The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King (3 page)

And sometimes he did—for no reason greater than whim or boredom or aching appetite. But
today, a loaf of fresh-baked bread was the only sustenance that interested him. With manners to equal
the most pampered noblewoman's, the king broke the loaf apart, then dipped a small, steaming chunk in
amber honey before raising it to his lips.

Fear was intoxicating, but fear could not compare to the changeable taste and texture of a
yeast-risen mixture of flour and water when it was still hot from the oven..

"Enver," Hamanu said between morsels, "there's a bakery at the northeast corner of Joiner's
Square—"

"It shall be closed at once, Omniscience, and the baker sent to the mines," Enver eagerly assured
him, adding another bow and an arm-wave flourish for good measure.

The dwarf was more than Hamanu's steward; he was a templar, an executor, the highest rank
within the civil bureau. Enver's left sleeve was so laced with precious metal and silk that it fell a handspan
beyond his fingertips as he remained folded in the depth of his bow. It was a ridiculous pose and a futile
attempt on Enver's part to hide his disapproval behind an obsequious mask. The fear was back as well, a
fetid vapor in the warming air.

Hamanu ignored the temptation, trying instead to remember if he'd been either more capricious or
predictable of late. He strove to remember each day precisely as it happened, but after thirteen ages it
was difficult to separate memory from dreams. A man like Enver, or the druid-templar Pavek, or any one
of his score of current favorites, had simpler memories and a more reliable conscience.

Today, however, Enver had exercised his conscience needlessly.

"I have something else in mind, dear Enver. The baker there—" He paused, casting his thoughts
adrift in Urik until they found the mind he wanted—"Nouri Nouri'son, he saved my life this morning."

Enver straightened his spine and his sleeve. "Omniscience, may I inquire how this occurred?"

"Oh, the usual way." Hamanu sopped up honey with another morsel of bread, chewed it slowly,
savoring both it and the dwarf's bursting curiosity. "The streets were dirty. I'd retreated into an alley to
cleanse them, but this baker, Nouri Nouri'son, took it upon himself to rescue me with a kneading mallet."

"Remarkable, Omniscience."

"True. All-too-sadly true. He was so intent on saving me that he let the criminals get away."
"Get away, Omniscience? Not for long, surely."

Enver shook his head. "But you're watching them, Omniscience?"

"Dear Enver, of course I'm watching them. Even now I'm watching them. But, we were talking
about the baker, weren't we? Yes. I have a task for you. I want two sacks of the finest flour—not
warehouse flour, but my flour, white himali from the palace—taken to that baker's shop on Joiner's
Square, and a purse of silver, too—else he'll fire the ovens with inix dung! Tell him he is to bake a score
of loaves, the best loaves he's ever baked, and to deliver them to the palace before sundown."

The dwarf's grin was as broad and round as Guthay on New Year's Eve. The executor was
quick with numbers and devious despite his rigorous conscience. Nouri Nouri'son could buy a year's
worth of charcoal with a purseful of silver, and unless the man were a complete failure at his trade, he
could make a hundred loaves with two sacks of palace flour.

"I shall be seen, Omniscience," Enver said, more eagerly than before. "The merchant lords, the
high templars, the nobles, too, and all their cooks, I shall be seen by them all, Omniscience. By sundown
the entire city will know you're eating bread baked by Nouri Nouri'son. They'll stand in line outside his
doors."

"Mind you, dear Enver, it's a small shop on a small square. I think, perhaps, half the city would
be sufficient. A quarter might be wiser."

"Word will spread, Omniscience."

Hamanu nodded. No one would have noticed three bodies in an alley. No one had noticed the
solitary corpse he'd left in a doorway somewhat south of the square. But a generous gesture, that would
change lives in ways not even he could predict.

"Is that all, Omniscience?"

The king nodded, then called his steward back. If he was going to make a generous gesture to
the man who saved his life, he might as well make a similar gesture to the one whose life he'd borrowed.
"There'll be a beggar on the stoop. A human youth with a crippled leg. Put something useful in his bowl."

"Oh, yes, Omniscience! Will that be all, Omniscience?"

"One last thing, before you return to the palace, hie yourself to the fountain in Lion's Square and
throw a coin over the edge."

Enver's grin faded as his eyes widened. "Omniscience, what should I wish for?"

