“Go now, Prince Gaynor, to your unsleeping eternal consciousness, to all those horrors you had thought familiar…” She spoke with considerable satisfaction, while the face of Count Mashabak pressed for a moment against the membrane and the fangs clashed and drooled as he sought a glimpse of his rival, bearing back, with something close to gratitude, his small prize to his own dimension.

  “I have no claim now, Elric, to your father’s soul…”

  “But Mashabak?” said Elric as it dawned on him the responsibility they had brought upon themselves. “What shall we do with Mashabak?”

  The Rose smiled at him, a gentle smile that was full of wisdom. “There is something yet we have to do,” she said, and she turned to murmur to the three sisters, who took their swords—one of ivory, one of gold and one of granite—and with slow care placed a black briar ring upon the tip of each blade so that suddenly the swords were alive with glowing, flowery light—a calm energy—Nature’s energy balanced against the raging power of Chaos. Then they lifted these swords in unison beneath the heaving membrane of that cosmic prison, so that each tip stood lightly upon the skin.

  And Count Mashabak growled and threatened and spoke some words in a language known only to himself; made helpless by the very act of being captured, for he was a creature that had known almost limitless power and had no means of existing with the shock of its own enforced impotence. He knew not how to beg or bargain or even to coax, as Arioch coaxed, for his nature was more direct. He had revelled in the unchecked force of his power. He had grown used to creating whatever he desired, of destroying whatever displeased him. He screamed at them to release him, he grumbled, he subsided, as the tips of the swords continued to support the ectoplasmic sphere. He was a crude, brutish sort of demigod and knew only how to threaten.

  The Rose smiled. It was as if she were achieving everything she had dreamed of over the years. “He will take some taming, that demon,” she said.

  If Elric had been disbelieving of Gaynor’s audacity, he was admiring of the Rose’s. “You knew all along how Mashabak could be controlled,” he said. “You manipulated events so that we should be here at the same time…” It was not an accusation, merely a statement of his understanding.

  “I took the events that existed,” said the Rose simply. “I did what I could in my weaving. But I was never certain, even as Gaynor bargained with you for your father’s soul, what the outcome would be. I still do not know, Elric. Watch!”

  She went to the table where Gaynor had placed his stolen treasures and she took the sweet-smelling rosewood box, advancing towards where the sisters held the sphere upon the tips of their swords, as delicately as if they balanced a soap-bubble, each woman concentrating upon her task while a strange, bubbling energy began to pulse along the blades. Down the ivory poured a smoky whiteness and down the granite a grey, curling substance; while the golden blade shook with light the colour of fresh-cut broom, all these colours spinning together and forming a kind of spiral which wound upwards again and back into the sphere.

  Led by the Rose, the sisters began a chant, harnessing streamers of multiversal life-force and bringing them together in a shimmering net of pale cerise light which surrounded them as they worked.

  Then the Rose cried out to Elric. “Bring your sword now. Bring it quickly. It must be the conductor once more, of all this energy!” She opened the lid of the box.

  The albino moved forward, his body making strange ritualistic gestures whose meaning was unknown to him.

  He lifted the Black Sword even as it uttered a moan of protest, and he placed it between the other swords, at the very apex.

  Carefully and slowly the Rose moved until she held the opened soulbox directly under the pommel of the runesword and cried: “Strike! Strike upwards, Elric, into the demon’s heart—!”

  And the albino yelled in terrifying anguish as the hellforce poured from the Chaos Lord in response to his single thrust. And Mashabak’s unholy demon’s soul poured with a gush of dark radiance which sent Stormbringer to shivering and howling again, down the blade and into the soulbox the Rose held ready for it.

  And it was only at that moment that Elric realised what, under the Rose’s direction, he had done!

  “My father’s soul,” he said, “You have wed it to that demon’s! You have destroyed it!”

  “Now we control him!” The Rose’s subtle pink skin glowed with her pleasure. “Now we have Mashabak. No mortal has the power to destroy him, but he is our prisoner. He will remain so for ever! While we can destroy his soul. He is forced to obey. Through him we shall re-create the worlds he crushed.” She closed the lid.

