by Kai Meyer
Then he saw her.
Until now he’d not been aware that he’d almost reached the floor of the shaft It might just as well have been a lake of fire, even more flames in this sea of heat. But the light was pure and natural, not like that one of stone that spun its net of meanness and greed in Hell. This light was the one that bore warmth, the light in whose beams Vermithrax’s lion people had sunned themselves on the rock terraces of Africa.
The light of the summer.
There she lay, stretched out in a sea of glitter and flame, supported by hot air, floating over the floor like a fruit just waiting to be picked.
There were no guards, no chains. Both would have been incinerated in a second. All that held her down here and had placed her in a trance was the sphinxes’ magic.
Vermithrax held himself above the floating Summer with gentle strokes of his wings and gazed down at her for a long moment. She looked as if she could be Winter’s sister, tall and thin, almost bony. She didn’t look healthy, not in the human sense, but that might lie in her nature. Her hair was of fire. Flames also flickered behind her eyelids, yellow and red like glowing coals. Her lips were as silky as flower petals, her skin pale, her fingernails sickles of pure fire.
She didn’t have her heat under control, Winter had said. And in fact everywhere there was fire licking out of her body, her body itself seemed to waver and melt like a wax figure in the heat of August.
Vermithrax observed her a moment longer. Then he stretched out his left front paw and touched her with the greatest imaginable gentleness on the upper thigh.
His heart stopped racing.
He knew about her heat, yet he didn’t feel it.
The Light, he thought again. The Stone Light is protecting me. I should he grateful to it and to that accursed Burbridge.
He pulled his paw back, waited for two or three breaths, then began a narrow loop around Summer’s floating body, past the flickering fountain of her fiery locks. Her hair streamed out like an explosion of fireworks, forever frozen in time. Once, twice, he kept circling around her until he was sure that he had cut through the invisible bands of the chain spell. Then he floated cautiously beside her and tried to lift her from her bed of heat.
She lay light as a feather between his forepaws and detached from her float with a slight jerk, as if he’d pulled a nail off a magnet. At the same moment the brightness around her dimmed, the shimmering of the air faded, the surroundings grew sharper. The heat ebbed perceptibly, he could literally see it. No one, no sphinx had thought it would ever be possible that there’d be a creature who could get to her here. The Stone Light, the power behind the power of the sphinxes, had deprived itself of the victory.
Vermithrax rose slowly upward, clutching Summer’s thin body firmly. She looked undernourished, a little like Merle’s friend Junipa. But with Summer it was not a sign of too little food or illness. Who could say how a season should look, her skin, her features? If Winter was a healthy example of his kind, then probably there was nothing wrong with Summer’s body.
Her mind, however, was another matter.
Although Vermithrax had severed the bonds of the sphinx spell, Summer still showed no signs of awakening. She hung in his grasp like a doll, not moving. He wondered if her eyelids were at least fluttering, as is often the case with humans who are gradually awakening from unconsciousness. But Summer was not human. Anyway, during the steep flight it was hard for him to lift her far enough away to be able to see her face.
They flew in an aura of warmth. The snow around them melted and gradually tapered off, the closer they came to the dizzying narrow path where Winter and the others awaited them. The power of the two seasons mutually canceled out, now that Summer was no longer hurling all her power to the outside. Vermithrax assumed that this was a sign of her recovery: Her body was again using its energy on herself, directing its power inside, endeavoring to heal.
They’d almost reached the thin bridge over the mirror abyss when Summer moved in Vermithrax’s claws. She groaned softly as life gradually returned to her.
Now he flew even faster, turned a triumphal pirouette around the bridge, and let Summer glide into Winter’s out-stretched arms. While the two embraced—he stormily, she barely conscious, still a shadow of herself—the obsidian lion sank down and gently landed in front of Lalapeya.
The sphinx let go of Merle, and Vermithrax enjoyed it when the girl threw herself on his neck with a happy shout, buried her face in his glowing mane, and wept with relief. The boy on the sphinx’s back was grinning broadly. Vermithrax winked at him, seeming extraordinarily human as he did so.
