The Knight of Swords by Michael Moorcock

Author:Michael Moorcock [Ismeretlen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_fantasy

The Twelfth Chapter

THE MARGRAVE'S BARGAIN

The ship reached the causeway and stopped. It reeked of ozone and of decay.

"If it be an illusion," Corum murmured grimly, "it is a good one."

Beldan made no reply.

In the distance they heard the barbarians blundering off through the forest. They heard the sound of the chariots turning as Glandyth pursued his allies.

Though all the corpses were armed, they did not move, but simply turned their heads, as one, toward the mam gate of the castle.

Corum was transfixed in astonished horror. The events he was witnessing were like something from the superstitious mind of a Mabden. They could have no existence in actuality. Such images were those created by ignorant fear and morbid imagination. They were something from the crudest and most barbaric of the tapestries he had looked at in the castle.

"What will they do now, Beldan?"

"I have no understanding of the occult, Prince. The Lady Rhalina is the only one of us who has made some study of such things. It was she who made this summoning. I only know that there is said to be a bargain involved…"

"A bargain?"

Beldan gasped. "The Margravine!"

Corum saw that Rhalina, still walking in a trance, had left the gates and was moving, calf-deep, along the causeway toward the ship. The head of the dead Margrave turned slightly and the green fire in his eye sockets seemed to burn more deeply.

"NO!"

Corum raced from the battlements, leapt down the stairway, and stumbled through the main hall over the corpses of the fallen.

"NO! Rhalina! NO!"

He reached the causeway and began to wade after her, the stench from the ship of the dead choking him.

"Rhalina!"

It was a dream worse than any he had had since Glandyth's destruction of Castle Erorn.

"Rhalina!"

She had almost reached the ship when Corum caught up with her and seized her by the arm with his good hand.

She seemed oblivious of him, continued to try to reach the ship.

"Rhalina! What bargain did you make to save us? Why did this ship of the dead come here?"

Her voice was cold, toneless. "I will join my husband now."

"No, Rhalina. Such a bargain cannot be honored. It is obscene. It is evil. It-it…" He tried to express his knowledge that such things as this could not exist, that they were all under some peculiar hallucination. "Come back with me, Rhalina. Let the ship return to the depths."

"I must go with it. Those were the terms of our bargain."

He clung to her, trying to drag her back, and then another voice spoke. It was a voice that seemed without substance and yet which echoed in his skull and made him pause.

"She sails with us, Prince of the Vadhagh. This must be."

Corum looked up. The dead Margrave had raised his hand in a commanding gesture. The eyes of fire burned deeply into Corum's single eye.

Corum tried to alter his perspective, to see into the other dimensions around him. At last he succeeded.

But it made no difference. The ship was in each of the five dimensions.

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