Vanishing Tower - Michael Moorcock [53]
"Because—don't you see?—I am Elric—I am Corum—oh, this is the worst agony. . . . Or, at least, I have been or am to be Elric or Corum. . . ."
"Your name, sir?" Corum said again.
"A thousand names are mine. A thousand heroes I have been. Ah! I am—I am—John Daker—Erekosë—Urlik—many, many, many, more. . . . The memories, the dreams, the existences." He stared at them suddenly through his pain-filled eyes. "Do you not understand? Am I the only one to be doomed to understand? I am he who has been called the Champion Eternal—I am the hero who has existed forever—and, yes, I am Elric of Melniboné—Prince Corum Jhaelen Irsei—I am you, also. We three are the same creature and a myriad other creatures besides. We three are one thing—doomed to struggle forever and never understand why. Oh! My head pounds. Who tortures me so? Who?
Elric's throat was dry. "You say you are another incarnations of myself!"
"If you would phrase it so! You are both other incarnations of myself!"
"So," said Corum, "that is what Bolorhiag meant by the Three Who Are One. We are all aspects of the same man, yet we have tripled our strength because we have been drawn from three different ages. It is the only power which might successfully go against Voilodion Ghagnasdiak of the Vanishing Tower."
"Is that the castle wherein your guide is imprisoned?" Elric asked, casting a glance of sympathy at the groaning black man.
"Aye. The Vanishing Tower flickers from one plane to another, from one age to another, and exists in a single location only for a few moments at a time. But because we are three separate incarnations of a single hero it is possible that we form a sorcery of some kind which will enable us to follow the tower and attack it. Then, if we free my guide, we can continue on to Tanelorn. . . ."
"Tanelorn?" The black man looked at Corum with hope suddenly flooding into his eyes. "I, too, seek Tanelorn. Only there may I discover some remedy to my dreadful fate—which is to know all previous incarnations and be hurled at random from one existence to another! Tanelorn—I must find her!"
"I, too, must discover Tanelorn," Elric told him, "for on my own plane her inhabitants are in great danger."
"So we have a common purpose as well as a common identity," Corum said. "Therefore we shall fight in concert, I pray. First we must free my guide, then go on to Tanelorn."
"I'll aid you willingly," said the black giant.
"And what shall we call you—you who are ourselves?" Corum asked him.
"Call me Erekosë—though another name suggests itself to me—for it was as Erekosë that I came closest to knowing forgetfulness and the fulfilment of love."
"Then you are to be envied, Erekosë," Elric said meaningly, "for at least you have come close to forgetfulness. . . ."
"You have no inkling of what it is I must forget," the black giant told him. He shook his reins. "Now Corum—which way to the Vanishing Tower?"
"This road leads to it. We ride down now to Darkvale, I believe."
Elric's mind could hardly contain the significance of what he had heard. It suggested that the universe—or the multiverse, as Myshella had named it—was divided into infinite layers of existence, that time was virtually a meaningless concept save where it related to one man's life or one short period of history. And there were planes of existence where the Cosmic Balance was not known at all—or so Corum had suggested—and other planes where the Lords of the Higher Worlds had far greater powers than they had on his own world. He was tempted to consider the idea of forgetting Theleb K'aarna, Myshella, Tanelorn and the rest and devote himself to the exploration of all these infinite worlds. But then he knew that this could not be for, if Erekosë spoke the truth, then he—or something which was essentially himself—existed in all these planes already. Whatever force it was which he named "Fate" had admitted him to this plane to fulfil one purpose. An important purpose affecting the destinies of a thousand planes it must surely be if it brought him together in three separate incarnations.