The Dreamthief's Daughter

Chapter Eight The Arms of Morpheus

At that moment, as Klosterheim squeezed his automatic's trigger, I understood profoundly how I'd left my familiar world far behind and was now in the realm of the supernatural.

Klosterheim's gun barked for the briefest moment and there was no echo. The sound was somehow absorbed into the surrounding atmosphere. Then I watched as the bullet stopped a few inches from the barrel, and was swallowed in the air.

Klosterheim, an oddly fatalistic expression on his face, lowered his arm and holstered his useless weapon. He glanced meaningfully at his master.

Gaynor swore. "God be damned-we're in the Middlemarch!"

Klosterheim understood him. And so did I. A memory as ancient and mysterious as my family's blood.

The surrounding landscape, alien as it was, felt far too solid for me to believe myself dreaming. The only other conclusion had been edging at the corners of my mind for some time. It was as logical as it was absurd.

As Gaynor had guessed, we had entered the mythical Mittelmarch, the borderlands between the human world and Faery. According to old tales, my own ancestors had occasionally visited this place. I'd always assumed that realm to be as real as the storybook world of Grimm, but now I was beginning to wonder if Grimm was no more than a recollection of my present reality. Hades, too, and all the other tales of underworlds and other worlds? Was Mu Ooria the original of Alfheim? Or Trollheim? Or the caverns where the dwarfs forged their magic swords?

As the strange scene unfolded before me, all these images and thoughts passed through my mind. Time really did seem to have an indescribably different quality in this twilight realm. A foreign texture, a sense of richness, even a slight instability. I was sensing a way of living simultaneously at different speeds, some of which I could actually manipulate. I'd already experienced a hint of this quality in my recent dreams, but now I was certain that I was more awake than I had ever been. I was beginning to sense the multiverse in all her rich complexity.

Now that he had an idea of his geography, Klosterheim seemed more at ease than any of us. "I have always preferred the night," he murmured. "It is my natural element. When I am at my predatory best." A long, dry tongue licked thin lips.

Scholar Fi offered Klosterheim a shadowed smile. "You could try to kill me by some other means, but I can defend myself. It would be unwise to pursue your present aggression. We have countered violence before in our history. We have learned to respect all who respect life. We do not show the same respect for those who would destroy life and take all with them into the oblivion they crave. Their craving we are able to satisfy. Though it is a journey that can only be made alone."

I cast my eye over the Nazi ranks to see if any of them but their leaders understood the scholar's Greek, but it was clear all they heard were threatening foreign sounds. My attention was caught by a figure at the back of the party and to the right, standing beside a tall stalagmite, like a set of giant dishes stacked one on top of the other. The figure's face was obscured by an elaborate helmet and its body was clad in what appeared to be armor of coppery silver, gleaming like dull gold in the semidarkness. The baroque armor was almost theatrical, like something designed by Bakst for a fantastic Diaghilevian extravaganza. I felt I had glimpsed Oberon in Elfland. I turned to ask Fromental if he had seen the figure, but the Frenchman's attention was on Gaynor again.

My cousin had scarcely been listening to Scholar Fi. He drew the ornamental Nazi dagger from its scabbard at his belt. Pale steel and polished ebony, the hilt reflected the dancing, misty light. The blade's gleam seemed to pierce the atmosphere, challenging the whole organic world around us.

Balancing the dagger on the flat of his hand, Gaynor thrust it out to his side. His eyes challenged mine. Without turning his head he called behind him in German. "Lieutenant Lukenbach, if you please."

Proud of his master's recognition, a tall brute in SS black stepped forward and closed his fingers almost voluptuously around the dagger. He waited like an eager hound for his orders,

"You have the temerity to speak of aggression." Gaynor took a cigarette from his case. "You shall know that you challenge the authority of the Reich. Whether you realize it or not, my undernourished friend, you are now citizens of the Greater Germany and bound by the laws of our Fatherland." This speech was spoiled by his failure to ignite his cigarette. He threw both lighter and cigarette to the ground. "And some of your own laws, too, it seems.

He was mocking himself. I admired his coolness, if not his folly, as he signed Lieutenant Lukenbach forward. "Show this fellow how sharp our old-fashioned Ruhr steel can be."

I became increasingly fearful for Scholar Fi, who lacked the physical strength to defend himself against the Nazi. Fromental, too, was looking a little worried, but motioned me back. He was prepared to trust the Off-Moo's sense of survival.

Neither Scholar Fi's expression nor his stance had changed as he watched this threatening drama. He seemed completely unmoved, murmuring in Greek as the SS man approached.

I would have been terrified by what I saw in Lukenbach's eyes alone. They held that familiar dreaming glaze I had seen so many times in recent months-the look of the sadist, of a creature allowed to fulfill its most vicious yearnings in the name of a higher authority. What had the Nazis awakened in the world? Between relativism and bigotry, there is no room for the human conscience. Perhaps without conscience, I thought, there could only be appetite and ultimate oblivion-an eternity of unformed Chaos or petrified Law, which found such excellent expression in the lunacy of communism and fascism whose grim simplifications could only lead to sterility and death and whose laissez-faire capitalist alternative also brought us ultimately to the same end. Only when the forces were in balance could life flourish at its finest. The Nazi "order," however, was a pretense at balance, a simplified imposition on a complex world-the kind of action which always brought the most destruction. The fundamental logic of reaction. I was about to witness another example of that destructive power as the SS officer came slowly on.

Lukenbach's eyes were greedy for butchery. He drew back his arm and began to take the last few paces towards us, grinning into Scholar Fi's extinction.

Unable to restrain myself as the Off-Moo's life was threatened, I sprang forward, ignoring Fromental and the scholar. But before I could reach Lukenbach, another man appeared between us. This figure was also clad from head to foot in armor as baroque as the other I had seen, but his was jet black. Unfamiliar as his costume was, the face was all too familiar. Gaunt, white, with blazing eyes hard as rubies. It was my own. It was the creature I had already seen in my dreams and later in the concentration camp.

I was so shocked by this that I was stopped in my tracks, too late to grapple with the Nazi. "Who are you?" I asked.

My doppelganger was prepared to reply. He mouthed some words, though I heard nothing. Then he moved to one side. I tried to see where he went, but he had vanished.

Lukenbach was almost on his victim. I could not reach him in time.

Slowly Scholar Fi raised a long, slender arm, perhaps in warning. Lukenbach continued to advance, as if he were himself entranced. His grip on the swastika dagger tightened as he prepared to aim his first blow.

This time both Fromental and I instinctively moved to defend the scholar but he gestured us back. As Lukenbach came within striking distance the Off-Moo opened his mouth wider than any human's, almost as if he unhinged his jaw like a snake, and shrieked.

The sound was at once hideous and harmonious. A ululation, it seemed to weave its way through the quivering stalactites overhead, threatening to bring them all down on us. Yet I had the impression the shriek was directed very precisely and pitched in a specific way.

Overhead crystal began to tinkle and murmur in sympathetic vibration. Yet none broke free.

The shriek seemed endless, as melodic as it was controlled. High above, the crystals continued to rustle and chime until gradually they formed a single sweet harmonic whose note, surprisingly harsh, ended with a sudden snap.

A single slender spear had broken clear of its companions, as if the Off-Moo had selected it, and was dropping down towards the threatening Nazi whose grin broadened as he anticipated his pleasure. Clearly he thought Scholar Fi was shrieking with fear.

The crystal shaft hesitated a short distance above Lukenbach's head. The Off-Moo was controlling the thing with sound alone.

The shriek ended. Scholar Fi made a tiny movement of his lips. In response to a murmured command, the crystal lance changed its angle and rate of descent. Then the scholar gestured very carefully. The stalactite described a gentle arc and then, with an almost elegant impact, struck deep, precisely into the Nazi's heart.

That shriek continued to echo through the endless caverns while Lukenbach's death throes took their rapid course.

He lay still on the rocky surface, his blood welling up around the crystal spear jutting from his chest. Fromental and I were shocked by this death as much as we welcomed it. Gaynor was clearly revising his strategy.

My cousin bent forward and retrieved his dagger from Lukenbach's stiffening fingers. With some distaste he stepped back, straightening and looking directly into my eyes.

"I'm learning not to underestimate you, cousin. Or your comrades. Are you sure you won't throw in with us? Or failing that give me the Raven Sword and I'll promise to harass you no further."

I allowed myself to smile at his knowing effrontery while Fromental declared, "You're in a rather weak bargaining position at the moment, my friend."

"I have a habit of strengthening my position." Gaynor was still looking directly at me. "What d'you say, cousin. Stay here with your new friends and I'll take the sword back to the real world to carry on the fight against the forces of Chaos."

"You're not the forces of Chaos?" My amusement grew.

"They are exactly what I fight. Which is why I must have the Black Sword. If you return with me, you'll have honors, power- power to make the kind of justice the world is crying out for! Hitler is merely a means to this end, believe me."

"Gaynor," I said, "you've given yourself in service to the Beast. You'll bring nothing but chaos to the world."

It was my cousin's turn to laugh in my face. "Fool. Have you no idea how wrong you are? You're duped if you believe I serve Chaos. Law's my master and ever will be! What I do, I do for a better, more stable, predictable future. If you also believe in such a future, come over to our side while you can, Ulric. It's you who serves the cause of Chaos, believe me."

"This sophistry's unworthy of a Mirenburger," I said. "You have demonstrated your loyalty to evil. You are wholly selfish, I've witnessed your cruelty, heard your callousness too often, to be persuaded of any sincerity you protest, other than a sincere need to devour us all. Your love of Law's no more than a madman's obsession with tidiness, Gaynor. That's not harmony. Not true order."

A strange expression crossed Gaynor's handsome features as if he recalled memories of better times. "Ah, well, cousin. Ah, well."

"They're dupes, my lord," said Klosterheim suddenly. He looked troubled. "There's no convincing them."

"And do you, Herr Klosterheim, regard yourself a noble servant of Law?" asked Fromental.

Klosterheim turned his barren eyes on the Frenchman. He smiled his bleak, loveless smile. "I serve my own master. And I serve the Grail, whose guardian I shall again become. We shall meet again, gentlemen. As I told you, I am at last in my element. I have no fear of this place and shall eventually conquer it." He paused and looked around him in joy. "How often I have yearned for the night and resented the interruption of day. Sunrise is my enemy. Here I can come into my own. I am not defeated by you."

Gaynor seemed surprised by this outburst.

"A somewhat old-fashioned view," I said. "You sound as if you've been reading far too much romantic poetry, Herr Major."

He leveled glowering eyes at me and said flatly: "I am an old-fashioned man, a cruel and vengeful man." For a moment his voice was filled with poisoned dust.

"You must go now," said Scholar Fi suddenly. "If you are found in the light, our guards will kill you."

"Go? Go where? What guards?"

"Go into the dark. Beyond the light. Our guards are many." Scholar Fi gestured and it seemed the pointed rocks all around moved slightly. In each one I saw the face of an Off-Moo. "Time is not our master, the way it is yours, Prince Gaynor."

Gaynor and Klosterheim had underestimated us. I don't believe we underestimated them. Gaynor von Minct had become a handsome, watchful snake. "If we go back, we can return with an army."

"More than one army has been lost here," said the scholar casually. "Besides, you are unlikely to get back to the place you left and equally unlikely to find an entrance to our world again. No, you will journey to the darkness, beyond the river, and there you will learn to survive or perish, as fate decides. There are many others of your kind out there. Remnants of those same armies. Whole tribes and nations of them. Men as resourceful as yourselves should survive well and no doubt discover some means of flourishing."

Gaynor was contemptuous, disbelieving. "Whole nations? What do they live on?"

Scholar Fi began to turn towards the settlement. His patience had expired. "They are primarily cannibals, I understand."

He paused as we joined him. He looked back. Gaynor and the Nazis had not moved.

"Go!"

He gestured.

Gaynor continued to defy him.

Scholar Fi moved his mouth again, this time in a kind of echoing whisper. About a dozen crystal spears came crashing down a foot or two from the Nazis. We stood there and watched as Gaynor gave the command to retreat. Slowly the party disappeared into the darkness.

"We are unlikely to see them again," said the Off-Moo. "Their time will be taken up with defending themselves rather than attacking us."

Fromental's eyes met mine. Like me, he did not share the scholar's confidence.

"It's perhaps as well we're traveling to Mu Ooria," he said. "We should at least report this."

"I agree," said the scholar. "And because of the circumstances, I suggest you take the voluk, rather than go on foot. We have no clear idea how closely the time flows coincide in this season, so it is as well to be cautious." He was not expressing anxiety, rather common sense.

Fromental nodded his huge head. "It will be interesting," he said.

"What is the volukl" I asked him, after we had parted from Scholar Fi.

"I have never seen it," he said.

When he returned me to my quarters, Ravenbrand was waiting for me. My hosts were telling me to be prepared for the worst.

I slept fitfully for what seemed a few hours, but my dreams were confused. I saw a white hare running across the underground landscape, running through sharp crags and looming inverted pillars, running towards the towers of Mu Ooria, pursued by a red-tongued, jet-black panther. I saw two horsemen riding across a frozen lake. One horseman wore armor of silvered copper, glaring in the light from a pale blue sky. The other, who challenged him, wore armor of black iron, fashioned in fantastic forms, with a helm on his head that resembled a dragon about to take flight. The face of the black-clad horseman was my twin. I could not see the face of the other horseman, but I imagined it to be Gaynor, perhaps because I had encountered him most recently. As I fell in and out of these dreams, I wondered about my doppelganger, who had clearly not wanted me to interfere in the Off-Moo's defense. Was I deluded? Was it only I who could see him? Was there some Freudian explanation to my dreams and visions? And if what I saw was real, how was it possible? I consoled myself that in Mu Ooria I might learn a little more of the truth. Oona, for instance, would be glad to educate me. And there, I decided, I would ask for help in returning to my own Germany, to join in the fight against an evil which must soon engulf the whole of Europe and perhaps the world.

I had been awake for only a short time when Fromental called for me. I was surprised to see that he was carrying a sword at his hip and a bow and quiver of arrows on his back.

"You're expecting attack?" I asked.

"I see no point in not being ready for trouble. But I believe Scholar Fi's optimism is probably well founded. Your cousin and his band will have much to occupy them in the Lands Beyond the Light."

"And why do you travel to Mu Ooria?" I asked him.

"I hope to meet with some friends of Lord Renyard's," he said. And would not be drawn further.

I had wrapped my sword in a cloth and bound it up so that I,

too, could sling it over my back. I had a few provisions and changes of clothing and was now wearing my own familiar outfit, complete with deerstalker, which looked even more incongruous than Fromental's kepi.

After we had breakfasted on some rather bland broth, he led me through the twisting streets until we stood at last on the banks of the river, in a kind of cut where the waters were calmer. Scholar Fi and a group of Off-Moo were already on the harborside, apparently in lighthearted conference.

My own astonished attention was drawn to what was moored there. At first I thought the thing alive, but then I guessed it to be cunningly fashioned from some kind of crystalline stone, predominantly of dark marOone and crimson. The massive vessel seemed to have been carved from a single ruby. Yet the stone was light as glass and sat easily in the waters like a ship. The voluk looked like some mythical sea beast drawn up from the depths where it had long since petrified. As I regarded its fishy, reptilian face, all flared nostrils and jowls and coiling tendrils, I imagined that it looked at me. Was it alive? I had a nagging memory .. .

On the voluk's back was a large, flat area, created by a kind of enormous saddle, making a platform, a raft large enough to take fifteen or twenty passengers and steered by two massive sweeps, one on each side.

I was impressed by the size as well as the complexity of the carving and remarked on it to Fromental as we followed the Off-Moo crew up the gangplank to where they took their places at the oars. The Frenchman was amused by this. "It's nature's hand, not the Off-Moo's, you must blame for this monster. They draw these remains from their lake and find that with only minor modification, they can employ them as rafts. But, of course, they're rarely used, since they have to be dragged back upstream. Clearly, by putting a voluk at our disposal, our hosts are showing they believe the situation to be serious."

"They expect attack from Gaynor, when they are so easily able to defend themselves? Have they a means of seeing into the future?"

"They can see a million futures. Which in some ways is the same as not seeing any. They trust their instincts, I suspect, and know Gaynor's type. They know he will scarcely sleep until he has been revenged for what happened out there. They have survived for so long, my friend, because they anticipate danger and are ready to counter it. They will not underestimate men such as Gaynor. Whatever lives out there in the Lands Beyond the Light seems dangerous enough, from what I've learned. But the Off-Moo know that periodically one of the creatures unites the others in a truce, long enough to try to attack Mu Ooria. They can see that Gaynor and Klosterheim have the intelligence and motive to succeed in creating some kind of alliance of the darklands tribes. All hate Mu Ooria because at some stage Mu Ooria has welcomed them and then banished them to the outer darkness."

"Are we all eventually banished there?"

"By no means. Wait until you get to Mu Ooria herself!" Fromental clapped me on the back, clearly relishing the wonders he would soon be showing me.

Scholar Fi approached us as we settled into the shallow seats at the center of the raft. He was gracious. He hoped we would return, he said, and let them all know how we fared. Then he went ashore, the gangplank was raised, and the slender Off-Moo, in their nodding conical cowls and their flowing pale robes, lent their strength and experience to the sweeps, guiding us out of the calm water and into the black, star-studded channel of the main river.

At once the current caught us. The crew had little to do but keep the monstrous hull on course. We moved with alarming speed, sometimes striking white water as the river narrowed between high banks and seemed to pour even deeper into the core of the planet.

Not, of course, that we were any longer on the planet, as we knew it. This was the Mittelmarch, which obeyed the laws of Elfland.

The dark waters were surprisingly clear and it was often possible to see to the bottom, where the rock had been worn to an artificial smoothness. I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that we were actually moving along a man-made canal. The light grew increasingly bright as we neared the lake and the temperature also grew warmer, suggesting that this inland sea was the source of the Off-Moo civilization. It was to them what the sun and the Nile were to Egypt.

Although both banks were visible most of the time, the shadows and strange shapes of the rocks, the way the light from the water constantly varied, made it seem that the river course was populated with all kinds of monsters. Gradually I became used to the phantasmagoric nature of the swiftly passing landscape. But then, as I admired a grove of slender stalagmites which grew just on the edge of the water, like Earthly reeds, I was sure I saw an animal of some kind.

It was not a small animal. The light had caught its eyes, emerald green, glaring at me from the darkness. I turned to Fromental, asking him if he knew what creature it might be. He was surprised. There were usually no animals about larger than the Off-Moo themselves. Then, in a length of bank where the light flickered strongly, I saw it again.

I'd seen it once before. In my dream. A gigantic cat, far larger than the largest tiger, jet black, its red tongue lolling from a jaw filled with sharp, white fangs, and two enormous curving incisors. A saber-toothed panther, its long tail lashing even as it ran, was keeping pace with us. A creature of my dreams. Running beside the raft as the current bore us towards the Off-Moo capital!

Now Fromental could see the beast. He knew what it was. "Those cats are never normally found this close to the river, as they loathe and fear it. They hunt the Lands Beyond the Light. The cannibals are their natural prey. They're greatly feared because they can see in the dark, if not in the conventional sense. Though it seems those eyes look at you, in fact the beasts are completely blind."

