To Rescue Tanelorn (46 page)

“I would gladly obey thee, Duke Arioch.” Elric spoke feelingly. “For I have a notion that even an adept in sorcery could not survive long in a world where so much Chaos dwells. But I know not how. I came here by an accident. I thought myself in Xanardwys.”

There was a pause, then a painful gasp of words. “This…is…Xanardwys…but not that of thy realm. There is no…hope…here. Go…go…back. There…is…no hope…This is the very end of time…It is cold…so…cold…Thy destiny…does…not…lie…here…”

“Lord Arioch?” Elric’s voice was urgent. “I told thee…I know not how to return.”

The massive head lowered, regarding him with the complex eyes of the fly, but no sound came from his sweet, red lips of youth. Duke Arioch’s skin was like shifting mercury, roiling upon his body, giving off sparks and auras and sudden bursts of brilliant, multicoloured dust, reflecting the invisible fires of hell. And Elric knew that if his patron had manifested himself in all his original glory, not in this sickly form, Elric’s very soul would have been consumed by the demon’s presence. Duke Arioch was even now gathering his strength to speak again. “Thy sword…has…the…power…to carve a gateway…to…the road home…” The vast mouth opened to drag in whatever atmosphere sustained its monstrous body. Silver teeth rattled like a hundred thousand arrows; the red mouth erupted with heat and stink, sufficient to drive the albino back. Oddly coloured wisps of flame poured from the nostrils. The voice was full of weary irony. “Thou art…too…valuable to me, sweet Elric…Now I need all my allies…even mortals. This battle…must be…our last…against…against the power…of…the…Balance…and those who have…allied themselves…with it…those vile servants of Singularity…who would reduce all the substance of…the multiverse…to one, dull, coherent agony of boredom…”

This speech took the last of his energy. One final gasp, a painful gesture. “Sing the song…the sword’s song…sing together…that power will break thee into…the roads…”

“Lord Arioch, I cannot understand thee. I must know more.”

But the huge eyes had grown dull and it seemed some kind of lid had folded over them. Lord Arioch slept, or faded into death. And Elric wondered at the power that could bring low one of the great Chaos Lords. What power could extinguish the life-stuff of invulnerable immortals? Was that the power of the Balance? Or merely the power of Law—which the Lords of Entropy called “The Singularity”? Elric had only a glimmering of the motives and ambitions of those mighty forces.

He turned to find von Bek standing beside him. The man’s face was grim and he held his strange instrument in his two hands, as if to defend himself. “What did the brute tell you, Prince Elric?”

Elric had spoken a form of High Melnibonéan, developed through the millennia as a means of intercourse between mortal and demon. “Little that was concrete. I believe we should head for what remains of the city. These weary lords of hell seem to have no interest in it.”

Count Renark agreed. The landscape still resounded with the titanic clank of sword against shield and the thunderous descent of an armoured body, the smack of great wings and the stink of their breath. The stink was unavoidable, for what they expelled—dust, vapours, showers of fluttering flames and noxious gases of all descriptions—shrouded the whole world. Like mice running amongst the feet of elephants, the two men stumbled through shadows, avoiding the slow, weary movements of the defeated host. All around them the effects of Chaos grew manifest. Ordinary rocks and trees were warping and changing. Overhead the sky was a raging cacophony of lightnings, bellowings, and agitated, brilliantly coloured clouds. Yet somehow they reached the fallen walls of Xanardwys. Here corpses were already transforming, taking on something of the shapes of those who had brought this catastrophe with them when they fell through the multiverse, tearing the very fabric of reality as they descended, ruined and defeated.

Elric knew that soon these corpses would become re-animated with the random Chaos energy which, while insufficient to help the Chaos Lords themselves, was more than enough to give a semblance of life to a thing which had been mortal.

Even as von Bek and Elric watched, they saw the body of a young woman liquefy and then re-form itself so that it still had something human about it but was now predominantly a mixture of bird and ape.

“Everywhere Chaos comes,” said Elric to his companion. “It is always the same. These people died in agony and now they are not even allowed the dignity of death…”

“You’re a sentimentalist, sir,” Count Renark spoke a little ironically.

