The Stone Light (27 page)

“Why are you friendly to me, but you imprison my friend?” she asked, controlling herself with difficulty.

“We need him. More than the sphinx, even.”

Merle’s eyes went to the sphinx, who, half predator, half human, was rampaging in his cage, frantic with fury. The steel box swung back and forth, but its strong chain was equal to the burden. Merle’s eyes quickly turned back to Vermithrax. His long obsidian tail hung down between the bars of the cage and twitched slightly.

We have to free him, she thought.

“Yes.”
This time the Flowing Queen had no objections. No suggestions either, however.

“An experiment,” said Burbridge, “for which we’ve waited a long time.”

“What … are you planning to do with them?” Merle asked.

“We’re going to dip them in the Stone Light.”

“What?” Merle stared at him.

“I’ve thoroughly considered whether I should show
you this, Merle. But I think it’s important for you to understand. That you grasp what goes on down here. And why this world is the better one.”

Merle shook her head dumbly. She understood nothing. Nothing at all. Why her especially?

“What’s going to happen to him?” she asked.

“If I knew that, it wouldn’t be necessary to try it,” replied Burbridge. “We’re not experimenting with this thing for the first time today. The first attempts were failures.”

“You burn living creatures, only to see—”

“Don’t you feel it?” he interrupted her. “The Stone Light gives off no heat. It cannot burn anyone. Including your friend.”

“Then why do you want to dip Vermithrax in it?”

He grinned triumphantly. “In order to see what happens, of course! The Light changes every living creature, it
binds
itself with it and makes something new out of it. The stone hearts are part of the Light, small fragments, and they take the body’s own will away from it. Afterward we can do what we want to with them. That has shown itself to be quite practical, especially with the resistant Lilim.”

So, not all the Lilim had readily placed themselves under his rule. There were rebels. Potential opponents.

Merle and Burbridge were now standing at the inner railing of the round grill walk. Quite nearby was the first
of the motionless stone figures that flanked the entire circle.

“We tried it with the golems,” Burbridge continued. “Statues, bodies, hewn out of stone. We let them down into the Light on the chain and when we pulled them up again, they were
alive.”

Merle’s eyes flicked over the endless line of stone figures. They had human shapes, certainly, but their proportions were too massive, their shoulders too broad, their faces smooth as balls.

The professor twisted the corners of his mouth. Then, loudly, he called out a word in a language Merle didn’t understand.

All the stone figures made a step forward at the same time. Then they went stiff again.

He turned to Merle again with a smile. “Stone that becomes alive. A good result, one could say. In any case, a combat-effective one.”

Was that supposed to be a threat? No, she thought, he didn’t need to scare her with a stone army.

“And now,” he said, “we come to a new attempt. A second experiment, one could say. Your friend consists of stone that is already living
before
he comes into contact with the Stone Light. What do you think might happen when we dip the obsidian lion into the Light? What will become of
him?”
There was a spark in Burbridge’s eyes, and Merle realized that it was a part of the scientific
curiosity he’d spoken of earlier. But it was a cold and calculating gleam. It had an alarming similarity to the Stone Light, and for the first time she wondered whether possibly she might be speaking not with Burbridge himself but with something that had gained power over him.

A heart on the hunt for a body, he’d said. One like his own? Was that the way the Light organized and directed whole societies and peoples? By giving a new heart to its leader first of all?

“We must get away from here,”
said the Flowing Queen.

Really?

“I feel something!”

Two figures approached over one of the walks to the circle.

One was a bizarre creature that looked like a human walking on all fours—but its chest and its face were pointed upward. Around its head, eyes, and mouth were wound thorny vines of steel.

The second figure was a girl with long, white-blond hair.

Impossible! Absolutely impossible!

And yet …

“Junipa!”

Merle left Burbridge standing and ran up to the two of them.

The creature took a step back and let the two girls fall
into each other’s arms. Merle no longer kept back her tears.

When they pulled away from each other, Junipa smiled, her mirror eyes glowing in the light of the Stone Light. Very deep inside, very briefly only, Merle was horrified at this look; but then she realized that the mirror fragments only reflected the flickering brightness that was all around them.

“What are you doing here?” she asked breathlessly, asked it again, and yet again, shaking her head, laughing and crying at the same time.

Junipa took a deep breath, as if she must pull all her strength together to speak. She held Merle’s hands, and her fingers now closed about them even more strongly, as if she never again wanted to let go of her friend, her confidante from the first days in Arcimboldo’s mirror workshop.

“They have …” She fell silent, started over: “Talamar abducted me.” With a wave at the grotesque thing behind her, she added, “He killed Arcimboldo!”

“We must get away,”
said the Flowing Queen.
“At once!”

Merle stared at Talamar, saw the steel vine, which had distorted the face into a wasteland of scars. “Arcimboldo?” she whispered, disbelieving.

Junipa nodded.

Merle wanted to say something, anything—
“That’s
impossible! He can’t be dead! You’re lying!”
—when a scream sounded behind her.

A scream of fury.

A scream of hate.

“Must get away from here!”
said the Flowing Queen once again.

Merle whirled around and looked back, across the few yards to Burbridge and to the edge of the round grill walkway.

At first look, nothing had changed. The professor still stood there, his back to her, looking into the center of the circle. The golem guards were stiff as before. The sphinx rampaged in his cage, while Vermithrax sat motionless, gazing into the deep. Not at Merle and Junipa, and not at Lord Light.

The lion was looking down at the narrow walk that cut through the middle of the circle. At the platform in the center.

That platform from which the dead priest of Horus had been dangling.

The end of the rope now hung empty over the abyss. It was frayed, as if it had been bitten off.

