The Kalis Experiments

by R A Fisher

  The silo and the warehouse were made from a conglomeration of wood and stone, reinforced at random with white-washed rectangular plates of copper. The tower’s rough construction made it easy to climb, even with an unlit oil lantern and flint gripped in the remains of her left hand, but Syrina began to worry about the next step.

  You’ll be fine. Just don’t hesitate.

  No, hesitation wouldn’t do at all.

  Syrina flipped open the little ventilation hatch in the roof of the silo, sighed and closed her eyes.

  Unprocessed navaras seeds burned with a little fizzle, and the silos were full this time of year. The hard part wasn’t going to be blowing the place up. She couldn’t risk a fuse. It would leave evidence for an astute observer, of which there would be plenty around in a week or two. The lamp was risky enough, but if she demolished the silos and surrounding buildings, she didn’t think anyone would be able to tell where it had come from.

  Trust me.

  “Shut up.”

  The bright side was that it might be the last time she’d need to say that to herself.

  She lit the wick and felt her heart slow and stop as she stepped through the Papsukkal Door and dropped the lamp. Then she jumped.

  On the other side of the Door, she floated more than fell away from the silo. She began to think she’d miscalculated, that maybe the navaras wasn’t churned up enough to ignite, when a flash of blueish-white and yellow light bathed the twilight across the farm. She twisted to face the fireball blooming behind her and hoped the impact of landing on her back wouldn’t kill her. Then again, she wouldn’t need to worry about that until she’d survived long enough to hit the ground. The wall of light spread toward her, fast even from the other side of the Papsukkal Door.

  Syrina spun, ducked, and somersaulted away from the molten chunks of copper and flaming bits of wood. The sound of the explosion came to her as a low steady rush that drowned out all other sounds except the roar in her own head. Even through the Door, she wasn’t fast enough. A smoldering rock grazed her cheek, drawing blood, and as she contorted away from it, she threw her leg in front of a burning spear of wood that impaled through her thigh. The shockwave hit her with a wall of heat, like standing on the lip of an erupting volcano. It launched her faster, further, and she was just another piece of shrapnel waiting to get embedded into the first thing she hit. She turned back toward the rushing ground and attempted to twist away from the oncoming trees. Somewhere, someone told her that her leg hurt.

  The ground approached at an angle that a duck landing on a pond might be comfortable with. She curled into a ball, tucked her head beneath her shoulder, and hit the ground like a wheel. Syrina rolled up a shallow slope and launched off the top, bracing for some sort of horrible impact, but none came. She hit the ground again, felt something sharp slice into her back, rolled twenty more times, and came to a stop against a rain-smoothed boulder.

  It wasn’t so much that she stepped out of the Papsukkal Door as fell from it, and she lay there for a while, watching the sky growing dark in the quiet of the evening. Dark, except for the orange glow to the north which lit up the low clouds and turned the damp smell of the forest acrid. Quiet, except for the shouts drifting from the other side of the ridge. It wasn’t just the farm burning, but the forest around her, too, as the gentle rain of fire set the underbrush alight. Syrina couldn’t pass out here.

  Her back and cheek itched, and she needed to bite on a piece of wood to yank the spear of timber from her thigh. Then she staggered away, trying to stay pointed more or less south, fighting the sleep that crawled out of the cold ground, inviting her to lie down and rest a while. She could feel the entity in her mind occupying itself with keeping her focused enough to drag one foot in front of the other.

  When both fire and shouts were lost in the darkness, she lay down for an hour. However she felt, she couldn’t take more time than that, and the voice did a commendable job of making sure she didn’t.

  Syrina had to get back to NRI before anyone else did.

