Revenge of the Rose (34 page)

 
          
In
the time before the time of long ago,

 
          
When
neither haughty Law nor fractured Chaos rules,

 
          
Lives
a creature born of foliage and flesh,

 
          
Who
seeks to weave her world a-fresh,

 
          
And
weaves one fine, a woven womb,

 
          
A
womb of bramble flowers strong,

 
          
In
which to sing her briar-song,

 
          
And
bear her thorny child, who grows

 
          
Into
a perfect rose.

 
          
“They
are Wheldrake’s. From his youth, he says.”

 
          
But
then she saw that she had, in a way she might never understand, communicated
something to the pale lord, for Elric’s lips were moving and his eyes were
raised to look into worlds the others could not see. Strange musical sounds
came out of his lips, and even the three sisters could not understand what he
said, for he spoke no earthly tongue. He spoke a tongue of the dark clay and
the winding roots, of the old bramble-nests where the wild Vadhagh once, legend
had it, played and spawned their strange offspring, part flesh, part leafy
wood, a people of the forest and forgotten gardens, and, when he hesitated, it
was the Rose who joined him in his song, in the language of a folk who were not
her own, but whose ancestors had mingled with her own and whose blood flowed in
her to this day.

 
          
They
sang together, sending their song through all the dimensions of the multiverse,
to where a dreaming creature stirred and lifted up arms made of a million woven
brambles and turned faces which, too, were of knotted rosewood, in the
direction of the song it had not heard for a hundred thousand years. And it was
as if the song brought her to life, gave her some meaning at a moment when she
had been about to die, so that, almost upon a whim, from something like
curiosity, the Tangled Woman shifted her brambly body, arm by arm and leg by
leg, then head by head, and, with a rustling movement which made all her
foliage shudder, she formed herself into a shape very like a human shape,
though somewhat larger.

 
          
And
with that, she took a casual step through time and space which had not been in
existence when she had first decided to sleep, and which she therefore ignored,
and found herself standing in an ill-smelling morass of corrupt flesh and
rotting bone which displeased her. But through all this she sensed another
scent, something of herself in it, and she lowered her massive, woven head, a
head of thick thorn branches whose eyes were not eyes at all, but flowers and
leaves, and then she opened her briar lips and asked, in a voice so low it
shook the ground, why her daughter had summoned her?

 
          
To
which the Rose replied, in similar speech, while Elric sang his own tale to
her, in a melody she found tolerable. It seemed that she concentrated her woven
branches more thickly about her and looked with a certain sternness towards
Gaynor and the remains of the Chaos army which had come full stop to stare at
her before, at Gaynor’s lifting of his black-and-yellow sword, a shard of raging
energy, they began to race to the attack!

 
          
And
the sisters clutched hands, linked with Charion and Elric and the Rose, and
they held tight for security and power, for they somehow informed the Tangled
Woman in her primitive soul—they directed her as she bent and reached a
many-branched hand towards Gaynor, who barely yanked his horse aside in time
and rode beneath her, slashing at the wood which, because the energy which
enlivened it was of a kind that no power could suck out nor any mortal weapon
damage, was scarcely marked and, where it was marked, healed immediately.

 
          
With
calm deliberation now, as if she performed some unwelcome household task, the
Tangled Woman stretched her long fingers through the attacking ranks of Chaos,
oblivious to their hacking swords and jabbing pikes, their bitings and their
clawings, and wove her fingers thoroughly amongst them, twining and twisting
and bending and entangling them until every Chaos warrior and every Chaos beast
still living was embraced and fixed by her bramble fingers.

 
          
Only
one figure escaped, riding like fury from the bloody crystals of that
battlefield, slashing at the horse’s rump with the satiated leechsword.

 
          
Tangled
Woman reached thin tentacles out towards the disappearing Gaynor but had little
strength left; just enough to flick, with a thin, green branch, the sword from
his flailing hand and bear it triumphantly up, to fling it away, deep into the
forest where a black pool began to spread, turning all the surrounding crystal
to the consistency of coal.

 
          
Then
the leechsword vanished and they heard Gaynor’s furious yell as he forced the
sweating stallion up out of the valley and rode, without looking back, down the
other side, to vanish.

 
          
Tangled
Woman had lost interest in Gaynor. Slowly she withdrew her brambly fingers from
the field, from the bloody corpses her thorns had pierced, from the flesh from
which life had been crushed, her victims knowing a cleaner death than any Elric
offered.

