House of Reeds

surface came away.

'Ho!' Malakar snorted in alarm, half-blinded. Anderssen leaned in, her goggles automatically darkening to block the lurid, blue-white glow. 'Never have the gipu been so bright!'

'That's not gipu-light,' Gretchen said, eyes narrowed. 'Those are industrial floodlights.'

With the section of wall removed, Anderssen knelt and stared into the fane of the kalpataru in growing dismay. The opening seemed to be a meter or two above the floor of a circular, domed chamber dominated by a raised platform holding what could only be the tree-of-giving-what-you- desire itself.

In the glare of a row of Imperial-style floodlights hanging from wooden scaffolding, the kalpataru was a four-meter-high arc of perfect darkness rising out of a glassy gray marble floor. The surface of the object struck Gretchen as being impossibly smooth, even mirrored, but nothing reflected in the inky depths – not the pure white walls of the huge room, not the figures of uniformed Jehanan soldiers scurrying about its base, not the scaffolding, not even the hulking presence of three Honda EB62B fuel cell generators at the center of a network of heavy cables spilling across the floor. The generators wouldn't have been out of place at any dig Gretchen had ever worked on, but here the bulky red-and-silver chassis seemed almost alien. The kalpataru itself stood alone, apparently untouched by the bustling activity.

Gretchen felt a warm leathery snout push under her arm and squeezed aside, letting Malakar stare into the domed vault as well. The gardener made a strangled, horrified sound.

'Hhhh! Those are unlettered kujenai soldiers! They profane the holy of holies!'

'Yes,' Gretchen whispered, eyeing a huge rough-edged opening in the wall behind the scaffolding. 'They've dispensed with the old doorway… Looks likethey cut right through the marble with cutting gel and jackhammers.'

'Heathen barbarians!' Malakar stiffened in fury, grinding Anderssen against the side of the passage. 'Hoooo – if only this old walnut were young again! I would smite them mightily for such an affront!'

A pair of technicians approached the gleaming black shape and Gretchen tensed. The two Jehanan were dragging a thick power cable fitted with an induction clamp.

'They shouldn't do that -' Anderssen groped in her field jacket, dragging out the big survey comp and flicking the device on. 'They're going to supply power to the artifact – fools!'

The comp cycled up; a suite of video, magnetic and hi-band sensors waking to life. Almost immediately it reported the air in the chamber was charged with steadily rising heat and electromagnetic radiation from all the equipment, bodies and the lights. Only the glassy arc was inert, radiating nothing, yielding nothing to the passive scan. The two Jehanan technicians reached the base of the kalpataru and bustled about, aligning the clamp and checking readouts on the cable.

'We've got to stop them,' Gretchen said in a tight voice. 'Do you have a -'

Across the floor of the vault, the senior technician jammed the cable-plate to the gleaming dark metal at the base of the tree. Anderssen's vision sharpened in a peculiar way, as though she suddenly rushed close to the device and realized the glossy surface was composed of millions of tightly packed threads, each distinct, yet adjoining one another with micron-level precision.

An overwhelming sense of vast age struck her as an almost physical blow.

There was a soft flash – a muted, yellow-white light flooded the chamber – and Gretchen's eyes blinked wide. Everything in her perception slid to a gelatinous stop. The fronds of the ancient tree twisted, uncurled, revealing millions of tiny sparkling green cilia. A sound beyond hearing issued forth from the heart of the tree, bending the air, filling every cavity and crevice in the fane, in the network of curving corridors twisting around the vault like the chambers of a nautilus, singing down every tunnel and passageway, spilling into every room and hall, washing across countless unwary Jehanan priests and acolytes going about their business.

Gretchen beheld the air unfolding, molecules twisting, unraveling, shedding photons in a brilliant cascade. Shimmering waves of solid light belled up from her equipment, from the cables, haloing the unknowing technicians, swirled around the comp in her hand. A single golden tone – a deep, encompassing note – sustained, held captured in the shape of the curving fronds, in the arc of the tree.

