The Stone Light (35 page)

She whirled around. Before her stood the wounded sphinx, holding Junipa in his huge hands. She looked even more fragile than before, like a toy in the claws of that beast.

She didn’t scream, she only whispered Merle’s name, and then she was utterly silent.

Vermithrax was about to shove Merle to one side to better get at the sphinx on the bark. But the creature shook his head, with effort, as if every movement cost him
hideous pain. Blood dripped from his head wound onto Junipa’s hair and froze solid.

I’ll tear the child to pieces,” he got out with difficulty, in Merle’s language, but with an accent that sounded as if his tongue were swollen; perhaps it actually was.

“Say nothing.”
The voice of the Queen sounded imploring.
“Let Vermithrax deal with it.”

But Junipa—, Merle began.

“He knows what to do.”

Merle’s eyes fastened on Junipa’s face. The girl’s fear seemed to freeze on her features. Only the mirror eyes remained cold and detached.

“Don’t come any nearer,” said the sphinx. “She will die.”

Vermithrax’s lion tail thrashed slowly from one side to the other, back and forth, again and again. A shrill squeal sounded as he extended his claws and the points scratched on the fuselage.

The sphinx’s situation was hopeless. In a fight he wouldn’t have been able to do anything against Vermithrax. And yet he armed himself in his own way: He held Junipa in his grip and used her like a shield. Her feet were dangling twenty inches off the surface.

Merle noticed that the sphinx was not standing securely. He had bent his right foreleg just enough that the ball of the paw no longer touched the snow. He was in pain and in despair. That made him unpredictable.

Merle forgot the cold, the icy wind, even her fear.
“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” she said to Junipa, not certain whether her voice would reach her friend. Junipa looked as if with each breath she was pulling back into herself a little deeper.

Vermithrax took a step toward the sphinx, who evaded him, grasping his hostage tightly.

“Stay where you are,” he said in a strained voice. The glow of the obsidian lion was mirrored in his eyes. He didn’t understand who or what was standing there before him: a mighty winged lion, who shone like freshly wrought iron—never before had the sphinx seen such a creature.

This time Vermithrax obeyed the demand and halted. “What is your name, sphinx?” he asked in a growl.

“Simphater.”

“Good, Simphater, then consider. If you harm a hair of the girl, I will kill you. You know that I can do it. So quickly that you won’t even feel it. But also slowly, if you make me angry.”

Simphater blinked. Blood was running into his left eye, but he hadn’t a hand free to wipe it away. “Stay where you are!”

“You already said that.”

Merle saw how every sinew and muscle in the sphinx’s arms strained. He changed his grip, grabbed Junipa by both her upper arms, and held her out in the air.

He’s going to tear her apart, she thought in a panic. He’ll simply break her in two!

“No,”
said the Queen without any real conviction.

He’s going to kill her. The pain is driving him mad.

“Sphinxes can tolerate much more pain than you humans.”

Vermithrax radiated endless patience. “Simphater, you’re a soldier, and I won’t try to lie to you. You know that I can’t let you go. Nevertheless, I have no interest in your death. You can fly this bark, and we want to get away from here. That’s very convenient, don’t you think?”

“Why the bark?” said Simphater with irritation. “We fought up there. You can fly. You don’t need me.”

“I don’t. But the girls. A flight on my back in this cold would kill them in a few minutes.”

Simphater’s blurry eyes wandered over Merle and the lion, then hovered over the dazzling white of the endless snow fields. “Did
you
do that?”

Vermithrax raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“The ice. It doesn’t snow in this desert … it never did before.”

“Not we,” said Vermithrax. “But we know who is responsible for it. And he is a powerful friend.”

Again the sphinx blinked. He seemed to be weighing whether Vermithrax was lying to him. Was the lion just trying to make him unsure? His tail switched back and forth, and a drop of sweat appeared on his forehead, despite the icy cold.

Merle held her breath. Suddenly Simphater nodded
almost imperceptibly and set Junipa down gently. She only realized what was happening to her when her feet touched the golden surface of the bark. Stumbling, she ran over to Merle. The two embraced each other, but Merle did not go below. She wanted to look the sphinx in the eye.

Vermithrax had not moved. He and Simphater stared at each other.

“You are keeping your word?” asked the sphinx, sounding almost astonished.

“Certainly. If you get us away from here.”

“And do not try any magic tricks,” Merle added, but now it was the voice of the Queen who spoke out of her. “I know the sphinx magic, and I will know if you try to use it.”

Simphater stared at Merle in surprise and seemed to be asking himself whether he’d underestimated the girl at the lion’s side.

No one was more astonished at her words than Merle herself, but she made no attempt to deny the Queen the use of her tongue—even though she’d found out that she could do it.

“No magic,” said the Queen, once more through Merle’s mouth. And then she added some words to it, which belonged neither to Merle’s vocabulary nor to that of any other human being. They belonged to the language of the sphinxes, and their import seemed to impress Simphater deeply. Once more he eyed Merle suspiciously,
then his expression changed to one of respect. He lowered his head and bowed humbly.

“I will do what you desire,” he said.

Junipa looked confused, but Vermithrax knew well who spoke from Merle. Better than any human he sensed the presence of the Queen, and Merle had asked herself more than once what constituted the bond between the spirit creature inside her and the obsidian lion.

“You get in first,” he said to Simphater, pointing to the hatch.

The sphinx nodded. His paws left red impressions in the snow.

A shrill cry resounded over the icy plain, so piercing that Merle and Junipa put their hands over their ears. The scream reverberated over the landscape, out to the scattered snow pyramids in the distance. The ice crust cracked, and at the edges of the steps above and below the bark, icicles broke off and bored six feet deeper into the snow.

