by Kai Meyer
Seth was steering the bark by the power of his thoughts. The golden vehicle floated almost one hundred feet over the pack ice of the Nile, not very fast, for the cover of snow clouds over them was unbroken and no sunbeam pierced it. The diffuse daylight was enough to keep the bark in the air, but it wasn’t strong enough to speed it up.
Merle had assumed that there would be strange equipment inside the bark and a sort of console like the ones in the steamboats that crossed the Venetian lagoons. But there was nothing like that. The interior was empty, the metal walls bare. They hadn’t even installed benches—comfort was of no value to the undead mummy troops usually transported in the barks. The airship had all the charm of a prison cell.
Vermithrax stood right in front of Seth and kept his eyes on the priest. He’d folded his wings, but his claws were extended the entire time. His lava glow filled the interior of the bark with radiant brightness, which was reflected from the metal walls. The golden glow burned in Merle’s eyes, even penetrating through the lids; she felt as if she’d been enclosed in amber.
Junipa had her eyes closed, but Merle knew that she could see anyway. With her mirror eyes she looked out through the lids, in the light as well as in darkness, and if Professor Burbridge had told the truth, she was also able to see into other worlds with them. That was more than Merle could imagine. More than she wanted to imagine.
The task of telling Seth the truth about the new ice age had fallen to Merle, of course. Vermithrax would rather have had his eyeteeth pulled than to fulfill a wish for the hated priest.
And so Merle had told the story of Winter, the mysterious albino whose life she’d saved in Hell. Winter, who’d insisted he was a season become flesh, searching for his missing love, Summer. She’d vanished years ago, he said, and since then there’d no longer been any real summer in the world, no July heat and no brooding sun in August. In Hell, Winter was only an ordinary human, but he’d told how on the surface he brought ice and snow with him, under which he buried the land. Winter could touch no living creature without freezing that being to ice in an instant. Only Summer, his beloved Summer, withstood this curse and nullified it with her singeing heat. Only those two could lie in each other’s arms without killing one another, and it was their fate to belong to each other forever.
But now Summer was gone and Winter was searching for her.
Professor Burbridge—or Lord Light, as he was called as the ruler of Hell—must have given Winter a clue that lured him here to Egypt for the first time in thousands of years. In his wake, snowstorms had smoothed out the dunes and deadly ice lay over the desert.
There was no doubt that Winter had been here. Just like Merle, he’d left Hell through the steps inside the pyramid. But where did his path lead? Toward the north, apparently, for Seth was steering the bark northward, and as yet there was no end to the snow.
Seth had listened to her report and not interrupted her once. What was going on in his head remained his secret. But he’d kept his word: He’d gotten the bark into the air and so saved their lives. He’d even succeeded in producing a dry warmth inside the airship, which came from the gold layer on the walls.
“He knows more about Winter than he is admitting,” said the Queen.
Where do you get that? Merle asked in her thoughts. Her ability to speak soundlessly with the Queen had improved markedly in the days since their descent into Hell. She always found it easier to form the words with her lips, but she’d gotten quite good at the other way too, when she concentrated.
“He is the second man of the Empire, the deputy of the Pharaoh,” said the Queen. “If the Egyptians have something to do with Summer’s disappearance, he must know about it.”
Summer is here?
“Well, Winter is in Egypt. And he will have a good reason for it.”
Merle looked over at Seth once again. With his closed eyes and relaxed facial expression he had lost something of his external menace. All the same, she did not for one second harbor the illusion that he could have anything else in mind except killing them all at the end of their journey. Their lives would depend on Vermithrax’s getting to him first. The battle between the lion and the priest was unavoidable.
Seth’s words had hit Vermithrax in a place that was vulnerable, despite all his strength. The words had sown doubt in him, doubt in that one bright spot that had given him hope of a better future. The reunion with his people, whom he’d long ago left behind somewhere in Africa, had always been the goal for Vermithrax, the end point of his journey. And now he was nagged by the fear that Seth might have spoken the truth, that the talking stone lion people had been extinguished by the Empire.
