Then, pulling himself together, he straightened his shoulders and clapped his enormous hands.
The sound was like a shot in the huge, silent arena. It brought an almost instant reaction.
From within came a whinny, a snort. Something pounded the hard surface. Another great whinny, and out of the archway, mane flaring as if in the wind, sprang a horse of supernatural proportions. A monstrous black stallion, big enough to carry Sepiriz. He reared, flailing bright jet hooves and glaring from raging ocher eyes. The beast's mane and tail became a wild mass of black fire. He was muscular, nervous. This gigantic beast expressed impatience rather than anger. But at a word from Sepiriz, the horse cocked his ears forward and immediately settled. I had never seen a creature respond so swiftly to human command.
Although there was no doubting the animal's physical presence, I quickly noticed that for all his activity, he scarcely stirred the dust of the arena floor and left no hoofprints of any kind.
Noting my curiosity, Sepiriz laid a hand gently on my shoulder. "The horse, as I told you, exists on two planes at once. The ground he gallops on is unseen by us."
He led me up to the horse, who nuzzled at him, seeking a familiar treat. The beast already wore a saddle and bridle and seemed equipped for war as well as travel.
I reached a hand towards the mighty head and rubbed the animal's velvet nose. I noted the bright, white teeth and red tongue, the hot, sweet breath.
"What is his name?" I asked.
"He has no name in your terms." Sepiriz did not elaborate. He looked towards the walls, searching for something he had expected to find there. "But he will carry you through all danger and serve you to the death. Once you are in his saddle, he will respond as any horse, but you will find him, I think, unusually intelligent and capable."
"He knows where I am to go?" "He is not prescient!"
"No?" For a moment the ground beneath my feet shifted like liquid, then as quickly resettled. Again Sepiriz refused to answer my unspoken question. He was still searching. His eyes scanned the long, empty stone benches stretching into the gloom. I noticed that the darkness seemed to have absorbed some of the upper tiers. Smoke or mist swirled and gave carved figures expressions of gloating glee, then of wild, innocent joy.
Sepiriz noted this at the same time I did. I was certain I saw a flash of alarm in his eyes. Then he smiled with pleasure and turned as another horse emerged from the archway into the stadium. This horse had a rider. A familiar rider. A man I had met more than once. Our families had been related for centuries. His was a branch which had supported Mozart and been famous for its taste and intelligence.
This rider had first introduced himself to me in the 1930s as
a representative of an anti-Nazi group. His handsome, heavy features were enhanced now by an eighteenth-century wig, a tricorn hat and military greatcoat. He looked like one of the famous portraits of Frederick the Great. Of course it was my old acquaintance, the Austrian prince Lobkowitz. His clothing was bulky, completely unsuitable for this volcanic cavern. His face was already beaded with sweat, and he dabbed at himself with a vast handkerchief of patterned Persian silk.
"Good morning, sir." His voice a little hoarse, he reined in and lifted his hat, for all the world as if we met on a country bridle path near Bek. "I'm mightily glad to see you. We have a destiny to pursue. Sentient life depends upon it. Have you brought the sword?"
Lobkowitz dismounted as Lord Sepiriz came towards him, towering over the Austrian, who was not a short man. Sepiriz kneeled to embrace him. "We were unsure you could perform so complicated a figure. We had other means ready, but they were even more fragile. You must have succeeded thus far, or you would not have joined us."
Prince Lobkowitz put his hand on Lord Sepiriz's arm and came to shake my hand. He was in high spirits. Indeed, I found his attitude a little unseemly, considering my circumstances, if not his. His warm charm, however, was impossible to resist.
"My dear Count von Bek. You cannot know the odds against your being here and our meeting like this. Luck, if not the gods, seems on our side. The dice are tossed by a fierce wind, but now at least there is a little hope."
"What is the task? What do you seek to accomplish?"
Lobkowitz looked at Lord Sepiriz in surprise. He seemed to expect the black giant to have told me more. "Why, sir, we seek to save the life and soul of your dear wife, my protegee, Oona, the dreamthief's daughter."
