The Kalis Experiments

by R A Fisher

  N’talisan and one of the other assistants came out three hours later and closed the door behind them. It was afternoon now, and brighter. The clouds had lifted a little, and the drizzle had succumbed to a fine mist. The woman she’d seen tagging earlier wasn’t with them. Syrina wondered how she felt about being left behind.

  She decided to do it then and there. Assistants would be with him most of the time, and Syrina didn’t have the time or motivation to spare them. She was lucky there was only one now. The wide alley to the lab was empty, but a block or two in any direction and they’d be lost in the throngs of Fom where it would be impossible to do the job unseen. Plus, it was one thing to keep the audit quiet from Lees all the way up in Eheene. N’talisan would find out by dinnertime. Syrina would be lucky to find him after that if he was smart enough to realize where it would point, and Gaston N’talisan was nothing if not smart.

  She dropped into the street. He seemed oblivious as she slipped up behind him, fingers on her left hand rigid as she prepared to strike the nerves in his spine that would stop his heart. He’d have an early, unfortunate heart attack and a bruise on his back that would probably be explained away by his fall. If she was quick enough, she thought she might even be able to spare the assistant.

  Gaston whipped his body around, so quick it was a blur even to Syrina. He grabbed her wrist and dropped, tossing her over his shoulder onto the granite cobbles like a sack of potatoes. She stayed on the ground longer than she should have, not from the pain that danced around her senses, but from the shock of having been seen. Not just seen, but seen by her rub. It’s impossible.

  Gaston didn’t let his surprise at her attack show if he felt any. Before she’d even crumpled to the ground where he’d thrown her, his foot was coming toward her face. She rolled out of the way, noting that his gaze never left her eyes. Even when she spun away and back again, his eyes were there to meet hers. He knew what he was doing.

  As Syrina rolled away, her foot clipped up into his knee, and she spun upward to bring her palm into his face. He dropped back in a blur, not quite quick enough, and her fingers scraped his face at an angle. Her hand came away sticky with tough, rubbery globs of flesh. One side of Gaston’s face had peeled away to reveal his sharp blue eyes lost in a swirl of writhing tattoos.

  He—she—rolled back out of Syrina’s reach, stripping out of her now-useless costume at the same time. By the time the other Kalis stood, she was mostly lost to Syrina’s sight, as if Syrina was finding something out of the corner of her eye. She wanted to sit down for a minute and wonder why the hell Gaston N’talisan was a Kalis, but the blurry figure came at her again. The attack didn’t do any serious damage, but it knocked her off balance for a second, which was probably the point. The N’talisan-Kalis used the half-second to pause, sigh, and roll her eyes back into her head.

  She went through the Papsukkal Door a split second before Syrina could, and it was enough to keep her out of it. The N’talisan-Kalis streaked toward her so fast that Syrina couldn’t get a fix on her eyes, so she didn’t see the other Kalis until she barreled into Syrina’s chest and smashed her back into the limestone wall so hard Syrina heard her ribs pop. The N’talisan-Kalis smashed her fist into Syrina’s face, crushing her nose sideways and snapping her cheekbone. Syrina felt hot stickiness flood down her face, and she realized she was going to die. Her blood-covered face gave the N’talisan-Kalis a nice red target to practice on while Syrina squinted through the rain of her own blood, looking for sudden movement.

  Behind her, the vent to the Tidal Works began whistling in earnest, and the air began to thicken with brownish fog. Syrina dropped to her knees, hoping that if it happened to be at the same moment as the strike she knew was coming, it would make the N’talisan-Kalis miss and buy her own life a few more seconds.

  A white comet dropped out of the sky and hit the other Kalis while she was still ten hands away. A spray of blood arced into the street. Through the Papsukkal Door or not, Triglav was faster. He shot back up into the low clouds before the N’talisan-Kalis could react, no doubt as surprised by Syrina’s owl as Syrina had been by her. It was enough. Syrina felt her heart slow, then stop, and time stood still. She lunged from where she’d crouched against the wall, toward the bloody face that floated above a shadow in the middle of the alley and knocked the N’talisan-Kalis back against the opposite wall. Syrina pushed her fist hard into the woman’s solar plexus but was careful not to kill her. She just wanted her to sit still for a minute. She had questions.

