The Crystal Empire (6 page)

Soon, however, there was no misinterpreting it, a deep rumbling, more felt than heard, and more by the feet than by the ears, pulsing through the earth in an unhuman rhythm. Even across the sleeping vi
l
lage, through the forest at its margin, greasy smoke and wind-fanned flames were visible half a mile away, sparks wafting into the now-moonless sky like condemned souls fleeing corrupted bodies.

The apparition drummed nearer, a colossal fire-exhaling serpent winding toward them, relentless, unstoppable.

Next came real noise: hissing, shuffling, groaning, all in a cadence timed to the clash of metal against naked metal, multiplied ten tho
u
sandfold until a river of moving steel racketed by their door.

The flames grew brighter, the very windows rattling as if with the passage of some infernal forbidden engine.

“We believe— (Clash! Clash!)

We believe— (Clash! Clash!)

We believe in the Father,

Maker of heaven and earth,

Who hath turned His face away. (Clash!)

We believe— (Clash! Clash!)

In Jesus Christ, His only son,

Born of the Virgin Mary,

Crucified, dead, and buried....

He descended into Hell. (Clash!)

There shall he suffer

Till he be redeeméd,

And sitteth on the right hand

Of God the Father Almighty,

Whence shall he come— (Clash!)

To judge the quick and the dead! (Clash!)”

Yet, if it were an engine of some kind, it fueled itself on human blood, flagellants, marching in their hundreds from house to house, sometimes from village to village, as ever they had since the legend-misted centuries of the Old World.

Together, the family and their visitor crowded into the open doo
r
way.

Blood was all Sedrich noticed at first, glistening black in the torc
h
light, sprayed upon the face and forehead, down the arms, breast, and thighs of each marching flagellant. Each splashed the man behind him with his steel-linked whip as it cut his flesh. Even the man in front was covered with it, as, at regular intervals, he’d migrate to the rear of the column, leaving someone else to lead it.

To one side of the gore-stained horde Oln Woeck strode, unsullied by any blood save his own, the thumb-sized markings upon his temples blac
k
ly visible in the torchlight.

As if one being, the Brothers halted at his shouted command in the road between the houses of Owaldsohn and of his neighbor, Harold Bauersohn, the fletcher.

Silence crashed down about them.

Oln Woeck separated himself from the others, advancing to Baue
r
sohn’s threshold. The arrow-maker, a fellow veteran, with Sedrich’s f
a
ther, in the wars with the Red Men, came not to the door. It was opened to the leader of the Brotherhood by Helga Haroldsfrau, the man’s wife.

Even at this distance across the road, Sedrich could make out the whine and buzz of Oln Woeck’s voice.

It spoke.

It paused.

It spoke again.

At each utterance, the nightclothed woman in the torch-lighted doo
r
way bobbed her head.

Sedrich seized Ilse’s sleeve.

“She’s informing, Mother! Upon her own husband!”

“Hush, son,” Ilse replied, a grim expression making her face look like a stranger’s.

She stroked Willi’s head to calm him as well.

“’Tis the custom of our people.”

The talking continued. Whine-buzz, the unheard murmur of Helga’s answers.

Another whine-buzz.

Toward the end, she gave a loud sob.

As if this were a signal, half a dozen of the flagellants broke from the column, rushing past into the house. There was a shout, the unexpected sound of muffled thunder. One of the robed figures reeled backward, howling like a kicked dog, carrying his mates with him, the bent shaft of a shoulder-bow quarrel hanging where the fleshy part of his upper arm had been. Now there was naught save charred bone and sinew, smolde
r
ing. He was replaced by half a dozen more.

The augmented force charged back into the house.

Silence.

Amidst a flurry of shouted curses, Harold was dragged out by the Brothers, flung into the dirt at the feet of Oln Woeck. The fletcher tried to push himself upward, into a sitting position. It was all the man could ma
n
age. He had been crippled, captured by the Red Men and tortured, long before young Sedrich had been born. He’d spent his days since si
t
ting in the cross-legged pose his wife put him in each morning, fashio
n
ing a
r
rows with a small, flywheel-operated lathe.

He turned the best quarrels, bolts, and arrows in the canton.

Oln Woeck kicked the man’s hand from under him. The fletcher fell forward upon his face. Some decision having been come to, Harold’s wife screamed,
“No!”

From the house one of the Brothers brought an ax. Another seized Harold’s right wrist, twisted a bit of cord about it, stretched it out before him, while a third kept a bare, bloodied foot in the middle of the victim’s back.

In their own doorway, Willi and Klem growled.

Sedrich Owaldsohn took a step forward, the iron tendons of his wrists flexing along the handle of the greatsword.

Ilse placed a gentle hand upon his naked bicep.

“No, Husband, we can’t interfere.”

Oln Woeck himself swung the ax.

The cord flew free, carrying some terrible cargo. One of the Brothers put the torch to Harold’s mutilated arm.

The fletcher uttered not a sound. His wife continued sobbing.

Casting the ax aside, the Cult leader strode, without a backward look, across the road to the threshold of Sedrich Owaldsohn. The boy could smell him, ancient body odor mixed with the fresher iron tang of blood, where he stood, Fiery Cross imprinted upon the right side of his naked skull, flame-enveloped Sacred Heart upon the left.

Without preamble, at the top of his lungs, he gloated, “Harry Baue
r
sohn hath paid the price for dabbling where the blessed daren’t. Be there one among thy number who hath grinded good charcoal fine as flour?”

