The Sleeping Sorceress Read Online Free Page A

creatures. This was completely cut in two, its blood and its entrails spreading themselves upon the ground.
    Then, through the snowy dusk, another of the Oonai came down, its body glowing orange, its shape that of a winged snake with a thousand rippling coils.
    Elric struck at the coils, but they moved too rapidly.
    The other chimerae had been watching his tactics with their dead companions and they had now gauged the skill of their victims. Almost immediately Elric’s arms were pinned to his sides by the coils and he found himself being borne upward as a second chimera with the same shape rushed down on Moonglum to seize him in an identical way.
    Elric prepared to die as the horses had died. He prayed that he would die swiftly and not slowly, at the hands of Theleb K’aarna, who had always promised him a slow death.
    The scaly wings flapped powerfully. No snout came down to snap his head off.
    He felt despair as he realized that he and Moonglum were being carried swiftly northward over the great Lormyrian steppe.
    Doubtless Theleb K’aarna awaited them at the end of their journey.

C HAPTER T HREE
    Feathers Filling a Great Sky
    Night fell and the chimerae flew on tirelessly, their shapes black against the falling snow.
    The coils showed no signs of relaxing, though Elric strove to force them apart, keeping tight hold of his runesword and racking his brains for some means of defeating the monsters.
    If only there were a spell . . .
    He tried to keep his thoughts from what Theleb K’aarna would do if, indeed, it was that wizard who had set the Oonai upon them.
    Elric’s skill in sorcery lay chiefly in his command over the various elementals of air, fire, earth, water and ether, and also over the entities who had affinities with the flora and fauna of the Earth.
    He had decided that his only hope lay in summoning the aid of Fileet, Lady of the Birds, who dwelt in a realm lying beyond the planes of Earth, but the invocation eluded him.
    Even if he could remember it, the mind had to be adjusted in a certain way, the correct rhythms of the incantation remembered, the exact words and inflections recalled, before he could begin to summon Fileet’s aid. For she, more than any other elemental, was as difficult to invoke as the fickle Arioch.
    Through the drifting snow he heard Moonglum call out something indistinct.
    “What was that, Moonglum?” he called back.
    “I only—sought to learn—if you still—lived, friend Elric.”
    “Aye—barely . . .”
    His face was chill and ice had formed on his helmet and breastplate. His whole body ached both from the crushing coils of the chimera and from the biting cold of the upper air.
    On and on through the Southern night they flew while Elric forced himself to relax, to descend into a trance and to dredge from his mind the ancient knowledge of his forefathers.
    At dawn the clouds had cleared and the sun’s red rays spread over the snow like blood over damask. Everywhere stretched the steppe—a vast field of snow from horizon to horizon, while above it the sky was nothing but a blue sheet of ice in which sat the red pool of the sun.
    And, tireless as ever, the chimerae flew on.
    Elric brought himself slowly from his trance and prayed to his untrustworthy gods that he remembered the spell aright.
    His lips were all but frozen together. He licked them and it was as if he licked snow. He opened them and bitter air coursed into his mouth. He coughed then, turning his head upwards, his crimson eyes glazing.
    He forced his lips to frame strange syllables, to utter the old vowel-heavy words of the High Speech of Old Melniboné, a speech hardly suited to a human tongue at all.
    “Fileet,” he murmured. Then he began to chant the incantation. And as he chanted the sword grew warmer in his hand and supplied him with more energy so that the eldritch chant echoed through the icy sky.

    “Feathers fine our fates entwined
Bird and man and thine and mine,
Formed a pact that Gods