  27

  The Trap

  Words poured from the woman’s mouth, and it was a moment or two before Adan Spaad, Storik’s head receptionist and personal valet, could put together what she was talking about. She was short, filthy, and breathless, with matted brown hair cropped short. What was left of one of her hands was knotted with old burns. She’d burst into the vast lobby of NRI’s headquarters with a flare of dust and sunlight, already in mid-rant, and had focused her attention on Spaad. It was only a few minutes before the management offices in Aado closed for tomorrow’s Eye Night, and he wanted to go home.

  There’d been a silo explosion at one of the farms. A bad one, too, she said over and over again, as if there was another kind. Spaad forced himself to accept that he wasn’t going home just yet. He was reluctant to give into a migrant’s hysterics, but an explosion up north had the potential to sink their numbers for a year or more. Storik needed to know about it.

  He fetched her some water and told her to sit still and collect herself so that when his boss came down, the old man would be able to understand even half of what she was rambling about.

  Storik was busy, of course, even this late in the day, and it was almost an hour before he appeared in the lobby, disheveled and frowning. The woman had cleaned her face and reduced her sobs to a quiver in her voice, which rose and fell when she spoke like she was asking random questions. Her breathing was quick and exaggerated, but at least she was coherent.

  “What’s this about?” Storik’s frown edged downward.

  She took a deep, shuddering breath. “The silo? The grind silo at Nathco three-thirty-nine. I saw a flash. I think the grinder sparked? Then…”

  He shook his head, and his eyes narrowed. “Why didn’t you go to the Nathco office?”

  She shook her head back at him. “It’s another day into Eheene, and they won’t be open for Eye Night, so that’s another day. I don’t think anyone was hurt? But I thought it was important enough to stop here? I ran the whole way.”

  “And you knew to come here?” Storik’s brown eyes were piercing.

  The woman shifted in her chair and looked at the floor. “I heard a manager talking the other day? To someone about the head office in Aado. Was I not supposed to come here? I didn’t know…” She looked like she might start crying again.

  Storik sighed. “I see. No, it’s fine. I suppose you were right to come here. Whatever you saw, though, it wasn’t the grinder. They’ve all been updated. It’s been ten years since one jammed bad enough to cause an explosion.”

  The woman shook her head again. “I heard it catch. Right before the flash. I’m sure.”

  “Pah. Well, I’d better have a look at it.”

  Spaad’s small black eyes looked nervous. “Sir, it’s winter already up there, that far north and away from the coast. Anyway, your wife is waiting. I’m sure there’s someone else who can—”

  “If there’s a problem with the grinders, it’s better to know about it now and not after there’s another accident. And my wife can continue to wait.”

  Spaad drew his eyebrows together. “But after an explosion, there won’t be any trace of what might’ve caused—”

  “Nonsense. I’m the one who designed the new grinders, and I know what to look for. I’m not going to trust anyone else to find the problem, and I’m not going to wait until the spring thaw when everything is rusted or washed away. An airship this time of year is out of the question, I suppose?”

  Spaad shook his head, looking terrified that his boss would ask for one anyway.

  Storik only sighed and nodded. “Fine. We’ll leave first thing in the morning. Make the proper security arrangements.”

  Spaad wagged his head and slid off. Storik turned his attention to the weeping woman. The injury to her hand looked like an old one. He always marveled at what the non-citizens had to endure.

  “You. You’re coming with me. Show me what you saw and where you saw it. Now go get yourself
cleaned up. I’ll see to it that someone finds room for you in the barracks tonight.”

  “Of course.” She smiled a little, through her tears.

  Storik scowled at her, spun, and disappeared back into the NRI complex, leaving her to find her own way to the barracks, under the watchful eyes of security.

  They packed extra fuel for Storik’s carriage lanterns and left early the next morning, giving them a few hours of thin light before the Eye Night. Syrina followed in the skin of the woman she’d decided to call Myna, though no one had bothered to ask her what her name was yet.

