Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [47]
“Then he and we must come to our arrangements quickly,” said the Rose. “For the time is here when we must seek a means of charting a specific course between the worlds. If we can free you, can you lead us where we must go?”
“I have that ability, at least,” said Fallogard Phatt, “and will gladly aid you however I can. But the boy has found pathways through the realms I had not even heard rumoured. And the girl can seek out an individual through all the layers of the multiverse. She is a bloodhound, that child. She is a terrier. She is a spaniel …”
Interrupting this effusion of canine comparisons, Master Wheldrake found a book in one of his inner pockets and drew it forth with a flourish. “Here’s what I remembered having! Here it is!”
They looked at him in polite expectation as he pulled his newly received credits from his waistcoat and pushed them into the hands of the baffled boy. “Here, young Master Koropith, go with your cousin to the market! I’ll give you a list. Tonight I intend to make us all a meal substantial enough to help us through our coming adventure!”
He brandished the scarlet book. “Between Mrs. Beeton and myself I think I can provide us with a supper the like of which you’ll not have tasted in a twelvemonth!”
CHAPTER FIVE
Conversations with Clairvoyants Concerning the Nature of the Multiverse &c. Dramatic Methods of Escape.
The elaborate and exquisite feast over, and soothed by a recitation of some excellent sonnets, even Elric was able to divert his attention, for a little while, away from the persistent memory of his dead father waiting for him in that dead city.
“We have lived by our wits, the Phatts, for generations.” Fallogard Phatt was in his cups. Even his old mother put wine to her wizened lips and occasionally giggled. His son and niece were either in bed or hidden in the stairwell’s shadows. Wheldrake refilled Mother Phatt’s bumper while the Rose sat back in her chair, the only one determined to keep her mind upon the crucial issues of their circumstances. She drank no wine, but seemed content to let the others relax as they wished. Next to her around the table, Elric sipped the dark blue-black stuff and wished that it could have some effect upon him, reflecting sardonically to himself that after a draught of dragon’s venom most drinks had something of an insipid quality …
“There are only a few adepts,” Fallogard Phatt was saying, “who have ever explored even a fraction of the multiverse, but the Phatts, I must say, are as experienced as any. Mother here, for instance, has the routes of at least two thousand different pathways between some five thousand realms. Her instincts are occasionally a little dulled, these days, but our niece is learning well. She has the same talent.”
“So you sought this plane deliberately?” said the Rose suddenly, as if his remarks coincided with her own thoughts.
This produced a wild peal of laughter in Fallogard Phatt, threatening to burst his thoroughly buttoned waistcoat while his hair sprang up around his head and his face grew red. “No, madam, that’s the joke of it. Few here ever came because they had heard of the Gypsy Nation and wished to join it. But the Nation has set up its own peculiar field—a kind of psychic gravity—which draws many here who would otherwise be in limbo. It acts—in a psychic, but also in an oddly material way, too—as a kind of false-limbo, a world of lost souls, indeed.”
“Lost souls?” Elric now grew alert. “Lost souls, Master Phatt?”
“And bodies, too, of course. For the most part.” Fallogard Phatt made a drunken movement with his hand then paused, as if he heard something, then peered with sudden intelligence into the albino’s crimson eyes. “Aye, sir,” he said in a quieter tone, “lost souls, indeed!” And Elric felt for a few seconds the sense of some benign presence within him, sympathetic and perhaps even protective. The sensation was quickly gone and Phatt was holding