The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King (27 page)

The human glamour faded from Hamanu's hand. Black talons absorbed the sunlight as he raised
them between himself and Sadira's face. A threatening gesture, for certain—but threat and gesture only:
he intended to slash an opening into the netherworld and leave this place before he had even more to
regret.

Sadira responded with a head-down lunge at his midsection. Regardless of illusion, the Lion-King
carried the weight and strength of his true, metamorphic self. Sadira's attack accomplished
nothing—except to increase his anger and confusion. He backhanded her, mildly by a champion's
standards, but hard enough to fling her across the room. She hit the doorjamb headfirst, loosening plaster
from the walls and ceiling. Her head lolled forward.

Stunned, Hamanu told himself, as he strained his ears, listening for the sound of her heart. Her
heart skipped, and her breathing was shallow. A single stride, and he was on one knee beside her.
Illusion was restored as he pressed human fingertips against her neck. He found her pulse and steadied it.

"Get away from her!"

With his concentration narrowed, Hamanu hadn't sensed anyone in the doorway until he heard a
young man's voice, which he ignored. He hadn't come to the Asticles estate to kill anyone; he wasn't
leaving until Sadira was on her feet and cursing him again.

"I said: Get away from her!"

Hamanu felt the air move as a fist was cocked. The blow struck his temple, doing no more
damage than Sadira's whole body lunge had done. He raised his head and saw a human-dwarf mul in the
doorway.

"I know you," he muttered.

The Lion-King wasn't good when it came to putting children together with their proper identities,
and the mul, cocking his fist for another try, was still several years short of maturity. Children were
changeable, both in their bodies and their thoughts, but there were only two muls Hamanu associated
with Sadira. One was Rikus, who was old enough to know better when he'd led a cohort of Tyrian
gladiators in a foolish assault against Urik over ten years ago. The other had been a half-grown boy when
he wielded the sun spell that had separated Rajaat's essence from the substance of his shadow.

"Rkard," Hamanu said, flushing the name of Borys's ancient enemy out of his memory. "Rkard, go
away. There's nothing for you to do here."

The youth blinked and lowered his fist. Confusion wrinkled his handsome face. It seemed, for a
moment, that he'd simply do as he'd been told. But that moment passed, and he laid his hand rudely on
Hamanu's shoulder.

Hamanu lowered the sorceress gently to the floor. She, Rikus, and the rest of the Tyrian hotheads
had raised the young man staring intently at him. He had a fair idea what was going to happen once
Rkard recognized him.

"Rkard, don't do it."

The warning came too late. Three separate streams of fire, one orange, one gold, and the third
the same color as the sun, grew out of the young mul's sun-scarred hands. As Rkard cried out—sun
magic exacted a fearsome price on its initiates—the fire-streams braided together and bridged the gap
between them.

Hamanu cried out as well. The sun's power was real. His flesh burned within his illusion, but it
could burn for a long time before he'd be seriously injured. Hamanu could have brushed the sun-spell
aside but, almost certainly, it would have gone to ground in Sadira's defenseless flesh.

He tried to reason with the mul and got no further than his name, "Rkard—"

Rkard howled again as he evoked greater power from his element. The braided flames became
brighter, hotter. Hamanu's illusion wavered in the heat; he ceased to resemble a human man. He retreated
toward the open window. The mul followed, a smile—a foolish, ignorant smile— twisting his lips.

"Let it go, Rkard, before someone gets hurt."

The mul couldn't talk while he cast his sun-spell. He let his hands speak for him, clenching his fists
until the tricolored flame was a white-hot spear impaling a tawny-skinned human man against a wall.

Hamanu closed his eyes. A thousand years evaporated in the heat. In his mind, he was a man
again, with his back to a mekillot rib as Myron Troll-Scorcher assailed him with the eyes of fire, only now
he could fight back. The sun behind him and the shadow at his feet were both his to command. All he had
to do was open his eyes and his tormentor would be ash.

Hamanu did open his eyes but, rather than quicken any of the myriad destructive sorceries lurking
in his memory, he thrust his hand into Rkard's incendiary sun-spell, then closed his fingers around it. The
white fire consumed his illusion. To keep his fist where it needed to remain, Hamanu folded his spindly,
metamorph's legs beneath him. He hunched his shoulders and crooked his neck. All the while, the bloody
sun's might was held captive in the Lion-King's fist.

Hamanu squeezed tighter. He transcended pain and found triumph where he least expected it.

