The Crystal Empire (27 page)

Fireclaw could think of many worse.

No one aboard the land-ship had shot at him since Knife Thrower’s first whistling pass. Now the Comanche stopped their dusty circling, gathered in a line beyond what they imagined to be the range of the i
n
terl
o
per’s rifles. They’d little experience with firearms. Looking at the length of those barrels, and judging from the
crack
which spoke of rifled bores, Fir
e
claw realized the strangers were restraining themselves more for want of amm
u
nition than any lack of ranging power.

Boom!

As if to prove the Helvetian correct, a single shot blasted across the prairie, spanging off the fender of a cycle. In a cloud of wheel-spinnings, the warriors disappeared into a gully, reappeared one slanting hill-shoulder fu
r
ther away.

The land-ship creaked to a stop, raising a cloud of its own. Silence filled the ranch yard like a thick fog. Fireclaw raised his one good hand and strode toward the vessel.

Slapping the tiller aside, the orange-bearded figure in command lifted his fist, bellowed something in a strange, harsh-syllabled tongue. At his unsubtle urging, scurrying began elsewhere aboard the ship, other shou
t
ing voices, the sound of bare feet slapping hardwood.

The gray bird squawked, perhaps in the same language, flapped, ru
f
fled its plumage, then smoothed its wings and red tail feathers and sat quiet.

Fireclaw paused a few paces off, left hand far from the curved butt of his pistol.

He waited.

Halfway down the curving, shingle-planked hull, a door popped open, hinged upon its lower edge. Fastened to its inboard side, a short, steep flight of stairs tipped groundward—he could see brown hands strain upon a pair of hawsers guiding the contraption toward gentle co
n
tact with the yellow soil.

A stooped and feeble figure filled the doorway.

“Good morrow, young Sedrich,” wheezed a voice from the distant past. “I’ve a favor I’d ask of thee, my boy.”

It was the first time in two decades he’d heard the Helvetian la
n
guage spoken at any great length. It sounded foreign to his ear. Down the flight of stairs, clinging to its hawser hand railings, labored a back-bent ancient in a filthy shift, supported each step of the way by the land-ship captain’s countryman behind him.

Forgetting his pistol, Fireclaw jammed his prosthetic socket over the handle of the greatsword
Murderer
and swept it out. Bellowing, he charged the gangplank.

“Oln Woeck, prepare yourself to die!”

“...thou art truly among the Envoys on a straight path...that thou mayest warn a pe
o
ple whose fathers were never warned....”
—
The Koran
, Sura XXXVI

From her rooftop guardpost, Dove Blossom watched her husband hurl himself toward the land-ship.

Though he was by nature reticent, undisposed to talk about himself, in the fifteen winters she’d lived with Fireclaw, sharing with him his voluntary exile at foot of what he called the Great Blue Mountains, Dove Blossom had learned much which would have surprised the man.

Her body tensed now, ready for the fight to come. Sunlight, glancing from an arm’s length of polished, hammer-hardened steel, slashed past her eyes. Yet her mind was filled with memories of a man whose back she thus defended. Fireclaw had killed before. He would kill again this day, perhaps, or be killed. She readied her bow, sweeping the crosshairs of its telescopic sight along the land-ship’s deck.

In the tales of her people, Fireclaw loomed fully as terrible as wha
t
ever unknown majesty or horror lay beyond those ghostly peaks which fascina
t
ed him. Yet, with an unguarded utterance here, an unconscious gesture there, her legendary husband’s all-too-human past had, year by year, emerged. From such fragments had she pieced together the fabric of his personal tragedies, even—this last he’d taught her, that they might have means of controlling Ursi and the other dogs which no enemy might imitate—some smattering of his native tongue. Sometimes he babbled in this language, when emboldened by the darkness, the sca
v
enger-spirits which, sniffing out the last despairing breath of human life, devour the soul, stalked his, as they did those of all men.

There was a noise below.

At the end of the out-tilted gangplank, the ancient white man, head shaven, body draped in soiled clothing—she wondered what the dark blue markings at his temples meant—gave a feeble shout of dismay and threw himself at the feet of his fellow Helvetian. A single snarl from Ursi was enough to hold the other foreigners back.

“I beg thee,” Dove Blossom heard the old one scream into the dirt where he’d buried his pinched and shrunken nose—she comprehended perhaps four words in five—“do thou not injure me, Sedrich, son of Owaldsohn, called Fireclaw! I’m prostrate before thee! I come hither upon a mission of uttermost importance to our people! I—”

A sharp report from the land-ship’s center deck ripped through both the shimmering curtain of Fireclaw’s rising blood-haze and the paralysis of contemplation which had held his woman uncharacteristically m
o
tionless behind him. An ugly-smelling puff of smoke, looking like a dandelion blown to seed, blossomed upon the deck amidships. Impact kicked a yellow spurt of dust into the air between his feet. Fireclaw shook his head, unaccustomed to being awakened thus from his murde
r
ous trance.

Not quite aware of what she did, Dove Blossom sent first one arrow, then another, streaking toward that cloud. Almost as one, they thunked into the cover of a cargo hatch, less than a hand’s width either side of the shooter’s head.

Dove Blossom was astonished.

She’d missed!

Blinking as if waking from her own bad dream, she watched Fireclaw lift his face to the rail. Perhaps the thick, foul-smelling smoke had blurred her usually unerring aim. Then again, perhaps it had been ordinary simple-minded anger: yon round-eyed young woman had discharged yet another shot at her man. A thin blue curl drifted from the muzzle of the woman’s weapon.

