by Kai Meyer
Amenophis pulled her out of her astonishment. “Immortality is better than what you gave me,” he said to Seth. “A few decades, no more. Perhaps they would have made a century. But you were already tired of me, weren’t you? How long would you have tolerated me? You wanted to take my place … poor Seth, you were quite ill with envy and ambition. And who can blame you for that? You were the one who solved the riddles of the suboceanic kingdoms. You gave the Empire all its power. And now look at you! Only a man without hair and with a sword in his hand that he never even saw until a few days ago, much less carried.”
The Horus priest was standing with his back to Junipa, but she saw him tense. Death surged from every pore.
“All illusion,” said Amenophis, “all masquerade. Like the gold on our skin.” He ran a finger through the smudged gold paint on his face and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger.
“The Empire is no illusion. It is real.”
“Is it? Who will tell me, then, that it is not one of your illusions? There you’re a master, Seth. Illusions. Masks. Sleights of hand. Others might have thought it was magic, but I know the truth. You explored the remains of the suboceanic kingdoms as a scholar. But the learned man has become a charlatan. You know how to influence the minds of men, how to delude them. Giant falcons and monsters, Seth, those are the toys of children but not the weapons with which one manages an empire. At least the sphinxes were right about that.” The Pharaoh made a skipping turn and sank back onto the divan, back into the shadows. His weary voice floated into the darkness like a bird with a lame wing beat. “Is all this illusion? Tell me, Seth! Did you really awaken me to life or am I still lying in my burial chamber in the pyramid of Amun-Ka-Re? Have I really become the conqueror of the world, or is that only a dream you have conjured up for me? And is it true that all my loyal followers have left me and I am now all alone in a palace full of mummies—although perhaps I am one myself and have never left my grave? Tell me the truth, priest! What is illusion, and what is reality?”
Seth had not moved at all. Junipa moved slowly along the wall. She had a vague hope of making it to the door before one of the two of them noticed her.
“Do you really believe that?” asked Seth. Junipa stopped. Yet the words weren’t directed to her, but to Amenophis. “Do you actually think that the events of the past forty years are nothing but an illusion?”
“I know what you are capable of,” said the Pharaoh with a shrug. “Not real magic like the sphinxes, but you know all about deception. Perhaps in truth I am still laid out on the sandstone block in my pyramid, and you are standing beside me, your hand on my forehead—or whatever was necessary to plant all these images in my head. With every year that has passed and with every minute of the recent days my certainty has become greater: Nothing of all this is true, Seth! I am dreaming! My mind is caught in a huge, unique illusion! I have played the game, moved the pieces on the board, and had my fun. Why not? In truth, there was never anything to lose.”
Junipa reached the door, slowly pressed down the gigantic latch. And yes, the high oaken door swung open! A draft of cool air came from the corridor and blew through her hair. But still she did not run away. The last meeting between the Pharaoh and his creator held her fast with a macabre fascination. She had to know what happened next. Had to see it.
Slowly Seth began walking up to the divan.
“Even my death is only an illusion,” said Amenophis. From the mouth of a twelve-year-old, the sentence sounded as unreal as if he were rattling off a very complicated mathematical formula. Junipa was reminded again that the Pharaoh was much older than his body made him appear. Inconceivably older.
“Only illusion,” he whispered once more, as if his thoughts were somewhere else, in a place of deep silence and darkness. In a grave, in the heart of a stepped pyramid.
“If that’s what you think,” said Seth, and he raised the sword and let it fall on the Pharaoh.
There was no resistance.
Not even a cry.
Amenophis died quietly and meekly. Seth, who had given him his life, took it from him again. Only a dream, the Pharaoh might think as he died, only delusion induced by the priest of Horus.
Junipa pushed on the door and slipped through the crack. Outside in the corridor she took four or five steps before she became aware of the silence. Seth wasn’t following her.
Uncertain, she stopped.
Turned around. And went back.
Don’t do it! her mind screamed. Run awayy as fast as you can!
Nevertheless, Junipa stepped into the doorway and looked into the room again.
Seth was lying on the floor in front of the Pharaoh’s body, his face turned in her direction. His left hand was clenched into a fist, the right loosening on the grip of the sword. The sickle blade was sticking out of his body. He had driven it into his own chest without a sound.
“He was wrong,” he brought out with difficulty, spitting blood onto the parquet. “Everything is … true.”
Junipa overcame her fear, her aversion, her disgust. Slowly she walked into the room and went to the divan and the two men who, until a few days before, had together guided the destiny of the greatest and cruelest realm in human history. Now they lay before her, the one dead in a sea of jaguar skins, the other dying at her feet.
“I am sorry,” Seth whispered weakly, “because of the mirror—that was stupid.”
Junipa went onto her knees and looked for words. She considered whether she should say something to lessen his pain or his disappointment. But perhaps that was just what he had done: He had lessened his pain. He had killed the master that he himself had created, had slain the child and the father.
It is good this way, she thought, and she had the feeling that the thought floated away like a feather. Like a last illusion.
