The Stone Light (7 page)

But no, there
was
air, and now she filled her lungs with
it, yet it seemed to be different somehow, perhaps thinner, perhaps heavier, it didn’t matter. Gradually Merle grew calm again, and then for the first time she became aware that Vermithrax had also gone into a wobble, seized by the same terror of suffocating, by the certainty that it had all been a bad, even fatal, mistake. But now his wing beats steadied, became gentler again, more regular, and the winding course of their descent stabilized.

Merle leaned forward a bit. Not too far, because she already guessed what she would see—an abyss, a bottomless abyss—but the reality exceeded her fears by a great deal.

If a term such as
depth
had ever applied to anything—pure, frightening, reason-transcending
depth
—it was this shaft into the vitals of the earth. The mist was now gone completely and replaced by a clarity that seemed to Merle wrong somehow, somehow inappropriate. She had last experienced this feeling when she swam through the Venetian canals with the mermaids, protected by a glass globe that provided her with a remarkably sharp view of the world under the water. Nonetheless, it was a sight for which the human eye wasn’t created; really, everything ought to have been blurred and cloudy, a wavering curtain on her retina.

Here below, in the interior of the abyss, something similar was happening to her. This was no place for human beings, and it astonished her that still she perceived
it with all her senses, took it in, if she could not also comprehend it.

The rock walls fell away vertically to the deep, but it seemed to Merle that she saw every indentation, every projection, a little more clearly than above the fog. She could also make out the opposite side better now, although she didn’t at all have the impression that the walls were any closer together. Everything was bathed in red golden brightness, which came from the rock itself, from a hair-fine network of veins of glowing lines, in some places clumped, in others almost invisible.

“Impressive,”
said the Queen, and Merle thought that was an utterly inadequate description, a modest, empty word in the face of this marvel.

Suddenly she became aware that this place must be a facet of the real, true Hell. Something that, except for Professor Burbridge and a small number of select people, no human being had ever seen.

Then she caught sight of the tents.

“Do you see that?” Vermithrax bellowed.

“Yes,” whispered Merle, “I see them.”

A ways below them and about eighty yards sideways, there was a ledge in the rock wall, a protruding cliff, like the nose of a giant upside down. The upper side was flat and, estimating roughly, twenty by twenty yards wide. There were three tents on it. One was in tatters, although the poles still stuck up in the air like the branches of a dead
tree. Something had slit the canvas. A knife perhaps. Or claws.

The two other tents looked undamaged. The flap at the entrance of one was thrown back. As Vermithrax neared the camp, Merle could see that the rock ledge was abandoned.

“What do we do now?” she asked.

“You are curious, are you?”

“Aren’t you?”

“A mind can only take in a limited amount of knowledge, and to mine, those things there make no difference.”

Show-off, Merle thought. “Then aren’t you interested in what happened to the people?”

“It is of interest to you. That is enough.”

Vermithrax circled several times in front of the rock cliff. Merle noted how carefully he inspected the tents and the other remains of the camp. There was a fireplace; a row of chests, which were piled behind at the rock wall; a dish right beside the burned-out campfire; also three rifles, which were leaning against the wall as if their owners had just vanished behind the rocks for a moment. Whatever might have happened to these people, they hadn’t even had time to grab their weapons. An ice-cold tingle ran down her back.

Finally the obsidian lion had seen enough; he made an abrupt swerve and landed on the rock ledge, only a few yards away from the destroyed tent. Now Merle could
also see that the path she’d already noticed above opened onto this plateau, and to the right of them it led on farther down into the abyss.

She leaped from Vermithrax’s back, landed on both feet—and at first fell right onto her backside. Her knees were weak, her muscles stiff. It was almost an accustomed feeling by now, but it had never been so bad before—possibly also a result of the changed air conditions, just like the weariness that she now felt more strongly than in the past few days. And the rest on the plateau where they’d spent the night wasn’t even six or seven hours ago.

