Stormbringer - Michael Moorcock [63]
"Father—"
The old man raised a hand that was almost transparent with age. "There is another question I must ask of you. One that has troubled all who spend their immortality in this shade of a city. Some of us have noticed that the city itself fades at times and its colours dim, quivering as if about to vanish. Companions of ours have passed even beyond death and, perhaps, I shudder to contemplate it, into non-existence. Even here, in the timeless region of death, unprecedented changes manifest themselves and, those of us who've dared ask the question and also give its answer, fear that some tumultuous event has taken place in the world of the living. Some event which, so great is it, that even here we are affected and our souls' extinction threatened. A legend says that until the Dreaming City dies, we ghosts may inhabit its earlier glory. Is that the news you bear to us? Is this your message? For I note on clearer observation that your body lives still and this is merely your astral body, released for a while to wander the realms of the dead."
"Father—" but already the vision was fading; already he was withdrawing back down the bellowing corridors of the cosmos, through planes of existence unknown to living men, away, away...
"Father!" he called, and his own voice echoed, but there was none there to make reply. And in some sense at least he was glad, for how could he answer the poor spirit and reveal to him the truth of his guesses, admit the crimes he himself was guilty of against his ancestral city, against the very blood of his forefathers? All was mist and groaning sorrow as his echoes boomed into his ears, seeming to take on their own independence and warp the word into weirder words: "F-a-a-a-ath-e-er-r-r . . . A-a-a-a-a-v-a-a-a . . . A-a-a-a-h-a-a-a-a-a . . . R-a-a-a ... D-a-ra-va-ar-a-a ... !"
Still, though he strove with all his being, he could not rouse himself from slumber, but felt his spirit drawn through other regions of smoky indeterminacy, through patterns of colour beyond his earthly spectrum, beyond his mind's conception.
A huge face began to take form in the mist.
"Sepiriz!" Elric recognised the face of his mentor. But the black Nihrainian disembodied, did not appear to hear him. "Sepiriz—are you dead?"
The face faded, then reappeared almost at once upon the rest of the man's tall frame.
"Elric, I have discovered you at last, robed in your astral body, I see. Thank Fate, for I thought I had failed to summon you. Now we must make haste. A breach has been made in the defences of Chaos and we go to confer with the Lords of Law!"
"Where are we?"
"Nowhere as yet. We travel to the Higher Worlds. Come, hurry, I'll be your guide."
Down, down, through pits of softest wool that engulfed and comforted, through canyons that were cut between blazing mountains of light which utterly dwarfed them, through caverns of infinite blackness wherein their bodies shone and Elric knew that the dark nothingness went away in all directions for ever.
And then they seemed to stand upon a horizonless plateau, perfectly flat with occasional green and blue geometric constructions rising from it. The iridescent air was alive with shimmering patterns of energy, weaving intricate shapes that seemed very formal. And there, too, were things in human form—things which had assumed such shape for the benefit of the men who now encountered them.
The White Lords of the Higher Worlds, enemies of Chaos, were marvellously beautiful, with bodies of such symmetry that they could not be earthly. Only Law could create such perfection and, Elric thought, such perfection defeated progress. That the twin forces complemented one another was now plainer than ever before, and for either to gain complete ascendancy over the other meant entropy or stagnation for the cosmos.