by R A Fisher
There is as of yet still no connection found between the Preas Prohm, the Ora, and the device discovered at the center of the Tidal Works, nor in any similar Artifacts, despite the scattering of pre-Age records that imply the contrary. Our understanding of the nature of Ora after these tests also remains limited. Refer to studies AO-041 through AO-557 for further information.
Now that all NRI research on the subject has been halted indefinitely, please advise as to the continued status of our arrangement. It is this office’s suggestion that all connections are dissolved until fieldwork in Fom is resumed.
The crowd of low merchants gathered around Ormo’s dais scattered when Syrina’s feet hummed on the floor behind them, and they noticed her for the first time. Even behind the paint that coated his fat face, Syrina saw red rage glowing under Ormo’s hood.
This isn’t a good idea.
She ignored the voice. “Out,” she said to the merchants, who were still milling around.
They fled from the Hall. She waited until the doors banged closed behind them before she ascended the stairs.
“You have overstepped your bounds,” Ormo growled. “This had better—”
“It was all a setup,” she whispered.
Her face was just a hand from his, but she didn’t touch him. Not yet.
“What was a setup?” His tone betrayed nothing, but fury and understanding bubbled through his gray eyes.
“Triglav. The other Kalis in Fom was one of yours.”
“The other Kalis? I see you’ve been leaving out details from your reports.” Ormo’s voice was low, dangerous.
“You knew I left her out. You’re the one who sent her. So fine. You want to see an intense emotional reaction?” She swung at him, aiming the rigid blade of her left hand at his neck where it would shatter his spine just above the shoulder.
Her hand hit what felt like an iron plate hidden under the collar of his robe, and her left arm went numb from the shoulder down. At the same moment, Ormo crashed his heavily-ringed fist into her face, impossibly fast for a fat old man. She felt her nose shatter, and her vision clouded red.
I told you. You should’ve listened. Or at least thought this through.
“Shut up.” She lay crumpled where she’d fallen at the base of the dais.
Ormo stood now, his mass rolling under the wrinkles of his white and cobalt robes. She wondered what else he had hidden in its folds.
“It worked, didn’t it?” He started down the stairs toward her.
Excitement had overcome the rage in his voice.
Syrina clambered to her feet, ready to take him on, but as soon as he was within reach, his own arm shot out, again faster than she thought possible. His rings crashed into her face again. This time, a tremendous jolt shot through her body, making her heart skip a beat and her limbs go rigid. She fell to the ground, unable to move beyond an involuntary quiver. She could see the patterned silk of the bottom of his robes out of the corner of her eye. The polished, onyx floor was cool and musty.
He leaned over her. “The Preas Prohm. Can I talk to her? Is she there now?”
No.
“No.”
Ormo rolled Syrina over with his slippered foot, studied her eyes a few moments, sighed, and stood with a shrug.
“You are a fool, Kalis Syrina. But I suppose if it worked, it might still be worth it.”
“Why?” she croaked, from the floor.
“Because theory suggests that the Preas Prohm can interact with certain Artifacts. Because there is so little we understand about who we are, where we came from, what we’re entitled to. It was always the risk with you. In the entire history of the Merchant’s Syndicate, you were the most promising one. If it was ever going to work, it was going to work on you. But it meant risking the shift of your loyalty from me to that damn bird.”
Syrina thought of Triglav. “Fuck you.”
“You are a fool because you mistake what you felt for an owl as love. It was chemical. Induced for the sole purpose of your own self-discovery. The love you felt, I hope you still feel, for your Ma’is, your caretaker, your provider, grew within you. It is as real as any love between father and daughter. You are my daughter, in spirit, if not in biology. Would you turn on something so natural? With your loss, you have aided the one you love. More than you can imagine. More importantly, you have found something within yourself. Something more ancient than humanity’s entire tenure here on Eris. We believed we could never regain what was lost. You are proof we were wrong. Take solace in your sacrifice.”
Syrina thought about it. About the bastardized love that still ached in her chest for Triglav, the jumble of confused feelings she still harbored for her Ma’is. The voice in her head that wasn’t quite her own.
“Fuck you,” she said again and tried to get up off the floor.
She thought that if he gave her enough time, she might be able to get to her feet and take him on. In a minute or two.
He sighed. “So much to do, still. I hope this isn’t a permanent loss. There are so many unanswered questions, and I need you to answer most of them.”
“I was going to say the same thing to you,” she coughed.
“Then again,” Ormo sighed, voice filled with regret, “I suppose many of those questions could be answered by way of your dissection. Or your vivisection.” He bent down and brushed his rings against her face.
She gasped as the jolt flooded through her again, and then there was nothing.
The first thing that hit her was the stench.
A minute later, after it all tumbled back to her through the haze, she knew she was in one of the nameless holes where they threw naughty Kalis. She’d never been in one before, but Ormo had shown them to her back in her training years. At the time, she’d laughed at the idea that a Kalis could turn on someone as infallible as their Ma’is. She’d wondered if it had ever happened before now.
