Elric in the Dream Realms.

by Michael Moorcock.

FOREWORD.

by Neil Gaiman.

"Rolling ... we're rolling in the ruins," sings Michael Moorcock on my iPod as I write this, thrown up by coincidence or the magic of the shuffle. Which seems like a good place to start.

When I was nine I read Stormbringer Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock and it changed my life. Elric of Melnibone entered my head and it seemed that he had been there forever. by Michael Moorcock and it changed my life. Elric of Melnibone entered my head and it seemed that he had been there forever.

I was determined to read every tale of the albino prince with the black sword. I was an Elric reader, and only an Elric reader, until I found a copy of The Sleeping Sorceress The Sleeping Sorceress a year later and discovered that the other aspects of the Eternal Champion-the heroes and the protagonists of the other books by Moorcock-were also Elric. This was permission to read everything Moorcock had written, and over the next two years I enthusiastically discovered Jerry Cornelius and Karl Glogauer, Dorian Hawkmoon, Corum and the rest of them (the rest of him?). I was fortunate that my desire to read Moorcock coincided with the desire of the British publishing industry to bring everything Michael Moorcock had written back into print, and those books, with their hallucinatory covers, was what my pocket money went on. In a tiny bookshop in Brighton I found a small press Elric novella called "The Jade Man's Eyes" that no one in the world had heard of. I was twelve years old and I wondered if it had been put there just for me. a year later and discovered that the other aspects of the Eternal Champion-the heroes and the protagonists of the other books by Moorcock-were also Elric. This was permission to read everything Moorcock had written, and over the next two years I enthusiastically discovered Jerry Cornelius and Karl Glogauer, Dorian Hawkmoon, Corum and the rest of them (the rest of him?). I was fortunate that my desire to read Moorcock coincided with the desire of the British publishing industry to bring everything Michael Moorcock had written back into print, and those books, with their hallucinatory covers, was what my pocket money went on. In a tiny bookshop in Brighton I found a small press Elric novella called "The Jade Man's Eyes" that no one in the world had heard of. I was twelve years old and I wondered if it had been put there just for me.

I internalized the books: they became part of me on a very deep level. I forget to talk about Mike Moorcock, sometimes, when people ask me about my influences, because Mike's work, gulped and read and reread and absorbed when I was still forming, was less of an influence on what I was and how I thought than it was the foundation of it. For all my adult life it has seemed natural and sensible that fictions should be huge and sprawling, should contain their own cosmologies, cover unimaginable spans of time, encompass every possible genre and medium and, if possible, feature thin and pale princes who had trouble with relationships-family and interpersonal, not to mention sexual. (It is worth noting that all these things were, without any conscious thought on my part, evident in Sandman Sandman, my own largest work of fiction.) My debt to Michael Moorcock is unrepayable. It was from him that I learned-at an early enough age that the information sculpted the way that I thought-that a good writer should be able to do anything: that you could write heroic fantasy and mainstream fiction with the same typewriter, not to mention comics and movies and essays, political screeds and strange punk fantasies. Moorcock was the kind of editor who changed the field of speculative fiction simply by publishing the kind of stories he wanted to read. When I was too young to do anything more than dream that I wanted to be a writer, he was my model for what a writer was and what a real writer did; more than twenty years after I read Stormbringer Stormbringer I wrote a story called "One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock" that was the nearest I've come to pure autobiography, trying to explain the part that Moorcock (and Elric) had in making me who I am and who I was. I wrote a story called "One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock" that was the nearest I've come to pure autobiography, trying to explain the part that Moorcock (and Elric) had in making me who I am and who I was.

The Elric stories are quintessential Moorcock, the pure stuff, uncut and straight from the street (as are their fraternal twins and reflections, the Jerry Cornelius sequence, a land bridge to the work of the other Moorcock, the one who wrote Mother London) Mother London). They span the entirety of Moorcock's remarkable career to date. They swim with color, delirious and fantastic tales of heartbreak and loss and bittersweet victory, anchored always by the pale prince and his black, soul-eating sword. They are wise and painful and smart and if you read them right, they'll change you.

I wouldn't trade them for worlds.

Neil Gaiman.

Carharrack, Cornwall April 9, 2008

INTRODUCTION.

In the middle 1970s, with a fair amount of literary success in both generic and non-generic fiction, and having completed the final Corum sequence, I decided to stop writing epic fantasy fiction. One of the reasons for this was because there was now an entire genre come into existence. Tolkien's and my names were no longer the only ones decorating the fantasy shelves and I felt I had done everything I could do with the form. Fantasy, as a recognizable genre, was coming into its own.

