The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King (22 page)

It wasn't threats from Tyr or Giustenal, Nibenay, Gulg, or Raam, however, that drove Hamanu to
build Urik's walls or ensconce himself in a mud-brick palace. People simply kept coining to his city on the
hill. Humans, of course, though Hamanu didn't ask questions of the immigrants, so long as they didn't
look too much like elves or dwarves—the only uncleansed races left. His dusty, sleepy town grew into a
sprawling, complicated city that, of itself, attracted more folk, mostly honest folk, but a few would-be
warlords, brigands, and tyrants among them.
Hamanu let them all in, and weeded the worst out after they'd begun to sprout. When his city
became too big for him to do everything, he turned to the men and women who already wore his
medallions around their necks. After that, it was only a few short steps to the templarate, with its three
bureaus and distinctive yellow robes. After the templarate, the walls and the palace grew almost by
themselves.

When Borys recovered his sanity, he founded Ur Draxa to house Rajaat's prison and to keep the
rest of Athas— especially his fellow champions—at bay. Borys's plans had worked for thirteen ages—an
eternity, perhaps, in the minds of mortal men— but not nearly long enough from Hamanu's perspective.

He put his head down and slogged the rest of the way through the deserted outer city in
thoughtless silence. The sludge thinned. When Hamanu reached the spell-blasted walls that had separated
Borys's palace from the city, he was on the verge of Tithian's ceaseless storm. As Windreaver had
promised, icy winds alternated with gouts of sulphurous steam. The ground was slick and treacherous,
and nothing grew.

Hunkering down in such shelter as he could find, Hamanu removed the pearls from the amulet
case. He held them above his head, letting the heat of his hand melt them into a translucent jelly that
flowed down his arm and over his body. Not quite invisible, but no longer a perfect imitation of his loyal
high templar, Hamanu had, he hoped, made himself as inconspicuous and unremarkable as the critic
lizard that had sacrificed its life for this moment.

He found and followed the path that would take him to the heart of Ur Draxa and the lava lake.
The warm mist grew redder with each step Hamanu took. It was tempting to blame the changes on the
War-Bringer, but the cause was far simpler: daytime was drawing to an end.

Hamanu cursed. He muttered over his poor luck. He'd lost more time in the Gray than he'd
imagined. Night would be as dark and thick as pitch. If he wanted to see the lava lake with his own eyes,
he'd have to crawl to its shore on his hands and knees. He'd be so close to Rajaat's bones that he
doubted anything would hide him. Going on under such circumstances was the sort of folly that got
mortals killed. Immortal Hamanu kept going, step by step.

He'd taken about a hundred cautious strides, deafened by Tithian's thunder but cheated of the
illumination of the blue lightning that almost certainly accompanied it, when he hunkered down again to
measure his progress. This close to the Dark Lens, it was difficult to sense anything other than its
throbbing power. Hamanu was so intent on finding the world's push and pull beneath the Dark Lens that
he didn't immediately notice that its presence was growing stronger even while he remained still.

As Hamanu understood Rajaat's magic, the Dark Lens was an artifact of shadow rather than of
pure or primal darkness. It was—or should have been—less potent after sunset when shadows grew
scarce. Unless—

A revelation came to Hamanu, a revelation so simple and yet so fraught with implications that he
rocked back on his heel: Sadira's power came from shadow. By day, she was the champions' equal, but
by night, Sadira was a mortal sorceress, a novice in her chosen art, as Pavek was in druidry. Her own
spells were dross, cobwebs that couldn't hold a fly, much less the immortal inventor of sorcery.

Pavek could raise Urik's guardian spirit, but only when that spirit wished to rise. Could Sadira's
spells bind Rajaat when Rajaat didn't wish to be bound?

Hamanu didn't doubt that the Tyrian sorceress had meant to seal Rajaat in an eternal tomb. The
living god of Urik wasn't that foolish. Five years ago, when they must have stood near this very spot,
he'd probed Sadira's mind thoroughly—by night.

The living god of Urik changed his opinion of himself.

By night, Sadira wasn't infused with the sorcery that she'd received from the shadowfolk in the
Pristine Tower— Rajaat's white tower, where he'd made his champions. By night, she sincerely believed
that she'd put both his bones and the Dark Lens in a place from which they could never be retrieved,
never misused. By day, she probably believed the same thing, but by day Sadira wielded Rajaat's
shadow-sorcery, and what she believed was influenced by what Rajaat wanted.

Whim of the Lion—his own complacency could be taken as proof of Rajaat's lingering influence
over him!

