The Crystal Empire

  Rather a lot of couples, he knew—and knew he wasn’t supposed to know—had conceived, married, and suffered disappointment which the village women gossiped of afterward, but which Sedrich couldn’t quite fathom. What was a “stillbirth”?

  One or two households had grown children yet unmarried.

  One or two there were whose children had found mates.

  He knew of various widows and widowers—of these, Old Roger the resiner was crossing customary barriers by teaching Sedrich something of his arcane craft.

  He reminded himself also of the arrangements made for Sisters—likewise, he supposed, for Cult Brothers—who, despairing at last of finding someone to love, or of making a child, had given themselves to their beliefs. They were many, living in open compounds, one at the west end of the village, another at the south, rows of simple cabins centered about common structures of gathering and meditation. Each cabin door faced outward, for the sake of privacy, from the center of the compound.

  No one, Sedrich realized with sudden insight, ever gave up entirely.

  His own mother had been one such before the surprise of Sedrich’s quickening.

  Thus the population of the world which Sedrich knew lay somewhere between an uncounted four hundred and five hundred. When the proper time arrived—oh, but that was a long way off yet!—did he show interest in some one someone (for well he understood his parents, never expecting at their hands an arrangement against his own inclinations), this “someone” would be invited for visits, at first family dinners, then the bathing ritual which preceded the meal (he blushed again to contemplate his father’s threat regarding Frae), and then at last, did all proceed aright, for the entire night.

  The colloquial expression, Sedrich squirmed to recall, was “bundling,” every precaution taken to assure that the young couple was left unattended, undiverted save by one another’s presence. The tasteless hazing would come later, when a young man led his pregnant bride before a Sister who would sanctify what already existed.

  The whole idea filled him with foreboding—with the oddest feelings, like a deep-down itch, somehow pleasant, somehow demanding, somehow mysterious.

  It made sleep difficult.

  Yet not impossible...

  2

  He awoke a while later to a rattle-pounding which shook the house.

  “Sedrich! Sedrich! Wake up! Wake up!”

  At their posts beside the door downstairs, Willi and Klem began barking.

  The cries were for his father.

  He recognized the voice.

  Wrapping a blanket about him, Sedrich seized his dagger—this being no mere wooden model—where it lay beside his pallet, and placed a foot upon the folding ladder. The steps swung beneath his weight, coming to rest in the hallway below.

  Already his mother and father were descending the short fixed flight to the ground floor.

  Tossing aside the small pillow-sword he’d carried from their bedroom, Owaldsohn took his great blade Murderer from the wall. As he quieted the animals, his free hand reached to give his wife the shoulder-bow.

  “Yes, yes,” he shouted at the ironbound door, more from annoyance than lack of recognition. “Who is it?”

  “Your neighbor!” came a muffled voice. “Let me in! I bear ill tidings!”

  “’Twas e’er true,” the blacksmith muttered.

  He let his hand drop to the latch, which he unfastened.

  “What cause have you to rouse us up this late, Hethri Parcifal?”

  The oaken door swung to reveal a night-robed figure somewhere between the two Sedrichs in years, tall, and—thought the younger—odd-shaped. From stooped, narrow shoulders Parcifal tapered under purple draping to wide-set hips and plump behind. With the old green scarf about his neck, he resembled an eggplant, although he lacked, as yet, a belly to match the hips. The green-wrapped neck was skinny, the narrow head balding.

  Parcifal blinked as he stepped inside. The candle-lantern Ilse carried dazzled him.

  “Speak of rousing,” he began, “whate’er have you done to rouse the Brotherhood?”

  Listening, Ilse carried candle to hearth and began laying a fire. She fetched a kettle, hanging it on a hook as flames crackled up to reach its blackened bottom.

  Owaldsohn answered, “Whene’er did those blotchheads want something to rouse them, Hethri?”

  He tossed a glance at his son, whose hands still gripped the dagger, then looked back to Parcifal.

  “Tell me what they’re doing, and I’ll tell you, if I can, what we have done.”

  As if from exhaustion, Parcifal sat upon a chair Ilse kept by the door. He ran a hand across his forehead and looked up at the blacksmith.

  “Oln Woeck,” he groaned, glancing in apology at Sedrich, “has been sowing hints about the character of your son.”

  Owaldsohn shook his shaggy head. “Also, no doubt, about those who are bringing him up.”

  He found a chair of his own, placing the scabbarded Murderer between his knees as if it were a cane. The strap crossed his hairy thigh, trailing to the floor.

  Both dogs arose, settling themselves again at his feet.

  “But ’tis naught new. Why the midnight visit, Hethri?”

  The man opened his mouth to speak. He was interrupted by a low rolling growl from Klem. Willi shambled to the door, where he began pacing uneasily back and forth.

  Parcifal stopped, cocking an ear toward the door.

  “Too late!” he whispered, eyes focused somewhere other than the room he sat in. “It has begun!”

  It could indeed be heard before it could be seen. No night-bird sang, no insect chirped in the dew-wet grass. The still air carried a dull thrumming which might at first have been mistaken for no more than the rush of blood through straining ears.

  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 village, 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 thousandfold 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 doorway.

  Blood was all Sedrich noticed at first, glistening black in the torchlight, 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 blackly 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 Bauersohn’s threshold. The arrow-maker, a fellow veteran, with Sedrich’s father, 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 doorway 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, smoldering. 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 manage. He had been crippled, captured by the Red Men and tortured, long before young Sedrich had been born. He’d spent his days since sitting in the cross-legged pose his wife put him in each morning, fashioning arrows 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 Bauersohn 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, Murderer 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 happen 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 crystals 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 ‘belongs,’ 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 compounding 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 slavering, 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 Owaldsohn 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 referred 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 unintentionally 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 materials he would assemble, for the notes and drawings which must precede them. He’d hurry upstairs to his loft and write down the ingredients the Brotherhood had so thoughtfully listed for him!

  IV: Frae Hethristochter

  “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

  "Common wisdom”—Sedrich lowered his preadolescent voice to a timbre he imagined sagelike—“when it speaks upon such matters, has it they were sorcerers who drove the real human beings out of Eldworld long ago.”

  Dust coiled itself in hair-thin sheets in the narrow rays of afternoon sunlight 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 departed with the dawn, leading a two-dog cart laden with fresh-finished shoulder-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, imagining the squat vessels of evil magicians lurking just beyond her safe, familiar horizons.

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

  Sedrich set the bonded glass container, huge as a pumpkin, down on the bench. He stepped round the piled-up parts of what someday might become a spare dogcart. Somehow, they set a nagging tingle loose inside his mind. He’d thought of trying to apply his boat-crank to the thing—the reason for its having been reduced to constituent components—but the effort he foresaw, of propelling the resulting contrivance, was matched solely by the mechanical difficulty of fitting a high-mounted crank-shaft to a low-mounted axle.