by Kai Meyer
Merle wriggled out of Junipa’s hold. It wasn’t a serious attack, not one that was supposed to injure her. Junipa wanted to hold her, perhaps only for a few seconds, a few minutes. Long enough for Burbridge’s Lilim to overcome the cold and retrieve their victims. She couldn’t see the crack from here, didn’t know if Burbridge was already in the hall. But then she saw Vermithrax’s light again and told herself that he wouldn’t be there over her if the enemy were already in the vicinity.
Suddenly she received a blow from Junipa that knocked her to her knees. She immediately sprang up again and flung her antagonist against the rubble. Junipa’s head cracked on the hard stone and bounced back like a volleyball—then she collapsed and lay motionless. Before Junipa could get up, Merle slid her knapsack from her back, looked for something, anything with which she could defend herself, threw water bottle, mirror, hen’s claw carelessly on the ground. And gave up.
What had she expected? To be able to snatch Junipa from this nightmare with cold water? Slowly Merle turned to her, in the certainty of defeat, sensing that Junipa wouldn’t give up, not before Burbridge had achieved his goal. And was corrected.
For Junipa still lay stretched on the ground, motionless and with no sign of life. Her mirror eyes were open. They stared into Merle’s little hand mirror, which was lying before them on the rocks.
Merle bent for the mirror and the claw and shoved both into her pocket, then she ran, leaping over rubble and fissures, finally emerging from under the overhang. She waved both arms and bellowed Vermithrax’s name as loudly as she could, and after a few seconds, she saw the light turn toward her. The obsidian lion shot down out of the darkness. His glow illuminated her surroundings, creating shadows behind angled pieces of debris.
“Where’s the girl?” he asked as he landed next to her.
“Wait!” Merle stormed back under the overhang and came back with Junipa a moment later, carrying her like a child in both arms, with wheezing breath and a pain in the small of her back. Junipa was moving her lips, but Merle didn’t understand what she was saying.
“We have to take her with us.” She was about to say something else, but now her mouth opened without her help, as the Queen took it over. “She belongs to Lord Light! She has betrayed us!” Merle would have liked to bellow with rage, but she couldn’t even do that as long as the Queen was controlling her tongue. She pulled all her will together, balled her anger like a fist—and discharged it with a wild yell.
She felt the Queen’s astonishment. Her deep uncertainty. Felt how she withdrew, deeper into her interior, shocked at Merle’s sudden strong-mindedness.
Don’t you do that again! Merle thought furiously. Not ever again!
And she thought, We never once asked him … for help for Venice, for Serafin and Junipa and all the others … never once asked. In truth, you never intended to, right? You wanted to be sure you were right about something. That’s why we came down here. Was it about Burbridge? Or the Stone Light? No, she thought icily: Basically it was always only about you.
Contempt and a deep sense of injury were suddenly her only feelings. And at the same time she realized that the secret around the Flowing Queen was much larger, much more incomprehensible than she could grasp at this moment.
The Queen was silent and Vermithrax, surprised, allowed Merle to load Junipa onto his back. Then she climbed on behind her, wedged the lifeless Junipa backward between her and the lion’s neck, curled her hands into Vermithrax’s mane, and gave him the signal to take off.
The obsidian lion rose with a mighty flap of his stone wings and flew up to the opening.
Junipa’s lips moved more and more vehemently, but Merle dared not put her ear closer to the girl’s face, for fear it could be a trick to force her to Burbridge.
But then, very briefly, she did think she understood something that sounded like a word. Something that didn’t belong here at all.
“Grandfather,” said Junipa.
And then, more clearly: “He is your grandfather.”
Merle stiffened.
“He is not,” said the Queen. “She is lying. He is lying.”
Junipa’s eyes opened slowly, and in the mirror eyes Merle saw herself, lit from below by the light of the lion, white as a ghost.
Junipa’s features slept, only her eyes remained open, looking through Merle, the shadows, the world. Somewhere into the land of lies, the land of truth.
“Grandfather,” murmured Merle.
