The Stone Light
Page 1
Praise for The Water Mirror Dark Reflections: Book One
A School Library Journal Best Book
A Locus Magazine Recommended Read
A Book Sense Children’s Pick
A New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age
—New York Times Book Review
“A refreshing … compelling story.”
—School Library Journal, starred review
⋆ “This inventive and original fantasy … is a standout.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
⋆ “A complex work of high fantasy.”
Praise for The Stone Light Dark Reflections: Book Two
—School Library Journal
“Enthusiasts of the first book will fly through this one and await the conclusion of the trilogy.”
—Locus
“A catalog of wonders, full of weird marvels.”
Also by Kai Meyer
Dark Reflections, Book One: The Water Mirror
Dark Reflections, Book Three: The Glass Word
The Wave Walkers, Book One: Pirate Curse
The Wave Walkers, Book Two: Pirate Emperor
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIMON PULSE
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
English langauge translation copyright © 2007 by Elizabeth D. Crawford
Das Steinerne Licht text copyright © 2001 by Kai Meyer
Original German edition © 2002 by Loewe Verlag GmbH, Bindlach
Originally published in German in 2002 as Das Steinerne Licht by Loewe Verlag
Pulished by arrangement with Loewe Verlag
First U.S. edition, 2007
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
SIMON PULSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Also available in a Margaret K. McElderry Books hardcover edition.
Designed by Ann Zeak
The text of this book was set in Stempel Garamond.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Simon Pulse edition October 2007
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Meyer, Kai.
[Steinerne Licht]
The stone light / Kai Meyer ; translated by Elizabeth D. Crawford.
—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.—(Dark Reflections ; bk. 2)
Summary: While Merle and the Flowing Queen travel to Hell to enlist Lord Light’s help in Venice’s fight against the invading Egyptian army, Serafin joins a resistance group that is led by an ancient sphinx.
ISBN 13: 978-0-689-87789-6 (hc)
ISBN 10: 0-689-87789-7 (hc)
www.simsonspeakers.com
[1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Sphinxes (Mythology)—Fiction. 3. Orphans—Fiction. 4. Mirrors—Fiction. 5. Fantasy.] I. Crawford, Elizabeth D. II. Title.
PZ7.M57171113 Sto
[Fic]—dc22
2006002252
ISBN-13: 978-0-689-87790-2 (pbk)
ISBN-10: 0-689-87790-0 (pbk)
eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0878-9
www.SimonandSchuster.com
CONTENTS
1 SON OF HORUS
2 THE MASTER THIEF
3 LILITH’S CHILDREN
4 THE ENCLAVE
5 IN THE EAR OF THE HERALD
6 JUNIPA’S FATE
7 THE PHARAOH
8 WINTER
9 AXIS OF THE WORLD
10 THE ASSAULT
11 HEART HOUSE
12 LORD LIGHT
13 THE FIGHTERS AWAKEN
14 FLOTSAM
15 FRIENDS
1 SON OF HORUS
FAR BELOW THE LANDSCAPE, LOOKING LIKE A SEA OF ashes, steadily passed beneath the wings of the obsidian lion. Vermithrax’s pitch-black stone body glided along under the thick cloud cover, almost weightless. The girl on his back had the feeling that if she simply stretched out her arm, she could touch the puffy undersides of the clouds.
Merle was clutching the flying lion’s mane with both hands. Vermithrax’s long coat was of stone, like his entire body, but for some reason Merle didn’t understand, his fur felt soft and flexible—only one of the countless marvels the stone lion concealed in his mighty obsidian body.
The wind at this height was bitterly cold and cutting. It effortlessly penetrated Merle’s coarse, calf-length dress. The skirt had hiked up and uncovered her knees, so her legs were exposed to the wind. The goose bumps on her legs had come to seem just as matter of course as her growling stomach and the earaches she was having from the height and the cold air. At least her heavy leather shoes protected her feet from the cold, a feeble consolation considering their desperate situation and the empty countryside that was moving along a hundred yards below them.
Two days had passed since Merle had escaped from her native city of Venice on Vermithrax’s back. Together they’d broken through the Empire’s siege ring and were flying north. Since then they’d seen nothing beneath them but ravaged wilderness. Empty, ruined cities of jagged remnants of burned-out walls; abandoned farms, many burned down or ground to dust under the heels of the Egyptian army; villages in which only stray cats and dogs were still alive; and, of course, those places where the soil looked as if it were turned inside out, churned up, and devastated by powers that were a thousand times greater than any ox-drawn plow.
Only Nature resisted the brutal power of the Empire, and so it happened that many fields were sparkling with springtime green, blooming lilac bushes rose over the deserted walls, and trees wore dense, succulent foliage. The strength and life in all these plants stood in mocking contrast to the abandoned farms and settlements.
“How much farther?” Merle asked glumly.
Vermithrax’s voice was deep as a well shaft. “Before another full day passes.”