Silently she stretched out a forefinger and stroked it over the strands of the golden network that was inlaid into Seth’s scalp. It felt cool and not magic at all. Only like metal that had been pressed into flesh with terrible pain. It was exactly what it looked like: a network of gold in a place where it didn’t belong.
As we are all, she thought sadly.
“Don’t go … through the palace. The mummy soldiers are everywhere. There is no one left who … who controls them.”
“What will they do?”
“I … don’t know. Nothing, perhaps. Or …” He fell silent, began again: “Don’t go. Too dangerous.”
“I must find a mirror.”
Seth tried to nod, but he wasn’t able to. Instead, trembling, he stretched out a finger. Junipa looked in the direction he was pointing. And she saw what he meant.
Yes, she thought. That could work.
“Fare … well,” Seth gasped.
Junipa fixed her eyes on his. “What for? You’ve destroyed everything.”
Seth could not answer. His eyes dulled, the lids fluttered one last time. Then a slight shudder ran through his body and he stopped breathing.
Junipa walked wearily to the water basin beside the divan. It was big enough. She bent till her mouth was over it and whispered the glass word. Then she climbed onto the marble basin, swung her legs over the edge, and let herself down into her reflection.
The stone in her chest pulled her under.
SPHINX SPLINTERS
IT HAD NOT BEEN EASY.
Not easy at all.
Still, Merle had somehow managed to restrain Vermithrax before he could fly over the railing with a roar and tear the sphinx and the boy to pieces.
Now, much later, at the foot of the snow-covered stairs, the obsidian lion stopped and looked over at Lalapeya. The sphinx tilted her head, closed her eyes, and appeared to scent, the way Vermithrax sometimes did too, but in her it looked less like a wild animal. She does even that, Merle thought, with grace and beauty.
“Along there,” Lalapeya said, and Vermithrax nodded. He’d come to the same conclusion.
What they both scented, Merle did not know. It was only after
a while that she realized that it was the snow they were sensing, the way many animals instinctively flee an oncoming cold spell or store provisions in their burrows.
Some time had passed since the meeting on the staircase. Time in which Merle had to come to terms with the fact that the sphinx at her side was in fact her mother. And that it really was Serafin who was now sitting behind her on Vermithrax’s back and had put his hands around her waist to hold on.
After the obsidian lion had understood that the sphinx on the stairs was not an enemy, he’d set Merle down on the steps. She and Serafin had fallen into each other’s arms, to just stand there for a long time without words, hugging each other tightly. Merle had the feeling that he almost kissed her, but then his lips only touched her hair briefly, and all she could think of was that she hadn’t washed it for days. It was crazy, really. Here they were, all trapped in this accursed sphinx stronghold, and she was thinking about washing her hair! Was that what being in love did to you? And then, was it being in love that was responsible for the lump in her throat and the fluttering in her stomach?
Serafin leaned close to her ear. “I missed you,” he whispered. Her pulse raced. She was convinced that he must hear it, the hammering in her ears, the rushing of blood throughout her entire body. And if not that, then he doubtless felt the trembling of her legs, the trembling of every part of her.
She answered that she had missed him, too, which suddenly sounded trite and empty, she thought, because he’d said it to her first. Then she just talked straight on, said all sorts of other things, which two minutes later, thank heavens, she couldn’t remember, because it was probably pretty incoherent. She was sure she sounded dumb and childish, and she didn’t even know why.
And then, Lalapeya.
It was an entirely different kind of reunion from that with Serafin, most of all because it was, at least in Merle’s view, not a real reunion. She had no memories of her mother, not her voice, not how she’d looked. She only knew her hands, from all the hours they had held each other’s in the interior of the water mirror. But Lalapeya’s hands were bandaged, and Merle couldn’t touch them and reassure herself that they were the same hands she’d held before.
Not that, in all seriousness, she had to reassure herself. She knew that Lalapeya was her mother, knew it the moment she’d seen the sphinx on the stairs, even before she recognized Serafin on her back. That might simply have been due to appearances, to a resemblance of the eyes, a similar shape of face, or the long dark hair.
But it was far more that bound Merle to Lalapeya right off: The sphinx possessed exactly that degree of perfection that Merle sometimes imagined for herself, that beauty that she hoped she’d have when she grew up. But she was only fourteen, and a thing or two would happen in her face before it would become the firm, unchanging countenance she now saw before her above the slender shoulders of a sphinx.
She couldn’t embrace Lalapeya because she was afraid of touching her injured arms, and she also wasn’t sure it would be appropriate at their first meeting. So they only exchanged words. They spoke with a certain reserve, but also with scarcely concealed joy. Lalapeya was beaming despite her pain—and it was clear that she was feeling true happiness. And probably relief, too, that Merle didn’t reproach her for what she’d experienced as a small child.
The Flowing Queen said not one word the whole time. Was simply silent, as if she were no longer a part of Merle. As if her spirit were already caught up in the battle with the Son of the Mother and had completely tuned out of its surroundings, even at a moment like this. Once Merle thought: She’s hatching something. But then she told herself that the Flowing Queen possibly knew better than any of them what lay ahead. And then who could blame her if she didn’t feel like talking?
