The Stone Light (20 page)

T
HERE WERE SEVEN OF THEM.

Too many, Serafin thought as they pushed through the darkness. Way too many.

Five boys, including himself and Dario. In addition, two slender figures, two women. Larger than some of the boys—
rebels,
he chided himself, full of cynicism—but smaller than he was.

Eft had the kerchief over her face again, although he wasn’t sure why. Presumably they’d be seeing worse things this night than a mermaid’s mouth. But she insisted on her masquerade, though he didn’t believe she was
ashamed of her origin. She was a mermaid and always would be. The human legs Eft bore instead of her
kalimar,
her scaly tail, were only external. In her veins flowed the salty sea, the water of the lagoon.

The second woman was Lalapeya. The sphinx had taken her human form, and now his having seen her with her lion body seemed to Serafin almost like a bad dream. Each diminution of her perfection, each tiny blot seemed absurd in consideration of such perfection. He had to forcibly remind himself that this, too, was just part of her magic. The magic did not end with her external change; she manipulated the thoughts of all those who looked at her, just as she appeared to manipulate everything that happened around her.

And Serafin still wondered whether what they were doing was right. Why was he going along with Lalapeya? What was it that made him and the others do what she wanted?

Not
all
the others. Eft withstood the sphinx’s magic. Serafin suspected that Eft saw Lalapeya in her true form sneaking through the tunnels, a creature half lion, half human, moving forward on the velvet paws of a predator. He’d already noticed, too, that Lalapeya made less noise, less even than he did. It might look as though she was walking on human feet—but the truth was something else.

The sphinx was no human and would never be one. Why was she so interested in Venice and its inhabitants?
What made her incite a gang of street boys to assassinate the Pharaoh? The
Pharaoh!
Serafin simply could not understand why he’d let himself in for this.

“Eft,” he whispered in the half-dark of the underground canal.

She looked at him over the edge of the scarf covering her mouth. She nodded once, very briefly.

“Do you feel it too?” he asked.

Again she nodded.

“What is it?” He rubbed his hand over his right arm. The hairs were standing on end, and his skin was crawling, as if he’d grabbed hold of an anthill.

“Magic,” said Eft.

“Sphinx magic, worked by the commandants of the Pharaoh,” said Lalapeya, who suddenly stood beside the mermaid, as if someone had poured the darkness into the shape of a young woman.

Eft threw her a side glance, but she said nothing.

“Sphinx magic?” Serafin asked. He kept hoping that the other boys didn’t notice his uncertainty. But Dario, at least, perceived it and stopped next to him.

Serafin raised a hand and brought the entire troop to a halt. He and Dario and the two women formed the lead. So far. Tiziano, Boro, and little Aristide, whom they’d chosen because of his agility and adroitness, had followed without a single objection, question, or doubting look, along those secret canals that only a handful of other master thieves
besides Serafin knew of—canals that extended under piazzas and streets and were nevertheless just above the water level. In some places the ground was damp, in others the water was ankle deep; for the most part, however, the secret paths were dry. Dry enough for a group of assassins.

Murder, Serafin thought. That was the word that until now he’d avoided the way stone lions avoided water. He was a thief, one of the best, but certainly no murderer.

“What does that mean: sphinx magic?” he asked, turning this time to Lalapeya.

He knew that the others shouldn’t have been listening, but his conscience forbade him to leave them in the dark. If they were running straight into a magic trap, each of them had the right to know about it. They were doing what they did with free will, not from a sense of obligation. They were doing it for themselves, not for the city or even the citizens, who’d never given a damn about the begging street children.

For themselves. For each one of them.

For me, thought Serafin.

On the faces of the boys he read something more: for Lalapeya. That made him almost more uneasy than the magic crawling on his skin.

“Sphinx magic is worked by—,” began Lalapeya, but she was interrupted by Serafin.

“Worked by sphinxes. Yes, you said that already. But what are they doing?”

Tiziano and Aristide stared at him wide-eyed. No one had ever spoken to Lalapeya so disrespectfully.

