by R A Fisher
Thayn could’ve followed Menns. He was head of security. He could’ve told Menns that Carlaas Storik had returned from Fom yesterday and would be overjoyed to see his old friend, but he didn’t do that either.
Something about Menns had changed since the last time he was here when Thayn had seem him wandering around almost as if the man had no idea what he was doing. Something small and undefinable that no one else seemed to notice. Thayn wouldn’t expect anyone else to notice, because as far as Thayn knew, he—she—was the only Kalis seeded at NRI.
Kalis Azhaa, in the skin of Marus Thayn, rounded a corner and fell into step behind a clamor of hired guards piling down the hallway toward the receiving offices that overlooked the harbor. With Storik back, security had erupted in activity. Their boots scuffed against the marble tiles as they walked, their curved leather scabbards slapped against their thighs. They ignored Thayn when he kept pace behind them and didn’t notice when he slipped down another hallway and out of sight.
Azhaa was disturbed by the sudden return of both Menns and Storik. She hadn’t given a report to Ma’is Kavik in months, and she hadn’t planned to until she’d gotten to the bottom of the first suspicious disappearance of Menns, a few weeks after the archaeologist had vanished in Fom. Then he’d turned up in Eheene a few months later, disappeared just as suddenly, and now he was back yet again. That he could disappear and reappear so easily added to her suspicion, and no amount of combing Eheene had turned up anything. Now Storik was back, and he’d be talking to Kavik, and her Ma’is wouldn’t be happy to learn anything from Storik that he had every right to know from her first.
It would take at least a half-hour for Menns to fill out the paperwork to get anything released from the archives, but as far as Azhaa knew, no one had bothered to purge his name from the employment rolls, so he’d still be cleared to withdraw.
Thayn ducked his head into an office and barked to a clerk who sat hunched over a stack of ledgers.
“Get word to Eheene that any sensitive material held at Ka’id’s needs to be moved. All of it. By morning. Before that, if they can manage.”
“Sensitive material, sir?” the clerk said, incredulous. “It will take until tomorrow afternoon just to file the request forms—”
“This is a security issue. I am holding you accountable for any losses resulting from delay.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and closed the door behind him.
A timid voice said, “Yes, sir,” over the thack of the latch.
Storik’s office hid behind a broad oak door, polished and carved in the relief of a vast, feminine face. Thayn entered without knocking. On the other side of the door, on the opposite wall, were other giant faces of women, surrounded by carved vines and flowers. They seemed to glare behind their slight smiles, and darkness pooled under their wooden brows. The other two walls were carved as gigantic faces of bearded men, and no little smiles hid their glowering contempt for whoever was in the room.
Azhaa had always wondered if the artwork was commissioned by Storik or by whoever had run the TDD annex before him, but it had never been Thayn’s place to ask, so she needed to accept the fact that she’d probably never know.
Storik was there now, standing behind the polished desk of black wood that sprawled in the center of the office. The forgotten chair, stuffed and winged, was pushed back against the ivy-wreathed face behind him. His assistant, a thin weasel-faced man named Spaad, was there, too. But as Thayn entered, the wiry man gave a bow to Storik and a nod to Thayn before disappearing out the door and closing it behind him.
Storik was rifling through a leather satchel on the table. He was a broad-shouldered man, rippled with muscle under his dark blue silk shirt. His body didn’t fit with the thinning hair and scruffy jowls that hovered over the maw of the bag.
He glanced up at Thayn as the door latched, gave the man a brief nod of greeting, and went back to his rummaging.
“Marus,” he grumbled. “I was going to send for you, but I suppose word travels fast around here. Should’ve known you’d hear I was back before I even got through the door. I’m glad you came. So what’s happened while I was cleaning up the mess in Fom?”
Azhaa cleared Thayn’s throat, as if uncomfortable. She pitched the small sound just right, and Storik paused in his rummaging for the first time to look up at Thayn’s face.
“Is there something I should know?”
“Not at all, sir. It’s just that I thought you’d have been brought up to date by Menns.”
