The Fortress of the Pearl eas-2

by Michael Moorcock

  "No longer, sir. Now, will you take this gold and go? We have no wish to expend more of our energies upon you. They flag, but they are not exhausted. I think you will be dissolved soon."

  "We have defeated all your defenders," said Gone. "Why should we want gold?"

  "Do you not desire the Pearl?"

  Before Elric could answer, Oone silenced him with a warning gesture.

  "We come only to secure the release of the Holy Girl."

  The seneschal smiled. "They have all made that claim, but what they want is the Pearl. I cannot believe you, lady."

  "How can we prove our words?"

  "You cannot. We already know the truth."

  "We have no interest in bargaining with you, Sir Seneschal. If you serve the Pearl, who does the Pearl serve?"

  "The child, I think." His brow furrowed. Her question had confused him, yet to Elric it had seemed so simple. His admiration for the dreamthief's skill increased.

  "You see, we can help you in this," said Oone. "The child's spirit is imprisoned. And while it is imprisoned, so are you held captive."

  The old man offered the bags of gold again. "Take this and leave us."

  "I do not think we shall," said Oone firmly, and she led her horse forward, past the old man. "Come, Elric."

  The albino hesitated. "We should question him more, Oone, surely?"

  "He could not answer more."

  The seneschal ran at her, swinging the heavy bags, the salver falling to the floor with a clang. "She is not! It will hurt! This is not to be. Pain will come! Pain!"

  Elric felt sympathy for the old man. "Oone. We should listen to him."

  She would not pause. "Come. You must."

  He had learned to trust her judgement. He, too, pushed past the old man, who beat at his body with the bags of gold and wailed, the tears pouring down his cheeks and into his beard. It took a different courage to perform that particular action.

  There was another great curving doorway ahead of them, all elaborate lattice-work and mosaic, bordered by bands of jade, blue enamel and silver. Two large doors of dark wood, hinges and studs of brass, blocked their way.

  Oone did not knock. She reached gently towards the doors and placed her fingertips against them. Gradually, just as with the other gate, the doors began to part. They heard a faint noise from within, almost a whimper. The doors opened wider and wider until they were completely back on their hinges.

  For a moment Elric was overwhelmed by what he saw.

  A grey-gold glow filled the great chamber which had been revealed to them. The glow came from a column about the height of a tall man which was topped by a globe. At the centre of the globe shone a pearl of enormous size, almost as big as Elric's fist. Short flights of steps led up to the column from all sides, and around these steps were what at first appeared to be ranks of statues. Then Elric realised that they were men, women and children, dressed in all manner of costumes, though most of them in the styles favoured in Quarzhasaat and by the desert clans.

  The old man came stumbling behind them. "Do not hurt this!"

  "We defend ourselves, Sir Seneschal," Oone told him without turning to look at him. "That is all you need to know from us."

  Slowly, still leading the silver horses, still with their silver swords in their hands, the light from the pearl touching their silver armour and their helmets and making these, too, glow with soft radiance, they made their way into the chamber.

  'This is not to destroy. This is not to defeat. This is not to despoil."

  Elric shivered when he heard the voice. He looked over towards the distant walls of the room and there was the Pearl Warrior, his armour all cracked and slimed with blood, his face a terrible bruise, the eyes seeming alternately to fade and take fire. And sometimes they were Alnac's eyes.

  The warrior's next words were almost pathetic. "I cannot fight you. No more."

  "We are not here to hurt," said Gone again. "We are here to free you."

  There was a movement amongst the still figures. A blue-gowned veiled woman appeared. Queen Sough's own eyes had a suggestion of tears. "With these you come?" She indicated the swords, the horses, the armour. "But our enemies are not here."

  "They will be here soon," said Oone. "Soon, I think, my lady."

  Still baffled, Elric looked behind him, as if he would see their enemies. He made a movement towards the Pearl at the Heart of the World, merely to admire a marvel. At once all the figures came to life, blocking his path.

  "You will steal!" The old man sounded even more wretched than before, even more impotent.

