The sounds from the clock mask grew more jangled and out of tune. Taragorm was using a prearranged strategy, formulated no doubt long ago to help Gaynor in some other battle. The air around him spangled and faded, and I recognized magic at work.
Elric’s movements became increasingly disorganized, yet he kept his grip on the sword. His glance towards Taragorm told me he knew what was happening to him. I struggled to get up, yelling that I was coming to help. The circulation had not yet returned to my arms and legs. At the same time I feared I might still be in danger from St. Odhran. I watched, probably a bit like a hypnotized rat, as Taragorm disappeared around the rock, presumably to dispatch Jack.
Elric stumbled.
St. Odhran reached me, lifting me up to put me on my feet, caught me as I fell, and then pushed me down onto the ground so hard that I was winded. “Stay there,” he said urgently. “For your life, stay there!”
Big Ben’s hammers bounced against her bells. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! The familiar sounds of the Westminster chimes hideously off-key. It was madness. Elric wobbled and fell as the still grinning Gaynor moved in swiftly beside him, with Mournblade raised again to strike. This time Gaynor would not be distracted, and I still could scarcely move.
All at once Elric rolled, sprawling spread-eagled on his back. Stormbringer was still in his left hand while his right tried to find purchase on the glassy rock as he willed himself to stand. Gaynor took his time as he stalked forward, his huge mouth open in a roar of pleasure.
Then Elric pointed upwards with his right hand, and lights streamed out of it. Green, red, violet, indigo, the colors poured from his mouth and fingertips. His lips writhed and snarled, uttering incomprehensible words. Morbid shadows formed around him.
Gaynor was openly contemptuous. “Conjurer’s pranks, Lord Elric. Nothing more. You’ll not deflect my attention as you have that of previous enemies, who lacked defenses against you. I can match you spell for spell, Sir Sorcerer-King!”
The tentative smile on Elric’s face broadened. He raised his head and called out in his own language. He called on the ancient gods of his people to help him save his soul.
With a noise like bursting rockets, Elric was suddenly plucking at the air, as another might pluck at the strings of an instrument. A red glare surrounded him. Blue fire continued to pour from his mouth. In response to his spell making, sword after sword began to appear before him. And every one of the swords was black, pulsing with runes, identical to those grasped in the fists of the two fighters. Yet even now, with so many identical sentient swords, Stormbringer and Mournblade were subtly different, subtly more powerful. Stormbringer had an extra quality to it, impossible to identify. It was clear that there was only one true Stealer of Souls.
A forest of swords surrounded Gaynor now. Hundreds of them, all rustling and clashing together in their eagerness to engage the former Knight of the Balance.
Gaynor had no doubts about what was happening. His eyes held a bleak understanding as he spat on the floor, glaring at Elric, who stood with folded arms on the other side of that mass of swords. “Well, I reckoned without your particular powers, I suppose, Elric.” He sneered at his own folly. “You didn’t spend all those thousands of years on your dream couches in order to learn a few entertaining magic tricks for the provincial stage. I should have considered better what I was facing. Still, one symbol is destroyed and another takes its place. You’ll perish yet, Lord Elric, if it’s not at my hand. You have death all over you.”
“I welcome it,” said Elric, still gasping for air, “but I’d prefer to choose where death comes to me and what price I pay.”
The black swords hovered over and surrounded Gaynor. At first the blades took tiny nicks out of him as he attempted to fend them off, like a man swatting at insects. Then the nicks became deeper wounds, and blood began to pour from him. His clothes fell away in tiny shreds of rag. Even his boots were cut from him like that until he stood there, blood coursing down every part of his head and naked body, his mad eyes still glaring defiance. The blades then carefully removed his skin and filleted his flesh, leaving his head until last. As he watched himself being cut into tiny fragments, piece by piece, his screams became no longer defiant but terrible in their desperate pleading for Elric’s pity.
Elric had no pity.
