The Stone Light

by Kai Meyer

  Unexpectedly, Merle and Junipa were left unguarded.

  Not that it was of much use to them. All they could do was lie flat on the ground, Merle protectively over Junipa, who, though only a year younger, seemed to her at that moment like a child who must be shielded.

  “Too late!” whispered the Flowing Queen in her thoughts, but what she meant by it wasn’t clear to Merle yet.

  She lifted her head, first made sure that Junipa was all right, and then looked back at Burbridge. She was lying about ten yards from the place where the walkway entered the circle; ten yards from the place where Burbridge was taking cover behind a bunch of golem soldiers, while the sphinx with his rider—

  Dead! Seth had been dead!

  —flew in for a new attack. Two other stone men burst under a blow from Iskander’s claw, while Seth bellowed further orders in Egyptian, clasped both arms around Iskander’s half-human upper body, and kept his eye on the light-filled mist of the dome.

  Merle didn’t know how he’d managed to survive the execution, and perhaps it was better so. He was a high priest of Horus, one of the most powerful magicians in the Empire, and he must know how to raise the dead. Possibly that had been in his plan from the beginning: lull Burbridge into security and then be able to strike totally unexpectedly.

  And he understood about striking, no doubt about it.

  More golems shattered into pieces, proving that everything that Lord Light had expected of them had been in error. They might offer protection from humans and Lilim, but not against the anger of a sphinx, whose power and strength and cruelty were legendary among the peoples of the world.

  Iskander was, as Merle saw at once, no ordinary sphinx. He was bigger, stronger, and in addition to that, winged. His long, bronze-colored hair had loosed itself from his neck and whirled wildly around his head, a net of fluttering strands like the tentacles of a bizarre water plant. He had claws not only on his lion feet but also on both hands of his human torso, and they were long and sharp enough to break even stone. Merle didn’t like to imagine what would happen if they landed on soft flesh, muscles, skin, and bone.

  Her eyes sought the second cage, in which Vermithrax was still imprisoned. The obsidian lion was no longer sitting there quietly but vainly trying to bend the bars apart with his paws. To no avail. Iskander’s cage had been destroyed by Seth’s magic, not by the muscular power of the sphinx, and Vermithrax’s prison remained untouched by it. The steel box shook and jerked as Vermithrax ran around in it angrily, throwing himself against the bars repeatedly and bellowing something to Merle that she couldn’t understand over the noise of the fight.

  Why didn’t any Lilim come to Burbridge’s aid? He’d trusted in the strength of the golem soldiers. But wouldn’t he have guessed what the sphinx was capable of doing?

  Merle thought of the empty machine tunnels, the anxious creatures who took shelter from their master behind steel and smoke.

  Only a single Lilim was ready to go to his death for Lord Light.

  Talamar dared a desperate maneuver. When Iskander shot down once again from high altitude, the grotesque creature jumped from one of the railings and threw himself at the sphinx. Iskander crashed against him, lost his orientation for a moment, smashed into the opposite railing, and lost his rider. Seth was slung from the sphinx’s back and thumped onto the walkway.

  Talamar hung with his limbs entwined around Iskander’s body and was carried high up with him, depriving him of sight: Talamar’s scrawny body clung before the sphinx’s chest and face. Iskander was confused for a moment. Then he seized the Lilim with both hands, tore him to pieces, and flung him into the abyss. Talamar’s remains fell into the deep in a red cloud and disappeared in the glow of the Stone Light.

  Iskander let out an angry scream, licked the Lilim blood from his claws as he flew, and ignored the calls of his master. Seth had pulled himself up to the railing with his unwounded arm; the golden grid inlaid in his scalp was sprinkled with damp red. Again and again he roared orders up to Iskander, but the sphinx didn’t obey.

  The winged creature screeched in wild triumph, shot away over Seth, and flew in a wide arc. His eye fell on Vermithrax and recognized in him a worthy opponent. He rushed at the obsidian lion’s cage with brutish fury, leaped on it, fastened himself to the bars, and tore at them. Iskander was no ordinary sphinx. He was something artificial, bred through the black arts of the Pharaoh and his priesthood, a cross of several beasts, and Merle wouldn’t have been surprised if somewhere in him there were also the traces of a Lilim.

