The Kalis Experiments

by R A Fisher

  The extra security might be a hassle. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to be too concerned about it. She had yet to come across a mercenary detail she wasn’t able to handle, and it was worth it to go in already knowing the layout of his office. As long as she didn’t screw anything up, they wouldn’t even notice she’d been there.

  Syrina thought the Eheene docks at low tide were some of the most disgusting and impressive things that existed anywhere on Eris. When the tide was out, the biggest ships needed to move four spans out into the bay, or else sink into black mud six or seven hands deep. They carried smaller barges they could deploy to dock, where they perched on decaying wooden posts so they wouldn’t get stuck when the tide came back in. Sometimes they got stuck anyway. There were always at least a dozen huge steamships waiting in the deeper water, belching black smoke that wafted on the eternal wind blowing across the bay, occasionally drowning Eheene in its stench. Only a few of the wealthiest shipping companies in N’narad used clean-burning naphtha engines, and half of those were tankers that trafficked naphtha anyway, so could bear the cost.

  Workers got to the ships across wooden walkways, which rested on the muck when the water was out and floated when it was in. They were composed of slimy gray planks, dangerous even when people weren’t carrying heavy merchandise or naphtha kegs between ships. Everything was on a strict timetable. If one ship fell behind, they all did. If profits suffered, so did the workers.

  Syrina hunkered on the eves of a dilapidated warehouse, overlooking the docks. Triglav settled down next to her, his gaze following hers across the piers and mudflats. She watched the longshoremen and stevedores, toiling and oblivious. Her thoughts kept turning back to Ormo.

  “Why did he give you to me?” she asked Triglav, who turned his head to study her, eyes narrowed.

  The question didn’t seem right, anyhow. The owl didn’t feel like a possession as much as a companion. She supposed she could’ve asked, Why did he give us to each other, but the thought was too sentimental. Anyway, it didn’t matter. Kalis had neither possessions nor companions unless you counted the Ma’is they served. And the Ma’is did everything for a reason.

  Her sudden doubt brought her thoughts around to her childhood and Ormo’s reasons back then.

  She had had many instructors on her path to becoming a Kalis, each one crueler than the last. All of them but Ormo. Zigra stood out the most, her memory of the unassuming old man sharp even now. She smiled to herself. It had been a long time since she’d given much thought to Zigra and his tests.

  She had been seven or eight. Zigra was a language instructor, gray-bearded, and wiry. His test took place in a massive room filled with junk. Crates, broken naphtha machinery, heaps of rotting ropes. The objective was to stay hidden while answering the questions he shouted to her, about history and politics. She realized later that the questions and even the answers were secondary. It was instead a test of her responses under pressure and in pain. He would ask them in Skald and required her to respond in whatever language the question pertained to. A question about the Church required an answer in flawless N’naradin. A question about the Black Wall required her to use the proper nomad dialect, depending on the details of the question. While she answered, she was to remain hidden. It was a lesson in history, language, and the use of her tattoos.

  Every time he found her, every time she answered wrong, or Zigra heard a hint of her accent, he would break one of her fingers. The first few times, he summoned her to the center of the room to do this, but then she caught on and remained hidden. Then he would need to find her himself, still asking questions, her still answering.

  It was the worst of the days she always remembered when she thought of Zigra. He’d already broken all her fingers on her right hand, and all his questions were about obscure tribes in the Yellow Desert because he knew she always mixed them up and got the accents wrong. Even distracted by her pain, she managed to evade him for seven more mistakes before her involuntary whimpering gave her away.

  So defiant she’d been when he’d grabbed her by the neck. Seven mistakes and only five more fingers? What more could he do to her? She refused to cry as he broke the fingers on her left hand, starting with the thumb, his expression bored. But when he snapped her arm over his knee at the elbow, she screamed, and her cries grew shriller when he did the same to the other one.

  Syrina smiled wryly down onto the docks when she thought about it now. Twelve mistakes and only ten fingers. What else was he supposed to do?

  As she lay crying on the floor at Zigra’s feet, broken arms laying like dead branches on the floor at her sides, the old man’s face still bland and unassuming, Ormo appeared, lifting her up. He carried her through the palace to his own bed, set her bones himself, and fed her chocolate with his own hands. He had always saved her from the cruelty of the instructors, but it was then, as she lay in his bed chewing on chocolate through her tears, that she realized she would do anything for him. She loved him more than a father, with every fiber of her being, just as he loved her. He fed her all her meals himself for three days, scooping food into her mouth with a spoon like she was a baby until her arms and fingers had healed well enough to endure more training. But it was on that first day that he owned her, and every act of kindness after that only reinforced her loyalty.

  And then came Triglav. No, Ormo didn’t do anything without a reason.

  “So what’s the reason for you?” she asked the owl, giving him a scratch on the top of his head.

  He blinked at her and gave a little sigh.

  As the tide began to trickle in again a few hours after sunset, the night following Narn’s disappearance, she headed toward Lees’s warehouse, across the rooftops, naked and unseen. Triglav soared above her.

