no doubt, before they realize the trick and find a way of entering the city. So we must do all we have to as quickly as possible."
"I understood that time, as we know it, does not exist." I was becoming angry, beginning to think they tricked me. "Therefore there is no urgency."
Prince Lobkowitz allowed himself a small smile. "Some illusions are more powerful than others," he said. He seemed about to leave it at that, then added, "This is the last place in the mul-tiverse you can find this fortress physically. Everywhere else it has transformed itself."
"Transformed? This was a fortress?"
"Transformed by what it contains. By what it must guard. At one stage in the multiversal story, this was a great and noble city, self-contained and yet able to help all who came to it seeking justice. Not unlike the city you call Tanelorn, it brought order and tranquillity to all who dwelled here.
"The human story is what changes so drastically. Passion and greed determine the course of nations, not their ideals. But without change we would die. So simple human emotions, those which have brought down a thousand other empires and destroyed a thousand Golden Ages, worked to bring about the destruction of this stability. It is a story of love and jealousy, but it will be familiar enough to you.
"This fortress-this great metropolis-was built to guard a symbol. First, a symbol was chiefly all that it was. Then, through human faith and creativity, the symbol took on more and more reality. Ultimately the symbol and the thing itself were one. They became the same, and this gave them strength. But it also gave them dangerous vulnerability. For once the symbol took physical shape, human action became far more involved in its destiny. Now symbol and reality are the same. We face the consequences of that marriage. Of what, in essence, we ourselves created."
"Are you speaking of a symbolic tree?" I asked. I could only think of old German tree worship, still recalled in our decorated Yule pines. "Or of the multiverse itself?"
He seemed relieved. "You understand the paradox? The multi-
verse and the tree are one, and each is encompassed by the other. That is the terrible dilemma of our human lives. We are capable of destroying the raw material of our own existence. Our imaginations can create actuality, and they can destroy it. But they are equally capable of creating illusion. The worst illusion, of course, is self-deception. From that fundamental illusion, all others spring. This is the great flaw which forever holds us back from redemption. It was what brought an end to the Golden Age this place represented." "Do you say we can never be redeemed?" Lobkowitz brought his hand to my shoulder. "That is the fate of the Champion of Humanity. It is the fate of us all. Time and space are in perpetual flux. We work to achieve resolution in the multiverse, but we can never know true resolution ourselves. It is the burden we carry. The burden of our kind."
"And this dilemma is repeated throughout countless versions of the same lives, the same stories, the same struggles?"
"Repetition is the confirmation of life. It is what we love in music and in many forms of art and science. Repetition is how we survive. It is, after all, how we reproduce. But when something has been repeated so many times that it has lost all resonance, then something must be done to change the story. New sap must be forced into old wood, eh? That is what we try to do now. But first we must bring all elements together. Do you understand what we are hoping to achieve, Count Ulric?"
I had to admit that I was baffled. Such philosophies were beyond my simple soul to fathom. But I said, "I think so." All I really knew was that if I played out my role in this, I would be reunited with Oona. And nothing else much mattered to me.
"Come," said Sepiriz, almost taking pity on me. "We will eat now."
We walked outside to a wide path curving around the city. "What is the exact nature of this place?" I asked. "Some center of the multiverse?"
Lobkowitz saw how mystified I was. "The multiverse has no center any more than a tree has a center, but this is where the natural and the supernatural meet, where branches of the multiverse
twine together. These intersections produce unpredictable consequences and threaten everything. Size loses logic. That is why it is so important to retain the original sequences of events. To make a path and to stick to it. To choose the right numbers, as it were. It is how we have learned to order Chaos and navigate the Time Field. Have you not noticed that many people out there are of different dimensions? That is a sure sign how badly the Balance is under attack." Lobkowitz paused to look up. Tier after tier, the vast building disappeared into wisps of white cloud.