Originally identified with a certain small school-which included Morris, Dunsany and Cabell (and with one fine example by Poul Anderson)-as it became a genre, fantasy quite naturally swiftly incorporated all the methods and imagery created by those few writers, including myself, who wrote it. Reader expectations became more fixed. I had been attracted to epic fantasy as a form precisely because it contained so many unexplored possibilities and nobody knew or thought they knew what it "should" do. As with science fiction, I felt I had done pretty much all I could within the form, and now I wanted to write a different kind of fantasy and some more non-generic fiction (I regard Cornelius as non-generic). I completed the fourth book in the original Cornelius tetralogy and it won a literary prize I greatly valued,* so I felt as if most of my often experimental work had, one way or another, been accepted by the public. so I felt as if most of my often experimental work had, one way or another, been accepted by the public.

With this in mind, I wrote what was intended to be a fantasy swan song, a novel that would be an homage to Mervyn Peake, who had proven such an encouraging friend and continuing inspiration. My first surviving novel (at that time unpublished) was the Peake-influenced The Golden Barge The Golden Barge. His work is unquestionably sui generis sui generis. It makes use of fantastic landscape, grotesque or at least exaggerated characters and rather melodramatic events, but it contains little or nothing of the supernatural.

Gormenghast has far more in common with Kafka than Kuttner and is closer to the absurdism found in other work by Peake, whether in his drawings, poems, plays or short fiction. has far more in common with Kafka than Kuttner and is closer to the absurdism found in other work by Peake, whether in his drawings, poems, plays or short fiction. Gloriana; or, The Unfulfill'd Queen Gloriana; or, The Unfulfill'd Queen was an homage to Peake as well as my bow to Jacobean melodrama (the most sympathetic critics realized the language was not Elizabethan but closer to Carolingian). The book was well reviewed as a literary novel and at the same time won the World Fantasy Award (the "Howie"). With the acceptance of the non-generic Cornelius tetralogy as literary (as opposed to generic) fiction, together with was an homage to Peake as well as my bow to Jacobean melodrama (the most sympathetic critics realized the language was not Elizabethan but closer to Carolingian). The book was well reviewed as a literary novel and at the same time won the World Fantasy Award (the "Howie"). With the acceptance of the non-generic Cornelius tetralogy as literary (as opposed to generic) fiction, together with Gloriana's Gloriana's success, by 1977 I had finished everything I had set out to do in 1960. However, as readers of success, by 1977 I had finished everything I had set out to do in 1960. However, as readers of New Worlds New Worlds issues from that time knew, I was not really satisfied that publishing had changed enough; and it would take a little longer for the mingling of fantasy and contemporary reality to become as familiar to the public as Ballard and I had hoped when we began to talk of finding a new literary form that would be as valid to the year 2000 as Modernism was to 1900. issues from that time knew, I was not really satisfied that publishing had changed enough; and it would take a little longer for the mingling of fantasy and contemporary reality to become as familiar to the public as Ballard and I had hoped when we began to talk of finding a new literary form that would be as valid to the year 2000 as Modernism was to 1900.

By 1978, thanks to a bit of self-revelation in the bar of a Russian passenger ship, which I've described elsewhere, I was ready to begin what became my attempt to "explain" the Nazi holocaust by looking at Europe, America and the Middle East through the eyes of "Colonel Pyat," a crazed, terrified Ukrainian Jew who believes engineering (including social engineering) will save the world and who will go to any lengths to deny his Jewish origins. He is what Goebbels described as "that sad fellow, the anti-Semitic Jew." When you take on such a psychic load, you have no choice other than to go mad, especially when you realize that this acknowledgement of your own survival guilt should also be a comedy. By the summer of 1979, having completed the first volume of what became the realistic Pyat quartet, I had been mad for about a year, researching night and day, learning to read the Cyrillic alphabet and then Russian and Ukrainian, occupying the mind of that terrible character for whom sympathy has to be maintained, creating Byzantium Endures Byzantium Endures. When I look back, with more guilt, to the domestic carnage the novel helped create, I have to admit that I do so with few regrets. But writing the first Pyat book left me wiped out, and I found I rather enjoyed contemplating the writing of a fantasy novel as a break. My next book, some time after completing Byzantium Endures Byzantium Endures (which was so heavily edited in the United States it amounted to censorship, something that didn't happen in France, Germany and elsewhere) was (which was so heavily edited in the United States it amounted to censorship, something that didn't happen in France, Germany and elsewhere) was The War Hound and the World's Pain The War Hound and the World's Pain, set in what I regard as the dawn of modern European anti-Semitism, in the Hundred Years War, which so devastated Europe as various forms of Christianity clashed, made alliances and clashed again, often resulting in coreligionists fighting (dirty) to the death.