  “How can you control him, when Gaynor could not?” Elric looked up to where, oddly passive, the demon count peered from his prison.

  “Because now we possess his soul,” said the Rose. “This is my satisfaction and my revenge.”

  Wheldrake emerged from beyond the scaly back of his rival in love. “It is not a very dramatic vengeance, madam.”

  “I sought resolution to my grief,” said the Rose. “And we learned, my sisters and I, that such resolution is rarely achieved by further destruction. These two, besides, could never be destroyed. Yet, living, we have seen to it that they have served some useful purpose, the pair of them, and that is all I wished to bring about. To do positive good where positive harm had been done. It is the only possible form of revenge for such as myself.”

  And Elric, staring with growing horror at the soulbox, could not respond to her. He had been through all this, he thought, to fail to the very moment when he thought he had succeeded.

  The Rose was smiling at him still. Her warm fingers were gentle on his face. He glanced at her, but he could not speak.

  The sisters were lowering their swords. They looked drained and could barely replace the weapons in their scabbards. Charion Phatt, leaving the toad and Wheldrake, went to tend to them.

  “Here.” The Rose strode to the table and picked up the living bloom from where it lay upon the rosewood box which contained those three briar rings of power which had helped chain a demon’s soul. She handed him the flower. There was dew upon the leaves as if it still grew in a country garden.

  “I thank you for the keepsake, lady,” he said quietly, but his mind was still full of the horror to come.

  “You must take it to your father,” she said. “He will be awaiting you in those ruins. The ruins where your people made their final pact with Chaos.”

  Elric did not find her humour amusing. “I shall be speaking to my father soon enough, lady,” he said. With a deep sigh he sheathed his battle-blade. And he did not look into the future with any pleasure…

  She was laughing. “Elric! Your father’s soul was never in that box! At least, not trapped by it as the demon’s is. The briar rings are for the bonding of a demon’s soul. The box was built to hold a demon’s soul. But the Eternal Rose is too delicate a thing to contain such a soul. It can only hold the soul of a mortal who has loved another better than itself. This flower protects and is nourished by your father’s soul, Elric. That is why it lives. It is informed by all that is good in Sadric. Take it to your father. Once he has that, he can rejoin your mother as he longed to do. Arioch has forsworn all claim on him—and Mashabak has no power over him. We shall use the power of Mashabak. We shall force the Count of Hell to restore everything we loved. And so, by turning this evil into good, we redeem the past! And that is the only way by which we mortals may ever redeem our pasts! It is the only positive revenge. Take the flower.”

  “I will take it to my father, lady,” said Elric.

  “And then,” she said, “you may bring me back with you to Tanelorn.”

  He looked into her quiet, hazel eyes and he hesitated for a moment. “I would be honoured, lady,” he said.

  Suddenly Wheldrake’s yelling: “The toad! The toad!” And the creature is crawling, on massive hands and feet, through the door of the chamber and out into the galleries, the ruined decks, where all the wretches released from their servitude to Chaos are running and scampering and fleeing—out of the great hull, flushed rabbits from a warren, and Wheldrake runs behind him calling “Stop, dear toad. Sweet rival! For the sake of our mutual love, stop, I beg thee!”

  But the toad has turned now, at the entrance to The Ship That Was, and looks back at Wheldrake, looks back at Charion Phatt who also follows, and pauses, as if awaiting them. As they come closer, it waddles out of the hull and into the light, the humans running like lice around it, escaping back into the land no longer ruled by Chaos. And then it squats, waiting for them…

  …Where Ma Phatt, unsteady in her swaying chair, is borne along the beach by her son and grandson, the pair of them sweating and exhausted as she yells at them to increase their speed, then sees her granddaughter and Wheldrake and shrieks for them to stop. “My dolly-joys, my sweety-hearts, my jammy, juicy jolly-boy!” She discards the tattered parasol with which she has protected her wise old head and licks her lips at him; she ogles him. “My rock, my tasty wordsmith! Oh, how happy my Charion will be! How happy I would have been, had I but known you were in Putney! Put me down! Put me down, boys! We have arrived. I told you they were safe! I told you she had a machination or two, a twist in the cosmic fabric, a little smoothing out of the tangled sleeves. Sweet-rumped little coxcomb! Tiny reveller in rhyme! Come with me. We’ll seek the End of Time!”

