The Dreamthief's Daughter: A Tale of the Albino

by Michael Moorcock

  But it required fuel for my flexing muscles, my heaving lungs, fuel to power my warrior’s body as well as my warlock’s wisdom. Only two sources for that fuel existed. One was a combination of herbs and other ingredients which allowed me to lead an active life. The other was the sword. Understanding what the sword did, my ordinary human self was thoroughly repulsed. Yet I also understood that survival depended upon my using her and that she would not allow me to act against my own interest. My affection for Ravenbrand remained, but I had a new respect for her. Clearly this sword chose who would wield her.

  All my lessons of swordsmanship came back to me as I prepared to do battle. I was not reluctant to fight. I panted to fight, I yearned to draw blood.

  “Prince Gaynor.” Elric’s haughty formality made my Saxon manners seem loose. “Has your death time come so soon?”

  The Hungarian’s damaged face had a demented look. “What are you? Do you control that human?”

  “You’re impertinent, Prince Gaynor. Your questions are offensive and coarsely put. I am of the Royal Line of Melniboné and your superior. Throw down that bow. Or my sword drinks your soul.”

  Gaynor was frightened by the changes in me, even though he guessed the reason. He had not been prepared for anything like this. Klosterheim’s knife no longer pressed against my side. Gaynor’s cadaverous colleague was staring with dawning intelligence. He had seen Elric run through his master and be absorbed by my body. He knew what I was, and I frightened him.

  The sword was hungry for their souls. I could feel her needs speeding from her hilt to my hands. I did all I could to resist, but she became increasingly demanding.

  “Arioch!” The name formed on my lips. “Arioch!” It tasted like the most exquisite wine. I was one with a being for whom words had specific flavors and for whom music was also color.

  “He’ll not empower you here.” Gaynor was recovering himself. He unstrung his bow. “Not in Mu Ooria. Law rules here now.”

  I took charge of the quivering blade. I replaced it firmly in the rough sheath I had made. Gaynor had revealed something. Perhaps a weakness. Were his own supernatural allies also unable to enter Moo Uria herself? Did she have subtler defenses?

  “Only when the city’s taken,” I said on a hunch.

  And then he realized what he had revealed to me and smiled a wry acknowledgment. I now thought he had slipped into the city with a few men, but could not draw on his ally’s powers. It was a tribute to his daring that he came here with only Klosterheim to help him steal the Raven Sword.

  “You understand much of the multiverse, cousin,” said Gaynor.

  “Only in my studies and dreams,” I told him. “I am here at the request of my blood kin. Otherwise I’d have no part of this business.”

  “Blood kin?”

  I became circumspect. I now knew what Ulric had previously not known.

  I could scent familiar, ancient perfumes, traces of mustier smells. I began to take an interest in my surroundings.

  With my attention off him, Gaynor made several rapid steps backwards, believing himself out of range of my sword. He yelled and gestured. Klosterheim drew his own sword and ran to join him. I began to smile. This promised tasty sport. My left hand closed over the scabbard and held it firmly so I could draw the sword rapidly if I had to. She was murmuring and quivering again. She echoed my own rapidly changing moods.

  My ears were far sharper than when they belonged only to von Bek. I heard swift, slithering movements from the shadows. While Gaynor’s most powerful allies might not be able to help him here, his lowlier troops were all too evident. He had not, after all, braved the city with only Klosterheim’s support. I could see them, closing in from all sides. Their fear of cats dispelled, they had gathered enough courage to obey Gaynor and follow him. The gigantic grotesques Oona had called troogs. They snuffled and grunted in anticipation of a flesh feast. I recalled that the Off-Moo had called them cannibals.

  I began to laugh. “Here’s an irony, gentlemen,” I said. I made a fluid movement, and the black blade was loose again. The runes ran crimson up and down her length. The iron pulsed and crooned. I began to pad like a cat towards Gaynor and Klosterheim. I broke into a trot as I closed the distance between us. The dark iron lifted higher. At one with my blade and my doppelgänger I knew a sense of boundless power. My laughter filled those immeasurable caverns!

  Gaynor shrieked for his followers to attack. I defended myself against a blizzard of iron. Maces and swords swung at me from all sides. I dodged them with preternatural instincts and reflexes. I had soon cleared a space around me, but they scarcely feared me. I saw their nostrils dilating as they sniffed. I suspected they could hardly see me. Even here, they had no need of eyes. They had numbers. They had my scent. They were waiting only for Gaynor’s signal before moving in again. This time it seemed they must surely crush me.

  Now the black blade was howling. The sword which I called Ravenbrand and my alter ego called Stormbringer would not let me sheathe her again until she had been blooded. Her song blended with the delicate chimes of the crystal above. Her song was a hungry one. In her time, she had slain whole armies. She demanded her feast. She had moaned and lusted so long for satisfaction.

