Then Oone had mounted her silver horse and raised her silver sword. She called out: "Elric, do as I do!" and urged the stallion into a canter so that its hooves rattled like thunder in the chamber.

Prepared to die with courage, even at the moment of apparent triumph, Elric climbed into his saddle, took a spear in the hand that held the reins and with his sword already swinging charged against the invaders.

Only as they crowded around him, axes, maces, spears and swords lifted to attack, did Elric understand that Oone's action had not been one of mere desperation. These half-shades moved sluggishly, their eyes were misted, they stumbled and their blows were feeble.

The slaughter now became sickening to him. Following her example, he hacked and stabbed from side to side, almost mechanically. Heads came away from bodies like rotten fruit; limbs were sliced as easily as leaves from a stick; torsos collapsed under the thrust of a spear or sword. Their viscous blood, already the blood of the dead, clung to weapons and armour and their cries of pain were pathetic to Elric's ears. If he had not sworn to follow Oone, he would have ridden back and let her continue the work alone. There was little danger to them as the veiled men continued to pour through the walls and be met by sharp steel and cunning intelligence.

Behind them, around the column of the Pearl, the courtiers watched. These clearly did not know what a mediocre threat the two silver-armoured warriors confronted.

At last it was done. Decapitated, limbless bodies were piled all around the hall. Elric and Oone rode out of that slaughter and they were grim, unhappy, nauseated by their own actions.

"It is done," said Oone. "The Sorcerer Adventurers are slain."

"You truly are heroes!" Queen Sough came down the steps towards them, her eyes bright with admiration, her arms outstretched.

"We are who we are," said Oone. "We are mortal fighters and we have destroyed the threat to the Fortress of the Pearl." Her words had taken on a ritualistic tone and Elric, trusting her, was content to listen.

"You are the children of Chamog Borm, Brother and Sister of the Bone Moon, Children of Water and Cool Breezes, Parents of the Trees..." The seneschal had dropped his bags of gold and was shaken by his weeping. He wept with relief and with joy and Elric saw how much he resembled Raik Na Seem.

Oone, down from her horse again, was embraced by Queen Sough. Meanwhile, a shuffling and cackling announced the approach of the Pearl Warrior.

"This is no more for me," he said. Alnac's dead eyes had nothing but resignation in them. "This is for dissolution..." And he fell forward onto the marble floor, his armour all broken, his limbs sprawling, and there was no longer any flesh on him, only bone, so that what was left of the Pearl Warrior resembled little more than the inedible remains of a crab, the supper of some sea-giant.

Queen Sough came towards Elric, her arms outstretched, and she seemed much smaller than when he had first encountered her. Her head hardly reached to his lowered chin. Her embrace was warm and he knew she, too, was weeping. Then her veil fell away from her face and he saw that she had lost years, that she was little more than a girl.

Behind Queen Sough the Lady Oone was smiling at him as astonished understanding filled him. Gently he touched the girl's face, the familiar folds of her hair, and he drew in a sudden breath.

She was Varadia. She was the Holy Girl of the Bauradim. She was the child whose spirit they had promised to free.

Oone joined him, placing a protective hand upon Varadia's shoulder. "You know now that we are truly your friends."

Varadia nodded, looking about her at the courtiers, who had assumed their earlier frozen stances. "The Pearl Warrior was the best there was," she said. "I could summon none better. Chamog Borm failed me. The Sorcerer Adventurers were too strong for him. Now I can release him from his exile."

"We combined his strength with our own," said Gone. "Your strength and our strength. That is how we succeeded."

"We three are not shadows," said Varadia, smiling, as if at a revelation. "That is how we succeeded."

Oone nodded agreement. "That is how we succeeded, Holy Girl. Now we must consider how to bring you back to the Bronze Tent, to your people. You carry all their pride and history with you."

"I knew that. I had to protect it. I thought I had failed."

"You have not failed," said Oone.

"The Sorcerer Adventurers will not attack again?"

"Never," said Oone. "Not here, nor anywhere. Elric and I will make sure of it."

And then Elric realised in admiration that it had been Oone, in the end, who had summoned the Sorcerer Adventurers, summoned those shades for the last time; summoned them so that she might demonstrate their defeat.

Oone looked at him and warned him with her eyes not to say too much. But now he realised that all that they had fought, save perhaps a little of the Pearl Warrior and the Sorcerer Adventurers, had been a child's dreams. The hero of legend, Chamog Borm, could not save her because she knew he was not real. Similarly, the Pearl Warrior, chiefly her own invention, could not save her. But he and Oone were real. As real as the child herself! In her deep dream, in which she had disguised herself as a queen, seeking power but failing to find it, just as she had described, she had known the truth. Unable to escape from the dream, she had yet recognised the difference between her own invention and that which she had not invented-herself, Oone and Elric. But Oone had had to show that she could defeat what remained of the original threat, and in demonstrating the defeat, she freed the child.

And yet they were still within the dream, all three of them. The great Pearl pulsed as powerfully as before, the Fortress with all its mazes and intertwined passages and chambers was still their prison.

"You understood," Elric said to Oone. "You knew what they spoke of. The language was a child's language-a language seeking power and failing. A child's understanding of power."

But again Oone, with a glance, cautioned him to silence. "Varadia knows now that power is never discovered in retreat. All one can hope to do by retreating is to let one power destroy another or hide as one hides from a storm one cannot control, until the force has passed. One cannot gain anything, save one's own self. And ultimately one must always confront the evil that would destroy one." It was almost as if she herself were in a trance and Elric guessed that she repeated lessons learned in pursuit of her craft.

"You did not come to steal the Pearl but to save me from its prison," said Varadia as Oone took her young hands and held them tightly. "My father sent you to help me?"

"He asked our help and we gave it willingly," said Elric. At last he sheathed the silver sword. He felt slightly foolish in the armour of a fairy-tale hero.

Oone recognised his discomfort, "We shall give all this back to Chamog Borm, my lord. Is he permitted to return to the Fortress, Lady Varadia?"

The child grinned. "Of course!" She clapped her hands and through the doorway to the Court of the Pearl, walking proudly, still in the clothes of his banishment, came Chamog Borm, to kneel at the feet of his mistress.

"My Queen," he said. There was strong emotion in his wonderful voice.

"I return to you your armour and your weapons, your twin horses, Tadia and Taron, and all your honour, Chamog Borm." Varadia spoke with warm pride.

Soon Elric and Oone had discarded the armour and again wore only their ordinary clothes. Chamog Borm was in his silver-and-gold-chased breastplate and greaves, his helmet of gleaming silver, his swords and his spears in their sheaths at hip and on horse. His other armour he bound to the back of Tadia. At last he was ready. Again he kneeled before his Queen. "My lady. What task wouldst thou have me accomplish for thee?"