"How do they hunt? How is that beast able to follow us?"

"The Off-Moo tell me it is heat. Somehow the eyes see heat rather than light. And their sense of smell is extraordinary. They can pick up certain scents that are a mile or more away. The darklanders live in terror of them. The Off-Moo believe the cats are their greatest single protection against threats from the cannibals."

"The cannibals don't hunt the panther?"

"They can hardly protect themselves against it. Superstition and fire are about all they have in their defense, for they, too, are largely blind. They instinctively fear the creatures, for whom they are relatively easy prey."

But the Off-Moo were alarmed now that they could see the cat. They spoke in high-pitched Greek which was almost impossible for me to understand. Fromental told me that this sign increased their anxiety, their sense of danger. Why had the cat come so close to the river?

"Perhaps nothing more than curiosity," suggested my friend.

He signaled to Scholar Brem, an acquaintance, and went to talk to him. When he came back he seemed disturbed. "They fear that some powerful force drives the cats away from their usual hunting grounds. But there again it might just be an isolated young male looking for a mate." I didn't see the great, black saber-tooth again. We were already slowing as the thrust of the river met the embrace of the blazing lake, whose further shores were lost in the pitch-darkness beyond.

Gradually, just as one might from a ship or a train entering the outskirts of a mighty city, we began to notice that the formations around us had given way to the slender living towers of the Off-Moo. These towers often reflected soft shades, the merest wash of color, which added to their mysterious beauty. Curious Off-Moo began to appear on the banks and on their balconies while our steersmen strained against their sweeps, catching the current which bore us gracefully in towards a harbor, where several similar petrified sea monsters were moored.

With considerable skill, the sweepsmen brought the raft alongside a quay of elaborately carved rock. On it a small crowd waited to greet us. For the most part they were Off-Moo, subtly individual in their conical hoods, but then I recognized a shorter figure standing to one side and knew such pleasure, such relief, that I was surprised by the depth of my own emotion. I had come to care very much for Oona. Her pale, albino beauty gave her an even more ethereal quality in this world than it had in my own. But that was not what gladdened my heart. It was a feeling far more subtle. A sense of recognition, perhaps? I hurried off the bizarre raft and onto the basalt of the quayside, running to greet her, to embrace her, to feel the warmth, the reality, the profound familiarity of her.

"I am glad you are here," she murmured. She embraced Fromental. "You have arrived in time to meet Lord Renyard's friends. They bring desperate news. As we suspected, our foes attack three realms at least, all of them strategic. Your own world is in mortal peril. Tanelorn herself is again under deep siege, this time from Law, and could fall at any moment. And now, it seems, Moo Uria herself faces her greatest threat. This is not coincidence, gentlemen. We have a very powerful opponent." She was already leading us away from the docked raft, through twisting, narrow streets.

"But Tanelorn can't be conquered," said Fromental. "Tanelorn is eternal."

Oona turned serious eyes up towards his distant face. "Eternity as we understand it is in jeopardy. All that we take for granted. All that is permanent and inviolable. Everything is under attack. Gaynor's ambitions could bring about the destruction of sentience. The end of consciousness. Our own extinction. And possibly the extinction of the multiverse herself."

"Perhaps we should have killed him when he first threatened us," said Fromental.

The young huntress shrugged her shoulders as she led us into one of the slender buildings. "You could not kill him then," she said. "It would be morally impossible."

"How so?" I asked.

Her tone was matter-of-fact, as if I had missed the most obvious answer in the world.

"Because," she said, "at that point in your mutual histories he had yet to commit his great crime."

Chapter Nine A Conference of Spheres

I was having difficulties with Mittelmarch notions of time. It seems we were all fated to live identical lives in billions of counterrealities, rarely able to change our stories, yet constantly striving to do so. Occasionally, one of us was successful, and it was the effort to change that story which somehow helped maintain the balance of the universe-or rather the multitude of alternate universes Oona called "the multiverse," where all our stories were being played out in some form. Oona was patient with me but I was of a prosaic disposition and such notions didn't sit easily with my ideas of common sense. Gradually I began to see the broader vision, which helped me understand how our dreams were simply glimpses of other lives, often at their most dramatic, and how it was possible for some of us to move between these dreams, these other lives, and even sometimes change them.

She spoke of these matters after she had taken me to my quarters and allowed me to refresh myself. Then, when I was reinvig-orated, she led me out into the sinuous streets of Mu Ooria, a vital, crowded city which was far more cosmopolitan than I had anticipated. Clearly not all humans were banished into the darkness. Entire quarters were filled with people of many different races and creeds, evidence of a great mingling of cultures, including that of the Off-Moo. We passed through street markets which might have flourished in modern Cologne, between houses which would not have been out of place in medieval France. Clearly the Off-Moo had a long history of welcoming refugees from the surface, and these people had kept their habits and customs, blending happily with the others.

As well as the familiar, there was also the exotic. Oona led me past reflective jet and basalt terraces festooned with pale lichens and fungi, balconies of sinuous limestone whose occupants were sometimes indistinguishable from the rock. This eternal, sparkling night had a luring beauty of its own. I could understand how so many chose to settle here. While you might never know sunlight and fields of spring flowers, neither would you know the kind of conflict which could rob you of both in an instant.

I understood and sympathized with the people who had chosen to live here, but I longed to see again the familiar, robust, cherry cheeks of our honest Bek peasantry. Not one of the inhabitants of this place looked entirely alive, though they obviously took pleasure in their existence and enjoyed a high level of complex civilization, despite the sense of the crushing weight of rock overhead, the knowledge of this land's dark boundaries, the hush which seemed to settle everywhere, the slightly exaggerated courtesy you didn't expect to find in a busy metropolis. I had every admiration for it but would never choose to settle here myself. Would I ever now find my way back to my fatherland?

Again I was filled with a sense of desperate frustration. I loved my country and my world. All I wanted was the opportunity to fight for what was decent and honorable in both. I needed to take my place with those who resisted a cowardly terror. Who encountered cruelly philistine forces wishing to destroy everything that had ever been valuable in our culture. I told Oona this, as we continued to stroll through the winding canyons of the city, admiring gardens and architecture, exchanging pleasantries with passersby.

"Believe me, Count Ulric," she assured me, "if we are successful, you will have every opportunity to fight the Nazis again. But there is much to be done. The same battle lines are being drawn on at least three separate planes and at this stage it looks as if our enemies are stronger."

"You're suggesting I fight for the same cause by taking part in your struggle?"

"I am saying that the cause is the same. How you serve it will ultimately be your decision. But it will be simultaneous with other decisions." She smiled at me and put her delicate hand into mine, leading me eventually into a great, natural circle, slightly concave, close to the city's center. Here there were no stalagmites, and the stalactites in the roof were hidden by the deep shadow created by the lake's glare.

I thought at first this was an amphitheater, but there was no evidence that it accommodated any kind of audience. Leading out of the circle was one wide main thoroughfare which seemed to go directly to the lake. If the Off-Moo were a different people I would have assumed it was designed to display some kind of military triumph-a returning navy might parade up this avenue and its victorious forces present themselves to the people in the great, shallow bowl.

Oona was amused by my stumbling suggestions, my noticing that the floor seemed to have been worn smooth by thousands of feet, that there was a faint, familiar smell to the place.

"This is the only chance you will have to come here," she said. "Assuming the tenant returns."

"Tenant?"

"Yes. He has lived with the Off-Moo for as long as their history. Some think they came to this world together. There is even evidence that the city was created around him. He is very old indeed and sleeps a great deal. Periodically, perhaps when he is hungry, he leaves this place and travels down there"-she pointed to the broad avenue-"to the lake. The times of his disappearances vary, but he has always returned."

I looked around for some kind of dwelling. "He lives here without furniture or shelter?"

She was enjoying my mystification.

"He is a gigantic serpent," she said. "In appearance not unlike the voluk, but much bigger. He sleeps here and offers no harm to the Off-Moo. He has been known to protect them in the past. They believe that he goes into the lake to hunt. A strange beast, with long side fins, almost like the wings of a ray, but primarily reptilian. Some believe he has vestigial limbs secreted within his body, that he is in fact more lizard than snake. Not unlike those resurrected husks they turn into rafts, though much larger, of course."

"The World Serpent?" Half amused, half in awe, I referred to the mythical Worm Oroborous, said by our ancestors to guard the roots of the World Tree.

Surprisingly her tone was sober when she replied. "Perhaps," she said. Then, deliberately, she lightened her mood and took my hand again.

I was suddenly conscious that I was trespassing and was glad to let her laugh and lead me through another series of winding twit-tens to show me the pastel glories of the water gardens, fashioned from natural stone and cultivated fungi. Glimmering points of light from the misty miniature falls reflected all the subtle colors of the bizarre underground fauna. My guide was delighted at my enchantment, taking proprietorial pride in the wonders of Mu Ooria.

"Could you not learn to love this place?" she asked me, linking her arm in mine. With her I felt a friendliness, a comfortable closeness which I had never experienced with another woman. I found it relaxing.

"I love it already," I told her, "and I think the Off-Moo a civil and cultivated race. An exemplary people. I could stay here for a year and never experience all the city has to offer. But it isn't in my nature, Fraiilein Oona, to take exotic holidays while my nation is threatened by a monster far more dangerous than Mu Ooria's adopted serpent!"

She murmured that she understood my concern and that she would do everything she could for me. I asked after Captain Bastable, the mysterious Englishman, but she shook her head. "I believe he's engaged elsewhere."

"So will you, who clearly can come and go at will, lead me out of here?"

"There are dream roads," she said. "Finding them isn't difficult. But getting you back to where you came from can sometimes prove impossible." She raised a hand to forestall my anger. "I have promised you that you'll have the chance to fight your enemies. Presumably you would like to be as successful as possible?"

"You are telling me to be patient. What else can I be?" I knew she was sincere. I gave her arm an affectionate squeeze. I felt I had known her all my life. She might have been one of my more attractive relatives, a niece perhaps. I recalled her rather odd expectation that I would know her. Now I understood that, in the conflicting time streams of the multiverse, it was possible for something to be both mysterious and familiar. She had no doubt mistaken me for someone else, even one of my myriad "other selves" who, if she and the Off-Moo were to be believed, proliferated throughout a continuously branching multiverse.

I was not comforted by her assurance that I had not one dop-pelganger but an infinite number. Which reminded me to ask her about the two bizarre figures I had seen earlier. One of them had been my double.

She found my news disturbing, rather than surprising. She asked me precise questions and I did my best to answer. She shook her head. "I did not know there were such forces at work," she said. "Not such great forces. I pray some of them choose to ally their cause with our own. I might have misused or misunderstood my mother's skills."

"Who were those armored men?"

"Gaynor, if he wears the armor you describe. The other is his mortal enemy, one of the greatest of your avatars, whose destiny is to change the very nature of the multiverse."

"Not an ancestor, then, but an alter ego?"

"If you like. You say he was asking you for something?"

"My guess."

"He is desperate." She spoke affectionately, as if of a very familiar friend. "What did Fromental see?"

"Nothing. These were glimpses only. But not illusions. At least, not in any sense I understand."

"Not illusions," she confirmed. "Come, we'll confer with Fromental and his friends. They've had long enough without us."

We crossed a series of canals rather like those of Venice, one narrow bridge after another, following natural gullies and fissures employed as part of the city's water system. I was impressed by how the Off-Moo adapted to the natural formations of the earth. Goethe, for instance, would have been impressed by their evident respect for their surroundings. Ironically, those surroundings, if described in my own world, would have been taken for the fantasies of some opium-addicted Coleridge or Poe. A tribute to the majority's capacity to deny any truth, no matter how monumental, which challenges its narrow understanding of reality.

Eventually we entered a small square and Oona led me into a doorway and up a twisting, asymmetrical staircase until we came into a large room, surprisingly wide for an Off-Moo apartment. The place was furnished more to human taste, with large couches and comfortable chairs, a long table loaded with food and wine. Evidently a meal had been eaten while Fromental conferred with Lord Renyard and the three strangers who rose to greet us as we entered the room.

I had never, outside of a comic opera, seen such a collection of swaggering fantasticoes. Lord Renyard wore the lace and embroidery of a mid-seventeenth-century fop, balancing his slightly unsteady frame on an ornamental "dandy pole." A scarlet silk sash over his shoulder held the scabbard of a slender sword. His eyes narrowed in pleasure as he recognized us. "My dear friends, you are most welcome." He bowed with an awkward grace. "May I introduce my fellow citizens of Tanelorn-Baron Blare, Lord Bragg and Duke Bray. They seek to join forces against the common enemy."

These three were all dressed in the exaggerated uniforms of Napoleonic cavalry officers. Baron Blare had huge side-whiskers and a wide, horsey grin displaying large, uneven teeth. Lord Bragg was a glowering, self-important cockerel, all blazing wattles and comb, while Duke Bray had a solemn, mulish look to his huge face. Although not as distinctly animal-like as Lord Renyard, they all three had a slight air of the farmyard about them. But they were cordial enough.

"These gentlemen have come by a hard and circuitous route to be with us," Fromental explained. "They have walked the moonbeam roads between the worlds."

"Walked?" I thought I had misheard him.

"It's a skill denied to many." Lord Renyard's voice was a sharp, yapping bark. He spoke perfect classical French but he had to twist his mouth and vocal cords to get some of his pronunciations. "Those of us who learn it, however, would travel no other way. These are my good friends. When we understood the danger, we all left Tanelorn together. Our Tanelorn, of course. We were separated some while ago, during an alarming adventure. But they came here at last and brought fresh news of Tanelorn's plight."

"The city is under siege," said Fromental. "Gaynor, in another guise, attacks it. He has the Higher Worlds on his side. We fear it will soon fall."

"If Tanelorn falls, then all falls." Oona was pacing. She had not expected such dramatic news. "The doom of the multiverse."

"Without help Tanelorn will most certainly perish," said Lord Bragg. His flat, cold voice held little hope. "The rest of our world is already conquered. Gaynor rules there now in the name of Law. His patron is Lady Miggea the Mad. And he draws on the power of more than one avatar."

"We came here," said Duke Bray, "searching for those avatars in the hope that we could stop them combining. In our world it has happened already. Here, Gaynor has barely begun to test his power."

I didn't understand. Oona explained. "Sometimes it is possible, with immortal help, for two or more avatars of one person to be combined. This gives them considerably greater power, but they lose sanity. Indeed, such an unnatural blending threatens the stability of the entire multiverse! The one who draws on the souls of his avatars in this way takes terrible risks and can pay a very great price for the action."

Something in the way she glanced at me caused me to shudder. The chill went deep into my bones and would not leave me.

"We can't let Mu Ooria be attacked because of us," I said. "Why don't we lead an expedition into the Dark Land and strike at them first? It will take Gaynor months to marshal a force."

Oona smiled grimly. "We cannot anticipate the rate at which time passes for him."

"But we know we can defeat him."

"That depends," said Lord Renyard, apologetic for interrupting.

"On what?"

"On the quality of help we can summon. I would remind you, dear Count von Bek, that in our world all that remains unconquered is Tanelorn herself. Gaynor has mighty help. The help of at least one goddess."

"How has Tanelorn resisted up to now?" I asked.

"She is Tanelorn. She is the city of eternal sanctuary. Usually neither Chaos nor Law dare attack here. She is the embodiment of the Grey Fees."

Oona came to my rescue. "The Grey Fees are the lifestuff of the multiverse-you could call them the sinews, muscles, bones and sap of the multiverse-the original matter from which all else derives. The original home of the Holy Grail. Although creatures can meet in the Grey Fees, even dwell there if they choose, any attack on them, any fight that takes place within the Fees, is an affront to the very basis of existence. Some would call it an affront to God. Some believe the Grey Fees to be God, if the multiverse itself is not God. I prefer to take a more prosaic view. If the multiverse is a great tree, forever growing, shedding limbs, extending roots and branches in all directions, each root and branch a new reality, a new story being told, then the Fees are something like the soul of the entity. However crucial the struggle, we never attack the Grey Fees."

"Is attacking Tanelorn the same as attacking the Grey Fees?" I asked.

"Simply call it an alarming precedent," said Lord Bray, showing more irony than I first suspected in him.

"So Gaynor threatens the fundamental fabric of existence. And if he succeeds?"

"Oblivion. The end of sentience."

"How might he succeed?" My habits of logic and strategy were returning. Old von Asch had taught me how to reason.

"By recruiting the help of a powerful Duke of Law or Chaos. There are elements in either camp who believe that if they control everything, the multiverse will accord better with their own vision and temperament. The lives of the gods have cycles when senility and bigotry replace sense and responsibility. Such is the case with Gaynor's ally in our realm."

"A god, you said?"

"A goddess, as it happens." Lord Blare uttered an unruly laugh. "The famous Duchess Miggea of Dolwic. One of the most ancient of Law's aristocrats."

"Law? Surely Law resists such injustice?"

"Aggressive senility isn't only a characteristic of Chaos in its decline. Both forces obey the laws of the multiverse. They grow strong and virile, then decline and die. And, in their dying, they are often desperate for life. At any price. All past loyalties and understanding disappear, and they become little more than appetites, preying upon the living in order to sustain their own corrupted souls. Even the noblest Lords and Ladies of Law can suffer this corruption, often when Chaos is at her most vigorous and dynamic."

"Don't make my mistake," murmured Fromental to me, "and confuse Law and Chaos with Good and Evil. Both have their virtues and vices, their heroes and villains. They represent the warring temperaments of mankind as well as the best we might become, when the virtues of both camps are combined in a single individual."

"Are there such individuals?"

"A few," said Lord Bray. "They tend to arise as the occasion demands."

"Gaynor's not one of those?"

"He's the opposite!" Lord Renyard yapped indignantly. "He combines the vices of both sides. He damns himself to eternal despair and hatred. But it's in his nature to believe he acts from practical necessity."

"And he has supernatural help?"

"In our world, yes." Lord Bragg's long face became briefly animated. "At his side rides Lady Miggea. The Duchess of Law has all the powers of her great constituency at her command. She could destroy whole planets if she wished. The hand of Law is deadly when it serves unthinking destruction rather than justice and creativity. We had hoped Lord Elric ..."

Lord Blare had begun to pace about the room. He was all urgent blue eyes, rattling spurs and jingling harness. "Much as I enjoy a good chin-wag, gents, I'd remind ye that we're all in immediate danger and our journey here was to seek the help of the Grey Lords, whom we understood these Off-Moo fellers to be."

"But they can't offer much in the way of practical help, I gather. Gaynor threatens your world, too." Lord Bragg fingered his mut-tonchops. "So we must look elsewhere for salvation."

"Where would you go?" asked Fromental.

"Wherever the moonbeam roads lead us. They are the only way we know to travel between the realms." Lord Bray seemed almost apologetic. "With Elric duped and charmed ..."

"Would you teach me to walk those roads if I came with you?" Fromental asked quietly.

"Of course, my friend!" Lord Renyard responded with a generous yap. A clap of his paw upon Fromental's vast arm. "I for one would be proud to have the company of a fellow citizen of France!"