War Hound was the first of the von Bek novels. The overall sequence was intended to take place at key times in European history from the emerging modern age in the seventeenth century to the coming of the Age of Enlightenment and the moving of the French Revolution from Enlightenment to Terror (and which introduced my vulpine Encyclopaedist Lord Renyard) to the final clash of systems represented by the Nazis and Communists in the twentieth century. That we are back to sectarian warfare between the People of the Book is a sad fact that Jerry Cornelius was revived to encounter in the stories collected in was the first of the von Bek novels. The overall sequence was intended to take place at key times in European history from the emerging modern age in the seventeenth century to the coming of the Age of Enlightenment and the moving of the French Revolution from Enlightenment to Terror (and which introduced my vulpine Encyclopaedist Lord Renyard) to the final clash of systems represented by the Nazis and Communists in the twentieth century. That we are back to sectarian warfare between the People of the Book is a sad fact that Jerry Cornelius was revived to encounter in the stories collected in The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius. The second von Bek novel, The City in the Autumn Stars The City in the Autumn Stars, also dealt with our transition from alchemy and magic to modern physics, and the third was incorporated into the first of the most recent Elric/Eternal Champion stories beginning with The Dreamthief's Daughter The Dreamthief's Daughter in which I was at last able to give Elric a contemporary persona. in which I was at last able to give Elric a contemporary persona.

With all this going on, I thought I had put Elric behind me for good. But, in fact, by the 1980s, when most of the planned work was done, I still had not lost my fascination for the crimson-eyed albino. I wrote my novel Mother London Mother London as a celebration of my home city and remained unready to tackle the third Pyat novel. While researching those previous books I had ideas I thought would suit an Elric story. And so it slowly dawned on me that I might restore my literary wellsprings with a couple of Elric books. The first of these would incorporate images that had come to me in my travels through Europe and the Middle East. While I had not yet learned how Elric might confront modern times without turning into Jerry Cornelius, I wondered if there was anything new I could bring to the fantasy genre. I am now reconciled to knowing I will never leave it behind and will continue to enjoy writing it, at least in shorter forms, as in the Elric story I did in 2005 for an anthology using the U.S. National Spelling Bee as its base. The editor asked contributors to pick a word, and when I saw "insouciant," a word I might have overused to describe the albino prince, I knew I was fated to complete "A Portrait in Ivory." as a celebration of my home city and remained unready to tackle the third Pyat novel. While researching those previous books I had ideas I thought would suit an Elric story. And so it slowly dawned on me that I might restore my literary wellsprings with a couple of Elric books. The first of these would incorporate images that had come to me in my travels through Europe and the Middle East. While I had not yet learned how Elric might confront modern times without turning into Jerry Cornelius, I wondered if there was anything new I could bring to the fantasy genre. I am now reconciled to knowing I will never leave it behind and will continue to enjoy writing it, at least in shorter forms, as in the Elric story I did in 2005 for an anthology using the U.S. National Spelling Bee as its base. The editor asked contributors to pick a word, and when I saw "insouciant," a word I might have overused to describe the albino prince, I knew I was fated to complete "A Portrait in Ivory."

I had already brought Elric back in the nineties on his first recorded dream quest in graphic form, "Duke Elric," published in Michael Moorcock's Multiverse Michael Moorcock's Multiverse. There, Elric traveled from Ethelred's Dane-plagued England to Moorish Spain and on to discover a kind of dragon's graveyard deep in the Sahara. Working with Walter Simonson had become a pleasant habit, and we embarked on a four-part graphic novel, Elric: The Making of a Sorcerer Elric: The Making of a Sorcerer, also for DC. I wanted to show the history of the Melniboneans from the time they arrived at their island home and also develop relationships between Cymoril, Yyrkoon and especially Elric's father, Sadric, showing how Melniboneans achieved their vast knowledge of sorcery via their long dreams. Walter, as usual, rose to the occasion, and readers might find it interesting to see a script addressed to an artist who is also a friend. As with everything in this series, the intention is to offer readers insights they might not find elsewhere, so the only editing is for clarity.