  Iskander rattled the bars of the cage again, while Vermithrax struck at him from inside. He wounded the sphinx on his legs and paws, but the pain only made Iskander angrier. The cage danced wildly on its chain, swung wide back and forth, twisted and circled, and the sound of grinding iron came down to the round walkway over the Light.

  Merle and Junipa clung to each other; neither could do anything, and even the Flowing Queen stormed in Merle’s thoughts in fear for Vermithrax’s life.

  Injured, Seth was still leaning against the railing, looking frantically from Iskander to Burbridge. The professor appeared very briefly behind the wall of his remaining golem soldiers to assess the situation, then took cover again and sent two golems in Seth’s direction. The stone giants hurried forward with rumbling steps. The priest of Horus tried to hurl a magic spell against them, but when he opened his lips, only blood came out, red foam, which ran over his chin and soiled his chest.

  “Iskander!” he cried in a long, drawn-out howl into the ever-present brightness. At the same moment the golems reached him, were about to seize him—and then suddenly Seth was gone, and a mighty falcon shot forward, wobbling, between the giant soldiers, turned a groggy circle over Burbridge, and then rushed upward, disappearing without a trace into the mist of light in the dome.

  The sound of a metal grinding and rending alarmed Merle and Junipa and drew their eyes up to the cage.

  Vermithrax had succeeded in splitting Iskander’s face with a well-placed slash between the bars. The blow had torn a hand-sized piece of skin from the sphinx’s head like old wallpaper. But Iskander’s roar of pain was no different from the sound of his insane rage; his tearing and shaking grew even stronger.

  The grinding sound came again, followed by shrill poppings.

  Merle screamed. Junipa’s hands dug into Merle’s arms like pincers, clutching as hard as she could.

  The chain parted, and for a fraction of a second the cage appeared to float in the nothingness, held like a cocoon by an invisible spiderweb.

  Then it plunged.

  The roaring of the obsidian lion was mixed with that of the sphinx. Iskander pushed himself off the cage just in time, before it could carry him with it to the depths. His wings whipped the air and caused a maelstrom in the haze of light. He wavered and swayed, then stabilized his position and looked down to where the cage was becoming ever smaller.

  Merle tore herself loose from Junipa, rushed to the railing, and looked into the abyss.

  “Oh, no,” whispered the Flowing Queen, over and over again.

  The cage rotated as it fell, like a child’s building block. Inside it, Vermithrax was hardly still recognizable, only a black blur, which became smaller and smaller as it fell toward the brightness. Then the cage paled in the glowing mist over the curved surface; the chain, which had fallen behind it like an iron tail, vanished last of all.

  Merle did not utter a sound.

  The Queen was also silent.

  When Merle finally turned around, with trembling knees and hands that were scarcely able to hold on to the railing, Junipa was beside her. Junipa with the mirror eyes, out of which the glow of the Stone Light looked at her with its own intelligence. The impression vanished just as soon as Junipa bent toward her and the reflection vanished from the mirrors.

  Now Merle saw herself in them, with teary eyes and shining cheeks, and she was infinitely grateful when Junipa pulled her friend toward her, held her, and murmured soft words
of sympathy in a tone that was soothing and cheering at the same time.

  A resounding crash. The two girls whirled around.

  Iskander was not being stopped by the obsidian lion’s fate. Again he shot toward the catwalk in a nosedive, but this time he didn’t rush away over the golems but landed among them. Blows that might have felled trees struck him from all sides, and already the skin under his fur was turning dark red. But he raged further among his antagonists. For every blow that struck him, he delivered several more, shattering golem soldiers in all directions. Splinters of stone flew everywhere, striking Merle and Junipa, and yet they had no choice, except to watch what happened next.

  Now other Lilim were approaching from somewhere, winged creatures like those Merle had seen between the gigantic statues at the gate of Axis Mundi. But they were still far away, hardly more than tiny points in the brightness above.

