by R A Fisher
Her knock against the heavy metal sounded dull, like banging on a stone wall. But a few seconds later it silently swung inward. The Seneschal who greeted her with a wordless bow didn’t lead her into the study where she’d met Ormo the few other times he’d summoned her to his private quarters, though she could see the light from the fireplace glinting on the half-open bronze door that led there. Instead, the little man led her further into the chambers, to the spiral stair that led to the top of Ormo’s tower.
The Seneschal left her there and disappeared back into the palace. The stairway was broad, the steps shallow. There was no guardrail. Each stair was again cut from alternating obsidian and white marble. In the center, a massive brass brazier was sunk into the floor, burning with blue flame fed by pipes that ran all the way to the naphtha cisterns buried below the city. There was no other source of light, but the brazier flickered and glowed against the polished walls all the way to the top, where Syrina could make out a mosaic of the Skalkaad Spiral set into the ceiling.
The cold didn’t particularly bother her, but the warmth from the brazier was pleasant. She took her time mounting the stairs and hesitated a moment at the top to bask in the faint rising heat.
“Kalis Syrina,” Ormo said when she stepped out onto the terrace.
He waved off her bow and opened his arms to fold her into his robes for a brief, warm embrace. She returned the hug, glad they were meeting in his private quarters, where Ormo preferred forgoing with the usual formality he upheld when seated on his dais.
She stepped back when he released her, taking in the details of her surroundings. Twenty years of training and nine more as one of Ormo’s Kalis, but this was the first time she’d been here. A half-dome of marble arced over and behind her, robbing the view of the fourteen other palace towers and the winter fire in the north. The ubiquitous Eye loomed high over the southern horizon, rendering the steepled marble rooftops of Eheene faceless in its electric amethyst light. Beyond the city, she could make out the black plain of the Sea of Skalkaad. The bows of the ships gleamed where they anchored in the deep water beyond the harbor, slaves to the tides. The harsh glow of their beacons illuminated the thin frozen mist that had settled across the bay, but the water seemed to swallow their light. Wind came in icy gusts.
Ormo was wrapped in thick robes of blue and white, though the colors blended under the Eye into varying shades of violet. Beneath his hood, Syrina could make out the black and white geometry of his painted face. His breath froze when he exhaled, and the vapors fell like a dying bird and vanished in the shadows cast by his bulk. He was round, and the shortest of the Fifteen, but Syrina didn’t quite come up to his chin.
“You have always served me well,” he rumbled.
She tried to make out his expression, but it was impossible under the hood and the paint.
“I know there have been Kalis who have served their masters better than I have.” She wondered why she felt uneasy.
“You’re young yet. Your thirtieth year. I hope to have you for another hundred or more. That is, in fact, the reason I summoned you up here.”
Syrina couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so she waited. She thought she could discern a smile from the shadows under his hood. Anxiousness and excitement vied for control of her stomach.
Ormo put his thumb and little finger in his mouth and let out a high, warbling whistle. A second later, a white and silver owl with wings flecked in black swooped from behind the half-dome and floated down to perch on his shoulder. It settled and blinked at Syrina with round, curious eyes. It stood twice as large as Ormo’s hooded head, and tufts of dark feathers stood from its crown, curving inward like horns or pointed black ears.
She couldn’t think of anything to say to that either.
“His name is Triglav. A good name. A god ancient even to the ancestors. A god of war. Appropriate, maybe. Especially if you were to take him as your pet.”
Syrina blinked. She’d never heard of a Kalis receiving a gift before, much less a pet, and she said as much. But even as she spoke, she felt a pang of something unfamiliar when she looked at the owl. She realized, inexplicably, that she liked it.
“That’s true,” Ormo replied.
Now she was sure she could hear a smile in his voice.
“Take him as an exception to tradition, then, in exchange for your future loyalty.”
“You have my loyalty already, Ma’is, now and always.”
But an alien sense of mistrust seeded her gut. Ormo didn’t do anything without a reason.
He gave a slight shake of his arm, and Triglav floated over to Syrina’s shoulder and stayed there, gently grasping her naked skin with black, needle-sharp talons. She felt the tug of affection again, stronger this time, and it leaned over to press its head against hers. She guessed it liked her, too.
“Of that, I have no doubt,” he said.
“And how do you think this bird is going to help me?”
Ormo let out a deep chuckle and reached out a gloved hand to pat her cheek. “It’s a clever creature and well-trained. Just as you are. I have faith that you’ll find many uses for him in the years to come.”
“Of course,” Syrina said, without hesitation, pushing aside a hundred questions buzzing around her head. “So what would you have me do, Ma’is?”
“Only what I would always have you do, Kalis. Now here is a name…”
2
The Accounting Problem
It wasn’t Lees’s name that Ormo gave her then. It was more than a year before his name came up. In the meantime, things returned to business as usual for Syrina, with the addition of Triglav. Watch him, steal that, kill her. Working with the owl became as natural for her as it had being alone. He seemed to know her thoughts, and he always did what she wanted.
