The Stone Light (2 page)

“Apparently nothing changed at all while I was locked up in the Campanile.” Vermithrax laughed. “The humans are still always complaining from morning till night about the weather. How can so many heads busy themselves with so many thoughts about something they can’t influence at all?”

Merle couldn’t think of an answer. Again the Queen made use of her voice. “Vermithrax! Back there, at the foot of this mountain … what is that?”

Merle swallowed, as if she could just choke down the unwelcome influence that was controlling her tongue. She immediately felt the Queen withdraw from her mouth, a feeling as if, for the blink of an eye, all the blood left her tongue and her cheeks.

“I see it too,” she said. “A flock of birds?”

The lion growled. “Quite large for a flock of birds. And much too massive.”

The dark shadow floating like a cloud over part of the mountain’s flank was sharply outlined. It might be several thousand yards away yet, and in comparison to the huge rock giant in the background, the thing darkly silhouetted against the slope didn’t seem particularly impressive. But even now she suspected that this impression would change if they were to come nearer to it. Or if the thing came to them.

“Hang on!” cried Vermithrax.

He lost altitude so abruptly that Merle felt as if her insides were being expelled through her ears. For a moment she felt like throwing up. She was about to snarl at the obsidian lion when she saw what had prompted him to undertake the maneuver.

A handful of tiny dots were whizzing around the large silhouette, bright spots that glowed in the light of the setting sun as if someone had sprinkled gold dust over a landscape painting.

“Sunbarks,”
said the Queen in Merle’s mind.

Now they’ve got us, Merle thought. They’ve blocked our way. Who would have guessed we’re still so important to them? Granted, she was the bearer of the Flowing Queen, the protecting spirit who lived in the waters of the lagoon and who saved Venice from the Egyptian conquerors. But
that was past now. The city was irrevocably in the tyrants’ power.

“It must be coincidence that we are meeting them,”
said the mind-voice of the Flowing Queen.
“It does not look as though they have noticed us.”

Merle had to agree she was right. The Egyptians couldn’t have overtaken them so quickly. And even if they’d succeeded in alerting a part of their armed forces, they certainly wouldn’t have been waiting for the fugitives so very visibly on the snow field of a glacier. “What are they doing here?” Merle asked.

“The big thing must be a collector. One of their flying mummy factories.”

Vermithrax now shot away over the top of a dense forest. Occasionally he had to avoid towering firs and spruces. But otherwise he was heading straight toward their adversary.

“Perhaps we should avoid it,” Merle said, trying not to sound too anxious. But in truth her heart was racing. Her legs felt as if they belonged to a rag doll.

So that was a collector. A real, actual collector. She hadn’t ever seen one of the Egyptian airships with her own eyes, and she would gladly have missed out on the experience. She knew what the collectors did, even
how
they did it, and she was only too painfully aware that each collector was under the command of one of the dreaded sphinx commandants of the Pharaoh.

Quite a dark outlook.

And yet it got worse.

“That is really a
crowd
of sunbarks flying around it,” said Vermithrax tonelessly.

Merle, too, could now make out that the golden dots were nothing other than the smallest flying units of the imperial fleet. Each of the sickle-shaped sunbarks had places for a troop of mummy soldiers, besides the high priest whose magic held the bark in the air and in motion. If the Egyptians should become aware of Vermithrax and his rider, the setting of the sun would be their only chance: The darker it grew, the clumsier the barks became until, at night, they finally became completely unusable.

But the side of the mountain was still flooded with bloody red; in the west, the sun was only half sunk behind the peak.

“Avoid it,” said Merle again, this time more urgently. “Why aren’t we making a wide arc around it?”

“If I am not mistaken,” said the Queen through Merle’s mouth, for the words were also addressed to the lion, “this collector is on the way to Venice, to take part in the great battle.”

“Assuming there is one,” said Merle.

