Swords & Dark Magic

by Jonathan Strahan; Lou Anders

  It was as well that Stormbringer remained unsheathed. Next moment, the door had burst open and there stood the saturnine man from the ship with about a dozen of his fellow slave-traders. All of them were fully armed with a miscellaneous collection of weapons. They had not expected to find Elric standing, let alone observe him delivering a death blow to the still-writhing body of the guardian Asquinux.

  If the doorway had not been so narrow, they would have backed off, but that was not easily done. Warily, they edged towards the albino, beginning to form a half-circle, closing in on him. He smiled at them as if in welcome, holding Stormbringer almost lazily. He was breathing heavily from his exertions but otherwise the creature’s own tainted energy still sustained him. He was vaguely aware of the blood running down inside his armour from his wounded back.

  “I am glad to see you gentlemen.” The albino offered them a brief bow. “I cannot tell you how famished I have been.”

  With rather less confidence than they had shown on first entering, their boots slipping in the demon’s dark, stinking blood, they began to close in.

  Elric was laughing easily now, enjoying their dismay. He mocked them, feinting with his growling, insatiable blade. The men’s eyes narrowed as they pressed in. Then the albino reached out, almost elegantly, and took the head off the nearest soldier. They backed away, pushing one another aside in their panic. All they wanted to do now was escape, but Elric moved quickly so that he was between them and the dying demon. He reached behind him and drew the door as shut as possible. The severed head had rolled into the aperture and stopped the door from closing completely. From outside, a single bar of light entered the tower room. He feinted again, moving like a herdsman gathering his flock. Then, when the men were grouped together in the light, he swung the great, moaning broadsword so that its blade sliced into one, cutting him so deeply in the torso that half his body fell backwards while the other half fell forwards.

  Elric yelled with battle joy as the slaver’s energy filled him. He struck again and two arms flopped in the mess made by the demon’s dying. He stabbed, drawing that man’s life-force deep into himself, and then, when only the saturnine slave-trader was left, he took his sword and slipped it delicately into the man’s chest so that instantly the pumping heart sent energy into the sword and from Stormbringer into Elric’s own glowing body. His white skin blazed like silver and his red eyes glared in triumph. He lifted his head, surrounded by its halo of milk-white hair, and laughed—a sound which filled the tower with anguished triumph and which keened and echoed through all the countless worlds of the multiverse.

  When Elric had drawn a quick breath, he stepped through the door and saw the amphitheatre filled with startled faces. Addric Heed and his slavers stared up at him in baffled astonishment and Lady Fernrath ran like the wind towards him, shouting, “The slave quarters! Follow me!”

  “The slave quarters? Would you free the slaves?”

  “That, too, if we can. It might buy us time.”

  Then, while Addric Heed and his baffled warriors began to absorb what had happened, the two albinos dashed down the outer steps of the tower. Panting, she led Elric into the bowels of the White Fort. She had armed herself with a massive, beautifully balanced battle-axe, which she handled with considerable expertise. Together they cut down any who sought to stop them while Stormbringer sang its bloodthirsty song.

  Then, at last, they stood in long corridors stinking of human waste and putrifying flesh. There, shackled in every available space, were the choice men, women, and children whom Addric Heed had taken from all the cities and ships of the coast to be sold at the slave markets of Hizss in the coming days. These were the healthiest. The rest had failed to survive. Some corpses still hung in their shackles beside the living. Some slaves raised their heads, hopelessly curious. They were reconciled to their future.

  Lady Fernrath did not listen to their questions or answer their hope. She was headed for a large marble enclosure at the far end of the corridor, whose bars were set further apart and were four times the thickness of any others. She dropped the axe, her eyes fixed on that great cage. But, while she ran on, Elric spared time to strike through chains wherever he could and release as many slaves as possible, especially the men. He anticipated rapid pursuit from Addric Heed and his slavers and wanted as many people fighting for their own interests as possible.

  By the time he reached her, she had drawn back heavy bolts from the gigantic cage. Within, its empty sockets staring into space, its wings crumpled and awkwardly set, its claws clipped and bound with brass, sat a frail old Phoorn seemingly on the point of death.

