The White Wolf's Son (14 page)

“You lie, not I!” cried Klosterheim. But she had struck home.

Oona threw back her head and laughed again. “Ah! Liar! Liar! You no longer
know
what is truth and what is falsehood!”

“What do you demand of me?” asked the Sebastocrater, rather more impressed.

“Release my friends and my warriors, and we shall all leave Mirenburg,” promised Oona. “Save for LordRenyard, who will return
to rule the Deep City by tradition, as he has always done.”

“And if we should then have an epidemic?”

“You will not. I have told you. Klosterheim and von Minct lie.”

“Perhaps you merely wish to rescue your friends. The girl does not show plague. We did not say she did. We know she carries
it.” Prince Gaynor stepped towards me. “Doctor Klosterheim has explained all this. He was physician to more than one royal
court.”

“And no doubt poisoned more than one round of royal
cocoa,” I said, getting a glare of pure hatred from the “doctor” in question. “I’ve told you. He’s a liar.”

“Yet
you
could be the liar.”

Oona was getting pretty tired of this. She took her bowstring back another inch. “We have no motive. If you give this child
up to Klosterheim and von Minct, you almost certainly sentence an innocent to a dreadful death.”

I believed her and felt slightly faint. I stared at the two villains. They stared back. They didn’t seem to be denying anything.
Klosterheim’s cold eyes were angry. Von Minct’s face was hidden again in the depths of his cloak.

Were we at an impasse?

The Sebastocrater sighed. “It would seem that if I quarantined the child, and you, too, fräulein, until such time as we are
certain of the truth, I would be exercising my duty.”

“And Klosterheim and von Minct?”

“They, too, shall be quarantined.”

Klosterheim hissed his disagreement with this decision, but he was unsure what to do next. They both glared at me. I felt
like a steak being eyed by two famished men. I moved a little closer to Oona.

“No,” I said, “there’s nothing wrong with me, and I should be getting home. My parents will be worrying.”

“We’ll take you home,” growled Gaynor von Minct. Klosterheim drew a large pistol from within his cloak. “I believe this puts
you all at a disadvantage,” he said.

Von Minct also had a pistol. He cocked it with a heavy click.

Oona did not release her bowstring. She kept her weapon leveled at them as I began slowly to back out of the concert room,
out of the palace, with von Minct, Klosterheim and the Sebastocrater glaring at me, not daring
to follow. I moved towards the summerhouse where, in the moonlit garden, the band of Kakatanawa stood frozen.

I hadn’t expected it to be dark again. Time was playing the most peculiar tricks. Once again I was convinced I experienced
some kind of waking dream.

Oona wasn’t far behind me.

“Someone is already taking liberties with the machinery of the multiverse,” she murmured. She looked up to where the Autumn
Stars, like blossoming dahlias in dozens of deep, rich colors, poured down their light. A light which had tangible warmth.

Then a wild, cold wind whipped through the streets of the city. I heard a wailing command which I was sure I recognized. Could
it be the disgusting Clement Schnooke? He had been paid and was beginning his spell without waiting to coordinate with us.

The voice uttered an invocation, I was sure. It summoned up weather elementals. That was about all I knew. My mother hadn’t
wanted me to know too much of such supernatural details.

Suddenly a great bolt of lightning cracked down. The light on top of the palace went out. Then came on again.

I felt fine mist in my face. The mist turned to rain, and I shivered with cold.

And then a shot rang out in the night. I looked back. This was definitely Schnooke’s work. Rain swept in with long scimitar
strokes, and the light from the palace cut through the glinting silver. The effect was almost stroboscopic. I saw the Sebastocrater
clutching a wounded arm, with a look of pure astonishment on his face, while von Minct placed a pistol at his head and Klosterheim
reloaded.

“The advantage is ours, I believe,” snarled Prince Gaynor.

At that moment a huge splitting noise echoed through the garden, and golden light burned all around us, blinding me for a
second. I heard a roar like a distant waterfall. A swift shadow moved, and the Sebastocrater went down. Instinctively I began
to run.

Soon I heard water pounding on water. A great rush of water. Everything was flooding!