Commissioned by Ted Carnell, "Aspects of Fantasy" was my first attempt at introducing readers of Science Fantasy Science Fantasy magazine to the roots of modern fantasy fiction and suggesting where I thought the forms might go. Of course, I didn't know then what I know now, and it should be remembered that this was how a critic might talk about such books and ideas before, say, Lin Carter's Adult Fantasy series of reprints for Ballantine Books reintroduced readers to the origins of the genre. My articles, together with Carter's selections and mass-market reprints of Edgar Rice Burroughs, J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard, were, it emerged, early signs of a great renaissance of the fantastic that succeeded in allowing the fantasy genre regularly to dominate popular bestseller lists today and helped introduce certain conventions (often as magic realism) into our literature. Sophisticated writers like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Iain Sinclair, Michael Chabon, Walter Mosley and Thomas Pynchon have all produced wonderful work over the past decade or two and demonstrate how a good writer, frustrated by the old traditions of modernist realism, believing them to be constricting and cliched, can approach contemporary life with a richer, more complex set of literary tools to produce work that discovers sympathetic recognition in today's general reader. To have been part of the lives of such writers fills me with humility as well as pride. It gives me enormous delight and optimism to read their work, admire their sophistication and celebrate their part in securing that future for literature which a few of us had anticipated over the years. They have reunited popular and complex literary fiction. I love non-generic absurdists like Zoran ivkovi or Sebastien Doubinsky. I love the work of the best young adult writers, such as Holly Black or my old friend Terry Pratchett, whose work I published when he was far younger than I had been when I began selling to the same magazines. Terry's considerable success, making him the modern equivalent of P. G. Wodehouse, is perhaps the most honorable of all. I think of Thomas M. Disch, Jonathan Carroll, M. John Harrison, Howard Waldrop and Paul Di Filippo, who raised the general level of urban fantasy in particular. Talented writers such as China Mieville, Jeffrey Ford or Jeff Van-derMeer still find splendid possibilities in generic forms, equal the best we have, and produce work that is immediately identifiable as theirs. That they prefer to be published in genre does not make their work any less sophisticated than that of P. D. James or Margaret Atwood, who vehemently deny that work of theirs, oozing familiar generic traits at every punctilious pore, is fantasy or its child, science fiction. Indeed, the writers I most admire recognize that they are using methods identified with genre and, by showing respect for their predecessors, gain a keener sense of what they are doing when they use generic materials. Today, we frequently find superior talent working with genre-inspired ideas. These are signs of lively times and the plethora of talent they have thrown up. Does anyone remember when critics were wondering if the novel was dead? magazine to the roots of modern fantasy fiction and suggesting where I thought the forms might go. Of course, I didn't know then what I know now, and it should be remembered that this was how a critic might talk about such books and ideas before, say, Lin Carter's Adult Fantasy series of reprints for Ballantine Books reintroduced readers to the origins of the genre. My articles, together with Carter's selections and mass-market reprints of Edgar Rice Burroughs, J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard, were, it emerged, early signs of a great renaissance of the fantastic that succeeded in allowing the fantasy genre regularly to dominate popular bestseller lists today and helped introduce certain conventions (often as magic realism) into our literature. Sophisticated writers like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Iain Sinclair, Michael Chabon, Walter Mosley and Thomas Pynchon have all produced wonderful work over the past decade or two and demonstrate how a good writer, frustrated by the old traditions of modernist realism, believing them to be constricting and cliched, can approach contemporary life with a richer, more complex set of literary tools to produce work that discovers sympathetic recognition in today's general reader. To have been part of the lives of such writers fills me with humility as well as pride. It gives me enormous delight and optimism to read their work, admire their sophistication and celebrate their part in securing that future for literature which a few of us had anticipated over the years. They have reunited popular and complex literary fiction. I love non-generic absurdists like Zoran ivkovi or Sebastien Doubinsky. I love the work of the best young adult writers, such as Holly Black or my old friend Terry Pratchett, whose work I published when he was far younger than I had been when I began selling to the same magazines. Terry's considerable success, making him the modern equivalent of P. G. Wodehouse, is perhaps the most honorable of all. I think of Thomas M. Disch, Jonathan Carroll, M. John Harrison, Howard Waldrop and Paul Di Filippo, who raised the general level of urban fantasy in particular. Talented writers such as China Mieville, Jeffrey Ford or Jeff Van-derMeer still find splendid possibilities in generic forms, equal the best we have, and produce work that is immediately identifiable as theirs. That they prefer to be published in genre does not make their work any less sophisticated than that of P. D. James or Margaret Atwood, who vehemently deny that work of theirs, oozing familiar generic traits at every punctilious pore, is fantasy or its child, science fiction. Indeed, the writers I most admire recognize that they are using methods identified with genre and, by showing respect for their predecessors, gain a keener sense of what they are doing when they use generic materials. Today, we frequently find superior talent working with genre-inspired ideas. These are signs of lively times and the plethora of talent they have thrown up. Does anyone remember when critics were wondering if the novel was dead?