With that thought burning in his mind, there was little need, now, to risk a closer approach.
Hamanu wanted to know more about Sadira: what she'd seen and felt five years ago and what she'd
been doing ever since, but he wouldn't get the answers to those questions in Ur Draxa. As he began his
retreat, Hamanu realized that Sadira's shadow-cast warding spells had ebbed enough to allow the
War-Bringer's essence out of the leaking Hollow and into his bones beside the Dark Lens.

The Lion-King made himself small within his illusions as Rajaat drew the blue lightning down
through the fog. Hamanu was closer to the lava lake than he'd imagined, close enough to observe, in that
blue lightning flash, patches of molten rock on the lake's dark surface, close enough to watch in horror as
shards of translucent obsidian erupted from the lava, and disappeared into the fog.

Slowly and carefully, Hamanu took another retreating step. A moist, brimstone wind whispered
his name.

"Hamanu. Lion of Urik."

Not Rajaat's voice, but Tithian's. Tithian the usurper, Tithian the insignificant, Tithian the
high-templar worm who'd betrayed everyone around him and wound up, like a sole-squashed turd, on
the bottom of everything.

"Rajaat says Hamanu of Urik's the key to a new Athas. He says when you become a dragon, the
world will be transformed. Borys of Ebe, he says, was but a candle. You will be the sun. I say, if that
were true, you wouldn't be skulking about disguised as a lizard."

Thirteen ages, and a man learned when to rise to a challenge and when to let it pass
unacknowledged. It was discomforting to know that Rajaat and the worm were sharing confidences, but
discomfort was nothing new for the last champion.

"I say," Tithian's windy voice continued, "I say Rajaat's the one who wants to transform Athas,
and it will take a true dragon to stop him. I know the way, Hamanu; get me out of here. I'll play Borys's
part. I'll become the Dragon of Tyr. That's enough for me."

Hamanu swallowed a snort of disgusted laughter. There was some truth to the notion that the
quality of the mortal man determined the power of the immortal dragon, and by that measure, the worm
would be a lesser dragon. But that was not what Tithian believed. The craven fool believed he'd have
unlimited power; worse, he believed he could trick the Lion of Urik into helping him acquire it.

The only thing Tithian could truly do was draw Rajaat's attention, now, just when Hamanu was
nearly out of danger. Mindful of the obscuring fog and the slick, treacherous footing, Hamanu picked up
his pace. He needed to be outside the palace's blasted walls before he dared a netherworld passage. The
walls were still ahead when Tithian let out a howl that ended abruptly. Hamanu cast aside both illusion
and caution. He ran for the perimeter as another voice, larger and more menacing, filled the wind.

"Hamanu," Rajaat purred. "Come to me, little Manu."

The dank wind reversed itself. It blew in Hamanu's face, pushing him toward the lava lake. He
lowered his head, digging into the soggy moss with black-taloned dragon feet.

"You're starving, Manu. You've starved yourself; you're a shadow of what you should be. So
much the better, Manu.

Once you begin to fill your empty spirit with life, you won't be able to stop until every mote of
foul humanity is part of you. I've waited long enough, Manu. My other champions rise against you,
Manu—they've never liked you, they were easy to persuade. They want a dragon—" Rajaat's voice
turned indulgent: a predator toying with its prey. "You never told them, Manu; they think you're just like
them.

"Never!" Hamanu shouted back as the air turned hot enough to dispel the fog and jagged,
lava-filled crevasses yawned open all around him.

Desperately, he slashed an opening into the Gray. He was ankle-deep in molten rock before he
dived into a different sort of mist and darkness, clinging to the hope that Rajaat needed to trap him in the
material world to force dragon metamorphosis upon him.

He'd had the same hope in Urik thirteen ages ago.

The Gray closed about him, safe and familiar, Hamanu remembered that fateful day. He'd
received and ignored two invitations to return to the white tower. Rajaat came in person with the third.

"The world is almost cleansed," Rajaat had said in a now-abandoned chamber of Hamanu's
palace. "Only the elves, the giants, and the dwarves remain, and their fates will be written soon enough.
Borys has the last dwarves trapped at Kemelok. Albeorn and Dregoth are winning, too. It's time for my
final champion to begin the final cleansing. The Rebirth races defiled the land with their impurities because
humanity itself is a desecration of this world. Forget trolls and the eyes of fire, Hamanu—serve me now
as the Dragon of Athas!"

