The Stealer of Souls (57 page)

Jagreen Lern took an hour to die and only then because Moonglum begged Elric to finish him swiftly.

Elric handed Moonglum’s tainted sword back to him after wiping it on a shred of fabric that had been part of the Theocrat’s robe. He looked down at the mutilated body and stirred it with his foot, then he looked away to where the Lords of the Higher Worlds were embattled.

He was badly weakened from the fight and also from the energy he had been forced to exert to return the resisting Stormbringer to its sheath, but this was forgotten as he stared in wonder at the gigantic battle.

Both the Lords of Law and those of Chaos had become huge and misty as their earthly mass diminished and they continued to fight in human shape. They were like half-real giants, fighting everywhere now—on the land and above it. Far away on the rim of the horizon, he saw Donblas the Justice Maker engaged with Chardros the Reaper, their outlines flickering and spreading, the slim sword darting and the great scythe sweeping.

Unable to participate, unsure which side was winning, Elric and Moonglum watched as the intensity of the battle increased and, with it, the slow dissolution of the gods’ earthly manifestation. The fight was no longer merely on the Earth but seemed to be raging throughout all the planes of the cosmos and, as if in unison with this transformation, the Earth appeared to be losing its form, until Elric and Moonglum drifted in the mingled swirl of air, fire, earth and water.

The Earth dissolved—yet still the Lords of the Higher Worlds battled over it.

The stuff of the Earth alone remained, but unformed. Its components were still in existence, but their new shape was undecided. The fight continued. The victors would have the privilege of re-forming the Earth.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

At last, though Elric did not know how, the turbulent dark gave way to light, and there came a noise—a cosmic roar of hate and frustration—and he knew that the Lords of Chaos had been defeated and banished. The Lords of Law victorious, Fate’s plan had been achieved, though it still required the last note of the horn to bring it to its required conclusion.

And Elric realized he did not have the strength left to blow the horn the third time.

About the two friends, the world was taking on a distinct shape again. They found they were standing on a rocky plain and in the distance were the slender peaks of new-formed mountains, purple against a mellow sky.

Then the Earth began to move. Faster and faster it whirled, day giving way to night with incredible rapidity, and then it began to slow until the sun was again all but motionless in the sky, moving with something like its customary speed.

The change had taken place. Law ruled here now, yet the Lords of Law had departed without thanks.

And though Law ruled, it could not progress until the horn was blown for the last time.

“So it is over,” Moonglum murmured. “All gone—Elwher, my birthplace, Karlaak by the Weeping Waste, Bakshaan, even the Dreaming City and the Isle of Melniboné. They no longer exist, they cannot be retrieved. And this is the new world formed by Law. It looks much the same as the old.”

Elric, too, was filled with a sense of loss, knowing that all the places that were familiar to him, even the very continents were gone and replaced by different ones. It was like the loss of childhood and perhaps that was what it was—the passing of the Earth’s childhood.

He shrugged away the thought and smiled. “I’m supposed to blow the horn for the final time if the Earth’s new life is to begin. Yet I haven’t the strength. Perhaps Fate is to be thwarted after all?”

Moonglum looked at him strangely. “I hope not, friend.”

Elric sighed. “We are the last two left, Moonglum, you and I. It is fitting that even the mighty events that have taken place have not harmed our friendship, have not separated us. You are the only friend whose company has not worn on me, the only one I have trusted.”

Moonglum grinned a shadow of his old, cocky grin. “And where we’ve shared adventures, I’ve usually profited if you have not. The partnership has been complementary. I shall never know why I chose to share your destiny. Perhaps it was no doing of mine, but Fate’s, for there is one final act of friendship I can perform…”

Elric was about to question Moonglum when a quiet voice came from behind him.

“I bear two messages. One of thanks from the Lords of Law—and another from a more powerful entity.”

“Sepiriz!” Elric turned to face his mentor. “Well, are you satisfied with my work?”

“Aye—greatly.” Sepiriz’s face was sad and he stared at Elric with a look of profound sympathy. “You have succeeded in everything but the last act which is to blow the Horn of Fate for the third time. Because of you the world shall know progression and its new people shall have the opportunity to advance by degrees to a new state of being.”

“But what is the meaning of it all?” Elric said. “That I have never fully understood.”

