The Glass Word

by Kai Meyer

  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.

  “Where are we going, actually?” Merle asked.

  “I would like to know that too,” said the Queen.

  “Down,” retorted Seth, who was walking in front.

  “Oh?”

  “I didn’t ask you to come with me.”

  Vermithrax tapped him on the shoulder with the tip of his wing. “Where?” he asked with emphasis.

  The priest stopped, and for a few instants such fury blazed in his eyes that Merle felt Vermithrax’s muscles tense under his coat. She wasn’t even sure if it actually was only fury that raged in the priest’s head: Perhaps it was magic—black, evil, lethal magic.

  But Seth laid no spell on them. Instead he glared at Vermithrax for a moment longer, then said softly, “Soon it will be swarming with sphinxes up here. Someone will notice that we landed on the platform. And I don’t want to be here when that happens. Farther down it’s easier to hide. Or do you think in all seriousness that sphinxes are dumb enough to overlook thousands of lions who shine like the full moon and perhaps have as much intelligence?” And with that he pointed to the endless line of Vermithrax’s reflections all around them in the stairwell.

  Before the obsidian lion could reply, Seth was on his way again. Vermithrax snorted and followed him. As they rocked quickly downward, Merle observed herself and Junipa in the mirrors. It gave her a headache and made her dizzy, and yet she could not escape the fascination of this apparent endlessness.

  She remembered again the magic water mirror in her pocket and the mirror ghost who’d been trapped inside since the beginning of her journey. She pulled the shimmering oval out and looked at it. Junipa was looking over her shoulder.

  “You still have it,” Junipa stated.

  “Sure.”

  “Do you remember how I looked into it?”

  Merle nodded.

  “And I wouldn’t tell you what I saw in the mirror?”

  “Are you going to tell me now?” asked Merle.

  They both looked for a moment longer at the wavering surface of the water mirror, at their own wobbling faces.

  “A sphinx,” Junipa said softly, so that Seth could not hear her. “There was a sphinx on the other side. A woman with the body of a lion.”

  Merle let the mirror sink, until its cool back touched her thigh. “Seriously?”

  “I don’t make jokes,” said Junipa sadly. “Not anymore, not for a long time.”

  “But why�
�” Merle broke off. Until now she’d believed that the hand that reached for hers on the other side of the water mirror when she shoved her fingers into it belonged to her mother. The mother she had never known.

  But—a sphinx?

  “Perhaps it was something like a warning?” she said. “A sort of look into the future?”

  “Perhaps.” Junipa didn’t sound convinced. “The sphinx was standing in a room full of billowing yellow curtains. She was very beautiful. And she had dark hair, just like you.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  Junipa hesitated. “Nothing … I think.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you really think my mother was a sphinx?” She swallowed and tried to laugh at the same time, but it failed miserably. “That’s just nonsense.”

  “What I saw was a sphinx, Merle. I didn’t say it was your mother. Or anyone else you had to know.”

  Merle regarded the mirror in silence; it had accompanied her all her life and she had always guarded it like the apple of her eye. Her parents had laid it in the wicker basket in which she’d been set out on Venice’s canals as a newborn. It had always been the only link to her origins, the only clue. But now it seemed to her that its reflection was a little darker, a little stranger.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything,” said Junipa, downcast.

  “Yes, you were right to.”

  “I didn’t want to frighten you.”

  “I’m glad I know.” But what did she know, really?

  Junipa shook her head behind Merle’s shoulder. “Perhaps it was only some old image. Neither of us has any idea what it means.”

  Merle sighed, but as she was about to put the mirror away, she again remembered the ghost trapped inside, a milky film that rushed back and forth over the watery surface. “Do you think it could be that phantom from Arcimboldo’s mirrors?”

  Gently she touched the surface with her fingertip. Not deep enough to poke through the surface. Very, very gently.

  “There is someone here,” said the Flowing Queen.

  Silence.

  “Everywhere,” said the Flowing Queen, and for a moment she sounded almost panicked. “He … he is here!”

  “Here?” Merle whispered.

  Vermithrax noticed that something was happening on his back and briefly lowered his head, without, however, looking back so as not to make Seth aware of the two girls’ activity.

  “Hello?” Merle whispered.

  A syllable sounded in her mind, then the sound blurred, whispering and hissing.

  Was that you? she asked the Queen, although she already guessed the answer.

  “No.”

  She tried again, with the same experience. The voice from the mirror was too unclear. Merle knew why: Her fingers had poked too deeply into the water of the mirror. It was impossible while they were going down the stairs to stay still enough—but that’s exactly what seemed to be needed to hear the voice of the ghost. She was angry with herself for not having tried it sooner. But when? Since her flight from Venice she hadn’t ever had a single quiet moment, no real breather.

  “Later,” she whispered, drew out her finger, and let the mirror disappear into the buttoned pocket once more. To Junipa she said, “It won’t work here. It’s too wobbly.”

  “Something’s not right,” Seth said at the same time.

  Vermithrax slowed. “What do you mean?”

  “Why aren’t we meeting anyone?”

  “It’s said that the sphinx population isn’t very large,” said Merle with a shrug. “At least, someone told us that.”

  “That is true,” said Seth. “No more than two or three hundred. They don’t reproduce anymore.”

  “They never have,” said the Queen.

