With the left jaw and skull torn away, Dawd wrenched his arm free. He started to spin to face the last Jehanan, but a machete slammed into his shoulder as he moved. The stroke drove the Skawtsman to the floor though the combatskin stiffened, absorbing the impact and spreading the blow across his entire upper body. His boots and outstretched hand lost traction in the spilled intestines of the second assassin and he fell backwards.
The last assassin sprang over the corpse, a whistling shriek on leathery lips. The Skawtsman twisted up, pistol centering on the leaping creature's chest, finger squeezing the Bulldog's trigger – and the magazine whined emptily. A pair of enormous, clawed feet crashed down on carpet as Dawd rolled to the side and was up in one seamless motion.
The Jehanan spun, slashing with the machete, and his turning jaw was met by a combatskin-enhanced sidekick. Metal-cleated combat boot smashed into the creature's eye, splitting the fine scales, and the Jehanan staggered back, one long-fingered hand raised to shield his wound. With a fraction of a second to find balance, Dawd ducked a windmilling machete, turned slightly in and slammed forward with both forearms crossed and braced. The combatskin stiffened automatically, augmenting the Skawtsman's musculature, and the blow caught the Jehanan square in the chest. The creature flew back, smashing through a window in a cloud of shattering glass, wooden framing and broken plaster.
Squealing, the Jehanan assassin cartwheeled through an ivy-wound lattice and hit the tiled patio with a sodden crunch. Dawd tossed the empty Bulldog aside and snatched up his pair of Nambu automatics from the side table. Thumbing off both safeties, he jammed one into the holster of the gunrig, threw the leather and metal mesh harness around his shoulders with one hand and darted across the room to the bathroom door.
"Mi'lord, time to go!"
There was a muffled whimpering sound inside. Dawd slammed the lock-side of the doorframe with his armored shoulder – the entire cedarwood panel shattered – and turned in, both automatics now centered on the broken doorway to the hall.
"Mi'lord – are you hurt? Were you hit?"
"Eeee…" Tezozуmoc was curled up in the bathtub, still in his nightshirt, arms tight around his head. "I hate this place!"
"Don't care for it much myself," Dawd coughed, throat tight with adrenaline. He holstered one automatic and reached down with his free hand. "Get up, sir, we've got to find Colmuir."
The young man blinked, looked up, and turned very pale. Despite the blood dripping from Dawd's forearm, he reached out and seized hold. The Skawtsman dragged the prince to his feet, and then – keeping Tezozуmoc close to hand – scuttled across the room, avoiding the scattered bodies.
Tiny fires were burning in the ruins of the wardrobe and a string of deep craters, coiling with smoke, pocked the wall in the hallway opposite the door.
"Master Sergeant?" Tapping his comm-thread awake, Dawd flipped up the longeye mounted on his automatic and snaked the muzzle around the doorframe in each direction. "You still alive?"
I'm coming, Colmuir replied. Don't shoot my fool head off. I'm on the west stairs.
Seconds later, the master sergeant appeared, sliding along the inner wall, and ducked into the room as well. Dawd was frowning, finger pressed to his earbug, the comm display on his skinsuit flashing with amber and red lights. Colmuir spat out a dead tabac, looked the prince up and down and said: "Regimental net went wild a moment ago, heard someone shouting about being under attack – then everything flooded with ECM. Now it's all static and garbage."
The master sergeant shook his head, produced another tabac from his vest and snap-lit the paper with a fingernail. Smoke wreathing his head, he knelt, lifted up the whole bed with a strained grunt – sending mountains of clothing and quilts cascading onto the floor – and dragged out a Fleet duffel bag.
Dawd was still by the door, watching the hallway through his longeye. "Regimental net is back up," he reported, listening intently, "but some kind of jammer is playing havoc with the Army gear down in the flatlands. All the comm channels keep popping in and out. I don't know if they'll be able to get comm clear until whatever is pitching all this noise gets hit."
"That's not good," Colmuir said. He unzipped the bag and pulled out Dawd's Whipsaw along with two heavy ammunition coils. A broken-down Macana 8mm with the shoulder-stock removed followed, as well as a Fleet skinsuit pack and three combat visors. He beckoned politely to Tezozуmoc: "Mi'lord prince, you put this on now. Quickly, lad. It's not a combatskin, but it'll have to do."
