by Kai Meyer
There was a grating sound. Beside them, cracks went branching through the ice body of one sphinx, and a moment later he shattered with a crash into sharp-edged fragments. Only his four lion legs remained standing. They stuck out of the snow like road markers someone had forgotten.
For a moment none of them moved, as if they were turned to ice themselves. No one knew what had made the sphinx burst—until Serafin, cursing, pointed to a small dart that was sticking out of one of the pieces of debris.
“Someone’s shooting at us!”
Merle scanned the passage, and she didn’t have to look long before she discovered a sphinx who was leaning out of an archway and taking aim at them a second time. Before any of them could react, he fired. Lalapeya let out a scream as the shot grazed her shoulder and struck another ice sphinx behind her with a clink. Grinding and splintering, he broke apart.
More sphinxes appeared behind the sniper, but only some of them were armed. Some of them held chisels and hammers in their hands, as well as glass vessels and pouches.
They were going to examine the dead, Merle thought. They would break off little pieces to examine them and look for a weak spot in their opponent.
Unfortunately, the troop of researchers was accompanied by several soldiers, who didn’t look like the intellectual creatures Lalapeya had described before. They were big and muscular, with broad lion bodies and massive human shoulders.
Vermithrax took advantage of his wings and rose into the air with his riders. Lalapeya remained behind on the ground, but the obsidian lion had no intention of abandoning her. He rushed down onto the first adversary from above, knocked the bolt gun out of his hands, and struck him on the skull with his hind paw as he flew past. The sphinx was dead before he sank into the snow on bent legs.
The other soldiers reacted quickly: They shoved the sphinx researchers back under the arch, where they were protected from the lion’s air attacks. One sprang forward and placed himself opposite Vermithrax, his sword raised, while another tried to reach the gun—obviously their only one.
Vermithrax rushed past the first sphinx—not even flinching when a sword blow bounced off his obsidian body, striking sparks—and knocked the weapon out of the sphinx’s hand. The lion plunged down onto the second sphinx, seized him by the arms, pulled him high, and flung him against the mirror wall like a rag doll. The glass couldn’t withstand the blow. The lifeless sphinx fell to the ground in a hail of silvery splinters and moved no more.
One of the researchers had used the opportunity to leap out of the protection of the archway and now raised the bolt gun. He was unskilled in handling weapons; his first shot whistled past Vermithrax a yard wide and punched a crack in the curved ceiling.
Meanwhile Lalapeya had hurried behind the ice statues toward the only possible path of flight: a low corridor that opened off the broad mirror street about thirty yards away. If she’d followed the street, she would have been a perfect target. She just had to break through the opening to the corridor, its lower half being blocked by a six-foot-high drift of snow. She pushed into it like a hill of flour: Powdery white exploded in all directions, and then she was out of sight.
Vermithrax flew a narrow loop under the ceiling. Merle, who was used to such maneuvers, screamed to Serafin to hold on to her tightly. He strengthened his grip with stiff, ice-cold fingers, while she did her best to clutch the glowing lion’s mane. Serafin was slim and wiry, but he weighed quite a bit more than the featherweight Junipa. Merle wasn’t sure how long she would be able to hold on. Her frost-stiffened fingers had lost their strength; in fact, she could hardly feel the mass of her limbs. The thick mane protected her from the cutting drafts, but that was a weak reassurance in the present situation. It was only a question of time before the two of them would tumble from Vermithrax’s back and either break all their bones when they hit the ground or be spitted by one of the icy sphinx bodies.
“Did you see how many there are?” Serafin shouted into her ear over the wind and the rushing wings.
“Too many, anyway.”
“But there aren’t enough, are there?”
“What do you mean?”
“I know what he is thinking,” said the Queen, “and he is right.”
