When he returned to his companions the Tangled Woman had gone, taking whatever payment she required, and all that were left were the dead.
“The Chaos army is defeated,” said Princess Shanug’a. “But Chaos still dwells within our realm. Gaynor still has power here. He will soon come against us again.” She had recaptured her horse.
“We must not let him come again,” said the Rose, cleaning Swift Thorn upon a scrap of satin surcoat. “We must drive him back to hell and ensure he never more threatens your realm!”
“It is true,” said Elric, moody with his own unquiet thoughts, “we must track the beast back to its lair and it must be confined, even if we cannot kill it. Can you find the way, Charion Phatt?”
“I can find it,” she said. She had several minor wounds, which the others had helped her dress, but there was a kind of breathless pleasure in the way she moved, as if she were still exulting in her unexpected salvation. “He has returned, without doubt, to The Ship That Was.”
“His stronghold …” murmured the Rose.
“Where,” said Princess Mishiguya, settling herself in her saddle, “his power must be greatest.”
“There is a power there, to be sure,” agreed Charion, drawing her brows together—“a mightier power than any he commanded on this field. Yet I cannot completely understand why he did not use it against us here.”
“Perhaps he awaits us,” said Elric. “Perhaps he knows we will come …”
“We must go to reclaim the Rose’s treasures,” said Princess Tayaratuka. “We cannot allow Prince Gaynor to hold them.”
“Indeed,” agreed Elric with some feeling and a renewing sense of urgency. He had remembered that his father’s soul remained in Gaynor’s keeping and that very soon Arioch or some other Duke of Hell would try to claim it, whereupon it would flee to him and hide within his own being, forever united, father and son.
Elric drew off his black gauntlets and put his hands upon his horse’s muscular flanks, but nothing would take away the chill that gripped his being. No ordinary warmth could comfort him.
“What of the others?” said Charion. “What of my uncle and my grandma, my cousin and my betrothed? I think they must be reassured.”
They rode slowly back towards the cavern city, stabling their horses before beginning the long climb up the steps and walkways hidden within the walls, and when they finally reached the balcony where they had left the others, they found only Wheldrake.
He was distraught. His eyes were full of tears. He embraced Charion Phatt but his gesture was one of consolation rather than joy. “They have gone,” he said. “They saw that you were losing the battle. Or thought they saw that. Fallogard had to consider his son and his mother. He did not want to leave, but I made him. He had the power to do it. He could have taken me, but there was no time and I would not go.”
“Gone?” said Charion, holding him at arm’s length now. “Gone, my love?”
“Mother Phatt opened what she called a ‘tuck’ and they crawled under it, to disappear—at the very moment when that vast thicket materialized. It was too late. They have escaped!”
“From what?” yelled Charion Phatt, enraged. “To what? Oh, must we begin this search all over again?”
“It seems so, my dear,” said Wheldrake meekly, “if we are to have your uncle’s blessing, as we had hoped.”
“We must follow them,” she said firmly.
“Not yet,” said the Rose softly. “First we must ride to The Ship That Was. I have a small reckoning to extract from Gaynor the Damned—and from the company I suspect he keeps.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Concerning the Capturing and the Auctioning of Certain Occult Artifacts: Reverses in the Higher Worlds; The Rose Exacts her Revenge; Resolving a Cosmic Compromise.
The little caravan came to a ragged halt as the cliffs were reached at last. Their remaining horses, sometimes carrying double, were almost completely exhausted. But they had found the Heavy Sea; dragging its dark and weighty waves upon the shore, then dragging them back again, all beneath a slow, morbid sky. They looked down now at the narrow entrance of a bay, where the sea seemed calmer. Its high, obsidian walls enclosed a beach of oddly coloured shingle, of bits of quartz and shards of limestone, of semi-precious stones and glaring flint.
