He Blinked across the courtyard, landing without a sound on a wrought-iron balcony. Inside, a guest was arguing with a courtesan. Corvo pressed his face to the glass. The man’s throat was bare. His coin purse was fat. It would be so easy to slide a blade between his ribs.
Corvo’s grip tightened on his folding blade.
The mark on Corvo’s left hand still ached—a black, angular brand that smelled of ancient stone and void. It had given him powers he did not ask for: the ability to stop time, to possess the bodies of rats and men, to blink across rooftops like a thrown knife. Each power was a temptation. Each use a whisper that there were no clean hands in this fight. dishonored 1
He wasn’t. Not from cold. Not from fear.
He slipped through a service hatch, crawled through ducts slick with grime, and dropped into the private chambers of the Pendleton twins—the men who held Emily captive as leverage. They were drunk, arrogant, their faces painted like porcelain masks. One was detailing, with a laugh, how he planned to “train” the young empress. He Blinked across the courtyard, landing without a
She pulled back, eyes wide. “Can we kill them? The bad men?”
Corvo knew the truth the Loyalists had not yet learned: in Dunwall, mercy was a luxury. But so was vengeance. And he had not yet decided which one would cost him more. The man’s throat was bare
The rain over Dunwall had not let up for forty days. It fell in greasy sheets, washing blood and whale oil into the Wrenhaven River. Corvo Attano knelt in the shadow of a copper gargoyle, his masked face tilted toward the lamp-lit windows of the Golden Cat. Behind him, the city groaned—a dying beast choked by plague and the Lord Regent’s iron fist.