"Then I'm your man, monsieur!" The legionnaire straightened his cap and saluted. He turned to me. "I hope, my friend, that you don't feel I desert you. My quest was always for Tanelorn. Perhaps in my search I will learn something that will help us all fight Gaynor. Be assured, my friend, if you are ever in danger, I will help you if I can."

I told him much the same. We shook hands. "I'd go with you," I said, "only I have sworn to return home as soon as possible. So much is threatened at this moment."

"We have our separate destinies," said Lord Renyard, as if to console us. "All are threads in the same tapestry. I suspect we shall all meet again. Perhaps in happier circumstances."

"The Off-Moo are populous and resourceful, even when supernatural forces are brought against them." Oona stepped amongst the huge, beastlike military dandies to make her own farewells. "We each serve the Balance best by serving our own realms." She, too, shook Fromental's hand.

"Do you think Gaynor will attack the city?" asked the big legionnaire.

"This is his story," she said a little mysteriously, "his dream. I would not be entirely surprised if his great campaign has already begun. This is the adventure which will earn him his best-known sobriquet."

"And what is that?" asked Fromental, trying to smile.

"The Damned," she said.

When we had parted from the Tanelornians (of whom I could not help thinking in my own mind as "the Three Hussars"), I asked Oona how she understood so much.

She smiled and again settled her small body comfortably against mine as we walked through the twilight canyons in which so many commonplace activities were no doubt taking place.

"I am a dreamthief's daughter," she said. "My mother was a famous one. She stole some mighty dreams."

"And how are dreams stolen?"

"Only a dreamthief knows how. And only a dreamthief can safely carry one dream into another. Use one dream against another. But that is how she earned her riches."

"You could steal a dream in which I was emperor and place me in another where I was a pauper?"

"It's a little more complicated than that, I understand. But I did not receive my mother's training. The great school in Cairo was closed during my time in the city. Besides, I lacked the patience."

She paused in her step, bringing me to a halt. She said nothing, merely stared up into my face. Ruby eyes met my own. I smiled at her and she smiled back. But she seemed a little disappointed.

"So you are not the thief your mother was?"

"I didn't say I was a thief at all. I inherited some of her gifts, not her vocation."

"And your father?"

"Ah," she said, and began to laugh to herself, looking down at the jade-green street which reflected our shadowy figures. "Ah, my father."

She'd not be drawn further on that matter, so instead I asked her about her journeyings in other worlds.

"I've traveled very little compared to Mother," she said. "I spent some while in England and Germany, though not in your history. I must say I have something of a fascination with the worlds that would be most familiar to you, perhaps because my mother had such affection for them. And you, Count von Bek, do you miss your own family?"

"My mother died giving birth to me. I was her last child. Her hardest to bear."

"And your father?"

"A scholar. A student of Kierkegaard. I think he blamed me for my mother's death. Spent most of his time in the old tower of our house. He had a huge library. He died in the fire which destroyed it. Dark hints of madness and worse. I was away at school, but there were some strange tales told of that night and what the people of Bek believed they witnessed. There was a grotesque and sensational story spread about my father's refusing to honor some family 'pact with the devil' and losing an heirloom that was his trust."

I laughed, but not with my companion's spontaneity. I found it difficult to grieve for a man so remote from me, who would not, I suspect, have grieved if I had died in that fire. He found my albinism repulsive. Disturbing, at least. Yet my attempts to distance myself from my parents and their problems had never been wholly successful. He expected me to carry the family duty but could not love me as he loved my brothers. Oona did not press me further. I was always surprised by the levels of emotion such memories revealed.

"We share a complicated family life," she murmured sympathetically.

"For all that," I insisted, "I still intend to return to Bek. Is there no way you can get me home soon?"

She was regretful. "I journey between dreams. I inhabit the stories, they say, which ensure the growth and regeneration of the multiverse. Some believe we dream ourselves into reality. That we are yearnings, desires, ideals and appetites made concrete. Another theory suggests the multiverse dreams us. Another that we dream it. Do you have a theory, Count von Bek?"

"I fear I'm too new to these ideas. I'm having some trouble believing the basic notions behind them." I put my arm around her because I sensed a kind of desperation in her. "If I have a faith, it's in humankind. In our ultimate capacity to pull ourselves from the mud of unchecked appetite and careless cruelty. In a positive will to good which will create a harmony not easily destroyed by the brutes."

Oona shrugged. "Anxious dogs overeat," she said. "And then they usually vomit."

"You are a cynic?"

"No. But we have a long battle, we Knights of the Balance, to achieve that harmony."

I'd heard that phrase earlier. I asked her what it meant.

"A term some use to describe those of us who work for justice and equity in the world," she explained.

"And am I one of those knights?" I asked.

"I believe you know," she said. Then she changed the subject, pointing out the flowing cascades of what she called moonflowers, pouring down the slender terraces of Mu Ooria's spires.

In spite of all the dangers and mysteries I had known, it was a privilege to witness such beauty. It defied anything I had ever anticipated. It had an intensity, a tactile and ambient reality, that even an opium-eater could not understand. I knew that, whatever I experienced, I was not dreaming. There was no denying the absolute reality of this gloomy, rocky world.

Oona clearly wished to answer no further questions, so we spent the next while in silence, admiring the skills of the Off-Moo architects who blended their own creations with the natural, giving the city an organic wholeness I had never seen in a place of that size before.

As we turned from admiring a fluted curtain of transparent rock appearing to undulate in the light from the lake, I saw a man standing not four feet from me. I felt sick and silenced by the shock. Again this was my doppelganger, still clad in the baroque black armor, his face an exaggerated likeness of my own, with high cheekbones, slightly slanting brows and glaring red eyes, his skin the color of fresh ivory. Screaming at me. Screaming at me and understanding that I could not hear a word.

Oona saw him, too, and recognized him. She began to approach him, but he moved away down an alley, signaling me to follow. His pace increased and we were forced to run to keep up with him. Twisting, turning, dipping down into narrow tunnels, ascending steps, crossing bridges, we followed the armored man to the outskirts of the city, until we were some distance inland. He remained ahead of us, moving steadily up the bank of the river, in and out of the constantly changing shadows, the flickering, silvery light. Every so often he glanced back and the black metal helmet framed a face filled with urgency. I was certain that he wished us to follow him.

Momentarily blinded, I lost track of him. Oona began to run ahead of me. I think she could still see him. I hurried in her wake.

Then, from ahead, I heard a sudden, agonized scream, a wail of grief and terror combined. Rushing forward I found the young woman kneeling on the ground beside what I took at first for the corpse of the black-armored stranger.

The stranger had vanished. The carcass was that of the great saber-toothed panther who had kept pace with our raft as we sailed towards the city.

Oona raised her weeping eyes to mine.

"This can only be Gaynor," she said. "Murdering for pleasure."

I looked up, hoping to see the stranger, wondering if he had killed the cat. I thought I caught a glimpse of coppery silver, heard a mocking note in the current of the river, but there was no sign of my doppelganger.

"Did you know the animal?" I asked Oona, kneeling beside her as she wrapped her arms around its huge body.

"Know her?" Oona's slender frame shivered with unbearable emotion. "Oh, yes, Count von Bek, I know her." She paused, trying to take control of her grief. "We are more than sisters." The tears began to come now, streaming silver against her bone-white skin.

I thought I'd misheard her.

"Only Gaynor," she whispered, rising and looking about her. "Only he would have the cruel courage and cleverness to attack our cats first. They are crucial to Mu Ooria's defense."

"You say she's your sister?" I looked wonderingly down at the massive black cat, her curved, white tusks the length of swords. "This beast?"

"Well," she said abstractedly, still trying to recover herself. "I am, after all, a dreamthief's daughter. I have some choice in the matter."

Then Gaynor, still in his SS uniform, stepped from behind a pillar. Incongruously he had a short, bone bow in one hand. With the other, he was drawing back a string. Nocked to it was a slender silver arrow aimed directly at Oona's heart.

She reached for her own weapon but then froze, realizing that Gaynor had the complete advantage.

"I've been having some interesting adventures and encounters, cousin," he said. "Learning some good lessons. Time's simply zipped by. How has it been for you?"

Chapter Ten Rippling Time

My Raven Blade was where I had left it in my new lodgings. Oona could not use her bow and was otherwise without arms. Gaynor was choosing which one of us to shoot. His aim wavered, but he was too far distant for me to be able to attack him.

Then reason reminded me that he could not afford to kill us. He wanted my sword. He also seemed to have forgotten the still, slow-time Off-Moo sentinels.

"You'll recall, cousin, that not all who" guard this place are immediately detectable," I said.

His smile was dismissive. "They're no danger to me. I've had many ordeals, many adventures and encounters since we last met. I have more powerful help now, cousin. Supernatural help. We already lay siege to Tanelorn. The Off-Moo's defenses are unsophisticated in comparison. This is a wonderful realm, once you find your way around in it. I have learned much that will be useful when I have the Grail."

"You think that it will be easy for you to return?"

"For me, cousin, yes. You see, I've made some fine new friends since we parted on such bad terms. Once you meet them, you'll soon be enthusiastically apologizing to me. And only too pleased to run home to fetch the Raven Sword while I entertain your pretty young friend, eh?"

I recognized an element of bravado in him, an unsteadiness about his eyes. I replied contemptuously. "If I had the sword with me, cousin, I suspect you'd be a little more civil. Lower your bow. Was it you who killed the panther?"

"I'll keep the bow strung and maintain our equilibrium for the moment, cousin. Is the big cat dead? An epidemic, no doubt? One of those dreadful plagues which sometimes attacks the feline world . .." His arrow was still level with my heart, but the verbal barb was intended for Oona.

Oona did not respond. What was meant to goad her, only drove her to take further charge of herself. "Your claims are illegitimate, Prince Gaynor. Your own cynicism will defeat you. All the future holds for you is an eternity of despair."

His amusement increased. Then he frowned, as if he brought himself back to business. "True, I'd hoped to find you here with your sword, Ulric. So I'll strike that bargain-bring me the blade and I'll spare the girl's life in exchange."

"The sword is my charge," I said. "I can't give it up. My honor depends upon my stewardship . . ."

"Bah Your father's honor also depended upon a stewardship- and we know how thoroughly he defended his trust!" Now he was contemptuous.

"Stewardship?"

"Fool! The von Beks had the most powerful combination of supernatural artifacts in the multiverse. Your weakling father, degenerated to mumbling voodoo spells and other witcheries, let one fall from your possession. Because he feared it would be stolen! Your family doesn't deserve its destiny. From now on, I and mine will keep those objects of power together. Forever."

I was baffled. Had he gone mad? Though he seemed to think I understood him, I could scarcely make sense of a word he said.

"Quickly." He drew the bowstring back a little farther.

"Which one will get the sword, which one will stay here as hostage for it?"

Oona suddenly clutched her head and staggered. Gaynor turned the bow on her.

At Oona's feet, the shining black body quivered. Huge muscles flexed. A tail lashed. Vast whiskers twitched. Jade eyes gleamed. A great, black nose made a single, searching snort.

Oona was disbelieving, but Gaynor was cursing as the saber-tooth climbed slowly to its feet, its glaring eyes casting around for an enemy, its huge ivory tusks glinting in the riverlight. And then, standing shoulder to shoulder with the gigantic cat, I saw another human figure.

My doppelganger.

Had he brought the cat back to life? Gaynor barely disguised his own terror. Oona had the common sense to drag us behind the shelter of a nearby stalagmite so we could watch from cover.

The other albino seemed to be talking to Gaynor. He gestured. Suddenly both he and the cat vanished. Gaynor unnocked the arrow, stuck it in his belt and ran into the darkness.

I was completely mystified by the exchange. I tried to ask Oona if she understood any better, but she was grim, hurrying back to the interior of the city. "We must warn them of what's happening. This will take all their resources."

"What does it mean? Who is that bizarre version of myself?"

"Fairer to say that you are a version of him," she said. "He's called Elric of Melnibone and he carries the greatest burden of us all."

"And he's from another-what-? One of these alternatives to our own reality?"

"Some call them 'branches' or 'branes.' Or 'the realms,' or 'the scales,' but they are all versions of our universe." She was still intent on negotiating the winding lanes of Mu Ooria, heading deeper and deeper into the city.

"And like you, this doppelganger of mine travels between these worlds? And he knows you?"

"Only in his dreams," she said.

We were both out of breath. I had no idea where she was leading us, but she would not rest. While the immediate danger was in the forefront of my mind, I still seethed with a thousand unanswered questions. Questions so numinous I could not begin to frame them in words.

She had led us through a high doorway, down a long corridor and up a short winding ramp until we stood in a low-ceilinged hall full of long benches of carved stone arranged around a large, glassy circular area.

I was reminded of monks' communal quarters. The hall was lit by the tall, watery glasses. An air of tranquillity hung about the place. The shadows were soft. The circular area at the center stirred occasionally, its shades shifting from jet black to dark grey.

Oona led me behind the main rank of benches. As she did so, the first Off-Moo began to arrive, their long faces grave, their odd eyes questioning. I hadn't seen the young woman give any signal. Our presence in the room must have been enough to bring the Off-Moo elders there immediately. Some had the air of people interrupted in important tasks. Clearly they believed the matter serious. How had she summoned them? Was she in telepathic communication with their group intelligence? Her face had a beautiful, open quality when she communicated with them. The gracious unhumanity of these creatures made me feel I was in the company of angels.

With murmured acknowledgment to us, they assembled around the obsidian circle and listened gravely as Oona told them what she had seen and what we had learned.

"Could be an army already marches against Mu Ooria." She spoke a little hesitantly.

Again, she was acknowledged. But the Off-Moo's concentration had begun to focus on the reflective, glossy circle of rock around which they had gathered. I wondered what they saw there, if this were their version of a crystal ball? Some means of focusing their group consciousness?

Then I fell back, dazzled, throwing up my hands to protect my eyes. I thought the Off-Moo would be equally affected, but they calmly held their ground. Still guarding my eyes, I found Oona. She held her own hands before her face. "What's happening?" I asked.

I think they have a way of bending light," was all she could tell me. Then the worst of the white-gold glare had gone and my eyes had become accustomed to what remained. I could see the source of the radiance. At the center the circle, it was three-dimensional and thoroughly real-an ordinary block of stone suspended in space and giving off a faint, sweet-sounding vibration which brought strange memories, recollected moments of purity. When thought, deed and idea were all in harmony. I half expected Sir Parsifal, the pure knight, to appear kneeling before it. For the stone had changed before my eyes.

I was now looking in absolute awe at what I had always assumed to be nothing more than a beautiful legend. A great, golden bowl, set with crystal and precious jewels and brimming with thick, crimson wine which poured down the sides to be absorbed by the light which darkened to deep gold and showed the whole Off-Moo conference chamber in dramatic, organic contrast, alive with dark, swirling color. My senses were barely capable of registering so much at once. I felt oddly weak and found myself, for no clear reason, longing to be united with my Raven Sword. I felt that if only I could grasp the hilt, I would be able to draw strength from the black blade. But the sword was still in my chambers and I could not bear to leave the presence of that extraordinary vessel. The bowl, this Grail, grew larger. Everywhere the tall, conical hoods of the Off-Moo waved and nodded, as if this sight was unusual, even to them. Angular shadows were softened by the rounded rock over which they fell.

The Off-Moo's voices began a single low note which became a chant, a word, a mantra threatening to set the entire world vibrating. Light and dark were shaken together and mingled. The bowl then re-formed, rolling into itself until it was a golden, jeweled staff, rotating slowly in the air above the obsidian disk.

The Off-Moo chant changed and the staff expanded, grew. Just for an instant it became the shape of a small child with a round, beatific face. Then the staff returned and slowly changed shape again until it was a single arrow. The sign of Law. Then it became a sheaf of arrows, fanning out and upwards above the glassy circle. Eight golden, jeweled arrows, spinning slowly overhead. Chaos.

The Off-Moo were concentrating on the field of glistening obsidian. Very quickly a three-dimensional picture began to form there. Riders seemed to be emerging from the rock and galloping towards us. The illusion was not unlike a very realistic cinema experience. But it was also a terrifying reality. Gaynor, in his bizarre armor, rode a great white stallion whose blind eyes stared upwards, yet whose footing was unconsciously sure. Behind him, also on pale, blind horses, still in their black and silver uniforms, came the majority of his SS followers, Klosterheim at their head. All were cloaked and armed with miscellaneous antique weaponry.

Behind these was as bizarre a collection of monsters and grotesques as ever came shuffling and hopping out of a picture by Bosch. Perhaps, after all, the painter had been drawing from experience rather than imagination? They were long-limbed, longheaded, with huge myopic eyes. They had snuffling, exaggerated snouts, showing that they used scent more than sight. These loose-limbed travesties were much larger than the men who rode ahead of them, like toy soldiers modeled to two different scales. They were clearly savages, armed with maces and axes. Archers were in their ranks, and swordsmen. A mob rather than a disciplined army. But there were thousands of them,

"Troogs," said Oona.

I could see why the Off-Moo had known they had little to fear from these denizens of the borderlands. The giants had neither the intelligence nor the ambition to attack Mu Ooria on their own accord.

One of the Off-Moo murmured something and Oona nodded. "All the panthers have disappeared," she told me. "They no longer control the troogs. We don't know if the cats are dead, charmed or have simply vanished."

"How could they vanish?"

"The workings of a powerful spell."

"Spell?" I was thoroughly skeptical. "Spell, Fraulein? Are we so desperate we rely on sorcery?"

She showed some impatience with me. "Call it what you like, Count von Bek, but that is the best description. They sense a Summoning. A being far more powerful than the kind which usually walks these caverns. Perhaps a Lord of the Higher Planes. Which means that Gaynor has somehow brought the Lords of the Balance out of their own realm and has given his allegiance. If they are able to bring all their power with them, they will be almost impossible to defeat. But some need the medium of a human creature like Gaynor and his army."

"Those troogs are huge."

"Only here," she said. "In certain configurations of the branches, they are tiny. They're just the creatures who inhabit the borderland between Mu Ooria and the Grey Fees. They are not of the Higher Planes but exactly what you know them to be, creatures of the lower depths. They're Gaynor's cannon fodder. If Gaynor's sorcery is successful against us, they will do the routine slaughtering."

"You seem to have experienced such an invasion before," I said.

"Oh, more than once," she said. "This struggle is constant, believe me. You cannot imagine what is beginning to happen in your own world."

Increasingly, I was feeling the need to have the Raven Sword at my side. While Oona continued to confer with the Off-Moo, I told them I would return soon.

I ran through serpentine streets, through the shifting light, finding my way as much by the muted colors as by the shape of the buildings, until I reached my quarters. I went to where I had left the sword. To my enormous relief it was still in the alcove near my bed. I unwrapped it, just to make sure it was my own beloved blade, and the dark, vibrating steel murmured to me in recognition.

Settling Ravenbrand in its makeshift scabbard, I left the room with it over my shoulder and once again made my way through the winding streets, recognizing how a shaft of silvery light fell here, how the shadows moved there, how the colors changed in a particular stretch of wall, what was contained in those weird gardens.

