by Kai Meyer
The obsidian lion began moving again. He was trudging through high snow, but he found the steps without any trouble and walked on with amazing sure-footedness. Even a little dampness could turn the mirrored floors of the Iron Eye into slides; for the moment they almost had to be grateful for the snow, for it padded the lion’s steps and kept his paws from sliding on the icy glass floor.
“In any case, the storm came from Winter,” Merle said after a while. “Although I don’t believe he was anywhere inside it. But this must be the right path.” After pondering a little she added, “Vermithrax, did Andrej say where the Son of the Mother would be brought?”
“If he did, he said it in Russian.”
And you? Merle turned to the Queen. Do you know where he is?
“No.”
Perhaps where Summer is also?
“How do you fig—” The Queen broke off and said instead, “You really think there is more hidden in Summer’s disappearance, do you?”
Burbridge told Winter something, Merle thought. Therefore Winter is looking for her here in the Iron Eye. And if Summer had something to do with the power of the Empire?
“You are thinking of the sunbarks?”
Yes. But also about the mummies. And all those things that can only be explained by magic. Why didn’t the priests awaken the Pharaoh a hundred years ago? Or five hundred years ago? Perhaps because they only got the strength to from Summer! They call it magic, but maybe it’s something else. Machines that we don’t know, that are driven with a strength that they somehow … I don’t know, steal from Summer. You said it yourself: Seth is not a powerful magician. He may command a few illusions, but real magic? He’s a scientist, just like all the other Horus priests. And like Burbridge. The only ones who actually understand something about magic are the sphinxes.
The Queen thought that over. “Summer as a kind of living furnace?”
Like the steam furnaces in the factories outside on the lagoon islands, thought Merle.
“That sounds quite mad.”
Just like goddesses who bring a whole people into the world with a moonbeam.
This time she felt the Queen laugh. Softly and suppressed, but she laughed. After a while she said, “The suboceanic kingdoms possessed such machines. No one knew exactly how they were driven. They used them in their war against the Lords of the Deep, against the ancestors of the Lilim.”
Merle could see how all the mosaic pieces were gradually fitting together into a whole. Possibly the Horus priests had stumbled on remains or drawings from the sub-oceanic cultures. Perhaps with their help they’d succeeded in awakening the Pharaoh or building their sunbarks. Suddenly it filled her with bitter satisfaction that the cities of the suboceanic kingdoms had fallen in ruins on the ocean floor eons ago. The prospect of the same thing happening to the Empire suddenly moved quite a bit closer.
“There’s someone coming!” Vermithrax stopped.
Merle was startled. “From down below?”
The lion mane whipped back and forth in a nod. “I can sense them.”
“Sphinxes?”
“At least one.”
“Can you get any closer to the railing? Maybe we can see them then.”
“Or they us,” replied the lion, shaking his head. “There’s only one possibility: We fly past them.” Until now he’d avoided flying down, because the shaft in the center of the spiral staircase was very narrow, and he was afraid of breaking his wings on the sharp edges. And a wounded Vermithrax was the last thing they could bear.
However, the way things looked now, they had to try it.
They wasted no time. Merle clung to him. Vermithrax rose up and leaped over the railing and down into the chasm. They had dared such a steep flight once before, during the escape from the Campanile in Venice. But this one was worse. The cold bit into Merle’s face and through her clothing, she couldn’t brush away the snow particles that got into her eyes, and her heart was galloping as if it were trying to outrace her. She could hardly breathe.
They passed two windings of the stairs, then three, four, five. At the height of the sixth, Vermithrax braked his nosedive with such force that Merle thought at first they’d hit something—stone, steel, perhaps an invisible mirror floor in the stairwell. But then the lion leveled and floated with gentle wing beats in the center of the stairwell, with emptiness over and under them and in front of them—
“But that can’t be—” Then Merle’s voice failed her and she wasn’t even certain whether she’d actually said the words aloud or only thought them.
