The White Wolf's Son: The Albino Underground Read online

  Elric dreamed of strange lands and stranger creatures. He dreamed of heroes like himself; heroes with a destiny similar to his own. He dreamed of brutal warriors, of wonderful supernatural beings, of beautiful women, of exotic, secret places where the destiny of worlds was created. And he dreamed of a boy who, obscurely, he felt might be his son, though he had no son in this world. He dreamed, too, of a little girl, who played unconsciously and happily around her house, knowing nothing of the enormous forces of Law and Chaos, of Good and Evil, which clashed in worlds but a shadowed step removed from her own…

  ACCLAIM FOR

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK’S NOVELS

  THE WHITE WOLF’S SON

  “Fascinating … larger-than-life characters … stylish performance from a giant of fantasy.”

  —Kirkus Renews

  “Fans should enjoy this new outing… recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “Entertaining … a brilliant sci-finovel from this talented author… one of the best in this series.”

  —FreshFiction.com

  “A very exciting tale… lots of excellently described action… a must-read.”

  —Booklist

  “Fantastic… Moorcock uses the excesses of Granbretan to spotlight and satirize modern politics. While his characters demonstrate an interest in the nature of the Multiverse, Moorcock applies the same examination to the questions of good and evU as well as identity… We can only hope Moorcock will chose to return to these characters and places again.”

  —SFSite.com

  “Wonderful… charming and gripping.”

  —SciFi.com

  THE SKRAYUNG TREE

  “A fascinating tale … His novels are totally enthralling.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “A provocative story … Moorcock gets better and better.”

  —Tulsa World

  “Law, chaos, and balance all contend vigorously, aided by Moorcock’s knowledge of folklore, poetry, and storytelling.”

  —Booklist

  THE DREAMTHIEE’S DAUGHTER

  “Full of magic and mystery.”

  —Booklist

  “Sword and sorcery that stays true to its genre while reaching beyond it.”

  —Denver Post

  “Moorcock is at his best.”

  —Locus

  Also by Michael Moorcock

  The Dreamthief’s Daughter

  The Skrayling Tree

  Gloriana

  Available from Warner Books

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  All characters, the distinctive likenesses thereof, and all related indicia are trademarks of Michael Moorcock.

  Copyright © 2005 by Michael Moorcock and Linda Moorcock

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  Originally published in hardcover by Aspect

  First eBook Edition: November 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-57130-2

  In memory of

  Jerico Radoc:

  a generous spirit

  who died too young

  and for Alan Wall

  and all the regulars down

  at MWM, with thanks.

  Contents

  ACCLAIM FOR MICHAEL MOORCOCK’S NOVELS

  Also by Michael Moorcock

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE: A MUCH SOUGHT-AFTER YOUNG LADY

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  PART TWO: DIVERGING HISTORIES

  INTERLUDE UNA PERSSON

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PART THREE: THE WHITE WOLF’S SON

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Read Michael Moorcock!

  THE WHITE WOLF’S SON

  PROLOGUE

  And then did Sir Elrik spye Sir Yagrin and say to him “Fast thou, villain. Where goest thou this Daye?” Whereupon Sir Yagrin saith: “On my Honour, I shall answer ye with arms.” Whereupon one charged the other. Ten speares did they brake until Sir Elrik had killed Sir Yagrin and lay close to his deathe bedd with none in all that Woode to help him.

  —THE ROMANCE OF PRINCE ELRIK

  tr. from the Portuguese. Anon., London ca. 1525

  THE ALBINO HUNG captive in the rigging of the great battle barge, spread-eagled on the mainmast, barely able to open his red, glaring eyes. He was mumbling to himself, calling out a name, as if he felt that name would save him. Although dreaming, he was at the same time half-awake. He could see below him the foredeck of the ship, with its massive catapult whose cup slaves were already filling with flaming pitch. There, too, the White Wolf’s captor strutted in his seething rosy armor. Upon his head was the glowing scarlet helmet bearing the Merman Crest of Pan Tang, the island of the theocrats who had long envied Melniboné her power. High-shouldered, black-bearded, full of raging triumph, Jagreen Lern threw up his face and laughed at his enemy. He was delighting in his power, in the movement of his galley through the water, its huge bulk pushed by the oars manned by five hundred slaves. He turned to his followers, men made utterly mad by all they had witnessed, by their own demonic bloodlust, by their own cruel killing.

  “Let fly!” he roared. And another shot was discharged, arcing over the water and dropping into the boiling sea just short of the fleet which had assembled to defend what was left of the world from his conquest.

  “We’ll get their measure with the next one,” declared the theocrat, turning again to look up at Elric. He spat on the deck. There was a terrible, crooked grin on his face. He was full of his victories, swollen like a leech on blood.

  “See! The white-face is nothing without that black sword of his. Is this the hero you feared? Is this all Law could summon against us—a renegade weakling?”

