by Kai Meyer
“Possibly.”
He will not help us.
“He offered it once, and he will do it again.”
Merle shook her head silently, before she noticed that Winter was again looking at her suspiciously.
“Is that his palace?” she asked.
Winter’s hair was being whirled around in the headwind like a snowstorm. “I’ve never been here. I don’t know.”
The stone head kept on toward the monstrous dome, and now Merle noticed that the entire building appeared to be shining, from the inside out. In a different way from the subterranean lava strands, which provided light to all Hell, the dome glowed with no tinge of yellow or red, at once much brighter and yet duller.
“Before you ask—I do not know what sort of light that is,” said the Queen.
Winter’s dark expression had brightened. “That could be she.”
Merle looked at him with wide eyes. “Who? Summer?”
He nodded.
The Queen groaned.
Merle had a suspicion what the light might mean. Until now she hadn’t thought about why Lord Light bore this name at all. What if it was a description rather than a name?
“I am sorry to have to disappoint you,” said the Flowing Queen quickly. “In earlier times, the master of Hell was named Lucifer, and in your language that means nothing other than ‘bringer of light.’ Lord Light is a name humans have given him. Furthermore, quite a new one.”
Light bringer, Merle thought. Someone who brings the light—and maybe even imprisons it under a dome?
Winter’s behavior changed. He no longer brooded or confused Merle with dark hints. Instead, he ran back and forth along the lip, casting excited looks toward the dome and chewing on his lower lip like a nervous boy. Merle grinned stealthily. And he claimed not to be human?
A few hundred yards before the giant dome, the heads changed direction. Instead of flying straight toward the vault, they now approached an interconnected construction of rectangles and towers rising at the side of the dome. Merle noticed that everything here, every building, even the giant dome vault, consisted of smooth stone. Nothing was built of masonry and mortar. Every elevation within the city looked as if it had grown, as if someone had worked the rock and stretched it, the way the glass blowers on Murano worked their gatherings of glass; as if someone possessed the power to force the rock to an alien will.
The heralds glided through an opening that reminded Merle of the mouth of a giant fish. In comparison to this door, the stone heads seemed like pebbles. Beyond the opening was a broad hall, where a good dozen stone heralds were resting in several rows on the floor; they looked like remains of ancient statues in an archeologist’s storeroom.
First the front head sank into a free place, then their own. Its bottom struck the ground with a murderous jolt that knocked Merle and Winter off their feet. The noise was deafening. The stone quivered for a while afterward from the force.
Merle fought her way up, still quite dizzy and deaf from the impact. Fearfully she looked down. She’d almost expected that Lilim would hurry toward the head from all directions, like harbor workers to unload a newly arrived ship. But the floor around the herald remained empty. At first.
A powerful shadow appeared before the mouth opening, then Vermithrax shot across them, much too fast and with wing beats that created a real storm. He was just able to decrease his speed enough not to smash against the gums of the mouth cavity. Snorting, he landed on the floor and whirled around, all predator, all fighter from head to paws.
He approached tensely, keeping his eyes on Winter. Without looking at Merle, he asked her, “Are you all right?”
“We’re all fine and dandy.”
A silent duel of gazes between Vermithrax and Winter was under way. Merle was glad not to be standing between them, lest the quantities of mistrust and tension now in the air strike her like lightning.
“Vermithrax,” she said soothingly, “Winter is on our side.” Still, as she spoke, she wasn’t at all sure of that anymore. Perhaps it was pity. Or naive confidence.
“Your name is Winter?” asked Vermithrax.
The white-skinned, white-haired man nodded. “And yours Vermithrax.” He said the lion’s strange name without hesitation or a trace of mispronunciation, as if he’d already known him for a long time. And in fact, he did add, “I have heard of you.”
The obsidian lion threw Merle a questioning look, but she raised her hands defensively. “Not from me.”
“Your story is an old and well-known one,” said Winter to the lion, “and indeed, all over the world. I have heard of it in many places.”