  3

  Crime

  Syrina sent Triglav ahead. An hour later, she followed him, thankful the spring cloud cover was thick enough to mask most of the light from the Eye. She stuck to the rooftops, relishing the feeling of the wind and the rain. She circled Lees’s building until she found a storm drain she could shimmy up, but halfway to the top, wild barking erupted across the tar-covered roof.

  Dogs were usually reserved for the city watch. Only the High Merchants and a few of the aristocracy could afford the licenses for hounds and the mercenaries that used them. Lees really was at the top of the food chain. It also meant her tattoos wouldn’t be any help.

  She got to the roof’s edge at the same time the dog did. It was a gray and black purebred tundra hound, judging by the size of it. Its shoulder stood almost as high as her. She’d only clambered halfway to her feet before it clamped its jaws onto her forearm and thrashed its head with a guttural snarl, tearing into muscle and snapping bone. It would’ve knocked her backward off the roof if it weren’t for its death grip.

  Blood spattered her neck, and pain screamed up her arm. This already wasn’t going very well. Someone shouted, and she heard the buzz of a crossbow bolt whiz by her ear. Someone had already seen her. What a disaster. People didn’t see Kalis. Kalis didn’t even exist. Stories would spread.

  There was only one thing she could do now. She rammed the flat of her left palm into the dog’s nose. It yelped and let go, but dropped back on its haunches for another lunge. Meanwhile, the shouts coming from the other side of the roof turned to screams of agony, and a commotion went up somewhere in front of her.

  Before the dog could finish taking her arm off, Syrina twisted to her feet and swung her right foot out, kicking the thing in the side of the head as it charged, which sent it flying off the roof. It yelped, and after a pause, started to bark. She was glad she hadn’t hurt it. She liked dogs.

  Syrina turned her attention toward the screams that came from the opposite side of the building. The man who’d shot at her was staggering around in agony, the crossbow forgotten near his feet. Triglav’s had latched his talons onto his face, the owl’s short beak buried deep in the socket where his left eye had been. Blood gushed down his face and off his chi
n, pattering on the roof, like rain. Triglav’s wings were silent even as he flapped them wildly, trying to hang on as the man flailed against his back.

  There were red splatters all over Triglav’s white feathers, but how much blood was his and how much had come from the watchman, Syrina couldn’t tell. She sprinted over and struck the man on a nerve center at the base of his neck. He dropped and the screaming cut out, but the dog was still barking in the street. By now, anyone on the block knew something was going down at Lees’s place. So much for subtlety.

  She stretched out her arm and Triglav drifted over to land on it. She checked for cuts and found none, then felt along his back where the man had beat against him. Ormo hadn’t provided a book on owl anatomy, so she couldn’t be sure, but it didn’t seem like he’d broken anything.

  “Good boy.” Syrina felt like she should say something.

  Triglav gave her a curious look and flapped off to circle the building. As an afterthought, she bent down and stabbed the dead man in the chest with his own knife. Might as well do what she could to make it look like a burglary, never mind the claw marks and the missing eye.

  All the warehouses in the District had roof hatches. It didn’t snow often this close to the coast, but the roofs still needed to be cleared off a dozen or so times every winter. This one was locked, but there was a key in the guard’s pocket he wouldn’t need anymore.

  Lees had upped his security since the visit from Silas Narn. It was a good thing he’d underestimated who was going to break into his building. Still, the dog had put her off. Her right arm hung useless, drenched in blood below the elbow. She tore a wide strip of cloth from the dead man’s shirt to bind it and grimaced at the white and red band. She’d need to set the bone later. By morning, the tattoos would do their job and sew everything back together again, even if it would be sore for the next week. Tonight though, she had a big bloody bullseye tied to her flopping, useless arm. So much for subtlety, part two.

  She couldn’t spend any more time worrying about it though, and she dropped into the hatch and fell forty hands to the packed dirt floor of the warehouse. Normally, Syrina could handle a drop like that without a thought, but she hit the ground crooked, overcompensating for her injury. She landed with her weight on her left arm. It compressed, followed by her head into the ground.

  She jumped to her feet, fighting off the haze that came when she jumped off a roof and landed on her face, pushed a tooth back into place with her tongue, and rolled over to a stack of crates, concealing her bandaged arm as best she could with the rest of her body until she could regain her composure. She wiped the blood and grit from her eyes, but her nose and lip had already stopped bleeding.

  The interior was a maze of crates and stacked pallets, reminding her of Zigra’s test. The panicked, unintelligible whispers of people who think they’re under attack murmured in the dark, audible under the barking still coming from outside. Syrina couldn’t tell where the voices were coming from, but she could gauge which direction Lees’s office was. She began to move toward it, trying to keep her useless, obvious arm between her body and something else.

  She crept toward the office, then paused, eyes closed. Two voices came from ahead, and there were two others she couldn’t pinpoint, somewhere off to her right. Two at the door to the office and a patrol. They would’ve been easy to avoid if things had gone better on the roof. Now she needed to hurry. She ducked behind a huge wood and iron box that smelled of oil and metal and risked poking her head around the corner.

