The Stone Light Read Online Free PDF

the three traitors from the City Council and the Egyptian spy. Here they’d thwarted the delivery of the Flowing Queen.
    Now the house stood there abandoned and inconspicuous. No one would have supposed that the invasion of the Empire had begun precisely here, behind boarded-up windows and a gray, crumbling façade.
    On the bridge stood a figure in a long, dark cape. Its face was hidden under a deep hood.
    For a moment Serafin had a sense of walking through an invisible door into the past. He’d already seen this same man once, at the same hour of the night, in the same place: the Egyptian envoy, the spy, from whom they had wrested the crystal vial containing the Queen. Merle had burned his hand with the help of her magic mirror, while Serafin had set a horde of angry street cats on his neck.
    But now the man was here once more, and again he was hiding himself under a hooded cape like a street robber.
    Serafin overcame his shock quickly enough not to be discovered. He swiftly pressed himself against a housefront. The moon was illuminating the opposite side and a large portion of the narrow piazza; but the part through which Serafin was moving lay in deep shadow.
    Protected by the darkness, he approached the bridge. The envoy was waiting for something, and after Serafin’s recent discovery, there was little doubt as to what that was. In fact, there now sounded a hollow metallic sound, which was irregularly repeated. Something was striking against the wall of the canal under the bridge.
    Something was coming alongside.
    The envoy hurried to the foot of the bridge and from there looked into the water. Meanwhile, Serafin was still thirty feet away from him. He hid behind a small altar to the Virgin Mary that someone had attached to the house wall a long time ago. Very likely, no offerings had been placed there for a long, long time. In recent years most people had prayed to the Flowing Queen; nobody believed in the power of the Church anymore, even though there were still some holdouts who attended church as a matter of form.
    Serafin watched the envoy move back a few steps, away from the edge of the canal. He was making room for six men climbing up the narrow steps from the water.
    Men? Serafin bit his lower lip. The six figures had been men once. But today they bore no likeness to their former selves.
    Mummies.
    Six mummy soldiers of the Empire with faces dried up and fallen in, so that they resembled each other like twin brothers. Any characteristics that might once have differentiated them had vanished. Their faces were those of skeletons, covered with gray skin.
    All six wore dark outfits that glittered metallically in the moonlight now and then. Each held a sword such as Serafin had never seen before: The long blade was curved, almost half-moon-shaped, but the edge—unlike that of a scimitar—was on the inside of the curve, which led to a completely different way of wielding it. Egyptian sickle swords, the feared blades of the imperial mummy soldiers.
    There must have been room for two of them in each of the strange vehicles in the water. They had sat in them one behind the other, as in a hollow tree, unable to move. But mummies, Serafin thought cynically, probably didn’t have to scratch at all; that would only have peeled the desiccated skin from their bones.
    So that was what the Egyptians made of the dead. Slaves without will or mercy who sowed death and destruction. Presumably there were similar scenes playing out all over Venice at this moment. The invasion had begun.
    But there was a difference between being conquered by flesh-and-blood opponents and by … something like that. You could talk with humans, ask for mercy, or at least hope that they retained a portion of their humanity. But with mummies?
    Serafin could no longer bear the idea of a Venice emptied of all life, in which an inhuman Pharaoh ruled. He knew that it would be best for him to keep still, not move, not even breathe, but that was impossible.