The Crystal Empire

by L. Neil Smith

  At his side, a snarl.

  He whirled in time to see a Ute warrior, one of two or three daring braves who’d climbed down the cliff-face to surprise the Saracens, get his throat ripped out by the bear-dog. He dismissed the situation as taken care of. He’d problems of his own: the primary war-band had taken cover now, their belly-down approach obscured by the weather and sparse brush, crawling closer.

  He unlocked his longbow, unsheathed Murderer, his mighty sword, and drew his pistol once again.

  A Ute rose in front of him, shrilling. He snap-shot the warrior in the groin, feeling the buck and slap of the revolver’s grip against his palm, lunged to cut another, shoulder to waist. The great blade caught between the bones for a sickening moment. Fireclaw saw others rushing at him, two of whom he shot. A dead man’s hand, given momentum by a will which no longer existed, slapped the shaven top of Fireclaw’s head, grasping for a hold in hair that wasn’t there.

  Fireclaw thrust his foot against the dead man’s pelvic girdle; Murderer wrenched free with an ugly noise, to hew the rest down where they stood in shocked surprise.

  During a brief respite, Fireclaw discovered that the others of his party had been backed to the cliff. He, alone with Ursi, stood amidst an enemy who were learning a lesson he’d once taught the Comanches. About his feet lay the cloven, powder-burned, or broken bodies of a dozen men.

  Nowhere could he see Ayesha.

  Thunder rolled—he could not remember seeing lightning, but the air smelled rank with ozone, fresh-spilled blood, and gunpowder. Mochamet al Rotshild shouted behind him. A few yards away, Lishabha had a Ute down, the butt of her rifle making a figure eight as she finished him with the blade at its muzzle.

  Suddenly another of the cliff climbers was behind her.

  She moved to withdraw the blade—too late—as the warrior threw himself upon her back, one hand tangled in her hair, his other arm reaching round.

  His knife bit deep.

  Lishabha fell, her throat slashed to the spine.

  “Lishabha!”

  Roaring Arabic profanities, Mochamet al Rotshild rushed upon the startled man, the heavy pistols in his hairy hands both empty. Unheeding of the warrior’s flailing knife, he beat Lishabha’s assailant with the guns wherever he could reach.

  Even at this distance, Fireclaw could hear the small bones breaking in the man’s face as the massive weapons pounded him into unrecognizability.

  Po, the parrot, squawked and barked derisively into the dying man’s shattered face.

  Shulieman was down, too, his body curled about an arrow in his abdomen. It was the furious screeching of the marmoset Sagheer which told him at last of the whereabouts of the Princess Ayesha. Through a rift between the heavy sheets of drizzle and powder-smoke, Fireclaw could see the Saracen maiden. Soaked in blood from forehead to ankle, standing over her disabled mentor, her rifle tucked into her hip with one hand, the rabbi’s heavy pistol in the other.

  To Fireclaw’s utter amazement, Oln Woeck also huddled at her feet, reloading for her, terror and an odd sort of determination written upon his already shriveled features. Her face was that of a statue. Three warriors in succession tried to reach her, break the chain of fire she kept up.

  Each warrior died.

  A litter of bodies about them almost concealed Shrimp and Knife Thrower. Just as the attack appeared to slacken, fresh forces poured from between the hills.

  Shrimp went down to a polished wooden war-club.

  Knife Thrower stood a while longer until a Ute arrow transfixed him just beneath the collarbone. Refusing to fall, he spat blood in the eyes of the nearest Ute, carved the same face off with a single stroke. Another Ute stepped in, thrust a blade at Knife Thrower, who deflected it. Its point entered his right hip. The rest of it slid into his body e’er Fireclaw was upon the man.

  His knife still buried in the Comanche chieftain’s flesh, the Ute turned, mouth agape in what might have started as a war-cry. With an angled thrust, Fireclaw levered the smoking muzzle of his revolver past the man’s lips, shattering teeth.

  He pulled the trigger.

  Flame spurted from the Ute warrior’s nostrils. The back of his head disappeared in a reddened fog. Fireclaw and his brother Knife Thrower were showered with debris.

