The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King (29 page)

Pavek's efforts could go for naught, too, before this night was over. Ruari was so handsome, so
attractive, with his shades of copper hair, skin, and eyes; and Windreaver was an aching hole in
Hamanu's spirit that hadn't begun to heal: Hamanu hid his hand beneath a cushion. He made a human fist
and let an unborn dragon's talons dig into the heel of his palm.

He should have taken Manu outside the walls to Lord Ursos's estate, where
catharsis—especially the catharsis of pain and fear—was an every-night ritual.

A sudden movement on Ruari's shoulder startled both the half-elf and the Lion-King. Half-elves
had a special rapport with animals, which Ruari's druidry enhanced. The house critic—exhausted, no
doubt, by children who thought it was a brightly colored toy—had taken refuge behind the copper curtain
of Ruari's hair. But Manu's presence had roused it from its slumber. Both youths, Manu and Ruari,
looked up from the slowly stretching lizard and met each other's eyes.

Look away quick, Hamanu advised, but druid-trained Ruari resisted Unseen suggestion.

Ruari's eyes narrowed, and he tried to stop the critic from climbing down his arm. Outrage,
jealousy, and envy erupted from the half-elf's spirit, piquing the attention of the other sensitives in the
atrium. Pavek, who alone knew how hot the fire Ruari played with truly burned, was frantic in his
determination to break the attractive spell between them.

Pavek might have succeeded. Critic minds didn't comprehend sorcerous illusion. The critic saw
what it saw and placed its feet accordingly. Once the lizard had ambled across the table and begun its
journey up Manu's arm, Hamanu had to pay more attention to the substance of his illusion than to the
half-elf glowering at him.

Then someone—possibly Javed, Hamanu quite didn't catch the voice—said something about the
ways in which a veteran might fortify himself before a battle that might well be his last.

"I know what I'd do," Ruari interjected boldly. His narrow-eyed stare was still fastened on Manu,
whom he clearly considered younger and less experienced than himself. "I'd find myself a woman and
take her back to my room."

But Ruari didn't stop there. He went on, describing his wine-fueled fantasies—and they were
fantasies. Hamanu perceived that on the top of Ruari's thoughts: the boy had dallied, nothing more.
Pavek told his young friend to be quiet. By then it was too late.

Too late to visit Lord Ursos.

Too late for Ruari.

Though Pavek tried, putting himself squarely between them when the supper was, at last,
concluded and the guests were departing. Ruari was the last to find his feet. Lopsided and stumbling from
the wine, he aimed himself at an open door and headed off, alone, for his bed.

"He's hotheaded and harmless," Pavek insisted, and beneath his words the thought: If you must
consume someone, Great One, consume me.

That would have defeated Hamanu's hopes and intentions entirely. They were alone now, except
for the critic still balanced on Hamanu's shoulder. The lizard never flinched when Hamanu remade his
illusion, becoming the tawny-skinned, black-haired man Pavek knew—or thought he knew—best.

"You will come to the southern gate at dawn."

They stood face-to-face, Pavek a bit shorter now, but not falling to his knees.

"I know."

Hamanu unslung the scroll case. "For Urik." He placed his unnaturally warm hands over Pavek's
and molded them over the scuffed leather. "When I am gone, you will raise that guardian spirit of yours."

"I will try, Great One."

"You will not try, Pavek. You will succeed. You will raise Urik's guardian. You will evoke every
power it possesses, and you will destroy me, Pavek. That is my command."

Rajaat, the Dark Lens, the Gray, the Black, and a dragon, they were all just words to Pavek. He
tried to rank them in his mortal mind, but for him, there was no catastrophe greater than Urik without its
Lion-King.

"You'll know, Pavek. You'll know when you see what I become. Your conscience won't trouble
you."

"But Rajaat—" the templar protested. "A dragon will protect Athas from Rajaat, isn't that true?
Isn't that what the dragon—what Borys the Butcher of Gnomes did for two thousand years?"

Rajaat wasn't Pavek's worry. Rajaat would be Sadira's worry, and Rkard's. Rajaat would be
their punishment for doing nothing when they could have put an end to both Rajaat and dragons. Hamanu
wouldn't talk to Pavek about Rajaat.

"Borys was the Butcher of Dwarves," Hamanu corrected gently, after forcing the War-Bringer
out of his mind. "Gal-lard was the Gnome-Bane; he took the name of Nibenay after Borys became the
dragon, which was a thousand years ago, not two thousand."

"But—" Pavek had been educated in the templar orphanage; he knew the official history of his
city.

