“She gave birth to you here?”
“I was one of twins, she said.”
“Twins?”
“So she told me.”
“Your sibling died?”
“My twin didn’t die when we were born. But something happened which mother could not explain, and I was soon separated from my sibling. Gone. Gone. My mother’s words. I know nothing else.”
“You seem very casual about your twin’s fate.”
“Reconciled, my lord. I thought, until recently, you had found that twin to raise as your own, but, of course, I now know that is not the case.” She turned urgently, disappearing back into the kitchen. The smell of greenberry pie came to me in a single, delicious wave. I had forgotten the simple pleasures of human life.
Because this was a dream I saw nothing strange about being invited to sit down at a kitchen table and enjoy a meal of good, new bread, fresh-churned butter, some chandra and a bottle of goldfish sauce, with the prospect of the pie, and perhaps a puff of glas to complete my pleasure.
Not once, for all the trickeries of Law, did I further suspect this young woman. Nor the sense of sanctuary which came from her cottage. It was impossible. I knew she was of my blood. If she had been a lie, a shape-changing creature of Chaos, I should have guessed it immediately.
Yet a voice in the back of my mind told me I had not smelled sorcery when Law had so successfully defeated me and essentially committed me to my present fate. Had I lost my powers? Was I only now beginning to realize it? Was this another illusion to steal what was left of my soul?
My temperament was such that I could not go cautiously. Nothing was to be gained from caution. I had few choices in this extraordinary cottage at the center of the silvery matrix of moonbeams.
“So you have no idea what became of your sister?”
“My sister?” She smiled. “Oh, no, my dear father. It was not my sister. It was my brother we lost.”
“Brother?” Something in me shuddered. Something else exulted. “My son?”
“Maybe it’s as well you did not know, my lord. For if he is dead, as I suspect, then you would be grieving now.”
I reflected that I had only known I had a son for a few seconds. I was in shock. It would be a moment or two before I came to the grieving stage!
I looked wonderingly at my daughter. My feelings were both direct and complex. On an impulse which would have shocked and disgusted a Melnibonéan, I stepped forward and embraced her. She returned my embrace awkwardly, as if she, too, was not used to such customs, She seemed pleased.
“So you are a dreamthief,” I said.
She shook her head fiercely. I saw a dozen honest emotions flit across her features. “No. I am a dreamthief’s child. I have the experience and some of the skills, but not the vocation. In fact, to tell you the truth, Father, I’m somewhat divided. Part of my character vaguely disagrees with the morality of Mother’s profession.”
“Well, your mother was of great help to me when we sought the Fortress of the Pearl together.” I myself was overfamiliar with matters of moral and emotional division.
“It is one of the few adventures she retold. She was unusually fond of you, given the number of lovers she has known down the centuries and over the whole of the time field. I suspect you are the only one by whom she had children.”
“Special affection or special resentment?”
“She bore you no ill will, sir. Far from it. She spoke of you with pleasure. She spoke of you as a great warrior. As a brave and courteous knight of the limits. She told me you would have made the most gorgeous dreamthief of them all. That was her own special dream, I think. What do you think dreamthieves dream of most, Father?”
“Perhaps of dreamless sleep,” I said. I was still surprised by the discovery of my child. A child whose beauty was stunning and whose character seemed, as far as I could tell, complex and full of intelligence. A child who had brought me here to her little Earth on the very edge of time. Her birthplace, she told me as we ate.
The forest, which looked threatening to me, she assured me was full of amiable wonders. She had enjoyed a perfect childhood, she said. The forest and the cottage were protected in some way, much as Tanelorn was protected, from the rapacity of either Law or Chaos. The place was far from lonely. Many of her mother’s friends traveled between the worlds, as she did, and they loved nothing better than bringing back stories to tell in the evening around the fire.
When she was fifteen, she had gone with her mother to those worlds where Oone intended to retire, but she had not liked them. She decided to find her own vocation. Meanwhile she, too, would wander the myriad realms of the multiverse for a time. To give her travels some purpose, she tried to discover if her brother were still alive, but the only albino she heard of was her father, the feared and hated Elric of Melniboné. She had felt no great desire to meet him.
Then, later, she had discovered others. A bloodline, of sorts, which she was still trying to trace. She hoped this might provide a better means of finding her brother. She believed he had settled in one particular realm, similar to the kind her mother favored. Not only had he settled there, he had absorbed himself in his host culture, married and produced offspring.
I was feeling older by the moment. While I could grasp the notion of time having passed in different ways in different realms, it was still hard for me, a relatively young man, to see myself as the patriarch of generations. The responsibility alone made me uncomfortable. I felt a certain wariness overcome me, and I wondered if this were not part of Law’s complicated deception, part of some greater cosmic plot in which I played a minor role. I again began to feel like a pawn in a game. A game the gods played merely to while away their boredom.
This thought fired me to quiet anger. If that were the case, I would do everything I could to defeat their plans.
“I called you here, Father, not from curiosity, but out of urgency. I know how you were duped. And why.” She seemed to sense my mood. “Miggea and her minions threaten Tanelorn and several other realms, including the one inhabited by your descendants.”