Summer was growing more alert with every second in Winter’s embrace. When she opened her eyes, they’d taken on the colors of sun-glowing desert sand. The flames in her hair went out. Her narrow hands clutched Winter’s back, and she let out a sob. “It happened again,” she whispered. She was now weeping quite openly, without any shame. Winter’s closeness gave her support.
Vermithrax looked over at Merle, who had detached herself from him. Yet it was Serafin who put words to the question they all had: “And was that really all?”
For a moment there was silence. No more snow fell, and the winter winds around them had died down almost entirely. They stood quietly over the abyss, whose floor shone like a sea of silver below them.
“No,” said Merle, and again it was the Flowing Queen who spoke out of her. “That was by no means all.”
“But—” Serafin was interrupted when Merle shook her head and the Queen said, “It has happened. The sphinxes have used Summer’s last energies and reached their goal.”
“The Son of the Mother?” asked Vermithrax somberly.
“Yes,” said the Queen through Merle’s mouth. “The Son of the Mother is awake. I feel him, not far from here. And now there is only one who is a match for him.”
As there had been once before. Like that other time.
Mother against son, son against mother.
“Sekhmet,” said Merle waveringly, now again the mistress of her own voice. “Only Sekhmet can still stop her son. But for that—” She hesitated and sought dazedly for words, which she really already knew, because the Queen had passed them to her. “She says that for that she needs her old body.”
THE SON OF THE MOTHER
IT BEGAN WITH A SUNBARK THAT FELL FROM THE SKY somewhere over the Mediterranean. It plunged down like a dead bird struck by a hunter’s shot from ambush. The golden sickle wobbled downward in narrow spirals, and the sphinx on board could do nothing to stop the dive. The bark splashed into the sea in the center of a foaming fountain. Salt water sprayed through the viewing slits and leaky weld joints from all sides. Seconds later it had vanished.
Elsewhere, similar scenes took place over land. Sunbarks full of mummy soldiers fell out of the clouds and smashed on bare rocks, on deserted fields, between the tips of deep forests. Some fell over cities, frequently in the midst of burned-out ruins, or onto the roofs of houses, inhabited or uninhabited. Some sank in swamps and broad marshes, others were swallowed by jungles or desert dunes. High in the mountains they scraped along steep walls and were torn apart on rock projections.
Where men and women were witness to the events, they broke into jubilation, without guessing that the cause of it all was a girl and her motley companions in distant Egypt. Others suppressed their joy out of fear of the mummy soldiers who were guarding them—until they noticed that a change was also taking place in them.
Everywhere in the world, mummies disintegrated into dust and dried limbs, to stained corpse flesh and rattling tools. In some places it was a matter of a few breaths, during which whole peoples were instantly freed of their oppressors; elsewhere it took hours until the last mummy soldier became a lifeless corpse.
Sphinxes tried to hold the workers in their mummy factories in check, but they were too few, most of them having long since left on the road to the Iron Eye. Nor were there any Horus priests, who might have stopped the downfall; Amenophis him
self had wiped them out. As for the human servants of the Empire, their number was too small, their will too weak, and their strength too little to offer serious resistance to the flaring rebellion.
The Egyptian Empire that had taken decades to establish perished within a few hours.
On the borders of the free Czarist kingdom, it wasn’t long before the defenders on the walls and palisades, in the trenches and on the towers of lonely tundra fortresses, knew the truth. They dared raids, which quickly turned into campaigns—campaigns against an enemy who suddenly wasn’t there anymore, against crumbling mummy bodies and shattered sunbarks.
In many places the mighty collectors, the dreaded flagships of the Empire, plunged out of the clouds. Some into bleak no-man’s-lands, a handful over cities. Some took hundreds of slaves to death with them, all extinguished by a single stroke of Fate.
