by Kai Meyer
“The Queen must know that,” said Vermithrax. He was master of the art of letting his voice sound completely indifferent, even if he was presumably as stirred up inside as Merle was herself.
“We will ask him for help,” said the Flowing Queen.
“I know that.” Merle got to her feet, walked to the edge of the mesa, and let the warm, humid wind waft to her nose. Vermithrax called to her to be careful, but she had the feeling she had to sense the dangers of this environment with her own body in order to be sure that she wasn’t dreaming it all.
The steep wall fell away at her feet, 175 to 200 feet deep, and Merle grew dizzy. Strangely, she felt that was almost a good feeling. A true, actual feeling.
“I know that we’ve come here to ask him for help,” she said finally. “For Venice and for all the others. But how do we do that? I mean, what will he think when a girl on a flying lion appears before his throne and—”
“Who says he has a throne?”
“I thought he was a king.”
“He rules over Hell,” said the Queen patiently. “But here below is rather different from the upper world.”
Merle couldn’t take her eyes off the rough rock land. She saw no great difference from wildernesses she’d seen in drawings and engravings. A desert people like the Egyptians might feel quite comfortable down here.
Then a thought came to her, and it hit her like a blow in the face. “You know him!”
“No,” said the Flowing Queen tonelessly.
“How do you know that he has no throne, then? That he isn’t like other rulers?”
“Only a surmise.” The Queen was seldom so tight-lipped.
“A surmise, eh?” Her voice now sounded reproachful and angry, so that even Vermithrax looked over at her in confusion. “That’s why you knew so precisely where to find the entrance,” Merle burst out. “And that down here everything is different from up above…. But there, for once, you were mistaken. It’s not so different at all. For me, anyway, it looks like an ordinary grotto.” She’d never seen a grotto with her own eyes, but that didn’t matter now. She had no better argument.
“This grotto, Merle, has an area that is probably as large as half the planet. Perhaps it is even much larger. And how else would you describe the Lilim if not as ‘different’?”
“But that wasn’t what you meant before,” Merle said with conviction. She’d had enough of being put down in each of her discussions. It was a remarkable feeling to argue with someone you couldn’t look in the eye and whose voice wasn’t real. “I don’t understand why you aren’t honest with me … with us.”
Vermithrax was brushing his whiskers with his paw, but he wasn’t missing a word. He could only guess at the course of the conversation from what Merle said.
Again she thought that it simply wasn’t fair that only she could hear the Queen. And had to argue with her on her own.
“I have heard rumors about Lord Light, things the mermaids have picked up. That is all.”
“What sort of rumors?”
“That he is no ordinary ruler. It is not about power with him.”
“What else?”
“That I cannot tell you. I do not know.”
“But you have a surmise.”
The Queen was silent for a moment. Then she said, “What can a ruler of an entire kingdom concern himself with, if not with power? And furthermore, how great could his influence over his subjects be then? The Lilim in the rock wall did not look as if they would take any orders out of pure humility.”
“So what does he concern himself with?” Merle asked doggedly.
“With knowledge, I think. He likes ruling this world, but above all, I think, he investigates it.”
“Investigates? But—”
A loud exclamation from the lion interrupted her. “Merle! Over there!”
She whirled around and almost lost her balance. For an instant the edge of the steep cliff was dangerously close, the rocks leaped toward Merle’s feet. Then she caught herself again, turned hastily away from the drop, and followed Vermithrax’s look with her own eyes.
At first she detected nothing at all, only empty red over the breadth of the wasteland. Then she realized that the lion’s predator’s eyes were sharper than her own. Whatever he’d caught sight of must still be beyond her range of sight.
But it wasn’t long until she saw it. And whatever it was, it was coming nearer.
“What is that?” she exclaimed, breathless and suddenly oppressed with a flood of horrible pictures; fantasies of flying Lilim, thousands of them, danced in her mind.
Yet it wasn’t thousands, but only three. And although they were floating high over the rocks, they possessed no wings.
“Are they …”
“Heads,” said Vermithrax. “Gigantic heads.” And after a moment he added, “Of stone.”
She shook her head, not because she doubted his words but because it was the only reaction that seemed appropriate. Heads of stone. High in the air. Of course.
But after a while she could see them for herself. She saw the heads coming nearer, and quite fast—faster than Vermithrax could fly, of that she was sure.
“Come on, mount!” bellowed the lion, and before she could think of a good argument against it, she was already leaping onto his back, curling her hands into his mane, bending over, and pressing her upper body firmly to his obsidian coat.
“What is he going to do?”
“What are you going to do?”
“Look at them. They aren’t alive.” Vermithrax’s paws pushed off the rock, and seconds later they were already hovering three feet above the hatbox mesa.
“They are not alive,” Merle repeated to herself and then added more loudly, “So what? What does that mean?”
“That means they aren’t Lilim. At least, not dangerous ones.”
“Oh, yes?”
“Wait,” said the Queen. “Perhaps he is right.”
“And if he isn’t?”
She received no answer. She would probably not have heard it anyway, for now the three heads were close enough to see details.