“Who can? Who can know why the Cosmic Balance exists, why Fate exists and the Lords of the Higher Worlds? Why there must always be a champion to fight such battles? There seems to be an infinity of space and time and possibilities. There may be an infinite number of beings, one above the other, who see the final purpose, though, in infinity, there can be no final purpose. Perhaps all is cyclic and this same event will occur again and again until the universe is run down and fades away as the world we knew has faded. Meaning, Elric? Do not seek that, for madness lies in such a course.”

“No meaning, no pattern. Then why have I suffered all this?”

“Perhaps even the gods seek meaning and pattern and this is merely one attempt to find it. Look—” he waved his hands to indicate the newly formed Earth. “All this is fresh and moulded by logic. Perhaps the logic will control the newcomers, perhaps a factor will occur to destroy that logic. The gods experiment, the Cosmic Balance guides the destiny of the Earth, men struggle and credit the gods with knowing why they struggle—but do the gods know?”

“You disturb me further when I had hoped to be comforted,” he sighed. “I have lost wife and world—and do not know why.”

“I am sorry. I have come to wish you farewell, my friend. Do what you must.”

“Aye. Shall I see you again?”

“No, for we are both truly dead. Our age has gone.”

Sepiriz seemed to twist in the air and disappear.

A cold silence remained.

At length Elric’s thoughts were interrupted by Moonglum. “You must blow the horn, Elric. Whether it means nothing or much—you must blow it and finish this business for ever!”

“How? I have scarcely enough strength to stand on my feet.”

“I have decided what you must do. Slay me with Stormbringer. Take my soul and vitality into yourself—then you will have sufficient power to blow the last blast.”

“Kill you, Moonglum! The only one left—my only true friend? You babble!”

“I mean it. You must, for there is nothing else to do. Further, we have no place here and must die soon at any rate. You told me how Zarozinia gave you her soul—well, take mine, too!”

“I cannot.”

Moonglum paced towards him and reached down to grip Stormbringer’s hilt, pulling it halfway from the sheath.

“
No
, Moonglum!”

But now the sword sprang from the sheath on its own volition. Elric struck Moonglum’s hand away and gripped the hilt. He could not stop it. The sword rose up, dragging his arm with it, poised to deliver a blow.

Moonglum stood with his arms by his sides, his face expressionless, though Elric thought he glimpsed a flicker of fear in the eyes. He struggled to control the blade, but knew it was impossible.

“Let it do its work, Elric.”

The blade plunged forward and pierced Moonglum’s heart. His blood sprang out and covered it. His eyes blurred and filled with horror. “Ah, no—I—had—not—expected
this
!”

Petrified, Elric could not tug the sword from his friend’s heart. Moonglum’s energy began to flow up its length and course into his body, yet, even when all the little Eastlander’s vitality was absorbed, Elric remained staring at the small corpse until the tears flowed from his crimson eyes and a great sob racked him. Then the blade came free.

He flung it away from him and it did not clatter on the rocky ground but landed as a body might land. Then it seemed to move towards him and stop and he had the suspicion that it was watching him.

He took the horn and put it to his lips. He blew the blast to herald in the night of the new Earth. The night that would precede the new dawn. And though the horn’s note was triumphant, Elric was not. He stood full of infinite loneliness and infinite sorrow, his head tilted back as the sound rang on. And, when the note faded from triumph to a dying echo that expressed something of Elric’s misery, a huge outline began to form in the sky above the Earth, as if summoned by the horn.

It was the outline of a gigantic hand holding a balance and, as he watched, the Balance began to right itself until each side was true.

And somehow this relieved Elric’s sorrow as he released his grip on the Horn of Fate.

“There
is
something, at least,” he said, “and if it’s an illusion, then it’s a reassuring one.”

He turned his head to one side and saw the blade leave the ground, sweep into the air and then rush down on him.

“Stormbringer!” he cried, and then the hellsword struck his chest, he felt the icy touch of the blade against his heart, reached out his fingers to clutch at it, felt his body constrict, felt it sucking his soul from the very depths of his being, felt his whole personality being drawn into the runesword. He knew, as his life faded to combine with the sword’s, that it had always been his destiny to die in this manner. With the blade he had killed friends and lovers, stolen their souls to feed his own waning strength. It was as if the sword had always used him to this end, as if he was merely a manifestation of Stormbringer and was now being taken back into the body of the blade which had never been a true sword. And, as he died, he wept again, for he knew that the fraction of the sword’s soul which was his would never know rest but was doomed to immortality, to eternal struggle.

