Gaynor jumped his horse over a pile of bodies and turned, the Runestaff held in his gauntleted hand. “You cannot kill me while I hold this. You are fools to try. And while I hold this—I hold the key to all Creation!”
Elric and I did not have horses capable of jumping so high. We were forced to ride around the pile of corpses while Klosterheim and the three remaining Nazis interposed themselves between us and our quarry.
“I’m no longer Knight of the Balance,” Gaynor raved, “I am Creator of All Existence!” Lifting the white sword and the Runestaff over his head, he spurred his horse, galloping off into the misty blackness, leaving his followers to slow our pursuit.
I took no pleasure in that killing. Only Klosterheim escaped, disappearing soundlessly amongst the great pillars. I made to go after him, but Elric stopped me. “Gaynor must be our only prey.” He pointed. “Let her guide us. She can follow his scent.”
The panther padded on without pause and our tireless blind horses trotted behind it.
Once I thought I heard Gaynor’s laughter, the galloping of hooves, and then I saw a blaze of golden light as if the Grail signaled its own abduction. The pearly grey of the horizon grew wider and taller ahead of us until its light spread like a gentle blanket of mist over the whole vast forest of stone. The air had grown noticeably cooler and there was a clean quality to it I could not identify. For a while that featureless grey field filled me with utter terror. I looked upon endless nothingness. The finale of the multiverse. Limbo.
The calmness of it frightened me. But the fear began to disappear and was replaced by an equally strong sense of reconciliation, of peace. I had been here before, after all. None of these emotions affected the course of our actions, however, for the blind horses bore us relentlessly on. The panther continued to lead us and gradually, without any dramatic event, we found ourselves slowly absorbed into the gentle grey mist.
The mist had a substantial quality to it. I could not rid myself of the sense that Gaynor and Klosterheim might rush on us suddenly from ambush. Even when, for a few brief moments, the air ahead of us was filled with the brilliant scarlet and green of huge, delicate amaryllis blooms and creamy iris, I did not drop my guard.
“What was that?” I asked Elric.
The sorcerer offered me a crooked smile. “I don’t know. Someone’s sudden thought?”
Had those shapes been formed spontaneously by the strange, rich mist? I felt the stuff could create recognizable shapes at any moment. While I had expected something more spectacular from the legendary Grey Fees, I was relieved that it was not the roiling tangled strands of Chaos others had led me to expect. I had the feeling I would only have to concentrate to see my own most bizarre imaginings made concrete. I scarcely dared think of Gaynor and Klosterheim for fear of conjuring them into being!
The sound of our horses, of our harness, of our very breathing, seemed amplified by the mist. The panther’s outline was half-hidden by it, but remained just in view, a shadow. Whether we rode on rock or hard earth was impossible to tell now, for the pewter-colored fog engulfed the horses to their bellies, washing around them like quicksilver.
The ground beneath us became softer, a turf, and the sounds were more muffled. A silence was gradually dominating us. The tension was still considerable. I spoke briefly to Elric. My voice seemed to be snatched away, deadened.
“We’ve lost him, eh? He’s escaped into the Fees. And that, I understand, is a disaster.”
When he replied I was not sure if he spoke or if I read his mind. “It makes the task more difficult.”
Everything was becoming less certain, less defined, no doubt a quality of the Grey Fees. It was supposed to be, after all, the unformed fundamental stuff of the multiverse. But no matter how obscured, the panther remained in sight. Our path remained constant. Gaynor remained a threat.
The panther stopped without warning. It lifted its handsome face, sniffing, listening, one paw raised. The tail lashed. The eyes narrowed. Something perturbed the great, black cat. It hesitated.
Elric dismounted, wading chest-high through the mist to where the panther stood. The mist thickened and I lost sight of him for a moment. When I next saw him he was talking to a human figure. I thought at first we had found Gaynor.
The figure turned and came back with him. Oona carried her bow and her quiver over her shoulder. She might have been taking a casual stroll. Her grin was challenging and told me to ask no questions.
I still did not know if she was a sorceress, an illusionist, or if she merely controlled the movements of the panther or the hare. I had no clear idea of the magic involved. I was now perfectly prepared to accept that it was indeed magic that I witnessed. These people manipulated the multiverse in ways which were normal for them but which were totally mystifying to me. Once I realized that my own familiar twentieth century seemed a world of bizarre, chaotic mechanical invention to others, as mysterious to them as theirs was to me, that it still represented a terrifying conundrum to demigods able to manipulate worlds with their own mental powers, I began to accept for its own sake everything I experienced. I did not attempt, as some lunatic mapmaker might, to impose the grid of my own limited experience and imagination upon all this complexity. I had no wish, indeed, to make any mark on it. I preferred to explore and watch and feel. The only way to understand it at all was to experience it.
The pearly mist continued to swirl around us as I joined Oona and Elric. The Grey Fees I had crossed before had been more populous. She frowned, puzzled. “This is not,” she said almost disapprovingly, “my natural element.”
“Which way have they gone?” I asked. “Do you still have their scent, Lady Oona?”
“Too much of it,” she said. She dropped to one knee and made a sweep with her left hand, as if clearing a window. Her gesture revealed a bright, sunny scene. “See!”
