The Crystal Empire (23 page)

Outside, a wave-tossed ocean of man-high yellow grass rippled with its passing.

What sets mankind apart, she thought, from all other organisms is that mankind seeks pain and avoids pleasure—and is proud of it. Now she he
r
self was doing so at an unprecedented velocity. At this headlong speed, the great curved springs upon which each wheel’s axle rested failed to soften the roughness of the rutted road they rolled upon, as they had at a more temperate pace.

There was a hoarse shout of alarm just outside her louvered cabin door.

A buzzing shadow passed by her window.

In his swinging cage, little Sagheer chittered out his uneasiness. Ay
e
sha crossed the small room in a single pace to comfort him. Through the space she had occupied just a heartbeat before, an arrow flashed through the open porthole above her bunk, burying itself with a dull thud in the wall across her tiny cabin.

Outside, Mochamet al Rotshild shouted an order.

The land-ship picked up even more speed.

“But as for the ungodly, their refuge shall be the Fire; as often as they desire to come forth from it, they shall be restored into it, and it shall be said to them, ‘Taste the chastisement of the Fire....’”—The
Koran,
Sura XXXII

“W
hat is it, old fellow? What d’you hear?”

For Fireclaw, it began that cloudless morning with a squirming an
i
mal, its whistle-whimpering protests just at the upper limits of human audibility, and the not-quite-sound of muffled explosions somewhere near the razor-straight horizon. They were followed soon after by an u
n
derlying thunder which pricked memories he’d thought long buried.

Looking up from his work—one of Ursi’s great yellow-gray talons, too long unwatched, had curled upward into the pad, cruelly splitting it and causing the black woolly beast considerable pain—Fireclaw patted the a
n
imal upon its shaggy head and ducked out of the low earthen shed they occupied to see what the commotion was about.

Ursi barked, struggled to his feet, and limped to his master’s knee.

Upon the eastern skyline, brushed into crimson brilliance by the ri
s
ing sun, there stood a pillar of fire.

“Husband?”

At the same moment, Fireclaw’s wife, Dove Blossom, drying her brown, capable hands upon a homespun apron, appeared in the kitchen doorway across the yard, drawn by the same disturbances as her hu
s
band. Her ears were, at most times, much sharper than his. The noise of running water at the kitchen sink must have given him the advantage.

She stood upon her moccasined toes—a small woman, she needed all the height she could obtain thus—one hand resting upon the large, sca
b
barded knife at her waist, the other shading her eyes, straining to watch the apparition upon the flat, grass-covered prairie.

“Best we take the usual precautions,” was his only answer to her u
n
asked question, yet his tone and posture spoke to her—as such things are communicated, man to woman—of an inward excitement less stoic than his countenance.

Bending under the low wooden lintel once again, Fireclaw stepped back into the machine shed, his mind considering at once the rare occu
r
rence of visitors—unwelcome, dangerous ones in all possibility—and the everyday pragmatics of ranch life which those visitors, and that po
s
sibility, had just interrupted.

He swept his proud, proprietary gaze across the clutter of machinery: wire-spoked wheels and rubber tires, disembodied drive-trains shimme
r
ing with lubricant, small dismantled engines, the gleaming rustless and dust-free forms of metal lathe and horizontal mill, compound vise and drill-press, all of which he’d fashioned for himself, one square and clean-edged component at a time. The loving labor of twenty good years.

He thought of visitors to come, and of how much easier—and quic
k
er—it was to destroy than to build.

Ursi would be fine, although for a few days he and Dove Blossom would have to be watchful for infection. One of her mother’s herbal drawing poultices, applied this night ere bedtime—whenever that turned out to be—would solve that problem for a while.

He was their most valuable and prolific breeder, in his own right something of a legend among Dove Blossom’s people, and almost a full partner in the couple’s various enterprises. His own sire, gray about the ears and muzzle, and very nearly toothless, had gone down valiantly—before a pack of timber wolves wintering one harsh season upon the fr
o
zen plains—defending the very litter from which Ursi himself had sprung. ’Twas a good line, Fireclaw thought now, as he had often thought, and Ursi, just like his father before him, well trained and eager.

Ursi growled uncertainly, sensing changes in his master’s mood, his own brown, liquid eyes too poor to make out what the man had just seen, many miles away.

Fireclaw patted the animal, ran five stub-nailed and callused fingers through his own graying mop.

He was a big man in his middle years, his great strength and unr
e
lenting character the subject of many a harrowing tale among the tran
s
lucent re
s
ined hides and spun-glass lodgepoles of his adopted prairie tribe. Ever was he accompanied, in real life as well as in the tales, by Ursi (or another who, from countless retellings by a myriad of tongues, now bore the same name), his huge black, curly-pelted “bear-dog.”

Snapping the plier-like toenail-cutters into their socket with his left hand, Fireclaw reached for the great double-edged blade he’d leaned in its scabbard against the cluttered workbench. This he slung over his shoulder where it would hang ready—although its chiefest value now
a
days lay in its powers of intimidation—for the thrust-twist which would lock it to his right wrist. More than aught else about Fireclaw, this gleaming and terrible weapon, his skill in wielding it, and the grisly work to which, in years gone by, he’d put both, were the focus of his reputation among a hundred tribes of native plains-dwellers.