  Lady Fernrath approached the creature and placed gentle hands upon it, stroking its grey-white leathery scales and crooning to it in the ancient language of her people.

  “Father, it is I, your daughter Fernrath. Here to free you.”

  “Oh, child, you know I cannot be free. I cannot see to be gone from here. I cannot fly. Your brother will always keep me prisoner. There is no hope, daughter. You should not have risked Addric discovering the truth, of knowing what only we two know.”

  “It is different now, Father.”

  From the far end of the slave quarters, there came shouts and the noise of fighting. Clearly, now they were free, the slaves were not readily going to lose their liberty again. They understood that this was their last chance. This knowledge gave them the power to fight, even though few of them were professional soldiers. Clashing metal told Elric that some had already seized weapons. But he knew only a miracle would allow them to prevail for long against Addric Heed’s trained warriors.

  With a deep, not-unhappy sigh, Elric prepared to do battle with an army.

  The Advantages of Supernatural Compacts

  The old Phoorn was called Hemric and he was, of course, Lady Fernrath’s father. “He has been here for over two centuries,” she told the albino, “dying to serve my brother’s despicable descent into trade.”

  “Your brother is a poor specimen of our race,” said Elric in distaste. “And he has held his own father with human slaves?” Elric frowned. “Bad form at best, madam. If one would blind and imprison a relative, it should be with its own kind.”

  She was too hurried to answer. “Quickly, the pearls. Give me the pearls!”

  He slipped them from his shirt, already half-guessing what she meant to do. Stroking her father’s long snout, she persuaded the old Phoorn to lower his head, then, taking the glowing crimson pearls from Elric’s hands, she placed them one by one carefully and delicately into the long-healed sockets where his eyes had been, all the time crooning a long, melodic spell. Elric watched, fascinated, as the flesh began to form around the orbs and suddenly the Phoorn blinked. He blinked again. He could see.

  And then, as there came a shout from up ahead and the battling slaves, protecting their children, began to fall back before Addric Heed’s well-armed warriors, the twin crimson pearls glowed and pulsed. Intelligence came into them and with intelligence came anger. The old Phoorn’s venom had long since dried up, but the long, beautiful snout twitched and snorted as fury filled him.

  A deep, distant boom rose from somewhere within the old Phoorn’s huge chest. He lifted his head, and the quills—each the height of a tall man—rattled on his chest, while all along his tessellated tail the huge combs rose and stood proud. Even Elric found the transformation astonishing. The booming grew deeper and louder. He raised himself up on his muscular legs and blinked. From each eye now fell a drop of blood. The face, which regarded first his daughter and then Elric, was benign and profoundly sad, full of bitter wisdom. “With vision comes power,” he said in Phoorn. And blinked again. This time it was a gigantic salt tear which fell.

  Elric realised that the slaves had fallen back, were running past him, seeking the freedom of the forest. Addric Heed was there, riding astride a massive battle horse, blond and armoured. Behind him were massed more cavalry and fresh infantry. The slaves had, for the most part, dropped their weapons, taken
up their children, and ran out into the light, only to stagger back in, pierced by the arrows of Addric Heed’s waiting archers. “Like all others, save Hizss, this place was designed for warfare,” she said, “no matter what the occasion.” She watched as her father flexed wings long unused.

  From directly above, came a thunderous excitement of yelling, terrified voices, a clashing of metal.

  “Some fresh sorcery of Addric Heed’s no doubt,” she said. “It was through his magic that he first learned to make slaves of his ancestors and use them to build his power.”

  “Aye,” agreed Hemric, seeking her out with his unfamiliar sight and looking down on her with a benign expression never seen any longer on the faces of his Melnibonéan kin. “We were unsuspecting. When he could not make us fly for him, he took out our eyes and made us swim. I would like to kill my son if I could.”

  “You shall, Father, when we find him,” she promised. But it was a promise she would not keep.