She said nothing in reply but waited for the ghostlike voice inside her to make itself known, as it usually did when Merle needed comfort or just a few cheering words.
But the Flowing Queen was silent.
“Queen?” she asked boldly. Vermithrax had long ago gotten used to the fact that Merle occasionally spoke with someone he could neither see nor hear. He could easily tell when her words weren’t addressed to him.
“Did she answer?” he asked after a while.
“She’s thinking,” came out of Merle’s mouth, but it wasn’t she who spoke the words. The Flowing Queen had once again made use of Merle’s voice for herself. For the time being, Merle tolerated this rudeness, even though she was silently angry about it. At the moment she was glad that the Queen was at least showing a sign of life.
“What are you thinking about?” Merle asked.
“About you humans,” the Queen said and then changed into her mind-voice, which only Merle could hear. “How it could come to this. And what would bring a man like the Pharaoh to … do something like this.” She didn’t have a hand of her own to gesture toward the wasteland on the ground, but Merle knew very well what she meant.
“Is he one, then? A human being, I mean? After all, he was dead until the priests brought him to life again.”
“The mere fact that a man rises from the dead still need not mean that he engulfs all the countries in a war such as the world has not seen for a long time.”
“For a long time?” Merle mused. “Was there ever a war in which s
omeone succeeded in conquering the entire world?” Except for Venice, whose hours were numbered, only the Czarist kingdom had withstood the attacks of the Empire for three decades. All other countries had long since been overrun by mummy armies and scarab swarms.
“People tried. But that was thousands of years ago, in the time of the suboceanic cultures.”
The suboceanic cultures. The words resounded in Merle’s ears long after the Queen’s voice was silent. After she’d freed the Flowing Queen from the hands of an Egyptian spy, she’d first assumed that the strange being was a survivor of the suboceanic kingdoms, which, according to the stories, had once been inconceivably powerful. But the Queen had denied that, and Merle believed her. It would have been too simple.
No one was able to see through a being like her completely, not even Merle, who was closer to the Queen than anyone else since their joint flight from Venice.
Merle snatched herself from her thoughts. Thinking about Venice meant thinking about Serafin, and right now that simply hurt too much.
She peered out over Vermithrax’s black mane. Before them rose the rocky crags of high mountains. The landscape had been hilly for some time, and now it was rising ever more steeply. Soon they would reach the mountains. Supposedly their destination lay only a little bit beyond them.
“There’s snow down there!”
“What did you expect?” asked the obsidian lion with amusement. “Look how high we are here. It’s going to be quite a bit colder before we get to the other side.”
“I’ve never seen snow,” Merle said thoughtfully. “People say there hasn’t been any real winter for decades. And no summer. Spring and fall just melt into one another somehow.”
“Apparently nothing changed at all while I was locked up in the Campanile.” Vermithrax laughed. “The humans are still always complaining from morning till night about the weather. How can so many heads busy themselves with so many thoughts about something they can’t influence at all?”
Merle couldn’t think of an answer. Again the Queen made use of her voice. “Vermithrax! Back there, at the foot of this mountain … what is that?”
Merle swallowed, as if she could just choke down the unwelcome influence that was controlling her tongue. She immediately felt the Queen withdraw from her mouth, a feeling as if, for the blink of an eye, all the blood left her tongue and her cheeks.
“I see it too,” she said. “A flock of birds?”
The lion growled. “Quite large for a flock of birds. And much too massive.”
The dark shadow floating like a cloud over part of the mountain’s flank was sharply outlined. It might be several thousand yards away yet, and in comparison to the huge rock giant in the background, the thing darkly silhouetted against the slope didn’t seem particularly impressive. But even now she suspected that this impression would change if they were to come nearer to it. Or if the thing came to them.
“Hang on!” cried Vermithrax.
He lost altitude so abruptly that Merle felt as if her insides were being expelled through her ears. For a moment she felt like throwing up. She was about to snarl at the obsidian lion when she saw what had prompted him to undertake the maneuver.
A handful of tiny dots were whizzing around the large silhouette, bright spots that glowed in the light of the setting sun as if someone had sprinkled gold dust over a landscape painting.
“Sunbarks,” said the Queen in Merle’s mind.
Now they’ve got us, Merle thought. They’ve blocked our way. Who would have guessed we’re still so important to them? Granted, she was the bearer of the Flowing Queen, the protecting spirit who lived in the waters of the lagoon and who saved Venice from the Egyptian conquerors. But that was past now. The city was irrevocably in the tyrants’ power.
“It must be coincidence that we are meeting them,” said the mind-voice of the Flowing Queen. “It does not look as though they have noticed us.”
Merle had to agree she was right. The Egyptians couldn’t have overtaken them so quickly. And even if they’d succeeded in alerting a part of their armed forces, they certainly wouldn’t have been waiting for the fugitives so very visibly on the snow field of a glacier. “What are they doing here?” Merle asked.
“The big thing must be a collector. One of their flying mummy factories.”
