Revenge of the Rose (27 page)

 
          
But
when they taxed her on the meaning, if any, of her rhymes, she merely chuckled
and called for her tea. “Mother Phatt is a greedy old woman,” she confided to
Elric. “But she’s done her bit in the past, vicar, I think you’ll agree. Mother
Phatt sat under a tree; bore five strong sons to Eternity.”

 
          
“Koropith,
then, is not far from here?” Elric spoke to Fallogard Phatt. “You can sense
him, you said, sir.”

 
          
“Too
much Chaos, you see,” exclaimed the tall clairvoyant with a vigorous nod. “Hard
to part it—hard to look through. Hard to call. Hard to hear an answer. Fuzzy,
sir. The cosmos is always fuzzy when Chaos goes to work. This world is
threatened, sir, you see. The first invaders have long since gained their
foothold. Yet something holds them back, it seems.”

 
          
Elric
thought again of the runesword, yet had the notion that his blade was neither
helping nor resisting the complicated flow of events; it had merely fought to
return to the plane on which it must be at a certain time, during a certain
movement of the multiverse. Some other power fought Chaos here, of that he was
sure. And he wondered about the three sisters and their part in this. That they
possessed certain treasures, which both he and Gaynor coveted, was almost all
he knew—save for Wheldrake’s ballad, which was mostly the poet’s own invention
and therefore of little use as an objective oracle. Did the sisters exist at
all? Were they wholly the creation of the Bard of Putney? Was everyone pursuing
a chimera—the invention of a highly romantic and over-coloured imagination?

 
          
“In
the third grey month on the third grey day,

 
          
Three
sistren rode to Radinglay,
Seeking three treasures they had lost,

 
          
To
the laughing lord of The Ship That Was.”

 
          
“Well,
sir,” says Elric, helping with the fire they are building, for they had planned
to make camp here, even before his sudden arrival, “do those old rhymes of
yours give you any clue to the whereabouts of the sisters?”

 
          
“I
must admit, sir, that I have modified the verses a little, to allow for the new
things I have learned, so I am an unreliable source of truth, sir, save in its
most fundamental sense. Like a majority of poets, sir. Speaking of Gaynor, we
have intimations of him, but none of Master Snare. We were wondering what had
become of him.”

 
          
“He
sacrificed himself,” said Elric bluntly. “I think he saved me, also, from
Arioch’s full fury. To the best of my knowledge Arioch was driven from this
plane by him—and he died in that act of banishing the Lord of Hell.”

 
          
“You
have lost your ally, then?”

 
          
“I
have lost an ally, Master Wheldrake, as much as I have lost an enemy. I also
appear to have lost a year in this realm. However, I do not mourn the loss of
my patron Duke of Entropy …”

 
          
“Yet
Chaos still threatens,” said Fallogard Phatt. “This plane stinks of it.
Hovering, as it were, before it devours the entire world!”

 
          
“Is
it ourselves that Chaos desires?” Charion Phatt wished to know. Her uncle shook
his head. “Not us, child. It is not
greedy
for us. We are merely, at present, an irritant to it, I think. No longer
useful. But it would be rid of us.” He closed his heavily lidded eyes. “It
grows angry, I know. There is Gaynor now … See—smell—taste him—Gaynor—feel
his presence—see him riding … gone, gone … There he is—riding—I
think he seeks the sisters still. And is close to discovering them! Gaynor
serves it and himself. A subtle power. They desire to possess it. Without it
they can never fully conquer this plane. The sisters—at last—I can sense the
sisters. They seek another. Gaynor? Chaos? What is this? An alliance? They seek—not
Gaynor, I think … Ah! The Chaos stuff, it is too strong … Mist
again. Uncertain mist …” He lifted his head and gasped at the cold
twilight air as if he had been close to drowning in that psychic sea on which
he was, often, the only voyager …

 
          
“Gaynor
rode to the eastern mountains,” said Elric. “Are the sisters still there?”

 
          
“No,”
said Fallogard Phatt, frowning. “They have long since left the Mynce and yet—time—Gaynor
has gained time—he has been aided in this—is there a trap? What? What? I cannot
see him!”

 
          
“We
must break camp early,” said Charion with all her usual practicality, “and try
to reach the sisters before Gaynor. Yet our first duty is to family. Koropith
is here.”

 
          
“On
this plane?” Elric asked.

 
          
“Or
one that presently intersects this realm.” She broke off a piece of candied
leather and offered it to the albino who shook his head, having no love for the
sweetmeats of her world where, Wheldrake swore, the taste in food was even
worse than in his own. “I wonder,” she added, “if anyone but me has any notion
of Gaynor’s positive will to evil?” And when she looked into the fire, her eyes
were hidden from them all.

 
          
The
snow came softly in the morning, covering the scars they had made behind them,
covering the paths ahead, and the world was bitter with cold and silence as
they trudged on through the forest, following the line of the cliff-top above
and guessing, from thin sunlight, the direction in which they walked—yet they
moved without hesitation, doggedly onward, following a psychic scent through
this world where they appeared to be the only living creatures. They paused
briefly to rest, to tend to Mother Phatt’s needs, to boil her warming drinks of
the herbs she herself had told them to pick and which were chiefly what they
now lived on, together with the sweet jerky Charion carried. Then they were up
again and marching where the snow was shallow and Mother Phatt inspected the
moss and the bark they brought her and she told them that the realm had been in
the grip of winter for more than a year and that this was Chaos work without
doubt, and she murmured of old Ice Giants and the Cold Folk and the legends of
her mother’s people, who had been of the race, she claimed, that came before
Man, that had ruled Cornwall before it was named by human tongues. There had
been one, then, she said, that was also a prince, and that prince was of the
old race, while the woman he married was of the new. The children of that union
were her mother’s ancestors. “It is why we have so great a gift of the Second
Sight,” she said to Elric intimately, patting his shoulder as he knelt beside
her during one of their brief rests. She spoke to him as she might a favourite
grandchild. “And they were not unlike you in appearance, save for the pigment,
those folk.”

