The Glass Word (6 page)

“Now,” said Vermithrax with pleasure, “you are ruined. My congratulations.”

Seth glared at him, but he made no reply. Instead he continued, “I am certain that Amenophis already knows that Lord Light is still alive.” He lowered his eyes, and Merle almost wished she could feel pity for him. “My priests are now dead. The cult of Horus exists no more. I am the only one left. And the sphinxes have taken our place at the side of the Pharaoh. It was planned thus from the beginning: We should awaken Amenophis again and lay the foundations of the Empire. The sphinxes are the ones who are now harvesting the fruits of all our labors. They waited in the background until the time was ripe to draw the Pharaoh to their side. They got him to betray us. The sphinxes used Amenophis, and they used
us.
We were manipulated without knowing it. Or, no, that's not right. Others warned me, but I threw their advice to the winds. I didn't want to believe that the sphinxes were playing a false game with the Empire. But it was always going toward one thing: The Empire conquers the world, and the sphinxes take over the Empire. They made us into their tools, and I was the most gullible of all, because I closed my eyes to the truth. My priests had to pay the price for my mistake.”

“And now you are on the way to the sphinxes to avenge them,” said Junipa.

Seth nodded.
“That,
at least, I can do.”

“My heart is quite heavy,”
the Queen remarked sarcastically.

Merle paid no attention to her. “How do you intend to annihilate the sphinxes?”

Seth appeared a little shocked at his own openness. He, the most powerful of the Horus priests, destroyer of countless lands and slaughterer of entire peoples, had openly spoken his thoughts to two children and an embittered stone lion.

“I don't know yet,” he said after a moment of thoughtful silence. “But I will find a way.”

Vermithrax snorted scornfully, but not as loudly as he would probably have done
before
Seth's avowal. The priest's candor had surprised him, too, even impressed him a little.

Nevertheless, no one made the mistake of considering Seth an ally. If it meant an advantage for him, he would sacrifice all of them at the first opportunity. This man had extinguished tens of thousands with a wave of his hand, had burned cities to the ground with a brief command, and desecrated the cemeteries of entire nations in order to make the bodies into mummy soldiers.

Seth was no ally.

He was the devil himself.

“Good,”
said the Flowing Queen.
“And I was beginning to think he was going to wind all of you around his finger with his entertaining little tragedy.”

Merle grasped Junipa's hand. “What more do you know about him?” she asked, disregarding Seth's blazing look.

The mirror eyes reflected Vermithrax's golden glow with such intensity that Merle's image in them glowed like an insect in a candle flame. “Seth is a bad man,” said Junipa, “but the sphinxes are infinitely worse.”

Seth gave a slight, scornful bow.

“That will look good on your tombstone,” said Vermithrax grimly.

“I will order that it be chiseled out of your flank,” returned the priest.

Vermithrax scraped one of his paws across the floor but refused to be drawn into another battle of words. He preferred a battle with sharp claws to such subtleties.

Merle regarded Junipa with growing concern for a long moment, but then her eyes strayed to the window—and beyond it the monstrosity that rose over the delta of ice.

“Is
that
the Iron Eye?”

Seth didn't look out, keeping his expressionless gaze on Merle. No one needed his confirmation. They all knew the answer.

Junipa also pressed her face against the narrow glass. Ice patterns had formed around the edges of the windows, finely branching fingers that reached toward her mirror eyes.

It looked like a mountain, a pointed cone of ice and snow, an unnatural pucker in the flat landscape, as if someone had bunched the horizon together like a piece of paper. As they came closer, Merle could make out details. The image in front of them was pyramid-shaped, but with steep slopes, cut off at the top as if someone had struck off the point with a scythe, and there, in place of the point, peeling itself out of the snowdrifts, was a collection of towers and gables, balconies, balustrades, and arcades of columns. Whatever was hidden in the interior of the Iron Eye, that up there was the
true
eye. It seemed to Merle like the crow's nest of a gigantic ship, which could look out over the country and perhaps the entire Empire. The colossus—was it of steel or stone, or really made of iron?—appeared to Merle functional, without decoration, without any useless flourishes. But the upper buildings with which the fortress culminated sparkled in fantastic elegance: playful buildings with much decoration, narrow bridges, and extravagantly framed windows. If there was a place where the sphinxes really
lived—
not reigned, not commanded—then it was there at the tip of the Iron Eye.

