Read Online The Stone Light by Kai Meyer - Free Book Online Page B

it. Very briefly she thought she heard a whisper, a voice—of the phantom trapped in there?—then she thrust her arm in up to the elbow, and finally she again felt the hand that grasped hers from the other side and stroked her fingers, gently reassuring her.

4 T HE E NCLAVE
    T HE SKY HUNG GRAY AND HEAVY OVER V ENICE, foretelling the rain that would soon be pelting onto the palazzos and canals. A cutting wind, much too cool for this time of year, was blowing in from the north and whistling down the crooked streets, across deserted piazzas and the promenades along the banks of the islands. It swirled up fliers that the indefatigable resisters had distributed a few days before, after the appearance of the messenger from Hell and his offer to protect the Venetians from the armies of the Empire. The fliers were full of slogans, slogans against the city councillors and the Pharaohand anyone else who could be blamed for the desperate situation, slogans that might have put them in prison in other times, most certainly in the pillory. But today no one cared about that anymore. Fear held all Venice under its spell, so absolutely, so hopelessly, that even the soldiers of the City Guard forgot to arrest troublemakers and insurgents.
    In the very heart of this rebellion, in the secret hideout of the rebels—the enclave, as Dario had called the building—Serafin was eating breakfast.
    He wasn’t doing it very calmly, naturally, but not in a hurry, either, for he knew he could do nothing but wait. They would call him sooner or later and take him to their leader, the master of the enclave. Neither Dario nor any of the others had called the leader of the rebellion by name—obviously a precautionary measure. And yet the others’ mysteriousness made Serafin more uneasy than he was willing to admit.
    The palazzo lay in the center of Venice, hardly more than a stone’s throw from a half dozen famous buildings and places. And yet there was an aura of solitude around it—solitude a little too intense for it not to be magical, thought Serafin.
    The night before, on the way here, he and his three escorts had encountered traces of the invasion that was beginning all over Venice. On several canal banks they’d found the empty metal shells in which the mummy soldiershad penetrated the labyrinth of watery streets. They discovered no trace of the soldiers themselves, but they all realized that there was no going back now. The mummies were roaming through the streets, singly or in small groups, spreading fear and horror and completing the taking of the city from within. Here and there Serafin and the others had heard loud voices in the distance, also screams. Once they’d caught the sound of the clash of steel on the other side of a block of houses, but when they arrived they found only corpses, which Serafin identified as members of the Thieves’ Guild.
    No one understood very well what the Pharaoh had in mind with this sort of attack. His war galleys and sunbarks lay in sight of the quays of the lagoon, and it would have been easy to send soldiers on land all around the main island.
    Serafin guessed that the Pharaoh was only trying to rattle the Venetians. But the lagoon dwellers could scarcely be further rattled after more than three decades of siege. And if it were pure cruelty? The macabre fun of beginning the invasion small, in order to then drive the attack to high pitch in a storm of fire and steel?
    Serafin didn’t understand it all, and he hoped that the master of the enclave had some answers ready for his questions.
    The room into which Tiziano had led him was on the second floor of the palazzo. As with most of the oldpalaces, the ground floor was empty. At one time, when all these buildings had still belonged to the rich merchant families of the city, there had been merchandise and goods stored there below, in unornamented halls that every few years would be flooded by
acqua alta,
Venice’s famed high waters.
    But today, after so