“A race resembling Melniboné’s?”
“Resembling their last emperor, at any rate. Fighting the same forces we both fight, sir. They are our natural allies. And there is one who can help us defeat Law.”
“Madam,” I said with every courtesy, “you are aware perhaps that beyond this realm I have no true physical form. I am a shade. A ghost. Outside this environment I am a spirit. I am, madam, as good as dead. I could not hold a cup if it were not for whatever temporary physicality you or this place has bestowed on me. My body lies in a deep, unwakable slumber in the doomed city of Tanelorn, while Miggea, Duchess of Law, now holds the Black Sword and can do with it whatever she likes. I am defeated, madam. I have failed in every venture. I am a dream within a dream. All this can be nothing but dream. A useless, pointless dream.”
“Well,” she said, picking up the dishes, “one person’s dream is another’s reality.”
“Platitudes, madam.”
“But truths, too,” she said. A kind of confident stillness had come upon her as she undid her apron and hung it up. “Well, Father, are you pleased to see me?”
Her eyes, humorous and inquiring, looked frankly into mine.
I began to smile. “I believe I must be,” I said. “Though no royal Melnibonéan would admit it.”
“Well,” she said, “I am glad I am not a royal Melnibonéan.”
“I’m the last of those,” I said, “or so I understand.”
“Aye,” she said, “that seems to be the truth. Melniboné falls, but the blood continues. Ancient blood. Ancient memory.”
“Forgive me if I seem brusque,” I said, “but I understood you to say, Lady Oona, that you guided me here as a matter of some urgency.” I could not bring myself to address her informally.
“With my skill I can help you, Father,” she said. “I can help you get your sword back and possibly even be revenged on the one who stole
it from you.”
Again, I should have suspected a trick, but my daughter convinced me completely. I knew that this entire episode could be a development of the same enchantment under which Law had put me. But it seemed I had no other course of action to take. I had to trust her or remain frozen on my couch in Tanelorn, unable to retrieve my sword or claim vengeance on the one who had stolen it.
“You know the future?” I challenged.
She replied quietly, “I know more than one.”
She explained how the multiverse is made up of millions of worlds, each only a shade different from our own. In each of those worlds certain people struggle eternally for justice. Sometimes for Law. Sometimes for Chaos. Sometimes simply for equilibrium. Most people do not know that other versions of themselves are struggling, too. Each story is a little different. And very occasionally a major change can be made to the story. Sometimes their strengths can be combined. Which was exactly what we hoped to achieve through my daughter’s extraordinary strategy.
She believed it was possible for two or more avatars to occupy the same body, if the body was of like blood. I needed a physical body and a physical sword. She believed she had found both.
She told me of von Bek, of his blade and his own fight against corrupted authority. She said she believed our fates were intertwined at this particular configuration of the cosmic realms. He and I were both avatars of the same being. I could help him, and he could help me, by lending me his body and his sword.
I said that I had to think.
Dreamlessly, perhaps because I now lived a dream, I rested at Oona’s cottage on time’s borderlands in the so-called Mittelmärch. While I rested, my daughter taught me more of the dreamthief’s secrets. How to travel the roads between the realms. The realms we thought supernatural but which were perfectly mundane to their inhabitants. She had her mother’s library and was able to show me old tales, current scientific ideas, the theories of philosophers, all of which spoke of dreams as being glimpses of other times and places. Some of them understood what Oona understood—that the worlds of our dreams have physical reality and cannot be easily manipulated, that each one of us has a version of themselves in all these billions of alternative worlds and that somehow all our actions are interlinked to make a grander cosmic whole whose scale is inconceivable, a pattern of order which we either support or threaten, depending on our loyalties and ambitions.
One morning, looking at a book of watercolors done by an ancestor of Oona’s, I asked my daughter if she really believed that somehow we might dream one another. Did we exist entirely as a result of our own wills? Did we bring ourselves and our worlds into reality because of some mighty desire, stronger than the physical universe? Or was it possible we had already created the universe? The multiverse, even. Was the great tree something which mortals had nurtured until it was no longer in their control?
If so, had we also created the gods, the Cosmic Balance, the elementals? I could not bring myself to believe that. It would suggest we had forged our own chains, as well as creating the means of our salvation! It would mean that the gods were just symbols of our own strengths, weaknesses and desires!
I offered this speculation to my daughter, but she dismissed it. She had heard it all too often. There was little point to it, she seemed to say. We are here. Whatever the causes or the reasons, we now exist and have to make the best of it. She reminded me of her purpose in bringing me here.
“Once you are free,” she said, “you will be able to do everything you could do before. In Mu Ooria you will not be blocked from your elemental allies. Von Bek has one of Stormbringer’s manifestations. He is the only way you can recover your own blade. With von Bek’s help, you might get your sword back and save Tanelorn. I will help you as best I can, but my powers are limited. I have my mother’s skills, but not her temperament.”
The next morning I stood beside her as she locked her door and gave last instructions to her dog and bird, who listened intelligently.
