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

  Oona did not release her bowstring. She kept her weapon leveled at them as I began slowly to back out of the concert room, out of the palace, with von Minct, Klosterheim and the Sebastocrater glaring at me, not daring to follow. I moved towards the summerhouse where, in the moonlit garden, the band of Kakatanawa stood frozen.

  I hadn’t expected it to be dark again. Time was playing the most peculiar tricks. Once again I was convinced I experienced some kind of waking dream.

  Oona wasn’t far behind me.

  “Someone is already taking liberties with the machinery of the multiverse,” she murmured. She looked up to where the Autumn Stars, like blossoming dahlias in dozens of deep, rich colors, poured down their light. A light which had tangible warmth.

  Then a wild, cold wind whipped through the streets of the city. I heard a wailing command which I was sure I recognized. Could it be the disgusting Clement Schnooke? He had been paid and was beginning his spell without waiting to coordinate with us.

  The voice uttered an invocation, I was sure. It summoned up weather elementals. That was about all I knew. My mother hadn’t wanted me to know too much of such supernatural details.

  Suddenly a great bolt of lightning cracked down. The light on top of the palace went out. Then came on again.

  I felt fine mist in my face. The mist turned to rain, and I shivered with cold.

  And then a shot rang out in the night. I looked back. This was definitely Schnooke’s work. Rain swept in with long scimitar strokes, and the light from the palace cut through the glinting silver. The effect was almost stroboscopic. I saw the Sebastocrater clutching a wounded arm, with a look of pure astonishment on his face, while von Minct placed a pistol at his head and Klosterheim reloaded.

  “The advantage is ours, I believe,” snarled Prince Gaynor.

  At that moment a huge splitting noise echoed through the garden, and golden light burned all around us, blinding me for a second. I heard a roar like a distant waterfall. A swift shadow moved, and the Sebastocrater went down. Instinctively I began to run.

  Soon I heard water pounding on water. A great rush of water. Everything was flooding!

  The Indians were suddenly coming to life. Behind them the fountain had flooded.

  I had to get above the water. With relief, I felt the ground rising gradually beneath my feet. I was laboring up a slope. For the moment at least, there was a good chance I was safe.

  But what of my friends? Were they also managing to escape from the drowning city?

  PART TWO

  DIVERGING HISTORIES

  ’Twas moonlight when Sir Elrik rode

  His mighty steed from Old Nihrain

  With anger such a needless load

  Upon his heart; a bane upon his brain;

  Yet anger like a plague infected every vein.

  —WHELDRAKE,

  THE BLACK SWORD’S SONG

  INTERLUDE UNA PERSSON

  Then, with joyous heart, Sir Elrih cried, Why, this be Tanelorn, the Citadel of Peace; And all the old man did desire and say is true.

  —WHELDRAKE,

  The Black Sword’s Song

  IT HAD BEEN some years since I had received a visit from my old friend Mrs. Persson. I had reconciled myself to the idea that I might never see her again. In the past her stories had generally involved Bastable, Cornelius or the denizens of the End of Time. Only once had she told me anything concerning Elric of Melniboné, whose adventures I drew largely from other sources, especially from Mr. John D—, that contemporary manifestation of the Eternal Champion, whom I knew best. Mr. D—, as I might have mentioned elsewhere, married a distant relative of mine and eventually settled in the North. It wasn’t until a later occasion, when my wife and I spent a year or two in the English Lake District, that I had the pleasure of his company once more.

  At the time I met Mrs. Persson again, however, Linda and I had grown rather settled in our rural Texan life and had developed a pleasure in unexpected visitors, the way you hardly ever do in the city.

  One late October evening we sat in rocking chairs on our screened porch, enjoying the warmth and watching the sun set over our property’s low hills and wide, shallow streams, when a car approached on the dirt road. The machine threw up a great “dust ghost” which rose into the darkening sky like a pale fairy-tale giant. It fell back as the car passed under the tall gateposts on which hung the sign of the Old Circle Squared. My great-uncle had named the ranch when he settled in the Lost Pines area and made his first fortune in timber, his second in cattle, his third in river trade, his fourth in oil and his fifth in real estate. Because of bad advice from accountants, we had made almost no money. Now most of our remaining land is part of the Lost Pines State Park, and for a small tax break we raise a modest herd of longhorns, as much a part of the family as any one of our other domestic animals. We name them all, as they pay their own way like true Texans. The balance of our land, not kept for grazing or in forest, we employ for organic gardening.

