“They fight to control infinity!” Wheldrake was impressed.

  “The multiverse is not infinite in the strictest sense…” began Phatt, to be interrupted by his mother, suddenly shrill with irritability.

  “Infinity? Loose talk! Infinity? The multiverse is finite. It has limits and dimensions which only a god may occasionally perceive—but they are limits and dimensions! Otherwise there would be no point in it!”

  “In what, Mother?” Even Fallogard was surprised. “In what?”

  “In the Family Phatt, of course. It is our firm belief that we shall one day—” And she left her son to recite the bulk of what was evidently the family creed…

  “—learn the plan of the entire multiverse and travel at will from Sphere to Sphere, from realm to realm, from world to world, travel through the great clouds of shifting, multicoloured stars, the tumbling planets in all their millions, through galaxies that swarm like gnats in a summer garden, and rivers of light—glory beyond glory—pathways of moonbeams between the roaming stars.

  “Why, sir, have you ever sometimes stood alone and seen visions? That moment, you recall, when you pause and are granted a glimpse of near-eternity, the multiverse? You might glance at a cloud or a burning log, you might notice a certain fold in a blanket, or the angle at which a blade of grass stands—it does not matter. You know what you have seen and it brings that larger vision. Yesterday, for instance—?” And he cocked an enquiring eye at the poet before receiving his new friend’s approval to continue.

  “—for instance, I look up at about noon. Silver light pours like water down the massed clouds, themselves vast floating asymmetric sea-beasts so large they are host to whole nations of other species, including, surely, Man? As if they entirely surfaced from their element, ready to plunge again into depths as mysterious to those below as oceans are to those above them.” His face glowed a richer red with all this bright recollection, his eyes appeared to focus again upon those clouds, upon those monumental natural barges, like raised wrecks, alarmingly complete after millennia, alien beyond imagining, beyond any impulse of ordinary mortals to follow, which one’s very soul yearned to forget, those obscenely ancient beast-ships grown insubstantial in their sudden element, this brilliancy of sun and sky, and gradually their outlines dim, turn grey and fade one into another until only the sun and the sky remain, witnesses of their unmourned passing. “Have they grown invisible or are they gone for ever, even from our blood’s strange memory, that tiny speck of ancestral matter that informs our race’s united soul? Would that be to say they never existed and never could exist? Many things existed before our ancestors ever lifted one webbed foot upon a steamy shore…”

  And Elric smiled at this, for his race’s memory went back before mankind’s, at least in his own realm. His folk, older and unhuman settlers, pursued or banished or otherwise escaping through the realms, had been victims of a mighty catastrophe, perhaps of their own creation.

  Memory follows memory, memory defeats memory; some things are banished only into the realms of our rich imaginings—but this does not mean that they do not or cannot or will not exist—they exist! They exist!

  The last Melnibonéan thinks of his people’s history and legends, and he tells his human friends some of what he knows and one day a human scribe will write these remembered words which will become in turn the foundation for whole cycles of myths, whole volumes of legend and superstition, so that a grain of a grain of pre-human memory is carried over to us, blood to blood, life to life. And the cycles turn and spin and intersect at unpredictable points in an eternity of possibilities, paradoxes and conjunctions, and one tale feeds another and one anecdote provides others with entire epics. Thus we influence past, present and future and all their possibilities. Thus are we all responsible for one another, through all the myriad dimensions of time and space that make up the multiverse…

  “Human love,” says Fallogard Phatt, turning his eyes from his vision, “it is finally our only real weapon against entropy…”

  “Without Chaos and Law in balance,” says Wheldrake, reaching for some cheese and wondering, idly, which terrorised region along the road provided that particular tribute, “we rob ourselves of the greatest possible number of choices. That is the singular paradox of this conflict between the Higher Worlds. Let one become dominant and half of what we have is lost. I cannot but sometimes feel that our fate is in the hands of creatures hardly more intelligent than a stoat!”