“No.” She turned to me as if we were going on a family outing to the country. “We’ll take the moonbeam roads which will lead us to the heart of the multiverse. To the Grey Fees. And thence to Moo Uria, dear Father, and your continuing destiny.”
The Grey Fees? I shall not attempt to describe that place which is, most believe, the origin of all things, the fundamental stuff of the multiverse, misty fields where you glimpse ribbons of basic matter creating cryptic arabesques, perpetually writhing and pulsing, forming and re-forming, becoming whole worlds, dissipating again, and, perhaps most bizarrely, inhabited by mad adventurers with loyalty neither to Law nor to Chaos, only to their own idiosyncratic mathematics. Amiable enough fellows, and magnificently intelligent, able to sail anywhere in the multiverse by means of “scale ships” but warped by their environment in mind and body. We avoided these Lords and Ladies of Sublime Disorder whenever possible, Even they were aware that some great disaster threatened us all. That Law had gone mad.
The Chaos Engineers guided us through the bewildering Grey Fees to the terrifying world of the Nazis. Thereafter, I was with von Bek most of the time, though he could rarely see me. I became his guardian angel; his life was very important to me. By following Oona’s instructions I was able to help my doppelgänger von Bek in the camps and later in the caverns of Mu Ooria, where I discovered that what my daughter had said was true. It was possible to blend my own substance with von Bek’s.
My powers had some small potency even before I bonded with von Bek. But with von Bek to help, they were now completely restored. We were more than the sum of our parts. We were stronger when we came together although it was not easy to achieve the bonding or to make it last.
I tried more than once to merge with him but either he had resisted or the time had not been right. Twice I almost succeeded, but lost him again. Eventually, when he needed my help most and was prepared to accept what I could offer him, I stepped into his body, just as Oona had taught me, and immediately we became the single creature I have already described. I merged with him, blending his skills and character with my own. And now I had the benefit of von Bek’s wisdom and swordsmanship. That was how I had been able to return to Tanelorn. That was the only possible way to thwart the enchantment put upon me.
There was precious little time. Although we had returned rapidly, Lady Miggea and her knights could have left this world and, with Stormbringer to help them, even now be conquering Mu Ooria.
Brut gave us his best horses. Moonglum and I rode out of Tanelorn onto those unforgiving ash flats whose sentinels of limestone were a constant reminder of our mortality. On Oona’s advice and my own impulse, determined to achieve the impossible, we were going hunting.
Hunting for a goddess.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Fresh Treacheries
A deep chill had settled on this world. Nothing was alive. When the breeze stirred the ash drifts or flaked the crags so it seemed to snow, a complete absence of vitality was evident in the landscape.
Miggea’s was no ordinary desert. It was all that remained of a world destroyed by Law. Barren. No hawks soared in the pale blue sky. There were no signs of animal life. Not an insect. Not a reptile. No water. No lichen. No plants of any kind. Just tall spikes of crystallized ash and limestone, crumbling and turned into crazy shapes by the wind, like so many grotesque gravestones.
Law’s cold hand had fallen on everything. Law achieved this desolation at her worst. This tidiness of death. Mankind inevitably achieves the same when it seeks to control too much.
Moonglum had insisted on accompanying me and I had not refused. Unusually, I felt the need for company. Moonglum’s comradeship was something I valued. He recognized when I was at my most negative, my most self-pitying, and would say something sardonic to remind me of my stupidity. He was also a brilliant swordsman, who had fought sorcerers as well as soldiers, the steadiest man to have at one’s side in any kind of fight.
As we rode, I tried to explain to my somewhat repulsed
friend how I was now two people—two entirely different identities but of the same blood, locked together in one near-identical body. By this combination we had thwarted Lady Miggea’s enchantment. By entering the world of dreams and finding an alternative version of myself.
All this made my friend very uncomfortable. “Two people warring inside you?” He shuddered. “To be joined physically, by the head, say, is one thing. But to be joined in the mind! Forever in conflict . . .”
“We are not in conflict,” I explained. “We are one. Just as, say, a playwright will invent a character and that character will live within him, quite comfortably. So it is with von Bek and myself. Where his world is the most familiar, he will take the ascendancy, but here, within an environment I understand a little better, I am in command. We have shared memories also—the entire creature from birth to present. And believe me, my friend, there is less conflict between von Bek and myself than there is between me and myself!”
“That’s easy enough to believe, my lord,” said Moonglum, staring with half-seeing eyes out at the forest of stones.
We could ride only so far without water. We had large canteens, enough to last for several days, but no certainty that any of our enemies were still here. Indeed, Lady Miggea had a use for the sword, no doubt as part of her plans for further conquest. All we could do was follow the faint trails marked by her army, hoping they had left some clue behind that would lead us to discover where she had gone with my sword.
The sky was a stark eggshell blue. We had no means of keeping our direction except by noting the shapes of the different rocks we passed, hoping to recognize them on our return.
Less than a day from the city we began to descend into a wide shallow valley which stretched for several miles on all sides. When we were halfway down and rounding a great bulk of tattered rock, we saw some distance ahead of us a grotesque building, clearly the work of intelligent beings, but reeking of mad cruelty.