn't answer. He put the audiograph down, on the pile of other proof, and took a key from his pocket. Billie watched, biting her tongue not to yell, as he opened the drawer that no one would ever dare pick the lock to, as he took a letter out.
"Read this," he said.
Billie did, and as she did her eyes widened, and she was forced to consider another possibility.
"He wants you to kill the Empress," she said, and for a moment her anger was forgotten, her fury nothing but banked ashes. It was an outrageous sum of money, and with their share Quinn and Jenkins would be able to escape Dunwall to give a hope to the kid who'd be born in a few months. Fida and Joko would finally be able to buy passage on a ship back home to Pandyssia. Kent would finally be able to afford the wheeled chair that'd let him move around without the pain of every step.
But Billie was forced to consider another possibility, and her anger roared back into her ears. "Did you know?" she forced through her teeth. She crossed her arms again, the letter crumpled in her hand, so she wouldn't reach for her blade. She owed him. She owed him to listen.
She needed to know everything before killing.
Daud's expression finally, finally, changed.
The light was too low to make out the words, but Billie squinted through it and painfully traced each letter. Emperor's Grace. She growled, slid the file back into its place. Too far.
Emperor, Emperor, Emperor, and she jumped a few files ahead.
Outside the dockmaster's office, nothing moved. Whatever patrol was there, she still had a few minutes before they came round and risked seeing the light of her candle through the windows. She had to be out by then.
Ah! Empire's Glory! She scanned the information as quickly as she could in the low light, but it was the ship she was looking for. Registered to one of the Pendeltons' many mining enterprises, a ship that routinely made the trip from the Pandyssian continent to Karnaca, exceptionally docked in Dunwall four months ago. Yes, it was her.
Billie slid the file out, closed the cabinet drawer, snuffed the candle and replaced the key where she had found it, taped to the underside of the dockmaster's desk. She had laughed at his incompetence when she had seen him take it out during her surveillance, but she smirked again all the same. Poor security made her job easier, and she wasn't in the habit of complaining about some mark's shoddy precautions.
Navigating the office in the dark took her but a moment, the silhouttes of the furniture stark against the Void that filled her sight, and she closed the door with the key that she'd have to replace in the dockmaster's pocket first thing in the morning. That'd be easy, too; Mrs Ewert had been only too glad to accept a few coins that'd go towards her way out of Dunwall and away from the husband she hated. Billie only had to deliver the key to her and Dockmaster Ewert would be none the wiser. And if someone noticed the information on Empire's Glory missing, well, there were already rumours about his having got the job only through greasing a few palms. Far be it from Billie not to help them along.
Billie transversed away from in front of the door as the patrol rounded the corner. She was on the roof of the closest warehouse before they could even come into the yellow halo of the streetlight over the end of the street. Five minutes later, she was out of the Port District. The file she had stolen made the faintest rustling sound from the inner pocket she'd put it in, but she couldn't yet stop to read it, no matter how much she wanted to.
Dawn was just beginning to stretch its rosy light over the city behind her, and she had a key to deliver.
"Watch it, Lurk," Daud growled.
A dark satisfaction rose in Billie's stomach, but she snuffed it. It wasn't the time. She'd promised herself she'd be objective, she'd promised herself—But the letter. Burrows writing to Daud with an offer. Burrows beinging the rats to Dunwall. Burrows killing off the poorer districts. Nothing she'd found had even hinted at it, but Daud had taught her everything.
"Did you?" she asked again, stepping closer, closer, and only his desk separated them. An obstacle that didn't exist, for either of them.
"Would I have read everything you brought me if I did?" His voice wasn't calm, but it wasn't the snap it'd been a moment before, either. Teaching, a distant corner of Billie's mind recognised. He was trying to make her think.
But she was tired of it, of no straight answer, of nothing easy to discover, yet another training in disguise that no one else got. She was tired of being special. She wanted an answer.