  The Kalis’s head struck the stone, but she didn’t slow down, and she arced her hands up to smash over Syrina’s ears. It would’ve killed a normal person, but Syrina just heard a bang so loud it made her see white and all other sound died to nothing as if the world was suddenly wrapped in thick velvet. It stunned her, but Syrina was still on the other side of the Door, and it looked like the N’talisan-Kalis was already falling out of it. Syrina managed to stumble back a step just in time to make room for Triglav, who arced out of the clouds for a second swipe at the N’talisan-Kalis’s face.

  Syrina saw the crossbow bolt arc through white light and muffled noise. The feathers of it brushed past her face from somewhere behind her. Someone’s shooting at me.

  The bolt—she could’ve caught it, would’ve caught it if she’d thought about where it was going instead of why it hadn’t hit her—drifted like a paper bird, past her head and into Triglav’s back, where he was just arcing up from the N’talisan-Kalis to the safety of the clouds. He let out a soft hoot and fell like a stone to the cobbled street.

  What’s going on? A voice in Syrina’s head that sounded almost like her own shot through the spike of blind horror that pierced her the moment the bolt struck Triglav. Then it said, Never mind.

  Syrina leaped toward the other Kalis, who crouched against the wall, looking as shocked as Syrina had probably looked earlier, and dropped low, so her shoulder rammed into the N’talisan-Kalis’s chest. Syrina grabbed the woman’s wrist and broke her arm in three places. Then she spun around. The research assistant—the woman who’d been tagging innocuous pieces of metal earlier—still had the crossbow at her shoulder. Syrina darted forward, blind with grief and rage, faster than the bolt that had struck Triglav, intent on breaking the woman’s neck before the N’talisan-Kalis could recover from her shattered arm.

  The assistant stepped out of Syrina’s way as if Syrina was just walking toward her, and brought the crossbow down across the back of her head. Syrina stumbled, fell, jumped up and spun around, but all she saw were clothes drifting down to the wet cobblestones and a flash of motion out of the corner of her eye. A few globs of a waxy face oozed in the gutter. The abandoned crossbow clattered onto the ground.

  No, no, no, no, no. The crumpled white shape of Triglav lay in the street, burning behind her eyes even when she wasn’t looking at him. He’ll be okay. He’s okay.

  Syrina could feel herself tumbling out of the Papsukkal Door, but she wasn’t done yet. She staggered over to the N’talisan-Kalis, who hunched over, drained from her own Door, cradling her arm and staring down the street in shock, toward where the assistant had disappeared. Syrina dragged the woman into the door of the laboratory. The N’talisan-Kalis was too weak to resist. Whoever she was, Syrina’s training in Papsukkal was better.

  Then she killed the cowering male assistant. She didn’t like it, but she was about to be vulnerable in a Church city, and he knew what she was and where she would be. She tossed him into the room, too. Then she picked up Triglav’s still-warm body and collapsed into the lab herself, with enough wherewithal to wedge the crossbar across the door, jamming it closed.

  “You’re fine,” she whispered to the limp form, stroking his feathers, unfamiliar panic churning in her belly. “You’re fine. You’ll be fine. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  She wanted to pass out. She was lying down to pass out, but a voice in her head wouldn’t let her. Tie her up. It was almost Syrina’s voice. Almost.

  Whatever it
was, it was right, and somehow she was still conscious as if some alien part of her mind was forcing her to stay awake. Syrina spun up the black cloth that all the carefully marked parts were gathered on, scattered them onto the stone floor with a clatter like hail, and tied the unconscious Kalis’s wrists and ankles together behind her tight enough that the woman’s hands and feet began to turn blue under the tattoos. She tied them to the woman’s neck, too, so even the slightest squirming would strangle her. Then Syrina crawled over to the low door that led to the Tidal Works, slammed it closed, and broke off a thin metal rod that had tumbled from the table into the lock, not caring if any remaining assistants could still get through it or not.

  The voice in her head went silent when she finished, and Syrina passed out in the corner of the lab, cradling Triglav’s body like a baby.

