The Crystal Empire (63 page)

He pitched headlong over the lip, a desperate hand outthrust for the next step. He felt his father’s one good hand close hard upon his ankle. A long, terrible moment passed as the blood in which they all were bathed let the ankle slide, finger’s width by finger’s width, through Fir
e
claw’s bone-crushing grasp.

Owald dropped—

—and flattened both palms against the tread of the next step. He squirmed, twisted, pulled himself back to the comparative safety of the p
y
ramid-top.

“Die! Die! Die! Die! Die!”

Close beside Fireclaw’s shaven head there flashed a shower of o
r
ange sparks. A lone surviving priest swung what had once been a dec
o
rative s
a
crificial axe. His warrior’s sword, cast away that he might seize instead an ankle, was just beyond reach. Still watching his son’s reco
v
ery, pinned b
e
neath the semiconscious Princess Ayesha, the Helvetian warrior was slow to react.

Too slow.

Helpless, he watched the blade descend once more.

It whistled as it fell toward his face.

The earth gave a jolting shudder.

Of a sudden, Mochamet al Rotshild stepped into the way, taking the axe-bit through his unprotected skull, but gutting the priest who wielded it in the same instant with a thrust of
Murderer
’s great blade through the cre
a
ture’s abdomen.

The Mughal spy had made atonement.

Murderer
fell.

The axe wrenched free with the verminous priest’s dying convulsions and skidded, spinning butt about blade-bit, until it stopped at the fallen mirror’s edge.

3

Reclaiming
Murderer,
Fireclaw carried Ayesha to the airship.

Signaling Owald with a wave of his sword to take the controls, in one mighty fist Fireclaw seized the bonds restraining Oln Woeck and the Sun Incarnate, Zhu Yuan-Coyotl.

He’d sheathed his sword. Now he was assuring himself of something he carried in his shirtfront.

“Here, I’ve a job for the pair of you!”

He dragged them in an awkward dance toward the mirror, now lying face down over the still-warm, deadly eye of the crystal pyramid. In a blur of motion, he seized their wrists, tearing their bonds free with the doing of it, slammed them down across each other upon the metal bac
k
ing of the mirror’s edge. In a movement too fast for either of his victims to anticipate, he drew Dove Blossom’s little hollow-handled dagger from his b
o
som, thrust it through the living flesh of their wrists, into the backing-plate, nai
l
ing them both down.

Ignoring yet another fit of shaking from the earth below, he stepped back to admire his handiwork. His bear-dog had leapt from the airship and was beside him.

“Tell your Lord Jesus, Oln Woeck, you died that you might share his suffering right beside him—in Hell!”

Whirling upon his moccasined heel, he ran for the airship.

Ursi followed in his wake.

‘Wait, Sedrich, I beg you!”
cried Oln Woeck.

The old man whined. He’d ne’er intended harm to anyone, to injure Sedrich Owaldsohn or Ilse, Frae helpless in her pregnancy, or Owald. He hadn’t meant to slay Fireclaw’s wife....

The Sun Incarnate Zhu Yuan-Coyotl spat in his face.

Without further word, the young man set his teeth, stretching for the sacrificial axe which had killed Mochamet al Rotshild. He took a breath, raised the weapon, swung it down left-handed with all his might upon the arm pinned by the dagger.

The blade bit deep into the mirror-backing.

Oln Woeck watched, gibbering in horror, his eyes grown wide with shock. A gout of warm blood spurted over both of them in pulses, coo
l
ing in the salty breeze.

Five sharp tremors rattled the pyramid-top in rapid succession. Across the bay, the facade of a building slipped to the ground with a dusty roar. Staring at the twice-blooded axe, Oln Woeck renewed his wailing, afraid to die, yet afraid in equal measure to follow the Sun’s desperate example.

Zhu Yuan-Coyotl ignored him. Holding on to consciousness by sheer will, he laid the axe aside, using a strip of cloth he’d been bound with to tie off the stump.

Running to the edge of the pyramid, he glanced down its polished, glassy side, its two and a half thousand steps looking to him like the teeth of a hungry predator. He ran back a few paces, judged the wind, which was a strong, buffeting one off the bay. Gathering as much m
o
mentum as he could, he
leapt
!

Blocked as his vision was by the crystalline monument’s vast se
r
rate-sided slanting bulk, Fireclaw, watching from a window of the slow-rising airship, never saw the end of the Sun’s leap, nor whether it ended in a watery splash far below or, as was much more likely, in his re
d
dened, pulpy ruination. In either event the evil young man had met a fate far kinder than the one he’d intended for Ayesha, and had inflicted upon thousands more.

The water had been full of sharks, attracted by a cataract of blood from high above them.

Engines bellowing with the effort Owald demanded of them, the ai
r
ship soared away, just as the next pulse of power from within the crystal pyramid gathered itself. There was a mighty roar like unto lightning. Int
o
lerable light and heat sizzled out round the edges of the occulting mirror which nonetheless reflected most of the structure’s deadly ene
r
gies back into the pyramid.

Something within its substance groaned.

As Fireclaw and his companions watched, the smoking mirror seemed to hold a fraction of a second as its remaining captive screamed, roasting between knees and waist. The clothing about his middle burst into flame, showering spark-punctuated flames backward and away from him, across the heavy-lidded pyramid-top.

Oln Woeck’s screams were a siren of anguish. His free arm flailed, he retched and vomited. His upper body flopped like a landed, suffoca
t
ing fish. Something in his maimed hand gave way. It tore loose from the dull-glowing mirror-edge.

