The Glass Word

by Kai Meyer

  The Glass Word

  Also by Kai Meyer

  The Dark Reflections Trilogy

  The Water Mirror

  The Stone Light

  The Wave Walkers Trilogy

  Pirate Curse

  Pirate Emperor

  MARGARET K. MCELDERRY BOOKS

  Margaret K. McElderry Books

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  English language translation copyright © 2008 by Elizabeth D. Crawford

  Glaserne Wort: Text © 2002 by Kai Meyer

  Original German edition © 2002 Loewe Verlag GmbH, Bindlach

  Published by arrangement with Loewe Verlag

  First U.S. edition, 2008

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Book design by Ann Zeak

  The text for this book is set in Stempel Garamond.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Meyer, Kai.

  [Gläserne wort]

  The glass word / Kai Meyer; translated by Elizabeth D. Crawford.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.—(Dark reflections; bk. 3)

  Translation of: Das gläserne wort.

  Summary: While Merle, Junipa, and the great flying stone lion accompany an Egyptian high priest to the fortress of the powerful sphinx, Serafin and Eft voyage deep beneath the ocean to ask the help of a sea witch in freeing Venice from the Pharoah and his mummy warriors.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-689-87791-9 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 0-689-87791-9 (hardcover)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0841-3

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  www.simonpeter.com

  [1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Animals, Mythical—Fiction. 3. Orphans—Fiction. 4. Mirrors—Fiction. 5. Fantasy.] I. Crawford, Elizabeth D. II. Title.

  PZ7.M57171113Gla 2008

  [Fic]—dc22

  2006033185

  CONTENTS

  1 ICE AND TEARS

  2 UNDERSEA

  3 THE HEART OF THE EMPIRE

  4 PIRATES

  5 BACK TO THE LIGHT

  6 HER TRUE NAME

  7 THE ABDUCTION

  8 AMENOPHIS

  9 SPHINX SPLINTERS

  10 THE ONLY WAY

  11 THE SON OF THE MOTHER

  12 SNOWMELT

  13 LA SERENISSIMA

  ICE AND TEARS

  THE PYRAMIDS ROSE OUT OF DEEP SNOW.

  Around them stretched the Egyptian desert, buried under the mantle of a new ice age. Its sand hills were frozen stiff, its dunes piled high with drifts of snow. Instead of heat waves, ice crystals danced over the plain in swirling wind gusts that revolved a few times and feebly collapsed again.

  Merle was crouching in the snow on one of the upper steps of the pyramid, with Junipa’s head resting in her lap. The girl’s mirror eyes were closed, the lids trembling as though behind them a few beetles were struggling to get free. Ice crystals had caught in Junipa’s eyelashes and eyebrows and made them both seem even lighter. With her white skin and her smooth, pale blond hair she looked like a porcelain doll, even without the hoarfrost that was gradually covering both girls: fragile and a little sad, as if she were always thinking of a tragic loss in her past.

  Merle was miserably cold: Her limbs trembled, her fingers shook, and every breath she took felt as if she were sucking ground glass into her lungs. Her head ached, but she didn’t know if it was because of the cold or what she’d endured on their flight out of Hell.

  A flight that had brought them straight here. To Egypt. In the desert. Where the sand and dunes were buried under a three-foot-deep layer of snow.

  Junipa murmured something and frowned, but still she didn’t open her eyes. Merle didn’t know what would happen when Junipa finally awoke. Her friend was no longer herself since her heart had been replaced with a fragment of the Stone Light when she was in Hell. In the end Junipa had tried to turn Merle over to her enemies. The Stone Light, that incomprehensible power in the center of Hell, held her firmly in its grip.

  She was still unconscious, but when she woke up … Merle didn’t want to think about it. She’d fought with her friend once, and she wouldn’t do it again. She was at the end of her strength. She didn’t want to fight anymore, not against Junipa, not against the Lilim down below in Hell, and also not against the henchmen of the Egyptian Empire up here. Merle’s courage and determination were exhausted, and she only wanted to sleep. She leaned back, relaxed, and waited for the frosty wind to rock her into an icy slumber.

  “No!”

  The Flowing Queen roused Merle from her stupor. The voice in her head was familiar to her and at the same time infinitely strange. As strange as the being who’d installed herself inside her and ever since had accompanied her every thought, her every step.

  Merle shook herself and marshaled her last reserves. She must survive!

  She quickly raised her head and looked up at the sky.

  A bitter battle was still raging up there.

  Her companion, Vermithrax, the winged lion of stone, was engaged in a daredevil air duel with one of the sunbarks of the Egyptian Empire. Vermithrax’s black obsidian body had glowed ever since his bath in the Stone Light, as if someone had poured him from molten lava. Now the lion traced a glowing trail in the sky, like a shooting star.

  Merle watched as Vermithrax again rammed the wobbling sunbark from above, fastened himself to the sickle-shaped aircraft, and remained sitting on top of it. His wings settled on the left and right of the fuselage, which was about three times as long as a Venetian gondola. The craft rapidly lost altitude under the lion’s mighty weight, rushing toward the ground, toward the pyramid—and toward Merle and Junipa!

