"Kill you, Moonglum! The only one left-my only true friend? You babble!"
"I mean it. You must, for there is nothing else to do. Further, we have no place here and must die soon at any rate. You told me how Zarozinia gave you her soul-well, take mine, too!"
"I cannot."
Moonglum paced towards him and reached down to grip Stormbringer's hilt, pulling it halfway from the sheath.
"No, Moonglum!"
But now the sword sprang from the sheath on its own volition.
Elric struck Moonglum's hand away and gripped the hilt. He could not stop it. The sword rose up, dragging his arm with it, poised to deliver a blow.
Moonglum stood with his arms by his sides, his face expressionless, though Elric thought he glimpsed a flicker of fear in the eyes. He struggled to control the blade, but knew it was impossible.
"Let it do its work, Elric."
The blade plunged forward and pierced Moonglum's heart. His blood sprang out and covered it. His eyes blurred and filled with horror. "Ah, no-I-had-not-expected this!"
Petrified, Elric could not tug the sword from his friend's heart.
Moonglum's energy began to flow up its length and course into his body, yet, even when all the little Eastlander's vitality was absorbed, Elric remained staring at the small corpse until the tears flowed from his crimson eyes and a great sob racked him. Then the blade came free.
He flung it away from him and it did not clatter on the rocky ground but landed as a body might land. Then it seemed to move towards him and stop and he had the suspicion that it was watching him.
He took the horn and put it to his lips. He blew the blast to herald in the night of the new Earth. The night that would precede the new dawn. And though the horn's note was triumphant, Elric was not.
He stood full of infinite loneliness and infinite sorrow, his head tilted back as the sound rang on. And, when the note faded from triumph to a dying echo that expressed something of Elric's misery, a huge outline began to form in the sky above the Earth, as if summoned by the horn.
It was the outline of a gigantic hand holding a balance and, as he watched, the Balance began to right itself until each side was true.
And somehow this relieved Elric's sorrow as he released his grip on the Horn of Fate.
"There is something, at least," he said, "and if it's an illusion, then it's a reassuring one."
He turned his head to one side and saw the blade leave the ground, sweep into the air and then rush down on him.
"Stormbringer!" he cried, and then the hellsword struck his chest, he felt the icy touch of the blade against his heart, reached out his fingers to clutch at it, felt his body constrict, felt it sucking his soul from the very depths of his being, felt his whole personality being drawn into the runesword. He knew, as his life faded to combine with the sword's, that it had always been his destiny to die in this manner. With the blade he had killed friends and lovers, stolen their souls to feed his own waning strength. It was as if the sword had always used him to this end, as if he was merely a manifestation of Stormbringer and was now being taken back into the body of the blade which had never been a true sword. And, as he died, he wept again, for he knew that the fraction of the sword's soul which was his would never know rest but was doomed to immortality, to eternal struggle.
Elric of Melnibone, last of the Bright Emperors, cried out, and then his body collapsed, a sprawled husk beside its comrade, and he lay beneath the mighty balance that still hung in the sky. Then Stormbringer's shape began to change, writhing and curling above the body of the albino, finally to stand astraddle it. The entity that was Stormbringer, last manifestation of Chaos which would remain with this new world as it grew, looked down on the corpse of Elric of Melnibone and smiled. "Farewell, friend. I was a thousand times more evil than thou!" And then it leapt from the Earth and went spearing upwards, its wild voice laughing mockery at the Cosmic Balance; filling the universe with its unholy joy.
LETTERS AND MISCELLANY
ELRIC
(1963)
VERY NICE OF you to devote so much time to Elric-though he doesn't altogether merit it! I'd disagree with the writer when he says, "I expect the 'sword and sorcery' stories are by far the most popular type… etc." I think those who like them receive them enthusiasti-cally, but it's a fairly small minority compared with those who like, for instance, "science fantasy" of The Dragon Masters variety and the stuff Kuttner, Brackett and others used to turn out for Startling, Super Science, etc. These days people seem to want information of some kind with their escapism-and sword and sorcery doesn't strictly supply information of the type required. (The appeal of James Bond appears to be based primarily on the lumps of pseudo-data inserted every so often in the narrative.) The only sword-and-sorcery stuff I personally enjoy reading is Leiber's. Don't go much for Tolkien, Dunsany, Smith, Howard-or Edgar Rice Burroughs in spite of what some critics have said of my books recently.
Though I didn't know Science Fantasy was due to fold when I wrote it, I wound up the Elric series just in time to catch the last issue quite by coincidence. I had intended to kill off Elric (as is probably plain from the second story in the currently appearing quartet, "Black Sword's Brothers") and his world, so it is just as well. A story set in a world which so closely borders Elric's that some of the place names are the same will be appearing in Fantastic some time this year. This was originally called "Earl Aubec and the Golem" but the title has been changed to "Master of Chaos" (the cosmology is identical with the Elric stories' cosmology) and will be, if Cele Goldsmith likes the next one I'm planning, the first of a series showing the development of the Earth from a rather unusual start. It is vaguely possible that Elric will appear in future stories and some of his background not filled in in the concluding stories ("Sad Giant's Shield" in Science Fantasy No. 63 and "Doomed Lord's Passing" in Science Fantasy 64) will be filled in there.
But this depends on how the series develops and what Cele Goldsmith thinks of the stories. "Master of Chaos" is, I think, in many ways my best S amp;S tale.
It is a great disappointment, however, that Science Fantasy has folded. Not simply because stories sold to it paid my rent, but because for me and many other writers in this country (particularly, like me, the younger ones) it was an outlet for the kind of story that is very difficult to sell in America-even to Cele Goldsmith who appears to be the most open-minded of the U.S. editors. Particularly this went for the short novel of the "Earth Is but a Star" length and the recent 37,000-word "Skeleton Crew" by Aldiss. The slow-developing, borderline-mainstream story of the kind Ballard does so well will find more difficulty selling in the States too, though Ballard's "Question of Re-entry" was of this kind and published in Fantastic. It seems a pity that English SF has reached, in people like Ballard and Aldiss, an excep-tionally high standard and a strongly English flavour, and now it has no markets here.
The landscapes of my stories are metaphysical, not physical. As a faltering atheist with a deep irradicable religious sense (I was brought up on an offbeat brand of Christian mysticism) I tended, particularly in early stories like "While the Gods Laugh," to work out my own problems through Elric's adventures. Needless to say, I never reached any conclusions, merely brought these problems closer to the surface. I was writing not particularly well, but from the "soul." I wasn't just telling a story, I was telling my story. I don't think of myself as a fantasy writer in the strict sense-but the possibilities of fantasy attract me. For some sort of guide to what I see as worth exploiting in the fantasy form, I'd suggest you bear this in mind when you read "The Deep Fix" which will appear in the last issue of Science Fantasy along with