To Rescue Tanelorn (48 page)

“But what is this—this multiverse?” Elric shook his head. “It’s too much for me, sir. I doubt my brain is trained enough to accept it at all!”

“I can help you. I can take you to the
medersim
of Alexandria or of Cairo, of Marrakech and Malador, there to learn the skills of the adept, to learn all the moves in the great Game of Time.”

Again the albino shook his head.

With a shrug von Bek returned his attention to the children. “But what are we to do with these?”

“They’ll be safe enough with me, old boy.” Captain Quelch spoke from behind them. The floor of the temple alone remained, hovering in space, with the children gathered upon it. At their centre now stood Far-Seeing, smiling, her arms extended in a gesture of protection. “We’ll find a safe little harbour, my dears.”

“Have you power over all this, Count Renark?” Elric asked.

“It is within the power of all mortals to manipulate the multiverse, to create reality, to make justice and order out of the raw stuff of Chaos. Yet without Chaos there would be no Creation, and perhaps no Creator. That is the simple truth of all existence, Lord Elric. The promise of immortality. It is possible to affect one’s own destiny. That is the hope Chaos offers us.” Von Bek kept a wary eye upon Quelch, who seemed aggrieved.

“If you’ll forgive me interrupting this philosophical discourse, old sport, I must admit to being concerned for my own safety and future and that of the little children for whom I now have responsibility. You gentlemen have affairs of multiversal magnitude to concern you, but I am the only guardian of these orphans. What are we to do? Where are we to go?” There were tears in Quelch’s eyes. His own plight had moved him to some deep emotion.

The girl called Far-Seeing laughed outright at Captain Quelch’s protestations. “We need no such guardianship as yours, my lord.”

Captain Quelch made a crooked grin and reached towards her.

Whereupon the temple floor vanished and they all stood upon a broad, bright road, stretching through the multicoloured multitude of spheres and planes, that great spectrum of unguessable dimensions, staring at Quelch.

“I’ll take the children, sir,” said Count von Bek. “I have an idea I know where they will be safe and where they can improve their skills without interference.”

“What are you suggesting, sir?” Captain Quelch bridled as if accused. “Do you find me insufficiently responsible…?”

“Your motives are suspect, my lord.” Again Far-Seeing spoke, her pure tones seeming to fill the whole multiverse. “I suspect you want us only that you may eat us.”

Elric, baffled by the girl’s words, glanced at von Bek, who shrugged in helpless uncertainty. There was a confrontation taking place between the child and the man.

“To eat you, my dear? Ha, ha! I’m old Captain Quelch, not some cannibal troll.”

The white road blazed on every side.

Elric felt frail and vulnerable beneath the gaze of that multiplicity of spheres and realms. He could barely keep his sanity in the face of so many sudden changes, so much new knowledge. He thought that Captain Quelch’s features twisted, faded a little and then became of quite a different shape, with eyes that reminded him of Arioch’s. Then, just as von Bek realized the same thing, Elric knew they had been duped. This creature could still change its shape!

A Chaos Lord, no doubt, who had not been as badly wounded as the others, who had scented the life-stuff within the temple and found a way of admittance. Perhaps it was Quelch who had drained the old man of life and had failed to feed on the children only because the girl unconsciously resisted him. The children gathered around her, forming a compact circle. Their eyes glared into those of an insect, into the very face of the Fly. Now Quelch’s body shifted and trembled and quaked and cracked and took its true, bizarrely baroque shape, all asymmetrical carapace and coruscating scales, brass feathery wings, the same obscene stink which had filled the Xanardwys Valley; as if he could keep his human shape no longer, must burst back into his true form, hungering for souls, craving every scrap of mortal essence to feed his depleted veins.

“If you seek to escape your Conqueror’s vengeance, my lord, you are mistaken,” said the girl. “You are already condemned. See what you have become. See what you would feed off to sustain your life. Look upon what you would destroy—upon what you once wished to be. Look upon all this and remember, Lord Demon, that this is what you have turned your back upon. It is not yours. We are not yours. You cannot feed off us. Here we are free and powerful as you. But you never deceived me, for I am called Far-Seeing and First-of-Her-Kind and now I sense my destiny, which is to live my own tale. For it is by our stories that we create the reality of the multiverse and by our faith that we sustain it. Your tale is almost ended, great Lord of Chaos—”

And at this she was surprised by the great beast’s bawling mockery, its only remaining weapon against her. It shook with mephitic mirth, its scales clattering and switching. It clutched at a minor triumph.

