House of Reeds

the fusillade, his body jerking violently. Ricocheting bullets whined through the apartment, scoring the walls and clattering into the corners.

Magdalena looked up, saw the windows shattering into a cloud of glittering, plunging glass and kicked off again. Her legs were starting to cramp. Parker was a thin little human, but his squirmy weight was no furless kit clinging to her pelt. They bounded into another section of concrete and she kicked off again, flying past a row of windows.

Inside, a wide-eyed Jehanan child stared out, caught sight of a completely unexpected apparition, fluted in terror and scrambled under its sleeping rack.

The broken windows rained past them, forcing Maggie to duck her head and swing in close to the wall. Slivers of greenish glass caught in her pelt and spanged away from the concrete. Without looking up, the Hesht pushed off, monofil whirring through her harness and gloves. This time her legs were tired and they bounced into a row of windows. Glass splintered under her boots, and Maggie crabbed to the side, trying to reach concrete. The window groaned under the stress, cracked lengthwise and burst inwards.

One leg plunged into the opening, crashing through a shelf of potted plants. There were outraged hoots inside. Maggie kicked her leg free, shoved off with the other and swung past three more intact windows. She glimpsed two very large, very angry Jehanan males inside. The monofil whined, complaining, and she clenched hard with the gloves. She flew down the line as the descender released, their weight swinging them into a shallow arc.

Maggie forced her paws to release, skipping across ceramic facing. Their swing slackened, losing momentum, and they bounced to a halt against a concrete rib jutting from the face of the building. Parker grunted, suddenly jammed into a rock-hard surface, and his eyes flew open. The Hesht braced her feet, panting.

'Ooooh…my stomach feels…' The pilot stopped, squinting, his goggles automatically zooming in on the rushing shape as he focused. 'What in the Nine Hells is -'

A shrieking roar filled the sky. Maggie snapped her head around, alarmed.

A huge, winged silver shape blasted past – less than a kilometer away – between the apartment tower and its nearest neighbor. Sunlight gleamed on swept-back triangular wings and blazed from a mirrored canopy. Slender black canisters nestled under the wings. Bright red insignia were blazoned on the double-finned tail. Superheated air howled from twin fairings at the rear of the aircraft.

'Yeeeee-hah!' Parker screamed, his entire body jolted with adrenaline. 'Lookit that!'

The Jehanan jet fighter boomed past, slicing between the skyscrapers. One of the black cylinders suddenly broke free from the wing, ignited in mid-air and raced off to the southeast at supersonic speed. The boom of its passing hammered at Maggie's ears, making her blink with pain. The jet hooked left, flashing out of sight between the towers. A corkscrew of shimmering air remained, slowly untwisting in the haze.

'I can fly one of those,' Parker shouted – half-deafened – in Maggie's ear. 'I can!'

'Of course,' Maggie choked out, twisting her neck to clear her airway. 'Leggo!'

Parker relaxed his arm, looked down automatically and went white. 'Eeep!'

The Hesht kicked off and they sailed down another twenty meters, passing more windows and sections of bare concrete. This time they touched down within spitting distance of a building adjoining the apartment tower. Maggie clenched her hand repeatedly and they bounced down onto whitewashed plaster. Parker's legs touched slate tile and he collapsed bonelessly.

Magdalena grunted, taking his weight in her legs, and unclipped the monofil tabs. Squeezing the tabs twice, she threw them up into the air and ducked down.

The microspools clicked into retract and both tabs began reeling in the monofil at top speed. They vanished in the blink of an eye, racing up the side of the building.

Pushing the terrified gardener in front of her, Anderssen hurried them back to the opening. The floodlights were still shining bright as the sun. Wiping blood from her face, Gretchen crouched down, casting a wary eye at the chamber of the kalpataru.

The survey comp lay undisturbed on the floor, but now it had woken up and was happily scanning away.