Merle turned to the Flowing Queen again: Do you think that’s true?
“The Empire would be capable of it.”
But the lions are so strong….
“Other peoples were too. And they were more numerous than the free lions. Nevertheless, every single one of them was killed or enslaved.”
Merle looked out the window. Who were they fighting for, actually, if there was no one left out there in the world? In an absurd way, that linked them to the Pharaoh: They were all engaged in a battle whose real goal they had long lost sight of.
Seth opened his eyes. “We’ll be there soon.”
“Where?” asked Merle.
“At the Iron Eye.”
“What’s that?” Merle had assumed that he was taking them to Heliopolis, the Pharaoh’s capital city. Perhaps even to Cairo or Alexandria.
“The Iron Eye is the fortress of the sphinxes. From there they watch over Egypt.” His tone was disparaging, and for the first time it occurred to Merle that Seth might be ruled by other motives than the absolute will for power. “The Iron Eye is in the Nile delta. It will come into sight soon.”
Merle turned to her window slit again. If they were that far north, they must already have flown over Cairo. Why hadn’t she seen anything of it? The snow was piled high, but not high enough to bury a city of millions of people.
It must be, then, that someone had leveled Cairo. Had there possibly been some resistance by the Egyptian people after the Pharaoh and the priests of Horus had seized power? The idea that Cairo and all its inhabitants had been annihilated took Merle’s breath away.
Junipa’s voice snatched her from her thoughts. “What do you want with the sphinxes?” she asked the priest.
Seth looked at Junipa for a long moment, expressionless. Then he smiled suddenly. “You are a clever child. No wonder they put the mirror eyes in you. Your friends were probably asking themselves what they were supposed to do in the Iron Eye. But you ask what drives me there. And that’s just what it comes down to, isn’t it?”
Merle wasn’t sure she understood what he was talking about. She glanced at her friend, but Junipa did not betray what was in her mind by any emotion. Only when she spoke again did Merle understand where she was going—and that in fact she was right about it.
“You don’t like the sphinxes,” Junipa said. “I can see that.”
For a fraction of a second Seth appeared surprised. Then he immediately had himself under control again. “Possibly.”
“You are not here because the sphinxes are your friends. You are not going to ask the sphinxes for help, to kill us.”
“Do you really believe I need help for that?”
“Yes,” said Vermithrax; it was the first time he’d spoken in hours. “I certainly do believe that, utterly.”
The two antagonists fixed each other in a stare, but neither went any further. Not here, not now.
Again it was Junipa who eased the tension. Her gentle, infinitely relaxed voice groped for Seth’s attention. “You tried to kill Lord Light, and you returned from Hell into a land that has turned into a desert of ice. Why didn’t you make your way to the court of the Pharaoh first or to the temple of the Horus priests? Why straight to the stronghold of the sphinxes? That is quite remarkable, I think.”
“And what, in your opinion, might all that mean, li
ttle mirror maiden?”
“A fire in your heart,” she said enigmatically.
Merle stared at Junipa before her eyes met those of the obsidian lion. For a moment, amazement drove the coldness out of Vermithrax’s eyes.
Seth tilted his head. “Fire?”
“Love. Or hate.” Junipa’s mirror eyes glowed in the golden shine of the lion. “More likely hate.”
The priest was silent, thinking.
Junipa spoke again: “Vengeance, I think. You hate the sphinxes, and you are here to destroy them.”
“By all the gods!” murmured the Flowing Queen in Merle’s mind.
Vermithrax was still listening intently, and his eyes moved from Junipa back to Seth. “Is that true?”
The priest of Horus paid no attention to the lion. Not even Merle, whom he’d observed constantly before, appeared to have any importance for him now. It was as if he were alone in the bark with Junipa.
“You are actually an astonishing creature, little girl.”
“My name is Junipa.”
“Junipa,” he repeated slowly. “Quite astonishing.”
