Elric to Rescue Tanelorn - Michael Moorcock [160]
However, when after an hour or two the sides grew yet steeper and narrower, the albino prince began to puzzle. He had never encountered such a natural phenomenon and indeed was beginning to believe that this gorgeous wealth of spring might be, after all, supernatural in origin. But then, even as he considered turning back and taking heed of a prudence he usually ignored, the sides of the valley began to sink to gentler rolling hills, widening to reveal in the distance a misty outline which must surely be that of Xanardwys.
After pausing to drink at a sparkling stream, Elric and his mare continued on. Now they crossed a vast stretch of greensward flanked by distant mountains, punctuated by stands of trees, flowery meadows, ponds and rivers. Slowly they came closer to the domestic reassurance of Xanardwys’s rural rooftops.
Elric drew in a deep, contented sigh.
A great roaring erupted suddenly in Elric’s ears and he was blinded as a new sun rose rapidly into the western sky, shrieking and wailing like a soul escaped from hell, multicoloured flames forming a pulsing aura. Then the sound became a single, deep, sonorous chord, slowly fading.
Elric’s horse stood mesmerized, as if turned to ice. The albino dismounted, cursing and throwing up his arm to protect his eyes. The broad rays stretched for miles across the landscape, bursting from the pulsing globe and carrying with them huge shapes, dark and writhing, seeming to struggle and fight even as they fell. And now the air was filled with an utterly horrifying noise, like the beating of a million pairs of monstrous wings. Trumpets bellowed, the brazen voices of an army, heralding an even more horrible sound—the despairing moan of a whole world’s souls voicing their agony, the fading shouts and dying cries of warriors in the last, weary stages of a battle.
Peering into the troubled vivacity of that mighty light, Elric felt heavy, muscular, gigantic forms, stinking with a sweet, bestial, almost overpowering odour, landing with massive thuds, shaking the ground with such force that the entire terrain threatened to collapse. This rain of monsters did not cease. It was only the purest of luck which saved Elric from being crushed under one of the falling bodies. He had the impression of metal ringing and clashing, of voices screaming and calling, of wings beating, beating, beating, like the wings of moths against a window, in a kind of frantic hopelessness. And still the monsters continued to fall out of a sky whose light changed subtly now, growing deeper and more stable until the entire world was illuminated by a steady, scarlet glare against which flying, falling shapes moved in black silhouette—wings, helmets, armour, swords—twisted in the postures of defeat. Now the predominant smell reminded Elric of the Fall and the sweet odour of rot, of the summer’s riches returning to their origins, and still mingled with this was the foetid stink of angry brutes.
As the light became gentler and the great disc began to fade, Elric grew aware of other colours and more details. The stink alone threatened to steal his senses—the snorting, acrid breath of titanic beasts, threatening sudden death and alarming every revitalized fibre of his being. Elric glimpsed brazen scales, huge silvery feathers, hideously beautiful insect eyes and mouths, wondrously distorted, half-crystalline bodies and faces, like Leviathan and all his kin, emerging after millions of years from beneath a sea which had encrusted them with myriad colours and asymmetrical forms, made them moving monuments in coral, with faceted eyes which stared up in blind anguish at a sky through which still plunged, wings flapping, fluttering, folded or too damaged to bear their weight, the godlike forms of their supernatural kind. Clashing rows of massive fangs and uttering sounds whose depth and force alone was sufficient to shake the whole valley, to topple Xanardwys’s towers, crack her walls and send