House of Reeds

'Why were they riding in buses? Where were they going?'

'How do I know?' Parker took another drag on his tabac, then blew a fat cloud of pinkish smoke towards the ceiling. 'They were driving east towards the freight railway yards. The funny thing, though, was I saw a European on board the lead bus. He was giving the driver directions.'

'A human male? There is a scheme a-paw for certain.' Magdalena hooked another slimy chunk out of the bowl and popped it into her mouth. 'Hrrr…these are delicious, Parker, what are they called?'

'Zizunaga, which is snake, I think. Anyway, boss, be careful if you go out. The streets were pretty empty. Something must be going on.'

The well-maintained roofwalk Gretchen had been following ended in an irregular wooden platform lined with wide-mouthed ceramic pots. Each jar held a carved stone head surrounded by freshly planted flowers. The heads were recognizably Jehanan and their jaws yawned towards the sky, catching a fine mist of water spilling from the cliffs above.

A funeral offering? she wondered. Remembering ancestors, or placating their ghosts?

Gray limestone soared over her head, hung with trailing vines and thick, fingerlike succulents growing in crevices and clinging to tiny ledges in the rock. The walkway had been built up into a crevice, making a sort of elevated platform surrounded by a constant damp mist. Green-gray moss covered the wooden slats, making her footing tricky.

Gingerly, she reached out and touched the cliff face. The limestone was damp, beaded with water, and crisscrossed with sharp puckered ridges. Eight days of traveling and running around and finally I get to our destination. Hah.

Stepping carefully between the jars, Gretchen climbed up into the root of the crevice, gloved hands pressed against either wall. Trailing saprophytes brushed against her goggles. Cool water beaded on her face, a welcome relief from the usual soup of humid sweat she moved in. The narrow space ended in a still-smaller alcove – obviously worked by chisels at some time in the past – holding a lumpy-looking statuette.

A shrine? The planters and stone heads could be attendant ritual devices.

The god's features were entirely covered with moss. There were no tracks or traces of anyone coming to clean the votary, which made Anderssen grimace, realizing her boots had already left very obvious scars on the mossy stones. She turned around and carefully picked her way back to the platform. Once she was standing under the dripping vines, looking out through slowly falling sheets of mist, Gretchen was struck by the perfect quiet in the little ravine.

The usual sounds of the city – runner-cart horns, clattering machinery, the hooting voices of the natives singing, the pounding of hammers and the rasping whine of lathes – were swallowed by the mossy walls, or blocked by the mist.

'Quiet and still again,' she mused, hands on her hips. One eye narrowed in thought. I keep finding these little pockets of solitude – but there's no quarrelsome gardener here. And there's no way up, or into, the hill in this place. A little disappointed, she left the shrine and headed back towards the last junction in the maze of walkways running hither and yon across the rooftops of Takshila.

Two hours later, Gretchen turned a corner, one eye on her hand-comp – which was displaying part of their map – and found herself looking at a short, arched passageway cutting through the base of a circular tower made of brick. Beyond the opening, a flight of stairs – broad and low, just as the Jehanan liked with their long, splayed feet – disappeared up into the hillside.

'Maggie? Do you have me on locator?'

Yes, hunt-sister, plain as blood on whiskers.

'Good. Mark this spot. There's a passage through a building – our map shows the walkway ending here in a dead end – and a staircase. Can you see that?'

There was a pause, and then Magdalena made a thoughtful hissing sound. No…from our angle there's only more cliffside. Must be hidden in a fold in the rock.

Anderssen tiptoed through the passageway, looked carefully up and down the staircase, then double-checked all of her equipment. 'Am I still on locator?'

No. You've dropped off the display.

Gretchen nodded to herself and pulled a UV dye marker out of a jacket pocket. 'The stairs below here are blocked by rubble – looks like a building collapsed and they just made a new wall out of the debris. Keep an eye on my comm signal. I'm going to head up, keeping quiet.'

You should wait, Magdalena grumbled. We're far away. Let me send Parker to stand by at the entrance. Then, if a hostile clan pounces, he can come to your aid.

'I'll be fine.' Anderssen peered upwards. The stairs disappeared into the side of the hill. 'I'll be right back out and we'll be able to talk on comm.'

Oh, I've heard many a kit say that before, just before they were snatched up by crag- wolves. The Hesht did not sound convinced at all. And if you don't return? How long should I wait before singing your death-howl and collecting the skulls of a hundred lizards for your memorial tomb?

'You will do no such thing!' Gretchen was appalled at the prospect. 'If anything happens – if I'm not back in twelve hours – or you have to abandon the apartment, we'll meet at the train station, or if not there, then at the hotel in Parus. But don't worry, I will be fine.'

There was a grumbling sound, but Anderssen ignored the protest, turned around to fix the location of the passageway in her memory and then started climbing, the pen tucked into her right hand.

A warbling, humming sound echoed down a hallway lined with perforated stone screens. Anderssen, who had been creeping along the left-hand side of the passage, keeping her head below the rosette-shaped openings, became completely still. She waited, expecting to see the bulky shape of a Jehanan come padding down the hallway.

Nothing appeared, though the warbling sound – rising and falling in a tuneless way – seemed to come a little closer. Gretchen moved forward to one of the supporting pillars and unclipped an eyeball from her vest. Rotating a ring-control to turn on the tiny device, she pointed the camera out through an opening.

The heads-up display on her right goggle lens flickered awake, showing her a close-up of a leaf. Frowning, Anderssen dialed back the magnification until she could see more than vascular channels and phylem. Most of her view was blocked by foliage, but something moved in her field of view and – after peering at the image for a moment – she recognized a large Jehanan foot covered with mud and leaves. As she watched, a spade scraped soil back into a hole.

Well, I doubt it can see me, she thought, stowing the camera again. Checking behind her in case a whole troop of ferocious monks with saw-toothed swords had crept up, Gretchen scuttled forward to the end of the hall. A partially illuminated passageway dropped down a concave set of steps into the terrace to her left – she caught a glimpse of the city skyline – and curved away into darkness on her right. Intermittent lights spotted the passage, falling from tiny sconces set at the junction of roof and wall. They were not candles, but some kind of bioluminescent pod held in a fluted ceramic shell.

Nervous the Jehanan digging on the terrace would notice her, Gretchen tapped her comm awake and peered at her locator band. Both devices had stopped working as soon as she'd entered the monastery. The ruined stairs had led her to a circular door much like their apartment entryway, though the triangular sections were permanently rusted into the wall recesses. Oddly, the first door had immediately led to a second, which, while in slightly better condition, was also frozen open. An empty passageway, wide enough for four Jehanan to march down abreast, had beckoned her into the heart of the massif.

After that, she had tried to keep to the left-hand wall, indicating each turn with the UV marker. With no data suggesting where the kalpataru might lie, she had concentrated on covering as much ground as possible while the mapping software in her comp measured each winding ramp, hallway, abandoned chamber and empty passageway she passed through.

Though she heard voices echoing in the distance once or twice, she had not encountered a single Jehanan. After hours of leaden silence, accompanied only by the echo of her footsteps, even the alien tonalities drifting in from the terrace were comforting.