"We lie, Pavek. We've all lied; all the champions. When the wars ended, Tyr measured its years
from one High Sun solstice to the next, a full three hundred and seventy-five days, but Draj and Balic
measured theirs by equinoxes. Their years were half as long. Albeorn—Andropinis of Balic—didn't want
to be associated with the champion Elf-

Slayer. So we lied, we took history apart and put it back together again so mortals who might
remember the Cleansing Wars might never think that we had led them." Hamanu squeezed Pavek's hands
tighter around the scroll case, then let go. "This, and this alone, is the truth. Keep it safe."

Pavek frowned. The gesture tugged his scar and caused a twinge of pain, which Hamanu shared.

"You should let me fix this."

"More illusions? More taking history apart and putting it back different?" Pavek asked.

"You'd be a handsome man. Women would notice."

"It's not my face that keeps Kashi away," Pavek said honestly.

And Hamanu had to agree. He traced the ugly scar with a fingertip, but left it alone. "Good-bye,
Pavek, Just-Plain Pavek. It's time for me to go."

Pavek started to nod, but his chin stayed down against his chest. "I will miss you, Great One."
His voice was thick. "If ever I have a son, I will name him Hamanu."

"Kashi won't stand for that," Hamanu said as he turned away.

He was halfway to the door when Pavek called him back.

"Telhami—" the templar began. His face was raised; his eyes were glistening. He had to begin
again. "Telhami will be waiting for you."

Hamanu cocked an eyebrow, not trusting his own voice.

"When... if... you'll become part of the guardian after, Great One. That's what she says. And
she'll be waiting for you."

He hadn't thought about after; it gave him the strength to turn away and walk out the door.

Ruari had wedged himself into the corner where his narrow cot met the walls of his room, the
better to keep both cot and walls from swaying wildly. His eyelids were the heaviest part of his body, but
he didn't dare let them close. Without the moonlight patterns on the wall to tell him up from down, he'd
be overwhelmed with the sensation of falling backward, endlessly falling backward until his gut began to
heave in the other direction.

The half-elf knew this because it had already happened, not once, but twice. He'd shed his
reeking clothes outside the room and crawled the last distance to his cot on his hands and knees. His
mind wasn't working particularly well, but it seemed fairly certain that he'd never felt quite this sick, this
stupid, this drunk before. Given a choice between death right then or holding the walls up and his gut
down until dawn, Ruari would have chosen death without hesitation.

"Preserve and protect," he muttered, the conclusion of a druid blessing the first few words of
which he'd forgotten.

Grinding his heels into the mattress, Ruari pushed himself backward, but his legs were weak and
the walls of Pavek's red-and-yellow house were made of brick, not woven reeds, like the walls of his hut
back in Quraite. Terror seized him when she reached the cot and laid a surprisingly warm—for death,
anyway—hand on his foot.

Terror was nothing Ruari's wine-drenched gut could handle at that moment. He made a
desperate sideways lunge. Death caught him before he hit the floor.

"You shouldn't drink so much," she chided him.

Death smoothed his dank hair behind his ears—which Ruari didn't appreciate. Ears were
supposed to match and his didn't. One of them was more tapering, more elven, than the other. He tried
to hide the defect; she caught his hand before he caught his hair.

"Relax," she suggested, raising his hand. "You'll feel better." She pressed her lips against his
knuckles.

Very warm lips.

Very warm and relaxing lips.

Ruari did feel better than he had a moment ago. His gut was calmer, and when she put her-arms
around him, the room no longer threatened to spin wildly, either sideways or backward. He protested
when she released him, but it was only to stand a moment while she undid the laces of her shift. It fell in a
dun-colored circle about her ankles, revealing soft curves that glowed in the moonlight.

Ruari rose to his knees, balancing easily on the knotted rope mattress. No trace of his drunken
unsteadiness remained in his movements when he welcomed her.

"If you're not death," he whispered in her ear, "who are—?"

"Shhh-sh," she replied, surrendering to his embrace.

Entwined around each other, they sank as one onto the bed linens.

Later, Ruari thought they were flying high above the city.

Pavek didn't try to sleep, didn't bother going to bed. After the midnight watch bells rang, when
his household was at last asleep, he took a lamp and Hamanu's scroll case back to the atrium. Sitting
where Urik's king had sat in a youth's disguise, Pavek cleared a place on the littered table and unrolled
the vellum sheets.

He set aside the ones that he'd already read and started with the score or so of boldly scripted
sheets that his king said contained the truth. Pausing only to refill the lamp when its light began to flicker,
he read how Manu became a champion, how a champion cleansed Athas of trolls. The air was cold and
the eastern horizon was faintly brighter than the west when Pavek came to the last words: the onus of
genocide, rightfully, falls on me, on Hamanu. His heart was far colder.