“You’re no longer the right hand of the Pharaoh, are you? You lost everything when you didn’t succeed in killing Lord Light down there.” Junipa thoughtfully turned a strand of her white-blond hair between thumb and forefinger. “I know that I’m right. Sometimes I see not only the surface but also the heart of the matter.”
Seth sighed deeply. “The Pharaoh betrayed the Horus priests. He gave me the commission to murder Lord Light. The sphinxes prophesied to Amenophis that someone would come out of Hell and kill him. Therefore he intended that I should kill Lord Light—and best that I should also die while doing it. Amenophis had all my priests taken prisoner and threatened to kill them if my mission was not successful.”
“Now,” said Vermithrax with pleasure, “you are ruined. My congratulations.”
Seth glared at him, but he made no reply. Instead he continued, “I am certain that Amenophis already knows that Lord Light is still alive.” He lowered his eyes, and Merle almost wished she could feel pity for him. “My priests are now dead. The cult of Horus exists no more. I am the only one left. And the sphinxes have taken our place at the side of the Pharaoh. It was planned thus from the beginning: We should awaken Amenophis again and lay the foundations of the Empire. The sphinxes are the ones who are now harvesting the fruits of all our labors. They waited in the background until the time was ripe to draw the Pharaoh to their side. They got him to betray us. The sphinxes used Amenophis, and they used us. We were manipulated without knowing it. Or, no, that’s not right. Others warned me, but I threw their advice to the winds. I didn’t want to believe that the sphinxes were playing a false game with the Empire. But it was always going toward one thing: The Empire conquers the world, and the sphinxes take over the Empire. They made us into their tools, and I was the most gullible of all, because I closed my eyes to the truth. My priests had to pay the price for my mistake.”
“And now you are on the way to the sphinxes to avenge them,” said Junipa.
Seth nodded. “That, at least, I can do.”
“My heart is quite heavy,” the Queen remarked sarcastically.
Merle paid no attention to her. “How do you intend to annihilate the sphinxes?”
Seth appeared a little shocked at his own openness. He, the most powerful of the Horus priests, destroyer of countless lands and slaughterer of entire peoples, had openly spoken his thoughts to two children and an embittered stone lion.
“I don’t know yet,” he said after a moment of thoughtful silence. “But I will find a way.”
Vermithrax snorted scornfully, but not as loudly as he would probably have done before Seth’s avowal. The priest’s candor had surprised him, too, even impressed him a little.
Nevertheless, no one made the mistake of considering Seth an ally. If it meant an advantage for him, he would sacrifice all of them at the first opportunity. This man had extinguished tens of thousands with a wave of his hand, had burned cities to the ground with a brief command, and desecrated the cemeteries of entire nations in order to make the bodies into mummy soldiers.
Seth was no ally.
He was the devil himself.
“Good,” said the Flowing Queen. “And I was beginning to think he was going to wind all of you around his finger with his entertaining little tragedy.”
Merle grasped Junipa’s hand. “What more do you know about him?” she asked, disregarding Seth’s blazing look.
The mirror eyes reflected Vermithrax’s golden glow with such intensity that Merle’s image in them glowed like an insect in a candle flame. “Seth is a bad man,” said Junipa, “but the sphinxes are infinitely worse.”
Seth gave a slight, scornful bow.
“That will look good on your tombstone,” said Vermithrax grimly.
“I will order that it be chiseled out of your flank,” returned the priest.
Vermithrax scraped one of his paws across the floor but refused to be drawn into another battle of words. He preferred a battle with sharp claws to such subtleties.
Merle regarded Junipa with growing concern for a long moment, but then her eyes strayed to the window—and beyond it the monstrosity that rose over the delta of ice.
“Is that the Iron Eye?”
Seth didn’t look out, keeping his expressionless gaze on Merle. No one needed his confirmation. They all knew the answer.
Junipa also pressed her face against the narrow glass. Ice patterns had formed around the edges of the windows, finely branching fingers that reached toward her mirror eyes.
