The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King (7 page)

There were laws that not even Javed was above, and foremost among them was Hamanu's
injunction against beasts of burden on his city's immaculate streets. It was a wise law that did more than
improve the sight and scent of Urik; it kept down the vermin and disease as well. But a man did not reign
for thirteen ages without learning when to set his most cherished laws aside.

Granted, Hamanu said. He broke their Unseen connection.
Hamanu summoned the distinctive rooftops of the Modekan barracks from his memory and
made them real. Peering out of the netherworld, he watched a score of drowsy, yellow-robed templars
clutch their medallions in shock. As one, they turned bloodless faces toward the sky where, by the Lion's
whim, a pair of slitted, sulphurous eyes had opened above them.

Hamanu projected his voice from the palace to the village, where every templar heard it, and the
rest of Modekan, too. Cheers went up, and the village gong began a frantic clanging. If he weren't
absolutely confident of Javed's loyalty, Hamanu would have been greatly displeased by the elf's
popularity. He had to shout his commands.

"The Champion is not to be challenged or impeded. Clear the road to Urik for his swift passage."

Discipline was lax in the village barracks: half the templars dropped to their knees; the rest
thumped their breasts in salute. But Hamanu's will would be carried out—he caressed each and every
templar's spirit with the razor edge of his wrath before he closed his eyes. The king made a similar
appearance above Urik's southern gate before he blinked and brought his focus back to the cloister.

Pavek still stared at him. Though medallion conversation was inviolate, Pavek had heard the
spoken commands and drawn his own conclusions.

"Commandant Javed, Great One?" he asked. "Is Urik in danger, Great One?" The other
questions in Pavek's mind—Is that why you summoned me? Do you expect me to try to summon the
guardian?—went unspoken, though not, of course, unheard.

"You may judge for yourself, Pavek," Hamanu suggested, both generous and demanding. He let
the human glamour fade from his eyes and, at last, the templar looked away.

There was enough time for the palace slaves to bathe Pavek with scented soaps and clothe him in
finery from the king's own wardrobe. The silks skimmed Pavek's shoulders and fell a fashionable length
against his arms and legs. By measurement alone, Pavek cut a commanding figure, but he had no majesty.
He followed Hamanu into an audience chamber looking exactly like what he was: a common man in
borrowed clothes.

The sorcerer-kings, of which Hamanu was one, had built palaces with monumental throne halls
meant to belittle the mortals who entered them. Hamanu's hall had a jewel-encrusted throne that made his
back ache no matter how he disguised his body. Even so, circumstance occasionally demanded that he
receive supplicants in his fullest panoply, and ache. He wondered, sometimes, how the others endured
it—if they knew some sleight of sorcery he'd overlooked or if they simply suffered less because they did
not starve themselves and carried more flesh on their immortal bones.

Most likely, the others enjoyed their spectacles, as Hamanu did not. He'd had little enough in
common with his peers in the beginning, and nothing had since brought them closer together. He'd seen
less of them than he saw of the slaves who clipped his illusory toenails. In truth, Hamanu was a peer unto
himself alone. His closest companions were his own thoughts, and the places where he actually dwelt
reflected that isolation.

Hamanu preferred to conduct Urik's state affairs in an austere chamber where a pair of
freestanding, ever-luminous torches, a marble bench, and a black boulder set in fine, gray sand were the
only furnishings. Water rippled magically over the boulder and, as Hamanu entered the chamber, it began
to flow down three of the four rough-hewn walls. The liquid murmur soothed Hamanu's nerves and awed
the novice druid, who stifled his curiosity about the spells that made it flow. But the waterfalls had a
simple purpose: conversations in this chamber couldn't be overheard by any means, physical or arcane.

"Sit," Hamanu told Pavek as he, himself, began to pace around the glistening boulder with martial
precision. "Javed has passed beneath the gates. He'll be here soon."

Pavek obeyed. He focused his mind on the water flowing over the boulder, and his thoughts grew
quiet. Then Pavek's thoughts vanished into the sand. Hamanu ceased his pacing. He could see the man
with his eyes, hear his breathing, and the steady beat of his heart, but the Unseen presence by which the
Lion-King observed his templars and any living creature that captured his attention was suddenly and
completely missing.

