The Kalis Experiments

by R A Fisher

  Don’t think about it.

  She tried not to think about it, but thoughts of air came again, unbidden as she was jostled a second time. Mumbled strings of Ristroan came to her through the walls of the crate, over the static hiss of the waves.

  Finally! She could get out, take a deep breath, stretch her legs. She felt for the latch.

  No!

  Syrina froze, one hand still lingering on the catch.

  A little while longer. You’ll make it. Relax, relax. The voice was soft, soothing, a mother whispering her daughter to sleep. Not long now. Just a little bit more.

  Syrina felt the coldness creeping up her legs. She felt sleepy. Strange to be so tired now. She’d been meditating for hours.

  Yelling woke her up.

  “Shut up,” she mumbled. “I’m sleeping.”

  You’re dying. Wake up. Wake up!

  Syrina tried to brush away the tendrils of confusion that clung to her mind. Her neck hurt. Her back hurt, and she couldn’t feel her legs.

  Wake up and get out of the box!

  Box? She remembered something about a box. A few more minutes of sleep and she’d be able to think. She felt herself slipping away again. It was a pleasant feeling. Just a few more minutes.

  Get up!

  Reality trickled back to her. She suddenly really, really wanted to breathe. She groped for the fastening on the inside of the crate, fighting down panic. Her fingers felt like sausages wrapped in leather.

  Calm down. Calm. There.

  She felt something metal. She fumbled once and flipped it with a clack.

  The lid popped with a sucking sound, and cool salt-tinged air flooded over her. She sucked in a breath and felt the cobwebs drift away.

  Syrina dragged herself out of the crate, into the small creaking hold of a wooden ship, suppressing her cough with the crook of her elbow. It was almost pitch black, but after her time in the utter dark of the crate, she could make out shapes in the shadows. She didn’t care if anyone came down and found her or not, but she didn’t have enough energy to argue with the voice, which demanded she hide. She dragged herself into a corner, behind a low stack of crates identical to hers, wincing at the pins and needles lancing through her legs, back, and neck, all of them still refusing to move the way she told them to.

  She gasped again and went back to sleep. This time, the voice didn’t stop her.

  20

  Ghost Ship

  The nameless ship sat low in the water. It was so small that Syrina had no idea how it would make it to the southern tip of Ristro. Two-thirds of it lay below the waterline, and it was painted metallic cobalt over the copper sheets that covered it. A single high mast topped by a red flag with a yellow horizontal stripe along one edge sprouted from the center of the deck.

  Every nook was used for something, and the first night a crewman almost tripped over her while he was rummaging around in the hold. After that, she spent a few sleepless days watching the crew until she figured out the places she could be and when she could be there.

  She wanted to not talk to the voice in her head, with as little interruption as possible, and the voice, besides a few snide pieces of advice, kept quiet.

  The mystery of how the little boat would make it all the way to Ristro was solved on the third day when they dropped anchor near a sandbar humped just under the water at low tide. It was late afternoon. The sun sank in the west, while in the east, the gibbous Eye grew like a purple blister on the horizon. Far to the north, the sky was black with a roiling storm, the flashes of lightning a near-constant strobe, and the surf churned and spumed across the strip of exposed sand.

  Syrina had found a place at the aft, away from the busy crew, and was beginning to wonder whether they would stop for the night when a shadow passed across the deck, and the little ship dipped into sudden darkness.

  She looked up from where she crouched behind a tarp-covered pile of freight and watched the descent of a dirigible thrumming the air, with a propeller that jutted from the rear of a boat-shaped gondola dangling from the air bladder on brass chains. Its shadow grew over the sea around them like an obese bird of prey, and Syrina caught her breath despite herself. She’d heard of the Ristroan airships before, but this was the first time she’d seen one.

