Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [101]
Princess Tayaratuka was holding up the stone cylinder now, wondering at the shifting runes as if she had never seen them alive before, and her lips moved as she read them, forming words she had been taught in a time before she had learned to read any ordinary alphabet. This was her inheritance, this Rune of Power …
“Only three virgins born of the same mother and the same father at the same time may know the Ritual of the Rune,” said Shanug’a in a whisper. “But the Rune cannot be completed until we have seen the Black Sword’s runes and read those aloud in the Garden of the Rune. All these things must happen at once. Then, if we have spoken the Rune correctly, and if the magic has not faded in the centuries since it was distilled then perhaps we shall regain those things with which our ancestors brought us to this realm.”
Princess Mishiguya went to the bench where the hellsword rested, almost passively, and she picked it up and took it to the fountain where her sister, Shanug’a, waited, the water flowing over her and seeming to merge with the silken gown she wore, and Shanug’a took the sword’s grip in both her little hands and pulled deliberately so that bit by bit the blade emerged from the scabbard, the angry scarlet runes glowing already along the black metal, and a song escaped the sword that was unlike anything Elric had heard before. In all other hands, even perhaps Gaynor’s, the unscabbarded hellsword would have resisted, turned upon the one who sought to hold it and almost certainly killed them. Important sorcery was needed to hold the Black Sword even for a short while. Yet now it sang a song so strange and so sweet, high and unhappy, full of longing and unfulfilled hungers, that Elric was momentarily terrified. He had never suspected such qualities in the sword.
Even as Stormbringer continued its strange, unlikely song, Princess Shanug’a raised it high in the air and brought the tip down into the centre of the oddly carved bowl so that suddenly the fountain ceased to gush and at once there was a silence in the rose garden.
A stillness came to the sky above, as if the dark-blue light froze; a stillness in the garden, as if every flower and bud waited; a stillness in that triangular cloister, as if the very stones held themselves in readiness for some momentous event.
Even the three sisters seemed frozen in the attitudes of their ritual.
Awed by the scene, Elric felt he intruded and it occurred to him to withdraw, as if he were not required here, but Princess Tayaratuka was turning to him, smiling—offering him the runestone as it writhed and glowed in her palm.
“It is for you to read,” she said. “Only you, of all the creatures in the multiverse, have this power. That is why we sought you so eagerly. You must read our Rune—as we read the Black Sword’s. Thus shall we begin the weaving of this powerful magic. This is what we have been trained to do, almost since birth. You must believe us and trust us, Prince Elric.”
“I have sworn the blood-bond,” said Elric simply. He would do whatever they required of him, even if it meant his death, the enslavement of his immortal soul, the prospect of a hellish eternity. He would trust them without question.
The monstrous battle-blade stood upright in the bowl, the song still escaping it, the runes still flickering up and down its radiant black metal. It was almost as if it were about to speak, to transform itself into another shape, possibly its true shape. And Elric felt a chill in his soul and it seemed for a second that he looked into his future, to some predetermined doom for which this was a kind of rehearsal. Then he disciplined