The Stone Light

by Kai Meyer

  “Do you do that often?”

  “Don’t say that it’s a sign of … hmm, confusion. I guess you shouldn’t be a judge of that.”

  Winter’s face twitched again. Suddenly he burst into peals of laughter.

  Merle frowned. “What’s so funny?”

  “You.”

  “Heartfelt thanks.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “Whatever you say.” She was gradually losing all her shyness of him. She hoped that it wasn’t simply a sign of increasing apathy. If she made the mistake of feeling that nothing mattered to her, she could just as well jump out and down right now.

  She felt that Winter would stay with his assertion. A living season. Of course.

  Ultimately, it didn’t matter at all.

  “This thing here, this head,” she said. “Do you know what it is?”

  “A herald. It reports news in the breadth of Hell to Lord Light.”

  “Do you understand what it’s saying?”

  “I haven’t given it a thought.”

  “You’re traveling in it and haven’t thought about whether you understand it?”

  He shrugged. “No.”

  Mere noticed something. From far away, the voices of the heads had been clearly audible. Before, in the ear of the first one, they’d sounded dull and blurred. And now, in the mouth, of all places, she could hardly get more than a distant mumble. Shouldn’t the words have been deafening right here? The source of the voice must be somewhere else, perhaps in the bottom, in the stump of the neck. That they weren’t heard better here must mean that there was no connection between the neck and the mouth. She found that reassuring.

  “Who directed you here?” she asked.

  “I myself. And others.”

  “Well, well,” said the Flowing Queen.

  “What kind of others?”

  “Lord Light’s subjects. I’ve met many of them. I’ve crisscrossed this country. I was everywhere—except in Axis Mundi.” He snorted softly. “I should have gone there right off.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “There were … signs that the person I’m looking for wasn’t staying there. But it’s the last possibility.”

  “Who are you looking for, then?”

  Winter hesitated, then he smiled. “Summer.”

  “Who else?”

  “Summer?” Merle asked, blinking.

  Winter’s eyes misted dreamily. “My beloved Summer.”

  Merle couldn’t think of anything to say to that. She had saved a madman from dying of thirst.

  “Is this head … this herald on the way to Axis Mundi?”

  “On the direct path.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded. “I know this country, I’ve traveled it. And I’ve seen many things. The heralds only join up into a group when they’re on the way back to their master.”

  So Vermithrax had been right. She was sorry that he wasn’t here. He’d be worried about her, so alone in the head’s ear.

  “When are we going to reach the city?”

  “Very soon now. The heralds are going faster and faster. Not much longer and they’ll be silent. Then it’s not much farther.”

  Good. That was something, anyway.

  Merle dug in her knapsack. “Are you hungry?”

  “Winter doesn’t eat.”

  “But Winter drinks,” she said snippily. “At least it looked a lot like that.”

  “What would Winter be without water? There would be—”

  “No ice, no snow—I understood.” She swallowed a sigh and began to gnaw on a piece of jerky; it felt horribly tough between her teeth.

  Winter watched her eating for a while, then he bent toward her again. “May I have some more water?”

  “Help yourself.”

  “You are becoming close friends now, eh?” said the Flowing Queen acidly.

  Merle handed the opened bottle to Winter. They would find water in Axis Mundi, at least she hoped so.

  “Winter?”

  He set down the bottle. “Yes?”

  “This Summer, is he …”

  “She,” he said emphatically. “Summer is feminine.”

  “Oh, nice. Summer … Is she a … hmm, person like you?”

  He smirked. “You mean, does she look like a human?”

  Merle nodded.

  “Yes, she does,” he said. “When she wants to. Just as I do.”

  “Where do you know her from?”

  “There are only four of us. One should assume that we occasionally cross paths, don’t you think?”

  Spring, summer, fall, and winter. It occurred to Merle that she herself had just been thinking a few days before that there was no real summer and winter anymore, that spring and fall ran unnoticeably into each other.

  No wonder, she thought cynically, if they’re both running around down here.

  “And now you’re looking for her? Did she go away?”

  “Vanished. From one day to the next.”

  “You’re in love with her.” A statement, not a question. Now that she’d accepted his remarkable story, it was easier and easier for her to speak seriously with him about it. It was a piece of absurd theater into which she’d walked onstage a little late.

  “In love with … Pah!” He let the word drive between them like an ice crystal. “Never before has there been a stronger love. Never a more magnificent day than that one when Winter put his arms around Summer for the first time.”

  “He is a human,” said the Flowing Queen.

  “That sounds quite … romantic.”

  Winter stared sadly up through the open stone mouth to the heaven of Hell. “Up there, in the upper world, I can touch nothing without its turning to ice.” His hand reached out like a snake and grasped Merle’s leg. She shrank back. “If I were to touch you so, you wouldn’t even have time to be afraid. You would stiffen to ice on the spot.”

  Coolly she brushed his hand off. “Oh, yes?”

  “That is my curse. My eternal sorrow.”

  He’s putting on an act, Merle thought, but he has no experience with the public. “And down here?” she asked politely.