It looked like a mountain, a pointed cone of ice and snow, an unnatural pucker in the flat landscape, as if someone had bunched the horizon together like a piece of paper. As they came closer, Merle could make out details. The image in front of them was pyramid-shaped, but with steep slopes, cut off at the top as if someone had struck off the point with a scythe, and there, in place of the point, peeling itself out of the snowdrifts, was a collection of towers and gables, balconies, balustrades, and arcades of columns. Whatever was hidden in the interior of the Iron Eye, that up there was the true eye. It seemed to Merle like the crow’s nest of a gigantic ship, which could look out over the country and perhaps the entire Empire. The colossus—was it of steel or stone, or really made of iron?—appeared to Merle functional, without decoration, without any useless flourishes. But the upper buildings with which the fortress culminated sparkled in fantastic elegance: playful buildings with much decoration, narrow bridges, and extravagantly framed windows. If there was a place where the sphinxes really lived—not reigned, not commanded—then it was there at the tip of the Iron Eye.
The fortress was high, perhaps higher than the sky; but no, it was just that the cloud cover was hanging so gray and heavy over it, as it had everywhere on their journey. All-powerful the Iron Eye might be, but not supernatural, not heavenly.
He is a bad man, but the sphinxes are infinitely worse. Merle heard Junipa’s words about Seth once more, a whispering echo in her thoughts.
The bark circled in a wide arc around the whole area. Merle was not sure what Seth was intending by that. Did he mean to impress them with a final glorification of his magic powers? Or did he want them to see the power of the sphinxes along with the fortress? A warning?
Finally he guided the bark toward one of the countless openings in the south side of the eye, horizontal slits in the snow-covered white of the steep side. As they approached, Merle could see a whole squadron of sun-barks inside.
A dozen reconnaissance craft circled around the fortress, keeping the frozen arms of the river delta under surveillance. Yet their movements were sluggish, the cloudy sky having robbed the dreaded sunbarks of their agility. The birds of prey had turned into lame ducks.
“What are you going to do now?” Merle asked.
Seth closed his eyes again, concentrating on the landing. “I must land the bark in the hangar.”
“But they�
��ll see us when we disembark.”
“That’s not my problem.”
Vermithrax took a step toward Seth. “It could easily become yours.”
Once more the priest opened his eyes, but his gaze was directed toward Junipa, not at the lion who threatened him. “I could try to land up on the platform. The patrols will see it, but if we have any luck, we would already have disappeared between the buildings by that time.”
“Why is he risking his life for us?” the Queen asked mistrustfully.
“That’s a trick,” growled Vermithrax also.
Seth shrugged, now with his eyes closed again. “Do you have a better suggestion?”
“Take us away from here, now,” said the lion.
“And the truth you are seeking?” Seth smiled. “Where else will you find it?”
Vermithrax was silent then. Merle and Junipa said nothing more either. They had the choice between being set down in the snow again or hiding somewhere in the Iron Eye until they’d agreed on a reasonable plan.
Just before the hangar opening, the bark swerved, rose, and floated upward in a broad spiral. Merle tried to keep the patrols in sight, but her vision was limited by the narrow window slits, and she could make out only a single flying sickle in the distance. Finally she gave up. She had to resign herself to the fact that at the moment her life lay in Seth’s hands alone.
The bark needed several minutes to reach its target. Merle turned to the other side of the airship so that she could look at the buildings more closely. Thick caps of snow lay on all the roofs, balconies, and projections, and the vacant edge of the platform was so deeply snowed in that Merle questioned whether they could leave the bark at all there. It would be next to impossible to run away from their opponents in the deep snow.
Seth let the sunbark sink to the ground. It landed gently on the snow, accompanied by the crunching and snapping of the icy crust. The first buildings were more than twenty yards away from them. Through the window slits Merle saw narrow, deep lanes between the buildings. Considering the numerous roofs and towers, there must be a real labyrinth of lanes and streets in there.