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By Root 506 0

little poet up and carried him, as if he were a child, to his room before returning to his own bed and his contemplation of the map—the islands of the great reef and, beyond it, darkness, an impossible ocean, unnavigable and unnatural, the Heavy Sea. Reconciled to hiring some fishing boat to visit the islands one by one, he fell into a deep sleep and was awakened by a scratching at his door and the bellow of some maid informing him that it was past the one thousand and fifteenth hour (their largest division of yearly time in Ulshinir) and there would be no breakfast for him if he did not rise at once.

He did not care for breakfast, but he was anxious to confer with Wheldrake on the subject of the three sisters and was somewhat surprised, once he had prepared himself for the day, to discover the poet declaiming on the very subject—or so it seemed …

“Lord Soulis is a keen wizard,

A wizard mickle of lear:

Who cometh in bond of Lord Soulis,

Thereof he hath little cheer.

“He hath three braw castles to his hand,

That wizard mickle of age;

The first of Estness, the last of Westness,

The middle of Hermitage.

“He has three fair mays into his hand,

The least is good to see;

The first is Annet, the second is Janet,

The third is Marjorie.

“The firsten o’ them has a gowden crown,

The neist has a gowden ring;

The third has sma’gowd her about,

She has a sweeter thing.

“The firsten o’ them has a rose her on,

The neist has a marigold;

The third of them has a better flower,

The best that springeth ower wold.”

The inn’s female servant, the landlady and her daughter, listened enraptured to Wheldrake’s sing-song rendering. But it was the words that captured Elric’s imagination …

“Good morning, Master Wheldrake. Is that a dialect of your own land?”

“It is, sir.” Wheldrake kissed the hands of the ladies and strutted with all his old vigour across the room to greet his friend. “A border ballad, I believe, or something made very like one …”

“You did not write it?”

“I cannot answer you honestly, Prince Elric.” Wheldrake sat down on the bench opposite the albino and watched him sip a dish of stewed herbs. “Have some honey in that.” He pushed the pot forward. “It makes it palatable. There are some things I do not know if I wrote, if I heard, if I copied from another poet—though I doubt there’s any can match Wheldrake’s command of the poetic arts (I do not claim genius—but mere craft)—for I am prolific, you see. It is my nature, and perhaps my doom. Had I died after my first volume or two I should even now reside in Westminster Abbey.”

Not wishing a lengthy and impossible-to-follow explanation on the nature of this particular Valhalla, Elric, as had become his habit, merely let the unfamiliar words roll by.

“But this Lord Soulis. Who is he?”

“A mere invention, for all I know, sir. I was reminded of the ballad by the three ladies here, but, of course, perhaps our three elusive sisters struck a memory, too. Certainly, if I remember further verses I’ll speak up. But I believe it no more than a coincidence, Prince Elric. The multiverse is full of specific numbers of power and so on, and three is particularly popular with poets since three names are always excellent means of ringing changes on something long—which, of course, is the nature of narrative verse. Again, this slides from favour wherever I go. The artist is beyond fashion, but his purse, sir, is not. That’s an odd ship, isn’t it, sir, come into the harbour overnight?”

Elric had seen no ship. He put down his bowl and let Wheldrake lead him to the window where the landlady and her daughter still leaned, staring at a craft whose hull gleamed black and yellow and whose prow bore the marks of Chaos, while from her mast there flew a red-and-black flag centred with a sign in some unlikely alphabet. On her forecastle, weighting the ship oddly so that she was stern-light in the water and showing too much of her rudder, was a tall, square object swathed in black canvas and filling almost the whole