"The Kakatanawa built this city over the centuries from the original mountain," Lobkowitz told me as we continued past deserted homes, shops, stables. "They were a great, civilizing people. They lived by the rule of Law. All who sought their protection were accepted on condition that they accepted the Law. All lived for one thing-for the tree which was their charge. They devoted themselves to it. Their entire nation lived to serve and nurture the tree, to protect it and to ensure that it continued to grow. They were a famous and respected people, renowned across the multiverse for their wisdom and reason. The great kings and chiefs of other nations sent their sons to be educated in the ways of the Kakatanawa. Even from other realms they came to learn from the wisdom of the People of the Tree. White Crow, of course, follows his family's long tradition . . ."
I said that I understood Kakatanawa to mean 'People of the Circle'. Why did he say "tree"?
He smiled. "The tree is in the circle. Time is the circle, and the tree is the multiverse. The circle is the sphere in which all exists. Space is but a dimension of this sphere."
"Space is a dimension of time?"
"Exactly." Lobkowitz beamed. "It explains so much when you
realize that."
I was saved from any further contemplation of this bewildering notion by a sharp wailing sound. With sinking heart, I rushed to the nearest balcony. I saw dark clouds drawing in on the jagged horizon, gathering around one of the tallest peaks and writhing and twisting as if in an agonized effort to assume some living form.
The clouds were making one huge figure, drawn by all the winds now in thrall to Lord Shoashooan. A long streamer of cloud sped from the central mass, across the ice, over the walls of the great fortress city, and lashed at our flesh like a whip, then retreated before we could respond.
Even Sepiriz bore a thin welt across his neck where the cloud had caught him. I imagined I saw a flash of fear in his eyes, but when I looked again he was smiling. "Your old friends march against us," Lobkowitz said. "That is the first taste of their power. From this moment on, we shall never know peace. And if Gaynor the Damned is successful, we shall know agony for eternity."
I raised an eyebrow at this. Lobkowitz was serious. "Once the Balance is destroyed, time as we know it is also destroyed. And that means we are frozen, conscious but inanimate, at the very moment before oblivion, living that death forever."
I must admit I had begun to close my ears to Lobkowitz's existential litany. A future without Oona was bleak enough to contemplate.
Food forgotten, we watched the blue-black bruise of cloud forming and re-forming around the peaks of the mountains. A shout from another part of the gallery and we could see over the great gateway to the city, to the half-faded path which Ayanawatta had created with his flute. It now spread like dissipating mercury across the ice with men moving through it, leaping from patch to patch. The figures were tiny. They were not Kakatanawa. I thought at first they were Inuit, bulky in their furs, but then I realized that the leader had no face. Instead the light reflected from a mirrored helmet which was all too familiar to me. Another man strode beside him, one whose gait I recognized, and on the other side of him a smaller man, also familiar. But they were too far away for me to see their faces. They were without doubt his warriors.
The same Vikings who had tried to stop us reaching the fortress.
"Time is malleable," said Lobkowitz, anticipating my question. "Gaynor is now Gunnar the Damned. Merely a fraction of
movement sideways through the multiverse. He has gathered himself
together, but he dare not live now without that helmet-for all his faces exist at once. Otherwise he is here in your twelfth century, as indeed is this city and much else ..."
I turned to look at him. "Does Gunnar still seek the Grail?"
Lobkowitz shrugged. "It is Klosterheim who longs for the Grail. In his warped way he seeks reconciliation. Gunnar seeks death the way others seek treasure. But not merely his death. He seeks the death of everything. For only by achieving that will he justify his own self-murder."
"He is my first cousin, yet you seem to know him better than I do." I was fighting off a creeping sense of dread. "Did you know him in Budapest or Vienna?"
"He is an eternal, as you are an eternal. As you have alter egos, fellow avatars of the same archetype, so he takes many names and several guises. But the relative you know as Gaynor von Minct will always be the criminal Knight of the Balance, who challenged its power and failed. And who challenges it again and again."
"Lucifer?"
"Oh, all peoples have their particular versions of that fellow, you know."
"And does he always fail in his challenges?"
