The Stone Light (23 page)

But he didn’t. It occurred to him that she couldn’t swim and would go under if he didn’t help her. He was tempted to leave her to herself, but suddenly he searched in vain for the hatred in his heart that had just now driven him from the sea turtle shell and to the shore. It was as if his anger had blown away and left nothing but emptiness.

“Serafin!” she screamed, her voice distorted by the water that pushed across her lips. “Help … me—”

He couldn’t see her lion’s paws under the surface
anymore and was afraid her claws would shred him if he came too close to her. But he was indifferent even to that. He launched himself, glided over, and grabbed her from behind. He felt how she struggled under the water, and she hit against him, this time with human legs. She couldn’t swim, either as human or sphinx, but the heavy lion’s body would have pulled her down faster than her light girl’s figure. He laid an arm around her chest from behind and tried to keep them both above water somehow, but he sensed right away that he wouldn’t manage for long. In her panic she was resisting and threatened to pull him under.

Hands seized both of them from underneath and drew them out onto the water, toward the sea turtle shell, which floated in the darkness like half a skull. The mermaids didn’t show themselves, stayed under the surface, but there must have been at least two, perhaps more. Serafin floated on his back, Lalapeya pressed in front of him, still in his arm. She’d stopped kicking, she wasn’t moving at all, and for a moment he thought she was dead, drowned in his embrace—and wasn’t that what he’d wanted when he ran at her like a berserker? Hadn’t he intended for her to die and so discharge a part of her blood guilt?

Such thoughts seemed absurd to him now, and he sighed with relief when she moved and in vain tried to turn her head.

“Why did you … do that?” Her voice was mournful
and she sounded as if she were crying. “Why did you … stop me?”

Why?

A dozen answers shot through his head. But suddenly, in a flash, he was aware that it was
he
who had betrayed—not others, but he himself.

While the mermaids dragged them to the shell of the sea turtle, he discovered finally what Lalapeya had seen before him. And he realized that her magic had never been aimed at them, never at Eft and the boys, but always only at the collector.

The gridwork of fixed light flashes that bound the underside of the collector with San Michele were now a single quivering jumble of straight and crooked beams, hooks, curves, spikes, and loops. But they hadn’t aimed at the dead Venetians who were buried by the umpteen thousands on the cemetery island.

It was something else that they sought and had found. Something altogether different.

The mermaids pushed Serafin and Lalapeya out of the water; Eft, Dario, and Tiziano pulled them in. The shell boat tilted and would probably have capsized if the mermaids hadn’t held it steady in the water. Only Aristide crouched unmoving in his place and stared over at the cemetery island; he talked ceaselessly to himself and his fingers curled into claws; it looked as though he wanted to scratch out his eyes.

The others crowded close together in the center of the turtle shell, and while the mermaids went silently back to their work and drew the shell farther to the east, away from shore and toward the open sea, the six passengers looked at the island.

San Michele’s walls had cracked. In many places wide pieces wobbled and collapsed, followed by uprooted cypress trees, which bent to one side like black lance tips and bored into the water. The entire island seemed to break apart, great cracks opened up, and seawater flowed in, undermining graves and chapels and causing the clock tower of the church to fall.

Something that had lain under the island, under the graves and crypts and the small cloister, was being pulled into the open by the light-hooks of the collector, in a chain of dust explosions and whirls of loose soil. Something that was half as large as the island itself.

The body of a sphinx.

A sphinx larger than any creature Serafin had ever heard of. Larger than a whale, greater than the sea witches in the bottomless depths of the Adriatic, greater even than the legendary giant kraken in the abyss of the oceanic trenches.

Half lion, half human, though both seemed out of order, the arms and legs too long, the face too small, the eyes too far apart. Hands as large as warships, with fingers too many and too long, and lion paws with extended claws
of yellow horn and bone. The travesty of a sphinx and yet of an absurd grace, hideously distorted, almost a caricature, and yet with a grotesque elegance.

The gigantic cadaver lay on its side, the face turned toward the city, and floated against the underside of the collector, borne by hundreds of hooks of light. It was a cadaver, although it showed no trace of decay; there was no doubt that it was dead, and had been for perhaps centuries.

What was Lalapeya guarding?
Serafin had asked Eft, just a few hours before.

What was she guarding?

Now, finally, he saw it before him, and he realized that her attack on the palace, the assassination attempt on the Pharaoh, had been nothing but a diversion. Something that would give Lalapeya time to destroy the collector and defend the grave of her charge.

Eft looked over at Serafin and placed her hand on his, but he wouldn’t be comforted.

Boro had died for a dead sphinx.

No, he corrected himself: for a dead god.

A god of the sphinxes.

And with this thought, this realization, he collapsed and wept on Eft’s breast. He saw that Lalapeya was also weeping, perhaps for other reasons, and then the sphinx god disappeared inside the collector, and somehow, through a chink in the defenses of Serafin’s mind, crept the
certainty that their enemies now had at their disposal a weapon overshadowing all that had existed previously.

Yet at the moment, it didn’t matter. At the moment, all that counted was his despair.

Lalapeya sat down beside him and took his hand, but she felt cold and lifeless, somehow dead.

11
HEART HOUSE

W
HEN
M
ERLE AWOKE, SHE WAS ALONE.

Her first movement was to the water mirror in the pocket of her dress. Good. They hadn’t taken it away from her. She had the distinct feeling, as she pressed the oval through her dress, that it had missed the touch of her hand.