I crossed the central plaza again and was approaching the streets on the other side when I heard a mocking sound from behind me. Turning, I stared into the triumphant eyes of my cousin Gaynor. He was aiming an arrow directly at me.

It hadn't occurred to me that he would have the audacity to follow us all the way into the heart of Mu Ooria. I was still not used to seeing two versions of the same person-one leading a hideous army against a great city and the other already in the city.

Gaynor had a happy cruelty about him. "Surprised, I see, cousin. I have an alter ego taking care of one front, while I'm free to attack on another. Every general's greatest desire, eh?" He was salivating and his eyes kept moving towards the sword. He was fascinated-almost enraptured-by it.

Without thinking, I shifted my grip on the hilt and held it with the point down, against the counterweight of the pommel, so that it could come up rapidly, almost without any effort on my part, and send Gaynor's bow flying from his grasp. I only had to bring him in a little closer.

But he was wary. He stayed some distance off, the arrow still nocked against the string. He was clearly new to the art of archery but seemed to have mastered it well enough.

There was nothing else for it. I would have to close with him.

I began to move, very gradually, talking as I attempted to shorten the distance between us. But Gaynor was grinning and shaking his head from side to side. "Why on Earth would you think I had any reason to keep you alive now, cousin. You have what I need. All I have to do is kill you and take it from you."

"You could have shot me in the back to do that," I said, just as he loosed an arrow which caught me high in my left arm. I was surprised that I felt no pain, then I realized my sturdy Norfolk jacket's tweed had taken the arrow. I was untouched. Before he could fit another shaft to his bowstring, I took a few swift steps towards him and held the sword's needle-sharp point to his throat.

"Drop your weapon, cousin," I demanded.

I felt a sharp pain in my side, looked down and saw the blade of a Nazi dagger pressed against my rib cage. Looking up I stared into the lifeless eyes of the gaunt Klosterheim.

"So, you also have a twin." I shuddered.

"We are all the same," murmured Klosterheim. "All of us. Millions of us."

He seemed feverish, abstracted. Even nervous.

We were now in a stalemate, with my blade at Gaynor's throat and Klosterheim's at my ribs.

"Lower your sword, sir," he said. "And place it on the ground before you."

I laughed in his face. "I'm sworn to die before I give up Ravenbrand."

Gaynor was impatient. "Your father, too, was sworn to die to protect your family's inheritance. And die he did, sir. Ulric. Dear cousin. Give me the Black Sword and I guarantee that you will be allowed to live on at Bek, with all your villagers, your castle and everything back the way you're used to. No one will bother you. Believe me, cousin, there are those of us, quite as idealistic as you, who are prepared to get their hands dirty in order to plant the seeds of paradise. If you choose to keep clean hands, that is your decision. But I do not make that choice. I'm ready to accept the necessity, to establish order throughout the multiverse. Do you understand?"

"I understand that you're mad," I said.

He laughed aloud at this. "Mad? We're all that, cousin. The multiverse is mad. But we shall make it sane again. We shall make it whatever we wish it to be. Can't you feel yourself changing? It is the only way you'll survive. It's how I've survived. But no human brain can accept so much intellectual and sensory overload without radically adapting. Do you really believe you're the same person who so recently fled a concentration camp?"

He spoke the truth. I could never be the same man. Yet he was still trying to confuse me.

"Herr Klosterheim will have to kill me," I said, "because I am not going to volunteer you my services or my sword."

We had reached a rough-and-ready stalemate. I looked past Gaynor. Over his shoulder a familiar figure raced towards me across the smooth floor of the plaza. It wore ornate black armor, a complicated helm. Its red eyes blazed as its pale hands reached out. It ran straight through the unaware Gaynor. A mirror-ghost. It radiated a terrible, desperate urgency. My instinct was to pull back, but my intellect told me to hold my ground.

The figure charged at enormous speed. It must surely knock me down. But he did not stop. Neither did he run through me. Instead he ran directly into me. Armored body, helmed head, everything passed into my sensibly dressed twentieth-century person and was absorbed! A moment earlier I had been one individual. Now I was two.

I was two men in a single body. I did not for a second question this fact. How could I?

Suddenly I had two sets of memories. Two identities, each very distinct. Two futures. Two sets of emotions. But I also shared much with my doppelganger. An overweening hatred for Gaynor, his brutal pack and all that it represented both here and in my own world. My double's resolve combined to strengthen my own, to complement my own anger. I knew at once that this was his intention. He had deliberately set out to achieve a combination of our power. And, because he was in so many ways myself, I could only trust him. He could not lie to me. Only to himself.

Now the Black Sword began to pulse and murmur, the red runes running like veins up and down her throbbing length. I felt her writhe in my hand. She rose under her own volition, rose in my fist until I held her shoulder-high. I cried out some savage battle shout as the sword set my body thrilling with power, with a thousand conflicting notions and feelings, with a cruel, unfamiliar death lust. I could taste the sweet blood and bitter souls my sword would soon devour. I licked my long lips. I was coming alive!

The beast will return to the fold, the sparrow to the field. Swords to many, souls to heal.

I was speaking. A mantra. The end of some longer chant? A spell. In a language which one half of me did not understand at all, but the other half knew perfectly. It was not the language either of us habitually spoke. I could understand my thoughts in both languages and they were almost the same, save that the older tongue was full of throat-twisting glottal stops, clicks and hisses.

This other speech was far more liquid, immeasurably more ancient. Not human at all. Something that had to be learned, sound by sound, meaning by meaning. Something that had taken me many tortured years to come by.

Two cups for justice. Two swords for harmony. Twin souls for victory. Lords and ladies walk on moonshine. Twins command the serpentine. Flows the blood and flows the wine. Flows the river to the sign. Twins in harlequin combine.

My alter ego was concentrating on the mantra. It had enabled him to perform this astonishing magic. Of course, I understood everything at once, for we were now the same creature. And being two identities in a single body, I saw how it was possible to be many people. To be sane and conscious of many other identities all at the same time. So many decisions, choices, obstacles. To understand that, at every moment, a million other selves were determining a million subtly or radically different paths. To be able to see the multiverse in whole, to have no worlds hidden, no possibilities denied! A glorious gift. All you had to do was find the roads. Now I understood the lure of such a life and why Oona and her mother and her mother's mother had inevitably chosen it.

The immediacy of the moment was in no way lessened by this experience of infinity. I was able to defend myself, indeed to carry the attack if I so desired, for I had combined Elric's training with my own. I knew how to act in battle and concentrate on a spell at the same time, for I was of the pure, old blood of Melnibone and we nurtured such gifts in ourselves. Our ancient folk had

forged many compacts with the elementals of the multiverse. With the powers of Earth, air, water and fire. And many of those compacts remained unbroken. I could call on all the powers of nature, though not all nature's power. To sense one's control of the wind, fire, the very form of the Earth and flow of the water, to have conversed with the great beast-gods, those archetypes from whom all other animals came and who could command legions should they desire: all this was indescribably marvelous. Few of these allies had more than a healthy beast's need for a sufficiency of things and so had few ambitions in the affairs of men or gods, though the Lords of the Higher Worlds respected them. Only when called would the elementals agree, occasionally, to concern themselves in mortal conflicts. And now I had all these powers, understood the price to be paid for exercising them and the need for a psychic and physical sustenance far greater than anything I had required in the world of Bek. The reality was more intense, the stakes far higher than anything I had ever guessed possible.

But it required fuel for my flexing muscles, my heaving lungs, fuel to power my warrior's body as well as my warlock's wisdom. Only two sources for that fuel existed. One was a combination of herbs and other ingredients which allowed me to lead an active life. The other was the sword. Understanding what the sword did, my ordinary human self was thoroughly repulsed. Yet I also understood that survival depended upon my using her and that she would not allow me to act against my own interest. My affection for Ravenbrand remained, but I had a new respect for her. Clearly this sword chose who would wield her.

All my lessons of swordsmanship came back to me as I prepared to do battle. I was not reluctant to fight. I panted to fight, I yearned to draw blood.

"Prince Gaynor." Elric's haughty formality made my Saxon manners seem loose. "Has your death time come so soon?"

The Hungarian's damaged face had a demented look. "What are you? Do you control that human?"

"You're impertinent, Prince Gaynor. Your questions are offensive and coarsely put. I am of the Royal Line of Melnibone and your superior. Throw down that bow. Or my sword drinks your soul."

Gaynor was frightened by the changes in me, even though he guessed the reason. He had not been prepared for anything like this. Klosterheim's knife no longer pressed against my side. Gaynor's cadaverous colleague was staring with dawning intelligence. He had seen Elric run through his master and be absorbed by my body. He knew what I was, and I frightened him.

The sword was hungry for their souls. I could feel her needs speeding from her hilt to my hands. I did all I could to resist, but she became increasingly demanding.

"Arioch!" The name formed on my lips. "Arioch!" It tasted like the most exquisite wine. I was one with a being for whom words had specific flavors and for whom music was also color.

"He'll not empower you here." Gaynor was recovering himself. He unstrung his bow. "Not in Mu Ooria. Law rules here now."

I took charge of the quivering blade; I replaced it firmly in the rough sheath I had made. Gaynor had revealed something. Perhaps a weakness. Were his own supernatural allies also unable to enter Moo Uria herself? Did she have subtler defenses?

"Only when the city's taken," I said on a hunch.

And then he realized what he had revealed to me and smiled a wry acknowledgment. I now thought he had slipped into the city with a few men, but could not draw on his ally's powers. It was a tribute to his daring that he came here with only Klosterheim to help him steal the Raven Sword.

"You understand much of the multiverse, cousin," said Gaynor.

"Only in my studies and dreams," I told him. "I am here at the request of my blood kin. Otherwise I'd have no part of this business."

"Blood kin?"

I became circumspect. I now knew what Ulric had previously not known.

I could scent familiar, ancient perfumes, traces of mustier smells. I began to take an interest in my surroundings.

With my attention off him, Gaynor made several rapid steps backwards, believing himself out of range of my sword. He yelled and gestured. Klosterheim drew his own sword and ran to join him. I began to smile. This promised tasty sport. My left hand closed over the scabbard and held it firmly so I could draw the sword rapidly if I had to. She was murmuring and quivering again. She echoed my own rapidly changing moods.

My ears were far sharper than when they belonged only to von Bek. I heard swift, slithering movements from the shadows. While Gaynor's most powerful allies might not be able to help him here, his lowlier troops were all too evident. He had not, after all, braved the city with only Klosterheim's support. I could see them, closing in from all sides. Their fear of cats dispelled, they had gathered enough courage to obey Gaynor and follow him. The gigantic grotesques Oona had called troogs. They snuffled and grunted in anticipation of a flesh feast. I recalled that the Off-Moo had called them cannibals.

I began to laugh. "Here's an irony, gentlemen," I said. I made a fluid movement, and the black blade was loose again. The runes ran crimson up and down her length. The iron pulsed and crooned. I began to pad like a cat towards Gaynor and Klosterheim. I broke into a trot as I closed the distance between us. The dark iron lifted higher. At one with my blade and my dop' pelgänger I knew a sense of boundless power. My laughter filled those immeasurable caverns!

Gaynor shrieked for his followers to attack. I defended myself against a blizzard of iron. Maces and swords swung at me from all sides. I dodged them with preternatural instincts and reflexes. I had soon cleared a space around me, but they scarcely feared me. I saw their nostrils dilating as they sniffed. I suspected they could hardly see me. Even here, they had no need of eyes. They had numbers. They had my scent. They were waiting only for Gaynor's signal before moving in again. This time it seemed they must surely crush me.

Now the black blade was howling. The sword which I called Ravenbrand and my alter ego called Stormbringer would not let me sheathe her again until she had been blooded. Her song blended with the delicate chimes of the crystal above. Her song was a hungry one. In her time, she had slain whole armies. She demanded her feast. She had moaned and lusted so long for satisfaction. At last she could take her pleasure. At last she could feed. And deliver to me the energy I would need for my next Summoning.

Chapter Eleven The Power of Two

Gaynor shouted an order and the monsters were upon me. Seconds later I was carrying the attack. The sword was alive. She possessed an intelligence of her own. She slashed red gouting trails into the surrounding air, slid through flesh and bone and sinew and drew deep of this crude lifestuff, the souls of the slain. Every soul went to satisfy my own flagging substance. I had a taste for the work. I hacked my way through to where Gaynor and Klosterheim stood, on the edge of the square, goading the troogs and savages to kill me. I cleared a path towards the two leaders as another might clear his way through tall grass. They began to be afraid of me.

I was used to that fear. I expected little else. All humans had it. I despised it. No such weakness was allowed to infect the blood of a Melnibonean. My folk had ruled the world for ten thousand years. They had determined the histories of the Young Kingdoms, those nations of humankind. My race was older, wiser and infinitely crueler than men. We knew nothing of the softer ways, the cruder ways of creatures we regarded as scarcely higher than apes. In my bones I had only contempt for them.

I was a Melnibonean aristocrat. I had known more terror in the training for my sorcerous powers than these creatures had capacity or senses to experience. I had earned my alliances with the elementals and the lesser Lords of Chaos. I could raise the dead. I could force my will on any natural creature and could destroy an enemy with nothing but my black runeblade.

I was Elric of Melnibone, Last of the Sorcerer-Emperors, Prince of Ruins, Lord of the Lost. Called Traitor and Womanslayer. Wherever I went I was feared and courted, even by those who hated me, for I had a power no human could begin to control.

Even amongst my own people, I had only ever had one living rival. My family had kept its power down the millennia by cultivating its traditional learning and constantly making new alliances with Chaos. Our household gods were Dukes of Hell. Our patron was Lord Arioch of Chaos, whose fiefdom included a million supernatural realms. Whose power was vast enough to destroy them all. Those of my blood could call casually upon such forces for help. A handful of us had controlled the world for ten thousand years. We might have continued to rule, had I not betrayed that blood and made myself an outlaw everywhere.

"Arioch!" Again the name came readily to my lips. Arioch was my own patron Lord of Chaos, whose power was shared by the Black Sword, who fed from the same souls which fed me and the sword. Were we one creature-sword, god and mortal-truly potent only when all parts came together? These were easy, casual thoughts for a Melnibonean. What were less familiar were the notions of morality, of right and wrong, which now contaminated my brain and had done, it seemed, from childhood. A burden I had as yet not managed to abandon. My father had loathed me for this. My other relatives had been embarrassed. Many supported my cousin Yyrkoon's desire to replace me.

"Arioch!"

He could not or would not manifest himself here.

I heard a murmur in the back of my brain, as if that great Duke of Hell tried to speak, but then even that became faint.

Gaynor was growing more confident.

Recklessly he yelled for his remaining forces to attack me.

There was every chance I could be borne down under the weight of their numbers. Even the sword, which seemed to have a life of its own, could not kill them all. With desperate clarity my mind began to project a different quality of thought, like rapidly growing tendrils, into the surrounding supernatural realms, those infinite worlds the Off-Moo called the multiverse.

I was not sure I would be answered. I knew Duke Arioch could not aid me. But I had considered all the likely dangers I would have to face when I accepted the dreamthief's help. And while this human brain might lack some of the subtlety of my own, it was a good one. There was every chance I would be successful.

I began to murmur the deceptively simple mantra which helped my mind follow certain paths, engage with the stuff of the supernatural, speak a language which no living creature on the Earth could understand. The verses were plain enough. They connected me to the complexities of the elemental spheres, where I might, if luck was on my side, find the means of escaping an increasingly likely fate.

I fought on, pushing back first one wall of battling flesh and then another. Yet I never gained ground, was always threatened with losing the last few meters I had cleared. The bodies became a barrier which I could use to my advantage. Never once did I lose that special concentration which continued to send tentacles of thought through all planes of the multiverse until, just for a second, I seemed to touch an alien intellect. One that recognized me.

And one I, too, recognized.

I sensed a world of water. Universe upon universe of water. Populated water. Water that coursed from one plane of existence to another. Ancient water. Newborn water. Swirling and still, wild and tranquil. Water lapped my face, even as a score of monsters fell to my hungry sword.

I began to sing-King of all oceans; king of all the waters of the worlds; King of the deep darkness, king of silence, king of pearls;

King of washed bones, king of all our drowned;

King of sadness, of sinking souls unfound,

Revive our ancient friendship, our enemies confound.

As your old tides curl their currents like woven threads,

Recollect our bargains. Recall our sacrificial dead.

Bring honor to those compacts, and bind them fresh around,

Tie stronger still the white knots and the red,

Two kingdoms and two wounds. A mutual victory.

A memory, a means to meet our double destiny.

A tide suddenly swirled around me, passed and was gone. I looked for water but saw only the glittering faraway lake, the long prospect which stretched towards it from the square said by Oona to be the lair of the great World Worm. All of this I took for granted, for I had seen more monsters and miracles than most mortals, but, as the cannibals formed a circle around me and began to press in again, I knew I was lost if King Straasha, my old ally, avatar of all the gods of all the oceans of the multiverse, could not hear me, or did not wish to hear me.

Gaynor saw the thing first. My cousin whirled and pointed, as he signaled Klosterheim to flee. Gaynor had no disrespect for my powers of sorcery. He had counted on my not being able to use them here.

Beyond the quays and the tethered boats, the water was rising. It formed a towering wall, did not move like a tidal wave, but stayed in place, quivering, threatening. The wall grew higher. If it fell, it would extinguish the whole city.

Now the help I had summoned threatened to kill my friends as well as my enemies. I knew a sardonic moment. This seemed to be my perpetual destiny.

Yet I was sure the Off-Moo were not as vulnerable as they appeared. They must know by now that I fought Gaynor and his minions in the square. Had they fled? Or were they preparing defenses?

The wall of water began to move. It gathered itself together. It started to form a shape. And soon, in shimmering outline, I distinguished the bulky figure of a giant. He was all shifting, swirling pale green water, never stable, never completely still, with pale blue eyes that searched the city and, at length, found mine.

Gaynor's followers fell back screaming for orders. Gaynor knew he could not possibly begin to fight King Straasha. A heavy, wet movement brought water running around our feet. King Straasha stepped ashore. His huge body walked, step by liquid step, up the great prospect towards us. If that weight of water should lose its form, it would drown us entirely.

As Gaynor searched for the swiftest escape route, another human figure appeared on the far side of the square and ran towards me.

Oona, the dreamthief's daughter.

"Warn the Off-Moo," I said. "They are in danger."

"They know of their danger," she said.

"Then save yourself."

"I'm safe enough, Lord Elric." She addressed me casually by this name, as if she had always known it. "But you must go. You have achieved your purpose here. The rest is work for me and the others to do. At least for now."

I began to suggest she stay with me for safety, but Klosterheim flung a dagger at me. I was distracted by its clattering to the ground a few meters away. When I looked up again, Oona had gone.

King Straasha was still wading towards me. I could tell the action was painful to him, but he was genial enough. "Well, little mortal, I am here because I have never yet broken a bargain and I have a certain affection for your kind. What would you have me do? Does this city have to be destroyed?"

"I need your help, sire. I need to move through the realms of water. I need to find the realm I left-the realm where my mortal form remains."

He understood.