Seth stood on the platform—
alive!
—with both arms raised and again uttered a scream.

“Iskander,” he roared into the light-flooded emptiness.

The cage of the sphinx exploded as if the bars were glass.

And then Iskander descended on them.

13
T
HE
F
IGHTERS
A
WAKEN

T
HINGS HAPPENED TOO FAST FOR
M
ERLE TO SEE IT ALL AT
first. Only a little later did she succeed in grasping most of it, a movement here, a blur there, underscored by a cacophony of noise and screams and the rushing of powerful wings.

The sphinx shot out of the cloud of steel and iron fragments into which his prison had changed from one minute to the next. He raced down, faster than the remains of the cage plunging down around him, and reached the platform in no time.

Seth was waiting for him. He sprang agilely onto
Iskander’s lion back, screaming out a string of orders in Egyptian. Immediately, the sphinx launched himself from the platform, stormed onto the round path and, with a single, clawed blow, beheaded three of the golem guards that stood in his way. Burbridge threw himself to the ground behind them, while other stone soldiers on both sides stomped forward to protect their master.

Carried on by his swing, Iskander had to fly a loop in order to renew the attack on Lord Light.

When the cage burst, Merle had instinctively thrown herself on Junipa and pulled her to the ground with her. She halfway expected that Talamar would tear her friend away from her. But instead, the creature jumped nimbly over Junipa and raced over to Burbridge and the golem soldiers, with the intention of defending Lord Light with his life.

Unexpectedly, Merle and Junipa were left unguarded.

Not that it was of much use to them. All they could do was lie flat on the ground, Merle protectively over Junipa, who, though only a year younger, seemed to her at that moment like a child who must be shielded.

“Too late!”
whispered the Flowing Queen in her thoughts, but what she meant by it wasn’t clear to Merle yet.

She lifted her head, first made sure that Junipa was all right, and then looked back at Burbridge. She was lying about ten yards from the place where the walkway entered
the circle; ten yards from the place where Burbridge was taking cover behind a bunch of golem soldiers, while the sphinx with his rider—

Dead! Seth had been dead!

—flew in for a new attack. Two other stone men burst under a blow from Iskander’s claw, while Seth bellowed further orders in Egyptian, clasped both arms around Iskander’s half-human upper body, and kept his eye on the light-filled mist of the dome.

Merle didn’t know how he’d managed to survive the execution, and perhaps it was better so. He was a high priest of Horus, one of the most powerful magicians in the Empire, and he must know how to raise the dead. Possibly that had been in his plan from the beginning: lull Burbridge into security and then be able to strike totally unexpectedly.

And he understood about striking, no doubt about it.

More golems shattered into pieces, proving that everything that Lord Light had expected of them had been in error. They might offer protection from humans and Lilim, but not against the anger of a sphinx, whose power and strength and cruelty were legendary among the peoples of the world.

Iskander was, as Merle saw at once, no ordinary sphinx. He was bigger, stronger, and in addition to that, winged. His long, bronze-colored hair had loosed itself from his neck and whirled wildly around his head, a net of
fluttering strands like the tentacles of a bizarre water plant. He had claws not only on his lion feet but also on both hands of his human torso, and they were long and sharp enough to break even stone. Merle didn’t like to imagine what would happen if they landed on soft flesh, muscles, skin, and bone.

Her eyes sought the second cage, in which Vermithrax was still imprisoned. The obsidian lion was no longer sitting there quietly but vainly trying to bend the bars apart with his paws. To no avail. Iskander’s cage had been destroyed by Seth’s magic, not by the muscular power of the sphinx, and Vermithrax’s prison remained untouched by it. The steel box shook and jerked as Vermithrax ran around in it angrily, throwing himself against the bars repeatedly and bellowing something to Merle that she couldn’t understand over the noise of the fight.

Why didn’t any Lilim come to Burbridge’s aid? He’d trusted in the strength of the golem soldiers. But wouldn’t he have guessed what the sphinx was capable of doing?

Merle thought of the empty machine tunnels, the anxious creatures who took shelter from their master behind steel and smoke.

Only a single Lilim was ready to go to his death for Lord Light.

Talamar dared a desperate maneuver. When Iskander shot down once again from high altitude, the grotesque
creature jumped from one of the railings and threw himself at the sphinx. Iskander crashed against him, lost his orientation for a moment, smashed into the opposite railing, and lost his rider. Seth was slung from the sphinx’s back and thumped onto the walkway.

Talamar hung with his limbs entwined around Iskander’s body and was carried high up with him, depriving him of sight: Talamar’s scrawny body clung before the sphinx’s chest and face. Iskander was confused for a moment. Then he seized the Lilim with both hands, tore him to pieces, and flung him into the abyss. Talamar’s remains fell into the deep in a red cloud and disappeared in the glow of the Stone Light.

Iskander let out an angry scream, licked the Lilim blood from his claws as he flew, and ignored the calls of his master. Seth had pulled himself up to the railing with his unwounded arm; the golden grid inlaid in his scalp was sprinkled with damp red. Again and again he roared orders up to Iskander, but the sphinx didn’t obey.

The winged creature screeched in wild triumph, shot away over Seth, and flew in a wide arc. His eye fell on Vermithrax and recognized in him a worthy opponent. He rushed at the obsidian lion’s cage with brutish fury, leaped on it, fastened himself to the bars, and tore at them. Iskander was no ordinary sphinx. He was something artificial, bred through the black arts of the Pharaoh and his priesthood, a cross of several beasts, and Merle wouldn’t
have been surprised if somewhere in him there were also the traces of a Lilim.