The Skrayling Tree (32 page)

Then, pulling himself together, he straightened his shoulders and clapped his enormous hands.

The sound was like a shot in the huge, silent arena. It brought an almost instant reaction.

From within came a whinny, a snort. Something pounded the hard surface. Another great whinny, and out of the archway, mane
flaring as if in the wind, sprang a horse of supernatural proportions. A monstrous black stallion, big enough to carry Sepiriz.
He reared, flailing bright jet hooves and glaring from raging ocher eyes. The beast’s mane and tail became a wild mass of
black fire. He was muscular, nervous. This gigantic beast expressed impatience rather than anger. But at a word from Sepiriz,
the horse cocked his ears forward
and immediately settled. I had never seen a creature respond so swiftly to human command.

Although there was no doubting the animal’s physical presence, I quickly noticed that for all his activity, he scarcely stirred
the dust of the arena floor and left no hoofprints of any kind.

Noting my curiosity, Sepiriz laid a hand gently on my shoulder. “The horse, as I told you, exists on two planes at once. The
ground he gallops on is unseen by us.”

He led me up to the horse, who nuzzled at him, seeking a familiar treat. The beast already wore a saddle and bridle and seemed
equipped for war as well as travel.

I reached a hand towards the mighty head and rubbed the animal’s velvet nose. I noted the bright, white teeth and red tongue,
the hot, sweet breath.

“What is his name?” I asked.

“He has no name in your terms.” Sepiriz did not elaborate. He looked towards the walls, searching for something he had expected
to find there. “But he will carry you through all danger and serve you to the death. Once you are in his saddle, he will respond
as any horse, but you will find him, I think, unusually intelligent and capable.”

“He knows where I am to go?”

“He is not prescient!”

“No?” For a moment the ground beneath my feet shifted like liquid, then as quickly resettled. Again Sepiriz refused to answer
my unspoken question. He was still searching. His eyes scanned the long, empty stone benches stretching into the gloom. I
noticed that
the darkness seemed to have absorbed some of the upper tiers. Smoke or mist swirled and gave carved figures expressions of
gloating glee, then of wild, innocent joy.

Sepiriz noted this at the same time I did. I was certain I saw a flash of alarm in his eyes. Then he smiled with pleasure
and turned as another horse emerged from the archway into the stadium. This horse had a rider. A familiar rider. A man I had
met more than once. Our families had been related for centuries. His was a branch which had supported Mozart and been famous
for its taste and intelligence.

This rider had first introduced himself to me in the 1930s as a representative of an anti-Nazi group. His handsome, heavy
features were enhanced now by an eighteenth-century wig, a tricorn hat and military greatcoat. He looked like one of the famous
portraits of Frederick the Great. Of course it was my old acquaintance, the Austrian prince Lobkowitz. His clothing was bulky,
completely unsuitable for this volcanic cavern. His face was already beaded with sweat, and he dabbed at himself with a vast
handkerchief of patterned Persian silk.

“Good morning, sir.” His voice a little hoarse, he reined in and lifted his hat, for all the world as if we met on a country
bridle path near Bek. “I’m mightily glad to see you. We have a destiny to pursue. Sentient life depends upon it. Have you
brought the sword?”

Lobkowitz dismounted as Lord Sepiriz came towards him, towering over the Austrian, who was not a short man. Sepiriz kneeled
to embrace him. “We were unsure
you could perform so complicated a figure. We had other means ready, but they were even more fragile. You must have succeeded
thus far, or you would not have joined us.”

Prince Lobkowitz put his hand on Lord Sepiriz’s arm and came to shake my hand. He was in high spirits. Indeed, I found his
attitude a little unseemly, considering my circumstances, if not his. His warm charm, however, was impossible to resist.

“My dear Count von Bek. You cannot know the odds against your being here and our meeting like this. Luck, if not the gods,
seems on our side. The dice are tossed by a fierce wind, but now at least there is a little hope.”

“What is the task? What do you seek to accomplish?”

Lobkowitz looked at Lord Sepiriz in surprise. He seemed to expect the black giant to have told me more. “Why, sir, we seek
to save the life and soul of your dear wife, my protégée, Oona, the dreamthief’s daughter.”