Perhaps he alone knew it wasn’t over. For each piece of flesh the black swords cut off Gaynor, a new Gaynor grew before our eyes. Gaynor after Gaynor, every one of them wielding a black sword and attacking Elric. An army of shadow Gaynors, each becoming gradually harder to see, fought against the albino and his army of supernatural swords.
With the same little smile playing around his handsome mouth, Elric fought on steadily. Like someone who has found the comfortable rhythm of a walk, though I’m sure he knew he could not yet anticipate Gaynor’s defeat.
I watched in relief as one by one, Elric began to defeat his shadow enemies, who drew on the decreasing resources of the multiverse. With each sword cut, an aspect of his enemy, a fragment of Gaynor’s soul, was taken into Elric’s blade. The original Gaynor grew rapidly older and feebler even as his many avatars continued to fight on around him. Elric drove slowly forward until he stood before that proud revolutionary, that renegade Knight of the Balance, his lips working as if he found no suitable words, until, by its own volition, Stormbringer lunged forward and pierced Gaynor in his ambitious heart, making him drop his own sword and grasp at the black steel which entered his body. He cast one final horrified look at Elric and whimpered one last time. His huge body then dissipated to nothing. All the other Gaynors raced inward to rejoin him, to give him substance, even as that substance was drawn luxuriously into Elric’s greedy Stormbringer.
I was horrified. Elric visibly bloomed and grew stronger before our eyes.
At last Gaynor was gone, in all his aspects, and Mournblade had blended with Elric’s own sword. All those other swords, with their stolen souls, had blended with their great original, and Stormbringer howled out her wild song of triumph as Elric’s crimson eyes blazed and he opened his mouth wide in a bloody victory grin.
“Stormbringer!” he cried.
And then it was very quiet.
I saw a shadow slip away through the upper tiers. Klosterheim! I opened my mouth to warn them of his escape, but then I closed it. The beast-masked warriors were throwing off their helmets, revealing themselves to be the Kakatanawa who had traveled here with Elric. Silently the warriors surrounded Klosterheim. He died without noise.
Those of us left standing didn’t move. A moment later, tiny animals started to scuttle out onto the cavern floor, pouring from unseen holes in the rock. A kind of rodent smaller than voles, they chittered around our feet, utterly oblivious of us, their tiny twitching noses leading them to the blood. I wondered what else had gone on down here, and for how long, if a breed of vermin had developed dependent on the blood and flesh of tortured human beings. Snuffling and squeaking, they found those little morsels of Gaynor which now could never be reunited, at least until the whole multiverse turned upon its axis, mirror into mirror, blending and becoming one for that brief moment of complete coupling. The animals scuttled and peeped and squabbled over the tiny bits of flesh and bone that were their anticipated feast. An hour or two earlier and it might have been Jack and me whose scattered morsels fed the scavengers.
Taragorm, Master of the Palace of Time, lay crumpled over the body of his colleague, with whom he had schemed to take the power of God. The vermin found him next. His mask had fallen forward, revealing his wizened features. The tower of Big Ben hung broken on the floor of the amphitheater. Perhaps St. Odhran thought he’d redeemed himself by killing Taragorm.
Like a character out of Macbeth, the Scotsman leaned, panting, his bloody knife dropped to the ground, his back resting against the emerald stone, which continued to agitate internally. Jack D’Acre stood beside him. St. Odhran had his arm around the boy.
“The Stone could have brought them back to life had
it not been for the schichis,” he said. “Now we’ll never see that miracle. That’s why they chose this place, I suppose.”
Having betrayed and killed his companions, was the aeronaut trying to pretend that he had been on our side all along? I wasn’t about to forget what I’d seen and heard him do at the Countess Flana’s or what he’d done later in that alley. He had shoved us down the chute to be sacrificed. Only after Elric arrived did St. Odhran see the tide turn and change his mind.
I glared at him to show I knew what he was up to.
He looked back at me, grinned and bowed, absolutely unrepentant. I refused to look at him or Jack but went over to where my grandmother had fallen, on the other side of Elric, to try to help her.