"Water to water," he said, "and fire to fire. For the respect your ancestors showed my folk, I will do, Prince Elric, as you desire."

A vast watery hand descended towards me. I gasped, sensing that I was drowning as I struggled in King Straasha's grip. I feared he would kill me by accident.

Then I was engulfed in a bubble of air, held by a gigantic hand. I knew a sudden sense of peace, of absolute security. I was in the safekeeping of the king of water elementals. We flew over the crags and spires of Mu Ooria, until all I could see was the glowing lake surrounded by a mighty darkness. That part of me which was von Bek would have been incredulous, had not that part of me which was Elric shown such familiarity with the supernatural. Within me, even as I experienced the impossible, I could sense that von Bek believed in a world where all was Law, save for occasional upheavals of Chaos, and I believed in a multiverse where all was Chaos, where Law was something carved from that stuff and maintained by the will of mortals and the designs of the Lords of the Higher Worlds. Chaos was clearly the dominant force in all the realms, natural and supernatural. Two fundamentally opposed views of existence, yet in balance within the single body, the only mind. The harmony of opposites, indeed!

Von Bek neither hesitated nor questioned what I as Elric determined. For this was a world I understood and which had been a total mystery to him. Of course, he had all my memories, as I had all of his. For the moment the dominant me was the sorcerer-king, calling upon a great manifestation of an elemental, who served neither Law nor Chaos, nor any other thing, but lived to exist and perpetuate that existence endlessly.

The city was lost to sight. King Straasha hesitated, contemplating what he must do next. He and I had already communicated something which could not be represented by spoken language.

Unlike most sorcerer races, Melniboneans had deliberately cultivated alliances with the elementals. With those great, old beings who were the embodiment of familiar and unfamiliar animals-with Meerclar of the Cats and even Ap-yss-Alara, Queen of the Swine, who was said to refuse all mortal advances and would continue to do so while one of them still ate pork.

Since pork was not eaten by any Melnibonean of the higher castes, my folk had first made their accommodation with the queen.

The blood fever was dying away in me. For the moment Stormbringer was satiated.

The energy we had acquired was crude and would not last long, but it enabled me to do what I must. I delighted in the knowledge that I was thwarting Gaynor not on one plane, but on two or more.

We came to rest in the center of the lake. For a second I looked on a placid stretch of sparkling water: moonlight illuminating a Mediterranean idyll. Then King Straasha made a gesture with his other watery hand. He was laughing. Instantly I stared down into the wide mouth of a raging maelstrom. It sent

clutching, foamy tendrils up towards me. It roared and lusted for my life and soul. It swirled and eddied and whispered for me to jump from "King Straasha's protecting hand, down into the sublime rapture of its heart. That hypnotic sound, at once shriek and murmur, drew me helplessly towards it. My animal instinct was to resist, but I knew I must not.

The surrounding bubble had burst. I stood there on the sea king's palm. Without further thought, I secured the runesword and dived into the howling vortex.

I was caught like a speck of dust and drawn deeper and deeper towards the infinite. I knew that I was whirling to my death, but I had no fear.

I knew what I was doing, where I was going, just as had King Straasha. There was still a chance I could lose my way and be carried off by my enemies. Both Chaos and Law, in this current battle, had much at stake and could be ruthless in their self-protection.

I heard the sea king's roaring voice fade into the shout of the great maelstrom and I gathered all my resources, attempting to make my way through, to find the one pathway I needed.

It became almost impossible to breathe. The water began to fill my lungs. I wondered how much longer I could survive before I drowned. Then the sword stirred at my belt. Some instinct made me reach for her blindly, drag her free of her scabbard and then let her pull me through the wild swell. Her course took me first up, then down, then deep within those watery walls.

Whole cities, continents, races swirled around me. All the oceans of all the worlds had combined into one. I passed through universes of water. Blind instinct guided me while the sword pointed like a lodestone, pulling me deeper and deeper down into the maelstrom.

My feet touched something solid. I could stand upright, though water still flowed. I could feel its pressure on my legs and torso. The great underground ocean stopped its agitation. Overhead was blackness, before me was more water. I was standing waist-high in it.

Warily I sheathed my sword. I began to move forward, expecting at any moment to find the ground give way beneath my feet. At last I trod on fine gravel. There was a cool, steady breeze on my cheek. Somewhere, in the distance, a fox barked.

I was no longer in Mu Ooria but did not know if I had found my destination. As I emerged completely from the water, I looked up at a familiar sky, at familiar stars. Near the horizon was the thin outline of a gibbous moon. Growing accustomed to the faint light, I made out the steep roofs and spires of a city I recognized. A quiet place, with few monumental buildings, no great architecture. Like one of the more ordinary medieval German towns I had seen on our dash towards Hameln. I hoped I had returned to the right time as well as place.

A wide moat surrounded the island on which the city was built. The island had not always been there. I had created the moat in one of my first attempts to defend the city, which no longer existed in exactly the same position as when I had first arrived there. I had used all the forms of sorcery I knew to save her from conquest, but every spell had been countered. And he had defeated me.

Elric's personality was now paramount. As I waded ashore, I hoped no one had guessed my strategy, though it was clear Gaynor had been able to manifest himself concurrently on at least three different planes, no doubt with the help of his supernatural mistress. Miggea, Duchess of Law. Lady Miggea.

In Mu Ooria she had been unable to break through, but here she dominated the world. Only here, beyond the moat, was there any safety from Miggea's cold, relentless rule, and that safety was already threatened.

I was soaked and shivering. My clothing made movement difficult. I pulled off the cap and squeezed water from my long hair. I moved warily up the bank, my senses alert, my hand ready to pull my sword free in an instant.

Only now did I realize how weary I was. I found it difficult to put one heavy foot in front of another. I still did not know if I had reached my desired destination. Everything looked right. But a fundamental of the illusionist's art is that everything should look right. . .

I had become too used to deception. For all I knew I was quite alone in a world bereft of men and gods. Or did a thousand eyes even now watch me from the darkness?

I thought I heard a footfall. I paused. I could see very little. Just the outlines of shrubs and trees, the silhouette of the city ahead of me. Automatically I brought up my sword. All the energy we had stolen together, all the souls we had eaten, had dissipated in that journey through the vortex. I felt weak again. I was dizzy.

Voices. I prepared myself for battle.

I think I fell backwards. I still had some hold on my senses. I was aware of faces looking down at me. I heard my name spoken.

"It can't be him. We were told nothing could lift the enchantment. Look at its bizarre garments. This is a demon, a shape-changer. We should kill it."

I tried to join in the argument, to assure them that despite my costume I was truly Elric of Melnibone. Then my senses completely failed me. I fell into dreaming, urgent shadows. I struggled to get back. But it was useless. I was too weak to resist or to flee.

I thought I heard mocking laughter. The laughter of my enemies.

Had I been captured? After all my efforts, was I doomed never to reach my city again?

Darkness encircled my brain. I heard the whispering of my captors. Consciousness began to fade.

I knew I had failed.

I tried to lift my sword. Then I was engulfed.

Dreams fled away from me. Important dreams. Dreams which could save me. A white hare on a white road.

I tried to follow. I woke up in a clean bed, looking around at a familiar room. In front of me stood a stocky redheaded fellow with a wide mouth and freckled skin, dressed simply but with a certain style, in green and brown.

"Moonglum?"

The redheaded man grinned.

"So, Prince Elric, you know who I am?"

"It would be strange if I did not." I was weeping with relief. I had managed to return. And Moonglum, who had accompanied me on more than one recent adventure, was waiting for me. Foolish as it was, I felt more than comradeship for the loyal swordsman.

"True, my lord." He grinned and swaggered forward, a little puzzled. "But I wonder what exotic creature you robbed for your clothes."

"They're conventional," said von Bek, "in my time. His time."

I knew exactly where I was. In the Tower of the Hand in Tanelorn. A Tanelorn whose ruin was almost certain. And if she perished, all that she stood for would perish, too. It was for her that I had risked so much and had accepted the dreamthief's help. Not, she insisted, that Oona was a dreamthief. She was merely a dreamthief's daughter.

"And my body?" I asked, rising.

His face darkened and his eyes took on a certain expression, familiar to me when he believed sorcery to be involved. "Still in its place," he said. He grinned, but refused to meet my gaze. "Still sleeping. Still breathing." He paused. "Where, might I ask, my lord, did you acquire this new body? Is it something fashioned of sorcery?"

"Only of dreams," I said, and promised to answer him further when I knew more.

He led me from that simple bedroom to another. There in the gloom lay a sleeping man. I was not prepared for the sight of my own naked body lying stretched out before me, hands folded across my chest, which rose and fell with slow regularity. My eyes were open. Twin rubies staring into the void. I slept. I was not dead. But neither could I be awakened. I was, after all, dreaming this dream. I reached to close my eyes.

Gaynor had brought great power against me. I knew the enchantment. I had used it myself, to ill effect. It threatened all I loved.

Now he gathered his strength to finish us. And if he finished Tanelorn, then all the worlds of all the realms were in danger.

I looked up from my sleeping self. Through the window, the sun was beginning to rise. Its first golden light slipped above the horizon. I held up my hand in the faint rays and compared it to that of the sleeping man. Essentially we seemed to be the same creature. It had taken great sorcery and the work of a dreamthief to achieve this, but now both my body and my sword were restored to me.

There might yet be time to rescue Tanelorn.

Chapter Twelve The Word of Law

A few weeks earlier, Moonglum and I had come down out of the hills on the other side of Cesh, following 'any goat trail we could, having left the employ of the Cesh of Cesh in bad faith. In return for the destruction of a small supernatural army, we had been promised a treasure horde. The army destroyed, the horde was found to be two coins, one of them forged. I had left the Cesh on display at the city gates, as a warning to others not to waste our time or our good will. I had been weak before I left the place and in no condition to confront the war party sent to pursue us by the Cesh's blood relatives, duty-bound to kill us.

With imperfect maps we lost ourselves in the rocky terrain but lost our pursuers as well. We had certainly not expected to come upon Tanelorn so soon after finding our way down from the hills. We had expected to cross a desert before we found any form of civilization. We knew that it was in the nature of this city to manifest herself occasionally in another place, so we did not challenge our luck. Without hesitation, we led our exhausted horses down towards the city walls. We were grateful for sight of the ancient, welcoming buildings, the gardens and tall trees, the red brick, black beams and thatch, the orchards and fountains, the twisting timbers of the gables. I, for one, had become weary of the fantastic and looked forward to the common human comforts I'd become used to.

Our habit, when our travels took us here, was for Moonglum and myself to rest until we were ready to wander on, seeking fresh employment, new masters. Ours were the lives of mercenary swordsmen and, if sometimes short of wages, we were rarely short of work. Tanelorn, we consoled ourselves, would give us credit. We had acquaintances in the city. We occasionally met enemies there. But there was no conflict. Tanelorn was the haven to which all weary people could come, to rest, to stand outside the wars of men and gods. Here, with the necessary drugs, I could enjoy a certain peace.

I had hoped to lodge with my old friend Rackhir of Phum, the Red Archer, but he was gone on an adventure of his own. And he had left something in his house he did not want disturbed.

An acquaintance of mine, Brut of Lashmar, who had been a professional soldier, was the first familiar face to greet us. He was tall with close-cropped hair and scarred, handsome features. He wore dark linen and wool, seeming more monkish than soldierly, as a sign of his retirement. He seemed troubled. He was not an eloquent man, and it was difficult for him to find appropriate words to describe his feelings. He took us to his rambling house, gave us rooms there, an entire wing, and made us welcome. As we ate, he told us that there seemed to be sorcerous currents in the air. "Wizardry buzzing everywhere. Strange, powerful magic, my friends. Perilous magic."

I asked him to be specific, but he could not. I told him that I always knew when Chaos was present. I assured him there was no smell of Chaos here, unless about my own person. He was not happy, he said, that the city had moved. Usually moving was something she did to save herself only when in the worst danger.

I told him that he had become timid in his retirement. Tanelorn was safe. We had already fought for and won her security. Perhaps we should have to do so again some day, for Tanelorn, like all fragile ideas, had to be perpetually defended. Still, it was highly unlikely that Chaos would attack her again.

In good faith I was not as certain as I sounded. I told Brut that no being in all creation would be foolish enough to risk the destruction of the Balance itself. But in my heart I knew there were always such beings. We had already defended the city against them once. But it would be madness to assume Chaos would attack again, so soon after we had driven her back. I refused to become anxious. I intended to make the most of my stay, I said, and restore myself as best I could.

Most of our talk was reminiscence. It was the nature of the place. We discussed old fights, old threats, legendary battles of the past and speculated upon the nature of our sanctuary.

We were in Tanelorn less than a week, however, before the city came under direct threat. And, of course, I had not sniffed Chaos. I had never anticipated that Law would be taking her turn as aggressor. My world had little stability. Did it go back to that one moment in my past, that moment when I killed the only woman I truly loved? Had I set these events in motion, all that long time ago?

Meanwhile, again Tanelorn was threatened. And by Law gone mad. That these besieging powers must be particularly corrupt and manipulated by a creature whose ambitions were unusually determined was no comfort. Such mindlessness was always the most destructive. It had nothing to lose but its own threatened oblivion.

I knew we were being challenged by unusual wizardry one afternoon when the whole surrounding landscape melted even as we watched from the battlements and old walls. The land turned to glaring ash flats studded with wind-carved limestone crags-a world of crystalline whiteness. The inhabitants of Tanelorn were astonished and alarmed. This was the work of the gods. Or demons. Even I was not capable of such sorcery.

What fresh interest did the Lords of the Higher Worlds have in Tanelorn? Everything but Tanelorn was now the color of wind-scarred bone. Her gentle trees and pretty houses were made vulgar by all that starkness.

The moon must look like this, I said. Everything scoured away. Was that where we were now? Tanelorn's wise men thought we had merely been shifted to an alternative world from our own, which had already been conquered.

I was capable of one last Summoning. I begged the Earth ele-mentals to dig a defensive moat around the city walls. It was the best I could do and it exhausted me.

We could not imagine the madness of a creature capable of reducing a world to such barren horror.

There were scholars of every kind in Tanelorn. I sought their best wisdom. Who had moved us to this world?

"My Lady Miggea of Law," I was told. "Almost certainly. She has already reduced

several more realms to similar nothingness." She had immense supernatural resources and commanded more. I knew my gods and goddesses. I knew she had her own cycle of myth and legend which empowered her on earth, but she had to have mortal agents or she could not break through into these spheres.

At least one mortal was serving her here. My Lord Arioch of Chaos was equally helpless without mortal compliance. My patron, impulsive as he could be, had learned never to attempt the conquest of Tanelorn.

Our first attackers were mostly half-armored foot soldiers, oddly identical. They marched out of nowhere and did not stop marching until they reached our moat and then did not stop marching, over the backs of drowning comrades, until they were at our walls. Thousands and thousands were thrown against us daily and were so incapable of individual decision that we killed them effortlessly with few losses to our side.

The soldiers attacked again. We defended Tanelorn. We debated plans for her salvation. But we hardly knew what we were defending against, who our enemy really was. None knew how far the ash desert extended. A manifestation of Lady Miggea had been seen by some who recognized it, confirming that she was indeed in this realm now and watching from afar. At least this is what I was told. Some of our newer inhabitants had fled realms where she already ruled, had come here because of the terror they had left behind. But we still did not know the name of the mortal who served the Lady Miggea. And we wondered why the city did not shift herself away from danger, as we thought she could.

The marching minions of Law were easy enough to defeat. They had no true will and seemed almost drugged. They were mechanically predictable. They used identical tactics every time they tried to take the city. It was nothing to slaughter them in hundreds as they swam over or attempted to bridge the moat. I began to believe that their only function was to distract us while larger plans were hatched.

Warfare at its most boring.

Then Lady Miggea herself came to look at Tanelorn.

At first even I didn't understand the significance of the visit.

One morning I took my usual walk around the wall and to my astonishment saw that the surrounding horizon was filled with the pennants and lances of a vast mounted army. Everywhere their outlines signified our annihilation. These were not Law's cannon fodder, but her finest knights, drawn from all over the multiverse.

I threw up my hand to defend my eyes and saw, as if emerging from a shimmering mirage, a massive she-wolf, the size of a large mare, all caparisoned with pretty silks and beaded leather, with painted leather saddle, with brass and silver and glinting diamonds in her harness. Her deep-set eyes were mysterious as she came racing towards the city at the head of a pack of human knights. Her white, fanged muzzle twitched a little, as if she scented prey. Perhaps the wolf had been caught in Melnibone, I thought, for like me she was a pure albino. Her red eyes glared from bone-white fur, streaming behind her as she ran.

Even more bizarre was her rider. An armored man whose glittering silver helm completely hid his face. Whose lance shimmered the color of pewter. Whose metal was festooned with fluttering silks, with cloaks and scarves of a thousand colors.

I saw him turn, stand in his stirrups, and raise something to his helm. I heard the sound of his horn.

They came on and on. Thousands of white horses and their silver-armored riders. Surely they meant to trample Tanelorn beneath their hooves.

Then I saw what the wolf pursued.

A hare, as white as winter, raced over the pale ash ahead of that whole thundering army. Racing for our gates. A thousand spears poised to pierce her.

Too late.

The hare reached the moat and plunged into the water. She swam to the city gates and sped through a narrow gap, disappearing at once into the streets.

Only when the little animal found the safety of the city, did the hunt quickly disperse, fanning to both sides around Tanelorn's wide moat. They had lost their prey. A distant horn called them away.

But they had impressed us with their armor. Their shining armor. Their faceless, enigmatic helms. And their numbers.

I knew their kind. The Knights of Law served a holy cause. Summoned to the standard of their mistress, the Lady Miggea, I knew they would fight to the death for her. They did not and could not question her. Their nature was to serve the office, no matter how warped it had become. They clung to a single idea, just as she did, unable to imagine more than one thing, one future, which they must create. They disguised their natural rapacity as their quest for Order.

But it had been the hare they intended to destroy that morning, not us. Their horses' hooves churned the ashy desert as from her huge pale throat, the white she-wolf voiced her angry frustration at losing her quarry. A chilling growl.

Again the horn sounded.

The mounted knights began to reorder themselves, turning and moving back towards the horizon.

Moonglum stepped up beside me. He had been commanding a group of fighters farther along the wall.

"What's this?" He sniffed and rubbed at his sleeve, as if to remove a stain. "Were they simply out for a gallop? Did you see the quarry they followed, my lord? The little hare?"

I had seen her and I wondered why she was so important to a Duchess of Law. What had held them back from pursuing her into the city? Some understanding that by entering eternal Tanelorn they threatened the fundamental order of all our realms?

Madness is what I witnessed. I had seen it more than once when Law became corrupted and decadent. For that reason alone my people preferred the uncertainties and wildness of Chaos. Law gone rotten was a far more perilous prospect. Chaos did not pretend to logic, save the logic of temperament, of feeling.

The she-wolf had turned and was loping back towards us, bearing her arrogant rider, who now, apparently relaxed, held his lance easily in its stirrup.

I heard a noise from within the helm. I heard a voice. I heard my own name.

"Prince Elric, called Traitor. Is that you?"

