Revenge of the Rose (26 page)

 
          
Then
Elric saw the ectoplasmic sphere topple and fall towards the earth, with Arioch
and Esbern Snare still locked together in conflict, and something flared and a
darkness poured in upon him and swallowed him up and carried him relentlessly
through the broken walls of a thousand dimensions, every one of which lifted a
separate voice in protest; every one of which exploded with a different angry
colour. He was propelled through the multiverse with almost the last remaining energy
Arioch had been able to summon upon that plane.

 
          
That
was what Esbern Snare had known and that was why he had awaited this
opportunity to help his companions.

 
          
For
Esbern Snare was, indeed, a man of rare goodness and sanity. He had lived too long
in thrall to an evil power. He had seen all that he valued destroyed because of
it. So, though he could not reclaim his immortal soul, he could ensure himself
at least an immortal memorial, some action to ensure that his name, and the
name of the love he could never find again, would be forever linked in the
tales told amongst the realms, in all the various futures which lay ahead.

 
          
Thus
did Esbern Snare the Northern Werewolf redeem his honour, if not his soul.

 
          
Three swift swords for the sisters three;
The first shall be of ivory;

 
          
The second sword’s forged of rarest gold;
The third shall be cut from a granite
fold
.

 
          
The first sword’s name is ‘Just Old Man’;
And the second is called ‘The Urgent Brand’;

 
          
While the third thirsty sword of that
glamour’d three
Is the hungry blade named ‘
Liberty
’.

 
          
—Wheldrake,
    
Border Ballads

 
          
Of
Weapons Possessed of Will; A Family
Reunion
;
Old Friends Found; A Quest Resumed
.

 
          
NOW
ELRIC FOUGHT to resist the force of Arioch’s rage; stretching out his left hand
as if to grasp at the fabric of time and space and slow his rush through the
dimensions; clinging to his runesword while it howled and gibbered in his right
hand, itself insane with mysterious supernatural anger at the Lord of Hell who
had expended the last of his temporal energy on this plane in one final act of
petty, and passing, vengeance. For Arioch had proved himself as whimsical as
any other denizen of Chaos, willing to destroy all hoped-for futures in order
to satisfy a momentary irritation. Which was why Chaos could be trusted no
better than Law (which was inclined to permit similar actions, but in the name
of principles whose purpose and point were frequently long-forgotten, creating
as much mortal misery in the name of Intellect as Chaos wrought in the name of
Sensibility).

 
          
Such
thoughts were available to the albino, as he was flung through the radiantly
pierced barriers of the multiverse—
for
almost an eternity
—because, when eternity eludes the consciousness, then
soon all which that consciousness knows is the singular agony of an expectation
never
quite
fulfilled. Eternity is
the end to time; the end to the suffering of anticipation; it is the beginning
of life, of life unbounded! And thus Elric sought to embrace the beauty and the
psychic grace of that perfect promised multiverse, perpetually in a state of
transformation, between Life and Death, between Law and Chaos—accepting all,
loving all, protecting all—that state of forever-changing societies, natural
intelligences, benign supernature, evolving realities, forever relishing their
own and others’ differences, all in harmonious anarchy—that natural state, the
wise ones knew, of each and every creature in each and every world, and which
some imagined as a single omniscient entity, as the perfect Sum of Entirety.

 
          
Human
love, thought the albino, as universe upon universe engulfed and expelled him,
is our only constancy, the only quality with which we may conquer the
inescapable logic of Entropy. And at that the sword trembled in his hand and
seemed to be trying to twist free, almost as if it were disgusted by such
sentimental altruism. But Elric clung to the blade as his only reality, his
only security in this wildness of ruptured time and space, where the meaning of
colour became profound and the meaning of sound unfathomable.