She wasn’t injured but rather weak from hunger. They had been starving her to death after catching her on her way back to us. They had planned to torture her, but Elric, dropped from Bastable’s airship with the Kakatanawa, had found and released her while trying to find us. She had led him to the amphitheater. In turn she had done whatever she could in her weakened state to help Elric.
Elric barely glanced at either of us. He was making his way back down to the floor of the amphitheater, to the great block of emerald stone. The sword was still held purposefully in his hand, and I could tell that what he was about to do was unpleasant to him. St. Odhran continued to lean back and watch Elric dully, his arm still about Jack’s skinny frame.
With a shout and a grunt, Elric leaped into the air and plunged the sword into the top of the rock, where it then rested with a foot or so of its blade buried in the stone. Stormbringer vibrated gracefully now and sang to itself an utterly different song from the one it had sung while in Elric’s hands. The albino released the hilt and, overcome at last with weakness, staggered down to the floor of the cavern.
Oona got up, suddenly invigorated, and moved towards him.
“The rest of you must finish this,” Elric panted. “I’ve done what I must, and the Sword will serve me again, never fear. This is my bargain with it. But I will try to destroy the Balance. Erekosë—Hawkmoon—all that I am, was or will be …”
Those were the last words I would hear him say.
Oona had reached the great emerald stone. She took first one bowl and then the other and hung them by their chains from Stormbringer’s guard. They were in perfect balance. She smiled, her skin bathed in the light from each of the components. She looked towards her father.
Before our eyes, Elric fell stiffly backward through a circle of crystal pillars, whose tops formed into elongated icicles racing ahead of him as he fell up an infinitely growing circle, whose slopes became increasingly angular, turning from white to dark blue to deep, pulsing green. I myself desperately wanted to follow him, to go with him into his own vanishing dream. But he faded and disappeared, as if he had never existed.
I stumbled. A hand was on my shoulder. Refusing my wish to follow him, Oona held me back. “Let them go,” she said.
“Them?”
I looked up into her face. It was a mask of grief. Then I saw her grief change to alarm. To determination. I followed her gaze.
Two more men had appeared from nowhere. They were standing on either side of the Balance. One was black, handsome, massive. The other was white, wiry, grim. Yet both looked like brothers—twins, even! Were these the real siblings von Minct and Klosterheim had discovered in all their magical scrying? Both bore huge black broadswords like Elric’s. The white man had a black, pulsing jewel embedded in his forehead. Slowly they turned to regard the Balance. Then, as if for the first time, they saw each other!
With a terrible cry the black man lifted his sword. Not against the white man—but against the Balance itself!
“No!” cried Oona. “Erekosë! Now is not the time!” Staggering towards the ghostly pair, she lifted her hands. “No. The Balance is needed. Without it, Elric dies for nothing!”
For a second the black man turned, frowning.
This gave the white man his moment. He drove his own sword deep into the black man’s heart. Erekosë gasped. He struggled, trying to tug the sword from his body. The jewel in the white man’s skull blazed with dark fire as the black man died. But there was no joy or triumph in the victor’s face. Instead, he wept. And Oona wept with him.
Oona leaned back heavily against the sides of the amphitheater, clearly relieved. I watched in astonishment as slowly the black man seemed to be drawn up the length of his enemy’s blade, drawn into the metal and then into his body until there was nothing of him left. Then the white man collapsed to the ground, the black jewel growing dull, as if it died with him.
St. Odhran walked slowly and stiffly to look down on the corpse. Then he knelt, reaching for the white man’s left hand, which clenched something. St. Odhran pried the fingers open and took something from them. Whatever it was, he put it in his own pocket. Robbing the dead, I thought. But this was all over my head.
“It’s done,” said St. Odhran. “For now, it’s done.”
“Who is he?” I whispered. “What is he?”
