The Kalis Experiments

by R A Fisher

  “Why?”

  The N’talisan-Kalis snorted. “What? You mean Ormo gives you reasons for what he tells you to do? At the time, I assumed it was because he found out that something I did stepped on another High Merchant’s toes and he backed off.” She paused. “At least that’s the way it’s supposed to work.” She twisted her mouth into a brief frown, visible under the caking blood. “Not long after that, he planted me in Tyrsh to start setting up N’talisan.”

  “How long ago did all this happen?” Syrina’s throat was dry.

  “Like I said, maybe fifteen, twenty years. I’ve been N’talisan so long I think I was almost beginning to believe it. Hadn’t given any of it much thought since then, until yesterday, seeing you with that owl.”

  The Kalis tried to prop herself up a little to look at Syrina, who’d gone back to hunker against the wall, but the noose around her neck tightened again. She made a little strangled noise and lay still.

  Syrina plopped down to sit against the wall she was leaning against and stared at nothing. She couldn’t see the other Kalis’s face, but she could hear her laughter rasping through the noose.

  “My source on Ormo’s Kalis experiments—the only one I found before my own Ma’is pulled me out—he was a doctor. A guy named Saadasi.” The N’talisan-Kalis’s voice was a scratchy whisper.

  “Why are you telling me that?” Syrina asked, but it was what she would’ve done, too. She felt defeated.

  “Ormo’s a traitorous coward who’s stabbing my Ma’is in the back by sending you here to kill N’talisan. Why wouldn’t I screw up his little pet even more before she rubs me?” She nodded toward Triglav and snorted again. “I bet you won’t be able to resist looking into it now, whatever Ormo tells you to do.”

  “Fuck you.” Syrina stepped over, leaned down, and broke the other Kalis’s neck with a twist of her hand.

  The N’talisan impostor must’ve let her do it, or it wouldn’t have been so easy.

  Syrina went back to Triglav and cradled him while she watched the tattoos on the Kalis’s corpse blacken and grow. There was a flash as they ignited the flesh under them, so bright it hurt her eyes. In a minute, the body had disintegrated to ash and a few fragments of blackened bone. The room filled with noxious, sweet smoke.

  Syrina sat against the wall, coughing. She didn’t know what to do. It didn’t seem right to just leave Triglav there, so she bundled him up in the assistant’s shirt and slipped into the alley.

  It was dark. She had no idea what time it was. Late. She carried Triglav across the rooftops as far as she could until the maze of stone buildings straightened and grew further apart as the homes grew larger. Stone walls sprouted along both sides of the road and between the estates that blanketed the steep southern slope of Fom, their ramparts forming a bird’s-eye tapestry of uneven squares. The crowds that bustled all night deeper in the city thinned, until up here, she was alone.

  She padded along the edge of the camel cart road, on a narrow footpath crammed against a high, rough limestone wall green with moss. For a hundred paces, the fog grew so thick that even the ground became lost to her sight, and her only guide was the rugged unbroken vertical plane of the wall to her left.

  And then, just like that, she emerged onto a ridge above the rocky vineyards that sloped down to the cliffs south of the city. The Eye slashed a thin violet smile beneath an empty black circle surrounded by stars, and the dim, thick light of the crescent danced on the distant whitecaps. Behind her, Fom’s clouds boiled, burning gold with the city smoldering beneath them.

  Syrina jogged past stony straight rows of knotted vines, thick with brown, withered leaves. The vines ran all the way to the edge of the cliff. There, Syrina stopped running. As she released Triglav over the rim, a new twist of rage snarled in her chest. She didn’t care about killing and spying for Ormo or about Lees and the fake Professor N’talisan or the Tidal Works exploding and destroying a fifth of Eris. All she cared about was making whoever was responsible for her grief suffer, but she had nothing to go on except the job she was on now and the word of another Kalis, who’d been the first to admit she was just trying to screw with Syrina’s head.

