class="book">After a moment’s consideration, then a single careful thought, he felt himself begin to shrink once more.

It was strange walking along the groove between the tiles and seeing the edges stretch, valley-like, over his head. It was even stranger staring up between the legs of the colossal Topaz Guardsmen, each one now as tall as a the pylons of a bridge.

Be pretty cool to do this right underneath Diana Darwent and her jockette friends. If they were wearing skirts.

He laughed, then froze in place, afraid that he might be heard and noticed. After a moment’s reflection — had he ever heard a bug laughing? — he hiked on.

Climbing up onto the dais was difficult, but at his present size there were irregularities in the stone that offered good handholds. The robed and bearded men around the sword were talking, and just as with Elric, he could understand them perfectly — or at least their words, although their voices were thunderously loud and rumbled like the bass notes at a Deep Purple concert. Their meaning was a little less clear.

“It is a coagulated form of Etheric Vapor. Were it not for the binding rituals, it would re^transmogrify into Vapor Absolute and evaporate. If we could just try the Splitting Spell once more....”

“Your reasoning is as thin as a viper’s skinny bottom, Dalwezzar. Etheric Vapor plays no part here. It is a perfectly ordinary sword which has been drawn through a Multiversal Nexus, and hence its individual monads have... er... turned inside" out. More or less.”

“You two! If you would ever look at something without trying to make it fit those hobbyhorse ideas of yours, those addlehrained pseudo"Certainties you cosset and fondle in your lonely beds as though they were catamites.... Badichar Chon needs answers. Bah! Never send a Theoretical Thaumaturge to do a Practical Thaumaturge’s job.”

As he was listening to this, albeit uncomprehendingly, and pondering how he could get to the sword itself — he was putting aside the “and then what?” question for a little while — something large and dark moved over him like a storm cloud.

“And what is this? Look, Dalwezzar, a homunculus! Now tell me how your Etheric Vapor nonsense explains the breeding of homunculi by the Study Object! Ha! If there were ever a proof that this is a product of a Multiversal Nexus....”

Pogo looked up in shock as he realized that the homO"whatever they were talking about was him. As he wondered whether it was his desert boots — he had told his mom he wanted real hiking boots, but she had told him if he wanted a pair of sixtyMollar Vibratmsoled shoes just to stand around the parking lot, he could damn well get a job — a pair of tweezers the size of a lamp"post closed on his shirt and hoisted him into the air.

He was jerked upward to hang before something so full of holes, so covered with hairs like burnt tree'trunks, that for a moment he thought he had been kidnapped by a public campground. Several more moments passed before he could tell what it was —a giant face.

“Quick, get the killing jar!” The fumes from the yawning, snaggle'toothed cave were enough to make Pogo swear off onions for life. “Ah, Dalwezzar, you will cringe in embarrassment when this is published! You will shriek and writhe! ‘Etheric Vapor’ will be a term of academic scorn for centuries to come!”

“Pig! Of course you want to put it in the killing jar! Were I allowed to boil it alive, you would see that this too is a pure distillation of the Vapor! Give it to me!”

A gristly thing like a giant pink squid reached up and snatched at the tweezers. Pogo felt himself being whipped back and forth through the air as though on a malfunctioning carnival ride. The material of his t-shirt began to shred.

Oh shitshitshit, he thought in a panic. Small bad! Small bad! Big good!

The robed and bearded men suddenly began to shrivel around him, as did the room itself, even the serried ranks of Topaz Guards. Within moments, the entire half-dozen Learned Men had disappeared. Or rather, as Pogo realized after a bit, they were still around, but he was sitting on them. He could hear their dying cries from beneath the back pocket of his Levis, and feel their thrashing final moments against his posterior. It was pretty gross, but he couldn’t get up, since his head was now wedged against the tiled ceiling.

The Topaz Guards, hardened combat veterans to a man, stared at the sudden appearance of a forty-five-foot tall California teenager in a Lou Reed shirt, then screamed and fled the great chamber. By the time the last spear had clattered to the floor, Pogo was alone.

Something was giving him a distinctly painful sensation in his hindquarters. He reached around behind himself, shuddering as he scraped loose a wet unpleasantness in a robe, and tried to remove the pricking object.

As soon as his fingers touched the black sword, he found himself normal­sized once more, the transition so painfully swift that for some minutes he could only sit, head spinning, among the unwholesome remnants of what had once been Badichar Chon’s College of Thaumaturges.

Elric looked up at the sound, a thin yet painful scraping. Something was happening in the darkness near the door of his cell. He felt so weak it was difficult to focus his eyes, let alone muster any interest.

“Uh, hey, are you okay?”

It was the strange young man again. He had appeared out of the darkness as mysteriously as he had vanished. Elric gave a hapless shrug which gently rattled his chains. “I have been happier,” he admitted.