Serafin leaned closer to Merle, which was nice, even here, even now, and he brought his lips so close to her ear that they touched her hair. The tickling in Merle’s belly increased, and that wasn’t only because of Vermithrax’s renewed flight of attack on the sphinxes. “Too few!” Serafin shouted again. “This is their stronghold, the most secure place of all for them. What’s going on down there is destroying their world. And they only send a handful of soldiers and researchers?” Merle felt him shaking his head at her neck. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe,” she said, “there aren’t any more they can do without. It’s the same reason you were able to walk into the fortress so easily.”
“It wasn’t easy,” he contradicted.
Merle thought of the wounded, but nevertheless she argued, “Normally a few dozen guards would have been waiting for you, not just one. Or do you think the sphinxes would leave the Iron Eye as good as unguarded?”
Vermithrax killed a sphinx soldier with ease as he flew past him, like plucking a flower from a stem. Again the sickle swords of his adversaries struck sparks from his stone underside, but the tiny splinters they hacked out of his body didn’t weaken him.
“They’re too few,” said Serafin. “That’s just what I mean. Too few guards, and now too few to examine this catastrophe down there. It mustbe—”
“It must be,” said Merle “that this isn’t the only place in the Eye where something like this is happening!” Of course, Winter was skimming back and forth through the fortress on his search for Summer, exactly as he’d done in Hell. If he followed his courses over the world just as chaotically, it was no wonder that the seasons were so unreliable: Sometimes there was frost even in April, sometimes not, and you could never predict how the weather was going to be next week.
“The sphinxes have surely flocked here from all over the world to witness the Son of the Mother’s return to life.”
And Winter has come over them like a storm wind, Merle thought, and imagined gigantic salons full of ice sphinxes, like workshops of a crazed sculptor.
“It might have been that way.”
Then Burbridge told Winter about it! Merle thought. He planned for Winter to pass through here as revenge on the sphinxes.
“And the Stone Light?”
Burbridge must somehow have managed to take Winter into the mirror room.
“Looks very much like it.”
This isn’t the first time all this has happened, is it?
“No. But that was perhaps not Winter. Possibly Summer freed herself that time, or someone or something else came to her aid.”
The downfall of the suboceanic kingdoms!
“And the Mayas. The Incas. Atlantis.”
Merle recognized none of these names, but their very sound made her shudder. While Vermithrax detached himself from the sphinxes and flew up to the passageway into which Lalapeya had vanished, she explained her conjecture to Serafin, as well as she could in the headwind. He agreed with her.
They pulled in their heads as Vermithrax swept through the low arch, whirled up the remains of the snowdrift with his claws, and finally set himself down on all fours. The passage was too narrow to fly very far. Moreover, Lalapeya was waiting for them, looking worried. Her eyes sought Merle, saw that she was uninjured, and then turned to Vermithrax. “How many are there?”
“Four left. At least. Perhaps a few more.”
“There must have been an army.”
“Indeed.”
Merle held back a grin, but she knew that they all had the same thought. Considering how effortless Vermithrax’s fight with the sphinxes had been, Winter must have already taken a large part of the work from him.
The lion and the sphinx hurried along the passageway side by side, as their
adversaries appeared in the opening behind them. The scientists had stayed behind, and two soldiers took up the chase. At their backs, on the mirror street, a deep alarm signal sounded several times: The sphinx researchers used horns to call other troops from the breadth of the Iron Eye.
“Do you know your way around here?” Vermithrax asked the sphinx.
“No. When I left my people to watch over the lagoon, there was no Iron Eye yet. The sphinxes had always been a people of the desert and of the deep caves. All this here”—she shook her head resignedly—“all this has nothing to do with what I once knew.”
Although the same cold prevailed in the corridor as everywhere in the Iron Eye, the snow cover around them became thinner after a few steps, finally disappearing altogether. Cutting winds blew against them, but the winds brought no new ice. Nevertheless the mirror floor was slippery with frozen dampness, and neither Vermithrax nor Lalapeya got on as quickly as they wished. The obsidian lion could have stood against their two pursuers and in all probability vanquished them, but he feared that the two would soon be followed by a larger number of opponents. And as long as he was involved in fights, he couldn’t protect Merle and Serafin from attackers.