  Someone had ordered Triglav’s murder. There were Fifteen suspects, but all of them were untouchable. It could’ve been whichever High Merchant had sent the N’talisan-Kalis to Fom. That the impostor didn’t know about it didn’t mean anything. The machinations of the damned Merchant’s Syndicate were inscrutable to their pet Kalis. As far as Syrina knew, though, none of the other High Merchants even knew about Triglav. Then again, she had no idea what Ormo knew about anything, much less what the other Fourteen knew about her. But even if they did know, none of them had an obvious reason to kill Triglav and keep her alive.

  Except for Ormo. He gave her Triglav, forged some bond between them. And the N’talisan impostor said he’d done it before, if she was telling the truth, and if that other Kalis had been one of his, all those years ago. But why would he go to all the trouble just to take it away?

  Maybe you were the first time it worked.

  And then there was that voice. Too much, too much.

  The thought came that it was somehow Triglav’s voice, but she dismissed the idea as soon as it crossed her mind. Not just because it was crazy—it was, after all, a voice in her head—but because it simply wasn’t his. She could feel his absence. It was infinite. A black emptiness in her heart, edges still clawing outward, consuming her. Triglav was gone. The awful truth she kept coming back to was that the voice was a lot closer to her own.

  Syrina wasn’t ready to believe the other Kalis or the voice in her head. Neither one of them had any reason to tell her the truth, and it was Ormo they were talking about. Ormo. He’d raised her, taught her most of what she knew, and made sure she learned the rest from someone else. Up until he’d given her Triglav, she’d been his slave and a willing one at that. Just like any other Kalis.

  Exactly.

  She was done in Fom. She paid the smuggler, her various personalities checked out of their various hotels, and she gathered the absurd amount of materials that had turned up in the importer’s audit and shipped it ahead to Eheene.

  Little things here and there, a rat in the street, a random windowsill, would remind her of Triglav, and a ball would clot in her throat. She’d need to close her eyes and force her mind empty until it sank back into her stomach and she could think again. She cursed Ormo for introducing her to love. All it had brought her was grief.

  Syrina had a conversation with herself on the way home.

  She’d been growing more convinced that the voice was just some part of her mind in denial of the swell of new emotions that a Kalis shouldn’t have any business feeling. She was still almost as convinced of it after the conversation was over, but doubt smoldered in the black pit of grief that had settled in her chest.

  She sat in her tiny cabin, all done-up as Rina and staring out the round brass-rimmed portal, trying to keep herself from looking for Triglav as he skimmed through the clouds, when the voice asked her, Where am I?

  Syrina had nothing else to do. “On a boat? I don’t know what you mean.”

  How did I come to be here?

  Syrina was game. It was a long trip back to Eheene, and she needed a distraction.

  “That depends on where you came from.”

  The voice seemed to think about that for a minute. I was always here. Watching, like a dream I can’t remember.

  “That’s because you’re a figment of my imagination.”

  It paused again, and she could almost feel it considering that, too.

  No. Your heart is beating at twenty-six beats every minute. When I came into being, it wasn’t beating at all, but your blood was getting pumped through your system by your external markings at an equivalent of 297 beats per minute. I could increase that rate to 405 without any risk to yourself, and, consequently, me. The unavoidable fatigue you experience afterward can be managed a lot better than you did on your own. I tried t
o help, but my control was limited at the time. I’m not sure if you noticed. Your markings, by the way, are an artificial bacterium that’s also able to heal wounds and scatter photons, creating a confusing effect on most retinal—

  “Shut up a second. You can control my body?”

  Certain things, yes. Things that you don’t need to think about.

  “So you could kill me, then?”

  Syrina didn’t believe anything other than she was talking to herself.

  I suppose so, but since I’m inseparable from you, it would be a murder-suicide.

  “How do you know all this? What are you?”

  If it could’ve given her an explanation half as good as what it had just told her about the tattoos and the Papsukkal Door—most of which she didn’t even understand—Syrina might’ve been convinced. It would’ve been easier on her fragile state of mind than endless doubt.