Briefly he inspected the smaller but more potent article of hand-wrought weaponry slapping, handle forward, at his left thigh. Unlike the gleaming greatsword and the matching dagger which had been his f
a
ther’s only tangible legacy, this he never laid aside. The dagger, too, he loosened in its scabbard, then gathered up, from the pegs upon which they hung above a tool-covered bench, a quiver of stout, featherless a
r
rows and his four-limbed longbow, a peace-offering from Knife Thro
w
er, his former mortal foe, now trusted ally and good friend, Dove Blo
s
som’s brother.

And this, too, brought certain memories to his mind.

2

Cold and exhausted as he was, young Sedrich Sedrichsohn shook his head in wonder, staring, as he’d done a thousand times thus far, at the scar-ridged stump of his right hand.

Many weeks had passed—he wasn’t exactly certain how many—still, whene’er he willed it, and often when he willed it least, he could feel the fingers of the hand he’d left lying on the bloody sill-stone of his dead f
a
ther’s doorway curl themselves into a fist, even flex his nonexistent thumb toward the intangibly tangible palm.

Perhaps ’twould e’er be thus, he thought. Perhaps he’d e’er be haun
t
ed by the ghost of a hand severed from his body to no good purpose, for the gain of naught and to the loss of everything he loved.

He shook his weary head again—sprinkling his already white and shivering shoulders with rainwater—as if to rid himself of such thoughts. Painful they were, and of no more use to him than was the phantom hand which continued to mystify him. At this particular m
o
ment they were a distraction and a danger to his life.

Spring was surging northward onto the Forbidden Plains, bringing with it sudden storms which transformed arid gullies into rivers, rivers into swollen, deadly seas. A gust-lashed rain was falling now, and he’d been caught out in the open.

The rabbit Willi had managed to kill for them—he himself couldn’t have drawn and aimed a shoulder-bow if he’d brought one, nor even thrown a rock in any reasonable hope of hitting something with his left hand—was two days gone, and they were both hungry. That Willi, well trained as he was, had shared it with him—they’d been as hungry as this at the time—had been surprising and a stroke of luck.

The rabbit’s untanned pelt now cushioned Sedrich’s bleeding feet within his travel-worn moccasins and covered the end of his right wrist. Willi’s pads were bruised and bleeding as well, but the dog had chewed off every dressing Sedrich had applied. The rotting skin wouldn’t last long. What clothing Sedrich still retained, after a river crossing which had cost him most of his possessions, hung in shreds.

His only other luck had come upon the second—or had it been the third?—day after leaving home. Outside a neighboring settlement, a former member of the local Sisterhood, rejected by her husband after losing her one child to some feverish illness, and refusing to rejoin the compound of the Sisterhood, had found him wandering in delirium near her hermitage, instinctively avoiding villages upon a back trail, headed ever west.

He didn’t remember that part very well.

She had cared for him, in the way of her training cleansed and sewn his burned and bleeding stump. She had fed him, sheltered him, begged him afterward to stay with her. He could not. He was of an age which made it unclear what it was she wished of him, to take the place of her dead child or that of her unfeeling mate. Perhaps she hadn’t known, he
r
self.

Why begin again in a village no different from the one which had, in its complacence, witnessed the destruction of everything he loved? Would the Cult of Jesus shrink from persecuting unbelievers in this place? Would the Sisterhood defend him here, as it had failed to do at home?

And if he stayed here, something told him he would never learn the secret of what lay to westward of Helvetia. That secret, the curiosity it still piqued in him, was all that remained to animate him now.

Making good his escape from her woods-hidden cottage hadn’t been easily accomplished. One thing he did owe Ursula Karlstochter: follo
w
ing a practice held by but a few among the Sisterhood, she’d given him a slee
p
ing potion. He’d scarcely needed it (although he still shuddered at the chance of having awakened prematurely in the middle of her mi
n
istrations). Before sealing his flesh, free now of the stinking black and yellow discharge which had itself come near to killing him, she’d pulled the ra
v
aged muscle-ends into place and sewn them to the bones where they b
e
longed, using a tiny hand-driven brace and drill he or his father might have fashioned for the trade. This had restored the normal te
n
sions and rel
a
tionships among the parts of what remained of his right forearm, speeding the healing of it, allowing him greater use of the limb than might have ot
h
erwise been possible.

Later, when she thought his stomach capable of bearing it, she’d demonstrated for him what it was she’d accomplished, upon a chicken she was preparing for dinner. He almost smiled at the memory. She’d mi
s
judged what he could bear to witness. Afterward, he’d been unable to choke down a bite of that chicken. Huddling with a wet and odorous Willi against a slight overhang in the rocks of a waist-high ridge—nothing r
e
sembling a cave—he wished he had it now, e’en without a fire.

Of a sudden, Willi looked up, snuffling into the damp breeze. Rain still fell in stifling curtains all about them, limiting vision to a few paces in three directions. Sedrich kept his back to the rock, although it blinded him upon one side and sucked the heat out of his body. While he was wishing, he wished for flint and steel and tinder—e’en without the chicken. As he shivered and pulled the big dog closer, the pommel of his father’s greatsword scraped against the overhang.

Abruptly a wiry hand thrust itself down over the blind lip of the rock, seizing Sedrich by the hair, dragging him upward against the slanting cei
l
ing of the overhang.

Out of boyhood reflex, he grabbed for
Murderer
’s handle with the hand that wasn’t there. By the time he’d overcome this impulse, it was too late to correct it. Instead, he took a firm grip upon the rain-slick wrist above his eyes and
pulled.

A youth, no older than himself, tumbled over the rock onto his back, twist-jerked himself into a crouching posture, and slashed at Sedrich with a rusted knife, deep-worn in the center of the blade from being honed upon random stones.