Elric of Melniboné, last of the Bright Emperors, cried out, and then his body collapsed, a sprawled husk beside its comrade, and he lay beneath the mighty balance that still hung in the sky.

Then Stormbringer’s shape began to change, writhing and curling above the body of the albino, finally to stand astraddle it.

The entity that was Stormbringer, last manifestation of Chaos which would remain with this new world as it grew, looked down on the corpse of Elric of Melniboné and smiled.

“Farewell, friend. I was a thousand times more evil than thou!”

And then it leapt from the Earth and went spearing upwards, its wild voice laughing mockery at the Cosmic Balance; filling the universe with its unholy joy.

LETTERS AND MISCELLANY

ELRIC

(1963)

V
ERY NICE OF
you to devote so much time to Elric—though he doesn’t altogether merit it! I’d disagree with the writer when he says, “I expect the ‘sword and sorcery’ stories are by far the most popular type…etc.” I think those who like them receive them enthusiastically, but it’s a fairly small minority compared with those who like, for instance, “science fantasy” of
The Dragon Masters
variety and the stuff Kuttner, Brackett and others used to turn out for
Startling, Super Science
, etc. These days people seem to want information of some kind with their escapism—and sword and sorcery doesn’t strictly supply information of the type required. (The appeal of James Bond appears to be based primarily on the lumps of pseudo-data inserted every so often in the narrative.) The only sword-and-sorcery stuff I personally enjoy reading is Leiber’s. Don’t go much for Tolkien, Dunsany, Smith, Howard—or Edgar Rice Burroughs in spite of what some critics have said of my books recently.

Though I didn’t know
Science Fantasy
was due to fold when I wrote it, I wound up the Elric series just in time to catch the last issue quite by coincidence. I had intended to kill off Elric (as is probably plain from the second story in the currently appearing quartet, “Black Sword’s Brothers”) and his world, so it is just as well. A story set in a world which so closely borders Elric’s that some of the place names are the same will be appearing in
Fantastic
some time this year. This was originally called “Earl Aubec and the Golem” but the title has been changed to “Master of Chaos” (the cosmology is identical with the Elric stories’ cosmology) and will be, if Cele Goldsmith likes the next one I’m planning, the first of a series showing the development of the Earth from a rather unusual start. It is vaguely possible that Elric will appear in future stories and some of his background not filled in in the concluding stories (“Sad Giant’s Shield” in
Science Fantasy
No. 63 and “Doomed Lord’s Passing” in
Science Fantasy
64) will be filled in there. But this depends on how the series develops and what Cele Goldsmith thinks of the stories. “Master of Chaos” is, I think, in many ways my best S&S tale.

It is a great disappointment, however, that
Science Fantasy
has folded. Not simply because stories sold to it paid my rent, but because for me and many other writers in this country (particularly, like me, the younger ones) it was an outlet for the kind of story that is very difficult to sell in America—even to Cele Goldsmith who appears to be the most open-minded of the U.S. editors. Particularly this went for the short novel of the “Earth Is but a Star” length and the recent 37,000-word “Skeleton Crew” by Aldiss. The slow-developing, borderline-mainstream story of the kind Ballard does so well will find more difficulty selling in the States too, though Ballard’s “Question of Reentry” was of this kind and published in
Fantastic
. It seems a pity that English SF has reached, in people like Ballard and Aldiss, an exceptionally high standard and a strongly English flavour, and now it has no markets here.

The landscapes of my stories are metaphysical, not physical. As a faltering atheist with a deep irradicable religious sense (I was brought up on an offbeat brand of Christian mysticism) I tended, particularly in early stories like “While the Gods Laugh,” to work out my own problems through Elric’s adventures. Needless to say, I never reached any conclusions, merely brought these problems closer to the surface. I was writing not particularly well, but from the “soul.” I wasn’t just telling a story, I was telling
my
story. I don’t think of myself as a fantasy writer in the strict sense—but the possibilities of fantasy attract me. For some sort of guide to what I see as worth exploiting in the fantasy form, I’d suggest you bear this in mind when you read “The Deep Fix” which will appear in the last issue of
Science Fantasy
along with “Doomed Lord’s Passing,” the last Elric story…which might also provide a clue. “The Deep Fix” will be under a pseudonym [the late James Colvin, ed.].

