The White Wolf's Son (15 page)

“Why will he die?” I asked.

“There’s a symbiosis between the blade and the man. The blade’s the essence of Chaos. It might even have a mind.
His
mind. The blade lends him vitality in return for the souls it feeds upon. Yet the sword could be a holy object associated
with the Cosmic Balance itself. We must never forget that the Balance maintains the structure of the multiverse. When it tips
one way, Chaos rules ad infinitum across the multiverse. When it tips the other, Law grows dominant. One way lies madness
and hideous
death; the other, sanity and relentless nothingness. It is the Eternal Champion’s fate to ensure that the Balance is maintained.
Our fate, I suspect, is to help him in this task.”

“Our fate?”

“I’m afraid so. There’s also the problem of the Runestaff. Its existence or lack of substance could determine the issue. Many
believe the Staff and the Stone are the fundamental components of the Balance itself. Of course, we are also discussing an
abstraction.” She shrugged. “The symbols of power are not the power themselves. Unless you’re a magician, of course.”

“I understood the Grail was involved in that equation.”

“The Grail takes many forms. One of those could be the Staff. Anyway, the fact is that several people would like to control
one or all of these forces represented by those objects, because of the enormous power such possession would give them. This
is doubtless why, under great threat, it has again divided itself into its chief components and again gone out of the protection
of the family sworn to defend it—the von Beks.

“One of those pursuing the Stone across time and space for his own ends is Gaynor the Damned, a former Knight of the Balance,
disgraced and exiled, Elric’s most implacable enemy. He goes by many names but is best known in these times as von Minct.”

“He’s sailed with Elric to America?” asked Linda.

Una nodded. “Gaynor once drew on the power of the Balance, using it for his own benefit. Needless to say, he lost his calling
and became an outlaw, the enemy of all who served the Balance. Yet he yearned at the same time to be reconciled with what
he had been bred to respect. And if reconciliation’s not possible, he’ll destroy the Balance
and the multiverse with it. This is what fuels his unquenchable hatred. The Balance, of course, is essentially only a symbol
of the forces which rule the multiverse. Yet those forces are real enough, created out of the seminal stuff which exists in
the place we call the Grey Fees. Forces created by the common will or by an uncommon imagination. That is what we call reality.”

“And reality can be destroyed? Is that it? By an act of will?”

Mrs. Persson took a sip of her drink, rocking slowly back and forth, her face turned up to the emerging evening stars. “By
an act of extraordinary will, channeled by ritual and superhuman desire. We are dealing with a creature who has honed and
channeled that will and that desire for millennia.”

“What keeps him alive?” I asked.

“Some believe his very hatred sustains him. Neither he nor Elric is immortal, though their longevity is, of course, phenomenal.
Elric is not even conscious of his longevity. Both move from one dream quest to another, though Elric has not often walked
the moonbeam roads. It’s hard for some of us to understand. How do we count age when so much of your life is spent in dream
quests centuries long, in which you scarcely move in your sleep nor grow older?”

Sitting there in the warm Texas twilight discussing the nature of the infinite multiverse was a little odd, but our pleasure
in seeing our old friend was more than enough to make us forget the incongruity. Besides, it had been some while since I had
learned of any manifestation of the Eternal Champion, let alone Elric of Melniboné, whose adventures I first heard from Una
Persson in the 1950s, when I began recording them.