 
          
Again
it wrenched at his grasp so that he must hold tighter to the quillons as the
hellsword began to take its own determined course through the dimensions. It
was at this point that Elric grew to respect the extraordinary power which
dwelled within the black blade, of a power which seemed born of Chaos yet which
had loyalty neither to Chaos nor to Law—yet neither did it serve the Balance—of
a power so thoroughly a thing of itself that it required few outward
manifestations and yet which might be the profound opposite of everything Elric
valued and fought to create—as if some warring force were symbolized by this
ironic bond between yearning idealist and cynical solipsist, a force, perhaps,
which might be discovered in most thinking creatures, and which found
over-dramatic resolution in the symbiosis between Stormbringer and the Last
Lord of Melniboné …

 
          
Now
the albino flew behind the runesword as it carved a path for itself—almost as
if it drove back against Arioch’s power, refusing the consequences not from any
emotion Elric could understand, but to prove some principle as thoroughly
upheld as any perhaps less mysterious principles of Law, almost as if it sought
to correct some obscene malformation in the fabric of the cosmos, some event
which it refused to permit …

 
          
Now
Elric was caught up in a kind of intradimensional hurricane, in which a
thousand reverses occurred within his brain at once and he became a thousand
other creatures for an instant, and, where he lived through more than ten other
lives; a fate only minimally different from the one that was familiar to him
and so vast did the multiverse become, so unthinkable, that he began to go mad
as he attempted to make sense of just a fraction of what laid siege to his
sanity and he begged the sword to rest, to pause in its complex flight, to
spare him.

 
          
But
he knew that the sword considered him secondary to its chief concern, which was
to re-establish itself at the point it felt was
right
for it in the multiverse … Perhaps it was an
impulse no more conscious than instinct …

 
          
Elric’s
senses multiplied and became changed.

 
          
There was a sweet, calm sound of roses while
his father’s music flooded his arteries with bewildered sadness … with
excruciating anxiety … as if to let him know that the time was almost
over when Sadric had any choice but to seek out his son’s soul and join it with
his own …

 
          
At which the howling runesword gave up a
bellow of resistance, as if this, too, attacked its own ambitions and the logic
of its own unreasoning determination to survive without compromise with any
other entity in the multiverse—even, ultimately, Elric who must be
extinguished, as soon as he had fulfilled his final destiny, which at present
was known to no-one, even the runesword, which did not live in any past,
present or future understood by creatures of the Lower, Middle or Higher
Worlds; yet it wove a pattern of its own, calling upon vaster energies than any
Elric had witnessed, than any it had ever been required to utilize in giving
aid to him in return for the souls not apportioned to Arioch …

 
          
“
Elric!
”

 
          
“
Father, I fear I have lost thy soul …!
”

 
          
“
My soul shall never be lost to thee, my
son …
”

 
          
A bright and sudden gleam of hard, pink-gold
light, like a weapon against his eyes, and a smack of freezing air against his
flesh, and a rhythmic sound, so familiar, so wonderful to him, that he felt the
hot tears fall once, then twice, upon his chilled cheeks …

 
          
“
So Gaynor rode to The Ship That Was
,
And made of it his own
,

 
          
And three sisters rare he did ensnare
,
To insure the Chaos Throne
.

 
          
The first of these sisters was The Unfolded
Flower
,
The second was Duty’s Bud
,

 
          
While the third-born they christened Secret
Thorn
And her bower was built of blood.
”

 
          
And,
sobbing, Elric fell into the welcoming arms of that great-hearted, if dwarfish,
poet, Master Ernest Wheldrake. “My dear, good, sir! My good, old friend!
Greetings to thee, Prince Elric. Does something pursue thee?” And he pointed
back up through the deep snow-banks terracing the valley wall, where a
fresh-ploughed furrow ran, as if Elric had slid from the top of the cliff to
the bottom.