  Merle finally snapped out of her trance. It was as if the cold had laid an armor plate of ice around her, which she now burst with a single jerk. She leaped up, seized the unconscious Junipa under the arms, and pulled her through the snow.

  They were on the upper third of the pyramid. If the sunbark’s crash shattered the stone, they hadn’t a chance. An avalanche of stone blocks would pull them with it into the interior of the structure.

  Vermithrax looked up for the first time and saw where the bark’s tumbling flight was heading. The air resounded with a sharp crack as he pulled his wings apart and tried to steer the bark’s descent. But the vehicle was too heavy for him. It continued on its downward course, straight toward the side of the pyramid.

  Vermithrax roared Merle’s name, but she didn’t take the time to look up. She was pulling Junipa backward along the stone step. She had to pull her foot out of deep snow with every step, and she was in constant danger of stumbling. She knew that she wouldn’t be able to stand up again once she fell down. Her strength was as good as used up.

  A shrill howling pierced Merle’s ears as the sunbark came nearer—an arrow point aimed at her by Fate; there was hardly any doubt that it would knock her into kingdom come.

  “Junipa,” she gasped out, “you have to help me….”

  But Junipa didn’t move, though behind her closed lids there was twitching and trembling. But for those signs of life, Merle might as well have been dragging a corpse through the snow, for Junipa no longer had a heart to beat. Only stone.

  “Merle!” Vermithrax roared again. “Stay where
you are!”

  She heard him, but she didn’t react and had taken two more steps before the words got through to her.

  Stay where she was? What the devil—

  She looked back, saw the bark—so close!—saw Vermithrax on the fuselage with outspread wings, which the headwind was trying to blow backward, and recognized what the lion had realized a moment before she did.

  The sunbark wobbled even more, swerved from its original trajectory, and was now rushing toward the opposite edge of the pyramid’s side, just where Merle had been trying to get herself and Junipa to safety.

  It was pointless to turn around. Instead, Merle let go of Junipa, threw herself over her, buried her face in her arms, and awaited the impact.

  It took its time—two seconds, three seconds—but when the crash came, it felt as if someone had struck a gong right beside Merle’s ears. The vibration was so great that she was sure the pyramid was going to collapse.

  The stone was shaken a second time when Vermithrax came down beside them, more falling than landing, snatched up both girls in his paws, and carried them into the air. His body was cool, despite the glow he gave off.

  His precaution turned out to be unnecessary. The pyramid was still standing. Occasional clumps of snow broke from the edges and slid one or two steps deeper, to be dispersed in blinding clouds of crystals, momentarily wrapping the incline in a fog of ice. Only after the avalanche had settled could Merle tell what had become of the bark.

  The golden sickle lay on one of the upper steps, only a little beyond the place where Merle and Junipa had cowered seconds before. The vehicle had landed sideways, close to the wall of the next step up. From the air, Merle could see only a little damage, a hole in the upper side that Vermithrax had torn in the fuselage.

  “Put us down again, please,” said Merle to the lion, breathless certainly, but at the same time so relieved that she felt new strength streaming through her.

  “Too dangerous.” The lion’s breath formed white clouds in the ice-cold air.

  “Come on. Don’t you want to know what was in the bark?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “Mummy soldiers,” the Flowing Queen interjected in Merle’s mind, inaudible to the two others. “A whole troop of them. And a priest who held the bark in the air with his magic.”

  Merle cast a look over at Junipa, who was dangling in Vermithrax’s second paw. Her lips moved.

  “Junipa?”

  “What’s up?” asked Vermithrax.

  “I think she’s waking up.”

  “Once again, just at the right moment,” the Queen bleated. “Why do these things always happen just when one does not need them?”

  Merle ignored the voice inside her. No matter what it might mean for them all or whether they’d have more trouble because of it, she was glad that Junipa was coming to herself again. After all, she’d been the one who knocked Junipa unconscious, and the thought continued to pain her. But her friend had left her no choice.

  “If she still is your friend.” It wasn’t the first time that the Flowing Queen had read her thoughts; the bad habit had begun way back.

  “Of course she is!”

  “You saw her. And heard what she said. Friends do not behave that way.”

  “That’s the Stone Light. Junipa couldn’t help it.”

  “That changes little about the fact that she may try to do you harm.”

  Merle didn’t answer. They were floating a good ten yards over the nearest pyramid step. Gradually Vermithrax’s firm grip began to hurt.

  “Set us down,” she asked him once more.

  “At least the pyramid appears to be stable,” the lion agreed.

  “Does that mean we can look at the bark?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But there’s nothing moving down there. If there are really mummies in there, they must be—”

  “Dead?” the Queen asked pointedly.

  “Out of action.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe not”

  “Those are just exactly the sort of remarks we need,” said Merle caustically.

  Vermithrax had made his decision. With gentle wing beats he brought Junipa and Merle back to secure ground—as secure as four-thousand-year-old pyramids situated over an entrance to Hell are.

  He first set Merle down on one of the stone steps. After she was able to stand, she carefully took Junipa from Vermithrax’s grasp. Junipa’s lips were still moving. Weren’t her eyes open a crack now? Merle thought she saw the mirror glass under the lids.