When Lees’s name came up, it came up like all the others had.
She met Ormo in his Hall. It was decorated like his private chambers, and for that matter, like most of Eheene. Walls built from obsidian and white marble blocks made a rectangular checkered pattern, otherwise unadorned. Naphtha braziers hissed bluish-white flames in the corners and left only the top of the dais in the center of the vast room in shadows. The onyx floor whispered and hummed when Syrina’s bare feet padded over it, but she’d long ago stopped being disconcerted by the sound. Triglav circled somewhere outside. He’d find her within a few minutes of coming out and either land on her shoulder or follow above, depending on his mood.
“There’s a delicate situation I’d like you to look into,” Ormo said.
He began a lot of the jobs he gave her that way.
“Of course there is,” she said. “As usual, I’d like nothing better.”
“I know.”
Once again, she could feel his smile through the paint and shadows, as sure as she could feel Triglav’s presence somewhere outside.
“As I said, it’s a delicate matter. Subtlety is of the essence.”
“Isn’t it always?”
He chuckled down at her. “There’s a merchant—a low merchant—named Xereks Lees. For the past several years there have been growing discrepancies between his reported profits and costs. They’re beginning to show troubling tendencies. I’d like you to investigate the matter.”
Syrina couldn’t hide her disappointment. “If it’s an accounting issue, Ma’is, do you need a Kalis to deal with it? Surely—”
“Mr. Lees is a powerful man. About as powerful as someone can be without being invited to join the High Merchant’s Syndicate. Powerful enough that perhaps one day he’ll be asked to replace one of the Fifteen. His power, no doubt, comes in part from the backing of one of my colleagues. It’s for this reason I have ignored his inconsistencies until now. However, they have begun to affect my own interests past the point where I can pretend they don’t exist. If I’m going to pursue any action against Mr. Lees, legal or otherwise, I need to know what’s happening so I can decide whether it’s worth the risk. If it is, I need proof I can bring to the othe
r High Merchants. Enough that the one backing him will have no recourse against me.”
Syrina nodded and sighed. Paperwork. “Delicate. Fine. Where can I find this Xereks Lees?”
“He manufactures a wide range of ceramic and metal machine parts for local interests—naphtha refineries and the like—and for steam machines in N’narad. His offices are adjacent to his warehouse near the commercial port in the Foreigner’s District. Exporter Row.”
“N’narad. So he has dealings with the Church?”
“I don’t have details, but as difficult as it is to trade with N’narad without getting involved with the Church, it is likely.”
“Okay, then. Delicate. I’ll see what I can find. Anything else I should know?”
“He gets most of his raw components from Naasha Skaald.”
“Who? The name sounds familiar.”
“The materials merchant—copper mostly—who’s been having trouble with Corsair raids on her coastal smelters.”
“Ah, right.”
“Lees’s costs have been going up parallel to Skaald’s security expenses, same as everyone else’s.”
“I see. All right. I think I can use that.”
“I have faith, Kalis. Let me know if there’s anything else you need. Until then.”
Syrina spent the rest of the day hashing out her plan and getting some old documents from Ormo’s archives that would be easy to alter. Then she stopped by the room that Ormo kept for her for a couple hours to put on the face and clothes of a young N’naradin merchant marine. She went with a male since women in N’narad who weren’t Church officials tended toward less martial occupations. She preferred the faces of the poor for generic poking-around jobs. Merchants and other affluent types never did their own work if they could hire a lackey to do it for them, and foreign peasants were common and ignored where she was headed. It wasn’t unusual for unscrupulous captains to abandon their hired help to the alleys of the Foreigner’s District if they were going back empty and didn’t need the extra hands. Contracts forged with fresh, illiterate sailors often included provisions about getting paid upon return to their home port. Abandoning rubes in distant lands was an easy loophole. The wait was months or even years to sign onto a ship going back to wherever they came from, and a lot of them wound up getting remedial work in the District in the meantime. A few might even apply for Skalkaad citizenship, and a small fraction of those might earn enough tin to get it and see the other side of the wall that separated the District from the rest of Eheene.
As she dressed, she prepared her mind, getting into character, and she thought about what Ormo had told her. If this Lees was dealing with the Church of N’narad, it could make things a lot more complicated.
It was well after dark when she reached the high, copper gates separating Eheene from the District. The wall was twenty hands of granite, topped with another twenty of vertical pine posts, polished on the city-side, which was unguarded. She had no problem scaling over it and slipping past the mercenaries that sat on the ground on the other side playing cards, even with her tattoos hidden under the false skin of a seventeen-year-old N’naradin boy. They were looking for people sneaking into the city, not out of it.
The contrast between the District and the rest of Eheene was stark. Wide cobbled streets and high marble houses were replaced with narrow, unpaved alleys and low wooden hovels. And there were no lacy bridges, no oily canals. The streets in the rest of the city were all but abandoned this late, but the District thrived at night. People staggered from the multitudes of bars and brothels, laughing, fighting, and shouting in a confluence of languages. Honest peddlers hawked on every corner, yodeling about everything from cups to locks to ceramic piping. Others whispered from the alleys, selling tiny leather pouches full of delezine and the glass pipes to smoke it in, or sex, or slaves, or all three. Once, a few years back when she’d been there on another job, Syrina had been offered a wailing infant.