But she'd always been the special one, the only one who didn't get a straight answer because she'd dig and reflect her way to the proper one, and Billie put aside the sudden revelation of what it all meant. It wasn't the time, and Billie had always thought Coleman would succeed him regardless, no matter she'd acquiesced easily when Daud had replaced her with Billie as his second.
But Billie was fed up with the teaching.
"Answer me! No teaching, no training, answer!" She didn't yell as she wanted to, didn't scream, but her words hit all the same.
Daud was a still person. He didn't move any more than he needed to, no swaying from side to side when he waited, no bouncing legs when he was bored, no restless fingers when he thought. But Billie had never seen him more immobile, and for a moment the vicious satisfaction filled her again. She had hit him, and it had drawn blood.
"No," he carefully enunciated at the end. "No, I didn't know."
Billie had seen Fida cough incessantly while Rapha tried to save her, she had been the one to notice Daud's discoulorated face, she had stayed awake, outside the door, with Coleman and Thomas as they waited for news, as everyone else tried not to look at the back of their left hand every moment of every waking hour. But she also had been the first to see them both healed, because Daud wouldn't let even the plague keep him down for longer than he couldn't breathe, and he'd had orders and requests for information already two minutes after Rapha had acknowledged the lucky healing with suspiciously damp eyes.
Billie had seen the weepers, left to their fates on abandoned streets as the plague claimed each day more territory. She had seen the dead, their eyes glassy and blood running down their cheeks in crusty streaks. She had seen the dying, those who didn't weep before the plague claimed them and they expired where they stood.
But none of them, the ones that she knew would've died and no miracle or Voidly intervention would save, none of them had been someone she knew.
Daud accepted the refinery mask Rapha thrust into his hands. He adjusted the straps, slid it on, adjusted the straps again. He hadn't protested the precaution when Rapha had presented it, and he didn't protest then.
Billie thought that she wouldn't want to see that, when she died. She'd want to see his face as he sank his blade in her heart.
But if she caught the plague, if blood streaked down her cheeks and there was nothing else Rapha could do for her, she'd only have the choice of asking Daud to end it. She'd get the mask, and she'd be grateful for it.
Leonid had been crying when he'd asked Daud to be the one to do it, blood and water mixing in pinkish streaks down the sides of his face. He would've preferred no mask, too, but Rapha and Billie and everyone else had been adamant. Daud might've survived the plague once, but there was no guarantee he'd survive it again. And the plague was not a cyanide pill he could swallow just to unnerve a gang that had been stupid enough to go back on their word.
Billie watched as Daud entered the room and closed the door. Rapha and Coleman, shoulder against shoulder, watched with her.
Ten minutes later, Daud reemerged. He didn't say what had taken so long, and no one asked. He wouldn't have answered.
He didn't take the mask off until he shut himself in his office.
Billie's shoulders dropped, her hands relaxed on her own arms. She'd understood already, from context and logical inferences, from the question that'd have got her to think, but she had wanted, she had needed, a plain answer.
"So we kill him," she said, and if she was too direct, well, she really was fed up with the training.
Daud looked at her for a moment, no longer as neutral as he'd been while he had been reading the files Billie had collected. Billie watched him as he let her see how he reflected on the new information, as he slotted everything in place among the rest of what he knew, what he thought, what he held true.
"No," he said at last, and Billie held her tongue over the first, instinctual rebuttal. She'd trust him, at least until the end of the conversation. His mind wasn't as clouded with the state of his former home, with the state of his peers. As much as he'd demonstrated otherwise over the years, Dunwall wasn't his city. He hadn't grown up in the crooked alleyways on the other side of the Wrenhaven with other street kids as happy and miserable as him for only company.
"Because killing him won't stop the plague?" Billie couldn't but rebut. If her voice was more cutting that she'd have liked, well, Daud didn't comment on it.
He extended a hand, and she grudgingly deposited the crumpled letter on it.
"Do you want him dead, or do you want him to pay?" Daud asked, and anyone else might have thought he didn't care for the answer, didn't care about Lord Burrows' fate, didn't care about Billie's opinion. But Billie had made it her life to know him, to suss out his every trick and secret, ever since she'd seen a shadow kill three guardsmen with nothing but a whisper of steel as it slid into flesh. She knew when he wanted her input, and she knew his tone.