“It is you who are mistaken, my Lady Far-Seeing. I am not of Chaos! I am Chaos’s enemy. I fought well but was caught up with them as they fell. Their master is not my master. I serve the great Singularity, the Harbinger of Final Order, the Original Insect. I am Quelch and I am, foolish girl,
a Lord of Law
! It is my party which would
abolish
Chaos. We fight for complete control of the Cosmic Balance. Nothing less. Those Chaos Engineers, those adventurers, those rebellious rogues and corsairs who have so plagued the Second Ether, I am their nemesis!” The monstrous head turned, almost craftily. “Can you not see how different I am?”

In truth, Elric and von Bek could see only similarity. This Quelch of Law was identical in appearance to Arioch of Chaos. Even their hatreds and ambitions seemed alike.

“It is sometimes impossible to understand the differences between the parties,” murmured von Bek to Elric. “They have fought so long they have become almost the same thing. This, I think, is decadence. It is time, I suspect, for the Conjunction.” He explained nothing and Elric desired to know no more.

Lord Quelch now towered above them, constantly licking lips glittering with fiery saliva, scratching at his crystalline carapace, his moody, insect eyes searching the reaches of the multiverse, perhaps for allies.

“I can call upon the Authority of the Great Singularity,” Lord Quelch boasted. “You are powerless. I must feed. I must continue my work. Now I will eat you.”

One reptilian foot stepped forward, then another as he bore down upon the gathered children, while Far-Seeing stared back bravely in an attitude of challenge. Then von Bek and Elric had moved between the monster and its intended prey. Stormbringer still shone with the remaining grey-green light of its white sorcery, still murmured and whispered in Elric’s grasp.

Lord Quelch turned his attention upon the albino prince. “You took what was mine. I am a Lord of Law. The old man had what I must have. I must survive. I must continue to exist. The fate of the multiverse depends upon it. What is that to the sacrifice of a few young occultists? Law believes in the power of reason, the measurement and control of all natural forces, the husbandry of our resources. I must continue the fight against Chaos. Once millions gave themselves up in ecstasy to my cause.”

“Once, perhaps, your cause was worthy of their sacrifice,” said von Bek quietly. “But too much blood has been spilt in this terrible war. Those of you who refuse to speak of reconciliation are little more than brutes and deserve nothing of the rest of us, save our pity and our contempt.”

Elric wondered at this exchange. Even when reading the most obscure of his people’s grimoires, he could never have imagined witnessing such a confrontation between a mortal and a demigod.

Lord Quelch snarled again. Again he turned his hungry insect’s eyes upon his intended prey. “Just one or two, perhaps?”

Neither Elric nor von Bek were required to defend the children. Quelch was cowering before the gaze of Far-Seeing, increasingly frightened, as if he only now understood the power he was confronting. “I am hungry,” he said.

“You must look elsewhere for your sustenance, my lord.” Far-Seeing and her children still stared directly up into his face, as if challenging him to attack.

But the Lord of Law crept backwards along the moonbeam road. “I would be mortal again,” he said. “What you saw was my mortal self. He still exists. Do you know him? Las Cascadas?” It seemed as if he made a pathetic attempt at familiarity, to win them to his cause through sympathy, but Quelch knew he had failed. “We shall destroy Chaos and all who serve her.” He glared at Elric and his companion. “The Singularity shall triumph over Entropy. Death will be checked. We shall abolish Death in all his forms. I am Quelch, a great Lord of Law. You must serve me. It is for the Cause…”

Watching him lope away down that long, curving moonbeam road through the multiverse, Elric felt a certain pity for a creature which had abandoned every ideal, every part of its faith, every moral principle, in order to survive for a few more centuries, scavenging off the very souls it claimed to protect.

“What ails that creature, von Bek?”

