The Quest of Kadji

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.