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no souls here on which his sword could feed.
                 “I
am ailing, Father, and must soon return. The drugs that sustain me were lost
with my pack animals.”
                 Sadric
shrugged. “As for that, thou hast merely to discover a source of souls on which
thy blade might feed. There’s killing a-plenty ahead. And a little more that I
perceive, but yet it does not come clear …” He frowned. “Go …”
                 Elric
hesitated. Some ordinary impulse wanted him to tell his father that he no
longer killed casually to further any whim. Like all Melnibonéans, Sadric had
thought nothing of killing the human folk of their empire. To Sadric, the
runesword was merely a useful tool, as a stick might be to a cripple.
Supernatural schemer though his father was, player of complex games against the
gods, he still unquestioningly assumed that one must pledge loyalty to one
demon or another in order to survive.
                 Elric’s
vision, of universally held power, a place like Tanelorn, owing allegiance
neither to Law nor to Chaos but only to itself, was anathema to his father who
had made a religion and a philosophy of compromise, as had all his royal race
for millennia, so that compromise itself was now raised over all other virtues
and become the backbone of their beliefs. Elric wanted, again, to tell his
father that there were other ideas, other ways to live, which involved neither
excessive violence, nor cruelty, nor sorcery, nor conquest, that he had learned
of these ideas not merely from the Young Kingdoms but also from his own folk’s
histories.
                 Yet
he knew that it would be useless. Sadric was even now devoting all his
considerable powers to restoring the past. He knew no other way of life or,
indeed, of death.
                 The
albino prince turned away, and it seemed to him at that moment that he had
never experienced such grief, even when Cymoril had died on the blade of his
runesword, even when Imrryr had blazed and he had known he was doomed to a
rootless future, a lonely death.
                 “I
shall seek your rosewood box, Father. But where can I begin?”
                 “The
jill-dragon knows. She’ll carry thee to the realm where the box was taken.
Beyond that I cannot predict. Prediction grows difficult. All my powers weaken.
Mayhap thou must kill to achieve the box. Kill many times.” The voice was faint
now, dry branches in the wind. “Or worse.”
                 Elric
found that he staggered. He was weakening by the moment. “Father, I have no
strength.”
                 “ The dragon venom  …” But his father
was gone, leaving only a sense of his ghostly passing.
                 Elric
forced himself to move. Now every fallen wall seemed an impossible obstacle. He
picked his way slowly through the ruins, back over rubble and broken walls,
over the little streams and coarse turf terraces of the hills, forcing himself
with a will summoned from habit alone to climb the final hill where, outlined
against the huge, sinking moon, Scarsnout awaited him, her wings folded, her
long muzzle raised as her tongue tasted the wind.
                 He
remembered his father’s last words. They in turn made him recollect an old
herbal which had spoken of the distillation of dragon venom; how it brought
courage to the weak and skill to the strong, how a man might fight for five
days and nights and feel no pain. And he remembered how the herbal had said to
collect the venom, so before he clambered back upon the dragon he had reached
up his helm and caught in hissing steel a small drop of venom which would cool
and harden, he knew, into a pastille, a crumb or two of which might be taken
cautiously with considerable liquid.
                 But
now he must endure his pain and fight against his weakness as the dragon bears
him up into the unwelcoming