The Kalis Experiments

by R A Fisher

  Syrina scuttled across a warehouse roof and over the wall to follow. The sun had set, and the horizon glowed orange. They pushed through the ever-present throngs toward the piers, where the tide was coming in and the hordes of foreigners mingled with landed crews and mercenaries.

  Once into the slum, it was easy for Syrina to stay on the rooftops. But when she got to the water, she hesitated. People seethed around the docks, pushing on and off ships. There was no way she could get through to the piers unnoticed.

  Swim, the voice said, matter-of-factly, like she hadn’t already considered it.

  “How?” Syrina whispered, into the air while on the edge of the roof, where she squatted like an unnoticed gargoyle.

  She looked over the edge again. There was a wide, muddy street between her and the harbor, and a buoyant wooden pier, just as wide and at street level, bobbing as the tide neared its peak. It was a jump of at least sixty hands to the water, and the space between was packed with people.

  The voice was silent for a moment.

  She was just beginning to think it had gone away when it said, What do you care? No one will believe anyone who says they saw a Kalis jump into the harbor. And even if they do, they won’t know it was you.

  Syrina ground her teeth against a lifetime of training. It seemed like that was something she’d been doing a lot. Don’t be seen by anyone who’s going to stay alive. Don’t work against the Syndicate. Honor your Ma’is. They were the only rules that existed for Kalis, and she couldn’t kill everyone down there even if she wanted to.

  The wagon turned down a pier, not quite out of sight, and stopped at the third ship in—something small with sails, wooden and fast-looking that couldn’t quite be called a yacht, but couldn’t be called anything else either.

  Screw it. Might as well check off the last rule she hadn’t broken.

  Syrina took a running jump into the crowd and fell shoulder-first into a wiry black-haired woman, who grunted and stumbled into a fat man wearing a filthy captain’s hat that looked like he’d looted it from a corpse. He lurched forward with an angry shout, but Syrina was off, staying low, darting through the mob, ignoring the screams of terror and confusion that followed in her wake, holding the image of the yacht in her mind’s eye.

  And then she was through. She hit the water with a small splash and dove down underneath the wood and metal hulls. The water was cloudy and frigid.

  She came up for air once, two-thirds of the way there. The chaos of the harbor was intensifying as the tide started to ooze out and crews prepared for departure.

  The NRI boat had the uninspired name of The Gull. It was drifting away from the dock with the rest of the traffic by the time Syrina reached it. She shimmied up the narrow ladder to the deck, hunkered behind a coil of reeking, dripping rope, and waited.

  They’d cleared the harbor two hours ago, and The Gull was the fastest ship in NRI’s fleet outside the steamships, but Azhaa still had a bad feeling. There’d been no sign of Menns. Anywhere. Not at Ka’id’s bank, not at the docks, not in the streets between. She didn’t understand it, and she liked it even less. No one would go to all that trouble and then just give up without a fight. Not someone as tenacious as the Menns impostor had been. He’d been after something from Ka’id’s. Azhaa didn’t intend to let the crates out of her sight, even if it was a five-day trip to the NRI storage facility, buried under the wild hills of eastern Skalkaad.

  So while the navigator sat above, alone on the cramped bridge, and the rest of the crew slept in shifts in the two cramped cabins, Thayn huddled in the darkness of the cramped cargo hold, crouched on a crate, with his back to the wall. He’d refused to come up for food after they were clear of the port, and the others had left him alone to guard their cargo against ghosts.

  Ghosts. If only Azhaa was worried about ghosts.

  Six hours later, when the crescent of the Eye scythed the black sky high in the southwest, haloed by an ocean of silver stars and casting a wavering reflection in the sea, Azhaa was just beginning to think maybe she’d been wrong about Menns after all.

  Then she heard a muffled thump followed by a soft splash, not quite in time with the waves against the hull. Her heart skipped a beat, and she held her breath, eyes closed, and focused on the sounds coming from outside the hold. Nothing. No shouts from the seamen, no stirring from the cabins, where there should be a shift change taking place any second.