Earl Aubec is a character I had always intended to do more with, and for a while I was considering writing a sequence dealing with his adventures. All I have now, thanks to David Hill of Cornwall, who hung on to a copy and was able to let me have it back for this edition, is a proposal I must have written but never submitted. I later considered doing the synopsis as an RPG game, but somehow I never did produce it, even though I have a healthy admiration for games writers. I have included it since so much of the work here has something to do with origins and because my fantasy work has always had an intimate relationship with games, since D&D days. I felt that The Fortress of the Pearl The Fortress of the Pearl also might have functioned fairly readily as a game, since it is probably the most formulaic of the books. I'm not sure if anyone else noticed this, but I found it strange to be working within a genre whose conventions I had helped form; and, while many readers have said this book is their favorite Elric story, I felt I had relearned enough in writing it to try to do something a little bit different in the next one. also might have functioned fairly readily as a game, since it is probably the most formulaic of the books. I'm not sure if anyone else noticed this, but I found it strange to be working within a genre whose conventions I had helped form; and, while many readers have said this book is their favorite Elric story, I felt I had relearned enough in writing it to try to do something a little bit different in the next one.

Although I have had other work published in the People's Republic of China, Elric has never appeared there, but I was especially delighted when Taiwan began to publish the books and asked me for a special introduction. I was pleased to provide it and I reprint it here as another example of how I introduce non-Anglophone readers to the albino.

Lastly, when Edward Kramer had the idea of producing an anthology of Elric stories by other hands some fifteen years ago, I was impressed by the level of talent the project attracted. One of these was by the amazing Neil Gaiman, whose typically quirky and original story he has kindly allowed us to reprint here (it also appeared, in illustrated form, in P. Craig Russell's graphic novel version of Stormbringer Stormbringer!). I first met Neil as a bright teenager when he came to visit me at my London flat, and I have been delighted and encouraged to see his talent recognized by a huge audience. He remains as pleasant, courteous and intelligent as he was all those years ago and, of course, his taste remains impeccable. ... We don't meet often enough.

Lastly, I must thank Michael Kaluta, whom Walter Simonson once described-to Michael's embarrassment-as his mentor, for his fine, fine work. I am, as so often in my life, complemented by the best illustrators around. Who said this isn't a golden age?

Michael Moorcock The Old Circle Squared Lost Pines, Texas June 2008 * The Condition of Muzak The Condition of Muzak won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1977. won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1977.

THE FORTRESS OF.

THE PEARL.

THE FORTRESS OF THE PEARL.

(1989).

For Dave Tate And when Elric had told his three lies to Cymoril, his betrothed, and had set his ambitious cousin Yyrkoon as regent on the Ruby Throne of Melnibone, and when he had taken leave of Rackhir the Red Archer, he set off into lands unknown, to seek knowledge which he believed would help him rule Melnibone as she had never been ruled before.

But Elric had not reckoned with a destiny already determining that he should learn and experience certain things which would have a profound effect upon him. Even before he encountered the blind captain and the Ship Which Sailed the Seas of Fate he was to find his life, his soul and all his idealism in jeopardy.

In Ufych-Sormeer he was delayed over a matter involving a misunderstanding between four unworldly wizards who amiably and inadvertently threatened the destruction of the Young Kingdoms before they had served the Balance's ultimate purpose; and in Filkhar he experienced an affair of the heart which he would never again speak about; he was learning, at some cost, the power and the pain of bearing the Black Sword.

But it was in the desert city of Quarzhasaat that he began the adventure which was to help set the course of his weird for years to come...

-The Chronicle of the Black Sword

BOOK ONE.

Is there a madman with a brain To turn the stuff of nightmare sane And demons crush and Chaos tame, Who'll leave his realm, forsake his bride And, tossed by contradictory tides, Give up his pride for pain?-The Chronicle of the Black Sword

CHAPTER ONE.

A Doomed Lord Dying.

IT WAS IN LONELY QUARZHASAAT, destination of many caravans but terminus of few, that Elric, hereditary emperor of Melnibone, last of a bloodline more than ten thousand years old, sometime conjuror of terrible resource, lay ready for death. The drugs and herbs which usually sustained him had been used in the final days of his long journey across the southern edge of the Sighing Desert and he had been able to acquire no replacements for them in this fortress city which was more famous for its treasure than for its sufficiency of life.

