by Kai Meyer
Blinding brightness greeted them. A snowfield that was lengthened into infinity by the walls and the ceiling. A wave of noise and fury slammed against them, worse than anything Merle had expected. Vermithrax let out a shattering roar, while he took on two sphinxes at the same time. Andrej and Seth were fighting back-to-back. The red-haired spy lay lifeless on the floor; the blow of a sickle sword had felled him. There were several mummy soldiers in the hall. Beside them Merle counted three sphinxes. Another lay motionless in the entrance.
“Merle!” Vermithrax had seen her; he blocked the blow of a sword with his bare paw and with the other pulled his claws down the chest of the sphinx. Blood flowed into the snow and was soon covered by the body of the collapsed sphinx. The second sphinx hesitated before he resolved on a renewed attack. When he saw that his sword blow bounced off the lion’s glowing obsidian body as if it were a wall, he retreated. Vermithrax made a few lunges after him but then let his opponent run.
Andrej and Seth were fighting together against the third sphinx and the three mummy soldiers. The undead were no great help to their leader, continually standing in the way or stumbling into the attack of the sphinx. Finally he also let out an angry cry and stormed away, straight across the hall and through the high door, behind which still more snow stretched.
Junipa was still standing in front of the mirror wall, half in this world, half in the mirror world. Merle had taken her advice to heart and until now had endeavored not to lose contact with the mirror. But when she saw that the sphinxes were fleeing, she was about to let go of Junipa’s hand and run over to Vermithrax.
Suddenly someone seized her, tore her away from Junipa, and flung her to one side. With a scream she crashed against one of the mirrors and fell to her knees. At once her dress was sucking up ice-cold wetness.
When Merle looked up, she saw Seth. He’d grasped Junipa’s hand, pushed off, and pulled her with him through the mirror wall. No glass splintered, and Merle knew the reason for it: The glass door was open as long as Junipa had not left the mirror. The glass word remained in effect for her and anyone she touched. For Seth, too.
“No!” Merle leaped up and ran through the snow to the mirror. But she already knew that she was too late.
Seth and Junipa were gone. Merle wanted to follow them, against her better judgment, and she struck the glass with her shoulder. The glass wall creaked, but it held.
“No!” She shouted again, kicked her foot against the glass, and hammered on it with her fists. With watery eyes she stared into the mirror, but instead of her friend and the high priest, she saw only herself, with wild, straggling hair, red eyes, and shining cheeks. Her dress was wet with snow, but she hardly felt the cold.
“Merle,” said Vermithrax quietly, suddenly beside her.
She didn’t hear him, drummed against the mirror again, whirled around, and sank down with her back against the glass. In despair she rubbed her eyes, but the brightness around her now blinded her even more. Light reflections formed glistening stars and circles, all clear figures blurred.
One of them was Vermithrax. Another was Andrej, whom the stone lion had dragged with him and laid down between them in the snow. Somewhere in the background lay the mummy soldiers in the midst of gray fountains of dust.
“She’s gone,” said the lion.
“I see that, damn it!”
“Andrej is dying, Merle.”
“I—” She broke off, stared at Vermithrax, then the Czarist, who stretched out a hand to her from the ground. He whispered something in his mother tongue, and it was obvious that he saw in Merle someone other than herself.
Vermithrax nodded to her. “Take his hand,” he whispered.
Merle sank to her knees and embraced Andrej’s cold fingers with both hands. Her thoughts were still with Junipa, whom she’d now lost for the second time, but she did her best to concentrate on the dying man. Unreal kept thundering through her mind over and over. Everything is so unreal.
Andrej’s free hand grasped her shoulder, so hard that it hurt, and pulled her forward. The fingers climbed to her neck. Just as Merle was about to pull back, he was able to take hold of the leather band on which she wore the chicken’s foot. The sign of the Baba Yaga. The sign of his goddess.