  Azhaa chewed her tongue a minute, thinking. If Menns was aboard, if he’d been aboard this whole time and taken out the crew with no more than a thump and a single splash, then her worst fears were true. No one could do that. Almost no one. Azhaa might be able to do it. Or someone like Azhaa, who might be even better at it.

  If it was a Kalis, she would be an Arm, trained in Papsukkal, and she’d be able to kill Azhaa in a heartbeat. Less than a heartbeat, technically speaking. Azhaa was a Seed. She’d never learned how to use her tattoos to become unseen to the extent of the other Kalis. She’d never been taught how to find the Papsukkal Door with any real proficiency. Her training had involved mimicry and disguise that far surpassed what other Kalis could do, even most of her fellow Seeds. She knew how to inflect her voice to make people trust her, even tell her things they wouldn’t tell anyone else. And she could lie so well not even Ma’is Kavik could tell when she wasn’t being honest, Not that she would ever deceive him. She could make herself look like the head of NRI security and take his place for five years without even his mother noticing.

  Her training had also taught her a few things about her own kind. They were everywhere, the Kalis, and she knew the one on The Gull would kill her.

  She moved from her seat on the crate, deeper into the shadows of the hold, her gaze never leaving the gangway. Still no sound.

  She considered. The documents were irreplaceable, but each piece of paper on board could be used against her Ma’is in one way or another. She could give a rat’s ass if NRI suffered, but Kavik might be set back years if the crates were lost. On the other hand, if they fell into the hands of a seditious High Merchant, he could be ruined. Both thoughts made her sick to her stomach, but there was only one real choice, and she had to act now.

  She thought about removing Thayn’s face so she could at least try to slip by whoever was waiting above, but she discarded the idea as fast as she tossed aside any plan of trying to find the Papsukkal Door for the first time in twenty years. If there was another Kalis on board, neither would do any good. No reason to blow her cover and raise even more suspicions. Not if she was going to end up dead either way.

  Azhaa padded up the low gangway, listened at the hatch, and slipped onto the deck.

  Syrina waited for the thin slash of the Eye to start its downward slide to the west before she killed the first of the crew and tossed him overboard. Then she slipped down to the narrow mid-deck and killed the other four while they were sleeping, trying to suppress the unfamiliar guilt as she did so. Just work, just work, just work, just work, she repeated to herself, like a mantra, until the words became meaningless. She was prepared to jump overboard and drown herself if the voice said anything, but it left her alone.

  Then she went back up to the deck to consider her next move. She was pretty sure only Thayn and the navigator were left on The Gull. She’d be able to pilot the little ship most of the way back to Eheene, scuttle it, and make off with the cargo so she could leave the crates hidden somewhere along the coast for Ormo to find. But she needed to be careful. Off the port side, the Barrier Cliffs of Skalkaad loomed three spans away, the current shifting to crash into them. If Syrina took out the navigator, she’d need to be ready. Or she, the documents, and the voice were going to end up pulped against the rocks.

  Thayn popped out of the hold just then, looking grim and heading to the helm.

  He’s seen the bodies below, the voice said.

  Syrina wanted to ask it how it could know that, but she didn’t. She could see it was true. The look on his face said it all.

  You c
ould take them both now.

  She could, but she didn’t. She could kill them anytime, but then she wouldn’t know what they were about to talk about. It wasn’t like they could go anywhere.

  Thayn opened the door to the little room that served as a bridge.

  The navigator—Syrina still couldn’t figure out if he was a real captain or just the guy steering—laughed. “So you decided to come up out of there, after all. I thought you were even going to shit down there. I didn’t want to—”

  Syrina didn’t learn what the might-be-captain didn’t want to do, because at that moment, Thayn, without a word, plunged a white ceramic blade into the man’s neck, up through his jaw and into his head, all the way to the hilt. The sailor managed to look surprised before he fell where he stood.