“They will give up,” said Vermithrax. “The Venetians were never especially courageous. Present company excepted.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Vermithrax is right. There will probably not be any fighting at all. But who knows how the armies of the Empire will fall on the city and its inhabitants? Venice has led the Pharaoh around by the nose for more than thirty years, after all.”

“But that was you!”

“To save you.”

They had now come to within just a few hundred yards of the collector. The sunbarks were patrolling at a great height over them. The barks glowed red as the light of the sinking sun caught their golden armor. Merle’s only hope was that from above, the obsidian lion was invisible in the shadows among the treetops.

The collector was massive. It was in the form of a pyramid whose top point was cut off. Framed by a crenellated battlement, there was an extensive observation platform with several superstructures, which were arranged so that they were higher toward the middle and created a kind of point. Merle made out tiny figures behind the battlement.

The forest grew thinner as the land rose slightly. Now they could make out deep furrows in the forest floor, a labyrinth of protective trenches, which still, after all the years, had not been completely grown over. At one time a bitter battle had raged in this place.

“Here men are buried,”
said the Queen suddenly.

“What?”

“The land over which the collector hovers—there must have been a large number of dead buried there during the war. Otherwise it would not be hovering so steadily in one place.”

In fact, the massive body of the mummy factory was hanging completely motionless over a meadow on which the high grass bent in the evening wind. In another time, this could have been an idyllic picture, a place of rest and peace. But today the collector cast its threatening shadow over it. It floated just high enough over the meadow for a Venetian palazzo to have found room under it.

“I’m going to land,” said Vermithrax. “They’ll see us without the tree cover.”

No one contradicted him. The obsidian lion set himself down at the edge of the forest. Merle felt a hard jolt as his paws touched the ground. Now for the first time she became conscious of how very much her backside hurt from the long ride on the stone lion’s back. She tried to move, but it was almost impossible.

“Do not dismount,”
said the Queen.
“We might have to take off again in a hurry.”

Lovely prospect, Merle thought.

“It is beginning.”

“Yes … I see that.”

Vermithrax, who knew no more about the Empire and its methods than what Merle and the Queen had told him after they freed him from his tower prison in the middle
of the Piazza San Marco, let out a deep snarl. His mane stiffened. His whiskers suddenly stood out as straight as if they’d been drawn with a ruler.

It began with the leaves of the trees around them withering so fast that it seemed as if the autumn had decided to carry out its work a few months too early and within a few minutes. The foliage turned brown, curled, and gently fell from the branches. The fir tree under which they’d taken shelter lost all its needles, and from one moment to the next, Vermithrax and Merle were covered with a brown mantle.

Merle shook herself and blinked up toward the collector. They weren’t directly beneath it, Heaven forbid, but they were near enough to be able to see its entire underside.

The gigantic surface was suddenly covered with a network of crisscrossing dark yellow glowing stripes, with multifold angles and following no recognizable pattern. A round area in the center, half as large as the Piazza San Marco, was all that remained dark. Merle had to clutch Vermithrax’s obsidian mane more tightly when suddenly the ground trembled, as in a strong earthquake. Very close by, several trees were uprooted and tipped over, tearing out other trees as they fell and crashing to the ground in the midst of a thick cloud of flying dirt and needles. The air was so filled with dry splinters and bits of the withered foliage that, for a moment, Merle found it hard to breathe.
When her eyes stopped tearing, she saw what had happened.

The field over which the mummy factory hovered was gone. The soil was churned up as if by an army of invisible giant moles. The glowing net was no longer attached to the underside of the collector, but was unraveled into an immense number of glittering ropes of light and hooks, no one formed like the next. They were all aimed downward, approaching the ravaged ground and pulling something out of it.

Bodies. Gray, fallen-in corpses.

“So that’s how they get their mummy soldiers,” whispered Vermithrax, and his voice was faint with the horror of it.

Merle pulled at his mane. She had averted her eyes, could no longer look at what was taking place before her. “Let’s get out of here!”

“No!”
said the Flowing Queen.