  “Nothing.” He shook his head as if he could not grasp it himself. “No ice, not even a breath of cold. Here I’m nothing, almost like a human.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Of course not.”

  Winter sighed and twirled a strand of white hair between his bony fingers. “I do not speak with humans often. I only notice too late when I’ve wounded one of you.”

  “And Summer?”

  His eyes again took on that dreamy glow, which amused her and at the same time made her a little sad. “Summer is like me. And yet quite different.”

  “One often hears something like that about couples in love,” she said with precocious wisdom.

  “You are thinking of Serafin,” the Queen butted in.

  “I am not!”

  “And bow!”

  Winter’s eyes narrowed. “That is your conversation with yourself?”

  Merle shook her head hard, in the slight hope that the Queen in her head would get dizzy from it—but she knew that was nonsense. “It’s all right.”

  “There is someone there.” Winter did not take his eyes off her. “In you. I can feel him.”

  Merle was startled. Did he really feel the presence of the Flowing Queen in her thoughts? His look was so serious, as if he’d just accused her of a betrayal.

  “He knows,” said the Queen.

  Instinctively Merle slid away from him a little. He made no move to follow her. Perhaps he was still too weak. But his eyes remained firmly fastened on her, sticking to her eyes like pincers.

  “There’s no one there,” she said unconvincingly. “Tell me more about Summer.”

  “Summer can touch no human, just like me.”

  “What would happen?” She knew the answer already, before he said it, and with satisfaction s
he thought that perhaps she could see through him a bit. His madness followed certain firm rules.

  “Everything that is touched by Summer must burn,” he said.

  Merle nodded. She could fill in the rest of the story. “And therefore it’s possible for you two to touch each other without the other freezing stiff or going up in flames. Right? The effects cancel each other out.”

  Winter tilted his head to one side. “How do you know that?”

  “I have”—she almost said imagination—“guessed.”

  He sighed again. He was beginning to overdo it with his suffering expression. “She was the first creature I could ever touch without fear. It was just the same for her. We were made for each other.”

  “Yes,” said the Queen peevishly, “they all say that.”

  “And you think she’s here? In Hell?”

  “She was abducted.”

  Who abducted a being that could set anyone on fire who touched her? But Merle didn’t want to quarrel with him.

  Instead she stood up, climbed up to the stone bulge of the gigantic lip, and looked out over it into the distance. Actually, she only wanted to keep him from staring at her again with his dark, bottomless eyes.

  Her breath stopped.

  “Winter?”

  She heard a rustling as he carefully stood up and appeared beside her.

  “Is that it?” she asked tonelessly.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him nod.

  “Axis Mundi,” he said.

  Many miles ahead of them rose a wall of rock, reaching from the ground to the ceiling of Hell. It could have been the end of this subterranean world had there not been a wide gap there. What lay behind it was not discernible.

  However, she clearly saw the two gigantic stone figures that flanked the opening. Figures of humans. Each of the figures must be at least five hundred yards high, possibly even higher. They stood well forward, at the edges of the gap, the faces turned toward each other. But they were holding themselves strangely crooked, the upper bodies bent forward. Their arms were intertwined with each other, as if they were going to wrestle.

  “The Eternal Fighters,” said Winter softly.

  “Is that what they’re called?”

  He nodded. “People tell about them everywhere. Lord Light had them erected. See how they’re standing? It’s said that on Lord Light’s orders they come to life to continue their fight. And grind up everything that’s in the gap.”

  Now for the first time it became clear to Merle that the two figures formed a gate. The city must lie just behind it, on the other side of the rock wall.

  “Is that the only entrance?”

  “The only one that’s known.”

  “Then perhaps there are others?”

  “None that anyone knows of.”

  Merle rolled her eyes but said nothing. Instead she looked out over the wasteland to the feet of the fighters. Dark, seething lines moved through the rock desert like ant trails. Thousands upon thousands of Lilim!

  They were coming and going between the feet of the fighters, endless caravans that were taking the road toward Axis Mundi or were leaving it.

  “They all have to go between the statues’ legs,” she said with a shudder.

  “That’s the idea. It creates respect.”

  “It will create respect in me when we fly through there.”

  Winter twisted one corner of his mouth, perhaps a thin smile. “As long as they aren’t wakened to life, nothing can happen to us.”

  “Have they ever? Become living?”

  He shrugged. “Quite often, if you believe the legends in the outer regions. But the closer one comes to the city, the fewer of these stories there are. Apparently no one has yet seen it with his own eyes.”

  “A good sign, I guess.”

  “It could also mean,” said the Queen, “that all are dead who have seen it.”

  Silently the heads raced toward the center of Hell. The closer they came to the two stone giants, the more breathtaking those became, true mountains in the shape of men.

  But why humans? Why had Lord Light not created them on the model of the Lilim?

  Or were there Lilim who looked like humans?

  Again she inched away from Winter a little, unnoticeably, she hoped. He did notice it, however. In his eyes she could read that he knew what she was thinking. He knew her fear. But he didn’t defend himself. Said not a word, turned his head, and looked again toward the fighters.

