The White Wolf's Son (24 page)

You are only the Champion.

I am Elric! I am Urlik! I am Erekosë! I am Corum! I am Hawkmoon! I am too many. I am too many!

You are one.

And now, in his dreams (if dreams they were), he felt for a brief instant a sense of peace, an understanding too profound
for words. He was one.

And then it was gone, and he was many again. And he yelled in his bed, and he begged for peace.

And it seemed his voice echoed through the entire city, and all Mirenburg heard his sadness and mourned with him.

I
WASN
’
T SURE
exactly what happened after the Sebastocrater was shot and it started raining, except that Lord Renyard, Lieutenant Fromental
and Prince Lobkowitz all left the summerhouse and ran after me at the same time with Lady Oona. As I labored for the high
ground, Oona’s Kakatanawa (suddenly awake) began yelling what I guessed were their war cries just as a ball of bright silver
light appeared over the ornamental lake, where von Minct and Klosterheim fell back, blinded.

There was a horrible roaring noise in the distance, and it began to rain more heavily. Oona picked me up and set me squarely
on her shoulders. Everyone was shouting. Then suddenly there was silence, stillness. I looked back. The whole scene—summerhouse,
Kakatanawa, Sebastocrater, guards—had frozen, as if something had stopped time again. But Oona was in a hurry, and she and
I were unaffected by whatever spell had been cast. I saw the panther trotting ahead of the others, leading the way through
the narrow streets of Mirenburg. The whole city was frozen. We sped on through the gates, racing in moonlight towards the
heights above the city. Only when we were looking down on the towers of Mirenburg did Oona pause and lift me from her back.

Any barmy notion I might have had that Oona and the panther were the same had gone, of course. Yet I still had a sneaking
suspicion in the back of my mind that they were more closely related than most would think credible.

Below us I saw a ball of golden fire approach the still hovering ball of silver fire through slicing bursts of rain. They
quivered together in the air, as if sizing each other up. They expanded, growing brighter and apparently denser at the same
time, and did not touch until, in the blink of an eye, they had merged, become the same thing, a single iris the color of
polluted copper.

“Stay there!” cried Oona above the noise of the rain, and ran back down towards the city.

“Don’t leave me!” My shout was impulsive. With a wave she was gone, racing back towards that baleful eye which began to grow
larger as she got closer. She disappeared through the gates as I waited anxiously, watching little stars and sparks descending
on the roofs, chimneys and steeples of the City in the Autumn Stars. Then the globe became a red, glowing coal and dropped
earthward again.

Was Herr Clement Schnooke working the magic he had promised? Or was something else going on, maybe started by von Minct and
Klosterheim? I waited nervously. Suddenly I heard the rush of water from somewhere. I looked down through the starlight and
saw the glint of the river, which was rising with terrible speed. I was so fascinated that I couldn’t move. Then the panther
was there, pushing at me with her nose. It was wet and warm, just like an ordinary pet cat’s. She seemed to want me to follow
her. Reluctantly I turned and climbed to higher ground. The water had already risen above its banks and spread out through
the city streets. I began to hear distant shouts when the remains of the fiery ball fell back towards the Deep City and plunged
down to where I guessed Raspazian’s to be. Now I was certain this was Herr Schnooke’s magic at work. I had a sinking feeling
that the spell had gone seriously wrong, that Schnooke had been destroyed by his own magic. How many of my friends had he
taken with him? I guessed that the spell had clashed with all the other magic at work that night. I know I witnessed a genuine
disaster. All the inhabitants of Mirenburg were in serious danger.

At last Oona stood beside me again as her Indians crept out of the darkness with Lord Renyard, Herr Lobkowitz and Lieutenant
Fromental.

“I have to go back there,” I said. “I made a promise.”

“You can hope the majority survive,” said Oona very wearily. “We are only minutes away from being swallowed by the thing …
Damned amateur magicians!”

Which suggested it was definitely Schnooke.

But I had to get back to help Onric. I babbled. I insisted. I struggled to make them let me go.

