by Kai Meyer
“You are all right.” Not a question, a statement.
All right. Yes.
The argument broke off, and now someone was bending over her face. Not the surgeon. But the man was at least as old.
Scientist, as we all are, the surgeon had said.
As we all are.
“Are you Lord Light?” asked Merle weakly.
“Yes,” said the man. He had thick, gray hair.
“You are a human,” she stated, and thought she was dreaming, was almost convinced of it.
Lord Light, the ruler of Hell, smiled. “Believe me, Merle, the human is a better devil than the Devil.”
His face withdrew, then she only heard his voice.
“And now, please, stand up and come with me.”
12 LORD LIGHT
THE SURGEON REMAINED BEHIND IN THE HEART HOUSE. Merle cast a last look at the man in the wheelchair as Lord Light pushed her out onto the platform, one hand on her shoulder, not in an unfriendly way, yet firmly. The surgeon stared, first at her, then at Lord Light, his small, narrowed eyes blazing with hate and fury.
“You needn’t fear him anymore,” said her companion, as they stepped from the platform onto one of the grating walkways.
Lord Light, hammered in her head. He’s Lord Light.
Only a man.
“The surgeon can do nothing more to you,” he said.
Her hand moved to her chest, feeling for the quick pulsing of her heart.
Lord Light noticed it. “Don’t worry, it’s still the old one. Stone hearts don’t beat.”
Examining him from the side, she thought he looked like a scholar—which he doubtless was, if the surgeon had told the truth.
He wore a black frock coat, narrowly cut, with a flower of red glass on the lapel. His trousers were also black, and his pointed patent leather shoes gleamed. The golden chain of a watch hung in a semicircular loop out of his jacket pocket, as if the shape were mimicking the dark circles around his eyes. Merle had never seen such dark circles, as dark as if they were painted. Nevertheless, he didn’t act tired or exhausted, quite the contrary. He radiated a liveliness that belied his age.
Merle couldn’t take her eyes off him. This man, of all people, was supposed to help her free Venice? An old man who walked along beside her in his frock coat as if they were going on a Sunday walk together?
“Ask him his name,” said the Flowing Queen. “His true name.”
Merle ignored her. “Where are my friends?”
“No one has harmed a hair of them. The lion has raged continuously since the Lilim took him prisoner, but he is well. He survived the crash in the Hall of the Heralds without injury.”
They walked side by side along a grill walkway, then down a long set of stairs and across other walks. “I want to see him.”
“You will.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“How is Winter?”
Lord Light sighed softly. “Is that his name? Winter? He’s a strange fellow. To be honest, I can’t tell you how he is.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s fled.”
“What?” She stopped, a hand on the railing of the grill walkway. At some distance she saw several figures peel away from the light clouds, no larger than matchsticks, with too many arms and legs; at a crossing they turned off and quickly disappeared again in the glowing mist of the dome.
“He escaped,” said Lord Light, turning to her. She felt the impatience in his voice, but still he didn’t pressure her. “I had a long conversation with him. And then he was gone.”
“A long conversation?” asked the Queen suspiciously.
“He was weak,” said Merle incredulously. “Sick, I think. When we met him, he could hardly stand on his own.”
“Well, at least he could free himself on his own.”
Merle looked past him, down into the glowing depths. She wondered why she had no fear of Lord Light. “That’s impossible. You’re lying to me.”
“Why should I do that?”
“Perhaps you’ve killed him.”
“Without a reason?”
She hesitated briefly as she tried to find a logical argument. She was very close to saying something dumb like, “But you’re the lord of Hell! You’re mean, any child knows that. You don’t need a reason to kill someone.” But then she thought about it a moment longer and whispered, “It simply can’t be. He was much too weak.”
Lord Light began walking again and bade her follow him: He wanted to show her something, and it was a long way there. Merle wondered why he didn’t simply call over some flying monstrosity to carry them to their destination; but that didn’t fit him. Neither did he fit the picture of Lord Light she’d made for herself.
Should I ask him now, she wondered, whether he’ll help us? But somehow this prospect suddenly seemed a mistake to her. The dimensions of this world-within-the-world made her business shrivel to blurry insignificance.
But that was why they’d come, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
Instead of an answer, the Queen said once more: “Ask him his name.”
This time Merle obeyed, before the Queen could take over her voice.
“What’s your name?” she asked. “I mean, Lord Light surely isn’t your true name—at least not if you really are a human being.”
Humor gleamed in his eyes when he looked down at her. “Have you any doubt that I’m human?”
“I don’t know.” That was sincere. “I just saw shape changers, after all, and they—”
“Then you also saw how pitifully badly they can imitate a human being.”
“How about with magic, then?”
“I’m no magician, only a scientist.”
“Like the surgeon?”
He shrugged. “If you like.”
“Then tell me what your name is.”
Laughing, he raised both hands as if he had no other choice but to give in to her persistence. He cleared his throat—then he told her his name.
Merle stopped in her tracks. She stared at him, open-mouthed. “Seriously?”
The clouds of mist prevented his laugh from echoing into the distance. “I have of course been down here for quite a while now, but I haven’t forgotten my name, believe me.”