It could almost have been their own reflection: a figure who was riding on the back of a half-human creature, which was climbing the steps on four legs. A boy, only a little older than Merle, with tousled hair and cozy fur clothing. The creature on which he sat was a female sphinx. Her arms were scantily bandaged all the way to the elbows. The four paws of her lion lower body seemed to be unharmed; she had borne her rider securely up the steps.
The sphinx was beautiful, much more beautiful than Merle had imagined her, and not even her weary, emaciated look could alter that. She had black hair falling smoothly over her shoulders down to the place where human and lion melted together.
The boy opened his eyes wide, his lips moved, but his words were lost in the rushing of the lion wings and the raging of distant snowstorms below.
Merle whispered his name.
And Vermithrax attacked.
AMENOPHIS
SETH HAD LONG CEASED TO THREATEN HER WITH HIS DRAWN sword. It was unnecessary, as they both knew. And it lacked a certain dignity for a man like him to be pointing his sickle blade at a girl like Junipa, half as big and very much weaker.
Junipa was sure that he wouldn’t do anything to her as long as she obeyed him. Basically, she thought, she was of no importance to him, just like Merle and the others, just like the whole world. Seth had built up the Empire with sweat and blood and privation, and now he would demolish it again with his own hands, or at least swing the hammer to strike the first blow.
“To Venice,” he’d said, after he pushed her back into the mirror world. “Inside the palace.” As if Junipa were a gondolier on the Grand Canal.
When she’d looked at him for a long moment in disbelief, a spark of doubt had appeared in his eyes. As if he weren’t really aware of her capabilities.
But then she said “Yes,” and nothing else. And started on the way.
He was now walking some distance behind her, almost soundlessly. Only now and then the sword in his belt struck its point against a mirror edge, and the screeching that it caused rushed like a call of alarm through the glass labyrinth of the mirror world. But there was no one there who could have heard it; or if there was, no one showed himself, not even the phantoms.
Junipa didn’t ask Seth what he had in mind. For one thing, she already guessed. For another, he wouldn’t have given her an answer anyway.
Before, when she’d walked into the Iron Eye with Merle, she had felt again the grip of the Stone Light. A devilish pain flamed up in her chest, just as if someone were trying to bend her ribs apart from the inside like the bars on a cage. The fragment of the Stone Light that had been inserted into her in Hell reminded her emphatically that sooner or later it would again gain power over her, when she left the mirror world or just gradually when she began to feel secure. The stone in her chest was threat and dark promise equally.
Behind the mirrors she felt better, the pain was gone, the pressure vanished. Her stone heart did not beat, but somehow it kept her alive, the Devil might know why—and indeed, he certainly did know.
Considering her situation, the threat of the Horus priest seemed far less dreadful to her. She could run away from Seth, or at least attempt it—but there was no outrunning the Light. At least not in her world. The Light might lose interest in her for a while, the way it did after her flight from Hell, but it was always there. Always ready to seize her, to influence her, and to set her on her friends.
No, it was good tha
t she wasn’t in the Iron Eye with Merle. She was beginning to feel sure in the mirror world. Everything in this labyrinth of silver glass was somehow familiar. Her eyes led her, let her see what no one else saw, and that made her aware how very much Seth had put himself into her hands. Perhaps he wasn’t even aware of it himself.
To Venice, she thought. Yes, she would take him to Venice if he wanted it.
Just as in Hell, in the mirror world there was no difference between day and night. However, now and then the darkness appeared to descend on the other side of one of the mirrors or the morning to dawn; then the shine of the silver changed, the flickering of the colors. Their light also fell on Junipa and Seth and bathed them sometimes in one color, sometimes in another, from dark turquoise to milky lemon yellow. Once Junipa turned to the priest and saw the flaming red from a mirror gush over his face and strengthen his determined, warriorlike expression. Then again a gentle, heavenly blue covered him, and the hardness left his features.