  It couldn’t.

  I don’t know, it said, after another long pause. I am as much you as you are, and I came from the same place. Whatever I know, I just… know. I just didn’t know it until that day in the street.

  That drew Syrina’s mind back to Triglav, and her heart snarled into a knot. She fell silent.

  Who are you?

  “What?”

  She didn’t care if any of the crew heard Rina Saalesh talking to herself through the cabin door, but she dropped her voice to a harsh whisper anyway.

  You want to know what I am. I want the same from you. We’re inseparable from each other. It’s reasonable to think we might learn something about my nature by learning something of yours.

  “You want my life story or what? You’re in my head. Can’t you just dig around for it?”

  I don’t know. If I can, I don’t know how. If I could, would you want me to?

  Syrina felt like she was arguing with herself and losing. “Fine. Let’s see. You know about the tattoos, apparently. More than I do. I got them when I was five. I don’t remember getting them, or anything before then, or the year after. I know I was trained before then, but I don’t know what. Languages, I suppose, and whatever else. It’s my understanding that none of the Kalis remember. Trauma, maybe. Not just from the tattoos, although that must be the worst of it. They burn out every hair follicle with needles, pull out every fingernail and toenail, everything but our eyelashes. Then they can mark us, and the nails grow back over them. Inside lips and ears. Everywhere. Otherwise, one eyebrow, one strand of hair, anything for the eye to follow and the tattoos don’t work as well. And that’s just the tattoos. Who knows what else they do to us. It’s a wonder that any of the chosen kids survive.”

  Why you? Why were you chosen?

  Syrina was beginning to wonder that herself. “I don’t know.” She forced her eyes away from the window and lay down on the bed. “Girls are chosen before birth. Or rather, our parents are chosen.”

  Girls? No boys?

  Syrina allowed herself a little smile. “I asked Ormo that once when I was little. He told me men were anatomically unfit to be Kalis. Imagine, he said, if the most vulnerable part of your body was one you couldn’t use the tattoos to hide. I didn’t understand what he was talking about at the time, but I’ve seen men naked since then.

  Anyway, we’re trained, literally, from the day we’re conceived. Observe, mimic, disguise, forge, manipulate, kill. My life for Ormo.”

  But you don’t trust him anymore.

  Ormo. Goddamn Ormo. He was the first thing Syrina remembered when she woke from the nightmare of the tattooing. He gave her a hug and some chocolate and taught her how to paralyze a person’s lungs by tapping their neck. He was the only person she saw for the next two years, and he was the one that protected her from the cruelty of the instructors in the years that came after.

  It seemed so obvious now. The harshness of the teachers and the kindness of the master. An act. A High Merchant wringing loyalty from his servant. All of it flooded Syrina’s thoughts, but she didn’t want to talk anymore.

  “No.”

  The voice must’ve heard more than that because it didn’t say anything else.

  Too much. Triglav. Roiling grief. Boundless, impotent rage. A voice in her head. Confusion and doubt.

  12

  Heist

  Syrina told Ormo most of it. His expression was as unreadable as ever when she told him Triglav was killed, but his voice seemed sad. Not that that meant anything. She couldn’t bring herself to lie to him outright, but she didn’t mention the other Kalis. Either of them. She only said that one of N’talisan’s assistants had killed Triglav. If he sensed she was keeping something from him, he didn’t press her about it.

  It had never occurred to her before to keep something from Ormo, but she wasn’t ready to talk about the conversation she’d had with the N’talisan-Kalis or the voice in her head.

  The break-in at Lees’s and the death of Gaston N’talisan had combined to create quite a stir. Lees now had a contingent of mercenaries posted around his home and his warehouse, and he traveled with Orvaan and a gaggle of bodyguards when he went out, which was rare these days. The upper echelons of Eheene had been talking about how disgusting it was that he thought he was so important, but they all were still sycophants to his face.