They were human heads, without any doubt, and they were hewn out of stone. So high up in the air there were no fixed points by which to gauge their size, but Merle guessed that each was at least fifty yards high. Their faces were stiff and gray, the eyes open, but without pupils. The stone hair, formed like a helmet, lay close to the head and left the ears free. The powerful lips were open a crack, but what from afar Merle had thought was an entrance to the head’s inside showed itself up close to be an illusion, which was supposed to create the impression that the heads were speaking.
Now they also heard voices.
Words streamed over the plain like a swarm of birds, fluttering and restless, a language that Merle had never heard in her life.
The heads were still about half a mile away and were approaching in an arrow formation, one head at the point, the two others behind and to the right and left.
“Those voices … is that them?”
“I don’t know whether those are their voices, but they’re coming from inside them,” said Vermithrax. Merle noticed that he had his ears pricked. Not only could he see better than she could, he also heard much more and was able to distinguish sounds and where they came from.
“What do you mean? They’re not their voices?”
“Someone else is speaking out of them. They aren’t alive. Their stone isn’t—”
“Inspirited with a soul?”
“Precisely.” Vermithrax fell silent and concentrated completely on his flight. Merle had thought they would flee from the heads, but the lion had until now kept himself still in the air at a point that lay straight across the flight path of the foremost stone head. To her boundless horror, she now realized that Vermithrax was turning—not away from the heads, but toward them. He actually was intending to fly into them.
“Vermithrax! What are you doing?”
The obsidian lion did not answer. Ins
tead he made his wings fan up and down even faster, maneuvered himself a little farther to the left—and waited.
“What do you—”
“He is planning something.”
“Oh?” Merle would probably have turned red with fury if her fear hadn’t driven all the blood from her face. “They’re coming right at us!”
The uncanny voices blared louder and louder over the wasteland and were echoed back from the rock walls and towers of stone. It seemed to Merle as if she were dangling in fireworks of strange words as a multitude of different sounds exploded around her like colored fountains of flame. Even if she’d had command of the strange language, she wouldn’t have understood anything at all, so loud, so shrill were the syllables coming out of this nearest head. A piercing whistling started in Merle’s ears before the heads came level with them.
Vermithrax shook his head, as if trying to drive the noise out of his sensitive ears. His muscles tensed. Abruptly he rushed forward to the front head, at the last moment laid himself on an angle, bellowed something incomprehensible to Merle—probably a warning to hold on especially tight—and dived through under the ridge of the right cheekbone. Merle saw the huge face rush by her like a wall of granite, too big to take in with one look, too fast to perceive more than the weight, the size, the sheer force of its speed.
She called Vermithrax’s name, but the wind tore the syllables from her lips and the voices of the flying heads overwhelmed any sound.
So suddenly that her fingers gave way and her entire body was pulled backward, Vermithrax smashed his claws into the stone ear of the head and pulled himself along. At the same time his wings stopped beating, bent inward, and caught Merle before she could plunge down into the deep. The tips of the feathers pressed her down onto his back with the force of a giant fist, while Vermithrax did his best to absorb the brutal jolt that went through them both at the first contact with the head.
Somehow he succeeded. Somehow he found a grip. And then they were sitting in the ear of the gigantic head and rushing with insane speed across the rocky country.
Merle needed a while before her breathing had grown calm enough for her to be able to speak again. But even then the thoughts flitted around in her head like moths around a candle flame, wild and nervous, and she had trouble giving them a clear direction, had trouble grasping what had just happened. Finally she clenched a fist and struck Vermithrax. He didn’t seem to even feel it.
“Why?” she bellowed at him. “Why did you do that?”
Vermithrax climbed over a stone bulge deeper into the ear. It opened around them like a cave, rocky, dark, a deep funnel. Astonishingly, the noise here inside was dulled; for one thing, because it was now only a single voice that they heard, for here they were shut away from the racket of the two other heads; for another, because the voice of the head was directed to the outside.
Vermithrax let Merle slide from his back and lay down between two stone bulges, exhausted. He panted, his long tongue hanging down to his powerful paws.
“The probability is fifty-fifty,” he brought out between two deep intakes of breath.
“What probability?” Merle was still angry, but gradually her anger was overwhelmed by relief that in spite of everything they were still alive.
“Either the head is taking us to Lord Light, or it’s taking us in exactly the opposite direction.” Vermithrax pulled in his tongue and put his head down on his front paws. Merle became conscious for the first time how very much he’d exhausted himself with the leap to the flying head and just how closely they’d slid past death.
“This head here,” said Vermithrax wearily, “is announcing something. I don’t understand the words it’s broadcasting, but it’s always the same over and over again, as if it had a message. Perhaps it’s a kind of herald.”
“A message from Lord Light to his people?”
“Possibly,” said the Flowing Queen. “Vermithrax could be right.”
“What else?” asked the lion.
Merle rolled her eyes. “How should I know? Down here everything is different. These things could be who knows what!” As she spoke, she looked around the stone cave. It seemed so incredible: They actually had a firm seat in a gigantic ear.
