The Stone Light Page 4

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the fighter with the saber strike the head of his mummy foe from its shoulders, with an elegant turn that showed either long practice or enormous talent. The two others had also drawn their blades and fought with the remaining mummies, nowhere near so skillfully as their leader, but the fire assisted them. It consumed the undead soldiers with such speed that they literally fell apart before they could become dangerous. Serafin’s adversary, too, in spite of all its determination, became ever weaker, its movements more uncontrolled, until its legs gave under it. Serafin took a few steps backward and watched as the mummy was consumed by flames like a heap of straw.

  “Watch out!” cried a voice.

  Serafin looked hastily around. The two bodyguards of the envoy had rushed forward, followed by their master. They rushed at his saviors. Serafin’s eyes were tearing from the smoke of the numerous fires. He still could not clearly see who was standing with him. Earlier he had seen their faces … but no, that was impossible.

  He quickly ran around the first fire, jumped over the second, and lifted a sickle sword from the ground. One of the mummies had lost it before it was entirely burned up. The grip was warm, almost hot, but not so bad that he couldn’t hold it. The weapon felt clumsy to him, the balance of the blade with a will of its own. But he wouldn’t allow others to fight for him while he stood by doing nothing. He grabbed the weapon with both hands and rushed into the fight.

  The leader of the three rescuers sprang skillfully forward and back, avoided sword blows, and inflicted numerous wounds on one mummy soldier. Then the saber flashed through the defenses of the soldier in an explosion of blows and thrusts and beheaded it. Again, dust billowed out in all directions, but no blood flowed. The torso collapsed. Serafin quickly realized that this was the best way to conquer a mummy: The magic of the Egyptians affected the dead brain; without skulls they were ordinary corpses again.

  And then, when he finally recognized who’d saved him, he didn’t believe his eyes. He would have expected anyone else, but not him.

  The two other fighters had their hands full to keep the last mummy off their necks. Serafin supported them with the heavy sickle sword as well as he could, while the leader pressed forward, avoiding a revolver shot from the envoy, pursuing him to the bridge and there striking him down with slashing saber blows.

  Finally the last mummy also fell. Serafin looked across the plaza, his breath rattling. The traces of dead cats were clearly to be seen in the flickering light of the fire. He swore to himself never again, under any circumstances, to ask the cat folk for help. He had used them selfishly, without considering, and bought his life with those poor creatures lying there in front of him.

  One of his fellow fighters laid a hand on his arm. “If what I’ve heard about the friendship of thieves with the cats is true, they made their decision themselves.”

  Serafin turned and looked Tiziano in the face. Arcimboldo’s former apprentice smiled crookedly, then bent and wiped the dust off his saber blade on the uniform of a mummy torso. Boro, the second fighter, walked up next to him and did the same thing.

  “Thanks.” Serafin himself thought it could have sounded a little heartier, but he was still too astonished that it was they who’d come to help him. Although Tiziano and Boro had probably never been bad fellows at the bottom of their hearts—at least that’s what Merle thought; her problem was much more that they were too closely allied with Dario. Dario was the oldest of Arcimboldo’s apprentices and Serafin’s archenemy from the time he’d given up master thievery, and the two hated each other’s guts. One time Dario had even attacked Serafin with a knife in Arcimboldo’s workshop on the Canal of the Expelled.

  And of all people, Dario, who was more detestable to him than almost anyone else, whom he considered underhanded, lying, and cowardly, this same Dario now came straight across the piazza to him, carelessly shoving his saber back into its sheath, the saber with which he’d just saved Serafin’s life.

  Dario bowed to Serafin, looked him over, then grinned. But it didn’t seem especially friendly, only arrogant and unmitigatedly insufferable. Entirely the old Dario.

  “Looks as if we came just in time.”

  Tiziano and Boro exchanged looks that seemed embarrassed, but neither of them said a word.