'Get ready,' Gretchen said, voice tight with strain, as she picked up the comp. A rising sense of fragility was swelling in her mind, as though the stone under her feet, the bulky shoulder of the gardener, even her own skin was growing thinner and thinner with every passing second. The comp was reporting a steadily rising level of ambient electromagnetic energy in the vault. She adjusted her goggles, making sure they were on tight. 'In a second, I'm going out there. When I do -'

Anderssen closed Malakar's claws round the handle and trigger of the captured pistol.

'You have to shoot out those floodlights. Do you understand?'

Malakar stared at her with huge, wild eyes. Gretchen tried not to focus on the section of wall slowly becoming visible through the Jehanan's head or the white scars slowly emerging from her brown old hide. 'Shoot? Me?'

'Yes.' Anderssen fixed her with a fierce glare. Her fingers were trembling as she tucked the survey comp away. 'You have to shoot out the lights.'

'I…this old walnut's never used a gun like this before,' the Librarian stuttered, gingerly holding the bulky shape of a beam-pistol in her claws. 'I can't do this – she's the kujen ! Our Queen! You're talking treason and murder.'

'There's no time -' Gretchen heard the second generator whine up to full speed and threw herself through the opening, cutting tool tight in her right hand.

'There's only moments to spare,' a voice hissed from her mouth. 'We should have listened to the Jeweled-Kings when they tried to warn us… Now it's almost toolate.'

The heavy power cable shivered, current flowed through to the induction plate. The technicians – Gretchen caught a flickering double-image glimpse as she rolled up, Jehanan scientists in leather harnesses and too-small- seeming Imperial tools superimposed over much larger counterparts in advanced armor, festooned with tools properly fitted to claw and limb – were stepping back from the gleaming black arc of the tree.

This time the single ringing tone leapt instantly into immanence. The green void unfolded, rushing out to encompass the room. Gretchen stumbled, feeling the shining, sparkling effusion as a physical pressure on her face and hands. The arc unfurled, countless threads stiffening, forming a sharp-angled triangle. Then another, inverted triangle blossomed within the first, then another, inverted again. The shivering, endless hnnnnnnnnnnnnnng of the device slid upward, shrieking into ever higher registers.

Anderssen pushed forward, feeling time grind slow. The floor mottled and cracked and she became terribly aware of the vast pressure the artifact exerted on its surroundings. Stone crumbled an atom at a time, the air congealed, electrons crept sluggishly from valence to valence. Only the arc itself remained immobile, impenetrable and immune to the crushing press of time. The blaze of its power pierced the vault above, lancing towards the sky hidden beyond the marble dome, and down, plunging into the roots of the world.

The flood of visions touched old memories in Anderssen's mind, culled from endless days spent in library carrels, stacks of dusty books piled up around her 'net terminal.

Two eagle-faced abzu lift their sacred cones towards a juniper tree surmounted by a winged sun-disk. In the leaves of the divine tree are held all knowledge, as well as the fruit of eternity.

A cold, implacable awareness flooded out from the kalpataru, touching every comp within its purview.

Murdered Osiris is placed by divine hands into the heart of a tamarisk whose roots burrow into the earth, reaching the land of the dead, and stretch up to the heavens, entangling the stars. The god's eyes fly open, his sundered body returned to life.

The comp behind her on the floor turned itself off.

A gnarled ash rises against the abyss, branches spread out over all the worlds and across the sky. Three of the tree's roots reach far indeed. One winds among the Aesir, the second among the frost-giants, where Ginnungagap once was. The third extends over Niflheim, which is the source of all that is cold and grim. It was created many ages before the earth was formed. Under that root is the spring Hvergelmir in the midst of Niflheim, and Nidhogg the Serpent gnaws the bottom of this root. From this spring flow the rivers Svol, Gunnthra, Fjorm, Fimbulthul, Slidr and Hrid, Sylg and Ylg, Vid, Leiptr, and Gjoll, which is next to Hel's gates…

Gretchen's own perception attenuated, grown suddenly vast.

Photons flooding from the floodlights continued to crawl forward, brushing aside the thick soup of molecules