“Do not do that! That is exactly what he intends. Burbridge is only using her; he invents lies to weaken you.”
Merle stared a moment longer into the mirror eyes, at her two white likenesses, then gave herself a shake.
“It wouldn’t change anything,” she said, but in her head the thoughts were buzzing like a swarm of hornets. “Grandfather or not, he’s to blame for what happened to Junipa … and all the others.”
The Queen must have been feeling what was going on in her, but she restrained herself and kept quiet.
Vermithrax had almost reached the destroyed balustrade when Merle spoke a thought out loud. “Why can he control Junipa but not Vermithrax? Vermithrax has much more of the Stone Light in him than she does.”
The lion landed on the broken ledge not far from the opening to the outside. A drifting of snow had blown in and trailed off into ever-thinning white on the dark stone, like feathers from a burst down cushion.
“It doesn’t rule me.” Since his bath in the Light, the voice of the lion sounded even more awe-inspiring. “It is mine, but I am not its.”
His eyes said: Not yet.
Perhaps it was only an illusion, vanished in a blink. Please, please, please, thought Merle.
Behind him wings whirred in the darkness, slowly, torpidly, and as Merle and Vermithrax looked around, Burbridge on his Lilim hovered in the half dark. The spiral body of the creature wavered and trembled, its eyes glittered even more than before, and Merle saw that it was coated with ice.
You were right, she thought. The Lilim is freezing.
“Of course,” said the Queen.
The creature came no nearer, held itself in the air with difficulty, barely twenty yards away from them, and on a level with the balustrade.
Burbridge only looked at her. All the friendliness had departed from his features. The rest of his Lilim troops had not come with him. It must be clear to him that he was running the danger of being attacked by Vermithrax.
However, he was here.
“Merle,” he said to her. “Do you know your name? I can tell you your name.”
Whose name did he mean? The name of the Flowing Queen? But what—
A gust of wind made the snowdrift swirl up. White flakes, frozen hard like glass splinters, drove over the ragged edge of the balustrade down deeper into the darkness. The Lilim trembled and pulled back.
Burbridge said nothing more, only slowly shook his head. Merle had the feeling that the gesture had nothing to do with the Lilim. Only with her.
Then he kicked the creature in the flanks, and the slender body turned heavily and sank back into the deep, to the crack in the floor, and through it into the stairwell.
Merle detached her gaze from the abyss and looked again into the face of the unconscious Junipa. Her lids were closed now, but through two tiny cracks there was a shimmer of silver. Merle’s hand wandered to Junipa’s chest. No warmth, no heartbeat. But for a moment she had the impression that light streamed through her fingers, a fan of brightness. However, it paled before she could be certain it wasn’t an illusion.
She would help Junipa. Somehow she would help her.
What could Burbridge have meant? Your name …
Vermithrax bore her outside.
Glowing brightness awaited her, as if the Stone Light had also seized the upper world. But it was only the white of the landscape and the white of the sky. Snow clouds covered the sun. The plain that stretched far below them was buried under a deep layer of snow.
“Winter,” whisper
ed Merle.
“In the middle of summer?”
“Winter. He’s here.”
The Queen hesitated. “You think … ?”
“He spoke the truth. He arrived here before us.”
They stood high over the icy plain, and the wind bit painfully into Merle’s face. She’d long since been frozen through and thought it couldn’t get worse. But now she felt that the cold would kill her if she couldn’t warm up at a fire soon. Her hands shoved themselves into the pockets of her dress on their own. Her right hand touched the oval frame of the mirror, but it was also cold as ice. Only the water inside felt reassuringly warm, as always.
She’d assumed they were standing on a mountain, several dozen yards over the plain. But now as she looked around, she realized that was wrong. The snow-covered surface was smooth, but it was no balustrade as on the inside of the hall.
It was a step. The incline, as she looked down, consisted of a dozen such steps, each several yards high.
“Merle!” Vermithrax’s voice made her look up. “On the horizon.”
