The Glass Word (22 page)

“But what do they want?” asked Serafin. “Why are they doing all this?”

Lalapeya answered him. “They are using Summer to
drive the barks, the factories, and the machines with her energy. Thus they have helped bring the Pharaoh to power and conquered the world. But this world was really only a finger exercise for them, only a plaything. What is actually important to them is somewhere else.”

“All the mirrors?” Merle whispered.

“Their plan is to tear down the barriers between the worlds with the Iron Eye. With their fortress they're going to move from one world to another and carry on an unprecedented campaign of conquest.”

Vermithrax growled. “But that takes magic. More magic than that of an ordinary sphinx.”

“The Son of the Mother,” said Merle. The coming events were unreeling in her mind like the light and shadow play of a magic lantern.
“He's
the key to the whole thing, isn't he? When he awakens, the Stone Light will take control. And the Iron Eye will move through the mirror world in order to smash the gates to the other worlds.” She envisioned the gigantic fortress appearing in the labyrinths of the mirror world and destroying thousands upon thousands of mirror doors. The chaos in the worlds would be indescribable. Under the direction of the Light, the sphinxes would travel through the worlds like a mob of freebooters and sow death and destruction, exactly as they'd done in her own world. In other places too they would not dirty their own fingers but help upstarts like the Horus priests and Amenophis to power. Others would do the work for them, while they sat
in their fortress and waited. A people of scholars and poets, Lalapeya had said. The sphinxes
were
artists, scientists, and philosophers, but the price for their life of literature and debate was a high one. And its cost was supposed to be paid by entire worlds.

“Merle,” said Vermithrax firmly, “go to your mother.”

She still hesitated, even though she felt that he had made his decision. “You must promise to come back.”

Vermithrax purred like a kitten. “But of course.”

“Promise!”

“I promise you.”

That wasn't much reassurance, maybe nothing but empty words. Nevertheless, she felt a little better.

“Just fool yourself,”
said the Queen nastily.
“You humans always were the greatest at that.”

Merle wondered why the Queen was being so unbearable. Perhaps because Vermithrax's plan was better than her own: free Summer, thus rob the last sphinxes of their power, and so hinder the awakening of the Son of the Mother.

And the Queen's plan? Why didn't she reveal it? Where was the catch? For there was a plan, Merle had no doubt of that.

“I am worried about him.”
The Queen's tone had changed abruptly. No more sarcasm, no bitter irony. Instead, real concern.
“I want to speak with him—if you will allow it.”

“Yes,” Merle said, “of course.” The Queen played with
her feelings as if she were a piano, knew exactly which keys she had to press when. Merle saw through her and still could do nothing against it.

“Vermithrax,” said the Queen in Merle's voice. “It is I.”

Serafin and Lalapeya stared at Merle, and she had to remind herself that the two knew her story, of course, but they were hearing the Queen
speak
from Merle's mouth for the first time. Vermithrax had also pricked up his ears.

“I must tell you something.”

Vermithrax cast an uncertain look at Winter, who had raised himself and stood astride the path, without swaying, even without blinking. “Now, Queen? Couldn't it wait?”

“No. Listen to me.” He did, and all the others did as well. Even Winter tilted his head as if he were concentrating entirely on the words that fell from Merle's lips and yet were not her own. “I am Sekhmet, the mother of the sphinxes,” the Queen went on, “that you know.”

At least for Lalapeya and Serafin, that was a surprise. Lalapeya was going to say something, but the Queen interrupted her: “Not now. Vermithrax is right, haste is needed. What I have to say concerns only him. After I bore the Son of the Mother and with him generated the sphinx people, I soon recognized what had happened: The Stone Light had deceived me. And it had used me. I placed compliant servants in the world for it. When it became clear to me what that meant, I decided to do something. I could not kill all sphinxes and make everything unhappen—but I could
keep the Son of the Mother from being made into the slave of the Light. I fought with him, mother against son, and finally I succeeded in defeating him. I was the only one who had the power to do that. I killed him and the sphinxes buried him in the lagoon.” She paused, hesitated, and then continued: “What happened then, you know. But my story does not end with that, and it is important that you learn it now. You most of all, Vermithrax.”