"You have me at a disadvantage, sir."

"Oh, you'll soon be familiar enough with one or another of my names, sir."

"Why," I asked, "do you attack our Tanelorn? What do you want from it?"

"What, my lord, do you defend? Do you know? Have you never questioned your actions? You defend nothing. You defend an innocent idea. Not a reality."

"I have seen many an idea made reality," I replied. "I'll defend Tanelorn or sack her, should I feel the urge. I have nothing better to do, sir. And I would like a chance to kill you."

He laughed within his helm. An easy laugh. A familiar laugh. He ignored my taunt. "Prince Elric, I have a bargain to make with you. All in Tanelorn will be saved if you simply give me your sword. Upon my word, I will then leave you in peace. All of you. There's enough physic in the city to keep you alive and well. It's a fair bargain, Prince Elric. You save all your comrades and lose nothing but a useless blade."

"I have more care for my sword than for most of my comrades, sir. So the offer has no attraction for me. You are welcome to the city. I shall enjoy killing a vast number of you before you take it.

If you know me well, sir, you know that I am only replenished by the work of slaughter. Sir, if you'll forgive me for repeating myself, have you the courage to accept a challenge? I would enjoy the pleasure of killing you. And the overlarge beast you ride."

At this the beast turned her head and her red eyes met my own. There was a kind of threatening mockery in her expression.

"You will have considerable difficulty killing a Duchess of Law, Prince Elric," she said. She grinned, her pale tongue lolling amongst her sharp, yellow teeth.

I returned her stare. I said, "But a wolf might kill a wolf."

She made no answer, though it seemed she was off before her rider was ready. It amused me that she chose that particular form and pretended that the man on her back was her master. Another sign of her monstrous delusion. I had ventured into supernatural realms where logic of her sort ruled. Nothing was more hideous. Even a Melnibonean could not take pleasure in the wretchedness which the likes of Miggea created. Her half-dreaming mind was scarcely aware of the consequences of her actions. She believed that she ordered and protected, that she sacrificed herself to the common good. Her knights, of course, would obey her without question. Duty and loyalty were all. Virtues unto themselves. They were as mad as she.

I began to wonder if, after all, the object of their assault was not the city? What if they only wanted my sword? What if they directed all this vast sorcery upon Tanelorn merely in order to strike a bargain with me? A bargain I had refused. And would continue to refuse.

They would never compromise me. I would hold firm against them. And ultimately I would overcome them.

For the next few days the whole besieging army withdrew to below the horizon. Life in Tanelorn returned to something approaching normal. Not a single citizen attempted to leave as there was nowhere to go. The armies of Law had retreated, but the surrounding landscape had not returned to its natural state. For as far as the eye could see were bleak ash flats relieved by grotesque columns of clinkered limestone. A landscape of petrified death. I grew increasingly miserable with just that glinting desert for a view. I began to consider taking a horse and riding out to explore this world.

At night I began to dream again of different worlds. Worlds hardly distinguishable from my own. Worlds hideously or beautifully or subtly different. I dreamed of Bek, though I did not recognize it. I dreamed of uniformed men who stole my sword and tortured me. I dreamed of battles won and lost loves, of loves won and battles lost. I dreamed of terrifying landscapes and breathtaking natural visions. I dreamed of impossible futures and possible pasts. I dreamed of Cymoril, my murdered betrothed, pleading with me as her soul-stuff poured into mine. I woke sobbing.

Moonglum, in the next room, took to wrapping his bedclothes around his ears.

I was dreaming, of course, of my past as well as my near future. I dreamed of the world I would find. The world of my nightmares made reality.

This strategy of Law's was probably merely a pause while our enemies gathered strength to crush us. We discussed the nature of our predicament but had no precedents for it. I failed in my attempts to summon any further supernatural aid. Lady Miggea obviously controlled almost everything in this realm. We were dumbfounded. We hardly knew how to counter Law. Chaos had attempted to take Tanelorn more than once, but never, as far as we knew, the forces of Order.

For some reason not one of us believed we would all die. Perhaps Tanelorn had already demonstrated her invulnerability, when the White Hunt had divided around the city. Perhaps they could not enter. Some greater force prevented them. Or, perhaps like many gods and elementals, they needed to be invited by mortal agents into mortal realms? And, strictly, Tanelorn was not in this realm.

Our speculation was of little use to us. It was impossible to anticipate Law's next move. Impossible to understand their intentions.

We made some attempt to discover the white hare, but clearly she had waited for the hullabaloo to die down and gone back to her own territory.

I confided to Moonglum that I was growing bored. If no attempt was made on the city soon, I had it in mind to ride on. He did not offer to join me. I think he had some notion that I planned to betray Tanelorn.

Then one afternoon when the sun stained the ash flats scarlet, an armored rider on a white wolf came down the hills towards Tanelorn and sat yelling before our causeway gates, demanding that I be summoned.

The swaggering silver knight had draped himself in even more gaudy silk, as if in defiance of Law's cold taste. He sat arrogantly in his saddle. The water of the moat reflected his armor. He seemed made of mercury. Still nameless.

He recognized me the moment I appeared on the eastern keep and stepped up to the battlements. He gestured elaborately. Some unknown form of greeting.

"Good morning, Prince Elric." "Good morning, Sir No Name."

Easy laughter came out of that helm, as if I'd made a rich joke. This creature used every weapon in his arsenal, including subtle flattery and charm.

This morning he presented himself as being in a bluff, com-monsensical kind of mood.

"I'll not waste your time, my lord," he said, "but as a Knight of the Balance and a servant of Law, I have come to take you up on a challenge. Hand-to-hand combat, as you said. And what's more I offer you a bargain." He had that half-belligerent tone you often hear amongst merchants and office-seekers, forever trying to sell you something you don't want or need.

"I understand those roles to be contradictory," I said mildly. While I exulted at the chance to fight him, I had, of course, become immediately suspicious of his motives. "A Knight of the Balance serves only the Balance."

"Aye," says he, almost impatiently, "that's the old thinking on it. But Chaos threatens and will engulf all unless we guard against her."

"Well," says I, "as one who serves Chaos, I can only speak for myself: I have no plans to engulf anything or anyone."

"Then you're a liar or a dupe, sir," says he.

"I've often wondered the same," I admitted easily. I knew he attempted to goad me, but there were few who could match the cruel wit of the average Melnibonean aristocrat. "What would you sell me this morning, sir?"

"If you'll grant me a little hospitality, I'll tell you over breakfast. It's not my way to speak of private matters so publicly."

"We do not have private matters here in Tanelorn, sir. It's a communal place. We bother neither with secrets nor postmortems. It is part of our way of life."

"I have no wish to disturb that way of life, sir." The wolf moved suddenly as if not entirely in agreement with her rider. "And you can easily ensure your tranquillity. I came, after all, to accept your challenge. A duel. One to one. To decide the issue. Or, if you no longer feel you wish to settle this as a matter of honor, I'll take token tribute. All I seek is that old sword you carry. Give me the runeblade and I'll take my men away. You have seen the weight of armor we can bring against you. You know you would be crushed in an hour. Wiped out of existence. A few forgotten whispers on an ancient wind. Give me the sword and you'll all be immortal. Tanelorn will remain something more than a memory."

"Metaphysical threats," I said. "I've heard them echoing out of steel helmets all my life, sir. They always have the same apocalyptic ring to them. And they're exceedingly hard to prove ..."

"There's nothing vague about my threats, sir," says the Knight of the Balance, shifting impatiently and pushing almost fussily at his errant silks. "Nothing insubstantial. They are backed by a hundred thousand lances."

"Not one of which can enter this city, I'd guess." I began to turn away. "Without being invited. You have nothing to offer me,

sir, except the boredom I seek to escape. Even your unsavory, near-senile mistress Miggea cannot stride unasked into Tanelorn. Those mortal soldiers we fought were recruited here. Most are dead. Anything supernatural still must beg to be admitted. And you, sir, have already demonstrated your belligerence. I do not believe you have any intention of fighting me fairly."

"My tone was a mistake, I'll grant you, Prince Elric. But you will find me a more reasonable Champion of Law today. Willing to meet you man-to-man. Here's what I offer: I'll fight you fairly for the sword. Should you defeat me, all Law retreats from Tanelorn and you are returned to your natural condition, the city untouched. Should I defeat you, I take the sword. And leave you to defend yourselves as best you can."

"My sword and I are bonded," I said simply, "we are one. If you held the sword she could destroy you. And eventually she would return to me. Believe me, Sir Secret, I would not have it thus by choice. But it is so. And we are full of energy now. We have feasted well on your opposition. You have made us strong."

"Then let's test the strength. You have nothing to lose. Let me in and we'll fight for all to see-in the public square."

"Fighting is forbidden in Tanelorn." I said only what he already knew.

His voice was all mellow mockery. "What forces threaten your right to fight?" The knight's tone became openly challenging. "What power nursemaids an entire metropolis? Surely you are not going to let yourself be dictated to by meaningless custom? No free man should be forbidden the right to defend his life. To carry his weapons with pride and use them when he has to. That is how we of Law think now. We have rejected the great weight of ritual and look to a cleaner, fresher, more youthful future. Your rituals and customs are rules that have lost their meaning. They are no longer connected to the harsh realities of survival. Today the battle is to the strong. To the cunning. Those who do not resist Chaos are doomed to be destroyed by it."

"But if you destroy Chaos?" I asked. "What then?"

"Then Law can control everything. The unpredictable will be banished. The numinous will no longer exist. We shall produce an ordered world, with everything in its place, and everyone in their place. We will know at last what the future brings. It is man's destiny to finish the gods' work and complete the divine symphony in which we shall all play an instrument."

In my mind I was thinking I had rarely heard such pious lunacy expressed so perfectly. Perhaps my overfondness for reading, as a child, had made me too familiar with all the old arguments used to justify the mortal lust for power. The moment the moral authority of the supernatural was invoked, you knew you were in conflict with the monumentally self-deceiving, who should not be trusted at any level.

"Man's destiny? Your destiny, I think you mean!" I leaned on the battlements like a householder enjoying a chat across the fence with his neighbor. "You have a strong sense of what is righteous, eh? You know there is only one path to virtue? One clean, straight path to infinity? We of Chaos have a less tidy vision of existence."

"You mock me, sir. But I have the means of making my vision real. I suspect that you do not."

"Neither the means nor the desire to do so, sir. I drift as the world drifts. We have no other choice. I don't doubt your power, sir. Law has driven my own allies away from this realm. All that stands between us and your total conquest of us is my sword and this city. But somehow, I know, we can defeat you. It's in the nature of those of us who serve Chaos to trust a little more to luck than you do. Luck can often be no more than the mood of a mob, running in your favor. Whatever it is, we trust to it. And in trusting to luck, we trust ourselves."

"I'm not one to argue with Melnibonean sophistry," said the Silver Knight, fussing with his fluttering scarves and flags. "The ambitions of your own patron, Duke Arioch, are well known. He would gobble the worlds, if he could." A cool, morning breeze stirred the surrounding desert. Our visitor seemed almost bound up by those long scarves. Hampered by them, yet unwilling to be rid of them. As if he could not bear the idea of wearing undecorated steel. As if he yearned for color. As if he had been denied it for an eternity. As if he clutched at it for his life. Sometimes when the sun caught his armor and the fluttering silk, he seemed to be on fire.

I knew I could defeat him in a level fight. But if the Lady Miggea helped him, it would be more difficult, perhaps impossible. She still had enormous powers, many of which I could not even predict.

There was no doubt, when I looked back on that morning, that my enemies knew me in some ways better than I knew myself. For they were playing on my impatience, on my natural boredom. I had very little to lose. Tanelorn was tired. I did not believe she could be defeated by this beribboned knight, nor even by Miggea of Law. I was anxious for the siege to end, so that I could continue about my restless and, admittedly, pointless business. I was constantly reminded of my beloved cousin Cymoril, who had died by accident as Yyrkoon and I fought. All I had wanted was Cymoril. The rest I was willing to give up to my cousin. But because Cymoril loved me, Yyrkoon needed also to possess her. And as a result of my own pride, my folly and pas-sion, and of Yyrkoon's overweening greed, she had died. Yyrkoon, too, had died, as he deserved. She had never deserved such awful violence. My instincts were to protect her. I had lost control of my sword.

I had sworn never to lose that control again. The sword's will seemed as powerful as my own sometimes. Even now, I could not be entirely sure whether the energy I felt coursing through me was mine or the blade's.

Grief, anger and desperate sadness threatened to take hold of me. Every habit of self-discipline was strained. My will battled that of the sword and won. Yet I became determined to fight this stranger.

Perhaps my mood was encouraged by a clever enemy. But it seemed that I was offering to fight him on my terms. "The she-wolf must leave," I said. "The realm-" "She cannot leave the realm."

"She can have no hand in this. She must give me the word, the holy word of Law, that the wolf will not fight me."

"Agreed," he said. "The wolf shall have no part in our fight."

I looked at the wolf. She lowered her eyes in reluctant compromise.

"What guarantee is there that you and she will keep your word?"

"The firm word of Law cannot be broken," he said. "Our entire philosophy is based on that idea. I'll not change the terms of the bargain. If you defeat me, we all leave this realm. If I defeat you, I get the sword."

"You're confident you can defeat me."

"Stormbringer will be mine before sunset. Will you fight me here? Where I stand now?" He pointed back behind him. "Or there, on the other side?"

At this I began to laugh. The old blood-madness was gripping me again. Moonglum recognized it. He came running up the steps. "My lord-this has to be a trick. It stinks of a trap. Law grows untrustworthy. Everything decays. You are too wise to let them deceive you ..."

I was grave when I put my hand on his shoulder. "Law is rigid and aggressive. Orthodoxy in its final stages of degeneration. She clings to her old ways, even as she rejects what is no longer useful to her. She'll keep her word, I'm sure."

"My lord, there is no point to this duel!"

"It might save your life, my friend. And yours is the only life I care for."

"It could bring me torment, and the same to all others in Tanelorn."

I shook my head. "If they break their word, they can no longer be representatives of Law."

"What kind of Law do they represent, even now? A Law willing to sacrifice justice for ambition." Moonglum dragged at my arm as I began to descend the steps back to the ground. "And that's what makes me doubt everything they promise. Be wary of them, my lord." He gave up trying to persuade me and fell back.

"I'll be watching for any signs of their treachery and I'll do what I can to ensure the duel's fair. But I say again-it's folly, my friend. Your mad, old blood has seized your brain again."

I was amused by this. "That mad blood has found us many ways out of trouble, friend Moonglum. Sometimes I trust it better than any logic." But I could not raise his spirits.

A dozen others, including Brut of Lashmar, begged me to be cautious. But something in me was determined to break this stalemate, to follow my blind instincts and embrace a story that was not inevitable, that took a fresh direction. I wanted to prove that it was not the working-out of some prefigured destiny. As I'd told Moonglum, this was by no means the first time I had let the old blood blaze through my veins, sing its song in me and fill my being with wild joy. If I lived, I swore it would not be the last time I felt that thrill.

I was entirely alive again. I was taking risks. My life and soul were the stakes.

I marched down the steps, shouted for the gates to be raised. Demanded that the she-wolf be gone. That the faceless knight meet me alone.

When I had put Tanelorn's walls at my back and stepped across the causeway out into that barren world, the she-wolf had vanished. I looked into a mirror. I saw my own blazing features, my glaring ruby eyes, my fine, white hair whipping about my shoulders as the wind continued to blow across the ash desert.

The dismounted knight's helm and breastplate reflected everything they faced. Seemingly an advantage in battle. It would feel as if you were fighting yourself!

The knight stood with a silvery steel broadsword in his gauntleted hands. I was disturbed by the sight of it. He had not carried it earlier. This sword was a mirror of Stormbringer in everything but color. A negative image. I could easily recognize the symbols of sorcery, and that silver sword had no magical properties to speak of. I would have smelled them. Instead it exuded a deadness, a negativity.

No sorcery. Or sorcery so subtle even I couldn't detect it? A slow chill passed through me, leaving me wary and briefly weaker.

I felt a frisson of deja vu.

Something chuckled from within the silver helm. A different note, almost a whisper.

"We act out our stories many times, Prince Elric. And occasionally we are granted the means to change them. You will understand, I hope, that in some of those stories, in some of those incarnations, you lose. In some, you die. In others, you suffer more than death."

Again that mysterious chill.

"I think this will be one of those other stories, my lord."

Then the gleaming blade was rushing down on me.

I barely blocked it in time. Stormbringer growled as she clashed with that white steel. She was expressing hatred. Or was it fear? Not a sound I had heard from her before.

I felt energy flowing out of me. With every countered blow, I found it harder to lift my sword. I peered into the silver helm as we fought but could see no hint of the features within.

I was horrified. I relied on my sword's strength to sustain my own. And now instead Stormbringer was sapping my strength. What aided this mysterious warrior? Why had I not smelled sorcery? I was clearly the victim of some supernatural force.

The knight was not an expert swordsman, as I had expected. He was rather clumsy. Yet every blow of mine was met. Only rarely did the knight feint back at me. He seemed to be playing an entirely defensive role, This, too, made me suspicious. If I had not agreed to the fight, I would have ended it there and then and returned to the city.

I was used to the wild song of my sword as I fought, but now Stormbringer merely vibrated with her blows. And those vibrations seemed feebler for every passing moment.

Moonglum had been right. I was the victim of a trap. I had no choice but to fight on.

Two more blows of mine were met by two of the knight's and then I was staggering, my knees buckling. I could barely lift my sword, which increasingly became a dead weight in my hands. I was baffled. The urgency of my movements tired me further. I had been completely outmaneuvered.

Again a low unfamiliar chuckle came from the depths of that helm.

I rallied everything I had. I tried to call on Arioch for help, but I was overwhelmed with tiredness. An unnatural tiredness. I used all my sorcerer's disciplines to bring my mind back into control over my body, but it was no use. The heavy pall of enchantment seeped through my being.

Within a few minutes of that fight beginning I lost my footing, and fell backwards onto the harsh, white ground. I saw the armored figure stoop and take Stormbringer and I was horrified. I had no means of resistance. I tried to struggle up and failed. Few could handle that sword without evil consequences, yet my opponent was casually able to pick her up. My certainties were collapsing around me. I feared I was going mad.

As my vision began to blur, I grew aware of the armored figure looking down on me, still laughing.

"Well, Prince Elric. Our bargain and our duel are settled and you are free to return to Tanelorn. We'll not harm the city, have no fear. I have what we came for."

The knight then lifted the helm for the first time. A woman looked down at me. A woman with pale, radiant features, with blond hair and glaring black eyes. A woman whose teeth were pointed, whose lips were on fire.

I knew immediately how I had been deceived. "Lady Miggea, I presume." I could barely whisper. "You gave your word. The word of Law."

"You didn't listen carefully enough. It was the wolf who swore not to fight. Your blood is wise," she said softly, "but it informs your heart, not your mind. These are urgent times. There is much at stake. Sometimes the old rules no longer sustain the reality."

"You'll not keep your word? You said you'd leave the city in peace!"

"Of course, I shall. I'll let it die of natural causes."