  Feeling an unfriendly hand upon his blood-bespattered shoulder, Fireclaw turned, slapped the war-painted face of this new attacker with the barrel of his pistol—the front sight cut flesh—dropped the gun, and seized the warrior’s throat. Both hands locked in vain about the Helvetian’s mighty wrist, the man was lifted off his moccasined feet. They flapped and dangled as he danced for life and lost.

  The terror left his face.

  His eyes grew dull.

  Fireclaw tossed the hulk away and stooped to recover his revolver.

  Shrimp groaned, rolling over, injured but alert, but the three were alone for a moment. Knife Thrower coughed, covering his chest with clotted blood.

  “My brother—”

  He’d not time for another word. Across the gravel bed, a hundred Utes were massed to charge them. There came a hail of arrows, a worldful of screaming from the Utes. In sadness and disgust, Fireclaw knew that he and his Saracen party were doomed, almost before their journey had begun.

  The savages began running toward them.

  And abruptly froze.

  Over a rise, from the opposite end of the broad meadowed valley, there came a terrifying roar. Lumbering forms appeared, unearthly in the masking dampness. To Fireclaw, they looked like the beach-washed horseshoe crabs of his youth, darker—a glossy black—and infinitely larger.

  Traveling abreast, three of them—no, there were four, five—filled the meadow from cliff wall to mountainside. Lights twinkled along their flanks. There was a sound, as if a blanket the size of the entire valley were being ripped in half. Utes began to fall like the fat raindrops spattering Fireclaw’s bloody shoulders.

  The giant forms moved closer.

  Swift was their approach.

  A hurricane roared in their wake.

  SURA THE FIFTH: 1420 A.H.—

  The Saw-Toothed Sword

  **

  “No creature is there crawling on the earth, but its provision rests

  on God; He knows its lodging-place and its repository. All is in a Manifest Book.”—The Holy Koran, Sura XI, Hood

  XXXIII: The Copper-Kilts

  “And on the day when We shall muster them all together...Behold...how that which they were forging has gone astray from them!”—The Koran, Sura VI

  Despite the uproar of the battle raging round him, Oln Woeck, huddled at the obscenely bared knee of the pagan Princess Ayesha, thought he heard the gibbering of a nearby voice.

  Ayesha stood o’er him, as she stood o’er her wounded mentor, the false priest David Shulieman. Her demon marmoset sat upon her shoulder, screaming the Devil’s epithets past its bared fangs at the Utes. As for himself, Oln Woeck tried to move, tried to peek round the girl’s smooth, dark, naked—

  He broke off the unclean thought ere it was fully formed.

  Her robes were gore-bedecked, rain-soaked, and battle-shredded nearly to her waist. A shoulder of the garment was rent and hanging, exposing her left—

  Again he thrust the thought away, looking desperately about him, seeking the source of the whining sobs.

  As was to be expected, machines had failed them all. Again. Unequipped with an attaching barrel-knife such as that vessel of filth Lishabha had used, Ayesha held her unholy Saracen rifle, long since run empty of the iniquitous cartridges which had fed it, by its long, metal-banded barrel in her tiny fists, its broad, crescent buttplate glittering a brassy threat to anyone fool enough to venture too near. Her palms were reddened, blistered with the infernal heat the thing had built up doing its evil work. Yet, with the unflinching relentlessness of all souls lost in sin, she paid it not the slightest heed.

  Mayhap, with His inevitable and infinite concern with justice, He whose name might not be spoken by the
faithful until His Son be redeemed had visited upon the barbarous and unbelieving Saracens their just deserts. Oln Woeck discovered he was too paralyzed with fear to move. He wondered, ere he could stay himself from doubting, why a fastidious soul who took the righteous pains he did—as he had, for virtuous example, in the matter of the vile and unconsecrated mating Sedrich Fireclaw had committed—should be punished with the Saracens, as if he were but another among their blasphemous number. He discovered that, sometime in the past few minutes, he had wet himself like an infant. He discovered, as well, that the voice he’d heard gibbering earlier was his own.

  He let his wrinkled face fall, tears mingling incontinently in the mud. Above him, the Princess of the unbelievers braced herself, unaware that, in the bracing, she had lasciviously spread her—

  The Utes shrieked, forming for their final charge.

