The Glass Word (13 page)

“The sphinxes must have been here,” said Merle.

“Do you really think so?”

“Just look around. The Iron Eye is a replica. Mirrors everywhere, reflecting themselves. Over and over, reflecting oneself to oneself. The Iron Eye is a copy of this, a reflection of the mirror world, as it were. Only much clearer, much …
more rational.
Here everything appears to be so random. If I go to the right, am I really going to the right? And is left actually left? Where's up and down and front and back?” She was going to stop at what she thought was a dead end in front of her, but Junipa pulled her on, and they passed the place without encountering any resistance. To Junipa, the path appeared to be obvious, as if her mirror eyes had picked out a pathway. To Merle it was a miracle.

She regarded her friend from the side, letting her eyes slide over the girl's delicate profile, the sweep of her milky-white skin. She stopped at the mirror shards in her eyes.

“What do you see?” she asked. “I mean,
here …
how do you know the right way?”

Junipa smiled. “I just see it. I don't know how to explain it. It's as if I'd already been here before. When you go through Venice, you know the way too, without having to look for particular spots, for signposts or things like that. You simply go and eventually you get there. By yourself. It's the same thing for me here.”

“But you were never here before.”

“No, I wasn't. But maybe my eyes were.”

She was silent for a while until Merle took up the conversation again. “Are you angry at Arcimboldo?”

“Angry?” Junipa laughed brightly, and it sounded sincere. “How could I be angry at him? I was blind and he gave me sight.”

“But he did it on Lord Light's orders.”

“Yes and no. Lord Light, Burbridge … he ordered Arcimboldo to take us out of the orphanages. And the business with the eyes was also his idea. But that isn't the only reason Arcimboldo did it. He wanted to help me. The two of us.”

“Without him we wouldn't be here.”

“Without him the Flowing Queen would be a prisoner of the Egyptians or dead. Just like us and the rest of Venice. Have you ever considered it from that angle?”

Merle was of the opinion that she had regarded it from every possible angle. Naturally they were only free because Arcimboldo had taken them to be his apprentices. But what was this freedom worth? Basically they were prisoners like all the others—worse, even, they were prisoners of a fate that left them no choice except the way they had taken. It would have been so comfortable to stop, lean back, and say to themselves that someone else would settle the whole thing. But that wasn't the way things were. The responsibility was theirs alone.

She wondered if Arcimboldo had possibly foreseen
this. And if that was why he'd engaged in the trading with Lord Light.

“We'll be there soon,” said Junipa.

“So fast?”

“You can't measure the paths here with our measures. Each of them is a shortcut in its own way. That's the point of the mirror world: to get quickly from one place to another.”

Merle nodded, and suddenly she had the feeling that everything Junipa was telling her wasn't so weird at all. The more fantastic the things on her trip had turned out to be, the less astonishing they seemed to Merle. She couldn't help wondering how long ago it had been. When had the old world come apart for her and turned into something new? It wasn't at the moment when the Queen entered into her, but yet it was that same night, when she said good-bye to the old Merle for the first time and opened the door to the new one; when she'd left the festival with Serafin and let herself fall into that completely unlooked-for moment; when she'd become a little more comfortable with the idea of being grown up soon.

“There it is,” said Junipa. “In front of us.”

Merle blinked, saw only herself in the mirror at first, and thought acidly that it was the perfect reflection of her brooding: always only herself, herself, herself.

“Your self-pity is so unbearable sometimes,”
the Flowing Queen said. And after a pause she asked,
“Don't you have a smart answer?”

You're really right.

Junipa grasped her hand more firmly and pointed to a spot in the silvery infinity. “That's the door.”

“Oh, really?”

“Does that mean you can't see it?”

“Someone forgot to screw on the doorknob.”

Junipa smiled. “Just trust me.”

“I do that all the time.”

Junipa stopped and turned to her. “Merle?”

“Um?”

