That great, reptilian face glared down at him. “You are my sister’s son. Your blood demands you help me! You come here seeking the White Sword when you already possess the Black. And you did not know there would be a price? Have you forgotten all loyalty to your own, Prince Elric?”
“I did not know what you would demand.” He sounded feeble to his own ears.
She drew a strong breath and seemed to grow again.
Elric moved nervously on his couch, wishing he had his sword with him now. He was becoming alarmed. Somehow he needed to renew his energy. He had so few resources left. Lady Fernrath’s skin was no longer white but had taken on a gold-green sheen, while her hair moved under its own volition. He feared her in a way he had not when he first came to Hizss, existing in two worlds at the same time, visiting as a courtesy, he thought, the sister of his mother, whom Sadric had loved to distraction. Elric had learned more than he had wished to know. Of his ancestry. Of the people called the Phoorn, who even now lived on in Melniboné, who had not been scattered as the others had been scattered, or killed as his cousins and his other relatives had almost all been killed, after he had brought the sea reavers to destroy Imrryr.
Then he had loved the Phoorn as he loved them still. They had made alliances when they first discovered this world, coming as exiles to found a civilisation which would be based on notions of justice until then unknown to most gods or mortals. They had, by some vast supernatural alchemy, interbred, though their offspring usually took one form or the other, not both. It was not always possible to predict what would emerge from a Phoorn egg or, indeed, a human womb. Yet, Lady Fernrath had told him of the shape-changers, those few who could be what they willed themselves to be and who had, for centuries, continued their race. He owed much to her. He was wrong to begin fearing her now.
“My lady, I would help you if I could, not because you would strike a bargain with me, but for the sake of our old alliances. I came here, after all, to ask a favour. And I would gladly do you a favour in return.”
Her great Phoorn eyes softened. Her speech changed. She sounded affectionate again. “I should not have tried to bargain with you, Elric. But life here has changed a great deal since we last met. Though you never met them, I had a brother, a father, other kin. Over many centuries our world has grown corrupt. Wars were fought. You saw those fortified ports. Monstrous treacheries were conceived. Such appalling treachery…” Her tone became sad, reminiscent. “I need your help, Elric. There is something I have to do. One task before I die. A duty…” Perhaps she cast an enchantment on him, but he found himself sympathizing with her.
Yet he was still wary, still unsure. “No need to bargain with me, my lady. We have an ancient blood pact. I would help you without reward if I could. But could you not have found a warrior here to help you?”
“No. For none possesses what you own.”
“You mean Stormbringer? I will fetch it from the ship. And my armour. I will tell Princess Nauha where I am going—”
“My servant has already brought both sword and armour. No need to disturb the Princess of Uyt.”
A darkness was filling the sky as deep clouds sailed in from the south. The night grew colder and the albino shivered, fearing further for Nauha’s safety.
“Nobody here will harm her,” said the Phoorn. “But now I must venture into—take more substance—from—the—netherworld…” A noise like a whirlpool, running fast in high seas.
He had difficulty seeing her now. His mind was less clear than before. The table seemed to have disappeared. The house was a black shadow, unlit.
The sounds of the night had faded when her voice came again. He turned, peering into a void. Above him were two green-gold staring stars: passionless, cold. Her voice was still recognisable, yet hissed like waves on shingle:
“Are you ready to go with me, Elric?”
“You have my word.”
Something fell at his feet then. He knew what it was and bent to pick it up. He buckled on his breastplate and greaves, settled his helmet on his head, attached the scabbard to his belt. When he straightened, scaled flesh, long and sinuous, stretched down out of the sky and he looked deeper into those green-gold eyes, knowing them for what and whose they were. At the base of her long, reptilian neck was a natural indentation in which a man might sit. It had not been long since, in the great Dragon Caves of his people, he had taken a carved Vilmirian saddle and placed it in just such an indentation. The Lady Fernrath, a shape-changer of a very specific kind, touched him affectionately with her long claw. While Elric had experienced her strange powers before, reliving the first coming together of their related races, he had never seen her change so rapidly. Nor, in all his adventures and his dreams, had he seen movement so rapid in any shape-changer from mammal to reptile, though the Phoorn were not true reptiles, any more than Melnibonéans were true humans. Both had come into being in other worlds under different gods and philosophies. Both had learned the virtues of the other. And then, at last, they had mated, though still in many ways alien one to the other. And these were the folk whom the Dragon Kings of Melniboné claimed as their ancestors. This was not the first time he had seen why in his world dragons were called “brother” or “sister” and treated with such complete respect, each conversing with the other, when they lived on altered time, so that it seemed to Melnibonéans that their dragons slept for years or decades.
There were no further traces of the human about the Lady Fernrath. She was completely Phoorn, speaking in the ancient language used between Phoorn and Melnibonéan. Completely Phoorn as she bent that beautiful serrated neck to let him mount, turning her head so that residues of fiery venom from her mouth-sacs fell bursting upon the tiled terrace and did not harm him.
As if suspicious of pursuit, the lady firedrake peered this way and that into the night, her great claws clattering on the terra cotta, her wings stretching, wide, wide as she prepared to lift into the darkness of the night, giving voice with wild, beautiful music to the Phoorn’s ancient Song of Flight. Springing off the terrace, she began to gallop across the lawn, her sharp senses noting the obstacles as she approached that obsidian sea.
And then she was aloft.
And Elric, seated astride her gigantic, exquisite body, found himself flinging back his head, letting the cool air stream through his long white hair as he lifted his own voice to join in harmony with that complex melody, as natural to him and his kind as when the Phoorn and his own people first came to this sweet, glorious world and determined to take stewardship of it in the name of their ideals.
What had gone wrong between the time when he had enjoyed a long idyll with her and fallen in love in a new way? Then their faith in the Great Balance translated into so many practical notions of order and justice. Now? Now he had become used to lies, secrecies, political and other bargains. The whole world was a darker, more threatening place. If he had known how the changes in the World Below were mirrored in the World Above, he would not have had his friends come with him.
But all such thoughts were dissipating, for he rode a dragon again, bonding, as his genes remembered, with that monstrous, thumping heart, the deep, slow pulse, the beating of vast wings and the sweeping from side to side of that long, muscular tail. He relished the comfort of his heavy black armour but missed his great dragon spear, through which his thoughts were transmitted back and forth.