“So Gaynor rode to The Ship That Was,

  And made of it his own,

  And three sisters rare he did ensnare,

  To ensure the Chaos Throne.

  The first of these sisters was The Unfolded Flower,

  The second was Duty’s Bud,

  While the third-born they christened Secret Thorn

  And her bower was built of blood.”

  And, sobbing, Elric fell into the welcoming arms of that great-hearted, if dwarfish, poet, Master Ernest Wheldrake. “My dear, good, sir! My good, old friend! Greetings to thee, Prince Elric. Does something pursue thee?” And he pointed back up through the deep snowbanks terracing the valley wall, where a fresh-ploughed furrow ran, as if Elric had slid from the top of the cliff to the bottom.

  “I am glad to see thee, Master Wheldrake.” He brushed caked snow from his clothing, wondering, not for the first time, if he had dreamed his journey through the multiverse or if the dragon venom, perhaps, possessed more than restorative qualities. He glanced across the fresh-trod snow of a small clearing in the winter birchwood and saw Stormbringer leaning, almost casually, against a tree, and for a pure, clear moment, he knew absolute hatred of the blade, that part of himself he could no longer exist without or (as some small voice continued to tell him) that part, perhaps, that he wished to keep alive, since only in the rage of supernatural battle did he ever know any true relief from the burden of his conscience.

  With deliberate slowness he strolled to the tree, picked up the blade and sheathed it as a man might sheath any ordinary weapon, his attention still upon his friend’s dishevelled features. “How came you here, Master Wheldrake? Is it a plane familiar to you?”

  “Familiar enough, Prince Elric. And to yourself, I should think. We have not left the realm where flows the Heavy Sea.”

  And now Elric realised exactly what the Black Sword had done, dragging them both back to the very world from which Arioch had sought to banish them. And this suggested that the hellblade had motives of its own for ensuring his remaining here. He said none of this to Wheldrake but listened while his friend explained how Charion Phatt was at last reunited with her Uncle Fallogard and her grandmother.

  “But Koropith remains lost to us at present,” the poet concluded. “Fallogard, however, has a close sense of his son’s presence. So we are hopeful, dear prince, that soon all surviving Phatts shall know again the pleasures of family security.” He lowered his voice to a kind of conspiratorial squeak. “There is some talk of marriage between myself and my beloved Charion.”

  And, before he could burst into verse, the snowy branches of a forest path parted and here came the confident Charion, carrying the handles of a litter on which Mother Phatt sat, smiling and nodding, like a queen in a procession, the other end borne by her tall, untidy son who flashed a smile of jolly recognition towards the albino, as one might greet a familiar face at a local tavern. Only Charion seemed a little disturbed to discover the newcomer. “I sensed your destruction a year ago,” she said quietly, after she had lowered her grandmother’s litter to the ground. “I sensed you blasted out of any recognisable form of existence. How could you have survived that? Are you Gaynor or some shape-changer in Elric’s guise?”

  “I assure you, Mistress Phatt,” said Elric, also disturbed, “I am only the one you know. For some reason, Fate does not want me annihilated as yet. It seems, indeed, that I am surviving annihilation rather successfully.”

  It was this last little irony that seemed to convince her and she relaxed. But it was clear every psychic sense in her was probing his being for signs of imposture. “You are indeed a remarkable creature, Elric of Melniboné,” said Charion Phatt as she turned away to attend to her grandmother.

  “I am glad you found us, sir. We ourselves have some rather excellent intimations concerning my missing son,” called out Fallogard Phatt cheerfully, oblivious of his niece’s suspicions. “So, gradually, we become, as it were, concrete again. You already know, I believe, my niece’s intended?”

  At which Charion Phatt blushed girlishly, to her own furious embarrassment, yet the eye she cast upon the little coxcomb was not unlike that which a certain toad had once cast upon her: for there is never anything but apparent paradox in the choices made by lovers.

