The Glass Word by Kai Meyer Read Free Book Online Page B

somewhere in the Iron Eye until they’d agreed on a reasonable plan.
    Just before the hangar opening, the bark swerved, rose, and floated upward in a broad spiral. Merle tried to keep the patrols in sight, but her vision was limited by the narrow window slits, and she could make out only a single flying sickle in the distance. Finally she gave up. She had to resign herself to the fact that at the moment her life lay in Seth’s hands alone.
    The bark needed several minutes to reach its target. Merle turned to the other side of the airship so that she could look at the buildings more closely. Thick caps of snow lay on all the roofs, balconies, and projections, and the vacant edge of the platform was so deeply snowed in that Merle questioned whether they could leave the barkat all there. It would be next to impossible to run away from their opponents in the deep snow.
    Seth let the sunbark sink to the ground. It landed gently on the snow, accompanied by the crunching and snapping of the icy crust. The first buildings were more than twenty yards away from them. Through the window slits Merle saw narrow, deep lanes between the buildings. Considering the numerous roofs and towers, there must be a real labyrinth of lanes and streets in there.
    Involuntarily Merle thought of Serafin. Of how, as a master thief, he would have known how best to move inconspicuously through such a maze of streets.
    Of how very much she missed him.
    â€œGet out of here!” Seth’s voice wiped Serafin’s face from her thoughts. “Quick,
get moving!”
    And then she ran. With Junipa by the hand. Occasionally without her too. Then with her again. Stumbling. Freezing. Without daring to look up, for fear she might see a bark diving down at her.
    Only when they’d taken cover behind a wall, one after the other and even Seth and Vermithrax almost harmoniously side by side, did Merle dare breathe again.
    â€œWhat now?” The lion was staring tensely at the edge of the platform, where the glittering snow field ended abruptly in front of the gray of the cloud background.
    â€œYou can go where you want to.” Seth cast a sideways look first at Merle, then at Junipa. It didn’t escape Merlehow piercingly he kept examining Junipa, before in the bark and now here outside, and she didn’t like it at all.
    Junipa herself didn’t notice. She had placed a hand flat on the wall of the building, and now a suppressed groan came from her throat. With a jerk she pulled her arm back and stared at her palm—it was red as fire, and on the palm glowed droplets of blood.
    â€œIron,” said Vermithrax, while Merle bent over Junipa’s hand worriedly. “The walls are actually made of iron.”
    Seth smiled to himself.
    The lion sniffed a finger’s breadth away from the wall. “Don’t touch! The cold will make your skin stick to it.” And then he seemed to remember that Junipa had already made exactly that mistake. “Everything all right?” he asked in her direction.
    Merle had used her sleeve to blot the blood from Junipa’s hand. It wasn’t much, and it didn’t keep flowing. Junipa was lucky. Except in a few places where the thin outer layer of skin had peeled off and was still stuck to the iron, she wasn’t injured. In a normal person it would have taken one or two days until she could clench her fist again, but Junipa carried the Stone Light in her. Merle had seen with her own eyes how quickly Junipa’s wounds healed.
    â€œIt’ll be all right,” she said softly.
    Seth shoved Merle aside, took Junipa’s hand in his, whispered something, and then let it go again. Afterward the redness paled, and the edges of the shredded skin had closed.

    Merle stared at the hand. Why did he do that, she thought. Why is he helping us?
    â€œNot us,”
said the Flowing Queen.
“Junipa.”
    What does he want from her?
    â€œI do not know.”
    Merle wasn’t