Elric of Melnibone - Michael Moorcock [47]
‘And now, Cymoril...’ Yyrkoon grinned like a ferret as he reached out to grab his sister’s soft shoulders. ‘Now to prepare you for your lover, Elric.’
One of the blind warriors cried: ‘They no longer resist us, my lord. They are limp and allow themselves to be cut down where they stand. Why is this?’
‘The mirror has robbed them of their memories,’ Elric called, turning his own blind head towards the sound of the warrior’s voice. ‘You can lead us into a building now—where, with luck, we shall not glimpse the mirror.’
At last they stood within what appeared to Elric, as he lifted his helm, to be a warehouse of some kind. Luckily it was large enough to hold their entire force and when they were all inside Elric had the doors shut while they debated their next action.
‘We should find Yyrkoon,’ Dyvim Tvar said. ‘Let us interrogate one of those warriors...’
‘There’ll be little point in that, my friend,’ Elric reminded him. ‘Their minds are gone. They’ll remember nothing at all. They do not at present remember even what they are, let alone who. Go to the shutters yonder, where the mirror’s influence cannot reach, and see if you can see the building most likely to be occupied by my cousin.’
Dyvim Tvar crossed swiftly to the shutters and looked cautiously out. ‘Aye—there’s a building larger than the rest and I see some movement within, as if the surviving warriors were regrouping. It’s likely that’s Yyrkoon’s stronghold. It should be easily taken.’
Elric joined him. ‘Aye. I agree with you. We’ll find Yyrkoon there. But we must hurry, lest he decides to slay Cymoril. We must work out the best means of reaching the place and instruct our blind warriors as to how many streets, how many houses and so forth, we must pass.’
‘What is that strange sound?’ One of the blind warriors raised his head. ‘Like the distant ringing of a gong.’
‘I hear it too,’ said another blind man.
And now Elric heard it. A sinister noise. It came from the air above them. It shivered through the atmosphere.
‘The mirror!’ Dyvim Tvar looked up. ‘Has the mirror some property we did not anticipate?’
‘Possibly...’ Elric tried to remember what Arioch had told him. But Arioch had been vague. He had said nothing of this dreadful, mighty sound, this shattering clangour as if... ‘He is breaking the mirror!’ he said. ‘But why?’ There was something more now, something brushing at his brain. As if the sound were, itself, sentient.
‘Perhaps Yyrkoon is dead and his magic dies with him,’ Dyvim Tvar began. And then he broke off with a groan.
The noise was louder, more intense, bringing sharp pain to his ears.
And now Elric knew. He blocked his ears with his gauntleted hands. The memories in the mirror. They were flooding into his mind. The mirror had been smashed and was releasing all the memories it had stolen over the centuries—the aeons, perhaps. Many of those memories were not mortal. Many were the memories of beasts and intelligent creatures which had existed even before Melniboné. And the memories warred for a place in Elric’s skull—in the skulls of all the Imrryrians—in the poor, tortured skulls of the men outside whose pitiful screams could be heard rising from the streets—and in the skull of Captain Valharik, the turncoat, as he lost his footing on the great column and fell with the shards from the mirror to the ground far below.
But Elric did not hear Captain Valharik scream and he did not hear Valharik’s body crash first to a roof-top and then into the street where it lay all broken beneath the broken mirror.
Elric lay upon the stone floor of the warehouse and he writhed, as his comrades writhed, trying to clear his head of a million memories that were not his own—of loves, of hatreds, of strange experiences and ordinary experiences, of wars and journeys, of the faces of relatives who were not his relatives, of men and women and children, of animals, of ships and cities; of fights, of lovemaking, of fears and desires—and