Here and there a few sphinxes tried vainly to keep their flying apparatus in the sky, mustering all their sphinx magic. But their attempts were to no avail. Those who crawled from the smoking, bent steel wreckage alive were killed by their human slaves. Only a few succeeded in finding shelter in woods and caves, with no hope of ever again being able to walk safely in daylight.
The world changed. Not stealthily, not timidly. The change was like a thunder bolt out of the blue, a flash in the darkest night. What was suppressed and destroyed over decades broke out like a flower through ashes and stone, developed shoots, stretched and extended itself, bloomed to resistance and new strength.
And while life awakened anew on all continents, the snow in the Egyptian desert melted.
Winter stayed behind with Summer on the edge of the abyss, where the path ran into the wall of mirror-polished steel. Summer was still too weak to help Merle and the others in their battle.
Merle was clutching Vermithrax’s mane tightly with both hands. The obsidian lion bore her swiftly through the arched passages, halls, and stairwells of the Iron Eye. Water ran down the walls around them, snowdrifts and icicles melted into streamlets and lakes.
Serafin sat behind Merle, while Lalapeya followed them through the mirrored corridors at a fast gallop.
“And is she sure,” Serafin shouted into Merle’s ear, “that her body is preserved somewhere in the fortress?”
“She said that.”
“And she also knows where?”
“She said she sensed it—after all, it was once part of her.”
The Queen spoke up again. “That ill-bred boy talks about me as if I were not here.”
And you aren’t, either, Merle retorted. At least not for him. How much farther do we have to go?
“We shall see.”
That’s not fair.
“I know just as little as you. The presence of my former body fills all the lower floors of the fortress, exactly like the presence of the Son of the Mother. They must both be very nearby.”
Things were coming to their conclusion—a conclusion. Merle had to admit that everything had gotten to be too much for her long ago. So much had happened since Seth had abducted Junipa in the mirror room, and for a long time she’d felt unable to make sense out of anything anymore. Yet Serafin and the closeness of Vermithrax and Lalapeya gave her a vague feeling of security. She wished that Winter had stayed at her side too. But he refused to leave Summer and had sunk into his own superhumanity again. The seasons would continue to exist, no matter what became of the world, which they would continue to cover with ice and heat and fall foliage. Vermithrax had risked his life for Summer, but no one thanked him for it. Merle was angry at Winter. They could have used his help—whatever the Queen was planning.
You do have a plan, don’t you? she asked in her mind, but as usual with inconvenient questions, she received no answer.
As they went along they passed crystallized sphinxes, frozen to milky ice when Winter touched them during his wanderings through the fortress. Water dripped onto the mirrored floor from their bodies. Merle couldn’t shake off the feeling that she’d been moving through a gigantic mirrored mausoleum for hours.
Serafin was having the same thoughts. “Very odd,” he said as they passed a group of icy sphinx bodies. “They’re our enemies, of course, but this … I don’t know….”
Merle understood what he was trying to say. “It feels wrong somehow, doesn’t it?”
He nodded. “Maybe because it’s always wrong when so many living creatures simply stop being.” After a pause, he added, “No matter what they’ve done.”
Merle was silent for a moment, thinking about what he’d said. She came to an upsetting conclusion. “I’m not sorry for them. I mean, I’m trying … but I can’t be. I’m simply not sorry for them. Too much has happened for that. They have millions of human beings on their consciences.” She’d almost said “billions,” but her tongue hesitated to put the truth into words.
The frozen sphinx bodies whisked past them like a procession, forming bizarrely columned halls of ice cadavers. Broad puddles had already formed around some of them. The thaw created by the reunion of Summer and Winter was spreading into the lower stories.
Lalapeya had been silent the entire time. Merle couldn’t get rid of the feeling that her mother was observing her, as if she were trying to make a picture of her daughter that went beyond the simple surface. As if her eyes were also examining Merle’s interior, her heart. Presumably she was listening to every word that Merle said.
