The Quest of Kadji Read online

  “I wish you had, now it has gotten away and may find the others,” Sharnad said coldly. “They will know something is wrong, for the brute would not willingly have left her side. Odd that it did not fight you.”

  The blunt-nose, slope-browed face of the monsterling was inscrutable, scarlet eyes inhuman and feral in the glow of the fire. “Dogs do not like me,” he grunted slowly. “Something about me strikes them mad with terror …”

  “Your smell, I suppose,” said Shamad carelessly. “Well, at least you were wise enough to take the horse. We can use it to carry our gear, and we can use whatever provisions the girl had with her … what did you do to her anyway?”

  The monster man shrugged and spread blunt-clawed hands wide.

  “She did not move after she saw me. I think terror froze her at the sight of me. So I struck her at the base of the neck and she fell. I was afraid she would cry out and warn the others, for I did not at first realize they were not near. I did not kill her …”

  Shamad smiled fleetingly. “A good thing you did not! Or I would have made you suffer pain, as I did that time you slew the old noble to get his keys. Do you remember how I bound you to the post and hurt you with hot coals?”

  The monsterling’s eyes were dull and opaque, and his voice was heavy and lifeless. “I remember.”

  “Very well; keep it in mind, and do not harm the girl. We shall take her with us.”

  Zamog stirred uncomfortably.

  “Why do we need the girl?” he inquired.

  Shamad laughed. “You do not need her, but I do! I have not had a woman in many weeks. Also, if the others catch up with us, we can use her as hostage. The boy warrior is chivalrous and noble of heart … I think he would not like to see me do to the girl what I did to you that time with the burning coals. I think he will lay down his sword and let me take him, to spare her the pain. Then you can kill him—as slowly as you wish!”

  The Dragonman flexed his massive hands slowly.

  “I like to kill men,” he said thoughtfully.

  “I know you do, you ugly beast!” Shamad laughed. “It gives you the same pleasure that I take from women, I have often thought. Well, we are wasting time. Pleasures can come later … I would like to put a league between myself and that Nomad boy before day breaks. Saddle up, and put the girl behind you. Bind her wrists together at your belly so she cannot get free when she awakens. And let us be gone, for the love of the Gods! These hills are not healthy at night.”

  A few moments later they rode on. The fourth moon was above the horizon by now and the desert beyond the low humped hills was awash in hazy shifting shadows. The young moon peered down with cold curiosity as the man and the monster and their captive rode straight across the soft sands into the east and vanished slowly from the sight of any eye but hers.

  iii. Bazan

  THE OLD Easterling wizard was brewing herb tea over the small fire, stirring the steaming fluid in a small iron pot with along-handled spoon of carved horn and sniffing in the rich aromatic fragrance with sleepy pleasure when the thing came out of the darkness toward them.

  They had ridden hard, to the edge of their horses’ endurance, and a while ago they had made a rude camp amidst the waste. Now they had eaten and, while old Akthoob brewed his tea, the boy Kadji rested, sprawled out on his blankets, using the saddle as a sort of pillow. Behind him in the lengthening shadows, his black Feridoon pony and the old wizard’s steed munched dried grain from leather feedbags.

  The first two moons had just arisen to tremble like orbs of magical colored light on the dim horizon, when the shadowy shape came without a sound out of the blackness of night to stand before them.

  It was a great grey shaggy brute with scarlet, lolling tongue and glistening white fangs, and it was enormous—almost as big as the young Nomad warrior himself.

  Akthoob uttered a shocked squeal and knocked his herb tea, pot, spoon and all, into the small turf fire.

  Kadji sprang to his feet, snatching at his weapons. Then he stayed his hand, for the shaggy grey animal was not making any signs of attack. And it looked familiar… .

  He stared into the lambent golden eyes of the creature and whispered a name, “Bazan!”

  The grey plains-wolf whined deep in his throat and wagged the shadowy plume of his tail, for all the world like a gigantic dog.

