The White Wolf's Son (46 page)

We, too, have our ups and downs, of course. Jack says he remembers his life on the bum rather than our interventions
or adventures in the multiverse. He think it’s for the best. Some of us can absorb that amount of information. Some can’t.
Personally, I understand his denial. I don’t bring the past up very often.

I’m looking forward to moving. The first morning we get back to Tower House, we’ll go for a walk in grass which the fresh
summer rain has sweetened, and I’ll show Jack Daker the real world his eye surgery has let him see again. It will be sparkling
and beautiful in the golden sun, the evergreens dark against the pale blue sky. I’ll pretend it’s all as it was on that first
day of my adventures, before I went looking for crayfish in the brook and met the most evil man in the multiverse. It now
seems such a dream. As I often say to Jack, it takes a lot of courage and nerve just to face the terrors and anxieties of
bringing up a couple of children in our modern world. Today’s realities are violent and fantastic enough for us! He heartily
agrees.

A
S HE FELL
he knew that Law and Chaos both still pursued him and that somehow he was becoming an important piece in their perpetual
battle. Struggle as he might to move against the Higher Worlds’ plans for him, he was never entirely free of their influence.
His enemies wanted lives which were absolutely free to expand and express themselves without any form of hindrance. He could
not share that lust. He valued the power and compassion of the many over the individual power and greed of the few. This set
him apart from his father and family but reconnected him with his forebears who had practiced his virtues and vices with more
questioning of the moral uses of power.

He could not believe that it was enough to preserve Melniboné, and so he had come to think that only death could save his
people. Every advance in his journey to this moment had been earned and had brought him some unwanted burden of knowledge,
some dreadful doom. His fate had been to destroy an ancient nation and take on an ancient curse in the form of a blade which
served itself by appearing to serve certain masters. Yet his very struggle contained both the elements which warred in the
Higher Worlds, making him an unlikely Knight of the
Balance, one of those few representative champions chosen to fight the fight of the many.

And still he fell until he felt a sharp salt wind in his face and warm iron in his fist, and knew he breathed with a new vitality.
A vitality he had earned as he and his kind had earned it over and over again down the centuries, across all the worlds of
the moonbeam roads. This understanding faded as he woke, screaming:

“Stormbringer!”

Hearing a curse from beneath him, Elric saw Jagreen Lern pointing up at him. “Gag the white-faced sorcerer, and if that doesn’t
put an end to his babbling, slay him!”

“Stormbringer!”
called Elric again into that void, that terrible moment between life and death. “Stormbringer! Your master perishes!”

One of his guards reached up to tug at his bound foot. “Silence! You heard my master!”

But Elric had to take his remaining chance, his last knowing breath, to cry:

“Stormbringer!”

The guard put the sharp edge of his sword to Elric’s naked feet. He made to slice off his toes. But Elric paid him no heed.
There was still breath enough.

“Stormbringer!”

The guard had climbed the rigging and was almost face-to-face with Elric. His coarse features grinned in stupid triumph as
he drew back his arm to stab at the albino’s throat.

“Stormbringer!”

With an appalled gasp the warrior fell, his cutlass dropping from his fingers as he raised his hands to grapple with something
invisible, which had him by the
throat. Suddenly his fingers parted from his hands in little fountains of blood.

Flinging the lifeless corpse to the deck, the sword stood before its master for a moment. Then, in a series of rapid movements,
it slashed at the bonds holding him to the mast, leaped into his hand and fed him the life-stuff they, in their dreadful union,
sucked from their victims, making man and sword symbiotic predators.

Elric’s story was moving towards its ultimate tragedy. Those who had fought to deny him his destiny were defeated. He could
fight his way to the ruins of his own past, betraying all who sought to help him, to find at least a kind of tranquility,
one Champion among many in whom morality and bleak necessity continually made war.

And now the objects of power are in fresh configuration upon an Earth where Tanelorn may sometimes be found. Old friends go
there to meet and rejoice, and enemies go to be reconciled. Another name for that city is the Old and the New Jerusalem. And
it is all your soul desires.