The albino prince stretched, slowly and feebly, his bone-coloured fingers to the light and brought to vividness the bloody jewel in the Ring of Kings, the last traditional symbol of his ancient responsibilities; then he let the hand fall. It was as if he had briefly hoped the Actorios would revive him, but the stone was useless while he lacked energy to command its powers. Besides, he had no great desire to summon demons here. His own folly had brought him to Quarzhasaat; he owed her citizens no vengeance. They, indeed, had cause to hate him, had they but known his origins.

Once Quarzhasaat had ruled a land of rivers and lovely valleys, its forests verdant, its plains abundant with crops, but that had been before the casting of certain incautious spells in a war with threatening Melnibone more than two thousand years earlier. Quarzhasaat's empire had been lost to both sides. It had been engulfed by a vast mass of sand which swept over it like a tide, leaving only the capital and her traditions, which in time became the prime reason for her continuing existence. Because Quarzhasaat had always stood there she must be sustained, her citizens believed, at any cost throughout eternity. Though she had no purpose or function, still her masters felt a heavy obligation to continue her existence by whichever means they found expedient. Fourteen times had armies attempted to cross the Sighing Desert to loot fabulous Quarzhasaat. Fourteen times had the desert itself defeated them.

Meanwhile the city's chief obsessions (some would say her chief industry) were the elaborate intrigues amongst her rulers. A republic, albeit in name only, and hub of a vast inland empire, albeit entirely covered by sand, Quarzhasaat was ruled by her Council of Seven, whimsically known as The Six and One Other, who controlled the greater part of the city's wealth and most of her affairs. Certain other potent men and women, who chose not to serve in this Septocracy, wielded considerable influence while displaying none of the trappings of power. One of these, Elric had learned, was Narfis, Baroness of Kuwai'r, who dwelled in a simple yet beautiful villa at the city's southern extreme and gave most of her attention to her notorious rival, the old Duke Ral, patron of Quarzhasaat's finest artists, whose own palace on the northern heights was as unostentatious as it was lovely. These two, Elric was told, had elected three members each to the Council, while the seventh, always nameless and simply called the Sexocrat (who ruled the Six), maintained a balance, able to sway any vote one way or the other. The ear of the Sexocrat was most profoundly desired by all the many rivals in the city, even by Baroness Narfis and Duke Ral.

Uninterested in Quarzhasaat's ornate politics, as he was in his own, Elric's reason for being here was curiosity and the fact that Quarzhasaat was clearly the only haven in a great wasteland lying north of the nameless mountains dividing the Sighing Desert from the Weeping Waste.

Moving his exhausted bones on the thin straw of his pallet, Elric wondered sardonically if he would be buried here without the people ever knowing that the hereditary ruler of their nation's greatest enemies had died amongst them. He wondered if this had after all been the fate his gods had in store for him: nothing as grandiose as he had dreamed of and yet it had its attractions.

When he had left Filkhar in haste and some confusion, he had taken the first ship out of Raschil and it had brought him to Jadmar, where he had chosen willfully to trust an old Ilmioran drunkard who had sold him a map showing fabled Tanelorn. As the albino had half-guessed, the map proved a deception, leading him far from any kind of human habitation. He had considered crossing the mountains to make for Karlaak by the Weeping Waste but on consulting his own map, of more reliable Melnibonean manufacture, he had discovered Quarzhasaat to be significantly closer. Riding north on a steed already half-dead from heat and starvation, he had found only dried river-beds and exhausted oases, for in his wisdom he had chosen to cross the desert in a time of drought. He had failed to find fabled Tanelorn and, it seemed, would not even catch sight of a city which, in his people's histories, was almost as fabulous.

As was usual for them, Melnibonean chroniclers showed only a passing interest in defeated rivals, but Elric remembered that Quarzhasaat's own sorcery was said to have contributed to her extinction as a threat to her half-human enemies: A misplaced rune, he understood, uttered by Fophean Dals, the Sorcerer Duke, ancestor to the present Duke Ral, in a spell meant to flood the Melnibonean army with sand and build a bulwark about the entire nation. Elric had still to discover how this accident was explained in Quarzhasaat now. Had they created myths and legends to rationalize the city's ill-luck entirely as a result of evil emanating from the Dragon Isle?