  “Kill it—kill it!” old Akthoob squeaked, fluttering his bony hands nervously as if hoping to shoo the wolf away. Then he paused, blinking owlishly at the beast, which had padded over to kneel at Kadji’s feet. Akthoob sucked in his breath between his teeth with a little whistling sound as, greatly daring, the boy warrior bent slowly and scratched his fingers deep in the thick coarse fur that grew behind the wolf’s pointed ears.

  The long pink tongue came lolling out and timidly licked the boy’s wrist.

  “It is Bazan,” said Kadji slowly, trying to keep the tense excitement out of his voice. “It must be! The plains-wolves do not roam these far wastes at the World’s Edge … and if it is not Thyra’s pet, why should a strange plains-wolf be so friendly … or be here at all, a thousand leagues and more from the habitat of his own kind?”

  Akthoob blinked nervously, but was forced to admit that the beast bore much resemblance to the tame wolf who had followed the flamehaired girl.

  “It knows the smell of my body from the weeks we dwelt together in the cave, that time I lay sorely injured and close to the black gates of Death,” the boy reasoned. “It knows me for a friend—but why has Bazan left the side of his mistress?”

  The old Easterling wizard cleared his throat with a dry cough. “This humble person might suggest that, uh, the honorable lady has met with an accident … some enemy, perchance …”

  The firelight flared in Kadji’s eyes. He chewed restlessly on his knuckles.

  “You may be right, old man. Shamad is somewhere in this waste of dreary sand …”

  “Ay, young sir! But it need not he him we seek has harmed or captured the flamehaired one. There are beasts haunt these desolate wastes at the World’s Edge. Aye, and the shades of long-dead men roam the shadowy margins of the world, if old tales be true …”

  “Well, whatever has become of Thyra, her wolf will lead us to where she lies,” the boy warrior said. If hurt or—or—slain,” the youth gulped, choking a little on the word, “Bazan will guide us to the spot. And if taken captive by Shamad or by some other, the wolf will aid us in tracking her and her captors, as he can follow her scent.”

  Old Akthoob wearily agreed. “But on the morrow, surely! These old bones ache from hours in the saddle, and the horses are worn to their limit and must rest!”

  Reluctantly, Kadji permitted himself to be persuaded, although every fibre of his hot young heart urged him to ride forth into the night on the trail of the flamehaired girl. But he knew it was not a wise course, for if pressed beyond their endurance, the steeds would founder and they must thence forward attempt the crossing of the waste afoot, which were very great folly.

  They slept that night rolled in thick blankets beside the guttering fire, and rose with first dawn to eat hastily and ride on toward the Rim of the World.

  All that day they rode, with Bazan loping ahead, nose to the ground, guiding them due east. Every two or three hours they paused to rest the horses, and Kadji bitterly begrudged every lost moment. All that day, and much of the night, and for most of the day that followed they rode ever onward, close on the trail of Thyra, and of Shamad the Impostor, too, although they could not be certain of that fact.

  As they rode, the little old Easterling wizard grew more and more discomforted. For it looked as if the trail was leading them due east across the world and straight to the gates of Ithombar, king city of the Immortals, whose lofty purple towers were said to rise on the world’s ultimate Edge, and which was forbidden to all mortal men by the Gods.

  iv. The Chase

  THYRA WAS more frightened than she could recall ever having been in all her life. True, she had been frozen with fe
ar when the hulking form of the weird monsterling had loomed up out of the darkness and had strode for her, scarlet eyes gleaming. But that had merely been the natural fear of being attacked and injured, and she would have felt the same feeling had it been a mindless savage predator come loping from the gloom of night’s darkness to assault her, and not the Dragonman who served the Impostor.

  It was Shamad himself who struck cold terror deep into her soul. Something in his icy, tense, beautiful face, something in the mad flame that burned ever in his fixed, glaring eyes, and something in the tension wherewith he held himself, and the harsh note of hysteria that rang ever in his voice, and most of all in his high-pitched, dreadful laughter—this was the thing that filled her heart with the cold, sodden ashes of fear.

