The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King (16 page)

The Lion-King's armies were unbeaten because the Lion-King was not too proud to take his
advisers' advice.

Evaporating puddles from the Tyr-storm made for a sultry, sticky afternoon. Men, women, and
Hamanu himself shed their ceremonial garments—or the illusion of them— and, clad in plain linen,
thrashed out a battle plan. Night had fallen when Hamanu gave his approval to the best notions that
mortal and immortal minds could devise, never hinting that it wouldn't be enough if he were right about
the enemy they faced.

Enemy or enemies.

Try as he might in odd moments in the map room, or afterward, alone on his storm-tossed
rooftop, Hamanu could not wrestle the day's events into a single pattern. Rajaat's champions had
weaknesses deriving from their own human natures and the spells that created them. They'd contrived to
keep their weaknesses secret, but after ages of spies and spells, Hamanu could scarcely believe that he'd
been any more successful keeping his secrets from his peers than they had been keeping theirs from him.
He'd had Windreaver, of course, but he didn't know that he was the only champion whose victory was
one ghost shy of complete. And Gallard had talked to Borys, who'd known why the Lion of Urik would
never become the Dragon of Urik.

Unless Rajaat were still behind it all. If Rajaat had cast the spells that brought Uyness's voice to
the Lion-King's throne...? But, no, Hamanu hadn't recognized the personality behind the spell, and
whatever enmity the surviving champion peers had toward one another, it wouldn't dull their wits where
the War-Bringer might be involved.

Or had Rajaat found a way to conceal his sorcerous essence?

Hamanu found no answers on the rooftop above his moonlit city. The sounds of rescue and
repair, of mortal life determined to continue, no matter the price, rasped his nerves. He slashed the air
and returned to his workroom, where the city's noise was masked by walls and Pavek was enthralled by
the unfinished story written on the vellum sheets.

The Lion-King's sandals and jewelry were illusion. They made no sound as he approached the
lamplit worktable.

"Were you bored—?"

Pavek shot out of his seat before Hamanu finished his question. The chair toppled behind him and
the table in front of him. Loose vellum, the ink stone, the stylus and— not to forget—the leather-wrapped
shard went flying. The air snapped as Hamanu, moving faster than sight or sound, caught the leather a
handspan above the floor. For a moment, they both stared at the innocent-seeming parcel, then at each
other; then Pavek, who'd barely caught his balance after his leap, dropped hard on his knees.

"I am an oaf, O Mighty King," Pavek insisted breathlessly, though his agitated thoughts implied
that the Lion of Urik might have given a poor man a bit of warning.

"And I might have warned you, mightn't I?"

Wisely, Pavek said nothing. Hamanu righted the table, returned the shard to its top, and collected
a handful of vellum sheets.

"You were reading. What do you think?"
A veritable storm of thoughts stewed in Pavek's mind, but they were all half-formed and elusive.
As impatient as any fountain-side poet reciting for his supper, Hamanu had to wait for the man's spoken
words.

"That's all? No greater understanding of me, of the choices I made and make? It is not the
version you were taught in the orphanage," Hamanu said with certainty. That version—the Lion-King's
official history—was a god's tale, full of miracles, revelations, and infallibility, nothing like the human
frailties the vellum revealed.

It was embarrassing to beg a mortal's opinion. It was degrading. Worse, it stirred the dark fire of
Hamanu's anger. "Speak, Pavek! Look at me! Ask a question, any question at all. Don't just kneel there
like a poleaxed inix. I've told you secrets I've kept for ages. Don't you want to know why?"

"O Mighty King, forgive me, but I couldn't hope to understand. I have so many questions, I
wouldn't know where to begin—"

"Ask, Pavek. Look at me and ask a question, ask as if your life depended on it, for it does!"

The head came up, wide-eyed and very mortal, very fragile. The question flowed exactly as it
formed in Pavek's mind—

"Were you Rajaat's favorite? Is that what you became after—?"

Two questions: twice as many as he'd commanded and an excuse—if Hamanu needed one—to
slay the trembling man where he knelt. But, strangely, the rage was gone. Hamanu walked around the
table, righted the chair, and eased his illusory self onto its seat.