“I'm glad you're here. That we're going through this business together.”

Merle smiled. “Now you sound entirely different from before, in the Iron Eye. Much more … like yourself.”

“Here between the mirrors I can't feel the Stone Light anymore,” said Junipa. “It's as if I had an entirely normal heart. And I can see better than you or probably anyone else. I think I belong here.”

And perhaps that was the truth; perhaps Arcimboldo had in fact created her eyes out of the glass of the mirror world.
Junipa is a guide,
Lalapeya had said. And weren't guides always natives of the place? The thought sent shivers down Merle's spine, but she made an effort not to show it.

“Don't let go of my hand,” said Junipa. Then she whispered the glass word tonelessly and the two of them took the decisive step together.

Leaving the mirror world was accomplished just as unspectacularly as entering it. They went through the glass as if they were passing through a soft breeze, and on the other side they found—

“Mirrors?” Merle asked before she realized that this was by no means the same place from which they'd started.

“Mirrors?”
the Flowing Queen asked as well.

“Burbridge's mirror room,” said Junipa. “Exactly as your mother said.”

Behind them someone cleared his throat. “I'd hoped you'd find the way here.”

Merle whirled around, even faster than Junipa.

Professor Burbridge, Lord Light, her grandfather—three completely different meanings in one person. He walked up to them but stopped a few steps away. He didn't come too close, as if he didn't want to make them nervous.

“Don't worry,” he said. “In here I'm only myself. The Light has no power over me in the mirror room.” He sounded older than outside in Hell. And he looked that way too: He was much more bent now, and he acted frail.

“In this place I am not Lord Light,” he said with a sad smile. “Still only Burbridge, the old fool.”

The mirror out of which they'd walked was only one of many, arranged in a wide circle. Most were still in the glued frames that Arcimboldo had placed around the magic mirrors when he supplied them to his customers.

The mirrors that Arcimboldo had sold to Lord Light were arranged on the walls, maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred of them. Some were also lying on the floor like puddles of quicksilver, others hung flat beneath the ceiling.

“They keep the Stone Light away from here,” Burbridge explained. He wore a morning coat similar to the one he'd had on at their first meeting. His hair was disheveled and he looked untidy, as if his dapper appearance before was only a semblance that the Stone Light had kept in place. All that faded in here. The pouches under his eyes were heavier, his eyes lay deeper in their sockets. The veins showed dark on the parchmentlike backs of his hands. Liver spots covered his skin like the shadows of insects.

“We're alone.” He'd noticed that Merle kept surveying the room mistrustfully, for fear of the Lilim, Burbridge's creatures. He appeared to be telling the truth, in fact.

“My mother sent me.” Suddenly it didn't feel at all difficult to use that word. It sounded almost matter-of-fact:
my mother.

Burbridge raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Lalapeya? How I hated her in the old days. And she me, no doubt about that. And now she's sending you here, of all places?”

“She said you could explain everything to me. The truth about me and my parents. About Lalapeya … and about Steven.”

Burbridge had been standing in the center of the room at her arrival, as if he'd expected her coming.

“It is because of the mirrors,”
the Flowing Queen said.
“If the mirrors really protect him, then perhaps he is safest in the center where their looks meet.”
Arcimboldo had said something similar to her once: “Look into a mirror, and it looks back at you. Mirrors can see!”

“It is no coincidence,”
the Queen continued,
“that Burbridge named the capital city of Hell Axis Mundi, the axis of the world. The same way that symbolically marks the center point of Hell, this place here is the axis of his existence, his own center, the place where he is still always himself, without the influence of the Light.”
After a short pause, she added,
“Most are on the search for their center their entire life long, for the axis of their world, but only the fewest are aware of it.”

Burbridge again took two steps in the girls' direction. The movement had nothing threatening about it.

Is
he
my axis? Merle asked in her thoughts. My center?