Vermithrax now shot away over the top of a dense forest. Occasionally he had to avoid towering firs and spruces. But otherwise he was heading straight toward their adversary.
“Perhaps we should avoid it,” Merle said, trying not to sound too anxious. But in truth her heart was racing. Her legs felt as if they belonged to a rag doll.
So that was a collector. A real, actual collector. She hadn’t ever seen one of the Egyptian airships with her own eyes, and she would gladly have missed out on the experience. She knew what the collectors did, even how they did it, and she was only too painfully aware that each collector was under the command of one of the dreaded sphinx commandants of the Pharaoh.
Quite a dark outlook.
And yet it got worse.
“That is really a crowd of sunbarks flying around it,” said Vermithrax tonelessly.
Merle, too, could now make out that the golden dots were nothing other than the smallest flying units of the imperial fleet. Each of the sickle-shaped sunbarks had places for a troop of mummy soldiers, besides the high priest whose magic held the bark in the air and in motion. If the Egyptians should become aware of Vermithrax and his rider, the setting of the sun would be their only chance: The darker it grew, the clumsier the barks became until, at night, they finally became completely unusable.
But the side of the mountain was still flooded with bloody red; in the west, the sun was only half sunk behind the peak.
“Avoid it,” said Merle again, this time more urgently. “Why aren’t we making a wide arc around it?”
“If I am not mistaken,” said the Queen through Merle’s mouth, for the words were also addressed to the lion, “this collector is on the way to Venice, to take part in the great battle.”
“Assuming there is one,” said Merle.
“They will give up,” said Vermithrax. “The Venetians were never especially courageous. Present company excepted.”
“Thank you very much.”
“Vermithrax is right. There will probably not be any fighting at all. But who knows how the armies of the Empire will fall on the city and its inhabitants? Venice has led the Pharaoh around by the nose for more than thirty years, after all.”
“But that was you!”
“To save you.”
They had now come to within just a few hundred yards of the collector. The sunbarks were patrolling at a great height over them. The barks glowed red as the light of the sinking sun caught their golden armor. Merle’s only hope was that from above, the obsidian lion was invisible in the shadows among the treetops.
The collector was massive. It was in the form of a pyramid whose top point was cut off. Framed by a crenellated battlement, there was an extensive observation platform with several superstructures, which were arranged so that they were higher toward the middle and created a kind of point. Merle made out tiny figures behind the battlement.
The forest grew thinner as the land rose slightly. Now they could make out deep furrows in the forest floor, a labyrinth of protective trenches, which still, after all the years, had not been completely grown over. At one time a bitter battle had raged in this place.
“Here men are buried,” said the Queen suddenly.
“What?”
“The land over which the collector hovers—there must have been a large number of dead buried there during the war. Otherwise it would not be hovering so steadily in one place.”
In fact, the massive body of the mummy factory was hanging completely motionless over a meadow on which the high grass bent in the evening wind. In another time, this could have been an idyllic picture, a place of rest and peace. But today the collector cast its threatening shadow over it. It floa
ted just high enough over the meadow for a Venetian palazzo to have found room under it.
“I’m going to land,” said Vermithrax. “They’ll see us without the tree cover.”
No one contradicted him. The obsidian lion set himself down at the edge of the forest. Merle felt a hard jolt as his paws touched the ground. Now for the first time she became conscious of how very much her backside hurt from the long ride on the stone lion’s back. She tried to move, but it was almost impossible.
“Do not dismount,” said the Queen. “We might have to take off again in a hurry.”
Lovely prospect, Merle thought.
“It is beginning.”
“Yes … I see that.”
Vermithrax, who knew no more about the Empire and its methods than what Merle and the Queen had told him after they freed him from his tower prison in the middle of the Piazza San Marco, let out a deep snarl. His mane stiffened. His whiskers suddenly stood out as straight as if they’d been drawn with a ruler.
It began with the leaves of the trees around them withering so fast that it seemed as if the autumn had decided to carry out its work a few months too early and within a few minutes. The foliage turned brown, curled, and gently fell from the branches. The fir tree under which they’d taken shelter lost all its needles, and from one moment to the next, Vermithrax and Merle were covered with a brown mantle.
Merle shook herself and blinked up toward the collector. They weren’t directly beneath it, Heaven forbid, but they were near enough to be able to see its entire underside.
The gigantic surface was suddenly covered with a network of crisscrossing dark yellow glowing stripes, with multifold angles and following no recognizable pattern. A round area in the center, half as large as the Piazza San Marco, was all that remained dark. Merle had to clutch Vermithrax’s obsidian mane more tightly when suddenly the ground trembled, as in a strong earthquake. Very close by, several trees were uprooted and tipped over, tearing out other trees as they fell and crashing to the ground in the midst of a thick cloud of flying dirt and needles. The air was so filled with dry splinters and bits of the withered foliage that, for a moment, Merle found it hard to breathe. When her eyes stopped tearing, she saw what had happened.