  Burbridge sprang among the stone soldiers shattering around him, both arms held protectively over his head, bent, now only a panicked man who feared for nothing but his life.

  If the Stone Light had been in him, it had abandoned him now. Or was waiting to find out for itself how it was for a human to die. The search for new experience. Knowledge that made it easier for it to consume the next human, the next organism—or to become consumed by it, as a new heart, a new center of all things.

  Iskander’s power was ebbing, but his strength was still terrible enough to obliterate the last golem. Finally Burbridge stood alone on a heap of rubble, some parts still appearing human, others nothing but fragments of stone and sand.

  Iskander hauled back for a deadly blow, when something shot up from the depths behind him, glowing bright like a meteor, only bigger, with a shape that resembled a lion. A deep roar overwhelmed Iskander’s scream of rage and echoed back from the distant dome walls.

  The sphinx turned, his movements slower than before, weakened by his battle and his own rage. And he recognized Vermithrax. Saw the light in which the obsidian lion was bathed, no, that shone through him, as if he himself had turned to light, light of stone, not hot, not cold, only different, strange, and fearsome.

  Vermithrax seized Iskander by the head, tore him from the walkway, pulled him into the air, flung him up, and thus broke his neck.

  The sphinx’s wings fluttered one last time, held him in the emptiness for a moment, and then he would have plunged—had not the flying Lilim arrived at that moment. They caught up the body and carried it quickly away.

  Burbridge laughed.

  Laughed and laughed and laughed.

  Vermithrax didn’t bother with him; instead he rushed over to Merle and Junipa and landed beside them on the walkway. The grill rattled under his paws, as if his weight had multiplied at one stroke.

  “Come,” he cried in a voice that sounded a little more rumbling than before, “get on!”

  His body was no longer black. He glowed, as if someone had poured lava into the shape of a lion, and he was bigger, his feathered wings wider, his head heavier, his teeth and claws longer. In the midst of her relief, Merle wondered if that was all the Light had done or whether there were other changes, ones that she couldn’t see now, which might appear later when no one was thinking about it anymore. She remembered the spark in the professor’s eyes and saw a dissimilar, brighter glow in Vermithrax’s eyes, two beaming points like stars implanted in his face.

  But she was also happy, so happy, and she hugged the glowing lion’s head and patted his nose before she sprang on his back with Junipa and held on tight.

  “He is still the same old Vermithrax,” said the Queen in her head, and at the moment, Merle believed her. “Still the same old Vermithrax.”

  Vermithrax took off and rushed over the bunch of Lilim clustered around the dead sphinx. They let go of Iskander’s body; not much was left of him. Burbridge bellowed orders, and one of the Lilim shot over to him and waited until his master sat down on him—a serpentine creature that bore some likeness to a dragonfly, spiraled like a corkscrew, with massive wing shells like those of a beetle, three on each side, and a head that looked like a swirl of teeth.

  The Lilim rose up, placed itself at the head of the flying pack, and took up the pursuit of Vermithrax. Burbridge yelled something, but his voice was too shrill to understand. So they rushed after the glowing lion, the first living creature of stone that had been dipped in the glow of the Stone Light.

  “They are afraid,” said the Flowing Queen. “They are afraid of Lord Light, but also they are afraid of Vermithrax and what he is now.”

  What is he, then? Merle asked in her thoughts.

  “I do not know,” said the Queen. “I thought I knew much, but now I only know that I know nothing.”

  Junipa was sitting behind Merle and had flung both arms around her, holding on desperately and trying frantically not to look down into the abyss. Vermithrax was mounting more and more steeply, and it cost Merle all her strength to cling to his glowing mane. It was lucky that Junipa was thin, almost emaciated; it was all that allowed Merle to keep both their weights on Vermithrax’s back.

  Vermithrax was faster than before, as if the Light had doubled the strength of his wings. But he lost a portion of his valuable head start when he was compelled to circle under the highest point of the dome before he discovered an opening to the outside, a sort of gate, which was guarded by two winged Lilim. Both drew back anxiously when they saw him coming toward them, a beaming fury, a living, breathing, roaring comet.

