1 Ice and Tears
The pyramids rose out of deep snow.
Around them stretched the Egyptian desert, buried under the mantle of a new ice age. Its sand hills were frozen stiff, its dunes piled high with drifts of snow. Instead of heat waves, ice crystals danced over the plain in swirling wind gusts that revolved a few times and feebly collapsed again.
Merle was crouching in the snow on one of the upper steps of the pyramid, with Junipa's head resting in her lap. The girl's mirror eyes were closed, the lids trembling as though behind them a few beetles were struggling to get free. Ice crystals had caught in Junipa's eyelashes and eyebrows and made them both seem even lighter. With her white skin and her smooth, pale blond hair she looked like a porcelain doll, even without the hoarfrost that was gradually covering both girls: fragile and a little sad, as if she were always thinking of a tragic loss in her past.
Merle was miserably cold: Her limbs trembled, her fingers shook, and every breath she took felt as if she were sucking ground glass into her lungs. Her head ached, but she didn't know if it was because of the cold or what she'd endured on their flight out of Hell.
A flight that had brought them straight here. To Egypt. In the desert. Where the sand and dunes were buried under a three-foot-deep layer of snow.
Junipa murmured something and frowned, but still she didn't open her eyes. Merle didn't know what would happen when Junipa finally awoke. Her friend was no longer herself since her heart had been replaced with a fragment of the Stone Light when she was in Hell. In the end Junipa had tried to turn Merle over to her enemies. The Stone Light, that incomprehensible power in the center of Hell, held her firmly in its grip.
She was still unconscious, but when she woke up...Merle didn't want to think about it. She'd fought with her friend once, and she wouldn't do it again. She was at the end of her strength. She didn't want to fight anymore, not against Junipa, not against the Lilim down below in Hell, and also not against the henchmen of the Egyptian Empire up here. Merle's courage and determination were exhausted, and she only wanted to sleep. She leaned back, relaxed, and waited for the frosty wind to rock her into an icy slumber.
"No!"
The Flowing Queen roused Merle from her stupor. The voice in her head was familiar to her and at the same time infinitely strange. As strange as the being who'd installed herself inside her and ever since had accompanied her every thought, her every step.
Merle shook herself and marshaled her last reserves. She must survive!
She quickly raised her head and looked up at the sky.
A bitter battle was still raging up there.
Her companion, Vermithrax, the winged lion of stone, was engaged in a daredevil air duel with one of the sunbarks of the Egyptian Empire. Vermithrax's black obsidian body had glowed ever since his bath in the Stone Light, as if someone had poured him from molten lava. Now the lion traced a glowing trail in the sky, like a shooting star.
Merle watched as Vermithrax again rammed the wobbling sunbark from above, fastened himself to the sickle-shaped aircraft, and remained sitting on top of it. His wings settled on the left and right of the fuselage, which was about three times as long as a Venetian gondola. The craft rapidly lost altitude under the lion's mighty weight, rushing toward the ground, toward the pyramid -- and toward Merle and Junipa!
Merle finally snapped out of her trance. It was as if the cold had laid an armor plate of ice around her, which she now burst with a single jerk. She leaped up, seized the unconscious Junipa under the arms, and pulled her through the snow.
They were on the upper third of the pyramid. If the sunbark's crash shattered the stone, they hadn't a chance. An avalanche of stone blocks would pull them with it into the interior of the structure.
Vermithrax looked up for the first time and saw where the bark's tumbling flight was heading. The air resounded with a sharp crack as he pulled his wings apart and tried to steer the bark's descent. But the vehicle was too heavy for him. It continued on its downward course, straight toward the side of the pyramid.
Vermithrax roared Merle's name, but she didn't take the time to look up. She was pulling Junipa backward along the stone step. She had to pull her foot out of deep snow with every step, and she was in constant danger of stumbling. She knew that she wouldn't be able to stand up again once she fell down. Her strength was as good as used up.
A shrill howling pierced Merle's ears as the sunbark came nearer -- an arrow point aimed at her by Fate; there was hardly any doubt that it would knock her into kingdom come.
"Junipa," she gasped out, "you have to help me...."
But Junipa didn't move, though behind her closed lids there was twitching and trembling. But for those signs of life, Merle might as well have been dragging a corpse through the snow, for Junipa no longer had a heart to beat. Only stone.