  Oln Woeck had found much to fear in this Jesus-forsaken land. Each day he’d feared the foul and worldly tarnish of the ungodly Saracens would rub off upon his soul. Each day he’d feared the savages, who certainly could have no souls, would murder him, either in his nightmare-troubled sleep, or as now, upon this battlefield.

  Now he feared greatly they’d not do it swift enough.

  He feared the hidden, satanic empire upon whose bitterly defended borders they had trespassed, to their doom.

  And lately, most of all, most of the time, e’er since he’d come to that fateful, righteous decision at the ranch, then seen steadfastly to its carrying out, he feared that Sedrich Sedrichsohn, no longer the stripling boy he’d lorded over back in familiar Helvetian lands, but one whom whole nations of bloody-handed barbarians—who trembled at the name—called Fireclaw, would find his secret out.

  An unreasonable man, this Fireclaw (and in this he did indeed resemble Sedrich Sedrichsohn, the boy who had become the man), one who didn’t recognize reality—nor futility—when he saw it plainly. E’en now, the fine mist falling about him, he continued to wreak bloody havoc with blade and pistol till, jammed by fouling, the unsanctified revolver quit, and he had to rely upon his father’s greatsword alone.

  About the Helvetian warrior lay the bodies of uncountable dead. Had he, Oln Woeck, implanted such a fury in the boy, or had it been there, like his father’s blood-haze, smoldering, all the time? ’Twas sometimes said that animals came to be like those who raised them. So valiantly fought Fireclaw’s bear-dog, Ursi, that his assailants, sure of victory, now sallied forward simply to touch the great beast, that they could tell about it afterward—if they lived.

  Many of them didn’t, their throats torn out in the attempt.

  Should they be victorious, Oln Woeck understood from things he’d overheard before this trek, the Utes would take the hair from atop the animal’s skull, hang it in their lodges beside the scalps of valiant human warriors. At this terrible moment, ’twas the one thing about the Utes which made sense to him.

  The valor of the Helvetian warrior, the Saracen Princess, their mighty canine ally, and Mochamet al Rotshild, who’d o’ercome his grief to scream his Arabic curses once again and fight beside them, was in vain, Oln Woeck thought miserably.

  All was lost.

  Why didn’t they have the sense to see it? Why lacked they the good sense to lie down before the instruments of His wrath with some remnant of dignity? Why didn’t they give up?

  He had, long since.

  Of a sudden, lying there halfway upon the weather-slickened grass, halfway upon the muddy, blood-spattered gravel, awaiting the final merciless onslaught of the Utes, he’d something which resembled a cheerful thought. Through some terrible miscarriage or oversight, as may be, of justice, he was compelled to face the wrath of Him who might not be named. At least he wouldn’t have to face the wrath of Fireclaw, for now the man would ne’er find out what he’d done.

  ’Twas at this very moment that the sun broke blindingly from behind thinning clouds in the west. The vision-obscuring mist was swept away as if by an omnipotent—if somewhat ironic—hand. Five gigantic, powerful, wheelless craft rode up upon their cushions of hurricane-force wind. From a distance they began to massacre the marauding savages, saving what remained of the Saracen party.

  Likewise Oln Woeck for Sedrich’s vengeance.

  The objects were like great mobile barns, seven, perhaps eight times the height of a tall man. Yet, on account of their great length and breadth, they appeared to cling low to the ground they traveled o’er. Mostly black in color, their surfaces were mottled, varying in texture as if to make them difficult to see in a dark or wooded place. Here, they stood conspicuous against the yellow meadow grass, like alien mountains, their flanks steaming from the recent rain.

  Oln Woeck found himself wondering what their owners felt the need to hide them from.

  Toward the front of each machine, a series of sloping platforms was crowded with the forms of oddly-dressed men, directing the fury of multi-barreled weapons which had cut the Ute attackers down exactly as Oln Woeck’s razor—or Fireclaw’s now, for that matter—daily removed stubble from scalp.

  When the machines were close enough to whip-slap the remaining tatters which the Saracens wore, they gave out a great sighing. Their motive magics ne’er altogether silenced, the machines settled a bit closer to the damp earth.

  And lay motionless.