"The answer that comes to me, Pavek, is no. I was never Rajaat's favorite. I hated him before I
knew what he was, before he made me what I became, and he knew I hated him. I wouldn't have
tolerated his favor, and for all these years I have believed that I didn't have it. Tonight, though, it's not me
who asks the question, but you, a mortal, whom some might call my favorite. Hatred doesn't protect you
from my favor, dear Pavek, and so I realize I have become what I hated when I was a man.

"Today is a sad day, Pavek. Today I've realized that my hatred amused Rajaat, amuses him still,
as yours amuses me. I was the last of his creations—but not because we imprisoned him. No, he'd had
two hundred years to ponder his mistakes before he created me. I was the last because I was everything
he meant a champion to be. I loathed him, but, yes, Pavek, I was Rajaat's favorite. I carried in my bones
his hopes for a cleansed and purified Athas; I still Hamanu recalled the mortal man he'd been and felt the
weight of his immortal age as he'd never felt it before. Looking across his worktable, he saw the gray
dust and empty memories of an unnatural life. He didn't see Pavek at all, until the man said—

"I don't loathe you or hate you, O Mighty King."

"Then you are either an innocent or a fool," Hamanu said wearily, indulging himself in a moment of
self-pity— and eager to stifle a favorite, whose voice, at this moment, sounded too much like his own.

"Telhami says not, O Mighty King."

Perhaps Rajaat was right. Rajaat had already lived two thousand years or more when he began
creating his champions. Perhaps a man needed several ages to learn the ropes of immortality—to learn to
pick his favorites from the ranks of those who hated him.

When Telhami lived in Urik, Hamanu had forgotten Dorean and every other woman. Her eyes,
her hands, her laughter had made him human again. For how long? A year?

Twenty years? Thirty? He'd lived an enchantment. Every day had been bright and sparkling, yet
different; every night was the stuff from which men's dreams were spun. Then, one morning she was
dressed in traveler's clothes.

She'd had a vision during the night of a place beyond the Ringing Mountains, a place where the
air was cool and moist, where the ground was a thick, soft green carpet, and trees grew halfway to the
sun. Cold springs bubbled year around in the place she'd envisioned, and at the center of everything was
a waterfall shrouded in mist and rainbows. Her life in Urik was over; she had to find her waterfall.

Druids cannot stay, she'd said—as if that explained everything.

And he, of course, could not go. Urik had already suffered from his neglect. A generation of
templars had succeeded to power thinking that their king was a besotted fool. The ordinary folk on
whose shoulders he and the templars stood did truly curse the Lion-King's name.

Will you return? he'd asked, as countless other men and women had asked their departing
lovers, but never Hamanu, never the Lion-King, not before or since.

Telhami had returned, in her way. She'd settled her druids close enough to Urik that he knew
roughly where she was, but on the far side of lifeless salt, where his magic couldn't reach her. Until one
night, when this Pavek, this stolid, stubborn lump of humanity who stirred forgotten memories, gave his
king passage across the waste. Hamanu had saved Telhami's village from one of his own. He would have
saved her, too, but she chose to die, instead.

He never knew if she'd found her damned waterfall. Because he'd loved her, he hoped she had.
Because she'd left him, he hoped otherwise. Pavek might know, but thirteen ages had taught a farmer's
son not to ask questions unless he truly wanted the answers.

"Go home," he told Pavek. "I'll watch the chest overnight. Come back tomorrow or the day
after."

The templar rose to one knee, then froze as a breeze spiraled down from the ceiling, a
silver-edged breeze that roiled the vellum and became Windreaver.

A fittingly unpleasant end to an unpleasant day.

"I thought you'd gone to Ur Draxa."

"I have a question, O Mighty Master."

"I might have known."

A breeze and a shadow, that was all the influence the troll had in the material world, but he could
observe anything— Rajaat in his Ur Draxan prison or a scarred templar reading sheet after sheet of
script-covered vellum.

"Your little friend might find the answer interesting, O Mighty Master if you're inclined to
answer."

Hamanu could pluck thoughts from a living mind or unravel the memories of the naturally dead; he
could do nothing with his old enemy, Windreaver, except say—"Ask for yourself. Don't involve Pavek in
your schemes."

"O Mighty Master, it's his question as well as mine. I heard it off his own tongue as he turned the
last sheet over."