The spells of sorcery, the formulas of the magic that Rajaat had discovered, mastered, and
bequeathed to Athas before he decided to cleanse it, had to be quickened before they could be cast.
Something had to be sacrificed before sorcery kept its promise. The dilemma facing any sorcerer, from
the most self-righteous member of the Veiled Alliance to Rajaat's last champion, was—at its
simplest—what to destroy?

Preservers strove to limit the sacrifice by extracting a few motes of life's essence from many
sources, destroying none of them; defilers didn't care. Those who could used obsidian to quicken their
spells with the essences of animals as well as plants. Champions could hoard the life essence of the dead.
A few—Hamanu, Sadira, and Rajaat's shadow-minions—quickened spells by transforming sunlight, the
ultimate essence of all life, into shadow.

The Dark Lens intensified a spell after it was cast, but no sorcerer—including Hamanu and
Sadira—could use the Dark Lens as Rkard had used it against Rajaat: focusing the bloody sun's light first
inside the Lens, then letting it out again, letting it consume the War-Bringer's shadow. And not even
Rkard could duplicate that uncanny feat: Sadira had buried the Lens and Rajaat had almost certainly
found a better hiding place for his own life essence than his shadow.

But when he seized the white-hot stream and contained Rkard's sun-spell within his fist, Hamanu
found that the young mul was a living lens who concentrated the sun's quickening energy before a spell
was cast. With Rkard beside him, Hamanu could seal Rajaat's bones and the Dark Lens in a cyst the size
of a mountain. He could counter anything his fellow champions threw at Urik, be it spells or armies of the
living or the undead. And, for the first time in a thousand years, Hamanu thought it might be possible to
thwart a champion's metamorphosis.

Hamanu appealed to the mul with thought and words,

"The sun is stronger than both of us, Rkard. Together, we can forge spells that mill
imprison Rajaat forever, but only if you relent now. Persist, and the sun will destroy you long
before it destroys me. Save yourself, Rkard—"

"Never! Betrayer! Deceiver! You die first, or we die together and forever."

Hamanu remembered himself on the dusty plain, a young man consumed by hate and purpose.
He opened his fist. The sun-spell engulfed his arm; the obscene bliss of the eyes of fire threatened to
overwhelm him. He remade his fist; the threat receded but didn't disappear.

Sunlight, Hamanu thought. Blocking the sun and casting his own shadow over Rkard might break
the spell. He straightened his legs, bursting the room's walls and ceiling.

Somewhere outside the white fire, a woman screamed.

Still catching the sun-spell in his fist, Hamanu edged sideways. Rkard collapsed when the fringe
of the champion's shadow touched him. The white fire darkened to pale yellow; tiny flames danced on
the youth's arms. While Hamanu hesitated, Rkard wrenched free of shadow. The sun-spell whitened. The
youth would not relent—no more than Manu would have relented a thousand years ago.

Hamanu's short-lived dreams crumbled: the chance of finding another young mul already
hardened to the bloody sun's merciless might—of finding one in time—was incalculably remote. He
prepared to take the larger step that would center his black shadow over Rkard and his spell.

The woman screamed again, this time the mul's name, "Rkard!"

A red-haired streak shot through Hamanu's shadow. It wrapped itself around the enthralled youth
and heaved him sideways. The spell broke free, a diminutive sun hovering an arm's length above the
mosaic. In a heartbeat, it had begun to strengthen. In another, Hamanu had thrown himself on top of it.
The ground shuddered. For an instant, Hamanu was freed from his black-boned body. Then the instant
was gone, and he was himself again, reforming the flawless illusion of a tawny-skinned man.

Sadira cradled the mul's head and shoulders in her lap. He was exhausted, unable to speak or
move, but otherwise unmarked, unhurt. Hamanu's spirits soared.

"It could be done! We could do it. We could go to Ur Draxa and repair your ward-spells. We
could save Urik. Together nothing could stand against—"

The sorceress's eyes narrowed. She wrapped her arms protectively over Rkard. "Stand with
you?" Her expression said the rest: I'll kill him myself before I let that happen.

Hamanu tried to explain what had happened when Rkard's sun-spell struck him. Sadira listened;
he perceived the spirals of her thoughts as she considered everything he said, but none of her conclusions
included helping a champion save his city.

"I took the sun-spell inside, into my heart and spirit. Your shadow-sorcery doesn't go that deep,"
he warned. "You'd be consumed."