Anchored in the bay was a ship which Elric recognized at once. Her sail was furled, but the great covered cage in the forecastle made her prow-heavy. Gaynor’s ship and her crew had rejoined their master. On the far side of a spur of rock, which obscured their sight of the rest of the beach, there seemed to be activity—perhaps a figure or two—and now they must allow their horses to pick their way slowly down the narrow track from cliff to beach, threatening to slip on the shiny rock. Then at last the hoofs were grinding down upon the gleaming shingle, making a sound like ice being crushed, and the companions could see that the beach extended beyond the spur and that it was possible to ride along it.
Princess Tayaratuka rode a little ahead; then came her sisters (sharing a horse). Then came the Rose, followed by Elric and Charion Phatt, with Wheldrake’s tiny hands about her waist. A strangely disparate party, but with many shared ambitions …
Then they had rounded the point and they looked upon The Ship That Was.
Before them stood one of the most grotesque settlements Elric had ever seen.
Once it had, indeed, been a ship. A ship whose score of decks rose higher and higher to form what had been a vast, floating ziggurat crewed by huge, unhuman creatures; a ship worthy of Chaos herself. Her lines had the appearance of something organic which had petrified suddenly after being tortured into unnatural forms. Here and there were suggestions of faces, limbs, torsos, of otherworldly beasts and birds, of gigantic fish and creatures which were combinations of all these things. And the ship seemed to Elric to be of a piece with the Heavy Sea which, like green quartz turned viscous and sluggish now, flung its spume upon that gloomy strand where men, women and children, in every variety of clothing, in rags and silks and shoes which rarely matched, in the filthy sables of some slaughtered king, in the jerkins and breeks of a nameless sailor, in the dresses and undergarments of the drowned, in the hats and jewels and embroidery with which the dead had once celebrated their vanity, moved backwards and forwards amongst those dreadful breakers, amongst carrion and flotsam brought here on the morose tide, the detritus of centuries, to scuttle with any treasure they might discover back to the warren of the ship, which lay at a slight angle on the beach, its starboard buried, its port a-tilt, where perhaps a mast had halted its complete upending.
A dead husk, the ship was infested with its human inhabitants much as the body of some slain sea-giant might be infested with worms. They stained it with their very presence, dishonoured it by their squalor, as the bones of the fallen are stained and dishonoured by the droppings and the debris of the crows which feed upon their putrefying flesh. Within the ship was constant movement, an impression of one writhing mass of life without individual identity or concerns, without dignity, respect or shame—wriggling, scampering, quarreling, fighting, squealing, roaring, whining and hissing, as if in imitation of that horrible sea itself, these were those humans pledged to Chaos but not yet transformed by Chaos; creatures who doubtless had had little choice in their masters as Gaynor carried the banner of Count Mashabak out into this world. They were wretches now, however, and they had only their shame. They would not look up as Elric and his companions rode towards the looming shadow of The Ship That Was.
They would not answer the albino’s questions. They would not listen when the sisters tried to speak to them. Terror and shame consumed them. They had already given up hope, even of an afterlife, for they reasoned that the misery they suffered surely proved that the entire multiverse had been conquered by their tormentors.
“We are here,” said Elric at last, “to take prisoner Prince Gaynor the Damned and to hold him to account!”
Yet even this did not move them. They were used to Gaynor’s dec
eptions, the games he had, in his moments of boredom, played with their lives and their emotions. To them, all speech had become a lie.
The seven rode to where a kind of drawbridge had been built into the body of the upturned ship and, without hesitation, they cantered inside, to discover a nightmare of murky galleries and ragged holes, where crude doors had been carved between bulkheads, all strung with shreds of net and rope and various roughly made implements, drying bits of cloth and rag, of tattered clothing and ill-washed linen, where lean-to shacks and teetering shanties were erected, often on the very brink of an injured deck. Something large and strong had pierced this ship and brought her to her end, rupturing her innards.
