The Glass Word (5 page)

They took turns reporting what had happened and were not interrupted by the others one single time. Even when Eft told what goal she'd named to the witch, no one argued.

Egypt, then,
thought Serafin. And in an absurd, nightmarish way, it felt
right.

An hour or two later the water began to boil, and something mighty rose from the sea.

T
HE
H
EART OF THE
E
MPIRE

T
HE SUNBARK FLEW LOW, FOLLOWING THE COURSE OF THE
frozen Nile. It was buffeted by the winter winds, but at least no snow was falling, which could have forced them down.

Merle gazed out through the window slits. Below them the land lay dazzlingly white. The once green banks of the Nile hardly contrasted with the desert anymore—everything was buried under a thick layer of snow. Here and there a frozen palm grove protruded from the ice, and sometimes she saw ruins of huts, the roofs crushed by the weight of the snow.

Where are all the people? she wondered.

“Frozen to death, perhaps,”
the Queen said in her thoughts.

Only perhaps? Merle asked.

“If the Pharaoh had not already incorporated them into his mummy armies.”

You think he would have completely wiped out his own people to fill his army?

“You must not think of the Pharaoh as an Egyptian. He was a devil, even when he was alive more than four thousand years ago, but he has not been a human since the high priests awakened him. Whether the people who lived here on the Nile were ever his own is no longer of any consequence. Probably he saw no difference between the people here and those in all the other lands he conquered.”

A land without people? But then who is he waging this war for?

“Not for the Egyptian people, that is certain. Perhaps not even for himself. You must not forget the influence of the priests of Horus on him.”

Junipa was leaning on the wall of the bark beside Merle, her knees drawn up and her arms around them. Merle felt that Junipa was observing her, sometimes openly, sometimes covertly. Seth had fallen into a kind of trance after the bark's takeoff, which was probably necessary to steer the flight. Merle had observed him for a long while; then she'd decided to use the opportunity to tell Junipa everything that had happened since they'd parted
at Arcimboldo's in Venice. The girl with the mirror eyes listened, passively at first, then with increasing interest. But she said nothing, asked no questions, and now Junipa was sitting there, and Merle could virtually feel what was going on in her friend's mind, as if Junipa were waiting for a sign of the Flowing Queen.

Merle's eyes wandered over to Seth, who sat on a pedestal in the front part of the bark, his face turned toward the inner space. A vein stood out on his forehead and disappeared beneath the golden network. Nevertheless, Merle thought she felt him groping toward her with invisible feelers. Once before, at their first encounter, she'd had the feeling that he was looking straight into her interior—and that he saw who was hidden there.

She wondered whether the Queen shared her perceptions, but this time she received no answer. The thought that even the Flowing Queen could be afraid of the most powerful of the Horus priests frightened her.

Seth was steering the bark by the power of his thoughts. The golden vehicle floated almost one hundred feet over the pack ice of the Nile, not very fast, for the cover of snow clouds over them was unbroken and no sunbeam pierced it. The diffuse daylight was enough to keep the bark in the air, but it wasn't strong enough to speed it up.

Merle had assumed that there would be strange equipment inside the bark and a sort of console like the ones in
the steamboats that crossed the Venetian lagoons. But there was nothing like that. The interior was empty, the metal walls bare. They hadn't even installed benches—comfort was of no value to the undead mummy troops usually transported in the barks. The airship had all the charm of a prison cell.

Vermithrax stood right in front of Seth and kept his eyes on the priest. He'd folded his wings, but his claws were extended the entire time. His lava glow filled the interior of the bark with radiant brightness, which was reflected from the metal walls. The golden glow burned in Merle's eyes, even penetrating through the lids; she felt as if she'd been enclosed in amber.

Junipa had her eyes closed, but Merle knew that she could see anyway. With her mirror eyes she looked out through the lids, in the light as well as in darkness, and if Professor Burbridge had told the truth, she was also able to see into other worlds with them. That was more than Merle could imagine. More than she
wanted
to imagine.

The task of telling Seth the truth about the new ice age had fallen to Merle, of course. Vermithrax would rather have had his eyeteeth pulled than to fulfill a wish for the hated priest.

And so Merle had told the story of Winter, the mysterious albino whose life she'd saved in Hell. Winter, who'd insisted he was a season become flesh, searching for his missing love, Summer. She'd vanished years ago,
he said, and since then there'd no longer been any real summer in the world, no July heat and no brooding sun in August. In Hell, Winter was only an ordinary human, but he'd told how on the surface he brought ice and snow with him, under which he buried the land. Winter could touch no living creature without freezing that being to ice in an instant. Only Summer, his beloved Summer, withstood this curse and nullified it with her singeing heat. Only those two could lie in each other's arms without killing one another, and it was their fate to belong to each other forever.

But now Summer was gone and Winter was searching for her.

Professor Burbridge—or Lord Light, as he was called as the ruler of Hell—must have given Winter a clue that lured him here to Egypt for the first time in thousands of years. In his wake, snowstorms had smoothed out the dunes and deadly ice lay over the desert.

There was no doubt that Winter had been here. Just like Merle, he'd left Hell through the steps inside the pyramid. But where did his path lead? Toward the north, apparently, for Seth was steering the bark northward, and as yet there was no end to the snow.

Seth had listened to her report and not interrupted her once. What was going on in his head remained his secret. But he'd kept his word: He'd gotten the bark into the air and so saved their lives. He'd even succeeded in producing
a dry warmth inside the airship, which came from the gold layer on the walls.

“He knows more about Winter than he is admitting,”
said the Queen.

