A growl of rage escaped Lord Arioch as he pummeled at the ectoplasmic prison with his fists, while Count Mashabak screamed with insane laughter from within. The Duke of Hell looked down upon the labouring thousands, each one of whom maintained, only by the most accurate and mechanical rhythms, the lives of its fellows, and he smirked, threatening with a pointed, golden finger to poke at one of the little figures and so bring the whole complicated structure to collapse.
Then he looked up at where Gaynor the Damned stood, unmoving, as he had been for some time. “Find me that flower and I will make you a Knight of Chaos, immortal nobility, ruling in our name a thousand kingdoms!”
“I will find the flower, great duke,” said Gaynor.
“We shall make an example of thee, Elric,” said Arioch. “Even now. By conquering thee, I shall establish Chaos fully upon this plane.” And one golden hand stretched suddenly, longer and longer, larger and larger, towards Elric’s face. But the albino had drawn his runesword with all the rapid skill of years and the great battle-blade roared out a challenge and a threat to all the myriad denizens of the Lower, Middle and Higher Worlds, to come to it, to cast themselves upon it, to feed it and its master, for this thing was not an owned thing at all, but had become, if it had not always been, an independent force whose sole loyalty was to its own existence, yet was as dependent upon Elric’s wielding it as Elric was dependent upon its energy for his own survival. This unholy symbiosis, more profoundly mysterious than the wisest philosophers could fathom, was what made Elric the chosen child of Fate and it was what had, in the end, robbed him of his happiness.
“This must not be!” Arioch pulled back in thwarted anger. “Force must not fight force! Not yet. Not yet.”
“There is more than Law and Chaos at work in the multiverse, my lord,” said Elric calmly, the sword still held before him, “and more than one of these is thine enemy. Do not anger me too much.”
“Ah, most dangerous and courageous of my souls, thou art truly fitted to be my chosen mortal above all the others, ruling in my name, with my power. Whole worlds would be thine, Elric—whole Spheres to mould to thy every whim. All pleasure can be thine. All experience. And unendingly. Without price or consequence. Eternal pleasure, Elric!”
“I have made myself clear, already, Lord Duke, on the subject of perpetuality. It could be that one day in the future I shall determine that my fate lies wholly with thee. But until that time …”
“I shall attack thy memory. That I can do!”
“Only in some ways, Lord Arioch. Never in dreams. In my dreams, I recall everything. But with this pell-mell twirling from plane to plane and Sphere to Sphere, the worlds of memory and dreams become confused with the worlds of reality and immediacy. Aye, you can attack my mind, my lord. But not my soul’s memory.”
Which set insane Count Mashabak to cackling again. “Gaynor!” His wild eyes caught sight of his former servant. “Free me from this and thy reward will be tenfold what I promised.”
“Death,” said Gaynor suddenly. “Death, death, death is all I’m greedy for. And that you all deny me!”
“Because we value thee, dear one …” said the honey-sweet boy, lifting its head and chittering, like a startled wren. “I am Chaos. I am everything. I am the Lord of the Non-Linear, Captain of the Random Particle and Entropy’s greatest celebrant! I am the wind from nowhere and I am the drowner of worlds; I am the Prince of Infinite Possibility! What glorious changes shall bloom upon the face of the multiverse, what unlikely and perverse marriages shall be sanctified by hell’s priesthood, and what wonders and pleasures there will be, Elric! Nothing predictable. The only true justice in the multiverse—where all, even the gods, are subject to random birth and random annihilation! To banish Resolution and have instead eternal Revolution. A multiverse in permanent, gorgeous Crisis!”
“I fear I have spent too long with the gentler folk of the Young Kingdoms,” said Elric softly, “to be much tempted by thy promises, my lord. Nor can I say I am much feared of thy threats. Prince Gaynor and myself are upon a quest. If we are to be of service to one another, sir, then I propose you let us continue upon that quest.”