  11

  Questioning Authority

  Syrina woke, holding Triglav. His body was no longer warm. The corpse of the assistant who’d just been in the wrong place that day slumped in the corner she’d dropped him in. She could make out the shape of the N’talisan-Kalis lying hogtied to the leg of the heavy table. Syrina didn’t remember doing that, nor straightening her own nose, which seemed to have healed in place. The woman was awake, and she looked at Syrina with calm blue eyes.

  Syrina realized her own face was wet with tears. She’d been crying while she slept, and she was ashamed. Even during the harshest tests of her training, she couldn’t remember more than a handful of times she’d cried, and that was different anyway. Tears of a child in physical pain. This was… emotional, and she did her best to swallow her tears.

  But then she looked down at Triglav cradled in her arms, and her stomach twisted in a knot of grief so hard she thought she might throw up. She heard a low, moaning sob well-up from her throat and she couldn’t stop it, so she buried her face in the cold, bloody feathers of Triglav’s chest and screamed, so at least the other Kalis wouldn’t be able to get a clear look at her eyes.

  She sat like that, sobbing and screaming and clutching him and not caring about anything until the burning pain in her gut subsided into an ache that ebbed through every inch of her body. Then she lay Triglav down and walked over to the N’talisan-Kalis, who was watching her through the blood caked on her face, with an expression unreadable under the swirl of tattoos.

  She was taller than Syrina. Maybe older, though it was hard to tell. Their tattoos were similar, but where Syrina’s were all curves that flowed around her body, the other Kalis had sharp angles on her arms and thighs and under her small breasts.

  “It was just a matter of time,” the N’talisan-Kalis said.

  Her voice was soft and young and sweet, but Syrina had no way of knowing if it was her own.

  “Which one is it?” the woman said. “Berdai? Ormo? Nyliik? I know you have no reason to tell me, but I can’t help wondering which one you work for.”

  Syrina wanted to ask her the same thing but didn’t bother. The impostor had nothing to gain by giving up her Ma’is. On the other hand, Syrina might be able to get something out of the exchange if she told the N’talisan-Kalis she worked for Ormo.

  Not yet. Wait.

  That voice. Like someone mimicking Syrina’s and doing an imperfect job of it, right behind her head where she couldn’t see them. She could feel it holding her grief in check, helping her think.

  Well, one thing at a time. “What were you doing here as N’talisan?” Her words caught in her throat, and she bit her tongue against more tears.

  There was a certain camaraderie among Kalis, even if they never worked together and almost never met. The N’talisan-Kalis probably didn’t have anything personal against Syrina, even if she could guess what was in store for her when they were through talking. At least, Syrina knew that’s how she’d feel if the tables were turned.

  “Same as N’talisan,” the woman said, her voice grating with the twist of cloth around her neck. “Researching the Tidal Works. What its function is, how it’s made. My Ma’is taught me everything he could about the Works. Then he sent me here to learn whatever I could understand. At first, I think it was because he wanted me to disrupt it. Permanently, if I could. Open up the biggest city in the world to the naphtha market. The more I found, though, the more he just had me study the thing.”

  “Lees was shipping you the parts?”

  “Some of them. A lot of the ordinary ones that I couldn’t get through the Church without raising questions. You wouldn’t believe the list of stuff the priests gave me that I wasn’t allowed to do. I swear they don’t want to know what’s going on down there. Lees did some special orders, too, but he was slow, and then he got screwed anyway, so I arranged something else.”

  “Did your Ma’is set that up? With Lees, I mean.”

  “He had me set it up, yeah. The boss cleared everything up in Eheene so Lees could ship out the extra parts under the noses of the Port Authority. He didn’t want any flags raised on either end by strange shipment manifests. He paid Lees extra so that Lees would go to all the extra trouble of shipping his stuff for free and deal with the cover-up that went with it. No profits to report, no paper trail. Not unless someone started looking at a lot of different strings at the same time and knew what to look for. Someone like another goddamn High Merchant.”

  “What did you learn about the Tidal Works while you were here?”