I was horrified. "My wife is in danger? What is happening back there? Is someone attacking the house?"
"In relation to our position in the scheme of things, she is no longer at your house in Canada. She is further inland, deep in the
Rockies, and facing an enemy who draws his strength from every part of the multiverse. Unless we reach her at exactly the right moment, where our story intersects with hers, she will perish."
I could not control the pain I experienced at this news. "How did she come to be where she is? Could you not have helped her?"
Prince Lobkowitz indicated his costume. "I was until lately, sir, in the service of Catherine the Great. Where, I might add, I met your unsavory ancestor Manfred."
For one of such habitual grace, he seemed in poor temper. I apologized. I was a simple man. I had no means of understanding this topsy-turvy tumble of different worlds. It was more than I could normally do to try to imagine the space between the Earth and the Moon. Yet my veins beat with anxious blood at the thought of my beloved wife in danger, and I feared for my children, for everything that had meaning to me. I wanted to turn on this pair and blame them for my circumstances, but it was impossible. Another intelligence lurked within my own.
Gradually his presence was growing stronger. Elric of Melni-bone, who believed in the reality of only one world, understood perhaps instinctively the complexity of the multiverse. His experience, if not his intellect, told him how one branch sometimes intersected with another and sometimes did not, how branches grew quickly, took on bizarre shapes, and died as suddenly as they appeared.
Elric understood this science as his own sorcerous wisdom, captured over years of education in the long dreams which gave the Melnibonean capital its nickname of the Dreamers' City. For Elric's people extended their lives through drug- and sorcery-induced dreams which assumed their own reality, sometimes for thousands of years. By this means, too, did their dragon kin, to whom they were related by blood, sleep and dream and manifest themselves, no doubt, in others' dreams. It was dangerous for anyone but the full adept to attempt such an existence. And dangerous, I knew, to try to change a narrative which gave some kind of uneasy order to our lives. At best we could create a whole new universe or series of universes. At worst we could destroy those
which now existed and by some mistake or unlucky turn of the cards consign ourselves and everything we knew to irreversible oblivion.
My twentieth-century European sensibilities were repelled by such ideas, yet Elric's soul was forever blended with my own. And Elric's memory was filled with experiences I would normally dismiss as the fantasies of a tormented madman.
Thus I accepted and refused to accept at the same time. It was a wonder I had the coordination to mount the huge horse. He was at least as large as the famous old warhorses of past legends. I looked for Sepiriz, to ask him a question, but he had gone. The saddle and stirrups were modified for a man of my size, yet the saddle still felt huge, giving me an unfamiliar sense of security.
There was no doubt my horse was pleased to have a rider. He moved impatiently, ready to gallop. At Lobkowitz's suggestion I cantered the stallion around the arena. The Nihrainian steed trod the ground with evident familiarity, tossing his great black mane and snorting with pleasure. I noted the strong, acrid smell he exuded when he moved. It was the smell I normally associated with a wild predator.
Lobkowitz followed me, saying little but clearly noting my handling of the animal. He congratulated me on my horsemanship, which made me laugh. My father and brothers had all despaired of me as the wors
t rider in the family!
As we rode, I begged him to tell me more about Oona and her whereabouts. He asked that I respect any reticence on his part. Knowledge of a future could change it, and it was our task not to change the future but to ensure that, in one realm at least, it be a future I desired for my loved ones and myself. I must trust him. With some reluctance, I bowed to his judgment. I had no reason, I said, not to trust him, but my head ached with many questions and uncertainties.
Sepiriz returned bearing a scabbarded sword. Was it the sword I knew as Ravenbrand, which Elric called Stormbringer? Or was it the sister sword, Mournblade? Sepiriz did not tell me. "Each sword is of equal power. The power of the other avatars weakens
in proportion to their distance from the source. It is as well it happened this way," he said. "The Kakatanawa have already gone home. The circle tightens. Here."
