The Crystal Empire

by L. Neil Smith

  Before Sedrich Fireclaw could ask himself whether he was capable of murdering his own flesh and blood, the young man shifted his weapon aside, aiming it at the Sun Incarnate.

  “Quiet, you dirty little man,” he ordered. “Don’t you think you might need a pilot, Father?”

  Transmitted by the last taut mooring line, yet another earth-tremor jittered through the fabric of the airship. Fireclaw grinned, slashing the rope. They leapt over the angry, writhing body of Zhu Yuan-Coyotl—a disgusted Mochamet al Rotshild had stuffed a rag into his mouth—and were safe aboard before the airship had begun rising.

  In gratitude, the Saracen had stood back from the dial-crowded, bewildering console. Perhaps he might have puzzled the thing out by himself, he told the younger of the two Helvetians—given a year or two of study. Instead, Owald seized the controls with certain hands. The engines coughed to life. The airship rose.

  They made speed toward the crystal pyramid.

  There, preliminary sacrifices were being offered to the sun. Hundreds of thousands of worshippers crowded about the lower steps of the crystalline monument—boats ranging in size from little bobbing cockleshells to giant vessels capable of crossing the great sea had been moored about its glassy base.

  Braving the day’s unsettling quakelets, many more spectators filled the city plazas across the bay.

  At the pyramid’s blunt apex, the scarlet Eye-of-God was obscured by the close-packed forms of thousands of less fortunate participants, standing—in what state of mind Fireclaw couldn’t guess—shoulder to shoulder upon its surface. Silent they remained, all unmoving. As the sun struck the blocks of the pyramid, an incredible thing occurred.

  Having finished lining their compliant victims up in satisfactory ranks over the glassy “pool,” the priests stood back at the corners of the summit, their arms lifted to the sky, as if waiting—

  There was a titanic pulse of light!

  With a clap of thunder, a ruby-colored shaft of blinding luminescence exploded from the top of the pyramid, a full hundred paces in diameter it was, roiling the atmosphere above the bay, clawing miles into the tortured sky. Even at this distance, and through the cabin window, Fireclaw could feel its heat upon his face.

  When it winked out as if it had never been—Fireclaw wiped dazzled tears from his cheeks, blinked at the yellow-green coloring the world had by contrast taken on—naught whatever, no charred hulks, not even fine white ashes, of the sacrificial victims remained behind. The “pool” was as glossy-clean as it had been to begin with.

  A mighty groan of ecstasy went up from the crowds.

  Movement surged along the steps.

  Another group of sacrifices, thousands of them, was brought up the side of the pyramid. There they were stood in place by the priests. Fireclaw wondered to himself—red anger choosing a strange time to rise within him—whether these apparent willing victims had ever been aught he’d have called human. Certainly they seemed to possess no human will to survive.

  They too, disappeared in a blast of scarlet fury.

  Heedless of the coming beam-path, Owald leaned into the controls, as if by magic tilting the entire world about them, bringing the airship even closer.

  Of a sudden, from their airborne vantage, the escapees saw Ayesha being brought to the top of the pyramid in a black formal gown, steadied upon the steep-slanted pathway—rendered yet more treacherous by the shuddering earth—by a pair of priests. As with their previous victims, she seemed, however, to be climbing of her own accord.

  Upon her frail shoulder, little Sagheer the pygmy marmoset was with her, even unto the end.

  3

  Sunlight sparkled off the water below. The sun itself was a patch of blinding brilliance upon the earth-roiled waves.

  Thinking back over Mochamet al Rotshild’s mysterious tale of the destroyed Saracen fleet, Fireclaw began taking note of certain details visible at the pyramid-top, employing a more practical eye than he’d exercised upon it e’er now.

  “Owald!”

  He shouted against the speeding airship’s roaring engines, the hurricane-wind of its passage. Air sang in the window-frames, wire struts keeping harmony about the gondola.

  “How long does it take yon damned rockpile to store up energy for the next pulse?”

  Looking back over his shoulder at his father, the ex-commander of the Imperial Bodyguard opened his mouth—

  “In the Name of God, look you!”

  The interrupting voice was Mochamet al Rotshild’s, his tone incongruous, elated, bordering upon hysterical. His shaking finger pointed out the cabin window, westward.