The Indians were suddenly coming to life. Behind them the fountain had flooded.

I had to get above the water. With relief, I felt the ground rising gradually beneath my feet. I was laboring up a slope.
For the moment at least, there was a good chance I was safe.

But what of my friends? Were they also managing to escape from the drowning city?

D
IVERGING
H
ISTORIES

’Twas moonlight when Sir Elrik rode

His mighty steed from Old Nihrain

With anger such a needless load

Upon his heart; a bane upon his brain;

Yet anger like a plague infected every vein.

—W
HELDRAKE
,
T
HE
B
LACK
S
WORD
’
S
S
ONG

Then, with joyous heart, Sir Elrih cried, Why, this be
Tanelorn,
the Citadel of Peace; And all the old man did desire and say is true.

—W
HELDRAKE
,
The Black Sword’s Song

I
T HAD BEEN
some years since I had received a visit from my old friend Mrs. Persson. I had reconciled myself to the idea that I might
never see her again. In the past her stories had generally involved Bastable, Cornelius or the denizens of the End of Time.
Only once had she told me anything concerning Elric of Melniboné, whose adventures I drew largely from other sources, especially
from Mr. John D—, that contemporary manifestation of the Eternal Champion, whom I knew best. Mr. D—, as I might have mentioned
elsewhere, married a distant relative of mine and eventually settled
in the North. It wasn’t until a later occasion, when my wife and I spent a year or two in the English Lake District, that
I had the pleasure of his company once more.

At the time I met Mrs. Persson again, however, Linda and I had grown rather settled in our rural Texan life and had developed
a pleasure in unexpected visitors, the way you hardly ever do in the city.

One late October evening we sat in rocking chairs on our screened porch, enjoying the warmth and watching the sun set over
our property’s low hills and wide, shallow streams, when a car approached on the dirt road. The machine threw up a great “dust
ghost” which rose into the darkening sky like a pale fairy-tale giant. It fell back as the car passed under the tall gateposts
on which hung the sign of the Old Circle Squared. My great-uncle had named the ranch when he settled in the Lost Pines area
and made his first fortune in timber, his second in cattle, his third in river trade, his fourth in oil and his fifth in real
estate. Because of bad advice from accountants, we had made almost no money. Now most of our remaining land is part of the
Lost Pines State Park, and for a small tax break we raise a modest herd of longhorns, as much a part of the family as any
one of our other domestic animals. We name them all, as they pay their own way like true Texans. The balance of our land,
not kept for grazing or in forest, we employ for organic gardening.

Because of the garden we were used to the occasional neighbor dropping by for a bunch of carrots or a pound or two of tomatoes,
and so thought nothing of it until the car drew up at our porch steps and a slender, dark-haired woman got out. She had a
boyish, startling beauty. She wore a long coat of the kind we call a “duster” in Texas, and her hair was cut in what used
to be known as a
pageboy. From underneath those Prince Valiant bangs two bright grey eyes smiled at us. I recognized her at once, of course.
Mrs. Persson strode up the steps of the porch as I rose to open the screen door for her. My wife let out an expression of
pleasure. “My dear Una! What brings you to the back of beyond?”

Linda drew up another rocker for Mrs. Persson while I went to fix her a drink. Still standing, she received it gratefully.
Again I offered her a chair, but she said she’d been driving for some hours and preferred to remain standing for the time
being. She was in Austin, she told us, to see a colleague at UT, and while she never knew our phone number, she found our
address and decided to drive out to see if we were in.

I assured her that we had become lazy; I was pretty much retired and had absolutely nothing to do. I asked after old friends
as well as some of those I regarded as friends from her stories.

She said she saw little of anyone except her cousin and someone whose adventures she knew would interest me. “Elric of Melniboné?”
She made the words sound delicious, like exotic food. There might have been a hint of irony, the kind a woman gains from living
too long in Paris.

“Really? You’ve been enjoying more adventures in space and time?”

“Not at all. He has only recently returned to his own era. That is, whatever physical manifestation we take with us between
one plane of the multiverse and another. What his people know, I understand, as ‘dream quests.’”