  The enormous air bladder, ribbed in bronze, loomed, oblong and bulbous, tapered to points at either end and dwarfing the sea vessel she crouched on. A rumbling tarfuel engine that coughed smoke from four exhaust pipes dominated the gondola, which was about the same size as the boat. More bronze pipes, blackened with soot, led into the air bladder above, while others fed the pistons driving the lazily whirling propeller. Other pipes flared at the fore and aft on each side, bursting intermittent blasts of steam used for fine maneuvering. The front of the gondola was rounded and encased in brass-framed glass. The rest of it was built of copper-coated wood.

  She needed to scurry out of the way when grapples and nets lowered from the airship, and half the small ship’s crew began securing the freight she’d been hiding behind, while the rest began bringing more up from below.

  You wondered how this little boat could get us all the way to Vormisæn, the voice said. Now you know. You’d better find a way up there before we miss our ride and need to swim. Or end up back in Fom.

  She’d been thinking the same thing, and the voice must have known that, but she slipped up to the top of the freight without comment just as the ropes grew taut and the pile, now bound in netting, began to rise.

  She spent the next day and a half alternating between studying the engine and gazing down at the whitecaps on the sheet of the sea below—from this height, no more than specks of snow against a blue sky.

  The Syndicate had dabbled in airships, and there were the private ones that docked on the outskirts of Eheene and along the south coast of Skalkaad—luxury crafts for the low merchants wealthy enough to experiment. N’narad had a few, too, used as air ferries that shuttled dignitaries around on the Isle of N’narad.

  The weather was the problem. The same force that pulled Eris’s tides also pulled the air, and according to Ormo, created winds which became more unpredictable the further north one went. He had told her once that every High Merchant had detailed plans for naphtha-powered airships that far surpassed anything built by Ristro if only Skalkaad’s northern climate wouldn’t bring it down a few days or weeks after it first left the ground.

  She had pointed out that the Syndicate had other lands, such as the quarries on the far side of the Yellow Desert, but he had just shook his head. The desert and the Black Wall presented their own problems. She had pressed him further, but he turned stern and changed the subject, and that had been that.

  And now here she was.

  The gondola she rode now was a hollow shell save the piloting deck and the rumbling hulk of bronze, brass, and ceramic that was the engine. Six crew manned the airship—two pilots and four mechanics who seemed to be ever-occupied with maintaining the machinery. All of them slept in shifts of two, when they slept at all, in two cramped bunks behind a curtain at the rear of the cabin, on either side of the door leading to the deck. The exterior was flat and empty except for some tool storage boxes along the low rail, so that was where she spent most of her time.

  This high up the air was thin and icy cold, but neither of those things bothered her. The weather, though, wasn’t just a problem in the Skalkaad.

  The morning was cloudless. Even the storm that had roiled the northern sky for the past few days had either disappeared behind the horizon or blown itself out, so there was no warning when the gondola swung horizontal in a sudden blast of wind that sucked the thin air from Syrina’s lungs. The chains snapped taut under the enormous air bladder, which began to bounce and twist with groans of strained metal, their complaints drowned out a second later by three short blasts of a klaxon, loud even over the scream of the wind.

  Syrina skidded across the narrow deck and caught the guardrail just as it lurched back, shooting tingling pain from h
er grasping fingers to her shoulders.

  On the downward swing, she lost her grip and tumbled back across the deck, this time managing to catch the rail with her legs. She pivoted, flailed, and grasped it with all four limbs like a baby karakh clinging to its mother’s back, the wind so fierce it threatened to peel her off and cast her to the sea a span below.

  The dirigible began to plummet, whether from damage or as an emergency measure, she couldn’t be sure. The engine moaned. Black smoke twisted from the pipes and vanished in the wind.

  The fall felt endless, their demise inevitable, until all at once the wind eased and the airship halted its plummet some fifty hands above the waves. A few seconds later, the klaxon ceased its blaring. The engine sputtered as Syrina unpeeled herself from the guardrail, heart still pounding.

  We didn’t die, so there’s that, the voice said.

