a wild silvery light. He was growing in size. But as he grew, he dissipated. Like ripples in a pool, each one a slightly larger representation of its predecessor, Gaynor grew bigger and bigger, pulsing and expanding like a great chord of music, high into the sky, into the fabric of the multiverse. He fragmented and became whole at the same time!
I stumbled on, still trying to lay hands on him. I reached him, tried to hold him. Something electric tingled in my fingers, I was blinded for a moment, and then Gaynor was gone. Silence.
'We have lost both Gaynors, ' I said. I shook with violent anger mixed with fear. Elric gasped and shook his head. 'All of them, for the moment. He has fled in a thousand directions, playing his most dangerous card. Fragmenting into a multitude of versions, each one a slightly larger scale. He dissipates his essence throughout the multiverse, so that we cannot follow. He is at his most unstable. His most dangerous. Perhaps his most powerful. He exists everywhere and nowhere. The risk is that he can be everyone and no one. He spreads his essence thinly. But one thing we do know of him-he has failed to keep his bargain with Arioch. He was attempting to bring the Duke of Hell into this realm.
'If Gaynor hasn't driven himself completely insane, he will do one of two things. He will seek to escape the Duke of Hell, which would be foolish and probably impossible. Or he will go to seek a compromise with him. Which means he must find a place of convergence. Bek denied him, he needs another place of convergence through which he can admit his patron. There cannot be many others in this world.'
'Morn, ' said Oona. 'It will be on Morn.' She held up the paper she had taken.
'A place of convergence?' I asked. 'What is that?'
'Where many possibilities come together, ' she said. 'Where the moonbeam roads meet. I know this realm well. He will go to the Stones of Morn and attempt to gather all his many selves back into a single whole.'
That was all she could tell me before there came a hammering from within the tower.
'How can we possibly follow him?' I asked.
'I have brought friends, ' murmured Elric. 'Gaynor sought to use them for his own ends. But he lacks our blood. It is how I followed him from Melnibone. Swords call to swords. Wings to wings.'
Hess and his men were breaking down the door.
I looked over the battlements. The drop would kill us. There was nowhere left to go. We had no choice but to take a stand. Elric stumbled back towards the tower dragging his sword with both hands. As the door came down he swung the sword. It took the three leading storm troopers by surprise. They went down at once and the blade shrieked its glee. Elric's breath hissed as he absorbed the blade's strength. The stolen energy was quickly restoring him.
Reluctantly I joined him and together we took another five or six men before they retreated into the tower and began shooting at us from a safer distance. The narrow passage made it impossible for them to see us or hit us and their ammunition was wasted.
Elric told us to keep the storm troopers diverted. He limped to the edge of the battlements and looked up into a night sky which boiled with dark cloud stained by an orange moon. He lifted the sword. It began to blaze again with black fire. Elric, in his ruined armor and torn silks, burned with the same flame as he lifted his skull-white face to the turbulent heavens and began the singing of a rune so ancient its words were the voice of the elements, the wind and the earth.
A few more shots from the tower. A cautious storm trooper emerged. I killed him. Dark shapes roamed the sky now. Sinuous shapes slithered their way amongst the clouds.
Elric had drawn strength from his victims. He stood silhouetted against the battlements, sword in hand, screaming at the sky.
And the sky screamed back at him.
Like sudden thunder, there was a bang, and the sky began to bubble and crack. Forms emerged from the distance. Monstrous flying creatures. Reptiles with long, curling tails and necks, slender snouts and wide, leathery wings. I recognized them from my nightmares. The dragons of Melnibone, brought to my own realm by Elric's powerful sorcery. I knew Gaynor had hoped to recruit these dragons to his cause. I knew he had almost defeated Elric in the ruins of Imrryr. I knew he had found the hidden caves and sought to wake Elric's dragon kin. He had been successful. But he had not understood that the dragons would refuse to serve him. Blood for blood; brother for brother. They served only the royal blood of Melnibone. And that blood, by a trick of history, Oona and I shared with her father.
