by Kai Meyer
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.
KAI MEYER is the author of The Water Minor, the first book in The Dark Reflections Trilogy. The Water Minor was a Book Sense Pick., a School Library Journal Best Book., a Locus Magazine Recommended Read, and a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age, and received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal. Kai Meyer is the author of many bestselling books for young adults in his native Germany, and his books are published in more than thirty countries. For more information please visit his website at www.kaimeyer.com.
ELIZABETH D. CRAWFORD is the distinguished translator of the Batchelder Award—winning novels The Robber and Me by Josef Holub and Crutches by Peter Hartling. She lives in Orange, Connecticut.