  Jagreen Lern strutted beneath the mainmast, jeering up at the man whose crucifixion he had ordered.

  “Watch, Elric. Watch! Soon you shall see all your allies destroyed. All that you love turned to heaving Chaos. Lord Arioch refuses you help. Lord Balan refuses you help. Soon Law and all its feeble creations shall be banished from our world, and I shall rule in the name of the great Lords of Entropy, with the power to make what I like of inchoate matter and destroy it again and again at a whim. Can you hear me, White Wolf? Or are you already dead? Wake him, someone! I would have him know what he loses. He must learn his lesson well before he dies. He must know that by betraying his patron Chaos lords he has betrayed himself and all he loves.”
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  Some part of the albino heard his enemy. But Elric of Melniboné was desperately sending his mind out into the unseen worlds around him, the myriad worlds of the multi-verse, where he believed he might find the one thing which could help him. He had deliberately fallen into a dream, a slumber known by his sorcerer ancestors as the Sleep of a Thousand Years, by which he had earlier learned his wizard’s craft. He was now too weak to do anything else but send his failing spirit out into the astral worlds beyond his own. By this means he sought his sword, Stormbringer, calling its name as he slept, knowing that if he died on this, his last desperate dream quest, he would die here, also.

  He dreamed of vast upheavals and forces as powerful as those which now captured him. He dreamed of strange lands and stranger creatures. He dreamed of heroes like himself, heroes with a destiny similar to his own. He dreamed of brutal warriors, of wonderful supernatural beings, of beautiful women, of exotic, secret places where the destiny of worlds was created. In this dream he crossed whole continents, negotiated vast oceans, fought men and monsters, gods and demons. And he dreamed of a boy who, obscurely, he felt might be his son, though he had no son in this world. He dreamed, too, of a little girl, who played unconsciously and happily around her house, knowing nothing of the enormous forces of Law and Chaos, of Good and Evil, which clashed in worlds but a shadowed step removed from her own…

  The albino groaned. The bearded theocrat pushed back his pulsing scarlet helm, looked up at Elric and laughed again.

  “He lives, right enough. Wake him, someone, so that I might relish his agony all the better.”

  A crewman obeyed. Knife in belt, he began his ascent of the rigging. “I’ll tickle his toes with my dagger, master. That’ll bring him round.”

  “Oh, draw a little of his thin, deficient blood. Maybe I’ll drink a cup of it to celebrate his final agonies.” Jagreen Lern, master of all the once-human creatures who now gibbered and slavered and anticipated their final triumph over Law, reached out his red gauntleted hand, as if to receive a goblet from one of his minions. “A libation to the Lords of Chaos!”

  Elric muttered and stirred in his bonds, high above the ship’s main deck. A word formed on his lips.

  “Stormbringer!” he gasped. “Stormbringer, aid me now!”

  But Stormbringer, that unholy black sword which had preserved his life so many times before, did not materialize.

  Stormbringer was elsewhere, imprisoned by powerful sorcery, manipulated by men and supernatural monsters whose ambitions were even darker, even more dangerous than those of the creatures of Chaos who sought to rule Elric’s world.

  Stormbringer was being used in a summoning powerful enough to challenge the combined might of Law and Chaos and to bring about the end of everything, of the multiverse itself.

  Again the albino whispered his sword’s name. But there was no reply.

  “Stormbringer…”

  Nothing but the silence of the cold, unpopulated ether. The silence of death.

  And into that silence came laughter, cruel laughter full of the cold joy of slaughter.

  “Open his eyes for him, you scum! Watch, Elric! Watch all that you love perish!”

  The laughter blended with the crashing noise of the sea, the terrible sounds of the war-catapults, the groaning of the slaves, the creaking of the oars.

  The pale lips parted, perhaps for the last time, barely able to utter the word again:

  “Stormbringer!”

  PART ONE

  A MUCH SOUGHT-AFTER YOUNG LADY

  Lord Elrik sate in his own red bludde

  His vanquished foe beside him;

  Saith he, “Thou kepst my Treasure near

  In Castle Lorn do ye reside in. “

  “Take all, take all,” cried his noble foe,

  “Take all that I have defended

  My souls now Carrion for the bold black Crowe

  But my Conscience hast thou mended.”

  IV

  Heal’d and alone, Lord Elrik rode,

  Till Castle Lorn lay behind him

  “No Gold shall I need in Manor Bonne,

  Where I’ll finde my fair, forlorne one. “

  —"LORD ELRIK AND SYTHORIL,” CA. 1340

  Coll. Wheldrake, Ballads and Lays of the Britons, 1856

  CHAPTER ONE

  Then Elric sped out of Tanelorn, seeking Mirenburg, where the next step of his destiny must be taken. And he knew that the doom of ten thousand years lay upon him; and that of himself he’d made bloody sacrifice, having found the Stealer of Souls.

  Now his true dream began to resume; now his destiny marched to remorseless resolution.

