Revenge of the Rose (37 page)

 
          
He
lifted the Black Sword even as it uttered a moan of protest, and he placed it
between the other swords, at the very apex.

 
          
Carefully
and slowly the Rose moved until she held the opened soulbox directly under the
pommel of the runesword and cried: “Strike! Strike upwards, Elric, into the
demon’s heart—!”

 
          
And
the albino yelled in terrifying anguish as the hellforce poured from the Chaos
Lord in response to his single thrust. And Mashabak’s unholy demon’s soul
poured with a gush of dark radiance which sent Stormbringer to shivering and
howling again, down the blade and into the soulbox the Rose held ready for it.

 
          
And
it was only at that moment that Elric realized what, under the Rose’s
direction, he had done!

 
          
“My
father’s soul,” he said, “you have wed it to that demon’s! You have destroyed
it!”

 
          
“Now
we control him!” The Rose’s subtle pink skin glowed with her pleasure. “Now we
have Mashabak. No mortal has the power to destroy him, but he is our prisoner.
He will remain so for ever! While we can destroy his soul. He is forced to
obey. Through him we shall recreate the worlds he crushed.” She closed the lid.

 
          
“How
can you control him, when Gaynor could not?” Elric looked up to where, oddly
passive, the demon count peered from his prison.

 
          
“Because
now we possess his soul,” said the Rose. “This is my satisfaction and my
revenge.”

 
          
Wheldrake
emerged from beyond the scaly back of his rival in love. “It is not a very
dramatic vengeance, madam.”

 
          
“I
sought resolution to my grief,” said the Rose. “And we learned, my sisters and
I, that such resolution is rarely achieved by further destruction. These two,
besides, could never be destroyed. Yet, living, we have seen to it that they
have served some useful purpose, the pair of them, and that is all I wished to
bring about. To do positive good where positive harm had been done. It is the
only possible form of revenge for such as myself.”

 
          
And
Elric, staring with growing horror at the soulbox, could not respond to her. He
had been through all this, he thought, to fail at the very moment when he
thought he had succeeded.

 
          
The
Rose was smiling at him still. Her warm fingers were gentle on his face. He
glanced at her, but he could not speak.

 
          
The
sisters were lowering their swords. They looked drained and could barely
replace the weapons in their scabbards. Charion Phatt, leaving the toad and
Wheldrake, went to tend to them.

 
          
“Here.”
The Rose strode to the table and picked up the living bloom from where it lay
upon the rosewood box which contained those three briar rings of power which
had helped chain a demon’s soul. She handed him the flower. There was dew upon
the leaves as if it still grew in a country garden.

 
          
“I
thank you for the keepsake, lady,” he said quietly, but his mind was still full
of the horror to come.

 
          
“You
must take it to your father,” she said. “He will be awaiting you in those
ruins. The ruins where your people made their final pact with Chaos.”

 
          
Elric
did not find her humour amusing. “I shall be speaking to my father soon enough,
lady,” he said. With a deep sigh he sheathed his battle-blade. And he did not
look into the future with any pleasure …

 
          
She
was laughing. “Elric! Your father’s soul was never in that box! At least, not
trapped by it as the demon’s is. The briar rings are for the bonding of a demon’s
soul. The box was built to
hold
a
demon’s soul. But the Eternal Rose is too delicate a thing to contain such a
soul. It can only hold the soul of a mortal who has loved another better than
itself. This flower protects and is nourished by your father’s soul, Elric.
That is why it lives. It is informed by all that is good in Sadric. Take it to
your father. Once he has that, he can rejoin your mother as he longed to do.
Arioch has forsworn all claim on him—and Mashabak has no power over him.
We
shall use the power of Mashabak. We
shall force the Count of Hell to restore everything we loved. And so, by
turning this evil into good, we redeem the past! And that is the
only
way by which we mortals may ever
redeem our pasts! It is the only positive revenge. Take the flower.”

 
          
“I
will take it to my father, lady,” said Elric.

 
          
“And
then,” she said, “you may bring me back with you to Tanelorn.”

 
          
He
looked into her quiet, hazel eyes and he hesitated for a moment. “I would be
honoured, lady,” he said.

 
          
Suddenly
Wheldrake’s yelling: “The toad! The toad!” And the creature is crawling, on
massive hands and feet, through the door of the chamber and out into the
galleries, the ruined decks, where all the wretches released from their
servitude to Chaos are running and scampering and fleeing—out of the great
hull, flushed rabbits from a warren, and Wheldrake runs behind him calling “Stop,
dear toad. Sweet rival! For the sake of our mutual love, stop, I beg thee!”

 
          
But
the toad has turned now, at the entrance to
The
Ship That Was
, and looks back at Wheldrake, looks back at Charion Phatt who
also follows, and pauses, as if awaiting them. As they come closer, it waddles
out of the hull and into the light, the humans running like lice around it,
escaping back into the land no longer ruled by Chaos. And then it squats,
waiting for them …

 
          
 … Where
Ma Phatt, unsteady in her swaying chair, is borne along the beach by her son
and grandson, the pair of them sweating and exhausted as she yells at them to
increase their speed, then sees her grand-daughter and Wheldrake and shrieks
for them to stop. “My dolly-joys, my sweety-hearts, my jammy, juicy jolly-boy!”
She discards the tattered parasol with which she has protected her wise old
head and licks her lips at him; she ogles him. “My rock, my tasty wordsmith!
Oh, how happy my Charion will be! How happy I would have been, had I but known
you were in Putney! Put me down! Put me down, boys! We have arrived. I told you
they were safe! I told you she had a machination or two, a twist in the cosmic
fabric, a little smoothing out of the tangled sleeves. Sweet-rumped little
coxcomb! Tiny reveler in rhyme! Come with me. We’ll seek the End of Time!”

