The Warrior of World's End, page 16
“You can all go home now,” the Illusionist said to them quietly. “Take up your wounded and go home. You have lost the battle, you see; and it was your last battle.” He laughed a little. “I imagine it was your first battle, too.” Then he pointed a gloved hand at the dead man in gold. “Take that with you when you go. Your First Elphod; your First and Last Elphod, he is now. Go to your homes in peace, and come against us no more, or we shall destroy you to the last man and bring your city down in crashing ruin.”
Slowly, the soldiers turned, dispersed, wandering away, silent and weary and dispirited. The Illusionist watched for a little as three of them, with considerable effort, began to drag the crushed golden thing toward its waiting chariot. Then he turned back to his friends again.
“Ganelon, sit down and rest; you are tired and I must look to your wounds. First, you will find a skin of wine in the tail compartment of the Bazonga. Drink your fill and get us all something to eat.”
“But Xarda, master!”
“She is not slain; the electric weapons deal out a stunning shock that causes unconsciousness. Let me examine her; get the wine, and a skin of water, too.”
Ganelon put his great sword down and stumbled wearily to the dead, floating machine and began to rummage through their baggage.
“What about the bird, master? Is it dead?”
The Illusionist shook his head.
“Her energy crystals are almost drained. She was never built for fighting, poor thing, and she exhausted her power source in helping, you. But there are engines within the tower which still contain potent batteries I did not smash; it will be no great feat to reenergize the Bazonga. Now for the love of the Green Nexus, where’s that cursed wine? I am dry as the Voormish Desert!”
They ate and drank and rested, speaking very little, while the stars wheeled overhead and the great, cracked, swollen bulk of the Falling Moon slowly traversed the dome of the heavens from edge to edge of the world.
Xarda recovered from her swoon weak and shaken and with a small bum on her forehead; but she had taken no serious hurt from the battle and soon recovered her vigor and cheerfulness. It did not prove difficult for the magician to patch together copper electrodes which he attached to the battery terminals, draining their stores of power to reenergize the dormant Bazonga. In no time the quaint vehicle was working again.
The Illusionist dispatched Jebd the Sky Serpent together with Fryx into the city to turn loose and drive away all of the Phlygul who were housed in the roosting tower. The dawn-pink skies were made nightmarish for a time, as clouds of black-winged bat-monsters swarmed in the heavens above the metropolis of the former Airmasters; gradually the flying creatures dispersed to every point of the compass and the Illusionist laid a powerful enchantment upon the whole of Sky Island, which would ensure that never again while the world lasted would the Phlygul nest on Sky Island,.
“But what good does that do?” murmured Xarda.
“My dear child, with the Phlygul driven away, never to return, the Sky Islanders are helplessly marooned here and cannot descend to bother the people of Karjixia or any other land. And I have rendered the Death Machine thoroughly useless. With the Elphod dead, there is no one else on Sky Island with sufficient scientific and technical training to repair it or use it to threaten the world with the mobile Death Zone again. For only that old maniac, Vlydabec, had studied the lost knowledge of Vandalex.”
“So?” the girl snapped tartly.
“So, unless the once-high-and-mighty Airmasters want to starve themselves to death, they had better get busy farming the jungles for food. Because all commerce between them and the world below has been permanently terminated. They are stuck here, unable to raid or threaten or intimidate anyone else. They will have to feed themselves by the sweat of their brow, or die out.”
.He looked about him at the dawn-lit jungle, the grassy plains beyond, and the freshwater lake in the distance.
“This shouldn’t be a bad place to live, once they leam to fend for themselves, instead of living off the labor of others,” he said. “I will keep an eye on them to see they do not suffer.”
“So that’s it, then? You are not going to punish them any further, or wreak a more dire vengeance for all the fear and pain and death and suffering they have caused
the Tigermen, and would have caused the people of many other lands?”
He shook his head. “No, my dear. I have already punished them more dreadfully than you can possibly imagine. I took from them their convictions of superiority. I took from them their very god, and showed his feet of clay. It is a cruel punishment, Xarda; a bitter lesson. To hurt them further would be superfluous.”
“What do we do now, master? Do we go home?” asked Silvermane. The magician had treated his injuries with a powerful healing salve, and the giant had eaten and rested. He felt fit once again, although still bone-weary.
“I think not,” said the Illusionist. “I shall send Fryx and Jebd back home to Nerelon, of course, for we need them no longer. But I believe that you and I owe it to our little friend here to see her safely back to Jemmerdy, or wherever it is that she wishes to go. We owe her that much, at least, for her assistance in this adventure.”