Blinking, she followed his gaze, blinded by the endlessness of the snow. After her eyes had become somewhat accustomed to the brightness, she made out shapes in the distance. Too pointed and symmetrical for mountains. They were constructed of the same steps as those on which they stood.
Merle turned her head and looked up behind her. The stepped incline grew narrower above, ending in a point.
“Pyramids,” said the Queen.
Merle could scarcely breathe for cold, but also because she realized where they were.
Egypt.
And the desert was three feet deep in snow.
Merle’s hand felt for the water mirror, slid in, into gentle, comforting warmth. And while her eyes kept skimming over the ice, over to the snow-covered pyramids, slender, feminine fingers grasped her own inside the mirror, clasped them, stroked them.
Mother, thought Merle numbly.
The mirror phantom murmured, whispered, murmured.
And somewhere, on the tail fin of a floating sea witch, the sphinx Lalapeya crouched by the water, her hand plunged deep into the sea, and shed silent tears.
DON’T MISS THE FINAL INSTALLMENT IN THE DARK REFLECTIONS TRILOGY
The Glass Word
ICE AND TEARS
THE PYRAMIDS ROSE OUT OF DEEP SNOW.
Around them stretched the Egyptian desert, buried under the mantle of a new ice age. Its sand hills were frozen stiff, its dunes piled high with drifts of snow. Instead of heat waves, ice crystals danced over the plain in swirling wind gusts that revolved a few times and feebly collapsed again.
Merle was crouching in the snow on one of the upper steps of the pyramid, with Junipa’s head resting in her lap. The girl’s mirror eyes were closed, the lids trembling as though behind them a few beetles were struggling to get free. Ice crystals had caught in Junipa’s eyelashes and eyebrows and made them both seem even lighter. With her white skin and her smooth, pale blond hair she looked like a porcelain doll, even without the hoarfrost that was gradually covering both girls: fragile and a little sad, as if she were always thinking of a tragic loss in her past.
Merle was miserably cold: Her limbs trembled, her fingers shook, and every breath she took felt as if she were sucking ground glass into her lungs. Her head ached, but she didn’t know if it was because of the cold or what she’d endured on their flight out of Hell.
A flight that had brought them straight here. To Egypt. In the desert. Where the sand and dunes were buried under a three-foot-deep layer of snow.
Junipa murmured something and frowned, but still she didn’t open her eyes. Merle didn’t know what would happen when Junipa finally awoke. Her friend was no longer herself since her heart had been replaced with a fragment of the Stone Light when she was in Hell. In the end Junipa had tried to turn Merle over to her enemies. The Stone Light, that incomprehensible power in the center of Hell, held her firmly in its grip.
She was still unconscious, but when she woke up … Merle didn’t want to think about it. She’d fought with her friend once, and she wouldn’t do it again. She was at the end of her strength. She didn’t want to fight anymore, not against Junipa, not against the Lilim down below in Hell, and also not against the henchmen of the Egyptian Empire up here. Merle’s courage and determination were exhausted, and she only wanted to sleep. She leaned back, relaxed, and waited for the frosty wind to rock her into an icy slumber.
“No!”
The Flowing Queen roused Merle from her stupor. The voice in her head was familiar to her and at the same time infinitely strange. As strange as the being who’d installed herself inside her and ever since had accompanied her every thought, her every step.
Merle shook herself and marshaled her last reserves. She must survive!
She quickly raised her head and looked up at the sky.
A bitter battle was still raging up there.
Her companion, Vermithrax, the winged lion of stone, was engaged in a daredevil air duel with one of the sunbarks of the Egyptian Empire. Vermithrax’s black obsidian body had glowed ever since his bath in the Stone Eight, as if someone had poured him from molten lava. Now the lion traced a glowing trail in the sky, like a shooting star.
Merle watched as Vermithrax again rammed the wobbling sunbark from above, fastened himself to the sickleshaped aircraft, and remained sitting on top of it. His wings settled on the left and right of the fuselage, which was about three times as long as a Venetian gondola. The craft rapidly lost altitude under the lion’s mighty weight, rushing toward the ground, toward the pyramid—and toward Merle and Junipa!
