The Glass Word (17 page)

“It's as if this whole damned fortress were dead all of a sudden!” Vermithrax also sounded irritated. His huge nose sniffed the air in the circle of the stairwell, while his eyes swept alertly around. “There must still be someone somewhere.”

“Perhaps they have something to do somewhere else.” For instance, with Winter, Merle added in her mind.

“Or with the Son of the Mother,”
said the Queen.

Merle imagined the scene: a huge hall in which hundreds of sphinxes were gathered. All were staring raptly at the body on its bier. Singing hung in the air, soft murmuring. The words of a priest or a leader. Grotesque apparatus and machines were turned on. Electrical charges sparked
between metal balls and steel coils with many turns of wire. Fluids bubbled in glass beakers, hot steam shot out of vents to the ceiling. All was reflected dozens of times in the towering silver walls.

Then a cry, leaping like flame from one sphinx to the next. Strident masks of triumph, open mouths, wide eyes, roars of laughter, of joy, of relief, but also of barely concealed anxiety. Priests and scientists, who swarmed around the Son of the Mother like flies around a piece of carrion. A dark eyelid that slowly opened. Under it a black eyeball, dried and wrinkled like a prune. And in it, caught like a curse in a dusty tomb, an increasingly bright spark of devilish intelligence.

“Merle?”

Vermithrax's voice.

“Merle?” More urgent now. “Did you hear that?”

She came alert. “Huh?”

“Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“Listen carefully.”

Merle tried to comprehend what Vermithrax meant. It was only with difficulty that she was able to free herself from the picture that her mind had conjured up: the ancient, dark eye and in it the awakening understanding of the Son of the Mother.

Now she heard it.

A howling.

Again the image of a monstrous gathering of all the sphinxes arose in her. The murmuring, the singing, the sound of the rituals.

But the howling had another source.

“Sounds like a storm,” Merle said.

She'd hardly spoken when something rushed at them out of the depths of the stairwell. Vermithrax bent way over the railing; Merle had to cling tightly to his mane in order not to slide down over his head into the well.

A white wall rose up out of the mirrored chasm.

Fog, she thought at first.

Snow!

A snowstorm that seemed to come directly from the heart of the Arctic, a fist of ice and cold and unimaginable force.

Vermithrax raised his wings and folded them together over Merle like two giant hands, which pressed her firmly to his back. The howling grew deafening and finally so loud that she could scarcely perceive it as sound, a blade that cut through her auditory canal and carved up her understanding. She had the feeling that her living body was turning to ice, just like the dead gull she'd found on the roof of the orphanage one winter. The bird had looked as if it had simply fallen from heaven, the wings still spread, the eyes open. When Merle had lost her balance for a moment on the smooth roof slope, it had slipped out of her hand and a wing broke off as if it were made of porcelain.

The storm passed them like a swarm of howling ghosts. When it was over and the wind in the stairwell died down, the layer of snow on the steps had almost doubled.

“Was
that
Winter?” Vermithrax asked numbly. Ice crystals glittered on his coat, a strange contrast to his body glow, which gave off no heat and was not able to melt the ice.

Merle sat up on his back, ran both hands through her hair, and wiped the wet strands out of her face. The tiny little hairs in her nose were frozen, and for a while it was easier to breathe through her mouth.

“I don't know,” she got out with a groan. “But if Winter had been in that storm somewhere, he'd certainly have seen us. He wouldn't just have run past us. Or flown. Or whatever.” Dazedly she knocked the snow from her dress. It was completely frozen through, and at her knees the material was almost stiff. “It's time we found Summer.”

“We?” said the Queen in alarm.

Merle nodded. “Without her we're going to freeze. And then it doesn't matter anymore if your son wakes up or not.”

“The sphinxes,” Vermithrax said. “They're frozen, aren't they? That's why there aren't any down here anymore. The cold has killed them.”

Merle didn't think it was that simple. But sometimes Fate played tricks on one. And why couldn't it affect the other side once in a while, for a change?

The obsidian lion began moving again. He was trudging through high snow, but he found the steps without
any trouble and walked on with amazing sure-footedness. Even a little dampness could turn the mirrored floors of the Iron Eye into slides; for the moment they almost had to be grateful for the snow, for it padded the lion's steps and kept his paws from sliding on the icy glass floor.

“In any case, the storm came from Winter,” Merle said after a while. “Although I don't believe he was anywhere inside it. But this must be the right path.” After pondering a little she added, “Vermithrax, did Andrej say where the Son of the Mother would be brought?”

“If he did, he said it in Russian.”

And you? Merle turned to the Queen. Do you know where he is?

“No.”

Perhaps where Summer is also?

“How do you fig—”
The Queen broke off and said instead,
“You really think there is more hidden in Summer's disappearance, do you?”

Burbridge told Winter something, Merle thought. Therefore Winter is looking for her here in the Iron Eye. And if Summer had something to do with the power of the Empire?

“You are thinking of the sunbarks?”

Yes. But also about the mummies. And all those things that can only be explained by magic. Why didn't the priests awaken the Pharaoh a hundred years ago? Or five hundred years ago? Perhaps because they only got the strength to
from Summer! They call it magic, but maybe it's something else. Machines that we don't know, that are driven with a strength that they somehow … I don't know,
steal
from Summer. You said it yourself: Seth is not a powerful magician. He may command a few illusions, but real magic? He's a scientist, just like all the other Horus priests. And like Burbridge. The only ones who actually understand something about magic are the sphinxes.

The Queen thought that over.
“Summer as a kind of living furnace?”

