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.