Merle would have liked to wipe the tears from her eyes, but she knew she mustn’t let go of him now. No matter what happened around her: Andrej deserved to die in peace. He was a brave man, as were his companions; they’d taken the risk of giving up their camouflage for the girls and the lion. They could have been finished off by that first sphinx alone, but Andrej had struck him for them. Perhaps because after all the months in the Iron Eye he’d been glad to meet a living, breathing human again.
Andrej clung with one hand to the chicken’s foot on her neck while he murmured words in Russian, perhaps a prayer, perhaps something else. Several times there was a word that Merle thought was the name of a woman or a girl. “His daughter” flashed through her mind. He’d told her, very briefly, after he’d led all three of them into the hiding place, about his daughter, whom he’d left many thousands of miles away.
Then Andrej died. With trembling hands she had to loosen his fingers from the pendant.
Vermithrax snorted softly.
“We have to get away from here!” he said finally, and it seemed to Merle that these seven words described their journey best. Away from Venice, away from Axis Mundi, an everlasting flight. And her destination seemed always to slide into the distance again.
Vermithrax spoke again. “The sphinxes will send out the alarm.”
Merle nodded absently. She crossed Andrej’s hands on his chest, without knowing if this gesture was understood in his homeland. She lightly stroked his cheek with the back of her hand before she stood up.
Vermithrax looked at her out of his huge lion eyes. “You are very brave. Much braver than I thought.”
She gave a sob and began to cry, but this time she quickly got herself under control. “What about Junipa?”
“We can’t follow her.”
“I know that. But still we must do something—”
“We must get out of here! Fast.” At moments like this, Merle sometimes forgot that she wasn’t alone in her thoughts. When the Queen abruptly cut into the conversation, she started, as if suddenly there were someone standing behind her and bellowing in her ear. “Vermithrax is right. We have to keep them from calling the Son of the Mother back to life.”
“The Son of the Mother can go jump in a lake!” Merle shouted angrily, so that Vermithrax heard it too. He raised an eyebrow in amazement. “Seth has abducted Junipa, and at the moment that’s more important to me than some kind of sphinx god and its mother!”
That was clear, she hoped. But the Queen wouldn’t be moved. If there was anything on which she was an expert, it was persistence. Nerve-deadening, pitiless persistence. “Your world will be destroyed, Merle. It will be destroyed, if you and I do not do something to prevent it.”
“My world is already destroyed,” she said sadly. “From the moment you and I met each other.” She didn’t mean it sarcastically, and there was no malice in her voice. Every word was sincere, honestly felt: Her world—a new, unexpected one, but her own—had been Arcimboldo’s workshop, with all its pros and cons, with Dario and the other rowdies, but also with Junipa and Eft and a place where she felt she belonged. The appearance of the Queen had brought an end to it all.
The Queen was silenced for a moment, but then she broke into the gloomy silence in Merle’s head. “Do not blame me. After the attack of the Egyptians, nothing was the way it had been.”
Merle knew very well that she was putting blame in the wrong place. “I’m sorry,” she said, and yet she didn’t really mean it. She couldn’t help it, not here, not today, not beside Andrej’s body and in front of the mirror into which Junipa had vanished as if down a silvery throat. She could say she was sorry, but she couldn’t really feel it.
“Merle,” said Vermithrax urgently, “please! We h
ave to go!”
She swung onto his back. She cast a last sorrowful look at the mirror through which Junipa and Seth had disappeared, and then it was only one among many again, a facet on the many cut surfaces of a precious jewel.
“Where are we, anyway?” she asked as Vermithrax bore her through the door of the hall, stopped in the passage outside for a moment, then turned to the right. The snow inside the building lay high, twelve to sixteen inches, and it was churned up by the paws of the sphinxes and the boots of the mummy soldiers.
“Quite a way down below the spies’ room.” The obsidian lion gazed ahead tensely as he spoke. “We ran down stairs almost the whole time. Andrej knew the way very well. And probably his friends did too. But I couldn’t understand what they were saying.”
“Andrej knew it,” said the Queen. “He knew that the Son of the Mother is here in the stronghold.”
