The baying of the horde was growing louder. The dark tide of their armored forms swirled around the base of the hill. “But who or what is this Chronophage ?” Elric shouted. “Is it the master of these creatures?”
“No!” Uendrijj beckoned for his soldiers to gather around. “It is a... a force. A blasphemy, a thing that should not be. It devours all in its path. These creatures, these mad Chaos-things, run ahead of it, seizing a last opportunity to smash and rend and murder before the greater destroyer comes.”
A small troop of attackers had burst through the barricade at the bottom of the hill and were rushing up the slope. Their leader, whose sagging skin seemed to have melted and run like candle-wax, swung a long iron bar studded with rusting spikes. His cohorts, their faces and limbs also distorted, hopped and limped after him, barking like maddened dogs.
Elric lifted Stormbringer as the beast-men approached. His weakness made it feel very heavy; he was barely able to deflect the melted man’s flailing bar. Neither did he feel the runeblade’s usual sentience, its familiar battle-lust. As the bar whistled toward him again, Elric ducked under it and jabbed up into his foe’s throat. It seemed an effort even to pierce the runneled flesh, but at last the runesword sank in and a shower of watery blood spattered the albino’s face. Stormbringer did not drink the creature’s soul. It was as lifeless as any old iron blade.
Two of the melted man’s companions came shambling forward as Elric struggled to free his blade. A flick of white sheen from one side and the nearer limped on a few steps without a head before crumpling to the ground. Elric darted a quick look, but Uendrijj had already moved away again, carrying his ivory sword to the support of some of his hard-pressed soldiers. The second beast-man moved in more slowly, hefting a huge, crude axe. His mouth seemed to have slipped down to his neck, where it gaped wetly.
The axe rose and began to fall even as Elric at last yanked Stormbringer free. He whirled, knowing he could not bring it up in time to prevent the blow. The beast-rnan’s teeth were bared in a grin of triumph, gleaming from the hole in his throat. A moment later, he shot into the air and vanished. His axe thumped onto the ground.
A giant nearly ten times Elric’s height stood where the bar-wielder had been, his vast hand shielding his eyes against the sun’s glare.
“Cool,” said the giant. “He’s really flying!” He winced. “Whoah. Splat-
As the albino stared upward in shock, he was nearly beheaded by another member of the horde who ran forward whirling a long, weighted chain. As Elric began to duck, the creature abruptly disappeared beneath the odd, rubbery sole of the giant’s boot.
“Pogokhashman... ?”
“Yeah,” the giant boomed. “Sorry, ‘Ric. I got kinda startled at first, and got small. You almost stepped on me.” He examined the underside of his boot. “Ick. I woulda looked like t/iat.”
Elric smiled wearily. “I am too weak to be much amazed, but you are amazing, nevertheless. I begin to get some idea of how you defeated the Chon’s guardsmen.”
“Yeah. Hang on for a minute, okay?”
As the Melnibonean watched, Pogokhashman squinted as if in deep concentration, then grew even larger. Stepping carefully over Uendrijj’s soldiers, he crossed to the copse of trees, uprooted one of the largest and oldest, then returned to the battle, holding the tree by the roots. Using it as something between a wanclub and a broom, within moments he had scraped, slammed, and swept most of the beast^men from the hilltop, tumbling them broken and shrieking back down onto the plain, where the rest of the horde cowered in open astonishment. When Uendrijj and his men had dispatched the few remaining enemies, a relative calm fell over the hill. The horde of beastmen below seemed in no hurry to resume their assault.
“I think I should shrink back again,” Pogokhashman said, setting down his tree. A few squirrels crept out of its upper branches and wobbled away in search of a quieter home. “I’m getting kinda dizzy.”
The Gypsy Prince turned from posting a fresh set of sentries. “I do not know what the source of your magic is, brave youth, but I think as long as you retain that size, the enemy will hesitate before attacking again.”
“I’ll try. Maybe if I sit down.” Pogokhashman sank to the ground, where he sat crosslegged. Even with his chin resting on his fists, he was still as large as a moderately tall building.
“I have never seen the like.” The prince shook his head in admiration.
“We must talk while we have the opportunity, Shemei Uendrijj,” Elric said. “There are mysteries to be unraveled on both sides, but you know more of this situation than we do. What is the Chronophage?”
“Rest yourself, friend Elric, for you look ill and tired. I will tell you.” Uendrijj looked down at the sea of deformed creatures surrounding their tiny island. “I will make my tale brief.”
The Chronophage, he explained hurriedly, was not a living thing but a force of nature — or rather a force of urvnature, as his own magicians had told him when it first manifested.
