House of Reeds

hssst! Builders of the Ark of the Fathers!'

An enormous gleaming arch supporting a flat 'crossbar' rose from the middle of the river. Brown water surged around leviathan pillars. Blue-green moss clung tenaciously to a surface shimmering like abalone shell. The railway bridge ran straight as an arrow under the vault, passing slightly closer to the eastern buttress. Gretchen craned her neck, staring up, and guessed the flat top of the arch was nearly four hundred meters high and six hundred from end to end. The 'crossbar' flared out in a jagged lip. The obviously shattered edges were in striking contrast to the smooth, elegant proportions of the rest of the mammoth structure.

What could have broken off? Everything else seems so sturdy…

The part of her mind which could puzzle out the surviving fragments of a broken Tcho-Tcho pot from the midden debris of a late Khmer burial site stirred. She looked east and then west, staring at the banks of the river. A cold chill washed over her and she flinched away from the window. Far in the distance, on the northern horizon, a long blue smudge marked the rampart of the low hills ringing the city of Takshila.

'Hrrrr…' Magdalena paged through her guidebook. 'Ah! The 'Arch of the Risen Dawn,' ' she rumbled in her deep voice, 'the largest standing remnant of the Haraphan civilization which once ruled all of Jagan, nearly a million years ago. Huh – doesn't say what it was…'

Gretchen swallowed, staring at the lumpy hills in the distance. All the land they'd passed through since leaving Parus was depressingly flat farmland, lined with tiny roads and hedges of dusty blue-gray brush. Every few kilometers, the whitewashed buildings of a village – each sitting atop a substantial hill – broke the monotony. The fields spiraled out from the villages, following shallow canals cut through brick-red soil.

'It was a bridge.' Her voice sounded strange, as if it rang from a great distance.

Magdalena's ears twitched back and she made a disbelieving sound.

'Once,' Anderssen said, rubbing her thumb against the dirty glass, 'it vaulted a swift white river plunging through a rocky gorge or steep hills. The Haraphan builders drove the pillars into the sides of the canyon and laid their road atop…' She peered outside, but the train had rattled on, leaving the slow muddy river behind. 'The roadway is gone, shattered as the land wore away, carried down to the sea by the waters of the Phison, or torn up for building material. Only the bridge itself remains – the Haraphan engineers built to last.'

Maggie closed her guidebook, nostrils flared. Her hackles were stiffening. 'Eeee… can…can the land change so much, in this million years?'

Gretchen nodded, still cold, and she shrank into her seat, tugging the field jacket around her. The dusty, hot compartment now seemed small and sad and terribly fragile. A queer sensation of weight – building in her thoughts since they'd climbed the endless flights of stairs up to that first horrible little hotel room in Parus – now settled fully on her.

Everything is ground down here by age, even the land. Everything. Leaving nothing but finely ground dust. What I'll be, soon enough… Anderssen felt terribly sad – not for the Haraphans, so obviously wiped away by the inexorable progress of history – but for herself, knowing Duncan, Tristan and Isabelle would be unrecognizable when she saw them again. And how much longer will my mother live? She's not young, not anymore… Is this artifact worth anything?

Parker continued to snore, his mouth slightly open. Gretchen hugged the jacket tighter. She had a sinking feeling the kalpataru would be nothing more than a can full of rust.

'Here isss room.' The Jehanan rental agent inserted a cross-shaped key into a lock at the center of a hexagonal portal. Gretchen stepped through the opened door, duffel bag dragging from her shoulder, and stared around at a long, empty chamber. Soot-stained windows lined the northern wall, looking out over the jumble of Takshila and its seventeen hills. The floors had once been lacquered wooden parquet, but years of wear had left some sections black and others an eroded white.

'There isss cleaning deposit,' hissed the rental agent's voice through Magdalena's translator. The slick showed a mouth full of pinlike teeth. 'For asuchau. Very dirty.'

Magdalena nodded dolefully in agreement and pressed a stack of Parusian shatamanu – trade coins – into his claw.