Swallowing nervously, hands trembling, the prince shed his shirt and pajama pants and unzipped the skinsuit pack. An amber colored gel spilled out on the floor, studded with two rows of black rings. Tezozуmoc stepped carefully into the middle of the gel, reached down and slid his fingers into the rings. Colmuir – watching to make sure the suit got a clean seal – assembled the Macana with brisk, endlessly practiced efficiency. The prince pulled his hands up – the gel raced up his legs, covering his torso and chest, and then his neck and the back of his head – and swung his shoulders back, letting the skinsuit congeal to his body. He flexed both hands, then held them down by his thighs. Gel shifted, solidified and oozed down to cover his fingers.
"Good," Colmuir said, patting the prince's shoulder. The skinsuit was slowly turning Fleet black. "You want a gun?"
Tezozуmoc stared at the proffered Nambu, then shook his head. He was still very pale, but seemed to have regained some of his composure. "I might hit one of you. I can carry the bag, if that will help."
The master sergeant nodded and helped him swing the heavy back duffel over both shoulders. "Dawd – what have you got for us?"
The sergeant shook his head. "I can hear vehicles on the street from our remotes – running feet – slicks – and lots of them. There are at least a dozen hostiles downstairs too – more spears and machetes."
"We can take the lot, if we're quick, but…" Colmuir said, sidling to one window and looking out into the gardens. He hissed in disgust. "Ah, that tears it – they've got themselves a bloody tank."
"A what?" Dawd and the prince stared in disbelief at the master sergeant.
"A tank! Can y' not hear me?" Colmuir pointed out the window.
Dawd stiffened, hearing the rumble of multi-ton treads on cobblestones through the remote spyeyes watching the garden wall. A number of Jehanan in fleece-lined jackets and leggings, carrying what looked very much like KV-45B rifles, were messing with the front gate, which was closed. He looked at the prince, down at his pistol, over at the door, then started paging rapidly through building schematics and street maps on his comp.
"Do…do you have something that will stop a tank?" Tezozуmoc's voice was rather faint.
"Nooo…we do not. Not a real one." Colmuir backed away from the window, slinging the Macana behind his shoulder. "Come on lads, time to run for it."
Takshila Within The House of Reeds
Following close behind the gardener, Gretchen climbed a flight of narrow steps sandwiched between dusty stone walls covered with fluid carvings of shallow interlocking circles. She felt a little strange, as though the close, warm air was pressing heavily on her skull. Malakar reached the top of the staircase and peered out into a very narrow passageway marked by tilted walls and a curving floor.
"We are close," the Jehanan whispered, turning her head from side to side as she listened. "The level of the fane is arranged just in this way." Malakar patted a leathery palm on the nearest wall as she padded forward. "Quietly now, just beyond this stone are other, larger halls still in use."
Gretchen found her footing poor on the dusty floor. The surface of the passageway lifted in the middle and sloped away on either side, which made her wonder if they were moving down an old drainage tunnel of some type. She reached out to touch the Jehanan's shoulder, to ask exactly that question, when a muffled thud-thud-thud sound reached her ear.
Malakar stopped, skin wrinkling around her mouth. "Hooo… What an odd noise to hear."
Anderssen felt a steady vibration
start up through the soles of her boots. "That feels like heavy machinery turning on. It's not very far away either."
The gardener did not reply, moving forward again. After a few moments, the curve in the passage became particularly noticeable and Gretchen was forced to lean a little sideways.
We're in some kind of a dome, she realized, looking up and finding the ceiling had receded into tapering dimness, like the shell of a cathedral.
"Here…" Malakar stopped and suddenly Anderssen could see a faint gleam of light on the Jehanan's scales. The gardener turned, mischief sparkling in her deep-set eyes. "Looking upon the mystery of the kalpataru is forbidden to the acolytes," she said very softly, "so every short-horn in orders must find a way to creep in and touch the thing itself. Once the fane of the divine tree was seamless and whole, but over time the walls have been damaged and repaired…"
Crouching down, the Jehanan reached between two riblike carvings on the walls and took hold of a wooden beam. The lohaja groaned a little as Malakar pulled, but then there was a scraping sound – which seemed very loud to Gretchen – and blazing light flooded into their dim little passageway as the patched 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 countin
g 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 cafeteria on the corner.
That is a lot of riding lizards, he realized, and a lot of big Jehanan with guns and spears. What are they…
"Oh, bleeding hell!" Parker bolted back down the passage, through the wooden door and then up the stairs as fast as he could go. After three flights of steps he was wheezing and feeling faint. "Come on, David," he cursed at himself, poking at his medband. "Only thirty-two more to go… Oh, Xochipilli, Lord of Flowers, why did I ever taste your bitter smoke?"
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