  Another roll of thunder. Did it come from the sky? Addric Heed lifted his handsome, arrogant head, surprised by it. He reined in his pale stallion, looking upwards, staring about him. Having no other plan, the slaves had returned to mass around Elric. They had reached a sudden impasse. Even with the black sword, the albino knew they could not defeat such numbers.

  Elric considered a parlay with Addric Heed, but the power in him, which filled his mind, his body, and his soul, was not a compromising power; it did not apologise for itself, for it had no conscience. His unnatural empathy for humans had drawn him to the Young Kingdoms and beyond, to learn of their morality and humility, their curiosity, all that his people had lost, for he had realised instinctively that only with these qualities restored could his own folk survive.

  Then Elric’s cruel Melnibonéan pride had brought him home and achieved all he had desired to avert. He had assured the destruction of his people, the burning of their towers, and the end of a power they had taken for granted. The only power he had now was from Melniboné his family’s sorcery and its history, the pacts which it had, in its moments of crisis, been forced to make with Chaos, where once, long, long ago, it had leaned towards Law. His dreamquests into other planes, including his own family’s past and present, had taught him all this; but he had learned only to a degree how to harness and control such power, to restore his vitality with the life-stuff of living, sentient things.

  Addric’s army advanced through the echoing galleries towards Elric, that panting, unthinking creature bearing a pulsing, moaning sword in which red runes writhed, who was the last emperor of a dying race, a ragged horde of slaves at his back, together with an albino woman and her enfeebled father. At the pirate chief’s command, the archers began assembling before him. But then the thunder came again. This time Elric saw a messenger riding through the ranks to address Addric Heed. Fernrath’s brother lifted his hand to halt his men, turning in his saddle to speak, but not all had heard and some continued to advance. Elric watched as the pirate slaver led his men back through the prison quarters and up into the main fortress. The stairways were wide enough to allow the cavalry to remain mounted through several of the upper galleries.

  Soon the advancing soldiers began to realise they had been deserted. Some turned to follow. Others called out, warning that the fewer their numbers the worse their plight.

  Wearily, the slaves bent again to pick up abandoned weapons.

  This was an opportunity Elric had not anticipated and, trained strategist that he was, he at once shouted to the rabble army to follow, leading a charge that almost immediately broke Addric Heed’s forces, sending them running behind their master, convinced they were already defeated.

  The warriors were brave and experienced, but they were completely demoralised from the moment Elric struck them—a ghost from their own pasts—a whirlwind of black, vampiric death, its howling rune-blade an image of their own legends, its blazing crimson eyes haunting all their nightmares. And with their leader gone, and in the certain presence of their own Prince of Chaos, the demon lord Arioch, who was one of their shared pantheon, they had no stomach for fighting their kind. It took the Lady Fernrath to speak to Elric in the High Tongue of the Phoorn, reminding him of who and where he was, to urge him to lower his sword and look wonderingly around him at the piled corpses, the bodies of all those who had gone to feed himself and Stormbringer. So many damned souls! And then the albino knew a kind of grief. But it was not for the dead slavers that he wept.

  While Elric wept, there came another wave of amber-armoured soldiers. At first it seemed they had rallied, but they were in obvious disarray. Many had lost their weapons and, seeing that their comrades were captured, threw themselves on the mercy of their former booty, who promptly stripped them of their arms and put them in chains. For the moment, the air was free of arrows. Clearly, the archers had been called to another part of the fort to reinforce Addric Heed’s army. But who could be attacking?

  Suddenly Elric looked up to hear the constant rolling thunder moving first towards them, then away again, while the alabaster walls shook and shivered, and small showers of stone and plaster fell from ceilings and walls.

  Leaving the others behind to guard the ancient Phoorn and to organise themselves and their prisoners, Elric and Lady Fernrath stalked warily to the nearest stair and began to climb. As they reached galleries with windows which looked out on other windowed galleries, they could see that all the way to the top of the great fort, a terrible fight had been taking place and dead soldiers in amber armour lay everywhere. The sound of thunder was beginning to subside. The sky was clearing and the sun turned clouds to pale gold. From above, Elric heard his name being called.