Like the steam furnaces in the factories outside on the lagoon islands, thought Merle.

“That sounds quite mad.”

Just like goddesses who bring a whole people into the world with a moonbeam.

This time she felt the Queen laugh. Softly and suppressed, but she laughed. After a while she said,
“The suboceanic kingdoms possessed such machines. No one knew exactly how they were driven. They used them in their war against the Lords of the Deep, against the ancestors of the Lilim.”

Merle could see how all the mosaic pieces were gradually fitting together into a whole. Possibly the Horus priests had stumbled on remains or drawings from the sub-oceanic cultures. Perhaps with their help they'd succeeded in awakening the Pharaoh or building their sunbarks. Suddenly it filled her with bitter satisfaction that the cities of the suboceanic kingdoms had fallen in ruins on the ocean
floor eons ago. The prospect of the same thing happening to the Empire suddenly moved quite a bit closer.

“There's someone coming!” Vermithrax stopped.

Merle was startled. “From down below?”

The lion mane whipped back and forth in a nod. “I can sense them.”

“Sphinxes?”

“At least one.”

“Can you get any closer to the railing? Maybe we can see them then.”

“Or they us,” replied the lion, shaking his head. “There's only one possibility: We fly past them.” Until now he'd avoided flying down, because the shaft in the center of the spiral staircase was very narrow, and he was afraid of breaking his wings on the sharp edges. And a wounded Vermithrax was the last thing they could bear.

However, the way things looked now, they had to try it.

They wasted no time. Merle clung to him. Vermithrax rose up and leaped over the railing and down into the chasm. They had dared such a steep flight once before, during the escape from the Campanile in Venice. But this one was worse. The cold bit into Merle's face and through her clothing, she couldn't brush away the snow particles that got into her eyes, and her heart was galloping as if it were trying to outrace her. She could hardly breathe.

They passed two windings of the stairs, then three, four, five. At the height of the sixth, Vermithrax braked
his nosedive with such force that Merle thought at first they'd hit something—stone, steel, perhaps an invisible mirror floor in the stairwell. But then the lion leveled and floated with gentle wing beats in the center of the stairwell, with emptiness over and under them and in front of them—

“But that can't be—” Then Merle's voice failed her and she wasn't even certain whether she'd actually said the words aloud or only thought them.

It could almost have been their own reflection: a figure who was riding on the back of a half-human creature, which was climbing the steps on four legs. A boy, only a little older than Merle, with tousled hair and cozy fur clothing. The creature on which he sat was a female sphinx. Her arms were scantily bandaged all the way to the elbows. The four paws of her lion lower body seemed to be unharmed; she had borne her rider securely up the steps.

The sphinx was beautiful, much more beautiful than Merle had imagined her, and not even her weary, emaciated look could alter that. She had black hair falling smoothly over her shoulders down to the place where human and lion melted together.

The boy opened his eyes wide, his lips moved, but his words were lost in the rushing of the lion wings and the raging of distant snowstorms below.

Merle whispered his name.

And Vermithrax attacked.

A
MENOPHIS

S
ETH HAD LONG CEASED TO THREATEN HER WITH HIS DRAWN
sword. It was unnecessary, as they both knew. And it lacked a certain dignity for a man like him to be pointing his sickle blade at a girl like Junipa, half as big and very much weaker.

Junipa was sure that he wouldn't do anything to her as long as she obeyed him. Basically, she thought, she was of no importance to him, just like Merle and the others, just like the whole world. Seth had built up the Empire with sweat and blood and privation, and now he would demolish it again with his own hands, or at least swing the hammer to strike the first blow.

“To Venice,” he'd said, after he pushed her back into the mirror world. “Inside the palace.” As if Junipa were a gondolier on the Grand Canal.

When she'd looked at him for a long moment in disbelief, a spark of doubt had appeared in his eyes. As if he weren't really aware of her capabilities.

But then she said “Yes,” and nothing else. And started on the way.

He was now walking some distance behind her, almost soundlessly. Only now and then the sword in his belt struck its point against a mirror edge, and the screeching that it caused rushed like a call of alarm through the glass labyrinth of the mirror world. But there was no one there who could have heard it; or if there was, no one showed himself, not even the phantoms.

Junipa didn't ask Seth what he had in mind. For one thing, she already guessed. For another, he wouldn't have given her an answer anyway.

Before, when she'd walked into the Iron Eye with Merle, she had felt again the grip of the Stone Light. A devilish pain flamed up in her chest, just as if someone were trying to bend her ribs apart from the inside like the bars on a cage. The fragment of the Stone Light that had been inserted into her in Hell reminded her emphatically that sooner or later it would again gain power over her, when she left the mirror world or just gradually when she began to feel secure. The stone in her chest was threat and dark promise equally.

Behind the mirrors she felt better, the pain was gone, the pressure vanished. Her stone heart did not beat, but somehow it kept her alive, the Devil might know why—and indeed,
he
certainly did know.

Considering her situation, the threat of the Horus priest seemed far less dreadful to her. She could run away from Seth, or at least attempt it—but there was no outrunning the Light. At least not in her world. The Light might lose interest in her for a while, the way it did after her flight from Hell, but it was always there. Always ready to seize her, to influence her, and to set her on her friends.

No, it was good that she wasn't in the Iron Eye with Merle. She was beginning to feel sure in the mirror world. Everything in this labyrinth of silver glass was somehow familiar. Her eyes led her, let her see what no one else saw, and that made her aware how very much Seth had put himself into her hands. Perhaps he wasn't even aware of it himself.