Before Hamanu had recovered from the twin shocks of Rajaat's appearance and his demands,
the first sorcerer had seized his wrists. His illusions had evaporated between heartbeats. He was himself,
gaunt, with leathery flesh stretched taut over black bones. Then his body began to swell, and his mind
screamed the deaths of five-score mortals, whose only crime was their proximity to him.

Hamanu—and Urik—had survived that day because Rajaat hadn't conceived that one of his
creations could resist not only him but the dragon frenzy as well. In truth, it hadn't been particularly
difficult. When he'd felt the obscene ecstasy surging through his flesh, Hamanu had used it all to quicken a
single, explosive spell. He'd hurled himself into the Gray and run to Kemelok, where Rajaat had just told
him the one champion he dared trust could be found.

This time there was no Borys, no Kemelok, no place at all to run. There was only Hamanu
himself and, still standing guard above the Black, that tawny-skinned giant with a golden sword and a
lion's black mane.

By the time Hamanu knew that Rajaat hadn't pursue him, he was far from Ur Draxa, far from the
Hollow and the Black, far from the mysterious leonine giant, and far from Urik as well. The narrowness
of his escape and a sense of impending doom made his precious city the last place in the heartland he
wanted to be. As Hamanu drifted aimlessly through the Gray, however, no other material-world
destination sprang into his mind.

He couldn't imagine approaching Gallard or Dregoth as he'd approached Borys of Ebe outside
Kemelok all those ages ago, and Inenek was a fool. The heartland was home to guilds of powerful
sorcerers, druids, mind-benders, and other magic-wielders. Hamanu knew more about their practices
and strongholds than they imagined, and knew, as well, that none of them could light a candle in Rajaat's
wind. As the Lion-King of Urik, he'd disdained allies for thirteen ages; as Rajaat's last champion rebelling
against his creator, staring at three short days before doom, there was no one who could, or would, help
him.

Hamanu needed to think, to examine his choices, if he had any, and to plot a strategy that, if it
would not bring him victory, would at least spare his city. He imagined himself on a serene hilltop, reading
the answers to his many questions from patterns in the passing clouds. The place was real in Hamanu's
mind, but it wasn't real enough to end his netherworld drift. Green hilltops and cloudscapes belonged to
Athas's past. Aside from Urik, all the places Hamanu imagined belonged either to the past or to his
enemies.
His mind's eye finally fixed on a landscape filled with stones the same color as the netherworld:
the troll ruins in the Kreegill peaks above Deche. The ruins hadn't changed in the ages since he'd last seen
them; he had no difficulty finding them in the netherworld. A few walls had tumbled, and there was no
trace at all of the bits of mattress Manu found beneath the massive troll beds, but the rest was exactly as
he'd remembered it.

Not so the human villages. Turning away from the troll houses, Hamanu beheld a barren valley.
Wars hadn't devastated the Kreegills. The valley had been intact when Hamanu left it last. No other
champion had set foot on its fertile soil until Borys came, in his dragon madness, and sucked all the life
away.

A hundred years after he'd sated himself completely, metamorphosis, Borys recovered his sanity,
but the land— the land wasn't so fortunate. The sky had been permanently reddened by a haze of dust
and ash. Until the worm, Tithian, began his sulky storms, a mortal human might experience rain once in a
lifetime—as muddy pellets, nothing like the life-giving showers of Manu's boyhood.

Rain or no, wind still blew in the Kreegills. Thirteen ages of constant, parched wind had buried
the valleys beneath rippling blankets of loose gray-brown dirt. The soil itself was good, better, perhaps,
than the heavy soil Hamanu remembered. If the rains came back—and farmers built terraces to keep the
soil in place until long-lived plants put down their roots—the valleys would bloom again. Until then,
there'd be only the skeletal branches of the tallest trees reaching out of their graves.

The loss Hamanu felt as he turned away from the valleys was for Athas, not himself. There was
nothing down there to remind him of what he'd lost: Deche, Dorean, his own humanity. His memory held
a face he named Dorean, but were his Dorean to reappear, he wasn't certain he'd recognize her. She'd
never recognize him. The young man who'd danced for her was gone. His metamorphic body could no
longer perform the intricate steps.

Ages had passed since Hamanu wished that he could weep for his lost past or wished that he
was dead within it. There were no gods to grant a champion's wishes. He'd never weep again, and he'd
lived too long to throw his life away.

In his natural shape, Hamanu was taller than any troll. He looked directly at the carved
inscriptions he'd once studied from the ground, and lost himself recovering their meaning from his
memory.

"Can you read it?"