The bronze pipes that fed Eheene’s naphtha lamps were concealed by the elegant architecture on the citizen’s side of the wall. In the Foreigner’s District, aging copper tubes ran along rooftops from building to building, or led along the edges of the muddy streets, half-exposed and green with patina. In some sections, pipes had burst generations ago and never replaced. Now those streets were lit with torches, and candles flickered behind crooked shutters.
The District might be alive in the middle of the night, but Lees’s office wasn’t going to be, so she made her way to an inn she’d used before. An ancient, sprawling, dilapidated mess universally known, for some reason, as the Cranky Maiden, even though the sign over the brilliant orange door showed only a bed and a spilled pewter mug. It was less than a span from Exporter Row.
Syrina swaggered in looking drunk enough to not get noticed, but not so drunk that someone might try to rob her and put down two N’naradin tin Three-Sides from Ormo’s infinite coffers. Enough for a private room for a fortnight, plus another ten copper balls to be sure she got one where the locks worked.
The main floor of the Cranky Maiden was a high-ceilinged common room with a dozen long tables and a bar that ran the length of the back wall. Behind that, doors led to various private meeting rooms, the kitchens, and the cellar. Across the front of the room, filthy windows let in murky yellow light. Two unstable looking staircases led up to a mezzanine that ran above the bar. Smaller, more private tables ran along it, and two doors led back into the sleeping areas. The one on the right led to a series of dorms, each with a furnace in the center and twenty or so cots. The left one led to the private rooms, and that’s where Syrina stumbled. She found her door, made sure the locks really did work, and settled in.
The bed was small, but the linens were clean. Syrina was more comfortable sleeping on the floor, anyway. One of the walls was the chimney for the fireplace in the kitchen, so it was uncomfortably warm even with the window open, which in turn was small and dirty and looked out onto the wooden face of building opposite, so close she could almost touch it. She could climb out that way if she had to. Triglav found the window a few minutes after she settled in, and perched on the sill to watch her.
Syrina spent two nights and three days lurking around Lees’s warehouse, watching all the comings and goings, and followed some of the more interesting goings when it looked like they might be up to something interesting. It wasn’t strictly necessary, but she wasn’t one to jump into a situation without checking out all the players first if she had a choice about it.
She spent another two days in her room, doctoring the archived documents she’d gotten from Ormo’s library, changing what she could and faking the rest, along with the seal, until even the merchant whose name she was forging wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from one written by their own hand. As a rule, a Kalis needed to be more thorough than her target, and Lees would be as thorough as they came.
In the end, she was satisfied that she had all the information she was going to get without having a look inside Lees’s place. She took one more night to go back to the palace and confirm a few points with Ormo, then allowed herself a few hours of sleep at The Cranky Maiden.
As she drifted off, she felt Triglav find his spot on the windowsill.
Exporter Row was quiet in the early afternoon drizzle compared to the rest of the District. A few warehousing goons moved here and there, and once she needed to make way for a cart laden with bricks and long wooden dowels pulled by two shaggy black camels. But an hour after noon, most of the people were already in the work yards and warehouses, doing whatever it was they were paid to do. The air stank with tarfuel smoke from the N’naradin steamships anchored in the harbor, and her eyes burned.
Xereks Lees’s place was easy to find. Exporter Row was eighteen blocks long and two blocks wide, running along the northeast side of the commercial docks. His was the nicest building, if not the largest. Its wood was painted white. The high windows were cleaner than those of the Cranky Maiden’s, and LEES was painted in wide red letters ac
ross the side of the warehouse and above the door of the smaller adjacent office.
Syrina entered the office without knocking, ignoring the sign that said, PRIVATE. NO ENTRY.
The man behind the desk had a gaunt face and pudgy body. He lingered in that indeterminate age between thirty and fifty. What was left of his thin black hair was cropped short. He looked over his shoulder from where he fiddled with a row of dark wooden filing cabinets standing along the back wall, on either side of the door that led to Lees’s office. He wore loose, tailored, dark green trousers and a black satin vest, and he sported three large gems—red, black, and yellow—in rings on his right hand.
“This is a private business,” he said to the boy hovering in the doorway. “Didn’t you see the sign on the door? Are you lost?”
The lad appeared young, even among the N’naradin deckhands stranded in the Foreigner’s District, who averaged under seventeen. But his boyish cheeks, still free of stubble, were painted with burns, and his large green eyes were old and cold as glass.
“You mean you’re not expecting me?” The youth scowled and his scarred brow furrowed.
His N’naradin accent was thick, mushing his words together and rendering him almost unintelligible.
The man behind the counter only smirked and turned back to his filing. “Hardly.”
The boy sighed as if he weren’t surprised, stepped into the office, and sat in one of the two straight-backed wooden chairs opposite the plain reception desk.