The wild exultant battle-song of his ancestors came to Elric’s lips as he followed the Rose into the heart of the enemy and the sword fed him the energy it did not take itself until his eyes glowed almost as hotly as Gaynor’s, so that it seemed he, too, was filled to bursting with the fires of hell …
Now Wheldrake began to gasp as he saw that the six thin needles of radiance still flickered amongst all that slaughter—and already more than half the apparently invincible Chaos army was destroyed, a mass of torn and crushed flesh, of grotesque limbs and even more grotesque heads lifted in the final torments of unholy death.
… while clambering through this carnage, pushing aside imploring claws and pleading faces, plunging his steel heels into screaming mouths or agonized eyes, using for leverage any limb or organ or foothold in bone or flesh he could find, his flaring Chaos-blazoned armour all spotted with the blood and offal of his ruined army, came Gaynor the Damned, the black-and-yellow sword forking and fluttering in his hand like some living flag, and now there were names on his lips—names which became curses—names which became the synonyms for everything he hated, feared and most longingly desired …
… but this was a hatred expressed through random, disruptive violence and destruction; a fear which found its swiftest form in raging aggression; a desire so intense and so eternally frustrated that this had become the thing in himself Gaynor hated worst of all and hated in every creature he encountered …
… and it was upon Elric of Melniboné, who might have been his alter ego, some cosmic opposite, who had chosen the hardest of roads to follow rather than the easiest, that Gaynor the Damned concentrated the greatest volume of his enraged hatred. For Elric might yet become what Gaynor the Damned had been and which he could never be again …
… so thoroughly saturated with the air of Chaos was Gaynor that at this moment he was little more than a half-beast himself. He growled and he shrieked as he crawled over the corpses of his slain warriors, he made hideous, wordless noises, he slobbered as if he already tasted Elric’s deficient blood …
“Elric! Elric of Melniboné! Now I shall send thee to do eternal service with thy banished master! Elric! Arioch awaits thee. I offer up to him in friendly reconciliation the soul of his recalcitrant servitor …”
But Elric did not hear his enemy. His own ears were full of ancient battle-songs, his concentration was upon his immediate opponents as, one by one, he cut them down and took their souls for himself.
These souls he did not dedicate to Arioch, for Arioch had proved himself too fickle a patron and, as was clear, had no power in this realm. Whatever was left of Esbern Snare had carried Arioch back through the dimensions to his own domain, where he must recoup his strength and make fresh plots in his eternal rivalry with his fellow lords.
Elsewhere Charion Phatt and the Rose continued their delicate butchery, while Stormbringer’s sister swords rose and fell and made their own sweet, eerie music, as subtle and as dangerous as the three sisters who wielded them. Elric had never known such mortal peers. The knowledge that they were nearby filled him with a kind of pride and made his battle-joy the greater as he continued his sorcerous slaughter while, dimly now, through all that din of outraged militancy, he thought he heard his own name being called.
Two Chaos warriors, with spiked armour half-hiding skin like barnacles, struck at him together but were too slow for Elric and his hellblade—their heads flew like buckets at a sideshow and one spiked an eye in a second pair who came against him, confusing them both so that they slew each other, but meanwhile Elric galloped beside a wading half-reptile as it clambered over the ruined flesh towards the Rose and with two quick strokes had severed secret tendons and brought the Chaos beast crashing upon the bodies of its fallen fellows, roaring out its impotent anger, its stupefied astonishment at this discovery of its own mortality …
Yet more insistent now was that faint, familiar sound …
“Elric! Elric! Chaos awaits thee, Elric!” A high, keening sound; a vengeful wind.
“Elric! Soon we shall see an end to all thine optimism!”