In this place between places there were still many wonders to explore. The riddle of the colors and their effect was only one of countless mysteries.
She wasn’t able to say how much time passed before they reached their destination. They didn’t speak about it: It was several hours, certainly. But while behind one mirror only moments passed, behind the next it might perhaps be years. Still a secret, still a challenge.
Seth stopped beside her and regarded the mirror that rose in front of him. “Is that it?”
She wondered if the priest were filled with rage alone or whether there wasn’t also a little fear, a trace of insecurity in the light of the grandeur of the environment. But Seth betrayed nothing of what was going on inside him. He hid his true nature behind anger and bitterness, and his only drive was the desire for revenge.
“Yes,” she said, “behind it lies Venice. The chamber of the Pharaoh in the Doge’s palace.”
He touched the mirror surface with the palm of his hand, as if he hoped to be able to pass through it without Junipa and the glass word. He bent forward, breathed on it, and rubbed the cloud away with his fist, as if he were removing a spot of dirt. If there had been a spot there, it would only have been the hate in him, something that would not be simply wiped away.
Seth regarded his mirror image for a little while longer, as though he couldn’t believe that the man in the glass was a reflection of himself. Then he blinked, took a deep breath, and drew his sickle sword.
“Are you ready?” Junipa asked, and she already saw the answer in him. He nodded.
“I’ll take a look into the room first,” she said. “You’ll want to know if the Pharaoh is alone.”
To her astonishment, he refused. “Not necessary.”
“But—”
“You understood me, didn’t you?”
“There could be ten sphinxes there standing around the Pharaoh! Or a hundred!”
“Perhaps. But I don’t think so. I think they’re gone. The sphinxes are on the way back into the Iron Eye or are already gathered there. They’ve got what they wanted. Venice doesn’t interest them anymore.” He laughed coldly. “And Amenophis not at all.”
“The sphinxes have abandoned him?”
“Just as he did the Horus priests.”
Junipa said nothing. The Pharaoh’s betrayal had struck Seth more deeply than he would have thought possible. The two agreed on nothing, and yet Amenophis was anchored in his soul. Not as a human being, for Seth was indifferent to him, yes, he even despised him. But as his creation, which he’d awakened to life and which stood for all that Seth had once believed in.
What Seth was planning was far more than only the taking of another’s life. It was a betrayal of himself, of his goals, of all the possibilities that his pact with Amenophis had opened to him. It was also a clean break with his own works in all the decades since he planned and supervised the reawakening of the Pharaoh.
Either way, it was the end.
Junipa took hold of his arm, whispered the glass word, and pulled him through the mirror.
At once the pressure was there in her chest again, the seeking and squeezing and dragging of the Light.
The huge room behind the mirror was empty. At least at first sight. But then she discovered the divan of jaguar skins, which emerged from the semidarkness on the other side of the room. It was night in Venice, and also here in the salon; only a weak glow came through the window. Torchlight from the Piazza San Marco, she guessed. It rested softly on the patterns of the carved panels, on the brushstrokes of the oil paintings and frescoes, on the crystal pendants of the chandeliers.
Something moved on the divan. A dark silhouette in front of a still darker hill of skins.
No one spoke.
Junipa felt as if she weren’t really there, as if she were observing the scene from a faraway place. As in a dream. Yes, she thought, a great, horrible dream, and I can do nothing except watch. Not take part, not run away, only look on.
Glass shattered behind her and tinkled onto the floor in a cascade of silver droplets. Seth had smashed the wall mirror through which they’d entered the salon. No possibility of retreat anymore. Junipa looked around hastily, but there were no other mirrors here, and she doubted she would get far enough in the corridors of the palace to find another.
Amenophis rose from his divan of jaguar skins, a small, slender figure, who moved slightly bent, as if he carried a terrible weight on his shoulders.
“Seth,” he said wearily. Junipa wondered if he were drunk. His voice sounded numb and at the same time very young.