“These heads are dead objects,” said Vermithrax. “This is an important difference from the Lilim. Someone built them. And he did it for a certain purpose. Since Lord Light just happens to be the ruler of this place, it must have been he.”
“And why fifty-fifty?”
“Possibly the head is on the way to its master because it’s fulfilled a mission—or it’s just begun its journey and is going away from Lord Light. One of the two.”
“That means we can only wait, doesn’t it?”
The lion nodded, which looked strangely clumsy, since his nose still lay on his paws. “Looks like it.”
“What do you think?” Merle asked the Queen.
“I think he is right. We could probably wander through Hell for months without finding a trace of Lord Light. But this way we have at least a chance.”
Merle gave a sigh, then she edged closer to the lion and stroked his nose. “But next time, you tell me beforehand, okay? I really want to know why you’re almost killing us all.”
The lion growled something—was it a yes?—and nestled his fist-sized nose into Merle’s hand. Then he purred blissfully, thrashed his tail a couple of times, and closed his eyes.
Merle remained sitting beside him a moment longer, then she levered herself up on wobbly knees and climbed to the outer stone bulge of the giant ear.
Impressed, she looked down. The mournful landscape was flying along a thousand feet below them, so monotonous that there was nothing, but nothing at all, that she could have fastened her eyes on. Probably they were going too fast anyway. She doubted that Vermithrax could have kept up even half as much speed over a long period.
“What a desolate place!” she whispered with a groan. “Did Lord Light ever try to plant something here? I mean, to add a little color. A little variety.”
“Why should he? Nothing lives here. At least nothing that could value such efforts. Or do you think that the Lilim in the camp up there would be happy about a few flowers?”
“You don’t have to make it sound so ridiculous!”
“I do not mean to at all. Only, you must use other measures in this world. Other terms, other concepts.”
Merle was silent and leaned back. But then a thought came to her that made her sit right up again.
“If these heads are something like flying machines, like the sunbarks of the Empire, then there must be someone in them, mustn’t there? Someone who steers them!”
“We are alone.”
“Are you sure?”
“I would feel it. And Vermithrax, too, I think.”
Merle stretched out on the hard stone, observed the slumbering obsidian lion for a while, then looked out over the landscape of Hell. What a strange place! She tried to remember how Professor Burbridge had traveled through it, but she couldn’t think of anything. After all, she hadn’t really read any of his books; her teacher in the orphanage had talked about a few passages, but most of what she’d heard were synopses at second hand. Some descriptions, that was all. Now she regretted that she hadn’t been more interested in it at the time.
On the other hand, she remembered quite clearly the dangers of Hell that Burbridge had recounted in his reports. Gruesome creatures, which waited for the unsuspecting behind every stone and every … yes, tree. She was certain that the talk had been of trees—trees of iron, with leaves like razor blades. Well, here anyway, in this part of Hell, there appeared to be no plants, either of iron or of wood.
She also recollected very well stories of barbarous creatures that moved in huge packs over the plain, landscapes that were wrapped in everlasting fire, mountains that folded their wings and flew away, and ships of human bones that sailed over the lava oceans of Hell. All those were pictures that had stuck in Merle’s mind, so greatly had the
y impressed her at the time.
And now there weren’t any of those.
She was disappointed and relieved at the same time. The Lilim in the rock wall were murderous enough for her taste, and she could perfectly happily do without hordes of cannibals and gigantic monsters. However, she felt a little cheated, as if now, after years, all the infernal pictures had turned out to be just wild stories.
But Hell was gigantic, and so there might be different landscapes and cultures down here, as there were up on the earth. If a traveler from another world were set down somewhere in the Sahara, he’d certainly be disappointed if people had told him beforehand about the splendid palaces of Venice and its many branching canals. Even more, he probably wouldn’t be able to believe they existed at all.
Merle climbed back to the outermost swelling of stone and looked out at the rocky ground rushing past way below them. No change, no trace of life. Oddly, she felt no drafts of wind, no suction, which there really should have been at this speed.
A little bored, especially after all she’d been through, she turned her gaze behind them, to the second stone head, which was following them at some distance. From here she couldn’t see the third, which was on the other side.
Suddenly she started up, her sluggishness vanishing at one stroke.
“That isn’t …,” she began, but she forgot to end the sentence. Then, after a moment, she asked, “Do you see that too?”
“I see through your eyes, Merle. Of course I can see him.”
Between the lips of the second head there was a man.
He was perched behind the lower lip and lay with his upper body and arms stretched out over the stone, apparently lifeless, as if the mighty head had half swallowed him and then had forgotten to swallow the rest. His arms dangled back and forth, his head lay on one side, face turned away. He had very long, snow-white hair, and Merle would have taken him for a woman, if he hadn’t suddenly turned his head and looked over at her. He looked out at her between the white strands, which covered his features like fresh-fallen snow. Even at this distance she could see how narrow and wasted his face looked. His skin had hardly any more color than his hair; it was as pale as that of a corpse.