The Stone Light

by Kai Meyer

  The end of the gap came into view in front of them, and their worst fears were confirmed.

  The gate to the city was impassable.

  The Eternal Fighters were alive—awakened, as all here was awakened, by a light of stone.

  The two mighty statues had begun their wrestling, bent forward and wrapped around one another like two children in a fight over a toy. Their wrestling was so dogged, they were so evenly matched, that their positions changed constantly. Again and again, they crashed against the rock walls in the narrow mouth of the gap and caused further tremors. Merle saw a Lilim hit by a piece of stone and thrown down into the depths. Some barely caught themselves, others crashed against the walls or to the ground.

  But the stream of pilgrims and travelers between the feet of the rock giants were getting the worst of it. The endless ribbon was frayed. In panic, those who’d managed to get inside the gap streamed forward, plunging and stumbling over one another, pulling themselves up, running on two, four, and more legs; some emitted screams that sounded almost human, others high whistles, scratchy growls, or sounds for which there are no words and no descriptions.

  Even if the two battling stone giants did not completely fill the gap, anyone daring to run between them ran the danger of being ground up on the spot. It was suicide to fly through the gate.

  “I’m going to try it,” cried Vermithrax.

  Merle looked over her shoulder again, nodded encouragingly to Junipa first, then looked at their pursuers. The Lilim were relentlessly on their heels. Vermithrax was flying more slowly on account of the fighters, and the Lilim had caught up to them a little. Lord Light still rode at their head. She wondered how he’d succeeded in waking the fighters from a distance. Before, when it had looked as if the sphinx would kill him, Merle had assumed that the Stone Light had withdrawn from Burbridge. But now it appeared to be back, perhaps stronger than ever; there was no doubt that the Light, with its power over stone and rock, had called the Eternal Fighters to life. Suddenly Merle had the thought that possibly this whole place, perhaps the whole of Hell, was already possessed by the Stone Light. And she wondered if it hadn’t been a mistake to look at the Egyptian Empire as the greatest danger for the world. Perhaps they’d deluded themselves; perhaps the Pharaoh or even Lord Light or Hell were not the ones who were the worst threat to them all. Perhaps an entirely different war was taking place here in concealment. The Stone Light strove for more. First Hell. Then the upper world. And then, with Junipa’s help, all the other worlds that might exist somewhere behind the walls of dream and imagination.

  Vermithrax suddenly pulled in his wings and let himself drop. Something gigantic rushed away over them and cracked with deafening thunder against the rock wall—the elbow of a fighter as big as a church tower.

  Junipa’s hold around Merle’s waist was so tight that she could hardly breathe, but it didn’t matter, for she was almost forgetting to breathe with the tension. Stone splinters rattled down on them, and it was thanks to Vermithrax’s speed alone that they weren’t struck by any of the larger pieces. Suddenly everything else was meaningless. They dove into the middle of the fight between the two titans, and now saw nothing more but high stone walls and ramparts that relentlessly shifted, grinding and cracking, rubbing against each other and sometimes slowly, sometimes with lightning speed, moving toward or away from them. Vermithrax flew hair-raising maneuvers to avoid the bodies of the fighters, his wingtip sometimes touching the curve of a muscle here or the crest of a rib there.

  Then, just as abruptly as the fighters had popped up, they were behind them. Vermithrax carried the two girls out of immediate danger, past the edges of the rock gap, and out into the breadth of the plain, high over the heads of scattered Lilim hordes, who flowed fan-shaped in front of the fighting place of the stone giants and sought their safety in flight.

  “Have we made it?” asked Junipa in Merle’s ear. The words sounded breathy, tired, and feeble.

  “At least we’re out of the city.” Was that any ground for relief? Merle didn’t know, and she was sorry that she couldn’t be more encouraging for Junipa.