Poor Pavek—he'd said something that Windreaver had overheard, and now he was using every
trick he'd learned as a templar, every bit of druidry Telhami had taught him, to keep his wayward
thoughts from betraying him. It was a futile fight, or it would have been, if Hamanu weren't wise to
Windreaver's bitter ways.

"Ask for yourself!"

His voice blew Windreaver's silver shadow into the room's four corners. It was no more than a
moment's inconvenience for the troll, whose image reappeared as quickly as it had vanished.

"As you command, O Mighty Master. Why did Rajaat choose a thick-skulled, short-witted,
blundering dolt, such as you were, to replace Myron of Yoram?"

He almost smiled, almost laughed aloud. "Windreaver, I never asked, and he never told. He must
have had good reasons—not from your view, of course. You would have beaten Myron, eventually, but
once I was Troll-Scorcher, my victory was inevitable."

A blunt-fingered shadow hand scratched a silvery forward-jutting jaw. "Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Someone taught you strategies and tactics Yoram never imagined, and you never guessed while you
were..." Windreaver's voice, his deep, sonorous troll's voice, trailed off to a whisper.

"Alive?" Hamanu finished for him. "You cannot accept that the son of a Kreegill farmer
conquered the trolls. You'd prefer to believe that Rajaat conjured some long-dead genius to inhabit my
body."

"The thought had crossed my mind. I was there in the sinking lands, Manu of Deche. I saw you: a
stringy human. You looked young, acted younger, standing behind your bright steel sword with your jaw
slung so low that a mekillot could crawl down your gullet. You were unworthy of the weapon you held. I
watched as your own men came to kill you for die shame and defeat you'd brought them. Then I blinked,
and you were gone. The next time I saw you—"

"Were we betrayed?"

Windreaver inhaled his tears. "Betrayed?"

"Did Myron of Yoram sell my veterans to your trolls? Did you know where to find us?"

"We retreated to the sinking lands whenever the yora plants there had grown high enough to
harvest. The Troll-Scorcher never followed us; you learned why—"

"I followed you."

"Yes, O Mighty Master, you followed us everywhere, but Myron of Yoram did not. I think he
did not expect you to return, but he didn't betray you, not to us. I didn't guess the great game Yoram
played until I looked over Pavek's shoulder and read your recounting."

They stared at each other, through each other—immortal ghost and immortal champion. The air
was thick with unspoken ironies and might-have-beens.

Pavek, the mortal who didn't understand, couldn't possibly understand, cleared his throat. "O
Mighty King—what happened after the battle? How did you escape from the prison-hole?"

Hamanu shook his head. He hadn't escaped, not truly, not ever.

"Yes," Windreaver added, breaking the spell. "Rajaat must have prepared quite a welcome for
you."

"Not Rajaat," Hamanu whispered.

No sorcery or mind-bender's sleights could alter those memories. He could feel the walls as if
they were an arm's length away, just as they'd been when he realized he'd been stowed in a grain pit. The
remembered bricks were cool and smooth against his fingertips. Give a man a thousand years, and he
wouldn't scratch his way through that kiln-baked glaze or pry a brick out of its unmortared wall. Give him
another thousand, and he wouldn't budge the sandstone cap at the top of his prison, no matter how many
times he pressed his limbs against the bricks and shinnied up the walls, no matter how many times he
came crashing down to the layer of filth at the bottom.

"Not Rajaat?" Windreaver and Pavek asked together.

Hamanu spied the brass stylus on the workroom floor. He picked it up and spun it between his
fingers before closing his hand around the metal shaft. "The Troll-Scorcher, Myron of Yoram, plucked
me out of the sinking lands. He had me thrown in a grain pit on the plains where his army mustered—"

"A grain pit," Windreaver mused. "How appropriate for the pesky son of a farmer."

The Lion-King said nothing, merely bared his gleaming fangs in the lamplight and bent the stylus
over a talon as black as obsidian, as hard as steel.

"At night—" Hamanu's lips didn't move; his voice echoed from the corners and the ceiling. "At
night I could hear screams and moans through the walls around me. I wasn't alone, Windreaver. The
Troll-Scorcher had pitted me in the midst of my enemies: the trolls. Big-boned trolls who could stand,
maybe sit cross-legged—if they were young enough, agile enough—but never stretch their legs in front of
them, never lie down to sleep. Not once, in all the days and nights of their captivity, which was, of
course, as long as mine... or longer. And mine was...