 
          
“I
am glad to see thee, Master Wheldrake.” He brushed caked snow from his
clothing, wondering, not for the first time, if he had dreamed his journey
through the multiverse or if the dragon venom, perhaps, possessed more than
restorative qualities. He glanced across the fresh-trod snow of a small
clearing in the winter birchwood and saw Stormbringer leaning, almost casually,
against a tree, and for a pure, clear moment, he knew absolute hatred of the
blade, that part of himself he could no longer exist without or (as some small
voice continued to tell him) that part, perhaps, that he wished to keep alive,
since only in the rage of supernatural battle did he ever know any true relief
from the burden of his conscience.

 
          
With
deliberate slowness he strolled to the tree, picked up the blade and sheathed
it as a man might sheath any ordinary weapon, his attention still upon his
friend’s disheveled features. “How came you here, Master Wheldrake? Is it a
plane familiar to you?”

 
          
“Familiar
enough, Prince Elric. And to yourself, I should think. We have not left the
realm where flows the
Heavy
Sea
.”

 
          
And
now Elric realized exactly what the Black Sword had done, dragging them both
back to the very world from which Arioch had sought to banish them. And this
suggested that the hellblade had motives of its own for ensuring his remaining
here. He said none of this to Wheldrake but listened while his friend explained
how Charion Phatt was at last reunited with her Uncle Fallogard and her
grandmother.

 
          
“But
Koropith remains lost to us at present,” the poet concluded. “Fallogard,
however, has a close sense of his son’s presence. So we are hopeful, dear
prince, that soon all surviving Phatts shall know again the pleasures of family
security.” He lowered his voice to a kind of conspiratorial squeak. “There is
some talk of marriage between myself and my beloved Charion.”

 
          
And,
before he could burst into verse, the snowy branches of a forest path parted
and here came the confident Charion, carrying the handles of a litter on which
Mother Phatt sat, smiling and nodding, like a queen in a procession, the other
end borne by her tall, untidy son who flashed a smile of jolly recognition
towards the albino, as one might greet a familiar face at a local tavern. Only
Charion seemed a little disturbed to discover the newcomer. “I sensed your
destruction a year ago,” she said quietly, after she had lowered her
grandmother’s litter to the ground. “I sensed you blasted out of any
recognizable form of existence. How could you have survived that? Are you
Gaynor or some shape-changer in Elric’s guise?”

 
          
“I
assure you, Mistress Phatt,” said Elric, also disturbed, “I am only the one you
know. For some reason, Fate does not want me annihilated as yet. It seems,
indeed, that I am surviving annihilation rather successfully.”

 
          
It
was this last little irony that seemed to convince her and she relaxed. But it
was clear every psychic sense in her was probing his being for signs of
imposture. “You are indeed a remarkable creature, Elric of Melniboné,” said
Charion Phatt as she turned away to attend to her grandmother.

 
          
“I
am glad you found us, sir. We ourselves have some rather excellent intimations
concerning my missing son,” called out Fallogard Phatt cheerfully, oblivious of
his niece’s suspicions. “So, gradually, we become, as it were, concrete again.
You already know, I believe, my niece’s intended?”

 
          
At
which Charion Phatt blushed girlishly, to her own furious embarrassment, yet
the eye she cast upon the little coxcomb was not unlike that which a certain
toad had once cast upon her: for there is never anything but apparent paradox
in the choices made by lovers.

 
          
And
Mother Phatt opened her merry red mouth in which a few fangs still glittered
and cried: “Ding dong, for the six sad drabs! Ding dong for the dilly-o!” As
if, in senility, she had become possessed by a mad parrot. Yet she waved an
approving hand upon her granddaughter’s choice and her wink at Elric was full
of knowing wit and, when he returned it, he was sure she smiled. “Dark days for
the lily-white boy; bright days for the darkling joy! Feast of evil, feast of good,
feasting fine the Chaos brood. Feast the devil, feast the Son; dark days for
the shining one. For the flowers of the forest are blooming at night, and the
ships of the ocean are sailing on land. Ding dong for the lily-white lad, ding
dong for the good and the bad; sail through the wildwood, sow grain on the sea;
Chaos has come to the Land of the Three.”