“Merely another fragment of the whole.” St. Odhran sighed heavily as he knelt, cradling the dead man in his arms. “He’s served his turn. As most of us have.” He looked down at the dead man. “Eh, Hawkmoon, old comrade?” And then, to my further amazement, the white man began to fade until St. Odhran’s arms were empty. I felt I would never understand fully what had gone on here. The Balance pulsed, alive, it seemed to me, with the souls of those who had died in its restoration.
St. Odhran stood up and went over to Jack. The look in his eyes seemed to be one of pity.
Turning her eyes from the Balance, Oona led me over to Jack and St. Odhran. We were all exhausted, and I was aching horribly. She took St. Odhran’s hand.
He bowed and kissed her fingers. “Madame.” They seemed to share a secret moment.
“What’s this about?” I said. I suppose I was showing my “usual impatience,” as Mum and Dad call it, with other people’s intimate moments.
“I’m sorry, little mademoiselle, if I appeared to disappoint you.” St. Odhran drew a deep breath and smiled with all his old, sunny charm. “We told you, I think, that each and every one of us had a specific part to play if we were to succeed in restoring the Balance and defeat those who’d use it for evil.
“I elected to deceive our opponents by pretending to make a forgery of Elric’s sword, because a sword had to be introduced into their equation. But the black sword I brought here was Mournblade, the twin of Stormbringer. The other, the white blade, was the forgery. We had to make them think they were winning, or those four would never have gathered in this place for their ceremony. We might never have been able to forestall ‘em as we did. It was a dangerous chance, of course, but we had to take it. Everything was done according to careful calculations, considering all the risks. I couldn’t let you know the risk, or you would not have responded in the genuine way needed. There’s been nothing that’s happened, nothing that’s been avoided, that wasn’t planned either by their side or ours. Our only grief was that while we tried to protect you at all times, we gambled with the lives of our children. A very hard decision.
“We are engaged in a momentous war, and this has been the subtlest part of our strategy. We needed to make them become self-assured and unguarded, to believe the real power was all theirs, before we could strike in unison. Hawkmoon’s advance, Colonel Bastable’s aerial voyage, your capture, our arriving in time—everything was planned. Everything but that final scene. Those men—”
But I didn’t want him to tell me any more. I just couldn’t take it.
“I told them I wasn’t Jack’s twin,” I said lamely. I wasn’t entirely happy to hear I’d been used as a cat’s-paw.
“That’s right, you’re not,” said my grandmother. “I am. But those fools never did discover the true nature of time. They would have done irreparable damage. Of course, I am not your mother’s mother, as you doubtless know. Your mother is one of our adopted children.
Your grandfather and I wanted to lead normal lives as ordinary people. But I’m almost immortal, and your grandfather was not. He was, however, the most courageous man I ever knew, and the sanest. And I’m proud of your father. We never planned to have our own children, because we hoped to lift the family curse.”
“And did you?”
“Not really,” she said. With the same grieving air, she reached towards Jack and embraced him. “You’re my brother, Jack, as you know. A near-immortal like our own mother and father. In time it will be impossible to tell us apart by our ages. Whatever curves we followed in the moonbeam roads brought us out at a time a shade different from our original birthplace at the edge of the Grey Fees.”
I saw then that Jack’s blind eyes were full of tears. I was so touched for him that I didn’t realize myself that I was beginning to fall in love.
“Now Gaynor’s soul is trapped in the Black Sword,” said St. Odhran, “and the sword is more powerful, ready for the task it is to perform in Elric’s world. The rest of Gaynor’s physical substance is scattered and transformed. Yet it must be recognized that another Gaynor will come eventually, and another, to be first an idealist, a champion fighting for our great cause, and then a renegade, prepared to commit any savagery, any cruelty, any treachery, to win power over that which he once served. But for the moment our business is done. Now only Elric lives on in his own world, to call upon his sword for that one final time, when he will bear it against the overwhelming forces of Chaos and seek, with the Horn of Fate, to herald in the dawn of another age.”
I was still wary of St. Odhran. I’m not one to bear a grudge, but I do have a strong sense of justice when someone’s done me a wrong. “You pushed me,” I said. “Twice.”