Elric in the Dream Realms - Michael Moorcock [7]
Elric reflected how his own obsession with myth had brought him to almost inevitable destruction. “In my miscalculations,” he murmured, turning dull crimson eyes again towards the Actorios, “I have shown that I share something in common with these people’s ancestors.” Some forty miles from his dead horse, Elric had been discovered by a boy out searching for the jewels and precious artifacts occasionally flung up by those sandstorms which constantly came and went over this part of the desert and were partially responsible for the city’s survival, as well as for the astonishing height of Quarzhasaat’s magnificent walls. They were also the origin of the desert’s melancholy name.
In better health Elric would have relished the city’s monumental beauty. It was a beauty derived from an aesthetic refined over centuries and bearing no signs of outside influence. Though so many of the curving ziggurats and palaces were of gigantic proportions there was nothing vulgar or ugly about them; they had an airy quality, a peculiar lightness of style which made them seem, in their terracotta reds and glittering silver granite, their whitewashed stucco, their rich blues and greens, as if they had been magicked out of the very air. Their luscious gardens filled marvelously complex terraces, their fountains and water courses, drawn from deep-sunk wells, gave tranquil sound and wonderful perfume to her old cobbled ways and wide tree-lined avenues; yet all this water, which might have been diverted to growing crops, was used to maintain the appearance of Quarzhasaat as she had been at the height of her imperial power and was more valuable than jewels, its use rationed and its theft punishable by the severest of laws.
Elric’s own lodgings were in no way magnificent, consisting as they did of a truckle bed, straw-strewn flagstones, a single high window, a plain earthenware jug and a basin containing a little brackish water which had cost him his last emerald. Water permits were not available to foreigners and the only water on general sale was Quarzhasaat’s single most expensive commodity. Elric’s water had almost certainly been stolen from a public fountain. The statutory penalties for such thefts were rarely discussed, even in private.
Elric required rare herbs to sustain his deficient blood but their cost, even had they been available, would have proven far beyond his present means, which had been reduced to a few gold coins, a fortune in Karlaak but of virtually no worth in a city where gold was so common it was used to line the city’s aqueducts and sewers. His expeditions into the streets had been exhausting and depressing.
Once a day the boy who had found Elric in the desert, and brought him to this room, paid the albino a visit, staring at him as if at a curious insect or captured rodent. The boy’s name was Anigh and, though he spoke the Melnibonéan-derived lingua franca of the Young Kingdoms, his accent was so thick it was sometimes impossible to understand all he said.
Once more Elric tried to lift his arm only to let it fall. That morning he had reconciled himself to the fact that he would never again see his beloved Cymoril and would never sit upon the Ruby Throne. He knew regret, but it was of a distant kind, for his illness made him oddly euphoric.
“I had hoped to sell you.”
Elric peered, blinking, into the shadows of the room on the far side of a single ray of sunlight. He recognized the voice but could make out little more than a silhouette near the door.
“But now it seems all I have to offer in next week’s market will be your corpse and your remaining possessions.” It was Anigh, almost as depressed as Elric at the prospect of his prize’s death. “You are still a rarity, of course. Your features are those of our ancient enemies but whiter than bone and those