A voice—Windreaver's voice—asked from behind his back. Hamanu let out a breath he'd held
since Ur Draxa. He hadn't wanted to be alone. The troll's voice was the right voice for this place, this
moment.

" 'Come, blessed sun,' " he answered, tracing the word-symbols as he translated them. " 'Warm
my walls and my roof. Send your light of life through my windows and my doors.' " He paused with his
finger above the last group of carvings. "This one, 'awaken,' and the next pair, 'stone' plus 'life'—they're
on every stone in every wall. Wake up my stones? Wake up my people? I was never certain."

" 'Arise, reborn.' We believed the spirits of our ancestors dwelt in stone. We never mined, not
like the dwarves. Mining was desecration. We waited for the stone to rise. The closer it came to the
sun—we believed—the closer our ancestors were to the moment of rebirth."

"And do you still believe?" Hamanu asked. He didn't expect an answer, and didn't get one.

"Who taught you to read our script?" Windreaver demanded, as if the knowledge were a sacred
trust, not to be shared with outsiders, with humans especially.

"I taught myself. I was here at sunrise, whenever I could get away from my chores, imagining
what it had been like. I looked at the inscriptions and asked myself: what would I have written here, if I
were a troll, living in this place, watching the sun rise over my house. After a while, I believed I knew."

Silence lengthened. Hamanu thought Windreaver had departed.

He considered issuing a command that the troll couldn't disobey, demanding recognition for his
accomplishment. He'd learned the script without assistance and, save for the two symbols that dealt with
a faith he couldn't imagine, he'd learned it correctly. But that would be a tawdry triumph in a place that
deserved better. With a final caress for the carved stone, Hamanu turned and saw that he wasn't alone.

"I taught myself to read your script. I couldn't teach myself to speak it. If you wish to insult me,
do it in a living language."

"I said you read well."

The Lion-King knew his captive companion better than that. "When mekillots fly," he challenged.

"No, you're right. I said something else, but you read well. That's the truth. Nothing else matters,
does it—in a living language?"

"Thank you," Hamanu replied. He didn't want an argument, not today. But it seemed he was
going to have one: Windreaver's face had soured into an expression he hadn't seen before. "Is it so
terrible? A boy comes up here—a human boy. He imagines he's a troll and deciphers your language."

"What I said was: I could wish I had met that remarkable human boy."

Hamanu studied the ground to the right of his feet. He remembered the boy's shape, his voice,
and his questions as he stood among these stones. Memory was illusion; there was no going back. "I
could wish that, too. But we had no choice, no chance. Rajaat took that away before I was born. Maybe
before you were born. Our paths were destined to cross on the battlefield, at the top of a dark-sky cliff,
far from anywhere either of us knew. One misstep, by either of us, and we'd never have met at all."

" 'One misstep'?"

"And the Cleansing Wars would have ended worse than they did. You could have held Myron of
Yoram to a stalemate, but Rajaat would have found another lump of human clay to mold into his final
champion. The dwarves, elves, and giants wouldn't've survived... and neither would the trolls..." he
paused a second time and raised his head before adding the long-unspoken words—"My friend."

Windreaver's silver-etched silhouette didn't shift in the sunlight. "I believe you," he said softly,
without saying what he believed. "Our race was doomed."

Looking at the troll's slumped, translucent shoulders, the Lion-King remembered compassion.
"You believe your dead dwell in stone, awaiting rebirth. When the wind's done scouring these stones,
there'll be trolls again, someday. You'll teach them their language." He thought of the pebble imbedded in
his forearm. "You might be reborn, yourself."

Terrible silver eyes met Hamanu's. "If the spirits of our dead survived in stone, the War-Bringer
would have declared war on stone. He would have made a champion to suck life from stone."

The War-Bringer had. If there'd been life sleeping in these ruins, Rajaat's final champion could
have destroyed it. "I wouldn't... won't. It will not happen. Not in three days. Not ever."

"You learn," Windreaver concluded. "Of all your kind, you alone learned from your mistakes."

"I learned from you. But. by then, there were no choices so there couldn't be mistakes. When
Rajaat came to me in Urik and I ran from him. it was your taunts—"

"I didn't taunt you, not that day."

"You were waiting for me when I came out of the Gray near Kemelok. You'd gotten there first;
you knew exactly where I'd go. You said that if I ran—if I kept running— Rajaat would make another
champion to replace me. How many years had it been since that day on the cliff? You hadn't said a word
in all that time—I didn't think you could. As a man, I was still young—what did I know? Fighting and
forming. You were ages older. Of course I listened to you. 'Think of what the War-Bringer's learned
from you!' I've never forgotten it; I remember it as if it were yesterday. I realized that it wasn't enough to
disobey Rajaat; I had to stop him. I must remain his final champion. There can none after me."