  "No," said Oone. "It is not our purpose. You must understand that." She spoke urgently. "Raik Na Seem sent us to find her."

  "She is safe. Tell him she is safe."

  "She is not safe. Soon she will dissolve." Oone turned her gaze on the whispering throng. "She is separated, as we are separated. The Pearl is the cause."

  "This is a trick," said Queen Sough.

  "A trick," echoed the wounded Pearl Warrior, and there was a faint chuckle from his spoiled throat.

  "A trick," said the seneschal, and held out the bags of gold.

  "We come to steal nothing. We come to defend. Look!" Oone made a circular movement with her sword to show them what they had evidently not yet seen.

  Emerging through the walls of the chamber, their hands filled with every imaginable weapon, came the hooded, tattooed soldiers of Quarzhasaat. The Sorcerer Adventurers.

  "We cannot fight them," said Elric quietly to his friend. "There are too many of them." And he prepared himself for death.

  2 The Destruction in the Fortress

  Then Oone had mounted her silver horse and raised her silver sword. She called out: "Elric, do as I do!" and urged the stallion into a canter so that its hooves rattled like thunder in the chamber.

  Prepared to die with courage, even at the moment of apparent triumph, Elric climbed into his saddle, took a spear in the hand that held the reins and with his sword already swinging charged against the invaders.

  Only as they crowded around him, axes, maces, spears and swords lifted to attack, did Elric understand that Oone's action had not been one of mere desperation. These half-shades moved sluggishly, their eyes were misted, they stumbled and their blows were feeble.

  The slaughter now became sickening to him. Following her example, he hacked and stabbed from side to side, almost mechanically. Heads came away from bodies like rotten fruit; limbs were sliced as easily as leaves from a stick; torsos collapsed under the thrust of a spear or sword. Their viscous blood, already the blood of the dead, clung to weapons and armour and their cries of pain were pathetic to Elric's ears. If he had not sworn to follow Oone, he would have ridden back and let her continue the work alone. There was little danger to them as the veiled men continued to pour through the walls and be met by sharp steel and cunning intelligence.

  Behind them, around the column of the Pearl, the courtiers watched. These clearly did not know what a mediocre threat the two silver-armoured warriors confronted.

  At last it was done. Decapitated, limbless bodies were piled all around the hall. Elric and Oone rode out of that slaughter and they were grim, unhappy, nauseated by their own actions.

  "It is done," said Oone. "The Sorcerer Adventurers are slain."

  "You truly are heroes!" Queen Sough came down the steps towards them, her eyes bright with admiration, her arms outstretched.

  "We are who we are," said Oone. "We are mortal fighters and we have destroyed the threat to the Fortress of the Pearl." Her words had taken on a ritualistic tone and Elric, trusting her, was content to listen.

  "You are the children of Chamog Borm, Brother and Sister of the Bone Moon, Children of Water and Cool Breezes, Parents of the Trees..." The seneschal had dropped his bags of gold and was shaken by his weeping. He wept with relief and with joy and Elric saw how much he resembled Raik Na Seem.

  Oone, down from her horse again, was embraced by Queen Sough. Meanwhile, a shuffling and cac
kling announced the approach of the Pearl Warrior.

  "This is no more for me," he said. Alnac's dead eyes had nothing but resignation in them. "This is for dissolution..." And he fell forward onto the marble floor, his armour all broken, his limbs sprawling, and there was no longer any flesh on him, only bone, so that what was left of the Pearl Warrior resembled little more than the inedible remains of a crab, the supper of some sea-giant.

  Queen Sough came towards Elric, her arms outstretched, and she seemed much smaller than when he had first encountered her. Her head hardly reached to his lowered chin. Her embrace was warm and he knew she, too, was weeping. Then her veil fell away from her face and he saw that she had lost years, that she was little more than a girl.

  Behind Queen Sough the Lady Oone was smiling at him as astonished understanding filled him. Gently he touched the girl's face, the familiar folds of her hair, and he drew in a sudden breath.

  She was Varadia. She was the Holy Girl of the Bauradim. She was the child whose spirit they had promised to free.