“It’s stuck halfway under. It’ll fit, I just have to pull on it some more. Too bad nobody around here ever heard of a kitty-door. That woulda been perfect.”

Having finished this obscure announcement, the stranger turned and headed back toward the front of the cell. There was some kind of stain on the seat of his pants. It looked like blood.

After a further interlude of scraping, the apparition returned. Elric’s eyes widened.

“This must be it, right?” He held Stormbringer cradled in his arms. He had clearly never handled a sword.

“By my ancestors, how did you...?” Elric could feel the runeblade’s nearness like a cool wind on his face.

“Long story. Look, could you take it? It feels kind of weird. No offense.”

Elric’s white fingers strained at the hilt, which the strange man obligingly brought near. As his palm closed around it he felt a tiny trickle of energy, but within moments even that ended. Elric still felt very feeble.

“There is something wrong. Perhaps it has been too long since the blade has taken a life. It does not strengthen me the way it should.” He twisted his wrist; even with the slight additional strength it had given him, he could not lift it upright. “It is hungry for souls.”

The stranger — what had he called himself? Pogokhashman? — squinted suspiciously. “Like, take it to a James Brown concert or something. But don’t point it at me, okay? That thing’s weirder than shit.”

The Melnibonean slumped. “Of course, my friend. I would not harm you, especially when you have done me such an unexpected good. But without Stormbringer’s power, I am still as prisoned as I was before. And if the Chon has been alerted to its theft, he will approach me very carefully; I will not be given an opportunity to blood it.” He paused, staring at the black blade. “But if it were hungry for soul-energy — depleted — then I do not understand why it did not try to force me to kill you. Usually it is like an ill-bred mastiff, always lunging at my friends.”

Pogokhashman shrugged.

Frustration welled up in Elric. To think that the last scion of his proud people should come to this: slowly starving to death in a cell, prisoner of a low-level satrap, his blade in his hand and yet useless to him!

“Ah, Duke Arioch!” he screamed suddenly. “Fate has played a clever trick on me this time! Why have you not come to gloat? Your love of irony should draw you like a tick to hot blood! Come, Arioch, and enjoy my plight! Come, Chaos Lord!”

And, as the echoes of Elric’s voice settled into the damp walls and mired floor, Arioch came.

The light of the torch seemed to bend; the cell darkened hut for one spot, where the straw glowed as if afire. In that place the shadows became a buzzing cloud of flies, which drew into a tight spiral, then circled more closely still until they composed a moving tube of glinting, humming darkness. The tube widened, then unfolded, becoming a beautiful young man in a strange suit of red velvet. He wore a cylindrical hat with a wide brim, and his hair was nearly as pale as Elric’s own.

“Arioch! You have come after all.”

The Hell-duke eyed him with amusement. “Ah, sweet Elric. I find you in yet another dreadful predicament.”

Backed against the wall, Pogokhashman was staring, goggle-eyed. “I know you!” he said. “You’re that guy in the Rolling Stones. But Sammy said you drowned in your swimming pool.” He regarded him a moment longer. “Nice

tux.

Arioch turned to survey the stranger, his look of benign indifference unchanged. “Hmmm,” he said, his musical voice as langorous as the song of a summer beehive. “Your taste in companions is still inimitably your own, my little Melnibonean.”

Elric felt compelled to defend Pogokhashman, obscure and alien though he might be. “This man has done me a great service. He has returned Stormbringer

to me.

“Ah, yes. Stormbringer. Which was taken from you by ambush, yes?” Arioch walked delicately through the muck of the cell-floor as though trying to keep the hems of his flared scarlet pantaloons clean. “Your runeblade was snatched from you by Badichar Chon, I believe the fellow’s name is, and subjected to much experimenting by his pet wizards. And now it doesn’t... function properly, is that it?” He spoke with the solicitude of Elric’s old torturer Doctor Jest sympathizing with a prisoner over some heinous outrage which Jest himself had perpetrated.

“Yes. Yes! It does not overcome my weakness. I cannot break free.”

“No doubt that is because of the Splitting Spell... and the Chronophage.” Elric frowned. “I have never heard of either of these things.”

“The first is very simple — primitive even.” Arioch crossed his legs as a tailor might, and hovered a yard and a half above the cell floor. Across the cell, Pogokhashman’s face split in a wide, incredulous grin. “You wielded more powerful magicks yourself when you were but a child princeling. Badichar Chon searched far and wide to fill his College of Thaumaturges... but his is rather a backwater kingdom after all; the candidates were of a somewhat low order. Still, the Splitting Spell they used in an effort to unlock Stormbringer’s secrets was crudely effective, although in their ignorance they did not even recognize