Stormbringer - Michael Moorcock [35]
Through the echoing streets of the city they rode, proud and terrible, as if with an army at their backs. Dark buildings towered above them, but not a face dared peep from a window. Pan Tang had planned to rule the world—and it might yet—but, for the moment, its denizens were fully demoralised by the sight of two men taking their huge city by storm.
As they reached the wide plaza, Elric and Moonglum pulled their horses to a halt and observed the huge bronze shrine swinging on its chains in the centre. Beyond it rose Jagreen Lern's palace, all columns and towers, ominously quiet. Even the statues had ceased to scream, and the horses' hooves made no sound as Elric and Moonglum approached the shrine. The blood-reddened runesword was still in Elric's two hands and he raised it upwards and to one side as he reached the brazen shrine. Then he took, a mighty sweep at the chains supporting it. The supernatural blade bit into the metal and severed the links. The crash as the shrine dropped and smashed, scattering the bones of Jagreen Lern's ancestors, was magnified a thousand times by the silence. The noise echoed throughout Hwamgaarl and every inhabitant left alive knew what it signified.
"Thus, I challenge thee, Jageen Lern!" Elric shouted, aware that these words would also be heard by everyone. "I have come to pay the debt I promised! Come, puppet!" he paused, even his triumph not sufficient fully to conquer his hesitation at what he must do now. "Come! Bring Hell's Dukes with you—"
Moonglum swallowed, his eyes rolling as he studied Elric's twisted face, but the albino continued:
"Bring Arioch. Bring Balan. Bring Maluk! Bring the proud princes of Chaos with you, for I have come to send them back to their own realm forever!"
The silence again enfolded his high challenge, and he heard its echoes die away in the far places of the city.
Ten
Then, from somewhere inside the palace, he heard a movement. His heart pounded against his rib-cage, threatening to break through the bones and hang throbbing on his chest as proof of his mortality. He heard a sound like the clopping of monstrous hooves and, ahead of the noise, the measured steps that must be those of a man.
His eyes were fixed on the great, golden doors of the palace, half-hidden in the shadows that the columns threw. The doors silently began to open. Then a high shouldered figure, dwarfed by the size of the doors, stepped forth and stood there, regarding Elric with a horrible anger smouldering in his face.
On his body, scarlet armour glowed as if red-hot. On his left arm was a shield of the same stuff and in his hand a steel sword. He had a narrow, aquiline head with a closely trimmed black beard and moustache. On his elaborate helm with the Merman Crest of Pan Tang. Jagreen Lern said, in a voice that trembled with rage: "So, Elric, you have kept a part of your word, after all. How I wish I'd been able to kill you at Sequa when I had the chance, but then I had a bargain with Darnizhaan ..."
"Step forward, Theocrat," Elric said with sudden calm. "I'll give you the chance again and meet you fairly in single combat."
Jagreen Lern sneered. "Fairly? With that blade in your hands? Once I met it and did not perish, but now it burns with the souls of my best warrior-priests. I know its power. I would not be so foolish as to stand against it. No—let those you have challenged meet you!"
He stepped to one side. The doors gaped wider and, if Elric had expected to see giant figures emerge, he was disappointed. The dukes had assumed human proportions and the forms of men. But there was a power about them that filled the air as they moved to stand, disdainful of Jagreen Lern, upon the topmost step of the palace.
Elric looked upon their beautiful, smiling faces and shuddered again, for there was a kind of love on their faces, love mingled with pride and confidence, so that, for a moment, he was filled with a wish to jump from his horse and fling himself at their feet to plead forgiveness for what he had become. All the longing and the loneliness