The Queen laughed softly.
“He? Oh, no. But the center is often that which stands at the end of our search. You have sought your parents, and you are perhaps on the point of finding them. Perhaps your family is your center, Merle. And Burbridge is, for good or evil, a part of it. But sometime you will perhaps seek other things.”

Then is the center something like that happiness that one always seeks but never finds?

“It can be happiness, but also your downfall. Some seek their entire lives for nothing but death.”

At least they can be certain that they'll find it sometime, Merle thought.

“Do not joke about it. Look at Burbridge! The Stone Light has kept him alive for decades. Do you not think he is ready for death? And if he will find it anywhere, it will be here, where the Light cannot get at him. At least not yet.”

Not yet?

“The Light will know of our presence. And it will not look on much longer without taking action in spite of all this.”

Then we must hurry.

“Good idea.”

Merle turned to Burbridge. “I must learn the truth. Lalapeya says it's important.”

“For her or for you?” The old man seemed amused and at the same time desperately sad.

“Will you tell me about it?”

His eyes slid over the endless round of mirrors. Arcimboldo's legacy. “You perhaps don't know much about Lalapeya,” he said. “Only that she is a sphinx, isn't that so?”

Merle nodded.

“There is also a piece of the Stone Light in Lalapeya, Merle. As in you yourself, for you are her child. But I'll get to that. First the beginning, yes? Always the beginning first … A long time ago the sphinx Lalapeya received the task of protecting a grave. Not just any
grave, it goes without saying, but the grave of the first ancestor of all the sphinxes. Their progenitor and not, as many believe, their god—although he easily could become that, if his old power awakens again. They call him the Son of the Mother. After his death thousands upon thousands of years ago, the sphinx people laid him to rest in a place that later was to become the lagoon of Venice. At that time there was nothing, only gloomy swamps, into which no living thing strayed. They set watchers, a long line of watchers, and the last of them was Lalapeya. In that time, during Lalapeya's watch, it happened that men settled in the lagoon, first building simple huts, then houses, and finally, over the course of the centuries, an entire city.”

“Venice.”

“Quite right. The sphinxes ordinarily avoided humans; in fact, they outright hated them, but Lalapeya differed from the others of her people, and she decided to leave the men and women alone. She admired their strong wills and their determination to wrest a new home from the wet, desolate wasteland.”

An axis, thought Merle in sudden comprehension. A center of their small, sorrowful human world. And the Queen said,
“It is so.”

“Over the centuries the lagoon took on the form that you know today, and Lalapeya abided there all that time. Finally she was living in a palazzo in the Cannaregio district. And there my son met her. Steven.”

“Who was Steven's mother?”

“A Lilim. Naturally not one like the ones you've come to know. Not one of those barbaric beasts, and not a plump shape changer, either. She was what people in the upper world call a succubus. A Lilim in the shape of a wonderfully beautiful woman. And she
was
beautiful, believe me. Steven grew into a child who carried the inheritance of both parents in him, mine as well as hers.”

This thought made Merle's head spin. Her mother was a sphinx, her father half human, half Lilim. What was she herself, then?

“I often brought Steven here as a child,” said Burbridge. “I told him of the Stone Light, what it was doing to us, what it was making of us. Even then, as a little boy, he resisted this idea. And when he was older, he went away. He told no one of it, not even me. He took a secret gateway, which ended in the lagoon, and he felt the influence of the Light fall away from him. He must have thought he could live as a quite normal human being.” Burbridge lowered his voice. “I myself had lost this dream a long, long time ago. When I was still able to flee, I didn't want to. And today I cannot. The Light would not permit it. Steven, on the other hand, was unimportant to it, yes, perhaps it was even glad that he was gone—always provided that it thinks at all like a human, of which I have some doubt.

“So Steven went to Venice and remained there. He met
Lalapeya, perhaps by chance, although I rather believe that she sensed where he came from. He was, like her, a stranger in the city, a stranger among your people. And for a while they were together.”