At which Arioch shifted his beautiful rump upon the yielding globe and said pettishly, “The damned one can go on his way. As for thee, recalcitrant servant, I cannot punish thee directly, but I can hamper thy quest until this more trustworthy servant achieves his end—whereupon I shall promise him far more than Mashabak promised him. I shall promise him a true death.”
There came a sob from within Gaynor’s peculiar helm and he fell to his knees, perhaps in gratitude.
Now Arioch raised a golden hammer in either fist and his youthful features were ablaze with glee as he brought first one hammer and then another down upon the yielding surface of the ectoplasmic womb, and with each blow came an unlikely booming, like that of a great gong, while within the prison Count Mashabak clapped scaly claws to his asymmetrical ears and howled in fearsome silence, as if whole universes were in anguish.
“It is the Time,” cried Arioch. “It is the Time!”
Down falls Elric, screaming, with his hands, too, upon his ears. And Gaynor goes down, crawling and shrieking in a voice so high-pitched it sounds above the booming of the hammers.
And then there is a low whistling and Elric feels his substance being sucked away, bit by bit, from this plane to another. And he tries to fight against that force which only a Duke of Hell would use, since it damages whole histories and peoples with the violence of the dimensional rupturing, but he is helpless and his runesword will not help him. Stormbringer seems glad to leave that lifeless plane; it needs to feed on living souls and Arioch had offered it not a morsel from his store.
Yet, even as he watches the monstrous clock shimmer and grow misty to his sight, even as Gaynor’s mysterious armour becomes faintly outlined against a fainter landscape, the albino sees a huge grey shape loping towards him, the red tongue lolling, the grey-green eyes glaring, the white fangs clashing in its ferocious head, and he knows that it is the hungered werewolf, become so maddened by its lack of food that it is ready to risk even Stormbringer’s edge!
But then it has turned, sniffing, its savage mouth grinning and the hot saliva showering from its jaws, the ears laid first forward, then laid back, and it seems to curve in mid-air, a single fluid motion, and direct its great body straight upwards to where Lord Arioch giggles, then squeals in genuine surprise as Esbern Snare buries his fangs in the throat of one he recognizes as his true tormentor.
So startled was Arioch, and so sparing now of his remaining powers upon this plane, that he could neither change his shape nor did he wish to flee—for by fleeing he would leave his captured rival, who might then be freed, and that he could not bear. So he struggled upon the swaying clock while the damned souls below worked frantically to correct every unpredictable motion of the thing, and the last Elric saw of Esbern Snare was his wolf body burning with a fierce, red-gold light as if he gave up, with selfless joy, his last few embers of life.
Then Elric saw the ectoplasmic sphere topple and fall towards the earth, with Arioch and Esbern Snare still locked together in conflict, and something flared and a darkness poured in upon him and swallowed him up and carried him relentlessly through the broken walls of a thousand dimensions, every one of which lifted a separate voice in protest; every one of which exploded with a different angry colour. He was propelled through the multiverse with almost the last remaining energy Arioch had been able to summon upon that plane.
That was what Esbern Snare had known and that was why he had awaited this opportunity to help his companions.
For Esbern Snare was, indeed, a man of rare goodness and sanity. He had lived too long in thrall to an evil power. He had seen all that he valued destroyed because of it. So, though he could not reclaim his immortal soul, he could ensure himself at least an immortal memorial, some action to ensure that his name, and the name of the love he could never find again, would be forever linked in the tales
told amongst the realms, in all the various futures which lay ahead.
Thus did Esbern Snare the Northern Werewolf redeem his honour, if not his soul.
BOOK THREE
A ROSE REDEEMED; A ROSE REVIVED
Three swift swords for the sisters three;
The first shall be of ivory;
The second sword’s forged of rarest gold;
The third shall be cut from a granite fold.
The first sword’s name is ‘Just Old Man’;
And the second is called ‘The Urgent Brand’;
While the third thirsty sword of that glamour’d three
Is the hungry blade named ‘Liberty’.
—Wheldrake,
Border Ballads
CHAPTER ONE
Of Weapons Possessed of Will; A Family Reunion; Old Friends Found; A Quest Resumed.