"What do you mean?" My words were a dry gasp. I was beginning to realize the folly of my decision. Moonglum was right. I had brought untold disaster both to myself and my world. All because I had followed wild "instinct" rather than logic. There are times when faith provides only further catastrophe.

"There's no more water in this realm. Only what you see. Nothing to sustain your gardens. Nothing for you to drink." She smiled to herself as she held up Stormbringer by the blade, clutching it in a fist which seemed to grow larger as she spoke. "Nothing to help you. No supernatural aid. You cannot return to your own realm. It took my power to bring you here and keep you here. Few are as powerful as Miggea of Law. No human aid will save you. In time you'll wither away and that will be the end of you and your stories. But I have been merciful. You'll know none of this, Prince Elric, for you will be asleep."

As my sight faded and the last of my strength went out of me, I made one last attempt to rise. "Sleep?"

Her horrid crazed face came close to mine. She pursed her lips and blew into my eyes.

And then I descended into dreaming darkness.

Chapter Thirteen The Dreamthief's Daughter

I became dimly aware of my friends from the city carrying me back. I was entirely incapable of movement, drifting in and out of an enchanted sleep, only vaguely conscious of the surrounding world, sometimes completely oblivious to it. I knew my friends, especially Moonglum, were concerned. I tried to rouse myself, to speak, but every effort took me deeper into my dreamworld.

I did not want to go deeper. I feared something there. Something which Miggea had prepared for me.

The only course open to me was the interior. Incapable of movement or communication, yet aware of my own condition, I finally let myself slip slowly down, afraid that I might never emerge again from the pit of my own complex psyche. Drowning in my own dark dreams.

The last of my will deserted me. I began to fall. Away from Tanelorn. Away from all the fresh dangers of the future. Dangers I would not be able to face without my sword. And how would the sword be used? To destroy the Balance itself? My mind was in a turmoil. Falling at last into oblivion was a relief.

I was unconscious for seconds, and then I began to dream. In my dream I saw a man clothed in rags, standing with his face turned from his own house, a book in his hand and a great bundle on his back. I wanted to ask him his name, but his eyes were filled with tears and he could not see me. For a moment I thought when

he turned towards me his face would be mine, but it was a plain, round human head. He hesitated and then began to return to his house where his wife and children waited for him, glad he had not left them. They had not seen how distressed he was. For one of my kind to feel sympathy for such ordinary souls was almost disgusting, yet I longed to help these people in their misery.

Time passed. At last I saw the man leave his house with his burden and walk away until he was out of sight. I began to follow him, but when I reached the crest of the hill he had gone. I saw a valley and in that valley a number of different battles were being fought. Men burned castles, villages and towns. They slaughtered women and children. They killed everything that lived, and then they turned on one another and began to kill again. The only road took me through this valley. Reconciled, I began my descent.

I had not gone very far, however, before a small, hunched figure jumped from a rock onto the path in front of me and, grinning, offered me an elaborate bow. He spoke to me, but I could not hear him. He became frustrated, signing and gesturing, but still I could not understand him. Eventually he took me by the hand and led me around a corner of the rock. There ahead was what seemed like an ocean, rising vertically to form a wall in front of me. Through the ocean ran a gleaming road of dappled light, like one ray of sunshine falling on water.

So strange was the perspective that I felt almost ill. Yet the crooked little man continued to lead me until we had stepped onto that dappled road and were walking up its steep surface. I had the strong smell of ozone in my nostrils. The road then straightened and became a silver moonbeam in a complex lattice of moonbeams, like the roadways through the realms. My guide was gone.

I was alarmed. At the same time I realized I had a feeling of physical well-being. I had never known it before. I had only ever experienced pain or relief from pain, but never a body that did not know pain at all. All my life I had had to deal with some weakness, either physical or moral. Now I began to feel fresh, elated, even relaxed. Yet I knew that in reality I had no physical body at all, that it was only my dreaming soul which wandered these worlds of enchantment.

The conflicting emotions within me did nothing to help my condition. I did not know if this was part of Miggea's trap. I did not know which path to choose. I looked up into all that vast complexity and I saw a million roads, each one like a ray of light, on which creatures of every kind walked. I knew that there was no such thing as a multiversal vacuum, that every apparently empty space was populated. I saw the roadways as branches of a great silver tree, whose roots somehow went deep down into my own brain. I knew that this was the fundamental structure of the multiverse. I decided, in spite of recent experience, to trust my instincts and to follow a small branch running off a more substantial limb.

I set foot on the pale road and it gave slightly to my step. It made walking a pleasure. In no time I had passed half a dozen branches, heading for my chosen path. But as I did so, I realized that the weave of the branches was more complicated than I had originally seen. I found myself in a tangle of minor brambles, which blocked my way and which I could not easily push aside. My body felt so light, so insubstantial that there was no danger of my breaking the branches. It seemed to me that tiny figures moved along other branches, just as I moved along mine.

Eventually I found ways of passing through the branches so that I disturbed very little. I had the impression that somewhere up there might be another creature, far bigger than myself, perhaps a version of myself, who was carefully trying to avoid knocking me from my branch.

At one point I paused. I was no longer dressed in my ordinary clothes but wore full Melnibonean war armor. Not the elaborate baroque of ceremonial plate, but the efficient, blade-turning protection a man needed in battle. I had no sense of weight to the armor, any more than there was to my body. I half assumed I had died and become some kind of wandering ghost. If I remained here for a long time, I would gradually grow amorphous and merge with the atmosphere, breathed in like dust by the living.

Having lost my original direction, I found myself wandering down increasingly narrow and twisting branches. I thought I must soon step upon the last twig at the farthest edge of the multiver' sal tree. I was beginning to despair when I saw that the track led through a tunnel formed of willow boughs. On the other side of that tunnel was a weirdly shaped cottage, thatched with the straw of centuries, its bricks apparently borrowed from every source in existence, its windows at peculiar angles and of odd sizes, its door narrow and tall, its chimneys fantastically curled. From the roof of the small porch hung several baskets of blooming flowers and a birdcage. Under the birdcage sat a black and white sheepdog, her tongue lolling as if she had just come in from a day's work.

The pleasant pastoral scene made me oddly wary. I had become used to traps and delusions. My enemies seemed to enjoy making promises they had no intention of keeping, as if they had just discovered the power of the lie. If this image were a lie, it was a clever one. Everything looked perfect, including the plume of smoke coming from the chimney, the smell of baking, the domestic clatter from within.

I glanced back. Behind me, dwarfing everything, was the mul-tiverse. Its great lattice filled all the myriad dimensions, its branches stretched into infinity. And its light shone down on this little cottage which sat exactly on the edge of the abyss, a great dark wood behind it. I tried to move forward and to my astonishment had some difficulty. The armor was heavy. My body, though feeling fit, was weary. In an instant I had become full corporeal!

I opened the gate of the cottage and dragged myself up the slate path to knock on the door. I remembered to remove my helmet. It was an awkward thing to carry under one's arm, all angles and filigree.

"Come in, Prince Elric," called a cheerful young voice. "You have trustworthy instincts, it seems."

"Sometimes, madam." I passed through the narrow doorway and found myself in a low-ceilinged room with black beams and white plaster. On the floor was luxurious carpet and on the walls were tapestries, living masterpieces showing every manner of human experience. I was astonished at the opulence, which seemed in contrast to the domestic atmosphere.

A young woman came from the next room, evidently the kitchen, wiping flour from her hands and arms. The powder fell in a silvery shower to the rich maroon carpet. She sniffed and then sneezed, apologizing. "I have waited for you for what seems an eternity, my lord."

I could not speak. I looked at one of my own kind. She had extraordinary, aquiline beauty, with slanting eyes and delicate, small, slightly pointed ears. Her eyes were red as fresh strawberries in a skin the color of bleached ivory. Her long, bone-white hair fell in soft folds down over her shoulders. She wore a simple shirt and breeches, over which she had thrown a rough linen apron. And she was laughing at me.

"My friend Jermays put you on the right road, I see."

"Who was that little man?"

"You'll meet him again in time, perhaps."

"Perhaps."

"We all do. Often when our stories start to alter. Sometimes one's destiny changes radically. A new tale is born. A new myth to weave in with the old. A new dream."

"I am dreaming this. I am dreaming you. Therefore I am dreaming this conversation. Does this mean that I am mad? Has the enchantment which holds me in sleep also attacked my brain?"

"Oh, we all dream one another, Prince Elric, in some ways. It is our dreams and our demands upon them which have made us so various and at odds with so much and so many."

The young woman even had gestures which I recognized.

"Would you do me the honor, madam, of telling me your name."

"I'm called White Hare Sister by the dreamthieves and shapechangers amongst whom I was raised. But my mother calls me Oona, after the custom of her folk." "Her name is Gone?"

"Oone the Dreamthief. And I am Oona, the dreamthief's daughter. And Oonagh will be my daughter's name." "Oone's daughter?" I hesitated. "And mine?" She was laughing openly now as she came towards me. "I think it likely, don't you?"

"I did not know there was-issue."

"Oh, quite spectacular 'issue,' I assure you, Father."

The word struck at me with the force of a tidal wave. Father! An emotional blow worse than any sword stroke. I wanted to deny it, to say anything which would prove me to be dreaming. To make this fact disappear. But my eyes could not deceive me. Everything about her showed that she was my daughter and Oone's. I had loved Oone briefly. We had sought the Fortress of the Pearl together. But as I remembered this, another thought occurred to me. More deception!

"Not enough time has passed," I said. "You are too old to be my daughter."

"In your plane, perhaps, my lord, but not on this one. Time is not a road. It's an ocean. I believe you and my mother celebrated your friendship here in this realm."

I liked her irony.

"Your mother-?" I began.

"Her interests are no longer in these worlds, although she occasionally visits the End of Time, I understand."

"She gave birth to you here?"

"I was one of twins, she said."

"Twins?"

"So she told me."

"Your sibling died?"

"My twin didn't die when we were born. But something happened which mother could not explain, and I was soon separated from my sibling. Gone. Gone. My mother's words. I know nothing else."

"You seem very casual about your twin's fate."

"Reconciled, my lord. I thought, until recently, you had found that twin to raise as your own, but, of course, I now know that is not the case." She turned urgently, disappearing back into the kitchen. The smell of greenberry pie came to me in a single, delicious wave. I had forgotten the simple pleasures of human life.

Because this was a dream I saw nothing strange about being invited to sit down at a kitchen table and enjoy a meal of good, new bread, fresh-churned butter, some chandra and a bottle of goldfish sauce, with the prospect of the pie, and perhaps a puff of glas to complete my pleasure.

Not once, for all the trickeries of Law, did I further suspect this young woman. Nor the sense of sanctuary which came from her cottage. It was impossible. I knew she was of my blood. If she had been a lie, a shape-changing creature of Chaos, I should have guessed it immediately.

Yet a voice in the back of my mind told me I had not smelled sorcery when Law had so successfully defeated me and essentially committed me to my present fate. Had I lost my powers? Was I only now beginning to realize it? Was this another illusion to steal what was left of my soul?

My temperament was such that I could not go cautiously. Nothing was to be gained from caution. I had few choices in this extraordinary cottage at the center of the silvery matrix of moonbeams.

"So you have no idea what became of your sister?"

"My sister?" She smiled. "Oh, no, my dear father. It was not my sister. It was my brother we lost."

"Brother?" Something in me shuddered. Something else exulted. "My son?"

"Maybe it's as well you did not know, my lord. For if he is dead, as I suspect, then you would be grieving now."

I reflected that I had only known I had a son for a few seconds. I was in shock. It would be a moment or two before I came to the grieving stage!

I looked wonderingly at my daughter. My feelings were both direct and complex. On an impulse which would have shocked and disgusted a Melnibonean, I stepped forward and embraced her. She returned my embrace awkwardly, as if she, too, was not used to such customs, She seemed pleased. "So you are a dreamthief," I said.

She shook her head fiercely. I saw a dozen honest emotions flit across her features. "No. I am a dreamthief's child. I have the experience and some of the skills, but not the vocation. In fact, to tell you the truth, Father, I'm somewhat divided. Part of my character vaguely disagrees with the morality of Mother's profession." "Well, your mother was of great help to me when we sought the Fortress of the Pearl together." I myself was overfamiliar with matters of moral and emotional division.

"It is one of the few adventures she retold. She was unusually fond of you, given the number of lovers she has known down the centuries and over the whole of the time field. I suspect you are the only one by whom she had children." "Special affection or special resentment?" "She bore you no ill will, sir. Far from it. She spoke of you with pleasure. She spoke of you as a great warrior. As a brave and courteous knight of the limits. She told me you would have made the most gorgeous dreamthief of them all. That was her own special dream, I think. What do you think dreamthieves dream of most, Father?"

"Perhaps of dreamless sleep," I said. I was still surprised by the discovery of my child. A child whose beauty was stunning and whose character seemed, as far as I could tell, complex and full of intelligence. A child who had brought me here to her little Earth on the very edge of time. Her birthplace, she told me as we ate.

The forest, which looked threatening to me, she assured me was full of amiable wonders. She had enjoyed a perfect childhood, she said. The forest and the cottage were protected in some way, much as Tanelorn was protected, from the rapacity of either Law or Chaos. The place was far from lonely. Many of her mother's friends traveled between the worlds, as she did, and they loved nothing better than bringing back stories to tell in the evening around the fire.

When she was fifteen, she had gone with her mother to those worlds where Oone intended to retire, but she had not liked them. She decided to find her own vocation. Meanwhile she, too, would wander the myriad realms of the multiverse for a time. To give her travels some purpose, she tried to discover if her brother were still alive, but the only albino she heard of was her father, the feared and hated Elric of Melnibone. She had felt no great desire to meet him.

Then, later, she had discovered others. A bloodline, of sorts, which she was still trying to trace. She hoped this might provide a better means of finding her brother. She believed he had settled in one particular realm, similar to the kind her mother favored. Not only had he settled there, he had absorbed himself in his host culture, married and produced offspring.

I was feeling older by the moment. While I could grasp the notion of time having passed in different ways in different realms, it was still hard for me, a relatively young man, to see myself as the patriarch of generations. The responsibility alone made me uncomfortable. I felt a certain wariness overcome me, and I wondered if this were not part of Law's complicated deception, part of some greater cosmic plot in which I played a minor role. I again began to feel like a pawn in a game. A game the gods played merely to while away their boredom.

This thought fired me to quiet anger. If that were the case, I would do everything I could to defeat their plans.

I called you here, Father, not from curiosity, but out of urgency. I know how you were duped. And why." She seemed to sense my mood. "Miggea and her minions threaten Tanelorn and several other realms, including the one inhabited by your descendants."

"A race resembling Melnibone's?"

"Resembling their last emperor, at any rate. Fighting the same forces we both fight, sir. They are our natural allies. And there is one who can help us defeat Law."

"Madam," I said with every courtesy, "you are aware perhaps that beyond this realm I have no true physical form. I am a shade. A ghost. Outside this environment I am a spirit. I am, madam, as good as dead. I could not hold a cup if it were not for whatever temporary physicality you or this place has bestowed on me. My body lies in a deep, unwakable slumber in the doomed city of Tanelorn, while Miggea, Duchess of Law, now holds the Black Sword and can do with it whatever she likes. I am defeated, madam. I have failed in every venture. I am a dream within a dream. All this can be nothing but dream. A useless, pointless dream."

"Well," she said, picking up the dishes, "one person's dream is another's reality."

"Platitudes, madam."

"But truths, too," she said. A kind of confident stillness had come upon her as she undid her apron and hung it up. "Well, Father, are you pleased to see me?"

Her eyes, humorous and inquiring, looked frankly into mine. I began to smile. "I believe I must be," I said. "Though no royal Melnibonean would admit it."

"Well," she said, "I am glad I am not a royal Melnibonean." "I'm the last of those," I said, "or so I understand." "Aye," she said, "that seems to be the truth. Melnibone falls, but the blood continues. Ancient blood. Ancient memory."

"Forgive me if I seem brusque," I said, "but I understood you to say, Lady Oona, that you guided me here as a matter of some urgency." I could not bring myself to address her informally.

"With my skill I can help you, Father," she said. "I can help you get your sword back and possibly even be revenged on the one who stole it from you."

Again, I should have suspected a trick, but my daughter convinced me completely. I knew that this entire episode could be a development of the same enchantment under which Law had put me. But it seemed I had no other course of action to take. I had to trust her or remain frozen on my couch in Tanelorn, unable to

retrieve my sword or claim vengeance on the one who had stolen it.

"You know the future?" I challenged.

She replied quietly, "I know more than one."

She explained how the multiverse is made up of millions of worlds, each only a shade different from our own. In each of those worlds certain people struggle eternally for justice. Sometimes for Law. Sometimes for Chaos. Sometimes simply for equilibrium. Most people do not know that other versions of themselves are struggling, too. Each story is a little different. And very occasionally a major change can be made to the story. Sometimes their strengths can be combined. Which was exactly what we hoped to achieve through my daughter's extraordinary strategy.

She believed it was possible for two or more avatars to occupy the same body, if the body was of like blood. I needed a physical body and a physical sword. She believed she had found both.

She told me of von Bek, of his blade and his own fight against corrupted authority. She said she believed our fates were intertwined at this particular configuration of the cosmic realms. He and I were both avatars of the same being. I could help him, and he could help me, by lending me his body and his sword.

I said that I had to think.

Dreamlessly, perhaps because I now lived a dream, I rested at Oona's cottage on time's borderlands in the so-called Mittelmarch. While I rested, my daughter taught me more of the dreamthief's secrets. How to travel the roads between the realms. The realms we thought supernatural but which were perfectly mundane to their inhabitants. She had her mother's library and was able to show me old tales, current scientific ideas, the theories of philosophers, all of which spoke of dreams as being glimpses of other times and places. Some of them understood what Oona understood-that the worlds of our dreams have physical reality and cannot be easily manipulated, that each one of us has a version of themselves in all these billions of alternative worlds and that somehow all our actions are interlinked to make a grander cosmic whole whose scale is inconceivable, a pattern of order which we either support or threaten, depending on our loyalties and ambitions.

One morning, looking at a book of watercolors done by an ancestor of Oona's, I asked my daughter if she really believed that somehow we might dream one another. Did we exist entirely as a result of our own wills? Did we bring ourselves and our worlds into reality because of some mighty desire, stronger than the physical universe? Or was it possible we had already created the universe? The multiverse, even. Was the great tree something which mortals had nurtured until it was no longer in their control?

If so, had we also created the gods, the Cosmic Balance, the elementals? I could not bring myself to believe that. It would suggest we had forged our own chains, as well as creating the means of our salvation! It would mean that the gods were just symbols of our own strengths, weaknesses and desires!

I offered this speculation to my daughter, but she dismissed it. She had heard it all too often. There was little point to it, she seemed to say. We are here. Whatever the causes or the reasons, we now exist and have to make the best of it. She reminded me of her purpose in bringing me here.

"Once you are free," she said, "you will be able to do everything you could do before. In Mu Ooria you will not be blocked from your elemental allies. Von Bek has one of Stormbringer's manifestations. He is the only way you can recover your own blade. With von Bek's help, you might get your sword back and save Tanelorn. I will help you as best I can, but my powers are limited. I have my mother's skills, but not her temperament."