Up a mound of Chaos carrion rode Elric on his war-trained steed, to take stock of their battle …
Wheldrake on his balcony saw Elric’s horse climb that rise in the carpet of the conquered, saw the Black Sword raised in the albino’s black-gauntleted right hand, saw the left hand lifted against the blazoning rays which still sprang from every direction, wherever the crystal trees were broken. That dazzling intermixture of colour and light gave still more distance to the scene and Wheldrake, seeing what Elric did not yet see, offered up another prayer …
… Gaynor, carving his way through a pile of already rotting corpses, his armour now almost wholly encrusted with the remains of his warriors, plunged forward, still snarling Elric’s name, still obsessed with nothing but vengeance …
“Elric!”
A thin sound, like the warning cry of a faraway bird, and Elric recognized the voice as Charion Phatt’s.
“Elric! He is close to you. I can sense him. He has more power than we suspected. You must destroy him somehow … Or he will destroy us all!”
“ELRIC!” This last a great grunt of satisfaction as, through the piled corpses, Gaynor broke at last, to stand with his horrid eyes trained upon the face of his greatest enemy, the black-and-yellow sword, the ragged sword, flickering in his hand like lava fresh from some volcanic maw. “I did not think I would have need of this new power of mine, as yet. But here you are. And here am I!”
With that Gaynor lunged at Elric and the albino brought up Stormbringer easily to block him. At which Gaynor, surprisingly, laughed and lingered in the attitude of his failed stroke until, suddenly, the albino realized what was happening and tried to pull back, dragging Stormbringer free of the leechblade now seeking to suck all life from it. Elric had heard of blades which fed, in some strange manner, on the energies of such as Stormbringer—a parasite on whatever occult force emanated from the alien iron out of which these swords were forged.
“You resort to some ungentlemanly sorcery, it seems, Prince Gaynor.” Elric knew that much of the power still remained in his blade, but could not risk further leeching of that energy.
“Honour has no place in my catalogue of useful qualities!” Gaynor spoke almost lightly, feinting with the black-and-yellow leechblade. “But if it did, I would say, Prince Elric, that you lack courage to face a foe, man to man—each with a singular sword to aid his work. Are we not fairly matched, Prince of Ruins?”
“Well enough, well enough, I suppose, sir,” said Elric, hoping that the sisters would understand the urgency of their joint predicament. And, expertly, he made his horse sidestep another almost playful feint.
“You fear me, Elric, eh? You fear death, do you?”
“Not death,” said Elric. “Not that ordinary death which is a transition …”
“What of that death which is sudden and everlasting oblivion?”
“I do not fear it,” said the albino. “Though I do not desire it, either.”
“As you know I desire it!”
“Aye, Prince Gaynor. But you are not permitted to possess it. You never shall suffer such easy release.”
“Maybe.” Gaynor the Damned became almost secretive at this and he turned to look over his shoulder to chuckle as he saw Princess Tayaratuka riding back towards them while her sisters and the other two women continued their fierce advance. “Are there, I wonder, any constants at all in the multiverse? Is the Balance no more than a pleasant invention with which mortals reassure themselves that there is some kind of order? What evidence do we observe of this?”
“We can create the evidence,” said Elric quietly. “It is within our power to do that. To create order, justice, harmony …”
“You moralize too much, my lord. It is the sign of a morbid mind, sir. An over-burdened conscience, perhaps.”
“I will not be condescended to by such as yourself, Gaynor.” Elric let his body appear to relax, his expressi
on become casual. “A conscience is not always a burden.”
“O, murderer of kin and betrothed! What else but loathing can ye feel for your deficient character?” Gaynor feinted with words even as he feinted with the leechsword, and both were designed to deprive the albino of his faith in his own skills, his will to survive.
“I have killed more villains than I have killed innocents,” said Elric firmly, though it was clear Gaynor knew how to strike at the very vitals of his being. “And I regret only that I cannot have the pleasure of slaying thee, failed Servant of the Balance.”
“Make no mistake, my lord, it would be a pleasure for us both,” said Gaynor—and now he lunged—now Elric must block the blow. And again the energy from the sword was drained in a great gobbling up of cosmic force, and the black-and-yellow leechsword began to pulse with dirty light.