But Vermithrax had the same feelings as Merle. Just get away from there. Away from the suction of the collector before they themselves ended on one of the glittering hooks and were pulled up into the mummy factory, where slaves and machines would turn them into something that was satisfied by a
different
kind of life, of submissiveness and obedience and the will to kill.

“Hold on!” he roared. The Queen objected loudly in Merle’s voice, but the obsidian lion paid no attention to
her. In no time his wings raised them into the air. In a daring stratagem, he turned to the east, against the fast-approaching darkness. At the same time he shot forward, careless of all the sunbarks and high priests who might become aware of them at this moment.

Merle clung so tightly to Vermithrax’s coat that her arms vanished up to the elbows in his mane. She bent deep over his neck, to offer less wind resistance, but also to avoid the shots of the Egyptians. She hardly dared look up, but when she finally did, she saw that half a dozen sunbarks had detached from their formation around the collector and taken up the chase.

Vermithrax’s plan was as simple as it was suicidal. He had surmised that in the massive body of the collector there must be weapons that could easily shoot a flying lion from the sky. But if he got close to the vicinity of the sunbarks, the commanders on board the collector would perhaps think twice about shooting at a target in the midst of their own people.

It wouldn’t work, Merle thought. Vermithrax’s plan would have been a good one if they were dealing with ordinary opponents like the ones the winged lion knew from his own times, when he was not yet a prisoner of the Venetian City Guard. But the sunbarks were occupied by mummy soldiers, each of them only too easily replaced, and they would even sacrifice one or two priests.

Vermithrax cursed when he came to the same conclusion.
Only a little way ahead of them, a wooden bolt the length of a man whizzed through the air past them, fired from one of the ports in the collector body. The mummy factory itself was too cumbersome for a pursuit, but its weapons were vicious and long-range.

Merle felt sick, worse than ever as Vermithrax kept doubling back and maneuvering turns that she would not have believed possible for his heavy stone body. Up and down, often in such quick succession that Merle soon lost any feeling for over and under. Even the Queen was silent with concern.

Once, Merle looked back. They were now almost at the level of the observation platform. Several figures stood behind the battlement. Merle could see their robes and their grim faces. High priests, she guessed.

Among them was one who caught her eye especially. He was a good head taller than the others and wore a ballooning cloak that looked as if it were woven of pure gold. His hairless skull was covered with a network of gold-colored filaments, like a jeweler’s engraving on a brooch.

“The Pharaoh’s vizier,”
whispered the Flowing Queen in her head.
“His name is Seth. He is the highest priest of the cult of Horus.”

“Seth? Isn’t that the name of an Egyptian god?”

“The priests of Horus have never been known for their humility.”

Merle had the feeling that the eyes of the man were boring into her forehead across the distance. For a heartbeat it seemed to her that the Queen groaned in pain inside her.

“Everything all right?” she asked.

“Look away! Please … not into his eyes.”

At the same moment a whole swarm of bolts rushed over their heads. Two of them struck sunbarks that were quite close to the lion. Smoke billowed from one as it went down in a tailspin of jerky spirals. The other fell like a stone and smashed on the ground in showers of steel splinters. The rest of the sunbarks pulled back a little so as not to be caught in the hail of shots from the collector.

This was the chance Vermithrax had been waiting for.

With a wild cry he plunged down. On his back, Merle screeched as the ground shot up toward them. She already saw them lying smashed beside the debris of the bark.

But a few yards over the rocks, Vermithrax pulled out of the dive, swept across the ground and the edge of a wall of rock, then sank down deep again, behind the wall and out of the collector’s line of fire. Now they had to deal only with the four remaining barks, which would follow them over the rock wall at any moment.

The Flowing Queen had recovered from the penetrating eyes of the vizier.
“I know now why I chose Vermithrax for our flight.”

“Because you had no other choice.” Merle hardly
heard her own words; the headwind tore them from her lips like scraps of paper.

The Queen laughed in her mind, which was a strange feeling, for it seemed to Merle as though she herself was laughing, entirely without her own effort.