But she didn’t bother about that. Smiling, she looked at Serafin, holding him fast with her eyes, and continued, “Such magic may mean all possible things. It can kill someone who comes under its influence, and do it in more ways than humans can imagine. It can also be harmless and merely warn someone that they know of him.”

“Then do they know that we’re here now?” asked Dario in alarm. Even in the dark, Serafin could see how much Dario was sweating. Serafin’s forehead was also damp, and every few steps he’d run his hand over his face so that the trickles didn’t run into his eyes.

“They would know—if I hadn’t blocked the magic,” said the sphinx, and now her smile grew a little wider. She looked stunning.

A relieved murmur went through the group of boys, but Serafin was still tense. “I can still feel the magic on my skin.”

“That means nothing. Those are only the discharges in the air that occur when two spells run up against each other. Mine on theirs. That itching you all feel is only an aftereffect of the spells, not the spell itself.”

They went on their way again, but soon, somewhere under the Church of San Gallo, in a columned undercroft full of spiderwebs and forgotten statues of saints, Serafin held Eft back. She carried Arcimboldo’s mirror mask with
her in a knapsack of hard leather. Serafin shrank from coming too close to the strange relic, so he laid his hand on Eft’s arm, not on her shoulder. As she slowed, he quickly pulled his fingers back. She stopped now, a few steps away from the others.

“Do you trust her?” he whispered.

“Yes.” The cloth over the mermaid’s mouth stretched and puffed out with each breath and even more when she spoke.

“Completely?”

“She is Lalapeya.” As if that were reason enough.

“You knew that she was a sphinx, didn’t you? From the beginning.”

“I see her in her true form. She cannot deceive me.”

“Why?”

“The mermaid folk and the sphinxes have been related to each other since ancient times. Not many remember that today, but many thousands of years ago there were close ties. With the loss of the magic, we mermaids have also lost our meaning and power, while the sphinxes—at least some of them—have always understood how to fit themselves to new circumstances.”

“Like Lalapeya?”

Eft shook her head decidedly. “Not her. She has been what she is today for a long time.”

“But—”

She didn’t let him finish. “She is older than most of the
other sphinxes, even if she doesn’t look so to you humans. She knows how it was earlier, and she honors the old relationship.” Eft was quiet for a moment; then she said, “She gave us a secret place for our dead.”

The cemetery of the mermaids, thought Serafin, enthralled. An ancient legend. No one knew where it was. Many had sought it, but he knew of no one who had found it. “Lalapeya established your cemetery?”

Eft nodded. “Long ago. We are in her debt, even if she has never asked us for anything.”

“What is she doing in Venice?”

“She was already here when the city did not yet exist. The question should be: What is the city doing in a place that was under Lalapeya’s protection for thousands of years?”

“Thousands of years …” Serafin let the words melt on his tongue. He cast a look toward the sphinx, to the girlish young woman who led the procession at Dario’s side.

“She never tried to drive the humans away, although that would have been her right,” said Eft. “Her duty, some of us even said. This here, this night, Serafin … this is the first time that Lalapeya has intervened in the fate of Venice. And she must know very precisely why.”

Serafin stared at the mermaid and had trouble holding her piercing gaze. “Do you know it too?”

Eft’s scarf quivered as she smiled with her shark’s mouth. “Maybe.”

“That isn’t fair.”

“There’s a knowing that is not meant for humans. But just believe me when I say to you that she knows what she’s doing.” Her eyes narrowed. “She made mistakes earlier. Now she is fulfilling her destiny.”

A thousand questions burned on Serafin’s lips, but Eft hurried on again to reach the front of the troop. He hastened to keep up with her.

“What is she? Some kind of a guard?”

“Ask her yourself.”

“But a guard of what?”

Eft pointed forward. Reluctantly he followed her eyes and discovered that Lalapeya was looking back at him over her shoulder. She smiled, but it looked sad. He simply did not know what to make of her. Nevertheless, he asked no further questions for the moment, not even when he was walking beside her again and making every effort not to look at her. He was quite aware that she was looking over at him every now and then.

