The house was built over the massive central trunk (to her eye it was at least fifty meters wide) with wings connected by crosshalls spreading another fifty meters along side branches supported by hundreds of secondary trunks. Slender leaf-bearing limbs rose vertically around the perimeter of the building, curved inward above the house to form a thick green dome. It was pleasantly cool with enough sun filtering through to send leaf shadows dancing. She could see motorized mirrors fixed to the rib branches, catching that light and shooting it at the roof of the house, confirming her earlier guess. Riiight, I am one smart little bint. Hah! If you so smart, Shadow, what you doing here?
The leaves brushed against each other with a finely nuanced sound that was very much like a room full of whisperers. The name drifted into her mind, click-click. "Whisper Tree," she said aloud. "Yeh." She leaned against the rail and looked around. "Where now? How does one get to the ground?"
At the left end of this front porch there was a square of a different sort of wood, dark blue almost purple with brown streaks in it, big enough to hold two of her but a squeeze for the Ciocan. There was a pillared railing around three sides, carved from more of the purplewood. A gate of purplewood was swung back against the wall, pinned there by a bar-and-magnet latch. About two meters above the square, there was a domeshaped canopy carved from the purplewood, with two long reels tucked up under it and cables running from each end of each reel to the corners of the railing. There was a green leaf caught between the end of the square base and the house platform, the sap oozing from it still wet. She scowled down through the heavy shadow around the secondary trunks, but didn't see any broken bodies on the dirt below. That's reassuring, I think. Well, if it worked for the Ciocan.
She stepped on the base, tugged the gate from the magnet and slammed it shut. Above her, something whirred; after a slight hesitation the cables began to unwind and the base went down smoothly, swaying a little as the cables lengthened, scraping against the secondary trunks that were clustered close about it, descending into the stifling green twilight around them.
It stopped a handspan from the ground.
She opened the gate and stepped down, edged past air roots like straggly white hair that wobbled around her, scraped along the harpcase she had slung over her shoulder; they brushed against her body, her face, they tickled her, seemed to reach for her eyes. Yukh. Why don't they shave the damn things off?
Behind her she heard the soft sounds of the lift retreating upward, the brush-thunk as the open gate banged against the trunks. Paranoid little minkhas, or maybe it's Ginny doing his thing. I suppose we have to climb the tree to get back in the house. I knew I should've brought everything with me.
She worked outward toward the light. The supports were wider apart and got smaller as she moved away from the main trunk, the air roots were wilder and wispier.
She emerged into the slanted sunlight of late afternoon and found herself wading through the short curly grass of a mountain meadow half a kilometer across, ringed by huge ancient conifers like a scraggly, green-black hedge.
WATCHER 1
The immense screen that stretched across the entire front of the Bridge was lit from end to end, divided into dozens of cells, most of them still empty.
One by one, slowly, two or three an hour, the cells were filling with scenes from the world below them as Ajeri Kilavez and Pukanuk Pousli spoke with onpianet agents and deployed Ginbiryol Seyirshi's pathe-EYEs.
At the edge of nighe a raiding party was attacking the bighouse of an estate, mostly pellet weapons, though some cutterbeams were visible, along with a number of sliced-and-diced bodies.
In the hot morning sunshine of a market square of a small farm village not far from the ocean, three men were tied to whipping posts while a fourth man with his sleeves rolled up to show his massive forearms was laying into the back of one of the prisoners with a two-meter long stockwhip; he'd already drawn blood and was concentrating on the precision of this crisscross cuts. The POV lingered on his face, then moved to the face of the man being whipped, then to the faces of the men waiting their turn for punishment, lingering lovingly on them, tracking every nuance of expression. The villagers watched silently, sullenly. The local VIPs sat in shaded comfort in a permanent bleacher affair, the older males stem, the younger ones wagering on how long each victim would last or anything else that struck their fancy.
CELL 12
A house was burning, small, thatched roof; someone, it sounded like a small girl, was trapped inside screaming as she died very very slowly. A woman was shrieking and struggling In the arms of several men who were themselves cursing and weeping as they kept her from running back into the house.
A young woman pulled herself with furious agility onto the back of the stony riding beast of an equestrian statue, stood there declaiming verses in a powerful contralto, angry, satiric verses that brought cheers from the crowd of listeners drawn by her voice, shouts of go go go! until black-clad, half-armored guards came raging through the crowd, slamming their clubs into any part of anybody within reach. The poet jumped from the statue and vanished into the throng before the guards reached her.
Singing in a basso drone OP PAL LAN OP PAL LAH TIN OP PAL OP PAL LA TIN OP PAL OP PAL LAH TIN adouble line of long haired men In beaded robes hauled sacks of grain, beans and other dried foods into a stone pyramid with a massive plank door. The pyramid was one of a long line of caches built along a broad unpaved road that stretched from horizon to horizon across a sea of silver-green grass, an endless, dramatic sky arching overhead. The POV moved on along that broad, unchanging track bisecting the Plains of Kwamitaskwen, showing more lines of the tapwit priests provisioning more pyramids as they got ready for the mass march of the people in the Pakoseo.
CELL 8
The room was antiseptically clean, white tiles on the floor and wall, stainless steel appointments, smoothy shiny black wires for the electrical equipment; the men working there, all but one, wore surgical garb with gauze masks and black goggles that hid all expression and turned them into vaguely insectile figures. The odd man was tall and lean with a handsome lined face and a thick flowing mane of white hair. He wore a starched, wrinkle-free white cassock that brushed against black sandals and a robe beaded with totems and symbols in icon panels down the front, around the hem and sleeves in bright jewel colors that might have been garish but weren't.
A naked woman was stretched out on the steel table, glaring at them, terrified but defiant; she looked very much like the rebel poet of Cell 13, but was perhaps a few years older, she might have been a sister or cousin.
One of the masked figures bent over her, drew a scalpel in a slanting line from the hollow of her throat to the nipple of her right breast. She screamed and tried to struggle, but she had little leeway for movement; she gathered herself and spat in the face of the man bending over her. He ignored it and continued with his delicate work. The blade barely broke the skin, the cut burned a little but that was all.
"Give one the names of your cell," the robed man said; it was a beautiful voice, a warm creamy baritone, a voice made for caressing the ear. "Just the names. All one wishes is to persuade them for good of their souls and their brothers to abandon this foolish rebellion against the order Oppalatin decreed for us all. You and I, child, we have our place and function in life. It Is not good to deny this. There are enough terrors and and evils that one has to face from sun to sun, why create more? Give one the names. You will, you know. Don't make one hurt you, child; one doesn't want to hurt you. The Na-priest will remove your skin bit by bit and his assistants will paint pimikot tincture on the wound. Yes. I see you understand. Tell one, child, name the names…