The Stone Light (5 page)

Serafin was immobilized with horror. Not for long, only for a few instants. It was enough for him to realize that the cats were sacrificing their lives for him. With all the danger that threatened him, he couldn’t permit that. Cats were the friends of the master thieves, their allies, not their meek slaves. He hesitated a moment, then let out a new succession of whistles. Immediately the wave of cats surged back; only those who were biting and hooked into mummies stayed a few seconds longer. Then they also gave up, let themselves drop, and whisked away.

Serafin’s command meant that the cats should run away, back to wherever they had come from. But they didn’t obey. They fell back from the mummies for only a few yards, stopped at the edge of the piazza, and watched their opponents with glowing eyes.

Meanwhile, Serafin had run to the other side of the piazza. From there he looked back and saw the cats clumped in front of the buildings like a wave of fur. He also saw that the mummy soldiers were hard on his heels.

The cats waited for him to call them to attack again, but he didn’t have the heart to. Nearly a dozen animals lay dead or dying in the lane that the four mummy soldiers had plowed. The grief that overwhelmed Serafin at this sight shook him even more strongly than fear for his life.

Ten more yards and the four soldiers would reach him. Silently they rushed toward him. In the background, up
on the bridge, stood the envoy, his arms crossed, barricaded behind his two guards.

“The cats!” cried a light voice suddenly out of the shadows behind Serafin. “They should pull farther back!”

Serafin whirled around. A torch burned in the recess between the houses, but he couldn’t recognize who was holding it. He whistled again, moving toward the source of the light as he did so.

This time the cats obeyed. In the wink of an eye, they climbed the houses and windowsills, drainpipes and steps, wooden beams and balustrades.

“Watch out!” bellowed a second voice, this time from the left.

Serafin turned and ran. The mummy soldiers had almost reached him. He looked back over his shoulder—and saw two garish tongues of flame leap out of the street openings in the direction of the mummies. There was a crackling snarl, then the four mummies were alight. Flames licked over their dried-out bodies, sprang from one limb to the other, ate along under the steel of their armor. One soldier sank to its knees, while the other three still ran on. Two struck wildly about themselves, as if they could drive off the flames with their sickle swords. But the third rushed straight at Serafin without stopping, its weapon raised, ready to deal the deadly blow.

Serafin was unarmed except for his knife, which he tore from his belt. He knew he hadn’t a chance with it.
Nevertheless, he stood there as if his boots had taken root. He’d been a master thief of the Guild, the youngest ever, and had learned that you don’t run away from an opponent. Not if others were ready to risk their lives for you. And as he saw it, not only had the cats done that, but also the mysterious helpers who came to his aid with their fire breath.

Now he saw three figures leap out of the recesses on both sides of the street. Two flung their torches to the ground, while the third rushed at one of the burning soldiers with his drawn saber. Very briefly the idea flitted through Serafin’s mind that he knew this face, all three faces, but he had no time to make sure.

The burning mummy threw itself at him like a demon, a towering column of fire, from which the razor-sharp blade of the sickle sword struck at him. Serafin avoided the blow and at the same time tried to put some distance between himself and his opponent. He could perhaps escape the sword, but if the flaming creature fell on him, he would burn miserably.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the fighter with the saber strike the head of his mummy foe from its shoulders, with an elegant turn that showed either long practice or enormous talent. The two others had also drawn their blades and fought with the remaining mummies, nowhere near so skillfully as their leader, but the fire assisted them. It consumed the undead soldiers with such speed that they
literally fell apart before they could become dangerous. Serafin’s adversary, too, in spite of all its determination, became ever weaker, its movements more uncontrolled, until its legs gave under it. Serafin took a few steps backward and watched as the mummy was consumed by flames like a heap of straw.

“Watch out!” cried a voice.

Serafin looked hastily around. The two bodyguards of the envoy had rushed forward, followed by their master. They rushed at his saviors. Serafin’s eyes were tearing from the smoke of the numerous fires. He still could not clearly see who was standing with him. Earlier he had seen their faces … but no, that was impossible.

He quickly ran around the first fire, jumped over the second, and lifted a sickle sword from the ground. One of the mummies had lost it before it was entirely burned up. The grip was warm, almost hot, but not so bad that he couldn’t hold it. The weapon felt clumsy to him, the balance of the blade with a will of its own. But he wouldn’t allow others to fight for him while he stood by doing nothing. He grabbed the weapon with both hands and rushed into the fight.

The leader of the three rescuers sprang skillfully forward and back, avoided sword blows, and inflicted numerous wounds on one mummy soldier. Then the saber flashed through the defenses of the soldier in an explosion of blows and thrusts and beheaded it. Again,
dust billowed out in all directions, but no blood flowed. The torso collapsed. Serafin quickly realized that this was the best way to conquer a mummy: The magic of the Egyptians affected the dead brain; without skulls they were ordinary corpses again.

And then, when he finally recognized who’d saved him, he didn’t believe his eyes. He would have expected anyone else, but not
him.

The two other fighters had their hands full to keep the last mummy off their necks. Serafin supported them with the heavy sickle sword as well as he could, while the leader pressed forward, avoiding a revolver shot from the envoy, pursuing him to the bridge and there striking him down with slashing saber blows.

Finally the last mummy also fell. Serafin looked across the plaza, his breath rattling. The traces of dead cats were clearly to be seen in the flickering light of the fire. He swore to himself never again, under any circumstances, to ask the cat folk for help. He had used them selfishly, without considering, and bought his life with those poor creatures lying there in front of him.

One of his fellow fighters laid a hand on his arm. “If what I’ve heard about the friendship of thieves with the cats is true, they made their decision themselves.”