  Indeed. We didn’t die.

  Curious about the crew, she made her way to the low hatch to the flight deck. After the fall, she was unsteady and leaned against the door as she peeked through the small, round portal into the pilot’s compartment.

  Their decent had scattered a few tools and instruments across the floor, but the damage was less than she’d expected. The levers, gauges, switches, and pedals that lined the walls and floor seemed intact. The four crew were busy at controls, while the two pilots stood at the curved front windows and argued. Syrina wished knew Ristroan enough to understand more of the muffled yelling she could hear through the door, but from their gestures, she gathered that one of them wanted to ascend again while the other was against it.

  Before she could see the fight’s conclusion, one of the crew turned toward the hatchway, forcing Syrina to scramble to the side, crouched low as he made his way across the deck to begin repairs on the engine. She decided that whatever either of the pilots wanted, the engine was in no condition to do much of anything, at least for now, and she let herself relax while she thought about what to do next.

  They drifted for the rest of the day, always to the southeast, now only a hundred hands above the sea, which was much calmer than it had been when the storm was raging in the north.

  As the sun lowered itself onto the western horizon, the klaxon sounded again, this time a long blast followed by two short ones, repeating over and over again. Syrina braced herself on instinct, knowing as she did that this was different. More urgent. Two more crew came out to help with engine repairs, their demeanor frantic. The airship altered its course and accelerated, but the engine whined and slowed again with a loud grinding noise that almost drowned out the panicked shouts of the crew. Another horn from behind them added to the cacophony—a bass vibration, so loud it made the metal and wood under her feet tremble.

  We’re screwed, the voice said.

  Syrina didn’t see any reason to argue as she scurried to the rear of the ship, past two crewmen too focused on the engine to notice her, and an enormous ship came into view. The Heaven’s Compass. One of the three great naphtha ships of the N’naradin Navy.

  Whatever complex trade laws dictated economic interactions between N’naradin and Ristro, Syrina knew a corsair airship would be shot down on sight, anywhere in this sea that the Church claimed as its territory.

  The juggernaut cut through the water toward them at full speed, still only two hundred hands below them despite the airships abrupt panicked rise. Abrupt but ponderous, and even now the engine began to vibrate with a grinding, high-pitched wail.

  Twin cannons on the Heaven’s Compass burst gray smoke, the boom of the shots a second later almost drowned out by the blaring horns. The rear of the air bladder above Syrina erupted in a shower of flaming leather and twisted brass support beams, shattering the propeller and the deck under her and spilling her backward into the struggling engine. The dirigible began to fall.

  Syrina clambered to her feet and bolted again to what was left of the aft deck, ignoring the shudder of the dying engine and the desperate cries of the crew. Above, black smoke rolled from the remains of the sagging balloon, and the remnants of the brass frame screamed as it tore itself apart in the wind of its collapse. The airship careened downward as the bow of the Heaven’s Compass continued to charge toward them, not fast enough to catch the remains of the airship on the deck.

  Without letting herself think about it, she jumped.

  A moment too soon.

  Instead of landing on the edge of the deck, she was barely able to grab the rim of it by her fingertips. Her body and face smashed into the green-streaked copper hull. She felt her nose crunch, followed by a rush of blood down her face and body, and she could only breathe in shallow, painful gasps. At the same moment, the dirigible died below her, exploding into the waterline of the warship with an anticlimactic crunch. The ruined remains of the airbag shattered around her in a hail of rigid burning leather and twisted copper and brass ribs.

  A new blaze of pain erupted from her hip, hot and sharp. She was aware of shouting and the vibration in the hull as the enormous ship began to slow.

  Up. The voice was firm.

  Syrina could sense it getting a handle on the pain.

  Don’t think. Up.

  She clawed up. Something heavy and hot tugged her hip downward, and her mouth was metallic and salty. Blood streamed into her eyes from a gash on her forehead, and she still couldn’t suck in more than light, desperate breaths of the humid air.