"So you say, but I don't believe you. Dragons lie, and you're a dragon. You'd deceive us and
betray us. While even one of your kind exists, Athas can never be free."

"Free," Hamanu muttered. He had a thousand arguments against such foolishness, and none of
them would sway her. Better to let her learn the hard way, though she wouldn't survive the lesson, and
there was no guarantee Rkard would cooperate afterward. "For Athas, then, and your precious
freedom—go carefully to Ur Draxa, look at what's happened to the lake where you sealed Rajaat's
bones beside the Dark Lens. Look, then come to Urik at dawn, three days from now. I'll be waiting for
you."

Enver stood in the map room doorway. "Omniscience, a messenger approaches."

The sharpest mortal ear could not pick out the sounds of sandals rapidly slapping the tiles of the
palace corridors as the messenger neared the end of her journey. Her journey continued because
Hamanu didn't rely on his immortal ears. He'd known about the message since it passed through Javed's
hands in Javed's encampment south of the market village ring.

"Good news or bad, Omniscience?"

Hamanu smiled fleetingly. "Good. Nibenay sent it with our messenger, alive and intact. I believe
he has accepted my terms. We'll know for certain in a moment, won't we?"

Enver nodded. "For certain, Omniscience. Our messenger alive, that's certainly good news."

The dwarf's tightly ordered mind accepted that the Shadow-King was also a living god, and that
gods, all other aspects being equal, weren't omniscient with regard to one another. His eyes were wide
with awe and dread when the dusty half-elf slapped to a halt beside him. She clutched Gallard's black
scroll-case tightly in both hands, as if it were a living thing that might try to escape or attack her.
Nibenay's nine-rayed star glowed faintly on the case's wax seal, which protruded between her thumbs.

Knowing what she carried, although not the message it contained, she'd pushed herself to her
limit and beyond, as had every other relay-runner who'd touched it

"O Mighty One—" she gasped, beginning to cramp from her exertions.

Enver steadied her. He put his own powerful short-fingered hand around hers, lest the scroll case
slip through her trembling fingers and shatter on the floor.

"Give it to me," Hamanu suggested, reaching across the sand-table where he'd recreated Urik
and its battle lines.

The half-elf doubled over the instant Enver took the case. The trembling was contagious; the
dwarf's fingers shook as he handed it to Hamanu.

"See to her needs, dear Enver," the Lion-King said, dismissing them and their mortal curiosity
with a nod of his head.

Ah, the predictable frailties of his mortal servants... the pair stopped as soon as they were out of
sight and wrung their hands together in desperate, silent prayers: Good news. Good news. Whim of the
Lion, let the news be good.

Hamanu slid his thumb under the scroll-case seal. The hardened wax popped free, and a tiny red
gem rolled onto the sand pile that stood for the village of Farl. Never one to believe in omens, Hamanu
fished it out of the sand and squeezed it.

Alone. When the sun is an hour above the eastern horizon, he heard the Shadow-King's
hollow, whispery voice between his own thoughts. The armies will begin their engagement. I will cast
the first spell, then Dregoth, then Inenek. Do what must be done, and the walk of Urik will be
standing at sundown. This I solemnly swear.

The Lion-King let the bright gem fall back on the sand. By itself, the gem was worth many times
its weight in gold. What was the worth of a champion's solemn oath? At least Gallard was no longer
spouting nonsense about spells to forestall the creation madness that had overtaken Borys. Beyond that,
Gallard's oath was worth what Hamanu's oath would have been in similar circumstances: very, very little,
no more than a single grain of sand.

Hamanu studied the sand-table in front of him. Gentle mounds and grooves imitated the more
detailed map of Urik's environs carved onto the map room's northern wall. Strips of silk littered the sand:
yellow, of course, for the city's forces, green for Gulg, red for Nibenay, black for the largely undead
army of Giustenal. The red, green, and black strips were where Rajaat promised they'd be. If there was a
battle tomorrow, it would be on a scale not seen since the Cleansing Wars. If ±ere wasn't a battle,
there'd be mortal sacrifice to equal the day Borys laid waste to Bodach.

Was there a third alternative?

Yellow silk fingers surrounded the sandpile that stood for the market village of Todek, southwest
of the city. They faced nothing, except a tied-up bundle of blue ribbons. Blue, for the armies of Tyr. Blue,
for the army—enemy or ally—that hadn't arrived.
Hamanu's eyelids fell shut. He clutched his left forearm where, beneath illusion, an empty place
remained unfilled.