  “Intelligence and power were never the same thing,” murmurs the Rose, departing from her own train of thought for a moment. “Frequently a lust for power is nothing more than an impulse of the stupidly baffled who cannot understand why they have been treated so badly by Dame Fortune. Who can blame those brutes, sometimes? They are outraged by random Nature. Perhaps these gods feel the same? Perhaps they make us endure such awful trials because they know we are actually superior to them? Perhaps they have become senile and forget the point of their old truces?”

  “You speak truth in one area, madam,” said Elric. “Nature distributes power with about the same lack of discrimination as she distributes intelligence or beauty or wealth, indeed!”

  “Which is why mankind,” says Wheldrake, revealing a little of his own background, “has a duty to correct such mistakes of justice that Nature makes. That is why we must provide for those whom random Nature creates poor, or sick or otherwise distressed. If we do not do this, I think, then we are not fulfilling our own natural function. I speak,” he said hastily, “as an agnostic. I am a thorough-going Radical, make no mistake. Yet it does seem to me that Paracelsus had it when he suggested…”

  Whereupon the Rose, growing skilful at such things, halted his ascent into the realms of abstraction by enquiring loudly of Mother Phatt if she required more cheese.

  “Cheese enough tonight,” said the old woman mysteriously, but her smile was friendly. “Always moving. Always moving. Heel and toe, the walkers go. Heel and toe, heel and toe. All walking, my dear, in the hope of escaping their damnation. Unchanging; generation upon generation; injustice upon injustice; and sustained by further injustice. Heel and toe, the walkers go. Always moving. Always moving…” And she subsided almost gratefully into staring silence.

  “Ah, such an infamous society, sir,” says her son, with a sage nod, an approving wave of a biscuit. “Infamous. It is a lie, sir. A mighty deception, this ‘free nation’ that always seems to proceed, yet never changes! Is that not true decadence, sir?”

  “Shall it be Engeland’s fate, I wonder?” mused Wheldrake of some lost home. “Is it the fate of all unjust empires? Oh, I fear I see the future of my country!”

  “Certainly it became the only future of my own,” said Elric with a grin that revealed much more than it attempted to hide. “And that is why Melniboné collapsed like a worm-eaten husk, almost at a touch…”

  “Now,” says the Rose, “down to business.” And she sketches a plan to move at night between the wheels and find Duntrollin, there to skulk amongst the marching boards until such time as they could gain the stairs—from there Fallogard Phatt would be their bloodhound, his clairvoyance focused to find the three sisters. “But we must discuss the details,” she says, “there could be practicalities, Master Phatt, that I have overlooked.”

  “A few, ma’am, to be sure.” Politely, he listed them. The flaps to the marching boards would be guarded. The warrior inhabitants of Duntrollin would almost certainly be prepared for such an attempt as theirs. He had never seen the sisters and therefore his gift would be unreliable. What was more, even when they had reached the sisters there was no certainty they would be welcomed by them. And then, how were they to leave the Gypsy Nation? The barriers of garbage were almost impossible to cross and the guardians always detected would-be escapers. Besides, it was useless for the Family Phatt to consider such things since they were trapped by that peculiar form of psychic gravity which brought so many poor souls to this road, to dwell upon it, or under it, for ever. “We are all of us trapped here by more than a few black-fletched arrows and a refuse heap,” he said. “The Gypsy Nation controls this world, my friends. It has gained a strange, dark power. It has struck bargains. It has harnessed something of Chaos to its own uses. That, I believe, is why they dare not stop. Everything depends on maintaining their momentum.”

  “Then we must stop the Nation moving,” said the Rose simply.

  “Nothing can do that, madam.” Fallogard Phatt shook a sad and despairing head. “It exists to move. It moves to exist. That is why the road is never changed, but rebuilt, even when land has fallen away, as in the bay we shall soon be crossing. They cannot change the road. I put it to them, when we first arrived. They told me it was too expensive, that the community could not afford it. But the fact is they can no more break their orbit than can a planet change her course around the sun. And if we tried to escape it would be like a pebble attempting to escape gravity. We were told that our main concern here should be to stay in the villages but never below the villages!”

