The Quest of Kadji Read online

  He grew puzzled that she could not understand this, for surely she knew he bore with him the sacred honor of his people and could not act as he wished. He was not a free agent, but a bound man. Why could the stubborn girl not see this and stop mooning at him one moment and snapping rudely at him the next?

  From feeling puzzled he came to feel hurt and from thence to feeling angry with her, and he exhibited a bit of rudeness himself, from time to time. Old Akthoob sighed dismally, seeing the growing gulf of silence and misunderstanding between the young people, and reflected sadly that to be young is to be terribly vulnerable; it was better, he thought, on the whole, to be old and be past such storms and furies.

  But the wise old wizard said nothing to either of them. He had his reasons. He suspected a terrible truth about the girl but it was not his secret to divulge. Besides, although he did not think so, he might be wrong.

  The next morning they awoke to find Thyra gone.

  iv. Ambar

  SHE MUST have arisen before dawn, saddled her grey mare, packed her clothing, weapons and provisions, and ridden off with the great plains-wolf loping like a shadowy phantom at her side. She had left no message, no explanation.

  Kadji was grimly silent. He had by this time recovered most of his strength and expressed his determination to press on to the town of Ambar which lay further east; there they could pause before deciding whether to continue east on a trail now months old, or give up the Quest altogether.

  The old Easterling wizard did not ask why this decision could not be reached here in the hills. He guessed that this cave bore too many reminders of the girl Thyra, too many memories, for Kadji to endure, They rode east on the Grand Chemedis Road under skies clear and fresh and across a world quickening with the green impulse of spring,

  Ambar was a squalid huddle of hovels woven through with reeking alleys, dominated by the hulking ruins of a fallen wall and the time-eaten wreckage of a mighty citadel. Once this had been a provincial outpost of the great world-conquering Horde, but that was ages ago, when Chemedis, City of the Kings, had been young and rich and powerful. That age had long-since passed, the two travelers knew, and although a shrunken remnant of the Chemed Horde yet lurked in the half-ruined, half-deserted metropolis of Chemedis itself, many leagues to the east, all of this portion of the vanished empire had been abandoned for centuries and was given over to wilderness.

  They found an inn in Ambar where they could stay and house their steeds, but no one knew aught of any travelers before them. They lingered a time, Kadji grim and sullen, old Akthoob dismal and unhappy, wondering what to do. And then occurred a diversion.

  Merchant caravans still used the Grand Chemedis Road, of course. The mighty highway spanned half a continent, and on their year-long journeys between the raw young kingdoms of the west and the ancient and decadent empires of the east, there was no better route than the massive way of paven road that had been constructed in the golden days of the first and mightiest of the great Ja Chans of the Horde.

  Some of these merchants were of Akthoob’s own people, as their yellow skin, black queues, and slitted eyes attested. During long evenings in the inn of Ambar, the old wizard conversed with his countrymen, and one evening he came to Kadji quivering with excitement.

  “It is an odd tale, but this lowly one suggests there may be something of interest therein,” he puffed, black eyes a-glitter with suppressed eagerness. Kadji bade him speak on.

  The tale was shadowy and elusive, but it hinted at something that made Kadji’s blue eyes sparkle. Far to the east, in the half-ruined splendor of Chemedis where the vapid, enfeebled, and powerless descendant of the world-whelming Ja Chans of old held his shrunken court, a mysterious and unknown being had materialized out of nowhere and had rapidly risen to a position of enormous influence. No man knew the history of the nameless one, nor from what dim corner of this world of Gulzund he had come, but he claimed to be a messiah returned from out of ancient time to awaken the weak and languid and decadent Horde to its golden days of former greatness.

  Old Chemedian prophecies whispered that a messiah would come after ages of time—a Masked Prophet who would rouse the Chemed warriors again, and place the descendant of the Ja Chans upon the world-spanning throne of his ancestors. Kamon-Thaa, the God worshipped by the Hordesmen, would lend him magical powers. And this prophecy had come to pass!

