The Quest of Kadji

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 cook-fires 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.

Amidst the vast sprawling metropolis rose the Sun Palace, the residence of the Ja Chan. It dwarfed every other structure in all the magnificent city, and it was still an imposing edifice despite centuries of neglect and decay. One entire wing of the enormous palace had collapsed over the interval of ages, and miles of what had once been immaculately tended gardens had been transformed by neglect into an untamed forest, almost a jungle. Kadji and Akthoob strode into the Sun Palace through a portal that reared thirty yards above their heads and into a hall so vast that the eye could not discern the roof thereof. Beggars and shamans camped in the very hall of the monarch, and Kadji saw alcoves that had become reeking latrines, shrines where now unkempt ponies were stabled, and withered crones huddled in filthy tents that had been made out of superb tapestries. The black smoke of camp fires rose here and there amidst the infinity of the colossal hall to add their grime to columns and architraves black with centuries of filth. The squalor and decay was indescribable; the noise and confusion abominable; and the stench beyond words.

The Ja Chan was fat and giggling, painted like a harlot, and covered with flashing gems. He squatted like a huge toad atop a dais covered with priceless carpets, heaped with cushions, over which a golden canopy was stretched. Once that canopy had blazed like the sun and billowed like a cloud; now it was filthy and tattered.

The Ja Chan hardly noticed their obeisance and nodded absently as Yakthuul deposited a silver-bound casket of treasure on the lowest step. He was busy plucking gobbets of some sweet paste from a battered platinum urn with fat, jewelled, dirty fingers, and stuffing them between the rosy painted lips of several beautiful little boys who lolled or squatted nakedly around his cushioned nest. As the boy-concubines giggled and slobbered, licking the sugary paste from his fat hands, Kadji looked away in disgust … and promptly forgot the nauseating squalor and license of this degenerate court in a blinding instant of revelation.