House of Reeds

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 anger at the fools who run squeaking in empty halls, pretending to be the kujenai of old? Should I weep for what you've destroyed?"

Gretchen ran a hand through her hair and grimaced at the gritty feeling. She desperately needed a shower. Should I tell this old one what I saw? About the ghosts?

She gathered her thoughts, looked Malakar in the eye and said: "The stone floor holding the root of the tree was a particularly pure, seamless marble. These readings show it was all of one piece. Marble, you should be aware, does not conduct heat, vibration or electricity well. The domed chamber around the tree also served to dampen electromagnetic waves or currents. I think the chamber was completely enclosed. It was a tomb."

The Jehanan hooted questioningly. "Why would they hide the -"

"Because they thought the tree was dangerous!" Gretchen stared at her grimy hand. Her fingers were trembling. Are there scorch marks from the green fire that washed over me? Is this how Hummingbird feels every day of his life? Merciful Mary, please keep my thoughts from sin, drown my curiosity, still my reaching hand. "Because they knew it was dangerous. So they built a prison in their strongest fortress, and they set a particularly devout order – the mandire – to guard the cell and keep it safe."

Malakar's eye-shields rattled. "Safe? Safe from what?"

"From other Jehanan? From the last of the Haraphans?" Anderssen clenched her hands together. "Whoever they captured it from…"

The gardener hissed, confused. "You are filled with riddles. My snout is cold from all these twisty thoughts. The only matter to claw is – did any life remain in the cold metal? Was aught revealed to the Masters when they embraced the kalpataru down through these endless years?"

Taking a deep breath, Gretchen tucked the comp away. "I believe…" she said in a ragged voice, thinking of the fuel-cell generators. "Without power the tree slept for millennia. I believe the machine was very, very old. Older than the arrival of the Jehanan, older than the Haraphans. Once, the kalpataru had a power source of its own, but that mechanism failed long ago."

Malakar peered at Gretchen, turning her long head from side to side, letting each eye gaze upon the human. "Without power…and those whining boxes, they were feeding the tree? Would it have woken to life?"

"For an instant – Mother Mary bless and protect me! – for less than the blink of an eye, it did." She smiled grimly. "Don't worry about the Master of the Garden and his propaganda. If he had truly beheld the visions of the device, his mind would have been destroyed long ago."

"No loss!" The Jehanan hooted in amusement, rattling old, yellowed claws on the floor. "He might gain some wit thereby!"

Gretchen shook her head sharply, feeling a curdling, acid sensation stir in her stomach. "He might gain more than wit – if something filled his broken mind with new thoughts. You would not like what happened then -" She stopped, wondering if Hummingbird would tell the gardener of the cruel powers which had shattered lost Mokuil and still lay in dreaming sleep on desolate worlds like Ephesus. "You were right to mistrust the kalpataru and feel its worship unwholesome."

"But," Malakar said, "without rain and sun, it lay fallow."

"Yes," Anderssen allowed, rubbing her face with both hands. She was beginning to feel truly exhausted. "But not dead, only dormant. Waiting for meddling fools to come along and give it life again."

"Hrrr…" Malakar fell silent, watching the human with an intent expression. Anderssen grew nervous, wondering if the Jehanan would attack her again. After a long time, the gardener stirred. "This slow old walnut suddenly realizes even rich asuchau humans must spend shatamanu to buy tasty food, to travel the iron road, to stay in tall khus where the wind is always cool in the windows – but the rich never get their claws soiled with dirt, or split by toil. Never."

Malakar's fore-claw extended, gently touching the scars on Gretchen's hand. "These are not the claws of a rich woman," the gardener said softly. "Yet you are here… Who paid to send you so far? Someone who heard of a divine tree standing in an ancient Garden, this old walnut thinks. Do they desire the kalpataru? Will they dig in the ruins with greedy claws? Will they fall down and worship it? Will they feed it?"

Anderssen squared her shoulders and forced herself to not bite her lip. "They – the Honorable Chartered Company – sent me to Jagan to look upon the kalpataru, to take the readings I have in my comp now, and to bring them back. No more."

"Hoooo! Well, you've twisted my tail, sure enough." Malakar's jaws gaped. She hissed angrily. "Everything you wished, I've done, haven't I? What a good servant this old one proves! The Master of the Garden would be stricken dumb to see me bow and scrape!"

"Here." Gretchen held out the comp. "Everything is in here. If you take this, then I will return home with empty hands. The secrets of the kalpataru will be safe. No one will ever return to disturb the Garden. Go on, take it."

Malakar stared suspiciously at the comp and hesitated, just for an instant.

A howling, shrieking noise pierced the triangle-leaved trees and the stone screen. Malakar jerked back her claw and both she and Gretchen stared towards the terrace with alarm.

"What was that?" Gretchen blurted. "That sounded like…no, that's impossible…"

"I have never heard such a noise before," the old Jehanan said, striding down into the passage out onto the overlook. Anderssen hurried after her and they both stepped out into the ruddy sunshine of Bharat. Takshila lay before them, the sprawl of the apartment buildings and factories and refineries half-hidden under a dirty yellow haze. There was a distant, rippling boom.

Gretchen tugged the goggles down over her eyes and scanned the horizon. After only a second she pointed, stabbing her finger. "There – in the sky to the southeast! A silver flash!"

"Hrrrr!" Malakar shaded her eyes. "I see – a yi of enormous size, racing faster than the wind! Trailing smoke and fire!"

"Not a yi," Anderssen said, alarmed and puzzled by turns. "That looks like an old-style jet fighter – but they've not been used by the Empire for hundreds of years…"

The distant dot swept low over the sky, flashing through the rising fume of hundreds of smokestacks, then darted skyward. Below, there was a bright flash among the buildings. A sharper roar trembled across the city to reach their ears. A black smudge billowed up, lit from below by the red-orange glow of flames.

"What are they attacking?" Gretchen zoomed the magnification of her goggles, but the haze in the air obscured everything. "The train station?"

"No…" Malakar pointed off due south. "The iron road is there… That fireis where the asuchau merchant houses stand."

Gretchen pushed back her goggles, heart thudding with fear. "I have to get back to my friends right now. If Imperial citizens are being attacked, they are in danger."

Without waiting for a response, she turned and bolted down the passageway, goggles jammed down to her nose, the filter keyed into ultraviolet. There was a startled hooting from behind her, and then the slapping of leathery feet on stone. Anderssen didn't wait, plunging down the ramp at the end of the perforated hall, survey comp clutched to her breast.