"Merle!" Vermithrax roared again. "Stay where you are!"
She heard him, but she didn't react and had taken two more steps before the words got through to her.
Stay where she was? What the devil --
She looked back, saw the bark -- so close! -- saw Vermithrax on the fuselage with outspread wings, which the headwind was trying to blow backward, and recognized what the lion had realized a moment before she did.
The sunbark wobbled even more, swerved from its original trajectory, and was now rushing toward the opposite edge of the pyramid's side, just where Merle had been trying to get herself and Junipa to safety.
It was pointless to turn around. Instead, Merle let go of Junipa, threw herself over her, buried her face in her arms, and awaited the impact.
It took its time -- two seconds, three seconds -- but when the crash came, it felt as if someone had struck a gong right beside Merle's ears. The vibration was so great that she was sure the pyramid was going to collapse.
The stone was shaken a second time when Vermithrax came down beside them, more falling than landing, snatched up both girls in his paws, and carried them into the air. His body was cool, despite the glow he gave off.
His precaution turned out to be unnecessary. The pyramid was still standing. Occasional clumps of snow broke from the edges and slid one or two steps deeper, to be dispersed in blinding clouds of crystals, momentarily wrapping the incline in a fog of ice. Only after the avalanche had settled could Merle tell what had become of the bark.
The golden sickle lay on one of the upper steps, only a little beyond the place where Merle and Junipa had cowered seconds before. The vehicle had landed sideways, close to the wall of the next step up. From the air, Merle could see only a little damage, a hole in the upper side that Vermithrax had torn in the fuselage.
"Put us down again, please," said Merle to the lion, breathless certainly, but at the same time so relieved that she felt new strength streaming through her.
"Too dangerous." The lion's breath formed white clouds in the ice-cold air.
"Come on. Don't you want to know what was in the bark?"
"Absolutely not!"
"Mummy soldiers," the Flowing Queen interjected in Merle's mind, inaudible to the two others. "A whole troop of them. And a priest who held the bark in the air with his magic."
Merle cast a look over at Junipa, who was dangling in Vermithrax's second paw. Her lips moved.
"Junipa?"
"What's up?" asked Vermithrax.
"I think she's waking up."
"Once again, just at the right moment," the Queen bleated. "Why do these things always happen just when one does not need them?"
Merle ignored the voice inside her. No matter what it might mean for them all or whether they'd have more trouble because of it, she was glad that Junipa was coming to herself again. After all, she'd been the one who knocked Junipa unconscious, and the thought continued to pain her. But her friend had left her no choice.
"If she still is your friend." It wasn't the first time that the Flowing Queen had read her thoughts; the bad habit had begun way back.
"Of course she is!"
"You saw her. And heard what she said. Friends do not behave that way."
"That's the Stone Light. Junipa couldn't help it."
"That changes little about the fact that she may try to do you harm."
Merle didn't answer. They were floating a good ten yards over the nearest pyramid step. Gradually Vermithrax's firm grip began to hurt.
"Set us down," she asked him once more.
"At least the pyramid appears to be stable," the lion agreed.
"Does that mean we can look at the bark?"
"I didn't say that."
"But there's nothing moving down there. If there are really mummies in there, they must be -- "
"Dead?" the Queen asked pointedly.
"Out of action."
"Maybe. Or maybe not."
"Those are just exactly the sort of remarks we need," said Merle caustically.
Vermithrax had made his decision. With gentle wing beats he brought Junipa and Merle back to secure ground -- as secure as four-thousand-year-old pyramids situated over an entrance to Hell are.
He first set Merle down on one of the stone steps. After she was able to stand, she carefully took Junipa from Vermithrax's grasp. Junipa's lips were still moving. Weren't her eyes open a crack now? Merle thought she saw the mirror glass under the lids.
Slowly she let her friend down into the snow. She was burning to run over to the bark, but she had to take care of Junipa first.
She gently stroked Junipa's cheek. When her frozen fingers touched the skin, it was as if ice met ice. She wondered how long it would be before the first frostbite showed.
"Junipa," she whispered. "Are you awake?"
From the corner of her eye she saw Vermithrax's glowing body tense, noticed the mighty muscle cords that clenched under th...
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