  No trumpet sounded. Great ramps were lowered—or lowered themselves—to the ground. Broad double doors opened in the machines’ sides. From them vomited hundreds, perhaps thousands of men-at-arms, hastening toward the recent scene of battle.

  In utter, inhuman silence.

  The fighting-men, if men they were, not some man-shaped variety of demon, wore skirts fashioned out of strips of rust-browned copper, waist to knee, cunningly beaten into the delicate semblance of feathers, and riveted upon a backing of ebon-dyed leather.

  Likewise fashioned of black leather—or mayhap of the hardened resin such as the Helvetians were wont to use, ’twas difficult to say which—were their back- and breastplates, molded in the image of a naked human torso. Atop these, fastened at the shoulders with what may have been insignia of rank, they wore short, sheer cloaks of printed fabric, more images of feathers, mostly gray, contrived to blend into whate’er natural surrounding they should happen upon.

  O’er their heads they wore hard helms, fashioned in the fierce shapes of the skulls of birds of prey or predatory animals. The warriors’ faces were concealed behind the smoky tint of blistered transparencies. From the crest of each helm there projected a slender black wand, gracefully curved and bobbing like the antennae of a butterfly.

  As if a floodgate had been lifted within his mind, an overwhelming wave of insectile horrors crowded in upon him, images of loathsome, crawling hordes which suffocated sanity. He heard the gibbering again and forced himself to silence.

  Wordlessly—yes, and in Jesus’ name like so many ants or termites—hard-armored groups of five formed up to sweep across the corpse-littered battlefield, finishing off the wounded Utes they happened upon. Oln Woeck suspected that this represented no act of mercy, but of straightforward—insectile—thoroughness. Three of each five carried drawn swords of blackened steel, milled along the edges into deadly sawteeth. The other two, with short, peculiar weapons slung before their chests, stood watch. These also wielded some divining implement, a small black coffer to which they referred with great frequency, apparently informing themselves somehow whether or not those whose bodies they trod among yet lived—thus meriting their grim attentions.

  There was a clutter of other implements and weapons Oln Woeck couldn’t fathom even thus far.

  One such group of five at last approached Fireclaw, who stood panting, legs spread in a combat-stance, his greatsword held before him, dripping scarlet.

  Ursi growled as they came near.

  The Helvetian warrior spoke a warning word as if to render the giant bear-dog silent as these strangers. Unheeding of this gesture, one of the copper-kilts raised the blunt snout of a massive pistol. It gav
e forth a dull cough. Ursi started, then collapsed, the ebon fletching of a tiny quarrel projecting from one shoulder.

  Another copper-kilted group filed in behind the inert animal’s master, that he be surrounded.

  Fireclaw had raised his sword, shifted weight to spring upon the armsman who’d shot Ursi. Without a word, the leader-at-arms of both groups hailed the Helvetian, tapped upon the odd-shaped weapon hanging at his own armored chest, seized it by the handle hanging below it. Resettling its sling, he pointed toward a nearby evergreen, its scaly trunk perhaps the widest span across that which the outstretched fingers of an adult male human hand could measure. The leader raised the weapon, right hand upon the grip, left hand held beneath his forearm, clamping the receiver to it with his thumb. He peered through a tube attached to its side.

  Suddenly the ripping noise came.

  Oln Woeck cowered in terror. When he forced himself to look up again, the tree, shredded through its thickness, was toppling o’er. The leader-at-arms pulled at an odd rectangle upon his weapon where it projected a hand’s width behind the grip. It snapped free. He cast it aside, where it struck a boulder with a dull, clinking noise, replaced it with another taken from a pouch he carried at his waist.

  Turning once again to Fireclaw, he slapped at his hip, pointing a gauntleted finger at Fireclaw’s revolver, stretching out an upturned, empty hand to receive it.

  Fireclaw dropped the point of his sword, unfastened his weapons belt, tossed it toward the man. In his loins, Oln Woeck felt an inexplicable flush of satisfaction at the sight, one which bloomed into something resembling beatification when the Helvetian was likewise silently commanded to yield sword and dagger—and complied.

  This ritual, complete with its demonstration of the destructive qualities of the strangers’ powerful weapons, was soon repeated for the edification of Mochamet al Rotshild and the Princess Ayesha, who, as Fireclaw had before them, yielded their own arms.