But she didn't know the answer to his question.
"What's the difference?" she asked after a few moments. Was there a difference? She didn't see one, unless Daud meant the difference between killing and enjoying the kill, drawing it out, which he'd always, always, drove her from. Assassins didn't play with their jobs. That meant getting caught.
Daud flattened the letter out against his desk. "I had planned to answer the Lord Spymaster's inquiry tonight," he said.
That, Billie thought with an scknowledging nod, meant that he'd still not accepted. They weren't yet tied to Lord Burrows' will by Daud's word. Billie wouldn't have cared in any way, not on that, not with the way that the plague was killing the poorer districts, but Daud would have. Others would have.
And then, in a flash, Billie understood why Daud was insisting on talking it out, why he wasn't making a plan on his own and communicating it to her only after.
Billie looked at him, then down at the letter resting on her pile of proof between them.
Daud was asking for her opinion. He was letting her decide what to do, what their next job was. He was giving her a choice, what to do with all she'd uncovered on her own, a job taken by herself, for herself, that she could've brought to its end alone. But she'd involved him, because he was Daud, because he was nothing if not perfectly neutral, and now Billie wondered how neutral he really was on that. Because Leonid had died ten days before, and Daud hadn't come out of his office for the rest of the day.
So he was asking her, and she wanted Lord Burrows dead, she wanted the plague gone from the poorer districts, she wanted her people safe. How to get that? How? Killing Lord Burrows wouldn't get rid of the plague, and his allies would still be in power, ready to try again, to import another illness from Pandyssia with no known cure.
But Fida had survived. And Daud. And if the rumours were true, they did have something in common. And if other rumours were true, if Billie could put aside everything for a moment and reason on that…
And why was Daud asking her? No matter. He was, and she'd answer.
"Do you think—" she asked, slowly, as she built a picture of the situation in her head, one that went beyond Lord Burrows and his allies, "—that the Empress knows who brought the plague to Dunwall?"
The Lord Spymaster was at his mistress' when Billie broke into his mansion. She'd chosen the night exactly so she wouldn't be tempted to strike before she had the proof she was still lacking.
Entering was the easiest part, as old Miss Thompson had gleefully given her a key to the servants' door not even in exchange for coin, just the promise to ruin her master. Billie had slipped her a few coins anyway. Vengeance was its own incentive, but she'd long since learnt that paying even the lowliest informant often yielded even more help. Miss Thompson had been no exception, and Billie followed her thorough directions to Lord Burrows' study.
The three guards, and, really, the rich could be the biggest idiots of them all, was on the other side of the mansion, busy with his dinner that Miss Thompson had served later than usual but with a bottle of some wine she'd got out of the good cellar as apology.
In the study, Billie's information got vague. Miss Thompson hadn't been able to help, only giving a description of the room and which pieces of furniture had drawers, and her own surveillance had yielded little. Daud would've been able to tell her more, he'd undoubtedly visited the room on the owner's invitation and on his own, but Billie hadn't wanted to involve him. That was her job, her search for information, and she needed and wanted to be sure before presenting him with anything. There was still a chance, however remote, that she was wrong and everything she'd collected had another explanation.
She started with the desk and its drawers, but they only held monogrammed stationary and reference texts. Billie smirked at the few letters in the bottom drawer, the lock of which had been childishly easy to pick, but she wasn't there for blackmail and put them back in their place.
The safe, then? But surely the Lord Spymaster, who'd held his position ever since the reign of Emperor Euhorn Kaldwin, wouldn't leave incriminating files in the most obvious place, which was even proudly displayed in a corner of the room. Still, the Pendletons had kept all missives relating to the transportation of infected bull rats from Pandyssia, and the quick glance Billie had got of Campbell's black book had been enough for her to have to swear Akila to secrecy on Billie's investigation when she'd been forced to ask for help in deciphering it. Only Lady Boyle had been smart enough to destroy any trace of their plan. Or she'd hid everything somewhere Billie thorough search hadn't been able to find, at least.