  At last she could take her pleasure. At last she could feed. And deliver to me the energy I would need for my next Summoning.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Power of Two

  G aynor shouted an order and the monsters were upon me. Seconds later I was carrying the attack. The sword was alive. She possessed an intelligence of her own. She slashed red gouting trails into the surrounding air, slid through flesh and bone and sinew and drew deep of this crude lifestuff, the souls of the slain. Every soul went to satisfy my own flagging substance. I had a taste for the work. I hacked my way through to where Gaynor and Klosterheim stood, on the edge of the square, goading the troogs and savages to kill me. I cleared a path towards the two leaders as another might clear his way through tall grass. They began to be afraid of me.

  I was used to that fear. I expected little else. All humans had it. I despised it. No such weakness was allowed to infect the blood of a Melnibonéan. My folk had ruled the world for ten thousand years. They had determined the histories of the Young Kingdoms, those nations of humankind. My race was older, wiser and infinitely crueler than men. We knew nothing of the softer ways, the cruder ways of creatures we regarded as scarcely higher than apes. In my bones I had only contempt for them.

  I was a Melnibonéan aristocrat. I had known more terror in the training for my sorcerous powers than these creatures had capacity or senses to experience. I had earned my alliances with the elementals and the lesser Lords of Chaos. I could raise the dead. I could force my will on any natural creature and could destroy an enemy with nothing but my black runeblade.

  I was Elric of Melniboné, Last of the Sorcerer-Emperors, Prince of Ruins, Lord of the Lost. Called Traitor and Womanslayer. Wherever I went I was feared and courted, even by those who hated me, for I had a power no human could begin to control.

  Even amongst my own people, I had only ever had one living rival. My family had kept its power down the millennia by cultivating its traditional learning and constantly making new alliances with Chaos. Our household gods were Dukes of Hell. Our patron was Lord Arioch of Chaos, whose fiefdom included a million supernatural realms. Whose power was vast enough to destroy them all. Those of my blood could call casually upon such forces for help. A handful of us had controlled the world for ten thousand years. We might have continued to rule, had I not betrayed that blood and made myself an outlaw everywhere.

  “Arioch!” Again the name came readily to my lips. Arioch was my own patron Lord of Chaos, whose power was shared by the Black Sword, who fed from the same souls which fed me and the sword. Were we one creature—sword, god and mortal—truly potent only when all parts came together? These were easy, casual thoughts for a Melnibonéan. What were less familiar were the notions of morality, of right and wrong, which now c
ontaminated my brain and had done, it seemed, from childhood. A burden I had as yet not managed to abandon. My father had loathed me for this. My other relatives had been embarrassed. Many supported my cousin Yyrkoon’s desire to replace me.

  “Arioch!”

  He could not or would not manifest himself here.

  I heard a murmur in the back of my brain, as if that great Duke of Hell tried to speak, but then even that became faint.

  Gaynor was growing more confident.

  Recklessly he yelled for his remaining forces to attack me.

  There was every chance I could be borne down under the weight of their numbers. Even the sword, which seemed to have a life of its own, could not kill them all. With desperate clarity my mind began to project a different quality of thought, like rapidly growing tendrils, into the surrounding supernatural realms, those infinite worlds the Off-Moo called the multiverse.

  I was not sure I would be answered. I knew Duke Arioch could not aid me. But I had considered all the likely dangers I would have to face when I accepted the dreamthief’s help. And while this human brain might lack some of the subtlety of my own, it was a good one. There was every chance I would be successful.

  I began to murmur the deceptively simple mantra which helped my mind follow certain paths, engage with the stuff of the supernatural, speak a language which no living creature on the Earth could understand. The verses were plain enough. They connected me to the complexities of the elemental spheres, where I might, if luck was on my side, find the means of escaping an increasingly likely fate.

  I fought on, pushing back first one wall of battling flesh and then another. Yet I never gained ground, was always threatened with losing the last few meters I had cleared. The bodies became a barrier which I could use to my advantage. Never once did I lose that special concentration which continued to send tentacles of thought through all planes of the multiverse until, just for a second, I seemed to touch an alien intellect. One that recognized me.

  And one I, too, recognized.

  I sensed a world of water. Universe upon universe of water. Populated water. Water that coursed from one plane of existence to another. Ancient water. Newborn water. Swirling and still, wild and tranquil. Water lapped my face, even as a score of monsters fell to my hungry sword.

  I began to sing—

  King of all oceans; king of all the waters of the worlds;

  King of the deep darkness, king of silence, king of pearls;

  King of washed bones, king of all our drowned;

  King of sadness, of sinking souls unfound,

  Revive our ancient friendship, our enemies confound.

  As your old tides curl their currents like woven threads,

  Recoll ect our bargains. Recall our sacrificial dead.

  Bring honor to those compacts, and bind them fresh around,

  Tie stronger still the white knots and the red,

  Two kingdoms and two wounds. A mutual victory.

  A memory, a means to meet our double destiny.

  A tide suddenly swirled around me, passed and was gone. I looked for water but saw only the glittering faraway lake, the long prospect which stretched towards it from the square said by Oona to be the lair of the great World Worm. All of this I took for granted, for I had seen more monsters and miracles than most mortals, but, as the cannibals formed a circle around me and began to press in again, I knew I was lost if King Straasha, my old ally, avatar of all the gods of all the oceans of the multiverse, could not hear me, or did not wish to hear me.

