The Enchantress of World's End
- Автор: Картер Лин Спрэг
- Серия: Gondwane Epic #2
- Год: 101
- Язык: английский
- Год: DAW
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «The Enchantress of World's End». Краткое содержание книги:
Gondwane... When all the kingdoms of all the peoples of Earth had come and gone and new ones arose, it was on Gondwane they created their ephemeral glories.
On Gondwane, amid the turmoil of the last wars and the last quests and the last efforts of scientists and alchemists, there arose one final hero, the mighty Ganelon Silvermane.
The saga of Ganelon is the telling of master fantasist Lin Carter. And it is in the story of the Scarlet Enchantress that Ganelon first found the meaning of manhood.
They took another step—
Parched and dry, the desert sands stretched from horizon to horizon under seven burning suns of metallic indigo, canary yellow, olive green, grayish purple, and three other colors for which the dazed, bewildered travellers had no names. Stone colossi marched across the desert, hundred-foot-high figures of manlike marble, but headless, who walked with a grating, gritty sound of stone rubbing against stone. From whence they came and to what unthinkable destination the stone monsters were bound was equally unknown. With each step the ponderous giants took, the desert drummed and sand jumped. A black shadow, edged with penumbra of seven colors, fell over them. They stared up wildly to see a vast stone foot coming down— and took another step themselves.
They stood on ice, slick as glass. Above the immense glacier, northern lights flickered, forming an undulating, ghostly luminous banner. Frost sprinkled them from head to foot: their three breaths steamed before them like white plumes. A distant yelping echoed across the plain of ice. In a moment, a slithering horde of white reptiles with vicious red eyes and long alligator tails came swarming into view around icy pinnacles of glimmering green. The ice-dwelling reptiles were yer-xels; Ganelon had fought them before on Mount Droom so he knew that, wherever they were, at least they were back to Gondwane. Hissing like so many teakettles, the white lizards cames squirming towards them, claws skittering on the ice.
They took another step—
Dim green gloom closed about them now; a stone roof soared far above, supported by pillars that looked like stalagmites, and probably were. The cavern was unthinkably immense, cool and dim and echoing. But, at least, it seemed uninhabited. Still holding Phadia cuddled against his breast, Ganelon staggered. The sudden transitions from hot to cold, wet to dry, left him numb and feeling somehow pummeled.
They peered about them, cautiously. Nearby a great mound of boulders like a rocky hill loomed up, dim and glittering with lots of sharp rocky ridges. Beyond arched the cavern wall, gleaming with eerie phosphorescence. Underfoot, gems crunched. At first the three mistook them for pebbles, but then Grrff stopped, bent down, scooped up a pawful and let them trickle through his digits. A glinting cataract of chatoyants, beryls, garnets, amethysts and alexandrites.
“A duke’s ransom!” he hurled, eyes following the dazzling stream.
Ganelon wearily set the boy down, cautioning him not to stray. Phadia knelt and gathered up a handful of coins. They were old and tarnished—coins of copper, silver, gold, electrum, platinum, and metals blue, green, black, for which he had no name. Some were round, others square or oval; some bore portraits either profile or full-face; the inscriptions were in languages he could not read. The floor of the cavern was completely covered with coins and gems, as far as the eye could reach. And it was an awfully large cavern.
Ganelon turned and looked behind him. Their last step had carried them through a stone archway whose keystone bore the Omega Triskelion symbol. They were out of the labyrinth and safe for a while, it seemed.
He sat down on a rounded boulder, smooth with lichens, to catch his breath.
“I guess we’re safe here,” he said moodily. Something had happened to him under the Mind Probe, but the whirl of events had moved so swiftly that he had not yet had leisure time to evaluate it.
“Hmph! But where is here?” gruffed the Tigerman, looking about him skeptically.
Stretched out on his tummy, kicking his heels in the air, small chin resting on folded hands, Phadia peered drowsily into the glitter of heaped gems. Their lights sent a flicker of enchantment across his pretty, girlish face.
“Maybe this is dragon treasure,” he suggested dreamily, “and we’re in a dragon’s cave!’*
Grrff snorted, twitching his whiskers.
“Nonsense, cub! Fairy-tale-stuff! There are no dragons left in Gondwane …”
This isn’t Gondwane, said a huge voice, making them all jump. It was a deep, grumbly voice with a lot of hissing in it: sort of the kind of voice thunder might make if it tried to hiss at the same time. None of them had ever heard a voice remotely like it before, and the alarming thing was they could not see whom it was that had spoken.
Then the big, dim, sharply-ridged hill in front of them opened one huge eye, like a bright green full moon and winked at them!
This is a Dragon’s cave, said the voice again. And this time they saw that it did come from the hill. Only it wasn’t a hill, it was—
And I’m the dragon, said the Dragon.
18. THE OLDEST ONE
Phadia jumped to his feet and tried to stuff the fingers of both hands into his mouth, eyes wide and unbelieving. Ganelon hefted the bent copper bar wherewith he had fought his way from Varesco’s laboratory to the prison-yard, and wished for his Silver Sword. And, as for GrrfiE, the burly Tigerman growled deep in his chest, hackles rising on his nape, razory black claws bared, eyes glowing sulphurously through the dim greenish gloom.
The craggy hill in front of them opened a second great moon-eye with which to observe them interestedly. The monster was big as a house, big as a blockfull of houses, but it did not seem to be interested in dinner; at least, not at the moment. Some gigantic prehistoric monster, some huge lizard, some sentient saurian strayed here from Earth’s forgotten prime? Whatever it was, they had little hopes of fighting it.
Manlings, here in my lair? it murmured in that hissy, thunderthroated voice. How -wondrous strange! Has been a thousand ages, aye, and more, since last Dzimdazoul had manlings as his guests … put up thy copper club, Silverhair! Dzimdazoul hath ever been that friendly with thy kind, to win him place within thy legendry.
They began to relax, joint by joint, nerve by nerve. Something behind or underneath the words themselves stole fright from them, bit by bit. They began to stare at the great Dragon, open-mouthed with amazed and wide-eyed wonderment, as the enormous friendly creature regarded them with luminous, unwinking, philosophical and faintly humorous gaze.
They could see Dzimdazoul more clearly now, their eyes having adjusted to the dim green gloom. He had a broad head with prominent brow-ridges that curved above the great moon-like eyes, and a long, wrinkled, scaly snout with large nostrils from which exhaled a whiff of sulphurous steam as he breathed. When he grinned, as he did in a manner meant to be friendly, he exposed fangs longer than a man’s arms. The size of him, the scaly length, was preposterous—mythical!
The dragonish breed had long-since vanished from Gondwane by their age, lingering only in legend and in a few remnants of the race, dwarfed and mute, which lurked in crypts and caverns much like this one. But this was one of the Old Dragons, the great dragons of the Prime, and huger than any living thing had any right to be.
Curiously enough, it was little Phadia who was the first to lose his fear of Dzimdazoul. Smiling with shy wonder, he crept forward and seated himself timidly on one of the Dragon’s paws which were stretched out before him. The Dragon regarded the boy with friendly inquisitiveness, cocking his great head first on one side, then the other, like some enormous dog. A man-child, is it? he hissed affably. “Yes, sir,” said the boy in a very small voice. The Dragon chuckled—an unnerving sound like several avalanches rumbling down a very tall mountain.