A new passageway crossed theirs, and to the right, still more sphinxes were approaching. After a quick look, Vermithrax hurried straight on. The sphinxes couldn’t miss his glow. There was no question of a hiding place, especially as there were hardly any doors, only open archways that led into broad halls, infinite rooms in this imitation of the mirror world.
They crossed open canals with frozen surfaces and filigreed bridges that appeared about to break but didn’t even tremble as the weighty obsidian lion thundered across them. They came through a hilly landscape of mirror shards, waste dumps as high as houses of silvery chips and sharp pieces, and then steps went down again, and more steps, and still more steps.
The pursuers stayed on their trail the whole time, often concealed behind curves and corners, but always present as surges of noise: a tramping of lion feet on ice, a roaring of angry voices, a jumble of savage curses and commands.
And then again they were stumbling through high snow, damper and heavier than before, so high that Vermithrax sank up to his belly and Lalapeya was hopelessly stuck after a few steps. The obsidian lion swept the snow masses to the side with his wings, but it soon turned out that he couldn’t get them any farther that way.
“Vermithrax,” cried Lalapeya, “can you carry a third rider?”
“Two or three more, if there’s room for them. But that doesn’t help us much.”
“Perhaps it does.” And as she spoke, a change took place in her.
Merle looked on with open mouth and wide eyes, while Serafin took her hand reassuringly. “Don’t worry,” he whispered, “she does that a lot.”
Around Lalapeya, yellow fountains of sand appeared to shoot up from the snow where her lion legs were stuck. They enveloped her in seconds, until she dissolved in them, as if her entire body had exploded in an eruption of desert dust. Just as quickly the tiny particles joined together again, and Lalapeya emerged from them. She was unchanged from the hips up, but now she had long, slender human legs, which were bare, despite the cold. The fur jacket she’d gotten from the pirates reached down to her thighs, but her lower legs were exposed to the snow without protection.
Serafin let go of Merle and slipped backward a little. “Quick, up here!” he called.
Lalapeya fought her way through the snow to them, and Merle and Serafin pulled her onto the lion between them. The sphinx couldn’t use her injured arms, and if she stood much longer in the snow in her bare feet, the same thing would happen to her legs. Serafin pushed as close as possible against her, put his arms around her to Merle, and yelled, “Let’s go!”
Vermithrax rose from the ground and shook the snow from his paws. He dashed away over the ice, only several yards from the mirrored roof. The walls were barely far enough apart for his gigantic wings, but somehow he succeeded in not hitting the tips and carried his riders safely over the snow. Their pursuers were left behind as they tried to stomp their way through the high snow and then had to give up.
With a triumphant roar Vermithrax shot out of a round opening at the end of the tunnel into an unevenly higher hall, where it was still snowing out of gray fog that hung beneath the ceiling like real winter clouds. The flakes were thick and fluffy. They immediately stuck to Vermithrax and his riders and drove into their eyes. The lion’s glow was garishly reflected in the falling snow, like curtains of gleaming light. The visibility extended for a few yards only.
“I can’t see anything!” Vermithrax lurched in flight and sneezed once, so hard that Merle was afraid the shaking would throw them all from his back. Whatever his bath in the Stone Light had done, it hadn’t made him immune to colds.
The obsidian lion was having trouble maintaining his altitude. He was as good as blind in the snowstorm, and the wet snow weighed down his wings. “I have to go down,” he cried finally, but they’d all realized long ago that this move was unavoidable.
They sank down with the snowflakes, deeper and deeper, but the bottom they were expecting didn’t appear. What they’d taken for a hall was in reality a mighty chasm, an abyss.
“Up ahead there!” Merle yelled through the deluge of snow. Snow got into her mouth. “A bridge!”
A narrow footbridge of mirror glass spanned the infinite emptiness like a guitar string. It was hardly more than forty inches wide and had no railings; both ends lay buried in the snowstorm somewhere.