NOW ELRIC FOUGHT to resist the force of Arioch’s rage; stretching out his left hand as if to grasp at the fabric of time and space and slow his rush through the dimensions; clinging to his runesword while it howled and gibbered in his right hand, itself insane with mysterious supernatural anger at the Lord of Hell who had expended the last of his temporal energy on this plane in one final act of petty, and passing, vengeance. For Arioch had proved himself as whimsical as any other denizen of Chaos, willing to destroy all hoped-for futures in order to satisfy a momentary irritation. Which was why Chaos could be trusted no better than Law (which was inclined to permit similar actions, but in the name of principles whose purpose and point were frequently long-forgotten, creating as much mortal misery in the name of Intellect as Chaos wrought in the name of Sensibility).
Such thoughts were available to the albino, as he was flung through the radiantly pierced barriers of the multiverse—for almost an eternity—because, when eternity eludes the consciousness, then soon all which that consciousness knows is the singular agony of an expectation never quite fulfilled. Eternity is the end to time; the end to the suffering of anticipation; it is the beginning of life, of life unbounded! And thus Elric sought to embrace the beauty and the psychic grace of that perfect promised multiverse, perpetually in a state of transformation, between Life and Death, between Law and Chaos—accepting all, loving all, protecting all—that state of forever-changing societies, natural intelligences, benign supernature, evolving realities, forever relishing their own and others’ differences, all in harmonious anarchy—that natural state, the wise ones knew, of each and every creature in each and every world, and which some imagined as a single omniscient entity, as the perfect Sum of Entirety.
Human love, thought the albino, as universe upon universe engulfed and expelled him, is our only constancy, the only quality with which we may conquer the inescapable logic of Entropy. And at that the sword trembled in his hand and seemed to be trying to twist free, almost as if it were disgusted by such sentimental altruism. But Elric clung to the blade as his only reality, his only security in this wildness of ruptured time and space, where the meaning of colour became profound and the meaning of sound unfathomable.
Again it wrenched at his grasp so that he must hold tighter to the quillons as the hellsword began to take its own determined course through the dimensions. It was at this point that Elric grew to respect the extraordinary power which dwelled within the black blade, of a power which seemed born of Chaos yet which had loyalty neither to Chaos nor to Law—yet neither did it serve the Balance—of a power so thoroughly a thing of itself that it required few outward manifestations and yet which might be the profound opposite of everything Elric valued and fought to create—as if some warring force were symbolized by this ironic bond between yearning idealist and cynical solipsist, a force, perhaps, which might be discovered in most thinking creatures, and which found over-dramatic resolution in the symbiosis between Stormbringer and the Last Lord of Melniboné …
Now the albino flew behind the runesword as it carved a path for itself—almost as if it drove back against Arioch’s power, refusing the consequences not from any emotion Elric could understand, but to prove some principle as thoroughly upheld as any perhaps less mysterious principles of Law, almost as if it sought to correct some obscene malformation in the fabric of the cosmos, some event which it refused to permit …
Now Elric was caught up in a kind of intradimensional hurricane, in which a thousand reverses occurred within his brain at once and he became a thousand other creatures for an instant, and, where he lived through more than ten other lives; a fate only minimally different from the one that was familiar to him and so vast did the multiverse become, so unthinkable, that he began to go mad as he attempted to make sense of just a fraction of what laid siege to his sanity and he begged the sword to rest, to pause in its complex flight, to spare him.
But he knew that the sword considered him secondary to its chief concern, which was to re-establish itself at the point it felt was right for it in the multiverse … Perhaps it was an impulse no more conscious than instinct …
Elric’s senses multiplied and became changed.