She wasn’t certain how long she’d been lying in the dark, in an unsettling silence, with only the pulsing of her heartbeat and the whispering of her own confused thoughts in her ear. The darkness awoke with her, breathed with her. Alone in complete darkness, alone with herself. Thousands
of questions, thousands of doubts, and even more fears.

Where was Vermithrax? What had become of Winter?

So alone.

Only then did it dawn on her what was so unusual about this aloneness. She no longer felt the Flowing Queen!

“I am here,”
said the voice in her head, and it seemed a hundred times louder than usual.
“Do not worry.”

“You didn’t say anything. I thought you were gone.”

“Did that make you happy?”

“Not here.”

“Oh, when it becomes serious, then I am good enough.”

“I didn’t mean it that way, as you very well know.” Merle felt over the ground on which she lay. Cold stone, cut, polished smooth. A prison cell, she guessed.
Bring her into the Heart House,
the old man in the wheelchair had said. From that, she’d imagined something else. No, to be precise, she hadn’t imagined anything at all.

“You have slept.”

“How long?”

“Hard to say. I have certain abilities, of course, but a built-in clock is not among them.”

Merle sighed. “Since we’ve been down here … in Hell, I mean … since then I’ve lost all sense of time. Because it never gets dark. Have we been here now for a day or two, or perhaps even a week?”

“I do not know.”

“Then tell me where we are. Or don’t you know that, either?”

“In the Heart House, presumably.”

“Oh?” Merle rolled her eyes in the dark.

The Queen was silent for a moment, then she said,
“We will find out right now. They are coming to get us.”

Merle was just about to ask how the Queen knew that when she heard thumping steps, then the grating of an iron lock. A column of light suddenly appeared in the darkness, grew broader, opened to a door. Remarkable silhouettes, jagged and full of points, appeared in the door frame, looking like exotic plants, perhaps many-armed cacti, but then they appeared to dissolve and put themselves together anew. Possibly it was only happening in Merle’s head and, yes, the first sight was probably a deception, an image that fear painted for her.

She’d just come to terms with this thought when the Queen said,
“Shape changers.”

“You really know how to cheer a person up.”

“I knew that you would be glad to have me with you sometime.”

“In your dreams.”

“I cannot dream. Only when you dream.”

A hand seized Merle, and she was led through the door into the light, out onto a grating walkway that ran along a rock wall. On one side of the walk were doors of steel at
regular intervals, on the other yawned an abyss.

The outlook was shocking in its breadth. Obviously they were on the inside of the gigantic dome they’d seen on the flight into Axis Mundi. The rock wall curved slightly as it continued upward. High over Merle its contours dissolved into reddish yellow mist. Dozens of grating ledges ran along it. Other walkways, floating unsupported over the abyss, led out into the glowing mist, where they met other walkways, crossing them or joining with them and thus forming a broad network of traversable iron tracks, innumerable miles long.

Red-gold brightness shone up from the base of the dome, many times refracted by mist, which drank the light so that its real source could not be seen. As the light illuminated the entire base of the dome, it seemed to Merle as though she were standing over a sea of lava. But she had already guessed that the solution of this riddle wasn’t so simple, for no heat came from the light. Even the mist that billowed in the dome felt rather clammy and uncomfortable. And then something else dawned on her: Although the dome consisted of rock, it had looked from the outside as if
it
was what was giving off the light. Therefore the brightness from the ground must be coming
through
the rock, yet at the same time it wasn’t strong enough to blind Merle. It was almost as if the light in the depths was illuminating the stone so that the dome itself was glowing.

It was strange. And thoroughly unreal.

Her new companions also fit right in. The shape changers—if that in fact was what they were—had made an effort to assume human forms. And the effort had succeeded. Not the form of just any human, but that of Winter—which was even more ironic, since he’d insisted that he wasn’t human at all.

However, their faces seemed plump, unfinished somehow, as if they were swollen. Their bodies were white, but they hadn’t taken the trouble to imitate the structure or form of Winter’s clothing. Also, their eyes looked as if they were painted, blind like the pupils of dead fish.

If they’d hoped to decrease some of Merle’s fear through this weird masquerade, they achieved exactly the opposite effect.

They escorted her silently along the walkways and at each crossing indicated with a wave which direction to turn. They led her crisscross over the walks, out over the glowing chasm, until they finally came to a platform situated at a junction of several walkways.

On the platform stood a small house.

It didn’t fit here. Its walls were half-timbered, and it had a steep, red-shingled roof. A weathercock rose from the pointed gable. The windows were subdivided into bull’s-eye panes, and beside the wooden door, to make the idyll perfect, someone had placed a bench, as if the inhabitant of this little house came outside from time to time to
smoke a leisurely pipe. The house radiated the coziness of a fairy tale. As she came closer, Merle caught sight of a carved sign over the door:
WALK IN, BRING HEART IN!
Little hearts and flowers were worked around the letters, without skill, as if by the hand of a child.

One of her guards pushed her up to the door; the other stayed back at the edge of the platform. Someone opened the door from the inside, and then Merle was led in, under the sign with the inscription, which now, on second reading, gave her gooseflesh, for some unexplained reason. Wasn’t it supposed to read “bring luck in”? For a moment she had the feeling that her heart was beating a few beats faster, as if under protest, so hard that her chest hurt.

Inside the house, someone had attempted to maintain the romantic look of the outside but had woefully failed at it. To be sure, there were structural beams here, too, and even a rustic cupboard with flower inlays, but there were other objects that wouldn’t fit into the deliberate quaintness of the scenery.

The operating table, for example.