  —THE CHRONICLE OF THE BLACK SWORD

  Wheldrafce’s tr.

  MY NAME IS Oonagh, granddaughter of the Countess Oona von Bek. This is my story of Elric, the White Wolf, and Onric, the White Wolf’s son, of a talking beast in the World Below, of the League of Temporal Adventurers, the Knights of the Balance and those who serve the world; of the wonders and terrors I experienced as the forces of Law and Chaos sought the power of the Black Sword, found the source of Hell and the San Grael. All this happened several years ago, when I was still a child. It is only now that I feel able to tell my story.

  As usual, I was spending my summer holidays at the old family house in Ingleton, North Yorkshire. My father had been born there before his natural parents were killed in Africa, and he had inherited it when still a small boy. It was kept in trust by my grandparents until he was twenty-one.

  Tower House was an old place. The main part dated back to the seventeenth century. There was a big late-Victorian addition, built from local granite, put on when the building was turned into a girls’ boarding school in the 1890s. By the 1950s it had been split into several dwellings and sold to separate owners. My grandparents had helped my father turn the house back to its former glory. This meant that any guests generally had an entire wing to themselves. There was even a flat over the old stables, now a garage, where the permanent housekeepers, Mr. and Mrs. Hawthornthwaite, lived.

  My grandparents, Count and Countess von Bek, had come to love the place and now remained there almost permanently, only going down to London for the theater season or to visit doctors and dentists. They were a hearty old couple. My grandfather was at least ninety, and my grandmother, though she did not seem it, must have been close to seventy. Everyone remarked on how youthful she looked. I was not the only family member to notice how, beneath her makeup, her face was actually younger, softer. “Good skins run in the family,” said my mother. She never seemed to notice the oddness of that remark. Even Grandma’s slower movements and apparent absent mindedness seemed designed to deceive you into thinking she was older. Of course, she should have looked older, given that she had married my granddad in the 1940s, after the Second World War. But at that time in my life I didn’t really think much about it. Perhaps she aged herself to save my grandfather’s pride? No one else in the family mentioned it, so I didn’t think a lot about it, either.

  We had been going up to Yorkshire for the summer holidays ever since I was tiny. My mum and dad had spent the summers there long before I was born. I knew every inch of Storrs Common, the brook, the old caves all around the area, the abandoned mine workings down past Beesley’s farm on the path to the famous waterfalls. The falls themselves roared through a deep gorge in thick woods. The farms on the other side of the dale tried to charge tourists for walking in that beauty spot. This kept them fairly free of all but the most dedicated visitors! In Victorian times, trains had run special excursions to the Ingleton Falls, but now there was no station, let alone a railway.

  All that was left of Ingleton’s former glory were the reproductions of old photographs showing ladies in bustles and big hats posing beside one of the main falls. School parties came occasionally, little crocodiles of captive kids with packed lunches in their haversacks, trudging moodily along the high paths above the river. But most of the time it was still fairly remote country. I saw the occ
asional big red English squirrel in the oaks and hazels, and I had seen my first crayfish by the stepping-stones through that part of the river we called “the shallows.” You could sometimes catch trout if you fished patiently, but the water was too fast-running to attract most anglers. During high summer and autumn there were few visitors. People were no longer allowed to park on the common across from our house, mainly because of the erosion so many walkers had created. Instead they had to park in the village, and for many the paved road up to the common was too steep.

  We were used to that road. It was only half a mile, a bit less if you went the back way. Although a trip to the village took you about an hour, you could still get down to buy fish-and-chips, the occasional sweets and comics, or have a look in the souvenir shop. If it took more than an hour, it was because someone wanted to chat. We were on good terms with almost everyone there. It had taken my mum and dad a few years to be accepted, especially by our neighboring hill farmers, but now even they remembered my name most of the time.

  The place nearest to us was another half an hour up the hill. Without running water, the big old farmhouse was accessible by a rough cart track which even four-wheel-drive Jeeps found hard to handle. Having no significant land attached to it, the house tended to change hands quite often. We rarely saw much of the occupants, who were almost always natural recluses. The place was known as Starr Bottom, and when we were small, my older brothers and sisters had sworn it was haunted. Shaggy free-range sheep still grazed up to the foundations of its rather neglected drystone walls.

  Tower House had no gas, but it had electricity, central heating, fireplaces and a huge coke-fired stove in the big granite-flagged kitchen which had once served the whole school. It was built on the side of Ingleborough, one of the famous Three Peaks, and had a view over twenty miles of rolling hills and dales to the Atlantic at More-combe Bay. On a clear day you could see even further from the central tower: a beautiful, rugged landscape, whose limestone glittered in the sunshine and whose hawthorns bowed close to the crags, telling of our high winds and winter snows. Our scenery was made famous in old TV series like All Creatures Great and Small, and preserved in its original beauty by the National Trust and the farmers who loved it.