A scene I immediately recognized.
I gasped and moved forward, reaching towards that gap in the mist. I felt I’d been given my childhood back. But she restrained me. “I know,” she said. “It is Bek. But I do not think it is your salvation, Count Ulric.”
“What do you mean?”
She turned to her right and cleared another space in the mist. All was red and black turmoil. Beast-headed men and man-headed beasts in bloody conflict. Churned mud almost as far as the eye could see. On the horizon the ragged outline of a tall-towered city. Towards it, in triumph, rode the figure of Prince Gaynor von Minct—the one who would come to be called Gaynor the Damned.
Elric craned forward this time. He recognized the city. It was as familiar to him as Bek was to me. Familiar to me, too, now that our memories and minds had bonded. Imrryr, the Dreaming City, capital of Melniboné, the Isle of the Dragon Lords. Flames fluttered like flags from the topmost windows of her towers.
I looked back. Bek was still there. The green, gentle hills, the thick, welcoming woods, the old stones of the fortified manor farm. But now I saw that there was barbed wire around the walls. Machine-gun emplacements at the gates. Guard dogs prowling the grounds. SS uniforms everywhere. A big Mercedes staff car drove into view, speeding down the road to my old home. The driver was Klosterheim.
“How—?” I began.
“Exactly,” said Oona. “Too much spoor, as I said. He took two paths and there he is in two different worlds. He has learned more than most of us can ever know about existing in the timeless infinity of the multiverse. He still fights on at least two fronts. Which could be his weakness . . .”
“It seems to be his strength,” said Elric with his usual dry irony. “He is breaking every rule. It’s the secret of his power. But if those rules no longer have meaning . . .”
“He has won already?”
“Not everywhere,” said Oona. But it was clear she had no idea what to do next.
Elric took the initiative.
“He is in two places—and we can be in two places. We have two swords now and sword can call to sword. I must follow Gaynor to Melniboné and you m
ust follow him to Bek.”
“How can you see these places?” I asked her. “How do you select them?”
“Because I desire it?” She lowered her eyes. “We are not told,” she said. “What if the Grey Fees are created by the will and imaginations of mortals and immortals? What they most wish for and most fear are therefore created here. Created over and over again. Through the extraordinary power of human memory and desire.”
“Created and re-created throughout eternity,” mused Elric. He laid his gauntleted hand on the pommel of his runeblade. “Always a little different. Sometimes dramatically so. Memory and desire. Altered memories. Changing desires. The multiverse proliferates, growing like the veins in a leaf, the branches in a tree.”
“What we must not forget,” said Oona, “is that Gaynor has in his hands the power to create almost any desired reality. The power of the Grail, which is rightfully yours to protect but never directly use.”
In spite of our bizarre circumstances, I found myself laughing. “Rightfully mine? I would have thought such power was rightfully Christ’s or God’s. If God exists. Or is He the Balance, the great mediator of our creativity?”
“That’s the cause of much theological discussion,” said Oona, “especially amongst dreamthieves. After all, they live by stolen dreams. In the Grey Fees, they say, all dreams come true. And all nightmares.”
I felt helpless, staring around me in that void, my eyes constantly returning to those two scenes. They only reminded me of our quandary. They, too, could be an illusion—perhaps created by Oona herself, using the arts she had learned from her mother? I had no reason to trust her, or to believe she acted from altruism, but no reason not to either.
I felt a frustrated fury building in me. I wanted to draw my sword and cut through the mist, cut my way through to Bek, to my home, to the more peaceful past.
But there was a swastika flag flying over Bek. I knew that scene was no lie.
Elric was smiling his old, wan smile. “Difficult,” he said, “to follow a man who travels in two directions at once. Reluctant as we are to accept this, I do not believe we can continue this adventure together, my friends. You two must follow him one way—I’ll seek to stop him the other.”
“Surely we weaken our power by doing that?” We knew we fought against the Lords of the Higher Worlds as well as Gaynor and Klosterheim.
“We weaken our power significantly,” agreed Elric, “perhaps impossibly. But we have little choice. I shall go back to Imrryr to fight Gaynor there. You must go to your own realm and do the same. He cannot have the Grail in two places at once. That is a certain impossibility. He will have it, therefore, where it will serve him best. Whoever finds it first must somehow warn the others.”
“And where might such a place be?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Anywhere,” he said.
Oona was less uncertain. “That is one of many things we do not know,” she said. “There are two places he might go. Morn, whose stones he needs to harness the power of Chaos, or Bek.”
Elric remounted his blind horse. The beast whinnied and snorted, stamping at the mist. He urged it forward, towards the scene of turmoil which opened to absorb him. He turned, drawing his great blade and saluted me. It was a farewell. It was a promise. He then rode into the battling beasts, his black sword blazing in his right hand as he urged the horse towards Imrryr.
With a touch of her staff Oona sent my horse racing back into the mist. The beast would have no trouble getting home. Taking my arm Oona led me forward until we stood smelling the summer grass of Bek, looking down at my ancient home and realizing, for the first time, that it had been turned into a fortress. Some kind of important SS operations center, I guessed.