  Since Zamog the Dragonman had captured her, neither he nor his master had offered her any harm. She was kept bound at all times, her hands tied behind her back when in the saddle, and her legs tied when they slept, and she was completely helpless, save perhaps for her witch powers, which came and went, fickle and untrustworthy, and which could not really be counted upon. If anything, the two males ignored her most of the time, seldom spoke to her, and when a need of the body demanded her attention, it was the blue-scaled monsterling who grudgingly assisted her. She felt no embarrassment or shame under his cold, inhuman eyes, for he was little more than a beast to her mind, and his strange species and her own were so far apart in the spectrum of life that his presence at her ablutions offended her no more than would the presence of her horse or of Bazan, her wolf friend, have given her offense.

  But Shamad she feared to the depths of her being, with an icy, heart-stopping terror mingled with a helpless loathing that was indescribable. Partly, this was due to the dread of a normal and healthy mind helpless in the hands of one who was clearly insane. And in part, it was because she knew that he desired her.

  For if Zamog regarded her with the aloof, impersonal eye of a beast, Shamad thought of her as a very young and a very desirable woman. She was, of course, a virgin—her youth would have made that certain, even without her Vows as a White Witch of Zoromesh. She was ignorant of adult relations and innocent of their physical aspect, but she had a woman’s instinctive knowledge of them, and all the dread and terror of a young girl helpless in the captivity of a man. She avoided the presence of Shamad—avoided even looking at him as much as was possible, fearing to catch his eye—but she was horribly aware that his staring eyes rested meditatively on her very often, and that his gaze lingered on the slim, firmly rounded lines of her strong young body, on the rise and fall of her firm young breasts, on her sleek hips and on the rondure of her thighs and on her long, slender, adolescent legs.

  And yet, despite his obvious interest and her complete and total helplessness before him, he had never touched her, never laid hand upon her, never even tried to kiss her.

  The only reason for this forebearance seemed to be the unknown force that drove Shamad on, night and day. He was filled with a strange tension, a restless urgent need to go ever onward. She was aware, from careless words he had let fall, and from bits of conversation between Shamad and his monsterling slave which she had overheard, that he well knew the boy warrior was close behind them, still on the trail of his revenge. But this alone was not enough to cause the fear and tension she saw in Shamad’s every word and look and movement.

  Zamog alone was more than a match for the young warrior of the Chayyim Kozanga, aye, and the old Easterling wizard, too. His dangling, apelike arms, swollen with massive thews, his broad, sloping shoulders, short bowed legs, and the immense barrel of his chest, naked save for a harness of belted straps, denoted strength and endurance that was far more than the human. Zamog could crush the life from the Nomad youth with a single hand!

  It was not, then, the fear of the vengeance that pursued them and was ever at their heels, that drove the Impostor and his monstrous slave forward with such restless speed. It was something else, some sickness of the soul, perhaps. Or perchance it was, simply, that they bad been running for so long that they could not pause or turn aside or double back, but could only continue running, as if impelled by a need that had by now become an unbreakable habit, a condition of life. It was strange; it was, somehow, horrible, this endless running away from something that followed close behind.

  But then, the coldly beautiful man was—mad.

  TIME BEGAN to blur together for Thyra. The hours became an endless procession of blurred sameness. They paused to rest or eat or sleep infrequently. The jarring ache in her bones, the bodily exhaustion that sapped her strength, the pain of her bound wrists, where tight thongs bit into her tender flesh, the chafed agony in her thighs caused by endless hours in the saddle, all of these dulled the edge of her consciousness. And the numb terror in her heart deadened her to any sense of time or place … they went ever onward, by night and by day, until it seemed at any moment they must come at last to the world’s remote and ultimate Edge … and somehow a ghost of fear awoke within the numb, weary mind of the flamehaired girl at that thought … for it seemed to her that when they did arrive at the Edge the mad, restless demon of pursuit that dominated the broken mind of Shamad would urge him to goad them on and over the Edge of the World … and they should fall forever through the darkness Of That Which Lay Beyond The World, the golden stars rushing past them in their endless fall … to fall forever through the limitless depths of the Universe … and Death itself would claim them before ever they reached whatever mystery was the Bottom of Infinity …

  ON ACROSS the grey dunes they sped, and whether Kylix the sun star rode in the blue vault of heaven or whether the black dome of night was lit by many wandering and multicolored moons, the girl could not say.