Through the portholes from deck to deck poured a foggy, unpleasant light, creating a lattice of pale and dark shadows within the ship’s serpentine bowels, making the shapes of the inhabitants equally shadowy, like ghosts, crouching, skulking, coughing, wheezing, tittering, too despairing to look upon the living without increasing their already unbearable misery. The floor of The Ship That Was was deep with human ordure, with discarded litter even they did not value. Wheldrake put a hand to his mouth and dropped down from Charion’s horse. “Ugh, this is worse than the Stepney warrens. I’ll let you go about your business. I have nothing useful to do here.” And somewhat to Charion’s surprise he returned to the comparative wholesomeness of that dark beach.
“It is true,” said the Rose, “that he can do little that is practical. But his poetic inspiration is without parallel when it comes to tuning oneself to the harmony of the multiverse …”
“It is his most delightful quality,” agreed Charion with a lover’s enthusiasm, glad that what she admired in her beau was reflected in another’s opinion—which went a short distance to disproving what lovers always suspect of themselves; that they have gone entirely mad.
Now Elric was losing patience with that conspiracy of the desperate and the dumb. As his warhorse stamped upon the filthy shingle, he drew the runesword out of its scabbard so Stormbringer’s black radiance poured into that great, ruined space, and a dangerous murmuring song came out of it, as if it lusted for the soul of he who had tried to steal its energy.
And the warhorse reared up, pawing at the murky air; and the albino’s scarlet eyes blazed through all that layered darkness, and he cried out the name of the one who had wronged them, who had created all this, who had abused every power, every responsibility, every duty, every treaty, every trust ever placed in him.
“Gaynor! Gaynor the Damned! Gaynor, thou foulest hellspawn! We have come to be revenged on thee!”
From somewhere high above, in what had once been the deepest and strongest parts of the ship, where the darkness was complete, came a distant chuckling that could only emanate from that faceless helm.
“Such rhetoric, my dear prince! Such bluster!”
Then Elric was finding a way for himself and his horse, crashing upwards into the shadows, through the trellises of misty light, up companionways which had once felt the feet of massive sailors and which were now all crowded and cluttered with the debris of these human inhabitants, knocking aside steaming pots and scattering fires, heedless of any damage, knowing that whatever materials constituted this hull it could not burn from mortal flames, the Rose close at his heels, shouting for the sisters and Charion to follow.
Riding through galleries of filthy darkness, where startled eyes stared for a second from a cranny or hunched figures skittered into ill-smelling holes; riding through this collection of hopeless souls, to seek their master and (all manner of entities and forces willing) free them from his tyranny! It was the Rose who now threw up her head in a clear, sweet song—a song which spoke, through its melodies, of lost love, lost lands and frustrated revenge—of a dedication to make an end to this particular injustice, this obscene perversion in the order of the multiverse; the Rose who drew out her sword Swift Thorn and brandished it like a banner. Then the sisters, too, had drawn their blades—one of ivory, one of granite, one of gold—and were joining in with their own harmonies of outrage, determined that the cause of their despair should perpetrate no further harm. Only Charion Phatt sang no song. She was an inexpert rider and had fallen behind the others. Sometimes she looked back, perhaps hoping that Wheldrake had decided to follow after all.
They reached at last a pair of massive doors, their carvings so alien that they were, right or wrong way up, indecipherable to the mortals. Once these doors had guarded the quarters of whatever beast had ruled the ship and had been deep at the vessel’s heart, but now they lay close to the roof from beyond which could be heard the slow booming of the heavy breakers.
“Perhaps,” came Gaynor’s amused tones again, “I should reward such folly. I sought to bring you here, sweet princesses, to show off my little kingdom to you, but you refused to come! Now curiosity brings you here, anyway.”
“It is not curiosity, Prince Gaynor, which brings us to The Ship That Was.” Princess Shanug’a dropped from the horse she shared with her sister and went to push at one of the heavy doors, forcing it back a fraction—enough for them to pass through after they had all dismounted. “It is our intention to end your rule in this realm!”
“Brave words now, madam. Were it not for primitive earth-magic, you would be my slaves at this moment. Just as you shall be my slaves very soon.”