  Before Lord Light’s swarm reached the fighters, the two titans froze, closely intertwined with one another as before. The flying Lilim, headed by the one carrying Lord Light, shot unhindered between the bodies. The fighters had crushed hundreds of Lilim under their feet, and the survivors were still fleeing in all directions; it would be a long time before anyone dared to come here again. Yet Merle saw a few Lilim stop on the ground and gesticulate toward the red sky with a multitude of the most various limbs at Lord Light and his companions. Then Vermithrax strengthened the beat of his wings, and his speed became so fast that Merle had to blink to keep the headwind from making her eyes burn.

  The falcon had flown through the rock gap and the bodies of the fighters much more quickly than Vermithrax. But now Vermithrax caught up again and soon was staying just in sight of the bird. He was their only chance. On their own, they’d never find the gateway they’d used to enter. No one could have committed to memory the route the heralds had used, and so they knew neither where to find that entrance nor how long it would take to get there.

  Seth must know another way out of Hell.

  Merle had hundreds of questions she would have liked to put to Junipa. But they were both completely exhausted. Her curiosity could wait.

  The wasteland seemed even more monotonous to her now than during their flight with the heralds. The jagged rock fans and fissures, the cracks in the ground, the pointed rock promontories, and long-solidified lava glaciers repeated themselves over and over and over again, as if they had in truth been flying in circles for an eternity. Only small variations, differing formations here and there, confirmed to Merle that they were always going straight ahead, that Seth wasn’t fooling them.

  At some point, long after Merle’s sense of time had failed and she was having trouble not losing her grip with weariness, an outline peeled itself away from the red glow on the horizon. At first she thought it was a wind spout, perhaps of a cyclone. Then she realized that it was massive and didn’t move from the spot.

  A column. Miles high, so that it linked the floor of Hell with the ceiling.

  As they approached they could make out openings, irregularly arranged, but all the same size. Windows.

  “That’s no column,” whispered Merle in astonishment. “That’s a tower!”

  “The falcon is heading straight for it,” said Vermithrax.

  “Is that the exit?” asked Junipa, her voice weak.

  Merle shrugged her shoulders. “Seth at least seems to think it is. Anyway, he’s led us here.”

  “Yes,” said the Queen, “but not us alone.”

  Merle didn’t have to look back to know that the Queen spoke the truth. The swarm of Lilim was still behind them, flying just as tirelessly as Vermithrax and the priest of Horus.

  “This could become exciting,” she murmured.

  “And shortly,” said Junipa, who, unlike her, had looked back.

  Now Merle couldn’t resist either and looked behind them.

  The Lilim were barely fifty yards away.

  She could see Burbridge’s smile.

  14 FLOTSAM

  THE SEA TURTLE SHELL DANCED ON THE WAVES LIKE AN autumn leaf sailing down from a tree. Serafin’s stomach had been cramped for hours, as if he were actually falling, an endless drop into an uncertain chasm, and something in him seemed to be tensing for the impact—for something that would put an end to the monotony.

  He’d already been looking out at the unchanging sea for so long that he saw its image when he closed his eyes: a sky hung with clouds, and under it the gray, wavy desert of the sea, stirred up but not stormy, cold but not icy, as if the water itself couldn’t decide what it wanted. There was no land to be seen anywhere. Their condition hadn’t grown any more hopeful a while ago, when the mermaids who’d been pulling them had vanished without a trace. They’d dived away from one moment to the next, and he had on
ly to look into Eft’s eyes to read how perplexed she was.

  Eft sat between Dario and Tiziano in one of the horn segments of the sea turtle shell, holding the knapsack containing Arcimboldo’s mirror mask pressed firmly against her. Serafin grieved with her, certainly, but in spite of all that, he’d have appreciated it if she’d pushed away her despondency for a while and given a few thoughts to the future. The immediate future.

  It didn’t look good. Not by any means.

  Aristide had given up babbling to himself, though. Serafin had been afraid that either Dario or Tiziano would throw the boy overboard, but by daybreak, Aristide had finally grown quiet. Now he stared numbly ahead of him, didn’t answer when spoken to, but nodded occasionally or shook his head if someone asked him a question.