  Because of the garden we were used to the occasional neighbor dropping by for a bunch of carrots or a pound or two of tomatoes, and so thought nothing of it until the car drew up at our porch steps and a slender, dark-haired woman got out. She had a boyish, startling beauty. She wore a long coat of the kind we call a “duster” in Texas, and her hair was cut in what used to be known as a pageboy. From underneath those Prince Valiant bangs two bright grey eyes smiled at us. I recognized her at once, of course. Mrs. Persson strode up the steps of the porch as I rose to open the screen door for her. My wife let out an expression of pleasure. “My dear Una! What brings you to the back of beyond?”

  Linda drew up another rocker for Mrs. Persson while I went to fix her a drink. Still standing, she received it gratefully. Again I offered her a chair, but she said she’d been driving for some hours and preferred to remain standing for the time being. She was in Austin, she told us, to see a colleague at UT, and while she never knew our phone number, she found our address and decided to drive out to see if we were in.

  I assured her that we had become lazy; I was pretty much retired and had absolutely nothing to do. I asked after old friends as well as some of those I regarded as friends from her stories.

  She said she saw little of anyone except her cousin and someone whose adventures she knew would interest me. “Elric of Melniboné?” She made the words sound delicious, like exotic food. There might have been a hint of irony, the kind a woman gains from living too long in Paris.

  “Really? You’ve been enjoying more adventures in space and time?”

  “Not at all. He has only recently returned to his own era. That is, whatever physical manifestation we take with us between one plane of the multiverse and another. What his people know, I understand, as ‘dream quests.’”

  “You are not now embarked upon any such quest, are you?” my wife asked gently.

  Una Persson bowed her head a fraction and winked.

  “We are all embarked upon dream quests,” she said. “Those of us who are not wholly dead. Wholly dead.”

  “But your time on the stage, and so on—that wasn’t a dream quest,” said Linda. “That was a dream come true.”

  I laughed.

  “I wasn’t raised to know the difference,” said Una, settling at last into the rocking chair beside Linda. “Dreams and identities are there, like the multiverse, to be negotiated, to be tested and tried and sometimes adopted.”

  “I think I would prefer not to have that choice,” I said.

  “I know I would prefer not to have it,” she agreed vehemently.

  “You didn’t enjoy your time on stage?” Linda was implacable. She was a huge fan of musical comedy, and Una had for a while a very successful career both in the West End and on Broadway.

  “I think I enjoyed it most of all,” she said. “It was a long career, because of my peculiar circumstances. I came in with the great dowager halls, the massive palaces of variety like the Empire, Leicester Square. I went out with revue and the sophistic
ated topical songs of the 1960s. It was rock-and-roll and satire ruined me, my dear.” And she laughed. She had enjoyed it while it was fun, but never seemed to care that it was over. She had done so much more with her life, in political terms, since the mid-1960s. Her main association then, of course, was with Jerry Cornelius and his odd assortment of traveling players, who had been so typical of the situationalist theater which had grown up on the Continent but which had never really caught on in the United States or UK. I had heard that the theater had been a cover for other kinds of more serious activity, but I was never curious about so-called secret-service stories.

  Una had, in fact, a new Elric tale—or at least part of one—to tell us. Most of the facts, she promised, came from Elric himself. Others had been verified beyond doubt by various people she had met on the moonbeam roads in recent months.