Elric, unprepared for the power of Gaynor’s sword, fell backwards and almost lost his seat, the runesword hanging uselessly from its wrist-thong. The albino, slumping forward in his saddle, gasping for air, saw all they had lately won about to be taken back in moments … He croaked for Princess Tayaratuka, riding close now, to flee—to avoid the leechsword at any cost, for now it was twice as powerful as it had been …
But the princess could not hear him. Even now, with a grace that made her seem almost weightless, she was bearing down upon Gaynor the Damned, the golden sword whistling and ululating in her right hand, her black hair whipped behind her, her violet eyes alight with the prospect of Gaynor’s doom …
… and again Gaynor blocked her blow. Again he laughed. And again, in astonishment, Princess Tayaratuka felt the energy draining from herself and her blade …
… then, almost casually, Gaynor had knocked her from her saddle with the butt of his sword, leaving her to lie helplessly amongst the mangled flesh and bone of the field, and on her horse was riding to where the others fought, still oblivious of the danger he brought …
Princess Tayaratuka lifted her eyes to Elric’s as the albino strove to drag himself upright. “Elric, have you no other sorcery to help us?”
Elric racked his brains, considering all the grimoires and charts and words he had memorized as a child, and could put himself in tune with no psychic power at all …
“Elric,” came Tayaratuka’s hoarse whisper, “see—Gaynor has downed Shanug’a—the horse races with her, beyond control … and now Mishiguya is fallen from her horse … Elric, we are lost! We are lost in spite of all our sorceries!”
And Elric began dimly to recollect an old alliance his folk had had with some near-supernatural creatures who had helped them in the early days of the founding of Melniboné, but he could remember only a name …
“Tangled Woman,” he murmured, his lips dry and cracking. It was as if his whole body were drained of substance and that any movement would snap it in a dozen places. “The Rose will know …”
“Come,” said Tayaratuka, getting to her feet and grabbing hold of his horse’s bridle, “we must tell them …”
But Elric had nothing to tell; merely the memory of a memory, of an old tryst with some natural spirit which owed no loyalty to Law or Chaos; of a nagging hint of a spell—some chant he had been taught as a boy, as an exercise in summoning …
The Tangled Woman.
He could not remember who she was.
Gaynor was disappeared again, into his own ranks, seeking out Charion Phatt and the Rose, for now he was armed with a sword four times more powerful than those which had come against him and he wished to test the blade on ordinary, mortal flesh …
Wheldrake, still watching, still praying, saw everything from his balcony. He saw Princess Tayaratuka sheath her golden sword and lead Elric’s horse to where her sisters stood, also in attitudes of exhaustion. Their horses had bolted in Gaynor’s wake.
Yet still Gaynor had not found the Rose, and Charion Phatt evaded him as easily as an urchin in a market, returning to the others and speaking with some heat to the prone albino …
… When, round a pile of corpses, rode the Rose, dismounting in a single movement as she saw the predicament of her friends …
Then she, too, kneeled beside the fallen albino and she took his hand …
“There is one spell,” said Elric. “I am trying to recall it. There is, perhaps, a memory. Concerning you, Rose, or some folk of your own …”
“All my folk are dead, save me,” said the Rose, her soft, pink skin flushed with the work of battle. “And it seems I, too, am to die.”
“No!” Elric struggled to his feet. He held tight to his pommel while the horse shifted nervously, not knowing why it could not continue with its battle. “You must help me, lady. There is something about a woman, the Tangled Woman …”
The name was familiar to her.
“All I know is this,” she said, and, with furrowed brow, she recalled some lines of verse …
“In the first creative weaving of a world,
In the time before the time of long ago,
When neither haughty Law nor fractured Chaos rules,
Lives a creature born of foliage and flesh,
Who seeks to weave her world a-fresh,
And weaves one fine, a woven womb,
A womb of bramble flowers strong,
In which to sing her briar-song,
And bear her thorny child, who grows
Into a perfect rose.
“They are Wheldrake’s. From his youth, he says.”