Vermithrax raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”
Winter nodded. “The most powerful of the stone lions of Venice. You are a legend, Vermithrax.”
Merle automatically wondered why, then, she’d never heard the whole story about Vermithrax’s uprising against the Venetians. The Flowing Queen had been the first to tell her of it.
“You come from above?” asked the lion.
Winter nodded again.
In order to cut short the menacing interrogation, Merle joined in and told Vermithrax everything she’d learned about Winter. The story sounded even more incredible from her mouth. Vermithrax remained hostile, and she could hardly blame him. Perhaps it had been a mistake to tell about Winter’s unhappy love for Summer. With that she’d strained his credulity to the utmost—and beyond.
“Merle,” said the Flowing Queen suddenly, “we must get away from here. Quickly.”
Vermithrax was just about to take another threatening step toward Winter, when Merle leaped between them. “Stop it now! Right this minute, you two!”
Vermithrax stopped, finally turned his eyes from Winter, and looked at Merle. The expression in his eyes became gentler at once. “He could be dangerous.”
“What is most dangerous are the Lilim, who are coming from all sides,” said Merle, but it was the Flowing Queen who spoke out of her.
Are you sure? Merle thought.
“Yes. They will soon be here.”
Vermithrax made a leap and landed on the edge of the stone lower lip. “You’re right.”
Winter also climbed the stone bulge, nimbly followed by Merle. A horrified sound escaped her throat, and she quickly reassured herself with the thought that it must have been the Flowing Queen. Of course she knew better.
Countless Lilim were approaching the herald, absurdly comical figures with too many limbs, sharp-edged horn shells, and eyeless heads. The majority bustled along flat on the floor, while others went upright, if also bent forward, as if by the weight of their horny bodies. Some others ran on long, skinny legs, as if they were on stilts, and their arms stood out at angles like the legs of daddy longlegs. Those were the ones that horrified Merle most, for they moved fast and with agility, and Merle had to think involuntarily of giant spiders, even if that over-simplified the matter—and prettified it.
“They haven’t discovered us yet,” said Winter, as he leaped back behind the lip. Vermithrax and Merle followed him.
The lion waved Merle over with a scraping of his paws. “Get on!”
She cast a glance at Winter and hesitated. “What about him? There’s room enough on your back for two.”
Vermithrax looked anything but happy. “Do we have to?”
Merle looked over at Winter once more, then she nodded.
“Very well. Hurry up!”
Merle climbed up onto the lion’s black back. Winter followed her after a short hesitation. She felt him take a place behind her and try to find the best position. There was just time enough for him to grab on tight, for Vermithrax unfolded his wings and lifted them into the air with one powerful motion.
They shot out between the herald’s lips just as the first angled leg of a Lilim pushed over the edge.
Vermithrax rushed out into the hall. On the floor below, the Lilim turned their heads, some as ponderously as tortoises, others swiftly and with malicious eyes. Some let out shrill
animal sounds, others articulated words in a strange language. Over her shoulder Merle saw a whole flood of creatures climbing to the chin of the herald and streaming into the mouth cavity. But the ones with the long limbs remained behind and stared up at Vermithrax. One gave out a succession of high, sharp sounds, and at once the direction of the stream of Lilim changed. Like angry ants they swarmed out to all sides.
Merle clung to Vermithrax’s mane, while he climbed as high as possible, up to just below the ceiling of the hall. Her fingers got hold of something that didn’t belong there. When she pulled out her right hand, she saw that something had caught in Vermithrax’s coat, one of the black feathers from the ear of the herald. Only it wasn’t a feather at all: It was a tiny black crab, so fine-limbed that she’d taken its limbs for down. It didn’t move, was obviously dead. So they hadn’t lain on the leavings of Lilim in the ear but on Lilim themselves. The thought caused her such revulsion that for a moment it even masked her fear. She had the feeling that her entire body must be crawling. Shuddering, she cast a last look at the dead crab thing and then flung it into the void.