  “When did this Masked Prophet appear in Chemedis?” asked Kadji, frowning.

  Akthoob told him, and the boy warrior did some quick calculations. The date of the messiah’s appearance was about the time Shamad could be expected to have reached Chemedis, had he in fact traveled on into the east, instead of turning back. And it was not unlike the clever opportunist, having won but failed to hold one throne, to gamble for another… .

  “I suppose it could be him,” the boy muttered. “But have you any other reason to suspect the Masked Prophet to be our quarry, beyond the mere coincidence of dates?”

  Akthoob had indeed. “As proof of his god-given and sorcerous powers, the Prophet goes ever accompanied by a tame and subservient demon … a Serpent Demon, this person has been told … and Yakthuul the caravan-master, the source of this information, has seen this strange and hellish monster, and describes him shudderingly as hulking and anthropoid, but glittering in blue scales—”

  “—Zamog!” Kadji exclaimed. “It must be he!”

  Akthoob nodded, a smile of satisfaction on his thin lips.

  “So this lowly one surmised,” he purred.

  v. Caravan Trail

  KADJI WAS elated with this clue to Shamad’s whereabouts, although it would pose a bit of a problem to pluck his enemy from amidst the court of the Ja Chan. That problem, however, they would face when they came to it. But the assumption that the Masked Prophet of Kamon-Thaa and Shamad the Impostor were one and the same man was too logical to overlook, and worth a trip to Chemedis to investigate.

  Akthoob arranged passage for his friend and himself with his fellow countryman, Yakthuul, whose caravan was bound east on the Grand Chemedis Road and would pause for a time in the city of the Ja Chan before continuing further east and north to the kingdoms at the world’s remote edge. They had little gold left, but Yakthuul could always use a wizard to read the omens and ward off evil spirits, and another warrior handy with axe and sword was always welcome, as there were bandits aplenty who devoted their time to raiding the infrequent but always wealthy merchant caravans. Thus they rode out of the little town of Ambar under a grey and bleak dawn.

  Yakthuul the caravan master was fat and sleepy-eyed and rode in a comfortable carriage drawn by the shaggy little ponies of the eastern plains. This was due not only to his fondness for the bodily comforts but because he was too fat to sit astride a horse. Kadji held little converse with the merchant, who had a sort of suave contempt for the raw young kingdoms of the west, and considered Nomads of the plains like Kadji little better than barbarians, devoid of culture or history. But Akthoob was often invited to partake of the merchant princeling’s hospitality and came reeling back to the little tent he shared with the Red Hawk much the worse for liquor, night after night. Yakthuul, it seemed, was given to a potent beverage common in the kingdoms of the east, but unknown in the west. This powerful liquor was distilled from a fruit wine and was a heady intoxicant.

  It was on one of these evenings when Akthoob had imbibed a bit more freely than was his wont, that Kadji conceived of a clever plan. The boy warrior thought often of the flamehaired girl, Thyra, and of the mysteries surrounding her, and the enigma of her true identity. He was convinced that the old Easterling wizard knew or suspected her secret, although he concealed it from Kadji and would not divulge it. Thus one chilly night in early spring when they had been riding the caravan trail for two weeks, and Akthoob returned to their tent very much the worse for the potent alcoholic beverage, Kadji got him talking and maneuvered the direction of the conversation toward the girl Thyra and the surprising knowledge of the healing arts she had displaye
d when he lay ill almost to the point of death from the terrible wounds he had sustained in the camp of the villainous Perushka.

  “Odd that a Princess of the Blood should know how to care for an injured man with such skill,” he said, when the garrulous and drunken old wizard had begun to talk of Thyra.

  “Ah, more than odd, yes,” murmured Akthoob sleepily. “This humble person knows little enough of the healing science, but he knows that it is performed with herbs and elixirs, not with …” and here he used a word which meant ‘the-sending-forth-of-the-soul’ “…‘twas White Magic the young woman used, not medicine … aii, she is not what she did seem to be, although this one cannot guess why she did lie to us… .”