Elric reflected how his own obsession with myth had brought him to almost inevitable destruction. "In my miscalculations," he murmured, turning dull crimson eyes again towards the Actorios, "I have shown that I share something in common with these people's ancestors." Some forty miles from his dead horse, Elric had been discovered by a boy out searching for the jewels and precious artifacts occasionally flung up by those sandstorms which constantly came and went over this part of the desert and were partially responsible for the city's survival, as well as for the astonishing height of Quarzhasaat's magnificent walls. They were also the origin of the desert's melancholy name.

In better health Elric would have relished the city's monumental beauty. It was a beauty derived from an aesthetic refined over centuries and bearing no signs of outside influence. Though so many of the curving ziggurats and palaces were of gigantic proportions there was nothing vulgar or ugly about them; they had an airy quality, a peculiar lightness of style which made them seem, in their terracotta reds and glittering silver granite, their whitewashed stucco, their rich blues and greens, as if they had been magicked out of the very air. Their luscious gardens filled marvelously complex terraces, their fountains and water courses, drawn from deep-sunk wells, gave tranquil sound and wonderful perfume to her old cobbled ways and wide tree-lined avenues; yet all this water, which might have been diverted to growing crops, was used to maintain the appearance of Quarzhasaat as she had been at the height of her imperial power and was more valuable than jewels, its use rationed and its theft punishable by the severest of laws.

Elric's own lodgings were in no way magnificent, consisting as they did of a truckle bed, straw-strewn flagstones, a single high window, a plain earthenware jug and a basin containing a little brackish water which had cost him his last emerald. Water permits were not available to foreigners and the only water on general sale was Quarzhasaat's single most expensive commodity. Elric's water had almost certainly been stolen from a public fountain. The statutory penalties for such thefts were rarely discussed, even in private.

Elric required rare herbs to sustain his deficient blood but their cost, even had they been available, would have proven far beyond his present means, which had been reduced to a few gold coins, a fortune in Karlaak but of virtually no worth in a city where gold was so common it was used to line the city's aqueducts and sewers. His expeditions into the streets had been exhausting and depressing.

Once a day the boy who had found Elric in the desert, and brought him to this room, paid the albino a visit, staring at him as if at a curious insect or captured rodent. The boy's name was Anigh and, though he spoke the Melnibonean-derived lingua franca lingua franca of the Young Kingdoms, his accent was so thick it was sometimes impossible to understand all he said. of the Young Kingdoms, his accent was so thick it was sometimes impossible to understand all he said.

Once more Elric tried to lift his arm only to let it fall. That morning he had reconciled himself to the fact that he would never again see his beloved Cymoril and would never sit upon the Ruby Throne. He knew regret, but it was of a distant kind, for his illness made him oddly euphoric.

"I had hoped to sell you."

Elric peered, blinking, into the shadows of the room on the far side of a single ray of sunlight. He recognized the voice but could make out little more than a silhouette near the door.

"But now it seems all I have to offer in next week's market will be your corpse and your remaining possessions." It was Anigh, almost as depressed as Elric at the prospect of his prize's death. "You are still a rarity, of course. Your features are those of our ancient enemies but whiter than bone and those I have never seen before in a man."

"I'm sorry to disappoint your expectations." Elric rose weakly on his elbow. He had deemed it imprudent to reveal his origins but instead had said he was a mercenary from Nadsokor, the Beggar City, which sheltered all manner of freakish inhabitants.

"Then I had hoped you might be a wizard and reward me with some bit of arcane lore which would set me on the path to becoming a wealthy man and perhaps a member of the Six. Or you might have been a desert spirit who would confer on me some useful power. But I have wasted my waters, it seems. You are merely an impoverished mercenary. Have you no wealth left at all? Some curio which might prove of value, for instance?" And the boy's eyes went towards a bundle which, long and slender, rested against the wall near Elric's head.

"That's no treasure, lad," Elric informed him grimly. "He who possesses it could be said to bear a curse impossible to exorcize." He smiled at the thought of the boy trying to find a buyer for the Black Sword which, wrapped in a torn cassock of red silk, occasionally gave out a murmur, like a senile man attempting to recall the power of speech.

"It's a weapon, is it not?" said Anigh, his thin, tanned features making his vivid blue eyes seem large. "Aye," Elric agreed. "A sword."

"An antique?" The boy reached under his striped brown djellabah and picked at the scab on his shoulder.

"That's a fair description." Elric was amused but found even this brief conversation tiring.

"How old?" Now Anigh took a step forward so that he was entirely illuminated by the ray of sunlight. He had the perfect look of a creature adapted to dwell amongst the tawny rocks and the dusky sands of the Sighing Desert.

"Perhaps ten thousand years." Elric found that the boy's startled expression helped him forget, momentarily, his almost certain fate. "But probably more than that ..."

