The Stone Light (25 page)

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
L
ORD
L
IGHT

T
HE SURGEON REMAINED BEHIND IN THE
H
EART
H
OUSE.
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 wherever 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.