Tides Collection

2. The Accounting Problem-3

Whoever he was, Orvaan hadn’t been an ordinary secretary. One of his rings had a hidden hinge where he could conceal poison or something more unpredictable. And from the way he stood, Syrina was guessing he had a knife hidden under his left pant leg. Probably other weapons, too. He was confident that he could tell when someone wasn’t being honest with him. He was probably good at it, too, when it wasn’t a Kalis doing the lying. That meant his boss had confidence in him. Lees’s profile didn’t carve him out to be the sort of guy who hired people as egotistical as Orvaan unless they had something to back it up with. Orvaan was a hit-man and an interrogator, maybe a straight-up torturer.

One other thing was also certain—the files in the lobby that Orvaan kept pretending to be busy with weren’t going to tell her much, even if she did ever manage to see them. No successful business in Skalkaad kept their records in the most easily accessed room in the building, in plain view of anyone who wandered in. Whatever was in those cabinets was probably real in the sense that if Syrina looked into them, they would cover legitimate transactions. But she’d bet her tattoos they weren’t going to tell her what Lees was up to. The whole setup begged to show everyone who walked in how clean everything was, and only criminals were that proud of looking like they weren’t committing crime.

Back at the Cranky Maiden, Syrina went up to Silas’s room for a while, then back down, still wearing the boy’s face. Triglav didn’t make an appearance, but she could sense him somewhere above the inn, waiting for her to come out again. Near the front door sat two inconspicuous dock men she’d seen earlier on the Row. First, a few minutes after leaving Lees’s place. Then again as she passed the piers a few blocks from the Cranky Maiden. Both were stocky, with round noses, wide-set eyes, and black hair, though one was balding and the other sported a ponytail similar to Lees’s. The latter was a head shorter. Brothers. Now they were clinging to clay mugs of glog, lifting them to their lips without drinking. Too-restless eyes settled on Silas for too long before turning away to look anywhere else.

Syrina sauntered to the bar and ordered her own mug of glog, buying a little time while she decided what to do. She was sure her performance as Silas Narn had been flawless. The fact that Lees was so paranoid that he had the boy followed anyway didn’t bode well. If he was having Narn watched, he was going to check out his story, too. In a day, maybe two, Lees would hear back from Marik and find out that she’d never heard of the kid. Then Narn would have both low merchants on his case. Lees would keep these goons on him until then, and then hand down the order to nab him so Lees and Marik could take turns with him on the not so proverbial rack until they found out who he really worked for, then dump whatever was left of him into the harbor.

Of course, it would never go that far. Syrina would dispose of Silas Narn long before that happened, but that in itself was going to cause problems. Lees would still find out that Narn didn’t work for Marik, and when Narn disappeared under the noses of his two hired goons, it wasn’t going to help Lees’s paranoia problem one bit.

Well, first things first.

* * *

Kakrik jabbed his brother with an elbow, making him dribble a few drops of brown glog onto his dusty tan work vest.

“There he is.”

Lasaav, who’d been staring into the crowd boiling within the Cranky Maiden with a vacant look, made an annoyed grunting sound and turned to follow his younger brother’s gaze while he dabbed at the spill with his free hand. Silas Narn stood at one end of the bar, nursing his cup.

“Ah, yes. That’s him, all right. Good. I was beginning to think he wasn’t going to come back downstairs until tomorrow.”

“All right, all right,” Kakrik said, his voice low despite the din of the common room. “Don’t let him catch you staring at him.”

“He’s not paying any attention to us,” Lasaav grumbled. He turned back to face his brother. “So, now what? Does Lees want us to just follow him?”

“That’s what Orvaan said. Whenever he goes, we follow until he gets where he’s going. Then we report back. Easy. He’s supposed to be heading north somewhere, tonight or tomorrow.”

“If Lees knows where he’s going, then why do we have to follow him?”

Kakrik shrugged. “Suspicious, I guess. You know how Mr. Lees can be. Not my job to ask Orvaan why the boss wants us to do anything, and it’s not yours either. Just needs to be sure the kid is who he said he was. Simple as that. Far as we’re concerned, anyway.”

Lasaav frowned. “So who did he say he was?”

Kakrik gave his brother an annoyed look. “You know as much as I do. Did you just not pay attention at all when Orvaan gave us the job this afternoon?”

“I did,” Lasaav protested, but didn’t add anything further, and his brother rolled his eyes.