  And, after an eternity, they reached the Edge. And there was nowhere else to go.

  v. Wings of Storm

  IT HAD been brewing all that day, and in the last hours before the sun star sank in a funeral pyre of crimson flame in the distant west, the storm struck at last.

  They had known it was coming, the boy warrior and the old Easterling wizard. Thick clouds, black and turgid, swollen with vapors, had reared their dim castles against the sky since early afternoon. Within their tumultuous heart, the. storm had been slowly engendered.

  Now it spread its wings and struck at them.

  Wind buffeted them and stinging sand blinded them, and viewless hands plucked and tore at their garments until Kadji could almost believe in Akthoob’s tales of the ghosts of the dead who haunted these drear wastelands.

  Gasping for breath, he sucked in dry sand and spat it out while fumbling with a bit of cloth to cover his eyes from the howling winds and the whirling grains of sand they bore on their mighty wings.

  Beneath him, Haral stumbled and fell to his knees. Kadji slid down from the saddle and grabbed the reins, leading the little black Feridoon pony to where Akthoob stood. The old man had already dismounted and stood with his face pressed against the shoulder of his horse to keep the flying sand from his eyes.

  “We can’t ride in this murk,” Kadji yelled in the old wizard’s ear.

  “This person agrees … yet we could be buried if we stand here like this,” Akthoob shouted in hoarse reply.

  “What can we do, then? There is no place wherein to take shelter from the storm—the land is as flat as the palm of my hand!”

  At length, they decided to continue forward, but afoot, leading the horses. Muffling the heads of their steeds by winding cloth about them so as to protect eyes and ears and nostrils from the stinging blows of the howling sandstorm, and wrapping their cloaks about their own faces, the boy warrior and the old wizard led the horses forward, tugging at the reins. The grey wolf, Bazan, loped on ever ahead.

  The journey seemed endless. The wind howled like a horde of demons and they were like to have smothered in the thick cloaks. Wind tore at them as they plodded forward, leaning into the blast, and their feet slipped and slid in the swirling sand underneath them. They had no idea where th
ey were going, nor in which direction, and they dared not unveil their eyes in an attempt to tell their direction from the glow of the sun star. For sandstorms here in the Waste at the World’s End can strike men blind: the winds that drive the stinging particles of sand have traveled far, and may perchance have begun on the surface of another world, blowing across the empty gulfs between this world of Gulzund and the next.

  Thus they were plodding heavily along, heads downward, gasping for breath, feet slipping and sliding in the unsteady footing—when Zamog struck!

  It was Haral saved the life of its young master. The Nomad youth, blinded and deafened by the storm, could not have seen the, lurking Dragonman in time to defend himself. But the sharper senses of the little black pony scented the nearness of danger and of death. The pony halted suddenly, tossing its head, and neighed in a muffled cry. Then, as the blinded Kadji fumbled for the reins, the Feridoon pony reared, and struck out with sharp flying hooves whose blow would have smashed the skull of a man.

  The hulking Dragonman had come out of the flying murk and was standing behind Kadji, lifting a gigantic scimitar. The monsterling had tracked the two humans and their horses for hours, ever since Shamad, arriving at the World’s End and unable to go any farther, had sent him back to slay those who rode in pursuit. The lashing winds, the stinging sand, had bothered the giant Dragonman not the slightest. When the flying sand grains became painful, Zamog unsheathed the hard, transparent nictitating membranes within his eye-sockets and slid them across the scarlet eyes. Like all his monstrous kind, the Dragonman had no proper eyelids and slept with his eyes open.

  The horse surprised him. He had not really noticed the little black pony, his attention being fixed on the blinded, muffled Nomad boy. He had unwisely discounted the possibility of danger from the little black horse—very unwisely, as it turned out. For as Haral reared, the pony struck out with sharp hooves. Iron plates shod those hooves, and they were driven by the coiled and massive power of the, horse’s mighty shoulders, stronger and heavier than Zamog’s own.