“Now I know!” the Queen burst out. “I know why my body and the Son of the Mother are overlapping this way. Why it is so difficult to keep them separate.”
And?
“They are both here.”
In the fortress? But we’ve known that for a long time.
“Silly girl! In one single place. In a hall.” A short silence, then: “Directly in front of us!”
Merle was about to warn the others, but she didn’t need to. Vermithrax stopped suddenly as a knife-sharp outline emerged from the panorama of mirrors and ice, a horizontal line—they were approaching the edge of a wide balcony. And beyond it, again … an abyss.
The lion slowly felt his way forward, Lalapeya at his side.
“What is that?” Serafin whispered.
Merle could only guess the answer: They had stumbled on the heart of the Iron Eye, on the temple of the lion goddess.
Sekhmet’s shrine. The crypt of the Flowing Queen.
Merle and Serafin leaped off Vermithrax’s back and, on their knees, made their way to the edge. Serafin’s hand moved over Merle’s. She gave him a smile and enclosed his fingers in a firm grasp. Warmth crept up her arm, electrifying her. Unwillingly, she tore her eyes away to look down into the deep emptiness below.
On the opposite wall of the hall—for a hall it was, even if its proportions were beyond comparison with any human work of construction, any throne room, any cathedral—stood the gigantic statue of a lioness, taller than Venice’s Basilica of San Marco. It was stone, with predator’s fangs bared, each tooth as long as a tree trunk. Her gaze looked dark and mean, the eyes sunk in deep shadow. On each of her claws, hewn from rock, was spitted the figure of a human, as casually as dirt between her paws.
The statue was reflected many times in the mirror walls of the temple, over and over, so that it seemed as if it were not a single statue of Sekhmet standing there but a dozen or more.
“That was you?” Merle exclaimed.
“Sekhmet,” contradicted the Queen dejectedly, “not I.”
“But you’re one and the same!”
“We were once.” Her tone was bitter. “But I was never as the sphinxes have represented me. When I was still called Sekhmet, they revered me as a goddess—but not as that thing there!” There was loathing in her voice now. “Since then they have apparently made a demon of me. Look at the dead in the claws. I have never killed humans. But it fits with their plans. ‘Sekhmet did it,’ they say, “so we can do it too.’ That is the way it is with all gods who can no longer defend themselves—their adherents shape them just as it suits them.
In time, no one looks for the truth anymore.”
“This must be the deepest point of the Iron Eye,” Serafin said. “Look down there.”
From all the entrances to the mighty mirror temple, streams of water were splashing and gurgling into the hall, some only small rivulets, some as wide as brooks.
Lalapeya cautiously bent a little farther forward and looked down over the edge of the drop-off. “This is all going to be flooded soon, when the snow in the upper levels is completely melted.”
Vermithrax was still unable to take his eyes off the tower-high stature. “Is that her body?”
At first Merle had had the same thought, but now she knew better. “No, only a statue.”
“Where is her proper body, then?”
“Over there,” the Queen said in Merle’s head. “Look to the right, past the front paws. You see that low altar? And what is lying on it?”
Merle strained and blinked and tried to make something out. It was far away. The floor of the hall lay deep below them; the balcony ran around the upper third of the wall. Whatever the Queen intended, they could reach it only with Vermithrax’s help.
Merle discovered the altar just as she was about to give up. She also saw the body that was lying on it. Stretched out on its side, with the four paws pointed toward them. A wild cat. A lioness. She was no bigger than an ordinary animal; on the contrary, she appeared to Merle much more delicate, almost fragile. Her surface was gray, as if it were dusty—or stone.
Merle pointed out her discovery to the others.
“She’s made of stone,” Vermithrax purred. He sounded as if he felt a little flattered.
“I was not always,” said the Queen with Merle’s voice so that all could hear her. “When I laid aside that body, it was of flesh and blood. It must have turned to stone over all the millennia. I did not know that.”
“That could be due to the touch of the Stone Light,” said Lalapeya thoughtfully.