They sat in silence for a while. Then Kakrik elbowed Lasaav again, who was ready for it this time and moved his mug to avoid another spill.

“He’s going back upstairs,” Kakrik said.

“I see that. Do we follow?”

“No need. Just wait here.”

There were another few silence-filled minutes between the two.

“What if he’s going to bed?” Lasaav asked. “Are we supposed to stand here by the door all ni—”

“No, and shut up. He’s coming down. Looks like he’s got his stuff. Checkin’ out late. Let’s move away from the door.”

They jostled to a subtler vantage point toward the middle of the room, shielded from view by the growing crowd of vagrants, foreigners, and affluent citizens looking for the kinds of fun not easily found on the streets of Eheene-proper.

Silas Narn brushed through the mob, unaware of the eyes on him, and out the front door into the District. Thirty seconds later, Kakrik and Lasaav followed.

“I wonder what he’s doing leaving now?” Lasaav said.

They wound through the packed dusty streets, struggling to keep track of the back of Narn’s head a half-block in front of them.

“It’s dark out now,” Lasaav said. “He can’t take the roads north in the dark. He should at least wait until Eyerise.”

Kakrik didn’t bother answering. And as Lasaav spoke, his voice trailed off. Narn wasn’t heading north, but south toward the public docks.

The press of bodies grew thicker as they approached the harbor, and the tide began to reach its peak. The flow of people was still surging toward the moored ships, but like two leaves caught behind another in a river’s current, it was impossible for the brothers to get any closer to Narn than they already were. Narn’s short stature made any glimpse of him through the mass of humanity, lumbering steam trucks, and camels less and less frequent. By the time they reached the docks, the boy had vanished somewhere between the islands of light cast by the rows of naphtha lamps that lined the piers.

Kakrik looked around with building panic, while Lasaav climbed up a naphtha lantern pole to see above the press, ignoring the looks of irritation cast his way by the people swarming around him. It was no use. Silas Narn was gone.

“Well, at least we know he boarded a ship.” Lasaav hopped down from the lamp.

“Yeah.” Kakrik scowled. “Which one?”

Lasaav shrugged. “Well, it’s not like we don’t have anything at all to tell Mr. Lees. He thought Narn was heading north, but he got on a ship instead. That’s something. It proves the kid is a liar.”

Kakrik took one more futile look around, desperate to spot the short form of Silas Narn on the deck of one of the nearer ships, but there was no indication as to which one he’d boarded.

“Yeah.” He sighed. “It’s something, I guess. Let’s get back to Mr. Lees. Orvaan’ll probably have some s**t job for us to do, now that we bungled this one.”

* * *

Thanks to her timing with the high tide, it was easy for Syrina to lose the two goons once she got to the ships. Then she slipped into the murky, frigid water of the harbor, unnoticed by the seething hoard around her. She held her breath under the hull of a N’naradin loading barge and peeled off the clothes and face of Silas Narn, then hauled it all to her favorite drainage chamber under the docks. It was muddy, damp, and cold, and stank of rotting fish. She’d used it before, and she’d stayed in worse places than that. There, she burned the whole outfit after dousing it with the naphtha she kept there for that purpose. The chamber filled with steam and gray smoke, and the scent of burning wax. And so, she thought, thus ends the life of Silas Narn.

Syrina reflected that Lees was hearing about Narn’s disappearance right about now, which meant she wasn’t even going to get the luxury of a couple of days before the exporter found out that Narn didn’t work for Marik. Then the question became, what would Lees think? Corporate espionage, most likely. Someone trying to sabotage his relationship with Skaald. That sort of thing was common enough in Skalkaad. Or maybe, given Narn’s origins and his flight to the departing ships, a spy for the Church of N’narad. Either way, it meant the same thing for Syrina—Lees was going to beef up his watch at the warehouse before she could get back there and do anything unsavory.

The extra security might be a hassle. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to be too concerned about it. She had yet to come across a mercenary detail she wasn’t able to handle, and it was worth it to go in already knowing the layout of his office. As long as she didn’t screw anything up, they wouldn’t even notice she’d been there.