  To Lees’s credit, Syrina was going to kill him. She hoped that would vindicate him a little in the eyes of his peers. But before she rubbed Lees, she still needed to find out who his backer was. She now knew where his product was going and why, but not who he was working for. If she could find the source of his tin, she’d also find the High Merchant behind the N’talisan-Kalis and maybe a clue about the other one, too.

  Ormo had people going over everything pulled up from the audit on N’nareth. There was plenty in it to incriminate Lees, but nothing so far that said who was pulling his strings. It was a good bet he wasn’t keeping anything at his office anymore, which left his home and his accountant. His home was an if, and the accountant was a probably somewhere, so Syrina decided to check Ka’id’s again. She was acutely aware of how much she’d avoided doing just that from the very beginning. More goddamn paperwork.

  There was a note on Ka’id’s door that said she was out for the week, but she wouldn’t keep documents as sensitive as Lees’s there anyway.

  Syrina waited.

  She waited until the end of the week for Ka’id to get back from wherever she’d been. Then she spent another month waiting for Lees to pay her a visit. No doubt she had other clients whose records were kept in the banks, but Syrina didn’t know who they were or how many different banks Ka’id used, and it would take even longer to search every place the accountant went.

  It was cold. The sun came up late and went down early without ever clearing the copper points of the roofs on the south side of the street. People who walked by stayed hunched under heavy hoods of embroidered silk. The ones who rode within palanquins hid behind heavy curtains drawn closed to keep in the warmth, while the bearers wore thick, hooded white robes. The chilly, still air muffled sound, and the only noises on the narrow street in front of Ka’id’s office were the shuffling feet of passersby and the faint hiss of the naphtha lamps when they were lit every afternoon.

  Syrina perched on a ledge across the street from the accountant’s place every day, still as a gargoyle, as unnoticed as the marble hand above the door beneath her feet, holding its flame.

  After Lees and his entourage showed, she needed to wait three more weeks because Ka’id didn’t go anywhere with him the first time, and only went home at the end of the day.

  Winter Solstice came and went, and the days began to grow a little longer, but ice still glazed the oily canals.

  When the accountant finally did go somewhere with Lees, it was just a few blocks from the Syndicate Palace—a bank called Raymos Storage. There were a plethora of banks in that part of town that catered to the type of people that had a lot to hide and the money to hide it somewhere good.

  It was easy to get the floor plans from the Syndicate Agg
regate Halls. They had most of the plans of the city in there, as long as someone knew how to find them amid the rows of ancient rolled-up blueprints. Syrina had more than enough experience in that regard, but she couldn’t count on them including all the details. The banks claimed to be safe from everyone, and they’d all made steps to be sure of it, including altering most of the records before they made it into the Library.

  The huge marble and obsidian building was empty inside except for a long marble desk, behind which was a heavy copper door set in the floor, which led down to a second reception area. Behind the desk down there lay the vaults—three massive arched chambers deep below the streets of Eheene. They were level with the top of the naphtha reservoirs, which streaked the ground beneath the city, and a tricky architect could’ve put all sorts of nasty mechanisms down there. Vault One held Syndicate bonds and promissory notes as well as tin currency. Two held documents too sensitive to be kept anywhere else, and Three was arranged to hold larger items such as sculptures and iron ingots.

  Syrina spent the next four days creeping over every inch of the area around Raymos Storage. Naphtha and oil traps needed ventilation to work, and she found nine innocuous vents leading under the streets, placed above where the vaults were hidden. The shafts around Vault Two were set into the base of the Skalkaad Trade Union building, with another in the roof of the Feraas Wells Investment Corporation across the street.

  The vents told her there were traps but not what kind, besides either fire or gas. Both could cause problems for the bank. Venting toxic gas into the heart of Eheene would be frowned on by the Merchant’s Syndicate, but fire was also tricky, in a room full of papers valuable enough that someone would pay a lot of tin to keep them there. Whatever the traps did, though, they wouldn’t be good for whoever was down there when they went off.