“Oh, that I had destroyed Imrryr so that I might restore H’hui’shan!” He stood in a square of broken statues and fallen masonry looking up at the enormous moon which now rose directly above his head, sending his shadow to mingle with those of the ruins; and he dragged off his helmet and shook out his long, milk-white hair and turned yearning hands towards the city as if to beg forgiveness, and then he sat down upon a dusty slab carved with the delicacy and imagination of genius and over which blood had flowed, then baked, a coarse glaze; and he buried his crimson eyes in the sleeve of his ashy shirt and his shoulders shook and he groaned his complaint at whatever fate had led him to this ordeal …
There came a voice from behind him that seemed to echo from distant catacombs, across aeons of time, as resonant as the Dragon Falls where one of Elric’s ancestors had died (in combat, it was said, with himself) and as commanding as the whole of Elric’s long and binding royal history. It was a voice he recognized and had hoped, in so many ways, never to hear again.
Once more he wondered if he were mad. The voice was unmistakably that of his dead father, Sadric the Eighty-Sixth, whose company in life he had so rarely shared.
“Ah, Elric, thou weepest I see. Thou art thy mother’s son and for that I love her memory, though thou kill’dst the only woman I shall ever truly love and for that I hate thee with an unjust hatred.”
“Father?” Elric lowered his arm and turned his bone-white face behind him to where, leaning against a ruined pillar, stood the slender, frail presence of Sadric. Upon his lips was a smile that was terrible in its tranquility.
Elric looked disbelievingly at the face which was exactly as it had been when he had last seen it as his father had lain in funeral state.
“For an unjust hatred there is no release, save the peace of death. And here, as you’ll observe, I am denied the peace of death.”
“I have dreamed of you, Father, and your disappointment with me. I would that I could have been all you desired in a son …”
“There was never a second, Elric, when you could have been that. The act of thy creation was the sealing of her doom. We had been warned of it in every omen but could do nothing to avert that hideous destiny—” and his eyes glared with a hatred only the unrested dead could know.
“How came you here, Father? I had thought you chosen by Chaos, gone to the service of our patron duke, Lord Arioch.”
“Arioch could not claim me because of another pact I had made, with Count Mashabak. He is no longer my patron.” And a kind of laugh escaped him.
“Your soul was claimed by Mashabak of Chaos?”
“But disputed by Arioch. My soul is hostage to their rivalries—or was. By some sorcery I still command, I betook myself here, to the very beginning of our true history. And here I have some short sanctuary.”
“You are hiding, Father, from the Lords of Chaos?”
“I have gained some time while they dispute, for I have here a spell, my last great spell, which will free me to join your mother in the Forest of Souls where she awaits me.”
“You have a passport to the Forest of Souls? I’d thought such things a myth.” Elric wiped chilly sweat from his forehead.
“I sent thy mother there to remain until I joined her. I gave her the means, our Scroll of Dead-Speaking, and she is safe in that sweet eternity, which many souls seek and which few find. I swore an oath that I would do all I could to be reunited with her.”
The shade stepped forward, as if entranced, and reached to touch Elric’s face with something like affection. But when the hand fell away there was only torment in the old man’s undead eyes.
Elric knew a certain sympathy. “Have you no companions here, Father?”
“Only thou, my son. Thee and I now haunt these ruins together.”
An unwholesome frisson: “Am I, too, a prisoner here?” said the albino.
“At my humour, aye, my son. Now that I have touched thee we are bound together, whether thou leavest this place or no, for it is the fate of such as I to be linked always to the first living mortal his hand shall fall upon. We are one, now, Elric—or shall be.”
And Elric shuddered at the hatred and the relish in his father’s otherwise desolate voice.
