House of Reeds

keeps hopping in and out of its hole. If you get to a clearing, or a sunny rock exposed to the sky…'

Anderssen took a steadying breath and her fingers drifted to the medband on her wrist. She could feel her heart speeding up. Right. Time to retrace my steps – if I could remember which way I'd come! Stupid machines, why do they…Her thoughts became still for an instant. Wait. Remember…how do you unravel a knot you can't untie? You close your eyes. Let your fingers – or your feet – find the way.

Then doubt assailed her. Why should her feet, mended workboots and all, know their own way back to the apartment building? Because Green Hummingbird would say you'd left a shadow on the world while you were walking and if you were quiet, quiet as a desert mouse, you could catch hold of that shadow and follow it home.

The jarring sound of a clanging gong joined the angry, buzzing noise filling the air in the alley. Gretchen thought she could hear the trampling of hundreds of huge clawed feet on cobblestones. The sway of flickering, scaled tails. She knew how that felt, to have a long counter-balancing tail, to have stiff three-clawed feet digging in the sand as she ran.

Just like the Mokuil. As I was, if only for a moment…

Anderssen was surprised by the clarity of the memory, the fierce feeling of the Ephesian sun burning on her face, thin, bitterly cold air biting at her throat. The events she'd suffered through on Ephesus Three were muddled now, both by Imperial memorywipe and time, but every once in a while something surfaced, sharp and clear as broken glass. For the last year and a half, she'd done her best to ignore the hallucinogenic visions.

But now – here in this hot, alien labyrinth – the memory felt useful.

Suspicious, she looked at the houses lining the lane with sharp interest. Her moment of connection with the denizens of dead Mokuil had only been momentary – an hour, if that long – and suddenly Anderssen was sure the creature she'd shared footsteps with was not so very different from these Jehanan. The Imperial survey notes said the Jehanan had come to Bharat from another world – some kind of interstellar migration – had they crossed the void from lost Mokuil, wherever that might be?

Did – could – Green Hummingbird know I'd step into their footsteps again? Such a coincidence seemed impossible. Anderssen set the hypothesis aside in her mind. No data. Nothing but a queer feeling. Not enough…

But sometimes an irritating feeling – a sense of things being out of place – was all she'd needed to find something lost, a missing bit of evidence, a bone, a stone, whatever she needed to find in the rubble of the dig. Gretchen pushed away from the wall and clicked the channel to the apartment open.

'Maggie, I'm going comm silent for a bit. Watch for my locator signal.'

She shut down the earbug and then went through the gear on her belt and body-webbing, turning off everything running on a fuel cell or power chip. Then she closed her eyes again and stepped out into the lane, fingertips outstretched, feet firmly planted.

The sounds of trilling and squeaking and drumming in the air around her changed, shifted, fell from chaos into order. Gretchen breathed steadily, her attention focused on counting – a simple series of numbers, no more, no less – and let her feet, her hips, her arms shift minutely, bit by bit, until she felt perfectly comfortable.

After a long time, the sounds changed again and she felt cooler – had the sun been obscured by clouds? – but the buzzing noise resolved into voices piping and squealing. Children? Delicate fluting voices. Not adult Jehanan, for sure. The gong continued to sound, a stately voice calling out into some open space. A park? A square? Wheels were rattling on stone, that was very clear, the constant passage of wheeled carts and rickshaws. A commercial street beside a square. A temple, a school, someplace where the young are taught to sing.

The moment of cold passed and Gretchen felt the sun touch her shoulders and hair. Clouds are gathering. It will rain. Someone passed her in the passageway and she could feel – not hear, no, the moving creature said nothing – a sensation of pardon me as it passed.

Gretchen turned away from the unseen square and street and school, feeling the air push and press at her, and began walking. The sun was warm on the side of her face. Plaster brushed dustily under her fingertips.

She continued to count and walked more confidently. The lane turned and turned again, and then she was walking down a flight of steps. She could hear a saw cutting through wood, smell sawdust and hear the chatter of workmen laboring over their daily business.

Parker groaned in pain and rolled over on the blanket. He stared, eyes bloodshot, at Magdalena's back. The Hesht was working on the windows again. Four of the panes were open, letting a cold, damp breeze eddy through the barren apartment.

'Wha' you doing?' The pilot's mouth felt fuzzy and bruised at the same time. 'Di' I pass ou'?'

'Hrrr… You're sicker than a cub who bit a spinytail on a dare. Drink your water.'

A half-full water bottle stood on the floor beside Parker's sleepbag. Gingerly, he moistened his mouth. That seemed to cut some of the horrible taste, so he took a longer swallow. 'Gods, Mags, it is fucking cold, can't you close a window?'

The Hesht looked over her shoulder, yellow eyes sharp. 'No. Crawl under your hide and turn on the bag heater. Packleader needs running three-d camera, infrared, sensor readings – all the eyes of the hunt we have – on the hill. Business, remember? Hunting, remember? No – you're coughing bile and cheese on nice clean floor while I work. Hrrr…stupid leaf eater.'

Parker stared around, realizing the room had changed considerably since he'd shaken a local tabac out into his hand. The cig had smelled all right – a little sharp – but nothing like some of the things he'd smoked over the years. Came in a fancy cardboard box with advertising on every square centimeter. A stick of flavored chicle had been stuck in a cellophane wrapper on the back and the front had a little mini-manga which folded out. All completely confusing, of course, as Parker hadn't taken the time to learn the Jehanan script, but the tabac had seemed safe.

Of course, after inhaling he couldn't remember anything until opening his eyes in a pool of his own stomach lining. He forced himself up onto his forearms.

'Where's the boss?'

Maggie shook her head and wrenched the window pane she was working with violently. The glass made a shivery sound and cracked diagonally. The Hesht made an irritated hissing sound and groped around with her spare hand to find some sealotape. 'Packleader will talk to us later.'

'Why? Did something go wrong?' Parker levered himself up. The room began to spin.

'Wrong? Hssss…puking kitten, has anything gone particularly right since landing? No – the whole planet smells like your urine, nothing works, there are no soft beds and even the freshly killed meat tastes like hides-in-the-grass-and-bites-your-tail. Hrrr! Wrong? Hrrr…'

Parker nodded woozily, elected to say nothing and collapsed.

Shadow passed over Gretchen's face, her footsteps echoed down some kind of tunnel for thirty or forty paces and then she came out into a quiet space, half in shadow, half in the sun. She could smell rain gathering when the cooking smoke wasn't too thick – but for the moment, in this place, the sun was shining clear. A strong smell of wood smoke, hot tile, yeast and metal tickled her nose.

The feeling of the air pressing her, guiding her in a direction, evaporated. Anderssen opened her eyes, disappointed, sure she was not back at the apartment building. That didn't work worth a damn.

Two lanes came together in a jumble of archways and a looming wall of square-cut stone. Ahead, she could see a half-open door and beyond that, a sunny garden filled with red and blue flowers. The sound of a treadle clacking away filtered out of the upper air. To one side, to her left, was an alcove where the heavy stone wall came to an abrupt end.

A curving surface, cool and blue-green, shone in the sunlight. For an instant, as she first became aware of the fragment, Gretchen thought she was staring into the ocean depths, light bending and scattering among rippling waves, the image of the sun broken into dozens of reflections, each wavering in time to unseen currents. Then she blinked and there was only a smooth, solid surface glowing in the midday light. A section of wall rising above her head and an arm's reach to the left and right.

'Oh…' Anderssen stepped forward, nudging her work goggles up into her hair, stripping away her gloves, and