It was not long after this that the Bazonga bird rose from the grassy clearing with Xarda and the Illusionist and Ganelojn Silvermane in the cockpit. The sun was well up now; the morning air was fresh and bright and keen. The sky was a glorious blue, decorated here and there with small, crisply curled white clouds. Below them lay the immeasurable vastness of Old Earth’s last and greatest continent, Gondwane the Great, thronged with its innumerable cities and nations and empires, filled with unexplored mountains and rivers, valleys and deserts, plains and forests, jungles and lakes. There dwelt strange people and mysterious beings, curious beasts and monsters. Supernatural creatures never known to men lurked in many a chasm and crevice and cave; conquerors and warlords, sorceresses and wizards, plotted and schemed, dreaming their dreams and working their marvels. A worldwide land lay beneath their flying keel, a world they had as yet only begun to explore, a world that held yet many strange and perilous adventures for them.
The sentient vehicle circled Sky Island under the morning sun. Then it flew off and dwindled into the distance, bound for new and even more wonderful adventures.
APPENDIX
A GLOSSARY OF UNFAMILIAR NAMES AND TERMS
Appendix
A GLOSSARY OF UNFAMILIAR NAMES AND TERMS
Death Dwarfs:
A repulsive but hardy form of Antilife, sufficiently sentient to be easily corrupted into subservience for destructive purposes. The bald, diminutive, greenskinned bipeds are a grimly humorless and unlikable species, vicious by natural inclination, and extremely inimical to all other sentients. They subsist on a diet of liquid poisons, ground glass, and other inedible substances, as is usual for the reversed metabolism of their kind; normal or more wholesome varieties of nutriment are to them deadly and poisonous. They chiefly inhabit the so-called Mountains of the Death Dwarfs, preferring the bleak, sterile slopes and noisome craters and caverns to more amenable environments. At the time period in which this book is set several of the easternmost clans have come under the dominance of the Queen of Red Magic.
Galendil the Good:
The supreme divinity worshiped by the inhabitants of the Gondwane continent during this Eon and that following. According to the tenets of several related sects or creeds, Galendil was the lone survivor of previous pantheons formerly worshiped but since outmoded by the evolution of newer religions. His worship crops up in the most unlikely places; in the Zul-and-Rashemba mythos for example (
Godmaking, art of:
An art-form unique to the inhabitants of Gondwane during this Eon and that immediately previous; as intimations of newly developed divinities appear in the inspired imaginations of their prophets, or are invented by them, Godmakers are commissioned to intuit their likenesses and attributes, which they subsequently execute in sculpture for the adoration of the new sects. Masters of this difficult art are excessively rare, as an unusual degree of sensitivity and emotional empathy, to say nothing of intuition itself, are required of the Godmaker if he is to presage with accuracy the lineaments and vocations of yet-unbom divinities. Phlesco of Zermish, incidentally, lived with his wife some forty-nine years beyond the period of his appearance in this book of the Epic to become one of the most renowned and celebrated Godmakers of his age; successive generations of his fellow artisans held his achievements in the highest degree of veneration.
Gyraphonts:
A species of tomb-dwelling, grave-robbing, soul-devouring lobster-ghouls, part of the common mythologies of several related Gondwanian creeds, notably the Vemenoid and the Sarzanian. Not entirely indigenous to this plane, nor composed of Real Matter (except in the occult or metaphysical definition of the term), they are peculiarly difficult to pursue, hunt, capture, imprison, or train, since their capabilities include the handy use of interdimensional shortcuts. They are usually depicted in religious art as erect and bulbous, clad in scarlet chitin, with twenty-seven limbs, mandibles, or pincers, and possessing from nine to thirteen distinct eyes.* Since they are at once dangerous, elusive, and predatory, from his domestication of certain Gyraphonts, notably Fryx, the reader may deduce something of the extraordinary abilities of the Illusionist of Nerelon.
Horxite Faith:
Essentially an offshoot of Polydeuxianity, the Horxite faith (originally, the “Horxite heresy”) includes several tenets borrowed or derived from Margonomy and Old High Panduxism among its dogmas. Established by Hor the Revelator in the 940th Millennium of the Eon, the religious system is structured upon the inspired teachings contained in the Ninety Scriptures, and’ celebrates a pantheon composed of Gulnazphaz and six lesser Gods; originally conceived as a septitheism by the Revelator, the doctrine was later defined by the twenty-third Hierophant as an attenuated monotheism, since the remaining six divinities of the septitheism are now considered but facets or avatars of the seventh, who is Gulnazphaz himself. (Galendil the Good figures in the Horxite mythos, as in many others; in Horxite terms, he is Nerelus the Shadowmaker.)
Illusionist of Nerelon:
This enigmatic and shadowy personage was, in his time, ranked as one of the suoreme thaumaturgists in the Gondwane continent. The secret of his origin, identity, and true name have thus far successfully eluded the researches of innumerable generations of commentators and redactors of that great work, the Exemplary Life and Heroic Exploits of Ganelon Silvermane, from which enduring masterpiece the present book and its sequels are derived. The general consensus of scholars, however, is that whoever he actually was, he was probably a native of Northern YamaYamaLand, perhaps even a native of the Hegemonic city of Oryx, to which, it will be recalled, he flees for refuge at the approach of the Indigon horde (see Bk. I, Chap. 5). As Yllth, editor of the Eleventh Redaction of the Exemplary Life, was the first to point out, whatever his origins he was, very obviously, more than merely an Illusionist. (The term was generally employed, at royal court or in traveling carnivals, for an entertainer who concocted harmless and insubstantial pageants, tableaux, or spectacles for the amusement of an audience.) At various places he exhibits mastery of the arts of wizardry, necromancy, sorcery, warlockry, and pansprexy. The veiled features, the anonymity, and the extraordinary magical powers he displays on several occasions has led some scholars to consider him either an Avatar or a Sending.
