Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [85]
For this was the other thing that Elric knew; that to compromise with Tyranny is always to be destroyed by it. The sanest and most logical choice lay always in resistance. This knowledge gave Elric his strength—his profound anger at injustice and inequality—his belief, now that he had visited Tanelorn, that it was possible to live in harmony with mortals of all persuasions and remain vital and engaged with the world. These things he would neither sell nor offer for sale and, in refusing to give himself up wholly to Chaos, it meant he bore his weight of crimes upon his own conscience and must live, night and day, with the knowledge of what and whom he had killed or ruined. This, he guessed, was a weight that Gaynor had been unable to bear. For his part, he would rather bear the weight of his own guilt than the weight that Gaynor had chosen.
He turned again to look up at that obscene clock, Arioch’s cruel joke upon his slaves, upon his conquered rival, and every atom of his deficient blood cried out against such casual injustice, such delight in the terror and misery of others, such contempt for everything that lived within the multiverse, including itself; such cosmic cynicism!
“Have you brought me thy father’s soul, Elric? Where is that which I told thee to find, my sweet?”
“I seek it still, Lord Arioch.” Elric knew that Arioch had not yet established his rule across this whole realm and that his hold upon his new territory must still be tenuous. This meant that Arioch had nothing like the power he possessed in his own domain, where only the most crazed sorcerer would ever consider venturing. “And when I find it, I shall give it up to my father. Then, I would say, the rest is between yourself and him.”
“You are a brave little stoat, my darling, now that you are no longer in my kingdom. But this one shall soon be mine. All of it. Do not anger me, darling pale one. Soon the time will come when thou shalt serve mine every command!”
“Possibly, great Lord of Hell, but meanwhile that time is not here. I make no further bargains. And I believe that thou wouldst as readily keep our old bargain as have none at all.”
A growl of rage escaped Lord Arioch as he pummeled at the ectoplasmic prison with his fists, while Count Mashabak screamed with insane laughter from within. The Duke of Hell looked down upon the labouring thousands, each one of whom maintained, only by the most accurate and mechanical rhythms, the lives of its fellows, and he smirked, threatening with a pointed, golden finger to poke at one of the little figures and so bring the whole complicated structure to collapse.
Then he looked up at where Gaynor the Damned stood, unmoving, as he had been for some time. “Find me that flower and I will make you a Knight of Chaos, immortal nobility, ruling in our name a thousand kingdoms!”
“I will find the flower, great duke,” said Gaynor.
“We shall make an example of thee, Elric,” said Arioch. “Even now. By conquering thee, I shall establish Chaos fully upon this plane.” And one golden hand stretched suddenly, longer and longer, larger and larger, towards Elric’s face. But the albino had drawn his runesword with all the rapid skill of years and the great battle-blade roared out a challenge and a threat to all the myriad denizens of the Lower, Middle and Higher Worlds, to come to it, to cast themselves upon it, to feed it and its master, for this thing was not an owned thing at all, but had become, if it had not always been, an independent force whose sole loyalty was to its own existence, yet was as dependent upon Elric’s wielding it as Elric was dependent upon its energy for his own survival. This unholy symbiosis, more profoundly mysterious than the wisest philosophers could fathom, was what made Elric the chosen child of Fate and it was what had, in the end, robbed him of his happiness.
“This must not be!” Arioch pulled back in thwarted anger. “Force must not fight force! Not yet. Not yet.”
“There is more than Law and Chaos at work in the multiverse, my lord,” said Elric calmly,