  “Not much more than I already knew. Six or seven thousand years ago, when humanity started to claw their way out of the Age of Ashes and Fom sprouted up, they started building the Works around the Artifact to pump hot water into the settlement. Something to keep them warm at the end of the endless winter. This was way before naphtha machines were a thing. Hell, the Tidal Works was the reason anyone figured out how to make a naphtha turbine in the first place. And the tarfuel engine, and all the rest of it. As far as I can tell, Fom is the birthplace of modern society. Anyway, they probably remembered what it was for back then and decided to use what it was doing to their advantage. As Fom grew, so did the Tidal Works, until the Artifact was buried and forgotten. Something that just always worked. It bound itself to the newer machines, and the connections don’t wear out. Whatever it is, they built it to last forever, and what’s more, they built it to keep the things around it from wearing out, too. However that works. And it’s storing a tremendous amount of power.”

  “I guess it would have to if it can heat a city as big as Fom,” Syrina said.

  “No.” The woman’s blue eyes were serious. “A tremendous amount. As in, if that thing were to ever lose whatever force is holding it together, it could vaporize Fom and the coast most of the way to Maresg. Maybe shatter windows in Eheene.”

  Syrina stared at her, looking for some hint of deception and seeing none in the liquid blue eyes. It didn’t mean she wasn’t lying, but Syrina didn’t think she was. Just a hunch. Something in those sapphire eyes said that the N’talisan-Kalis believed the heart of the Tidal Works was every bit as important as N’talisan had said it was.

  “Oh,” Syrina said. Then she took a breath and asked the question she’d been avoiding. She tried to keep her voice from shaking. “What about your assistant? The other Kalis?”

  Syrina was knew the answer already, given how the N’talisan-Kalis had reacted, but she still had to ask.

  The Kalis laughed at her. “You’re smarter than that. She was after your friend there.” She nodded toward Triglav’s corpse and coughed as the gesture made the binding around her neck tighten. “I didn’t know about either of you,” she began again, when she could, her voice hoarser. “She was a new understudy. Transferred under N’talisan a month ago from Tyrsh. The professor’s bright new student. She had all the proper paperwork. Everything checked out. Naturally.”

  Syrina ground her teeth. The Kalis was right. The other one had just rubbed Triglav and run. That meant—

  Later. Tell her now.

  Syrina took a few deep breaths until she could relax enough to speak again, forcing down every
lesson her twenty years of training and ten of experience had taught her.

  “I’m here under Ma’is Ormo,” she whispered. “He has me investigating the finances of Xereks Lees.”

  The N’talisan-Kalis’s eyes grew wide, and she might’ve looked amused under the blood and tattoos.

  “Why on Eris would you tell me that, even if you are going to kill me?”

  “Do you know something about… Ormo?” Syrina had almost said me but caught herself before she showed the woman just how messed up she was.

  Not that she hadn’t already figured it out for herself.

  The Kalis laughed again. “Ormo. So that’s who it was. I should’ve known.”

  “What do you mean?” Syrina bent over the Kalis at her head, away from her tied hands.

  The Kalis managed a little shrug without strangling herself. “It must’ve been fifteen, maybe twenty years ago, now. My Ma’is started looking for some sort of connection between us and the Tidal Works.”

  “Us? You mean the Kalis?”

  “That’s right. I don’t know how he connected the Kalis with something like that, but he’s always digging around for stuff left over from the Ancestors, just like they all are. He must’ve found… I don’t know, something. Anyway, I ended up out in the taiga at one point, checking some things out. Long story, but the short version is I ran into another Kalis. She had this messenger hawk. They were inseparable. It was weird. Being a Seed means I come across other Kalis now and again, or rather, they come across me. You’re an Arm, I’d imagine, so you move around too much to run into your own kind very often. Well, you do, but you’re usually not aware of it. Anyway, when two Kalis meet, it usually goes better than this. Never saw anything like that, though. At first, the boss was interested in the idea, like maybe he thought the bird was connected to the Works somehow, too. It seemed like good old-fashioned Kalis luck at the time. Two of the Fifteen working on the same thing from different sides, you know? Mine looking at Artifacts being connected to the Kalis, the other one—Ormo, I guess—experimenting with the Kalis’s connection to the old Artifacts. I guess your boss and my boss didn’t play well together, though. A few weeks later, he pulled me out.”