The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King (28 page)

"Bigger'n stronger than you, huh?"

He was Manu tonight, this last night in Urik; it had seemed appropriate. And Manu had been an
unimpressive youth, though not as spindly as the boy imagined, comparing Manu to his mountain of a
brother. If he'd been real, and not illusion, Manu could have slept outside the walls tonight; the third levy
would have taken him.

The boy tugged Hamanu's shirt again. "You scared?" And where the brother had been in the
boy's thoughts, there was fear, hurt and emptiness: all that a child could understand of war.

"Yes, a little." Manu knew better than to lie to children.

"Me, too," the boy admitted and held out a dirty, half-size ceramic bit. "We can wish together?"

"What shall we wish for?"

The boy pressed a pudgy finger against his lips. Hamanu nodded quickly. He should have known:
wishes were secrets between the wish-maker and the Lion. They tossed their bits in together: two tiny
ripples in the moonlight. Not even a god could have said which was which.

"It's gonna be all right, isn't it?" the boy asked, looking up at him. "The Lion'll take care of 'em,
won't he?"

"He'll try," Hamanu said.

He was spared from saying more when the boy's mother called, "Ranci!" and held out her hand.

"Whim of the Lion," Hamanu said to the boy's shadow as he darted around the fountain. "He'll try
to save them all."

The Lion-King put his fountain behind him and wandered the streets of his city. Pools of light
spilled out of every tavern doorway where folk came together to either find courage or lose fear at the
bottom of a mug. Taverns didn't have anything to soothe a champion's nerves. Nothing he could eat or
drink would make this night shorter. Nothing he could imagine would make it easier.

Pavek's thoughts from a few long nights ago came back to him: Surely my king needs friends
about him tonight. Hamanu hadn't wanted friends that night, and wasn't entirely certain he wanted them
now. But he'd intended from the beginning to give his history to the druid-templar who was—he cocked
his head and listened through the crowded melange of thoughts and voices—among friends.
Hamanu wandered back toward the palace, toward the templars' quarter with its crisscross maze
of identical red-and-yellow striped facades on identical streets. Throughout the ages, the rivalries within
Urik's templar bureaus had been as intense and deadly as the rivalries among Rajaat's champions.
Nothing Hamanu could have done would have put an end to rivalry, but by keeping the bulk of his
templars in yellow robes and all of them in identical dwellings in just one quarter of the city, he'd done as
much as one man could to lessen the damage rivalries caused.

They hoped.

Within his slight-framed illusion, Hamanu remained Hamanu. His champion's ears listened through
the walls as he walked and yanked the most flagrant of his weedy templars as he passed their dwellings.
He filled their minds with morbid guilt and lethal nightmares; he savored their anguish as they died. Then
he calmed his vengeful heart and put his fist on the door of Pavek's house.

He had to knock twice before he heard someone moving toward the door. Even then, he wasn't
certain the woman was coming to open it or was chasing a child who'd strayed into the vestibule. With or
without his preternatural senses, Pavek's house was one of the noisiest dwellings in the templar quarter.
Hamanu was about to attract Pavek's attention through his gold medallion when, at last, he heard
footsteps on the interior stairs, and the door swung open.

It was the woman he'd heard before, and she did have a damp and writhing child straddling her
hip. She wasn't a slave—Pavek didn't keep slaves—and she wasn't one of the servants Hamanu had
hired to open the house before Pavek returned to Urik from Quraite. She wasn't a Quraite druid, either;
druidry left its mark on those who practiced it, as did any magical or Unseen art, and she didn't bear it.
Stirring her thoughts gently, Hamanu was surprised to discover she was simply a woman who'd lost her
man to the second levy and, reduced to scrounging for herself and her child, had made the fateful mistake
of offering herself to a certain scar-faced man.

By the look and sound of the dwelling, she was far from the only stray Pavek had brought home.

"I wish to speak to the high templar, Pavek," Hamanu said.

He was prepared to stir her thoughts to obedience, but that was unnecessary. Strangers, it
seemed, came to this door all the time and, disguised as he was in Manu's homespun garments, the
woman assumed he was another stray like her.

"The lord-templar's in the atrium. I'll take you to him—"

Hamanu raised his hand to stop her. There was more life in this place than he wished to have
around him tonight. "I have something for him. If you'll fetch him for me, I'll give it to him and be gone."

