her.
Sometimes it was good to have someone who knew all about you share everything and have an answer to many questions.
And sometimes it was a scourge.
Vermithrax began the descent. He didn’t head down in a straight line but turned in wide circles. As he did so, he tilted dangerously to the side, so that after a short time Merle could feel her stomach rebel once again. She would never get used to this accursed flying.
The obsidian lion stayed close to the southern wall. The stone was dark and appeared to be full of cracks. Once Merle thought she made out a kind of groove leading down from the upper edge; it looked like a makeshift staircase or a road that someone had hewn out of the rock. But at the next turn she lost sight of the narrow ribbon again. Anyway, she had her hands full just holding on tight and keeping her eyes more or less rigidly on the back of Vermithrax’s head in the hope of being able to keep her nausea and dizziness halfway under control.
The fog lay a few yards below them, smooth as afrozen lake. Only, its center was filled with incessant motion, wafting veils that turned around themselves like lone dancers of water vapor. The red glow was brighter in some places than others. Whatever might await them down there in the depths, it wouldn’t be long before they came face-to-face with it.
It had been cool high up in the air; but now, the farther down they moved, the warmer it became. Not hot, not humid, in spite of the moisture, but warm in a comfortable way. However, Merle was much too tense to be happy about it. Only a few minutes before, when Vermithrax had been circling the statues, the wind had cut through her clothes like a knife through parchment, but the cold wasn’t what was occupying her mind. Other thoughts claimed her attention, concerns and speculations, premonitions, and an appropriate measure of confusion.
Then they broke through the fog.
It was only a short moment, certainly not a minute, until Vermithrax’s descending flight had borne them through the layer of mist and thrust them out on the underside in a star-shaped eruption of steam and gray vapors. Merle had automatically held her breath, and now, when she tried to take in a deep breath, she was overcome with panic: It wouldn’t work! She couldn’t breathe! Her throat closed, her chest burned like fire, and then there was only fear, pure, instinctive fear.
But no, there
was
air, and now she filled her lungs withit, 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 perceivedit with all her senses, took it in, if she could not also comprehend it.
The rock walls fell away vertically to the
Sometimes it was good to have someone who knew all about you share everything and have an answer to many questions.
And sometimes it was a scourge.
Vermithrax began the descent. He didn’t head down in a straight line but turned in wide circles. As he did so, he tilted dangerously to the side, so that after a short time Merle could feel her stomach rebel once again. She would never get used to this accursed flying.
The obsidian lion stayed close to the southern wall. The stone was dark and appeared to be full of cracks. Once Merle thought she made out a kind of groove leading down from the upper edge; it looked like a makeshift staircase or a road that someone had hewn out of the rock. But at the next turn she lost sight of the narrow ribbon again. Anyway, she had her hands full just holding on tight and keeping her eyes more or less rigidly on the back of Vermithrax’s head in the hope of being able to keep her nausea and dizziness halfway under control.
The fog lay a few yards below them, smooth as afrozen lake. Only, its center was filled with incessant motion, wafting veils that turned around themselves like lone dancers of water vapor. The red glow was brighter in some places than others. Whatever might await them down there in the depths, it wouldn’t be long before they came face-to-face with it.
It had been cool high up in the air; but now, the farther down they moved, the warmer it became. Not hot, not humid, in spite of the moisture, but warm in a comfortable way. However, Merle was much too tense to be happy about it. Only a few minutes before, when Vermithrax had been circling the statues, the wind had cut through her clothes like a knife through parchment, but the cold wasn’t what was occupying her mind. Other thoughts claimed her attention, concerns and speculations, premonitions, and an appropriate measure of confusion.
Then they broke through the fog.
It was only a short moment, certainly not a minute, until Vermithrax’s descending flight had borne them through the layer of mist and thrust them out on the underside in a star-shaped eruption of steam and gray vapors. Merle had automatically held her breath, and now, when she tried to take in a deep breath, she was overcome with panic: It wouldn’t work! She couldn’t breathe! Her throat closed, her chest burned like fire, and then there was only fear, pure, instinctive fear.
But no, there
was
air, and now she filled her lungs withit, 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 perceivedit with all her senses, took it in, if she could not also comprehend it.
The rock walls fell away vertically to the
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