Apparently, it had. If she’d been the first to turn, they wouldn’t have built such a specialized dungeon in the first place, and Ormo wouldn’t have been so ready for her to attack him. Or maybe he would have. There was a lot she didn’t know about the Syndicate she’d served her whole life. There was a lot she didn’t know about everything.
It was pitch black, and the air was so permeated with the stench of rot it made the back of her throat burn. She knew from memory the space was round, about sixteen hands across, and cut from one seamless, polished hunk of granite, fifty or sixty hands deep. There would be a steel grate at the top, locked in place with a crossbar. The hatch led into another locked room in one of the Syndicate Palace sub-basements. There were a dozen identical holes, but when she’d visited here a lifetime ago, they were all empty. She listened for a while and decided that if there were any other imprisoned Kalis now, or anyone guarding the room above, they were being quiet about it.
You need to learn to listen. You should’ve waited.
“Yes. Yes, I should have,” Syrina whispered.
She felt less uncomfortable talking to the voice now. At least she knew it wasn’t just her imagination.
Did you ever think I was?
“But what are you? Besides something called a Preas Prohm, I mean.”
Silence.
Syrina got the impression it still didn’t know much more than she did.
She sat there for a while, avoiding what she knew she would need to do, but the only other option was to keep sitting where she was until she died.
She started groping around in the blackness. Her hand fell on something soft and cold and sticky and fuzzy. A rat. She was fully prepared to find a corpse down there with her. It was the sort of thing the Syndicate liked to throw at people they weren’t happy with, but maybe there was a shortage of disposable bodies this week. Syrina didn’t have any problems with being locked up with dead people over dead rats, except that people took up a lot more space as they lay around decomposing.
She found four other rats by the time she’d finished pawing around, all in a sim
ilar state as the first. Well, five dead rats were still better than one dead human. She pushed them all to one side of her circular prison and hunkered down against the opposite wall, then wiped her hands off on the granite floor, which was futile. Syrina could tell when she moved them that at least two had cleanly broken backs, confirming they didn’t come in here and die on their own. She pictured Ormo up there somewhere, enjoying the sight of his favorite Kalis kicking dead rats around in a hole, even though she knew he had better things to do.
Her options were limited. She waited, slept, waited, slept, and waited more. No one came. No food, no water. Ormo knew she could survive a long time without either, and she was beginning to think he was going to see how long.
I don’t think anyone is coming to let us out.
Syrina tried not to be bothered by the us. “Did you come up with that on your own or did you just start thinking that because I did?”
It occurred to me before now, but probably just because some part of your mind was already thinking about it. I don’t know these people well enough to form opinions about them on my own.
Syrina tried to tell if the voice was being wry, but she couldn’t.
“Any ideas?”
Maybe. What are we going to do if we get out of here, anyway?
The more she thought about it, the more she was glad she hadn’t succeeded in killing Ormo. He was the only string she had to follow about what the voice was, what she was, what Kalis in general were, and now, how all of it was connected to the Tidal Works. As much as she pined for vengeance, what Ormo wanted to know, Syrina also wanted to know, and he was the only one with the wherewithal to guide her.
So you’re not going to kill him?
“Oh, I’m going to kill him if it’s the last thing I do,” she whispered into the dark. “It’s just not going to be the first. Why does it matter to you?”
Same reason it matters to you. He knows more than he’s letting on. You think you have questions? Think about how I feel. You and I both want the same thing—self-knowledge. So how do we get it? Go ask for your job back?
Syrina considered that. Could she? By all rights, she should be dead. Any other Kalis who tried to kill their Ma’is would’ve been executed on the spot. Of that, she had no doubt. None of the low merchants she’d barged in on would be allowed to leave Syndicate grounds after seeing her. That would be a harsh blow to Ormo even before considering the cover-up job he had ahead of him when a dozen oligarchs never returned home. And without Syrina to help with the footwork.
Yet there she was, confined but alive. Ormo was too smart to lock her up for a slow death as added punishment. Too much time for something to go wrong. He knew what she could do. He’d been the one to make sure she was capable of it. He might be waiting for her to get out so she could convince him she saw things his way. Another experiment. The pits were designed to contain Kalis, but maybe Ormo wanted to see just how different from the others she was.
All that crap about real and artificial love. From everything Syrina had experienced in her lifetime of willing slavery, she didn’t think it mattered where love came from. His real love could bite her ass. Still, if she could pretend to be almost anyone, she might be able to fake her way through believing what he’d said. Even if she succeeded, though, he would never trust her again. Not the way he had. Her second shot at the bastard, whenever it came, would be all sorts of difficult.
“I think so,” she said to the voice.
But by the same logic that gave Ormo a reason not to kill her, it stood to reason that he might let her out. So she continued to sit and sleep and wait.
But days, then a week went by, and no one came to speak to her through the hatch or feed her or bring her water, let alone release her. She realized she really was going to die if she didn’t try something.
You can get up there through the Door.
She almost asked, what door, until it occurred to her. “What happens when I pass out and fall back down?”
I think I can keep that from happening.
“You think?”
I haven’t tried.