"Why—that Nouri Nouri'son's bread is as good as his kneading mallet, what else?"

Hamanu's morning audiences began when Enver left the roof. They ended when the king had
broken the seal on the last scroll in the baskets on his marble table and had summoned, by a
mind-bending prick of conscience, the last petitioner in the unwindowed and, therefore, stifling, waiting
chamber below.

Sometimes petitioners abandoned their quest for a private audience before they felt the
unforgettable terror of their king's presence in their thoughts. Sometimes Hamanu didn't second-guess a
petitioner's misgiving. Other times he pursued the tender-hearted spirit throughout Urik and beyond; he
had that power. After thirteen ages of practice, Hamanu could give his whims wills of their own and set
them free to wander his city as he himself did almost every night, borrowing shape and memory—stealing
them—and making another life his own for a moment, a year, or a lifetime.

Hamanu had a handful of willful whims and stolen shapes loose in the city just then, and touched
them lightly as the day's last petitioner climbed the stairs. A thief who'd shown creative promise in his
craft had seized a woman—a child, really, half his age—and forced her to the ground in the kitchen yard
of her own modest home.

The king seared the thief's mind and flesh with a single thought. The last image that passed
through the thief's senses was the woman screaming as her rapist's hot blood burst over her. Then the
thief was thoroughly dead, and the last petitioner was walking across the palace roof.

Deceit was another matter.

He watched the merchant—Eden—lift the hem of her gown and step over the blasted remains of
the day's most unfortunate petitioner. Most unfortunate, so far.

Her mind was filled with disgust, not fear. For the corpse, Hamanu hoped. As himself—as
Hamanu, King of Urik—he dealt with few women, save templars and whores. His reputation was
burdened with an ancient layer of tarnish. Respectable families hid their wives and daughters from him, as
if that had ever protected anyone.

This Eden, with her white linen gown, pulled-back hair, and unpainted face, was the epitome of
respectability. Far more respectable than the young nobleman—the late, young nobleman—whose
bowels were beginning to stink in the brutal sunlight.

Hamanu didn't truly mind that Renady Soleuse had inherited his estate through the proven
expedient of slaughtering his father and his brothers and the rest of his inconvenient kin; link's king didn't
meddle in family affairs. And Hamanu wasn't outraged that the accusations of water-theft Renady leveled
against his neighbors were whole-cloth lies; audacity was, in truth, a reliable pathway to royal favor. But
the young man had lied when Hamanu had asked questions about the financial health of the Soleuse
estate, and worse, the fool had counted on a defiler charlatan's lizard-skin charm to protect him while he
lied.

Hamanu killed for deceit.

The hereditary honor of Soleuse had been extinguished with thought and fire, both somewhat
sorcerous in origin and wielded with a soldier's precision. Now, Hamanu and Urik were short a noble
family to manage the farms and folk the Soleuse had been lord to. Most likely he'd offer the honor to
Enver. After more than an age overseeing a king's private life, Hamanu judged that the affairs of a noble
estate should be child's play for the likes of Enver. But, perhaps he'd offer the spoils of Soleuse to this
Eden, this plain half-elf woman with a man's name.

He'd hate to have to kill her. Two petitioners in one morning: that was both careless and wasteful.

"Why are you here?" Hamanu asked. His templars had written that she offered trade. No surprise
there: she was a merchant; trade was her life's work. But, what sort of trade? "Recount."

She hesitated, moistening her lips with a pasty tongue and wrinkling her linen gown between
anxious fingers. "O Mighty King of Urik, King of Athas, King of the Mountains—" Her face turned as
pale as her gown: she'd lost the rhythm of his titles and her mind—Hamanu knew for certain—had gone
blank.

"And so on," he said helpfully. "You have my attention."

"I am charged with a message from my husband, Chorlas, colleague of the House of Werlithaen."

"I know the name Werlithaen," Hamanu admitted. As the name implied, the Werlithaen were
elves. Three generations back, they'd been elves who'd exchanged their kank herds for the tumult of
Urik's almost-legal Elven Market. About an age ago, a few of the tribe had abandoned the Market for
the civilized ways of the merchant houses. A step down, no doubt, in the eyes of the Werlithaen kindred,
and sufficient to account for Eden's plain, diluted features.