Not even Telhami had mastered that feat.
The guardian, Hamanu told himself, the druidic essence of Urik that shunned an unnatural
creature forged of Rajaat's sorcery, but heeded the call of a very ordinary man. The Lion of Urik cast an
imperceptible sphere around his druid-templar and let it expand, hoping to detect some perturbation in
the netherworld that would illuminate the guardian's disposition.

The elf was tall for his kind. He stood head and shoulders above Pavek, above Hamanu, himself,
in his human glamour. His skin and hair were as black as the boulder in the middle of the chamber—or
they would have been if he hadn't ridden hard and come directly to his king. Road dust streaked the
commandant from head to foot; he almost looked his age. Pavek, who was, by rank, Javed's superior,
offered his seat on the marble bench.

Javed bent his leg to Hamanu, then turned to Pavek. "I've sat too long already, my lord. It does
an old elf good to stand on his own feet awhile."

Which was true, as far as it went. Hamanu could feel the aches of Javed's old bones and
travel-battered wounds. He could have ignored them, as he ignored his own aches, but accorded the
commandant an empathic honor Javed would never suspect.

"May I hold this for you?" Pavek—ever the third-rank regulator—asked, reaching for the
leather-wrapped parcel Javed carried under one arm.

But the parcel was the reason Javed had raced across the barrens and risked his king's wrath
with a mind-bender's shield. The commandant had a paternal affection for the scar-faced Pavek; but he
wouldn't entrust this parcel to anyone but his king.

"What did you find, Javed? Scrolls? Maps?" Hamanu asked, fighting to contain his curiosity,
which could kill any man who stood too long between him and satisfaction.

Javed had seen that happen. He hastily laid the parcel on the bench and sliced the thongs that
bound it, lest the knots resist and get him killed. Beneath the leather were layers of silk—several of the
drab-dyed, densely woven shirts Javed insisted were a mortal's best defense against a poisoned arrow or
blade.

Hamanu clenched his fists as the commandant gingerly peeled back sleeve after sleeve. He knew
already there was nothing so ordinary as a sorcerer's scroll or cartographer's map at the heart of Javed's
parcel. Though neither mortal had noticed, the chamber had become quiet as the minor magic that
circulated the water was subsumed by the malevolence emerging from the silk. The Lion of Urik steadied
himself until his commandant had stepped back.

The last layer of silk, which Javed refused to touch, appeared as if it had been exposed to the
harsh Athasian sun for a full seventy-seven year age. Its dyes had faded to the color of moldering bones.
The cloth itself was rotting at the creases.

"Great One, two good men died wrapping it up so I could carry it," Javed explained. "If it's your
will, I'll lay down my own life, but if you've still got a use for an old, tired elf, Great One, I think you'd
best unwrap the rest yourself."

"Where?" Hamanu asked in a breathless whisper, no more eager to touch the silk or what it
contained than either Javed or Pavek. "How? Was there anything with it?"

Javed shook his head. "A piece of parchment, Great One. A message, I imagine. But the thing
had bleached and aged it like this silk. We didn't so much find it as one of our men stumbled across it
and died...." The elf paused and met Hamanu's eyes, waiting for a reaction Hamanu wasn't ready to
reveal. He coughed nervously and continued, "I can't say for certain that the Nibenese left anything
behind deliberately—"

"You may be certain it was deliberate," Hamanu assured him with a weary sigh.

He waved the mortals aside and shed the glamour surrounding his right hand. Neither man
reacted to the skeletal fingers, with their menacing black talons—or, rather, each man strove to swallow
his shock as Hamanu carefully slit the remaining silk.
A black glass shard as long as an elf's arm came into view. Obsidian, but as different from the
obsidian in Urik's mines as mortals were from Rajaat's champions.

A smoky pall rose from the shard, obscuring the ember from any eyes less keen than Hamanu's,
which saw in it a familiar, blue-green eye. A foul odor, partly brimstone, partly the mold and decay of
death, permeated the window-less chamber. Shedding his human glamour completely, Hamanu bared
dripping fangs. The pall congealed in a heartbeat and, like a serpent, coiled up Hamanu's arm. It grew
with lightning speed until it wound from his ankles to his neck.

"Damn Nibenay!" Javed shouted as he drew his sword, risking his life twice-over as he
disobeyed his king's command and prepared to do battle with sorcery.