“Menns? You mean Cairnsworth Menns?”
Azhaa made Marus’s face perfectly surprised. “Of course. He came here to work with us a month or so after you left for Fom. He was just here. He said he was getting release papers to retrieve a few files from the archives at Ka’id’s.”
“What? Today?”
“Yes. Is there something wrong? I thought he said he’d come here under your orders, but I didn’t speak to him about it myself. I could be mistaken.”
“No, it wasn’t my order, but Fom was a mess. Still is. Everything’s put on hold, people running scared. Menns disappeared a week or so after I got there, and I didn’t blame him. So this is where he got off to. Well, if he’s still in the building, I’d like to see him. I doubt he knows I’m back.”
“Would you like me to bring him here?” Azhaa made Marus’s voice casual, but she was bursting at the seams to track Menns down.
If he made off with anything important, Storik’s wrath, as great as it might be, would be nothing compared to the inferno that would be coming at her from Ma’is Kavik.
“No, no. I’d hate to inconvenience him. I’ll check with the door to see if he’s left yet. If he hasn’t, we can meet him on the way out.”
“Good, sir. After you, then.”
Syrina stepped out of the open bronze doors that led from the corporate offices, into the cavernous lobby of NRI. There was something wrong, and she could feel it tickling the back of her throat.
The lobby was high-ceilinged, fifty-feet wide and over a hundred long. The stairway she had emerged from rose from the back of the room on the right side. Sixty hands down, also on the right, the double wooden doors that led to receiving and the harbor stood closed. Opposite them were the broad iron doors leading to the mercenary barracks and armory. Between, a knee-high, broad-rimmed, reflecting pool rose from the blue and white mosaic of the floor tiles.
In front of each set of doors was a thick unadorned marble desk with a uniformed receptionist trying to look busy. A larger greeting desk stood in the center of the room, between the back wall and the reflecting pool, but the chair behind it was empty.
Security wore long, thin ceramic knives and blue and white NRI livery. Two soldiers flanked every doorway, and bored-looking crossbowmen stood on narrow balconies along the back of the lobby and along each wall. Thayn and a broad-shouldered, well-dressed old man stood at the front doors, heads close in private conversation.
Shit. There was no way she was going to get out of here without dealing with Thayn again. It had been careless to blow him off before, but something about him had seemed so… well, disarming. There were no other exits, though. At least none that wouldn’t make Menns look even more suspicious if he tried to leave through them.
Syrina bit her tongue and began to walk toward Thayn in the same relaxed, hurried manor Menns had been scurrying around in all day. She made it to the empty reception desk before Thayn noticed Menns for the first time. By the look on the security chief’s face, Syrina knew she was in trouble.
Thayn’s features blossomed into a smile, betrayed by the angry triumph that flashed through his eyes. He said something to the old man, nodding in Menns’ direction, who looked confused, then angry. Thayn barked a few incoherent words that echoed around the huge lobby, and a gong started wailing from some hidden room behind the huge landscape paintings that covered the east side of the receiving hall, beneath the crossbowmen’s balcony.
Shit. It had been stupid to go back to NRI, b
ut Ormo needed specifics on this circus. She couldn’t even blame Ormo for this one. It had been her fault she hadn’t done a proper job of it the first time.
Of course, she’d had her own reasons for returning to NRI, but obviously, today wasn’t going to be a good day for side projects. She needed to get to the archives before someone moved them, and judging by the look Thayn was giving Menns, the order had already been given.
The surrounding guards moved forward, pale ceramic blades drawn. There were eight of them moving in from their posts flanking the doors, but if the wailing gong was any indication, there’d be more pouring in from the barracks any second. Syrina tried to make Menns look innocent, fidgeting and looking surprised in the center of the giant blue and white spiral mosaic that reached across the floor like a flattened octopus.
So they knew Menns was an impostor, but she didn’t know what else they knew. Talking her way out may or may not be an option, but going full Kalis in here wasn’t. There’d be no way Ormo could clean up a mess that big. Even if he didn’t execute her outright for blowing it that bad, he’d never trust her competence again. However Syrina was getting out of this, she needed to do it as Cairnsworth Menns.
