The Crystal Empire (62 page)

They made speed toward the crystal pyramid.

There, preliminary sacrifices were being offered to the sun. Hundreds of thousands of worshippers crowded about the lower steps of the cry
s
talline monument—boats ranging in size from little bobbing cockl
e
shells to giant vessels capable of crossing the great sea had been moored about its glassy base.

Braving the day’s unsettling quakelets, many more spectators filled the city plazas across the bay.

At the pyramid’s blunt apex, the scarlet Eye-of-God was obscured by the close-packed forms of thousands of less fortunate participants, stan
d
ing—in what state of mind Fireclaw couldn’t guess—shoulder to shou
l
der upon its surface. Silent they remained, all unmoving. As the sun struck the blocks of the pyramid, an incredible thing occurred.

Having finished lining their compliant victims up in satisfactory ranks over the glassy “pool,” the priests stood back at the corners of the summit, their arms lifted to the sky, as if waiting—

There was a titanic pulse of light!

With a clap of thunder, a ruby-colored shaft of blinding luminescence exploded from the top of the pyramid, a full hundred paces in diameter it was, roiling the atmosphere above the bay, clawing miles into the to
r
tured sky. Even at this distance, and through the cabin window, Fireclaw could feel its heat upon his face.

When it winked out as if it had never been—Fireclaw wiped dazzled tears from his cheeks, blinked at the yellow-green coloring the world had by contrast taken on—naught whatever, no charred hulks, not even fine white ashes, of the sacrificial victims remained behind. The “pool” was as glossy-clean as it had been to begin with.

A mighty groan of ecstasy went up from the crowds.

Movement surged along the steps.

Another group of sacrifices, thousands of them, was brought up the side of the pyramid. There they were stood in place by the priests. Fir
e
claw wondered to himself—red anger choosing a strange time to rise within him—whether these apparent willing victims had ever been aught he’d have called human. Certainly they seemed to possess no human will to su
r
vive.

They too, disappeared in a blast of scarlet fury.

Heedless of the coming beam-path, Owald leaned into the controls, as if by magic tilting the entire world about them, bringing the airship even closer.

Of a sudden, from their airborne vantage, the escapees saw Ayesha being brought to the top of the pyramid in a black formal gown, steadied upon the steep-slanted pathway—rendered yet more treacherous by the shuddering earth—by a pair of priests. As with their previous victims, she seemed, however, to be climbing of her own accord.

Upon her frail shoulder, little Sagheer the pygmy marmoset was with her, even unto the end.

3

Sunlight sparkled off the water below. The sun itself was a patch of blinding brilliance upon the earth-roiled waves.

Thinking back over Mochamet al Rotshild’s mysterious tale of the destroyed Saracen fleet, Fireclaw began taking note of certain details visible at the pyramid-top, employing a more practical eye than he’d exercised upon it e’er now.

“Owald!”

He shouted against the speeding airship’s roaring engines, the hurr
i
cane-wind of its passage. Air sang in the window-frames, wire struts kee
p
ing harmony about the gondola.

“How long does it take yon damned rockpile to store up energy for the next pulse?”

Looking back over his shoulder at his father, the ex-commander of the Imperial Bodyguard opened his mouth—

“In the Name of God, look you!”

The interrupting voice was Mochamet al Rotshild’s, his tone inco
n
gruous, elated, bordering upon hysterical. His shaking finger pointed out the cabin window, westward.

Just this side of the faraway blue horizon, what Fireclaw presumed was the Mughal fleet the man had earlier spoken of had appeared, its tall smokestacks and high-masted rotating sails—these reminded the Helv
e
tian of his boyhood—invisible to all within the arms of the great bay save the airborne party.

Owald nodded.

“The quakes might be slowing the priest-technicians a little. Several m
i
nutes, at the least—I think!”

“He thinks!”

A grim expression settled upon the older Helvetian’s face. He looked round at the Saracen—or was it Mughal now?—captain, Mochamet al Rotshild. The elderly figure danced a little with excitement. The man no
d
ded back at Fireclaw, in wordless willingness to carry out whatever plan he’d conceived.

The Sun Incarnate Zhu Yuan-Coyotl and Oln Woeck, both trussed up, heaped without dignity into a corner of the cabin, the Helvetian wa
r
rior and his allies ignored.

Fireclaw clapped his good hand upon Owald’s shoulder. None but the man’s son could have taken it without buckling.

“Then I
think
I know what we shall do!”

More words were in haste exchanged.

At Fireclaw’s shouted instruction, the huge, curved, polished mirror b
e
low the airship was tilted upon its hinges from beneath the hull. This process took far longer than any of them might have wished. At this speed, a supporting structure never designed to take such strain groaned against the wind, shaking the mighty vessel like a dog brandishing the rags of a fresh-killed hare.

Something like a dog as well the Sun Incarnate Zhu Yuan-Coyotl writhed with impotent fury. He bit at the gags stuffed in his mouth until the spittle foamed down his naked chest.

Fireclaw looked down upon him and laughed.

Oln Woeck cried out, wetting himself.

Squinting, measuring precious time and shorter distances against an emerald-glowing grid set into the instrument-studded console before him, Owald dropped the mighty airship groundward while coaching Mochamet al Rotshild, sea-sailor and Mughal spy. Together they’d i
n
convenience two empires.

XLVII:
The Blinded Eye

“...unto each God has promised the reward most fair....Is it not time that the hearts of those who believe should be humbled...?”—
The
Koran,
Sura LVII

Far below, repeated tremors roiled the waters of the bay in an insane crisscross of interfering patterns.

