Elric in the Dream Realms - Michael Moorcock [103]
And the albino began to grin his horrible battle-grin, and his red eyes blazed and his face was the skull of Death and his sword was the vengeance of his own people, the vengeance of the Bauradim and all those who had suffered under the injustice of Quarzhasaat over the millennia.
And he offered up the souls he took to his patron Duke of Hell, the powerful Duke Arioch who had grown sleek on many lives dedicated to him by Elric and his black blade.
“Arioch! Arioch! Blood and souls for my lord Arioch!”
Then the true slaughter began.
It was a slaughter to make all other events pale into insignificance. It was a slaughter that would never be forgotten in all the annals of the desert peoples, who would learn of it from those who fled Quarzhasaat that night—flinging themselves into the waterless desert rather than face the white laughing demon on a Bauradi horse who galloped up and down their lovely streets and taught them what the price of complacency and unthinking cruelty could be.
“Arioch! Arioch! Blood and souls!”
They would speak of a white-faced creature from hell whose sword poured with unnatural radiance, whose crimson eyes blazed with hideous rage, who seemed possessed, himself, of some supernatural force, who was no more master of it than were his victims. He killed without mercy, without distinction, without cruelty. He killed as a mad wolf kills. And as he killed, he laughed.
That laughter would never leave Quarzhasaat. It would remain on the wind which came in from the Sighing Desert, in the music of the fountains, the clang of the metal-workers’ and jewelers’ hammers as they fashioned their wares. And so would the smell of blood remain, together with the memory of slaughter, that terrible loss of life which left the city without a Council and an army.
But never again would Quarzhasaat foster the legend of her own power. Never again would she treat the desert nomads as less than beasts. Never again would she know that self-destructive pride so familiar to all great empires in decline.
And when the slaughter was finished, Elric of Melniboné slumped in his saddle, sheathing a sated Stormbringer, and he gasped with the demon power which still pulsed through him and he took a great pearl from his belt and held it to the rising sun.
“They have paid a fair price now, I think.”
He tossed the thing into a gutter where a little dog licked congealing blood.
Above, the vultures, called from a thousand miles around by the prospect of memorable feasting, were beginning to drop like a dark cloud upon the beautiful towers and gardens of Quarzhasaat.
Elric’s face held no pride in his achievements as he spurred his horse for the west and the place on the road where he had told Anigh to await them with enough Kwani herbs, water, horses and food to cross the Sighing Desert and seek again the more familiar politics and sorceries of the Young Kingdoms.
He did not look back on the city which, in the name of his ancestors, had been conquered at last.
CHAPTER FIVE
An Epilogue at the Waning of the Blood Moon
The celebrations at the Silver Flower Oasis had continued long after the news came of Elric’s vengeance-taking on those who would have harmed the Holy Girl of the Bauradim. The news was brought by Quarzhasaatim, fleeing from the city in an action which had no precedent in all their long history.
Oone the Dreamthief, who had stayed at the Silver Flower Oasis longer than was necessary and who was yet reluctant to leave and go about her proper business, learned of Elric’s vengeance without joy. The news saddened her, for she had hoped for something else to happen.
“He serves Chaos as I serve Law,” she said to herself. “And who is to say which of us is the worse enslaved?” But she sighed and threw herself into the festivities with a force which was less than spontaneous.
The Bauradim and the other nomad clans did not notice, for their own pleasure was intensified. They were rid of a tyrant, of the only thing in the desert lands that they had ever feared.
“The cactus tears our flesh so that