Elric_ The Sleeping Sorceress - Michael Moorcock [117]
“Perhaps Yyrkoon is dead and his magic dies with him,” Dyvim Tvar began. And then he broke off with a groan.
The noise was louder, more intense, bringing sharp pain to his ears.
And now Elric knew. He blocked his ears with his gauntleted hands. The memories in the mirror. They were flooding into his mind. The mirror had been smashed and was releasing all the memories it had stolen over the centuries—the aeons, perhaps. Many of those memories were not mortal. Many were the memories of beasts and intelligent creatures which had existed even before Melniboné. And the memories warred for a place in Elric’s skull—in the skulls of all the Imrryrians—in the poor, tortured skulls of the men outside whose pitiful screams could be heard rising from the streets—and in the skull of Captain Valharik, the turncoat, as he lost his footing on the great column and fell with the shards from the mirror to the ground far below.
But Elric did not hear Captain Valharik scream and he did not hear Valharik’s body crash first to a roof-top and then into the street where it lay all broken beneath the broken mirror.
Elric lay upon the stone floor of the warehouse and he writhed, as his comrades writhed, trying to clear his head of a million memories that were not his own—of loves, of hatreds, of strange experiences and ordinary experiences, of wars and journeys, of the faces of relatives who were not his relatives, of men and women and children, of animals, of ships and cities, of fights, of love-making, of fears and desires—and the memories fought each other for possession of his crowded skull, threatening to drive his own memories (and thus his own character) from his head. And as Elric writhed upon the ground, clutching at his ears, he spoke a word over and over again in an effort to cling to his own identity.
“Elric. Elric. Elric.”
And gradually, by an effort which he had experienced only once before when he had summoned Arioch to the plane of the Earth, he managed to extinguish all those alien memories and assert his own until, shaken and feeble, he lowered his hands from his ears and no longer shouted his own name. And then he stood up and looked about him.
More than two thirds of his men were dead, blind or otherwise. The big bosun was dead, his eyes wide and staring, his lips frozen in a scream, his right eye-socket raw and bleeding from where he had tried to drag his eye from it. All the corpses lay in unnatural positions, all had their eyes open (if they had eyes) and many bore the marks of self-mutilation, while others had vomited and others had dashed their brains against a wall. Dyvim Tvar was alive, but curled up in a corner, mumbling to himself and Elric thought he might be mad. Some of the other survivors were, indeed, mad, but they were quiet, they afforded no danger. Only five, including Elric, seemed to have resisted the alien memories and retained their own sanity. It seemed to Elric, as he stumbled from corpse to corpse, that most of the men had had their hearts fail.
“Dyvim Tvar?” Elric put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Dyvim Tvar?”
Dyvim Tvar took his head from his arm and looked into Elric’s eyes. In Dyvim Tvar’s own eyes was the experience of a score of millennia and there was irony there, too. “I live, Elric.”
“Few of us live now.”
A little later they left the warehouse, no longer needing to fear the mirror, and found that all the streets were full of the dead who had received the mirror’s memories. Stiff bodies reached out hands to them. Dead lips formed silent pleas for help. Elric tried not to look at them as he pressed through them, but his desire for vengeance upon his cousin was even stronger now.
They reached the house. The door was open and the ground floor was crammed with corpses. There was no sign of Prince