  “Many thanks,” said Serafin, who still could think of nothing better. To deny the help he’d desperately needed from the three would have been foolish and transparent—and besides, it was just the sort of answer Dario would have given in his situation. Instead, and in order to differentiate himself even more strongly from his former adversary, he added a compliment with a sincere smile: “You can handle a saber really well. I wouldn’t have expected it of you.”

  “Sometimes you can be wrong about others, hmm?”

  “Very possibly.”

  Boro and Tiziano gathered up their torches and rubbed them on the housefronts until the flames were extinguished. Now for the first time Serafin noticed the bulbous flasks they wore at their belts. There must be a fluid in there they’d used to spit fire. Certainly he’d heard that Arcimboldo’s apprentices had left the magic mirror workshop two days ago in order the join the resistance fighters against the Empire. But he was astonished at how fast they’d learned to handle the flames. On the other hand, it was possible that they’d learned it earlier. He knew much too little about them.

  “I thought you’d have turned tail sooner,” Dario said. “Thieves aren’t fighters, are they?”

  “Not cowards, either.” Serafin hesitated. “What do you want with me? You certainly didn’t cross my path by accident.”

  “We were looking for you,” Boro said. Dario repaid him with a dark side glance. But the sturdy youth took no notice of him, wholly in contrast to the past. “Someone wants to see you.”

  Serafin raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  “We’re not mirror makers anymore,” said Dario, before one of the others could come forward again.

  “Yes, I’d already heard that.”

  “We’ve joined the rebels.”

  “Sounds fabulous.”

  “Don’t get funny.”

  “Your performance was quite impressive. You just polished off six of those … brutes.”

  “And the fellow in the cape,” said Dario.

  “And the fellow in the cape,” Serafin repeated. “I wouldn’t have been able to deal with them alone. Which perhaps means that I wouldn’t be a particularly good rebel, right?”

  They all knew better, for although Serafin wasn’t a skillful fighter with a saber, like Dario, as a former master thief he possessed a whole list of other talents.

  “Our leader wants to speak with you,” said Dario.

  “And I was thinking that was you.”

  Dario’s look grew as dark as the empty eye sockets of a mummy soldier. “We don’t have to be friends, no one’s asking that of you. You should just listen. And I think you owe us that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Serafin. “I guess I do.”

  “Good. Then just come with us.”

  “Where?”

  The three exchanged looks, then Dario lowered his voice conspiratorially. “To the enclave,” he whispered.

  3 LILITH’S CHILDREN

  MERLIE SAW THE STATUES EVEN FROM A DISTANCE, AND they were bigger than anything she had ever seen in her life. Very much bigger.

  Ten figures of stone—each at least four hundred feet high, although that was a rough estimate, and they might actually have been even a little higher—standing around a gigantic hole in the landscape. That was what it was, in fact: a hole. Not a crater, not a deep valley. The closer they came to the opening, the clearer it became that it had no bottom, as if a divine fist had simply smashed a piece out of the earth’s crust like a splinter from a glass ball. The hole had an irregular shape and must have been larger than Venice’s main island.

  As Vermithrax flew closer to it, the edges blurred in the moisture drifting across the landscape like a very f
ine drizzle. Soon Merle saw only the vast edge in front of her, as if the lion had brought them to the end of the world. The opposite side of the abyss was no longer visible. Merle was seized by a feeling of great emptiness and desolation, in spite of the Queen inside her, in spite of Vermithrax.

  For hours now they’d been noticing a strange smell—not of sulfur, like the time Hell’s messenger had appeared in the Piazza San Marco, but sweeter, hardly less unpleasant, as if something were decaying in the innards of the earth. Perhaps the heart of the world, she thought bitterly. Perhaps the entire world was just dying from the inside out, like a fruit on a tree in which rot and parasites had spread. The parasites were the Egyptians. Or, she corrected herself, maybe even all the people who had no better ideas than to plunge into a war of mythical dimensions.

