But not, reflected Elric with a certain humour, as effective as a black runesword.

  And with that he dragged the hellblade from its scabbard and ran on bare feet along the deck to greet the first of the pirates as they dropped aboard the ship.

  Above them, on the foredeck, the navigator appeared for a moment, glaring upward and moving with an odd series of leaps back into the rigging. “Dramian Toad-hunters!” he cried to Elric. “They’re after our guide! We are dead without it!”

  Then the navigator had disappeared again and the first of the hunters stabbed at Elric with the jagged points of his pike—

  —and died almost without realising it, wriggling like a speared fish as his soul was sucked into the blade…

  Stormbringer seemed to purr with pleasure. The sword’s song grew louder, greedier as one by one the hunters went down.

  Elric, used to supernatural foes, stood amongst the growing pile of corpses like a farmer scything hay on a pleasant summer’s day and it was left to Charion and the crew to finish off the few who now tried desperately to get back to their ship…

  …But Elric was ahead of them, clambering up one of their own lines as a hunter desperately tried to saw at it with his pike. Elric reached the hunter before the rope was sheared and he drove the sword deep through the man’s breastbone, watching him writhe. The hunter tried to keep his hold on the rope, then grasped the blade itself with both hands, as the sword relished its gradual feasting on the rich marrow of his soul. He tried to push himself off the sword, to cast himself into the dark water that now showed between the two ships, and on an impulse Elric released his grip on Stormbringer and watched with a sense of profound calm as sword and victim went plunging downwards. Weaponless, he continued his climb up the rope, swinging over the crenellations to discover that the bulky forward tower belonged to a vessel of singular slimness. It was a ship designed to race upon the surface of this peculiar ocean. Elric could see large outriggers, like the limbs of some huge water-insect, curving into the darkness.

  And then, from a hatch in the deck, came more of the hunters, all armed with flenchers and grinning with the prospect of their butchery. Elric cursed himself for a fool and backed away from them, his eyes searching for some means of escape.

  The hunters had the look of men who intended to enjoy their work. The first made an experimental swing with his flencher. The broad, curved blade whistled in the sultry air.

  They were almost upon Elric when the albino heard a deep growling from somewhere over his head and thought the toad had climbed the tower undetected. But what he saw instead was a great snarling dog, silvery in the darkness, springing for the throat of the nearest hunter and tearing at it until it was nothing more than bloody meat, glaring up with a triumphant flaring of its nostrils as the other hunters fled. Elric did not care at that moment where his rescuer had come from. He merely thanked the animal and glanced down onto the deck to see how his companions fared. He saw Charion finishing off an adversary and lifting her lovely head in a high, ululating note.

  The few hunters who still lived ran for the sides in blind panic; for now, over the starboard rail, its lips smacking and its eyes gleaming, breathing with wheezing slowness, crawled the toad they had sought to capture for themselves. The dog had vanished.

  Khorghakh hesitated once he was aboard, his bulk enveloping parts of the rail and the hatches, and he cocked his head enquiringly.

  From somewhere on the Chaos ship Elric heard Gaynor’s voice crying out, exultant and full of an unusual excitement.

  “Now, toad! Now, my darling, now you can feed!”

  * * *

  Later, when what was left of the hunters and their ship was burning in the darkness of the Heavy Sea and Khorghakh in his cage was snoring with monstrous hands upon a swollen belly, and Charion sat cross-legged beside him, as if comforted by the beast’s enormous power, Elric walked slowly along the deck searching for his sword.

  He had not for a moment believed that he had rid himself of the blade when he let it go with its victim. In the past whenever he had tried to abandon Stormbringer it had always returned to him. Now he regretted his folly. He was likely to need his sword. In trepidation, wondering if the blade had been stolen by some supernatural agency, he continued to search.

  He searched again, in the shadows of the ship. He knew the blade refused to be separated from him. He had fully expected it to return. Yet the scabbard was gone, too, which suggested theft. He looked, also, for the dog which had appeared to help him and which had gone again so suddenly. Who, aboard, had owned such a dog? Or had it belonged to the hunters and, like the toad, taken vengeance on its oppressors?

