Free The Stone Light by Kai Meyer Page B

legs of a lioness. The
lower body
of a lioness.
    Serafin started back so violently that he got tangled up in one of the silken curtains, lost his balance, and fell over backward, pulling a torrent of yellow silk with him.
    When he had finally freed himself, she was standing directly in front of him. If he stretched out an arm, he could touch one of her paws, the soft yellow fur that covered her and that he’d just taken for a tight-fitting dress.
    “You-You are…”
    “Certainly not a mermaid.”
    “A sphinx!” escaped him. “A sphinx of the Pharaoh!”
    “The last part is not true. I have not met the Pharaoh, ever, and I regret it most deeply that some of my people serve him.”
    Serafin tried to get to his feet, but he only partially succeeded, and when he again pulled back from her, one foot dragged the pulled-down curtain with him, two, three paces away.
    The lion paws carried the sphinx after him in an elegant motion. “Please, Serafin. I’ve shown you so that you know whom you’re dealing with. But it wasn’t urgently necessary.”
    “What—What do you mean?”
    She smiled, and it made her look so pretty that it almost pained him to see the animal part of her body at the same time. “What do I mean? Oh, Serafin!
This,
of course.”
    At the sound of the words, her image blurred before his eyes. At first Serafin thought that the sand was billowing up from the ground, but then he realized that it was more than that.
    She wasn’t only blurred in his perception—her entire body seemed to dissolve for one second and reconstitute itself, not a flowing transition but an explosion-like whirl, as she dispersed in a cloud of tiny little parts, then in the same breath put herself back together as something new. Something different.
    Her face and the slender upper body remained unchanged, but now they no longer grew out of the body of a lion but continued naturally into narrow hips and long, brown legs. The legs of a woman.
    Her fur had vanished. Without replacement.
    “Allow me?” Naked, she bent over, fished up the curtain at Serafin’s feet, and with a lightning twirl, covered her nakedness. The yellow settled around her figure like a dress; no one would have guessed that the stuff had just been hanging from the ceiling as a curtain; on her it looked as natural and perfectly fitting as the most expensive fabric from Umberto’s workshop.
    Serafin had tried to turn his eyes away, but she left him no time for that. Instead, the image of her completed body kept shining before his eyes as if it had burned into his retina. Like light spots after one has looked at the sun for too long.
    “Serafin?”
    “Uhh … yes?”
    “Is this better?”
    He looked down her, down to her narrow feet, which stood half covered in soft sand. “It doesn’t change anything,” he said, having to force out every word. “You’re a sphinx, no matter what shape you assume.”
    “Of course. But now you don’t need to be afraid of my claws anymore.” Pure roguishness gleamed in her eyes.
    He made a great effort to ignore her scornful undertone. “What are you doing here?”
    “I lead the counterattack.”
    “Against the Pharaoh?” He laughed and hoped that it sounded as humorless as it was meant to. “With a few children?”
    She rubbed her right foot over her left; he almost believed she felt the embarrassment she intended to convey. Only almost. “Are
you
a child, Serafin?” The way she raised her eyes was a bit too coquettish to be accidental.
    “You know exactly what I mean.”
    “And you know, I think, what
I
mean.” All at once her tone became sharper, the emphasis harder. “Dario and the others might be just fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen years old”—with which she indirectly confirmed what he already suspected: that there were no grown-ups among the rebels—“but they are skillful and quick. And the Pharaoh will underestimate them. That is perhaps our strongest weapon: Amenophis’s vanity.”
    “You said