Grunting from the effort, a sweating, red-faced Owald Sedrichsohn shifted levers, twisted wheels. Veins stood out upon his neck and for
e
head. He swore at both the instruments and his encumbering Bod
y
guardsman’s armor, dragging the great airship and its dangling mirror, almost as ma
s
sive, over the top of the pyramid.

When the great craft of the skies had at last dropped low enough, bobbing in the unsteady breeze as if ’twere a child’s plaything, Fireclaw slammed the door back. Timing himself against the vessel’s uncertain sur
g
ing motions, he leapt from the gondola, the greatsword
Murderer
locked upon his steel-rimmed wrist.

He was appropriately greeted.

Hundreds of the filthy priests of the Han-Meshika surged forward, the foul miasma of their crusted, unwashed bodies enveloping him. They ca
r
ried no weapons he could see, but enough of them there were and more to crush him ’neath their dirty weight alone, did they but, in their fanatic blood-lust, will it.

Shouting curses at them, he didn’t break his stride, but swung the greatsword
Murderer
from side to side—its razor-tip whistled with its pa
s
sage through the air—half in warning to the priests, half to limber up an arm grown stiff with tension.

He took firm hold with his good left hand upon the greatsword’s grip, just behind the guard, high above the place where his prosthetic locked upon the pommel.

Neither did the shrieking insect-beclouded mass of hel
p
less-peasant-murderers falter, but running, mindless, stumbled into one another with their thirst to add his death this morning to ten thousand others—and one—closing their share of the narrowing distance between themselves and the Helvetian warrior.

The joy upon their dirt-seamed faces told him they believed him easy prey.

Learning different, the first to rush upon Fireclaw’s gleaming blade-point screamed and died and fell, his body cloven, gutted from colla
r
bone to crotch—severed bone-ends gleaming white in shattered flash—but not before a second and a third had rushed to join him and su
f
fered the same fate, their spilled vitals writhing, braiding into one another u
p
on the slic
k
ened building-top.

He killed another, and another. Still they came upon him at a run. Their mingled blood sluiced down the fuller of the greatsword, cresting where it ended halfway down the forte, showering the Helvetian warrior in scarlet until his arms, chest, and shoulders likewise ran sticky, hot, and smoking with it.

More of the screaming rent-robed men surrounded him.

He was distracted for a moment as great Ursi snarled beside him. A few feet away, one of the priests clutched at the ruined, naked skull-front which had been his face e’er the bear-dog had torn it away with a single snap of his mighty jaws.

The circle about the warrior and his dog began to close.

Bringing up a hoarse, gut-born bellow with effort, three of their hair-matted heads did Fireclaw shear off with a single blow. Still grinning, they jumped from their severed neck-stalks, fountaining with gore. They rolled over the glassy roof-lip, down the two and a half thousand cruel-edged steps below. They ended, pulped beyond recognizability, by splashing into the predator-infested waters of the bay.

In an instant Fireclaw began littering the evil temple with the entrails and disembodied limbs of a hundred others as he hacked a path through the circle they’d formed about him, measuring his progress in deaths a dozen at a time, ever forging toward the livid center of the vast altar where the Princess Ayesha still stood drugged into motionless empt
i
ness, little Sa
g
heer chittering upon her shoulder.

The tide began to turn. Already demoralized by the quaking building, the remaining priests of the Han-Meshika—deprived of weapons to d
e
fend themselves by generations of rulers who thought it convenient—were helpless to stop him.

Now they fell in ranks before his scarlet-streaming greatsword like scythe-gathered sheaves of grain, till it seemed to the warrior’s rage-numbed mind there could be no more of them to give their lives to
Mu
r
de
r
er
’s legend.

Still they came.

Fireclaw shifted his greatsword from the end of his weary right arm to the good hand at his left.

A priest behind him screamed. Ursi had hold of his arm, just above the elbow, but it was bleeding at the shoulder from which it was being wrenched like an uprooted weed.

2

Behind Fireclaw, still within the flying machine, Owald and the ot
h
ers tore their eyes away from Fireclaw’s battle, the young commander attemp
t
ing, as he’d been ordered, to jockey the tilted mirror across the su
r
face of the Eye-of-God.

He was almost too successful. All too soon it cast its titanic shadow upon the Helvetian warrior and the helpless girl he’d reached at last, e
n
veloping them.

Nearby, a blubbering priest lay face down, flopping as the mighty bear-dog stripped the backbone from his body with a savage twisting m
o
tion of his shaggy head.

Still the priests kept coming.

Shouting back at Mochamet al Rotshild, the warrior’s son jumped from the gondola, racing to aid him.

At Owald’s instruction, the older man lifted a red-enameled switch-cover upon the control panel, watched the three upon the pyr
a
mid-top. When he felt the time was right, he took a breath, toggled the emergency switch which fired explosive bolts, releasing the great mirror, slamming it into place over the glassy giant lens just as Fireclaw, Ayesha in his arms, raced clear of the space.

Owald was right behind them, Ursi in the lead.

At the edge, they tumbled, taken from behind by a blast of air as the giant mirror crashed over the “pool.” Fireclaw rolled with it, protecting Ayesha with his body.

Owald kept his feet until his heel, slick from the priest-blood his f
a
ther had spilled by the hogshead, slipped from beneath him as the buil
d
ing qu
i
vered.