  As he passed the cabin under the foredeck, he heard a familiar sound. It came from Gaynor’s berth—a low, peculiar moaning. He was astonished and further alarmed at the power commanded by the Prince of the Damned. No mortal could have taken up that naked sword and not been harmed, especially when it had so recently drawn enormous psychic force into itself!

  Softly Elric moved to Gaynor’s door. Now there was only silence on the other side.

  The door was not locked. Gaynor was careless of any mortal attempt on his life or his person.

  Elric paused for a second before flinging open the door, to reveal a sudden eruption of yelling light, a screeching and a hissing, and then Gaynor stood before him, adjusting his helm with one metal-shod hand, holding the runesword in the other. The runes along the blade juddered and whispered, as if the sword itself understood that the impossible had occurred. Yet Elric noticed that Gaynor trembled and that he had to put his other hand upon the runesword’s hilt, to hold it steady, though his stance remained apparently casual.

  Elric stretched his open palm towards the blade.

  “Even you, Prince of the Damned, could not wield my runesword with impunity. Do you not understand that the blade and I are one? Do you not know that we are brothers, that sword and I? And that we have other kin who may be summoned to our aid when we require it? Know you nothing of that battle-blade’s qualities, prince?”

  “Only what I have heard of in legends.” Gaynor sighed within his helm. “I would test it for myself. Will you lend me your sword, Prince Elric?”

  “I could more easily lend you a limb.” The albino gestured again for the return of his sword.

  Prince Gaynor was reluctant. He studied the runes, he tested the balance. And then he returned the blade to both steel hands. “I do not fear your sword will kill me, Elric.”

  “I doubt it has the power to kill you, Gaynor. Is that what you desire of it? It might take your soul. It might transmogrify you. I doubt, however, if it will grant you your desire.”

  Before he gave it up, Gaynor laid one metal-clad finger upon the blade. “Is that the power of the anti-Balance, I wonder?”

  “I have not heard of such a power,” said Elric. He slid the scabbard back onto his belt.

  “They say it is a power even more ambitious than the Lords of the Higher Worlds. More dangerous, more cruel, more effective than anything known to the multiverse. They say the power of the anti-Balance has the means of changing the whole nature of the multiverse in a single stroke.”

  “I know only that Fate has forged us together, that blade and I,” said Elric. “Our destinies are the same.” He glanced around Gaynor’s sparely furnished cabin. “I have little interest in the broadly cosmic, Prince Gaynor. I have desires rather less exaggerated than most I have met of late. I seek only to find the answers to certain questions I have asked myself. I would gladly be free of all Lords of the Higher Worlds and their machinations. Even of the Balance itself.”

  Gaynor turned away from him. “You are an interesting creature, Elric of Melniboné. Ill-suited to serve Chaos, it would seem.”

  “Ill-suited for most things, sir,” said Elric. “To serve Chaos is merely a family tradition with us.”

  Gaynor’s helm came round again to stare broodingly at the albino. “You believe it is possible to banish Law and Chaos entirely—to banish them from the multiverse?”

  “Of that I am not so sure. But I have heard of places where neither Law nor Chaos have jurisdiction.” Elric was too cautious to mention Tanelorn. “I have heard of worlds where the Balance rules unchallenged, also…”

  “I, too, have known such places. I dwelled in one…” There came a frightful chuckling from within the shifting steel helm and then a pause as the Prince of the Damned moved slowly to the far side of his cabin and appeared to be staring through the porthole.

  His final words were uttered with such chilling ferocity that Elric, completely unprepared for them, felt he had been struck physically, to his vitals, by iron of such infinite coldness it reached to his soul…

  “Oh, Elric, I hate thee with such jealous hate! I hate thee for thine insistent relish of life! For what I once was and what I might have become, I hate thee! For what thou aspireth to, I hate thee most of all…”

  As he bent to close the door, the albino looked back at the figure of Gaynor and it seemed to him that the armour which enclosed the damned prince had long since ceased to protect him from any of the things he truly feared. Now the armour had become nothing more than a prison.