  Vermithrax bore Merle and Junipa out of the haze of light, broke out of the brightness with them, and shot out into the eternal red dusk of Hell. After the extreme glitter of the interior of the dome, the diffuse lava light of the rock ceiling over Axis Mundi seemed to Merle dark and uncanny. Her eyes needed a while to get used to it.

  She imagined how Vermithrax must be affecting the Lilim who’d gathered in streets and on piazzas: a glowing tail of light against the rock sky, a creature that hadn’t yet been seen in Hell.

  She glanced back and saw again the growing swarm of their pursuers, which shot out of the dome not even a hundred yards behind them, pulling a thin veil of light along with them before it paled and dissolved into glowing dust.

  Lord Light sat on the back of the foremost Lilim, with fluttering coattails and streaming hair, his face twisted; some blows of the sphinx had grazed him and torn red furrows in his hair and clothing.

  “He wants Vermithrax,” said the Queen. “More than anything else, he wants Vermithrax.”

  And as if Junipa had heard the words in Merle’s head, she contradicted the Queen: “He wants you, Merle. He’s after you.” After a moment she added, “And after me. My eyes.”

  “Your eyes?” cried Merle over her shoulder, while deep below them the towers and roofs and domes of Axis Mundi moved past and Vermithrax neared the gap in the rock wall.

  “Yes. He ordered Arcimboldo to implant them in me.”

  “But why you?”

  “You know how I began to see with the mirror eyes? First only outlines and shapes, then your faces, and then everything? And how I began to even see in the dark? I can always see, no matter where and when, whether I want to or not.”

  Merle nodded. Of course she remembered that.

  “It didn’t stop with that,” Junipa said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I can see even farther.” She sounded sad. “Always farther. Through things and … other places.”

  Merle looked back at the Lilim. Vermithrax had increased the distance again, but the number of pursuers had grown to fifty or sixty.

  “Other places?” she repeated.

  “Into other worlds,” said Junipa. “That’s the reason why Lord Light needs me. I’m supposed to look into other worlds for him … into worlds that need a new heart, he said.”

  Merle shivered and thought of Winter. She was suddenly overcome with remorse because she hadn’t thought about him the whole time. He’d fled, Burbridge said. In silence she wished him the best of luck
. He’d been going through Hell alone before they met him, and he’d probably manage from now on.

  “Where are we flying?” she roared into Vermithrax’s glowing ear.

  In front of them the gap now yawned, like a chasm in the rocks of Hell. “Out of the city, first,” cried the lion. “And then we’ll see where our leader takes us.”

  She didn’t understand. “Our leader?”

  Vermithrax’s mane vibrated as the powerful lion head nodded. “Look straight ahead!”

  Merle peered forward over the glowing head. The gap was darker than its surroundings, and it was hard to make out anything in it. There were a few flying Lilim, but most turned aside when they saw Vermithrax coming toward them.

  But then Merle saw what he meant: a tiny dark dot that was flying some distance ahead of them. She just caught sight of it before it disappeared behind the first bend of the rock gap. It looked like a bird, like a—

  A falcon!

  “We’ll hope that Seth knows how we’re going to get out of here,” cried Vermithrax.

  “Quite possible,” said the Queen, and finally she sounded like herself again. “Perhaps we really will manage it.”

  The walls of the rock gap grew rapidly toward them along both sides. Vermithrax rushed between them at breakneck speed. Projections, ledges, and spines blurred in the corners of Merle’s eyes to a brown-red fog.

  They had almost reached the last curve when a shudder ran through the rock walls, a shaking and explosion, followed by dust and an avalanche of rubble that plunged down to the bottom to the right and left of them. The vibrations appeared to come toward them, as if the structure of the rock walls were falling in waves, which rolled toward them, grinding and thundering. The rockfalls became stronger, ever more pieces broke out of the rock with such force that they were carried far out into the pass. Sometimes Vermithrax made a swift turn to the side in order to avoid them, but even he couldn’t prevent his riders from being repeatedly struck by small stones, which smacked painfully against them like shots.