Elric to Rescue Tanelorn - Michael Moorcock [171]
Lord Quelch turned his attention upon the albino prince. “You took what was mine. I am a Lord of Law. The old man had what I must have. I must survive. I must continue to exist. The fate of the multiverse depends upon it. What is that to the sacrifice of a few young occultists? Law believes in the power of reason, the measurement and control of all natural forces, the husbandry of our resources. I must continue the fight against Chaos. Once millions gave themselves up in ecstasy to my cause.”
“Once, perhaps, your cause was worthy of their sacrifice,” said von Bek quietly. “But too much blood has been spilt in this terrible war. Those of you who refuse to speak of reconciliation are little more than brutes and deserve nothing of the rest of us, save our pity and our contempt.”
Elric wondered at this exchange. Even when reading the most obscure of his people’s grimoires, he could never have imagined witnessing such a confrontation between a mortal and a demigod.
Lord Quelch snarled again. Again he turned his hungry insect’s eyes upon his intended prey. “Just one or two, perhaps?”
Neither Elric nor von Bek were required to defend the children. Quelch was cowering before the gaze of Far-Seeing, increasingly frightened, as if he only now understood the power he was confronting. “I am hungry,” he said.
“You must look elsewhere for your sustenance, my lord.” Far-Seeing and her children still stared directly up into his face, as if challenging him to attack.
But the Lord of Law crept backwards along the moonbeam road. “I would be mortal again,” he said. “What you saw was my mortal self. He still exists. Do you know him? Las Cascadas?” It seemed as if he made a pathetic attempt at familiarity, to win them to his cause through sympathy, but Quelch knew he had failed. “We shall destroy Chaos and all who serve her.” He glared at Elric and his companion. “The Singularity shall triumph over Entropy. Death will be checked. We shall abolish Death in all his forms. I am Quelch, a great Lord of Law. You must serve me. It is for the Cause…”
Watching him lope away down that long, curving moonbeam road through the multiverse, Elric felt a certain pity for a creature which had abandoned every ideal, every part of its faith, every moral principle, in order to survive for a few more centuries, scavenging off the very souls it claimed to protect.
“What ails that creature, von Bek?”
“They are not immortal but they are almost immortal,” said von Bek. “The multiverse does not exist in infinity but in quasi-infinity. These are not deliberate paradoxes. Our great archangels fight for control of the Balance. They represent two perfectly reasonable schools of thought and, indeed, are almost the same in habit and belief. Yet they fight—Chaos against Law, Entropy against Stasis—and these arguments are mirrored in all our mortal histories, our daily lives, and are connected in profound but complex ways. Over all this hangs the Cosmic Balance, tilting this way and that but always restoring itself. A wasteful means of maintaining the multiverse, you might say. I think our role is to find less wasteful ways of achieving the same end, to create Order without losing the creativity and fecundity of Chaos. Soon, according to other adepts I have met, there will be a great Conjunction of the multiversal realms, a moment of maximum stability, and it is at this time that the very nature of reality can be changed.”
Elric clapped his hands to his head. “Sir, I beg you! Cease! I stand here, in the middle of some astral realm, about to tread a moonbeam into near-infinity, and every part of me, physical and spiritual, tells me that I must be irredeemably insane.”
“No,” said Renark von Bek. “What you behold is the ultimate sanity, the ultimate variety, and perhaps the ultimate order. Come, I will take you home.”
Von Bek turned to the children and addressed Far-Seeing. “Would you care for a military escort, my lady?”
Her smile was quiet. “I think I have no further use for swords. Not for the moment.