Read Online The Stone Light by Kai Meyer - Free Book Online Page A

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.”
    “Hurry up,” Vermithrax called. He still hadn’t noticed anything.
    Merle dashed toward him. She didn’t know what she was running from, or if there was even a reason for her fear. She had almost reached Vermithrax when a piercing, screeching sound, drawn out and painful, made her whirl around.
    At first she didn’t see anything. Not really. But there was
something,
a movement perhaps, a change near the place where she’d shouldered the knapsack.
    “Merle!”
    The rock quivered under her feet as Vermithrax sped toher, much faster and more nimbly than she would have thought possible, a black flash of obsidian who was suddenly behind her, scooping her from the floor with one of his wings and letting her slide down a ramp of stone feathers.
    “Lilim,”
sounded in her head, and it took a moment before she realized that it wasn’t her own thought but a shout from the Flowing Queen.
    Vermithrax began to lift off. An instant later they were rushing out over the edge of the cliff, still in a leap, not in flight. They dropped a good yard down into emptiness before the wings of the weighty lion stabilized their position in the air, at the same time bearing them away from the abandoned camp of the Czarist expedition and the spirit of death enveloping the empty tents.
    Merle started to look around, but the Queen said sharply,
“Do not do that!”
    Of course she did it anyway.
    The rock wall had come alive. Then Merle realized that it wasn’t the stone itself that had begun moving but something that had perhaps been there the entire time, had been lurking, or was just now creeping out of some invisible cracks and holes like the scarab swarms of the Empire.
    The entire surface of what she’d taken for mere rock had dissolved and now streamed from all sides toward the rock ledge, a concentration and agglomeration so strange and bizarre that she couldn’t think of any human or animal motion like it. It wasn’t like the crawling of insects,even if that perhaps came closest; it was more as if the dark scales and shells billowed in grotesque zigzags on the plateau, apparently without order, completely chaotic, and yet so purposefully that within seconds the ring enclosed the rock ledge.
    Under the rippling top surface, which consisted of a host of man-sized bodies, Merle saw more and more tilted strands and structures that might be limbs, many times broken and angled, spiderlike and yet so utterly different. As they moved, they left behind a track of deep scars in the rock where they’d dug in their invisible claws and slashed the stone, tangled paths like a relief by a mad sculptor.
    The dark flood poured over the edges of the plateau from all directions, also down from the overhang, and buried the tents and the chests under them. The creatures concealed themselves behind their stony shells, or what Merle took to be shells, and yet any brief flash of fangs or claws was enough to fill her with sheer terror.
    Faster and faster, Vermithrax hurried out into the emptiness, away from what was taking place behind them. But Merle still saw the plateau sink completely under the assault of the Lilim, swallowed up, like a stone inexorably pulled down into a vortex of quicksand.
    As if by itself, Merle’s hand crept into the pocket where she kept the mirror. She absently pushed her fingers through the surface, deeper into the warmth of the magicplace behind