  But strangest of all was the way Lalapeya was behaving. The sphinx, in her human form, crouched half over the edge of the shell and let her hand dangle in the water up to her wrist. Someone—Serafin thought it was Tiziano—had remarked that perhaps Lalapeya hoped to catch a fish for breakfast, but no one laughed. And anyway, by now the time for breakfast was long past.

  The sphinx’s silence filled Serafin with anger, almost more than the situation into which Lalapeya had brought them. After endless hours on the water, first in darkness and now in the bright daylight, she still hadn’t considered it necessary to explain the experiences of the night to them. She brooded to herself, gazed into emptiness—and let her hand hang in the water as if she were only waiting for someone underneath to grab it.

  But whoever she might be waiting for refused her the favor.

  “Lalapeya,” said Serafin for the hundredth time, “what happened on San Michele? How long had that … that thing been lying there?”

  He thought, She will say “a long time.”

  “A long time,” she said.

  Dario shifted backward and forward against the horn wall at his back, but he didn’t find the comfort he was seeking. “That was no ordinary sphinx.”

  “Oh, really?” Tiziano made a face. “As if we hadn’t noticed that ourselves.”

  “What I mean,” said Dario sharply, staring angrily at his friend as he spoke, “is that it wasn’t just a large sphinx. Or a gigantic sphinx. That thing lying buried under San Michele was … more.” The appropriate words failed him; he shook his head and was silent again.

  Serafin agreed with him. “More,” he said shortly, and after a pause: “A sphinx god.”

  Aristide, confused, silent Aristide, looked up and said his first words in many hours: “If it was a god, then it was an evil one.”

  As if Lalapeya had suddenly awakened from a trance that had carried her far from the boys and the sea turtle shell, even from the sea, she said: “Not evil. Only old. Unimaginably old. The first son of the Mother.” She took her hand out of the water, stared at it for a long moment, as if it belonged to someone else’s body, then went on, “He was already lying under there before there was Egypt—and I mean the ancient Egypt! At a time when other powers ruled the world, the suboceanic cultures and the lords of the deep and—” She broke off, shook her head, and began again: “He lay there a long time. At that time no humans lived in the lagoon, and he was brought there so that no one would disturb his rest. He was a god, at least by your measures, even if at that time no one called him that. And they wanted to be sure that he would remain there undisturbed forever. Therefore, guards were put in place to watch over him.”

  “Guards such as you,” said Serafin.

  The sphinx nodded, looking infinitely beautiful in her grief. “I wasn’t the first, but that isn’t important. I watched the lagoon for so long that I gave up counting the years. I came here when there was still no city, no houses or fishermen’s huts at all. But then I watched men come, take possession of the islands, and settle there. Perhaps I ought to have prevented it, who knows? But I always liked you humans, and I saw nothing wrong with your living there where he lay buried. I did what I could to protect his honor and rest. It was I who saw to it that San Michele would also become a cemetery for you humans, too. And I took pains to be a friend to the mermaids, for they are the true masters of the lagoon—or at least they always were until the humans made a sport of catching them and killing them or hitching them before their boats.”

  Eft had been listening attentively for some time, and now she nodded in agreement. “You gave us the cemetery of the mermaids. A place that the humans could not find. To this very day.”

  “I’ve only done what I could do best,” said Lalapeya. “I’ve watched the dead. Just as I have done for thousands of years. And it was easy. At first I had only to be there, only wait. Then it was time to build a house, finally a palace, all in order not to attract attention, to give no one reason to mistrust.” She dropped her eyes, and for a moment it seemed as if she were about to put her hand into the water again, almost mournfully, guiltily. “When the lagoon was still uninhabited, the loneliness didn’t bother me. That only came later, when all the others turned up, the mermaids and the humans. And naturally, the Flowing Queen. I had to see how it was to have friends, to trust others. Therefore I gave the mermaids a place for their dead, but they avoided me too.”

  “We honored you,” said Eft.

