"I…this old walnut's never used a gun like this before," the Librarian stuttered, gingerly holding the bulky shape of a beam-pistol in her claws. "I can't do this – she's the kujen ! Our Queen! You're talking treason and murder."
"There's no time -" Gretchen heard the second generator whine up to full speed and threw herself through the opening, cutting tool tight in her right hand.
"There's only moments to spare," a voice hissed from her mouth. "We should have listened to the Jeweled-Kings when they tried to warn us… Now it's almost toolate."
The heavy power cable shivered, current flowed through to the induction plate. The technicians – Gretchen caught a flickering double-image glimpse as she rolled up, Jehanan scientists in leather harnesses and too-small-seeming Imperial tools superimposed over much larger counterparts in advanced armor, festooned with tools properly fitted to claw and limb – were stepping back from the gleaming black arc of the tree.
This time the single ringing tone leapt instantly into immanence. The green void unfolded, rushing out to encompass the room. Gretchen stumbled, feeling the shining, sparkling effusion as a physical pressure on her face and hands. The arc unfurled, countless threads stiffening, forming a sharp-angled triangle. Then another, inverted triangle blossomed within the first, then another, inverted again. The shivering, endless hnnnnnnnnnnnnnng of the device slid upward, shrieking into ever higher registers.
Anderssen pushed forward, feeling time grind slow. The floor mottled and cracked and she became terribly aware of the vast pressure the artifact exerted on its surroundings. Stone crumbled an atom at a time, the air congealed, electrons crept sluggishly from valence to valence. Only the arc itself remained immobile, impenetrable and immune to the crushing press of time. The blaze of its power pierced the vault above, lancing towards the sky hidden beyond the marble dome, and down, plunging into the roots of the world.
The flood of visions touched old memories in Anderssen's mind, culled from endless days spent in library carrels, stacks of dusty books piled up around her 'net terminal.
Two eagle-faced abzu lift their sacred cones towards a juniper tree surmounted by a winged sun-disk. In the leaves of the divine tree are held all knowledge, as well as the fruit of eternity.
A cold, implacable awareness flooded out from the kalpataru, touching every comp within its purview.
Murdered Osiris is placed by divine hands into the heart of a tamarisk whose roots burrow into the earth, reaching the land of the dead, and stretch up to the heavens, entangling the stars. The god's eyes fly open, his sundered body returned to life.
The comp behind her on the floor turned itself off.
A gnarled ash rises against the abyss, branches spread out over all the worlds and across the sky. Three of the tree's roots reach far indeed. One winds among the Aesir, the second among the frost-giants, where Ginnungagap once was. The third extends over Niflheim, which is the source of all that is cold and grim. It was created many ages before the earth was formed. Under that root is the spring Hvergelmir in the midst of Niflheim, and Nidhogg the Serpent gnaws the bottom of this root. From this spring flow the rivers Svol, Gunnthra, Fjorm, Fimbulthul, Slidr and Hrid, Sylg and Ylg, Vid, Leiptr, and Gjoll, which is next to Hel's gates…
Gretchen's own perception attenuated, grown suddenly vast.
Photons flooding from the floodlights continued to crawl forward, brushing aside the thick soup of molecules floating in emptiness. Every computer-controlled object in the chamber – her chrono, the generator fuel regulators, the Jehanan commander's hand-comm – stopped working.
Waiting.
The wave of electron paralysis leapt outwards, permeating the bulk of the ancient ship, flooding across Takshila and its myriad buildings, washing through the jet fighters howling in the late afternoon sky, licking across every comm and comp and Imperial device within the planetary magnetosphere.
Every device halted, set aside its allotted tasks and fell quiet, seized by the irresistible power of the kalpataru.
Listening.
In that same still moment of time, Gretchen perceived all this, ears flooded with sound, eyes drowned by a million unfiltered points of view.
And the shimmering tone of the kalpataru changed: a keen, sharp wail echoing out of the abyss of time trapped in the ancient metal. The matrices of form inside the howling green void shifted, attempting to attain proper alignment. Gravity dragged against them and the wear of millennia fouled the trembling dance, but the machine adapted, resorted, shifted, pressed mightily on time and space, trying to fold aside barrier after barrier.
The dials on the Honda fuel-cell generator pegged over to maximum and the entire machine began to whine dangerously.
Here, the kalpataru wailed after an eternity of patience. I am here! Command me!
All this Gretchen perceived, but she found herself powerless to act.
In her mind, at one instant, she was everywhere within the purview of the machine, a helpless passenger swept along in the tide of radiant power.
In that one instant, she was with Magdalena and the Hesht was growling at Parker, urging him to stagger forward across a wet, rainy rooftop. The buildings around them were unfamiliar and their faces were tense.
Maggie, Gretchen wailed, you've got to run! Get out of the city! Run, Maggie, run!
Parus
District of The Ever-Turning Wheel
Itzpalicue moved through a large dim room with a ceiling of hard-fired yellow brick. Sunlight streamed through openings piercing a succession of domes. The Arachosians filling the room regarded her with curiosity as the little old NГЎhuatl woman examined their archaic-looking weapons and ammunition bandoliers.
"You are hunting an invisible enemy," she rasped, mouth contorted to pronounce the harsh highland dialect of the tribesmen. Her earbug was running hot, providing a simultaneous translation of every voice in the room, and two vibrating 'sounders' taped to the sides of her throat managed to produce a facsimile of the thrumming overtone present in Jehanan voices. "A deadly one, quiet as a xixixit in the forest or a huungal in the marsh. The kind of enemy which never strikes with its own claw, only those of a pawn or a decoy. No open battle, no heroes clashing between arrayed armies, no charge of mounted man against mounted man. This is not a mudfoot you seek…"
A throaty trill of laughter boomed from the Arachosians. They were tall and wiry, scales stippled brown and tan, with narrow, cold eyes. They were garishly adorned with rows of fore-teeth and ear-bones. Long cowls shrouded their triangular heads and layered cloaks hid elaborately scaled armor of ceramic plates, leather harnesses hanging with knives, punch-daggers, pistols, ropes of grenades, the queer strangling rope called than-tan and bags of loose cartridges for their long-barreled rifles. Most had their modern, Imperial weapons laid out for cleaning and inspection. Strings of ammunition coils were stacked on the floor.
"You say," rumbled their kurbardar, a notorious chieftain named Gher Shahr, "we are hunting a man from the hills? Something like an Arach? In this fetid, wet den of fools a canny hunter might hide forever…"
"Even so." Itzpalicue removed a black lozenge from the folds of her dress. "Do you feel the fire and smoke quickening in the air? Soon the divine liquid will be spilled in plenty. The lowlanders will strive to drive the Imperials from their cities, their towns, from the land of the Five Rivers. When that happens, my enemy will move. He will press his pawns to attack, he will reveal his hidden strength to strike at the Empire – and he must make his will known somehow." She held up the lozenge. "These detectors ignore Imperial and kujenate comm traffic. They will lead you to anyone else operating advanced equipment in the city. If he is here…even an encrypted voice makes a sound."