As I reached to accept the sword, I thought its metal voiced a faint moan, but it could have been my imagination. There was, however, a distinct, familiar vibrancy to the hilt as it settled into my right hand. Automatically I hooked the scabbard to the heavy saddle.
"So," I said. "I am prepared to follow a road for which I have no maps, in a quest whose purpose is mysterious, with a companion who seems scarcely more familiar with the territory than I am. You place much faith in me, Sepiriz. I would remind you that I remain suspicious of your motives and your part in my wife's endangerment."
Sepiriz accepted this, but clearly he did not intend to illuminate me further. "Only if you are successful in this adventure will you ever know more of the truth concerning the swords," the black seer told me. "But if you do, indeed, succeed in fulfilling your destiny, of serving Fate's purpose, then I promise, what you hear shall hearten you."
And with that Lobkowitz yelled for us to be off. We must be free of Nihrain before the new eruption, when all here will be destroyed, and Sepiriz and his brothers will ride out into the world to fulfill another part of their complex destiny.
I could do nothing but follow him. The prince bent over his horse's neck and rode with impossible speed out of the huge amphitheater and down corridors of liquid scarlet veined with black and white and tunnels of turquoise, milky opal and rubies. All carved in the same relief. Faces begged and twisted in agony. Their eyes yearned for any kind of mercy. Vast scenes stretched for miles, every figure minutely detailed, all exquisitely individual. Landscapes of the most appalling beauty, of elaborate horror and hideous symmetry, rose and fell around me as I rode. All were given movement by my own speed. Were they designed to be seen thus? A creative style best appreciated from the back of a galloping warhorse?
I began to believe that I inhabited a fantastic dream, a nightmare from which I must inevitably wake. Then I remembered all I had learned from Oona and realized that I might never wake, might never see her or my children again. This infuriated me, firing me with a righteous anger against Fate or whatever less abstract force Sepiriz and his kind served.
I put all that emotion into my riding, into following the expert Lobkowitz through tunnels, chambers, corridors of dazzling diamonds and sapphires and carnelians, down long slopes and up flights of steps, our horses' hooves never quite touching the ground of the paths we traced. I gasped and braced myself to fall the first time the horse galloped across the air separating one part of the mountain from another. By the second experience I had learned to trust its surefooted pace over an invisible landscape.
We galloped through oceans of lava, through foaming rivers of dust, over blue-veined pools of marble, sometimes blinded by a fiery light, sometimes plunging through pitch darkness. The great black horses never tired. When we passed through caverns of ice, their breath erupted like smoke from their nostrils, but they were otherwise undisturbed by any natural obstacle. Now I understood what a valuable animal Sepiriz had loaned me.
In spite of my anxieties, I began to know an old, familiar elation. The sword at my side was already wrapping me in her bloody gyres, sending me a taste of what I would experience if I unsheathed her. I dared not draw the thing from her scabbard, for I knew what she would make of me, what pleasures I would taste and what mental torments I would experience.
I was filled with a dreadful mixture of fear and desire. Knowing my wife was even now in danger, I longed to feel the hilt in my hand again and taste the most terrible drug of all, the very life stuff of my foes. What some called their souls. As the spirit of Elric combined with that of the sword, together they threatened to overwhelm the part of me who was Ulric von Bek. Already far too much of me longed to charge into battle on this magnificent horse, to hack and pierce, to slice and skewer, to lift my arm and let death come wherever it fell.
All this horrified Ulric von Bek, that exemplar of liberal humanism. Yet perhaps here was a time when a rational, modern man was not best suited to deal with the realities around him. I should give myself up wholly to Elric.
Should I do that, I thought, I would in some way be abandoning my wife and children. I had to hang on to the humanistic person I was, even though increasingly Elric lurked just below the surface, threatening to take me over and make me a willing tool of his killing frenzy.
How I yearned never to have known this creature, nor ever to have had to rely on his help. Yet, I thought, if I had not involved myself with Elric and his fate, I should not now be married to his daughter, Oona, whom we both loved in our own ways. At least in this we were united. What was more, the last Emperor of Melnibone had saved me from torture and degrading death in the Nazi concentration camp.
