House of Reeds

stooped old Jehanan and a swarm of children who carefully plucked wayward leaves from the trees and trimmed the stems with scissors.

'I'm amazed those trees are still standing. A dozen kids should have reduced the whole terrace to a desert by now.'

Magdalena looked up from her comps – now laid out on a low wicker table Parker had found in the district furniture market – and twitched her ears lazily. 'Perhaps the orb-trees grow quickly in this nnningurshimakkhul climate. Perhaps the kits are specially trained guardians who protect the world from being consumed by leaf demons.'

'Ha!' Gretchen laughed, grinning at the Hesht. 'You're in a good mood this morning.'

'Hrrr… This ssshuma will be in a good mood when we find the gifting-bush and leave this nose-biting place.'

Anderssen shrugged, looking at the northeastern sky through the windows. A pall of yellow-gray smoke filled the sky, drifting west from a huge district of chemical refineries. The noxious cloud choked the city whenever the wind turned. Magdalena had been particularly revolted to find the smog left a gummy residue on her fur.

'Any luck on getting the ground-penetrating radar to work?'

The Hesht shook her head and the tip of her tail lashed from side to side in annoyance. 'There must be shielding beneath all the ornamental carving.' She tapped a claw on one of her displays. 'Each open window and door gives us a paws-breadth slice of the interior, but only for six, seven meters – then nothing. Without sensor relays placed inside the complex? No more than this.'

Magdalena flexed her claws, letting them slide out of cartilage-sheaths, and tipped her chin at the three-d map. Three quarters of the surface of the hill had been mapped in painstaking detail by the array of sensors clipped to the windows or mounted on tripods. The far northern quadrant was still a mystery, though Gretchen intended to hike around to the far side in a day or so and mount their two spare cameras and radar packs on a rooftop, if she could find a suitable location.

Everything within the hill was also beyond their reach, at least while they observed from a distance. Sadly, the Company had neglected to provide them with antigrav spyeye remotes. Every indication pointed to a warren of tunnels and chambers and hidden rooms. The personage identifier system in Maggie's number three comp was counting silhouettes, facial pictures and stride lengths – when they could be captured on camera – and the count of inhabitants of the hill of the 'relentless ones' stood at four hundred so far.

Anderssen scanned her camera down to the 'Southern Entrance.' This was a broad, triumphal-style staircase vaulting up a near-vertical cliff from a warren of closely packed, shoddy-looking buildings at the foot of the hill. Age-eroded statues lined the stairs, which ended in a monumental gateway. The massive doors – probably made of the ubiquitous lohaja wood – were closed. Gretchen had yet to see them open.

She shook her head in consideration. 'The south doors have to be for ceremonial occasions. There are drifts of leaves on the steps and a native avian is roosting in the crown of this topmost statue. We haven't seen any other location where there's traffic…no deliveries, no waste being taken out, nothing. So – do they leave? Are they a completely self-contained community?'

'An ark in the middle of a city?' Magdalena growled in disbelief. 'What would be the purpose?'

'It's only a thought,' Gretchen replied, standing up with a groan. 'More likely, day-to-day business is conducted out of sight, through tunnels or even an entrance which is completely obscured by a building.' She stretched, feeling her back creak in protest. 'Do you suppose Parker can find me a real chair?'

'Hrrr! Shiny-backed lizards don't use human chairs! Learn to sit on comfortable floor like the Nisei do!'

'He found you a table…' Anderssen swung from side to side, trying to loosen up her stiff back. Time to get out of the house. 'We've mapped enough of the rooftop walkways,' she said, beginning to braid her hair into a thick ponytail, 'for me to be able to reach the cliffs. When Parker gets back, I think I'll try making a circuit of the whole hill -'

The apartment door made a grinding sound and then recessed into the door-frame, allowing the pilot to stomp in with an enormous woven basket clutched to his chest. The top was packed with glass bottles filled with purified water.

'Konnichi-wa!' He called cheerfully. 'Where can I put this down?'