  When he changed his position, it was as if he and his shadow were moving in different directions. Only for a moment. Perhaps an illusion.

  Merle again turned her eyes toward the gate of Hell’s city.

  9 AXIS OF THE WORLD

  THEY WEREN’T THE ONLY ONES IN THE AIR APPROACHING the gap in the rocks. Merle could now distinguish creatures swarming around the stone colossi like mosquitoes, a multitude of dark dots. They were too far away to make out any details.

  Merle and Winter took cover behind the stone bulge. Merle hoped that Vermithrax had also withdrawn deeper into the ear. She worried about him. He was alone and had no one to explain to him what was going on outside.

  “He is doing well,” the Queen said reassuringly.

  The first head, which was diagonally in front of them, sank into the shadows of the gigantic legs. From above, Merle could see the giant feet on the ground, mighty ovals of rock, around which snaked the Lilims’ route of march. Still, she wasn’t able to see the creatures in detail, so tight was the throng, so great the distance.

  The heralds raised their flight path considerably, until they were soaring above the stone knees of the colossi. Merle lost sight of the columns deep below them and instead looked up at the gigantic bodies of the fighters. From close up, they could just as well have been bizarre rock formations; their proportions were discernible only from a distance. The stone thighs, between which the heralds were flying, became great walls, too big to measure.

  The sight took Merle’s breath away. The thought that these huge things were created artificially, with sweat and blood and endless patience, was beyond her power of imagination.

  What did the workers who’d hewn these figures out of stone look like? Like men? Or instead, like the watchers in the abyss, roachlike creatures that had eaten the superfluous rock instead of cutting it away?

  Despite the heralds’ speed, it took quite a while until they had the fighters behind them. The gap in the rocks was somewhat deeper than Merle had thought, and it had a slight bend, which made it impossible to see the end of it. The rock walls moved past them on the left and right, and there Merle saw flying Lilim, coming toward them or flying in the same direction. They all seemed to avoid the heralds in wide arcs, as if they were afraid of the giant stone heads.

  No Lilim appeared to be like the other. Some resembled the pictures that men had made of the inhabitants of Hell for thousands of years: horned, scaly beings that sailed on arching wings. Others were similar to oversized insects, clicking and rattling in black shells of horn. But the greater part were like nothing Merle had ever seen. With most, the extremities could be determined, sometimes also something that might be a face, eyes, jaws, teeth.

  “They all look completely diffferent,” she said, fascinated.

  Winter smiled. “After a while you’ll discover that there are repeating patterns. They’re just not so easy to recognize as with humans or animals. But when you get used to the sight, you see them right away.”

  At some point the gap came to an end. Before them opened a grandiose panorama.

  Axis Mundi.

  The city of Lord Light, the center of Hell.

  Merle had received a foretaste of real size when she saw the watchers at the abyss and then the two fighters in the rock gap. But this was pure madness: a view that could be apprehended only if she turned off her reason and simply looked—merely observed rather than tried to understand. For this place did not let itself be truly understood.

  The city looked like a sea o
f tortoise shells, shoved over and under one another, some tilted, others broken. Domes of rock stretched among towers, minarets, and pyramids, under bridges and paths and grillwork. No area was unbuilt, all spaces were inhabited. The rock walls between which Axis Mundi spread out like a coral reef were lined with houses and huts; the towers infested with whole tribes of insectoid Lilim; the ledges, which, like the bones of an elephant graveyard, rose above the buildings, covered with swarming life; and even in the thousands of columns of smoke that disappeared under the ceiling nested dark, fluttering creatures.

  Enthroned at the center of this hodgepodge of inconceivable diversity was a dome that was broader and higher than all the others. The heralds headed toward it, and Merle guessed that they were approaching the holy of holies, the triumphal temple of Lord Light, the center of Axis Mundi, of Hell, and perhaps of the whole world, merged into one mighty edifice.

  It would be a while yet before they arrived there, so far was the road from the rock gap, over roofs, spires, and gables. Merle used the time to examine the chaos below them more carefully. Once, a few years ago, in the streets of Venice, she’d seen a beggar whose entire face was infected by a proliferating ulcer that looked like the top of a cauliflower. From above, Axis Mundi reminded her of that sight, a grotesque work of tumors, entwined and distorted like melted muscle tissue.

  And then there was the smell.

  A spice dealer might perhaps have been able to recognize the individual odors in this abominable mixture of scents of all kinds. But in Merle’s nose, the stink worked like a poison that etched itself into her mucous membranes.

  The view over the city and the vague idea of what might live down there was enough to cast her into deep despair. Whatever had they been thinking of to come here? That Lord Light resided in a golden tower and would receive them with open arms? How should they find help here for their city, for their friends?

  This was Hell, after all—true, at least in some respects, to the horrors that Professor Burbridge had evoked in his reports. And some things, she had no doubt, were certainly even worse.

  “Do not let it frighten you,” said the Flowing Queen. “We have nothing to do with all that down there. It is Lord Light who interests us, not this scum.”

  He is one of them, Merle thought.