The Kalis Experiments

by R A Fisher

  N’nareth smiled, sincerely this time. “Excellent. Since there’s a good chance he won’t need your wares anyway, I’m sure I can find another buyer within a few weeks. A month at the most.”

  “I hope that won’t be necessary.” Rina frowned. “I may not have that much time before work calls me back to Eheene.”

  “We shall see. I’ll contact you after I speak with him. Early next week.” N’nareth stood with Rina to shake her hand.

  Rina flashed her a smile as she bowed, then left.

  Lees’s buyer, whoever he was, would have records of what he was getting from Eheene. With a little luck, they might even say who was paying for it. N’nareth probably had some version as well, but Syrina was willing to bet they’d just be lists of serial numbers, useless by themselves, and she’d rather meet the buyer, in any case.

  If Lees was just pocketing the extra tin without recording it to avoid the taxes, that would be the end of it. But if this buyer was getting free equipment, it still begged the question, why?

  Before anything, though, she needed to make sure the buyer had a reason to deal with her at all. If he thought his work was as important as N’nareth implied, Syrina was sure he’d be desperate enough to deal with anyone if he had to, and she had a good idea where to start.

  8

  Pirates

  There were quite a few Ristroans in Fom—descendants of Corsairs and those who’d converted to the Church. Syrina had assumed a guy like the one she’d seen go into N’nareth’s place would be easy to track down, but there were about a hundred thousand Ristroans living in the city out of its five million citizens, and at least half of them maintained their native customs and dress, whatever allegiance they swore to the N’naradin Heavens.

  Syrina couldn’t take a lot of time finding the man she needed. If the mystery buyer got back to N’nareth and told her he had all the Ristroan parts he needed, thank you very much, she doubted she would get another chance to change his mind.

  She gave a passing thought to spending another day or two in the ferns outside the office to see if the pirate turned up a second time, but she didn’t know enough about how N’nareth conducted her business. It might be months before the Ristroan needed to meet with her again.

  She spent an afternoon deliberating by way of getting drunk on rice spirits, dressed in the skin of a diminutive dock worker, in the seediest bar she could find—a place just a few blocks from Tower Five called The Whore’s Crack. She found herself hoping for a brawl to break out around her so she could get involved and clear her head a bit, but the few other customers huddled at the bar seemed too depressed to put forth that much effort. As she sat there, rocking back and forth in front of her sixth cup, she decided she might as well try the only other person she’d met in Fom. At least he and the Ristroan worked with the same importer.

  Reluctantly, she concentrated a few minutes to purge the alcohol from her system, slipped into a quiet alley where she could relieve herself behind a midden heap, and went back to work.

  Helrith Caff’s office was in another affluent parish not far from the arenas and the Market Triangle. All the buildings were whitewashed limestone and plaster, two and three stories high, with steep red tile roofs that glistened in the drizzle.

  A tiny, sallow dark-skinned woman with jaundiced, watery eyes ambled down one of the dim streets that spiked from the cluster of arenas in the center of the parish. She flicked her black locks from her face by flipping her head, and her neck strained from grinding her teeth—a common side effect of delezine addiction—as she scanned up and down the streets, looking at the houses. She wore a cheap, clean white shirt with cuffs that reached halfway to her elbows, and a worn tan riding coat, dark with oil to keep out the damp, and its tails dragged on the ground. The streets were crowded—as always in Fom—but she received a wide berth when people noticed that her skin bore the same unhealthy yellow tinge as her green eyes, and the backs of her hands and spots on her forehead were flaking and cracked.

  She approached a house as the night grew brighter with the Eye rising somewhere above the fog, and paused in the gloom of a nearby alley. Behind her, a vent to the Tidal Works sculpted into a trio of dancing fish began to sputter tepid, oily steam.

  A few minutes later, a large white and silver owl with tufted black feathers like horns and speckled wings floated down from the low clouds to settle on the dripping eves, studying the street with wide eyes. A sign dangling above the door depicted a quill inside a triangle, the N’naradin symbol for an accounting firm.

  After a while, the lights went out in the office, and the owl took wing back up into the mist. A minute later, Helrith Caff and another man came out, locked both doors and the gate, bid each other goodnight, and headed off in opposite directions. After another few minutes, the sickly woman headed off in the same direction as Caff. Every once in a while, she would pause at an intersection, but invariably chose the same way he’d gone. The faint calls of an owl hooted from somewhere above the roofs.

  In fifteen minutes, Caff arrived at his home in a building that looked much like his office—one of the white blocky, red-roofed townhouses that crowded down both sides of the street. The owl glided down to perch above the door, eyes wide as it watched the woman approach a few minutes later.

  Without hesitation, the Ristroan went up to the porch and kicked in the heavy front door with strength shocking for her small size and sickly appearance. A little girl playing with wooden toy camels in the foyer screamed and began to cry as she fled deeper into the house, calling for her mother. The intruder ignored her and marched into the living room. Caff sat in a puffy green velvet chair in the corner, next to the lacy, abstract ceramic sculpture that connected to the Tidal Works and heated his home, which, even in the summer, was chilly and damp. His shoes were off, his jacket draped across the back of the chair, but he was still dressed in his gray and brown day clothes. A book lay open in his lap, and a glow lamp sprouted from the floor behind him to hiss yellow light over his shoulder.