  And Mother Phatt opened her merry red mouth in which a few fangs still glittered and cried: “Ding dong, for the six sad drabs! Ding dong for the dilly-o!” As if, in senility, she had become possessed by a mad parrot. Yet she waved an approving hand upon her granddaughter’s choice and her wink at Elric was full of knowing wit and, when he returned it, he was sure she smiled. “Dark days for the lily-white boy; bright days for the darkling joy! Feast of evil, feast of good, feasting fine the Chaos brood. Feast the devil, feast the Son; dark days for the shining one. For the flowers of the forest are blooming at night, and the ships of the ocean are sailing on land. Ding dong for the lily-white lad, ding dong for the good and the bad; sail through the wildwood, sow grain on the sea; Chaos has come to the Land of the Three.”

  But when they taxed her on the meaning, if any, of her rhymes, she merely chuckled and called for her tea. “Mother Phatt is a greedy old woman,” she confided to Elric. “But she’s done her bit in the past, vicar, I think you’ll agree. Mother Phatt sat under a tree; bore five strong sons to Eternity.”

  “Koropith, then, is not far from here?” Elric spoke to Fallogard Phatt. “You can sense him, you said, sir.”

  “Too much Chaos, you see,” exclaimed the tall clairvoyant with a vigorous nod. “Hard to part it—hard to look through. Hard to call. Hard to hear an answer. Fuzzy, sir. The cosmos is always fuzzy when Chaos goes to work. This world is threatened, sir, you see. The first invaders have long since gained their foothold. Yet something holds them back, it seems.”

  Elric thought again of the runesword, yet had the notion that his blade was neither helping nor resisting the complicated flow of events; it had merely fought to return to the plane on which it must be at a certain time, during a certain movement of the multiverse. Some other power fought Chaos here, of that he was sure. And he wondered about the three sisters and their part in this. That they possessed certain treasures, which both he and Gaynor coveted, was almost all he knew—save for Wheldrake’s ballad, which was mostly the poet’s own invention and therefore of little use as an objective oracle. Did the sisters exist at all? Were they wholly the creation of the Bard of Putney? Was everyone pursuing a chimera—the invention of a highly romantic and over-coloured imagination?

  “In the third grey month on the third grey day,

  Three sistren rode to Radinglay,

  Seeking three treasures they had lost,

  To the laughing lord of The Ship That Was.”

  “Well, sir,” says Elric, helping with the fire they are building, for they had planned to make camp here, even before his sudden arrival, “do those old rhymes of yours give you any clue to the whereabouts of the sisters?”

  “I must admit, sir, that I have modified the verses a little, to allow for the new things I have learned, so I am an unreliable source of truth, sir, save in its most fundamental sense. Like a majority of poets, sir. Speaking of Gaynor, we have intimations of him, but none of Master Snare. We were wondering what had become of him.”

  “He sacrificed himself,” said Elric bluntly. “I think he saved me, also, from Arioch’s full fury. To the best of my knowledge Arioch was driven from this plane by him—and he died in that act of banishing the Lord of Hell.”

  “You have lost your ally, then?”

  “I have lost an ally, Master Wheldrake, as much as I have lost an enemy. I also appear to have lost a year in this realm. However, I do not mourn the loss of my patron Duke of Entropy…”

  “Yet Chaos still threatens,” said Fallogard Phatt. “This plane stinks of it. Hovering, as it were, before it devours the entire world!”

  “Is it ourselves that Chaos desires?” Charion Phatt wished to know. Her uncle shook his head. “Not us, child. It is not greedy for us. We are merely, at present, an irritant to it, I think. No longer useful. But it would be rid of us.” He closed his heavily lidded eyes. “It grows angry, I know. There is Gaynor now… See—smell—taste him—Gaynor—feel his presence—see him riding… gone, gone… There he is—riding—I think he seeks the sisters still. And is close to discovering them! Gaynor serves it and himself. A subtle power. They desire to possess it. Without it they can never fully conquer this plane. The sisters—at last—I can sense the sisters. They seek another. Gaynor? Chaos? What is this? An alliance? They seek—not Gaynor, I think… Ah! The Chaos-stuff, it is too strong… Mist again. Uncertain mist…” He lifted his head and gasped at the cold twilight air as if he had been close to drowning in that psychic sea on which he was, often, the only voyager…

  “Gaynor rode to the eastern mountains,” said Elric. “Are the sisters still there?”