The guards approached the cowering form of Menns, weapons drawn but lowered. The soldiers with the crossbows watched from the balconies, heavy weapons dangling in their hands, un-cocked.
“You’re sure it’s not Menns?” Thayn whispered to Storik.
“Of course I’m sure.” Storik didn’t bother lowering his voice. “I worked with Menns for five years, and he looks nothing like this diminutive impostor.”
Thayn nodded. “It’s a good thing you came back when you did.”
He walked forward to address the man who wasn’t Menns, standing some thirty feet away on the other side of the reflecting pool.
Three guards surrounded the impostor, pressing the points of their long knives into his neck. The others looked on behind them, calm and menacing. The door to the barracks opened, and a dozen more mercenaries wandered in, chatting in whispers with the ones that had stayed back.
“Is there a problem? I have—” Menns began, his voice shrill enough to reverberate off the walls.
“Save it!” Thayn barked, drowning out the other man’s whine. He spoke again when he was around the pool and no longer need to shout, making it a point to take his time, watching the Menns’s impostor squirm in the silence. “We know you’re not Menns. We’ll learn who you are and why you’re here soon enough. You can choose for yourself how much time and effort will be required before we get the answers we’re looking for.”
Menns swallowed. “What will happen to me?”
“That depends on what you tell us and how fast. Now, come. There’s no reason we can’t continue this conversation somewhere more comfortable.”
Thayn made a vague gesture to the surrounding guards, who spun Menns around and began to prod him in the back with the tips of their knives, toward the bronze doors that led upstairs.
Azhaa had just enough time to think, why didn’t any of these idiots tie his hands?
A low, frightened moan emanated from deep within Menns’ chest, and he stumbled away from the blades. One foot caught on his other heel, and he spilled with a grunt onto the glittering tiles in front of the empty reception desk. The fall pushed Menns over the brink of panic. He scrambled backward, crab-like, until he pressed into the desk, arms flying up over his face as if protecting himself from blows, but the soldiers were only sheathing their knives to grapple him. The crossbowmen didn’t look bored anymore, but they weren’t aiming their weapons yet, either.
Menns snuffled and coughed and wiped the tears from his face, pressing harder back into the desk as he flinched away from the approaching guards. As soon as one of them reached for him, he screamed and jerked away from her.
“Oh, please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me!” he shrieked, and lurched forward with unexpected strength, tearing his coat sleeve from the grip of the woman who’d made a grab at him, and bowling over another in a flailing, blind attempt to get away.
Menns made a stumbling, panicked sprint down the long lobby, toward the exit. Thayn stretched to tackle him as he shambled by, but Menns dodged wide, out of the security chief’s reach.
“Alive!” Storik roared.
He still stood before the front doors and didn’t look like he was going to move for anyone. Sweat beaded on the old man’s forehead.
“Take him alive!”
The crossbowmen, who were finally aiming at the fleeing figure, hesitated. Menns tripped past the grip of another mercenary and fell against the obsidian rim of the reflecting pool. The guards that had only been watching swarmed him as he lay against the black stone. He looked helpless, but he had become a sobbing, crazed animal and he slithered between their legs, striking at knees and ankles and groins with his small knobby hands. He brought down three men as he struggled and broke free. No one managed to get a grip on anything but his jacket, which he slipped out of, leaving it dangling in the mercenary captain’s hand.
As soon as Menns was clear of them, he charged toward the exit doors, right at Storik, whose sagging pale features had become blotchy with rage.
Menns tripped again and fell to one knee. Two more guards tried to grab him just as three of the crossbowmen fired, to the enraged protest of Storik. Two of the bolts clattered against the mosaic tiles of the floor. The other pierced through a soldier’s hip, who’d been behind Menns before the impostor had fallen, dodging the shot. The mercenary screamed and toppled, and two others who might’ve been close enough to reach Menns instead spun to help their injured comrade. No one was able to grab the small, weeping figure of Menns as he bowled Storik over and ran into the courtyard.