 
          
“They
were of Melniboné?”

 
          
“No,
no, no! The word is meaningless. These were the great Vadhagh people who came
before the Mabden. So, we are related, perhaps, you and I, Prince Elric?” Her
intelligence was undisguised for a moment and complemented her humour. And
Elric, looking into that face, thought that he looked into the face of Time
itself.

 
          
“Are
we,” she asked him, “both of that Heroic blood?”

 
          
“It
seems likely, madam,” said Elric gently, scarcely aware of what she spoke, but
glad to help her ease the burden she carried and which in some ways she
appeared to resent.

 
          
“And
born to bear a greater share of the world’s grief, I fear,” she said.

 
          
At
which she began to cackle again, and to sing. “Dingly-dongly-bongly! Old Pim’s
a-dabbling-o! Ring the rich and lively boy to bleed his heart for May to bloom!”
Whereupon she began to beat a kind of savage dirge with her spoon and plate. “Up
from the blood and into the brain jumps that memory of pain!”

 
          
“O,
Ma! O, Loins of my Creation! When Chaos mists so much, your recollection of
ancient savageries does further encloud my sight!” Fallogard Phatt spoke with
nervous grace and entreating hands.

 
          
“They’ll
gnaw and pick at poor old Ma’s few remaining bits of brain.” The ancient matron
drew upon her store of pathos to charm her son, but he was adamant.

 
          
“Ma,
we’re almost onto Koropith and the going looks to get hard from now on. We must
save our energies, Ma! We must hold our tongues and stop the scattering of
random charms and jingles or you’ll leave a witch-trail behind us to march an
army up. Which is never prudent, Ma.”

 
          
“Prudence
never pickled no rats,” said Ma Phatt with a reminiscent chuckle, but she
obeyed her son. She accepted his logic.

 
          
Elric
had begun to notice that the air grew warmer and the ice was melting in the
trees, while snow fell heavily to mushy ground and was quickly absorbed. By
that afternoon, under an intense sun, they had crossed a line of grotesquely
armoured beast-men tortured into even stranger shapes and enshrouded in ice
which was burning hot to the touch but through which the travelers saw eyes
moving, lips straining to speak, limbs frozen in attitudes of perpetual agony.
A small Chaos army, Fallogard Phatt had agreed with Elric, defeated by some
unknown sorcery, perhaps an effort of Law? Now they rode across a desert
through which ran what was almost certainly an artificial watercourse and from
which they could drink.

 
          
The
desert ended by the next day and they saw ahead of them the immense foliage of
a dark, lush forest, whose trees bore leaves as long as a man, with trunks as
slender and sinewy as human bodies, whose gorgeous foliage was deep scarlets
and deep yellows, dusty browns and clouded blues, while mingling with these
rich, threatening colours were strands of pale pink and veins of purple or
grey, as if the forest was fed by blood.

 
          
“It
is there, I think, we shall find our missing prodigal!” announced Fallogard
Phatt heartily, though even his mother looked doubtfully at that menacing
tangle of massive blooms and sinuous branches. There seemed to be no hint of a
pathway through it.

 
          
But
Fallogard Phatt, now at the head of the litter, trotted forward, causing his
shorter niece to take quicker steps to maintain the balance and momentum of
their progress, until she cried out for her uncle to stop as he plunged forward
into the sticky, almost reptilian forest.

 
          
Glad
to be in the shade, Elric leaned against a yielding trunk. It was as if he sank
into soft flesh. He straightened his back and shifted his weight to his feet. “This
is without doubt Chaos work,” he said. “I am familiar with these creations,
half-animal, half-vegetable, which are usually the first growths Chaos achieves
on any world. They are essentially the detritus of unskilled sorceries and no
self-respecting emperor of Melniboné would have wasted time on such stuff. But
Chaos, as you no doubt have already learned, has very little taste—whereas Law,
of course, has rather too much.”

 
          
They
found the forest easier going than they had imagined, for the fleshy branches
parted easily and only occasionally did a pod cling sensually to an arm or part
of a face, while a glossy green tentacle embraced the body like the arms of a
lover. Yet the things were not greatly animated by Chaos-energy and Fallogard
Phatt’s progress was scarcely ever blocked for long.

 
          
Until,
without warning, the jungle was no longer organic.

 
          
It
became crystalline.

 
          
Pale
light of a thousand shades fell through the prisms of the forest roof, flashed
and skipped from branch to crystal leaf, flooded down trunks and across
canopies—and still Fallogard Phatt continued his relentless advance through the
jungle, for the crystals yielded as easily as had the branches.

 
          
“And
this is Law’s work, surely?” said Charion Phatt to Elric. “This sterile beauty?”

 
          
“I
would admit—” said Elric studying the way the light fell in multicoloured slabs
one upon the other until the forest floor ran with flooding light, like rubies
and emeralds and dark amethysts, until they were knee-deep in it, wading on
through this wealth of pigment which was also reflected in their skins so that
Elric himself was at last one with his friends, for all looked in wondering pleasure
at their swirling motley flesh which seemed to glint and dance with the
crystals all around them. Then they had reached and entered a mighty cavern of
cool, silver radiance—where distant water lapped gentle banks and they knew an
intense peace, such as Elric had only known before in Tanelorn.