  Gaynor saw the thing first. My cousin whirled and pointed, as he signaled Klosterheim to flee. Gaynor had no disrespect for my powers of sorcery. He had counted on my not being able to use them here.

  Beyond the quays and the tethered boats, the water was rising. It formed a towering wall, did not move like a tidal wave, but stayed in place, quivering, threatening. The wall grew higher. If it fell, it would extinguish the whole city.

  Now the help I had summoned threatened to kill my friends as well as my enemies. I knew a sardonic moment. This seemed to be my perpetual destiny.

  Yet I was sure the Off-Moo were not as vulnerable as they appeared. They must know by now that I fought Gaynor and his minions in the square. Had they fled? Or were they preparing defenses?

  The wall of water began to move. It gathered itself together. It started to form a shape. And soon, in shimmering outline, I distinguished the bulky figure of a giant. He was all shifting, swirling pale green water, never stable, never completely still, with pale blue eyes that searched the city and, at length, found mine.

  Gaynor’s followers fell back screaming for orders. Gaynor knew he could not possibly begin to fight King Straasha. A heavy, wet movement brought water running around our feet. King Straasha stepped ashore. His huge body walked, step by liquid step, up the great prospect towards us. If that weight of water should lose its form, it would drown us entirely.

  As Gaynor searched for the swiftest escape route, another human figure appeared on the far side of the square and ran towards me.

  Oona, the dreamthief’s daughter.

  “Warn the Off-Moo,” I said. “They are in danger.”

  “They know of their danger,” she said.

  “Then save yourself.”

  “I’m safe enough, Lord Elric.” She addressed me casually by this name, as if she had always known it. “But you must go. You have achieved your purpose here. The rest is work for me and the others to do. At least for now.”

  I began to suggest she stay with me for safety, but Klosterheim flung a dagger at me. I was distracted by its clattering to the ground a few meters away. When I looked up again, Oona had gone.

  King Straasha was still wading towards me. I could tell the action was painful to him, but he was genial enough. “Well, little mortal, I am here because I have never yet broken a bargain and I have a certain affection for your kind. What would you have me do? Does this city have to be destroyed?”

  “I need your help, sire. I need to move through the realms of water. I need to find the realm I left—the realm where my mortal form remains.”

  He understood.

  “Water to water,” he said, “and fire to fire. For the respect your ancestors showed my folk, I will do, Prince Elric, as you desire.”

  A vast watery hand descended towards me. I gasped, sensing that I was drowning as I struggled in King Straasha’s grip. I feared he would kill me by accident.

  Then I was engulfed in a bubble of air, held by a gigantic hand. I knew a sudden sense of peace, of absolute security. I was in the safekeeping of the king of water elementals. We flew over the crags and spires of Mu Ooria, until all I could see was the glowing lake surrounded by a mighty darkness. That part of me which was von Bek would have been incredulous, had not that part of me which was Elric shown such familiarity with the supernatural. Within me, even as I experienced the impossible, I could sense that von Bek believed in a world where all was Law, save for occasional upheavals of Chaos, and I believed in a multiverse where all was Chaos, where Law was something carved from that stuff and maintained by the will of mortals and the designs of the Lords of the Higher Worlds. Chaos was clearly the dominant force in all the realms, natural and supernatural. Two fundamentally opposed views of existence, yet in balance within the single body, the only mind. The harmony of opposites, indeed!

  Von Bek neither hesitated nor questioned what I as Elric determined. For this was a world I understood and which had been a total mystery to him. Of course, he had all my memories, as I had all of his. For the moment the dominant me was the sorcerer-king, calling upon a great manifestation of an elemental, who served neither Law nor Chaos, nor any other thing, but lived to exist and perpetuate that existence endlessly.

  The city was lost to sight. King Straasha hesitated, contemplating what he must do next. He and I had already communicated something which could not be represented by spoken language.

  Unlike most sorcerer races, Melnibonéans had delibera
tely cultivated alliances with the elementals. With those great, old beings who were the embodiment of familiar and unfamiliar animals—with Meerclar of the Cats and even Ap-yss-Alara, Queen of the Swine, who was said to refuse all mortal advances and would continue to do so while one of them still ate pork.

  Since pork was not eaten by any Melnibonéan of the higher castes, my folk had first made their accommodation with the queen.

  The blood fever was dying away in me. For the moment Stormbringer was satiated. The energy we had acquired was crude and would not last long, but it enabled me to do what I must. I delighted in the knowledge that I was thwarting Gaynor not on one plane, but on two or more.

  We came to rest in the center of the lake. For a second I looked on a placid stretch of sparkling water: moonlight illuminating a Mediterranean idyll. Then King Straasha made a gesture with his other watery hand. He was laughing. Instantly I stared down into the wide mouth of a raging maelstrom. It sent clutching, foamy tendrils up towards me. It roared and lusted for my life and soul. It swirled and eddied and whispered for me to jump from King Straasha’s protecting hand, down into the sublime rapture of its heart. That hypnotic sound, at once shriek and murmur, drew me helplessly towards it. My animal instinct was to resist, but I knew I must not.