by R A Fisher
“N’narad is the only player left.”
“More than half of Eris’s moon’s population now belongs to the Church, which is a ponderous thing hindered by the inconveniences of history. Even if a few of the faithful were inclined to believe the truth, most would rather disregard it in the face of the promise of Heaven. The fear of their names being blotted from the Books or an increase in their Salvation Taxes is more immediate to them than some vague, ancient doom. Doubly so, since when that ancient doom comes, their place in the afterlife is secure. The Syndicate has been our enemy since before the onset of the Age of Ashes, but the Church is the greater threat. And so we study in secret, through our erstwhile greatest enemy.”
“All that, and you know nothing else of the Kalis?” Anger shadowed Syrina’s voice.
“Any insight about you and the demon within wasn’t one of the secrets taken with us when we fled the Syndicate ten thousand years ago. Any knowledge of the Kalis was lost in the Age of Ashes, except what the Fifteen members of the Merchant’s Syndicate know.”
It was almost dawn when Syrina went to bed, but she lay awake a long time on the cool stone floor. She asked the voice what it thought of everything, but this time, it was the one who had nothing to say.
25
Traveling
They sent Syrina back to Fom on a smuggler’s ship. She’d given them a list of materials, and they’d complied, giving her everything she needed to do a proper job on a disguise. She only hesitated a second before giving up that little secret. Why stop breaking the rules when she was on such a roll? This time, she even got the skin tone right.
Syrina got the bad end of the deal, and on the way back she had a lot of time to think about it. On one hand, the Astrologer probably already regretted trusting her, but at least he got a Kalis spy out of the bargain, even if it was one he couldn’t trust. On the other hand, she got nothing. Nothing she wanted. Just a story about the Tidal Works that she would’ve been happier not knowing because now she felt obligated to do something about it, even if she didn’t know what she could do. No one could tell her who Kavik was, and she wouldn’t have believed them if they had.
The only thing the Astrologer could do was give her a few documents that would back up the story she planned to tell Ormo. She supposed that was something. It still wasn’t going to be easy to lie to him, but at least she’d be telling him what he wanted to hear, with evidence in hand to back up her words.
The papers, which the Astrologer claimed were accurate copies of original records, proved Ristroan tin was channeled through NRI and signed off on by Storik—a simple engineer who, for some reason, was also on the board of directors and head researcher of one of the most influential conglomerates in Skalkaad. In return, Storik gave periodic reports to Asapalashvari, under the guise of business meetings with a rep from Hood Manufacturing.
Storik had been involved in the Tidal Works project from the beginning, and he wielded unlikely influence at one of the most powerful corporations on Eris, not to mention he had had at least one Kalis working under him as N’talisan. He then reported everything he learned to the leaders of Ristro. If Syrina was going to accuse Ma’is Kavik of being a traitor and Storik of being Kavik, she wouldn’t be able to find much more evidence than that. There were a few meetings with others, too, infrequent and trivial-seeming, but every sign except one pointed to Kavik being the obvious choice. She hoped her suspicions were right.
She’d asked the Astrologer how he felt about losing the most influential contact they’d ever had with Skalkaad. To which he replied that now they had their very own Kalis instead.
If it surprised Ormo to see Syrina again, a half-year after she’d left, he didn’t let it show. She told him her theory about Storik and showed him the documents the Astrologer had given her, which Ormo translated that same night. The voice guided her, kept her calm, kept the lie from touching her voice. She was afraid of going into details, but Ormo didn’t inquire about her methods, or even where she’d gotten the paperwork from. Not that he ever had, but this time it made her nervous.
One of Ormo’s other spies had tracked down Xereks Lees while she was in Ristro. Or rather, they’d found Orvaan in Valez’Mui and watched him board a ship to Maresg. They’d sent a hawk to Eheene with the news. Ormo was expecting word any day from someone in Maresg to back up the report. He had a new request for the job—however she did it, he wanted it public. Lees had gotten away from him, at least for a while. Ormo wanted to remind the world that accidents happened to those that crossed the Syndicate. Especially to those that got away.