  “And for my part, Gaynor the Damned,” he said with gentle subtlety, “I pity thee with all my soul.”

  4 Land At Last! A Certain Conflict of Interests. Concerning the Anatomy of Lycanthropy.

  “In my own world, sir, sad to say, human prejudice is matched only by human folly. Not a soul claims to be prejudiced, of course, as there are few who would describe themselves as fools…” Ernest Wheldrake addressed the grey navigator as they sat at breakfast on deck the next morning beneath a leaden sky upon the Heavy Sea and watched black waves rise and fall with what seemed unnatural slowness.

  Elric, chewing on a piece of barely palatable salt beef, remarked that this seemed a quality of a good deal of society, throughout the multiverse.

  The navigator turned his sharp green-grey eyes upon the albino and there was a certain restrained humour in his face when he spoke. “I have known whole Spheres where reason and gentleness, respect for self and for others, have existed together with vigorous intellectual and artistic pursuits—and where the supernatural world was merely a metaphor…”

  At which Wheldrake smiled. “Even in my England, sir, such perfection was rarely found.”

  “I did not say perfection was common,” murmured the grey man, and he curled his lithe old body off the bench and stood to peer into the green-black sky and stretch his long limbs and lick his thin lips and sniff at the wind and turn towards the prow and the toad, whose sleepy bellows had sounded like rage to the waking passengers. “There is a comet up there!” He pointed one tapering finger. “It means a prince has died.” He listened for a moment until, mysteriously satisfied, he loped on about his duties.

  “Where I once lived,” came the sepulchral melody of Gaynor the Damned as he climbed up from his cabin, “they said that when a comet died a poet died.” He clapped a shimmering gauntlet upon Wheldrake’s resisting shoulder. “Do they say that, where you are from, Master Wheldrake?”

  “You are in ungentle spirits, I see, this morning, sir.” Wheldrake spoke gently, his cool anger overwhelming his fear. “Perhaps you have your toad’s indigestion?”

  Gaynor withdrew his hand and acknowledged the little man’s admonishment. “Well, well, sir. Some princes are more eager for death than others. And poets, for life, we know. Lady Charion.” A bow that set his whole helm to flowing with angry fire. “Prince Elric. Aha! And Master Snare—” for back from his post ran the grey navigator.

  “I sought you earlier, Prince Gaynor. We had an agreement between us.”

  “There is no hope for you,” said Gaynor the Damned, making a movement forward, perhaps of sympathy. “She is dead. She died when the church collapsed. You must seek your bride in limbo now, Esbern Snare.”

  “You promised you would tell me—”

  “I promised I would tell thee the truth. And the truth is what I have told thee. She is dead. Her soul awaits thee.”

  The grey navigator bowed his shaggy head. “You know I cannot join her! I have forfeited my right to life after death! And in return, O, Heaven help me! I have joined with the Undead…” With that sudden statement of feeling, Esbern Snare rushed back to the forecastle and ran up into the rigging, to stare blindly into the seething horizon.

  Whereupon Gaynor the Damned made a sound like a sigh, deep within his helm, and Elric understood how he had been rescued on the ship and why there was a fellow-feeling evident between the navigator and the deathless prince.

  But Wheldrake was gasping with a kind of joy and clapping his hand upon the breakfast table, making the stewed herbs slop, unmourned, from cup to cloth. “By Heaven, sir, that’s Esbjörn Snorrë, is it not? Now I have the trick of your pronunciation—and his, I note. I make no claims. We are, after all, rather grateful for that singular telepathy which provides us with the means, so frequently, of our survival in some highly inclement social weather—we should not begrudge benign Mother Nature a few regional accents—by way of a little light-hearted relief to her in her ever-vigilant concern for our continuing existence. Astonishing sir, when you think of it.”

  “You have heard of the navigator?” Lady Charion caught, as it were, at the coat-tails of his conversation’s substance.