It was Vermithrax who reminded Merle that they must be on their way. She then took great pains to explain their plan to Lalapeya and Serafin. Considering how much had happened since their last meeting, she quickly realized that she must limit herself to the most essential facts. Nevertheless she earned more than one incredulous look, and it took a while before she finally came to Winter’s role in the whole story: who he was, what he was looking for, and why they were looking for him.
As they made their way down the stairs together, Serafin took over the story and told how they’d landed there. When he revealed that Eft, Dario, and the others were also in the Iron Eye, Merle could hardly believe it. Especially Dario! Her archenemy from the mirror workshop. But he’d been Serafin’s antagonist even more than hers. If the two of them had now become friends, in fact, a whole lot must have happened. She burned to know the details.
“Eft is hurt,” Serafin said. He told how she’d become involved in a fight with a sphinx guard at the foot of the stronghold. Eft had broken her lower leg, while Dario and Aristide had suffered severe sword cuts. None of their injuries were mortal, but after they’d tried to climb one of the staircases in the lower regions of the Eye together, the others had had to give up. Tiziano had stayed with them so that the injured weren’t on their own, while Lalapeya and Serafin had continued the ascent. “I didn’t want to leave them behind,” he said finally, “but what were we supposed to do?”
“We could have turned around and gone back to the boat together,” said Lalapeya. “But then it would all have been for nothing. So Serafin and I decided to go on alone.”
“Where are they now?” asked Merle.
“In a library near the entrance,” Serafin answered. “There’s a gigantic library down there, incredibly huge.”
Merle looked at him in disbelief. Until now she’d seen nothing but mirrors in the Iron Eye. Salons, halls, chambers of mirrors. The idea of one or even several giant libraries didn’t fit into the picture she’d had of the fortress. She spoke her thoughts aloud.
Lalapeya looked over her shoulder. “To you, the sphinxes must seem a people of warriors and conquerors. You’ve never known them to be any different, in Venice with the Pharaoh or here. But the sphinxes are far more than that. They are a people of scholars. There are many wise heads among them, and once they gave the world great philosophers, storytellers, and playwrights. In the old desert cities there were theater arenas, where we gathered not only to watch, but also to discuss. Not all the sphinxes’ arguments were carried on with weapons in those days. I can remember the great speeches, the clever debates and lectures—all at a time when the human race had more similarity to animals than the sphinxes do today. There were great minds among us, and then the artists … the old songs and poetry of the sphinxes possess a poetic charm that is unique.”
“She speaks the truth,” the Flowing Queen said suddenly. “In certain respects, anyway. However, humans were not so primitive and simpleminded as she claims.”
Of course not, Merle thought acidly, or otherwise they’d hardly have made you into a goddess.
“I did not seek that out,” said the Queen. “It is characteristic of humans not to ask those whom they worship for permission first. And, unfortunately, it is also characteristic of the gods to grow accustomed to being worshipped.”
They were following a broad corridor a good two hundred yards wide with a high, curving ceiling, almost a kind of roofed-over street, though bigger and more imposing, when Vermithrax pointed forward with his head. “There! Do you see that?”
Merle blinked in the blinding white expanse of snowflakes, extended into a plain by the mirrors on both sides of the passage. The light was too bright for her to be able to make out anything in the distance. Serafin and Lalapeya didn’t see what Vermithrax’s sharp eyes had spied either.
“Sphinxes,” he said. “But they aren’t moving.”
“Guards?” asked Lalapeya.
“Perhaps. Although I don’t think that matters anymore.”
The sphinx gave him an astonished look, while Merle gently scratched him behind the ear. “What do you mean?” she asked.
He purred briefly, perhaps because he enjoyed the touch, perhaps just to please her. “They�
�re white,” he said then.
“White?” Serafin repeated in amazement.
“Frozen to ice.”
Merle felt Serafin’s tension. He didn’t like sitting inactive on the back of a lion and waiting. He itched to take matters into his own hands again. She understood him well; it didn’t suit her temperament to become a victim of events either. Perhaps she’d let herself be pushed around too much since her meeting with the Queen, had done what was expected of her, not what she really wanted to. But at the same time, she had to recognize that she’d never had a choice: Her path had been predestined, and even at little crossings, a detour had been out of the question. Not for the first time she felt like a puppet who was being manipulated by everyone—worse yet, like a child. While basically, she never had been one. In the orphanage she’d had no time for it.
They went on, and soon Merle and the others, too, realized what Vermithrax had meant. Like a forest of statues, outlines detached themselves from the omnipresent white, hardly visible at first, then a little more clearly, finally as clear as polished glass. And in fact that’s what the sphinxes resembled most: glass. Ice.
There were more than a dozen, fixed in various poses of fear and retreat. Some had tried to escape Winter’s touch by running ahead of him; others had tried to fight, but the expressions on their faces showed the mood of despair, even of panic. Some had let the weapons slide from their hands, sickle swords half buried by the snow.
“What has happened here?” Lalapeya murmured.
“Winter was here,” Merle said. “Everything he touches turns to ice. He told me that. Every living thing, with one exception—Summer. That’s why he’s looking for her. That’s why they love each other.”