“Burbridge?” she repeated. “Professor Burbridge?”
“Sir Charles Burbridge, honorary chair of the National Geographic Society, First Explorer to Her Majesty the Queen, discoverer of Hell, and its first and probably only cartographer. Professor of geography, astronomy, and biology. And an old man, I’m afraid.”
Merle exhaled through her clenched teeth. It sounded like a whistle. “You are Professor Burbridge!”
He smiled, now almost a little embarrassed. “And something more than that,” he said mysteriously. But then he went on again, this time without telling her to come along. He knew that she’d follow him.
Merle trotted wordlessly along beside him as he knocked dust from the left arm of his coat with his hand. Shaking his head, he said, “You know, one can teach these creatures to build all this here, whole cities, steam engines, and factories—but one is doomed to failure if one tries to impart to them anything so basic as a sense of fashion. Look at this here!” He held out his sleeve and she had to force herself to look very closely. “See it?” he asked her. “Cross-stitch! They sew such a piece of clothing with cross-stitch! Absolutely inexcusable.”
Merle thought of the creatures in the Heart House. Cross-stitch. She shuddered. “Where are you taking me?”
“To the Stone Light.”
“What is that?”
“You’ll soon see.”
“Is Vermithrax there?”
He smiled again. “He should be, anyway. Provided he hasn’t tricked these blockhead guards like your other friend.” A grin. “But I think not.”
Silently they went down more steps, followed endless walkways. Merle had the feeling that soon they would have crossed the entire dome. Yet wherev
er she looked, she never saw the curving wall anywhere; they were still somewhere in the center of the light dome. Also, the Heart House had disappeared over them.
The Stone Light.
She got gooseflesh, without understanding why.
She kept wanting to ask him for the help his messenger had offered to the Venetians, wanted to fulfill her mission—but she had the feeling that for a long time it hadn’t been about that anymore. Not about Venice. Not about her.
Did we really come here about that? she asked in her thoughts and received no answer. The Queen had been notably quiet since the Lilim had taken Merle into their power, almost as if she were afraid someone would notice her. But was that the only reason?
“The surgeon,” said Merle after a long while, “can he do that, really? Put a stone heart in a human?”
“Yes, he can.”
“Why does he do it?”
“Because I ordered him to.”
Merle’s stomach lurched, but she didn’t let it show. She’d been taken in by him and his friendliness. It was time to remember who he was and what he represented down here.
“The messenger I sent to you up in the Piazza San Marco,” he said in a conversational tone, “he had a stone heart. One of the first that actually functioned. And the same with many others upon whom I rely. The stone makes it easier to control them.”
“They haven’t wills of their own anymore?”
“Not like you and me. But it’s a little more complicated.”
“Why do all that? The Lilim appear to obey you anyway. Or does each of them have a stone heart?”
“Bah! Control their leaders and you control the whole bunch. You know, down here everything seems gigantic and immeasurable. But in truth, the threads all run to small centers, as in a knot. Or even a heart. Get it on your side, and the rest is child’s play.”
He was walking more slowly now, almost sauntering, a nice old man who wouldn’t harm a fly.
Bah, she thought, Devil take him! Then it occurred to her that he was the Devil.
“But why?” she asked again.
He took a deep breath, looked at his spotlessly shining shoes, then out into the mist. “Why did I come here and build all this? Why did I write books full of lies about Hell so that no one would dare to think of coming down here? For science, naturally! What else?”
“You became the ruler of Hell in order to study it?” She remembered that the Flowing Queen had once suggested something quite similar—and wondered again if she hadn’t even known it.
The Queen remained obdurately silent.
“Several of us came here,” said Burbridge. “I and a handful of colleagues from different faculties. Medical men like the surgeon, but also aestheticians, geologists, and biologists, such as me, even a philosopher…. He made the mistake of debating with a Lilim about Plato’s cave allegory. The Lilim didn’t agree with him. He didn’t agree with the Lilim, either, by the way.” He wore an amused smile, but it almost looked a little sad. “We had to learn a great deal. Adapt to new things and fundamentally change ourselves—not only our preoccupations and opinions but also ourselves. Our consciences, for example. Our ethics.”
Merle nodded, as though she knew exactly what he was talking about. And basically, she saw through what he intended to say quite well: that he, no matter how one looked at it, had done the right thing. As if he personally had made the sacrifices that this madness had cost.
Suddenly she felt he was nothing more than false and a glib liar. She despised him almost more than the surgeon. The old man in the wheelchair had at least been honest, to her, but also with himself.
Burbridge, on the other hand, was a hypocrite.
She had always hated men like him when she was still living in the orphanage and had learned to know more of his type than she liked: administrators, priests, teachers. Even some of those who came to take children away with them.
She felt sick. Not from the height, and not from fear. Only from him and his nearness.
“You don’t share your research results with anyone. You’ve served up a quantity of nonsense to the world above and kept for yourself everything you’ve actually found out down here. What’s the point of that?”
“Tell me, Merle, you’re curious too, aren’t you?
“Certainly.”