She shrugged and hitched the toddler higher on her hip. "What's your name?"

He hesitated, then said, "Manu. Tell Lord Pavek that Manu is here to see him."

The name was common enough in this, Hamanu's city. She repeated it once and disappeared up
the steps into the living quarters. Hamanu shut the door—a slave's job, but there were no slaves
here—and settled down to wait on a tradesman's bench.

In a few moments Pavek appeared at the top of the stairs. He was alone. His right hand was
tucked under his shirt hem and resting lightly on the hilt of a steel-bladed knife.

"It's a little late for caution, Pavek," Hamanu observed without raising his head. "Half the city
could walk through your unguarded door. Half the city already has."

"Manu?" Pavek descended a few steps. "Manu? Do I know you? Step into the light a moment."

Hamanu obeyed. His illusion was, as always, perfect, and though Pavek could not hide his novice
druidry from one of Rajaat's champions, there was nothing at all magical about the aura the illusory Manu
projected. Indeed, there was nothing about Manu that Pavek should have recognized, including the scroll
case, which was plain leather, sturdy, but scuffed.
A child's spindle top shot out of the doorway behind Pavek, followed immediately by the child
who'd lost it. The top bounced down the stairs, coming to rest at Hamanu's feet. Pavek put a hand out to
stop the child, a scruffy little creature of indeterminate race and gender. He bent down and whispered
something in the child's ear. There was a hug and a high-pitched giggle, then the child was gone, and
Pavek was coming slowly down the stairs.

Hamanu picked up the toy and handed it to Pavek as he reached the last step. Their eyes met in
the lantern light. Manu's eyes were brown, plain brown—even Dorean, who'd loved every part of Manu,
said his eyes were ordinary, unremarkable. Hamanu's eyes, the eyes Rajaat had given him, were obsidian
pupils swimming in molten sulphur. When Hamanu crafted his illusions, he always got the eyes correct,
yet Pavek stared at his eyes and would not look away.

"Great One," he said at last, trying—and failing—to kneel on the entrance steps of his own home.
"Great One."

Pavek lost his balance. Hamanu caught him as he fell forward, and held him until he was steady
on his feet again.

Somewhere a child screamed, as children would, and incited a commiserating chorus.

Hamanu plucked the top out of the air where it had hovered while the Lion-King assisted his
templar. He'd changed his mind about staying here. "Is there room in this house for one more?" he asked,
dropping the toy in Pavek's nerveless hands.

"It is yours, Great One. Everything I have—"

"Manu," he said, grabbing Pavek's arm to keep him from kneeling.

Pavek nodded. "Your will, Great One—Manu."

They went up the stairs together. The child who'd lost the toy was waiting inside the hall along
with two others, one definitely a dwarf, the other definitely a girl. They were soft-voiced and polite until
Pavek relinquished the top. Then they were off, shrieking like harpies.

"Are you collecting every castoff and stray in Urik?"

"They have nowhere else to go, Gr—" Pavek caught himself. "I find one... but there's never just
one. There's a sister, or a friend, or someone." He gestured at the ceiling. "This place, it's so big. How
can I say no?"

"I can't have this, Pavek. You're giving the bureaus a bad name."

Pavek gave Hamanu the same worried look Enver had given him at least once a day. But
Pavek—Whim of the Lion—knew when his humor was being tested.

"Not to worry, Manu. My neighbors think I'm fattening them up for market."

They laughed. It was invigorating to laugh in the face of doom. Manu, head-and-shoulders
shorter than Pavek, reached out and gave the bigger-seeming man a hearty, laughing thump between the
shoulder blades, which rocked him forward onto his toes. For a heartbeat, there was silence, and a
world of doubt in Pavek's thoughts. Then Pavek dropped an arm on Manu's shoulder and laughed—
tentatively—again.

A cold supper had been laid out in the moonlit atrium and a score of men and women gathered
together to enjoy it. Hamanu was mildly surprised to see Javed sitting beside his chalk-skinned bride. The
king of Urik might reasonably expect the Hero of Urik to lay his old bones on the hard ground of the
army encampment the night before a great battle. But Javed knew exactly what they faced and how little
difference his own presence on the battlefield would make tomorrow, and Mahtra, his bride, was as
comfortable in this dwelling as she was anywhere. She'd practically lived here when it had belonged to
Elabon Escrissar.

