A deep, distant boom rose from somewhere within the old Phoorn’s huge chest. He lifted his head, and the quills—each the height of a tall man—rattled on his chest, while all along his tessellated tail the huge combs rose and stood proud. Even Elric found the transformation astonishing. The booming grew deeper and louder. He raised himself up on his muscular legs and blinked. From each eye now fell a drop of blood. The face, which regarded first his daughter and then Elric, was benign and profoundly sad, full of bitter wisdom. “With vision comes power,” he said in Phoorn. And blinked again. This time it was a gigantic salt tear which fell.
Elric realised that the slaves had fallen back, were running past him, seeking the freedom of the forest. Addric Heed was there, riding astride a massive battle horse, blond and armoured. Behind him were massed more cavalry and fresh infantry. The slaves had, for the most part, dropped their weapons, taken up their children, and ran out into the light, only to stagger back in, pierced by the arrows of Addric Heed’s waiting archers. “Like all others, save Hizss, this place was designed for warfare,” she said, “no matter what the occasion.” She watched as her father flexed wings long unused.
From directly above, came a thunderous excitement of yelling, terrified voices, a clashing of metal.
“Some fresh sorcery of Addric Heed’s no doubt,” she said. “It was through his magic that he first learned to make slaves of his ancestors and use them to build his power.”
“Aye,” agreed Hemric, seeking her out with his unfamiliar sight and looking down on her with a benign expression never seen any longer on the faces of his Melnibonéan kin. “We were unsuspecting. When he could not make us fly for him, he took out our eyes and made us swim. I would like to kill my son if I could.”
“You shall, Father, when we find him,” she promised. But it was a promise she would not keep.
Another roll of thunder. Did it come from the sky? Addric Heed lifted his handsome, arrogant head, surprised by it. He reined in his pale stallion, looking upwards, staring about him. Having no other plan, the slaves had returned to mass around Elric. They had reached a sudden impasse. Even with the black sword, the albino knew they could not defeat such numbers.
Elric considered a parlay with Addric Heed, but the power in him, which filled his mind, his body, and his soul, was not a compromising power; it did not apologise for itself, for it had no conscience. His unnatural empathy for humans had drawn him to the Young Kingdoms and beyond, to learn of their morality and humility, their curiosity, all that his people had lost, for he had realised instinctively that only with these qualities restored could his own folk survive.
Then Elric’s cruel Melnibonéan pride had brought him home and achieved all he had desired to avert. He had assured the destruction of his people, the burning of their towers, and the end of a power they had taken for granted. The only power he had now was from Melniboné his family’s sorcery and its history, the pacts which it had, in its moments of crisis, been forced to make with Chaos, where once, long, long ago, it had leaned towards Law. His dreamquests into other planes, including his own family’s past and present, had taught him all this; but he had learned only to a degree how to harness and control such power, to restore his vitality with the life-stuff of living, sentient things.
Addric’s army advanced through the echoing galleries towards Elric, that panting, unthinking creature bearing a pulsing, moaning sword in which red runes writhed, who was the last emperor of a dying race, a ragged horde of slaves at his back, together with an albino woman and her enfeebled father. At the pirate chief’s command, the archers began assembling before him. But then the thunder came again. This time Elric saw a messenger riding through the ranks to address Addric Heed. Fernrath’s brother lifted his hand to halt his men, turning in his saddle to speak, but not all had heard and some continued to advance. Elric watched as the pirate slaver led his men back through the prison quarters and up into the main fortress. The stairways were wide enough to allow the cavalry to remain mounted through several of the upper galleries.
Soon the advancing soldiers began to realise they had been deserted. Some turned to follow. Others called out, warning that the fewer their numbers the worse their plight.
Wearily, the slaves bent again to pick up abandoned weapons.
This was an opportunity Elric had not anticipated and, trained strategist that he was, he at once shouted to the rabble army to follow, leading a charge that almost immediately broke Addric Heed’s forces, sending them running behind their master, convinced they were already defeated.
The warriors were brave and experienced, but they were completely demoralised from the moment Elric struck them—a ghost from their own pasts—a whirlwind of black, vampiric death, its howling rune-blade an image of their own legends, its blazing crimson eyes haunting all their nightmares. And with their leader gone, and in the certain presence of their own Prince of Chaos, the demon lord Arioch, who was one of their shared pantheon, they had no stomach for fighting their kind. It took the Lady Fernrath to speak to Elric in the High Tongue of the Phoorn, reminding him of who and where he was, to urge him to lower his sword and look wonderingly around him at the piled corpses, the bodies of all those who had gone to feed himself and Stormbringer. So many damned souls! And then the albino knew a kind of grief. But it was not for the dead slavers that he wept.
While Elric wept, there came another wave of amber-armoured soldiers. At first it seemed they had rallied, but they were in obvious disarray. Many had lost their weapons and, seeing that their comrades were captured, threw themselves on the mercy of their former booty, who promptly stripped them of their arms and put them in chains. For the moment, the air was free of arrows. Clearly, the archers had been called to another part of the fort to reinforce Addric Heed’s army. But who could be attacking?
Suddenly Elric looked up to hear the constant rolling thunder moving first towards them, then away again, while the alabaster walls shook and shivered, and small showers of stone and plaster fell from ceilings and walls.
Leaving the others behind to guard the ancient Phoorn and to organise themselves and their prisoners, Elric and Lady Fernrath stalked warily to the nearest stair and began to climb. As they reached galleries with windows which looked out on other windowed galleries, they could see that all the way to the top of the great fort, a terrible fight had been taking place and dead soldiers in amber armour lay everywhere. The sound of thunder was beginning to subside. The sky was clearing and the sun turned clouds to pale gold. From above, Elric heard his name being called.
“Elric! My lord! We thought you dead!”
The albino stopped and looked up. At length, he saw through a smashed window in the gallery above a broad, redheaded face grinning down. The face was Moonglum’s.
Slowly, the madness deserted Elric and in something close to joy he ran through the galleries until he found his friend. Princess Nauha stood with Moonglum and also Cita Tine, the tavern wench. All were armed with bloody swords and bore the familiar look of war-wolves who had fought a long, exhilarating fight. And then, as if Insensate Fate could not contain this level of coincidence but must burst and spread it across the multiverse, there appeared the nuns of Xiombarg, smug as nuns are who have pleased themselves by some deed of virtue, to report that all was settled as justice demanded.
“Our lady answered us and we reached an agreement,” declared one as she straightened her unwieldy crown.