Read Revenge of the Rose for Free Online Page A

blackness which lies above the moon; and a single
long, slow stroke of silver gashes the dark and a single sharp clap of thunder
breaks the terrible silence of the sky, and the jill-dragon raises her head and
beats her monstrous wings and roars a sudden challenge to those unlikely
elements …
                  … While
Elric howls the old wild songs of the Dragon Lords, and plunges, in sensuous
symbiosis with the great reptile, out of the night and into the blinding glory
of a summer afternoon.
     

  CHAPTER
THREE
 
                 Peculiar
Geography of an Unknown Realm; A Meeting of Travelers. On the Meaning of
Freedom .
     
                 As
if aware of her rider’s growing weakness, the dragon flew with long, deliberate
strokes of her wings and banked with careful grace through the blue pallor of
the sky until they flew over trees so close together, and with foliage so
dense, that it seemed at first they crossed dark green clouds until the old
forest gave way to grassy hills and fields through which a broad river ran, and
again the gentle landscape had a familiarity to it, though this time Elric did
not dread it.
                 Soon
a sprawling city lay ahead, built on both banks and making the sky hazy with
its smoke. Of stone and brick and wood, of slate and thatch and timber
shingles, of a thousand blended stinks and noises, it was full of statues and
markets and monuments over which the jill-dragon began slowly to circle while
below, in panic and curiosity, the citizens ran to look or dashed for cover,
depending upon their natures—but then Scarsnout had flapped her wings and taken
them with stately authority back into the upper sky, as if she had investigated
the place and found it unsuitable.
                 The
summer day went on. More than once did the great dragon-she seem about to land—on
scrubland, village, marsh, lake or elm-glade—but always Scarsnout rejected the
place and flew on dissatisfied.
                 Though
he had taken the precaution of tying himself by his long silk scarf to the
dragon’s spine-horn, Elric was losing strength with every moment. Now,
moreover, he had no reason to welcome death. To be reunited with his father
through eternity was perhaps the worst of all possible hells. It was only when
the dragon flew through rainclouds and Elric was able to capture a little water
in his helmet, crumbling into it the merest flake of dried venom and drinking
the foul-tasting result off in a single draught, that he knew any hope. But
when the liquid filled his every vein with fire whose stink made him loathe the
flesh that harboured it and want to tear at offending arteries, muscles, skin,
he wondered if he had not merely chosen an especially painful way of ensuring
his eternal union with Sadric. With each nerve alight, he yearned for any
death, any release from the agony.
                 But
even as the pain filled him, the strength grew until soon it was possible to
call on that strength and gradually abolish or ignore the pain until it was
gone and he felt a cleaner, sweeter energy fill him, somehow purer than that he
received from his runesword.
                 As
the jill-dragon flew through evening skies, Elric felt himself grow whole
again. A peculiar euphoria filled him. He sang out the ancient dragon-songs,
the rich, silky, wicked songs of his folk who, for all their cruelty, had
relished every experience that came their way and this relish for life and
sensation came naturally to the albino, despite the weakness of his blood.
                 Indeed,
it seemed to him that his blood was somehow touched by a compensatory quality,
a world of almost unrelieved sensuality and vividness, so intense that it
sometimes threatened to destroy not only him, but those around him. It was one
of the reasons he was prepared to accept his loneliness.
                 Now
it did not matter how far the