Merle passed the information along to Vermithrax. He agreed: “Seth told us while you were gone.”
“Why did he do that?”
“Maybe to keep us busy while he was thinking about how to get at Junipa.”
Merle deflated a little further.
“Seth only had revenge in his head,” the lion added.
“Why not?” said the Queen. “If that helps us to stop the Son of the Mother.”
Merle would have loved to take her by the shoulders and shake her, but the shoulders of the Queen were now her own, and that would have looked really silly. “Good,” she said after a while, “then just tell us what we should do if we suddenly stumble on him by accident.”
“May I?” asked the Queen, with unwonted politeness.
“Help yourself.”
Immediately the Queen took over Merle’s voice and told Vermithrax very briefly who and what the Son of the Mother was. And what role she herself played in this affair.
“You are the mother of the sphinxes?” asked Vermithrax in astonishment. “The great Sekhmet?”
“Only Sekhmet. That is enough.”
“The lion goddess!”
“Now he is starting that business too,” said the Queen in Merle’s thoughts, and this time Merle could not suppress a faint grin.
“Is that really true?” asked Vermithrax.
“No, I am only inventing it to keep us from getting bored in this accursed fortress,” the Queen said through Merle’s mouth.
“Forgive me.”
“No reason to become unctuous.”
“Sekhmet is the goddess of all lions,” said Vermithrax. “Also of my people.”
“More than that,” whispered the Queen to Merle, before she said aloud, “If you like. But I have not been a goddess for a long time—if I ever was one.”
Vermithrax sounded baffled. “I don’t understand.”
“Just act the way you did before. No ‘Great Sekhmet’ here or ‘goddess’ there. Agreed?”
“Certainly,” he said humbly.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Merle, when her own voice belonged to her again. “You get used to her.”
“A little humility would probably not hurt,” said the Queen peevishly.
Vermithrax carried them down more steps, deeper and deeper, and at each landing the snow became higher, the cold more cutting.
Merle looked into the mirrors, which lengthened the white into infinity, and made a decision. “We have to find Winter.”
“We have to—,” the Queen began, but Merle interrupted her.
“Alone we have no chance anyway. But together with Winter … who knows.”
“He will not help us. His mind is only on his search for Summer.”
“Perhaps one thing has something to do with the other?” Merle twisted one side of her mouth in a cool smile.
“But the fastest way—”
“At the moment I’m for the safest way. What do you think, Vermithrax?”
“Everything the goddess commands.”
“A lion with principles.”
Merle rolled her eyes. “I don’t care. We’re looking for Winter! Vermithrax, keep walking to where the snow is highest.”
“You will freeze to death.”
“Then we’ll both freeze.”
“I will try to prevent that.”
“Very kind.”
In the middle of a stairwell, the fourth or fifth since their leaving the hall, Vermithrax stopped so abruptly that Merle slid into his mane face-first; it felt as if she’d dived into a forest of glistening underwater plants.
“What is it?”
He growled and looked around warily. “Something’s wrong here.”
“Are we being followed?”
“No.”
“Observed?”
“That’s just it. Since the fight we haven’t seen any more sphinxes and mummies.”
“That’s all right with me.”
“Come on, Merle, don’t pretend to be stupid. You know what I mean.”
Of course she knew. But she’d been trying the whole time to suppress it and would have liked to be able to do it a while longer. Besides, she was in the mood to quarrel. With the Queen, even with Vermithrax. She didn’t rightly understand where all this anger at everyone and everything came from. Really it was Seth who’d betrayed them and abducted Junipa. Wrong! Abducted Junipa, yes—but betrayed? He’d done nothing to surrender Merle and the others to the sphinxes. He was always pursuing his own personal ends and, looking at it objectively, he had simply seized an advantage. Junipa was supposed to take him somewhere, that much was certain. For she was the key to a fast, effortless change of location. But where? To Heliopolis? Or some other place here in the Eye?