Syrina ended up being in Eheene less than a week before she was on another ship, this one bound for the Upper Peninsula, on her way to finish what ended up being the easiest part of the job.
Xereks Lees glowered over the edge of the veranda, eyes pinched. He placed a finger against his sharp nose and snorted, then spat down into the latticework of bridges and support beams that wound their way through the massive, umber trunks of the mangrove trees and the crooked, whitish, vertical beams of the ruins. He watched it fall, glittering in the smoky afternoon light like a clot of blood, passing between walkways and kiosks, pedestrians and prostitutes, before vanishing into the glint of the incoming tide.
“Damn,” he said.
“Stop worrying all the time,” Nazaa said, from the open doorway. “I don’t know why you still worry. It’s been months now. Anyway, they already said it was an accident.”
Lees grunted at his wife but continued to peer down into the lower levels of Maresg. A cloud passed in front of the sun and the sea far below became lost in rust-tinged shadows.
Nazaa looked at his back a moment longer and then vanished into the house.
The cloud passed, but the recent storm still painted the sun bloody where it hovered two hands above the tops of the tallest ruins. The white nonmetal beams and plates glowed pink in the dying light.
Lees tugged at the high collar of his bleached linen shirt, damp with perspiration, and absentmindedly wiped his hands on the baggy black silk of his pants. It was too hot here. His silver ponytail had become dull gray and matted with sweat. It would be spring in Eheene now. Cherry blossoms would carpet the streets and cling to the gnarled branches, wafting onto the marble lanes like pink perfumed snow. He could imagine the canals brimming with the winter runoff, the faint scent of naphtha. The chaotic ballet of the harbor. All of it coming together to make the music of power and money.
Here in Maresg, it was already summer, but the only difference between now and six months ago was less rain to wash the stench of brine from the air, wafting up from the tidal pools at the base of the mangroves.
Lees hated this place, but he could never go back to Eheene, whatever his wife said. First, the incident at his warehouse. Then the alarm at the vault. Nazaa kept telling him not to worry, but she didn’t take these things seriously enough. Never had. He’d rather spend his life hiding in Maresg for no reason than go back to Eheene and find out he’d been right the instant before they killed him.
He turned to the open door and called, “I’m going to Calveeni’s.”
If Nazaa heard him, she didn’t bother answering, and he only waited long enough for his bodyguards to join him. There were five of them, including Orvaan, all dressed in the gaudy silks and linens popular on the Upper Peninsula. Back in Eheene, Lees had made it a point to stand out from the crowd. Now the idea terrified him.
They wound their way down to the gate at the bottom of the polished spiral stairs that connected Lees’s balcony to the Westbridge Thoroughfare like a giant corkscrew supporting the top floor of his home.
His house was a slender six stories and crooked, like a guard tower smashed between the trunk of a mangrove tree and a bent white pillar of the ruins. The whole disjointed mess of it was slathered in primary colors that made his head hurt.
The Thoroughfare led from Lees’s neighborhood of Mourner’s Lookout in the north, through the heart of Top Market. Along the way, smal
ler walkways and stairs of wood led down into the lower, darker parts of the city. Parts of the city Lees didn’t spend any time in.
Westbridge, though, was the finest strip of real estate in Maresg until it hit the southern edge of the city and sank into the Malak Ravine, where fugitives maintained the immense wooden chain that stretched across the canal, holding the passage for ransom. Plenty of captains would rather pay two-thousand Three-Sides to common criminals than take an extra three or four weeks to sail around the Upper Peninsula. As a merchant, he loathed them. As a citizen of Maresg, he found that he hated them no less, but he’d come to appreciate their business acumen.
