The Crystal Empire (61 page)

“What in Goddess’ name are you good for, then?” Fireclaw asked, a grin belying the harshness of his words. “Ne’er mind, I shall find Ay
e
sha myself. Since the rabbi no longer needs yon wheeled chair they brought back for him, I’ll borrow it. You take Ursi with you, go now. Prepare our way out of this accursed place—provided you’re feeling up to it—you’ll find the bloated thing moored upon the roof!”

He wrapped the greatsword
Murderer
in a blanket, laid it slantwise in the chair. Ignoring certain grumbled objections from his comp
a
nion—most to the effect that he didn’t know how to fly the airship—he slung the aut
o
matic weapon over his chest, squeezed his head into the birdlike he
l
met, poked his head into the corridor.

Observers there were aplenty along its length, none of whom paid him the slightest attention.

Taking a breath, he joined them, pushing the chair, glad he’d thought of this deception as a way to keep his greatsword, which he’d not leave b
e
hind, from giving away the game. Besides, the chair might otherwise prove to be useful. It would give him an appearance of businesslike pu
r
pose. Several turns later in the complicated building, he’d lost the way, but this lik
e
lihood had never worried him. He was looking for another uniform like the one he wore.

He found it, at long last, standing beside an elevator, waiting in imp
a
tience for a slow-moving car to make its appearance. The man had his helmet nestled in the crook of his left arm, his weapon slung across the small of his back.

With a gauntleted finger, Fireclaw tapped him upon the shoulder, crooked the same finger, turned, striding to a nearby niche along the wall where he’d left the chair. He turned, but not before he arrived at the place he’d chosen. With a look which was a mixture of annoyance and puzzl
e
ment, the man had followed.

“Mann
—who are you?
Maadaa thureet?”

Fireclaw blinked. The words had been garbled but understandable, some dialect of the Saracen tongue.

“Where’s the Sun?” he asked, mismouthing his own words in what he hoped was a similar manner. “Upon the authority of Owald the Commander. There’s been a...a situation.”

He indicated the wheeled chair, as if it explained everything. The Bod
y
guardsman drew an instrument from his belt, consulted it, pointed a finger at the floor.

“Somewhere below.”

Fireclaw nodded, flipped a thumb, gave the man a gentle shove, pushed the chair toward the elevator. The Body-guardsman sighed, no
d
ded, plo
d
ded along with the warrior.

The car descended almost as far as it had before their submarine vo
y
age to the Spire of Dreamers. When its steel doors had once more hissed aside, Fireclaw and his accidental companion marched toward another door, hal
t
ing there.

The Bodyguardsman raised a fist to knock upon it.

Fireclaw seized that fist, twisted it till the Bodyguardsman turned about, slapped him once across the forehead with the steel rim of his prosthetic.

As the man slumped into the chair Fireclaw shoved behind him, u
n
conscious, likely dying, the Helvetian forced the helmet over his head, r
e
moved the magazine from his Bodyguard-issue weapon, seized the bag of spares, rid himself of the empty magazine in his own weapon, slapped a fresh one home, and worked the operating handle.

He rolled the body aside, the bundled greatsword lying across the chair-arms, arranging things to appear that the bodyguard upon watch at the door was dozing—it occurred to him to wonder why someone was not a
l
ready guarding the door.

He arranged his own uniform and accoutrements.

Only then did he raise his own hand to knock upon the door.

It slid aside before he touched it.

Fireclaw stumbled through.

The sight which he beheld there stunned him.

He looked down upon a supine, undraped female figure, her head t
o
ward him, her feet away. The rest of the room invisible to his shocked gaze, he strode closer. Upon a narrow table in the middle of the room lay the unquestionably dead form of an olive-skinned girl, not yet twe
n
ty, her smooth arms spread a bit over the edges of the table, her hands curled as if in sleep, the palms upward in a gesture betokening surre
n
der.

A tumble of shining, raven-colored hair cascaded toward him. It lay about her shoulders as well, obscuring her face. Yet he could see that large, lash-fringed eyes, set in a soft, high-cheekboned face, were dark brown, open wide, unaware.

Fireclaw knew a moment of the blackest horror he’d ever felt.

He whispered a name.

“Ayesha...”

**

“You were upon the brink of a pit of Fire, and He delivered you from it; even so God makes clear to you his signs; so haply you will be guided.”—
The
Holy Koran,
Sura III,
The House of Imran

“And...Moses said to his people, ‘My people, you have done wrong against you
r
selves by taking the Calf.’”—
The
Koran,
Sura II

In a brocaded robe, Oln Woeck looked up at him without a word, madness mingling with ecstasy deep within his glittering eyes. Beside him, in a rattan chair like the one the old Helvetian occupied, reposed the bronzed, irresistible figure of Zhu Yuan-Coyotl, ruler of the Han-Meshika, the Sun Incarnate.

Both men had blood upon their lips, the elder of the pair wiping it from his chin as Fireclaw approached.

The Bodyguard Fireclaw had wondered about was here as well, si
t
ting upon a stool beside the door.

The slender soft-skinned torso of the helpless maiden had been with deftness opened hip to breast—perhaps with one of those razor-edged push-daggers the Sun Incarnate always carried with him—her liver r
e
moved and placed within a bed of crisp green leaves upon a golden pla
t
ter which Oln Woeck and the Sun shared between them, partaking of the warm, blood-slippery, sweet-smelling meat.

Zhu Yuan-Coyotl chuckled, brushing hair away from the dead girl’s face with blood-lacquered fingers.