“Can I not release you, Father? I have been to R’lin K’ren A’a, where our race began in this realm. I sought our past there. I could speak of it …”
“Our past is in our blood. It travels with us. Those degenerates of R’lin K’ren A’a, they were never our true kin. They bred with humans and vanished. It was not they who founded or preserved great Melniboné …”
“There are so many stories, Father. So many conflicting legends …” Elric was eager to continue the conversation with his father. Few such opportunities had existed while Sadric lived.
“The dead know truth from lies. They are privy to that understanding, at least. And I know the truth of it. We did not stem from R’lin K’ren A’a. Such questings and speculations are unnecessary. We are assured of our origins. Thou wouldst be a fool, my son, to question our histories, to dispute their truth. I had thee taught this.”
Elric kept his own counsel.
“My magic called the jill-dragon from her cave. The one I had the strength to summon. But she came and I sent her to thee. This is the only sorcery I have left. It is the first significant sorcery of our race and the purest, the dragon-sorcery. But I could not instruct her. I sent her to thee knowing she would recognize thee or she would kill thee. Both actions would have brought us together, eventually, no doubt.” The shade permitted itself a crooked smile.
“You cared no more than that, Father?”
“I could do no more than that. I long for thy mother. We were meant to be united for ever. Thou must help me reach her, Elric, and help me swiftly for my own energies and spells weaken—soon Arioch or Mashabak shall claim me. Or destroy me entirely in their struggle!”
“You have no further means of escaping them?” Elric felt his left leg shake uncontrollably for a few seconds before he forced it to obey his will. He realized it had been too long since he had last taken the infusion of herbs and drugs which allowed him the energy of a normal creature.
“In a way. If I remain attached to thee, my son, the object of my unjust hate, then my soul could hide with thine, occupying thy flesh and mine, disguised by blood that is my blood. They would never sniff me out!”
Again Elric was seized by a sensation of profound cold, as if death already claimed him; his head was a maelstrom of ungoverned emotions as he sought desperately to take a grip on himself, praying that with the sun’s rising his father’s ghost would vanish.
“The sun will not rise here, Elric. Not here. Not until the moment of our release or our destruction. That is why we are here.”
“But does Arioch not object to this? He is my patron, still!” Elric looked for a new madness in his father’s face but could find none.
“He is otherwise engaged and could not come to thee now, whether to aid or to punish. His dispute with Count Mashabak absorbs him. That is why thou canst serve me, to perform the task I did not know to perform when alive. Wouldst thou do this thing for me, my son? For a father who always hated thee but did his duty by thee?”
“If I performed this task for you, Father, would I be free of you?”
His father lowered his head in assent.
Elric put a trembling hand upon the pommel of his sword and flung back his head so that the long white hair filled the air like a halo in the moonlight and his uneasy eyes rose to stare into the face of the dead king.
He let out a sigh. In spite of all his horrors, there was some part of him which would be fulfilled if he achieved his father’s desire. He wished, however, that he had been permitted the choice. But it was not the Melnibonéan way to permit choice. Even relatives had to be bonded by more than blood.
“Explain my task, Father.”
“Thou must find my soul, Elric.”
“Your soul—?”
“My soul is
not with me.” The shade itself seemed to make an effort to remain standing. “What animates me now is my will and old sorcery. My soul was hidden so that it might rejoin thy mother, but in avoiding Mashabak’s and Arioch’s wrath, I lost that which contained it. Find it for me, Elric.”
“How shall I recognize it?”
“It resides in a box. No ordinary box, but a box of black rosewood carved all with roses and smelling always of roses. It was your mother’s.”
“How came you to lose such a valuable box, Father?”
“When Mashabak appeared to claim my soul, then Arioch, I drew up a false soul, which is the spell I taught thee in Incantations After Death, to deceive them. This quasi-soul became the object of their feuding for a while and my true soul fled to safety in the box which Diavon Slar, my old body-servant, was to keep safely for me on strictest instructions of secrecy.”
“He maintained your secrecy, Father.”