Winter had tried at first to cling to the flanks of the lion, but now, when that hold wasn’t enough, he put an arm around Merle’s waist from behind. She had the feeling he shrank from the touch; perhaps out of fear she still might freeze to ice.
“They were expecting us,” said the Queen.
“But how did they know that we’re here?” Merle no longer cared if Winter overheard her.
“Perhaps they could sense one of you.”
“Or you.”
The Queen didn’t say anything to that. Perhaps she was considering that idea, in fact.
The obsidian lion flew over the rows of giant heads and kept heading toward the door through which the heralds had entered. It must be a good fifteen hundred feet to it from where they were. From up here the hall looked even more gigantic.
“Vermithrax!”
Merle flinched when she heard Winter’s cry.
Their enigmatic companion pointed his long fingers above them. “There they come!”
The obsidian lion flew faster. “I see them too.”
Confused, Merle looked toward where Winter was pointing. She’d expected flying Lilim, flying beasts like those they’d seen in the rock crevice and over the city. But what she saw now was something different.
The Lilim who’d taken up their pursuit didn’t fly—they were clambering along under the ceiling!
They were the same ones she’d already seen down there on the floor, long-legged, spiderlike, and yet many times stranger than all that she knew from the upper world.
And they were inconceivably fast.
Vermithrax decreased his altitude a little again, so that the creatures couldn’t reach him from above with their long legs. But they now seemed to be coming from everywhere, as if they’d already been lying in wait, invisibly merged with the rock ceiling. Merle watched as some of them apparently appeared from nowhere. They’d been up there the whole time and now detached themselves from the flat stone surface, their long limbs outstretched, and from one heartbeat to the next, they launched into darting motion.
“There ahead!” she yelled to override the sound of the flight and the screeching of the Lilim. “They’re in front of the door now!”
The entire ceiling over the hall’s exit had awakened. A carpet of dry bodies twitched and shoved and tumbled up there, over and under one another, like an army of daddy longlegs, none of them smaller than a human and some almost twice as large. Many stretched single limbs downward, trembling and twitching, to reach Vermithrax in the air.
The lion remained relaxed. “If we fly low enough, they won’t get us.”
Merle was about to say something, and she felt that the Queen was getting ready to speak in her thoughts as well, but then they both kept silent and left it to Vermithrax to carry them to safety.
Winter was the only one who objected. “That way won’t work.”
Merle looked over her shoulder. “What do you mean?”
She saw his eyes widen. His grip around her upper body became firmer, almost painful. “Too late!”
She looked ahead again.
The entire ceiling was now in motion, a boiling mass of bodies and eyes and spindle-thin legs.
In front of them one of the Lilim plunged into the depths, a whirling tangle of limbs, too far away to be dangerous to them. Merle’s eyes followed its fall, a hundred, a hundred fifty yards down, and she was certain that the creature would shatter on the floor. The thing landed, remained lying there for a moment, rolled up like a ball—then put out its legs and ran hectically here and there as if nothing had happened, forward and back, in a circle, until finally it stopped below, waiting, and stared up at them.
“No,” whispered the Queen, and Merle grasped what Winter had meant by “too late.”
Around them the Lilim began falling from the ceiling like ripe fruit. A spider leg with a sharp hook on the end grazed Vermithrax’s left wing and pulled out a handful of feathers. The obsidian lion went into a brief wobble, but then flew on, ever faster, toward the mighty door.
The Lilim fell. More and more pushed off from the ceiling and plunged. Vermithrax was compelled to fly daredevil avoidance maneuvers. Merle bent forward until her face almost touched his mane. She couldn’t see what Winter was doing behind her, but she figured he was also pulling his head in.
It was as if they’d been caught in the middle of a bizarre rain shower—with the difference that it was raining living creatures, gigantic spider animals, only one of which would have been enough to put an army to flight. But here they were falling by the dozens, finally by the hundreds.