“You’re mistaken, impetuous friend. All of the earth’s people serve Us in their own wise, ’tis true. This is but a little peasant-girl, of small use to Us save as you see her here, the centerpiece of an initiation rite—our m
u
tual friend here has determined, with commendable pragmatism, to tran
s
fer his religious faith to the Sun Incarnate. Your Saracen Princess will serve Us in quite another capacity.”

Something inside the paralyzed warrior spoke for him. “Where is she?”

“At this moment, We expect she’s being prepared to join the Sun in wedlock.”

He pushed back a voluminous sleeve, consulting a timepiece strapped to his wrist.

“She’s already at the place appointed.”

“And you?” demanded Fireclaw beginning to recover his wits, “Isn’t the bridegroom going to be late?”

“We shan’t attend, at least not in this fleshly aspect, for ’tis neither to the body nor to the mind of Zhu Yuan-Coyotl that the Saracen Princess will be joined, but—”

Fireclaw stepped forward, seizing the Sun Incarnate by the front of his embroidered robe, dragging him to his feet. Hideous images washed through his mind, mingled with relief that it was not Ayesha here upon the table.

The young man didn’t resist him.

“At the pyramid?”

“At the pyramid.”

A disturbance near the door behind him distracted Fireclaw’s atte
n
tion. He spun, pulling the Sun with him that the younger man’s body might interpose itself between the warrior and the Body guardsman, flung Zhu Yuan-Coyotl toward him. The Sun shouted, stumbled, a sli
p
per caught in the hem of his robe. He fell just as the Helvetian raised his weapon. The B
o
dyguardsman raised his own, slapping in desperation at the operating ha
n
dle, fumbling with the safety lever.

The room filled with the yammering of gunfire, the smoke of “smokeless powder” obscuring vision. Empty cases fountained from the weapons of both men. When it had ceased, the Bodyguardsman lay dead atop the struggling form of his ruler.

Fireclaw was untouched.

Another noise.

Fireclaw whirled toward a shadow creeping up on him, one of the chairs held clublike overhead, and lay Oln Woeck out with a single ne
g
ligent swing of his prosthetic. Before the man had fallen, he leapt fo
r
ward, pres
s
ing the muzzle of his weapon against Zhu Yuan-Coyotl’s cheek.

“Lift those knives out with both little fingers—if I see the rest of your hands uncurl, boy, I’ll kill you with some satisfaction here and now—toss them away!”

The Sun complied.

Finding something to do with Oln Woeck was not difficult. Bundled up in the blanket with
Murderer,
the unconscious former leader of the Cult of Jesus soon occupied the rabbi’s chair.

Persuading Zhu Yuan-Coyotl to come along in peace was another matter. Fireclaw settled this, giving him a job pushing the chair. He first supe
r
vised the young man as, under the warrior’s instruction, he pulled co
p
per-clad bullets from several aluminum cartridges, filled the barrel of the dead Bodyguardsman’s weapon with powder—in front of a cha
m
bered bulle
t
less round, and hammered one of the leftover bullets into the muzzle, conver
t
ing the weapon into a bomb.

Strapped across the Sun’s chest—Zhu Yuan-Coyotl was by now wearing the uniform of his own Bodyguard—with a bit of the same ravelings of brocade attached to the trigger which Fireclaw had used to tie his hands to the handles of the chair, the converted weapon assured that the young man presented little problem.

2

The Sun’s personal airship, the same great craft with painted eyes which had brought them all here, had been left moored, unattended, u
p
on the building’s roof. The bullet-pierced bodies of two mechanics now lay tucked behind a ladder where the gondola lay closest to the roof. In the co
n
trol-cabin, Mochamet al Rotshild, strain showing upon his face, was ove
r
joyed—no more than was the bear-dog, Ursi—to see the three men emerge from the elevator.

Still uncertain how they planned to steer the craft, the Saracen took charge of Fireclaw’s prisoners, at his suggestion trussing them with strips torn from their own clothing. As the Helvetian cast them off, ru
n
ning from tie-down to tie-down at the roof’s edge, slashing restraining hawsers with his greatsword, however, a familiar copper-kilted figure appeared at the elevator, gun in hand.

Ursi snarled, sniffed the air, whine-whistling in confusion. Fireclaw turned from cutting the next-to-last rope. The airship had begun to bob in the continuous gusty breeze off the bay. The figure with the weapon was his own son.

“Kill them! Kill them all!”

The voice was that of the Sun, shouting from the open doorway of the gondola. Owald Sedrichsohn, Commander of the Bodyguard, slapped back the operating handle. He let the bolt slam home upon a ca
r
tridge. He raised the sight to eye level.

Before Sedrich Fireclaw could ask himself whether he was capable of murdering his own flesh and blood, the young man shifted his wea
p
on aside, aiming it at the Sun Incarnate.

“Quiet, you dirty little man,” he ordered. “Don’t you think you might need a pilot, Father?”

Transmitted by the last taut mooring line, yet another earth-tremor jittered through the fabric of the airship. Fireclaw grinned, slashing the rope. They leapt over the angry, writhing body of Zhu Yuan-Coyotl—a di
s
gusted Mochamet al Rotshild had stuffed a rag into his mouth—and were safe aboard before the airship had begun rising.

In gratitude, the Saracen had stood back from the dial-crowded, b
e
wildering console. Perhaps he might have puzzled the thing out by hi
m
self, he told the younger of the two Helvetians—given a year or two of study. Instead, Owald seized the controls with certain hands. The e
n
gines coughed to life. The airship rose.