Maybe, it occurred to her suddenly, they’d lost time in some way when they entered this other world by crossing the fog, or even earlier, when they’d passed the stone watchers. Had they in truth traveled not just a few seconds but several hours through the layer of mist?

Nonsense, she told herself, and
“Nonsense!”
said the Flowing Queen in her mind. But somehow it seemed to Merle not entirely convincing either time.

After she’d limbered up her legs and her knees would again bear the featherlight weight of her body, she began to search the tents. Vermithrax begged her to be careful, while he sniffed the rifles and rooted through the chests with nose and paws. Even the Queen warned her to be careful, which really was something totally new.

Ultimately they found little that would be useful to
them. In one of the undamaged tents Merle found a thin leather band on which dangled a dried chicken claw as a pendant. At the top, sticking out of the severed limb, were several sinews like the wires of a puppet. When Vermithrax challenged her to pull on them, the chicken’s claw closed, as if all at once there were life in it. Merle almost dropped the hideous thing in terror.

“Yucky.” She let go of the claw and only held on to the leather thong.

“It is a good luck charm,”
the Queen explained.

“Oh, yes?”

“The inhabitants of the Czarist kingdom carry them. You do know that they are under the protection of the Baba Yaga?”

Merle nodded, although she was aware that the Queen couldn’t see it, only feel it at the most.

On the other side of the plateau, Vermithrax rooted through another chest with his front paws and poked around in it with his nose.

“What do you know about the Baba Yaga?”

“Not much. She’s a witch. Or something like that.”

The Queen was clearly smirking.
“A witch. A goddess. The people have seen very much in her. It is a fact that she has protected the Czarist kingdom, as I”
—she stopped, as if pain and guilt welled up in her and in some strange way rubbed off on Merle—
“as I protected Venice.”

“Do you know her? Personally, I mean.”

“No. She is not like me. At least I guess that. But what I want to say is this: Since time immemorial the Baba Yaga has had a certain form with which the people identify her. An old woman who lives in a little house—but this house stands on two chicken legs as tall as trees and can run around on them like a living creature.”

Merle swung the pendant. “Then this thing is a sort of symbol?”

“It is. The way the Christians wear a cross to protect themselves from evil, so the inhabitants of the Czarist kingdom wear such a chicken foot—at least those who believe in the protection of the Baba Yaga.”

“But that would mean—”

“That these are the remains of an expedition that was sent here by the Czar.”

Merle thought over what that might mean. The armies of the Egyptians had overrun the entire world within a few decades—with the exception of Venice and the Czarist kingdom. However, there had never been contact between the two, at least none of which the common folk had learned. Nevertheless, the sight of the destroyed camp filled her with a remarkable feeling of loss, as if an important opportunity had been missed here. How did it look in the Czarist kingdom? How did people there defend themselves against the attacks of the Empire? And, not least, how did the Baba Yaga protect them? All questions to which they perhaps could find answers here, if someone didn’t prevent them.

“Do you think they’re dead?” Merle directed the question to both the Queen and Vermithrax.

The lion trotted over placidly. “The tent wasn’t slit with a knife, at any rate. The edges are too rough and frayed for that.”

“Claws?” Merle asked, and she guessed the answer already. Gooseflesh crept along her arms.

Vermithrax nodded. “There are traces of them on the ground.”

“They scratched the
rock?”
Merle’s voice sounded as though she’d swallowed something much too large.

“I’m afraid so,” said the lion. “Pretty deeply, too.”

Merle’s eyes slid to the obsidian lion’s paws and inspected the ground. His own claws left no traces in the stone. The creatures the Czar’s expedition had encountered—what kind of claws must they have?

Then she knew. The answer popped up from her memory like the head of a sleeper who unexpectedly awakens. “Lilim,” she said immediately.

“Lilim?”
the Queen asked.

“When Professor Burbridge discovered Hell sixty years ago and encountered its inhabitants for the first time, he gave them this name. The teacher in the orphanage told us about them. Burbridge named them after the children of Lilith, the first wife of Adam.”