“You are not now embarked upon any such quest, are you?” my wife asked gently.

Una Persson bowed her head a fraction and winked.

“We are all embarked upon dream quests,” she said. “Those of us who are not wholly dead. Wholly dead.”

“But your time on the stage, and so on—that wasn’t a dream quest,” said Linda. “That was a dream come true.”

I laughed.

“I wasn’t raised to know the difference,” said Una, settling at last into the rocking chair beside Linda. “Dreams and identities
are there, like the multiverse, to be negotiated, to be tested and tried and sometimes adopted.”

“I think I would prefer not to have that choice,” I said.

“I know
I
would prefer not to have it,” she agreed vehemently.

“You didn’t enjoy your time on stage?” Linda was implacable. She was a huge fan of musical comedy, and Una had for a while
a very successful career both in the West End and on Broadway.

“I think I enjoyed it most of all,” she said. “It was a long career, because of my peculiar circumstances. I came in with
the great dowager halls, the massive palaces of variety like the Empire, Leicester Square. I went out with revue and the sophisticated
topical songs of the 1960s. It was rock-and-roll and satire ruined me, my dear.” And she laughed. She had enjoyed it while
it was fun, but never seemed to care that it was over. She had done so much more with her life, in political terms, since
the mid-1960s. Her main association then, of course, was with Jerry Cornelius and his odd assortment of traveling players,
who had been so typical of the situationalist theater which had grown up on the Continent but which had never really caught
on in the United States or UK. I had heard that the theater had been a cover for other kinds of more serious activity, but
I was never curious about so-called secret-service stories.

Una had, in fact, a new Elric tale—or at least part of one—to tell us. Most of the facts, she promised, came from Elric himself.
Others had been verified beyond doubt by various people she had met on the moonbeam roads in recent months.

I mixed her a fresh drink while Linda went into the house to see about dinner. Then, when Linda had returned, Una began her
tale.

E
LRIC OF
M
ELNIBONÉ
, Una told us, had embarked involuntarily on what he called the Dream of a Thousand Years. Having arrived in England some
years before the Battle of Hastings, in the reign of Ethelred the Unready, he served as a seagoing mercenary against the encroaching
Danes until Ethelred, impoverished as a result of his own poor planning, failed to pay him. Therefore the albino took what
was his and left for the Middle Sea, where for a while he fell in with a female pirate known as the Barbary Rose, striking
merchant ships from the security of her island stronghold of Las Cascadas. Later he went adventuring into the wildern lands
of the Moors, beyond the High Atlas into the desert, where, it was said, he came upon a country ruled by intelligent dragons.
Little was then heard of him until he turned up as a crusader, becoming the ally of Gunnar the Doomed and sailing with him
to America.

Elric, who had used a variety of names, founded a nation. He carved it from the old German and Slavic lands in a place called
Wäldenstein, whose capital was the city of Mirenburg. There he and what seemed to be his progeny ruled by virtue of dark magic
and a fabulous black sword said to drink souls as readily as it drank blood. Terrible
legends surrounded the Princes of Mirenburg until the nineteenth century, when the city appeared to have been abandoned by
the crimson-eyed albinos who occupied it. At the early part of the twentieth century, though a few stories still existed in
Mirenburg concerning a soul-eating demon called Karmingsinaugen, the old tales of the vampire prince and his vampire sword
continued to circulate. They soon merged with those of Nosferatu and the hero-villains of German cinema. Meanwhile an albino
resembling Elric began to entertain with a magic act on the English stage. Monsieur Zodiac, as he was called, was a very popular
attraction, and his son, who might have been his twin, later took over the act as well as the name.

Mrs. Persson believed that his thousand-year sojourn in our world, where his dream self took on solid flesh, was coming to
an end. She wanted to help him return to his world, “where he hangs crucified on a ship’s mast,” but was afraid he was now
too weak to resist the controlling power of his massive runesword, which, she believed, had been stolen and carried across
the multiverse. He was desperate to rediscover it and convinced he would die if he awoke from his dream without it.