  It came out slowly that Akthoob suspected Thyra was not the Princess she had claimed to be, but one of the White Witches of Zoromesh! Kadji bit his lips, and murmured more questions into the ear of the sleepy old wizard.

  “The honorable youth could not speak of his love for the maiden for his vows forbid it … aye, but little did he suspect that the same holds true for the young woman, if indeed she be of the Zoromesh covens … for they are sworn to perpetual virginity.”

  Kadji suppressed a gasp of amazement. Sudden understanding flooded his mind: it was not to be wondered at, that a wall of silence and misunderstanding had risen between him and the girl, forming a breach between them.

  He, sworn to chastity for the duration of his sacred Quest, could not display the growing love he felt for the flamehaired girl … and She, sworn to virginity by the vows of her sorcerous sisterhood, was equally bound. But—neither had known of the other’s vow; and both misunderstood the silence between them for lack of response!

  He groaned and bit off a savage curse. O, the folly of it all!

  Each, bound by vows which forbade the expression of the affection they felt, had not understood the other to be similarly bound—had not understood why the other had not expressed that affection—had grown hurt, then angry, then bitter.

  Kadji put his head in his hands. Thyra was gone and he would not find her again in the wide-wayed world. She would never realize that he, too, felt the stirrings of love. The irony of the dilemma was cruel. But life itself is cruel, as the boy warrior was beginning to discover.

  vi. The White Witches

  THE NEXT morning they rose, Akthoob with an aching head and a queasy stomach, feebly swearing that never again would he imbibe so freely of Yakthuul’s fiery brandy.

  They breakfasted over a smoky fire and Kadji confessed that he had pried the truth out of his comrade the night before. Akthoob was glum and dispirited, and not entirely from the after-effects of his drinking the night before. He had hoped to spare the boy’s feelings by keeping from him his suspicions that Thyra was an impostor and had lied to them.

  Horns blew from the forefront of the caravan, and creaking wains began drawing into line for the days’ journey. They hastily crushed out their fire, saddled up, and mounted to join the wagontrain. As they rode in the wake of a huge wain, Akthoob miserably revealed the full weight of his suspicions.

  “This miserable person suspects the purposes of the noble young woman, although he has not dared to give words to them ere this,” he muttered. “Now they matter nor, nor can they deal the honorable Kadji greater hurt than his heart has already sustained.”

  He then, in his flowery and indirect mode of speech, explained the whole story for the first time.

  The wizards and sorcerers and magicians of this world of Gulzund, he told Kadji, are organized into various fraternities and guilds, among them being the White Sisterhood of Zoromesh.

  Although his homeland lay very far to the east, in the northern land of Zool which lay above the Yan Than Mountains near the Frozen Country, and though he had not previously visited the world’s west, old Akthoob knew by reputation of this Sisterhood.

  The motives of the White Witches were shadowy and mysterious, even to their brother magicians. But it was known that from time to time they intervened in the great affairs at the center of the world’s stage, for reasons unguessable, and then returned again to the seclusion of their remote and secret sororities. Akthoob had surmised that for some reason the Sisterhood had interested itself in the dynastic troubles of imperial Khôr, and had dispatched the girl Thyra, disguised as a Dragon Princess, to make contact with the Emperor Yakthodah.

  But Akthoob could not hazard a guess as to the purpose of her mission, nor did Kadji greatly care.

  It was enough to know that she had lied to him.

  But the question remained unanswered, was she his friend or his enemy?

  True, she had nursed him back to health, which is something one seldom does for a foeman. But that the motive for that action might have been an obscure sense of obligation, since it had been, to some degree, her fault that he had been cut down by the swarthy Perushka rogues in the first place.

  Had she been sent to build an alliance of power between the mysterious White Witches of westernmost Zoromesh and the Dragon Throne? Or had it been her purpose to expose Shamad for a rank impostor?