  I mixed her a fresh drink while Linda went into the house to see about dinner. Then, when Linda had returned, Una began her tale.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ELRIC OF MELNIBONÉ, Una told us, had embarked involuntarily on what he called the Dream of a Thousand Years. Having arrived in England some years before the Battle of Hastings, in the reign of Ethelred the Unready, he served as a seagoing mercenary against the encroaching Danes until Ethelred, impoverished as a result of his own poor planning, failed to pay him. Therefore the albino took what was his and left for the Middle Sea, where for a while he fell in with a female pirate known as the Barbary Rose, striking merchant ships from the security of her island stronghold of Las Cascadas. Later he went adventuring into the wildern lands of the Moors, beyond the High Atlas into the desert, where, it was said, he came upon a country ruled by intelligent dragons. Little was then heard of him until he turned up as a crusader, becoming the ally of Gunnar the Doomed and sailing with him to America.

  Elric, who had used a variety of names, founded a nation. He carved it from the old German and Slavic lands in a place called Wäldenstein, whose capital was the city of Mirenburg. There he and what seemed to be his progeny ruled by virtue of dark magic and a fabulous black sword said to drink souls as readily as it drank blood. Terrible legends surrounded the Princes of Mirenburg until the nineteenth century, when the city appeared to have been abandoned by the crimson-eyed albinos who occupied it. At the early part of the twentieth century, though a few stories still existed in Mirenburg concerning a soul-eating demon called Karmingsinaugen, the old tales of the vampire prince and his vampire sword continued to circulate. They soon merged with those of Nosferatu and the hero-villains of German cinema. Meanwhile an albino resembling Elric began to entertain with a magic act on the English stage. Monsieur Zodiac, as he was called, was a very popular attraction, and his son, who might have been his twin, later took over the act as well as the name.

  Mrs. Persson believed that his thousand-year sojourn in our world, where his dream self took on solid flesh, was coming to an end. She wanted to help him return to his world, “where he hangs crucified on a ship’s mast,” but was afraid he was now too weak to resist the controlling power of his massive runesword, which, she believed, had been stolen and carried across the multiverse. He was desperate to rediscover it and convinced he would die if he awoke from his dream without it.

  “Why will he die?” I asked.

  “There’s a symbiosis between the blade and the man. The blade’s the essence of Chaos. It might even have a mind. His mind. The blade lends him vitality in return for the souls it feeds upon. Yet the sword could be a holy object associated with the Cosmic Balance itself. We must never forget that the Balance maintains the structure of the multiverse. When it tips one way, Chaos rules ad infinitum across the multiverse. When it tips the other, Law grows dominant. One way lies madness and hideous death; the other, sanity and relentless nothingness. It is the Eternal Champion’s fate to ensure that the Balance is maintained. Our fate, I suspect, is to help him in this task.”

  “Our fate?”

  “I’m afraid so. There’s also the problem of the Runestaff. Its existence or lack of substance could determine the issue. Many believe the Staff and the Stone are the fundamental components of the Balance itself. Of course, we are also discussing an abstraction.” She shrugged. “The symbols of power are not the power themselves. Unless you’re a magician, of course.”

  “I understood the Grail was involved in that equation.”

  “The Grail takes many forms. One of those could be the Staff. Anyway, the fact is that several people would like to control one or all of these forces represented by those objects, because of the enormous power such possession would give them. This is doubtless why, under great threat, it has again divided itself into its chief components and again gone out of the protection of the family sworn to defend it—the von Beks.

  “One of those pursuing the Stone across time and space for his own ends is Gaynor the Damned, a former Knight of the Balance, disgraced and exiled, Elric’s most implacable enemy. He goes by many names but is best known in these times as von Minct.”

  “He’s sailed with Elric to America?” asked Linda.

  Una nodded. “Gaynor once drew on the power of the Balance, using it for his own benefit. Needless to say, he lost his calling and became an outlaw, the enemy of all who served the Balance. Yet he yearned at the same time to be reconciled with what he had been bred to respect. And if reconciliation’s not possible, he’ll destroy the Balance and the multiverse with it. This is what fuels his unquenchable hatred. The Balance, of course, is essentially only a symbol of the forces which rule the multiverse. Yet those forces are real enough, created out of the seminal stuff which exists in the place we call the Grey Fees. Forces created by the common will or by an uncommon imagination. That is what we call reality.”

  “And reality can be destroyed? Is that it? By an act of will?”

