Through the blinding flare of the detonation she saw her target spin away—but then she noticed the figure standing farther up the slope, and she recognized it as Crawford. Had she shot the wrong person?
But the person up the slope, she now saw, wasn’t solid—the light was glowing right through its substance. Why, she thought with relief, that isn’t Crawford; that’s just his ghost.
Crawford heard the bang, and turned—and then he sprang away to the side, for he had seen a shiny ball rushing through the air toward him as fast as an angry bee.
And all at once he felt as if he had jumped into an invisible haystack. He heard the pistol ball buzz past him, and felt the shock wave of its passage ripple across his body like a caress, but he was too stunned to do anything more than stare down at his feet, which were suspended a yard above the rock surface. He was floating, supported only by the gelatinous air.
It took several long seconds for him to settle to the ground; and only when he had landed did it occur to him to look back in the direction the bullet had come from.
By the reddening light he saw a figure standing behind a bulge of rock eight yards away. Crawford couldn’t guess who it might be, but he assumed the person would have as much trouble moving as he was having, and that he would be safe in ignoring him or her for a little while.
And if the person had another pistol, and shot at him more successfully in the meantime, wouldn’t that actually be a good thing?
He turned back to Julia. She was walking down the slope toward him and Byron, and somehow she was able to walk in this thickened air … though it seemed to Crawford that she was getting more transparent. He wondered if his nausea and light-headedness were indications of near panic.
Byron might not have heard the shot. “I don’t need to know how she died,” he said now in a choking voice. “I killed her. I seduced her, God damn me! That’s what I tried to tell you, that day I picked you up in my carriage. Incest—it wasn’t her fault, she was never strong-willed, and she did resist me at first. And then I left her alone in England with our child … and my horrible ex-wife.”
Byron frowned and clenched his jaw, and Crawford knew he was resisting the despair the mountain’s psychic field was inducing. “My ex-wife drove Augusta to this, I’m certain—I won’t take every bit of blame here, God damn it!—Augusta was so like me, and that harridan I married didn’t have me around to torment any longer.”
The phantom was only a few yards away now, and it was definitely Julia. She was looking directly at Crawford, and her face suddenly curdled into an expression of almost imbecilic hatred. He flinched back and raised his hand, his sleeve rippling so rapidly that it was momentarily a smoky blur; he would have dived back the way they’d come and scrambled or tumbled back down to the valley where Hobhouse and the servants waited, but Byron caught his arm.
The phantom was fading away to complete transparency even as he watched … even as the light got redder and the air got thicker. It now required real muscular effort to breathe. And then she was gone.
But she had only made way for something else—the thick air was humming with the imminence of something else. Crawford tried to scramble back to the place where they’d come up to the summit, but the air was too thick now to push through—it seemed to squeeze his ribs, compressed by the bulk of some approaching thing.
Something was forming, but not on this mountaintop—something immensely bigger and farther away, looming down and across the miles—from the peak of the Jungfrau.
It was made of arcs of darkness that gathered out of the dimming sky, and though it never did attain anything much like form, something in his blood or his spine or the oldest lobe of his brain recognized it as feminine and leonine, and as it leaned down over the three people on the Wengern summit, eclipsing the whole sky, its malevolence was as palpable as the cold.
Tears sprang from Crawford’s eyes and hung in the air like gelatinous gnats.
The thing in the sky spoke, shivering the crystal air with a voice like rock strata shifting. “Answer my riddle or die,” it said. After a long pause it spoke again. ‘What is it that walked with four limbs when the sunlight had not yet changed, and now is supported by two, but will, when the sunlight is changed again and the light is gone, be supported by three?”
Crawford exhaled, and the spent breath was a bulk in front of him, pushing his head back against the resisting air.
“Four, two and three,” Byron managed to say. “It’s … the riddle … of the … sphinx.” Even in this dimming red light Crawford could see that Byron’s face was hollowed and pale. “We’re facing … the sphinx.”
Crawford forced himself to look up at the thing. She seemed to be a lens, warping the magnetic lines into her shape; she was less substantial now than she had been in the days when she had caused the seven great gates of Thebes to be closed in fear of her, and been portrayed in towering stone on the plain of Gizeh, but she had clearly lost none of her power, at least in these high regions.
Crawford fought the induced self-loathing and made himself remember the legend; Oedipus had been confronted by the sphinx, and she had asked him what creature walked on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening. According to the story, the answer had been “man,” who crawls in infancy, walks on two legs in maturity, and walks with a stick in old age. He opened his mouth to force the word into the air, but then he hesitated.
Why was the thing asking? And had Greek mythology preserved the answer correctly? Why would the sphinx want him to say man? And, as a matter of fact, man didn’t seem to be the correct answer to this version of the riddle—there was nothing about infancy that he could think of that corresponded to “when the sunlight had not yet changed.” Whenever that might have been, he didn’t think humans would even have been around.
Who had been? The nephelim? And was the sphinx one of that species? Was he supposed to say you, instead of, in effect, me?
He remembered the flash of primordial memory he’d had when he first saw the streaks in the sky—something about the other sentient race on Earth. Could this riddle be the equivalent of a diplomatic demand of recognition, in which case the answer would be “Both of us"?
Byron opened his mouth to answer it himself, but Crawford waved at him urgently, forcing his hand through the thick air, and Byron noticed and remained silent.
“Remember the … consequences … of a wrong guess,” Crawford told him. “And I don’t think … mythology recorded … the right answer.”
The thing was leaning down closer to them, and Crawford was looking up into the darkness of her gigantic eyes. They were as inorganic as frost crystals, and it was wildly disorienting to recognize intelligence—albeit a profoundly alien intelligence—behind them.
He saw that her mouth was opening, and then the whole summit of the mountain seemed to tilt toward that vast, black maw.
He went with his last guess. “Sentient life on Earth,” he called, forcing the words out.
Something changed then.
The menacing shape still loomed above them, but after a moment Crawford realized that the sphinx was gone—what had been the arch of her wings was now a pattern of cloud on one side and the shadowed flank of the Jungfrau on the other, and the face, which had given such a strong impression of femininity, was just a pattern of stars in the dark sky. The sphinx had receded back to the remoteness of the Jungfrau’s peak.