  “This is a mere prison,” says Wheldrake, still picking at the cheeses, “not a nation. It is a foul disturbance in the order of things. It is dead and maintained by death. Unjust and maintained by injustice. Cruel and sustained by cruelty. And yet, as we have seen, the folk of Trollon congratulate themselves upon their urbanity, their humanity, their kindness and their graceful manners: while the dead stagger under their feet, supporting them in all their self-deceiving folly! Producing this parody of progress!”

  Mother Phatt’s old head turned to regard Wheldrake. She chuckled at him, not mockingly but with affection. “My brother told them as much, and continued to tell them as much. But he died on the marching boards, nonetheless. I was with him. I felt him die.”

  “Ah!” said Wheldrake, as if he shared that death also. “This is an evil parody of freedom and justice! It is a lie of profound dishonesty! For while one soul in this world suffers what hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, now suffer, they are culpable.”

  “They are fine fellows all, in Trollon,” said Fallogard Phatt ironically. “They are persons of good will and charity. They pride themselves on their wisdom and their equity…”

  “No,” says Wheldrake with an angry shake of his flaming comb, “they may accept that they are lucky, but cannot believe themselves either wise or good! For in the end such folk agree to any device which keeps them in privilege and ease, and so maintain their rulers, electing them with every show of democratic and republican zeal. It is the way of it, sir. And they do not ever address the injustice of it, sir. This makes them hypocrites through and through. If I had my way, sir, I would bring this whole miserable charade of progress to a halt!”

  “Stop the progress of the Gypsy Nation!” Fallogard Phatt laughed with considerable glee, adding with pretended gravity, “Be careful, my dear sir. Here you are amongst friends—but in other circles such sentiments are the sheerest heresy! Be silent, sir. For your own sake!”

  “Be silent! That is the perpetual admonition of Tyranny. Tyranny bellows ‘Be silent!’ even to the screams of its victims, the pathetic moans and groanings and supplications of its trampled millions. We are one, sir—or we are fragmented carrion which worms permit the false appearance of Life—corpses that twitch and tremble with their weight of maggots—the rotten carcass politic of an ideal freedom. The Free Gypsy Nation is an enormous falsehood! Movement, sir, is not Freedom!” Wheldrake drew furious breath.

  From the corner of his eye, Elric saw the Rose get up from her chair and leave the room. He guessed that she had grown bored with the debate.

  “The Wheel of Time groans and turns a million cogs which turn a million cogs again and so on, through infinity—or near infinity,” said Phatt with a glance at his mother, who had closed her eyes again. “All mortals are its prisoners and its stewards. That is the inescapable truth.”

  “One may mirror the truth or seek to assuage it,” said Elric. “Sometimes one can even try to change it…”

  Wheldrake took a sudden pull on his bumper. “I was not raised to a world, sir, where truth was malleable and reality a question of what you made it. It is hard for me to hear such notions. Indeed, sir, I will admit to you that it alarms me. Not that I fail to appreciate the wonder of it, sir, or the optimism which you are, in your own way, expressing. It is just that I was born to trust and celebrate certain senses and accept that a great unchanging beauty was the order of the universe, a set of natural laws which, as it were, coincided in subtle ways with a mighty machine—intricate and complex but ultimately rational. This Nature, sir, was what I celebrated and worshipped, as others might celebrate and worship a Deity. What you suggest, sir, seems to me retrogressive. These, surely, are closer to the discredited notions of alchemy?”

  And so the discussion continued until they all grew weary with the sound of their own voices and were not reluctant to seek their beds.

  As Elric climbed the stairs, his lamp throwing enormous shadows on the lime-washed walls, he wondered at the Rose’s sudden departure from the table and hoped that something had not offended her. Normally he would have cared little about such things, but he had a respect for the woman which went beyond mere appreciation of her intelligence and beauty. There was also an air of tranquillity about her which reminded him, in an odd way, of his time in Tanelorn. It was hard to believe that a woman of such evident integrity and wisdom was bent upon the resolution of a crude blood-feud.

  In the narrow room he had chosen for himself, little more than a cupboard with a cot in it, he prepared himself for sleep. The Family Phatt had readily made them comfortable while involving themselves in only the minimum disruption, and had agreed to use their psychic powers in the service of the Rose’s quest. Meanwhile, the albino would rest. He was weary and he was yearning deeply now for a world he could never know again. A world that he himself had destroyed.