The fortress was high, perhaps higher than the sky; but no, it was just that the cloud cover was hanging so gray and heavy over it, as it had everywhere on their journey. All-powerful the Iron Eye might be, but not supernatural, not heavenly.

He is a bad man, but the sphinxes are infinitely worse.
Merle heard Junipa's words about Seth once more, a whispering echo in her thoughts.

The bark circled in a wide arc around the whole area. Merle was not sure what Seth was intending by that. Did he mean to impress them with a final glorification of his magic powers? Or did he want them to see the power of the sphinxes along with the fortress? A warning?

Finally he guided the bark toward one of the countless openings in the south side of the eye, horizontal slits in the snow-covered white of the steep side. As they approached, Merle could see a whole squadron of sun-barks inside.

A dozen reconnaissance craft circled around the fortress, keeping the frozen arms of the river delta under surveillance. Yet their movements were sluggish, the cloudy sky having robbed the dreaded sunbarks of their agility. The birds of prey had turned into lame ducks.

“What are you going to do now?” Merle asked.

Seth closed his eyes again, concentrating on the landing. “I must land the bark in the hangar.”

“But they'll see us when we disembark.”

“That's not my problem.”

Vermithrax took a step toward Seth. “It could easily become yours.”

Once more the priest opened his eyes, but his gaze was directed toward Junipa, not at the lion who threatened him. “I could try to land up on the platform. The patrols
will see it, but if we have any luck, we would already have disappeared between the buildings by that time.”

“Why is he risking his life for us?”
the Queen asked mistrustfully.

“That's a trick,” growled Vermithrax also.

Seth shrugged, now with his eyes closed again. “Do you have a better suggestion?”

“Take us away from here, now,” said the lion.

“And the truth you are seeking?” Seth smiled. “Where else will you find it?”

Vermithrax was silent then. Merle and Junipa said nothing more either. They had the choice between being set down in the snow again or hiding somewhere in the Iron Eye until they'd agreed on a reasonable plan.

Just before the hangar opening, the bark swerved, rose, and floated upward in a broad spiral. Merle tried to keep the patrols in sight, but her vision was limited by the narrow window slits, and she could make out only a single flying sickle in the distance. Finally she gave up. She had to resign herself to the fact that at the moment her life lay in Seth's hands alone.

The bark needed several minutes to reach its target. Merle turned to the other side of the airship so that she could look at the buildings more closely. Thick caps of snow lay on all the roofs, balconies, and projections, and the vacant edge of the platform was so deeply snowed in that Merle questioned whether they could leave the bark
at all there. It would be next to impossible to run away from their opponents in the deep snow.

Seth let the sunbark sink to the ground. It landed gently on the snow, accompanied by the crunching and snapping of the icy crust. The first buildings were more than twenty yards away from them. Through the window slits Merle saw narrow, deep lanes between the buildings. Considering the numerous roofs and towers, there must be a real labyrinth of lanes and streets in there.

Involuntarily Merle thought of Serafin. Of how, as a master thief, he would have known how best to move inconspicuously through such a maze of streets.

Of how very much she missed him.

“Get out of here!” Seth's voice wiped Serafin's face from her thoughts. “Quick,
get moving!”

And then she ran. With Junipa by the hand. Occasionally without her too. Then with her again. Stumbling. Freezing. Without daring to look up, for fear she might see a bark diving down at her.

Only when they'd taken cover behind a wall, one after the other and even Seth and Vermithrax almost harmoniously side by side, did Merle dare breathe again.

“What now?” The lion was staring tensely at the edge of the platform, where the glittering snow field ended abruptly in front of the gray of the cloud background.