  How do you know so much about them? Merle asked.

  “Old reports.” For the first time Merle felt very clearly that the Queen was lying.

  Seth went on, “But there are still enough left to populate their own stronghold.”

  “If the barks are being piloted by sphinxes these days, a whole lot of them must be gone,” Merle said.

  “But even if you take away the ones who are in Venice or at the court in Heliopolis, there must still be far more than a hundred in the fortress. It’s unusual for everything to be so dead.”

  “Maybe we should be glad about it instead of pulling a long face,” suggested Vermithrax, who by nature had to oppose everything that came from Seth.

  The priest lowered his voice. “Yes, perhaps.”

  “Anyhow, there were patrols outside,” said Merle. “So the sphinxes must be in here somewhere.”

  Seth nodded and went on. They might now have gone some one hundred and fifty feet downward, but still there was no end to the stairs. A few times Merle managed to look over the railing, but only more and more mirrors shimmered up at her from below. It was impossible to see the bottom of the staircase.

  And then, unexpectedly, they got to the end.

  The stairwell opened into a large room, mirrored like all the others in this fortress. The walls consisted of countless mirror surfaces like the faceted eye of an insect.

  “I wonder who polishes them all,” Merle murmured, but she was only covering up the fear that the surroundings aroused in her. The room might be approximately round and empty, but the mirrors reflecting each other a thousand times made it impossible to determine its dimensions clearly. They might just as well be going through a mirror labyrinth of narrow corridors. Vermithrax’s glow, beaming back at them from all directions, didn’t make things any easier, and it constantly blinded them. Only Junipa was not disturbed by it; with mirror eyes of her own, she looked through the brightness and the illusion of the multiplications.

  Someone yelled something.

  For a moment Merle thought Seth had cried out. But then she realized the truth: They were surrounded.

  What at first look appeared to be hundreds of sphinxes who approached them from all sides was soon revealed to be only one.

  The dark-haired man with the lower body of a sand-yellow lion was broader in the shoulders than any of the harbor workers on the Venetian quays. He wore a sword lance as long as a man, its blade reflecting Vermithrax’s golden glow. It looked like a torch.

  Seth stepped forward and said something in Egyptian. Then he added so that all could understand, “Do you speak the language of my … friends?”

  The sphinx nodded and weighed the sword lance in his hands for a moment, without lowering the point. His eyes kept darting uncertainly toward Vermithrax.

  “You are Seth?” he asked the Horus priest in Merle’s language.

  “It is so. And I have the right to be here. Only the word of the Pharaoh weighs more heavily than mine.”

  The sphinx snorted. “The word of the Pharaoh commands that you be taken prisoner as soon as anyone sees you. Everyone knows that you have betrayed the Empire and are fighting on the side”—he hesitated—“of our enemies.” His short pause was probably due to the fact that he couldn’t imagine what enemies of the Empire were left after decades of war.

  Seth bowed his head, which might have seemed submissive to the sphinx but in truth was preparation for—yes, what? A magic blow that would shred his opponent?

  Merle was never to find out, for at that moment the sphinx received reinforcements. Behind him, through an almost invisible opening between the mirrors, a troop of mummy soldiers appeared. Their images multiplied in the walls like a chain of cut paper dolls being drawn apart by invisible hands.

  The mummies wore armor of leather and steel, but even that could not conceal that these undead soldiers were specimens with uncommonly robust proportions. Their faces were ash gray, with dark rings under the eyes, but they did not appear as wasted and half decayed as other mummies of the Empire. Perhaps they hadn’t been dead so long when they were snatched from their graves to serve in the Pharaoh’s armies.

  The soldiers moved into place behind the sphinx
. Their mirror images made it hard to say how many there really were. Merle counted four, but perhaps she was wrong and there were more.

  The air over the golden network that covered the back of Seth’s head shimmered the way it does on an especially hot summer day.

  Horus magic shot through Merle’s mind, and at the same time she had to think that his magic could just as well be directed at them and not against their enemies.

  At the same moment the mummy soldier in front raised his sickle sword. The sphinx looked back over his shoulder, visibly irritated by the appearance of the soldiers but at the same time grateful for their support. Then he turned again to Seth, Vermithrax, and the girls on the back of the lion. He now grasped that the Horus priest had not bowed to honor him, saw the boiling air over Seth’s skull, raised his lance, about to launch it at the priest—

  —and was felled from behind by the mummy soldier’s sword blow.

  Instantly the soldiers leaped over the sphinx lying on the ground and struck at him from all sides. When there was no more life in him, their leader turned slowly around. His eyes passed over Vermithrax and the girls, then fastened on Seth.

  The network on the priest’s skull glowed, and fireballs like balls of pure lava appeared in Seth’s hands.

  “No,” said the mummy soldier. His voice sounded astonishingly alive. “We don’t belong to them.”

  Seth hesitated.

  “Let them alone, Seth,” cried Merle. She didn’t suppose the priest would pay any attention to her, but for some reason he still didn’t throw the fireballs.

  “They are not real,” said the Queen in Merle’s head.

  The mummies?

  “Not those, either. But I meant the fireballs. They are only illusion. The Horus priests understand that better than anyone: about lies, about deceit. And, in addition, about alchemy and the awakening of the dead.”

  Then he can’t burn up the soldiers at all?

  “Not with this playacting.”