  “Elric! My lord! We thought you dead!”

  The albino stopped and looked up. At length, he saw through a smashed window in the gallery above a broad, redheaded face grinning down. The face was Moonglum’s.

  Slowly, the madness deserted Elric and in something close to joy he ran through the galleries until he found his friend. Princess Nauha stood with Moonglum and also Cita Tine, the tavern wench. All were armed with bloody swords and bore the familiar look of war-wolves who had fought a long, exhilarating fight. And then, as if Insensate Fate could not contain this level of coincidence but must burst and spread it across the multiverse, there appeared the nuns of Xiombarg, smug as nuns are who have pleased themselves by some deed of virtue, to report that all was settled as justice demanded.

  “Our lady answered us and we reached an agreement,” declared one as she straightened her unwieldy crown.

  “Agreement?” Elric knew that the Gods of the Balance rarely made bargains not to their advantage.

  Then Cita Tine was calling out. “Where? The slaves? Are they still in the pens?”

  Elric shrugged. “Some are. Others set off through the forest.” He was puzzled by her interest.

  She sheathed her blades and peered down. Then she moved away in the direction from which Elric and the Lady Fernrath had come.

  Elric turned enquiring eyes on his friend. Moonglum sighed and scratched his head. “That’s why she came with us. Her plan all along was to sell valuables here and use the money to buy her husband back from the traders. He was taken a voyage ago.”

  Elric frowned. “So—?”

  “Aye. She used me and now she’s off to see if her spouse survived.” Moonglum sighed. “Still, for a few weeks, I have to say, she was happy to have me as his substitute.” He cast a hopeful eye upon one of the acolytes, who moved closer to her colleague. And he sighed again.

  “So Xiombarg’s the cause of all this destruction?” Elric wiped other men’s life-stuff from his face.

  “We fought hard and well, but we could not have succeeded without her ghastly help.” Nauha stepped closer, “We certainly enjoyed a little sword work of our own.” She noticed that blood was crusting on both her blades and, glancing around her, saw a useful cloak. Bending, she ripped the garment away from its former owner and began to wipe first one sword and then the o
ther.

  “Addric Heed?” asked Fernrath, looking about her at the devastation. “Does he live?”

  “After a fashion,” said the Princess of Uyt. “Knowing your relationship, I begged him spared. But I was almost too late. Xiombarg—”

  “Where is he?”

  Nauha frowned, thinking. “Two floors below and…” She shook her head. “Two to the left. His banners and his horse are there. He barely lives, however. Xiombarg was eating him.”

  Lady Fernrath was already running from the hall seeking the downward staircase and calling her father’s and her brother’s names.

  “There has been a feasting here today.” From curiosity, Elric followed her, the others coming in his wake. “Was this Xiombarg’s only payment?” He indicated the mounded dead.

  Nauha laughed. “I think not. I recruited the priestesses when it became clear the supernatural was involved. Moonglum and the girl came up from the town, ready to defend you, but Fernrath had already—already transformed herself. And carried you off.”

  “You knew where we went?” He moved down a staircase covered in corpses. “How so?”

  “We were in time to see you leave. Cita Tine knew of the White Fort and how to get there.”

  “But you arrived so swiftly!”

  “Xiombarg was enlisted for that, too. The priestesses summoned their goddess and she transported us here.”

  “Yet no sacrifice was made?”

  “Oh, she feasted very well. And there was some trinket at Fernrath’s house, which Xiombarg valued. All she did, she did for that.”

  They came upon Fernrath then, amongst all the blood and dismembered bodies, amber-coloured armour discarded like the remains of shrimp sucked clean of their shells. She crouched on the marble floor, her shoulders shaking in grief. In her arms, she held something ragged and red. Elric saw that it was all that was left of a man. Addric Heed, proud pirate prince and dealer in slaves lay there, taking great gasps, his lifeblood bubbling from his chest. Little was left of his face. His legs and an arm were missing. One side of him looked as if it had been gnawed upon. Xiombarg had been interrupted in her feasting. He tried to speak, but failed.