Amenophis, the resurrected Pharaoh and leader of the Empire, stepped into the half light from the window.
He was still a child. Only a boy, who had been turned into something that he might never have become without gold paint and makeup. He was no older than twelve or thirteen, at least a year younger than herself. And yet he’d commanded his armies to rule the world for four decades.
Junipa stood stock-still among the ruins of the mirror. The shards were spread wide over the dark parquet. It looked as though she were swimming in the middle of a starry sky.
Seth walked past her up to the Pharaoh. If he was looking around for guards or other opponents, he didn’t betray it by any motion. He stared straight ahead at the ordinary-looking boy who waited for him in front of the divan.
“Are they all gone?” he asked.
Amenophis did not move. Said nothing.
“They’ve left you, haven’t they.” Seth’s tone was without any arrogance or spiteful pleasure. A statement, nothing else. “The sphinxes are gone. And without the Horus priests … yes, what are you without us, Amenophis?”
“We are the Pharaoh,” said the boy. He was smaller than Junipa, very slight and unprepossessing. He sounded sulky but also a little resigned, as if in his heart he’d accepted his fate. And then Junipa realized there would be no spectacular final battle between the two of them. No wild swordplay, no murderous duel over tables and chairs, no antagonists who swung through the room from the lamps and the curtains.
This was the end, and it was coming quietly and without tumult. Like the end of a serious disease, a gentle death after a long illness.
“Were all the priests executed?” asked Seth.
“You know that.”
“You could have let them go.”
“We had given our word: If you failed, they would die.”
“You already broke your word once when you betrayed the Horus priests.”
“No reason to do it a second time.” The boy’s smile belied his words as he added, “Even we learn from our mistakes sometimes.”
“Not today.”
Amenophis took a few steps to the right, to a large water basin beside the divan. He put his hands in and washed them absently. Junipa almost expected that he would pull out a weapon and point it at Seth. But Amenophis only rubbed his fingers clean and shook them briefly, so that the droplets whirled in all directions, before he again turned to the priest.
&nbs
p; “Our armies are inconceivably large. Millions upon millions. We have the strongest men as guards, fighters from Nubia and the old Samarkand. But we are tired. So tired.”
“Why don’t you call for your guards?”
“They left when the sphinxes disappeared. The priests were dead, and suddenly there were only living corpses in this palace.” He let out a cackling laugh, which didn’t sound either real or especially full of humor. “The Nubians looked at the mummies, then us, and they realized that they were the only ones alive in this building.”
He had the council murdered, flashed through Junipa’s mind. The entire City Council of Venice.
“They left us a short time later; secretly, of course. Though we had long observed what was going on in their heads.” He shrugged. “The Empire is destroying itself.”
“No,” said Seth. “You destroyed it. At the moment when you had my priests executed.”
“You never loved us.”
“But we respected you. We Horus priests were always loyal and would have continued to be, if you had not given the sphinxes preference over us.”
“The sphinxes were only interested in their own intrigues, that is true.”
“Insight too late.”
For the first time Amenophis spoke of himself in the singular. “What shall I say?” The most powerful boy in the world smiled, but it distorted his face like his reflection on the moving surface of the water basin. “I have slept for four thousand years, and I can do it again. But the world will not forget me, will it? That is also a form of immortality. No one can forget what I have done to the world.”
“And are you proud of that?” asked Junipa, her first words since her arrival. Amenophis didn’t deign to answer her, not even with a glance. But suddenly something became clear to her: The two were speaking Egyptian with each other; and yet she understood what they said. And at the same time she understood what Arcimboldo had meant when he told her, “As guide through the mirror world, you are a master of all voices, all tongues. For what good would a guide be if he didn’t know the language of the lands through which he led others?” How could she have guessed before what that was going to mean? It was still hard for her to grasp the whole truth now. Did that really mean that she understood each of the languages that were spoken in the countless worlds? All voices, all tongues echoed through her mind, and she grew quite dizzy with it.