When the agent had yielded up the key and a stack of paperwork with colored stamps, waxed sigils and handwritten signatures affixed, the Hesht spun the door closed and coughed in amusement. 'See, Parker? He agrees!' Mockingly, she chanted: 'If we lose deposit, your hide will pay me back!'

'Sure…' Parker stuck his head in the nearest door opening off of the main room. 'Toilet? Filled with sand…just like Maggie likes it!'

'That's the bathing room,' Gretchen said absently, staring out one of the window panes. 'The toilet will have urea crystals in the cracks between the floor tiles.'

Her calves hurt and her hip was throbbing. The apartment tower – a khus in the local dialect – stood among a cluster of equally tall buildings just to the east of the city center. As in Parus, there were no working elevators. The steam-powered express train had left them at a station on the southern fringe of Takshila. Getting a taxi had proved impossible – where Parus had benefited from an influx of imported Imperial vehicles, the northern city seemed almost untouched by the signs of Mйxica commercialism so apparent in the south.

Having no way to identify an honest porter from a thief, they had carried their bags through the streets to the apartment tower themselves. A seemingly short distance on their one map had become several miles of pushing through strange-smelling crowds and dodging carts and wagons drawn by lizardlike beasts of burden. That had been unpleasant.

Maggie slunk in and out of all the rooms, before testing the windows. Each opened along a grooved track, but years of pollution had jammed them shut. The Hesht grunted, running an extended fore-claw through the black gum sticking the window panes closed. 'Den needs a good scrubbing – but Parker would be welcomed among his gods by smoking this…'

Takshila was strewn with seventeen famous hills, and circumscribed to the south and east by a tributary of the Phison. The largest of the hills – a stolid limestone outcropping rising above neighborhoods of tightly packed buildings – stood in full view, bathed russet by the late afternoon sun. At first glance, the massif seemed untenanted and empty, but as Gretchen let her eyes rove over the whitened cliffs and straggling trees clinging to the rocks, she realized the entire top half of the hill was a single enormous building.

So this is the House of Reeds. Anderssen slid the work goggles down from her forehead and clicked up a magnification mode. Now, without the grayish-yellow haze permeating the city air softening edges and obscuring vertical walls, she could see dark windows piercing the hill, staircases climbing shoulders of barren rock, arcades of pillars, and the ornamental trees filling terraced gardens. Quite large…doesn't seem so old, though.

Puzzled a little – her first impression of the city was of relative newness, particularly in comparison to Parus, which had fairly reeked of hoary age – Gretchen began scanning the rest of the city within her line of sight. Skyscrapers, more of those odd curved boulevards, wide streets…hmmm…each hill is circled by radial roads…ceramacrete buildings…

'Ha!' She laughed aloud and pushed her goggles back up. Turning around, she found Parker watching his self- inflating floor pad deploy itself. Maggie was banging around in what had to be the kitchen, though Gretchen wasn't sure she wanted to see what passed as a Jehanan kitchen. 'Mags – this big hill to our north is the House of Reeds, right?'

'Yarrrrr,' responded the Hesht. She emerged from the kitchen with a hooked steel blade as long as her forearm. Parker's eyebrows rose in alarm and he backed quietly away to stand near the front door of the apartment. 'You wanted a hunting lie close to the prey, yes? Well, there it is. All rocky and grim-looking as any citadel of the slave-lords of Magdag…'

Gretchen made a face. 'Slave-lords? What have you been reading? Is that a cutlass? Why do the Jehanan have…never mind.'

Magdalena sniffed ostentatiously, whiskers twitching and went to the nearest window. The hooked blade proved to be near enoughin size to allow her to pick out the gummy debris clogging the window tracks without getting her claws dirty. The Hesht began rattling the window back and forth, trying to make it open properly. Making a face at being so ostentatiously ignored, Anderssen turned to the pilot.

'Parker – would you say this is an older city than Parus?'

'This place?' Parker had a tabac out, but seemed wary of lighting up while the windows were still closed. 'Not