The foggy air was thick with hot, unnatural odours and brands burned in it, scarcely casting better light than the flickering candles whose huge yellow stems dripped hissing wax upon what had once been an intricately carved roof but which was now covered in matted straw and rags. Webs were silhouetted in the air, hinting at the workings of enormous spiders, and from the deeper shadows came a scuttling that could only be of rats. Yet it seemed to Elric that all this was merely an illusion, a curtain which was being parted, for into view—and he was never sure how—came the fierce, rich, roiling colours of Chaos—a great sphere whose contents were in constant movement—and this displayed the dark outline of Gaynor the Damned, standing before it as if at some kind of altar on which he had placed some few small objects …
“Oh, you are most welcome,” he said. He was half-crazed with delight at what he was sure must soon be their acceptance of his sovereignty. “There is little need for this display of challenges and insults, my friends, for I can surely solve our differences!” The helm pulsed now with a scarlet fire, shot through with veins of black. “Let us put an end to exuberant violence and settle these matters as wiser folk should.”
“I have heard your reasoning tone before, Gaynor,” said the Rose contemptuously, “when you tried to make my sisters bargain for their honour or their lives. I do not bargain with you, any more than did they!”
“Long memories, sweet lady. I had forgotten such a trifle and so should you. It was yesterday. I promise you a glorious rule in tomorrow!”
“What can you promise that we could possibly value?” said Charion Phatt. “Your mind is chiefly mysterious to me, but I know that you lie to us. You have all but lost your grip upon this realm. The power which aided thee, aids thee no longer! But you would make it aid thee, again …”
At this the great pulsing ectoplasmic sphere behind Gaynor flared and shivered and revealed, for an instant, three glaring eyes, tusks, drooling jaws and furious claws, and Elric realized to his horror that Mashabak was not free, that Gaynor had somehow kept control of the prison, appearing to do Count Mashabak’s bidding while scheming to take the power of a Chaos Lord for himself!
Arioch had been banished from this plane, dragged through the dimensions by the last brave action of Esbern Snare, and Gaynor had been more audacious than any of them could imagine—he had determined that he should take the place of Arioch, rather than freeing his master! But though he held the Chaos Lord prisoner, he had no means of harnessing his power, of using it for his own ends. Was this why, with his leechblade, he had sought to steal the energy of Stormbringer and its sister swords?
“Aye,” said Gaynor, reading his ene
my’s expression. “I had planned to gain the necessary power by other means. But I am a practical immortal, as thou must understand by now, and if I must bargain—why I shall happily go to market with thee!”
“You have nothing I need, Gaynor,” said Elric coldly.
But the ex-Prince of the Universal was already mocking him, holding up one of the objects he had placed there and jeering softly. “Do you not want this, Prince Elric? Is this not what you have sought for so long? Across the realms, sir? With such considerable impatience, sir?”
And Elric saw that it was the box of black rosewood, its gnarled surfaces all carved with black roses. Even from here he could smell its wonderful perfume. His father’s soulbox.
And again Gaynor jeered, louder now. “It was stolen by one of your sorcerer ancestors, given to your mother, then your father (who conceived his extraordinary deception once he understood what it was!), whose servant lost it! It was purchased, I believe, for a few groats by its owner in Menii. A pirate auction. Some small irony is to be enjoyed, I’d say …”
The Rose shouted suddenly, “You shall not bargain with us for that box, Gaynor!”
And Elric wondered why she had grown subtly more aggressive since they had entered those doors, as if she had rehearsed this moment, as if she knew exactly what she had to say and do.
“But I must, madam. I must!” Gaynor opened the box and drew out of it, between flickering blue finger and thumb, a great, lush crimson rose. He held it up by its dewy stem. It seemed to have been fresh-picked a moment earlier. A perfect rose. “The last living thing in your land, madam! Save yourself, of course. The only other survivor of that particularly enjoyable victory. Like you, madam, it has survived all that Chaos could do to it. Up to now …”
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