I am not a logical thinker. I am, if anything, an intuitive thinker. Most facts bore me. Some inspire me. Nuclear physics, for instance, though I know scarcely anything about the field, excites me, particularly when watching a nuclear physicist explaining his theories on TV. My only interest in any field of knowledge is literary. This is probably a narrow interest, but I’m a writer and want to be a good one. I have only written two fantasy stories in my life which were deliberately commercial (sorry, three—one hasn’t been published). These were “Going Home” in
Science Fiction Adventures
and “Kings in Darkness” in
Science Fantasy
. The rest, for better or worse, were written from inside. Briefly, physics doesn’t interest me—metaphysics does. The only writer of SF I enjoy is J. G. Ballard. The only writer of fantasy currently working in the magazines I like is Leiber. The three works of fantasy I can still reread and enjoy, apart from those, are Anderson’s
The Broken Sword
, Peake’s Titus Groan trilogy, and Cabell’s
Jurgen
. Anderson has done nothing better than
The Broken Sword
, in my opinion, and I sometimes feel that his talent has since been diverted, even lessened. I feel that writing SF can ruin and bleed dry a writer’s talent. The best he can do in this field is improve his technique—at the expense of his art. I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I’d rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas—or ideas that have gone bad. I tend to think of the SF magazine field as a field in which it is possible to experiment—and sell one’s mistakes; but the impulse to sell tends to dominate the impulse to experiment the longer one stays in the field.

And fear of death, incidentally, is probably another source of inspiration in the Elric stories. I don’t believe in life after death and I don’t want to die. I hope I shan’t. Maybe I’ll be the exception that proves the rule…

Now for some specific remarks about the Elric material in
Niekas
. Firstly, a few carping points on the spelling. As you’ll see from the book
Stealer of Souls
, which I had an opportunity to get at before it was printed, there is an accented é in the spelling of Melniboné. Melnibonay—this accent was, of course, left out of all but the first story. Imrryr is spelled thus. Count Smiorgan Baldhead—not
of
Baldhead (his head was hairless).

A point about the end of “The Dreaming City”: Elric used the wind to save himself, abandoning his comrades to the dragons. This, and Cymoril’s death, is on his conscience.

I don’t know whether the Imrryrians would have
despised
Elric (second story synopsis, line 1). I think of them as accepting his treachery fairly calmly, and yet bound to do something about it if they caught up with him.

When I wrote this story I was thinking of Stormbringer as a symbol—partly, anyway—of Man’s reliance on mental and physical crutches he’d be better off without. It seems a bit pretentious, now. I suppose you could call the Dharzi zombie men, but really I didn’t think of them as men at all, in the strict sense. The sea is, of course, an underground sea—and also not “natural” as Elric discovered. The hill, castle, etc.—all the bits and pieces in this episode—are all underground. There was the intention here to give the whole episode the aspect of taking place within a womb. The Book is a similar symbol to the Sword in this story. Again, in the end of this story, he leaves Shaarilla to her fate—abandoning her. At this period of my writing women either got killed or had some other dirty trick played on them. The only female character who survived was my own La Belle Dame sans Merci—Yishana. I won’t explain that here—too personal….

“The exact nature of the feud is a mystery” (“Theleb K’aarna,” line 6): Maybe I wasn’t clear enough here—but I have the idea that I explained somewhere how Theleb K’aarna had devised a means of sending Elric on a wild goose chase by loosing some supernatural force or other against him. This was why Elric wanted blood. That story by the way was the most popular of the first three. I guess a Freudian psychologist would know why….

“Kings in Darkness” I’d rather not deal with, since it was the worst of the series and, as I mentioned, written commercially. Therefore there is little of it which fits in with what I like to think of as the
real
content of the Elric series.

No comments, either, on “The Flame Bringers”—although I enjoyed writing the Meerclar bit and the last sequence with Elric on the back of the dragon. This, I think, is nothing much more than an adventure story, though it serves to show up Elric’s weakness in that the moment things get tough he’s seeking his sword again. Also the last bit where the sword returns is a hint of the sword’s “true” nature.

In the book version of the last quartet (of which “Black Sword’s Brothers” is the first part) I’ve revised the opening a bit. It was—and C. R. Kearns pointed this out and I agreed with him—what you might call a confused start. In the final revision of the short story version I changed it fairly considerably from the original and one or two inconsistencies crept through—I was working hard at the time and was very tired.