  Just this side of the faraway blue horizon, what Fireclaw presumed was the Mughal fleet the man had earlier spoken of had appeared, its tall smokestacks and high-masted rotating sails—these reminded the Helvetian of his boyhood—invisible to all within the arms of the great bay save the airborne party.

  Owald nodded.

  “The quakes might be slowing the priest-technicians a little. Several minutes, at the least—I think!”

  “He thinks!”

  A grim expression settled upon the older Helvetian’s face. He looked round at the Saracen—or was it Mughal now?—captain, Mochamet al Rotshild. The elderly figure danced a little with excitement. The man nodded back at Fireclaw, in wordless willingness to carry out whatever plan he’d conceived.

  The Sun Incarnate Zhu Yuan-Coyotl and Oln Woeck, both trussed up, heaped without dignity into a corner of the cabin, the Helvetian warrior and his allies ignored.

  Fireclaw clapped his good hand upon Owald’s shoulder. None but the man’s son could have taken it without buckling.

  “Then I think I know what we shall do!”

  More words were in haste exchanged.

  At Fireclaw’s shouted instruction, the huge, curved, polished mirror below the airship was tilted upon its hinges from beneath the hull. This process took far longer than any of them might have wished. At this speed, a supporting structure never designed to take such strain groaned against the wind, shaking the mighty vessel like a dog brandishing the rags of a fresh-killed hare.

  Something like a dog as well the Sun Incarnate Zhu Yuan-Coyotl writhed with impotent fury. He bit at the gags stuffed in his mouth until the spittle foamed down his naked chest.

  Fireclaw looked down upon him and laughed.

  Oln Woeck cried out, wetting himself.

  Squinting, measuring precious time and shorter distances against an emerald-glowing grid set into the instrument-studded console before him, Owald dropped the mighty airship groundward while coaching Mochamet al Rotshild, sea-sailor and Mughal spy. Together they’d inconvenience two empires.

  XLVII: The Blinded Eye

  “...unto each God has promised the reward most fair....Is it not time that the hearts of those who believe should be humbled...?”—The Koran, Sura LVII

  Far below, repeated tremors roiled the waters of the bay in an insane crisscross of interfering patterns.

  Grunting from the effort, a sweating, red-faced Owald Sedrichsohn shifted levers, twisted wheels. Veins stood out upon his neck and forehead. He swore at both the instruments and his encumbering Bodyguardsman’s armor, dragging the great airship and its dangling mirror, almost as massive, over the top of the pyramid.

  When the great craft of the skies had at last dropped low enough, bobbing in the unsteady breeze as if ’twere a child’s plaything, Fireclaw slammed the door back. Timing himself against the vessel’s uncertain surging motions, he leapt from the gondola, the greatsword Murderer locked upon his steel-rimmed wrist.

  He was appropriately greeted.

  Hundreds of the filthy priests of the Han-Meshika surged forward, the foul miasma of their crusted, unwashed bodies enveloping him. They carried no weapons he could see, but enough of them there were and more to crush him ’neath their dirty weight alone, did they but, in their fanatic blood-lust, will it.

  Shouting curses at them, he didn’t break his stride, but swung the greatsword Murder
er from side to side—its razor-tip whistled with its passage through the air—half in warning to the priests, half to limber up an arm grown stiff with tension.

  He took firm hold with his good left hand upon the greatsword’s grip, just behind the guard, high above the place where his prosthetic locked upon the pommel.

  Neither did the shrieking insect-beclouded mass of helpless-peasant-murderers falter, but running, mindless, stumbled into one another with their thirst to add his death this morning to ten thousand others—and one—closing their share of the narrowing distance between themselves and the Helvetian warrior.

  The joy upon their dirt-seamed faces told him they believed him easy prey.

  Learning different, the first to rush upon Fireclaw’s gleaming blade-point screamed and died and fell, his body cloven, gutted from collarbone to crotch—severed bone-ends gleaming white in shattered flash—but not before a second and a third had rushed to join him and suffered the same fate, their spilled vitals writhing, braiding into one another upon the slickened building-top.

