Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [121]
And Count Mashabak growled and threatened and spoke some words in a language known only to himself; made helpless by the very act of being captured, for he was a creature that had known almost limitless power and had no means of existing with the shock of its own enforced impotence. He knew not how to beg or bargain or even to coax, as Arioch coaxed, for his nature was more direct. He had reveled in the unchecked force of his power. He had grown used to creating whatever he desired, of destroying whatever displeased him. He screamed at them to release him, he grumbled, he subsided, as the tips of the swords continued to support the ectoplasmic sphere. He was a crude, brutish sort of demigod and knew only how to threaten.
The Rose smiled. It was as if she were achieving everything she had dreamed of over the years. “He will take some taming, that demon,” she said.
If Elric had been disbelieving of Gaynor’s audacity, he was admiring of the Rose’s. “You knew all along how Mashabak could be controlled,” he said. “You manipulated events so that we should be here at the same time …” It was not an accusation, merely a statement of his understanding.
“I took the events that existed,” said the Rose simply. “I did what I could in my weaving. But I was never certain, even as Gaynor bargained with you for your father’s soul, what the outcome would be. I still do not know, Elric. Watch!”
She went to the table where Gaynor had placed his stolen treasures and she took the sweet-smelling rosewood box, advancing towards where the sisters held the sphere upon the tips of their swords, as delicately as if they balanced a soap-bubble, each woman concentrating upon her task while a strange, bubbling energy began to pulse along the blades. Down the ivory poured a smoky whiteness and down the granite a grey, curling substance; while the golden blade shook with light the colour of fresh-cut broom, all these colours spinning together and forming a kind of spiral which wound upwards again and back into the sphere.
Led by the Rose, the sisters began a chant, harnessing streamers of multiversal life-force and brought them together in a shimmering net of pale cerise light which surrounded them as they worked.
Then the Rose cried out to Elric. “Bring your sword now. Bring it quickly. It must be the conductor once more, of all this energy!” She opened the lid of the box.
The albino moved forward, his body making strange ritualistic gestures whose meaning was unknown to him.
He lifted the Black Sword even as it uttered a moan of protest, and he placed it between the other swords, at the very apex.
Carefully and slowly the Rose moved until she held the opened soulbox directly under the pommel of the runesword and cried: “Strike! Strike upwards, Elric, into the demon’s heart—!”
And the albino yelled in terrifying anguish as the hellforce poured from the Chaos Lord in response to his single thrust. And Mashabak’s unholy demon’s soul poured with a gush of dark radiance which sent Stormbringer to shivering and howling again, down the blade and into the soulbox the Rose held ready for it.
And it was only at that moment that Elric realized what, under the Rose’s direction, he had done!
“My father’s soul,” he said, “you have wed it to that demon’s! You have destroyed it!”
“Now we control him!” The Rose’s subtle pink skin glowed with her pleasure. “Now we have Mashabak. No mortal has the power to destroy him, but he is our prisoner. He will remain so for ever! While we can destroy his soul. He is forced to obey. Through him we shall recreate the worlds he crushed.” She closed the lid.
“How can you control him, when Gaynor could not?” Elric looked up to where, oddly passive, the demon count peered from his prison.
“Because now we possess his soul,” said the Rose. “This is my satisfaction and my revenge.”
Wheldrake emerged from