"Then it's a rarity, indeed! Rarities are prized by Quarzhasaat's lords and ladies. There are those amongst the Six, even, who collect such things. His honour the Master of Unicht Shlur, for instance, has the armour of a whole Ilmioran army, each piece arranged on the mummified corpses of the original warriors. And my Lady Talith possesses a collection of war-instruments numbering several thousands, each one different. Let me take that, Sir Mercenary, and I'll discover a buyer. Then I'll seek the herbs you need."

"Whereupon I'll be fit enough for you to sell me, eh?" Elric's amusement increased.

Anigh's face became exquisitely innocent. "Oh, no, sir. Then you will be strong enough to resist me. I shall merely take a commission on your first engagement."

Elric felt affection for the boy. He paused, gathering strength before he spoke again. "You expect I'll interest an employer, here in Quarzhasaat?"

"Naturally." Anigh grinned. "You could become a bodyguard to one of the Six, perhaps, or at least one of their supporters. Your unusual appearance makes you immediately employable! I have already told you what great rivals and plotters our masters are."

"It is encouraging-" Elric paused for breath-"to know that I can look forward to a life of worth and fulfillment here in Quarzhasaat." He tried to stare directly into Anigh's brilliant eyes, but the boy's head turned out of the sunlight so that only part of his body was exposed. "However, I understood from you that the herbs I described grew only in distant Kwan, days from here-in the foothills of the Ragged Pillars. I will be dead before even a fit messenger could be halfway to Kwan. Do you try to comfort me, boy? Or are your motives less noble?"

"I told you, sir, where the herbs grew. But what if there are some who have already gathered Kwan's harvest and returned?"

"You know of such an apothecary? But what would one charge me for such valuable medicines? And why did you not mention this before?"

"Because I did not know of it before." Anigh seated himself in the relative cool of the doorway. "I have made enquiries since our last conversation. I am a humble boy, your worship, not a learned man, nor yet an oracle. Yet I know how to banish my ignorance and replace it with knowledge. I am ignorant, good sir, but not a fool."

"I share your opinion of yourself, Master Anigh."

"Then shall I take the sword and find a buyer for you?" He came again into the light, hand reaching towards the bundle.

Elric fell back, shaking his head and smiling a little. "I, too, young Anigh, have much ignorance. But, unlike you, I think I might also be a fool."

"Knowledge brings power," said Anigh. "Power shall take me into the entourage of the Baroness Narfis, perhaps. I could become a captain in her guard. Maybe a noble!"

"Oh, one day you'll surely be more than either." Elric drew in stale air, his frame shuddering, his lungs enflamed. "Do what you will, though I doubt Stormbringer will go willingly."

"May I see it?"

"Aye." With painful awkward movements Elric rolled to the bed's edge and plucked the wrappings free of the huge sword. Carved with runes which seemed to flicker unsteadily upon the blade of black, glowing metal, decorated with ancient and elaborate work, some of mysterious design, some depicting dragons and demons intertwined as if in battle, Stormbringer was clearly no mundane weapon.

The boy gasped and drew back, almost as if regretting his suggested bargain. "Is it alive?"

Elric contemplated his sword with a mixture of loathing and something akin to sensuality. "Some would say it possessed both a mind and a will. Others would claim it to be a demon in disguise. Some believe it composed of the vestigial souls of all damned mortals, trapped within as once, in legend, a great dragon was said to dwell inside another pommel than that which the sword now bears." To his own faint distaste, he found that he was taking a certain pleasure in the boy's growing dismay. "Have you never looked upon an artifact of Chaos before, Master Anigh? Or one who is wedded to such a thing? Its slave perhaps?" He let his long, white hand descend into the dirty water and raised it to wet his lips. His red eyes flickered like dying embers. "During my travels I have heard this blade described as Arioch's own battlesword, able to slice down the walls between the very Realms. Others, as they die upon it, believe it to be a living creature. There is a theory that it is but one member of an entire race, living in our dimension but capable, should it desire, of summoning a million brothers. Can you hear it speaking, Master Anigh? Will that voice delight and charm the casual buyers in your market?" And a sound came from the pale lips that was not a laugh yet contained a desolate kind of humour.

Anigh withdrew hastily into the sunlight again. He cleared his throat. "You called the thing by a name?"

"I called the sword Stormbringer Stormbringer but the peoples of the Young Kingdoms sometimes have another name, both for myself and for the blade. The name is but the peoples of the Young Kingdoms sometimes have another name, both for myself and for the blade. The name is Soulstealer Soulstealer. It has drunk many souls."