Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [20]
“Bring back my soul and we are both released.”
“But if I fail?”
“My soul will leave its prison and enter thee. We shall be united until thy death—I, with my unjust hatred, bonded to the object of my hatred, and thee burdened by all thou most hatest in proud Melniboné.” He paused, almost to savour this. “That would be my consolation.”
“Not mine.”
Sadric nodded his corpse’s head in silent understanding, and a soft, unlikely laugh escaped his throat. “Indeed!”
“And dost thou have other aid for me in this, Father? Some spell or charm?”
“Only what thou comest by on the way, my son. Bring back the rosewood box and we both can go our own ways. Fail, and our destinies and souls are linked for ever! Thou wilt never be free of me, thy past, or Melniboné! But thou wilt bring the old glories back, eh?”
Elric’s drug-enlivened body began to tremble. The flight and this encounter had exhausted him, and there were no souls here on which his sword could feed.
“I am ailing, Father, and must soon return. The drugs that sustain me were lost with my pack animals.”
Sadric shrugged. “As for that, thou hast merely to discover a source of souls on which thy blade might feed. There’s killing a-plenty ahead. And a little more that I perceive, but yet it does not come clear …” He frowned. “Go …”
Elric hesitated. Some ordinary impulse wanted him to tell his father that he no longer killed casually to further any whim. Like all Melnibonéans, Sadric had thought nothing of killing the human folk of their empire. To Sadric, the runesword was merely a useful tool, as a stick might be to a cripple. Supernatural schemer though his father was, player of complex games against the gods, he still unquestioningly assumed that one must pledge loyalty to one demon or another in order to survive.
Elric’s vision, of universally held power, a place like Tanelorn, owing allegiance neither to Law nor to Chaos but only to itself, was anathema to his father who had made a religion and a philosophy of compromise, as had all his royal race for millennia, so that compromise itself was now raised over all other virtues and become the backbone of their beliefs. Elric wanted, again, to tell his father that there were other ideas, other ways to live, which involved neither excessive violence, nor cruelty, nor sorcery, nor conquest, that he had learned of these ideas not merely from the Young Kingdoms but also from his own folk’s histories.
Yet he knew that it would be useless. Sadric was even now devoting all his considerable powers to restoring the past. He knew no other way of life or, indeed, of death.
The albino prince turned away, and it seemed to him at that moment that he had never experienced such grief, even when Cymoril had died on the blade of his runesword, even when Imrryr had blazed and he had known he was doomed to a rootless future, a lonely death.
“I shall seek your rosewood box, Father. But where can I begin?”
“The jill-dragon knows. She’ll carry thee to the realm where the box was taken. Beyond that I cannot predict. Prediction grows difficult. All my powers weaken. Mayhap thou must kill to achieve the box. Kill many times.” The voice was faint now, dry branches in the wind. “Or worse.”
Elric found that he staggered. He was weakening by the moment. “Father, I have no strength.”
“The dragon venom …” But his father was gone, leaving only a sense of his ghostly passing.
Elric forced himself to move. Now every fallen wall seemed an impossible obstacle. He picked his way slowly through the ruins, back over rubble and broken walls, over the little streams and coarse turf terraces of the hills, forcing himself with a will summoned from habit alone to climb the final hill where, outlined against the huge, sinking moon, Scarsnout awaited him, her wings folded, her long muzzle raised as her tongue tasted the wind.
He remembered his father’s last words. They in turn made him recollect an old herbal which had spoken of the distillation of dragon venom; how it brought courage to the weak and skill to the strong, how a man might fight for