The lion nodded thoughtfully, as if he already guessed what was coming.

“I knew that I could not watch the lagoon alone, and so from the stone of the image the humans had erected in my honor, I created the first stone lions. I created them of magic and my own heart's blood, and I think that makes them—like the sphinxes and yet entirely different from them—my children, does it not?”

The lion, unable to look Merle and the Queen in the eye as they sat on his back, lowered his head. “Great Sekhmet,” he whispered humbly.

“No,” the Queen exclaimed, “it is not about honoring me! I intend only that you know the truth about the origins of your people. No one remembers anymore when and how the stone lions came to be in the lagoon, and so I am telling you. The lagoon is the birthplace of the stone lions, for after the Son of the Mother was buried there, I created you as guards: I myself would watch over him, but I needed helpers, my arms and my legs and hands and
claws. Thus arose the first of your people, and after I was sure that you were equal to the task, I gave up my own body and became the Flowing Queen. I could not and would not live as a goddess anymore with the shame of what I had done. I became one with the water. On the one hand that was the proper decision, but on the other it was a mistake, for with it I gave up supervision of the stone lions. My servants were strong, but at the same time trusting creatures, who got mixed up with humans.” She hesitated before she went on in a bitter tone, “You know what happened. How the humans betrayed the lions and robbed them of their wings; the flight of those who escaped the treachery; and finally Vermithrax's unsuccessful attack on Venice to redress the wrong that had been done to his ancestors.”

The obsidian lion was silent. He'd listened with lowered head. He and his companions were the children of Sekhmet. The stone guards of the Son of the Mother.

“Then it is right that I am here today,” he said finally, lifting his head with new determination. “So perhaps I can make up for the mistake of my forefathers. They failed to guard the Son of the Mother.”

“Just as I did,” said Lalapeya.

“And I,” said the Queen from Merle's mouth.

“But fate has given me a chance,” Vermithrax growled. “Perhaps all of us. We failed then, but today we have another chance to stop the Son of the Mother. And I will
be no lion if we do not succeed.” He uttered a pugnacious growl. “Merle, get down now.”

She obeyed, very slowly, very carefully, until Lalapeya enveloped her in her injured arms. But Vermithrax walked up to Winter. The albino touched him on the nose, scratched under his chin. Vermithrax purred. He'd been right: The frost had no effect on his stone body.

“Good luck,” said Merle softly. Serafin bent down from the back of the sphinx and placed a hand on Merle's shoulder. “Don't worry,” he whispered, “he'll manage it.”

Winter nodded to Vermithrax one last time; then the lion let out a battle roar and leaped into the deep. After a few yards, his wings stabilized his flight, and a few moments later he was only a glowing phantom behind a curtain of ice and snow. At last he faded entirely, like a candle flame extinguished in white wax.

“He will manage it,”
whispered the Queen.

And if he doesn't, Merle thought. What will become of us then?

Ignoring her bandaged arms, Lalapeya embraced her daughter even more tightly and looked her in the eyes at close range.

And thus they stood for a long time, with no one saying a word.

Vermithrax felt it, he felt the Stone Light in him and yet knew that it could not harm him. He'd been able to feel it
when he'd bathed in the Light, down there under the dome of Axis Mundi—nothing tangible, no clear sensation. But he'd known that there was something in him that protected him from the Light and at the same time united him with it. Now it was clear to him that it was the legacy of Sekhmet, the foremother of all stone lions and sphinxes, the Flowing Queen. She had been touched by a beam of the Stone Light, and a little of this contact had also passed over to the lions. When he'd plunged into the Light, it had recognized itself in Vermithrax and protected him. Even more: It had made him stronger than ever before. Perhaps involuntarily, but that no longer mattered.

He was Vermithrax, the biggest and most powerful among the lions of the lagoon. And he was here to do what he'd been born for. If he were to die doing it, it would only close the circle of his existence. And if Seth had told the truth, he was anyway the last of his people, the last of those lions who could fly and speak. The last free creature of his species.