 
          
But
now Elric pulled himself into his saddle and, while the others refused to look,
he went about the business of slaughtering the wounded, letting the sword feast
and renew his energy. He was determined to find and punish Gaynor for the evil
he had done. And as he passed among what remained of the living, their
imploring wails were ignored. “I must steal from you what your master would
have stolen from us,” he explained. And that killing had neither honour nor
satisfaction in it. He did only what was necessary.

 
          
When
he returned to his companions the Tangled Woman had gone, taking whatever
payment she required, and all that were left were the dead.

 
          
“The
Chaos army is defeated,” said Princess Shanug’a. “But Chaos still dwells within
our realm. Gaynor still has power here. He will soon come against us again.” She
had recaptured her horse.

 
          
“We
must not
let
him come again,” said
the Rose, cleaning Swift Thorn upon a scrap of satin surcoat. “We must drive
him back to hell and ensure he never more threatens your realm!”

 
          
“It
is true,” said Elric, moody with his own unquiet thoughts, “we must track the
beast back to its lair and it must be confined, even if we cannot kill it. Can
you find the way, Charion Phatt?”

 
          
“I
can find it,” she said. She had several minor wounds, which the others had
helped her dress, but there was a kind of breathless pleasure in the way she
moved, as if she were still exulting in her unexpected salvation. “He has
returned, without doubt, to
The Ship That
Was.
”

 
          
“His
stronghold …” murmured the Rose.

 
          
“Where,”
said Princess Mishiguya, settling herself in her saddle, “his power must be
greatest.”

 
          
“There
is a power there, to be sure,” agreed Charion, drawing her brows together—“a
mightier power than any he commanded on this field. Yet I cannot completely
understand why he did not use it against us here.”

 
          
“Perhaps
he awaits us,” said Elric. “Perhaps he knows we will come …”

 
          
“We
must go to reclaim the Rose’s treasures,” said Princess Tayaratuka. “We cannot
allow Prince Gaynor to hold them.”

 
          
“Indeed,”
agreed Elric with some feeling and a renewing sense of urgency. He had
remembered that his father’s soul remained in Gaynor’s keeping and that very
soon Arioch or some other Duke of Hell would try to claim it, whereupon it
would flee to him and hide within his own being, forever united, father and
son.

 
          
Elric
drew off his black gauntlets and put his hands upon his horse’s muscular
flanks, but nothing would take away the chill that gripped his being. No
ordinary warmth could comfort him.

 
          
“What
of the others?” said Charion. “What of my uncle and my grandma, my cousin and
my betrothed? I think they must be reassured.”

 
          
They
rode slowly back towards the cavern city, stabling their horses before
beginning the long climb up the steps and walkways hidden within the walls, and
when they finally reached the balcony where they had left the others, they
found only Wheldrake.

 
          
He
was distraught. His eyes were full of tears. He embraced Charion Phatt but his
gesture was one of consolation rather than joy. “They have gone,” he said. “They
saw that you were losing the battle. Or thought they saw that. Fallogard had to
consider his son and his mother. He did not want to leave, but I made him. He
had the power to do it. He could have taken me, but there was no time and I
would not go.”

 
          
“Gone?”
said Charion, holding him at arm’s length now. “Gone, my love?”

 
          
“Mother
Phatt opened what she called a ‘tuck’ and they crawled under it, to disappear—at
the very moment when that vast thicket materialized. It was too late. They have
escaped!”

 
          
“From
what?” yelled Charion Phatt, enraged. “To what? Oh, must we begin this search
all over again?”

 
          
“It
seems so, my dear,” said Wheldrake meekly, “if we are to have your uncle’s
blessing, as we had hoped.”

 
          
“We
must follow them,” she said firmly.

 
          
“Not
yet,” said the Rose softly. “First we must ride to
The Ship That Was
. I have a small reckoning to extract from Gaynor
the Damned—and from the company I suspect he keeps.”

 
          
Concerning
the Capturing and the Auctioning of Certain Occult Artifacts: Reverses in the
Higher Worlds; The Rose Exacts her Revenge; Resolving a Cosmic Compromise
.

 
          
The
little caravan came to a ragged halt as the cliffs were reached at last. Their
remaining horses, sometimes carrying double, were almost completely exhausted.
But they had found the Heavy Sea; dragging its dark and weighty waves upon the
shore, then dragging them back again, all beneath a slow, morbid sky. They
looked down now at the narrow entrance of a bay, where the sea seemed calmer.
Its high, obsidian walls enclosed a beach of oddly coloured shingle, of bits of
quartz and shards of limestone, of semi-precious stones and glaring flint.