  Oone joined him, placing a protective hand upon Varadia's shoulder. "You know now that we are truly your friends."

  Varadia nodded, looking about her at the courtiers, who had assumed their earlier frozen stances. "The Pearl Warrior was the best there was," she said. "I could summon none better. Chamog Borm failed me. The Sorcerer Adventurers were too strong for him. Now I can release him from his exile."

  "We combined his strength with our own," said Gone. "Your strength and our strength. That is how we succeeded."

  "We three are not shadows," said Varadia, smiling, as if at a revelation. "That is how we succeeded."

  Oone nodded agreement. "That is how we succeeded, Holy Girl. Now we must consider how to bring you back to the Bronze Tent, to your people. You carry all their pride and history with you."

  "I knew that. I had to protect it. I thought I had failed."

  "You have not failed," said Oone.

  "The Sorcerer Adventurers will not attack again?"

  "Never," said Oone. "Not here, nor anywhere. Elric and I will make sure of it."

  And then Elric realised in admiration that it had been Oone, in the end, who had summoned the Sorcerer Adventurers, summoned those shades for the last time; summoned them so that she might demonstrate their defeat.

  Oone looked at him and warned him with her eyes not to say too much. But now he realised that all that they had fought, save perhaps a little of the Pearl Warrior and the Sorcerer Adventurers, had been a child's dreams. The hero of legend, Chamog Borm, could not save her because she knew he was not real. Similarly, the Pearl Warrior, chiefly her own invention, could not save her. But he and Oone were real. As real as the child herself! In her deep dream, in which she had disguised herself as a queen, seeking power but failing to find it, just as she had described, she had known the truth. Unable to escape from the dream, she had yet recognised the difference between her own invention and that which she had not invented-herself, Oone and Elric. But Oone had had to show that she could defeat what remained of the original threat, and in demonstrating the defeat, she freed the child.

  And yet they were still within the dream, all three of them. The great Pearl pulsed as powerfully as before, the Fortress with all its mazes and intertwined passages and chambers was still their prison.

  "You understood," Elric said to Oone. "You knew what they spoke of. The language was a child's language-a language seeking power and failing. A child's understanding of power."

  But again Oone, with a glance, cautioned him to silence. "Varadia knows now that power is never discovered in retreat. All one can hope to do by retreating is to let one power destroy another or hide as one hides from a storm one cannot control, until the force has passed. One cannot gain anything, save one's own self. And ultimately one must always confront the evil that would destroy one." It was almost as if she herself were in a trance and Elric guessed that she repeated lessons learned in pursuit of her craft.

  "You did not come to steal the Pearl but to save me from its prison," said Varadia as Oone took her young hands and held them tightly. "My father sent you to help me?"

  "He asked our help and we gave it willingly," said Elric. At last he sheathed the silver sword. He felt slightly foolish in the armour of a fairy-tale hero.

  Oone recognised his discomfort, "We shall give all this back to Chamog Borm, my lord. Is he permitted to return to the Fortress, Lady Varadia?"

  The child grinned. "Of course!" She clapped her hands and through the doorway to the Court of the Pearl, walking proudly, still in the clothes of his banishment, came Chamog Borm, to kneel at the feet of his mistress.

  "My Queen," he said. There was strong emotion in his wonderful voice.

  "I return to you your armour and your weapons, your twin horses, Tadia and Taron, and all your honour, Chamog Borm." Varadia spoke with warm pride.

  Soon Elric and Oone had discarded the armour and again wore only their ordinary clothes. Chamog Borm was in his silver-and-gold-chased breastplate and greaves, his helmet of gleaming silver, his swords and his spears in their sheaths at hip and on horse. His other armour he bound to the back of Tadia. At last he was ready. Again he kneeled before his Queen. "My lady. What task wouldst thou have me accomplish for thee?"

  Varadia said deliberately: "You are free to travel where you will, great Chamog Borm. But know only this-you must continue to fight evil wherever you find it and you must never again allow the Sorcerer Adventurers to attack the Fortress of the Pearl."

  "I swear."