Vermithrax flew down to it, and with full confidence in the sphinxes’ architecture, he landed on it. It gave a slight shudder but no sign at all that the construction wouldn’t bear his weight. On both ends of the bridge, five or six yards of the snow edges loosened and tumbled into the whitish gray deep.
Vermithrax shook his wings to shake off the lumpy layer of ice that had impeded his flying. Serafin tried to pull the ends of his coat wide enough to cover Lalapeya’s bare legs, but she waved him off.
“Let me down. I can walk on my own again here. Vermithrax won’t be flying anymore in this snow, anyway.”
“The path is too narrow,” said Serafin. “If you get off Vermithrax sideways, you’ll fall down into the chasm.”
“What about from behind?”
Serafin and Merle looked over their shoulders at the same time. The sight of the abyss on both sides of the pathway was alarming. As a master thief, Serafin had balanced over Venice’s roofs all year long without wasting more than a thought on the danger. But this was different. If he went into a slide on the wet, slushy snow, nothing could save him, not luck, not skill.
“I’ll try it,” he said.
“No,” Merle contradicted. “Don’t be silly.”
He looked past Lalapeya to Merle. “Her legs will freeze if she doesn’t change back. So she must get down.”
Merle glared at him: as if she didn’t know that herself. Nevertheless, she was afraid for him and Lalapeya. Although, after watching her transformation, the thought that the sphinx actually was her mother seemed even more incredible.
“Be careful,” said Lalapeya as Serafin slowly slid back-ward.
“Plucky,” the Flowing Queen commented dryly.
“Just hold still!” Serafin called to Vermithrax. His voice sounded grim. Merle held her breath.
“Don’t worry,” replied the lion, and in fact he did not move a fraction of an inch. Even his heartbeat, which Merle could feel clearly beneath her legs most of the time, appeared to stop.
With infinite caution, Serafin slid backward over Vermithrax’s hips. At the same time he grasped the lion’s tail; it gave him additional stability when his boot soles sank into the snow. For a long moment he swayed slightly and cast mistrustful glances into the abyss to the right and to the left. Finally he gave Lalapeya the sign to follow him. His feet seemed to swim in the loose slush, so uncertain was his footing on the bridge. An overhasty movement and he would slide over the edge
along with a gigantic snow clump.
He let go of the lion’s tail in order to free the way for Lalapeya. She nimbly slid back and off the lion, while Merle twisted her neck and worriedly watched what was going on behind her.
“They will make it,” said the Queen.
Easy for you to say, Merle thought.
“Take one step back,” said the sphinx to Serafin, “but carefully.”
Extremely carefully he moved backward, striving not to pay any more attention to the depths below him.
“Good,” said Lalapeya. “And now sit down. And support yourself with your hands.”
He did that. He felt sick and dizzy, master thief or not. Only when he was sitting somewhat securely in the snow did he dare take a deep breath.
Lalapeya changed into a column of whirling sand, from which, in a flash, came flesh and hair and bone. After the sphinx was standing there in her lion form again, she told Serafin to climb onto her back. He obeyed, and the color returned to his face. It reassured him a little that Lalapeya and Vermithrax had four legs that gave them more traction up here. They had their predator’s genes to thank that the suction of the abyss had no power over them. Fear of heights was alien, not only to the winged Vermithrax but also to Lalapeya, as was any clumsy or superfluous movement.
Merle gave a shudder of relief when Serafin was finally sitting safely on Lalapeya’s back. For a long moment she’d even forgotten the cold, which was troubling her more and more. Now she again felt the bite of the frost, the icy burden of the snow, and the severe tugging of the high wind.
“What now?” asked Vermithrax.
“We follow the path,” Merle suggested. “Or does someone have a better idea?”
They moved forward on eight lion paws, not sure what to expect on the other side of the thick blizzard.
After a few steps, Vermithrax stopped again. Merle caught sight of the obstacle at the same moment.
A figure crouched in front of them on the narrow band.
