The Enchantress of World's End

Entering the city by its sole gate, whose glassy barbican-towers were fantastically worked into flame-like points and flying buttresses, they traversed the miniature metropolis to the soaring cluster of pylons at its heart. This was, Ganelon assumed correctly, the Palace of the Queen of Red Magic. It consisted of nine spires of varying heights, interconnected by flying aerial bridges, with a spiral ramp enclosing the entire group.

The streets, squares and shops were virtually deserted, and the few persons they did pass on their way were a sullen-faced, dispirited lot with frightened faces and empty eyes, who shied away from the Red Magic legion. Most of the buildings they passed were soaring palaces and superb mansions whose fluted colonnades and impressive facades gleamed in the brilliance of dawn. The vistas of the city were breathtakingly lovely. But it seemed odd to the bronze giant that so many of the gorgeous glass palaces, although in perfect repair and kept immaculately cleaned and polished, seemed to be completely empty.

Shai was, he knew, a brand-new city which had arisen only in the past generation. The Queen of Red Magic herself was but newly come to Northern YamaYamaLand, having arrived in these parts somewhat less than a century ago. Rumor had it that she was the first of a race of Red Amazons who had formerly inhabited the Cham Archipelago near Thoph in the remote, virtually unknown southwestern corner of the Supercontinent. Studying the Secret Sciences at the magician’s college of Nembosch, she had discovered one of the nine-thousand ninety portals which gave entry into the Halfworld Labyrinth, a complex system of interdimensional conduits connecting several parts of this world with adjacent worlds and planes. This labyrinth, known to the scholars of legend as the “Cavern of a Thousand Perils,” exited in the Mountains of the Death Dwarves. Emerging therefrom, Zelmarine had established her dominance over the eastern half of Dwarfland and announced her empire.

The Death Dwarves had, at first, fought furiously against her kingdom; conquered by her invincible scythe-armed Automatons, they withdrew into their mountains and eventually some of the border tribes fell under Zelmarine’s dominance. She had employed the tireless vigor of her Automatons, together with the mineral strength and durance of the subservient Dwarves, to raise her capitol on the edges of the mountain country. She captured by magic whole village populations from the realms about to people her glass metropolis. This explained the cowed, subdued attitude of the few Shai citizens Ganelon had encountered on the way hither.

They enjoyed an audience with her, although he had glimpsed her once from a distance; the time she had paid a visit of state to the Hegemon of Zermish after Ganelon’s victory in the Battle of Uth had brought to an end the invasion of the Indigons.* He was not exactly looking forward to the eventual interview with his captress, for from all descriptions she was a forceful, dynamic, voluptuous woman of imperious will and dominance— exactly the sort of person the simple, inexperienced young giant felt most uncomfortable with. But he had long known of her interest in him, although her reasons were still unknown to him. Indeed, shortly before he had left his home in Zermish to enter the service of the Illusionist of Nerelon, Zelmarine had attempted to purchase him from the Hegemon of his natal city. It was all rather ominous and uncomfortable.