For that matter, Hamanu had visited House Escrissar many times and in many guises, but never
as himself, certainly never as Manu.

There was a glimmer of inquiry from Javed's mind when Pavek introduced Manu, a Gold Street
scribe left behind when his employer pulled up stakes and ran for a noble estate outside the walls.
Hamanu had no difficulty raising a mind-bender's facade to defeat the commandant's curiosity. He had to
scramble a bit, though, to keep up with the story that Pavek was cutting quickly out of whole cloth.

As for the other guests, beside Javed and Mahtra, there were the Quraite druids, all eight of
them, including the young half-elf Hamanu had met before. Beyond-the-walls druids weren't the only
guests in Pavek's house; there were Urikites, too, eating at his table, and not merely the strays he'd swept
off the streets: A cheery earth-cleric helped himself to a handful of dried berries while a smattering of
merchants and artisans—most of whom would not have nodded to each other on a sunlit street—talked
softly among themselves. That they spoke naively of an unattainable future didn't diminish the remarkable
nature of the gathering, especially in the red-striped home of a high bureau templar.

Pavek was a remarkable man, sitting at the foot of his own table—when he sat. Somewhere in
the house there had to be servants, but Pavek was the one who poured wine for Manu and anyone else
who needed it. He was the one who brought fresh food from the sideboard and carried away the empty
bowls. A truly remarkable man, Hamanu decided as he sipped his wine and settled among the cushions.
Quite possibly remarkable enough to evoke a miracle.

Hamanu's spirit was as calm and optimistic as it had been since he'd left Tyr, which, perversely,
left him thinking not about where he was or with whom he was, but about Windreaver. Having put
himself in the midst of friends, the immortal champion found himself with nothing to say, except to an
ancient troll he'd never speak to again, no matter what happened tomorrow. He hadn't helped himself,
either, with his choice of illusion.

He'd made himself Manu as Manu had been in Deche. Smooth-chinned and slight, that Manu
appeared years younger than the rest of Pavek's atrium guests. He was a child among adults, and they
patronized him. Hamanu could have aged himself: Manu had been a hardened veteran by the time Myron
of Yoram snatched him away from the trolls in the sinking lands. Lean and scarred, he could easily have
been mistaken for a half-elf, if there'd been half-elves in those days and if he hadn't been short-statured,
even among humans.

But, then, being mistaken for a half-elf wouldn't necessarily make Manu more welcome or more
comfortable in this gathering. The only half-elfin the atrium was Ruari, the youngest of the Quraite druids,
who'd collapsed under the weight of his terror a few years ago when the Lion-King had asked him his
name. Surrounded by congenial folk on the opposite side of the table, Ruari wasn't talking to any of
them, nor they to him. All Ruari's attention went into his wine cup, which had been filled too many times.

Among the numerous legends that attempted to explain how Athas came to be, there were many
tales of elves and humans. Half the tales maintained that elves were humanity's first cousins, the oldest of
the Rebirth races. The other half, predictably, maintained that elves were the last, the youngest, the race
that yearned in its heart to be human again. All the tales agreed, though, that elves and humans found
each other considerably more attractive than either race found their inevitable half-breed offspring.

Frequently abandoned by their parents, half-elves were a dark and lonely lot. A casual stroll
through any slave market would uncover a disproportionately large number of half-elves, as would a roll
call of the templar ranks in any city. Hamanu had always found them fascinating, and in this gathering of
Pavek's friends, none was more fascinating than Ruari.

Ruari's aura was all defense, closed in on itself; it posed no challenge for a champion's idle
curiosity. There was nothing about Ruari's life that didn't yield itself to Hamanu's very gentle Unseen
urging. The young man had all the earmarks of a typical templar: a vulnerable heart, an innate conviction
that he'd never be treated fairly, a greater appreciation for vengeance than justice, and a quick and cruel
temper. There were scores just like him wearing yellow in this quarter and scattered through the
encampments outside the city walls. But Ruari had followed a different path. His mother had been a free
elf of the tribes and the open barrens, and when she abandoned her rape-begotten son, she'd dropped
him in Telhami's arms instead of an Elven Market flesh-peddlar's.
Telhami had reshaped Ruari's destiny, channeling all his empathy into Athas until she'd made a
druid out of him.