Vermithrax cocked his head. “A human legend?”

Merle nodded. “Perhaps the oldest of all. I’m surprised you don’t know it.”

“Every people and every race has its own myths and stories about its origin.” The obsidian lion sounded a little offended. “You don’t know the old lion legends, either.”

“I know who Adam was,”
said the Queen.
“But I have never heard of Lilith.”

“Adam and Lilith were the first humans God created.”

“I thought the woman was named Eve.”

“Eve came later. The first time, God created Adam and Lilith, man and woman. They were alone in Paradise and were supposed to have children together, to people the world with their descendants. Anyway, they were the first living creatures at all.”

Vermithrax growled something, and Merle looked inquiringly at him.

“That’s typical of you humans again,” he said crossly. “You always believe you are the first and best. The first stone lions had been there for a long time before that.”

“That’s what
your
legends say,” Merle retorted, grinning.

“Of course.”

“Then we aren’t likely to find out which is the truth, are we? Not now, not here, and probably never at all.”

Vermithrax was forced to agree.

“All the myths of origins tell the truth,”
said the Queen mysteriously.
“Each in its own special way.”

Merle continued, “So Lilith and Adam were destined to have children together. But whenever Lilith wanted to approach her husband, he drew back from her, filled with fear and disgust.”

“Hah!” growled Vermithrax. “That certainly didn’t happen to the first lions at all!”

“Anyway, Adam was afraid of Lilith, and finally God lost patience and banned Lilith from the Garden of Eden. Filled with anger and disappointment, she wandered through the desert regions outside Paradise, and there she met creatures that had nothing in common with Adam, creatures that were more alien and more gruesome and more terrifying than anything we can imagine.”

“I can imagine something like that,” said the lion, with a side glance at the claw marks in the rock.

“Lilith bred with the creatures and was supposed to have borne them children that surpassed even their fathers in monstrosity—the Lilim. In the legends they are the demons and monsters who wander through the forests and deserts and over the bare rocks of the mountains.”

“And Professor Burbridge knew these stories,”
said the Queen.

“Of course. When he needed a name for the inhabitants for his papers and his scientific works, he called them the Lilim.”

“Well, good,” said Vermithrax. “Our Czarist friends also met a few of them. Don’t you think we should avoid that?”

“Vermithrax is right,”
replied the Queen.
“We had better leave. We are safer in the air.”
But there was something in the way she emphasized that last sentence that alarmed Merle even more deeply. For who actually said that the Lilim had no wings?

“Just a moment.” She ran over to the chests that the lion had already searched. Out of the corner of her eye she’d seen a few items that were useless to Vermithrax but that she could use. She found a small knife in a leather sheath, no longer than her hand, and put it in the pocket of her dress along with the magic mirror. In addition, she discovered several tin boxes with food rations, stone-hard strips of dried meat, zwieback, a couple of water bottles, and even a few cookies. She packed them all in a small leather knapsack she’d found in one of the tents and strapped it onto her back. While she was doing that, she chewed on a piece of dried meat, which was as hard as tree bark and as tough as shoe soles, but nonetheless, she managed to swallow the shreds. In the past few days she’d had very little to eat; the rations of the Czarist expedition looked more than suitable to her.

“Hurry up,” Vermithrax called to her as she was fastening the straps of her new knapsack.

“I’m coming,” she said—and suddenly she had a feeling of being watched.

Her fingers let go of the leather straps, and—despite the omnipresent warmth—she shivered. Her hair was standing on end. Her heart skipped a beat once, then began racing again, so suddenly that it almost hurt.

Confused, she looked toward the back of the plateau, to the rock wall, then over at the tents and at both openings to the paths that led up and down from there. Nothing moved. There was no one there. Only Vermithrax, who stood at the edge of the cliff, tapping impatiently on the rock with one claw.

“What is wrong?”
asked the Queen.

“Don’t you feel anything?”

“Your fear masks everything.”