The Crystal Empire (38 page)

Waiting was over.

Feeling the scarlet curtain of blood-haze begin to descend about him, Fireclaw took two deep strides into the muddy bottom of the streambed. The shimmering five-foot length of
Murderer
whispered from the sca
b
bard at his back.

He spoke softly, fighting to remain conscious long enough to finish speaking.

“If yon girl yet lives, I’ll dry your nasty little pricks to hang upon her belt.”

Kabeer and Crab whirled to face him, short exclamations leaping from them at the sound of Fireclaw’s voice. The challenge, issued to draw the three away from Ayesha, was his last conscious act. Slipping at last into combat-madness, he decapitated Ali in mid-scream with a cas
u
al backhand swipe of the greatsword as the treacherous servant dropped the head-sized stone and straightened. Stone and head rolled separate ways, the latter wide-eyed, openmouthed, into the growing runnel of the creekbed. Ali’s torso toppled, splashing into the water like a broken toy.

Before Ali hit the ground, Fireclaw was battling with Crab, their e
f
forts spraying sheets of water from beneath their feet, while great black Ursi bared his fangs and lunged for Kabeer’s throat. In this the dog was aided by the sudden appearance of a wet and furious Sagheer, who scratched and bit, ripping one of the assailant’s eyes from his head.

Even had the sailor been Fireclaw’s equal, a pair of saw-toothed da
g
gers against greatsword was an uneven match. A ringing slap spun one of the shorter blades away into the rain-soaked night. Without effort, Fireclaw straightened his arm. The razor-pointed blade-tip sighed into Crab’s mi
d
section, two more feet of whispery-keen edge following on its momentum with a hiss. Wrist up, bending elbow, tucking in his shoulder, Fireclaw tore the steel through him sideways.

Crab’s remaining weapon fell from an unfeeling hand. He pitched forward.

Forgetting the sailor before he had yet fallen, Fireclaw turned.

“Down, Ursi!”

He intended saving Kabeer from the animals, were it possible, if only to discover why a man he might otherwise have respected had visited such betrayal upon a harmless girl.

“Down!”

Even within his own death-dealing frenzy, the animal knew this i
m
per
a
tive must be obeyed. Pushing the dog back by its bloodied muzzle, Fireclaw reached to pull the screeching marmoset away, bent over, seized K
a
beer by a collarbone, lifted him, one-handed, to his feet. The man’s still-unfastened trousers slopped about his ankles. He had, in te
r
ror, soiled hi
m
self. Blood trickled from his wounds, mingling with the rain.

Disminded, Kabeer could only whimper.

Fireclaw let go for a fraction of a second, backhanded Kabeer across the face to stop his blubbering, grabbed him once again before he could fall backward.

“Now, child-molester,” he shouted against the weather, “we’ll have answer from you!”

The sergeant flapped his ruined mouth and flailed both his arms. A sudden
twang
answered for him before he could speak. A shoulder-bow quarrel whistled past Fireclaw’s unprotected head from the misty sha
d
ows to snatch another rapist’s life away.

Stubby arrow planted in an empty eye-socket, Kabeer, late captain of the Caliph’s personal guard, slumped in upon himself and became one with the muddy soil around him.

Lightning ripped the sky, thunder smashed the silence.

The rain kept falling.

2

Wet wind returned Fireclaw to himself within an unprecedented breath or two. The warrior found himself staring round at a scene such as he’d not witnessed since those first blood-drenched boyhood years upon the forbi
d
den plains. Five bodies—those of Traveling Short Bear, Ali, Crab, Kabeer, and little Ayesha—lay about him upon the gravel, covering the mud-streamed floor of the little creek-bend.

He whistled: “Ursi! Come!”

Fireclaw went first to Traveling Short Bear, knowing within an i
n
stant’s touch that the Saracen party now faced a disaster they might well never overcome. The war chief of the Utes was as dead as was possible, his head like the hollowed back of a dance-mask. With him died any hopes they owned of passing in peace through the territory of his tribe.

He rose, muscles trembling with the cold and with the drain which blood-haze always put upon him. Little point wasting time upon Crab or Ali. Had e
i
ther yet lived, he’d have left him to die. Likewise, Kabeer would ne’er stir again.

The arrow Fireclaw recovered from the sergeant was of Saracen make, with feathered vanes about its nether end, not that this told him anything. There were three or four shoulder-bows about the camp, some Saracen, one Helvetian, handy to anyone who picked one up. He had seen Crab use one, and likewise Shrimp. A tool can be used for many purposes, he thought, but ’tis the intentions of the user which do the murdering.

The moment he removed her gag and the garotte, Ayesha vomited, voiding herself onto the rain-washed gravel in a much less fatal wise than her attackers had. She went on with it until naught was left to give up, and she was doubled with cramps, close to asphyxiated with the e
f
fort.

She uttered not a solitary word.

Fireclaw wrapped his cloak about her, comforted her as best he could. He’d never doubted she was still alive, having been forced by grim ci
r
cumstance to watch what the others had done with her. At the same time, d
e
spite himself, he was somewhat suspicious. It had been surpassing stupid of the girl to wander off like this. Perhaps her car
e
lessness had been deliberate, inviting the attack that she might be “spoiled,” and thus unable to wed her unknown husband-to-be.

He’d known others—himself, name one—who’d performed despe
r
ate, self-destructive acts to rival this.