Oona continued to speak softly and kindly to me, but her attention was elsewhere. In the end I had to hope the boy had saved
himself from the flood. His coworkers, after all, had seemed to value and respect him.

“We must stick together,” Oona insisted. The others agreed. She turned to her Kakatanawa to speak to them in their own language.

I gave it one last try: “But there’s a boy back there. He’s like you, Lady Oona. Like Monsieur Zodiac!”

She didn’t really hear me. “We can do little here. We must assume our friends are still in pursuit. This has much to do with
them, I suppose.”

I felt sick as I watched the city fill with water. I now
clearly heard shouts, screams and the noises of panicking animals. Oona said something again to the Kakatanawa.

I found it hard to turn my back on the flooding city. I still had friends down there. When I mentioned this to Prince Lobkowitz
he put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. I looked up into his kindly, miserable eyes. “What we have to do is more important
than the fate of those poor souls, my dear. We must get away from here as soon as possible. We have to consider the wider
good.”

“I would have thought Onric could have been included in the wider good,” I said.

“What name?” She frowned at me through the rain. “What name?”

“Onric. An albino. Looked a lot like you. He had a job in a factory down there. Well, he’ll probably be out of work now.”
I was a bit fed up that nobody had listened to me.

“A factory?”

“A steel-making place. Where everything’s white-hot, you know, unless it’s red-hot.”

She turned to look back at drowning Mirenburg. Some factory chimneys still smoked, but it was easy to see that their fires
had been dampened, flooded and were choking. “Was he my age?” she asked in a strange voice.

Lord Renyard came over to us before I could reply to her weird question. “The moon,” he murmured, and looked up.

My heart began to beat all the harder, for through the rain a full moon glowed, bright, clear and blue. The rocky landscape
ahead of us was bathed in a faint blue light.

Behind us on the road below we saw people and animais
plunging in panic out of the city gates nearest us, heading towards higher ground. We continued on the rocky paths well above
them as my friends clearly tried to gain as much height as possible above the still rising waters.

Oona cursed the incompetent magician Clement Schnooke from time to time. I felt that more than one kind of magic had met here
tonight, without actually managing to do anyone any good.

“We can’t be certain how far the river will rise,” said Oona. “For all we know, it won’t be much. But we have to get up into
the mountains if we can. They are using quicksilver against us.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, and I was almost in tears again, imagining my new albino friend drowned in his factory
after I had promised to help him.

“Are we going back home?” I asked.

“As soon as we can, dear,” murmured my grandmother.

“You might say we have lost the path through.” Lord Renyard was looking longingly back at the flooded city. I felt so sorry
for him. All his people had been left behind, everything he loved, including his prized library. At least my own home was
still in one piece. Or so I supposed.

The Autumn Stars were appearing over the city, forming almost a pattern around the still glowing blue moon. I tried to look
up in the sky and see where they began and ended, but I couldn’t tell. I focused on a big rent in the black clouds, almost
as if the light itself had created it.

Wet, miserable and tired, we kept walking all that night and by dawn were well into the mountains. Only
then did Oona sign that we could stop and shelter in the pine forest while she and the Kakatanawa went off to find food for
us. Prince Lobkowitz and Lieutenant Fromental built a fire. Lord Renyard, having spent much of the night in low conversation
with Oona, was definitely depressed. He went over to some mossy rocks and sat down. I joined him. He seemed pleased.

“What’s going on, Lord Renyard?” I asked. “I’m sure your people must have been able to save themselves. They’re very resourceful.
Not too many will have been hurt.”

“Some, at least, are safe. Perhaps all of them. The worst flooding appears to have been in reverse. In the mirror city. In
the world below. Our path was between the worlds.”

He didn’t seem to have seen what I had seen, yet I believed him.

“What happened?”

“A clash of magics, almost certainly. Those men who seek you are ruthless. They’ll risk anyone’s life to capture you. But
nobody expected them to try to flush you and Oona out with a water spell. That went wrong for them when their spell clashed
with Clement Schnooke’s. You saw the result.”

