The Enchantress of World's End

Through the skies of Gondwane the Great, Earth’s last and mightiest continent, there floated an extraordinary vehicle. It bore the likeness of an ungainly Phoenix-shaped bird of dark bronze, with spread wings and peacock-tail, measuring some thirty feet from beak to tail-tip. For all that it should have weighed many tons, it soared as lightly as a wisp of cloud through the sides.

Behind the arched neck, and between the broad shoulders of the bronze bird-machine, a cockpit containing six seats was hollowed. The vehicle transported a remarkable foursome. In the “driver’s seat,” so to speak, reposed an elderly but vigorous man robed and gloved in glimmering silks, whose features were perpetually masked from sight behind a visor of lilac vapor. This personage was a powerful but friendly magician known as the Illusionist of Nerelon. For better or for worse, he regarded himself as the benign protector of these regions of north-central-eastern Gondwane—a position of responsibility he had, in a sense, inherited.

Seated beside him was a pert, long-legged, adolescent girl with a snub nose, a pretty, freckled face, sparkling green eyes under a mop of tousled red curls, full lips and a small, stubborn chin. She wore odd bits of steel armor—greaves, girdle, gorget, and the like. Her firm, pointed, tip-tilted breasts were also cupped in steel, and an abbreviated mail-skirt, which barely covered her rounded hips and left her tanned thighs deliciously bare, completed her curiously warlike costume. She was a girl knight from the distant kingdom of Jemmerdy where the women are the warriors and the men are all scholars, administrators, or aesthetes. Her name was Xarda.

Behind these two, uncomfortably squeezed into the second row of seats, towered a gigantic warrior. He had a grim-jawed, heavy-boned face, with fierce black eyes under scowling brows; the dark bronze of his naked hide was offset by his spectacular mane of glittering silver hair which poured over herculean shoulders and down his back. His bronzed torso, bulging with steely thews, was strapped into a war-harness of black leather. Between his shoulders an enchanted Silver Sword was scabbarded. He was a Construct, a synthetic superman created by the Time Gods for some unknown world-saving mission, and his name was Ganelon Silvermane.

I have referred to these persons as a remarkable foursome: the fourth individual of their company, possibly the most unique and curious of them all, was their bird vehicle itself, called the Bazonga. This animated aerial contraption housed a sentient crystalloid brain, connected by cunning electrodes to vision lenses, ear tympanies and a voice-box. It could thus see, hear, reason and speak; and, as its bronze body was rendered weightless by antigravitic yxium crystals, powered for flight by magnetic waves, it made the perfect companion of their travels.

At the time whereof I write, the four adventurers, having successfully terminated the menace of the Airmasters of Sky Island who had terrorized the Tigermeri of Karjixia*, were enroute from the kingdom of the Tigermen to the realm of Jemmerdy in the east. The Illusionist had decided that the very least they could do to thank the girl knight for her share in their adventure was to assist her in returning home, before journeying themselves back to the magician’s enchanted palace of Nerelon in the Crystal Mountains, south of the Voormish Desert. They had left the flying island early that morning, after ending the career of the tyrannical Elphod of the Airmasters; and, after a brief visit to Xombol, the capital of the kingdom of the Tigermen, where they had given Prince Vrowl the glad tidings that his difficulties with the troublesome Sky Islanders had been brought to a happy conclusion, they had flown in the Bazonga bird all day across the regions of Northern YamaYamaLand.