  They first traveled up a winding road, then a straight trail. The forest was thick on either side. There was no conversation, and their procession was silent except for the steady creak, creak of a carriage wheel turning on an under-greased axle, and the gentle clatter of the camel’s hooves on the frozen ground. She watched the karakh travel alongside, surging in and out of the darkness. It leaped from tree to tree when the trunks were thick enough to support its massive body, tearing huge rents into the bark and smashing through limbs. Through glades and saplings, it scuttled at an angle like a shaggy, saucer-eyed crab, whistling, clicking and warbling at its shepherd. Watching it in its natural environment for the first time, Syrina realized just how unsubtle the thing was. Almost cute in its ungainliness.

  They moved north until what would’ve been dusk if the Eye hadn’t hidden the sun, but the going was slow, with no light except the swinging beams of the lanterns. Clouds had rolled in from the west, and after the Eye set, there were no stars.

  The air was sharp with cold. The six guards and Myna huddled around the little fire they’d built with Spaad, who doubled as Storik’s carriage driver. No one said anything, and Syrina was too hung up on her own thoughts to strike up a conversation. She couldn’t see where the karakh had gone off to, but every once in a while, she heard something clicking and crashing in the bushes around the campsite. Storik never emerged from the heated carriage except to relieve himself.

  Day returned, but the sun didn’t. The girl who brought the news of the explosion, Myna—one of the bodyguards had finally asked her what her name was—sometimes muttered to herself. Spaad couldn’t blame her. He’d heard stories of silo explosions. He wouldn’t have handled it any better.

  They began to pass a trickle of people coming from the other direction. A few were driving caravans from other farms, hauling navaras, but most were empty-handed, returning from the Nathco farm. A few suffered from minor burns, and one man had a broken arm, but most were just in the after-effects of shock.

  Storik interrogated the first dozen from the cracked open window of the carriage, but no one had many details beyond what Myna had already told him. It had happened right after the evening bell, and so far, she was the only one who had seen it.

  Myna greeted a few of the migrants as friends, relieved they had survived, but they just looked at her with dull, tired eyes and responded with confused looks or weary nods. After a while, they passed each other in silence.

  The returning workers warned them that one of the bridges was out ahead. Probably the wind. The weather was strange this far north, one had babbled. Especially in the fall and spring. Isolated storms, like miniature hurricanes, could blow through an area with no warning, covering everything in hands of snow or ice in a few hours, before evaporating into a gentle breeze as fast as it had come. Storik had only grunted at him and closed the carriage window.

  A few days later, they reached the broken bridge. It had been rope and wood, spanning over a narrow forested canyon. At one time, it had been sturdy enough to hold two teams of camels at a time, pulling carts loaded with navaras. Now the remnants of it hung down into the gorge. Chunks of wood and long tangles of rope gnarled in the giant trees around the creek below like the web of some giant, drunken spider.

  For the first time, Storik left the confines of the carriage for something besides relieving himself along the road, which at this point was little more than two wheel ruts cut through the hard ground of the forest. He frowned over the edge of the broken bridge and spat into the canyon.

  “I know this place.” He walked back to the waiting door of his carriage, held open by Spaad. “This bridge was only six or seven years old. Cut five, maybe six hours off the trip. I hope no one was on it when it went down. I suppose we’ll find out.”

  “The weather can be like that up here,” Myna said.

  Storik ignored her. “An hour behind us, maybe less, the old trail leads down into the ravine. Probably too overgrown now to take the camel and the damn wagon.” He shot a triumphant look at his bodyguards and climbed back into the carriage.

  What began as cliffs some three hundred feet above the creek tapered down to steep wooded slopes. The grassy land around the stream was level, wide enough for an overgrown trail that crisscrossed every two hundred hands or so. The brook was a little too wide to jump and painfully cold. Remnants of the old road could be seen through the dead summer weeds, littered with saplings and clogged with fallen rocks.

  They had left the carriage where the road forked toward the broken bridge with one of the bodyguards. Storik seemed to enjoy walking. He selected a long walking stick from the side the path and plodded along between his men, humming to himself. The bodyguards tensed and complained that they needed to keep track of their ward while he was exposed outside of the carriage. Storik conceded that there were occasional robberies during the harvest, but the idea didn’t seem to bother him much.

