The Stone Light by Kai Meyer

actually was intending to fly into them.
    “Vermithrax! What are you doing?”
    The obsidian lion did not answer. Instead he made his wings fan up and down even faster, maneuvered himself a little farther to the left—and waited.
    “What do you—”
    “He is planning something.”
    “Oh?” Merle would probably have turned red with fury if her fear hadn’t driven all the blood from her face. “They’re coming right at us!”
    The uncanny voices blared louder and louder over the wasteland and were echoed back from the rock walls andtowers of stone. It seemed to Merle as if she were dangling in fireworks of strange words as a multitude of different sounds exploded around her like colored fountains of flame. Even if she’d had command of the strange language, she wouldn’t have understood anything at all, so loud, so shrill were the syllables coming out of this nearest head. A piercing whistling started in Merle’s ears before the heads came level with them.
    Vermithrax shook his head, as if trying to drive the noise out of his sensitive ears. His muscles tensed. Abruptly he rushed forward to the front head, at the last moment laid himself on an angle, bellowed something incomprehensible to Merle—probably a warning to hold on especially tight—and dived through under the ridge of the right cheekbone. Merle saw the huge face rush by her like a wall of granite, too big to take in with one look, too fast to perceive more than the weight, the size, the sheer force of its speed.
    She called Vermithrax’s name, but the wind tore the syllables from her lips and the voices of the flying heads overwhelmed any sound.
    So suddenly that her fingers gave way and her entire body was pulled backward, Vermithrax smashed his claws into the stone ear of the head and pulled himself along. At the same time his wings stopped beating, bent inward, and caught Merle before she could plunge down into the deep. The tips of the feathers pressed her down onto his backwith the force of a giant fist, while Vermithrax did his best to absorb the brutal jolt that went through them both at the first contact with the head.
    Somehow he succeeded. Somehow he found a grip. And then they were sitting in the ear of the gigantic head and rushing with insane speed across the rocky country.
    Merle needed a while before her breathing had grown calm enough for her to be able to speak again. But even then the thoughts flitted around in her head like moths around a candle flame, wild and nervous, and she had trouble giving them a clear direction, had trouble grasping what had just happened. Finally she clenched a fist and struck Vermithrax. He didn’t seem to even feel it.
    “Why?” she bellowed at him. “Why did you do that?”
    Vermithrax climbed over a stone bulge deeper into the ear. It opened around them like a cave, rocky, dark, a deep funnel. Astonishingly, the noise here inside was dulled; for one thing, because it was now only a single voice that they heard, for here they were shut away from the racket of the two other heads; for another, because the voice of the head was directed to the outside.
    Vermithrax let Merle slide from his back and lay down between two stone bulges, exhausted. He panted, his long tongue hanging down to his powerful paws.
    “The probability is fifty-fifty,” he brought out between two deep intakes of breath.
    “What probability?” Merle was still angry, but graduallyher anger was overwhelmed by relief that in spite of everything they were still alive.
    “Either the head is taking us to Lord Light, or it’s taking us in exactly the opposite direction.” Vermithrax pulled in his tongue and put his head down on his front paws. Merle became conscious for the first time how very much he’d exhausted himself with the leap to the flying head and just how closely they’d slid past death.
    “This head here,” said Vermithrax wearily, “is announcing something. I don’t understand the words it’s broadcasting, but