Merle knew that sound.

The cry of a falcon.

Simphater froze.

Over the horizon appeared the outline of a gigantic raptor, many times higher than all the pyramids, feathered in gold and with wings so huge it looked as if he intended to embrace the world. When he spread them, they triggered a raging snowstorm.

Merle watched as the icy masses of the plain were whipped and whirled up to them as a white cloud wall; just before they reached the pyramid they lost their strength and collapsed. The gigantic falcon opened his beak and again let out the high scream, still louder this time, and now all around them the snow was in motion, trembling and vibrating as if there were an earthquake. Junipa clung to Merle, and Merle instinctively clutched at Vermithrax’s long mane.

Simphater lapsed into utter panic, shrank back with wide eyes, lost his balance on the smooth fuselage of the sunbark, and skittered over the edge into empty space, this time with much greater momentum than before. The next pyramid step did not stop him; he fell farther down, his long legs snapped, his head cracked several times on ice and stone, and the sphinx finally came to rest at the foot of the pyramid, many steps and yards below them, twisted so unnaturally that there could be no doubt that he was dead.

The falcon screamed for a last time, then he closed the wings in front of his body the way a magician closes his cape after a successful magic trick, hid himself behind them, and dissolved.

Moments later the horizon was empty and all was as before—with the exception of Simphater, who lay lifeless in the snow below them.

“Into the bark, quickly!” cried Vermithrax. “We must—”

“Leave?” asked someone above them.

On the next higher step stood a man, unclothed despite the cold. For a moment Merle believed she saw fine feathers on his body, but then they faded. Perhaps an illusion. His skin had once been painted golden, but now only a few smeared stripes of color were left. A fine-meshed netting of gold had been implanted in his bald scalp. It covered the entire back of his head and reached forward to his eyebrows, looking like the pattern of a chessboard.

They all recognized him again: Seth, the highest of the Horus priests of Egypt, personal confidant of the Pharaoh and second man in the hierarchy of the Empire.

He had flown out of the underworld in the form of a falcon after his failed attempt to assassinate Lord Light, the ruler of Hell. Vermithrax had followed the bird, and so they found the pyramid exit that brought them back to the surface.

“Without me you would have gotten nowhere,” said Seth, and yet it didn’t sound half as fear-inspiring as he probably intended.

The sight of the icy desert disconcerted him, just as it did all the others. At least he didn’t appear to be freezing, and Merle saw that the snow under his feet was melting. Not without reason was Seth counted the most powerful magician among the Pharaoh’s servants.

“Into the bark!” whispered Vermithrax to the girls. “Hurry up!”

Merle and Junipa rushed over to the hatch, but Seth’s voice halted them again.

“I don’t want to fight. Not now. And most certainly not here.”

“What then?” Merle’s voice trembled slightly.

Seth seemed to be considering. “Answers.” His hand included the breadth of the icy plain. “To all this.”

“We know nothing about it,” said Vermithrax.

“You claimed something different before. Or were you trying to deceive poor Simphater in his last moments? You know who’s responsible for this. You said he was your friend.”

“We are not interested in a quarrel with you either, Horus priest,” said Vermithrax. “But we are not your slaves.”

The priest was an enemy like no other, and it was not Vermithrax’s way to underestimate his opponent.

Seth smiled nastily. “You’re Vermithrax, right? Whom the Venetians in ancient times called traitor. You left your folk of the talking stone lions behind in Africa a long time ago to go to war against Venice. Don’t give me that thunderstruck look, lion—yes, I know you. And as for your not intending to be slaves: I have no desire to have a servant like you. Your kind is too dangerous and unpredictable. A painful experience we had to suffer with the rest of your people too. The Empire has ground their cadavers to sand in the corpse mills of Heliopolis and scattered, them on the banks of the Nile.”

Merle couldn’t have moved, even if she’d wanted to. Her limbs were frozen; even her heart seemed to stand still. She stared at Vermithrax, saw the anger, the hatred, the despair in his glowing lava eyes. He’d been driven by the hope of one day returning to his people ever since she’d known him.

“You lie, priest,” he said tonelessly.

“Maybe. Perhaps I am lying. But perhaps not.”

Vermithrax crouched to spring, but the Queen called through Merle’s mouth, “Don’t! If he is dead, we will never get away from here alive!”

For a moment it looked as though there was nothing that could hold Vermithrax back. Seth even took a step backward. Then, however, the lion got control of himself, but he maintained his ready-to-spring stance.

“I will find out if you spoke the truth, priest. And if the answer is yes, I will find you. You and all who are responsible for it.”

Seth smiled again. “Does that mean that we can now set personal feelings aside and come to the nub of our business? You tell me what is going on in Egypt—and I will take you away from here in the bark.”

Vermithrax was silent, but Merle said slowly, “Agreed.”

Seth winked at her, then looked again at the lion. “Have I your word, Vermithrax?”

The obsidian lion drew his front paw over the metal of
the bark. It left behind four finger-wide furrows, as deep as Merle’s index finger was long. He nodded, only once and very grimly.

Ground to sand in the corpse mills, echoed again in Merle’s thoughts. An entire people.
Could
that be at all true?

“Yes,”
said the Queen.
“This is the Empire. Seth is the Empire.”

Maybe he’s lying, she thought.

“Who knows?”

But you don’t believe it?

“Vermithrax will find out the truth sometime. What I believe is unimportant.”

Merle wanted to go to Vermithrax and embrace his powerful neck, reassure him, and weep with him. But the lion stood there as if turned to ice.

She motioned to Junipa and climbed after her down into the interior of the bark.