The Crystal Empire (48 page)

As she had often seen the captain do, Ayesha thrust an outstretched hand against Po’s gray-scaled legs. The bird climbed, stiff-limbed and co
m
ical despite the circumstances, upon her finger, let her carry him across the room to a steel hammock-hook.

There he perched, his feathers ruffled, his white-rimmed black-in-yellow eyes dilating.

With all the gentleness he was capable of, Fireclaw turned Mochamet al Rotshild over, surprised to find that the man yet lived. The deep-set eyes, shut tight against some inner agony, forced themselves open to behold the younger man.

“I will be damned...I had not looked for something like this to happen to me for a few more years yet...it is difficult to breathe,” he complained with a wheeze which underlined his words. “The pain within my left arm is nigh unbearable.”

Fireclaw nodded, his good hand massaging the fallen man’s arm which was curled up in a cramp. After a few short, gasping breaths, the Comm
o
dore spoke also of a feeling that steel bands were crushing his chest. This speech seemed to exhaust him.

He shut his eyes again.

“This thing,” Fireclaw offered, thinking of his father’s death, “I’ve seen ere now.”

He looked up into the dark, widened eyes of the girl who knelt upon the floor beside him.

“Ayesha, I greatly fear—”

A noise came at another door.

The louvered panel swung aside.

From the corridor beyond, a single guardsman, like his fellows co
p
per-kilt and helmeted, entered their stateroom, one gauntleted hand upon the pommel of an all-too-familiar holstered pistol, the other pounding once upon his breastplate in salute.

“Sir!” he announced with military briskness, in flawless, if somewhat overloud, Helvetian. “As chief commander of the personal bodyguard of the Sun Incarnate, Zhu Yuan-Coyotl, I...”

The man’s voice tapered off as he beheld the scene he had interrup
t
ed within the suite.

“I take it”—Fireclaw looked up with a bitter expression at the black-helmeted figure—“that your child-tyrant wants to summon one of us again. If so, he’ll have to wait.”

The guardsman shook his head.

“Uh, no, sir, in truth it is not the ruler of the Han-Meshika who seeks you.”

He removed his helmet, revealing to them a fair-complected face, surrounded by a shaggy mane of red-blond hair.

The eyes within that face were icy blue.

“It is I myself who request leave to speak with you, Sedrich Sedric
h
sohn, first to apologize for having shot you. Also to inform you that I am your son, Owald.”

“Do the people reckon that they will be left to say ‘We believe,’ and will
not be tried?”—
The
Koran,
Sura XXIX

The armored figure froze a moment, held a hand out as if to tell the others to wait, then reached down and manipulated something in the helmet he held within the crook of his arm. Insanely, he spoke a word into the helmet, then looked up with a satisfied expression.

Less than a minute passed before they had more company.

Once inside the door, the young man stepped aside for two of his copper-kilted minions, one of them bearing a bright-colored rigid box swin
g
ing by a handle from his fist.

Without a word, these two shouldered Fireclaw and Ayesha out of the way—a small movement across the stateroom caught the Helvetian wa
r
rior’s eye: the Rabbi David Shulieman was out of his hammock, a curious expression on his face, leaning against the frame of the connec
t
ing door—and opened the Saracen sea-captain’s clothing.

Ayesha rose, hurried to her tutor.

Letting his eyes stray now and again to the man who claimed to be his son, Fireclaw had stepped back, seating himself in a low chair to watch what happened next.

The pair standing in the adjoining cabin doorway held a brief, muted exchange in Arabic—the Princess Ayesha pointing with angry gestures several times to the man’s heavy bandages—after which the curly-haired bespectacled scholar glanced helplessly toward the ceiling, pe
r
haps appea
l
ing to some deity, and shrugged.

He allowed the girl to help him out of Fireclaw’s sight, back to the sickbed he’d just left.

From the handled kit-box the guardsmen removed a number of i
n
struments foreign to the Helvetian, passing them over Mochamet al Ro
t
shild’s supine body, along his arms, upon one occasion lifting him so that one of the objects might take the old man’s measure from the mi
d
dle of his back to the center of his chest.

That implement, once unfolded, firmed into a C-shape with the car
e
ful tightening of several thumb-screws, resembled one of the calipers Fireclaw used to test dimensions of a work-piece upon his lathe. The chest-end of the device held a tiny gray-green glowing window which the guardsmen watched with the greatest of concentration, here and there remarking to one another upon some esoteric point of interest.

After a short while, they turned once again to their commander, who stood leaning against the corridor-side wall with his arms folded across his black-armored chest. They uttered no more than a dozen words, in a language Fireclaw couldn’t follow. If it were a question, it was not couched in the language spoken in the audience chamber.

Nodding, Owald replied in kind, receiving an answer.

To Fireclaw, he said in Helvetian: “Your Saracen friend’s an old man, Fa—Sedrich Fireclaw. E’en without proper treatment, he could recover, living on in vigorous health for another twenty years. Or with it, he could expire tomorrow.”

“No different,” Fireclaw observed, “from any of the rest of us. What troubles him? Is it his heart?”

Owald shrugged.

Medicines were administered with the aid of barreled needles, thrust i
n
to blood vessels beneath the skin, not unlike the dart which had been used upon the Helvetian warrior. With some effort, the guardsmen lifted M
o
chamet al Rotshild, who was beginning to stir a little upon his own now, into the nearby hammock.