I would rather you had left this story out or waited until all four had been published before synopsizing it since this is the first part of a novel and many issues are not clarified until the end. I’m not happy with any of the magazine stories as they stand and have made, in places, quite heavy revisions. The last story to be written is, I feel, the best though. A final word—the Lords of Chaos hated Tanelorn not because it was a utopia, but because nearly all those in the city had once owed them, the Lords, allegiance and had forsworn it when they came to Tanelorn (or so the story goes). This is probably the most overtly philosophical or mystical of the Young Kingdom tales, as you say, and took much longer to write than the rest. It could be improved, I feel, by more play on the actual characters involved.

The writer feels that “Black Sword’s Brothers” was the dullest Elric story. It was certainly, as explained above, one of the most patchy from the point of view of construction. It’s true, in one sense, that I was losing interest in the Elric series—or rather that I had reached a point before it was written where I had run out of inspiration. But the interest picked up as I began to write and, by the time I’d got into the second part, I was enjoying the writing again. I think it’s possible to look at the Elric stories as a sort of presentation of the crude materials which I hope to fashion into better stories later. Being non-logical, I have to produce a great deal of stuff in order to find the bits of it I really want. My ideas about Law and Chaos and the rest became clearer as I wrote. Of the four, “Black Sword’s Brothers” and “Sad Giant’s Shield” (the most recently published) are the weakest in my opinion. Both were revised (something I do not usually do with the Elric stories) and both suffered from this revision, I think. My mind was at its clearest (not very clear by normal standards) when I wrote “Doomed Lord’s Passing.” I’ve found that I can only really learn from my mistakes after they’ve been published, which is hard on the reader.

Ted Carnell, who handles my other work as well, said that he felt “Earl Aubec and the Golem” (or “Master of Chaos”) was a sort of crystallization of everything I’d been working on in the Elric series. Maybe not everything, but I think he’s right. “Earl Aubec” is more a kind of sword-and-philosophy tale than an outright sword-and-sorcery. Elric tales—or the best of them—were conceived similarly.

The writer thinks that John Rackham’s fantasies (or properly “Occult-thrillers”) will outlast my stories. I don’t think either will last for long, but I might as well admit that I was slightly hurt by this remark, for Rackham’s stories that I have read struck me as being rather barren, stereotyped tales with no “true” sense of the occult at all (whatever a true sense of the occult is). Moreover I know John doesn’t believe in his stuff for a second (at least not in any supernatural sense), whereas I believe whole-heartedly in mine, as I’ve pointed out. It’s silly to take up someone’s remark like this, especially since it is fair criticism and just a statement of someone’s individual taste, but I suppose I’m still young enough to feel defensive about my stories—especially my Elric stories for which I have an odd mixture of love and hate. They are so closely linked to my own obsessions and problems that I find it hard to ignore any criticisms of them and tend momentarily to leap to their defense.

As I said earlier, and Cele Goldsmith said in a supplement to
AMRA
, sword and sorcery seems to appeal to an enthusiastic minority and may receive a large volume of praise from a fairly small section of readers.

When Carnell asked me to think up a sword-and-sorcery series, I tried to make it as different as possible from any other I’d read. I’d hesitate to agree that the two best known magic swords are Excalibur and Prince Valiant’s Singing Blade—Excalibur, certainly, and probably Roland’s Durandana. The idea of the magic sword came, of course, from legend, but I willingly admit to Anderson’s influence, too. The idea of an albino hero had a more obscure source. As a boy I collected a pre-War magazine called
Union Jack
. This was Sexton Blake’s Own Paper—Blake was the British version of your Nick Carter, I should imagine, and
Union Jack
was the equivalent of your dime novels. One of Blake’s most memorable opponents was a character named M. Zenith—or Zenith the Albino, a Byronic hero-villain who aroused more sympathy in the reader than did the intrepid detective. Anyway, the Byronic h-v had always appealed; I liked the idea of an albino, which suited my purpose, and so Elric was born—an albino. Influences include various Gothic novels, also. Elric is not a new hero to fantasy—although he’s new, I suppose, to S&S.

I cannot altogether agree that Elric remains an essentially simple character. I think of him as complex but inarticulate when he tries to explain his predicament. His taste for revenge seems to be a sort of extension of his search for peace and purpose—he finds, to coin a phrase, forgetfulness in action. Elric’s guilt over the slaying of Nikorn was guilt for the
slaying
itself, not because he’d killed a particular man.