He propelled himself downward with broad sweeps of his wings, flew down with the snowflakes, overtook them, shot like a comet through the middle of them into the abyss. Soon it seemed to him they were growing smaller and wetter, no longer the fluffy flakes of farther up but slushy dots, then drops. Snow turned to rain. With the onset of heat, the water evaporated too, and he entered a zone of comfortable warmth, then heat, then finally roaring fire. The air around
him shimmered and boiled, but he inhaled it the same as the icy air of the high heavens, and his lungs, glowing like everything in him, sucked out the oxygen and kept him alive.

He was proven right. The Light, which had made him strong, at the same time protected him from heat and cold.

Soon it was so hot that even stone would melt to glass, yet his obsidian body withstood it. The distant walls of the shaft had long since become unrecognizable; whatever material they might be made of, it was also not of this world. Of magic mirrors, perhaps, like the rest of the Iron Eye. Or of pure magic. He understood little of these things, and they didn't interest him. He only wanted to carry out the tasks he had undertaken. Free Summer. Defeat the sphinxes. Stop the Son of the Mother.

Then he saw her.

Until now he'd not been aware that he'd almost reached the floor of the shaft It might just as well have been a lake of fire, even more flames in this sea of heat. But the light was pure and natural, not like that one of stone that spun its net of meanness and greed in Hell. This light was the one that bore warmth, the light in whose beams Vermithrax's lion people had sunned themselves on the rock terraces of Africa.

The light of the summer.

There she lay, stretched out in a sea of glitter and flame, supported by hot air, floating over the floor like a fruit just waiting to be picked.

There were no guards, no chains. Both would have been incinerated in a second. All that held her down here and had placed her in a trance was the sphinxes' magic.

Vermithrax held himself above the floating Summer with gentle strokes of his wings and gazed down at her for a long moment. She looked as if she could be Winter's sister, tall and thin, almost bony. She didn't look healthy, not in the human sense, but that might lie in her nature. Her hair was of fire. Flames also flickered behind her eyelids, yellow and red like glowing coals. Her lips were as silky as flower petals, her skin pale, her fingernails sickles of pure fire.

She didn't have her heat under control, Winter had said. And in fact everywhere there was fire licking out of her body, her body itself seemed to waver and melt like a wax figure in the heat of August.

Vermithrax observed her a moment longer. Then he stretched out his left front paw and touched her with the greatest imaginable gentleness on the upper thigh.

His heart stopped racing.

He knew about her heat, yet he didn't
feel
it.

The Light,
he thought again.
The Stone Light is protecting me. I should he grateful to it and to that accursed Burbridge.

He pulled his paw back, waited for two or three breaths, then began a narrow loop around Summer's floating body, past the flickering fountain of her fiery locks. Her hair streamed out like an explosion of fireworks, forever frozen in time. Once, twice, he kept circling around
her until he was sure that he had cut through the invisible bands of the chain spell. Then he floated cautiously beside her and tried to lift her from her bed of heat.

She lay light as a feather between his forepaws and detached from her float with a slight jerk, as if he'd pulled a nail off a magnet. At the same moment the brightness around her dimmed, the shimmering of the air faded, the surroundings grew sharper. The heat ebbed perceptibly, he could literally see it. No one, no sphinx had thought it would ever be possible that there'd be a creature who could get to her here. The Stone Light, the power
behind
the power of the sphinxes, had deprived itself of the victory.

Vermithrax rose slowly upward, clutching Summer's thin body firmly. She looked undernourished, a little like Merle's friend Junipa. But with Summer it was not a sign of too little food or illness. Who could say how a season should look, her skin, her features? If Winter was a healthy example of his kind, then probably there was nothing wrong with Summer's body.

Her mind, however, was another matter.

Although Vermithrax had severed the bonds of the sphinx spell, Summer still showed no signs of awakening. She hung in his grasp like a doll, not moving. He wondered if her eyelids were at least fluttering, as is often the case with humans who are gradually awakening from unconsciousness. But Summer was
not
human. Anyway, during the steep flight it was hard for him to
lift her far enough away to be able to see her face.