"I wish that were so," said Lobkowitz. "Sometimes, I must say, he understands his folly and seeks to correct his actions. But there is no such hope here, my dear Count. Come, we must confer. Lord Shoashooan gathers strength again." He paused to glance out of another opening in the great wall winding up the ziggurat. "Gaynor and his friends bring considerable sorcery to this realm."
"How shall we resist them?" I looked around at the little party, the black giant, Prince Lobkowitz, the sachem Ayanawatta and White Crow. "How can we possibly fight so many? We are outnumbered and virtually unarmed. Lord Shoashooan gathers strength while we have nothing to fight him with. Where's my sword?"
Sepiriz looked to Lobkowitz, who looked to Ayanawatta and White Crow. Both men said nothing. Sepiriz shrugged. "The sword was left on the ice. We cannot get the third until..."
"Third?" I said.
Ayanawatta pointed behind him. "White Crow left his own blade down there with Bes. His shield is there, too. But again, we lack the necessary third object of power. There is no hope now, I think, of waking the Phoorn guardian. He dies. And with him the tree. And with the tree, the Balance . . ." He sighed hopelessly.
The silence of the city was suddenly cut by a squealing shriek, like metal cutting metal, and something took shape above the ice directly behind where Gaynor and his men were moving cautiously along the dissipating trail.
I was sure we could defeat the warriors alone, but I dreaded whatever it was I saw forming behind them. It shrieked again.
The sound was full of greedy, anticipatory mockery. Lord Shoashooan, of course, had returned. No doubt, too, Gaynor had helped him increase his strength.
White Crow turned away from the scene. He was deeply troubled. "I sought my father on the island, in my crow form. I thought he would help us. That he would be the third. But Klosterheim was waiting for me and captured me. At first I thought that you were him, my father. If you had not been near . . . The Kakatanawa came to rescue me after Klosterheim went away. They released me and found you. My father is, after all, elsewhere. He followed his dream and was swallowed by a monster. I thought he had returned to the Dragon Throne, but if he did, he has come back for some reason. This must not be." He lowered his voice, troubled. "If that man is who I am sure it is, I must not fight him. I cannot fight my own father."
I frowned. "Elric is your father?"
He laughed. "Of course not. How could that be? Sadric is my father."
Ayanawatta touched his friend's arm. "Sadric is dead. You said so. Swallowed by the kenabik."
White Crow was genuinely puzzled. "I said he was swallowed. Not that he was killed."
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Pathfinder
Pour the beer and light me feasting fires,
Bring you in the tall Yule trees,
Without, let Father Frost anadBrother Death reside
Let Mother Famine fly to farther fields,
Raise high the trees and high the ale-cup lift,
Let good will rule and to ill will all folk give short shrift.
OLD MOORSDALE SONG
Lord Shoashooan did not merely take shape above the fading causeway. He drew strength from the surrounding mountains. Storm clouds boiled in from north, south and west, masses of dark grey and black shot through with points of white, tumbling swiftly towards us.
Shale and rocks began to fly towards his spinning form, and from within that bizarre body his grotesque face laughed and raved in its greedy rage, utterly deranged. He was now more powerful than when either Oona or I had fought him. His size increased by the moment. Pieces of ice flew up from the lake to join the whirlwind's heavy debris. And when I looked deep into it, I saw the twisting bodies of men and beasts, heard their cries mingled with the vicious shriek of the cruel Warlord of Winds.
Realizing suddenly what he faced, White Crow frowned, murmured something to himself, then turned and began to run back down the long, curving roadway between the tiers. Sepiriz and Ayanawatta both cried out to him, but he ignored them. He flung some cryptic remark over his shoulder and then disappeared from
sight. Was he deserting us? Where was Oona? Did he go to her? Was she safe? And who did he think his father was? Gaynor? How did White Crow hope to avoid conflict?
Questions were impossible. Even Sepiriz seemed flustered by the speed with which Lord Shoashooan was manifesting himself. The maddened Lord of Winds was already ten times more powerful than when he had sought to block our way across the ice.