 
          
Anchored
in the bay was a ship which Elric recognized at once. Her sail was furled, but
the great covered cage in the forecastle made her prow-heavy. Gaynor’s ship and
her crew had rejoined their master. On the far side of a spur of rock, which
obscured their sight of the rest of the beach, there seemed to be activity—perhaps
a figure or two—and now they must allow their horses to pick their way slowly
down the narrow track from cliff to beach, threatening to slip on the shiny
rock. Then at last the hoofs were grinding down upon the gleaming shingle,
making a sound like ice being crushed, and the companions could see that the
beach extended beyond the spur and that it was possible to ride along it.

 
          
Princess
Tayaratuka rode a little ahead; then came her sisters (sharing a horse). Then
came the Rose, followed by Elric and Charion Phatt, with Wheldrake’s tiny hands
about her waist. A strangely disparate party, but with many shared
ambitions …

 
          
Then
they had rounded the point and they looked upon
The Ship That Was
.

 
          
Before
them stood one of the most grotesque settlements Elric had ever seen.

 
          
Once
it had, indeed, been a ship. A ship whose score of decks rose higher and higher
to form what had been a vast, floating ziggurat crewed by huge, unhuman
creatures; a ship worthy of Chaos herself. Her lines had the appearance of
something organic which had petrified suddenly after being tortured into
unnatural forms. Here and there were suggestions of faces, limbs, torsos, of
otherworldly beasts and birds, of gigantic fish and creatures which were
combinations of all these things. And the ship seemed to Elric to be of a piece
with the Heavy Sea which, like green quartz turned viscous and sluggish now,
flung its spume upon that gloomy strand where men, women and children, in every
variety of clothing, in rags and silks and shoes which rarely matched, in the
filthy sables of some slaughtered king, in the jerkins and breeks of a nameless
sailor, in the dresses and undergarments of the drowned, in the hats and jewels
and embroidery with which the dead had once celebrated their vanity, moved
backwards and forwards amongst those dreadful breakers, amongst carrion and
flotsam brought here on the morose tide, the detritus of centuries, to scuttle
with any treasure they might discover back to the warren of the ship, which lay
at a slight angle on the beach, its starboard buried, its port a-tilt, where
perhaps a mast had halted its complete upending.

 
          
A
dead husk, the ship was infested with its human inhabitants much as the body of
some slain sea-giant might be infested with worms. They stained it with their
very presence, dishonoured it by their squalor, as the bones of the fallen are
stained and dishonoured by the droppings and the debris of the crows which feed
upon their putrefying flesh. Within the ship was constant movement, an
impression of one writhing mass of life without individual identity or concerns,
without dignity, respect or shame—wriggling, scampering, quarreling, fighting,
squealing, roaring, whining and hissing, as if in imitation of that horrible
sea itself, these were those humans pledged to Chaos but not yet transformed by
Chaos; creatures who doubtless had had little choice in their masters as Gaynor
carried the banner of Count Mashabak out into this world. They were wretches
now, however, and they had only their shame. They would not look up as Elric
and his companions rode towards the looming shadow of
The Ship That Was
.

 
          
They
would not answer the albino’s questions. They would not listen when the sisters
tried to speak to them. Terror and shame consumed them. They had already given
up hope, even of an afterlife, for they reasoned that the misery they suffered
surely proved that the entire multiverse had been conquered by their
tormentors.

 
          
“We
are here,” said Elric at last, “to take prisoner Prince Gaynor the Damned and
to hold him to account!”

 
          
Yet
even this did not move them. They were used to Gaynor’s deceptions, the games
he had, in his moments of boredom, played with their lives and their emotions.
To them, all speech had become a lie.

 
          
The
seven rode to where a kind of drawbridge had been built into the body of the
upturned ship and, without hesitation, they cantered inside, to discover a
nightmare of murky galleries and ragged holes, where crude doors had been
carved between bulkheads, all strung with shreds of net and rope and various
roughly made implements, drying bits of cloth and rag, of tattered clothing and
ill-washed linen, where lean-to shacks and teetering shanties were erected,
often on the very brink of an injured deck. Something large and strong had
pierced this ship and brought her to her end, rupturing her innards.

 
          
Through
the portholes from deck to deck poured a foggy, unpleasant light, creating a
lattice of pale and dark shadows within the ship’s serpentine bowels, making
the shapes of the inhabitants equally shadowy, like ghosts, crouching,
skulking, coughing, wheezing, tittering, too despairing to look upon the living
without increasing their already unbearable misery. The floor of
The Ship That Was
was deep with human
ordure, with discarded litter even they did not value. Wheldrake put a hand to
his mouth and dropped down from Charion’s horse. “Ugh, this is worse than the
Stepney warrens. I’ll let you go about your business. I have nothing useful to
do here.” And somewhat to Charion’s surprise he returned to the comparative
wholesomeness of that dark beach.

