The Quest of Kadji (13 page)

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.

THYRA WAS more frightened than she could recall ever having been in all her life. True, she had been frozen with fear 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.

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 they 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 sand-storms 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.

One caught him in the shoulder, half spinning him around. The other caught him full in the face.

Kadji slipped in the loose sand, trying to hold onto the reins of the bucking, kicking horse, and fell to his knees. Off balance, Zamog swung wildly but the scimitar whistled past Kadji and spun itself from the Dragonman’s nerveless grip. The sledgehammer blow of the horse’s hoof had broken his shoulder, and he would fight with that scimitar no more.

Kadji tore the cloth from his face and ripped the sacred Axe from the bosom of his robes and sprang at the staggering figure of Zamog, looming like some shambling demon of the storm amidst the flying murk.

But Haral’s thundering hooves had won the fight. The second blow had taken the hapless monsterling full in the face. The force of a battering ram was behind that iron-shod hoof. The skull of a human being would have splattered like a broken egg shell before so terrific a blow. The tougher and heavier bone of the Dragonman’s skull had held—but just barely.

Zamog lifted a mask of streaming horror to face the attack of the Nomad youth.

Both eyes were gone, smeared to liquescent ruin. The lower jaw was broken and hung and waggled helplessly, baring glistening and terrible fangs that could have torn Kadji’s flesh to scarlet ruin if they could have closed on him. But they would never close again.

It was a marvel that the Dragonman lived. In fact, it was a miracle that he was still on his feet. Staggering, blinded, one arm hanging like a dead weight from the shattered shoulder, the blue-scaled monsterling yet groped for the boy warrior with his single hand. Even then, had that hand closed on Kadji, such was the strength in that one good arm that it could have crushed the Red Hawk of the Chayyim Kozanga to mangled death.

But it did not.

The Axe of Thom-Ra lifted, glittering in the wan light of the dying sun star, and came flashing down.

The first stroke took Zamog full in the chest with a heavy
thunk
like a forester chopping wood. The glittering blade sank two inches into the tough, blue-scaled flesh: a rib or two cracked; Zamog staggered back, retaining his balance with some difficulty.

The second axe-blow took the Dragonman full on the side of the neck, half shearing off his head, and severing the spinal cord. It was a terrible wound: oily, malodorous serpent-gore pumped in a thick, gluey rope from a cut artery, slithering down his massive body to stain and besplatter the sands underfoot.

Zamog fell, slowly, in sections, like a tower whose foundations have eroded away. He went to his knees, then to all fours, then be sprawled at full length in the shifting sands. His broad, flat-tipped tall slapped the sand a time, then twitched spasmodically. And he died there in the cold grey sands at the World’s Edge.

The sandstorm ended shortly thereafter, and the two mounted and rode forward again—due east.