“What was Schnooke’s spell?”

“His was a time spell, with elements of fire and water spells, intended to release us and divert our captors. But two kinds
of magic being wrought at the same time— well, people will always suffer.” He sighed. “And it is always the innocent who suffer
most. Had I been free, I might have prevented this.”

“Isn’t there somewhere else—some other … you
know … world—where you can go, where things are more or less the same?”

“I am something of a monster, my dear. Few places on the surface find me acceptable. I must eventually seek either fabled
Tanelorn or return to Mu-Ooria and the Off-Moo, who seem to appreciate my company.”

“Where are we going now?”

“To find a new gateway to the moonbeam roads, the old one being blocked for us by von Minct’s cruel and bloody sorcery.”

“What do all these people want from me, Lord Renyard?”

“They think you can lead them to what they seek.”

“Which is?”

“Well, ultimately it amounts to what someone from a pre-Enlightenment culture might describe as power over God and Satan.
Whatever you call it, that’s what von Minct and Klosterheim want. Power. Immense power. Power over all the worlds of the universe.
What Prince Lobkowitz calls the multiverse, that is, all the versions of all the worlds.”

“I know what it means,” I said. “I read a lot of comics, and my dad gets
Scientific American.
What, billions of them?”

“Oh, billions of billions—we call this quasi-infinity because while it is not an infinite number, we cannot know a finite
number.”

“Why would they want so much power?”

“To rival God and Satan, as I said.”

All my family and most of their friends were of a secular disposition, so I was inclined to be amused by the ideas of God
and Satan as such. “Isn’t that Satan’s job?” I asked.

“It was,” said Lord Renyard seriously. “But Satan no longer wished to be God’s rival. He sought and found reconciliation with
God. This reconciliation was not in our enemies’ interest. They want, if you like, to take the job Satan renounced. To return
to a state of cosmic war.”

“So if they got what they wanted, they’d rule an infinite number of worlds of evil?”

“They would not call it evil. They believe that an ideal universe is one in which their priorities are uppermost. It is almost
impossible for us to understand. Perhaps someone else can understand them better. They are not like us. They have no self-doubt.
They believe that what is best for them is best for everyone. For everything. At least, they think that every ‘normal’ person
wants to do what is best for von Minct and Klosterheim. Anyone who disagrees with them or resists them is abnormal and must
be reeducated or eliminated. If they have God’s power, they can set the cosmos to rights.”

“Even though God created it?”

“Even so.”

“They’re mad,” I said.

Lord Renyard laughed at this. “Ah, the directness of children. How I envy you!”

I found this condescending. “So how are you planning to get them sorted?”

“We can only oppose them. As effectively as possible. And protect those they would harm.”

“How on earth could I give them that kind of power?’ I was even more baffled. “I’m a little girl.”

“A rather brave and clever one,” he said gallantly. I wanted to hug him.

“But still—”

“We need to discover what it is you have,” he said quietly. “We do know that the Sword, the Stone and two cups are involved.
All the things called ‘objects of power.’”

Oona and her men were returning through the woods. They carried several game birds. Lord Renyard began to salivate. “Here’s
our breakfast,” he said. “I wonder if mine might be a little more underdone …”

I realized that I was very hungry, too.

After we’d eaten we packed up and moved on across the hills. It felt like Yorkshire again. I was enjoying the smell of the
heather, the glint of the sunlight on limestone, the cool shade of the woods. Hunting hawks sailed high above us. Every so
often we passed streams and groves of wildflowers. I began to hope we might already be on our way home.

I had to give up that idea when we reached a well-trodden road and saw an old-fashioned coach drawn by six black horses, pounding
along at a dangerous speed, with its driver cracking a whip and yelling at the top of his lungs. I recognized the crest on
the coach’s door. It belonged to the Sebastocrater and must have come from Mirenburg. It went past too fast for us to catch
up or see who was in it. If it was Klosterheim and von Minct, they might have seen us. Prince Lobkowitz frowned. “That’s the
Munich road,” he said.