  Slowly she let her friend down into the snow. She was burning to run over to the bark, but she had to take care of Junipa first.

  She gently stroked Junipa’s cheek. When her frozen fingers touched the skin, it was as if ice met ice. She wondered how long it would be before the first frostbite showed.

  “Junipa,” she whispered. “Are you awake?”

  From the corner of her eye she saw Vermithrax’s glowing body tense, noticed the mighty muscle cords that clenched under the obsidian-like fists. The lion was ready to respond to an attack immediately. And his distrust was directed not toward the sunbark alone. Junipa’s treachery had made him just as mistrustful as the Queen, only he didn’t show it so openly.

  The girl’s eyelids fluttered, then opened hesitantly. Merle saw her own face reflected in the mirror shards Junipa had for eyes. She hardly recognized herself. As if someone had shown her a picture of a snowman, with ice-encrusted hair and blue-white skin.

  We need warmth, she thought with alarm. We’ll die here outside.

  “Merle,” came weakly from Junipa’s chapped lips. “I … You have …” Then she fell silent again and clutched the hem of Merle’s dress. “It’s so cold. Where … are we?”

  “In Egypt.” Although she said it herself, it seemed as absurd to Merle as if she’d said “On the moon.”

  Junipa stared at her with her mirror eyes, but the gleaming glass betrayed none of her thoughts. When the magic mirror maker Arcimboldo had implanted them in her and made the blind girl see, Merle had found the gaze of the mirrors cold; but the feeling had never been as appropriate as it was now, in the middle of this new ice age.

  “Egypt …” Junipa sounded hoarse but no longer as indifferent as she had inside the pyramid, when she’d tried to talk Merle into remaining in Hell. A breath of hope rose in Merle. Had the Stone Light lost its power over Junipa up here?

  From the direction of the bark came a metallic sound, followed by creaking.

  With a threatening growl, Vermithrax whirled around. Again the ground trembled under his feet.

  At the side of the bark—in the wall now facing skyward—a section of the metal snapped outward and stood there for a moment, trembling like an upright insect’s wing.

  Vermithrax pushed protectively in front of the girls, blocking Merle’s view. She almost put her neck out of joint in order to see between his legs.

  Something worked itself out of the opening. Not a mummy soldier. Not a priest.

  “A sphinx,” whispered the Flowing Queen.

  The creature had the upper body of a man, whose hips merged into the body of a lion, with sand-colored fur, four muscular legs, and razor-sharp wild animal claws. He appeared not to be aware of Vermithrax and the girls at all, he was so battered by the crash. Blood was flowing into his fur from several contusions; a gouge in his head was particularly deep. After several attempts, he managed to climb feebly out of the hatch, until in the end he lost his balance, rolled over the edge of the bark’s fuselage, and fell. He crashed onto the next lower step, as hard as a full-grown buffalo. His blood sprinkled the snow. He lay there, unmoving.

  “Is he dead?” asked Merle.

  Vermithrax stamped through the snow up to the bark and looked down at the sphinx. “Looks pretty much like it.”

  “Do you think there are more inside?”

  “I’m going to look.” He approached the bark in stalking position, low to the ground and with mane on end.

&n
bsp; “If the bark was only a scout, what was a sphinx doing on board?” asked the Queen. “Normally a priest is available for such tasks.”

  Merle didn’t know too much about the hierarchy of the Egyptian Empire, but she did know that the sphinxes ordinarily occupied the most important positions. Only the high priests of Horus stood between them and Pharaoh Amenophis.

  Vermithrax climbed onto the fuselage as agilely as a young cat. Only the soft scratching of his claws on the metal betrayed him. But if there were actually anyone still alive inside, their voices would have warned him long before.

  “Why a sphinx?” asked the Queen once more.

  “How should I know?”

  Junipa’s hand felt for Merle’s. Their fingers closed around each other’s. In spite of the tension, Merle was relieved. At least for the moment, it appeared that the Stone Light had lost its influence over Junipa. Or its interest in her.

  Vermithrax, still prowling, covered the last distance to the open hatch. He pushed his gigantic front claws to the edge of the opening, stretched his neck forward, and looked down.

  The attack they were all expecting did not come.

  Vermithrax walked all around each part of the hatch that was not obscured by the open cover. He looked into the interior from all sides.

  “I am so cold!” Junipa’s voice sounded as if she were far away in her thoughts, as if her mind had still not processed what had happened.

  Merle pulled her closer, but her eyes remained fixed on Vermithrax.

  “He will not go inside there,” said the Queen.

  What do you want to bet? Merle thought.

  The obsidian lion made an abrupt leap. His powerful body just fit through the opening, and as he disappeared inside, its outline glowed. From one moment to the next, their surroundings became gray and colorless. For the first time Merle became conscious of how very much his brightness had made the icy surface around them sparkle.

  She waited for a noise, the sound of battle, cries and roars and the hollow crashing of bodies banging against the bark’s fuselage. But it remained quiet, so quiet that now she began to really worry about Vermithrax.