  The entrance to the office was more obvious here than it was from the other side, where it had been concealed by the mural. There were no more dogs, but two men stood by the door, in a pool of lantern light. The brothers that had followed her the night before. She felt bad for them. Their presence here was probably punishment for losing Narn. They cradled loaded crossbows across their chests, wore long ceramic knives at their waists, and peered into the shadows of the warehouse, back to back, eyes wide, bickering in whispers that Syrina couldn’t quite make out. The other two were still back in the darkness somewhere, searching for the intruder.

  Syrina ducked down again and sighed. She’d need to kill the brothers. She couldn’t slip by with her arm like it was. If Lees was backed by another High Merchant and it got out that a Kalis was responsible for the break-in, Eheene, and then the rest of Skalkaad, would implode into chaos, starting with the Syndicate. And if she didn’t kill them quick, she’d need to kill the two on patrol, too.

  She closed her eyes, letting all thoughts drain. The last one was that this was really going to hurt her arm. The world shimmered in front of her, and she felt her heartbeat slow, then stop. She strode out from behind the crate and stepped through the Papsukkal Door. The two men stood motionless at first, before one, then the other’s eyes widened, focusing on Syrina’s bandaged arm, which now swung wide from the rest of her body, unable to keep up with it.

  They were bringing their crossbows up to target her, the speed of cold honey oozing from a jar. One began to yell something, but it was drowned out by the roar that thundered in her ears. She was halfway to them when the bolts released almost as one. They floated toward her like feathers in a soft breeze. She stepped around one, but the other’s obsidian edge sliced through her lagging, mangled arm at the shoulder. She saw a mist of blood drift upward out of the corner of her eye. Before the first drops had hit the ground, she was on the men. With her good hand, she found the hilt of the shorter man’s long knife and arced it up and through the other’s eye, which was still focused on where her arm had been. She continued the momentum all the way around, releasing the knife still lodged in the taller man’s head, smashing the throat of the other with her dangling forearm like a flail, crushing his windpipe and shattering his spine.

  Far away, she heard a bone pop, and a distant voice in the back of her head said it was hers. Continuing the same motion, she dropped her body down, leaped, and arced her right foot up to kick in the locked door. She dove into the dark doorway to find herself in the Lees’s family portrait office. She was running out of time and energy. Over the roar in her ears, she could hear the thudding boots of the patrol, ponderous but getting closer. Her body could only keep up ten or twenty more seconds of being on the other side of the Papsukkal Door before it was going to drop her out whether she was ready or not.

  Ten or fifteen seconds on the other side gave her at least a minute from her perspective. Maybe two. She’d have to be clear of Lees’s place before then, or she was doomed. She had no idea where to begin looking for clues either, but she could make an educated guess. If she was wrong, she’d have to come up with another plan after she’d slept and eaten.

  Syrina began to ransack the office, figuring it was a good thing to do anyway. The more it looked like a robbery, the better off she’d be when corporate security showed up. From the other side of the Door, everything she flung across the room was doing a lot more damage than it would have in a normal burglary, but she didn’t have the luxury of moving slower. There’d be all sorts of wild accusations, but it was the sort of thing that happened in Eheene sometimes. Without any proof, the investigation would go nowhere.

  There was a long, thick iron box hidden between the upper drawer and the top of the marble desk, concealed behind the flowing stonework of leaves and elk. It slid out, was heavy, and rattled and clanked, making her think at least one of the things in it was tin. So much the better. Even if nothing else useful was in it, it would help point the finger at a burglar.

  It would have to do. She felt the Papsukkal Doorway charging in at her and the pain in her arm intensified, while the rushing in her ears grew to a moaning thunder she couldn’t ignore. An alarm telling her she was out of time. Her chest ached from where her heart longed to beat again.

  Syrina tucked the box under her good arm, then burst into the lobby and catapulted over Orvaan’s desk. She tossed aside the bar that locked the front door and fled into Exporter Row. A clamor of alarm bells pealed from some
where towards the District, and the dog still barked on the other side of the building.

  She used the last of her momentum to run up the wall of a warehouse a half-block down and crawl under the overhanging eaves of the higher building backed against it, into shadows and mounds of ancient pigeon shit. A pipe jutting up from the lower roof squelched greasy gray smoke. She braced the wrist of her ruined arm between her knees and pulled back with her body, biting her lip against the pain, until the bones aligned. Then she made sure her damaged arm and the box were between herself and the wall, and passed out, wondering if Triglav would figure out where she was.

  4

  Suspicions

  When Syrina woke, it was dark. Triglav perched on the roof above her. That she woke up at all was good news. Going through the Papsukkal Door without an exit plan was a good way to get killed.

  She looked up at Triglav, who’d noticed her wake and stared down at her with his giant slow-blinking eyes.

  “Good boy,” she said.

  She took her time hopping rooftops back to her drainage chamber where she could examine the box. It was a normal key lock, well-made. She jammed a chicken bone into it, one of a handful she’d picked out of the garbage on the way back, and pulled it out again. She did it with a few more and studied the scratches on them. Then she took out a small knife from a tool kit she’d stashed with the naphtha supply she kept there and went to work carving up a passable key. It was time-consuming, but she didn’t want to smash it open without knowing what was inside.