But then she saw that she had, in a way she might never understand, communicated something to the pale lord, for Elric’s lips were moving and his eyes were raised to look into worlds the others could not see. Strange musical sounds came out of his lips, and even the three sisters could not understand what he said, for he spoke no earthly tongue. He spoke a tongue of the dark clay and the winding roots, of the old bramble-nests where the wild Vadhagh once, legend had it, played and spawned their strange offspring, part flesh, part leafy wood, a people of the forest and forgotten gardens, and, when he hesitated, it was the Rose who joined him in his song, in the language of a folk who were not her own, but whose ancestors had mingled with her own and whose blood flowed in her to this day.
They sang together, sending their song through all the dimensions of the multiverse, to where a dreaming creature stirred and lifted up arms made of a million woven brambles and turned faces which, too, were of knotted rosewood, in the direction of the song it had not heard for a hundred thousand years. And it was as if the song brought her to life, gave her some meaning at a moment when she had been about to die, so that, almost upon a whim, from something like curiosity, the Tangled Woman shifted her brambly body, arm by arm and leg by leg, then head by head, and, with a rustling movement which made all her foliage shudder, she formed herself into a shape very like a human shape, though somewhat larger.
And with that, she took a casual step through time and space which had not been in existence when she had first decided to sleep, and which she therefore ignored, and found herself standing in an ill-smelling morass of corrupt flesh and rotting bone which displeased her. But through all this she sensed another scent, something of herself in it, and she lowered her massive, woven head, a head of thick thorn branches whose eyes were not eyes at all, but flowers and leaves, and then she opened her briar lips and asked, in a voice so low it shook the ground, why her daughter had summoned her?
To which the Rose replied, in similar speech, while Elric sang his own tale to her, in a melody she found tolerable. It seemed that she concentrated her woven branches more thickly about her and looked with a certain sternness towards Gaynor and the remains of the Chaos army which had come full stop to stare at her before, at Gaynor’s lifting of his black-and-yellow sword, a shard of raging energy, they began to race to the attack!
And the sisters clutched hands, linked with Charion and Elric and the Rose, and they held tight for security and power, for they somehow informed the Tangled Woman in her primitive soul—they directed her as she bent and
reached a many-branched hand towards Gaynor, who barely yanked his horse aside in time and rode beneath her, slashing at the wood which, because the energy which enlivened it was of a kind that no power could suck out nor any mortal weapon damage, was scarcely marked and, where it was marked, healed immediately.
With calm deliberation now, as if she performed some unwelcome household task, the Tangled Woman stretched her long fingers through the attacking ranks of Chaos, oblivious to their hacking swords and jabbing pikes, their bitings and their clawings, and wove her fingers thoroughly amongst them, twining and twisting and bending and entangling them until every Chaos warrior and every Chaos beast still living was embraced and fixed by her bramble fingers.
Only one figure escaped, riding like fury from the bloody crystals of that battlefield, slashing at the horse’s rump with the satiated leechsword.
Tangled Woman reached thin tentacles out towards the disappearing Gaynor but had little strength left; just enough to flick, with a thin, green branch, the sword from his flailing hand and bear it triumphantly up, to fling it away, deep into the forest where a black pool began to spread, turning all the surrounding crystal to the consistency of coal.
Then the leechsword vanished and they heard Gaynor’s furious yell as he forced the sweating stallion up out of the valley and rode, without looking back, down the other side, to vanish.
Tangled Woman had lost interest in Gaynor. Slowly she withdrew her brambly fingers from the field, from the bloody corpses her thorns had pierced, from the flesh from which life had been crushed, her victims knowing a cleaner death than any Elric offered.
But now Elric pulled himself into his saddle and, while the others refused to look, he went about the business of slaughtering the wounded, letting the sword feast and renew his energy. He was determined to find and punish Gaynor for the evil he had done. And as he passed among what remained of the living, their imploring wails were ignored. “I must steal from you what your master would have stolen from us,” he explained. And that killing had neither honour nor satisfaction in it. He did only what was necessary.