The Glass Word (10 page)

He was just about to give voice to his doubts when he felt Lalapeya gently touch his hand. Without anyone else noticing it, she bent toward his ear and whispered, “Merle is there.”

He stared at her, dumbfounded.

Lalapeya smiled.

Merle?
he thought, but he didn't dare to put the question. If Dario and the others knew of it, they would accuse him of being involved in this business only because he wanted to see Merle again, not because he believed in their higher goal.
Good,
he thought,
they should follow their higher ideals;
he, anyway, knew why he was
really
doing it, and his motives didn't seem to him any less honorable than theirs. They came out of himself, from his heart.

Lalapeya nodded to him, barely noticeably.

Eft's voice made them both look up at the hatch. Serafin had the feeling he was perceiving everything blurrily, the surroundings, Eft's speech, the presence of the others. Suddenly he was burning to climb up to the outside.

Merle is there,
he heard the sphinx say again and again, and the words flitted through his head like moths around a candle.

Eft had not stopped speaking, giving instructions for how to manage in snow, but Serafin scarcely listened.

Merle is there.

At last they set out.

B
ACK TO THE
L
IGHT

“I
CAN FEEL IT.
W
ITH EVERY STEP.
E
VERY TIME
I
TAKE A
breath.” Junipa kept her voice low so no one except Merle could hear her. “It's as if there's something in me … here, in my chest … something that pulls on me and drags me as if I were on a rope.” Her mirror eyes turned to her friend like the signal fire of a lighthouse: silvery light behind glass. “I try to resist it. But I don't know how long I'll be able to do it.”

“And you can remember everything that happened in the pyramid?” Merle was holding Junipa's hand and stroking it gently. They were sitting in the farthest corner of the Czarist spies' hiding place.

Junipa swallowed. “I know that I tried to stop you. And that we … that we hit each other.” She shook her head in shame. “I am so sorry.”

“You couldn't help it. It was Burbridge.”

“Not him,” Junipa contradicted. “The Stone Light. Professor Burbridge is just as much under its control as I am—as long as he's down there, anyway. Then he's not the scientist he used to be anymore, only Lord Light.”

“And it's better for you up here?”

Junipa considered for a second before she found the right words. “It feels weaker. Maybe because it's stone and can't penetrate the stone of the Earth's crust. At least not completely. But it isn't gone. It's always with me, all the time. And sometimes it hurts quite a lot.”

Merle had seen the scar on Junipa's chest after they climbed out of Hell, the incision through which Burbridge had had a new heart inserted—a splinter of the Stone Light. It was now reposing, cold and motionless, in her chest cavity, keeping her alive as her real heart had done before, like a glowing, sparkling diamond. It healed her wounds in a very short time and lent her strength when she was exhausted. But it also tried to force her under its control.

When Junipa said that it hurt, she didn't mean the pain of the operation, the scar. She meant the pressure to betray Merle another time—the fight against herself, the inner strife between her gentle ego and the icy power of the Stone Light.

And as much as the thought pained Merle, she had to be wary of what Junipa did. It was possible that she'd suddenly stab them in the back a second time.

No, not Junipa, Merle thought bitterly. The Stone Light. The fallen Morning Star in the center of Hell. Lucifer.

She was silent for a moment, and then she spoke about a thing that had been on her mind for a long time. “What you said there, in the pyramid …”

“That Burbridge claimed to be your grandfather?”

Merle nodded. “Do you know if that's true?”

“He said it, anyway.”

Merle looked at the ground. She opened the buttoned pocket of her dress and pulled out the water mirror, stroking the frame with the tips of her fingers. Her other hand felt for the chicken's foot, now dangling on a cord around her neck, absently playing with the small, sharp claws.

“More soup?” asked a voice behind them.

The two girls turned around. Andrej, the leader of the Czarist spy troop, had sketchily washed the gray color from his face and wore just a part of his mummy armor. He was a tough, grim man, but the presence of the girls brought out a friendliness in him that seemed to amaze his four comrades.

On the other side of the low-ceilinged room, the men were still standing around Vermithrax, their wooden soup
bowls in one hand, the other repeatedly stretching toward the obsidian lion's glowing body.

They didn't know that he'd plunged into the Stone Light. In contrast to Junipa, it had gained no power over him. Merle found that strange, but so far she hadn't been able to observe anything disquieting. Since then Vermithrax had been stronger, even a little bigger than before, but aside from his body's lavalike glow, he had not changed. He was the old, good-natured Vermithrax, who now, despite all his concern for his people and his hatred of Seth, was enjoying the admiring attention the Czarists offered him. He basked in their questions, their timid touching, and the respect in their faces. They'd all heard of the stone lions of Venice, even of the few that were able to fly. But that one of those lions was able to speak like a human and, in addition, radiated light like one of the icons in the churches of their homeland—that was new and fascinating to them.

Junipa refused the soup that Andrej offered them, but Merle let him fill her bowl again. After all the days of nourishing herself on tough dried meat, the thin broth seemed like a delicacy to her.

“You do not have to be afraid.” Andrej misunderstood the fact that they were sitting in a corner, separated from the others. “The sphinxes will not find us here. We have been here almost six months, and so far they have not once noticed that we exist.”

“And you don't find that strange?” Merle asked.

Andrej laughed softly. “We have asked ourselves that a thousand times. The sphinxes are an ancient race, known since the beginning of time to be wise and clever. Do they only observe and tolerate us? Do they feed false information to us? Or are they simply indifferent that we are here because we have no chance of sending our knowledge home anyway?”

