Elric to Rescue Tanelorn - Michael Moorcock [173]
They walked between the worlds.
They walked for timeless miles, taking this path and then another through the great silver lattice of the moonbeam roads, while everywhere the multiverse blossomed and warped and erupted and glowed, a million worlds in the making, a million realms decaying, and countless billions of mortal souls full of aspiration and despair, and they talked intimately, in low voices, enjoying conversations which only one of them would remember. It seemed sometimes to Elric that he and Count von Bek were the same being, both echoes of some lost original.
And it seemed sometimes that they were free for ever of the common bounds of time or space, of pressing human concerns, free to explore the wonderful abstraction of it all, the incredible physicality of this suprareality which they could experience with senses themselves transformed and attuned to the new stimuli. They became reconciled to the notion that little by little their bodies would fade and their spirits blend with the stuff of the multiverse, to find true immortality as a fragment of legend, a hint of a myth, a mark made upon our everlasting cosmic history, which is perhaps the best that most of us will ever know—to have played a part, no matter how small, in that great game, the glorious Game of Time…
CRIMSON EYES
CRIMSON EYES
(1994)
CHAPTER ONE
Crimes of the City
WE ARE ALL familiar with the wave of murders, scandals and suicides coinciding with the collapse of BBIC and culminating on Christmas Eve with the bizarre death of a profoundly unpopular Prime Minister.
“That poor fellow captained the most incompetent crew of self-impressed scamps ever to tangle themselves in the rigging of the ship of state,” declared Sir Seaton Begg, heading the investigation. “But, however apt, I wouldn’t wish a fate like his on anyone.” A Callahan Home Office appointee, Begg had led the inquiry into the financial affairs of his own nephew, Barbican Begg, whose mighty frauds had drained the country.
Barbican himself had disappeared, but the aristocrats, politicians and famous plutocrats left to face trial made a sensational list, especially as they began to be killed. Barbican Begg himself had been married to the Prime Minister’s sister, Wendy, who had overdosed two years earlier. A certain coolness between the two men had not interfered with their association. The government depended heavily on Begg’s help. It had continued to endorse BBIC while the cabinet gave authority to large-scale money laundering in the British Caribbean territories, for Begg was underwriting some of its most lunatic flotations.
The first murders in what soon emerged as a pattern had been discovered a year earlier, preceding Barbican Begg’s exposure by months. At Marriage’s Wharf, Wapping, three armed skinheads had been killed by a large blade leaving a single, identical wound which at first looked like the imprint of a pair of lips. The detective in charge believed the skinheads to have been slaughtered in self-defense. KGB, he thought. There was something subtly Slavic about the method. A former MI5 man, given to unfashionable and oversubtle analysis, he could not easily explain the corpses’ grotesque colour nor the hideous terror marking the dead faces, unless, he suggested, the blade had been poisoned.
The pathologist brought in was a retired Scotland Yard man whom Begg had known in his private detective days. Dr. “Taffy” Sinclair’s respect for Begg was returned. In the past, Dr. Sinclair had discovered causes of death previously never imagined but admitted bafflement in this case. “Clearly they were all stabbed,” he told his old colleague over Christmas pints of foaming Ackroyd’s at The Three Revenants, “yet I couldn’t swear they’d been stabbed to death.” The pathologist’s high, pale forehead had creased in a frown. “It’s fanciful, Begg, but if you asked how they’d died I’d have to say, well, that something was