The Crystal Empire (42 page)

The crack of Lishabha’s long-barreled military rifle was distinctive, fo
l
lowed as it was each time by the scream or grunt of a dying opponent. A momentary glitter caught the corner of Sedrich’s eye as she u
n
sheathed the long, narrow knife she carried, affixing it with a mechan
i
cal clank to the end of the single-shot weapon. This—“bayonet” he r
e
membered hearing it called—didn’t impede her shooting, but it kept the enemy away from her when she’d opened the breech of her rifle or was reaching for more a
m
munition.

Mochamet al Rotshild had a large-bored pistol in each hand. When he’d discharged these to good effect—the Utes had slowed their charge now, having discovered the party wasn’t the easy pickings they’d antic
i
pated—he reached for smaller weapons in his boot-tops, accounting for another pair of Utes.

His parrot screamed, echoing the joyous war-cries of its master.

The Princess Ayesha wasn’t in evidence. The mist had thickened. Fireclaw couldn’t spare the time to do more than glance about for her, then go on fighting.

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 co
v
er 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;
Mu
r
derer
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. Moch
a
met 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 reac
h
ing round.

His knife bit deep.

Lishabha fell, her throat slashed to the spine.

“Lishabha!”

Roaring Arabic profanities, Mochamet al Rotshild rushed upon the sta
r
tled 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 wh
e
rever 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 unrecogni
z
abil
i
ty.

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 a
b
domen. It was the furious screeching of the marmoset Sagheer which told him at last of the whereabouts of the Princess Ayesha. Through a rift b
e
tween the heavy sheets of drizzle and powder-smoke, Fireclaw could see the Sar
a
cen maiden. Soaked in blood from forehead to ankle, standing over her disabled mentor, her rifle tucked into her hip with one hand, the ra
b
bi’s heavy pistol in the other.

To Fireclaw’s utter amazement, Oln Woeck also huddled at her feet, r
e
loading for her, terror and an odd sort of determination written upon his already shriveled features. Her face was that of a statue. Three wa
r
riors 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 e
n
tered 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 ba
r
rel of his pistol—the front sight cut flesh—dropped the gun, and seized the warrior’s throat. Both hands locked in vain about the Helv
e
tian’s mig
h
ty wrist, the man was lifted off his moccasined feet. They flapped and da
n
gled 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 worl
d
ful of screaming from the Utes. In sadness and disgust, Fireclaw knew that he and his Saracen party were doomed, almost before their journey had b
e
gun.

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 spa
t
tering Fireclaw’s bloody shoulders.

The giant forms moved closer.

Swift was their approach.

A hurricane roared in their wake.

**

“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

“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, hu
d
dled 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 shou
l
der, 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. Un
e
quipped with an attaching barrel-knife such as that vessel of filth Lish
a
bha had used, Ayesha held her unholy Saracen rifle, long since run em
p
ty 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 re
d
dened, 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 r
e
deemed 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 vi
r
tuous example, in the matter of the vile and unconsecrated mating Sedrich Fireclaw had committed—should be punished with the Sar
a
cens, 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 gibbe
r
ing 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 ce
r
tainly 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 carr
y
ing 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 Fir
e
claw, would find his secret out.

An unreasonable man, this Fireclaw (and in this he did indeed r
e
semble 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 ha
v
oc with blade and pistol till, jammed by fouling, the unsanctified revol
v
er 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 Fir
e
claw’s bear-dog, Ursi, that his assailants, sure of victory, now sallied fo
r
ward simply to touch the great beast, that they could tell about it afte
r
ward—if they lived.