Oln Woeck’s screams were a siren of anguish. His free arm flailed, he retched and vomited. His upper body flopped like a landed, suffocating fish. Something in his maimed hand gave way. It tore loose from the dull-glowing mirror-edge.
Legs useless, he fell upon his face, still writhing—
The bay-floor deep beneath the island seemed to give a convulsive leap, jolting the rocky outcrop and the mile-long transparent monument upon it. A titanic ring-shaped wave surged outward from the island, curling o’er at the top, sweeping away the thousands of boats, large and small, which had clustered about the island, passing by as if without notice, showering behind itself a forest of shattered planks and timbers upon the tortured surface of the water.
The ring-wave swept outward, its muddy, debris-toothed crest frothing, growing higher with each moment.
As it reached the Palace of the Sun and the nearby sheltering peninsula, the wave scooped the earth up like a gigantic shovel, turning it back upon itself, smashing, burying, drowning the millions of watchers upon the banks who’d gathered for the sacrifice.
Like a chorus of every soul condemned to Hell since the Beginning, their screaming could be heard, e’en above the catastrophe which had provoked it.
The earth gave another heave below the pyramid.
Another, great killer-wave was in this moment born to follow close upon its predecessor’s wake. ’Twould find fewer victims to claim, Fireclaw thought, when it reached what had been the shore. Atop the monument, no longer resembling a mountain of ice but a living, incandescent coal from deep within the celestial conflagration it was dedicated to, the great capping mirror itself glowed hot, still turning the furious energies from below back into their source.
The mighty pyramid began to shudder, not from the tremors but in a rhythm with them nonetheless, adding power to their frequency and fury. The structure groaned. Yawning gaps began appearing ’tween the great crystalline blocks.
At the heaving, buckling summit, a tiny fire—greasy smoke rose from it and was whisked away—marked the place where Oln Woeck had fallen. It consumed itself and went out.
The earth gave one more monumental, agonized shudder—
The pyramid exploded!
XLVIII: Flowery Death
“Never a city We destroyed, but it had warners for a reminder.”
—The Koran, Sura XXV!
The whole world tilting about it, the stolen airship whirled, slapped aside, its wire-struts snapping, lashing free, its overburdened structure groaning with the stresses, as its occupants clung, desperate, to aught within reach.
The isle of the Eye-of-God was now enveloped in a murky, fierce-glowing scarlet-centered cloud which boiled and twisted upward past the battered airship in a dense, ropy column, only to flatten into an evil-looking mushroom-cap as it met the cooler upper air.
Thunder bellowed in its heart.
Below, inside the already deep-riven earth, something gave way with a hideous noise which seemed to all about the ship like the screeching of a dying god. As if in sympathy, the surface of the great bay, extending now from horizon to horizon, churned itself in that instant into an angry, muddy foam.
Lightning flashed upon the faraway peaks.
A mighty rumbling came to them, greater than any they’d heard before, more felt than heard, like unto the end of all things, godlike and mortal alike. As Fireclaw and his shaken companions watched in horror, full half the Han-Meshika capital city, already smashed by three titanic waves, shuddered. It leapt northward in a single, terrible bound, the sudden shifting of the earth they stood upon flattening every edifice still standing for a hundred square leagues.
The wave-wrecked ruins of the Palace of the Sun swirled about themselves and disappeared, along with the island they’d occupied, swallowed by the raging inland sea. Not e’en an identifying eddy in the water marked its passing.
Likewise, nothing could be seen of any land which had once surrounded the great bay and which was now, at least until the waves subsided, part of its catastrophe-racked floor.
Aroused from her drugged stupor, Ayesha cried out.
Fireclaw followed her stunned gaze.
To the westward, the Spire of Dreamers began to change shape in some monstrous, subtle wise. Left erect by the still-quaking earth, nevertheless its great height seemed somehow reduced, its tapering sides swollen outward. Fireclaw watched great jagged cracks race one another from its base in churning wreckage and corpse-littered mud-froth, up the building’s exterior, splitting, branching like the tangled corridors within, crazing the entire surface.
The mile-tall Spire began to settle into its own length, the smoke of powdered stone erupting in gray billows at its base, till nothing more remained than a pile of dust-obscured rubble a few man-heights tall upon the wave-battered barren rock.
A dull flicker of light followed, a muffled explosion which was a feeble anticlimax after the destruction of the Eye-of-God. The Spire of Dreamers vanished altogether, leaving naught but the naked stony island it had stood upon.
Already, about its fringes—the only shoreline now in sight—were heaped in man-height piles the remains of billions of dead fish, mingled with those who’d once fished for them.
Perhaps someday, the warrior thought in weary cynicism, ’twould once again be made a prison-island. Meantime, six million living dead had found their rest.
Owald shouted something, mopping at blood streaming from a shallow cut upon his forehead with one sleeve of his soiled, tattered under-armor. Wind sang round them once again, but this time ’twas more than just the shrill passage of the air past window-frames and wire braces. Alarm bells and klaxons began sounding.
The airship, its broad, fabric-covered outer surfaces slashed and tattered, had been penetrated in a thousand places by the crystalline shards of the pyramid.
It began to fall.
Trying to declare the emergency to anyone who’d failed to appreciate it, Owald turned to catch his father with a beautiful Saracen girl, many years his junior, in his arms.
He seemed to be enjoying it.
As did she.
Owald cleared his throat, a gesture wasted in the noise racketing about them.
“If you’re interested,” he advised, unable to resist a smile in the midst of catastrophe, “I believe I can reach the Mughal fleet ere this thing sinks not that gently, to rise no more.”
He received no answer from his father.
He held up a fist. From it, upon a glittering chain, there hung a golden medallion.
“Mochamet al Rotshild,” he shouted, “gave me this, ere he rushed to aid you, as token of safe passage among the Mughal. Having destroyed an entire civilization, we’re assured of a most cordial welcome there—if we can make it!”
Ursi barked with joy.
Neither Fireclaw nor Ayesha heard him.
The Crystal Empire Page 42