  Mrs. Persson took a sip of her drink, rocking slowly back and forth, her face turned up to the emerging evening stars. “By an act of extraordinary will, channeled by ritual and superhuman desire. We are dealing with a creature who has honed and channeled that will and that desire for millennia.”

  “What keeps him alive?” I asked.

  “Some believe his very hatred sustains him. Neither he nor Elric is immortal, though their longevity is, of course, phenomenal. Elric is not even conscious of his longevity. Both move from one dream quest to another, though Elric has not often walked the moonbeam roads. It’s hard for some of us to understand. How do we count age when so much of your life is spent in dream quests centuries long, in which you scarcely move in your sleep nor grow older?”

  Sitting there in the warm Texas twilight discussing the nature of the infinite multiverse was a little odd, but our pleasure in seeing our old friend was more than enough to make us forget the incongruity. Besides, it had been some while since I had learned of any manifestation of the Eternal Champion, let alone Elric of Melniboné, whose adventures I first heard from Una Persson in the 1950s, when I began recording them.

  Apparently Elric, in his guise of Monsieur Zodiac, the stage conjurer, was visited by two men he had met during the 1940s, when he discovered himself at odds with various Nazis, including Gaynor, who had transformed himself into a minor German nobleman, cousin to Ulric von Bek. Elric had founded the family line in his first years in Mirenburg. The extraordinary coming together of von Bek and Elric, whose identities blended into a single physical being, was something neither had experienced and which almost defeated description. These disruptions in the order of time had come about, Mrs. Persson had told me, as a result of Gaynor and his ally Klosterheim seeking to use for themselves the power of the Grail and the Black Sword Ravenbrand, sometimes called Mournblade, the sibling sword to Stormbringer.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Persson said, Elric went to Portugal, searching for the Black Sword, which had passed out of his hands sometime in 1974 in the course of an adventure she promised to relate to me on another occasion. Having only a few years left to repossess the blade before his dream quest ended, Elric ev
entually found himself and his recovered blade in Cintra, outside Lisbon, where the Chevalier St. Odhran in turn discovered him. From there the two men journeyed via St. Odhran’s Scottish estates to Ingleton in North Yorkshire, to Tower House, not far from my own ancestral home of Moorcock, near Dent. There they met Prince Lobkowitz and his old friend Lieutenant Fromental and Colonel Bastable, all able to negotiate the moonbeam roads, all Knights of the Balance and members of the League of Temporal Adventurers, founded in the mid-twentieth century. They had expected to discover the von Beks there. Oona von Bek, a relative of Mrs. Persson, was Elric’s daughter and had, like Count von Bek, fought at his side against Gaynor the Damned on more than one occasion.

  “What was the reason?” I asked her. “Isn’t it unusual for so many heroes to gather in one place?”

  “Yes, it is unusual,” she agreed. “Indeed there’s some danger in it. But it appears they learned von Bek’s young granddaughter was being sought by Gaynor, and they went there to protect the little girl.”

  “They succeeded, I hope.”

  “Not entirely. The child has a mind of her own and disappeared. It was thought at first that Gaynor and Klosterheim had been successful in their intentions. But the real cause of her disappearance was a weakening in the fundamental fabric of time and space, the Gray Fees, the very DNA of the multiverse. She vanished during a minor local earthquake caused by this chaotic movement. Gaynor and Klosterheim were seen in the vicinity, but it’s pretty clear they didn’t set out to kidnap her. They are opportunists, and they were lunging after her as clumsily as the rest of us. The presence of so many people from alternate spheres of the multiverse seems to have produced a certain amount of cosmic turbulence.

  “Lobkowitz and Fromental set off to find the little girl while the others waited to join forces with the von Beks—Ulric and Oona. Ulric remained with his other children while his wife, who had sworn never to revisit the moonbeam roads—by which means travelers cross between the worlds—took up her old calling. Her mother was a dreamthief, but Oona had been content merely to explore the worlds her mother had once entered with the intention of stealing dreams to sell to her clients. It was in one such world that her mother met Elric and conceived their twin children, as I believe you already know.” 1