  “I have heard of Esbern Snare. But the ending of his tale was a happy one. He tricked a troll into building a church for him and his bride to be married in. The troll’s wife gave away the troll’s name and so released Esbern Snare from his bargain. The troll’s wife can still be heard wailing, they say, under Ulshoi hill. I wrote a kind of ballad about it in my Norwegian Songs. Pillaged, of course, by Whittier, but we’ll say no more of that. No doubt he needed the money. Still, plagiarism’s only dishonourable if the coin you earn with it is worth less than the coin you stole.”

  Again, Charion clutched bravely for the original substance:

  “He married happily, you say? But you heard what Gaynor told him?”

  “This is a sequel, it seems, to the original tale. I only know of the successful trickster. Any subsequent tragedy had been forgotten by the folklore of my day. Sometimes, you know, it occurs to me that I am in a dream in which all those heroes and heroines, villains and villainesses of my verses have come to life to haunt me, to befriend me, to make me one of themselves. A man, after all, could rarely hope to find such varied company in Putney…”

  “So you do not know why Esbern Snare is aboard this ship, Master Wheldrake?”

  “No better than you, my lady.”

  “And you, Prince Elric?” She attracted the albino’s wandering attention. “Do you know this story?”

  Elric shook his head.

  “I only know,” he said, “that he is a shape-changer and, that most cursed of souls, a person of rare goodness and sanity. Imagine such torment as is his!”

  Even Wheldrake bowed his head, as if in respect. For there are few more terrible fates than that of the immortal separated, by force of the most profound natural logic, from those immortal souls it cherishes in life. It can know only the pain of death but never the ecstasy of everlasting life. Its pleasures and rewards are short-lived; its torment, eternal.

  And this made Elric think of his father, lingering in that timeless destruction of Imrryr’s ancestor; himself separated from his one abiding love by his willingness to bargain with his patron demon—even betray him—for a little more unearned power on Earth.

  The albino found himself brooding upon the nature of all unholy bargains, of his own dependency upon the hellsword Stormbringer, of his willingness to summon supernatural aid without thought of any spiritual consequences to himself and, perhaps most significantly, of his unwillingness to find a way to cure himself of the occult’s seductive attraction; for there was a part of his strange brain that was curious to follow its own fate; to learn whatever disastrous conclusion lay in store for it—it needed to know the end of the saga: the value, perhaps, of its torment.

  Elric found that he had walked up the deck to the forecastle, past the reverberant toad, to put his back against the bowsprit’s copper-shod knuckle and stare up at the navigator as he hung, still motionless, in the rigging.

  “Where do you journey, Esbern Snare?” he asked.

  The grey man cocked his head, as if hearing a distant but familiar whistle. Then his pale green-grey eyes stared down into the albino’s crimson orbs and a great gust of air escaped him, and a tear appeared upon his cheek.

  “Nowhere, now,” said Esbern Snare. “Nowhere, now, sir.”

  “Would you continue in Gaynor’s service?” Elric asked. “Even when land is sighted?”

  “Until I choose to do otherwise, sir. As you shall yourself observe. There is land ahead, no more than a mile before us.”

  “You can see it?” Elric asked in surprise, attempting to peer into the swirling vapours of the Heavy Sea.

  “No, sir,” said Esbern Snare. “But I can smell it.”

  And land it soon was. Land rising up from the slow, awful waters of the Heavy Sea; land like a wakened monster, an angry shadow, all sharp ridges and jagged points; cliffs of black marble; beaches of carbon, and black breakers which poured like the smoke of hell upon that squealing shore…

  Land so inhospitable the voyagers who looked at it now were all pretty much of the same accord, that the Heavy Sea was less daunting; and it was Wheldrake who suggested they sail on until they found a more accessible island.

  But Gaynor shook his flickering helm and lifted up his glowing fist and put his steel palm upon the slender shoulders of Charion Phatt. “You told me, child, that the other Phatts are here. Have they found the sisters?”

  The young woman shook her head slowly. Her face was grave and her eyes seemed to look into some different reality. “They have not found the sisters.”