  The karakh went on ahead, leaping from tree to shuddering, creaking tree, back and forth across the brook when the trunks were big enough to support it, which was most of them along the stream bed. Storik and his guards followed while Myna and Spaad took the rear, hiking together in silence. Myna seemed nervous and fidgety. Spaad left her alone.

  Evening was growing somewhere behind the clouds when they got to the first remnants of the bridge scattered along the bottom of the canyon. First, a copper bolt. Then a few shattered boards that had fallen all the way to the path. Wooden support rods and broken planks dangled in the twilight, and a huge snarl of rope wove through the trees above. The limbs were bare except for a smattering of dry leaves, and a thick blanket of the ones that had already fallen coated the path.

  There was a waterfall nearby, a little further up. They could hear it rumble somewhere beyond the bend in the canyon. The constant mist from the falling water made the ground icy, and gray moss clung to the immense trunks of the ancient trees and hung from their branches like wisps of dirty snow.

  As they approached the bulk of the ruined bridge, Myna slipped on a wet stone and fell to the side of the brook, yelping in pain. Spaad paused, torn between helping her and following his boss, who had continued on after a glance back. The karakh bounded on ahead, taking advantage of the massive trees that grew near the waterfall.

  Spaad decided on chivalry and turned to Myna, who was curled on the ground, holding her ankle and muttering curses under her breath. Storik stopped to yell back something about needing to hurry and the sun going down, his words drowned out by the rush of water.

  There was a tremendous crack, like a strike of lightning. One of the biggest trees, rotten on the inside and gouged by a falling boulder, had splintered under the weight of the karakh. The snap was the old fir’s death knell as it made its final tumble onto the steep hillside.

  The karakh, off balance, leaped across the creek, toward another huge trunk, reaching back and tossing the shepherd in the same direction, intent on catching him after it landed to protect him from the impact of the landing. They had done the same move hundreds of times in the past few days. This time, though, the shepherd’s right arm snared in the web of rope from the fallen bridge as he flailed through the air. The karakh, focused on the landing, reached back to catch him, and its strength and weight turned the gesture to a yank. The shepherd screamed as his arm ripped off at the shoulder.

  There was a convulsion of blood. The karakh placed the shepherd back in h
is place behind its head, but the man didn’t grab onto the chains. He balanced there for a few seconds, then keeled forward into the fur of his mount, pressing his face into it, letting go of the tattered flesh of his hemorrhaging shoulder to run his fingers through the coarse hair. Then he slid off and landed with a thud and a splash, face down and half submerged in the stream.

  Myna began to cry in low, peeling sobs.

  The karakh, for all its brutal ugliness, looked down on the body of its shepherd with human-like shock and unleashed a long warbling, clicking scream. Then the glaze in its owl-like eyes turned from grief to rage, and it focused on the people closest to it—Storik and his personal guard.

  A few of the bodyguards had the wherewithal to draw their weapons and move between the karakh and Storik, who was staring up at the beast with detached horror. None of them had any real way of dealing with a karakh.

  There was a brief pause before the creature took a short hop to get within arm’s length. Its first swipe tore two bodyguards into slabs of meat that splashed into the stream like flabby red stones tumbled from the cliffs. Their blood swirled with the shepherd’s and turned the brook crimson as it bubbled past Myna and Spaad.

  Entrails and strings of blood still hung from the karakh’s right hand as it lurched forward another step and impaled Storik on its bronze-bolted tusks. It shook its head like a dog shaking off water, and uttered more whines and clicks until the Chief Engineer and Chairman of NRI tumbled in two pieces among the corpses of his bodyguards. Spaad screamed and tried to run, but Myna grabbed him and pulled him down to her, holding him in a grip strong for such a small woman.