"I'd sworn I wouldn't speak to you. Then you broke away from the War-Bringer. I saw it, heard
it, but I didn't believe it. You refused what he offered. Then you ran to Borys, and I was afraid for you,
my enemy, my warden, so I broke my oath," said the troll's spirit, as though in recitation.

"You made me think before I talked to him."
"For all the good it did, Manu. For all the good it did, long ago..."

Borys hadn't welcomed another champion's sudden appearance behind his Kemelok siege line.
The Butcher of Dwarves hurled a series of Unseen assaults at his illusion-shrouded visitor. Hamanu
deflected everything that came his way, all without raising a counterattack. After a short lull, a solitary
human strode out of the besieger's camp. It wasn't a good time for meeting another champion. Borys
made that clear from the start.

As Borys explained, ten days earlier, he'd fought a pitched, but not quite decisive, battle against
the dwarven army here at Kemelok. He'd given their king, Rkard, a fatal wound—at least it should have
been fatal. Borys wasn't certain. That was half his anger. The sword Borys had carried into the battle was
enchanted. Rajaat had given it to him the day he'd become the thirteenth champion. The sword imparted
a lethal essence to any dwarf it cut open, as it had opened Rkard, but the cursed dwarf had gotten lucky.

Rkard's axe had taken a chunk out of Borys's shoulder, a blow that would have quartered a
mortal man. Battle-stunned and unable to hold his weapon, Borys had fallen. His officers had carried him
back to their lines—leaving the sword behind in the hairy dwarf's chest. Borys admitted that he had slain
three of his best men before he got his rage controlled, His own life was never in danger, but the damned
sword was irreplaceable.

Hamanu listened to the Butcher of Dwarves's tirade and wisely didn't mention that his victory
over the trolls hadn't depended on any enchanted weaponry. He waited until the other champion had
calmed down enough to ask the obvious questions.

"What do you want? Who sent you? Why are you here?" asked Borys.

"Rajaat came to me in Urik."

"This is my war, Troll-Scorcher, and I'm ending it now. No one's coming in to share my kill. If
Rajaat's whispering in your ear, that's your problem, not mine."

"Wrong," Hamanu countered. He opened his mind to share his recent encounter with their mutual
creator, but Borys was warded against such invasion. "He means for me to finish your war—"

"Never," Borys snarled and quickened another spell. "I warned you."

"—And start another cleansing war, this time against humanity itself."

A needle-thin ray of orange light shot from the palm of the Butcher of Dwarves to Hamanu's gut,
where it raised a finger-wisp of oily smoke before Hamanu deflected it with a gesture of his own. Once
pointed at the ground, the orange ray seared a line a hundred paces long across the already ash-streaked
dirt.

"He showed me how it would be done," the Lion-King said, "and gave me a foretaste of human
death."

"We can all kill, Hamanu," Borys said wearily, as if explaining life's realities to a dull-witted child.
"Kill all Urik, if that pleases you, but stay away from my damned dwarves, and know this: make war with
humanity, and you're making war with me."

"I'll win."

"When mekillots fly, Hamanu. You're the last, and the least. You may have vanquished the trolls,
but they were almost finished when Yoram lost his fire. You don't have the wit or power to battle any
one of us. Go back to Urik. Be careful, though—I hear you're taking in half-bloods. Give a dwarf shelter,
and I'll make war with you."

"Forget dwarves," Hamanu advised. "Think about what happens next. What did he promise
you?"

"A new human kingdom in a new human world, a pure world, without dwarves and the rest of the
Rebirth scum. I'll rule from Ebe—or here at Kemelok—until I can wrest Tyr from old Kalak. After that,
who knows? We needn't be enemies, Hamanu. There's enough to go around, for now."

"You seemed wiser. I thought you knew better than to believe him."

"If Rajaat could cleanse the world, none of us would exist. He's the War-Bringer, not the war
commander; the first sorcerer, but not a sorcerer-king. He needs us more than we need him."

Locked in what he hoped would be humanity's final battle with the Rebirth dwarves, Borys
wasn't eager to be seen conferring with a man who was clearly not-quite-human. After throwing a scrap
of cloth on the ground, to shape his spell, Borys tried to reconfine Hamanu in his customary black-haired
and tawny illusion.