Indigons:
Quasianthromorphs of considerable weight, strength, and ferocity, sufficiently intelligent to employ rude tools and weapons. They commonly herd on the Purple Plains north of Karjixia and Phynx, but their migratory instinct makes them formidable invaders of more civilized countries ‘when, in certain seasons, they stampede. It is believed that the Indigons were bred in the vats of Uxorian Maximus, a prominent magician of the Eon,
Phloigms:
The three organs of supernatural preception located in the cortex of the human forebrain between the cerestium gland and the outermost ovules of the peripexian system. The first of the three, the celestial, is the phloigm by which visitations, inspirations, or prophetic visions of the Gods may be observed; the second, or demonic, phloigm serves the same usages as regards evil spirits of the infernal plane; the third, or elemental, enables one to perceive nature spirits, genii and the like. Now largely vestigial, save in certain rare individuals, fully developed phloigmal systems were the rule rather than the exception in previous Eons.
Vandalex:
The name of an immensely powerful Technological Empire which flourished nearly ten million years before the lifetime of Ganelon Silvermane. It was located in northwestern Gondwane, beyond the Plains of Vlad, and was the dominant civilization of the Eon of the Flying Cities. The capital, Grand Phesion, still existed in Ganelon’s time, and many of the robot mechanisms were actually functional. The Empire fell in war against the High Advocates of Tring, but was not completely extinguished in the intervening ages. Silvermane himself visited the ruins of Grand Phesion at the end of the Eon, according to the eighth book of the Epic. Not all of the scientific learning and wisdom of the Technarchs of Vandalex had vanished by Silvermane’s time; libraries and documents still existed, and more than one of the amazing “cortexiums” (libraries of knowledge stored in a giant robot memory facility) were still operational; the Elphod of Sky Island, for instance, may have learned from a cor-texium the technological data he later used to render the Death Zone of Karjixia mobile.
Yxium:
Element 127 on the Periodic Table; the known isotope of yxium possessing the longest half-life has an atomic weight of 280. The element is exceedingly rare, existing only in the cores of certain stars, particularly the so-called “neutron stars.” In the form of a durable crystalline isotope with a half-life of several thousand years, it has been synthetically created on Earth by the use of fire magic. The molecular polarities of yxium are reversed, and the lattice structure of its particles are bent awry at a right angle to that of all other known elements; this is believed to be the factor which causes yxium crystals to reverse the gravitational field and hence “fall upward” instead of down.
Zul-and-Rashemba Mythos:
A Gondwanian religious system which interprets the entirety of universal history in the symbolism of domestic spats and periods of affectionate tranquility between the Goddess Zul (the Cosmic Overself) and her often-erring husband, the God Rashemba (the Universal Soul-Ocean). According to the tenets of this sect, the Divine Couple ruled the Earth for thirty-two thousand millennia before going on a second honeymoon to an adjoining space/time plenum.
They left the Earth, it is believed, in the care of their teen-aged son, Galendil, who was also instructed to watch over their former home atop Marmoramax the Cosmic Mountain (believed to exist at the exact center of the Gondwane supercontinent, and to achieve a height of 394 miles about the Earth). Galendil, however, prefers to reside elsewhere, it is said, being un-fond of heights. The Time Gods also play an obscure part in this mythology, but their exact relationship to the Divine Family is difficult to ascertain due to ambiguities in the Scripture. The Phoenix-like Bazonga bird (the Messenger of Heaven) was a domestic pet of the Couple, and other mythological creatures figure in one or another manner in the mythos. Rashemba, by the way, was amusingly presented as an ordinary husband, employed to keep the Sun energized; and Zul, the typical housewife, had, among her numerous domestic duties, the task of polishing the Moon and replacing the stars when they burned out. The entire mythos is considered by some a degenerate popularization of Old High Great Quaxianity.
THE FARTHEST FUTURE AS SEEN BY THE MASTER OF SWORD AND SORCERY…
I see Gondwane as it shall be in the untold ages of dim futurity, near the time when the Earth shall be man’s habitation no more, and the great night shall enfold all, and naught but the cold stars shall reign. The first sign of the end ye shall see in the heavens, for Lo! the Moon is falling, falling. And there shall come a man into the lands, a man not like other men, but sent from Galendil.
The name of the man is Ganelon Silvermane —and this is the first of a new marvel-adventure series by Lin Carter.
Lin Carter, The Warrior of World's End