This final thought helped me sustain a balance within myself as the Nihrainian steed carried me higher and higher out of the depths, up into the roaring chasm and then down black shale, rivulets of red lava, a rain of pale ash. The Nihrainian horses continued to follow their own peculiar route parallel to this reality. The stink of sweat and sulphur remained in my nostrils. The neck of the great beast steamed, bulging with straining muscles as it continued down the flanks of the black mountain and out into a world which turned by degrees from night to dawn and from lifeless ash to rolling meadowlands with copses of oak and elm.
I was tiring. The horse's pace slowed to a steady canter as if to enjoy the cool, autumnal air, the scents of sweetly fading summer. The leaves of the trees turned gold and brilliant yellow and russet in the low, comforting light. Lobkowitz, still ahead of me, his greatcoat and tricorn hat covered with light gray ash, turned in his saddle to wave. He seemed jubilant. I guessed we had crossed another barrier. Our luck was holding.
At last we rested beside a pond on which a few white ducks squabbled. There were no signs of human beings, although the whole area had a pleasant, cultivated look. I mentioned this to
Lobkowitz. He said he thought that we were in a part of the mul-tiverse which for some reason had ceased to be inhabited by human beings. Sometimes entire futures vanished, leaving the most unexpected traces. He guessed that this land had once been settled by prosperous peasants. Some action in the multiverse had affected their existence. Their natural world had survived as they left it. Everything they had made had vanished. Every little pact they believed they had with mortality brushed aside.
He gave a small, sad shrug.
Lobkowitz said that he had witnessed the phenomenon too often not to be convinced that he was right. "You might note, Count Ulric, a certain barrenness to those gently rising and falling hills, those old stones and trees. They are a dream without its dreamers." He rose from where he had been washing his face and hands in the pond. He shivered, drying his palms under his arms as he waited for me to drink and wash. "I am afraid of places like this. They are a kind of vacuum. You never know what horrors will choose to fill it. An untrustworthy dream at best."
I followed his reasoning, but did not have his experience. I could only listen and try to understand. I knew I did not have a temperament for the supernatural, and I thus would never be thoroughly comfortable in its presence. Not all my family had a natural affinity with infinite possibility.
Some of us preferred to cultivate our own small gardens. I wondered with sudden amusement if I might be the horror who chose to fill this particular vacuum. I could see Oona and our children cultivating a farm, a pleasant house . . .
And then I understood what Lobkowitz feared. There were many traps of many kinds in the multiverse. The harshest climate could hide the greatest beauty, the most attractive shireland could disguise hidden poisons. With this realization, I was glad to remount the big, tireless stallion and follow Lobkowitz through endless meadows until starless, moonless night fell, and I heard the sound of water far below me.
I hardly dared look down. When finally I did, I saw little, but it seemed the big Nihrainian horse was galloping across a lake. We
slept in our saddles. By morning we rode over the high, tough grass of a broad steppe. In the distance we saw grazing animals which, as we drew closer, I recognized as North American bison.
With some considerable relief I realized that we were probably upon the same continent as my imperiled wife. Then the bison vanished.
"Is she nearby?" I asked Prince Lobkowitz when we next stopped on a rise overlooking a broad, winding river. All wildlife seemed to have disappeared. The only sound we heard was the remorseless keening of the west wind. We dismounted and ate some rather stale sandwiches Lobkowitz had carried in his knapsack from Moscow.
His reply was not encouraging. "We must hope so," he said. "But we have several dangers to overcome before we can be certain. Many of these worlds are dying-already as good as dead . . ."
"You take much in your stride, sir," I said.
" 'Some polish is gained with one's ruin,' " he said. He quoted Thomas Hardy, but the reference to our circumstances was obscure to me. He threw the remains of his sandwich onto the ground and watched it. It did not move. I was puzzled. Why were we studying a piece of discarded food?
The Skrayling Tree toa-2 Page 24
