The Enchantress of World's End

Still, Grrff could not allay his suspicions that something had happened to the big man he regarded as his friend, comrade and fellow-warrior. At the evening feast, peering around at the scrawny ruffians, Grrff found himself wondering if the vagabonds were really as friendly as they seemed. Perhaps they had waylaid Silvermane once he was alone, and had imprisoned or slain him. King Yemple swilled down wine, gurgling with laughter over the grotesque capers of his clowns and conjurers; sly, thievish Zilth gorged on fresh meat, jested and snickered with his cronies; Phadia and Slioma hardly touched their meat and had eyes only for each other. Before the feast was actually concluded, the Tigerman noticed, the lad and the girl stole off together to find an unused cubicle. Grrff only hoped it was for the purpose of mutual amatory pleasure, and not a cunning plot on the part of Yemple’s bravos to separate them one by one and then capture them. But about an hour and half later his tentative suspicions were relieved when the two young people returned to the feast, flushed, bright-eyed and tousled, with their clothing considerably in disarray.

By bedtime the giant man still had not returned to the tunnel system. Grrff, tossing and turning restlessly on his pallet, entertained visions of Ganelon trapped in a bubble car and condemned to endless circlings of the City; of Ganelon lost in the sewers, having forgotten the code markings which clearly blazoned the way into portions of the system currently inhabited by the lomagoths; of Ganelon seized by the cold, dispassionate sentience of the City Brain, and now stretched naked under blazing antiseptic lamps while the robot intelligence scrutinized his innards, laid bare by dissection. The multiplicity of dire eventualities his fevered imagination conjured up forbade Grrff from slumbering.

At length he rose, took up his gear, and found his way past snoring vagabonds to the upper levels again. He had no real idea of where Ganelon Silvermane could have gotten to, nor even why the big man had remained behind. But remembering his queries regarding the central edifice, Grrff decided to begin his search there.

The City by night was weird and more than a little spooky, the faithful Tigerman discovered. The empty buildings stared at him with blank windows, like the eye-sockets of so many giant skulls. His footsteps clanged hollowly on the metal streets as he strode their length. He constantly had a feeling of being watched from a secret place of concealment by hidden eyes, which caused his hackles to lift in a stiff ruff of fur. Clenching his weapon in his huge paws he prowled the City, eyes roaming nervously from side to side.

The City was in motion, skimming along over the Purple Plain in a north-easterly direction insofar as he could judge, and traveling along at a pretty fair clip—about thirty miles per hour, he estimated roughly. The omnipresent hum and purr of the internal mechanisms of Kan Zar Kan were lost in the rush of wind that blew, with an eerie moaning sound, through the tall spires of the robot metropolis. The air cushion which lifted the dish-like foundation of the City a dozen feet above the violet sward was almost completely soundless: the City glided across the prairie in ghostly flight. It was all just a bit unnerving, he found.

And so was the metal metropolis itself. For its un-ligjited and long rows of dark, empty houses, unil-luminated towers and gloom-filled domes lent it something of the aspect of a dead, long-deserted city of the past. In his quests and peregrinations across the mighty face of Gondwane, the Tigerman had once visited the Cylinder Cities of the north and the Dead Cities of Caostro in the remote southlands: the same weird uncanniness gripped him now that he had experienced in those far kingdoms, whose builders had belonged to races long since extinct.

Grrff wondered to himself why Kan Zar Kan did not light itself by night. Surely, the several techniques of artificial illummation were not beyond the skills of its automatic workshops. He brooded over the possibilities of their being some arcane and mysterious reason for the lack of night lights. The City, cloaked in gloom, glided across the meadowlands in an almost furtive fashion. As if bound on a sinister mission, it concealed itself in darkness the better to avoid chance discovery as it crept stealthily upon its prey.

The whole scene was getting on his nerves! With a deep-chested growl, the busly Karjixian shook himself and cast off his spooky speculations. Probably, the answer to the question was simplicity itself: perhaps Kan Zar Kan had only observed real human cities by daylight, and had no way of knowing the lengths to which men go to illuminate their centers of population after nightfall.

The citadel was nearer now: he eyed it thoughtfully. If he managed to gain entry unobserved and unmolested, was able to search the towering ziggurat in satisfactorily thorough manner and did not find Ganelon Silvermane, then he had no idea where else to seek his missing friend.

But—first things first. The central structure was the most obvious place to look for the bronze man. He would worry about what to do after that when the time came.