The Thoroughfare itself was a haphazard smattering of wood and sheets of the white nonmetal hauled from the surrounding ruins eons ago, when Maresg had first grown above the ebb and flow of the tides, up the mangroves and through the ruins like cancer. Shops, homes, brothels, tanneries, and tattoo parlors ran above and below the wide, wobbling bridge, clinging to it with ramps, ladders, and stairs, with no sense of pattern or design. Every hovel and hut, tower and mansion were unique, splashed with red, blue, orange, and yellow, wedged wherever they fit among the filthy white bones of the ruins and the giant trees. All they’d ever had in Maresg was fish and fruit and whatever they could embezzle from the desperate or steal from the foolish, and they’d prospered. The pigs.
Nazaa was right. Certainly right. They’d only taken the tin from his warehouse office. The investigator had found the ledger ignored and ditched in the harbor the next evening after the tide had gone out. And nothing had gone missing from Ka’id’s vault. The inventory had been triple-checked. Something had dislodged from one of the ventilation shafts and tripped the alarm. Lees hoped the idiots in maintenance had been fired for that. Every damn one of them.
So maybe he was overreacting, but he hadn’t learned the details from Ka’id until he was already settled in Maresg, and for some reason, finding out it had been a false alarm didn’t make him feel any better.
So they stayed, and Nazaa complained, and Lees couldn’t blame her. The bottom line was that he was just too much of a coward to go back to Eheene.
Instead, he’d taken to spending time at Calveeni’s where he could drink in peace and gaze from the balcony. Like a little boy, he would imagine himself leaping off, soaring away above treetops and over the sea, back to Eheene where he would take back the life that was stolen from him. A childish dream, of course, and one he kept to himself. Not even Nazaa knew of such fantasies.
In the end, only part of it came true.
26
The Farm
When Syrina got back to Eheene, she watched Storik for a while, trying to decide what to do about him. He wouldn’t be easy. According to Ormo, the man had barely left the NRI compound since Syrina had first encountered him, and she couldn’t just take him out, in any case. It needed to look like an accident. Even more so than usual. On top of that, she couldn’t be sure if any other Kalis might be keeping an eye on him, not to mention the karakh.
Storik left just twice in the two months she watched the compound. The first time, he went into Eheene to meet with a lawyer. She didn’t bother finding out why, but no opportunity for an accident presented itself in the day he was there.
The second time, he went up into the taiga, three days northeast, to meet with the manager of a naphtha company about the navaras harvest, which hadn’t started yet but was going to be too small. Syrina followed his carriage at a distance, hoping for a chance at an accident, but nothing came up that wouldn’t have raised at least a couple eyebrows. With Storik, even one eyebrow raised was too many. It hadn’t helped that the karakh had come along as part of his personal escort. All things considered, she might wait years for him to make himself available to be killed.
And then she had an idea.
The creation of naphtha involved the mining of certain minerals and the extraction and refinement of tarfuel, but the whole process started with the harvesting of navaras seeds, which could only be grown in the taiga of Skalkaad. Tarfuel was produced and refined in N’narad and Ristro, but it was far inferior, the same amount burning a sixth as long as it did when made with navaras. True naphtha only came from Skalkaad, and every High Merchant, whatever their other differences, wanted to keep it that way.
Well, they could have it. She wasn’t out to break anyone’s monopoly on flammable goo.
A navaras farm during the harvest was a swarm of activity, and the unharvested seed pods were closely guarded. The navaras plants were low, scraggly, and miserable-looking—benign, considering they were the core ingredient of one of the most feared and useful substances on Eris. The farms were sprawling, rocky, and difficult to work. The people that did were either indentured prisoners or paid very, very well. It was the paid ones Syrina needed to worry about.
The farm below, where she hunkered at the top of a broken ridge, lay one week north of Eheene, but she’d taken two to get there so she could set up a few things on the way. It sprawled to the hills slouching on the horizon, where cultivated land met taiga.
She knew the place from a job she’d done ages ago, before Lees, Triglav, and the rest. The company that managed it was called Nathco, but they were a subsidiary of NRI.