“I have no feeling for these folk,” Elric assured him with rather too much haste. “I merely mourn the waste of it all.” Stepping over metamorphosing bodies and fallen architecture, which also began to alter its shape, the two men reached a small, domed structure of marble and copper, seemingly untouched by the rest of Chaos.

“Some kind of temple, no doubt,” said von Bek.

“And almost certainly defended by sorcery,” added the albino, “for no other building remains in one piece. We had best approach with a little caution.”

And he placed a hand up on his runesword, which stirred and murmured and seemed to moan for blood. Von Bek glanced towards the sword and a small shudder passed through his body. Then he led the way towards the temple. Elric wondered if this were some kind of entrance back to his own world. Had that been what Arioch meant? “These are singularly unpleasant manifestations of Chaos,” Count von Bek was saying. “This, surely, is Chaos gone sour—all that was virtue turned to vice. I have seen it more than once—in individuals as in civilizations.”

“You have traveled much, Count von Bek?”

“It was for many years my profession to wander, as it were, between worlds. I play the Game of Time, sir. As, I presume, do you.”

“I play no games, sir. Does your experience tell you if this building marks a route away from this realm and back to my own?”

“I could not quite say, sir. Not knowing your realm, for instance.”

“Sorcery protects this place,” said the albino, reaching for the hilt of his runesword. But Stormbringer uttered a small warning sound, as if to tell him that it could not be employed against this odd magic. Count von Bek had stepped closer and was inspecting the walls.

“See here, Prince Elric. There is a science at work. Look. Something alien to Chaos, perhaps?” He indicated seams in the surface of the building and, taking out a small folding knife, he scratched at it, revealing metal. “This place has always had a supernatural purpose.”

As if the traveler had triggered some mechanism, the dome above them began to spin, a pale blue aura spreading from it and encompassing them before they could retreat. They stood unmoving as a door in the base opened and a human figure regarded them. It was a creature almost as bizarre as any Elric had seen before, with the same style of clothing as von Bek, but with a peaked, grubby white cap on its unruly hair, stubble upon its chin, its eyes bloodshot but sardonically intelligent, a piece of charred root (doubtless some tribal talisman) still smouldering in the corner of its mouth. “Greetings, dear sirs. You seem as much in a pickle over this business as I am. Don’t it remind you a bit of Milton, what? ‘Cherub and Seraph rolling in the flood, with scattered arms and ensigns?’ Paradise lost, indeed, my dear comrades in adversity. And I would guess that is not all we are about to lose…Will you step inside?”

The eccentric stranger introduced himself as Captain Quelch, a soldier of fortune, who had been in the middle of a successful arms sale when he had found himself falling through space, to arrive within the building. “I have a feeling it’s this old fellow’s fault, gentlemen.”

The interior was simple. It was bathed in a blue light from above and contained no furniture or evidence of ritual. There was a plain geometric design on the floor and coloured windows set high near the roof.

The place was filled with children of all ages, gathered around an old man who lay near the centre of the temple, on the tiles.

He was clearly dying. He beckoned for Elric to approach. It was as if he, like the Lords of Chaos, had been drained of all his life-stuff. Elric knelt down and asked if there were anything he needed, but the old man shook his head. “Only a promise, sir. I am Patrius, High Priest of Donblas the Justice Maker. I was able to save these, of all Xanardwys’s population, because they were attending my class. I drew on the properties of this temple to throw a protection around us. But the effort of making such desperate and powerful magic has killed me, I fear. All I wish now is that you take the children to safety. Find a way out of this world, for soon it must collapse into unformed matter, into the primal stuff of Chaos. It is inevitable. There is no hope for this realm, sir. Chaos devours us.”

A dark-skinned girl began to weep at this and the old man reached out his hand to comfort her.

“She weeps for her parents,” said the old man. “She weeps for what became of them and what they will become. All these children have second sight. I have tutored them in the ways of the multiverse. Take them to the roads, sir. They will survive, I am sure. It is all you need do. Lead them to the roads!”

A silence fell. The old man died.

Elric murmured to von Bek—“Roads? He entrusts me with a task that’s meaningless to me.”

“Not to me, Prince Elric.” Von Bek was looking warily in Captain Quelch’s direction. The man had climbed a stone stair and stood peering out of the windows in the direction of the defeated legions of hell. He seemed to be talking to himself in a foreign language.