Where do you get that? Merle asked in her thoughts. Her ability to speak soundlessly with the Queen had improved markedly in the days since their descent into Hell. She always found it easier to form the words with her lips, but she'd gotten quite good at the other way too, when she concentrated.

“He is the second man of the Empire, the deputy of the Pharaoh,”
said the Queen.
“If the Egyptians have something to do with Summer's disappearance, he must know about it.”

Summer is here?

“Well, Winter is in Egypt. And he will have a good reason for it.”

Merle looked over at Seth once again. With his closed eyes and relaxed facial expression he had lost something of his external menace. All the same, she did not for one second harbor the illusion that he could have anything else in mind except killing them all at the end of their journey. Their lives would depend on Vermithrax's getting to him first. The battle between the lion and the priest was unavoidable.

Seth's words had hit Vermithrax in a place that was vulnerable, despite all his strength. The words had sown
doubt in him, doubt in that one bright spot that had given him hope of a better future. The reunion with his people, whom he'd long ago left behind somewhere in Africa, had always been the goal for Vermithrax, the end point of his journey. And now he was nagged by the fear that Seth might have spoken the truth, that the talking stone lion people had been extinguished by the Empire.

Merle turned to the Flowing Queen again: Do you think that's true?

“The Empire would be capable of it.”

But the lions are so strong….

“Other peoples were too. And they were more numerous than the free lions. Nevertheless, every single one of them was killed or enslaved.”

Merle looked out the window. Who were they fighting for, actually, if there was no one left out there in the world? In an absurd way, that linked them to the Pharaoh: They were all engaged in a battle whose real goal they had long lost sight of.

Seth opened his eyes. “We'll be there soon.”

“Where?” asked Merle.

“At the Iron Eye.”

“What's that?” Merle had assumed that he was taking them to Heliopolis, the Pharaoh's capital city. Perhaps even to Cairo or Alexandria.

“The Iron Eye is the fortress of the sphinxes. From there they watch over Egypt.” His tone was disparaging,
and for the first time it occurred to Merle that Seth might be ruled by other motives than the absolute will for power. “The Iron Eye is in the Nile delta. It will come into sight soon.”

Merle turned to her window slit again. If they were that far north, they must already have flown over Cairo. Why hadn't she seen anything of it? The snow was piled high, but not high enough to bury a city of millions of people.

It must be, then, that someone had leveled Cairo. Had there possibly been some resistance by the Egyptian people after the Pharaoh and the priests of Horus had seized power? The idea that Cairo and all its inhabitants had been annihilated took Merle's breath away.

Junipa's voice snatched her from her thoughts. “What do you want with the sphinxes?” she asked the priest.

Seth looked at Junipa for a long moment, expressionless. Then he smiled suddenly. “You are a clever child. No wonder they put the mirror eyes in you. Your friends were probably asking themselves what
they
were supposed to do in the Iron Eye. But you ask what drives
me
there. And that's just what it comes down to, isn't it?”

Merle wasn't sure she understood what he was talking about. She glanced at her friend, but Junipa did not betray what was in her mind by any emotion. Only when she spoke again did Merle understand where she was going—and that in fact she was right about it.

“You don't like the sphinxes,” Junipa said. “I can see that.”

For a fraction of a second Seth appeared surprised. Then he immediately had himself under control again. “Possibly.”

“You are not here because the sphinxes are your friends. You are not going to ask the sphinxes for help, to kill us.”

“Do you really believe I need help for that?”

“Yes,” said Vermithrax; it was the first time he'd spoken in hours. “I certainly do believe that, utterly.”

The two antagonists fixed each other in a stare, but neither went any further. Not here, not now.

Again it was Junipa who eased the tension. Her gentle, infinitely relaxed voice groped for Seth's attention. “You tried to kill Lord Light, and you returned from Hell into a land that has turned into a desert of ice. Why didn't you make your way to the court of the Pharaoh first or to the temple of the Horus priests? Why straight to the stronghold of the sphinxes? That is quite remarkable, I think.”

“And what, in your opinion, might all that mean, little mirror maiden?”

“A fire in your heart,” she said enigmatically.

Merle stared at Junipa before her eyes met those of the obsidian lion. For a moment, amazement drove the coldness out of Vermithrax's
eyes.

Seth tilted his head. “Fire?”

“Love. Or hate.” Junipa's mirror eyes glowed in the golden shine of the lion. “More likely hate.”

The priest was silent, thinking.

Junipa spoke again: “Vengeance, I think. You hate the sphinxes, and you are here to destroy them.”

“By all the gods!”
murmured the Flowing Queen in Merle's mind.

Vermithrax was still listening intently, and his eyes moved from Junipa back to Seth. “Is that true?”

The priest of Horus paid no attention to the lion. Not even Merle, whom he'd observed constantly before, appeared to have any importance for him now. It was as if he were alone in the bark with Junipa.

“You are actually an astonishing creature, little girl.”

“My name is Junipa.”

“Junipa,” he repeated slowly. “Quite astonishing.”

“You're no longer the right hand of the Pharaoh, are you? You lost everything when you didn't succeed in killing Lord Light down there.” Junipa thoughtfully turned a strand of her white-blond hair between thumb and forefinger. “I know that I'm right. Sometimes I see not only the surface but also the heart of the matter.”

Seth sighed deeply. “The Pharaoh betrayed the Horus priests. He gave me the commission to murder Lord Light. The sphinxes prophesied to Amenophis that someone would come out of Hell and kill him. Therefore he intended that I should kill Lord Light—and best that I
should also die while doing it. Amenophis had all my priests taken prisoner and threatened to kill them if my mission was not successful.”