"Yes," said Lobkowitz. "We are walking against what you would usually conceptualize as the flow of time. We could be said to be walking backwards to Christmas."
I was about to respond to this whimsicality when a pale face some seven feet high blocked the narrow mountain path ahead. A giant peered at us from eye level. When I peered back at the face, I realized it was a realistic carving. What mighty force had placed a great stone head directly in our way, blocking the path? The thing stared at me with a smile which made the Mona Lisa's seem broad, and I found myself charmed by it. Indeed I admired its beauty, running my hand over the smooth granite from which it had been sculpted. "What is it?" I asked Lobkowitz. "And why is it blocking our path?"
"It is a creature called an Onono. A tribe of them used to live in these parts. What you cannot see are the useful legs and arms hidden within what looks like a singularly thick neck. They are extinct in this realm, everywhere but in Africa, where they are a distinct species of their own. You should be pleased this one has petrified. They are formidable and savage enemies. And cannibals to boot." With his crooked staff Lobkowitz levered the thing towards the edge. It began to rock almost at once and then suddenly flew over and down. I watched it tumble into the gorge far below. I expected it to land in the river, but instead, with a snapping crash it went into a stand of dark trees. I found myself hoping it had managed a reasonably soft landing. The way ahead, though a little chipped and eroded, was now clear.
Lobkowitz moved cautiously forward and was wise to do so, for as the path widened and turned we confronted not a stone guardian, but several living versions of the creature we had just sent over the edge. Long, spindly, spiderlike arms and legs were extended from within the shoulder area. Their huge heads, filed teeth and great, round eyes were like something out of Brueghel.
Parleying with the Ononos was not a possibility. Six or seven of them crowded across the pathway. We had to fight them or retreat. I guessed that retreat would sooner or later involve us in fighting them anyway. Lobkowitz unsheathed the monstrous cutlass under his coat, and with a guilty sense of relief, I drew Raven-brand from her scabbard. Immediately the black blade howled with a mixture of joyous delight and horrible bloodlust. I was dragged towards my foes, Lobkowitz in my wake, as we ran to do battle with these grotesque failures of evolution.
Spindly fingers gripped my legs as I swung my sword full into the face of the first Onono, splitting it like a pumpkin and covering his companions and myself in a gruesome mixture of blood and brains. The things had massive but relatively delicate crani-ums. Two more of the monsters fell to Ravenbrand, who now shrieked with a disgusting and undisguised love for blood and souls. I heard my voice shouting Elric's Melnibonean war cry "Blood and souls! Blood and souls for my lord Arioch!" Part of me shuddered, fearing that to invoke that name might be the worst thing I could do in this world.
Yet it was Elric of Melnibone who dominated now. Wading into the hideous Ononos, I drew their crude life stuff into my own. Their coarse blood pulsed through me, giving me a foul, virtually invulnerable energy.
Soon they were all dead. Their twitching hands and feet lay strewn everywhere on the path. Some had sailed down towards the trees. Other parts had landed on the mountainside. The remaining two creatures-who looked like young females-were bounding away on their knuckles and would offer us no further trouble.
I licked my lips and wiped my blade clean on coarse black Onono hair. Nearby Prince Lobkowitz was examining those corpses still more or less in one piece. "These were the last of Chaos in this realm, at least until now. I wonder if they will welcome their cousins." He sighed. He seemed to feel sympathy for our defeated attackers.
"We are all Fate's fools," he said. "Life is not an escape plan. It is an inevitable road. The changes we can make in our stories are not great."
"You are a pessimist?"
"Sometimes the smallest of changes can become significant," said Lobkowitz. "I assure you, Count Ulric, that I am anything but a pessimist. Do not I and my kind challenge the very condition of the multiverse?"
"Which is?"
"Some believe the only power which makes existence in any way choate is the imagination of man."
"We created ourselves?"
"There are stranger paradoxes in the multiverse. Without paradox there is no life."
"You do not believe in God, sir?"
Lobkowitz turned to regard me. He had a strange, pleasant expression on his face. "A question I rarely hear. I believe that if God exists he has given us the power of creativity and has left us with it. If we did not exist, it would be necessary for him to create us. While he neither judges nor plans, he has given us the Balance- or, if you prefer, the idea of the Balance. It is the Balance I serve, and in that, perhaps, I am serving God."
I became embarrassed, of course. I had no wish to pry into another man's religious beliefs. But, raised as I was in the Lutheran persuasion, there were certain questions which naturally occurred to me. His was a religion of triumphant moderation, it seemed, whose purpose was clear and whose rules were easily absorbed. The Balance offered creativity and justice, a combination of all human qualities in harmony.
A harmony not mirrored in the busy wind which again began to lick at what little flesh we had exposed. It lashed us with rain and sleet. It blinded us and chilled us to our bones, but we continued to follow the mountain trail. Winding around great cliffs and across narrow ridges, on both sides were drops of a thousand feet or more. The wind seemed to attack us when we were most vulnerable.
In certain parts of the mountains' flanks, high overhead, some snow had begun to settle. I became alarmed. If we had heavy snow, we were finished, I knew. Doing his best to reassure me, Lobkowitz failed to convince himself. He shrugged. "We must hope," he said. " 'Hope ahead and horror behind, tell of the creatures I have in mind.' " He seemed to be quoting from the English again. Only when he made such quotations did I realize that our everyday speech was German.
From somewhere in the distance came the faint, cawing voice of a bird. Lobkowitz became instantly alert.
We rounded a great slab of granite and looked out over a descending cascade of mountain peaks towards a frozen lake. I must
have gasped. I remember my own breath in the air. I heard my own heart beating. Was this Oona's prison?
Far out in the lake I could see an island. On the island had been raised some sort of gigantic stepped metal pyramid which dazzled with reflected light.
Leading from shore to island, a pathway, straight and wide, shone like a long strip of silver laid across the ice. What sort of thing was this? A monument? But it seemed too large.
The wind then slashed stinging sleet into my eyes. When they cleared, a rolling mist was covering the lake and the surrounding mountains.
Lobkowitz's face was shining. "Did you see it, Count Ulric? Did you see the great fortress? The City of the Tree!"
"I saw a ziggurat. Of solid gold. What is it? Mayan?"
"This far north?" He laughed. "No, only the Pukawatchi have ventured up here, as far as I know. What you saw was the great communal longhouse of the Kakatanawa, the model for a dozen cultures. Count Ulric, give thanks to your God. Intratemporally we have followed a dozen crooked paths all at the same time. The odds on accomplishing that were small. By chance and experience, we have found resolution. We have found the roads to bring us to the right place. Now we must hope they have brought us to the right time."
Lobkowitz looked up with a broad smile as out of the air a large bird dropped and settled on his extended forearm. It was an albino crow. I looked at it with considerable curiosity.