Once he was comfortable, they folded up their devices, closed their case upon them. With an alien word of permission from the man who called himself Owald Sedrichsohn, they departed.

Owald crossed the little room in two deep strides, unlatched his broad, heavy weapons belt—Fireclaw noted pouches its entire length, which he presumed carried extra drug-darts, and a short, broad dagger hanging o
p
posite the pistol—let the scabbarded pistol drop to the floor, along with his smoke-visored eagle helmet. Finding a second chair, he seated himself without relaxing, his blue eyes fastened upon his father’s brown as his f
a
ther’s were upon his.

Again, a small movement at the other side of the room caught both men’s momentary attention.

The Princess Ayesha stood against the doorway, a neutral expression upon her features, the posture of her body—her arms were folded across her breasts—telling them, whatever propriety might demand, that she’d not leave them to their privacy.

Silence hung palpable for an unbearable time.

“You know,” Owald essayed at last, “I’d planned for years the proper wise to begin this conversation, but now—”

Fireclaw interrupted. “You knew—”

“Aught there was to know,” the younger man answered, “aught about you, about your work, your woman, your great dogs. I see the questions boiling behind your eyes, Sedrich Fireclaw. Perhaps the best wise to begin is to go back many years, to explain why, knowing aught about you, I could ne’er come to you till first you came to me.

“When I was but a boy...”

2

“Owald!”

The young man turned his head a moment, toward the calling voice. His father’s latest bodyguard-companion took this as an opportunity—he had been interrupted by that voice, in mid-harangue—to teach the lad a painful lesson.

The huge, meaty fist whistled toward the side of Owald’s head.

Craack!

The eunuch danced back howling, cradling a forearm in which both bones had been broken.

Baring well-formed, even teeth in what might have been mistaken for a smile, Owald lowered his own forearm—after having snapped it u
p
ward in a dynamic block which had taken the older man by surprise—but didn’t relax his guard. He could never relax his guard, not in this company. For some reason he’d never understood, this man, like all the others who’d passed through their lives, resented him, jealous of each moment the boy and his father spent together.

Veins standing out beneath tattoos upon his temple, the injured e
u
nuch lunged forward. Owald caught him with an upraised foot, not a thrust, in the solar plexus.

The man stopped as if he’d hit a wall.

Owald let his foot drop, danced for a flashing moment in a tight ci
r
cle which brought the same foot slamming round again into the tattooed, sh
a
ven head.

Eyes empty, the eunuch sagged straight downward to his knees.

He fell upon his face.

Well, that was done with, the boy thought, at least for the moment.

Owald bore the scars of many such “lessons.” His father (Owald was charitable enough to believe the older man was unaware of the inevit
a
ble jealous resentment) had put the eunuch in charge of the boy’s d
e
portment whenever he himself was absent.

Always he felt watched, though for what actions or betraying signs in his personality, he could never learn. He was not deaf to whisperings behind his back about “bad blood,” whatever that phrase meant. Wha
t
ever crimes he or his blood had unintentionally committed, it meant cr
u
el p
u
nishment for every least imagined infraction—or, as the boy grew taller, more skill at a method of defense he had secretly himself invented and practiced, exchanges such as this which had established certain ground rules. The odd thing was that Owald never begrudged the times the two men, the eunuch and his father, spent together at night, after the single candle had been snuffed out.

But of course, Owald Olnsohn had never liked his father.

It took but a moment to observe that his “guardian” still breathed. Snatching up his coarse-woven robe, Owald crossed the compound, walking toward the Cult-Brother who’d called his name.

“Yes, Brother Hansl, what is it?”

Hansl Niemandsohn was a year older than Owald—and a foot shor
t
er. His shoulders were narrow, his watery pale eyes useless beyond the length of his spindly extended arm. The surname he’d been given upon entering the Brotherhood was at once something of a courtesy and a joke, conside
r
ing his unknown antecedents.

“It’s the old witch-woman, Owald, Ilse Sedrichsfrau. A traveler stopped outside our gate with a message. She’s asking for you, insisting you come. I don’t know why.”

Owald flipped the plain-fashioned cassock over his lion-maned head, wiggled his broad shoulders into the garment which, like all the clothing he’d ever been given to wear, had been too small for those shoulders wit
h
in a few short weeks.

He nodded at Brother Hansl.

The “witch-woman” had taken interest in him as long as he could remember, one of the few bright lights in his otherwise grim life. She had taught him many things, suggested this method of fighting to him, had even helped him learn to read, despite his father’s wishes to the co
n
trary. He liked her, and she’d been ill of late.

Perhaps she needed him to do some chores for her.

All his short life, the Brotherhood had increasingly prospered, About him, tattooed, robed, and shaven Brothers of the Cult wielded brooms and mops and leaf-rakes, scouring the already spotless compound, sweeping up a thimbleful of soil and the few dead leaves the wind had yesternight blown there, washing ornately glazed windows, polishing the brass appointments of rich-furnished doors, watering the many dec
o
rative plantings, bustling from the cool shade of awning-draped buil
d
ings—chapel, meeting-hall, infirmary, the new dormitories—into the clean-swept, sunlit courtyard, flagged with imported green-veined ma
r
ble from the far north.

The many lawns were thick and green.

The gateposts—though the gates were never closed, lest some ben
e
factor lose the opportunity to contribute to the Brotherhood—were fas
h
ioned of wrought iron, salvaged from some abandoned smithy here
a
bouts, overl
a
id with sheets of beaten gold.