Serafin turned and looked Tiziano in the face. Arcimboldo’s former apprentice smiled crookedly, then bent and wiped the dust off his saber blade on the uniform
of a mummy torso. Boro, the second fighter, walked up next to him and did the same thing.

“Thanks.” Serafin himself thought it could have sounded a little heartier, but he was still too astonished that it was they who’d come to help him. Although Tiziano and Boro had probably never been bad fellows at the bottom of their hearts—at least that’s what Merle thought; her problem was much more that they were too closely allied with Dario. Dario was the oldest of Arcimboldo’s apprentices and Serafin’s archenemy from the time he’d given up master thievery, and the two hated each other’s guts. One time Dario had even attacked Serafin with a knife in Arcimboldo’s workshop on the Canal of the Expelled.

And of all people, Dario, who was more detestable to him than almost anyone else, whom he considered underhanded, lying, and cowardly, this same Dario now came straight across the piazza to him, carelessly shoving his saber back into its sheath, the saber with which he’d just saved Serafin’s life.

Dario bowed to Serafin, looked him over, then grinned. But it didn’t seem especially friendly, only arrogant and unmitigatedly insufferable. Entirely the old Dario.

“Looks as if we came just in time.”

Tiziano and Boro exchanged looks that seemed embarrassed, but neither of them said a word.

“Many thanks,” said Serafin, who still could think of nothing better. To deny the help he’d desperately needed from the three would have been foolish and transparent—and besides, it was just the sort of answer Dario would have given in his situation. Instead, and in order to differentiate himself even more strongly from his former adversary, he added a compliment with a sincere smile: “You can handle a saber really well. I wouldn’t have expected it of you.”

“Sometimes you can be wrong about others, hmm?”

“Very possibly.”

Boro and Tiziano gathered up their torches and rubbed them on the housefronts until the flames were extinguished. Now for the first time Serafin noticed the bulbous flasks they wore at their belts. There must be a fluid in there they’d used to spit fire. Certainly he’d heard that Arcimboldo’s apprentices had left the magic mirror workshop two days ago in order the join the resistance fighters against the Empire. But he was astonished at how fast they’d learned to handle the flames. On the other hand, it was possible that they’d learned it earlier. He knew much too little about them.

“I thought you’d have turned tail sooner,” Dario said. “Thieves aren’t fighters, are they?”

“Not cowards, either.” Serafin hesitated. “What do you want with me? You certainly didn’t cross my path by accident.”

“We were looking for you,” Boro said. Dario repaid him with a dark side glance. But the sturdy youth took no notice of him, wholly in contrast to the past. “Someone wants to see you.”

Serafin raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“We’re not mirror makers anymore,” said Dario, before one of the others could come forward again.

“Yes, I’d already heard that.”

“We’ve joined the rebels.”

“Sounds fabulous.”

“Don’t get funny.”

“Your performance was quite impressive. You just polished off six of those … brutes.”

“And the fellow in the cape,” said Dario.

“And the fellow in the cape,” Serafin repeated. “I wouldn’t have been able to deal with them alone. Which perhaps means that I wouldn’t be a particularly good rebel, right?”

They all knew better, for although Serafin wasn’t a skillful fighter with a saber, like Dario, as a former master thief he possessed a whole list of other talents.

“Our leader wants to speak with you,” said Dario.

“And I was thinking that was you.”

Dario’s look grew as dark as the empty eye sockets of a mummy soldier. “We don’t have to be friends, no one’s asking that of you. You should just listen. And I think you owe us that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Serafin. “I guess I do.”

“Good. Then just come with us.”

“Where?”

The three exchanged looks, then Dario lowered his voice conspiratorially. “To the enclave,” he whispered.

3
L
ILITH’S
C
HILDREN

M
ERLIE SAW THE STATUES EVEN FROM A DISTANCE, AND
they were bigger than anything she had ever seen in her life. Very
much
bigger.

Ten figures of stone—each at least four hundred feet high, although that was a rough estimate, and they might actually have been even a little higher—standing around a gigantic hole in the landscape. That was what it was, in fact: a hole. Not a crater, not a deep valley. The closer they came to the opening, the clearer it became that it had no bottom, as if a divine fist had simply smashed a piece out of the earth’s crust like a splinter from a glass ball. The
hole had an irregular shape and must have been larger than Venice’s main island.

As Vermithrax flew closer to it, the edges blurred in the moisture drifting across the landscape like a very fine drizzle. Soon Merle saw only the vast edge in front of her, as if the lion had brought them to the end of the world. The opposite side of the abyss was no longer visible. Merle was seized by a feeling of great emptiness and desolation, in spite of the Queen inside her, in spite of Vermithrax.

For hours now they’d been noticing a strange smell—not of sulfur, like the time Hell’s messenger had appeared in the Piazza San Marco, but sweeter, hardly less unpleasant, as if something were decaying in the innards of the earth. Perhaps the heart of the world, she thought bitterly. Perhaps the entire world was just dying from the inside out, like a fruit on a tree in which rot and parasites had spread. The parasites were the Egyptians. Or, she corrected herself, maybe even all the people who had no better ideas than to plunge into a war of mythical dimensions.

But no,
they
were not the ones who had begun this war. And also not billions of other people. At this moment, for the first time, she became aware of the whole magnitude of the responsibility she’d undertaken: She was looking for help in the battle against the Egyptians, for help for an entire world.

In the battle against the Egyptians.
There it was again.
And she was right in the middle of it. She was no better than all the others in this war.

“Do not talk such nonsense,”
said the Queen.