Not long ago, on a night when he'd bandaged the Lion-King's hand, Hamanu had told him that no
mortal could imagine or judge him. As he rolled the vellum and stuffed it into the case, Pavek tried to do
both, and failed. He couldn't imagine the forces that had transformed the young man who'd come to his
house into the champion who stood and watched the last trolls march silently to their deaths. More than
that, he couldn't imagine how the man—and despite the vellum, Pavek thought of the Lion of Urik as a
man, now, more than ever—he knew had remained sane.

And without knowing that, without being absolutely certain that Hamanu was sane, as mortals
measured sanity, Pavek couldn't begin to judge his king, his master, and— Whim of the Lion—his friend.
He could confidently judge Rajaat more evil than Hamanu, but that was no sound footing for judging
Hamanu.

The eastern sky was definitely brighter than the west when Pavek sealed the scroll case and got
to his feet. His gold medallion thumped against his breastbone. He drew it out and studied the rampant
lion engraved on its shiny face. While he wore a medallion, be it gold or cheap ceramic, Pavek was a
templar. A templar obeyed his king and left the judging to the guardian.

Lamp in hand, Pavek went from room to room, awakening the Quraite druids whom he'd asked
to join him on the south gate tower. Twice before, he'd awakened Urik's guardian spirit and brought it
from the depths of Athas to the surface where it had guided him and preserved him. Hamanu believed the
city's guardian could surmount one of Rajaat's dragons. After reading the vellum sheets, Pavek was less
certain than ever. He was a novice in druidry, with only his devotion to his city and—yes—his devotion
to the Lion-King to sustain him. He'd try to justify Hamanu's faith in him, but didn't want to be standing
alone on the south gate tower when the Dragon of Urik came calling.

Five of the six druids were awake when Pavek came looking for them. Ruari's cast-off, reeking
clothes were heaped outside his door. Considering how much the slight half-elf had drunk the previous
evening and how unaccustomed he was to wine's perils, Pavek expected to find his troublesome young
friend curled up on the floor, still too far gone to rouse. Instead, when he opened the door, his lamp
revealed an empty room.

The bed-linen was disheveled. The patterned lattice night-shutters weren't merely open, they
were gone. And there was a woman's shift on the floor beside Ruari's cot.

Clutching the neck of his shirt and the gold chain beneath it, Pavek shouted Ruari's name and got
no response. He levered himself over the high windowsill and peered down into a night-dark alley, two
stories below.

Nothing. By then, the other druids had joined him. They searched the house frantically, as aware
of the brightening horizon as they were of the missing half-elf. A search of the alley produced a pair of
shattered night-shutters, nothing more. A search of all the inside rooms brought word that there was a
young woman missing, too.

"She got up in the middle of the night, my lord, put on her shift, and went to the door," a
somewhat younger girl explained to Pavek. "I asked her what was the matter, and she didn't answer. She
didn't seem to hear me at all. It were passing odd, my lord, but I didn't think no harm would come of it.
Whim of the Lion, my lord."

To no one's surprise, the girl identified the linen garment Pavek held in his hand as belonging to
the missing woman.

Whim of the Damned Lion, indeed. Pavek swore a string of templar oaths that widened the eyes
of Quraiters. But the whim of the Lion-King was the best, the only, explanation he could offer his stunned
guests, and even then, Pavek didn't tell them how or why the half-elf might have caught the mighty king's
eye.

"He's young. Impulsive and reckless," one of the other druids said. "He'll be here waiting for us
when we get back."

"And we'll never hear the end of it," another added.

Pavek raked his hair and stared at the sky. In his heart, he reminded himself that he was not the
one to judge Hamanu of Urik and that one life measured against Hamanu's crimes and accomplishments
was not terribly significant. It was merely that the life had belonged to a friend, and he'd thought another
friend might respect it.

Urik's situation had changed overnight, and not for the better. From the south gate tower, Pavek
saw the roofs and kitchen-smoke of four market villages, the velvet expanse of Urik's farmland, and well
beyond all that, three dusty, torch-lit smears where the armies of Nibenay, Gulg, and Giustenal had
reestablished themselves during the night. Urik's army had fallen back into a thick black line between the
farmland and the enemy.

"Orders," Javed said when Pavek stepped back from the tower balustrade. "Everybody's been
moving all night. Everybody's tired, and we're jammed up like fish in a barrel. Not enough room to fight.
Not for us or them. There's not going to be a battle."

The ebony-skinned elf stared straight at Pavek, expecting confirmation or denial.

"He told me to be here at dawn," was Pavek's answer, until he added—foolishly—"Ruari's
missing. Gone from his bed. A girl, too."