  But no, they were not the ones who had begun this war. And also not billions of other people. At this moment, for the first time, she became aware of the whole magnitude of the responsibility she’d undertaken: She was looking for help in the battle against the Egyptians, for help for an entire world.

  In the battle against the Egyptians. There it was again. And she was right in the middle of it. She was no better than all the others in this war.

  “Do not talk such nonsense,” said the Queen.

  “But it’s the truth.”

  “That it is not. No one wants more war, even more bloodletting. But the Egyptians will not let anyone talk to them. There is no other way. The fruit on the tree is helpless when it rots—but we have a choice. We can make our own decisions. And we can try to defend ourselves.”

  “And that means more war. More dead.”

  “Yes,” said the Queen sadly. “It probably does.”

  Merle looked out over Vermithrax’s mane again. To her left and right, the obsidian wings were rising and falling. The soft swishing swelled and receded, gently, almost leisurely, but Merle hardly heard it anymore. The sound had long ago entered into her flesh and blood, just like the lion’s throbbing heartbeat; she felt it beneath her as if she were herself a part of this stone colossus, merged into him the way the Queen was now a part of her. She wondered if things would all come to the point when they, who had once been three, would more and more become one, just like the Egyptians, who numbered in the millions but followed only one brain, one hand, one eye—that of the Pharaoh.

  Yes, said a cynical voice that wasn’t the Queen’s, and at the end the shining prince is waiting for you on his white horse and will carry you to his castle of flower petals.

  Vermithrax’s voice snatched her back to reality. “That is so … gigantic!”

  Merle saw what he meant. The closer they came to the statues, the more titanic they seemed to her, as if they were continuing to grow right out of the soil, until the stone skulls broke through the clouds somewhere and swallowed the stars with their mouths.

  “They are watchmen. The Egyptians built them,” said the Queen with Merle’s voice so that Vermithrax could hear too. “Here the Egyptian forces clashed with the armies of the Czarist kingdom for the first time. Look around you—everything is wasted and destroyed and uninhabited. Even the birds and insects have flown away. It is said that the earth itself finally convulsed in pain and distress, a last act of strength, to make an end of the fighting, and it swallowed all that it found on it.”

  “It really looks as though the ground fell in!” Vermithrax said. “Simply collapsed on itself. No earthquake could do something like that.”

  “There has only twice in history been something comparable. For one, the landslide that swallowed Marrakesh a few years ago—and perhaps the same powers were at work there as here—and then of course the wound that the fall of Lucifer Morningstar made in the earth.”

  “Morningstar?” asked Vermithrax.

  “Even a stone lion must have heard of him,” said the Queen. “An infinitely long time ago—so the humans tell it—a burning light from Heaven was supposed to have fallen directly to the earth. Many stories are told of its origins, but most people still believe that it was the angel Lucifer, who turned against his creator and was thrown out of Heaven by him. Lucifer fell burning to the depths, tore a hole in the earth, and thence plunged into Hell. There he rose to become ruler and the most powerful antagonist of his creator. So the angel became the devil—at least the old legends say so.”

  “Where is this place where Lucifer hit the earth?” Vermithrax asked.

  “No one knows. Perhaps it is somewhere at the bottom of the sea, where no one has looked—except for the inhabitants of the subterranean kingdoms. Who knows?”

  Merle felt her tongue loosen, and finally she herself was able to speak again. “I can’t stand it when you do that.”

  “Excuse me.”

  “You’re only saying that.”

  “I am dependent on your voice. We cannot exclude Vermithrax.”

  “But you could ask politely. How about that?”

  “I will take pains to.”

  “Do you believe that story? I mean, about Lucifer Morningstar and all that?”

  “It is a legend. A myth. No one knows how much of it corresponds to the truth.”

  “Then you have never seen that place in the sea yourself?”

  “No.”

  “But you know the suboceanic kingdoms.”

  “I know no one who has seen the place with his own eyes. And no one who knows for certain whether it ever existed at all.”

