The Stone Light (19 page)

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.

Vermithrax, she thought.

“He is alive.”

Merle looked around the hall, but she could see no farther than the second or third row of the Lilim army. “Certain?”

“I feel him.”

“You’re only saying that to calm me.”

“No. Vermithrax is alive. Just like Winter.”

“Where are they?”

“Here somewhere. In the hall.”

“The Lilim have them?”

“I am afraid so.”

The thought that the obsidian lion had been forced by the Lilim to land or even fall made her heart miss a beat. But the Queen said he was alive. Merle didn’t want to question that. Not here, not now.

The circle of Lilim had closed to about three feet around them. Although the spider creatures predominated, there were also some others among them, pressed flat to the ground or two-legged or without limbs altogether, a seething, swarming, whispering chaos of claws and spines and spikes and eyes.

So many eyes.

And movement everywhere, a ferment of iridescent surfaces, shiny with dampness, like a mess of algae and flotsam in the waves.

“Someone is coming.”

Before Merle could ask how the Queen knew that, the wall of Lilim parted. The front ones fell silent, some sank their heads in respect—or what Merle took for respect.

She had expected a commander, a kind of general, perhaps an animal, bigger than all the others, something that far surpassed the others in strength and cruelty and pure repulsiveness.

Instead she saw a little man in a wheelchair.

He was being pushed by something that had a distant
resemblance to a knot of glowing ribbons, which were in constant motion, turning in and around one another and still moving forward as they did so. It was only when they came closer that she realized that it wasn’t one creature but innumerable ones: a multitude of snakes, which moved together like a single organism, linked together and controlled. Its heads moved alertly back and forth, and its bodies shimmered in unimaginable colors, more beautiful than anything Merle had seen since her flight from Venice.

The man in the wheelchair examined Merle without any emotion. No smile, also no malice. Only blank, empty features—the interest of a scientist who was looking at a new but not especially fascinating species under a magnifying glass.

The coldness in his eyes made Merle shudder. They made her far more anxious than the thousand-headed army of monstrosities.

Was that by any chance Lord Light? Was the lord of Hell actually this little man with the dead facial features?

“No,”
said the Flowing Queen.

Merle would have loved to ask what made her so sure, but the man in the wheelchair left her no time. His voice was old and squeaky, like the creaking of hardened leather.

“What to do, what to do?” he murmured, more to himself than to anyone else.

Then: “I know, I know.”

He doesn’t have all his marbles, Merle thought.

The man gave the mass of snakes behind his wheelchair a sign, and immediately the bands billowed around and turned the chair, shoving it back in the direction from which it had come.

“Bring her to me,” growled the man with his back to Merle. “Bring her into the Heart House.”

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