Not an army. An army wouldn't make a difference. But two people—even one person, one
young mul with the sun's bloody mark on his forehead—that could make all the difference in the world.

Windreaver couldn't answer. There'd be no answer.

As soon as he'd returned to Urik after his disastrous meeting with Sadira at the Asticles estate
outside of Tyr, Hamanu had sent a peace offering to the sorceress: a champion's apology, rarer than
iron, rarer than a gentle rain in this dragon-blasted world. He'd sent golden-crust himali bread from his
own ovens, because bread had been peace and life and all good things in the Kreegills, and a hastily
scribed copy of the history he'd written for Pavek, in the hope that she would understand why he was
what he was, and why losing Windreaver was a loss beyond measure.

He should have sent Pavek. Pavek had a true genius for charming his enemies. As a runaway
templar, he'd charmed the druids of Quraite. As both a runaway and a would-be druid, he'd charmed the
Lion-King himself. If anyone could have undone the hash that Hamanu had made of his Tyrian visit,
Pavek would have been the one.

But for Hamanu, sending Pavek out of Urik would have been sending away his last—his
only—hope. So he'd appealed to the Veiled Alliance of sorcerers in Urik, stunning them, of course, with
his knowledge of their leadership, their bolt holes, and all that his knowledge implied. For Urik, he'd told
the old rag-seller who was Urik's mistress of unlawful sorcery. And, reluctantly, she'd sent an adept
through the Gray with his gifts.

The adept had arrived. The gifts had been conveyed to the Asticles estate. Beyond that, without
Windreaver to be his eyes and ears in tight-warded places, Hamanu knew nothing, which was, itself, an
answer. The sorceress wasn't coming. Whether Rajaat plucked Sadira's strings in subtle melodies, or she
was simply a mortal woman as stubborn and single-minded as he'd been at her age, was a dilemma the
Lion-King would never resolve.

These last two days, he'd picked apart the memory of their abortive conversations as often as
he'd examined the deployments on the sand-table. He'd blamed Sadira— mostly he'd blamed
Sadira—for her failure to listen, but he'd blamed Rkard, too, and Rajaat, and Windreaver, for planting
the weed's seed in his mind in the first place. At one time or another, Hamanu had blamed everyone for
his blundering failure to win Sadira's help.

Recalling his own words, he'd blamed himself: his blindness, his prejudice, his overwhelming need
to answer hurt with hurt. In the end, with the blue silk ribbons still tied in a compact bundle and Gallard's
red gem in the sand beside Khelo, blame was unimportant.

"Mistakes," he told the absent Windreaver, "were made. I had choices, and I made the wrong
ones. Now, I pay the price of my own foolishness. What do you think, wherever you are, old friend, old
enemy? Will Pavek come to Urik's rescue with his druid guardian? Will the guardian vanquish the dragon
I become? Will that be enough? Is there a guardian who can stand against the first sorcerer?"

He swept his arm across the table, leveling the mounds, burying the multicolored ribbons beneath
the sand.

"From the day he made me his champion, I have prepared for the day when I would face my
destiny. I had a thousand times a thousand plans, but I never planned for today."

Hamanu extinguished the map room lanterns with a thought. He left the room and found Enver
sitting on the floor outside the door.

"You heard?" Hamanu asked.

The dwarf's upturned face, pale and vacant, answered before his thoughts became coherent.

"Go home, dear Enver." Hamanu helped his steward to his feet. "Stay there tomorrow. You'll
know what to do."

Enver shook his head slowly from side to side. "No," he whispered. "No..."

Hamanu laid his hand atop the dwarf's bald head, as he might have done with a child. "It will be
better, dear Enver. I will not be able to protect or spare you, and whoever comes after me—"
"Omniscience, there can be no after—"

The dwarf shook his head, ducking out from beneath Hamanu's hand. His focus, that uniquely
dwarven trait that guided a dwarf's life and determined his fate after death, was foremost in the thoughts
Hamanu gleaned. It was a face the Lion-King scarcely recognized, though it was him, Hamanu, as Enver
knew him.

"Your focus will be fulfilled, dear Enver. It is I who abandon you, not you who abandon me." He
put a guiding hand on his steward's shoulder and pointed him away from the map room. "Go home now.
It's time."