“You can go where you want to.” Seth cast a sideways look first at Merle, then at Junipa. It didn't escape Merle
how piercingly he kept examining Junipa, before in the bark and now here outside, and she didn't like it at all.

Junipa herself didn't notice. She had placed a hand flat on the wall of the building, and now a suppressed groan came from her throat. With a jerk she pulled her arm back and stared at her palm—it was red as fire, and on the palm glowed droplets of blood.

“Iron,” said Vermithrax, while Merle bent over Junipa's hand worriedly. “The walls are actually made of iron.”

Seth smiled to himself.

The lion sniffed a finger's breadth away from the wall. “Don't touch! The cold will make your skin stick to it.” And then he seemed to remember that Junipa had already made exactly that mistake. “Everything all right?” he asked in her direction.

Merle had used her sleeve to blot the blood from Junipa's hand. It wasn't much, and it didn't keep flowing. Junipa was lucky. Except in a few places where the thin outer layer of skin had peeled off and was still stuck to the iron, she wasn't injured. In a normal person it would have taken one or two days until she could clench her fist again, but Junipa carried the Stone Light in her. Merle had seen with her own eyes how quickly Junipa's wounds healed.

“It'll be all right,” she said softly.

Seth shoved Merle aside, took Junipa's hand in his, whispered something, and then let it go again. Afterward the redness paled, and the edges of the shredded skin had closed.

Merle stared at the hand. Why did he do that, she thought. Why is he helping us?

“Not us,”
said the Flowing Queen.
“Junipa.”

What does he want from her?

“I do not know.”

Merle wasn't sure she wanted to believe her. The Queen still had too many secrets from her, and if she thought about it carefully, new riddles were constantly appearing. Merle didn't even take the trouble to hide these thoughts from her invisible guest. The Queen might as well know that she didn't trust her.

“Seth is playing a double game,”
said the Queen. Again mistrust rose in Merle. Was the Queen trying to divert attention from herself?

The priest had turned away from the little group and hastened, stooping, through the snow to a door that led into the interior of the building: a high tower with a flat roof, whose upper surface was covered with a bizarre pattern of ice tracery. At first look, it wasn't possible to see that under the crust of frost was concealed polished metal.

“Wait!” Vermithrax called after the Horus priest, but Seth acted as if he hadn't heard the lion. Just before the door he stopped and looked behind him briefly.

“I don't need the extra baggage of children and
animals.”
The way he emphasized the word was an open challenge. “Do what you want, but don't run after me.”

Merle and Junipa exchanged a look. It was too cold out
here, the wind was as cutting as broken glass. They had to get inside the fortress, no matter what Seth thought about it.

With two sliding steps Vermithrax was beside the priest and shoved him aside, a bit more roughly than necessary. When he noticed that the door was barred, he pushed it in with a blow of his paw. Merle realized that the lock had broken and the door was made of wood. Only the outer surface was overlaid with a reflective metal alloy. Perhaps the walls were made the same way and were not really of massive iron, as she'd supposed until now. She wasn't at all sure if ordinary iron could reflect like that; probably it was some other metal. Real iron existed only in the name of the fortress.

“That was certainly discreet,” Seth observed mockingly as he walked past Vermithrax into the interior of the building. Beyond lay a short corridor, which led into a stairwell.

Everything was silvery and reflective, the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Inside, the mirrors were no longer of metal but of glass. They saw themselves reflected in the walls of the passages, clear as glass, without any noticeable distortions. Since the mirror walls on both sides of the corridors lay opposite each other, their likeness continued into infinity, a whole army of Merles, Junipas, Seths, and obsidian lions.

Vermithrax's glow shone in the multiplication as brightly as a sun, a whole chain of suns, and what had been
quite useful to them up till now—a constant source of light, entirely without lamps or torches—became a treacherous alarm signal to anyone who approached them.

The stairs were wider than in a human building. The intervals had to fit the four lion paws of a sphinx, and the height of the individual steps was also enormous. For Vermithrax, however, the unusual dimensions were an advantage, and so he took Merle and Junipa on his back and observed with satisfaction how Seth was soon sweating with exertion.