“Aye—and fled, believing he had a treasure, believing he could control me through his possession of that box! He fled to Pan Tang with what he understood to be my trapped spirit—some children’s tale he had heard—and was disappointed to find no spirit obeyed him at his command. So he planned, instead, to sell his booty to the Theocrat. As it happened, he never reached Pan Tang but was seized by sea-raiders from the Purple Towns. They included the box in their casual booty. My soul was truly lost.” And with this came a flicker of a former irony, the faintest of smiles.
“The pirates?”
“Of them, I know only what Diavon Slar told me as I was extracting the vengeance I had warned him I would take. The raiders probably returned to Menii, where they auctioned their booty. My soulbox left our world entirely.” Sadric moved suddenly and it was as if an insubstantial shadow shifted in the moonlight. “I can still sense it. I know it traveled between the worlds and went where now only the jill-dragon can follow. That is what has thwarted me. For, until I called thee, I had no means of pursuit. I am bound to this place and now to thee. Thou must fetch back my soulbox, Elric, so that I can rejoin thy mother and rid myself of unjust hate. As thou wilt rid thyself of me.”
Trembling with conflicting passions, Elric spoke at last:
“Father, I believe this to be an impossible quest. I cannot but suspect you send me upon it out of hatred alone.”
“Hatred, aye, but more besides. I must rejoin your mother, Elric! I must. I must.”
Knowing his father’s abiding obsession, that convinced Elric of the ghost’s veracity.
“Do not fail me, my son.”
“And should I succeed? What will happen to us, Father?”
“Bring back my soul and we are both released.”
“But if I fail?”
“My soul will leave its prison and enter thee. We shall be united until thy death—I, with my unjust hatred, bonded to the object of my hatred, and thee burdened by all thou most hatest in proud Melniboné.” He paused, almost to savour this. “That would be my consolation.”
“Not mine.”
Sadric nodded his corpse’s head in silent understanding, and a soft, unlikely laugh escaped his throat. “Indeed!”
“And dost thou have other aid for me in this, Father? Some spell or charm?”
“Only what thou comest by on the way, my son. Bring back the rosewood box and we both can go our own ways. Fail, and our destinies and souls are linked for ever! Thou wilt never be free of me, thy past, or Melniboné! But thou wilt bring the old glories back, eh?”
Elric’s drug-enlivened body began to tremble. The flight and this encounter had exhausted him, and there were no souls here on which his sword could feed.
“I am ailing, Father, and must soon return. The drugs that sustain me were lost with my pack animals.”
Sadric shrugged. “As for that, thou hast merely to discover a source of souls on which thy blade might feed. There’s killing a-plenty ahead. And a little more that I perceive, but yet it does not come clear …” He frowned. “Go …”
Elric hesitated. Some ordinary impulse wanted him to tell his father that he no longer killed casually to further any whim. Like all Melnibonéans, Sadric had thought nothing of killing the human folk of their empire. To Sadric, the runesword was merely a useful tool, as a stick might be to a cripple. Supernatural schemer though his father was, player of complex games against the gods, he still unquestioningly assumed that one must pledge loyalty to one demon or another in order to survive.
Elric’s vision, of universally held power, a place like Tanelorn, owing allegiance neither to Law nor to Chaos but only to itself, was anathema to his father who had made a religion and a philosophy of compromise, as had all his royal race for millennia, so that compromise itself was now raised over all other virtues and become the backbone of their beliefs. Elric wanted, again, to tell his father that there were other ideas, other ways to live, which involved neither excessive violence, nor cruelty, nor sorcery, nor conquest, that he had learned of these ideas not merely from the Young Kingdoms but also from his own folk’s histories.
Yet he knew that it would be useless. Sadric was even now devoting all his considerable powers to restoring the past. He knew no other way of life or, indeed, of death.
The albino prince turned away, and it seemed to him at that moment that he had never experienced such grief, even when Cymoril had died on the blade of his runesword, even when Imrryr had blazed and he had known he was doomed to a rootless future, a lonely death.