  “A confusing place, as I recall,” says Wheldrake, but he basks in her approval, her celebration of him, her pleasure at his joining her family.

  “I told you we did not go far, Father!” declared Koropith Phatt a little too triumphantly, so that Fallogard Phatt caught his eye in a stern glare. “Although you, too, were right, of course, when you recognised this beach.”

  The Rose and the three sisters were emerging now, to greet their friends, but they carried only the soulbox. The metaphysically filleted Count of Hell was left within, to think for a little upon the nature of his fate, in which he would be forced to create everything that was anathema to him. In her left hand the Rose carried, so that it hung loose and dragged upon the shingle, the grey wolf pelt which Gaynor had sported, not knowing that it was a sign that, in some manner at least, Esbern Snare had been released from his particular burden.

  “What?” said Wheldrake, a trifle surprised. “Do you take that as a trophy, madam?”

  But the Rose shook her head gently. “It belonged once,” she said, “to a sister of mine. The only other survivor of Gaynor’s treachery…”

  And only then did Elric understand the full import of the Rose’s fate-weaving, of her astonishing manipulation of the fabric of the multiverse.

  Ma Phatt was looking at her quizzically. “You have your satisfaction then, my dear?”

  “As much as is possible,” agreed the Rose.

  “You serve a powerful thing,” added the old woman, clambering down from her rickety litter and hobbling across the shingle, her red face alive with a variety of pleasures. “Do you call that thing the Balance, by any chance?”

  But the Rose linked an arm in Ma Phatt’s and helped her to sit upon an upturned bucket and she said: “Let us simply agree that I am opposed to all forms of tyranny, whether of Law or of Chaos or any other power…”

  “Then it is Fate itself you serve,” said the old woman firmly. “For this was a powerful weaving, child. It has made fresh reality in the multiverse. It has corrected the disruptions which upset us so badly. Now we can continue on our journey.”

  “Where do you go, Mother Phatt?” asked Elric. “Where will you find the security you seek?”

  “My niece’s future husband has convinced us that we should discover the kind of domestic peace we value in the place he knows called ‘Putney,’ ” said Fallogard Phatt with a kind of hesitant heartiness. “And so we shall all seek this place with him. He has, he said, an unfinished epic, in two volumes, concerning some local champion of his people. Which he left in Putney, do you see. So we must begin there, at least. We are all one united family now and do not intend to be further separated.”

  “I go with them, lady,” said Koropith Phatt, grasping the Rose’s hand quickly and kissing it, almost as if embarrassed. “We’ll take the ship and the toad and cross the Heavy Sea again. From there we shall follow the pathways through the realms until, no doubt, we shall come inevitably to Putney.”

  “I wish you a safe and direct journey,” she said. Then she too kissed his hands. “I will miss you, Master Phatt, and your expert tracking through the multiverse. There was never a better psychic bloodhound!”

  “Prince Elric fled from that fateful strand,

  Great hope had he in his heart,

  From the sweet rose blooming in his hand,

  No mortal could dispart…”

  intoned the red-headed poet and then shrugged by way of apology. “I was not prepared, today, for epilogues. I had hoped only for a noble end. Come toad! Come Charion! Come family all! We sail again upon the Heavy Sea! For far-flung Putney and the golden bliss of happy domesticity!”

  And there was something in the proud prince of ruins that yearned, as he waved farewell, for the less dramatic adventures of the hearth.