Legs useless, he fell upon his face, still writhing—

The bay-floor deep beneath the island seemed to give a convulsive leap, jolting the rocky outcrop and the mile-long transparent monument upon it. A titanic ring-shaped wave surged outward from the island, curling o’er at the top, sweeping away the thousands of boats, large and small, which had clustered about the island, passing by as if without n
o
tice, showering behind itself a forest of shattered planks and timbers u
p
on the tortured su
r
face of the water.

The ring-wave swept outward, its muddy, debris-toothed crest frot
h
ing, growing higher with each moment.

As it reached the Palace of the Sun and the nearby sheltering peni
n
sula, the wave scooped the earth up like a gigantic shovel, turning it back upon itself, smashing, burying, drowning the millions of watchers upon the banks who’d gathered for the sacrifice.

Like a chorus of every soul condemned to Hell since the Beginning, their screaming could be heard, e’en above the catastrophe which had pr
o
voked it.

The earth gave another heave below the pyramid.

Another, great killer-wave was in this moment born to follow close upon its predecessor’s wake. ’Twould find fewer victims to claim, Fir
e
claw thought, when it reached what had been the shore. Atop the mo
n
ument, no longer resembling a mountain of ice but a living, incande
s
cent coal from deep within the celestial conflagration it was dedicated to, the great capping mirror itself glowed hot, still turning the furious energies from below back into their source.

The mighty pyramid began to shudder, not from the tremors but in a rhythm with them nonetheless, adding power to their frequency and f
u
ry. The structure groaned. Yawning gaps began appearing ’tween the great crystalline blocks.

At the heaving, buckling summit, a tiny fire—greasy smoke rose from it and was whisked away—marked the place where Oln Woeck had fallen. It consumed itself and went out.

The earth gave one more monumental, agonized shudder—

The pyramid exploded!

“Never a city We destroyed, but it had warners for a reminder.”
—
The
Koran,
Sura XXV!

The whole world tilting about it, the stolen airship whirled, slapped aside, its wire-struts snapping, lashing free, its overburdened structure groaning with the stresses, as its occupants clung, desperate, to aught wit
h
in reach.

The isle of the Eye-of-God was now enveloped in a murky, fierce-glowing scarlet-centered cloud which boiled and twisted upward past the battered airship in a dense, ropy column, only to flatten into an evil-looking mushroom-cap as it met the cooler upper air.

Thunder bellowed in its heart.

Below, inside the already deep-riven earth, something gave way with a hideous noise which seemed to all about the ship like the screeching of a dying god. As if in sympathy, the surface of the great bay, extending now from horizon to horizon, churned itself in that instant into an angry, mu
d
dy foam.

Lightning flashed upon the faraway peaks.

A mighty rumbling came to them, greater than any they’d heard before, more felt than heard, like unto the end of all things, godlike and mortal alike. As Fireclaw and his shaken companions watched in horror, full half the Han-Meshika capital city, already smashed by three titanic waves, shuddered. It leapt northward in a single, terrible bound, the sudden shifting of the earth they stood upon flattening every edifice still standing for a hu
n
dred square leagues.

The wave-wrecked ruins of the Palace of the Sun swirled about the
m
selves and disappeared, along with the island they’d occupied, swallowed by the ra
g
ing inland sea. Not e’en an identifying eddy in the water marked its passing.

Likewise, nothing could be seen of any land which had once surrounded the great bay and which was now, at least until the waves subsided, part of its catastrophe-racked floor.

Aroused from her drugged stupor, Ayesha cried out.

Fireclaw followed her stunned gaze.

To the westward, the Spire of Dreamers began to change shape in some monstrous, subtle wise. Left erect by the still-quaking earth, nevertheless its great height seemed somehow reduced, its tapering sides swollen outward. Fireclaw watched great jagged cracks race one another from its base in churning wreckage and corpse-littered mud-froth, up the building’s exter
i
or, spli
t
ting, branching like the tangled corridors within, crazing the entire surface.

The mile-tall Spire began to settle into its own length, the smoke of powdered stone erupting in gray billows at its base, till nothing more r
e
mained than a pile of dust-obscured rubble a few man-heights tall upon the wave-battered barren rock.

A dull flicker of light followed, a muffled explosion which was a feeble anticlimax after the destruction of the Eye-of-God. The Spire of Dreamers v
a
nished altogether, leaving naught but the naked stony island it had stood upon.

Already, about its fringes—the only shoreline now in sight—were heaped in man-height piles the remains of billions of dead fish, mingled with those who’d once fished for them.

Perhaps someday, the warrior thought in weary cynicism, ’twould once again be made a prison-island. Meantime, six million living dead had found their rest.

Owald shouted something, mopping at blood streaming from a shallow cut upon his forehead with one sleeve of his soiled, tattered under-armor. Wind sang round them once again, but this time ’twas more than just the shrill pa
s
sage of the air past window-frames and wire braces. Alarm bells and klaxons began sounding.

The airship, its broad, fabric-covered outer surfaces slashed and tattered, had been penetrated in a thousand places by the crystalline shards of the p
y
ramid.

It began to fall.

Trying to declare the emergency to anyone who’d failed to appreciate it, Owald turned to catch his father with a beautiful Saracen girl, many years his junior, in his arms.

He seemed to be enjoying it.

As did she.

Owald cleared his throat, a gesture wasted in the noise racketing about them.