“Then imagine your curiosity like a glass of water. And now take a whole barrel of it. Then you know how it looks in the heart of a scientist. Of a true scientist!”
Rubbish, she thought. Just talk. He and his researcher friends could probably outdo each other in lying.
“Will we be there soon?” she asked, to change the subject.
“Look down below. You’ll be able to see it right now.”
“The Stone Light?”
He nodded.
“How can a light be stone?” she asked.
He grinned and again looked terribly friendly. “Perhaps it always has been, and you just haven’t noticed until now.”
She looked over the handrail down into the abyss. He was right. The mist gradually dissolved. Vaguely she could make out something down there like a dark star, massive gray beams that ran out from a bright central point in all directions. But it wasn’t until they’d gone down another long staircase that she saw that these beams were walkways, which opened onto a round grill walk in the middle. It had a diameter of about 150 yards, and only a single walkway cut straight across the center like a lone spoke.
The grill circle floated high over the glowing bottom of the hall, which now, as they came closer, turned out not to be a smooth surface but a mighty dome, like the upper quarter of a ball, which lay buried in the rock. Its size couldn’t even be guessed at, but it must cover the entire base of the rock dome. The circular mesh walkway was located exactly over the center of this curvature, suspended over its highest point; there were no columns or supporting structures, the walkway alone held it in the air.
“That down there,” said Burbridge, “is the Stone Light.”
“It looks like a piece of the moon.” She imagined that someone had cut the moon into slices like a loaf of bread; after that, they’d laid one of the two heels on the ground and erected the dome over it.
Burbridge continued, “Think of a gigantic, glowing ball, which has fallen from the sky at some point, broken through the outer crust of the earth, and drilled down here into the bottom of Hell. What you see there is a part of it, which still shows above the rock. The Morning Star, Lucifer, the fallen angel. Or simply the Stone Light.”
“Did you have the dome built over it?”
“Certainly.”
“Why? What does the Light do, then, except to illuminate?”
For the first time the Flowing Queen made herself heard again: “Are you still playing naive, or are you really?”
Be quiet, thought Merle. To her surprise, the voice obeyed without contradiction.
As they walked farther, down ever deeper, toward the light and the round grill pathway, Burbridge circled the entire interior of the dome with a wave of his hand. “When I came here for the first time, this place was a holy place for the Lilim, and they feared it. None of them dared to approach it voluntarily. They avoided this place as well as they could. I was the first to show them how one could put the power of the Light to use.”
“But Axis Mundi, the city,” said Merle, “it must be much older than the sixty or seventy years since you discovered Hell.” Even as she spoke, it dawned on her how old Burbridge must in fact be, and she wondered if he had the Light on the bottom of the dome to thank for that.
As he walked, the professor absentmindedly stroked the handrail with one hand. “There was already a city on this spot when humanity was still crouching in its caves. The Lilim once possessed a highly developed civilization—not technically highly developed; rather, more comparable to our Middle Ages. But they possessed a social structure and their own culture, they lived in cities and large communities. However, that was all long past when I came down into H
ell. The few who’d survived the decline in the course of eons lived as loners in the vastness of the rock deserts, some also in tribes and packs. But there was no civilization anymore. That was all long declined and forgotten. Together with this city.”
Merle gradually understood. “Was the city already here when the Morning Star—or the Stone Light—crashed down here?”
Burbridge nodded. “It was the center of the old Lilim culture. The Stone Light destroyed large parts of that and made it uninhabitable for thousands of years. When I came, the Lilim told a whole heap of legends about the ruins of the city. Some maintained that the Light made them deformed, and they became caricatures of themselves—to the human eye at least.”
“And is that true?”
Burbridge shrugged. “Who knows? More than sixty years ago, when I made my first visit here, there was no trace left of it at all. I discovered the Light and recognized that its energy could be useful for a whole list of things. But I knew, naturally, that I would need helpers, countless helpers, and that men couldn’t be considered for it.”
“Why not?”
“What do you think would have happened if I’d gone back to the surface and reported what I’d stumbled on here? They would have thanked me, of course, pinned all sorts of orders on my lapel, and sent me home. And then they’d have appointed others to make use of this place. First the British Crown, then perhaps the Czar. They would have hired experts, wouldn’t have needed me for it anymore—a brilliant, but also very young scientist!” Grimly he made a gesture of dismissal. “No, Merle, what I needed then was my own kingdom, with its own subjects and workers. I and some of my colleagues, in whom I’d confided, succeeded in uniting a majority of the Lilim through simple things, a few technical tricks, playthings from the magic hat of the colonial masters of all ages. The Lilim might look like beasts to our eyes, but at bottom they are no different from the natives that the Spaniards and Portuguese found in South America or the French in Indonesia. With a little energy they can be manipulated and controlled.”
“With force, you mean.”
“That too, yes. But not only and not primarily. As I said, a little technology, a few simple trinkets can work wonders here. And when we finally got to the point where they were serving us, and we could make use of the power of the Stone Light, we were also in a position to offer greater wonders. The flying heralds, for example. Or other powers that at first sight appear to be magic, like the destruction and boring through rock on a large scale. And, naturally, the hearts of stone, which keep an organism alive and control it.”