  With a bow to Oone and Elric, the legendary hero rode slowly from the Court, his head high with pride and noble purpose.

  Varadia was content. "I have made him again what he was before I called him. I now know that legends in themselves have no power. The power comes from the uses that the living make of the legend. The legends merely represent an ideal."

  "You are a wise child," said Oone admiringly.

  "Should I not be, madam? I am the Holy Girl of the Bauradim." Varadia spoke with considerable irony and good humour. "Am I not the Oracle of the Bronze Tent?" She lowered her eyes, perhaps in sudden melancholy. "I shall be a child only a little longer. I think I shall miss my palace and all its kingdoms..."

  "Something is always lost here." Oone placed a comforting hand on the child's shoulder. "But much is gained also."

  Varadia looked back at the Pearl. Following her gaze, Elric saw that the entire Court had now vanished, just as the crowds had vanished on the great staircase when they had been attacked by the Pearl Warrior just before they first met Lady Sough. He now realised that in that guise she herself had guided them to her own rescue, as best she could. She had reached out to them. She had shown them the way in which they could, with their wits and courage, accomplish her salvation.

  Varadia was ascending the steps, her hands outstretched towards the Pearl. 'This is the cause of all our misfortune," she said. "What can we do with it?"

  "Destroy it, perhaps," said Elric.

  But Oone shook her head. "While it remains an undiscovered treasure thieves will constantly seek it. This is the cause of Varadia's imprisonment in the Dream Realm. This is what brought the Sorcerer Adventurers to her. It is why they drugged and attempted to abduct her. All the evil comes not from the Pearl itself but what evil men have made of it."

  "What shall you do?" asked Elric. "Trade it in the Dream Market when you next go?"

  "Perhaps that is what I should do. But it would not be the means of ensuring Varadia's safety in the future. Do you understand?"

  "While the Pearl is a legend, there will always be those who will pursue the legend?"

  "Exactly, Prince Elric. So we shall not destroy it, I think. Not here."

  Elric did not care. So absorbed had he become in the dream itself, the revealing of the levels of reality existing in the Dream Realm, that he had forgotten his original quest, the threat to his life and that of Anigh in Quarzhasaat.

  It was for Oone to remind him. "
Remember, there are those in Quarzhasaat who are not only your enemies, Elric of Melniboné. They are the enemies of this girl. The enemies of the Bauradim. You have still a further task to accomplish, even when we return to the Bronze Tent."

  "Then you must advise me, Lady Oone," said Elric simply, "for I am a novice here."

  "I cannot advise you with any great clarity." She turned her eyes away from him, almost in modesty, perhaps in pain. "But I can make a decision here. We must claim the Pearl."

  "As I understand it, the Pearl did not exist before the lords of Quarzhasaat conceived of it, before someone discovered the legend, before the Sorcerer Adventurers came."

  "But it exists now," said Oone. "Lady Varadia, would you give the Pearl to me?"

  "Willingly," said the Holy Girl, and she ran up the remaining steps and took the globe from the plinth and threw it to the ground so that shards of milky glass shattered everywhere, mingling with the bones and the armour of the Pearl Warrior, and she took the Pearl in one hand, as an ordinary child might grasp a lost ball. And she tossed it from palm to palm in delight, fearing it no longer. "It is very beautiful. No wonder they sought it."

  "They made it, then they used it to trap you." Oone reached up and caught it as Varadia threw it to her. "What a shame those who could conceive of such beauty would go to such evil lengths to own it..." She frowned, looking about her in sudden concern.

  The light was fading in the Court of the Pearl.

  From all around them came an appalling noise, an anguished groaning; a great creaking and keening, a tortured screaming, as if all the tormented souls in all the multiverse had suddenly given voice.

  It pierced their brains. They covered their ears. They stared in terror, watching as the floor of the Court erupted and undulated, as the ivory walls with all their wonderful mosaics and carvings began to rot before their eyes, crumbling and falling, like the fabric in a tomb suddenly exposed to daylight.

  And then, over all the other noises, they heard the laughter.

  It was sweet laughter. It was the unaffected laughter of a child.