Merle finally snapped out of her trance. It was as if the cold had laid an armor plate of ice around her, which she now burst with a single jerk. She leaped up, seized the unconscious Junipa under the arms, and pulled her through the snow.
They were on the upper third of the pyramid. If the sunbark’s crash shattered the stone, they hadn’t a chance. An avalanche of stone blocks would pull them with it into the interior of the structure.
Vermithrax looked up for the first time and saw where the bark’s tumbling flight was heading. The air resounded with a sharp crack as he pulled his wings apart and tried to steer the bark’s descent. But the vehicle was too heavy for him. It continued on its downward course, straight toward the side of the pyramid.
Vermithrax roared Merle’s name, but she didn’t take the time to look up. She was pulling Junipa backward along the stone step. She had to pull her foot out of deep snow with every step, and she was in constant danger of stumbling. She knew that she wouldn’t be able to stand up again once she fell down. Her strength was as good as used up.
A shrill howling pierced Merle’s ears as the sunbark came nearer—an arrow point aimed at her by Fate; there was hardly any doubt that it would knock her into kingdom come.
“Junipa,” she gasped out, “you have to help me. …”
But Junipa didn’t move, though behind her closed lids there was twitching and trembling. But for those signs of life, Merle might as well have been dragging a corpse through the snow, for Junipa no longer had a heart to beat. Only stone.
“Merle!” Vermithrax roared again. “Stay where you are!”
She heard him, but she didn’t react and had taken two more steps before the words got through to her.
Stay where she was? What the devil—
She looked back, saw the bark—so close!—saw Vermithrax on the fuselage with outspread wings, which the headwind was trying to blow backward, and recognized what the lion had realized a moment before she did.
The sunbark wobbled even more, swerved from its original trajectory, and was now rushing toward the opposite edge of the pyramid’s side, just where Merle had been trying to get herself and Junipa to safety.
It was pointless to turn around. Instead, Merle let go of Junipa, threw herself over her, buried her face in her arms, and awaited the impact.
It took its time—two seconds, three second
s—but when the crash came, it felt as if someone had struck a gong right beside Merle’s ears. The vibration was so great that she was sure the pyramid was going to collapse.
The stone was shaken a second time when Vermithrax came down beside them, more falling than landing, snatched up both girls in his paws, and carried them into the air. His body was cool, despite the glow he gave off.
His precaution turned out to be unnecessary. The pyramid was still standing. Occasional clumps of snow broke from the edges and slid one or two steps deeper, to be dispersed in blinding clouds of crystals, momentarily wrapping the incline in a fog of ice. Only after the avalanche had settled could Merle tell what had become of the bark.
The golden sickle lay on one of the upper steps, only a little beyond the place where Merle and Junipa had cowered seconds before. The vehicle had landed sideways, close to the wall of the next step up. From the air, Merle could see only a little damage, a hole in the upper side that Vermithrax had torn in the fuselage.
“Put us down again, please,” said Merle to the lion, breathless certainly, but at the same time so relieved that she felt new strength streaming through her.
“Too dangerous.” The lion’s breath formed white clouds in the ice-cold air.
“Come on. Don’t you want to know what was in the bark?”
“Absolutely not!”
“Mummy soldiers,” the Flowing Queen interjected in Merle’s mind, inaudible to the two others. “A whole troop of them. And a priest who held the bark in the air with his magic.”
Merle cast a look over at Junipa, who was dangling in Vermithrax’s second paw. Her lips moved.
“Junipa?”
“What’s up?” asked Vermithrax.
“I think she’s waking up.”
“Once again, just at the right moment,” the Queen bleated. “Why do these things always happen just when one does not need them?”
Merle ignored the voice inside her. No matter what it might mean for them all or whether they’d have more trouble because of it, she was glad that Junipa was coming to herself again. After all, she’d been the one who knocked Junipa unconscious, and the thought continued to pain her. But her friend had left her no choice.