“You understood the elder? You know a way out of this doomed place?”

“Aye, Prince Elric. I told you. I am an adept. A jugador. I play the Game of Time and roam the roads between the worlds. I sense that you are a comrade—perhaps even more than that—and that you are unconscious of your destiny. It is not my place to reveal anything to you more than is necessary—but if you would join with me in the Game of Time, become a mukhamir, then you have only to say.”

“My interest is in returning to my own sphere and to the woman I love,” said Elric simply. He reached out a long-fingered, bone-white hand, on which throbbed a single Actorios, and touched the hair of the sobbing child. It was a gesture which gave the watching von Bek much insight into the character of this moody lord. The girl looked up, her eyes desperate for reassurance, but she found little hope in the ruby orbs of the alien creature who stared down at her, his expression full of loss, of yearning for some impossible ambition. Yet she spoke: “Will you save us, sir?”

“Madam,” said the prince of ruins, with a small smile and a bow, “I regret that I am in a poor position to save myself, let alone an entire college of tyro seers, but it is in my self-interest that we should all be free of this. That you can be sure of…”

Captain Quelch came down the steps with an awkward swagger and a hearty, if unconvincing, chuckle. “We’ll be out of this in no time, little lady, be certain of that.”

But it was Elric to whom the young woman still looked and it was to Elric she spoke. “I am called Far-Seeing and First-of-Her-Kind. The former name explains my skills. The latter explains my future and is mysterious to me. You have the means of saving us, sir. That I can see.”

“A young witch!” Captain Quelch chuckled again, this time with an odd note, almost of self-reference. “Well, my dear. We are certainly saved, with so much sorcery at our disposal!”

Elric met the eyes of Far-Seeing and was almost shocked by the beauty he saw there. She was, he knew, part of his destiny. But perhaps not yet. Perhaps not ever, if he failed to escape the doom which came relentlessly to Xanardwys. They were in no immediate danger from the Chaos Lords; only from the demons’ unconscious influence, which gave foul vitality to the very folk they had killed, transforming them into travesties. Casually, unknowingly, the aristocracy of hell was destroying its own sanctuary, as mortals, equally unknowingly, poison their own wells with their waste. Such brute behaviour horrified Elric and made him despair. Perhaps after all, we were mere toys in the hands of mad, immortal beasts? Beasts without conscience or motive.

This was no time for abstract introspection! Even as he looked behind him, Elric saw the walls of the temple begin to shudder, lose substance, and then re-form. But those within had nowhere to flee. They heard grunts and howls from outside.

Shambling Chaos creatures pawed at the building, their sensibilities too crude to be challenged by argument, science or sorcery. The revived citizens of Xanardwys now only knew blind need, a horrible hunger to devour any form of flesh. By that means alone could they keep even this faint grip on life and what they had once been. They were driven by the knowledge of utter and everlasting extermination; their souls unjustly damned, mere fodder for the Lords of Hell.

Once, Elric’s folk had made a pact with Chaos in all her vital glory, in all her power and magnificent creativity. They had seen only the golden promise of Chaos, not the vile decadence which greed and blind ambition could make of it. Yet, when they had discovered Evil and married that to Chaos, then the true immorality of their actions had become plain to all save themselves. They had lost the will to see beyond their own culture and convictions, their own needs and brute survival. Their decadence was all too evident to the Young Kingdoms and to one sickly inheritor of the Ruby Throne, Elric; who, yearning to know how his great people had turned to cruel and melancholy incest, had left his inheritance in the keeping of his cousin; had left the woman he loved beyond life to seek an answer to his questions…But, he reflected, instead he had come to Xanardwys to die.

Renark von Bek was running for the steps, his weapon in his hands. Even as he reached the top a creature, flapping on leathery wings in parody of the Chaos Lords, burst through the window. Von Bek threw his weapon to his shoulder. There was a sharp report and the creature screamed, falling backwards with a great, ragged wound in its head. “Angel shot,” called von Bek. “I carry nothing else, these days.” Quelch seemed to understand him and approve.

While he could not grasp the nature of the weapon, Elric was grateful for it, for now the door of the temple bulged inward.