  “No,” said Fallogard Phatt, frowning. “They have long since left the Mynce and yet—time—Gaynor has gained time—he has been aided in this—is there a trap? What? What? I cannot see him!”

  “We must break camp early,” said Charion with all her usual practicality, “and try to reach the sisters before Gaynor. Yet our first duty is to family. Koropith is here.”

  “On this plane?” Elric asked.

  “Or one that presently intersects this realm.” She broke off a piece of candied leather and offered it to the albino who shook his head, having no love for the sweetmeats of her world where, Wheldrake swore, the taste in food was even worse than in his own. “I wonder,” she added, “if anyone but me has any notion of Gaynor’s positive will to evil?” And when she looked into the fire, her eyes were hidden from them all.

  * * *

  The snow came softly in the morning, covering the scars they had made behind them, covering the paths ahead, and the world was bitter with cold and silence as they trudged on through the forest, following the line of the cliff-top above and guessing, from thin sunlight, the direction in which they walked—yet they moved without hesitation, doggedly onward, following a psychic scent through this world where they appeared to be the only living creatures. They paused briefly to rest, to tend to Mother Phatt’s needs, to boil her warming drinks of the herbs she herself had told them to pick and which were chiefly what they now lived on, together with the sweet jerky Charion carried. Then they were up again and marching where the snow was shallow and Mother Phatt inspected the moss and the bark they brought her and she told them that the realm had been in the grip of winter for more than a year and that this was Chaos work without doubt, and she murmured of old Ice Giants and the Cold Folk and the legends of her mother’s people, who had been of the race, she claimed, that came before Man, that had ruled Cornwall before it was named by human tongues. There had been one, then, she said, that was also a prince, and that prince was of the old race, while the woman he married was of the new. They were her mother’s ancestors. “It is why we have so great a gift of the Second Sight,” she said to Elric intimately, patting his shoulder as he knelt beside her during one of their brief rests. She spoke to him as she might a favourite grandchild. “And they were not unlike you in appearance, save for the pigment, those folk.”

  “They were of Melniboné?”

  “No, no, no! The word is meaningless. These were the great Vadhagh people who came before the Mabden. So, we are related, perhaps, you and I, Prince Elric?” Her intelligence was undisguised for a moment and complemented her humour. And Elric, looking into that face, thought that he looked into the face of Time itself.

  “Are we,” she asked him, “both of that Heroic blood?”

  “It seems likely, madam,” said Elric gently, scarcely aware of what she spoke, but glad to help her ease the burden she carried and which in some ways she appeared to resent.

  “And born to bear a greater share of the world’s grief, I fear,” she said.

  At which she began to cackle again, and to sing. “Dingly-dongly-bongly! Old Pim’s adabblingo! Ring the rich and lively boy to bleed his heart for May to bloom!” Whereupon she began to beat a kind of savage dirge with her spoon and plate. “Up from the blood and into the brain jumps that memory of pain!”

  “O, Ma! O, Loins of my Creation! When Chaos mists so much, your recollection of ancient savageries does further encloud my sight!” Fallogard Phatt spoke with nervous grace and entreating hands.

  “They’ll gnaw and pick at poor old Ma’s few remaining bits of brain.” The ancient matron drew upon her store of pathos to charm her son, but he was adamant.

  “Ma, we’re almost onto Koropith and the going looks to get hard from now on. We must save our energies, Ma! We must hold our tongues and stop the scattering of random charms and jingles or you’ll leave a witch-trail behind us to march an army up. Which is never prudent, Ma.”

  “Prudence never pickled no rats,” said Ma Phatt with a reminiscent chuckle, but she obeyed her son. She accepted his logic.

  Elric had begun to notice that the air grew warmer and the ice was melting in the trees, while snow fell heavily to mushy ground and was quickly absorbed. By that afternoon, under an intense sun, they had crossed a line of grotesquely armoured beast-men tortured into even stranger shapes and enshrouded in ice which was burning hot to the touch but through which the travellers saw eyes moving, lips straining to speak, limbs frozen in attitudes of perpetual agony. A small Chaos army, Fallogard Phatt had agreed with Elric, defeated by some unknown sorcery, perhaps an effort of Law? Now they rode across a desert through which ran what was almost certainly an artificial watercourse and from which they could drink.