  He killed another, and another. Still they came upon him at a run. Their mingled blood sluiced down the fuller of the greatsword, cresting where it ended halfway down the forte, showering the Helvetian warrior in scarlet until his arms, chest, and shoulders likewise ran sticky, hot, and smoking with it.

  More of the screaming rent-robed men surrounded him.

  He was distracted for a moment as great Ursi snarled beside him. A few feet away, one of the priests clutched at the ruined, naked skull-front which had been his face e’er the bear-dog had torn it away with a single snap of his mighty jaws.

  The circle about the warrior and his dog began to close.

  Bringing up a hoarse, gut-born bellow with effort, three of their hair-matted heads did Fireclaw shear off with a single blow. Still grinning, they jumped from their severed neck-stalks, fountaining with gore. They rolled over the glassy roof-lip, down the two and a half thousand cruel-edged steps below. They ended, pulped beyond recognizability, by splashing into the predator-infested waters of the bay.

  In an instant Fireclaw began littering the evil temple with the entrails and disembodied limbs of a hundred others as he hacked a path through the circle they’d formed about him, measuring his progress in deaths a dozen at a time, ever forging toward the livid center of the vast altar where the Princess Ayesha still stood drugged into motionless emptiness, little Sagheer chittering upon her shoulder.

  The tide began to turn. Already demoralized by the quaking building, the remaining priests of the Han-Meshika—deprived of weapons to defend themselves by generations of rulers who thought it convenient—were helpless to stop him.

  Now they fell in ranks before his scarlet-streaming greatsword like scythe-gathered sheaves of grain, till it seemed to the warrior’s rage-numbed mind there could be no more of them to give their lives to Murderer’s legend.

  Still they came.

  Fireclaw shifted his greatsword from the end of his weary right arm to the good hand at his left.

  A priest behind him screamed. Ursi had hold of his arm, just above the elbow, but it was bleeding at the shoulder from which it was being wrenched like an uprooted weed.

  2

  Behind Fireclaw, still within the flying machine, Owald and the others tore their eyes away from Fireclaw’s battle, the young commander attempting, as he’d been ordered, to jockey the tilted mirror across the surface of the Eye-of-God.

  He was almost too successful. All too soon it cast its titanic shadow upon the Helvetian warrior and the helpless girl he’d reached at last, enveloping them.

  Nearby, a blubbering priest lay face down, flopping as the mighty bear-dog stripped the backbone from his body with a savage twisting motion of his shaggy head.

  Still the priests kept coming.

  Shouting back at Mochamet al Rotshild, the warrior’s son jumped from the gondola, racing to aid him.

  At Owald’s instruction, the older man lifted a red-enameled switch-cover upon the control panel, watched the three upon the pyramid-top. When he felt the time was right, he took a breath, toggled the emergency switch which fired explosive bolts, releasing the great mirror, slamming it into place over the glassy giant lens just as Fireclaw, Ayesha in his arms, raced clear of the space.

  Owald was right behind them, Ursi in the lead.

  At the edge, they tumbled, taken from behind by a blast of air as the giant mirror crashed over the “pool.” Fireclaw rolled with it, protecting Ayesha with his body.

  Owald kept his feet until his heel, slick from the priest-blood his father had spilled by the hogshead, slipped from beneath him as the building quivered.

  He pitched headlong over the lip, a desperate hand outthrust for the next step. He felt his father’s one good hand close hard upon his ankle. A long, terrible moment passed as the blood in which they all were bathed let the ankle slide, finger’s width by finger’s width, through Fireclaw’s bone-crushing grasp.

  Owald dropped—

  —and flattened both palms against the tread of the next step. He squirmed, twisted, pulled himself back to the comparative safety of the pyramid-top.

  “Die! Die! Die! Die! Die!”

  Close beside Fireclaw’s shaven head there flashed a shower of orange sparks. A lone surviving priest swung what had once been a decorative sacrificial axe. His warrior’s sword, cast away that he might seize instead an ankle, was just beyond reach. Still watching his son’s recovery, pinned beneath the semiconscious Princess Ayesha, the Helvetian warrior was slow to react.

  Too slow.

  Helpless, he watched the blade descend once more.

  It whistled as it fell toward his face.

  The earth gave a jolting shudder.