Apparently Elric, in his guise of Monsieur Zodiac, the stage conjurer, was visited by two men he had met during the 1940s,
when he discovered himself at odds with various Nazis, including Gaynor, who had transformed himself into a minor German nobleman,
cousin to Ulric von Bek. Elric had founded the family line in his first years in Mirenburg. The extraordinary coming together
of von Bek and Elric, whose identities blended into a single physical being, was something neither had experienced and which
almost defeated description. These disruptions in the order of time had come about, Mrs. Persson had told me, as a result
of Gaynor and his ally Klosterheim seeking to use for themselves the power of the Grail and the Black Sword Ravenbrand, sometimes
called Mournblade, the sibling sword to Stormbringer.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Persson said, Elric went to Portugal, searching for the Black Sword, which had passed out of his hands sometime
in 1974 in the course of an adventure she promised to relate to me on another occasion. Having only a few years left to repossess
the blade before his dream quest ended, Elric eventually found himself and his recovered blade in Cintra, outside Lisbon,
where the Chevalier St. Odhran in turn discovered him. From there the two men journeyed via St. Odhran’s Scottish estates
to Ingleton in North Yorkshire, to Tower House, not far from my own ancestral home of Moorcock, near Dent. There they met
Prince Lobkowitz and his old friend Lieutenant Fromental and Colonel Bastable, all able to negotiate the moonbeam roads, all
Knights of the Balance and members of the League of Temporal Adventurers, founded in the mid-twentieth century. They had expected
to discover the von Beks there. Oona von Bek, a relative of Mrs. Persson, was
Elric’s daughter and had, like Count von Bek, fought at his side against Gaynor the Damned on more than one occasion.

“What was the reason?” I asked her. “Isn’t it unusual for so many heroes to gather in one place?”

“Yes, it is unusual,” she agreed. “Indeed there’s some danger in it. But it appears they learned von Bek’s young granddaughter
was being sought by Gaynor, and they went there to protect the little girl.”

“They succeeded, I hope.”

“Not entirely. The child has a mind of her own and disappeared. It was thought at first that Gaynor and Klosterheim had been
successful in their intentions. But the real cause of her disappearance was a weakening in the fundamental fabric of time
and space, the Gray Fees, the very DNA of the multiverse. She vanished during a minor local earthquake caused by this chaotic
movement. Gaynor and Klosterheim were seen in the vicinity, but it’s pretty clear they didn’t set out to kidnap her. They
are opportunists, and they were lunging after her as clumsily as the rest of us. The presence of so many people from alternate
spheres of the multiverse seems to have produced a certain amount of cosmic turbulence.

“Lobkowitz and Fromental set off to find the little girl while the others waited to join forces with the von Beks—Ulric and
Oona. Ulric remained with his other children while his wife, who had sworn never to revisit the moonbeam roads—by which means
travelers cross between the worlds—took up her old calling. Her mother was a dreamthief, but Oona had been content merely
to explore the worlds her mother had once entered with the intention of stealing dreams to sell to her clients. It was in
one such world that her mother met Elric and conceived
their twin children, as I believe you already know.”
¹

“And the male twin?” asked my wife. “What became of him?”

“He disappeared before his sister even remembered him. He was kidnapped.”

“By von Minct and Klosterheim?”

“As it happens, probably not. They found him later and bought him from his master.”

“So what became of Elric? Did he ever contact the child? Or his own lost son?”

“Why don’t I tell you the story from the beginning,” she said, “as best I can.”

Over the next few days, as our guest in Texas, my old friend told me everything she knew of the events concerning Elric of
Melniboné and the last months of his dream quest, when his body, suffering extreme pain, hung in the rigging of Jagreen Lern’s
flagship moments before a mighty sea fight. The naval battle’s outcome would be a crucial factor in events which were to change
the whole course of his world’s history. It would begin actions whose consequences would resonate throughout the multiverse.

How Mrs. Persson knew so much concerning the private lives of some of those featured in this narrative, she would not at that
time say. In many cases I have been unable to verify what she told me, and have set it down here without checking.

According to Mrs. Persson this is what happened: Elric, St. Odhran, Fromental and Colonel Bastable, having conferred with
the old Count and Countess von Bek,
agreed that the countess should set off on her own. They then traveled together to Mirenburg by conventional means, from Heathrow,
London, to Munich, Germany, and from there to Mirenburg, capital of the newly independent principality of Wäldenstein, where
Germany, Austria and Bohemia came together.

Though still beautiful, the city had yet to recover entirely from the poverty of her Communist past. German had been her official
tongue before the Russian conquest, but her people still spoke a Slavic language akin to Polish. Her parliament, however,
returned primarily to the German form, so that her seat of government was known as the Reikstagg, and the chief executive
of her elected city council was called her majori, or mayor.