Magdalena regarded a covered wooden bowl Parker had removed from the basket suspiciously. 'This is supposed to be food?'

'Extra spicy,' the pilot said, mouth already full of fried pakka dumpling. 'G'head, that's yours – all raw and juicy, but with some peppers – well, I say they're peppers, dunno what the slicks call them. Meat, Miss Magdalena, real meat! And not skomsh either.'

The Hesht's nostrils flared, but she removed the cover and sniffed the goopy contents with interest. The hackles rose on the back of her neck, then settled and she experimentally hooked one of the pieces of meat out with her little claw. Gelatinlike brown fluid dripped into the bowl.

Gretchen averted her eyes, hoping to keep her own lunch down. Parker grinned, a familiar-looking paper cylinder in one hand, his lighter in the other.

'That's not an Imperial-brand tabac is it? Is your medband on? Did you take an anti-anaphylactic?'

'Very funny,' Parker replied, lighting the tabac and taking a tentative puff. His eyes widened, he coughed sharply, then inhaled again. 'Ahhh…much more like the real thing.'

'Is it real tabac?' Anderssen picked up the little cardboard box. The lettering was modern Takshilan block script, and the packet had all the usual gewgaws the city vendors used to flog their wares. In this case, a whistle was tacked to one side, enclosed in cellophane, while small paperboard cards with the toothy portraits of famous Gandarian racing lizard jockeys were on the other. For a moment, Gretchen had trouble making out the brand name of the tabac, but then realized the blocky, bold name was transliterated NГЎhuatl.

'You're smoking 'The Emperor's Teat,' ' she said in a dry voice. 'How does he taste?'

Parker snorted, laughing, and with tears in his eyes managed to choke out 'Just like the real thing!' before going into a violent fit of coughing.

Magdalena looked up, still suspicious. 'What are you hooting about, monkey?' She recoiled, suddenly aware of the cloud of tabac smoke coiling lazily in the air. 'These leaves smell stronger than the last ones…'

'Great.' Anderssen pinched her nose closed and picked up one of the bottles of fresh water. The pipes in the building were only capable of disgorging rust-red fluid which did, in fact, contain some H-two-Oh, but all three of their medbands flashed red when used to test the potability. Parker was of the opinion that 'some water is provided with the bacteria.' Gretchen was surprised the building water mains still worked as high up as the thirty-third floor. 'I'm going out.'

'Wait -' Parker rolled up, wiping his mouth. He looked quite pale. 'Be careful. I saw something really strange while I was out getting groceries. It's hard to navigate roof-stairs with that basket, so I was walking back through the tanner's district – which is never terribly busy, unless you're delivering hides – and some buses went past.'

'Real Imperial-style buses? With wheels and methanol engines?' Gretchen glanced at Magdalena. 'Do you hear anything on your comm-scanner about that?'

The Hesht shook her head. Out of habit, she had set up a frequency-hopping comm wave scanner to listen for anything interesting. Unfortunately, the only comm traffic in the city was encrypted beyond the capability of Maggie's comp soft to decode. 'Sometimes I hear chartered merchants chatting, if they're here sitting attendance on the kujen…'

'Anyway!' Parker raised his voice, giving both women a glare. 'These weren't just Imperial- style buses; they were surplused Colonial Department of Education sixty-seaters. Repainted, of course, but it's hard to cover up the markings with only one coat of sprayon. But that wasn't the oddest thing – I mean, you know how hungry the market here is for modern transport, why not ship your retired school buses to the back of beyond? – what made me stop and stare was the buses were filled with Quarsenian jandars -'

'Which are?' Gretchen spread her hands questioningly.

'Which are tribesmen from the northern mountains,' Parker replied. 'Nasty-looking characters – mottled hides, felted armor, conical hats and ornamental spiked masks; they look like porcupines – these ones were armed to the teeth. They had rifles too, modern rifles – not those jezail-looking things some of the richer nobles carry.'