  She’d never get anything more out of the Queen this way. But what did she care about the suboceanic cultures at the moment, anyway? A much more pressing problem lay directly in front of her, now stretching from one horizon to the other.

  They were still some forty feet away from the edge of the Hell hole. In front of them rose one of the ten statues, more impressive than the Basilica of San Marco. It was the figure of a man with naked upper body and legs. According to the manner of ancient Egypt, he had only a loincloth wound around his hips. His skull was hairless, smooth as a polished ball. This head alone must have weighed several tons. The figure had both elbows bent and the palms laid together in front of its chest so that the arms formed a large triangle. The stone fingers were intertwined in a complicated gesture.

  Merle suppressed the impulse to imitate it with her own hands; she would have had to let go of Vermithrax’s mane to do it.

  “Ask him to fly past two other statues,” said the Flowing Queen.

  Merle passed the request on to the obsidian lion. Vermithrax immediately flew a loop and turned east, where the next stone giant was, a few hundred yards away. Each of these monumental figures stood with its back to the abyss, its pupilless eyes gazing rigidly into the distance.

  “And the Egyptians built them?” Merle asked.

  “Yes. After the battlefield sank into the ground, the remaining armies of the Czarist kingdom used the opportunity to flee. They retreated many thousand of miles to the northeast and established a new boundary there, which they still hold today. The Egyptians went around the area and continued their advance, while their priests had these statues erected to watch over the entrance to the interior of the earth.”

  “Only symbolically, I hope.”

  The Queen laughed. “I do not believe that the statues will suddenly come to life when we fly past them. In case that is what you meant.”

  “I was thinking of something like that, yes.”

  “Oh, well, I have of course not been here myself before, and—”

  Merle interrupted her by clearing her throat.

  “Yes?”

  “Please hold your tongue.”

  “If I had one, I would not always be needing yours.”

  “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re a know-it-all?”

  “No one.”

  “Then now is the best time to do it.”

  “What is a know-it-all?”

  Merle let out a groan and addressed the lion. “Vermithrax, was she always like this?”

  “Like what?” asked the obsidian lio
n, and she had the feeling that he was smirking, even though from her place on his back she couldn’t see his face.

  “So difficult.”

  “Difficult, hmm? Yes … yes, I think you could say that.”

  Again the Queen laughed inside her, but she dispensed with any remark. Merle could hardly grasp that for once the Queen did not have to have the last word.

  The second statue was not appreciably different from the first, with the exception that the fingers were intertwined in a different way. The third figure displayed yet another gesture. Otherwise they were all as alike as peas.

  “Is that enough?” Vermithrax asked.

  “Yes,” said the Flowing Queen, and Merle passed it on.

  Vermithrax flew around the statue without it awakening.

  “Did you really expect that all at once it would start moving so as to catch us out of the air with its hand?”

  Merle shrugged her shoulders. “I think for a long time I haven’t known what to expect anymore and what not to. I also didn’t think that I would free Vermithrax from his prison. Or fly over the countryside on his back. Aside from all the other things that have happened in the last few days.”

  She tried to catch a glimpse over the edge of the abyss, but she saw only rocks and fine, vapory veils, bathed in a reddish shimmer. She wasn’t sure if that was caused by the sun, which stood high over the wasteland, or if the source of the diffuse glow was inside the earth.

  “Do you think that’s really Hell down there? I mean, like in the Bible or the pictures on church altars?” Her skeptical tone surprised her. Hadn’t she just declared that after all their experiences there was nothing left that could astonish her?

  Vermithrax didn’t answer, perhaps because he was still thinking, or he had no clear opinion about it. But the Queen answered, “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.” Merle’s eyes swept over the expressionless face of the nearest statue, and she wondered if the artist who had created these features would actually have made them so utterly emotionless if gravest danger lay in wait there below. “Anyway, Professor Burbridge never wrote of gigantic fires roasting the damned. Or of chains and torture chambers. I guess we should believe him. Besides—,” she broke off.