Prince Lobkowitz was grim as he hurried up the ramps. Higher and higher we climbed, and the tornado rose to match our height. The causeways grew tighter and narrower as we neared the top of the city, and the wind licked and tasted us, playing with us, to let us know there was no escaping its horrible intelligence, its vast destructive power.
As we neared the top, heavy pieces of earth and stone flew against the walls of Kakatanawa, chipping at surfaces, slashing into foliage. A large rock narrowly missed me, and Sepiriz shook twice as he was hit. Part of an outer wall fell. Through the gap I saw the tiny figures of the Vikings on the ice moving in closer, but we were momentarily safe from any immediate confrontation with them. We had no way to resist the invader even if we could engage him. Lord Sepiriz carried no sword. Save for Ayanawatta's bow and Prince Lobkowitz's cutlass, we had no weapons.
We had reached a broad-based tower with dark red walls and a deep blue ceiling and floor; a central spiral staircase led like a cord of silver up to a platform and what was clearly an experimental laboratory. An alchemical study, perhaps? Certainly Prince Lobkowitz had expected to find it there. He began at once to climb the stairs.
"Let's have a better look at our enemies," he murmured. We followed him up. Here was an assortment of large, chunky machinery, mostly constructed of stone, like an old mill with huge granite cogwheels and smaller ones of beaten gold and platinum. Apparently this people, too, had no notion of smelting iron. The strange, bulky cogs and levers worked a series of lenses and mirrors. There was something familiar about all this.
Of course. My father had experimented with a smaller version
at Bek before the first war. I realized we were looking at a rare form of camera obscura, which, by means of mirrors, could show scenes of the surface around the city. It was not entirely mechanical in nature. There were other forces involved in its construction, more common to Melnibone than Munich. Indeed, when Lord Sepiriz joined the stocky prince, he easily made parts move by a murmured command and a gesture. Gradually the two men brought the scene outside the gates into view.
I had been right. Gaynor the Damned led them. Near him was his turncoat lieutenant Klosterheim. The third man also wore a helmet, which obscured most of his face, but his eyes were shockingly familiar. He had an edgy, wolfish air, as did all the Vikings, but his was of
a different quality. There was something fundamentally self-contained about the figure, and I feared him more than the others.
The Vikings did not look as if they had slept or eaten well for some time. Their journey here had clearly not been an easy one. I had rarely seen a hungrier bunch of cutthroats. They watched the Wind Demon with considerable wariness and did not look happy to be of Gaynor's party now. They were almost as nervous of the huge whirlwind as we were! Only the stranger in the black helmet seemed to be in a different mood. His eyes in shadow, his pale lips half-hidden by the upwardly thrusting chin-guard, the man was smiling. Like his eyes, his smile was one I recognized and feared.
Still larger rocks smashed into the walls, leaving deep gashes. Sepiriz was furious, muttering about the age of the place and what it had meant for so many millennia.
I think he had believed us safe, at least temporarily, in the remote fortress city, but these events were proving far more dangerous and whimsical than he had expected. He realized he may have underestimated the danger. The developing situation appeared to have defeated his imagination.
A gritty wind howled into the tall camera and whistled around the complicated confection of copper wires and polished mirrors, the worn granite cogwheels and brass pivots, the pools of
mercury. There was a busy humming, a rattling and buzzing as the wind touched the delicate, half-supernatural instruments. Polished glass flashed and blinded me. Thin tubes rattled and hissed and scraped together.
Lord Shoashooan's voice whispered through the tall rooms, finding strange, ugly echoes. "Mortals and immortals both, you face your end without dignity or grace. Accept the fact that the Balance is finished. Its central staff has been lost, its scales discarded. Soon the tree itself will die. The regulator of the multi-
verse has failed you. Law triumphs. The steady calm of complete stability awaits you. Time is abolished, and you can anticipate, as do I, a new order."
The Skrayling Tree toa-2 Page 29