The buildings that concerned Syrina were scattered on the south end. There was a barn that housed the hounds and shaggy camels that helped with the harvest, and a huge dormitory for the workers. Next to that was a squat administration building, and a little apart from everything else loomed a trio of silos where seeds were stored and ground to a powder before getting hauled by cart or steam truck to one of the refineries along the coast.
The silo closest to Syrina was attached to a warehouse where camels hauled carts laden with sacks of seed in and empty sacks out. Everything was covered in sloppy white paint, so it looked like the buildings were covered in dirty snow. The green mountain and tree symbol of Nathco was stenciled on every building.
She was banking on the fact that the Northern Resource Initiative conglomerate was the biggest producer of naphtha on Eris, and Storik was at the top of it all. However important the Tidal Works was to him, the naphtha needed to come first. It wasn’t called the Northern Resource Initiative for nothing, and judging by Storik’s actions in the past, he was going to take care of any big problems himself.
Guards and their hounds patrolled the perimeter. She’d need to watch out for the dogs. She hoped she wouldn’t need to hurt any of them. These days, she wasn’t too thrilled about hurting the guards either.
Syrina considered herself lucky that everything was coming to the edge now, during the harvest. In the summer, there wouldn’t be a lot she could do to cause problems, short of a full-blown forest fire, and that could interrupt a lot of interests beyond Kavik’s. In the winter, now just two or three weeks away, the place would be all but deserted, and anything she messed with would be buried and unnoticed until spring, if it hadn’t washed away by then.
She picked her way down the shallow slope until she was in the edge of the field. The plants around her had already been harvested, their rough leafless branches bare of the cerulean seed pods she could see further afield.
If anyone noticed her, she’d need to kill everyone at the farm and set it all up as some sort of calamity. The voice didn’t need to tell her that for her to know it was true. If word got out that a Kalis was screwing around with the harvest, nothing Syrina did to Storik would be called an accident.
She slunk over to the silos. She was eighty hands away when a patrol and their tundra hounds came around the nearest one, talking with each other in low voices, and headed toward her across the field. Syrina dropped onto her chest and tried to press herself further into the dirt, but the ground was already frozen solid under a thin layer of topsoil. Her hand ached where her fingers had been, and she bit her lip against the pain. She shimmied backward, hoping it was enough to get out of the path of the dogs. They’d already smelled her, but she hoped they couldn’t tell her scent from any of
the hundreds of temporary migrant workers.
She kept her head low and listened to the dog’s panting and the crunch of feet on the cold uneven ground. The guards weren’t talking anymore, so she couldn’t tell their mood, other than it was silent, which might not be good. Then the panting turned into sniffing. She froze. The footsteps stopped. There was more crunching, but no one seemed to be moving so much as shifting around, thirty hands from where she cowered.
Take them now before they loose the dogs on you.
She bit her tongue against the shut up that was blooming to her lips and didn’t move. The sniffing intensified and moved a few feet closer. She felt her limbs coil, ready to spring. Three seconds and they’d be close enough that she could take the dogs, followed by the men, even if the thought made her miserable. At least she could probably rig it up as an accident and spare everyone else.
Three… two…
“Come on.” A loud voice in the vast quiet interrupted the furious sniffing. “We’ve been out here long enough. Let’s go eat.”
There was a disgruntled growl, and the footsteps crunched away.
Syrina lay there a while, breathing in the cold jagged clay of the frozen ground until she decided she should get up before the next shift wandered by. She sprinted the rest of the way to the warehouse, hunkered against the rear wall, and waited for the evening whistle.
The blank gray sky dimmed to something between afternoon and evening, and a bell rang off in the direction of the administration building, but most of the camel drivers and pickers had already started off toward the smells of camel porridge and roasted apples. Syrina edged to the front of the warehouse to snatch the lamp and flint from the hook inside the door, then crept around the back to shimmy up the silo.