Carlaas Storik surveyed the wide lobby. NRI’s highly paid mercenaries were getting to their feet, lying on the floor, or disappearing out the door after the Menns impostor. Thayn was walking toward him, expression blank and stunned.
“These are the soldiers the Board of Directors has been paying so much for?” The words flooded out of Storik’s mouth in a bubbly whisper.
“Yes, sir. I’ll go now and—”
“Look at this. Look at this, Thayn! Your people blunder around and shoot each other at the first sign of a reason to have them here in the first place! Go. Don’t come back until you’ve found this Menns.”
Azhaa screamed inside her head, but she didn’t let it show. Five years she’d built Thayn’s place here. Five years. She could have stopped the impostor. She was a spy, not a fighter, but she could’ve stopped him. And given herself away and tossed five years of lies and insinuation into the harbor muck. And now, she might’ve thrown it all away, anyway.
Outside, the mid-morning sun was hot, and it wasn’t much cooler under the dark green boughs of the gnarled cherry trees. The summer rains were still a few weeks away, and her feet kicked up little yellow dust clouds from the flagstones in the courtyard.
“There’s no sign of him,” a woman named Petsha panted, as she jogged up to Thayn from the outer gate. “Just disappeared. Might still be inside the wall somewhere. None of the gatemen saw him. Laas is checking with the shepherd, but he was on the other side of the building when it happened. I don’t think he got back here in time to see anything.”
“I know where he’s going,” Thayn said.
“Sir?”
“He’s heading to the accountant’s.”
“But why?” Petsha asked.
She matched Thayn’s trot to the carriage he’d summoned with a gesture to the gatemen.
“Corporate spy, most likely. Every company in Skalkaad wants a piece of one thing or another around here. We’ll know more when we catch the bastard.”
But that wasn’t what he was after. True, there were a million things inside NRI headquarters that any company would pay a boatload of tin for. But he could’ve gotten anything he wanted when he was here a month ago. He was back now for… what?
She hoped he was only a spy
. She’d watched Menns blunder out of their custody. No one was that lucky. Almost no one.
They were already carrying Ka’id’s files from the Raymos building by the time Syrina got there. Four burly men loaded crates into an unmarked box wagon pulled by two shaggy brown and white camels. She could tell it was NRI’s people because she recognized the driver and one of the goons from Aado.
It was afternoon. The high sun was warm on her back, but she couldn’t enjoy it. In the southeast, low on the horizon, the rising crescent of the Eye blended into the firmament, almost imperceptible in the cloudless sky. The wind sighed now and then through the evergreens, which had been sculpted into abstract shapes and lined either side of the white flagstone street.
Just wait. See where they take it.
“Don’t tell me how to do my job,” Syrina said.
Thayn showed up a few minutes after she got there, looking worried and barking orders to the crew. Syrina wondered what he thought was going on. It had been quite the display back in Aado. Anybody who wasn’t an idiot would question Menns’ luck, blundering away like that. Kavik or whichever High Merchant was running the show at NRI would suspect, maybe even know the truth, but they wouldn’t know who or why. Nothing concrete. They’d be forced to explain it away publicly as a lucky corporate spy that nobody could find again, but Syrina would need to watch her back for a while.
There were long periods where no one came out, probably sorting through what needed to go as they went. Four mercenaries stood around the door, and Syrina left her vantage long enough to find two more milling in the dusty narrow alley behind the bank. By the time they were done, they’d loaded five water-tight shipping crates into the wagon.
The streets were narrow and crowded with people going home, so the camels needed to take their time through the press of silk-clad bodies, rickshaws, and palanquins vying for space between the rustling trees and white-pillared townhouses. The sun still glared across the tops of the marble buildings, making the shadowed streets glow. It was easy for Syrina to follow along on the rooftops. She hadn’t paid attention to where the tides were when she’d arrived at Ramos, but Thayn led them straight toward the gate, to the District.