  Of a sudden, Mochamet al Rotshild stepped into the way, taking the axe-bit through his unprotected skull, but gutting the priest who wielded it in the same instant with a thrust of Murderer’s great blade through the creature’s abdomen.

  The Mughal spy had made atonement.

  Murderer fell.

  The axe wrenched free with the verminous priest’s dying convulsions and skidded, spinning butt about blade-bit, until it stopped at the fallen mirror’s edge.

  3

  Reclaiming Murderer, Fireclaw carried Ayesha to the airship.

  Signaling Owald with a wave of his sword to take the controls, in one mighty fist Fireclaw seized the bonds restraining Oln Woeck and the Sun Incarnate, Zhu Yuan-Coyotl.

  He’d sheathed his sword. Now he was assuring himself of something he carried in his shirtfront.

  “Here, I’ve a job for the pair of you!”

  He dragged them in an awkward dance toward the mirror, now lying face down over the still-warm, deadly eye of the crystal pyramid. In a blur of motion, he seized their wrists, tearing their bonds free with the doing of it, slammed them down across each other upon the metal backing of the mirror’s edge. In a movement too fast for either of his victims to anticipate, he drew Dove Blossom’s little hollow-handled dagger from his bosom, thrust it through the living flesh of their wrists, into the backing-plate, nailing them both down.

  Ignoring yet another fit of shaking from the earth below, he stepped back to admire his handiwork. His bear-dog had leapt from the airship and was beside him.

  “Tell your Lord Jesus, Oln Woeck, you died that you might share his suffering right beside him—in Hell!”

  Whirling upon his moccasined heel, he ran for the airship.

  Ursi followed in his wake.

  ‘Wait, Sedrich, I beg you!” cried Oln Woeck.

  The old man whined. He’d ne’er intended harm to anyone, to injure Sedrich Owaldsohn or Ilse, Frae helpless in her pregnancy, or Owald. He hadn’t meant to slay Fireclaw’s wife....

  The Sun Incarnate Zhu Yuan-Coyotl spat in his face.

  Without further word, the young man set his teeth, stretching for the sacrificial axe which had killed Mochamet al Rotshild. He took a breath, raised the weapon, swung it down left-handed wit
h all his might upon the arm pinned by the dagger.

  The blade bit deep into the mirror-backing.

  Oln Woeck watched, gibbering in horror, his eyes grown wide with shock. A gout of warm blood spurted over both of them in pulses, cooling in the salty breeze.

  Five sharp tremors rattled the pyramid-top in rapid succession. Across the bay, the facade of a building slipped to the ground with a dusty roar. Staring at the twice-blooded axe, Oln Woeck renewed his wailing, afraid to die, yet afraid in equal measure to follow the Sun’s desperate example.

  Zhu Yuan-Coyotl ignored him. Holding on to consciousness by sheer will, he laid the axe aside, using a strip of cloth he’d been bound with to tie off the stump.

  Running to the edge of the pyramid, he glanced down its polished, glassy side, its two and a half thousand steps looking to him like the teeth of a hungry predator. He ran back a few paces, judged the wind, which was a strong, buffeting one off the bay. Gathering as much momentum as he could, he leapt!

  Blocked as his vision was by the crystalline monument’s vast serrate-sided slanting bulk, Fireclaw, watching from a window of the slow-rising airship, never saw the end of the Sun’s leap, nor whether it ended in a watery splash far below or, as was much more likely, in his reddened, pulpy ruination. In either event the evil young man had met a fate far kinder than the one he’d intended for Ayesha, and had inflicted upon thousands more.

  The water had been full of sharks, attracted by a cataract of blood from high above them.

  Engines bellowing with the effort Owald demanded of them, the airship soared away, just as the next pulse of power from within the crystal pyramid gathered itself. There was a mighty roar like unto lightning. Intolerable light and heat sizzled out round the edges of the occulting mirror which nonetheless reflected most of the structure’s deadly energies back into the pyramid.

  Something within its substance groaned.

  As Fireclaw and his companions watched, the smoking mirror seemed to hold a fraction of a second as its remaining captive screamed, roasting between knees and waist. The clothing about his middle burst into flame, showering spark-punctuated flames backward and away from him, across the heavy-lidded pyramid-top.