Parcifal shrank back into the shadows of the room.

Owaldsohn strode forward, flanked by his great bearlike dogs,
Mu
r
derer
still in his hand, as much to bar the way as greet a visitor. This nightmarish parade was no routine occurrence—although they’d been known to ha
p
pen in the past—but was intended for his benefit.

Lips compressed with rage, red color showing in his face, Owaldsohn answered, “No.”

His wife stood by him, crook-bent staff in hand, no implication in her manner, or the way she held the copper shaft, that its Mistress was a shepherdess of any kind.

Oln Woeck spoke again. “Be there one among thy number who hath pitchforked beneath dungheaps for the evil crystals to be found there?”

Owaldsohn lifted an elbow, exposing a hand’s width of razor steel at the scabbard throat.

“A petty way to even up the morning’s confrontation, Oln Woeck. And dangerous—”

Ilse placed a hand again on Owaldsohn’s huge-muscled arm.

“Hush, Husband, mind the ritual.”

“Answer,
blacksmith
Sedrich, son of Owald! Be there
any
one among thy number who hath pitchforked beneath dung-heaps for the evil cry
s
tals to be found there?”

“No, Goddess blind you!”

Oln Woeck ignored the epithet.

“Be there one among thy number who hath delved in the earth in search of brimstone ore?”

“No!”

“Be there one among thy number who hath mixed the three together, leavening with water?”

“No!”

“Be there one among thy number who hath dried the black cakes, breaking them asunder and, so doing, sifting them?”

“No! Go away, you scabrous creature! We’re no practitioners of your cursed Cult, attempting to take the weight of what you imagine to be the world’s sin upon your own self-lacerated shoulders! We don’t belong—”

The spatter-visaged baldpate sneered.

“Have a care for public utterances of heresy, blacksmith! No one ‘b
e
longs,’ yet everybody doth—to his neighbors and fellowmen who must be protected from the likes of thy vile little—”

Klem gave a mind-curdling snarl.

Steel rang as it leapt from brass-lined leather. Owaldsohn hurled the wolfhide scabbard aside.

“Have a care yourself, loosemouth! Are you saying because my son has found a better way to row a boat, he’s the sort to play at compoun
d
ing the forbidden substance?”

“On the contrary, Owaldsohn, ’tis just the other way round!”

Forgetting the sword in his right hand, Owaldsohn lunged forward, wrapping a black and mighty left about the Cult leader’s throat, lifting him from the ground. As a pair of Brothers stepped out of the column to assist their leader, they were met at the front margin of the yard by a pair of sla
v
ering, curly-pelted guards who brought them to a halt.

Oln Woeck’s eyes bulged, but there was no terror to be found in them, only derisive laughter which, shut off, could not escape his lips.

Ilse pounded her husband’s back with the copper staff before he flung the robed man away.

Oln Woeck staggered back but didn’t fall.

He coughed long and rackingly.

For his part, Sedrich had listened carefully to the ritual questions. His mother had been wrong, he thought, very wrong to hold his father back. If only someone would stand up to these crazy-men—and great Owal
d
sohn was just the man to do it—life would be different. Better.

It was the first time it had occurred to Sedrich that his mother could be wrong about anything. He didn’t much welcome the revelation, nor what it told him of the Sisterhood she was sworn to.

Still, she had been right, after all, about reading and writing.

Charcoal...easy enough, “ground fine as flour,” the man had said. And dungheap crystals—mother called it nitre, keeping a supply for healing purposes, along with what Oln Woeck in his ignorance had r
e
ferred to as brimstone ore.

He wondered about the proportions. He knew he could expect no help from his mother or from anybody else. They were all too frightened of Oln Woeck and of the Brotherhood of the Cult of Jesus in Hell. He could only depend upon himself. As soon as these meddlesome old men had gone along their way, he’d take advantage of what they’d uninte
n
tionally given away. Perhaps he’d borrow a little from the fear which froze everyone about him into inaction, transforming it into appropriate precautions. Most of all, he’d take advantage of what his mother had insisted he learn.

Exploding shoulder-bow quarrels—what an idea!

Some hiding places—that’s what he’d need for the experimental m
a
terials he would assemble, for the notes and drawings which must pr
e
cede them. He’d hurry upstairs to his loft and write down the ingredients the Brotherhood had so thoughtfully listed for him!

“No man can change the words of God...and if their turning away is
distressful for thee...so be not thou one of the ignorant. Answer only will those who hear....”—
The Koran
, Sura VI

"C
ommon wisdom”—Sedrich lowered his preadolescent voice to a ti
m
bre he imagined sagelike—“when it speaks upon such matters, has it they were sorcerers who drove the real human beings out of El
d
world long ago.”

Dust coiled itself in hair-thin sheets in the narrow rays of afternoon su
n
light pouring through the rafter-gaps at the front of the shed. Sedrich, for the moment, had been left alone with his dangerous dreams. Owaldsohn had d
e
parted with the dawn, leading a two-dog cart laden with fresh-finished shou
l
der-bow prods for a neighboring village.

Nine-year-old Frae Hethristochter sneezed, blinking tears, and took a step backward, out of Sedrich’s dust cloud. The little girl shaded her blue eyes, a faint chill nuzzling the back of her neck as she looked toward the ocean, ima
g
ining the squat vessels of evil magicians lurking just beyond her safe, familiar horizons.

At last she turned toward her grime-covered friend with something r
e
sembling benediction. “What manner of people are they, Sedrich, d’you think?”