  The desert ended by the next day and they saw ahead of them the immense foliage of a dark, lush forest, whose trees bore leaves as long as a man, with trunks as slender and sinewy as human bodies, whose gorgeous foliage was deep scarlets and deep yellows, dusty browns and clouded blues, while mingling with these rich, threatening colours were strands of pale pink and veins of purple or grey, as if the forest was fed by blood.

  “It is there, I think, we shall find our missing prodigal!” announced Fallogard Phatt heartily, though even his mother looked doubtfully at that menacing tangle of massive blooms and sinuous branches. There seemed to be no hint of a pathway through it.

  But Fallogard Phatt, now at the head of the litter, trotted forward, causing his shorter niece to take quicker steps to maintain the balance and momentum of their progress, until she cried out for her uncle to stop as he plunged forward into the sticky, almost reptilian forest.

  Glad to be in the shade, Elric leaned against a yielding trunk. It was as if he sank into soft flesh. He straightened his back and shifted his weight to his feet. “This is without doubt Chaos work,” he said. “I am familiar with these creations, half-animal, half-vegetable, which are usually the first growths Chaos achieves on any world. They are essentially the detritus of unskilled sorceries and no self-respecting emperor of Melniboné would have wasted time on such stuff. But Chaos, as you no doubt have already learned, has very little taste—whereas Law, of course, has rather too much.”

  They found the forest easier going than they had imagined, for the fleshy branches parted easily and only occasionally did a pod cling sensually to an arm or part of a face, while a glossy green tentacle embraced the body like the arms of a lover. Yet the things were not greatly animated by Chaos-energy and Fallogard Phatt’s progress was scarcely ever blocked for long.

  Until, without warning, the jungle was no longer organic.

  It became crystalline.

  Pale light of a thousand shades fell through the prisms of the forest roof, flashed and skipped from branch to crystal leaf, flooded down trunks and across canopies—and still Fallogard Phatt continued his relentless advance through the jungle, for the crystals yielded as easily as had the branches.

  “And this is Law’s work, surely?” said Charion Phatt to Elric. “This sterile beauty?”

  “I would admit—” said Elric studying the way the light fell in multicoloured slabs one upon the other until the forest floor ran with flooding light, like rubies and emeralds and dark amethysts, until they were knee-deep in it, wading on through this wealth of pigment which was also reflected in their skins so that Elric himself was at last one with his friends, for all looked in wondering pleasure at their swirling motley flesh which seemed to glint and dance with the crystals all around them. Then they had reached and entered a mighty cavern of cool, silver radiance—where distant water lapped gentle banks and they knew an intense peace, such as Elric had only known before in Tanelorn.

  And it was here that Fallogard Phatt stopped and signed for his niece to lower the litter to the sweet-smelling moss of the cavern floor. “We have entered a zone where neither Law nor Chaos rules—where the Rule of the Balance is undertaken, perhaps. Here we shall find Koropith. Here we shall seek the three sisters.”

  Then, from somewhere above them, where the cavern roof caught the light of a setting sun and reflected it down to them, they heard a thin, angry shout and a voice calling from a distant gallery:

  “Hurry, you idiots! Come up! Come up! Gaynor is here! He has captured the sisters!”

  2 A Rose Rejoined; Further Familial Joy; Gaynor’s Rape Thwarted and the Sisters Found At Last—Still Another Strange Turn of Fate’s Wheel.

  “Koropith, my heartsease! Oh, my beauty! Oh, my fruit!” Fallogard Phatt peered up through the shafts of intersecting light, through the galleries of green foliage and dark rock, through the richly scented blooms, and stretched slender fingers out for his son.

  “Quick, Pa! All of you! Up here! We must not let him succeed!” The boy’s voice was clear as a mountain spring. His tone was desperate.

  Elric had found steps cut into the cave wall, winding up towards the roof. Without further thought he began to climb these, followed by Fallogard and Charion Phatt who left Wheldrake to protect Mother Phatt.