  * * *

  Now the albino sleeps and his lean, pale body turns this way and that; a groan escapes the large, sensitive lips and once, even, the crimson eyes open wide and stare with terror into the darkness.

  “Elric,” says a voice, full of old rage and grief so great it has actually become a fixed aspect of the timbre, “my son. Hast thou found my soul? It is hard for me here. It is cold. It is lonely. Soon, whether I wish it or no, I must join thee. I must enter thy body and be forever part of thee…”

  And Elric wakes with a scream that seems to fill the void in which he floats and his scream continues in his ears, finding an echo in another scream, until both are screaming in unison and he looks for his father’s face, but it is not his father who screams…

  It is an old woman—wise and tactful, full of extraordinary knowledge—who screams as if demented, as if in the grip of the most horrible torture, screams out “NO!”—screams “STOP!”—screams “THEY FALL—OH, DEAR ASTARTE, THEY FALL!”

  Mother Phatt is screaming. Mother Phatt has a vision of such unbearable intensity her screaming cannot relieve the pain she experiences. And she becomes silent.

  As the world is silent, save for the slow rumbling of the monstrous wheels, the steady, faraway sound of marching feet, never stopping, marching around the world…

  “STOP!” cries the albino prince, but does not know what he commands. He has had just the merest glimpse of Mother Phatt’s vision…

  Now there are ordinary sounds outside his door. He hears Fallogard Phatt calling to his mother, hears Charion Phatt sobbing and realises there is uproar close to hand…

  * * *

  With his lamp relit and in his borrowed linen, Elric goes out upon the landing and sees through the open door Mother Phatt, bolt upright in her bed, her old lips flecked with foam, her eyes staring ahead of her, frightened and sightless. “They fall!” she moans. “Oh, how they fall. It should not come to this. Poor souls! Poor souls!”

  Charion Phatt holds her grandmother in her arms and rocks her a little, as if she seeks to comfort a child wakened in a nightmare. “No, Granny, no! No, Granny, no!” Yet it is evident from her own expression that she, too, has seen something utterly terrifying. And her uncle, beside himself—sweating, red, flustered, pleading, holding his own poor tangled head as if to shield it from bombardment, cries: “It is not! It cannot! Oh, and she has stolen the boy!”

  “No, no,” says Charion, shaking her head. “He went willingly. That was why you did not sense any danger. He did not believe there was any!”

  “She plans this?” moans Fallogard Phatt in outraged disbelief. “She plans such death?”

  “Bring him back,” says Mother Phatt harshly, her eyes still blind to the world around her. “Get her back quickly. Find her and you shall save him.”

  “They went to Duntrollin to seek the sisters,” Charion says. “They found them, but there was another… A battle? I cannot read in such confusion. Oh, Uncle Fallogard, they must be stopped.” She grimaces in agony, clutching at her face. “Uncle! Such psychic disruptions!”

  And Fallogard Phatt, too, is shaking with the pain of the experience while Elric, joined by Wheldrake, tries urgently to discover what it is they fear so much. “It is a wind howling through the multiverse,” says Phatt. “A black wind howling through the multiverse! Oh, this is the work of Chaos. Who would have guessed it?”

  “No,” says Mother Phatt. “She does not serve Chaos, neither does she call on Chaos! Yet…”

  “Stop them!” cries Charion.

  And Fallogard Phatt raises long fingers in helpless despair. “It is too late. We are already witnessing the destruction!”

  “Not yet,” says Mother Phatt. “Not yet. There could be time… But it is so strong…”

  Elric no longer bothered with thought. The Rose was in danger. Hurriedly the albino returned to his room and dressed, buckling on his blade. Wheldrake was with him as they left the house and ran through the wooden streets of Trollon, taking wrong directions in the unfamiliar darkness, until they found a stairway down to the marching boards and Elric, to whom caution was only ever a half-learned lesson, had drawn Stormbringer from its scabbard so that the black blade glowed with a formidable darkness and the runes writhed and twisted along its length, and suddenly was killing anyone with a weapon who sought to stop him.