“It’s as if this whole damned fortress were dead all of a sudden!” Vermithrax also sounded irritated. His huge nose sniffed the air in the circle of the stairwell, while his eyes swept alertly around. “There must still be someone somewhere.”
“Perhaps they have something to do somewhere else.” For instance, with Winter, Merle added in her mind.
“Or with the Son of the Mother,” said the Queen.
Merle imagined the scene: a huge hall in which hundreds of sphinxes were gathered. All were staring raptly at the body on its bier. Singing hung in the air, soft murmuring. The words of a priest or a leader. Grotesque apparatus and machines were turned on. Electrical charges sparked between metal balls and steel coils with many turns of wire. Fluids bubbled in glass beakers, hot steam shot out of vents to the ceiling. All was reflected dozens of times in the towering silver walls.
Then a cry, leaping like flame from one sphinx to the next. Strident masks of triumph, open mouths, wide eyes, roars of laughter, of joy, of relief, but also of barely concealed anxiety. Priests and scientists, who swarmed around the Son of the Mother like flies around a piece of carrion. A dark eyelid that slowly opened. Under it a black eyeball, dried and wrinkled like a prune. And in it, caught like a curse in a dusty tomb, an increasingly bright spark of devilish intelligence.
“Merle?”
Vermithrax’s voice.
“Merle?” More urgent now. “Did you hear that?”
She came alert. “Huh?”
“Did you hear that?”
“What?”
“Listen carefully.”
Merle tried to comprehend what Vermithrax meant. It was only with difficulty that she was able to free herself from the picture that her mind had conjured up: the ancient, dark eye and in it the awakening understanding of the Son of the Mother.
Now she heard it.
A howling.
Again the image of a monstrous gathering of all the sphinxes arose in her. The murmuring, the singing, the sound of the rituals.
But the howling had another source.
“Sounds like a storm,” Merle said.
She’d hardly spoken when something rushed at them out of the depths of the stairwell. Vermithrax bent way over the railing; Merle had to cling tightly to his mane in order not to slide down over his head into the well.
A white wall rose up out of
the mirrored chasm.
Fog, she thought at first.
Snow!
A snowstorm that seemed to come directly from the heart of the Arctic, a fist of ice and cold and unimaginable force.
Vermithrax raised his wings and folded them together over Merle like two giant hands, which pressed her firmly to his back. The howling grew deafening and finally so loud that she could scarcely perceive it as sound, a blade that cut through her auditory canal and carved up her understanding. She had the feeling that her living body was turning to ice, just like the dead gull she’d found on the roof of the orphanage one winter. The bird had looked as if it had simply fallen from heaven, the wings still spread, the eyes open. When Merle had lost her balance for a moment on the smooth roof slope, it had slipped out of her hand and a wing broke off as if it were made of porcelain.
The storm passed them like a swarm of howling ghosts. When it was over and the wind in the stairwell died down, the layer of snow on the steps had almost doubled.
“Was that Winter?” Vermithrax asked numbly. Ice crystals glittered on his coat, a strange contrast to his body glow, which gave off no heat and was not able to melt the ice.
Merle sat up on his back, ran both hands through her hair, and wiped the wet strands out of her face. The tiny little hairs in her nose were frozen, and for a while it was easier to breathe through her mouth.
“I don’t know,” she got out with a groan. “But if Winter had been in that storm somewhere, he’d certainly have seen us. He wouldn’t just have run past us. Or flown. Or whatever.” Dazedly she knocked the snow from her dress. It was completely frozen through, and at her knees the material was almost stiff. “It’s time we found Summer.”
“We?” said the Queen in alarm.
Merle nodded. “Without her we’re going to freeze. And then it doesn’t matter anymore if your son wakes up or not.”
“The sphinxes,” Vermithrax said. “They’re frozen, aren’t they? That’s why there aren’t any down here anymore. The cold has killed them.”
Merle didn’t think it was that simple. But sometimes Fate played tricks on one. And why couldn’t it affect the other side once in a while, for a change?