  He leaped up, the book falling to the floor, and stumbled a few steps backward, his eyes wide with fear. The little girl and her mother were both hiding, but their whimpers could be heard coming down the stairs that led up from the foyer.

  “Heaven, grant us mercy!” Caff screamed, and took another step back until he pressed against the elaborate radiator, which was hissing and ticking with building heat.

  The woman drew a long ceramic knife from her belt but didn’t raise it. “Relax. We am here only a person to find.”

  Her accent was thick, strange.

  Caff blinked at her. She sat down in his chair and turned it to face him, gracefully nudging the fallen book out of the way with her foot, before raising her leg to rest it on the ticking sculpture and block Caff between it and the wall. She kept the knife out.

  “What do you about the business associates of Stysha N’nareth know?” She balanced the knifepoint on the tip of her finger, concentrating on the blade, but glancing at Caff out of the corner of her eye.

  Her corneas were a brilliant green, a contrast to the watery yellow around them.

  “What?” He seemed taken aback.

  The woman frowned and leaned forward, her leg still blocking him in as she pointed the white blade at his stomach.

  “Every time we must repeat, you will one finger lose.”

  He tried to back up more but could only press into the heater, which was now hot enough to make him wince.

  “What? I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know any of them. I’ve met a few, but I don’t know them. I’m just an accountant. I don’t deal with her business. I don’t meet her clients. Just the numbers. No names.” He began to cry.

  The woman looked uncomfortable. She leaned back into the cushions of the chair and started balancing the knifepoint again, this time on the back of her hand. She still didn’t drop her leg, and Caff seemed too flustered to try to climb over it.

  “We am for a man like us looking. Ristroan.” Her eye
s intent on the knife. “Do you a man like that who business does with Miss N’nareth know?”

  Caff wiped his face with his sleeve, trying to sort out the question. “What? No. I mean, I’ve seen a guy a few times. In her office. I mean, I’ve seen him, not… I don’t know him. I don’t even know his name. Is that what you’re trying to ask? Why don’t you just ask N’nareth?”

  “This man, green gems in his head?”

  Caff’s voice shook. “Yes.”

  The woman nodded. “The lady N’nareth needs know of us not. Understand? We to you come because you N’nareth knows, and she the man knows. He who can something from our employer take and to Fom come, to hide and not be found thinks he. But we him will find, Mister Caff, because we you found and you will us everything you know tell, or fingers…” The woman shrugged.

  Caff’s eyes grew wide again. “What?” He said again, confusion and terror plain on his face. “I don’t know anything else, I swear. No name, I told you. Nothing. N’nareth doesn’t do names. Not on paper. Just numbers. Please. I have a family…” He began to cry again.

  “That all?” She waved the knife vaguely.

  “He’s from the Lip, I think. Or he keeps shop there. N’nareth mentioned something once. Unless there’s another guy. If there’s another, I don’t…” He seemed to realize he was rambling and sucked in a shuddering breath, wiped his face with his sleeve. “That’s it. That’s all I know. Please.”

  The woman looked at him a long time, making a show of it. Then she stood and gave him a traditional Corsair bow, her arms out and one leg extended.

  “To your wife and child, our apologies.” She left through the broken door.

  Syrina headed toward the Lip after ditching the Ristroan woman on a rooftop, which she hoped she could find later. She didn’t relish the idea of mixing that particular skin tone a second time if she needed to use the girl again, and she thought she might be able to improve on it if she ever had the time. And she wasn’t looking forward to dyeing her eyes again if she didn’t have to. They still burned and watered. It had been a mistake to go overboard with the disguise like that without a good reason.

  The rain poured, and she hopped from rooftop to rooftop without a sound on the clay tiles, scaling the stucco walls of the higher buildings when she had to. It wasn’t late when she left Caff’s house, but it was morning by the time she reached the northern tip of Fom, known as the Lip. No sign or wall advertised that she was there, but the line that separated the Lip from the rest of the city was no less abrupt for the lack of one. High buildings built from stone became wooden single- and two-story shacks that crowded on top of each other from one block to the next. Every street was a narrow alley or dead end or both, and even narrower stairs descended into the old quarries. The crash of waves against cliffs was close enough to be heard and far away enough that it was impossible to know which direction the sound was coming from.

  The Lip comprised only a fifteenth of the land of the Crescent City, but it contained an eighth of the population. They lived within the layers of quarry tunnels and on the trellis of bridges and platforms running down the face of the northern cliffs, dangling all the way to the high tideline.

  The rest of Fom kept its cliffs clear so the sea could flow in and out of the Tidal Works, but there were no machines beneath the Lip. None of the hot running water, central heating, or glow bulbs that the rest of Fom was famous for. The old quarries here were lawless warrens filled with escaped prisoners, refugees, and the insane. At least, that’s what people in Eheene said. But Syrina wasn’t going to believe anything until she saw it for herself.