  On the deck, she got to her knees, reached behind her, and yanked out the long curved copper pole that had harpooned her. With one hand, she tugged her nose back to where it belonged, while with the other, she wiped the blood from her eyes enough that she could look around. And she saw a young N’naradin seaman staring at her, frozen in terror.

  Syrina took the deepest breath she could, intending to use the Papsukkal door the same time the sailor regained his wits and turned to flee toward a pair of men who were manning the still-smoking, dog-faced cannons looming in front of the forecastle. He shouted something about a Kalis on board, almost drowned out by the drone of the engines and the high-pitched scrape of the ruined airship against the hull.

  To her shock, she felt resistance as she summoned the Door.

  I wouldn’t do that if I were you, which I am. Too much bleeding. It will kill you.

  Syrina felt the Door fall away. Already, the cadet had gotten the attention of the cannoneers, who were squinting her way with looks first of disbelief, then shock. She was covered in blood. The only thing her tattoos were doing was telling everyone that she was a Kalis.

  Don’t panic. Run.

  Syrina began a staggered run that arced as far away from the trio watching her as she could, while they began to follow with a lot more caution than was necessary. They seemed reluctant to confront her, battered as she was, and even in her broken state, she outpaced them and dodged around the edge of the forecastle. She coughed and spit a gob of blood over the rail.

  Vent. Hurry.

  Syrina thought that the voice was sounding further and further away, and was surprised to see a waist-high, round, brass air vent poking from the side of the forecastle, the grate covering it clipped but not screwed on. How could a Kalis not notice something like that?

  A Kalis who’s bleeding to death. Squeeze in. You need to find somewhere to be still so I can stop the bleeding.

  Syrina felt too far away from the situation to bother arguing, so she pulled the grate off and slid in, amazed at how clumsy her fingers were.

  “They’ll see the grate. They’ll find me.”

  There was a shout from outside, metallic and flat in the tight space.

  “See?”

  I know. Get lost in here. This boat is huge. None of those guys are small enough to follow you, and nobody who is will want to come in here after you. Probably.

  Syrina obeyed, winding this way and that on her belly, climbing through the dark, down when she could and up when she had to. Every pull of her arms felt heavier. Dragging a sack of rocks across sand.

  “I am the
rocks,” she said to herself. “I am rocks.”

  She became aware that she’d stopped moving, and the voice wasn’t complaining about it.

  It’s fine. It’ll have to be. I think the bleeding has stopped for now. You’ll need to get cleaned up. But rest first.

  “Okay.”

  She wasn’t sure if the word had left her head or not. But it didn’t matter. She was unconscious before she could worry about it.

  Syrina knew it was hot. She wasn’t used to being hot, or cold for that matter, and the sensation snapped her awake.

  Hello, the voice said.

  Syrina ached all over, and she still could only manage shallow, painful gasps.

  Your side isn’t bleeding anymore, but I think there’s a rib in your lung. That’s the sort of thing I can’t fix without your help.

  Syrina nodded. Even that slight gesture made her feel woozy. She squirmed but couldn’t get into a position where she could reach into her chest in the confined space of the duct.

  “How long have I been unconscious?”

  Not long. My sense of time is strange when you’re not awake, but I don’t think it’s been longer than fifteen minutes or so.

  “They’re looking for me.”

  I’m sure. You crawled a long way, though. They must not have any idea where you are. I think they’re trying to flush you out. It started getting hotter a few minutes ago. A lot hotter.

  “It might just be a coincidence.”

  Might be.

  Whether or not it was coincidence didn’t matter. She needed to get out. She began squirming along on her belly again. Each short gasp sent bright rays of pain from her chest to the rest of her body. She started to cough. Blood flecked the dusty metal and glinted in the trickle of light coming from somewhere ahead. Something black and lumpy splattered into the grime in front of her, and she grimaced as she dragged her body over it.