I was horrified. “My wife is in danger? What is happening back there? Is someone attacking the house?”

“In relation to our position in the scheme of things, she is no longer at your house in Canada. She is further inland, deep
in the Rockies, and facing an enemy who draws his strength from every part of the multiverse. Unless we reach her at exactly
the right moment, where our story intersects with hers, she will perish.”

I could not control the pain I experienced at this news. “How did she come to be where she is? Could you not have helped her?”

Prince Lobkowitz indicated his costume. “I was until
lately, sir, in the service of Catherine the Great. Where, I might add, I met your unsavory ancestor Manfred.”

For one of such habitual grace, he seemed in poor temper. I apologized. I was a simple man. I had no means of understanding
this topsy-turvy tumble of different worlds. It was more than I could normally do to try to imagine the space between the
Earth and the Moon. Yet my veins beat with anxious blood at the thought of my beloved wife in danger, and I feared for my
children, for everything that had meaning to me. I wanted to turn on this pair and blame them for my circumstances, but it
was impossible. Another intelligence lurked within my own.

Gradually his presence was growing stronger. Elric of Melniboné, who believed in the reality of only one world, understood
perhaps instinctively the complexity of the multiverse. His experience, if not his intellect, told him how one branch sometimes
intersected with another and sometimes did not, how branches grew quickly, took on bizarre shapes, and died as suddenly as
they appeared.

Elric understood this science as his own sorcerous wisdom, captured over years of education in the long dreams which gave
the Melnibonéan capital its nickname of the Dreamers’ City. For Elric’s people extended their lives through drug- and sorcery-induced
dreams which assumed their own reality, sometimes for thousands of years. By this means, too, did their dragon kin, to whom
they were related by blood, sleep and dream and manifest themselves, no doubt, in others’ dreams. It was dangerous for anyone
but the full adept to attempt
such an existence. And dangerous, I knew, to try to change a narrative which gave some kind of uneasy order to our lives.
At best we could create a whole new universe or series of universes. At worst we could destroy those which now existed and
by some mistake or unlucky turn of the cards consign ourselves and everything we knew to irreversible oblivion.

My twentieth-century European sensibilities were repelled by such ideas, yet Elric’s soul was forever blended with my own.
And Elric’s memory was filled with experiences I would normally dismiss as the fantasies of a tormented madman.

Thus I accepted and refused to accept at the same time. It was a wonder I had the coordination to mount the huge horse. He
was at least as large as the famous old warhorses of past legends. I looked for Sepiriz, to ask him a question, but he had
gone. The saddle and stirrups were modified for a man of my size, yet the saddle still felt huge, giving me an unfamiliar
sense of security.

There was no doubt my horse was pleased to have a rider. He moved impatiently, ready to gallop. At Lobkowitz’s suggestion
I cantered the stallion around the arena. The Nihrainian steed trod the ground with evident familiarity, tossing his great
black mane and snorting with pleasure. I noted the strong, acrid smell he exuded when he moved. It was the smell I normally
associated with a wild predator.

Lobkowitz followed me, saying little but clearly noting my handling of the animal. He congratulated me on my horsemanship,
which made me laugh. My father and
brothers had all despaired of me as the worst rider in the family!

As we rode, I begged him to tell me more about Oona and her whereabouts. He asked that I respect any reticence on his part.
Knowledge of a future could change it, and it was our task not to change the future but to ensure that, in one realm at least,
it be a future I desired for my loved ones and myself. I must trust him. With some reluctance, I bowed to his judgment. I
had no reason, I said, not to trust him, but my head ached with many questions and uncertainties.

Sepiriz returned bearing a scabbarded sword. Was it the sword I knew as Ravenbrand, which Elric called Stormbringer? Or was
it the sister sword, Mournblade? Sepiriz did not tell me. “Each sword is of equal power. The power of the other avatars weakens
in proportion to their distance from the source. It is as well it happened this way,” he said. “The Kakatanawa have already
gone home. The circle tightens. Here.”