There was a sweet, calm sound of roses while his father’s music flooded his arteries with bewildered sadness … with excruciating anxiety … as if to let him know that the time was almost over when Sadric had any choice but to seek out his son’s soul and join it with his own …
At which the howling runesword gave up a bellow of resistance, as if this, too, attacked its own ambitions and the logic of its own unreasoning determination to survive without compromise with any other entity in the multiverse—even, ultimately, Elric who must be extinguished, as soon as he had fulfilled his final destiny, which at present was known to no-one, even the runesword, which did not live in any past, present or future understood by creatures of the Lower, Middle or Higher Worlds; yet it wove a pattern of its own, calling upon vaster energies than any Elric had witnessed, than any it had ever been required to utilize in giving aid to him in return for the souls not apportioned to Arioch …
“Elric!”
“Father, I fear I have lost thy soul …!”
“My soul shall never be lost to thee, my son …”
A bright and sudden gleam of hard, pink-gold light, like a weapon against his eyes, and a smack of freezing air against his flesh, and a rhythmic sound, so familiar, so wonderful to him, that he felt the hot tears fall once, then twice, upon his chilled cheeks …
“So Gaynor rode to The Ship That Was,
And made of it his own,
And three sisters rare he did ensnare,
To insure the Chaos Throne.
The first of these sisters was The Unfolded Flower,
The second was Duty’s Bud,
While the third-born they christened Secret Thorn
And her bower was built of blood.”
And, sobbing, Elric fell into the welcoming arms of that great-hearted, if dwarfish, poet, Master Ernest Wheldrake. “My dear, good, sir! My good, old friend! Greetings to thee, Prince Elric. Does something pursue thee?” And he pointed back up through the deep snow-banks terracing the valley wall, where a fresh-ploughed furrow ran, as if Elric had slid from the top of the cliff to the bottom.
“I am glad to see thee, Master Wheldrake.” He brushed caked snow from his clothing, wondering, not for the first time, if he had dreamed his journey through the multiverse or if the dragon venom, perhaps, possessed more than restorative qualities. He glanced across the fresh-trod snow of a small clearing in the winter birchwood and saw Stormbringer leaning, almost casually, against a tree, and for a pure, clear moment, he knew absolute hatred of the blade, that part of himself he could no longer exist without or (as some small voice continued to tell him) that part, perhaps, that he wished to keep alive, since only in the rage of supernatural battle did he ever know any true relief from the burden of his conscience.
With deliberate slowness he strolled to the tree, picked up the blade and sheathed it as a man might sheath any ordinary weapon, his attention still upon his friend’s disheveled features. “How came yo
u here, Master Wheldrake? Is it a plane familiar to you?”
“Familiar enough, Prince Elric. And to yourself, I should think. We have not left the realm where flows the Heavy Sea.”
And now Elric realized exactly what the Black Sword had done, dragging them both back to the very world from which Arioch had sought to banish them. And this suggested that the hellblade had motives of its own for ensuring his remaining here. He said none of this to Wheldrake but listened while his friend explained how Charion Phatt was at last reunited with her Uncle Fallogard and her grandmother.
“But Koropith remains lost to us at present,” the poet concluded. “Fallogard, however, has a close sense of his son’s presence. So we are hopeful, dear prince, that soon all surviving Phatts shall know again the pleasures of family security.” He lowered his voice to a kind of conspiratorial squeak. “There is some talk of marriage between myself and my beloved Charion.”
And, before he could burst into verse, the snowy branches of a forest path parted and here came the confident Charion, carrying the handles of a litter on which Mother Phatt sat, smiling and nodding, like a queen in a procession, the other end borne by her tall, untidy son who flashed a smile of jolly recognition towards the albino, as one might greet a familiar face at a local tavern. Only Charion seemed a little disturbed to discover the newcomer. “I sensed your destruction a year ago,” she said quietly, after she had lowered her grandmother’s litter to the ground. “I sensed you blasted out of any recognizable form of existence. How could you have survived that? Are you Gaynor or some shape-changer in Elric’s guise?”
“I assure you, Mistress Phatt,” said Elric, also disturbed, “I am only the one you know. For some reason, Fate does not want me annihilated as yet. It seems, indeed, that I am surviving annihilation rather successfully.”
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