  She had told Kadji she meant to expose and thus destroy him, but Kadji could no longer trust anything she had said to be the truth, since she had lied about being a Princess of the House of Turmalin.

  And one lie—discovered—throws question on a thousand truths.

  He rode on all that day frowning in sullen thought, his mind a weary turmoil of conflicting emotions. If ever they met again, would it be as enemies—or allies?

  vii. City of the Ja Chan

  THEY PASSED half a moon on the long road into the mysterious and little-known realms of the east, and early summer was come.

  Golden Khôr was far behind him now, and the Nomad plains of his people even further remote. He felt lost and alone amidst an unknown world, as if the plain-lands that had been his home had become lost in the mists of the far distance.

  Now he traveled among a people strange and alien to him: a dwarfish folk with yellow faces, slant eyes and shaven pates, who rode curious shaggy ponies with braided manes and who went garbed in fantastic armor of lacquered and gilded leather, with conical helmets of polished copper. They spoke a strange tongue and worshipped alien gods, and among them, in these strange weird lands of the remote east, he felt very much the stranger.

  Akthoob, however, was his constant companion, and during the long days and nights they followed in the train of the mighty caravan of Yakthuul the merchant, the kindly old wizard patiently instructed him in the intricacies of the eastern tongue. It was bafflingly different from the language of the west, but he mastered enough of it to hold at least a halting converse with the bandy-legged little men about him.

  It felt odd to Kadji to find himself a stranger, for all his life had been spent among people of his own kind who spoke his own tongue and knew the same ways. He recalled when first be had encountered Akthoob, many months ago and many leagues to the west, in the House of the seven Moons in. distant Khôr. Then the little Easterling wizard had been the stranger; now their positions were reversed, and it was Kadji, with his rangy height, his length of leg, his pale skin and straight eyes and starting thatch of yellow hair, who was the stranger.

  He felt lost and alone here on the other side of the world. The world was vaster than he had guessed, and amid its endless leagues, he dwindled to a minute fleck upon a huge and unexplored chart. And his all-important mission, the redeeming of the sacred honor of his clan, dwindled into insignificance and he must be constantly reminding himself of the importance of his Quest. In truth it was hard, for now he moved in a world that had never heard of the Chayyim Kozanga Nomads, and to whom the holy Axe of Thom-Ra, and in verity Thom-Ra himself, were meaningless names.

  IT WAS thus, in a mood of alienage and strangerhood, that Kadji came to the king city of the once-mighty Horde, and found the gates of immemorial Chemedis opening before him.

  The city was vast and bewildering, but to every hand lay the evidence of an advanced and glorious civilization.
Khôr, for all its imperial magnificence, could have been tucked away in one corner of Chemedis and been easily lost.

  All of red stone was the old city built, or if not, then the masonry was sheathed in red plaster. The buildings were immense and complicated warrens, almost minor cities in themselves, each crowned with spires and minarets as thickly set as the boles of a forest. The walls of Chemedis were so enormous that entire regiments were housed within them, together with stables and granaries, barracks and kitchens,

  The architecture was bewildering in its multiform complexity: great, sleepy-lidded faces of stone gazed down from the eight-sided towers; fantastic dragon-hybrids writhed entangled coils above portal and arch; many-armed and beast-headed gods thronged the paven ways, lining entire avenues in rank on rank of carven stone idols so innumerable as to suggest pantheons as populous as dysasties.

  For all its size and splendor, the city was a half-deserted ruin. The entire southern half lay mouldering in decay; kingly mansions were gutted shells; great twisted trees grew in the midst of avenues where once Hordes had marched forth to the conquest of half the world, A once-sophisticated and urban people had degenerated to greasy-faced savages, squatting in filthy hovels built amidst the wreckage of immense palaces their own ancestors had reared. The black oil smoke of cookfires rose beside ragged tents; naked yellow children ran through paven ways buried beneath centuries of filth; statues lay fallen to fragments; fires had consumed entire suburbs and had burnt out, exhausting their flames against walls of imperishable marble.