* * *

Syrina thought the Eheene docks at low tide were some of the most disgusting and impressive things that existed anywhere on Eris. When the tide was out, the biggest ships needed to move four spans out into the bay, or else sink into black mud six or seven hands deep. They carried smaller barges they could deploy to dock, where they perched on decaying wooden posts so they wouldn’t get stuck when the tide came back in. Sometimes they got stuck anyway. There were always at least a dozen huge steamships waiting in the deeper water, belching black smoke that wafted on the eternal wind blowing across the bay, occasionally drowning Eheene in its stench. Only a few of the wealthiest shipping companies in N’narad used clean-burning naphtha engines, and half of those were tankers that trafficked naphtha anyway, so could bear the cost.

Workers got to the ships across wooden walkways, which rested on the muck when the water was out and floated when it was in. They were composed of slimy gray planks, dangerous even when people weren’t carrying heavy merchandise or naphtha kegs between ships. Everything was on a strict timetable. If one ship fell behind, they all did. If profits suffered, so did the workers.

Syrina hunkered on the eves of a dilapidated warehouse, overlooking the docks. Triglav settled down next to her, his gaze following hers across the piers and mudflats. She watched the longshoremen and stevedores, toiling and oblivious. Her thoughts kept turning back to Ormo.

“Why did he give you to me?” she asked Triglav, who turned his head to study her, eyes narrowed.

The question didn’t seem right, anyhow. The owl didn’t feel like a possession as much as a companion. She supposed she could’ve asked, Why did he give us to each other, but the thought was too sentimental. Anyway, it didn’t matter. Kalis had neither possessions nor companions unless you counted the Ma’is they served. And the Ma’is did everything for a reason.

Why did he give us to each other,Her sudden doubt brought her thoughts around to her childhood and Ormo’s reasons back then.

* * *

She had had many instructors on her path to becoming a Kalis, each one crueler than the last. All of them but Ormo. Zigra stood out the most, her memory of the unassuming old man sharp even now. She smiled to herself. It had been a long time since she’d given much thought to Zigra and his tests.

She had been seven or eight. Zigra was a language instructor, gray-bearded, and wiry. His test took place in a massive room filled with junk. Crates, broken naphtha machinery, heaps of rotting ropes. The objective was to stay hidden while answering the questions he shouted to her, about history and politics. She realized later that the questions and even the answers were secondary. It was instead a test of her responses under pressure and in pain. He would ask them in Skald and required her to respond in whatever language the question pertained to. A question about the Church required an answer in flawless N’naradin. A question about the Black Wall required her to use the proper nomad dialect, depending on the details of the question. While she answered, she was to remain hidden. It was a lesson in history, language, and the use of her tattoos.

Every time he found her, every time she answered wrong, or Zigra heard a hint of her accent, he would break one of her fingers. The first few times, he summoned her to the center of the room to do this, but then she caught on and remained hidden. Then he would need to find her himself, still asking questions, her still answering.

It was the worst of the days she always remembered when she thought of Zigra. He’d already broken all her fingers on her right hand, and all his questions were about obscure tribes in the Yellow Desert because he knew she always mixed them up and got the accents wrong. Even distracted by her pain, she managed to evade him for seven more mistakes before her involuntary whimpering gave her away.

So defiant she’d been when he’d grabbed her by the neck. Seven mistakes and only five more fingers? What more could he do to her? She refused to cry as he broke the fingers on her left hand, starting with the thumb, his expression bored. But when he snapped her arm over his knee at the elbow, she screamed, and her cries grew shriller when he did the same to the other one.

Syrina smiled wryly down onto the docks when she thought about it now. Twelve mistakes and only ten fingers. What else was he supposed to do?

As she lay crying on the floor at Zigra’s feet, broken arms laying like dead branches on the floor at her sides, the old man’s face still bland and unassuming, Ormo appeared, lifting her up. He carried her through the palace to his own bed, set her bones himself, and fed her chocolate with his own hands. He had always saved her from the cruelty of the instructors, but it was then, as she lay in his bed chewing on chocolate through her tears, that she realized she would do anything for him. She loved him more than a father, with every fiber of her being, just as he loved her. He fed her all her meals himself for three days, scooping food into her mouth with a spoon like she was a baby until her arms and fingers had healed well enough to endure more training. But it was on that first day that he owned her, and every act of kindness after that only reinforced her loyalty.

And then came Triglav. No, Ormo didn’t do anything without a reason.

“So what’s the reason for you?” she asked the owl, giving him a scratch on the top of his head.

He blinked at her and gave a little sigh.

* * *

As the tide began to trickle in again a few hours after sunset, the night following Narn’s disappearance, she headed toward Lees’s warehouse, across the rooftops, n***d and unseen. Triglav soared above her.