  “Honored!” Lalapeya sighed softly. “I wanted friendship and instead I got honor. One has nothing to do with the other. I was always lonely and would have remained so, if not …” She fell silent. “When the great war began, when the Egyptians conquered the world, I knew that it was time to act. I heard that they possessed the power to awaken the dead and to enslave them—and then finally I understood that I, without knowing it, had been awaiting this moment down all the ages. Everything suddenly made sense. If the Egyptians succeeded in making the god, as you called him, be their tool … if they actually succeeded in that, yes, then they would truly be masters of the world.”

  “But where do the sphinx commanders come into it?” asked Dario.

  “I no longer doubt that the Pharaoh has been merely a puppet of the sphinxes for a long time,” said Lalapeya thoughtfully. “The commanders are young, in comparison to me and some others of my people, and they have no respect for the old laws and customs anymore. They recognized the power that the god would give them. Had it not been for the Flowing Queen, they would have reached their goal much earlier.”

  Serafin nodded slowly. So that was it. The sphinxes had worked in the background all those years to make the old god of their people into their slave. For that, they first needed the Pharaoh, then the priests of Horus with their power to subjugate the dead. Not much longer and they would rule the Empire with the help of the old god.

  Lalapeya continued. “So I began to take precautions. All the millennia, all the waiting … now finally I realized that it hadn’t been for nothing. And so I tried all that was in my power.” She dropped her eyes. “And I have failed. Such a long time, and then a defeat. The son of the Mother is lost.”

  Serafin had said not a word. But now he had to accept the responsibility: Her failure wasn’t her fault. He was the one who’d prevented her from stopping the collector; he’d wrecked all that she and her predecessors had been awaiting for eons.

  But that also didn’t change the fact that Boro had had to sacrifice his life.

  Serafin didn’t feel guilty. He wanted to, but he could not. They had both made mistakes, Lalapeya and he, and now they must both bear the consequences.

  “We’re dying of thirst,” said Tiziano, as if Lalapeya’s confession hadn’t taken place at all. Perhaps he hadn’t been listening to her.

  Serafin stared at the sphinx and now she returned his look, and for a fleeting moment he thought he’d seen those eyes once before, but not in her.

  “Land!” Dario’s voice shattered the silence. “There’s land over there!”

  All looked in the direction he was pointing. Even Lalapeya.

  Tiziano leaped up, and at once the shell began to rock and tip, and suddenly water splashed over the edge, an entire wave,
and then they were sitting up to their ankles in wetness.

  “Sit down, damn it!” Dario raged at him.

  Tiziano, completely in thrall to his euphoria over the light-colored mound in the distance, stared at him for a moment as if he didn’t understand what Dario wanted of him. But then he sank back into his place without taking his eyes off the gray hump that had broken through the surface of the sea some distance away, like the hump of a whale.

  The mound must have been visible for quite a while before Dario had discovered it, but its color was hardly any different from that of the sea or the sky.

  “That isn’t land,” said Serafin, and no one contradicted him.

  There was tense silence for a while, then Dario said aloud what all were thinking: “A fish?”

  And Aristide: “A whale?”

  An icy shiver ran down Serafin’s back. He shook his head. “If it is one, then it’s no longer alive. The thing doesn’t move. Eft?”

  When she looked at him and he looked into her eyes, he immediately wished that he’d kept back the question. But it was too late for that now.

  “You won’t want to hear it,” she said softly.

  “I want to hear it,” said Dario in irritation.

  “Me too,” Tiziano added quickly.

  Serafin was silent.

  Eft didn’t take her eyes off him as she said, “We’re sinking.”

  “What?” cried Tiziano in horror. Again he leaped up but was immediately pulled back into his place by Dario.

  “That’s only a little water,” said Dario quickly, letting a little of the saltwater on the floor run through his fingers. “Not bad. And I don’t know what that has to do with that thing out there—”

  “We’re going under,” said Eft once more. “Have been for quite a while now. Very, very slowly. We can’t stop it. And the only place we can go is that thing over there.” She pointed to the light-colored elevation in the sea without looking toward it herself.