Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [91]
“He sacrificed himself,” said Elric bluntly. “I think he saved me, also, from Arioch’s full fury. To the best of my knowledge Arioch was driven from this plane by him—and he died in that act of banishing the Lord of Hell.”
“You have lost your ally, then?”
“I have lost an ally, Master Wheldrake, as much as I have lost an enemy. I also appear to have lost a year in this realm. However, I do not mourn the loss of my patron Duke of Entropy …”
“Yet Chaos still threatens,” said Fallogard Phatt. “This plane stinks of it. Hovering, as it were, before it devours the entire world!”
“Is it ourselves that Chaos desires?” Charion Phatt wished to know. Her uncle shook his head. “Not us, child. It is not greedy for us. We are merely, at present, an irritant to it, I think. No longer useful. But it would be rid of us.” He closed his heavily lidded eyes. “It grows angry, I know. There is Gaynor now … See—smell—taste him—Gaynor—feel his presence—see him riding … gone, gone … There he is—riding—I think he seeks the sisters still. And is close to discovering them! Gaynor serves it and himself. A subtle power. They desire to possess it. Without it they can never fully conquer this plane. The sisters—at last—I can sense the sisters. They seek another. Gaynor? Chaos? What is this? An alliance? They seek—not Gaynor, I think … Ah! The Chaos stuff, it is too strong … Mist again. Uncertain mist …” He lifted his head and gasped at the cold twilight air as if he had been close to drowning in that psychic sea on which he was, often, the only voyager …
“Gaynor rode to the eastern mountains,” said Elric. “Are the sisters still there?”
“No,” said Fallogard Phatt, frowning. “They have long since left the Mynce and yet—time—Gaynor has gained time—he has been aided in this—is there a trap? What? What? I cannot see him!”
“We must break camp early,” said Charion with all her usual practicality, “and try to reach the sisters before Gaynor. Yet our first duty is to family. Koropith is here.”
“On this plane?” Elric asked.
“Or one that presently intersects this realm.” She broke off a piece of candied leather and offered it to the albino who shook his head, having no love for the sweetmeats of her world where, Wheldrake swore, the taste in food was even worse than in his own. “I wonder,” she added, “if anyone but me has any notion of Gaynor’s positive will to evil?” And when she looked into the fire, her eyes were hidden from them all.
The snow came softly in the morning, covering the scars they had made behind them, covering the paths ahead, and the world was bitter with cold and silence as they trudged on through the forest, following the line of the cliff-top above and guessing, from thin sunlight, the direction in which they walked—yet they moved without hesitation, doggedly onward, following a psychic scent through this world where they appeared to be the only living creatures. They paused briefly to rest, to tend to Mother Phatt’s needs, to boil her warming drinks of the herbs she herself had told them to pick and which were chiefly what they now lived on, together with the sweet jerky Charion carried. Then they were up again and marching where the snow was shallow and Mother Phatt inspected the moss and the bark they brought her and she told them that the realm had been in the grip of winter for more than a year and that this was Chaos work without doubt, and she murmured of old Ice Giants and the Cold Folk and the legends of her mother’s people, who had been of the race, she claimed, that came before Man, that had ruled Cornwall before it was named by human tongues. There had been one, then, she said, that was also a prince, and that prince was of the old race, while the woman he married was of the new. The children of that union were her mother’s ancestors. “It is why we have so great a gift of the Second Sight,” she said to Elric intimately, patting his shoulder as he knelt beside her during one of their brief rests. She