  Then he turned towards the Rose, that mysterious manipulator of destinies, and he bowed. “Come, madam,” he said, “we have a dragon to summon and a journey to make! My father is doubtless a trifle concerned for the well-being of his much-bartered soul.”

  EPILOGUE In Which the Prince of Ruins Honours a Vow.

  Against the full heat of a harvest moon, Lady Scarsnout lifted her magnificent head to taste the wind, flapped her wings once to set her course and lifted away from that perpetuity of night where Sadric’s ghost had hidden.

  Elric had put the living rose into his father’s pale hand. He had watched as the rose faded and died at last, no longer kept alive by the thing which had been hidden in it. And then Sadric had sighed. “I can hate thee no longer, son of thy mother,” he said. “I had not hoped for so much as the gifts thou broughtest me.”

  And his father had kissed him with lips suddenly warm upon his cheek, with a momentary gesture of affection such as he had never made in life. “I will await thee, my son, where thy mother awaits me now, in the Forest of Souls.”

  Elric had watched the ghost fade away, like a whisper on the wind, and, looking up, he had realised that time was no longer stilled, and that Melniboné’s bloody history, her ten thousand years of dominance, of cruelty and heartless conquest, was at the point of its beginning.

  For a brief instant he had considered taking some new action—some action to change the course of the Bright Empire’s progress down the centuries—to make of his race a gentler, nobler people—but then he had shaken his head and turned his back on H’hui’shan, on his past and on all brooding about what might have been, and he had settled himself into that natural skeffla’a behind the Phoorn’s shoulders and was calling confidently, with a new hope in his voice, for his mount to bear him skyward.

  Then up they went together, dragon-leather slapping against the swirling clouds, up into the starry languor of a Melnibonéan night, into a future where, by a certain crossroads at the edge of time, the Rose awaited him.

  For he had promised her that, when she first saw Tanelorn, she would be riding upon a dragon.

  THE BANE OF THE BLACK SWORD

  To the memory of Hans Stefan Santesson, an editor of great patience and kindness who, with L. Sprague de Camp, encouraged me in the late 1950s to write heroic fantasy. His magazine, Fantastic Universe, ceased publication before I could contribute, much to my regret, for it was, in my opinion, one of the best fantasy magazines ever produced.

  THE BANE OF THE BLACK SWORD

  CONTENTS

  BOOK ONE: THE STEALER OF SOULS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  BOOK TWO: KINGS IN DARKNESS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BOOK THREE: THE FLAME BRINGERS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  EPILOGUE: TO RESCUE TANELORN…

  BOOK ONE THE STEALER OF SOULS

  In which Elric once again makes the acquaintance of Queen Yishana of Jharkor and Theleb K’aarna of Pan Tang and receives satisfaction at last.

  1

  In a city called Bakshaan, which was rich enough to make all other cities of the north-east seem poor, in a tall-towered tavern one night, Elric, Lord of the smoking ruins of Melniboné, smiled like a shark and dryly jested with four powerful merchant princes whom, in a day or so, he intended to pauperise.

  Moonglum the Outlander, Elric’s companion, viewed the tall albino with admiration and concern. For Elric to laugh and joke was rare—but that he should share his good humour with men of the merchant stamp, that was unprecedented. Moonglum congratulated himself that he was Elric’s friend and wondered upon the outcome of the meeting. Elric had, as usual, elaborated little of his plan to Moonglum.

  “We need your particular qualities as swordsman and sorcerer, Lord Elric, and will, of course, pay well for them.” Pilarmo, overdressed, intense and scrawny, was main spokesman for the four.

  “And how shall you pay, gentlemen?” enquired Elric politely, still smiling.

  Pilarmo’s colleagues raised their eyebrows and even their spokesman was slightly taken aback. He waved his hand through the smoky air of the tavern room which was occupied only by the six men.

  “In gold—in gems,” answered Pilarmo.

  “In chains,” said Elric. “We free travellers need no chains of that sort.”

  Moonglum bent forward out of the shadows where he sat, his expression showing that he strongly disapproved of Elric’s statement.