The petition had mentioned trade, not a message, but knowledge was sometimes more valuable
than water or gold and a sound basis for trade. Eden hadn't yet deceived him.

"What manner of message?" the king continued, curious as to the sort of bargain this woman
would offer.

Eden made what appeared to be another nervous gesture, fondling the large, pale-green ceramic
beads of her bracelet. There was a click that earned Hamanu's undivided attention, and when her hands
separated, a coil of parchment bounced in her trembling fingers.

"My husband bade me give you this."

The coil dropped from her fingers onto the black marble table. Hamanu retrieved it and read the
words Chorlas had written, telling about three hundred wooden staves caravaned east, out of Nibenay,
to a deserted oasis and left, unattended, by moonlight. The staves appeared to be plain brown wood,
according to Chorlas, who was in a position to know, having been the owner of that east-bound caravan.
But the staves left stains on the palms of the caravaneers who handled them and, afterward, the formerly
brown wood had acquired a distinctly bronze-metallic sheen.

Agafari wood, no doubt, Nibenay's most precious resource and a reliable weapon against the
serrated obsidian edges of Urik's standard-issue swords. Urik and Nibenay weren't at war, not openly,
though there hadn't been true peace between the Lion and the Shadow-King since they'd laid claim to
their respective domains long ago. And there'd been no trade between the cities these last three years, for
which lapse there were as many reasons as there were grudges between Hamanu and his brother
monarch, not least of which was the misfortuned ambition of a Urikite templar named Elabon Escrissar.

Indeed, at the moment, no legal trade passed between Urik and any other city in the old
human-dominated heartland. No visitors, either. Folk stayed within Hamanu's purview, if that's where
they were when he'd issued his decree, or they stayed outside it, under penalty of death.

There was trade, of course; no city was entirely self-sufficient, though, with well-stocked
warehouses, Hamanu's Urik could withstand a siege of many years. The laws merely complicated and
compounded the risks all merchants knowingly took when they carried goods among the rival city-states,
and gave Hamanu the pretext—as if he needed one—to interfere.

"Was your husband in Nibenay when he wrote this?" Hamanu asked mildly, maliciously. If she
lied, he'd know it instantly. If she told the truth, she'd be an accomplice in illegal trade, the punishment for
which—at a minimum— was the loss of an eye.

"He was, O Mighty King. He sent this at great risk and bade me bring it here at once. And I
did—" she raised her head and, despite crashing waves of cold-blooded terror, met Hamanu's
smoldering stare with her own. "Five days ago, O Mighty King."

So, she dared to be indignant with him. On a bad day, that was a death sentence; today, it
intrigued him. Hamanu ran a fingertip over Chorlas's words, reading the man who'd written them.

"There was another message," he concluded.

"Only that I was to come directly to you, O Mighty King, as I have already said."

"Your husband has placed you in great danger, dear lady, or do you claim not to know that it is
against my laws to have discourse or trade with the Nibenese?"

"O Mighty King, my husband is Urikite born and raised."

Hamanu nodded. His edict isolating Urik from the anarchy spreading across Athas in the wake of
the Dragon's demise had sundered families, especially the great, far-flung merchant dynasties, and his was
not the only such edict: Tyr and Gulg and Nibenay itself had raised similar prohibitions;

Giustenal had never been without them. But trade and risk were inseparable, as the woman
standing before him surely knew.

"That changes nothing, dear lady. I have forbidden all commerce. You have imperiled your life at
your husband's bidding. Your life, dear lady, not his. And for what? What trade could justify the risk?"
Hamanu could imagine several, but Eden might surprise him, and notwithstanding the content of the
message she'd brought him, which was itself enough to merit reward, Hamanu cherished surprises.

Anxiety froze Eden's tongue in her mouth; Hamanu despaired of any surprise, then she spoke:

"O Mighty King, my husband and I, we judge it likely that the king of Nibenay is arming Urik's
enemies."

"And?" Hamanu demanded. Her reasoning, though concurred with his own, wasn't the surprise
he'd hoped for.

"So he sends you to tell me that Nibenay arms my enemies? That the House of Werlithaen
supplies the caravan? And for this mote of good news he expects me to leave Urik's gates ajar so he
might return?"