The heart of the black arc split, revealing a green void filled with boiling, half-seen movement. Countless cilia unfurled from the top of the arc into a winged, sharply edged star. An even more brilliant glow began to emanate from the cluster. Anderssen felt herself recoil from a sensation of emptiness, a moment of annihilation, an unfolding which would leave her exposed, her self – her mind – her thoughts – her core – inverted and extended into…

Something sighed and the fuel-cell generator popped loudly. Smoke hissed from its metal housing. The technicians looked up, puzzled, and the vault was filled with their hissing and hooting.

Gretchen jerked back, dizzy, and fell into Malakar's arms. Everything was spinning. Her fingers were numb. The comp clattered to the ground. A strange, half-familiar sensation fled as she tried to grasp what had happened. For a moment – just the time between two breaths – she thought she was surrounded by Jehanan in ragged, carbon-scored metallic armor. They seemed grimly pleased, as though they'd won through to a desperate victory. The wooden scaffolding was absent, replaced by huge green-tinted floods hanging from cranes. Power saws roared, cutting away the sides of an enormous obsidian box. The sides toppled, crashing to a rough limestone floor. The outline of the fane was already present as a vault of stone ribs, but unfinished, lacking the smooth marble facing. Inside the box a shape was revealed, heavily padded with shockfoam. A Jehanan technician stepped forward, spraying dissolver from a pressurized canister. The pinkish-white encasement sluiced away to spill across the rough floor. A black curved shape was revealed, fronds folded back to make a twisted, ropy arc…

The floodlights shone hot in her eyes. Anderssen blinked away tears and tried to sit up. Her limbs were trembling as if she'd run clear to the postal station at Dumfries and back again without stopping.

Malakar dragged her back into the darkness, but not fast enough to keep one of the Jehanan soldiers milling around in the vault from catching sight of movement out of the corner of his eye. Curious, the soldier moved along the wall, long feet slapping on marble, and then saw the opening. He crouched down, drawing a modern-looking pistol, and crawled inside.

Behind him, a spirited discussion began between the durbar commanding the detachment of soldiers and the lead technician. After a few moments of hooting and hissing, the dead generator was pushed aside by four brawny Jehanan corporals and the second one rolled forward.

The durbar, disgusted at the fragility of the Imperial equipment, snarled at his underlings. Time pressed and he kept checking his chrono. Somewhere outside, the kujen of Takshila was counting on them to invoke the power of the dusty old machine. 'Clean up all this mess – there are work tools and cables and cutting equipment everywhere!'

The kalpataru remained quiescent, pressing into the marble floor with the weight of ages.

Parker clattered down the last flight of steps and out into the courtyard at the center of the apartment building. He was draped in a long rain poncho, a broadbrimmed, waxed field hat on his head and an umbrella tucked under his arm. The thirty-third floor weather service reported rain and more rain in the offing. The pilot turned right, strode along a dim, sour-smelling arcade and pushed open a door made of interleaved wooden slats.

Then his pace slowed and he looked back curiously at the empty arcade. Rain was drumming on ancient, cracked concrete in the courtyard.

There's always a whole crowd of grandmas down here, the pilot thought. Selling ornaments and scale-polishing cream and claw-sharpeners. Where'd they go?

Cautious, he moved quietly down the hallway to the front lobby. Everything was very quiet, which made Parker nervous. Like the courtyard, the lobby was empty. Even the little green felted tables where the diviners consulted their oracular bones had been packed up and taken away. Parker licked his lips, wished he had a tabac, and eyed the street outside.

A single runner-cart rolled past, a wiry Jehanan bent between the wooden poles, powerful legs loping along the glassy surface of the boulevard. The pilot blinked, noticed the shops across the street were all closed and shuttered, and then frowned at a reflection in the front windows of the akh-noodle