Read The Dragon in the Sword Online
Authors: Michael Moorcock
The Dragon in the Sword
CONTENTS
Also Available from Titan Books
THE ETERNAL CHAMPION SERIES
The Eternal Champion
Phoenix in Obsidian
The Knight of the Swords
(May 2015)
The Queen of the Swords
(June 2015)
The King of the Swords
(July 2015)
The Bull and the Spear
(August 2015)
The Oak and the Ram
(September 2015)
The Sword and the Stallion
(October 2015)
The Dragon in the Sword
Print edition ISBN: 9781783291632
E-book edition ISBN: 9781783291601
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First Titan edition: January 2015
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 1987, 2015 by Michael Moorcock. All rights reserved.
Edited by John Davey
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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For Minerva, the noblest Roman
Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World!
You, too, have come where the dim tides are hurled
Upon the wharves of sorrow, and heard ring
The bell that calls us on; the sweet far thing.
Beauty grown sad with its eternity
Made you of us, and of the dim grey sea.
Our long ships loose thought-woven sails and wait,
For God has bid them share an equal fate;
And when at last defeated in His wars,
They have gone down under the same white stars,
He shall no longer hear the little cry
Of our sad hearts, that may not live nor die.
—W.B. Yeats,
‘The Rose of War’
PROLOGUEI
AM
J
OHN
Daker, the victim of the whole world’s dreams. I am Erekosë, Champion of Humanity, who slew the human race. I am Urlik Skarsol, Lord of the Frozen Keep, who bore the Black Sword. I am Ilian of Garathorm, Elric Womanslayer, Hawkmoon, Corum and so many others—man, woman or androgyne. I have been them all. And all are warriors in the perpetual War of the Balance, seeking to maintain justice in a universe always threatened by encroaching Chaos, to impose Time upon an existence without beginning or end. Yet even this is not my true doom.
My true doom is to remember, however dimly, each separate incarnation, every moment of an infinity of lives, a multiplicity of ages and worlds, concurrent and sequential.
Time is at once an agony of the Present, a long torment of the Past and the terrible prospect of countless Futures. Time is also a complex of subtly intersecting realities, of unguessable consequences and undiscoverable causes, of profound tensions and dependencies.
I still do not truly know why I was chosen for this fate or how I came to close the circle which, if it did not release me, at least promised to limit my pain.
All I do know is that it is my fate to fight for ever and to possess peace but briefly, for I am the Champion Eternal, at once a defender of justice and its destroyer. In me, all Humanity is at war. In me male and female combine, in me they struggle; in me so many races aspire to make reality of their myths and their dreams…
Yet I am no more or less a human creature than any of my fellows. I can be possessed as easily by love as by despair, by fear as by hatred.
I was and am John Daker and I came at last to find a certain peace, the appearance of conclusion. This is my attempt to put down my final story…
I have described how I was called by King Rigenos to fight against the Eldren and how I fell in love and came to commit a terrible sin. I have told what befell me when (I believed as punishment for my crime) I was called to Rowernarc, how I was induced to wield the Black Sword against my will, how I encountered the Silver Queen and what we did together on the South Ice plains. I believe, too, I have set down somewhere other adventures of mine (or they have been set down by others to whom I recounted them); I have told a little of how I came to voyage on a dark ship captained by a blind man. I am not sure, however, if I ever described how I came to leave the world of the South Ice or my identity as Urlik Skarsol, so I shall begin my story with my final recollections of the dying planet whose lands were slowly falling to the conquest of cold and whose sluggish seas were so thick with salt they could virtually sustain the weight of a grown man. Having succeeded in that world at redressing at least to some degree my earlier sins, I had hoped I might now be united again with my one and only love, the beautiful Eldren princess, Ermizhad.
Although a hero to those whom I had helped, I grew more and more lonely. Increasingly, too, I was subject to fits of almost suicidal melancholy. Sometimes I would fall into senseless raging against my fate, against whatever and whoever separated me from the woman whose face and presence filled my hours, waking and sleeping. Ermizhad! Ermizhad! Had anyone ever loved so thoroughly? So constantly?
In my chariot of silver and bronze, drawn by great white bears, I ranged the South Ice, forever restless, full of my memories, praying to be restored to Ermizhad, aching with longing for her. I slept little. From time to time I would return to the Scarlet Fjord, where there were many who were glad to be my friends and auditors, but I found the ordinary business of people’s lives almost irritating. Hating to appear churlish, I avoided their hospitality and companionship whenever possible. I would confine myself to my chambers and there, half asleep, perpetually exhausted, I would seek to place my soul in limbo, to depart from my body, to quest through the astral plane (as I thought of it) for my lost love. But there were so many planes of existence—an infinite number of worlds in the multiverse, as I knew already, a vast variety of possible chronologies and geographies. How was it possible to quest through all of these and find my Ermizhad?
I had been told I might discover her in Tanelorn. But where was Tanelorn? I knew from my memories of other existences that the city took many forms and was forever elusive, even to one skilled in moving between the multitudinous layers of the Million Spheres. What chance had I, bound to a single body, a single earthly plane, of finding Tanelorn? If yearning were enough, then certainly I should have discovered the city a dozen times already.
Exhaustion gradually took its toll on me. Some thought I might die of it, others that I might go mad from it. I assured them my will was too strong for that. I agreed, however, to accept their medicines and these at last sent me into deep sleep where, almost to my joy, I began to experience the strangest dreams.