 
          
“A
confusing place, as I recall,” says Wheldrake, but he basks in her approval,
her celebration of him, her pleasure at his joining her family.

 
          
“I
told you we did not go far, Father!” declared Koropith Phatt a little too
triumphantly, so that Fallogard Phatt caught his eye in a stern glare. “Although
you, too, were right, of course, when you recognized this beach.”

 
          
The
Rose and the three sisters were emerging now, to greet their friends, but they
carried only the soulbox. The metaphysically filleted Count of Hell was left
within, to think for a little upon the nature of his fate, in which he would be
forced to create everything that was anathema to him. In her left hand the Rose
carried, so that it hung loose and dragged upon the shingle, the grey wolf pelt
which Gaynor had sported, not knowing that it was a sign that, in some manner
at least, Esbern Snare had been released from his particular burden.

 
          
“What?”
said Wheldrake, a trifle surprised. “Do you take that as a trophy, madam?”

 
          
But
the Rose shook her head gently. “It belonged once,” she said, “to a sister of
mine. The only other survivor of Gaynor’s treachery …”

 
          
And
only then did Elric understand the full import of the Rose’s fate-weaving, of
her astonishing manipulation of the fabric of the multiverse.

 
          
Ma
Phatt was looking at her quizzically. “You have your satisfaction then, my
dear?”

 
          
“As
much as is possible,” agreed the Rose.

 
          
“You
serve a powerful thing,” added the old woman, clambering down from her rickety
litter and hobbling across the shingle, her red face alive with a variety of
pleasures. “Do you call that thing the Balance, by any chance?”

 
          
But
the Rose linked an arm in Ma Phatt’s and helped her to sit upon an upturned
bucket and she said: “Let us simply agree that I am opposed to all forms of
tyranny, whether of Law or of Chaos or any other power …”

 
          
“Then
it is Fate itself you serve,” said the old woman firmly. “For this was a
powerful weaving, child. It has made fresh reality in the multiverse. It has
corrected the disruptions which upset us so badly. Now we can continue on our
journey.”

 
          
“Where
do you go, Mother Phatt?” asked Elric. “Where will you find the security you
seek?”

 
          
“My
niece’s future husband has convinced us that we should discover the kind of
domestic peace we value in the place he knows called ‘Putney’,” said Fallogard
Phatt with a kind of hesitant heartiness. “And so we shall all seek this place
with him. He has, he said, an unfinished epic, in two volumes, concerning some
local champion of his people. Which he left in Putney, do you see. So we must
begin there, at least. We are all one united family now and do not intend to be
further separated.”

 
          
“I
go with them, lady,” said Koropith Phatt, grasping the Rose’s hand quickly and
kissing it, almost as if embarrassed. “We’ll take the ship and the toad and
cross the Heavy Sea again. From there we shall follow the pathways through the
realms until, no doubt, we shall come inevitably to Putney.”

 
          
“I
wish you a safe and direct journey,” she said. Then she too kissed his hands. “I
will miss you, Master Phatt, and your expert tracking through the multiverse.
There was never a better psychic bloodhound!”

 
          
“Prince
Elric fled from that fateful strand,
Great hope had he in his heart,

 
          
From
the sweet rose blooming in his hand,
No mortal could dispart …”

 
          
intoned
the red-headed poet and then shrugged by way of apology. “I was not prepared,
today, for epilogues. I had hoped only for a noble end. Come toad! Come
Charion! Come family all! We sail again upon the Heavy Sea! For far-flung
Putney and the golden bliss of happy domesticity!”

 
          
And
there was something in the proud Prince of Ruins that yearned, as he waved
farewell, for the less dramatic adventures of the hearth.

 
          
Then
he turned towards the Rose, that mysterious manipulator of destinies, and he
bowed. “Come, madam,” he said, “we have a dragon to summon and a journey to
make! My father is doubtless a trifle concerned for the well-being of his
much-bartered soul.”

 
          
In
Which the Prince of Ruins Honours a Vow
.

 
          
Against
the full heat of a harvest moon, Lady Scarsnout lifted her magnificent head to
taste the wind, flapped her wings once to set her course and lifted away from
that perpetuity of night where Sadric’s ghost had hidden.

 
          
Elric
had put the living rose into his father’s pale hand. He had watched as the rose
faded and died at last, no longer kept alive by the thing which had been hidden
in it. And then Sadric had sighed. “I can hate thee no longer, son of thy
mother,” he said. “I had not hoped for so much as the gifts thou broughtest me.”

 
          
And
his father had kissed him with lips suddenly warm upon his cheek, with a
momentary gesture of affection such as he had never made in life. “I will await
thee, my son, where thy mother awaits me now, in the Forest of Souls.”

 
          
Elric
had watched the ghost fade away, like a whisper on the wind, and, looking up,
he had realized that time was no longer stilled, and that Melniboné’s bloody
history, her ten thousand years of dominance, of cruelty and heartless
conquest, was at the point of its beginning.

 
          
For
a brief instant he had considered taking some new action—some action to change
the course of the Bright Empire’s progress down the centuries—to make of his
race a gentler, nobler people—but then he had shaken his head and turned his
back on H’hui’shan, on his past and on all brooding about what might have been,
and he had settled himself into that natural saddle behind the dragon’s
shoulders and was calling confidently, with a new hope in his voice, for his
mount to bear him skyward.

 
          
Then
up they went together, dragon-leather slapping against the swirling clouds, up
into the starry languor of a Melnibonéan night, into a future where, by a
certain crossroads at the edge of time, the Rose awaited him.

 
          
For
he had promised her that, when she first saw Tanelorn, she would be riding upon
a dragon.