“I shall seek your rosewood box, Father. But where can I begin?”
“The jill-dragon knows. She’ll carry thee to the realm where the box was taken. Beyond that I cannot predict. Prediction grows difficult. All my powers weaken. Mayhap thou must kill to achieve the box. Kill many times.” The voice was faint now, dry branches in the wind. “Or worse.”
Elric found that he staggered. He was weakening by the moment. “Father, I have no strength.”
“The dragon venom …” But his father was gone, leaving only a sense of his ghostly passing.
Elric forced himself to move. Now every fallen wall seemed an impossible obstacle. He picked his way slowly through the ruins, back over rubble and broken walls, over the little streams and coarse turf terraces of the hills, forcing himself with a will summoned from habit alone to climb the final hill where, outlined against the huge, sinking moon, Scarsnout awaited him, her wings folded, her long muzzle raised as her tongue tasted the wind.
He remembered his father’s last words. They in turn made him recollect an old herbal which had spoken of the distillation of dragon venom; how it brought courage to the weak and skill to the strong, how a man might fight for five days and nights and feel no pain. And he remembered how the herbal had said to collect the venom, so before he clambered back upon the dragon he had reached up his helm and caught in hissing steel a small drop of venom which would cool and harden, he knew, into a pastille, a crumb or two of which might be taken cautiously with considerable liquid.
But now he must endure his pain and fight against his weakness as the dragon bears him up into the unwelcoming blackness which lies above the moon; and a single long, slow stroke of silver gashes the dark and a single sharp clap of thunder breaks the terrible silence of the sky, and the jill-dragon raises her head and beats her monstrous wings and roars a sudden challenge to those unlikely elements …
… While Elric howls the old wild songs of the Dragon Lords, and plunges, in sensuous symbiosis with the great reptile, out of the night and into the blinding glory of a summer afternoon.
CHAPTER THREE
Peculiar Geography of an Unknown Realm; A Meeting of Travelers. On the Meaning of Freedom.
As if aware of her rider’s growing weakness, the dragon flew with long, deliberate strokes of her wings and banked with careful grace through the blue pallor of the sky until they flew over trees so close together, and with foliage so dense, that it seemed at first they crossed dark green clouds until the old forest gave way to grassy hills and fields through w
hich a broad river ran, and again the gentle landscape had a familiarity to it, though this time Elric did not dread it.
Soon a sprawling city lay ahead, built on both banks and making the sky hazy with its smoke. Of stone and brick and wood, of slate and thatch and timber shingles, of a thousand blended stinks and noises, it was full of statues and markets and monuments over which the jill-dragon began slowly to circle while below, in panic and curiosity, the citizens ran to look or dashed for cover, depending upon their natures—but then Scarsnout had flapped her wings and taken them with stately authority back into the upper sky, as if she had investigated the place and found it unsuitable.
The summer day went on. More than once did the great dragon-she seem about to land—on scrubland, village, marsh, lake or elm-glade—but always Scarsnout rejected the place and flew on dissatisfied.
Though he had taken the precaution of tying himself by his long silk scarf to the dragon’s spine-horn, Elric was losing strength with every moment. Now, moreover, he had no reason to welcome death. To be reunited with his father through eternity was perhaps the worst of all possible hells. It was only when the dragon flew through rainclouds and Elric was able to capture a little water in his helmet, crumbling into it the merest flake of dried venom and drinking the foul-tasting result off in a single draught, that he knew any hope. But when the liquid filled his every vein with fire whose stink made him loathe the flesh that harboured it and want to tear at offending arteries, muscles, skin, he wondered if he had not merely chosen an especially painful way of ensuring his eternal union with Sadric. With each nerve alight, he yearned for any death, any release from the agony.
But even as the pain filled him, the strength grew until soon it was possible to call on that strength and gradually abolish or ignore the pain until it was gone and he felt a cleaner, sweeter energy fill him, somehow purer than that he received from his runesword.