Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [102]
One sister now stood on each side of the column, looking up at the sword. Their voices began to chant in unison, until it was no longer possible to distinguish their cadences from the sword’s …
… Then Elric found that he was lifting up the runestone in his two hands stretched before him and his lips began to form wordless, beautiful sounds …
They had sought him for his sword; but they had sought him also for this unique gift. Only Elric of Melniboné, of all living mortals, had the power and the skills to read such potent symbols, to voice them as they must be voiced, matching each part of a note to each nuance of the rune. This rune, the sisters knew by heart, but the rune that blazed upon the Black Sword they themselves had to read. Thus they combined all their resources, all their talents, into the reading of a double rune, the mightiest of all Runes of Power.
The runesong rose in volume and became increasingly complicated—
—for now the four adepts were rune-weaving—folding their spells in and out of time, moving their voices beyond the audible range, making the air crease and shiver into thousands of strands which they wove and threaded—
—weaving the runes into a thing of impossible strength, making the very atmosphere bubble and dance, while all around now the shrubs and flowers swayed, as if adding their own rhythms and cadences to the runesong.
Everything was alive with a thousand different qualities, blending and separating, changing and transforming. Colours ran through the air like rivers. Eruptions of nameless forces came and went around them, while the bowl and the sword and the runestone seemed to become the only constancies in that double triangle.
Elric now understood how this was a place of enormously concentrated psychic energy. From this source, he guessed, they had drawn the power with which they had so far resisted Chaos—enough at least to protect a few settlements like these. But with the power of the Black Sword combined, the Garden of the Rune was becoming something infinitely mightier than anything it could have become on its own.
… to shatter the Sword of Alchemy and make the One power Three …
Elric realized he was hearing a story woven in amongst the runes, almost an incidental to the ritual they performed. It was a story of how these people were led by a dragon through the dimensions—a dragon which had dwelled once within a sword. Such legends were common to his folk and doubtless referred to some long-forgotten part of their wandering history. At last they had come to this land, which was uninhabited by human folk. So they made it their own, building to follow the existing contours of the earth, its forests and rivers. But first they had built the Garden of the Rune. For through their considerable sorcery they had changed and hidden the power which, they believed, was the result of their salvation and any future salvation for their descendants.
The runesong went on. The story continued. Into the fountain were built what the song called ‘the tools of last resort’. The princesses’ ancestors passed the runestone down from mother to daughter since they believed no man capable of carrying the secret.
Only against Chaos could these tools of last resort be used, and only then when all else had failed them. They could only be used in combination with another great Object of Power. The borrowed Objects of Power which the sisters had held, and with which they had intended to bargain for Elric’s help, ignorant of how close a kinsman he was, were not strong enough for the work.
Gaynor had stolen those Objects, knowing that Chaos feared them and desired them. One such Object had already been stolen from the Rose and returned to her possession by a surprising and circuitous means. The others she had guarded better. But none had been powerful enough to use in the Ritual of the Garden.
Yet while the three sisters sought Elric and the Black Sword, others, like Elric, had sought what the sisters carried. Now the circle was completed. Now every proper element