“It was brought about by some unprecedented slippage or sparking of the multiverse. We know not what caused it, but only that it threatens all life, all thought... everything. It is a mindless hunger that eats Time itself — where it has passed, nothing remains but swirling, unfathomable emptiness. Even the Lords of Law are helpless against it.”
“As must be the Lords of Chaos as well,” Elric said thoughtfully. “In his backhanded manner, my patron Arioch has manipulated me into fighting a battle which he cannot himself fight.”
“You are a servant of Chaos?” asked Uendrijj, a little startled. “But I have been taught that its underlings are as soulless as the deformed beasts we fight.”
“I am an oftenmnwilling servant.” Elric explained his family’s age-old pact with Arioch and his kin. “And both Chaos and Law manifest themselves differently in different spheres.”
“I myself am not always happy in my service to Law,” admitted Uendrijj. “I fear the stultifying world my masters would make should they ever triumph — but they are weak in my world, and to maintain a balance under which mortals can live, their cause must be supported.” He continued, explaining that his people had first heard rumors of the Chronophage from the fleeing survivors of worlds where it had already struck, and how at last he, the prince, had been forced to the temple of Law to beg for supernatural aid. There Donblas herself, the living Goddess of Serene Peace, had told him that the Chronophage threatened not just humankind, but the continued existence of the entire multiverse.
“So I retrieved Cloudhurler, my singing sword, from the place where it hung. I had sworn an oath that I would not draw it again, since it had served me treacherously during my pacification of the Merymmen, the Undersea People, leading me to inadvertent murder. But human oaths mean little set against the safety of Time itself.”
As he spoke, he looked at gleaming Cloudhurler with an expression Elric knew all too well.
“I chose this deserted site, a world my magicians discovered, as the place to make a stand against the Chronophage. We are few, as you have seen: the rest of my armies are helping my people to flee to another world through portals the wizards have made. Numbers will not avail me here, but I fear that neither will flight save my people if I fail.”
“And your sword?” Elric leaned closer. “I was brought here by my own blade, in quest for its lost essence. Like yours, Stormbringer is more than a mere weapon.
Could there be some reason having to do with your sword that we were drawn here?”
The prince frowned. “It is possible. My chief mage, Jazh Jandlar, assisted me in a spell designed to use Cloudhurler to summon supernatural allies — it has served me that way before, though never reliably. But no allies answered my summons.”
Elric sat up, pondering. “So you used your blade to call for help. I used my own summoning to call my patron, Duke Arioch of Chaos, to help me regain my lost sword Stormbringer — but at the very moment I did so, my enemy’s chief magicians were tampering with the substance of my runeblade. And now we are both here, in this empty place. That makes for too many coincidences. I think I see the manipulation of the Lords of the Higher Planes at work here.” He looked up at Pogokhashman, who was trying to scrape something off the sole of his yards' long shoe. “I received an ally — that strange youth. Could it be that you received something of the essence of Stormbringer?”
The Gypsy Prince stared at him for a moment, then drew his white blade, which was discolored with various shades of beast^man ichor. “I have noticed a certain... restlessness in it, but the Singing Sword has ever been an unpredictable companion; I thought perhaps it responded to the presence of the Chronophage.”
Something had been stirring in the depths of Stormbringer for several moments, as faint but arresting as an almost inaudible cry of pain. Elric lifted his runeblade and gently laid it against Cloudhurler’s white length. Suddenly, the sensation of sentience flared; at the same moment, Uendrijj reeled back as if he had been struck.
“By the Root, the Black Cat, and D’Modzho Feltarr!” breathed the prince. “Something is indeed alive in that sword of yours. I felt it as though it clawed at my soul.”
The albino did not speak, but gritted his teeth, suppressing a scream. Stormbringer’s lost power was flooding back into the blade and into him as well, boiling through his veins like a river of molten metal. Sweat beaded on his brow and his muscles trembled convulsively. Uendrijj lifted a brown, longTingered hand as though to aid him, but hesitated, not sure what was happening.
As Stormbringer’s stolen essence flowed out of the white sword and through his own black blade, Elric felt something of Cloudhurler, and of its master as well. When at last the inrush stopped, his body throbbed with new strength. He boomed out a laugh, startling Uendrijj again.
“O Gypsy Prince, I sense that we have far more in common than just the possession of such weapons! You have been the victim of many of the same cosmic jests that have made my life a misery.”
Before Uendrijj could reply, the moon-wide face of Pogokhashman suddenly tilted down toward them.
“Hey, those weirdos are coming at us again,” the giant boomed. “Think you better get ready, man.”
Elric sprang to his feet. Now that his strength had returned, the prospect of combat almost delighted him. He reminded himself that some of the anticipation