Enver took a few flat-footed steps, then turned, painted a new portrait in his mind's eye, and
turned away again. The swift painless poison Hamanu had provided for all his household was, in truth, a
regular precaution whenever he led his army to war. Rajaat's champions had learned how to kill each
other. The dwarf's determination not to use it was an almost-tangible cloak around his shoulders as he
walked down the corridor. Hamanu hoped he'd change his mind. The fate of anyone who'd been close to
the Lion-King wouldn't be pleasant once the Lion-King was gone.

Hamanu waited until the corridor ahead of him was silent. Then he followed Enver's footsteps.
From the map room, he went to the armory, from the armory slowly through every public room. Except
for the slave and servant quarters, which he avoided, the Lion-King's palace was deserted. He'd sent
away as many as he could, to Javed's camp or to their own families.

The sun had set some time ago. Slaves had set torches in the hundreds of wall sconces, as they'd
done every night for ages. Hamanu snuffed the torches out, one by one, with a thought or a memory as
he walked by. He came to the throne room with its monstrosity of a throne; he wasn't sorry to leave that
behind.

Above the throne hung the lion's head lantern, the eternal flame of Urik. Hamanu recalled the day
he'd hung it there and lit it. Immortal wasn't eternal. He'd known there'd come a day, a night, when it was
extinguished—but not this night. He left it burning and felt its yellow eyes on his back as he left the throne
room and began his circuit of his private places, closing doors, saying good-bye, until he came to his
cloister sanctum.

His vellum history was there, a leather scroll-case beside it. He'd written no further than
Windreaver's last battle. A thousand years went unrecounted; wars with all his neighbors, with rebels,
criminals, and blighted fools. Except for the dead, all his wars had been alike. If he had written them,
they'd all read: We fought; I won. Urik prospered. Urik endured.

There was nothing more to write. Hamanu rolled the vellum sheets together, tied them with a silk
cord, and slid them into the case that he slung over his shoulder. Bathed in moonlight, the Kreegill murals
painted on the walls were studies in charcoal and silver; they seemed too real to consider touching.
Pavek's tools stood where he'd left them, in an orderly row against the little cottage. The novice druid
had restored the scorched dirt. He'd planted grain in the ground he'd tilled and tended. High as a man's
forearm, it, too, was silver in the moonlight.

Hamanu plucked a sprig and held it to his nose. He remembered the smell.

When the cloister doors were bolted shut for the last time, from the inside, Hamanu made a
familiar slashing motion through the air. Netherworld mist enveloped him. He emerged beneath the palace
gate-tower, a slightly built, dark-haired human youth with a leather case slung over a narrow shoulder.

The templar guards didn't notice him, nor did anyone else. Urik's streets were quiet, though not
as doom-laden as the palace. War had been a regular occurrence throughout the Lion-King's reign. Even
siege camps beyond the ring of market villages weren't unknown—and weren't a source of great concern
for the ordinary Urikite. After all, as the magic-voiced orators reminded them at the start of each watch:
Urik has never lost a battle when the Lion-King leads her armies.

Outside the Lion-King's inner circle of confidants and advisors, the city's plight was not widely
known. Mortal minds, Hamanu had learned long ago, were ill-suited for lengthy confrontations with
despair. Let them carry their faith to the end, or to the Lion-King's fountain in the city's center where, by
moonlight and torchlight, a small crowd had gathered.
Long, slender eel-fish swam in the fountain's lower pools. They were bright streaks by day, dark
shadows by moonlight, and sharp-toothed at any time. When a Urikite made a wish, second thoughts
were ill-advised, and woe betide any light-fingered criminal who tried to skim the ceramic bits from the
bottom. Those coins belonged to the Lion-King, the living god who cherished them, though he had no
use for them. His eel-fish would eat just about anything, but their favorite snack was a finger or a toe.

Let him lead us to victory. Make him invincible before our enemies. Return our king, safe,
to us—

As if they knew Hamanu, the Lion of Urik, was not a god at all.

He was lost in listening when he felt a tug on the hem of the plain illusory shirt he wore.

"Want to make a wish?" a little boy asked.

The boy's thoughts were of a brother, a giant of a brother who'd been called up in the second
levy a quinth ago, and of his mother, a shrunken woman on the other side of the fountain. The woman
gave a shy, toothless smile when Hamanu looked at her.

"My brother's outside," the boy said. Neither he nor his mother had the least notion that
explanations were unnecessary. "You got a brother outside? A sister? Somebody?"

He had no brothers, not for a thousand years, but Hamanu had somebody—ten thousand
somebodies in yellow and mufti—outside the wall. "Yes."