The Best of Lucius Shepard Read Online Free Page B

the scale.
Deathly afraid, knowing he was no match for the foreman, Meric seized Lise’s
hand and ran deeper under the wing. He hoped Pardiel would be too frightened to
follow, leery of the creature that was rumoured to live there; but he was not.
He came after them at a measured pace, tapping the hook against his leg.
     
    Higher on
Griaule’s back, the wing was dimpled downwards by hundreds of bulges, and this
created a maze of small chambers and tunnels so low that they had to crouch to
pass along them. The sound of their breathing and the scrape of their feet were
amplified by the enclosed spaces, and Meric could no longer hear Pardiel. He
had never been this deep before. He had thought it would be pitch-dark; but the
lichen and algae adhering to the wing were luminescent and patterned every
surface, even the scales beneath them, with whorls of blue and green fire that
shed a sickly radiance. It was as if they were giants crawling through a
universe whose starry matter had not yet congealed into galaxies and nebulas.
In the wan light, Lise’s face - turned back to him now and again - was teary
and frantic; and then, as she straightened, passing into still another chamber,
she drew in breath with a shriek.
     
    At first
Meric thought Pardiel had somehow managed to get ahead of them; but on entering
he saw that the cause of her fright was a man propped in a sitting position
against the far wall. He looked mummified. Wisps of brittle hair poked up from
his scalp, the shapes of his bones were visible through his skin, and his eyes
were empty holes. Between his legs was a scatter of dust where his genitals had
been. Meric pushed Lise towards the next tunnel, but she resisted and pointed
at the man.
     
    “His eyes,”
she said, horror-struck.
     
    Though the
eyes were mostly a negative black, Meric now realized they were shot through by
opalescent flickers. He felt compelled to kneel beside the man; it was a
sudden, motiveless urge that gripped him, bent him to its will, and released
him a second later. As he rested his hand on the scale, he brushed a massive
ring that was lying beneath the shrunken fingers. Its stone was black, shot
through by flickers identical to those within the eyes, and incised with the
letter S. He found his gaze was deflected away from both the stone and the
eyes, as if they contained charges repellent to the senses. He touched the
man’s withered arm; the flesh was rock-hard, petrified. But alive. From that
brief touch he gained an impression of the man’s life, of gazing for centuries
at the same patch of unearthly fire, of a mind gone beyond mere madness into a
perverse rapture, a meditation upon some foul principle. He snatched back his
hand in revulsion.
     
    There was a
noise behind them, and Meric jumped up, pushing Lise into the next tunnel. “Go
right,” he whispered. “We’ll circle back towards the stair.” But Pardiel was
too close to confuse with such tactics, and their flight became a wild chase,
scrambling, falling, catching glimpses of Pardiel’s smoke-stained face, until finally
- as Meric came to a large chamber — he felt the hook bite into his thigh. He
went down, clutching at the wound, pulling the hook loose. The next moment
Pardiel was atop him; Lise appeared over his shoulder, but he knocked her away
and locked his fingers in Meric’s hair and smashed his head against the scale.
Lise screamed, and white lights fired through Meric’s skull. Again his head was
smashed down. And again. Dimly, he saw Lise struggling with Pardiel, saw her
shoved away, saw the hook raised high and the foreman’s mouth distorted by a
grimace. Then the grimace vanished. His jaw dropped open and he reached behind
him as if to scratch his shoulder blade. A line of dark blood eeled from his
mouth and he collapsed, smothering Meric beneath his chest. Meric heard voices.
He tried to dislodge the body, and the effects drained the last of his
strength. He whirled down through a blackness that