  Syrina was so startled she didn’t do anything, and even the voice was shocked into silence.

  Without hesitation, Thayn pushed the body out of the hatch with his foot and cranked the wheel hard to the port. The Gull lurched, and Syrina fell back against the rail. Thayn reached down and slid his knife out of the man’s neck before opening the maintenance compartment under the wheel.

  Too late, Syrina realized what he was doing. He slashed twice, and she heard the rope running to the rudder snap. The Gull lurched again and began to drift as the tide carried them toward the cliffs. Then he stepped out and reached up, slicing through the rope that tied the sail, which shuddered and collapsed with a hiss of fabric barely audible over the distant crash of surf.

  Syrina got enough of a grip on herself to do something. She walked over to Thayn and punched him in the face. In the moment between when he saw her and when she knocked him out, the look on his face was even more unnerving than what he’d just done, even if it did explain quite a bit. There was no fear or shock at seeing a Kalis. Thayn had known she was there, and he was doing everything in his power, including sacrificing himself, to make sure Syrina would never get the cargo.

  She looked north, now across the bow. The cliffs loomed closer.

  There were five hundred questions Syrina wanted to wake Thayn up to ask, but she didn’t have time, and she’d get answers to at least a few of them if she got the records to Ormo.

  She looked again at the encroaching cliffs. Maybe a half-hour. More, if she got lucky again. She dragged Thayn’s unconscious body over to the rail and heaved him overboard. Then she ran down to the hold and started dragging the archives up to the deck, one crate at a time.

  By the time she had them lined up, she could hear the surf crashing into the rocks. The cliffs consumed a third of the sky to the north. The Eye hovered high, a thin purple and azure smile under the vast, featureless black of its dark side, while the eastern sky was growing brackish red in a line along the horizon.

  The crates were made from copper and oiled pine, rigged with thick copper rings on two sides so they could be carried by two people with poles. She ran a rope through the rings, alternating them with all the leather and wood life-preservers she could find and attached three hard air-filled leather boat fenders to either end. The boxes were tough and waterproof, but they were heavy. She wasn’t sure the six fenders and the wooden rings would be enough to keep them afloat, but she was about to find out.

  The cliffs were close now. It had only taken Syrina ten minutes to haul the crates out of the hold and rig everything together, but she could feel the spray of the surf as it blew off the rocks. Birds wheeled above in the predawn glow, launching themselves from hidden nests in the gray rock. The dark tideline was still thirty hands above the surging water, and the waves heaved foam, bloody red in the dim light, halfway up the cliff. She was down to five minutes, tops. So much for luck.

  Syrina secured the last knot on the rigged crates, pushed the tangle of boxes into the rolling froth, and followed it over the rail. Instantly, she knew she was in trouble. Her head went under, and she lost track of where the crates were, where the ship was, where the cliffs were, where she was. This close to the rocks, the currents swirled and eddied. The water tugged her feet one direction and her head the other, flipping her over so fast she didn’t have time to take a breath. She spun around, straightened herself out, and tried to thrust her face toward the red light, which was all around her, but pinker in the direction she hoped was up.

  Her face broke the surface, and she tried to spend the moment inhaling instead of coughing, to limited success. She sunk down and bobbed back up, more stable this time, and rode up the wave from the trough. The first thing she saw was the string of crates, floundering half-afloat further on toward the rocks. She slid down the back of the wave into the next trough, and when she rode up the next one, she saw the hull of The Gull smashing into two pieces against a massive spear of stone that jutted from the water a few hundred hands from the cliffs. Each breaker tore more chunks off the boat and brought Syrina closer to the same fate. The white noise of the surf was so loud that the sound of the dying ship didn’t reach her ears over it. There was no sign of Thayn.

  She struggled toward the crates for a minute but gave up. They were headed into the rocks, too, anyway. There was no way she could get to them, and nothing she could do if she got there.

  The cliffs were a less than quarter span away now, and they lurched closer with every wave. After everything she’d been through, dying like this was insulting.