Billie stepped up to the safe, studying it. A three-digit combination, which Miss Thompson had spied one day and happily passed on when Billie had asked about the study. Surely the Lord Spymaster wouldn't hide the proof of his involvement with the plague inside a three-digit safe. Surely he wasn't that much of an idiot.
Billie moved the first mechanism until it stopped on the number 9, then set the others to 3 and 5 and spun the wheel. The safe emitted a series of noises until, with a final click, the door opened and let her see the piles of papers inside. She huffed. She'd have to sort through them by the light of the lantern she'd brought, again, and there was no telling when the patrolmen would pass. She'd have to stop regularly to check through the Void and keep her ears pricked. The carpet wasn't the most comfortable place, but it'd do. At least it wasn't the cold floor.
Settling in, Billie glanced at the first folder in the pile she'd taken, and her incredulous smirk wasn't enough to quell the sudden rage.
The idiot had even labelled his treason.
Billie looked down at the grounds. She watched the patrolling guards, the servants hurrying along to their tasks, the princess and her governess playing something in a corner of the gardens.
To her left, Daud was watching the same scene. The roof of the waterlock wouldn't be safe for long, someone could look up at any time, they'd have to move soon. The Empress wasn't under the gazebo, at least. That would've been an awful meeting place, so out in the open. Decent for an assassination, a corner of Billie's mind noted, especially with someone on the inside to call the guards away at the right moment, but too spectacular. A wrong move and it'd be Coldridge for all.
"Ready?" Daud asked, and Billie looked back at him. She nodded.
They transversed away, Daud first. He knew the Tower for reasons Billie hadn't asked but could guess; the Tower and Holger Square were too dangerous for anyone else. He led her through the grounds, on a circuituous route along the exterior wall, through the waterworks, on a ledge that ran all along the exterior of the Tower between floors. One foot at a time, hugging the stone, a route that Billie wouldn't let any novice take and very few of the masters, too narrow and exposed, but she didn't hesitate and Daud didn't turn back to see if she was following.
The sea churned against the rocks, hundreds of feet below. Billie kept her eyes on the ledge, on Daud's side in front of her.
He stopped in the middle of the wall, pointed above their heads. "The Empress' study," he explained, and Billie followed him up when he transversed. The balcony was wide and long, sporting nice blind spots where at least three people could stay hidden from inside. A way better spot for an assassination. Especially with the roof immediately above.
Daud stopped them in one of the blind spots between the glass-panelled door and a window. His eyes shone violet for a brief moment as he looked through the wall.
"She's inside," he confirmed. "Alone."
Billie nodded. The Lord Protector could've been a problem, but they had timed the whole thing so that he'd just be beginning training the guards. Not that it'd have been difficult to neutralise him, but he'd still have added some degree of danger that Billie hadn't wanted and Daud had agreed would only bring problems.
"Do you have everything?" Daud asked.
Billie nodded, putting a hand on the waterproof bag she'd filled with the results of all her investigations and everything that would help explain the situation. She'd swiped the books on the plague from Daud's bookshelves and thrown them with the rest, though she held no illusion that he hadn't caught her. She'd included Lord Burrows' letter and any other incriminating document that Daud had kept as insurance from previous jobs they'd done for him. After some hesitancy, she had also put the results of her own investigation into what, if anything, the Empress knew of her spymaster's machinations. Very little, it had turned out, and Billie still wondered how someone like that could run an empire.
But the empress wasn't actively trying to kill her subject, and maybe that would count for something. And if not, well, Daud had taught Billie how to kill even the most protected of marks. The Lord Spymaster would fall, one way or another.
"I'm going," Billie mumbled, suddenly a little nervous, but Daud's nod, the quirk of his lips, were enough of an encouragement to quell any fear she felt.
Billie nodded at him, took a deep breath, and opened the door.