In echo, further forward, came the
thwack
of a shoulder-bow. This time, Dove Blossom was ready. Her answering arrow, aimed for the heart, missed again, but it pinned the shooter’s intervening hand to the stock of his shoulder-bow, burying itself in resin-impregnated har
d
wood. Mea
n
while, with an almost negligent twitch of his greatsword, Fireclaw grinned and swatted the foreigner’s feather-fletched bolt from its path ere it could reach his own otherwise unprotected breast.

He whistled, gave a series of commands. There was movement b
e
hind Dove Blossom as well as below as her rear guard leapt from the roof to join the rest of the great pack Fireclaw had summoned. Instantly two do
z
en giant, snarling, coal-black dogs, their eyes lit with the insane fire of c
a
nine ferocity unleashed, formed a half-circle about him, an arc of death, defying anyone to come and touch their master.

Dove Blossom chuckled to herself. The fabulous
Murderer
might be an object of respect, even veneration, among her people, the Comanche woman thought to herself. But without the mighty Fireclaw behind it, and the magic he brought to everything he touched, ’twas just another billet of hammered steel.

“Chinthazir taqeeqagh! Maa ghaadaa!”

The brawny red-haired figure at the tiller shouted something in a la
n
guage which she couldn’t follow—to her it sounded like a curse. Upon his shoulder, the strange red-tailed bird—it had mustard yellow eyes and a beak which might have been carved of jet—squawked and whistled, gr
i
macing a different way with each new noise it made.

No one fired another shot.

Silence descended over the scene, broken when Fireclaw spat, mis
s
ing the scabrous nape of the old man’s bowed and dirty neck by not more than a finger’s length.

He turned and glanced toward Dove Blossom, his brief look conveying, as such will between well-married couples, many minutes’ worth of conve
r
sation.

Dove Blossom relaxed minutely, tension turning into curiosity.

Bending his elbow high above his head, Fireclaw sheathed his mighty blade, unlocked his wrist from off the grip—a display, his wife knew well, of contempt for an unworthy enemy—and pointed his good hand toward the rise, a thousand paces westward, where Knife Thro
w
er’s braves watched and waited upon their idling machines.

“Our people?” Fireclaw snarled in Helvetian. “Take a good look, old man;
those
are
my
people!”

Obediently the old man raised a trembling, tear-streaked face. He peered at the horizon, whimpered, and slumped back into the dirt.

Dove Blossom’s heart swelled within her, she who’d been named for the blue and yellow flowers of her native high plains. She was thrilled to hear her husband’s words. She’d always understood that she could never replace the lost love of his youth. Indeed, she’d been too wise to try. I
n
stead, she’d become a willing token—numb with fear upon that first day as the gift-bride to a monster—a token of the peace which had become necessary b
e
tween the Comanche and their Destroyer.

She heard Knife Thrower and his followers give a shout in answer to her husband’s gesture.

Like the bow her brother had also given Fireclaw on that day—an e
x
tension upon the handle of the powerful, quadruple-limbed weapon fit his prosthetic, as was the case with
Murderer
—identical to that which she held ready now, with its magical bright-lensed sight (this came in trade from somewhere beyond the mountains), she’d served him fait
h
fully, in the thousand ways of a wife, lived beside him, slept beside him, fed him, washed both his clothing and his wounds, at all times striving within he
r
self to lose hold of her terror of him. Nor could she name the moment when at last she had succeeded.

Shouts from the land-ship’s deck took the tone of questions now. The old man gave a muffled reply, asking something of Fireclaw. Fireclaw no
d
ded, replying affirmatively.

The old man rose to his bare, bony knees and cuffed the nose-runnings from his chin.

Shedding fear of Fireclaw hadn’t been an impossible task. Far from it. He’d shown her as much kindness and gentleness as it had been in him to show. She snorted—more than any Comanche husband would have! Nor can any woman live long with a man retaining, for good or for evil, all of her illusions about him. And Fireclaw, whate’er legend said of him—and all of it, and more, was true—was still a man.

For his part, he’d come, in his own wise, to love her; upon that she was well satisfied and certain.

The old man upon the ground grimaced, muttering something to her husband that she couldn’t hear.

As for her people, they who’d at first borne the consequences of the mad Helvetian’s insane rage, they’d at last surrendered to his grim d
e
termination to dwell unmolested in this place which was otherwise fo
r
bidden to his kind. Now they’d peace—

—or had until this ship arrived.

If Fireclaw was displeased, upon occasion, with certain aspects of his life with her, if she could never be for him his long-dead, pale-haired, gentle Frae—it was, perhaps, the greatest measure of that benign depar
t
ed spirit’s power that, over the years, and even in death, Dove Blossom he
r
self had come to feel toward Frae something akin to sisterly love—if he felt her and her kin to be uncivilized, if sometimes he must overlook the grisly trophies of continuous slaughter—though he’d done much slaughtering himself in early days—draped in decoration upon the m
a
chinery he repaired, he never complained of it.

Not once in all of those fifteen years.

The supplicant before her husband uttered a few more whining words. Keeping his own peace, Fireclaw looked up toward the deck again, sweeping it with his gaze. Someone beside the figure Dove Blossom had shot pulled the arrow from his hand. This untender ministration was r
e
ceived in stoic silence, even without the grimace Dove Blossom might have expected. Both men stood up, unarmed. The woman who was with them stood as well.

The red-haired shouter took a step away from the tiller of his ship, drew pistol and dagger from his waistband—Dove Blossom tensed, ce
n
tering her crosshairs upon his broad chest—then set his weapons upon the deck at his feet. His two companions followed his example.