The travelers went immediately to the Berghof and, thanks to letters from Count von Bek, received a swift audience with Mayor
Pabli, who put his city’s law enforcers at their disposal on the assumption that young Oonagh von Bek would be found there.

Meanwhile Elric, who was most familiar with the city’s secrets, set about on his own explorations, glad, he told my friend,
to be back in his old haunts. In no time he found his familiar secret back alleys and explored the tunnels only he and a few
others knew about, eventually emerging in the underground “looking glass” city which lay alongside their time and space (an
area known in German as the Mittelmarch), close to the borders of that exquisitely beautiful land of Mu-Ooria. He found this
manifestation of the city largely deserted and in ruins. The Off-Moo told of a terrible internal war where the people of the
Deep City, the interior of Thieves’ Quarter, had clashed with the forces of the Byzantine Sebastocrater.

Realizing he was not in a place where he was likely to find the girl, Elric returned to the Mirenburg of the early twenty-first
century to report to his friends, only to find them gone, leaving him a message to let him know they were following other
important clues.

Modern Mirenburg, with its decaying industrial section and impoverished working class, was not to Elric’s taste, but he had
come to love the old city, which still retained much of her beauty and quaintness. He decided, however, to waste no further
time and employ what little sorcery was still available to him in a world where the Lords of Law and Chaos exhibited themselves
in alien and rather prosaic ways and where the great elementals, his old traditional allies, had either disappeared or died.

Unlike his daughter, Elric had only limited experience of the silver strands of the moonbeam roads, where adepts walked between
the worlds, crossing from one level of the multiverse to another, from one alternative Earth to another; but he decided that
if he was to find his daughter’s grandchild, he would have to explore more than one version of the World Below. Thus he gathered
his strength, performed the necessary exercises and rituals, and found himself on the roads between the worlds.

Mrs. Persson had described these roads in the past, but much as I longed to see them for myself, I never had the privilege
of even so much as a glimpse. To the mortal eye, she said, they appeared like an infinite lattice of silver ribbons, wide
enough to take a number of travelers, most of whom walked and all of whom represented an enormous variety of peoples and cultures,
some extraordinarily different from our own and some very similar.
The travelers reached the roads by several means and interpreted this experience in quite different ways. Most would readily
exchange information, and few were antagonists.

Elric had used these roads only in his youthful dream quests, through which his people gained wisdom and made compacts with
supernaturals. He was scarcely aware of them in his waking world, where a great fight was brewing between Law and Chaos, waged
for control of the Balance, and echoed in many different forms across the multiverse.

After buying himself a horse, Elric made inquiries of his fellow travelers and soon discovered that young Oonagh was to be
found in a particular place and had, in fact, not yet left Mirenburg. So he plunged again into the strange, almost limitless
underground domain of the Middle Marches, through the infamous Gray Fees, unformed Chaos reacting unpredictably on the imagination.
In his wisdom Elric feared his own mind more than he feared any being, mortal or supernatural. Only his need to ensure the
safety of the little girl drove him on, and he hated himself for what he considered his own weakness.

Yet in the familiar deep chasms and jagged peaks of Mu-Ooria, following the glowing silver river towards Mirenburg, he was
surprised not to see the outlines so familiar to him in his numerous travels. The lake—actually a great widening of the river—had
extended itself. The cries of birds, almost deafening, were baffling to him, for they were not the voices of waterfowl but
rather were the anxious voices of birds finding what nesting space they could among the towers, eaves and taller trees of
a recently flooded city.

The city’s phosphorescent liquid had lost much of its luster. Elric felt a vague sense of alarm. When, after several hours’
ride, he came to a village of shacks and makeshift houses built from the rubble of more magnificent buildings, he recognized
the spires and domes and roofs of that ancient, drowned metropolis, where, in cavernous shadows, naked men dived, disappearing
into still deeper darkness, into the faintly glowing silver depths, and occasionally reappearing clutching sodden trophies.
Sad, ill-fed women tended sputtering fires outside their dwellings. Elric dismounted beside one of them and asked her what
this place was called and what the men were doing.