 
          
“It
is true,” said the Rose, “that he can do little that is practical. But his
poetic inspiration is without parallel when it comes to tuning oneself to the
harmony of the multiverse …”

 
          
“It
is his most delightful quality,” agreed Charion with a lover’s enthusiasm, glad
that what she admired in her beau was reflected in another’s opinion—which went
a short distance to disproving what lovers always suspect of themselves; that
they have gone entirely mad.

 
          
Now
Elric was losing patience with that conspiracy of the desperate and the dumb.
As his warhorse stamped upon the filthy shingle, he drew the runesword out of
its scabbard so Stormbringer’s black radiance poured into that great, ruined
space, and a dangerous murmuring song came out of it, as if it lusted for the
soul of he who had tried to steal its energy.

 
          
And
the warhorse reared up, pawing at the murky air; and the albino’s scarlet eyes
blazed through all that layered darkness, and he cried out the name of the one
who had wronged them, who had created all this, who had abused every power,
every responsibility, every duty, every treaty, every trust ever placed in him.

 
          
“Gaynor!
Gaynor the Damned! Gaynor, thou foulest hellspawn! We have come to be revenged
on thee!”

 
          
From
somewhere high above, in what had once been the deepest and strongest parts of
the ship, where the darkness was complete, came a distant chuckling that could
only emanate from that faceless helm.

 
          
“Such
rhetoric, my dear prince! Such bluster!”

 
          
Then
Elric was finding a way for himself and his horse, crashing upwards into the
shadows, through the trellises of misty light, up companionways which had once
felt the feet of massive sailors and which were now all crowded and cluttered
with the debris of these human inhabitants, knocking aside steaming pots and
scattering fires, heedless of any damage, knowing that whatever materials
constituted this hull it could not burn from mortal flames, the Rose close at
his heels, shouting for the sisters and Charion to follow.

 
          
Riding
through galleries of filthy darkness, where startled eyes stared for a second
from a cranny or hunched figures skittered into ill-smelling holes; riding
through this collection of hopeless souls, to seek their master and (all manner
of entities and forces willing) free them from his tyranny! It was the Rose who
now threw up her head in a clear, sweet song—a song which spoke, through its
melodies, of lost love, lost lands and frustrated revenge—of a dedication to
make an end to this particular injustice, this obscene perversion in the order
of the multiverse; the Rose who drew out her sword Swift Thorn and brandished
it like a banner. Then the sisters, too, had drawn their blades—one of ivory,
one of granite, one of gold—and were joining in with their own harmonies of
outrage, determined that the cause of their despair should perpetrate no
further harm. Only Charion Phatt sang no song. She was an inexpert rider and
had fallen behind the others. Sometimes she looked back, perhaps hoping that
Wheldrake had decided to follow after all.

 
          
They
reached at last a pair of massive doors, their carvings so alien that they
were, right or wrong way up, indecipherable to the mortals. Once these doors
had guarded the quarters of whatever beast had ruled the ship and had been deep
at the vessel’s heart, but now they lay close to the roof from beyond which
could be heard the slow booming of the heavy breakers.

 
          
“Perhaps,”
came Gaynor’s amused tones again, “I should reward such folly. I sought to
bring you here, sweet princesses, to show off my little kingdom to you, but you
refused to come! Now curiosity brings you here, anyway.”

 
          
“It
is not curiosity, Prince Gaynor, which brings us to
The Ship That Was.
” Princess Shanug’a dropped from the horse she
shared with her sister and went to push at one of the heavy doors, forcing it
back a fraction—enough for them to pass through after they had all dismounted. “It
is our intention to end your rule in this realm!”

 
          
“Brave
words now, madam. Were it not for primitive earth-magic, you would be my slaves
at this moment. Just as you shall be my slaves very soon.”

 
          
The
foggy air was thick with hot, unnatural odours and brands burned in it,
scarcely casting better light than the flickering candles whose huge yellow
stems dripped hissing wax upon what had once been an intricately carved roof
but which was now covered in matted straw and rags. Webs were silhouetted in
the air, hinting at the workings of enormous spiders, and from the deeper
shadows came a scuttling that could only be of rats. Yet it seemed to Elric
that all this was merely an illusion, a curtain which was being parted, for
into view—and he was never sure how—came the fierce, rich, roiling colours of
Chaos—a great sphere whose contents were in constant movement—and this
displayed the dark outline of Gaynor the Damned, standing before it as if at
some kind of altar on which he had placed some few small objects …