"Fool!" Hamanu replied, which froze the commandant where he stood, though it was neither the
Shadow-King nor Javed who occupied the forefront of his thoughts. "I am no longer the man fate made
of me," he warned the sooty serpent constricting his ribs and neck.

Working his hand through the serpent's sorcerous coils, Hamanu found the head and wrenched it
into the light where he could see it. And it could see him.

"I am not the man you thought I was."

With a flicking gesture, Hamanu impaled the serpent's head on his thumb's talon, then he let the
heat of his rage escape from his heart. The serpent writhed. Ignoring the talon piercing its skull, it opened
its mouth and hissed. Glowing, molten blood flowed from its fangs, covering Hamanu's wrist. Hamanu
hissed back and, reaching into the Gray, summoned a knife from the void.

He cut off the serpent's head. Its coils fell heavily to the floor around his feet, where they released
noxious vapors as they dissolved.

The poison posed no threat to Hamanu, but Javed and Pavek fell to their knees. The Lion of Urik
was in no mood for sacrifice, especially of his own men. Reversing his grip on the hilt of his knife, which
was forged from the same black glass as the now-shrunken shard, Hamanu drew a line along his forearm.

His hot blood sizzled when it struck the ooze on the floor. Dark, oily smoke rose as it consumed
the dregs of vanquished sorcery. The stench grew worse, but it was no longer deadly. When the ooze
was gone, Hamanu inhaled the odor into himself. He looked down on his mortal companions, who were
still on their knees and far beyond fear.

"Did you bring the message?"

Javed nodded, then produced a stiff, stained sheet of human parchment. "I knew you'd want it,
Great One."

Hamanu seized the parchment with a movement too quick for mortal eyes to follow. The ink was
gone, as Javed warned, but there were other ways to read a champion's message. He closed his eyes,
and the Shadow-King's blurred features appeared in his mind.

You have seen our danger. This was sent to me. You can imagine who, imagine how. We've
gone too long without a dragon. If we can't make one, he will. Mark me well, Hamanu: he'll find a
way to shape that turd, Tithian, into a dragon, if we don't stop him. Long before he died, Borys
confided in me that Rajaat had intended to shape you into the Dragon of Tyr until he—Borys, that
is—decided otherwise. It's not too late. The three of us can shape you before Rajaat tries again
with Tithian. I've evolved a spell that will preserve your sanity. It won't be the way it was with
Borys; we can't permit that, none of us can. Think about it, Hamanu. Think seriously about it.

The Shadow-King's image vanished in the heat of Hamanu's curse. The shard of Rajaat's sorcery
was an unexpected, unpleasant proof of Gallard's claim. If Rajaat was making sorcery in the material
world, then the Hollow was weakening; they'd gone too long without a dragon maintaining it. But if
Gallard had found a spell that tempered the madness of dragon creation, Gallard wouldn't be offering it to
him.

Reluctantly, Hamanu reconsidered Windreaver's recounting of the Gnome-Bane's strategy. There
were three ways to transform a champion into a dragon: his peers pells to accelerate his metamorphosis,
he could quicken so many sorcerous spells that he'd transform himself, or—following Kalak of Tyr's
despicable example—he could gorge himself on the death of his entire city. Most likely, Gallard hoped to
implement all three.

"Who do we fight, Great One?" Javed asked, his voice cracked and weak from poison.

"Do as I command, Javed," Hamanu scolded his most-trusted officer. "Summon my levy."

Wisely, the elf nodded and bowed as he rose to his feet. "As you will, Great One. As you
command."

He retreated to the bronze door, which Hamanu opened with a thought. Pavek followed.

"Not you. Not yet."

Pavek dropped again to his knees. "Your will, Great One."

"I need you here, in the palace, Pavek, but I need your druid friends as well. Send a message to
Quraite. Send a message to Telhami, if you will. Tell her it's time, Pavek; the end of time."

"If Urik's danger is Quraite's danger, Great One, then I'm sure she already knows. She says
there's only one guardian spirit for all of Athas, and she is part of it now," Pavek said, still on his knees
with his head tightly bowed.

There were many tastes and textures swirling in the young man's thoughts, but loathing was not
among them. Leaning forward, Hamanu hooked a talon under Pavek's chin, nudging gently until he could
see the troubled face his templar strove to conceal. Then, with another talon, he traced the scar across
Pavek's face.