As for the men, Fireclaw was somehow certain, without knowing whence that certainty arose—that there was more to this, beyond the si
m
ple, ugly act he’d witnessed. Groping for an answer, he first asked himself whether it had been the Princess they’d intended assaulting. ’Twould be natural to assume, in that cloak, and in the rainy darkness, that the odd-assorted trio had mistaken Ayesha for her maidservant—save that she was dead. Or for Mochamet’s “attendant,” Lishabha—but everyone knew what a fighter that one was. To add to the mystery, each of the attackers carried a large cache of unembossed silver disks—like coins, but without mar
k
ings—which he could have earned in no honest pursuit.

From long habit and longer prejudice, the Helvetian warrior found himself wondering what part Oln Woeck might have had in this, then dismissed the speculation, not as unworthy, but as unreasoned and unpr
o
ductive.

Feeling emotions toward Ayesha he hoped were fatherly, Fireclaw began to suspect she’d wanted, abandoned by her father, simply to die. To be certain, she’d not put up a fraction of the fight she had earlier, from the deck of the Saracens’ land-ship.

He gave equal consideration to the matter of her “gift” of second sight—he’d spoken with Mochamet of this ere leaving the ranch—of what the affli
c
tion had done to her. He knew the Saracens admitted of a peasant superst
i
tion—such as there’d been where he’d grown up, belied by the proficiency of those like his own mother—that such powers remained only with untaken women
.

Perhaps Ayesha had reasoned at some level she could rid herself of this burdensome curse, at the same time of a marriage she rejected, pe
r
haps even of a life she no longer wanted to live.

Fireclaw suspected she was to be disappointed upon all three counts. Ay
e
sha still lived, thanks to Fireclaw, to play out whatever hand fortune had in mind for her. To the reckoning of some, this might make Fireclaw a hero for a time.

She herself would never thank him for it.

Still conscious of the existence of some anonymous someone out there beyond his range of vision, who’d slain the third rapist—who could as eas
i
ly slay him and the girl—Fireclaw lifted her in his arms, carried her back toward the encampment. Partway there, they encou
n
tered Knife Thrower, stalking the perimeter. The Comanche war chief carried neither longbow nor shoulder-bow with him.

Knife Thrower made no conversation, his one swift glance taking in ev
e
rything he might have asked his Helvetian brother about: the bloodied girl, the bloodier sword. Ever watchful, he knew who was missing from the camp. He raised an inquiring eyebrow. Fireclaw tossed his head a fraction of an inch, back toward the gravel-wash, and Knife Thrower nodded unde
r
standing.

Together, they took the Princess back to warmth and safety.

Ursi followed, Sagheer not far behind.

“And they have made the angels, who are themselves servants of the
All-merciful, females.”—The
Koran,
Sura XLIII

The rain had died off to a heavy, falling mist.

Fireclaw sat cross-legged beneath his stick-supported cloak, before a bed of glowing coals protected from the weather by a slant of short-cut logs. Locked into the socket which replaced his missing hand, he held a tool which looked to Lishabha, from where she half-reclined a dozen yards away, like a complicated pair of black enameled pliers. In his lap and sca
t
tered otherwise about him, he held supplies and other tools.

The man had been at it an hour, inserting spent revolver cartridges, one by one, into the small cylindrical attachment extending at right a
n
gles from the stationary leg of the pliers, squeezing the other leg with his good hand, opening the tool to let the reshaped casing, its dented primer ejected by a pin, pop out onto a blanket spread beside his knee. Threa
d
ing a new fi
x
ture into the pliers, he had then replaced the primers with fresh ones, filled each casing with propellant, employing a tiny dipper across whose opening he struck off surplus powder with a small brass rod.

Now he sat assembling the projectiles his pistol used, each small metal arrow laid within its expendable resin “shoes,” slipping each r
e
sulting c
y
linder into the mouth of a casing. These he had laid out in flat wooden blocks, each with holes drilled halfway through its thickness in rows of ten by five.

Lishabha was impressed. Fireclaw’s cartridge manufactory took up less space than the utensils she carried for eating, a pair of metal bowls, and matching cup.

When a hundred pistol shells were thus complete, Fireclaw changed the die once more, pressing each projectile to its proper depth, crimping the brass cartridge mouth into the surface of the shoe. He wiped each casing clean of the touch of lubricant he had employed to work them, then a
s
sembled them to circular clips which enabled him, one-handed, to recharge all the chambers of his pistol with one smooth motion.

The process was interesting; watching it had occupied the rain-gloomy hours. But it was an omen that meant he expected trouble. Lishabha had concerns of her own—not unrelated to the preparations Fireclaw was ma
k
ing. Beside her, sweat-drenched head and shoulders in her lap, lay the Pri
n
cess Ayesha, whom Fireclaw and his brother-in-arms had brought back to the camp. Knife Thrower was out prowling the p
e
rimeter now, having ta
k
en Mochamet and young Hraytis with him.

Before they had gone, they and Fireclaw had transformed this sto
p
ping-place into a real encampment.

Fireclaw’s great blade, cleansed of human leavings, had easily hewn a couple of small trees into stripped branches and broad, dense boughs. These the men had assembled into a half-tent under which they had placed the exhausted, bloody young woman they had rescued. Lishabha had boiled water in her kit and, when the men had gone—all save Fir
e
claw, who appeared to take no notice in any case, and the holy man, Oln Woeck, who seemed intent upon some meditations of his own—sponged the girl as best she could with a scrap of cloth about whose origins she did not i
n
quire.

It had not been a pretty sight nor a pleasant task, although Ayesha would not be long healing. Physically, she should be as ready to march t
o
morrow as any other of the party—save those,
thapnan
, upon whom Fireclaw’s sword had taken vengeance. Yet the Princess’ mind, her wil
l
ingness to continue life, let alone the journey, was another matter.