"Yes, O Mighty King. My husband knows the precise location of the deserted oasis; it was not
charted on any of his maps—until now."

"The master merchant of Werlithaen thinks that because he did not know the location of an oasis,
then / would not know it either."

"Yes, O Mighty King," Eden repeated. Chorlas of Werlithaen had raised her well. She was afraid
of him; that was only wise, but fear was not her master. She continued, "It lies outside Urik's purview;
outside Nibenay's, as well. It is an oasis of death under Giustenal."

Wish for a surprise and get an unpleasant one. Once again Hamanu ran his fingertip over the
writing. Five days, she'd said, since she had presented herself to his templars. Ten days, perhaps, since
the words beneath his sensitive fingertip had been written. And how many days had passed between
Chorlas's leaving the agafari staves for Giustenal's howling army and Chorlas's writing a message to his
dear wife? Three, at best, if an old man had overcome elven prejudice, got himself a swift riding kank,
then rode the bug into the ground.

Hamanu had his own spies, and those who rode kanks were ever in need of new bugs. He would
hear about the staves, the oasis, and Giustenal's ambitions, but he hadn't heard it yet. He touched her
mind, a gentle feather's touch that aroused neither her defenses nor her fears. She hadn't eaten in three
days, not for poverty, but because her husband had returned to Urik. Chorlas was hiding in the slave
quarters of their comfortable home. Between beats of Eden's heart, Hamanu found her Urik home and
Chorlas within it. The elf was old and honest, for an elven merchant. His heart was weak, and he did truly
wish to die within the massive yellow walls.

"What is your trade, Eden of House Werlithaen? Do you wish to die in Urik, like your husband?"

"O Mighty King, I do not care where I die," she said evenly. "But while I live, I wish to see my
city's enemies ground beneath the heel of my king."

Hamanu laughed—what else could any man do, face-to-face with a bloodthirsty woman? He
took amber resin from a small box and held it in his hand until it was pliable. "I shall count it treason, then,
if my templars do not report seeing you and your emeritus husband beside the Lion Fountain before
sunset." He marked the resin with his sea ring, then hardened it again with icy breath.

Her face was pleasing and far from plain when she smiled.

The ever-efficient Enver had completed his tasks in Joiner's Square and returned to the palace
before Eden departed, still smiling. Perhaps he passed her on his way to the roof with the usual herd of
slaves in his wake, armed, this time, with buckets and bristle brushes. Hamanu didn't ask, didn't pry,
anymore than Enver asked about the Soleuse corpse.

Enver was, however, adamantly uninterested in becoming the Soleuse lord.

"Omniscience," the dwarf said from a bow so deep his forehead touched his knees. "Have I or
my heirs displeased you so much?"

"Of course not, dear Enver." It was not a question that merited an answer, except that there was
no way Enver could have seen his king's grimace. "But after what?— almost three ages between you and
your father, is it not? Perhaps you're ready for a change."
"Your welfare is my family's life, Omniscience. More than life, it is our eternal honor."

Enver straightened suddenly, with such a look of outrage on his face that Hamanu was obliged to
sit back a hair's breadth in his chair.

"I'd sooner die."

"Later, then, dear Enver. In the meantime, who was in charge downstairs this morning? That
fool—" Hamanu flicked a forefinger at the wet spot where Renady had died and the slaves were now
scrubbing furiously—"stood before me wearing a charm, dear Enver, a charlatan's lizard-skin charm
which no one had confiscated. And later, a woman stood where you're standing and removed a message
from a bead as large as your thumb! A useful message, to be sure— Nibenay's sent agafari staves to
Giustenal—but someone downstairs was more than careless, and I want that someone sent to the
obsidian pits."

Enver knew which investigator had been in charge of the waiting room: the face floated instantly
to the surface of the dwarf's mind, along with numerous details of the templar's currently troubled
life—his mother had died, his father was ailing, his wife was pregnant, and his piles were painfully
swollen—none of which mattered to Hamanu.

"To the pits, dear Enver," he said coldly.

And Enver, who surely knew he had no private thoughts when he stood before his king, nodded
quickly. "To the pits, immediately, Omniscience." Not as a slave, as Hamanu had intended, but as an
overseer, with his sleeve threads intact. The image was crystal clear in Enver's mind.