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.
The appearance and disappearance of the peculiar mountain-range is, after all, a matter of little or no importance to anybody in particular. The cliffy heights are not inhabited by anything more lively than a few scruffy lichens and a small colony of disagreeable land-crustaceans, or mountain-dwelling lobsters, who formerly were denizens of the sea. That was a couple of dozen thousand years ago, when the Inland Sea of Voorm occupied most of the barrens about this part of Gondwane. Then the Vanishing Mountains were forced skywards by geological forces, when the crust of Old Earth buckled hereabouts, and the sea receded and finally drained away into the bowels of the planet. Suddenly finding themselves marooned high and dry on the mountain-peaks, the local variety of lobster would doubtless have died out, had it not been for a. sympathetic magician in the neighborhood who cast an. enchantment over them, turning them into mountain dwellers.
The magician in question, an affable personnage called Ulph the Unpredictable, had an innate fondness for marine life which was quite understandable, when you pause to consider his lineage (his mother, that is, was one of the Merfolk).
Even a land-dwelling lobster, by now inured to sudden changes in habitat, finds it difficult to adjust to blinking in and out of Reality. At the period whereof I write, the lobster-colony had been ruminating for some generations a planned migration to the lowlands, away from the Vanishing Mountains. But this is neither here nor there—like the Mountains themselves.
I mention all of this merely to point out the unpredictability of the existence of the Mountains.
They were not there when the Bazonga flew Ganelon to safety; on her return flight, however, the poor creature was less fortunate.
Suddenly, a gigantic wall of rock zoomed up right in front of her nose, so to speak. With a startled squawk, the ungainly animated contraption strove to put on the brakes, but slammed into the rocky wall nonetheless.
Solid bronze is, of course, a tough and durable metal—far less easily broken than steel, for example. Ferrous metals possess a lamentably frangible crystalline structure which permits them to fracture with surprising ease. Hence the bronze bird-vessel was not particularly damaged, even by a head-on collision with a mountain-range.
But her crystalloid brain was somewhat less durable. The impact seemed to stun the poor Bazonga. Her eye-lenses dulling, her beak-jaws wobbling open, she floated back from the impact and drifted idly on the night-breezes, which impelled her to and fro.
From their clefts in the rocky wall, the mountain-dwelling lobsters surveyed the ungainly creature with stalked eyes a-glare. This was the last straw, certainly! If thirty-foot metallic monstrosities were going to be banging into their mountains from now on, surely it was tune to decamp for the comfort and relative security of the lowlands! Packing theh” supplies of edibles, and rounding up the young ones, the heartily offended crustaceans began to migrate in unison, crawling down the slopes of the Vanishing Mountains and paying no further mind to the vacant-eyed Bazonga as she drifted lifelessly on the wind.
7. ESCAPE TO JEOPARDY
From his narrow cell, which was on the interior of the Administratum and, windowless, the Illusionist of Nerelon had no way to judge the moment of nightfall, save for the peculiar behavior of the monitors set to patrol the dungeons.
Promptly at the hour of Moonrise, one of the hard-faced monitors threw down his yarmak, plucked out a bit of chalk from a pocket in his kilt, and began to scrawl something on the wall. Peering interestedly through the bars, the Illusionist could just make out the graffiti. It read:
GLASTRO, NURDIX AND PETRAPHAR ARE A BUNCH OF OLD MEANIES!
His commentary on the rulership of Chx completed, the monitor slunk down the hall to see if he couldn’t rob the off-duty guards, asleep in the barracks.
Grinning to himself, the Illusionist rose to his feet, yawned and stretched lazily, and hurled a minor enchantment at the door of his cell, whose strong metal bars promptly turned to rubber. Stepping out into the corridor, the Illusionist began searching about for his friends. Xarda he discovered, pacing her cell irritably. The girl knight of Jemmerdy was much relieved when the robed and mist-masked magister popped into sight, and even more relieved when the bars of the cell-door wilted like yesterday’s asparagus.
Ganelon they could not find at all, but Prince Erigon, still locked in the subterranean dungeon, was easily found and freed. Using the Third Eye of occult vision, which functions only on the next highest plane of the Plenum, which is called the Astral, it was simple for the old magician to locate the cells of his companions. Auric spectra are clearly visible on the Astral level, and stone walls happen to be invisible on that plane.
“I can’t understand what could have happened to Ganelon,” the Illusionist said fretfully. “I’ve searched the entire area of space occupied, on the Physical plane, by the Administratium and his aura is nowhere to be seen.”
“Could he possibly have escaped, all by himself?” inquired the Skix, a trifle anxiously.
The magician shrugged. “It’s possible, I suppose. The dear boy possesses remarkable strength, and the Time Gods outfitted him with more than a few extraordinary powers which are seldom the possession of ordinary humans. Most of these super-abilities remain mere potentials, as yet, but under stress or duress, there is simply no guessing what the Great Lump might not be able to do.”
“Well, what are we to do? Just go of! and leave him?” she demanded. The magician shrugged helplessly.
“I don’t know what else there is to do!” he confessed. “This is obviously our best opportunity to escape from our captivity and gain the outside world unmolested and unpursued. Once we are free, and have found a place of relative safety, I should be able to ascertain the lad’s whereabouts by means of sortilege or divination. Come, then; let us be off.”
Xarda chewed her lip unhappily. Then, hefting the huge length of the Silver Sword, she said, miserably: “I suppose you are right. At any rate, we have found his magic weapon for him …”
Prince Erigon cleared his throat, a small, polite sound.
“I dislike abandoning a comrade as heartily as do you, for all that my acquaintance with the fellow has been very much briefer, but permit me to suggest that, while we stand here discussing the question, trouble approaches.” He gestured; down the hall a crew of rowdies approached, lustily swigging from small jugs of brandy, and reciting obscene limericks at the top of their lungs. From their soiled and disarranged tabards, it was obvious that the quarrelsome rabble, during the daylight hours, doubled as civic monitors.
Due to the regular night-time crime wave, everybody that should ordinarily have been on duty at the Administratium was off robbing stores, mugging passers-by, tying tin cans to the tails of domestic pets, or committing a malfeasance. The Illusionist, the knightrix, and Prince Erigon of Valardus found it quite easy to escape from the central edifice of the city, with a little help from one of the magician’s invisibility spells.
They returned to the Hospice of the Twelve Cardinal Virtues to find the taproom a seething mass of drunken, struggling men; eluding the several thieves, assassins, burglars and footpads who lurked in the shadows, they went around to the back. They entered the courtyard where they had left their peculiar aerial vehicle, tethered by a mooring-line to one of the tall, flowering zooka-zooka trees.