He took the lead and went on ahead alone, a few steps in front of the others. He again concentrated on the matter he knew more about than anyone. He sought the best way to get through the city in concealment, as he had done countless times in the past.

At length he had them all stop under a round hatch in the ceiling of the tunnel and gave them to understand that from here on they mustn’t make a sound.

With Dario’s help he opened the hatch and climbed up. Above the exit stood a round staircase, which led through all the floors of the Doge’s Palace. The steps were narrow and had a much-needed banister: a few posts holding an old handrail. In earlier days, criminals were sometimes led to condemnation on these circular stairs, but today they were rarely used. The thick dust on the floor and the handrail showed that the last usage had been a long time ago.

Serafin was quite certain that the Egyptians wouldn’t know of this staircase. Not yet. The Pharaoh’s bodyguards would get busy with the plans of the palace, no question, but he doubted there’d been enough time for that yet. For that reason too, the attack had to take place as soon as possible, this very night.

He loosed a rope from his belt, fastened it with a few quick flicks of his wrist to the lowest banister post, and helped the others climb out. He was in suspense as to how Lalapeya would come up—perhaps with the spring of a lion—but then she climbed the rope just like anyone else, with her hands and feet, if with a little less effort than the others. With her it almost looked playful, which once more earned her the admiration of the boys. The climb was most difficult for Eft, who, in spite of all her agility, had no practice in rope climbing.

Silently and swiftly they ran up the spiral staircase. The Pharaoh’s chambers were on the upper floor, but Serafin
was only too aware that he mustn’t take the easiest approach. What they desperately needed was an advantage, and they wouldn’t gain that by the shortest route.

He led the group past the entrance to the upper floor, still higher, to the end of the stairs, where the steps came up against a plank door. The wood was darkened with age, the mountings corroded by rust.

As Serafin had expected, the door could be opened without difficulty. The heavy latch, as long as his lower arm, yielded with a grating sound, and the door swung slowly inward. Wordlessly Serafin directed his comrades through the opening into a dusky half light.

He’d explained the exact route to the others at the enclave—however, only as far as this staircase. The last part of the plan he’d kept to himself.

All the same, each of the others guessed where they were—there was only one place in the Doge’s Palace that was higher than the top floor. In past centuries, many thousands of prisoners had lost their lives up here in the dreaded lead chambers under the roof, herded into tiny cells, in winter half-frozen, in summer subjected to the heat of the sun beating down on the lead roofs; they might just as well have been imprisoned in ovens.

Each of them, even the most uneducated street boy, knew the stories of the prisoners’ sufferings. Serafin would have been just as impressed as the others if this had been his first visit up here. At the beginning of his thieving
career, he and a few friends had made a game of sniffing around in the Doge’s Palace under the noses of the City Guard.

“No one can hear us up here,” he said to the others. “The ceilings are thickened, because of the screams in the olden days.”

“What do you have in mind?” Tiziano asked.

Serafin grinned, before Eft’s dark look reminded him that this wasn’t a game, unlike that time when he was dancing around under the noses of the City Guard. “We’re going to invade the Pharaoh’s rooms from above,” he said. “That’s the only way that’s pretty sure not to be guarded.”

Dario raised an eyebrow.
“Pretty
sure?”

Serafin nodded.

“And you think no one’s going to hear when we break open the ceiling?” asked Boro. “And what with, anyway? With our bare hands?”

“No,” said Serafin. “There’s a narrow staircase behind the paneling, leading from the cells in the top floor. The Doges used the secret passageway when they wanted to watch the torture without being seen.”

“Torture” wasn’t a word that raised the mood, and so no one asked any more questions. They were depressed enough; their fear was too consuming.

Serafin led them through dusty passageways, so narrow that they had to go single file. They passed cells
standing open, from which came a horrible smell, even though it had been ages since anyone was imprisoned here.

Outside there was a soft warmth, like spring, and still, under the lead roofs they all had trouble breathing. The stuffy air from the lead chambers filled their lungs like hot water. Only Lalapeya, whose people came from the great deserts, remained untouched by it. She and Eft whispered with each other a few times, but Serafin didn’t understand what they said.