“I thought you had carrier pigeons?”

“We did indeed. But how many pigeons can one keep in a place like this before someone notices them? The birds were used up after the first weeks, and there was no way of sending us new ones. Therefore we are only collecting—in our heads, not on paper, nothing is written down—and soon we will return to our homeland. Thanks be to the Baba Yaga.”

He gave the girls an encouraging smile, and then he went back to the others. He respected the wish of the two of them to be alone.

“He's strange, don't you think?” said Junipa.

“Very nice,” said Merle.

“That too. But so … so understanding. Quite different from what you'd expect from someone who secretly traveled halfway around the world and has been hiding in his enemy's stronghold for half a year.”

Merle shrugged. “Perhaps his mission has helped him to keep his sanity. He must have seen a lot of bad things.” She indicated the other spies with a somber nod. “All of them.”

Junipa's eyes wandered from the Czarists over to Seth, who was sitting near the entrance, leaning up against one of the mirror walls. In his bound hands he held a drinking bowl. His ankles were also bound. Had Andrej known who his prisoner really was, he would probably have struck off his head without hesitation. Even if Vermithrax might have agreed thoroughly with that, Merle thought it was wrong. Not because it was unreasonable and quite certainly not because it was undeserved, but she hoped that Seth could still be useful to them. And this time the Flowing Queen shared her opinion.

“Are you going to try it again?” asked Junipa, when she saw Merle's fingertips moving from the frame of the water mirror over the surface.

Merle only nodded and closed her eyes.

Her fingers touched the lukewarm water as if they were lying on glass, without breaking through the faint rings. The murky phantom on the surface brushed against the ends of her fingers. Merle still had her eyes closed, but she could feel him, his frantic rushing back and forth over the water.

She heard his whispers, distorted and much too far away for her to be able to understand them. She must somehow bind the phantom to herself, like a piece of iron to a magnet.

“The word,” she whispered to Junipa. “Do you still remember the word?”

“What word?”

“The one Arcimboldo gave us when we had to imprison
the phantoms in the magic mirrors for him.” Their old teacher had opened the door through one of his mirrors for them that time in Venice. They had entered the magic mirror world and found the mirror phantoms inside: beings from another world who wanted to cross into this one and then were stranded in Arcimboldo's magic mirrors as spiritlike shadows. The spirits moved almost invisibly and as lightly as wind gusts in the glassy labyrinths of the mirror world, yet they were forever barred from returning or from a further journey into a physical existence. With a magic word the girls had bound them and brought them back to their master, who had let them go into the reflections in the water of the Venetian canals.

“Hmm, the word,” murmured Junipa thoughtfully. “Something with
intera
or
intero
at the beginning.”

“Intrabilibus
or something like that.”

“Something like it.
Interabilitapetrifax.”

“Childish rubbish,”
scolded the Queen.

“Intrabalibuspustulens,”
said Merle.

“Interopeterusbilibix.”

“Interumpeterfixbilbulus.”

“Intorapeterusbiliris.”

Merle sighed.
“Intorapeti—
wait, say that again!”

“What?”

“What you just said.”

Junipa thought for a moment.
“Intorapeterusbiliris.”

Merle exulted. “Almost! Now I remember:
Intorabiliuspeteris.”
And she said it so loudly that for a minute even the conversation between the Czarists and Vermithrax on the other side of the room stopped.

“Seth is watching us,” Junipa whispered.

But Merle neither bothered about the Horus priest nor paid attention to Junipa's warning. Instead she said the magic word impatiently a second time, and now she suddenly felt a tickling that crept from her right hand up to her elbow.

“Merle!” Junipa's voice became imploring.

Merle blinked and looked at the mirror. The phantom flickered like a circular billow of fog around her fingertips.

“It worked,”
said the Flowing Queen. She also sounded concerned, as if she were not pleased that Merle was making contact with the phantom.

“Hello?” asked Merle tonelessly.

“Brbrlbrlbrbr!” said the phantom.

“Hello?”

“Harrlll … hello.”

Merle's heart beat faster with excitement. “Can you hear me?”

Again the strange muttering, then: “Of course. It was you who couldn't hear
me.”
He sounded fresh and not at all ghostly.

“Did he say something?” asked Junipa, and Merle realized that her friend couldn't hear the phantom. Neither could the others in the room, who'd now resumed their conversation and paid no more attention to what Merle was
doing. With the exception perhaps of Seth. Yes, he was very definitely observing her. A shudder ran down her back.

“Can you help me?” she asked straightaway. She had no time for verbal sparring. At any moment Andrej could signal them to come for a discussion of their situation.

“I've been wondering when you'd ever get around to that,” said the phantom snappishly.

“You will help me?”

He sighed like a mulish little boy. She wondered if that's exactly what he'd been before he became a phantom: a boy, perhaps even still a child. “You want to know what's behind your water mirror, don't you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Your friend is right. If you call someone who's sometimes a woman and then again a woman with lion's legs a sphinx, then she'd probably be a sphinx.”

Merle didn't understand a word. “Could you be a bit clearer?”

Again the phantom sighed. “The woman on the other side is a sphinx. And, yes, she is your mother.” When Merle took in her breath sharply, he added, “I think so, anyhow. Now are you satisfied?”

“What's he saying?” whispered Junipa excitedly. “Tell me!”