It was a foolish remark because there wasn't a full-elf anywhere who'd ever truly sympathized
with a half-elf. If the missing girl had been an elf, that might have gotten a rise out of the Hero of Urik, but
for Ruari the best Javed could manage was a sigh and an offhand gesture.

"He destroyed the trolls, every last one of them," the commandant said, as if that accounted for
Ruari's fate. "He knows that whether there's battle today or not, he's not walking away from this
battlefield. Not the way he walked onto it."

The Hero of Urik had performed some unpleasant duties during his forty-year tenure. Every few
years, he'd marched the slave levies into the barrens and kept watch over them until the Dragon of Tyr
showed up.

"We're meat, Pavek," said the Hero of Urik. "Less than meat. Just grease and ash. That's all that
was left when Borys was done with them. But I saw those shards, too." He shook his head. "We die so
the Lion can fight Rajaat. It's fair, I suppose, but I'd rather fight Rajaat myself."

Beyond the steel medallion he wore, Javed didn't have much faith in magic, whether it was
sorcery or druidry. But it was magic that drew them all to the balustrade when a sergeant shouted:

"There he is!"

The gates hadn't opened, and there were no outbuildings beyond the tower where Hamanu could
have hidden while he strapped on the glowing armor that had been his hallmark at the front of Urik
armies for thirteen ages. Yet, he was there, a solitary figure, shining in the light as the bloody sun poked
above the horizon, walking south to face his enemies' might.

Pavek wanted to believe. He wanted to feel his heart soar with admiration and awe for a true
champion. He even wanted the despair of knowing not even a champion could surmount the odds the
Lion-King faced. Instead, he felt nothing, a dull, sour nothing because, in taking Ruari, Hamanu had
proved he was no different than his enemies, and there was no hope for Athas.

Still, he couldn't turn away. He watched, transfixed, as the striding figure grew smaller and
smaller, until he couldn't see it at all.

"What next?" one of the Quraite druids asked. "Is it time to evoke the guardian?"

Pavek shook his head. He sat down with his back against the southern balustrade and buried his
face in his hands. The sun began its daily climb from the eastern horizon. The sky changed color, and the
first hints of the day's heat could be felt in the air. Pavek raised his head and studied the light. At the rate
Hamanu had been walking, he should have been nearing one of the villages. He lowered his head again.

"Pavek!"

He looked up. The voice was so familiar. He thought it had come from his heart, not his
ears—but the others with him had heard it, too, and were looking at the stairs.

"Pavek!"

Pavek was on his feet when Ruari cleared the last stain.
"Pavek—you'll never believe what happened—"

Pavek needed another moment to realize the shirt was silk, trimmed with gold, nothing Ruari
could have found in the red-and-yellow house in the templar quarter.

Then he seized Ruari's wrists and gave them a violent shake. "Where were you, Ru? I looked all
over. You weren't in your room."

"You'll never believe—" Ruari repeated before his lungs demanded air.

"Try me."

They gave him more water and a stool to sit on.

"I was drunk, Pavek—"

"I know."

"I was so drunk I thought she was Death when she came into my room. But she wasn't, Pavek,"
Ruari gulped more water.

Pavek waited. He didn't really need to hear anything more. It was enough that Ruari had survived
whatever encounter he'd had with the Lion-King, because, surely, that was Hamanu's shirt he was
wearing. He wanted nothing more than to grab his friend and hold him tight, but Ruari had gotten his
breath and was talking again.

"She was so beautiful, standing there in the moonlight. I thought—I thought it couldn't get better,
then we were flying, Pavek—"

Pavek started to shake his head in disbelief, then curbed himself. Ruari hadn't been in his room;
Ruari had been with Hamanu—whatever else the half-elf had seen or thought or chose to believe—and
he could very well have been flying. There had to be some explanation for the shirt.

"Then, I woke up in this huge bed—on the palace roof. The palace roof! Do you believe it?"

Pavek nodded.

"Wind and fire—I knew you'd be looking for me. I found some clothes and got out of there as
quick as I could—I knew you'd be angry, Pavek. I knew you would. But what does it mean?"

"Whim of the Lion," a druid and sergeant said together.

"What about the girl?" Pavek asked.

Ruari blushed; his already heat-flushed skin turned a shade darker than the bloody sun. "I sent
her back to your house—in a shirt, Pavek. I found another shirt for her and sent her back to the templar
quarter."

There was laughter, from the women as well as the men. Ruari's face became dangerously bright.

"What else was I supposed to do?" he demanded.

"Nothing, Ru," Pavek assured him. "You did the right thing." Then he welcomed his friend back
from the presumed-dead with a bone-snapping embrace. "What's her name?"