The next morning I stood beside her as she locked her door and gave last instructions to her dog and bird, who listened intelligently.

"No." She turned to me as if we were going on a family out- • ing to the country. "We'll take the moonbeam roads which will lead us to the heart of the multiverse. To the Grey Fees. And thence to Moo Uria, dear Father, and your continuing destiny."

The Grey Fees? I shall not attempt to describe that place which is, most believe, the origin of all things, the fundamental stuff of the multiverse, misty fields where you glimpse ribbons of basic matter creating cryptic arabesques, perpetually writhing and pulsing, forming and re-forming, becoming whole worlds, dissipating again, and, perhaps most bizarrely, inhabited by mad adventurers with loyalty neither to Law nor to Chaos, only to their own idiosyncratic mathematics. Amiable enough fellows, and magnificently intelligent, able to sail anywhere in the multiverse by means of "scale ships" but warped by their environment in mind and body. We avoided these Lords and Ladies of Sublime Disorder whenever possible, Even they were aware that some great disaster threatened us all. That Law had gone mad.

The Chaos Engineers guided us through the bewildering Grey Fees to the terrifying world of the Nazis. Thereafter, I was with von Bek most of the time, though he could rarely see me. I became his guardian angel; his life was very important to me. By following Oona's instructions I was able to help my doppelganger von Bek in the camps and later in the caverns of Mu Ooria, where I discovered that what my daughter had said was true. It was possible to blend my own substance with von Bek's.

My powers had some small potency even before I bonded with von Bek. But with von Bek to help, they were now completely restored. We were more than the sum of our parts. We were stronger when we came together although it was not easy to achieve the bonding or to make it last.

I tried more than once to merge with him but either he had resisted or the time had not been right. Twice I almost succeeded, but lost him again. Eventually, when he needed my help most and was prepared to accept what I could offer him, I stepped into his body, just as Oona had taught me, and immediately we became the single creature I have already described. I merged with him, blending his skills and character with my own. And now I had the benefit of von Bek's wisdom and swordsmanship. That was how I had been able to return to Tanelorn. That was the only possible way to thwart the enchantment put upon me.

There was precious little time. Although we had returned rapidly, Lady Miggea and her knights could have left this world and, with Stormbringer to help them, even now be conquering Mu Ooria.

Brut gave us his best horses. Moonglum and I rode out of Tanelorn onto those unforgiving ash flats whose sentinels of limestone were a constant reminder of our mortality. On Oona's advice and my own impulse, determined to achieve the impossible, we were going hunting.

Hunting for a goddess.

Chapter Fourteen Fresh Treacheries

A deep chill had settled on this world. Nothing was alive. When the breeze stirred the ash drifts or flaked the crags so it seemed to snow, a complete absence of vitality was evident in the landscape.

Miggea's was no ordinary desert. It was all that remained of a world destroyed by Law. Barren. No hawks soared in the pale blue sky. There were no signs of animal life. Not an insect. Not a reptile. No water. No lichen. No plants of any kind. Just tall spikes of crystallized ash and limestone, crumbling and turned into crazy shapes by the wind, like so many grotesque gravestones.

Law's cold hand had fallen on everything. Law achieved this desolation at her worst. This tidiness of death. Mankind inevitably achieves the same when it seeks to control too much.

Moonglum had insisted on accompanying me and I had not refused. Unusually, I felt the need for company. Moonglum's comradeship was something I valued. He recognized when I was at my most negative, my most self-pitying, and would say something sardonic to remind me of my stupidity. He was also a brilliant swordsman, who had fought sorcerers as well as soldiers, the steadiest man to have at one's side in any kind of fight.

As we rode, I tried to explain to my somewhat repulsed friend how I was now two people-two entirely different identities but of the same blood, locked together in one near-identical body. By this combination we had thwarted Lady Miggea's enchantment. By entering the world of dreams and finding an alternative version of myself.

All this made my friend very uncomfortable. "Two people warring inside you?" He shuddered. "To be joined physically, by the head, say, is one thing. But to be joined in the mind! Forever in conflict..."

"We are not in conflict," I explained. "We are one. Just as, say, a playwright will invent a character and that character will live within him, quite comfortably. So it is with von Bek and myself. Where his world is the most familiar, he will take the ascendancy, but here, within an environment I understand a little better, I am in command. We have shared memories also-the entire creature from birth to present. And believe me, my friend, there is less conflict between von Bek and myself than there is between me and myself!"

"That's easy enough to believe, my lord," said Moonglum, staring with half-seeing eyes out at the forest of stones.

We could ride only so far without water. We had large canteens, enough to last for several days, but no certainty that any of our enemies were still here. Indeed, Lady Miggea had a use for the sword, no doubt as part of her plans for further conquest. All we could do was follow the faint trails marked by her army, hoping they had left some clue behind that would lead us to discover where she had gone with my sword.

The sky was a stark eggshell blue. We had no means of keeping our direction except by noting the shapes of the different rocks we passed, hoping to recognize them on our return.

Less than a day from the city we began to descend into a wide shallow valley which stretched for several miles on all sides. When we were halfway down and rounding a great bulk of tattered rock, we saw some distance ahead of us a grotesque building, clearly the work of intelligent beings, but reeking of mad cruelty.

Dry wind whispered through a palace built of bones. Many of those bones still had rotting flesh clinging to them: The bones of horses. The bones of men. From the evidence, the bones of all those Knights of Law who had so recently threatened us. Who had thundered so forcefully past us in pursuit of the little white hare. Their silver armor was scattered around the building, thousands of breastplates, helmets, greaves, gauntlets. Their lances and swords lay half-buried in the pale ash. Miggea had expected the ultimate sacrifice from her loyal followers, and she had received it.

But what had she built her fortress against?

Or was it a fortress? Did it now function as a prison?

As we drew nearer, the wind began to sough more miserably than ever through those half-picked bones, turning to a mournful howling that filled the world with despair. We slowed our horses and moved more cautiously, searching the low surrounding hills for the sight of wolves. There were none.

We moved closer to the towering palace of bones. Keeps and domes and battlements and buttresses were shaped from the recently living bodies of men and horses from which strips of flesh and fur and linen fluttered like banners in the erratic wind. And the terrible howling continued. All the grief in all the realms of the multiverse. All the frustration. All the despair. All the wounded

ambition.

So dense were the bones packed to form the walls of the palace that we could not see inside. But we thought we saw a movement behind the palace. A solitary figure. Perhaps an illusion.

"The bowling's coming from inside the bones, my lord." Moonglum cocked his head to one side. "From deep within that house of bones. Listen."

He was better able to locate the source of sounds than I, though my hearing was more acute. I had no reason to disbelieve him.

Whatever was howling was either trapped in the bone palace or was defending it. Was Miggea still here, still in the shape of a wolf? That would explain the howling and also the frustration. What could have thwarted her plans?

Again we glimpsed movement, this time from within the palace, as if something paced back and forth. We moved closer still until the vast construction loomed over us. And now we could smell it. Sweet, cloying, horrible, It stank of rotting flesh.

We hesitated before the great central entrance. Neither of us had any desire to confront what was within.

Then, as we made up our minds to dismount and enter, another human figure came around one of the bone buttresses. Colored rags still clung to him. He carried a sword in either hand. Leaf-bladed broadswords. One was a shade of diseased ivory with black runes running its length. The other was Stormbringer, all pulsing black iron and scarlet runes.

The man who bore them was Prince Gaynor of Mirenburg. He was wearing a mirror breastplate over the torn remains of his SS uniform.

He was laughing heartily.

Until I drew my Ravenbrand.

Then his breath hissed from him. He looked about, as if for allies or enemies, then he faced me again. He forced a grin.

"I did not know there was a third sword," he said. I could see from his eyes that he was attempting a new calculation.

"There is no third sword," I told him, "or second sword. You are disingenuous, cousin. There is only one sword. And you have stolen it. From your mistress, eh?"

He looked down at both hands. "I seem to have two swords, cousin."

"One, as you know, is a farun, a false sword, forged to attract the properties of the original and absorb them. It can steal the souls of men as well as swords. It's a kind of mirror, which absorbs the essence of the thing it most resembles. No doubt Miggea made it for you. Only a noble of the Higher Worlds can forge such a thing. Foolishly I did not anticipate such elaborate conjuring.

"That was how you two tricked Elric. And were able to capture first my energy, then the power of my blade and then the blade itself. I name your second sword 'Deceiver' and demand you return its stolen power. You defeated me by trickery, cousin, with words and illusions."

"You always were too wild-blooded, cousin. I relied on you being unable to resist a challenge."

"I shall not be foolish again," I said.

"We'll see, cousin. We'll see." He was eyeing Ravenbrand. Looking from it to Stormbringer, as if alarmed by what might happen if the two should meet in battle. "You say there's only one sword, yet-"

"Only one," I agreed.

He understood the implications of my words. While he had not studied as I had and did not possess my skills or learning, he had masters whose casual knowledge was far more profound than all my wisdom. Yet he was impressed. His answering grimace was almost admiring. "Powerful sorcery," he said. "And clever strategy. You've had unanticipated help, eh?"

"If you say so, cousin." I was reluctant to use the blade. I had no idea what the consequences might be. I had a sense of extraordinary supernatural movement all around me, unseen, not yet expressed. An imminence of sorcery. It was easy, in that atmosphere, to feel little more than a desperate pawn in a vast game played by the Lords of the Higher Worlds, who some said were also ourselves at our most powerful and least sane. I took control of myself. Slowly, with all the habits of discipline learned from Bek as well as Melnibone, I extended my mind to include as many of the supernatural realms as I could, sensing unexpected friends as well as mighty enemies.

Gaynor's answer was drowned by a vast, mournful howl from within the palace of bones. He laughed richly in response. "Oh, she is an unhappy goddess," he said jubilantly. "Such a sad old she-wolf. A prisoner of her own forces. A pretty irony, eh, cousin?"

"You did this to her?"

"I arranged it, cousin. Even I cannot control a Duchess of the Distance, a Denizen of the Higher Worlds." He paused, as if with modesty. "I only helped. In a small way."

"Helped what? Whom?"

"Her old enemy," he said. "Duke Arioch of Chaos."

"You serve Law! Arioch is my patron!"

"Sometimes these alliances are convenient," he said, shrugging. "Duke Arioch is a reasonable fellow, for a Lord of Hell. When it became evident that my patroness was no longer in charge of her sanity, I simply made a bargain with that Master of Entropy to deliver my erstwhile mistress into his keeping. Which I shall do as soon as I can deliver her to him. Tricking her, Prince Elric, was even easier than tricking you. The poor creature is senile. She has lost all judgment. She brought no honor to her cause. Only defeat. I had to save the good name of Law. It was time she sought dignified retirement. Her followers were no longer useful to her. And so they became her home. She believed she was going to the Isle of Morn ..."

"She doesn't seem to appreciate it greatly," said Moonglum. "Indeed she appears to be acting as if you have imprisoned her."

"It's for her own good,'' said Gaynor. "She was becoming a danger to herself, as well as to others."

"Such a high moral purpose," I said. "And meanwhile you steal from her the sword she fought me for."

"The plan was mine and the sword is mine," he said. "Only the magic was hers."

He held the white sword by the hilt and stripped off the last of his colored scarves, as if he had no further need of them.

"Her ambitions were unrealistic. I, on the other hand, am the ultimate realist. And soon I shall have everything I have sought. All the old, mystic treasures of our ancestors. All the great objects of power. All the legendary treasures of our race. Everything that guarantees us victory and security for the next thousand years. Herr Hitler's time will soon be over. He'll be recognized as the flawed knight, my precursor."

He gave me a mad, knowing look, as if I were the only creature who could possibly understand his intelligence and the logic of his ambition.

"I shall prove their Parsifal. Their true Führer. For by then I will have the sword and the cup, and I will be able to show the world proof of my destiny to rule. All Christendom, East and West, will rally to my banner. Arioch has promised me this. I shall have no challengers, for my power shall be both temporal and spiritual. I will become the true blood leader of the Teutonic peoples, cleansing the world in the name of our holy discipline. Then the Golden Age will begin. The Age of the Greater Reich."

I was familiar with such nonsense. I had heard a hundred like him in those years before and after Hitler ascended to the chancellorship. For all his bombast, he seemed to be playing a tyro's game. Such games often progress rapidly, whether in chess or with worlds for stakes, because of the very lack of sense behind their strategies. They can't be anticipated or countered logically. They eventually doom themselves and are always overcome. I was far more interested in what he had said earlier. "How," I asked him, "did you strike a bargain with my own patron, Arioch of Chaos?"

"Miggea was no longer trustworthy and therefore no longer useful to my plans. For an eternity Arioch has yearned for vengeance on his old enemy. I sought him out and offered to help him reach this plane. He could do so only with human agency. He agreed happily to the bargain and trapped her here. She cannot leave. For she has no one left to help her. Should you attempt to free her, you will be betraying your trust, flaunting the will of your patron demon." He raised his voice in malevolent glee, to be heard by his prisoner as well as by me.

Once more the air was filled with that terrible howling.

Furious, I raised my black sword and spurred my horse towards my cousin.

He began to laugh at me again. Standing his ground as I rode down on him.

"One other thing I forgot to mention, cousin." He crossed the two blades in front of him, as if for protection against me. "I am no longer part of your dream."

The blades formed an X as a strange yellow and black light began to pulse from them, half blinding me so that I could no longer see Gaynor clearly. I held up one hand to shade my eyes,

my sword ready. But he had become a rapidly moving shadow, racing away from me with violent light flickering all around him. He passed between two great crags and disappeared.

I spurred after him around the great bone palace while the she-wolf kept up her perpetual howling, and I almost caught him. Again the two swords were crossed and again they fluttered with that confusing black and yellow light.

Blinded by the light, deafened by the howling, I once more lost sight of Gaynor. I heard Moonglum yelling something. I looked around for my friend but could not see him. More shadows ran back and forth in front of me.

The horse balked, reared and began to whinny. I tried to control him but only barely managed to get him steadied. He was still uneasy, shifting his feet and snorting. Then there was an explosion of silver, soft, all-engulfing, narcotic. And a sudden silence.

I knew Gaynor was gone.

After a while, the she-wolf began her howling again.

Moonglum suggested that I summon Arioch. "It is the one move you can make to allow us to pursue Gaynor. Arioch can come and go as he pleases here now. Miggea's power no longer opposes his."

When I pointed out that Arioch habitually demanded a blood sacrifice as the price of his summoning and that he, Moonglum, was the only other living mortal soul in the vicinity, my friend put his mind to alternative schemes for our salvation.

I suggested that rather than remain and listen to Miggea's eternal lament, we should return to Tanelorn and seek the advice of the citizens. Should a blood sacrifice still be necessary, at least I could kill an exiled witch-lawyer and win easy popularity with the majority.

So we turned our horses, hoping to reach the city by dark.

By nightfall, however, we were hopelessly lost. As we feared, it had been impossible to tell one pillar of ash from another. The wind recarved them by the moment.

With some relief, therefore, a few hours later, with the stars our only light, we heard someone calling our names. I recognized it at once. My daughter's voice. Oona had found us. I congratulated myself on the intelligence of my relatives.

Then I thought again. This could be another deception. I cautioned Moonglum to ride forward carefully in case of a trap.

In the starlight, reflecting the glittering desert, I saw the silhouette of a woman on foot, bow and arrows slung over her shoulder. I had begun to guess that Oona had a more supernatural means of traveling than by horseback.

Once again I was looking at her intensely.

Her white skin had a warmth to it which my own lacked. Her soft hair glowed. She had much of her mother in her, a natural vitality I had never enjoyed. I had admired, respected and loved Oone the Dreamthief for a brief time when our paths had crossed. We had risked our lives and our souls in a common cause. And we had grown to love and ultimately lust for each other. But this feeling for my daughter was a different, deeper emotion.

I felt a peculiar pride in Oona, a gladness that she so resembled her mother. I imagined that her human characteristics sat better than those of her Melnibonean ancestry. I hoped she had less conflict in her than did I. I suppose I envied her, too. It could be, of course, that all of us were doomed eternally to conflict, but maybe Fate granted a few a little more tranquillity than others. What I chiefly felt, even in these dangerous circumstances, was a quiet affection, a sense that whatever virtues I had were being passed by my blood from one soul to another. That perhaps my vices had atrophied and been lost from the blood.

Surging up from the ancient layers of my breeding came the utterly Melnibonean response to one's children, to cut off all feelings of affection lest they weaken us both, to turn away from them. I resisted both impulses. My self-discipline was constantly being tested, constantly being tempered and retempered.

"I thought you had again fallen prey to Gaynor." She sounded relieved. "I know he was here until a short while ago."

I told her what had happened to Miggea. I spoke grimly of Gaynor's trick with the swords, his escape. I cursed him for a traitor, betraying his mistress to my patron, Duke Arioch. Whom he would doubtless betray as well, should it suit him.

At this Oona began to laugh heartily. "How thoroughly he behaves according to type," she said. "There is no hope for that poor soul. No redemption. He races towards his damnation. He embraces it. Betrayal is becoming a habit with him. Soon it will become an addiction and he will be wholly lost. Declaring it mere common sense, he betrays Law in the name of the Balance and betrays the Balance in the name of Entropy. Inevitably he will betray Arioch. And then what a sad renegade he will be. For the moment, admittedly, he achieves a certain power."

"Then there is no defeating him," I said. "He will destroy Mu Ooria and then his own world."

She held my reins as I dismounted. Somewhat awkwardly, I embraced her. She seemed in good spirits. "Oh," she said, "I think we still have a good chance of thwarting Gaynor's ambition."

Moonglum began to grin. "You're an optimist, my lady, I'll say that. You must own a strong belief in the power of luck."

"Indeed I do," she agreed, "but I think we'd be wiser for the moment to rely upon the power of dreams. I shall visit the imprisoned goddess while you make haste for Tanelorn. You are free to inhabit your own form now, Father, and leave poor Count von Bek the privacy and sanctity of his overworked body."

With that she loped off the way we had come and was soon out of sight. The sun began to pour its scarlet light over the forlorn horizon. It revealed in the distance the gables and turrets of our doomed, beloved Tanelorn.

Riding out to greet us was as odd a group of warriors as I had seen. The leader was Fromental, still in his Foreign Legion uniform. Behind him rode the three beastly lords Bragg, Blare and Bray, while on all fours, and looking a little odd in all his fineries, trotted Lord Renyard. He was the first to greet us. They had heard of our quest and had come to aid us.

I told them of our adventures and suggested we all turn back to Tanelorn for some food and rest, but that motley party was adamant. They had come all the way from the Stones of Morn to settle with Gaynor. They could find a way to follow him. Perhaps Miggea would help them.

Resignedly I gave them directions and wished them good fortune. My purpose was to save Tanelorn, not pursue Gaynor, but I had no objection if they wished to take their revenge on him. My thoughts were elsewhere.

Soon it would be time for me to return to my own body and allow von Bek to make what he could of his destiny in our fight against the common enemy.