Free The Stone Light by Kai Meyer

many years of isolation, there was hardly any trade in Venice, and the little that remained made no one rich. Most of the well-to-do families had fled to the mainland long ago, right at the beginning of the war, never supposing that there they would be helplessly delivered to the mummy armies and scarab swarms. No one could have foreseen that the power of the Flowing Queen would protect the city, and it was a malicious irony of fate that those who had enough money to flee were the first to fall victim to the Egyptians.
    The windows and doors of the empty ground floor were walled up with large stones, apparently long before anyone ever even thought of a resurrection of the Pharaoh. The rebels had not settled into an abandoned building. Serafin assumed that the leader of the rebellion had been living here for a long time already. Perhaps a nobleman. Or even a merchant, one of the few who were still left.
    Serafin shoved the last piece of bread into his mouth as the door of the bare room opened. Tiziano told him to come with him.
    Serafin followed the former apprentice mirror maker through corridors and suites, up a staircase, and under an archway. He didn’t see another soul the entire time. It seemed as though all were strictly forbidden to enter the apartments of the master of the enclave. But at the same time, Serafin had the feeling that the atmosphere of the corridors and high rooms had altered, a scarcely noticeable shift of reality to something different, confusing. It wasn’t that the light changed, or the smell—everything here smelled moldy and of damp stone—no, it was the way his surroundings
felt,
as if he were perceiving with a new sensory organ that had only been waiting to finally be activated.
    At Tiziano’s bidding he stopped before a double door, almost three times as tall as he was.
    “Wait here,” said Tiziano. “You’ll be called in.” He turned to go.
    Serafin grabbed his shoulder. “Where are you going?”
    “Back to the others.”
    “You aren’t staying here?”
    “No.”
    Serafin looked mistrustfully from Tiziano to the door, then back again. “This isn’t some trap or something?” He felt a little foolish as he voiced this suspicion, but he couldn’t forget his old quarrel with Dario. He believed his—former?—archenemy was capable of any meanness.
    “What would be the sense of that?” asked Tiziano.“We could just have left you to the mummies, couldn’t we? Things would have taken care of themselves.”
    Serafin still hesitated, then he nodded slowly. “Sorry. That was ungrateful.”
    Tiziano grinned at him. “Dario can be quite a pain, huh?”
    Serafin couldn’t help smiling back. “You and Boro, you’ve noticed that?”
    “Even Dario has his good sides. A few of them. Otherwise he wouldn’t be here.”
    “That probably goes for all of us, I guess.”
    Tiziano gave an encouraging nod toward the door. “Just wait.” With that, he finally turned and walked briskly back the way they had come. The thought sizzled through Serafin’s head that he’d never find his way back alone. The interior of the enclave was a first-class maze.
    The right half of the door was swung open by an invisible hand, and at once he was enveloped in something light and soft, which played around his body like a hundred gentle fingers, light as a feather, almost bodiless. Surprised, he took a step backward. It was only a filmy silk curtain that a draft was blowing against him.
    “Enter,” said a voice. A woman’s voice.
    Serafin obeyed and pushed the curtain aside, very carefully, because he had the feeling that the delicate tissue could tear between his fingers like spiderwebs. Behind that, barely six feet away, a wall of curtains bellied out,all of the same material and in the same light yellow, which reminded him of the color of beach sand. He remembered to close the door behind him before he began to move. Then he ventured deeper into that labyrinth of silk.
    He passed one curtain after