House of Reeds

z-suit comm switches to local point-to-point mode, no central relay allowed. Four teams – one for each fore-aft access way – run those spools out from here and affix local repeaters at each bulkhead. Move!

'Environmental section! Bring up your systems isolated from main comp, reflash your control code from backup and get the air recyclers working again.' More ratings scattered and the engineer fixed his gaze on the damage- control section, which was staring helplessly at rows of displays which were showing flashing, endlessly repeated images of an animated rabbit hopping through a field of psychedelic, oversaturated flowers.

'Damage control is -'

Main comp shut down hard and every single display on the ship went black with a pitiful whine. The rabbits flickered wildly before vanishing with a pop! The engineering deck was suddenly very, very quiet.

The subsonic background thunder of the main reactors stuttered and failed.

Even the space-bending, subliminal ringing tone of the hyperspace coil fell silent.

Isoroku swallowed, suddenly feeling cold, and realized he was trapped in the heart of a nine-thousand-ton tomb of hexacarbon and glassite and steel.

The House of Reeds

Within the Nautilus

Dust billowed along a trapezoidal passage, enveloping Gretchen and Malakar in a dirty tan cloud. Coughing, the Jehanan fell to her hands, overcome. Anderssen, thankful for her goggles, bit down on her breathing tube, seized the gardener under the shoulders and forged ahead. Twenty meters on, a ramp cut off to the left and they staggered up the slope, rising out of the toxic murk stirred up by the collapse of the vault three levels below.

Snuffling loudly, Malakar collapsed on the stone floor, gasping for breath.

Gretchen knelt beside the gardener and shook a thick coating of limestone powder from her field jacket. Everything was permeated with the fine gritty residue. 'Can you breathe?'

Malakar responded with a wheezing snort, spitting goopy white fluid on the ground.

'I guess you can.' Gretchen offered the Jehanan her water bottle.

Watching the alien drink, Anderssen was struck again by the dilapidated age of the entire structure. The grimy sensation of every surface being caked deep with the debris of centuries was only reinforced by the strange, massive pressure the kalpataru was exerting on her mind.

'Do your people – the priests, I mean – do they ever make new halls, cut new passages?'

'Is there need?' Malakar shook her head, returning the empty bottle. 'Even I can become lost – once a Master ordered maps and charts made – but after a hand of years, the project was abandoned. I saw the room of books so made, when I was a short-horn, they were rotting. Paper is treacherous with its promises. No, all the priests do now is close up the places they fear to tread.'

Gretchen nodded and helped the Jehanan to her feet. 'Do you know the way out?'

'This old walnut doesn't even know where we are,' Malakar grumbled, sniffing the air. 'Perhaps this way.'

After an hour or more, they turned into a long narrow hall, spaced with graven pillars reaching overhead to form a roof of carved triangular leaves. Malakar picked up her pace, forcing Gretchen to jog along behind. Here the floor was cleared of dust and ahead a gipu gleamed in the darkness.

'Quietly now,' the gardener whispered. 'We will reach the first level of terraces soon, and there will be priests – or even more of those profaning soldiers – about. The closest outer door known to me is some distance away, but that one is watched and guarded. We must reach one of the forgotten ones…'

They reached the end of the pillared hall, found themselves in an intersection of three other passages – all of them lit – and Malakar turned down the one to the right, then immediately stepped between two of the pillars – into a shadowed alcove – and began climbing a very narrow set of stairs. Once they had ascended beyond the lights, the gardener brought out the gipu and held the egg aloft. Picking her way along in the faint light, Gretchen ventured to speak again.

'Do you call this place the Garden because of the terraces?'

Malakar shook her head, still climbing. 'They are new – or as new as such things can be in this hoary old place. Once they were broad platforms edged with rounded walls on each level above the entrance tier. One of the Masters – six of them ago now? – decided they should be filled with earth and planted. Some fragments still surviving from those times speak of a dispute with the kujen over the provision of tribute to the House.'

'They provide all your food now?' Gretchen was thinking of the countless rooms and dozens of levels and the failure of her comm to penetrate the walls of the massif. 'How many priests live within the House?'

'Two hundred and nineteen in these failing days,' Malakar said, coming to the end of the stairs. 'We no longer use the Hall of Abating Hunger – too many echoes and shadows for so few. But there I wager over a thousand could comfortably squat and stanch their hunger with freshly grilled zizunaga.' Her long head poked out into a new passage and sniffed the air. 'We are very near the terrace where I hid the pushta in the soil.'

'I can find my way back to the entrance I used from there.' Gretchen checked her comp. The mapping soft was still running, showing her path as an irregular, looping line of red through half-filled-in rooms, chambers and halls. The cross-corridors fanned out like spines from the back of a broken snake. 'Was I wrong before, when I said this was one of the spacecraft which brought your people to Jagan? Was this a fortress, a citadel raised at the heart of their landing, to secure the new conquest? And all these new halls and tunnels and rooms cut from the rock – they're not as ancient as they seem – only hundreds of years old, from the time of the Fire.'

Malakar did not answer, but waved her forward and they hurried down another curving passage. A faint radiance began to gleam on the walls ahead, a slowly building light, promising a smoggy sky and clouds pregnant with rain.

The Jehanan remained silent, head moving warily from one side to the other, until they reached a junction where – suddenly and without warning – Gretchen's goggles picked up a UV-marker arrow pointing down a side passage.

'There!' she exclaimed, enormously relieved. 'That's the way I came.'

'Hooo…' Malakar squatted down in the passageway with the pierced stone screen, claws ticking against the floor. The bright light of afternoon filtered through the trees and picked out shining scales on her head. The gipu was tucked away. 'I know this path. A steep stair with many broken steps leads to a laundry and a bakery selling patu biscuits. I had not thought the entrance still open, but…memories fade and fail. Hoooo… I am weary now.'

'Both the inner and outer doors are frozen open.' Gretchen knelt as well, thumbing her comp to the display showing the analysis results from the scan of the kalpataru. 'Are there stories of the House during the time of the Fire? Could the entire population of the city fit inside? Is it that vast? Are there – were there – other citadels like this one?'

The Jehanan opened her jaws, trilling musically. Anderssen guessed she was laughing.

'So hungry, so hungry…W ith your claws full, you reach for more! Does this hunger ever abate or fade?'

'No, not often.' Gretchen shook her head sadly. 'Sometimes, when I am at home, with my children – I have a hatchling, as you would say, and two short-horns – I forget for a little while. But then I rise one morning and my heart wonders when the liner lifts from port, what quixotic vista is waiting for me, what dusty tomb will reveal the lives of the dead and the lost to me. Then I am happy for a little while, until I miss my children again.'

'Hur-hur! One day you will catch your own tail and eat yourself up before you've noticed!'

Anderssen grimaced at the image, then held up the comp. 'There is a preliminary analysis, as I promised, if you still want to know the truth of the kalpataru.'

Malakar raised her snout, flexed her nostrils and hooted mournfully. 'Does it matter now?' She stabbed a claw at the floor. 'Everything is buried for all time…Who could say how many lie mewed up in that bright tomb? Will truth taste as bitter as the other fruit I've plucked from your tree?'

Gretchen shrugged and looked the gardener in the eye. 'Neither sweet nor sour, I venture. Not, perhaps, what you expected.'

'Tell me then, meddling asuchau. Dare I ever sleep again? May I feel just, righteous