  Whatever else the Lip was, it was also a maze. There was no way she would find the still-nameless man she was looking for by wandering around and hoping for blind luck. She needed another face, and for that, she needed either privacy and a few raw materials or to go all the way back to Rina’s hotel to do-up something more professional. She didn’t want to take another day to go back to the hotel, and the Ristroan girl she’d just taken off didn’t fit with what she had in mind.

  The materials to make false skin were common enough once you knew what they were, if you weren’t too picky about your apparent health, so that wasn’t a problem. Good pigment was harder, but the light was poor in the best parts of Fom and downright dark in the Lip. The clothes—well, there were clothes everywhere, so that was easy. There was nothing she could do about hair, but bald men didn’t draw attention.

  Privacy proved to be the hardest thing to come by. She had to go to a rooftop garden almost a whole span back into Fom where she could take the hour or so she needed to do a decent job on the disguise. Triglav circled overhead and hooted to her when someone was coming.

  She ended up being a bald, pale effeminate man with a broken nose and what might be a mild case of jaundice. It wouldn’t have been her first or fifth choice to look for a businessman, even if he was a pirate, but it would do. She decided she’d used too much yellow again, but at least no one would think she was working for the Church.

  Syrina filled out the image with some ill-fitting, colorless clothes that looked like they’d been stitched from sacks. She didn’t have any shoes, so she muddied her feet until it covered her tattoos, and hoped no one would pay too much attention to them.

  Letting Triglav ride around on her shoulder was a gamble. It drew a lot of attention, and there was a chance, however small, that someone here might’ve heard about Rina’s pet on the ship from Eheene, but she was willing to take the chance. Even if someone had heard about Rina, they probably weren’t going to place the small under-nourished peasant on the Lip with her. People saw what they understood, and putting one-and-one together was too big of a reach for most. At worst she could explain it away as one of Rina’s errand boys, though she didn’t want to get Rina involved if she could help it. The bottom line was, the more attention she got, the more likely that the pirate would come to her just to shut her up.

  The stink of human hit her first when she first stepped into the quarries. A stench of sweat and excrement and sex and death was unfiltered by fresh air or breeze and blanketed with the tang of wood smoke and fish and saltwater.

  The second shock was the ant-like efficiency of the swarm of people existing in the tunnels. Some of the passages were so narrow that barely one person could fit through at a time, but it didn’t seem to slow the thousands pressing past each other through the maze of corridors. They maneuvered through halls most of them had lived in all their lives, with grace not even Syrina could come close to matching. She was glad she’d decided to wear the face. The tattoos would never hide her here in the constant press of bodies.

  Children were the only ones not smart enough to stay away from the little sick man with the owl. But there were children everywhere, playing in alcoves and chasing each other around the legs of the adults, playing tag or picking the pockets of the unwary. They paid the man no heed, even when grownups hissed their disapproval.

  Everyone else gave the little man as wide a berth as they were able to, and after a few forks, he came to a wider passage where vendors had set up in alcoves along one wall.

  “Machinery?” he asked each one. “You know, foreign stuff? Special stuff? Know what I mean? You know where to buy something like that? Not for me, of course, of course. For the boss.”

  And the owl on his shoulder would blink at the crowd around them in the hazy air, sleepy and curious.

  The vendors balked, shaking their heads, and muttered, “Nothing like that here.”

  But the rumor of his presence spread like fire through the tunnels before him, and after an hour or two they shook their heads at the owl man before he even had a chance to ask any questions.

  By the time the clouds had lightened into day and darkened again the next evening, he was an expected presence, and he got an occasional nod further into the maze, toward the cliffs or further down into the tunnels.

  Many hours later, he emerged on a platform of wet unfinished wood a few levels abo
ve the incoming tide smashing into the rocks below. Fishing sheds and lean-tos lined the limestone wall, and ladders of wood lashed together with rotting rope led down to the lower tiers. It was still night, but the glow of Fom lit the clouds from beneath and bathed the Lip in a sickly brownish glow. Thick wooden beams jutting from the cliff face supported the platforms. There were nine or ten tiers between the top and the dark line at the bottom which marked high tide. Black openings on each level led into the tunnels, and almost vertical stairs cut into the rock led to the crush of shanties on the top.

  A crude breakwater extended about a quarter-span out, a jagged tumbling of huge boulders and discarded blocks of stone piled up during low tide in a futile attempt to quell the sea. It was illegal to port in Fom anywhere but the harbor, but they told stories of smuggler captains and murderous pirates docking along the Lip even in Eheene. Even with the breakwater and at half-tide, the waves smashed and writhed against the rocks, and it was only possible to dock along the Lip when the tide was at its peak. Murderous or not, they would need to be insane to anchor there.

  The little man climbed down to the lowest platform, the incoming sea crashing and boiling some forty hands below. The structure he stood in front of was about fifty hands long and made from water-warped wood that leaned against the mossy rock. A short pier jutted less than thirty hands further out from the shack’s low entrance, suspended over the water by a stout beam beneath it. Two frayed ropes tied the end to the tier above. A big, tangled fishing net hung along the windowless wall of the lean-to, but it was dry and stiff as if it hadn’t been used in years.

  The owl blinked once and floated up into the Fom mist.