I hope I will see you there.

An End and a Beginning

M
ICHAEL
M
OORCOCK
is a vanguard author, editor, journalist, critic, and rock musician. As the editor of the controversial magazine
New Worlds,
he fostered authors who would go on to win accolades as prestigious as the Booker Prize. A member of the Science Fiction
and Fantasy Hall of Fame, Moorcock has won the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the
British Fantasy Award, among others. He received a platinum disc for
Warrior on the Edge of Time,
his band Hawkwind’s bestselling Eternal Champion concept album. His song “Black Blade” is one of several produced with Blue
Oyster Cult.

One of the most intricate,
beloved series in all fantasy:

ELRIC, THE ETERNAL CHAMPION

THE DREAMTHIEF’S DAUGHTER

(0-446-61120-4)

The albino Ulric von Bek, last Count of Bek, battles to keep the dark sword
Ravenbrand
from being taken by Adolf Hitler while Elric, the last sorcerer-king of Melniboné, fights to keep the black sword
Stormbringer
from being taken by Gaynor the Damned. They both fail. Now, their destinies entwined with that of Oona, the mysterious Dreamthief’s
Daughter, Elric and von Bek must become one hero. For the entire Multiverse will be destroyed—unless Elric can summon his
dragon kin across space and time to the Battle of Britain, and show the Third Reich what hell on earth
truly means
…

THE SKRAYLING TREE

(0-446-61340-1)

Oona von Bek and the shaman White Crow cross Hiawatha’s lands of legend to a fabled golden city as Elric of Melniboné encounters
fierce pygmies in need of an ally in Vinland, all while Count Ulric von Bek attempts to
save all existence
by protecting a golden city from demons and berserkers. The three heroes must follow their own fateful paths through space
and time—only to meet in a moment of terrible tragedy that may destroy them … and the Multiverse itself.

A
VAILABLE IN MASS MARKET FROM
W
ARNER
B
OOKS

GLORIANA
Or,
The Unfulfill’d Queen

Beautiful, powerful, and revered, Gloriana rules Albion, a vast empire that stretches from Asia to America. On the surface,
the queen appears happy and her empire enjoys an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity. But underneath the golden veneer
is a monarch suffocating under the burden of her duty and seeking release in all manner of debauchery. And, unknown to Gloriana,
her chancellor is keeping this age of peace through terror, oppression, and a network of informants—the most dangerous of
whom is the sinister Captain Quire.

When this peerless spy feels insulted by the court, all Albion will suffer. For Quire plots to destroy the empire by seducing
the sexually frustrated queen …

Praise for
Gloriana:

“Vastly entertaining … a labor of love, and a triumphant one.”

—W
ILLIAM
G
IBSON

“Bawdy, barbaric, elegant … a beautifully written, perfectly realized tour de force … Moorcock’s most ambitious and most successful
novel.”

—Publishers Weekly

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VAILABLE IN MASS MARKET FROM
W
ARNER1 B
OOKS

Legendary, award-winning author Michael Moorcock presents a monumental work that knits together the many tales of the Eternal
Champion… in which Elric, the White Wolf, reaches the end of his thousand-year dream quest.

Young Oonagh von Bek has an extraordinary and perilous adventure: She falls into a subterranean chasm only to be chased by
dangerous men. Her grandparents—Oona, the Dreamthief’s Daughter, and Elric, the last sorcerer of Melniboné—follow, seeking
Elric’s son, and encounter other avatars of the Eternal Champion. Now fanning out across the infinite realms of existence,
they hope to stop Oonagh’s pursuers, Gaynor the Damned and his allies. All paths will converge in a cruel land of tyranny
and dark magic, where defilers plan the ultimate arrogance: to re-create the entire Multiverse—and install themselves as eternal
overlords…

“A classic fantasy…one of the best books Moorcock has ever written.”—
Midwest Book Review

“Complex and entertaining… a triumph of mature talent and imagination?”

—
Publishers Weekly (starred review)

¹
See
The Fortress of the Pearl
.