Vermithrax hadn’t a chance.
A Lilim’s body crashed on the lion’s back end, slid off, and with its whirling limbs might have pulled Winter down with it, had he not swiftly slid closer to Merle and taken cover. So the hook on the Lilim’s leg just tangled in Winter’s long hair and pulled out a strand. Winter didn’t even seem to notice it.
A second Lilim smashed onto Vermithrax’s left wing, and this time they almost all crashed. At the last moment, Vermithrax got his ponderous body under control again—until the next Lilim fell in front of him and scratched his nose with its hook. Vermithrax bellowed with pain, shook his head so hard that Merle almost fell off, opened his eyes again and saw another creature, which struck at him with its legs as it fell, a whirling black star of horn and teeth and knife-sharp hooked claws.
The next fell right on Merle.
She was torn from Winter’s grasp, slipped sideways, and fell into the abyss. She heard Vermithrax bellow above her, then Winter, then both together, and while she still fell she thought coolly that she would die now, finally and without any way out.
She felt something clawing around her, limbs like dry branches, which pressed against her legs, her upper body, even against her face; it felt as if she’d run into a low-hanging branch in the dark. Her back was pressed against something soft, cool, a body, hairy and moist like a sliced peach.
The impact was bad.
But much worse was when she realized what had saved her.
The Lilim had closed around her like a protective ball, the way spiders do just before they die. It had turned in the air and had landed on its back. Merle could see the ceiling of the hall through the latticework of its limbs, an inferno of plunging bodies in which she saw no trace of the obsidian lion. But her vision was blurred anyway, her mind hardly in a position to process the images.
She’d fallen more than three hundred feet to the ground, and she had survived. The shock struck deep, if not deep enough to completely paralyze her. Her mind grew clearer with every breath, forming the beginnings of thoughts out of the confusion in her head.
The first thing that came into her mind was doubt as to whether she should in fact be grateful that she was still alive. She felt the damp, sticky underside of the Lilim at her back, the bristly hairs sticking through her clothing like dull
nails. She saw the hairy, lath-thin limbs over her, cramped, motionless.
“It is dead,” said the Flowing Queen.
Merle needed a moment before she took in the meaning of the words.
“If it had landed on its feet like the others, it would have survived. But it landed on its back in order to protect you.”
“To protect … me?”
“It does not matter why—in any case, you should try to free yourself from its grasp before rigor mortis sets in.”
Merle pushed with all her strength against the enclosing limbs. They squeaked and snapped, but they would not be moved. Merle had not only to battle with her revulsion but also with the trembling of her arms and legs. Her head might have realized that she was still alive, but the rest of her body appeared to be just a bit later getting ready. Her muscles trembled and twitched under her skin like fish in a trap.
“Hurry!”
“All right for you to talk.” Anyway, her voice was the old one again. Perhaps a little shrill, perhaps a little breathless. But she could speak.
And curse. Loudly.
“That was pretty good,” said the Flowing Queen, impressed, after the flood of swear words from Merle’s mouth had dried up.
“Years of practice,” gasped Merle as she pushed aside the last Lilim leg. She made a great effort not to look down as she put both hands on the damp, soft mass at her back and pushed herself up. Somehow she succeeded in freeing herself of the cadaver’s embrace and springing to the floor between two branch-limbs.
Her feet gave out and she fell. Not from exhaustion this time.
Around her hundreds of Lilim stood and stared at her, teetering on their long legs and sharpening their hooked claws on the ground. They’d encircled Merle and their dead comrade, but they came no nearer, as if something were holding them back. Perhaps the same command that had made the Lilim sacrifice himself for Merle.
The Queen anticipated the upshot of this realization: “They are not going to do anything to you. Someone intends something else for you.”
For us, Merle wanted to say, but finally her voice failed her. She turned her eyes up to the roof and saw that no more Lilim were falling to the floor. The ceiling was still in motion, but the swarming was gradually decreasing and the creatures again melted into the rock, became invisible.