Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [152]
Paying for a quiet room, with two hammocks and a window overlooking the inner courtyard, Elric tipped the servant generously when hot water for baths was brought. Moonglum sighed. His friend was too generous with the little money they had remaining. After washing and grooming themselves, they donned fresh linen and went back downstairs. Looking around at the other guests, they judged Dulk’s advice reliable. Moonglum’s thieves’ eyes brightened with curiosity when he saw that the main hall of the inn was full of well-dressed merchant seamen already engaged in the business which brought them half across the world and might take them still closer to the edge. Some men were running impromptu auctions with those who had waited days for ships, delayed by bad weather. Even Elric, who had traveled widely on dream quests over a hundred thousand years of history and seen much, was surprised by the amounts of money changing hands on speculative bargaining.
They sat together, under a window in the quieter part of the hall, drinking the local wine and studying a map they had bought in Thokora. The albino was having difficulty focusing. He muttered that the livestock the ships had brought in was in considerably better health than himself.
“Aren’t you at all tempted to untwist those supernaturally intricate lengths of brass and copper which lock your sword to its scabbard?” Moonglum whispered, holding a blank scrap of vellum up to the light because he thought he might confuse a potential observer while he had the chance. Shaking his head, Elric seemed utterly unaware of what two men in a harbour tavern poring over a map might signify to the crazed, treasure-hungry denizens who hung around these merchants like carrion birds.
Moonglum knew that Elric feared his blade Stormbringer quite as much as any potential enemy. Indirectly, it was their chief reason for risking this long journey from the few remaining sources of Elric’s drugs. In Melniboné’s past, before such drugs were discovered, “silverskins” like himself had led short, painful lives usually ending in madness and self-destruction. Only by resorting to the darkest sorcery and trading their souls for supernatural aid, could the enfeebled creatures hope to live like others. While the drugs sustained Elric, they did not invigorate him as the sword had. Yet he wished never to draw it again and have more souls pay the terrible price so many had already paid for his own life. To that end, he must find the legendary noibuluscus plant.
For the first time in months, the pale prince, reassured that, in Nassea-Tiki, his reputation was no more than a distant legend, relaxed a little. Thankfully, the Bright Empire of Melniboné had never extended this far. And the noibuluscus could soon be his. He had bought the book and map in a market; they had been in the middle of a vast pile of manuscripts, any valuable decoration already removed, looted from somewhere by illiterate nomads who brought the stuff to market only in the faint hope someone would put value on it.
Map and herbal had told of the so-called “Black Anemonë” which grew in a temple’s “lunarium” at the centre of an ancient jungle city, upriver of Nassea-Tiki. The plant had all the properties Elric needed to sustain himself. But, another grimoire he had consulted reminded him, the black flower only bloomed once a century; and in full moonlight. So he had gambled on finding it and forever protecting himself against the sickness brought by his rare form of albinism.
A dozen dark legends surrounded the Black Anemonë. Truth could not be told from fable. What all his sources agreed, however, was that the time of the Black Anemonë’s blooming grew close. Their departure from Lormyr had been hasty. At certain moments, when the