House of Reeds

The Fane of the Kalpataru Deep Within the House of Reeds

A succession of sharp popping sounds rippled across the vault. The banks of floodlights hanging from the wooden scaffolding flickered and died. Darkness engulfed the Jehanan soldiers scrambling to react to Gretchen's mad dash across the floor. The durbar blinked, suddenly blind.

"Lights!" he shouted, edging backwards, claw out to find the cover of the generator housing. "Get some lights on in here, you fools!"

His wild, panicky voice touched Anderssen's ears as a long, muffled huuuummmaaa. For her, the air was still thick and impenetrable – the glorious radiance of the shining black arc was failing, swallowed by the air, by the stone dome overhead, by the inert marble of the floor – but its influence still pervaded the vault. Ghostly forms thronged around her – both the Jehanan workers in the distant past as they cleared away the shockfoam from the kalpataru, and those in the present, who were cowering wherever they could, fearful of being struck by a stray bullet.

She turned, the delicate shining curve of the divine tree drawing her eye.

The boiling green void was dimming, the vast array of sharp angles collapsing, softening, the buckling vortices of space and time folding back in upon themselves, the half-open gate disintegrating as quickly as it had begun to form.

Gretchen saw: A jagged stone plunging from the sky, white-hot with atmospheric friction, spearing into a green mountainside with a burst of flame. Spindly-looking trees toppled, blown down, and the stone – hissing and popping – lay inert at the bottom of a crater.

Tri-lobed grass grew with dizzying speed, violet-colored fern-trees lifted themselves from the ashes. Millennia passed. The forest was swept away by fire, then renewed, over and over again. The sun darkened. The violet-leafed saprophytes failed and were replaced by hardier species that could live on the slowly dimming radiance of Bharat.

Gods raged in the heavens, splitting the clouds, fighting among themselves. Cities rose, glittering, on the plain below the mountain and then failed, wiped away by the relentless pressure of time. Still, the sun continued to dim. Slowly the forest darkened as the implacable hand of circumstance winnowed the weaker species away.

Something came pacing in the nighted forest – a shining chitinous creature with long bifurcated legs and shimmering wings bearing a glowing eye – in the radiance of the eye, the mossy stone was ablaze with light. The Jeweled-King plucked it from the heather and carried it away.

The stone sat alone in a blue-green room, undisturbed until slender machines descended from the roof, poking and prodding, examining the striations in the jagged surface. Then the stone split, falling into three equal portions. Behind glassite windows, the jewel-colored insects chimed in horror as a single glistening dark seed was revealed.

The seed split and split again, unfolding into a sharp, jagged arc of darkness which lifted towards the sky…

Anderssen wrenched her attention away from the distant past. Furtive images of burning cities and vast armies of insectile creatures warring upon one another for custody of the dreadful arc slipped away from her awareness.

The vault was aglow with shifting, subtle patterns. Gretchen turned with enormous effort – everything seemed frozen, but now she realized her perception of time was drastically altered. Something was approaching her – a cylindrical bullet, corkscrewing through the heavy air, leaving a twisting trail of disrupted gas behind it – and she dragged her head out of its path.

The Jehanan durbar was caught in mid-lunge, lurching towards the freshly punctured fuel-cell generator.

Technicians were scattering, claws over their heads.

One of them was crouched by the entrance, beside the dead generator, hands placing packs of blasting gel and triggers into a metal carrier bearing the Sandvik logo. Gretchen saw him, perceived a shining glide path in the air between her and the back of his scaly skull, felt the heaviness of the cutting tool in her hand.

Breathe, she commanded herself, struggling to wrench her arm back. Let yourself breathe.

A dry, acerbic voice cut through her thoughts – Clarity is the enemy of action, Green Hummingbird said mockingly – and the illusion of elapsing time snapped violently back into synch with her perception.

The bullet snapped past, spanging away from the glossy metal. Gretchen thumbed the cutting tool to life and pitched the heavy rod in one desperate motion. Malakar was hooting wildly, her pistol blasting again and again. The durbar rolled behind the generator, his own automatic blazing back at the stuttering flashes of the gardener's weapon.

Ducking low, Anderssen spun and scrabbled wildly across the floor. "Malakar, go go go!"

The old Jehanan flung the empty pistol away and scrambled towards the hole.

The cutting tool clipped the Jehanan technician on the back of his head, hissing plasma-jet searing the side of his face, and bounced away into the auditorium beyond the broken wall, still spewing flame. Crying out in terrible pain, the technician jerked to the side, mashing the trigger pack in his hands down into the container of cutting gel. There was a sharp, hot spark.

Gretchen threw herself into the crevice, cracking her shoulder against the marble, and immediately had her nose smashed by Malakar's wildly lashing tail. "Ahhh! Move move move!"

The gardener bolted up, reached back to seize hold of Anderssen's jacket collar and staggered off down the tilted passageway.

Sixty kilos of cutting gel ignited in the container. Ravening flame burst upwards, incinerating the wounded technician and engulfing the wooden scaffolding. Marble groaned, tormented by raging heat. The air in the vault rushed inwards, fueling the flames roaring outwards. The kalpataru was wrapped in liquid fire, though the ancient metal remained unmoved and untouched. All three fuel-cell packs blew apart, adding yet more heat to the incandescent explosion. Stone ribs flexed, expanding violently, and then the roof of the dome splintered, raining debris down on the huge room below.

A shockwave of white-hot flame, smoke and dust boomed out through the adjoining corridors, overcoming more Jehanan soldiers rushing towards the fane. The entire structure, buried deep within the body of the House, buckled, crashing down, burying the divine tree in thousands of tons of limestone and marble.