The Glass Word (21 page)

The obsidian lion was having trouble maintaining his altitude. He was as good as blind in the snowstorm, and the wet snow weighed down his wings. “I have to go
down,” he cried finally, but they'd all realized long ago that this move was unavoidable.

They sank down with the snowflakes, deeper and deeper, but the bottom they were expecting didn't appear. What they'd taken for a hall was in reality a mighty chasm, an abyss.

“Up ahead there!” Merle yelled through the deluge of snow. Snow got into her mouth. “A bridge!”

A narrow footbridge of mirror glass spanned the infinite emptiness like a guitar string. It was hardly more than forty inches wide and had no railings; both ends lay buried in the snowstorm somewhere.

Vermithrax flew down to it, and with full confidence in the sphinxes' architecture, he landed on it. It gave a slight shudder but no sign at all that the construction wouldn't bear his weight. On both ends of the bridge, five or six yards of the snow edges loosened and tumbled into the whitish gray deep.

Vermithrax shook his wings to shake off the lumpy layer of ice that had impeded his flying. Serafin tried to pull the ends of his coat wide enough to cover Lalapeya's bare legs, but she waved him off.

“Let me down. I can walk on my own again here. Vermithrax won't be flying anymore in this snow, anyway.”

“The path is too narrow,” said Serafin. “If you get off Vermithrax sideways, you'll fall down into the chasm.”

“What about from behind?”

Serafin and Merle looked over their shoulders at the same time. The sight of the abyss on both sides of the pathway was alarming. As a master thief, Serafin had balanced over Venice's roofs all year long without wasting more than a thought on the danger. But this was different. If he went into a slide on the wet, slushy snow, nothing could save him, not luck, not skill.

“I'll try it,” he said.

“No,” Merle contradicted. “Don't be silly.”

He looked past Lalapeya to Merle. “Her legs will freeze if she doesn't change back. So she
must
get down.”

Merle glared at him: as if she didn't know that herself. Nevertheless, she was afraid for him and Lalapeya. Although, after watching her transformation, the thought that the sphinx actually was her mother seemed even more incredible.

“Be careful,” said Lalapeya as Serafin slowly slid back-ward.

“Plucky,”
the Flowing Queen commented dryly.

“Just hold still!” Serafin called to Vermithrax. His voice sounded grim. Merle held her breath.

“Don't worry,” replied the lion, and in fact he did not move a fraction of an inch. Even his heartbeat, which Merle could feel clearly beneath her legs most of the time, appeared to stop.

With infinite caution, Serafin slid backward over Vermithrax's hips. At the same time he grasped the lion's tail;
it gave him additional stability when his boot soles sank into the snow. For a long moment he swayed slightly and cast mistrustful glances into the abyss to the right and to the left. Finally he gave Lalapeya the sign to follow him. His feet seemed to swim in the loose slush, so uncertain was his footing on the bridge. An overhasty movement and he would slide over the edge along with a gigantic snow clump.

He let go of the lion's tail in order to free the way for Lalapeya. She nimbly slid back and off the lion, while Merle twisted her neck and worriedly watched what was going on behind her.

“They will make it,”
said the Queen.

Easy for you to say, Merle thought.

“Take one step back,” said the sphinx to Serafin, “but carefully.”

Extremely carefully he moved backward, striving not to pay any more attention to the depths below him.

“Good,” said Lalapeya. “And now sit down. And support yourself with your hands.”

He did that. He felt sick and dizzy, master thief or not. Only when he was sitting somewhat securely in the snow did he dare take a deep breath.

Lalapeya changed into a column of whirling sand, from which, in a flash, came flesh and hair and bone. After the sphinx was standing there in her lion form again, she told Serafin to climb onto her back. He obeyed, and the color returned to his face. It reassured him a little that Lalapeya
and Vermithrax had four legs that gave them more traction up here. They had their predator's genes to thank that the suction of the abyss had no power over them. Fear of heights was alien, not only to the winged Vermithrax but also to Lalapeya, as was any clumsy or superfluous movement.

Merle gave a shudder of relief when Serafin was finally sitting safely on Lalapeya's back. For a long moment she'd even forgotten the cold, which was troubling her more and more. Now she again felt the bite of the frost, the icy burden of the snow, and the severe tugging of the high wind.

“What now?” asked Vermithrax.

“We follow the path,” Merle suggested. “Or does someone have a better idea?”

They moved forward on eight lion paws, not sure what to expect on the other side of the thick blizzard.

After a few steps, Vermithrax stopped again. Merle caught sight of the obstacle at the same moment.

A figure crouched in front of them on the narrow band.

A man sitting cross-legged.

His long hair was snow-white, his skin very light, as if someone had formed the motionless figure of snow. The man had his head thrown back, his closed eyes facing upward. His bony hands were clutched around his knees, the dark blue veins standing out clearly.

“He's meditating,” said Lalapeya in amazement.

“No,” said Merle softly. “He's seeking.”

Winter dropped his head and looked over at them wearily.

T
HE
O
NLY
W
AY

I
T ALMOST SEEMED AS IF HE'D BEEN WAITING FOR THEM.
“Merle,” he said, sounding neither pleased nor annoyed. “She's here. Summer is here.”

“I know.”

Vermithrax had come within two paces of him.

“Don't come any closer,” said Winter. “You'll all freeze to ice if you touch me.”

“You killed the sphinxes,” Merle said.

“Yes.”

“How many are left?”

“I don't know. Not enough to oppose me.”

“Do you know where they've hidden Summer?”