Well, it was better than sitting in there with a pile of decomposing rats, waiting to die.
Syrina tried to remember the setup of the hole and the chamber above from her visit two decades ago. A padlock was looped through the end of the crossbar that held the hatch in place. Or at least, it had been. If she could reach it through the bars, she could pick it open.
She hadn’t eaten in a week. The Papsukkal Door would drain her. If she didn’t die, she might only be able to have one go at it, and she was going to need at least two.
“Fine.” She let her mind and body relax, and her heart grew still.
With one bound, she hit the wall six feet up, twisted, and launched across to the other side, then back again. On the fourth jump, she smacked her head into the hatch in the center of the ceiling, scrabbled until her fingers found purchase on the bars, and hung there a moment, getting her bearings.
Compared to the darkness at the bottom, it was bright. A trickle of light filtered through the bars from somewhere above. She pressed her eye up against the grate, her heart silent and still where it fluttered on the other side of the Door. She could make out the crossbar just inside her field of vision, but she couldn’t see a padlock on either end of it. Damn. The keyhole in it was bound to be flipped away from the hatch, but maybe…
She swung back against the shaft wall and dropped down, sliding against the stone to slow her fall a little, broken further by the pile of decomposing rats.
Damn, you needed those.
She couldn’t bring herself to care. She crawled across to the other side of her cell and fell asleep.
“Screw you,” Syrina said when she woke up. She felt draped in heavy spiderwebs. “I thought you said you could keep me conscious.”
There didn’t seem to be any point. Now you can have another go.
The thought made her feel even worse, and she said so.
I didn’t mean right away.
“Okay, then,” Syrina mumbled and went back to sleep.
You don’t need to talk out loud, you know. I’m in here.
She ignored it.
Syrina felt a little better when she came-to again, but the thought of trying the Door so soon still made her want to lie back down.
It’s not going to get any easier.
“Shut up. I know.”
She stood and steadied herself against the wall. “Eye take me. I don’t think this will work.”
Yes, it will. One more shot. Get ready.
She crawled over to the pile of rat carcasses and started sifting through them, picking out the long bones she hadn’t smashed in her fall. They were big rats, and she ended up with a small handful of slimy, thin bones more or less the length of her middle finger. She hoped it would be enough, or she was out of ideas.
Something in the back of her mind cried when she tried to enter the Door again so soon on an empty stomach, but she went anyway. She’d already tried scaling up without it, but the walls were too smooth and far apart, and she was too weak.
Once at the top, it was a gamble of which side the lock was on, but she had a fifty-fifty shot. She slid her rat bones through one of the slits at the edge of the hatch, then picked one up between the two fingers she could squeeze out and wiggled it around. Bingo. The end of the bone poked something heavy and loose.
She spent the next twenty minutes hanging there, wiggling rat bones, prying at the lock until she’d flipped it over, so its keyhole faced her. It was still angled up, but it was as close as it was ever going to get.
The Door had long since shut, and she struggled through waves of semi-consciousness while her body throbbed in agony, but she wasn’t done. She could feel the voice busy in the back of her mind, keeping her awake.
As steady as her shaking hand would permit, she slid a long, thin rib into the lock, jiggled it, and slid it out again. Then she did it with three more and dropped back to the
floor. The bones she cradled in her palm, hoping she wouldn’t crush them when she hit the ground, but she was unconscious before she had a chance to find out.
They weren’t crushed, but she was. Every part of her ached, and for the first time she could remember, she was cold. A deep, bone-gnawing cold that came from being naked and locked in a damp stone pit for over a week. Her tongue was swollen, and her stomach constricted with hunger.
In ideal conditions, Syrina could live over two months without food, and more than one without water. Ideal conditions meant she spent her time meditating, being still. Going through the Papsukkal Door twice in four hours would’ve done her in even if she’d eaten a whole goat in the time between, and now she was fading fast. If she didn’t get out now, she wasn’t going to. She didn’t even know if she had enough in her to get through the Door one more time, but she needed to, or else concede her life to Ormo’s pit.
She took the bones still cradled in her palm, closed her eyes—out of habit, since it was so dark at the bottom of the hole there was no change in her perception—and ran her fingers along their lengths, one at a time. It was a difficult task at the best of times, and almost impossible with the mound of distractions her fractured body was throwing at her.
She tried again. Slowly, slowly, the minute nicks and grooves scratched out by the workings of the lock formed a shape in her mind. She checked them twice and considered all the angles until she knew what she needed to do. The hard part would be getting up there one more time and doing it.
She sat back down against the wall. Even that small act made her body scream. She wished she’d choked down a few of the rats when she’d first woken up a week ago. Now they were too corpulent do anything but make her sicker than she already was.
The longer you wait, the weaker you get. It’s now or not at all.
Syrina was looking forward to the day the voice in her head was wrong about something.
She stood, still clinging the bones, and let out an involuntary groan. Whatever else she did, she needed to eat something. The only thing harder on an empty stomach than going through the Papsukkal Door would be lying to Ormo’s face. Not that she’d tried it yet, but she knew enough about her Ma’is to know it was true.