  You can’t swim anywhere. We’ll need to climb the rocks. Try to time the swells.

  Her shoulder hit a rock so hard she felt her humerus snap. The pain blinded her for a second until she felt the voice ooze around it, dull it down to a throbbing numbness. She’d still been facing south when the surf threw her against the cliff, and she wasn’t ready for the blow, which felt like she’d been shot with a cannon. Before she could recover, she slammed into it again. She sunk, tumbling, this time too weak to claw up toward the light, which was now a little more yellow than it had been a few minutes ago.

  Fine.

  No. Turn. Face the—

  Syrina slammed into a rock a third time, this time with her face. There was roaring all around her, and she couldn’t tell if it was coming from outside or somewhere in her head. The yellow light was fading, and she wondered how it could be getting dark again so early in the morning.

  Snap out of it.

  The light around the edges of her vision grew brighter.

  Wait, wait. Grab it. One… two… three. Now!

  Mindlessly following orders, Syrina reached up and out, toward the light. The water in front of her parted and turned to reddish gray stone as she smashed into it again. She scratched at it frantically with her good arm, hating the useless one that flopped broken in the surf, pulling her this way and that. The ocean was sucking her back down, away into darkness.

  With the tips of her fingers, she found purchase on wet stone and the sea drained away beneath her. All she could do was dig in and brace herself for the next wave that slammed into her a few seconds later, somehow failing to sweep her off the rock, to her death.

  You’ve got to climb.

  “With one arm?”

  Fine. You can try your other ideas first.

  Shit.

  She braced for the next impact, and as the water rushed down her legs, she pulled herself up to her chin, then snapped her arm up to scramble for another finger-hold before the next wave smashed into her. After five or six lunges, she was out of the fiercest of it. And after twenty more, she crossed the dark tideline, and the crashing surf dwindled to a heavy spray.

  The sea coiled and writhed like a pit of snakes beneath her, reaching for her dangling legs. Looking up, the cliff went on, solid and eternal, to the zenith. The sun was up all the way now, a ball of flame resting on the southeastern horizon and hot on her back. The humid air smelled of brine and fish and birds. Her broken arm throbbed, and the fingers on her good hand were sore. There was no way she was going to make it.

  Good thing you have another plan.

  Shit.

  After another twenty minutes of pained,
one-armed climbing, Syrina reached a crack in the cliff that was big enough to squeeze into if she let her legs hang out the end and jammed her neck against a rock. She’d never been so grateful for anything.

  She yanked at her broken arm, pinned the useless wrist down with her good hand, and maneuvered the bone back into place. She passed out not caring whether she fell from the crack while she slept.

  When she woke up, it was dark. The reddish-purple crescent of the Eye loomed above, a little fatter than the night before. Her broken arm ached and itched so bad it brought tears to her eyes, but a little experimenting proved it had healed enough to hold her weight.

  Before she began the climb, she poked her head out and scanned the roiling surf. The tide had gone down and was coming back in again. A few chunks of The Gull still lay among the rocks, now lifting with the rising water. A little way out, in the low purple light, she could make out a few other pieces of the ship. The tide had carried them out and was bringing them back. Below and off to the east, the crates, still tied to the rope and the boat fenders, hung entangled in a jagged stump of stone jutting from the sea, caught in a fissure six feet above the tideline.

  The currents along the cliffs were circular, and sometimes it caught shipwrecks in them for years. Fragments serving as warnings for sailors of the Skalkaad Sea.

  Syrina hoped that if the boxes dislodged and washed away, they would keep coming back again, at least until Ormo’s people could find them. It needed to be that or nothing.

  She began to climb.

  That son of a bitch. Thayn might not have killed her, but he’d come damn close, and he’d screwed Ormo. It would take Syrina a month to hike back through the broken mountains and forests to Eheene. More, since there weren’t any roads along this part of the coast. By then, the autumn storms would hit, and recovering the crates would be impossible until spring if they could even be found by then.