He nodded and pointed down into the chasm.

“Down there?” Merle was irritated to have to pull every word out of him.

Again a nod. Only then did she notice that the thick snow made a detour around him. No ice crystals caught in his hair, no flakes stuck to his white clothes. His breath didn't even come from his lips in puffs of white. It was as if Winter himself was no part at all of the season he embodied.

“I've come this far,” he said, “but now I lack the power to take the last step.”

“I don't understand.”

“Summer is being held at the bottom of this shaft. There are no other entrances, I've searched everywhere.”

“So?”

Winter smiled shyly and very vulnerably. “How am I supposed to get down there? Jump?”

She'd had the idea that of course a being like him would be able to fly if he needed to. But he could not. He'd frosted the Egyptians and the Iron Eye with a new ice age, but he wasn't able to advance to the bottom of this shaft.

“How long have you been sitting there?”

Winter sighed. “Much too long.”

“He is a whining weakling,”
grumbled the Flowing Queen.
“And all this uproar he is causing around him does not change that.”

Don't be so unfair, Merle thought.

“Pah! A weakling.”
Had the Queen had a nose, she would probably have wrinkled it.
“How long can he have been here? He left Hell shortly before us.”

He's just … well, sensitive. He's exaggerating.

“Sensitive? He is a liar! If he succeeded in getting from the pyramid to here in the delta in such a short time and then still managed to breeze through the Eye and freeze hundreds of sphinxes … that is damned fast, is it not?”

Merle glanced back over her shoulder at Serafin and Lalapeya. Both were looking impatient but also uncertain, faced with the strange creature blocking their way.

She turned to Winter again. “You really can't fly?”

“Not down there. I ride on the icy winds and the snowstorms. But that's meaningless here.”

“What do you mean?”

Again he sighed from the bottom of his heart while the Queen uttered an exaggerated groan. “I'll explain it to you, Merle,” he said. “And to your friends if they want to hear it.”

Serafin growled something that sounded like, “What else can we do?”

“Summer is at the bottom of this shaft. Her strength, her sun heat, if you will, normally rises up through the shaft. No man can approach the ground, he'd burn up in an instant.”

Merle shifted her weight nervously and looked down from Vermithrax's back into the deep. She saw nothing but whitish gray chaos. And she was getting colder and colder, quite terribly now.

“My presence here in the shaft interrupts the flow of heat.” he continued. “Ice and fire meet each other down there, about halfway between me and her. The snow instantly melts in the air, the cold transforms into heat. Sometimes there are thunderstorms when we meet. I could let myself be carried down there by the icy winds, but Summer is captive and doesn't have her heat under control. She is weakened and not able to cool herself down, as she usually does when we meet. Down there, the wind would turn into a lukewarm puff of air, the ice would melt, and I … well, imagine a snowflake on a hot plate.” He buried his bony face in his hands. “Do you understand now?”

Merle nodded uncomfortably.

“Then you grasp the utter hopelessness of my situation,” he proclaimed, waving his arms.

“That might not even he true,”
said the Queen venomously.
“This fellow has almost annihilated an entire people, and now he is sitting here crying!”

You could easily show a little more sympathy.

“I cannot bear him.”

You were certainly not everyone's darling among the gods.

“Ask him if he has ever heard the word
dignity.”

That I most certainly will not.

“I could do it for you.”

Don't you dare!

Serafin interrupted them. “Merle, what now? We can't just keep standing here forever.”

Of course not, she thought with a shiver.

Then Vermithrax spoke up. “I know a solution.”

In the tense silence, only the Queen murmured sourly,
“Whatever it is, it had better be quick. We have no more time. The Son of the Mother is awake.”

“I can fly down there and try to free Summer,” Vermithrax said. “I'm stone, heat and cold can't affect me … at least I think not. Besides, I've survived a bath in the Stone Light, so I'll probably survive here as well. When Summer is free, I can carry Winter to her. Or her to him.”

Merle's fingers clutched his mane even more tightly. “That's out of the question!”

“It's the only way.”

Merle felt that the Queen was about to take command of her voice, but she pushed her roughly back. For the last time, she snapped at the Queen in her mind, back off!

“He will endanger everything if he does that! Without him we will not get far.”

You mean, if he doesn't do what you say, don't you?

“It is not about that.”

Oh, yes, that's exactly what it's about, thought Merle. You've used him, just as you've used me. You knew from the beginning that we were coming here, that we had no other choice. You've always brought us exactly where you wanted us. “And now that's the end of it!” She said the last
words out loud, and everyone looked at her in puzzlement. Her face had turned red, and the heat felt almost comfortable in the ice-cold air.

“She doesn't like the idea,” Vermithrax stated.

Merle shook her head grimly. “At the moment what she thinks doesn't count.”

The lion turned to Winter. “What will happen when Summer is free?”

The albino made a dramatic gesture with his hands that took in the entire Iron Eye. “What always has happened. All this will lose its power. Exactly as before.”

Merle pricked up her ears. “Like the suboceanic kingdoms?” Her guess was very close to the mark.

Winter nodded. “They weren't the only ones to have tried it, but their failure was the most spectacular.” He thought for a moment. “How shall I explain it? They tap her strength, the strength of the sun—perhaps that describes it the best. They don't realize that they are only injuring themselves. They know of the failure of the old ones, but they try it again anyway. They are so terribly weak, and they think they are so infinitely strong.” Winter shook his head. “These fools! They cannot win, one way or the other. They will destroy themselves, sooner or later, even if we do not free Summer.”