We dropped to the ground. I prayed we had not been seen. SS people were everywhere. This was no ordinary establishment. It was thoroughly guarded, with machine-gun posts and heavy barbed wire. Two crude barbicans of wire surrounded the moat.
We crept down the hills away from Bek’s towers. I was easily able to guide Oona through the dense undergrowth of our forestland. I knew as many trails as the foxes or rabbits who inhabited these woods when Beks had cleared the land to build their first house. We had lived in harmony, for the most part, down all those centuries.
My home had become an obscenity, a shameful outrage. Once it had stood for everything Germans held to be of value—prudent social progress, tradition, culture, kindness, learning, love of the land—and now it stood for everything we had once loathed; intolerance, disrespect, intemperate power and harsh cruelty. I felt as if I and my entire family had been violated. I knew full well how Germany had already been violated. I knew the nature of that evil and I knew it had not been spawned from German soil alone, but from the soil of all those warring nations, the greed and fear of all those petty, self-serving politicians who had ignored the real desires of their voters, all those opposing political formulae, all those ordinary citizens who had failed to examine what their leaders told them, who had let themselves be led into war and ultimate damnation and who still followed leaders whose policies could only end in their destruction.
What was this will to death which seemed to have engulfed Europe? A universal guilt? Its utter failure to live up to its Christian ideals? A kind of madness in which sentiment was contrasted by action at every turn?
Night came at last. Nobody hunted us. Oona found some old newspapers in a ditch. Someone had slept on them. They were yellow, muddy. She read them carefully. And, when she had finished, she had a plan. “We must find Herr El,” she said. “Prince Lobkowitz. If I am right, he’s living quietly under an assumed name in Hensau. Time has passed here. We are several years further on than when you left Germany. Hensau is where he will be. Or was, the last time I was in 1940.”
“What do you mean? You are a time traveler, too?”
“I once thought so, until I understood that time is a field, and the same event takes place over and over again within that field, all at the same time. How we select from that field gives us a sense of the multiverse’s mortality. We are not really time-traveling but shifting from one reality to another.
“Time is relative. Time is subjective. Time alters its qualities. It can be unstable. It can be too stable. Time varies from realm to realm. We can leave this realm and find ourselves in a similar one, only separated by centuries. By this same process people sometimes believe they have discovered time travel. We escaped from Hameln in 1935, I believe. Five years ago. It is now the summer of 1940 and your country is at war. She appears to have conquered most of Europe.”
The old newspapers gave no idea of what events had led to the current situation, but “brave little Germany” was now fighting alone against a dozen aggressive nations bent on taking back what little they had not already looted. According to the Nazi press, Germany for her part was merely demanding the land she needed for her peoples to expand—a region she was calling Greater Germany. A bastion against the Communist Goliath. Some European nations were already described as “provinces” of Germany while others were included in the German “family.” France had reached a compromise, while Italy under Mussolini was an ally. Poland, Denmark, Belgium, Holland. All defeated. I was horrified. Hitler had come to power promising the German people peace. We had yearned for it. Honest, tolerant people had voted for anyone who would restore civil order and avert the threat of war. Adolf Hitler had now taken us into a worse war than any previous one. I wondered if his admirers were cheering him quite so enthusiastically now. For all our self-destructive Prussian rhetoric, we were fundamentally a peaceful people. What mad dream had Hitler invented to induce my fellow Germans to march again?
At last I slept. Immediately my head was filled with dreams. With violent battle and bizarre apparitions. I was experiencing everything my doppelgänger was experiencing. Only while awake could I keep him out of my mind, and even then it was difficult. I had no idea what he did, save that he had returned to Imrryr and from there gone underground. A scent o
f reptiles . . .
Awake again, I continued to read all I could. Most of what I read produced fresh questions. I could not believe how easily Hitler had come to power and why more people were not resisting, though the blanket of lies issued by the newspapers stopped many decent people from having a clear idea of how they could challenge the Nazi stranglehold. Otherwise, I had to piece together the picture for myself. It left many questions.
I learned most of the answers when we eventually found our way to Lobkowitz’s apartment in Hensau, traveling at night for almost a week, scarcely daring the woodland trails, let alone the main roads. I was glad to sleep during daylight hours. It made my dreams a little easier. The newspapers, once read, were used to wrap around Ravenbrand. Our weapons seemed scarcely adequate to challenge the armaments of the Third Reich.
Everywhere we saw signs of a nation at war. Long trains carrying munitions, guns, soldiers. Convoys of trucks. Droning squadrons of bombers. Screaming fighters. Large movements of marching men. Sometimes we saw more sinister things. Cattle trucks full of wailing human beings. We had no idea at that time the scale of the murders Hitler practiced on his own people and the conquered citizens of Europe.
We traveled extremely cautiously, anxious not to draw the attention of even the most minor authority, but Oona risked stealing a dress from a clothesline. “The Gypsies will be blamed, I suppose.”
Hensau, having no railway station and no main road, was relatively quiet. The usual Nazi flags flew everywhere and the SS had a barracks nearby, but the town was mostly free of military people. We could see why Lobkowitz had chosen it.
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