Two huge beasts circled the tower in the orange moonlight. Young Phoorn dragons, still with the black and white rings around their snouts and tails, still with feathery tips to their wings, they had not grown to the size of their elders, whose life spans were almost infinite, as dragons spent most of their time asleep.
Elric was weakened by his incantation, but his spirits were rising. 'I prepared for this. But I had also expected to have the Grail with me when I summoned my brothers.' Melniboneans claimed direct kinship with the Phoorn dragons. In another age they had shared the same names, the same quarters, the same power. In ancient history, it was said dragons had ruled Melnibone as kings. Whatever the truth, Elric and his kind could drink dragon venom, which killed most other creatures. The venom was so powerful that it ignited in the air as soon as it spewed from the dragons' mouths. I knew all this, because Elric knew it.
I knew the language of the dragons. We greeted them affectionately as they landed their huge bodies delicately on the tower. They were steaming and shaking with the turbulence of their journey through the multiverse. They opened their huge red mouths, gasping in the thin air of this world. Their vast eyes turned to regard us. Expectant, benign, their monstrous claws gripped the stone battlements as they balanced there. The patterns of their scales, subtle and rich purples and scarlets, golds and dark greens, glistened in the moonlight. They were very similar in appearance, one distinguished by a blaze of white above its nose, the other with a blaze of black. Their great white teeth clashed when they closed their mouths, and on the edges of their lips, their venom constantly boiled. These were the beasts of the Siegfried legend, but far more intelligent and considerably more numerous. The Melniboneans had made many studies of dragons, detailing all the various kinds, from the snub- snouted Erkanian, nicknamed the batwing, to these long-nosed hibernating Phoorn, whose relationship with us was oddly telepathic.
Holding his side, Elric approached the nearest dragon, speaking to her softly. Both dragons were already saddled with the pulsing Phoorn skeffla'a, a kind of membrane which bonded with the dragon above its shoulder blades, giving it the ability to travel between the realms. The skeffla'a was one of the strangest productions of Melnibonean alchemical husbandry and one of the oldest.
Their names were simple, like most names given to them by men-Blacksnout and Whitesnout. Their names for themselves were long, complicated and utterly unpronounceable, detailing ancestry and where they had journeyed.
Elric turned to me. 'The dragons will take us to Gaynor. You know how to ride?' I knew. As I now knew most things connected with my dop-pelganger.
'He's still in this world. Or at least certain aspects of him are. He could have exhausted himself and no longer have the power to travel the moonbeam roads. Whatever the reasons, the dragons can take us to him.'
'To Morn, ' said Oona. 'It must be Morn. Does he still have the Grail?'
'It's not something we'll know until we catch up with him ...' Elric's voice trailed away as he was overcome with pain. Yet he seemed slightly stronger than a few minutes earlier. I asked him how badly he had been shot and he looked at me in surprise. 'Klosterheim shot to kill. And I am not dead.'
'I should also have died from Klosterheim's gun, ' I told him. 'The wounds were very evident. I lost an enormous amount of blood. But the wound has now almost vanished! '
'The Grail, ' said Elric. 'We've been exposed to the Grail and haven't known it. So it is either on Gaynor's person or hidden somewhere back there.'
Hess's face emerged from the doorway. He ordered his men to stop shooting. His face bore an expression of sincerity, of urgency.
'I must talk to you, ' he said. 'I must know what all this means. What kind of heroes are you? The heroes of Alfheim? Have we conjured our ancient legendary Teutonic world back in all its might and glory? Thor? Odin? Are you-?'
The dragons had impressed him.
'I regret, Your Excellency, ' I said, 'that these are dragons of oriental origin. They are Levantine dragons. From the wrong side of the Mediterranean.'
His eyes widened. 'Impossible.'