As I reached to accept the sword, I thought its metal voiced a faint moan, but it could have been my imagination. There was,
however, a distinct, familiar vibrancy to the hilt as it settled into my right hand. Automatically I hooked the scabbard to
the heavy saddle.

“So,” I said. “I am prepared to follow a road for which I have no maps, in a quest whose purpose is mysterious, with a companion
who seems scarcely more familiar with the territory than I am. You place much faith in me, Sepiriz. I would remind you that
I remain suspicious of your motives and your part in my wife’s endangerment.”

Sepiriz accepted this, but clearly he did not intend to illuminate me further. “Only if you are successful in this adventure
will you ever know more of the truth concerning the swords,” the black seer told me. “But if you do, indeed, succeed in fulfilling
your destiny, of serving Fate’s purpose, then I promise, what you hear shall hearten you.”

And with that Lobkowitz yelled for us to be off. We must be free of Nihrain before the new eruption, when all here will be
destroyed, and Sepiriz and his brothers will ride out into the world to fulfill another part of their complex destiny.

I could do nothing but follow him. The prince bent over his horse’s neck and rode with impossible speed out of the huge amphitheater
and down corridors of liquid scarlet veined with black and white and tunnels of turquoise, milky opal and rubies. All carved
in the same relief. Faces begged and twisted in agony. Their eyes yearned for any kind of mercy. Vast scenes stretched for
miles, every figure minutely detailed, all exquisitely individual. Landscapes of the most appalling beauty, of elaborate horror
and hideous symmetry, rose and fell around me as I rode. All were given movement by my own speed. Were they designed to be
seen thus? A creative style best appreciated from the back of a galloping warhorse?

I began to believe that I inhabited a fantastic dream, a nightmare from which I must inevitably wake. Then I remembered all
I had learned from Oona and realized that I might never wake, might never see her or my children again. This infuriated me,
firing me with a righteous
anger against Fate or whatever less abstract force Sepiriz and his kind served.

I put all that emotion into my riding, into following the expert Lobkowitz through tunnels, chambers, corridors of dazzling
diamonds and sapphires and carnelians, down long slopes and up flights of steps, our horses’ hooves never quite touching the
ground of the paths we traced. I gasped and braced myself to fall the first time the horse galloped across the air separating
one part of the mountain from another. By the second experience I had learned to trust its surefooted pace over an invisible
landscape.

We galloped through oceans of lava, through foaming rivers of dust, over blue-veined pools of marble, sometimes blinded by
a fiery light, sometimes plunging through pitch darkness. The great black horses never tired. When we passed through caverns
of ice, their breath erupted like smoke from their nostrils, but they were otherwise undisturbed by any natural obstacle.
Now I understood what a valuable animal Sepiriz had loaned me.

In spite of my anxieties, I began to know an old, familiar elation. The sword at my side was already wrapping me in her bloody
gyres, sending me a taste of what I would experience if I unsheathed her. I dared not draw the thing from her scabbard, for
I knew what she would make of me, what pleasures I would taste and what mental torments I would experience.

I was filled with a dreadful mixture of fear and desire. Knowing my wife was even now in danger, I longed to feel the hilt
in my hand again and taste the
most terrible drug of all, the very life stuff of my foes. What some called their souls. As the spirit of Elric combined with
that of the sword, together they threatened to overwhelm the part of me who was Ulric von Bek. Already far too much of me
longed to charge into battle on this magnificent horse, to hack and pierce, to slice and skewer, to lift my arm and let death
come wherever it fell.

All this horrified Ulric von Bek, that exemplar of liberal humanism. Yet perhaps here was a time when a rational, modern man
was not best suited to deal with the realities around him. I should give myself up wholly to Elric.

Should I do that, I thought, I would in some way be abandoning my wife and children. I had to hang on to the humanistic person
I was, even though increasingly Elric lurked just below the surface, threatening to take me over and make me a willing tool
of his killing frenzy.

How I yearned never to have known this creature, nor ever to have had to rely on his help. Yet, I thought, if I had not involved
myself with Elric and his fate, I should not now be married to his daughter, Oona, whom we both loved in our own ways. At
least in this we were united. What was more, the last Emperor of Melniboné had saved me from torture and degrading death in
the Nazi concentration camp.