“They are not immortal but they are almost immortal,” said von Bek. “The multiverse does not exist in infinity but in quasi-infinity. These are not deliberate paradoxes. Our great archangels fight for control of the Balance. They represent two perfectly reasonable schools of thought and, indeed, are almost the same in habit and belief. Yet they fight—Chaos against Law, Entropy against Stasis—and these arguments are mirrored in all our mortal histories, our daily lives, and are connected in profound but complex ways. Over all this hangs the Cosmic Balance, tilting this way and that but always restoring itself. A wasteful means of maintaining the multiverse, you might say. I think our role is to find less wasteful ways of achieving the same end, to create Order without losing the creativity and fecundity of Chaos. Soon, according to other adepts I have met, there will be a great Conjunction of the multiversal realms, a moment of maximum stability, and it is at this time that the very nature of reality can be changed.”

Elric clapped his hands to his head. “Sir, I beg you! Cease! I stand here, in the middle of some astral realm, about to tread a moonbeam into near-infinity, and every part of me, physical and spiritual, tells me that I must be irredeemably insane.”

“No,” said Renark von Bek. “What you behold is the ultimate sanity, the ultimate variety, and perhaps the ultimate order. Come, I will take you home.”

Von Bek turned to the children and addressed Far-Seeing. “Would you care for a military escort, my lady?”

Her smile was quiet. “I think I have no further use for swords. Not for the moment. But I thank you, sir.”

Already she was leading her flock away from them, up the steep curve of the moonbeam and into a haze of blue-flecked light. “I thank you for your song, Prince Elric. For the singing of it you will, in time, be repaid a hundredfold. But I think you will not remember the singing of your song, which brought the Grail to us three, who are, perhaps, its guardians and its beneficiaries. It was the sword which found the Grail and the Grail which led us through. Thank you, sir. You say you are not of the Just, yet I think you are unknowingly of that company. Farewell.”

“Where do you go, Far-Seeing?” asked Melniboné’s lord.

“I seek a galaxy they call The Rose, whose planets form one mighty garden. I have seen it in a vision. We shall be the first human creatures to settle it, if it will accept us.”

“I wish you good fortune, my lady,” said Count Renark with a bow.

“And you, sir, as you play the great Game of Time. Good luck to you, also.” Then the child turned her back on them and led her weary flock towards its destiny.

“Can you not see the possibilities?” Von Bek still sought to tempt Elric to his Cause. “The variety—every curiosity satisfied—and new ones whetted? Friend Elric, I offer you the quasi-infinity of the multiverse, of the First and Second Ethers, and the thrilling life of a trained mukhamir, a player in the great Game.”

“I am a poor gambler, sir.” As if fearing he would not remember them, Elric drank in the wonders all about him: the crowded, constantly swirling, constantly changing multiverse; realm upon realm of reality, most of which knew only the merest hint of the great order in which they played a tiny, but never insignificant, part. He looked down at the misty stuff beneath his feet, which felt as firm as thrice-tempered Imrryrian steel, and he marveled at the paradoxes, the conflicts of logic. It was almost impossible for his mind to grasp anything but a hint of what this meant. He understood even so that every action taken in the mortal realms was repeated and echoed in the supernatural and vice versa. Every action of every creature in existence had meaning, significance and consequence.

“I once witnessed a fight between archangels and dragons,” von Bek was saying, leading the albino gently down the moonbeam to where it crossed another. “We will go this way.”

“How do you know where you are? How are time and distance measured here?” Elric was reduced to almost childlike questions. Now he understood what his grimoires had only ever hinted at, unable or unwilling to describe this super-reality. Yet he could not blame his predecessors for their failures. The multiverse defied description. It could, indeed, only be hinted at. There was no language, no logic, no experience which allowed this terrifying and rapturous reality.

“We travel by other means and other instincts,” von Bek assured him. “If you would join us, you will learn how to navigate not merely the First Ether, but also the Second.”

“You have agreed, Count Renark, to guide me back to my own realm.” Elric was flattered by this strange man’s attempts to recruit him.

Von Bek clapped his companion upon the back. “Fair enough.” They loped down the moonbeams at a soldier’s pace. Elric caught glimpses of worlds, of landscapes, hints of scenes, familiar scents and sounds, completely alien sights, seemingly all at random. For a while he felt his grasp on sanity weakening and, as he walked, the tears streamed down his face. He wept for a loss he could not remember. He wept for the mother he had never known and the father who had refused to know him. He wept for all those who suffered and who would suffer in the useless wars which swept his world and most others. He wept in a mixture of self-pity and a compassion which embraced the multiverse. And then a sense of peace blanketed him.