The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King

by Lynn Abbey

  Drubbed in the netherworld, unable to deliver Hamanu to Rajaat, and besieged on the battlefield, Inenek withdrew her support from her templars who, feeling the tide of battle shift away from them, tried to escape a now-inevitable defeat. A few, on the battlefield's fringes, might have succeeded; they were hardly the lucky ones. Inenek wouldn't take them back for fear Hamanu had tampered with them, and ordinary folk made certain that the life of a renegade templar was neither pleasant nor long.

  The Gulg templars who fell into Hamanu's hands knew what their fate would be: a quick death, if they were lucky, a drawn-out one if they weren't. They didn't know who the sorcerer-kings truly were or why they despised one another. They only knew that a templar's life was over once he stood before another sorcerer-king. Two or three of Inenek's templars fell on their knees, renouncing their city; they offered oaths to Urik's mightier king. But there was no hope in their hearts or useful knowledge in their heads—and he would never spare a templar who denied his city.

  He offered them the same opportunity he offered his templar prisoners—death by their own hands instead of his. Without exception, they took the easier, safer course: running onto the swords and spears the Urikites held before them.

  "O Mighty One, your will is done," a young adjutant informed Hamanu when the deeds were finished. The elf's bright yellow robe and metallic right sleeve were torn and stained. The thoughts on his mind's surface were painfully clear. His name was Kalfaen, and this had been his first campaign. He hadn't risen through the war-bureau ranks, but had been given an adjutant's enameled medallion on the strength of his family's connections. "The Oba's templars are all dead, except—except for the wounded—"

  Hamanu ignored the young man's distress. He tolerated nepotism in the templar ranks because it gave the likes of Kalfaen no real advantage. "Wait here," he commanded, and insured obedience with a frigid thought that held the youthful elf where he stood. "When I am finished with the wounded, you shall recount what happened here, from the beginning."

  Elves were chancy mortals. A good many of them crumpled and died the first time Hamanu touched their minds. The best of them matured into loyal, independent templars such as Javed. If he'd made the effort, Hamanu could have learned to separate the weak from the strong before he put them to the test, but it was easier—certainly quicker—to nail Kalfaen to the ground and see if he survived.

  None of the Oba's wounded templars would survive. Those who remained welcomed the release provided by yellow-robed surgeon-sergeants, usually with a quick slash through the jugular. The two knife-wielding sergeants bowed low when Hamanu's shadow fell between them. Without a spoken word, they scuttled off to join their comrades beside the Urikite wounded. They left their king to tread silently among the bloody Gulgans, carefully severing the spiritual fibers that bound essence to substance. Hamanu had subsumed one man's spirit already, and he neither wanted nor needed to add another name to his army of grievance against Rajaat.

  He was careful as well because these templars had belonged to Inenek and she could have easily tampered with them. He himself had done so, from time to time, with the men and women he'd sent into war.

  With Nibenay between them, Urik and Gulg—the Don-King and the Oba—had rarely warred with each other. While Borys lived, Rajaat's champions made war with their closest neighbors and uneasy alliances with the rest of their peers. Gulg and Nibenay had never been anything but enemies, until now—

  Hamanu plunged his awareness deep into the ground and located himself. A chill shook his heart. This battle had taken place far from any road, farther still from any village or oasis, deep within the barren borderlands that Urik and Nibenay had contested for thirteen ages.

  Hamanu didn't doubt that Gallard knew where Inenek had sent her templars, but he doubted that his old nemesis knew she'd been trading secrets with Rajaat. In other times, communion with the War-Bringer was the only crime that the champions would unanimously condemn and punish.

  Times had changed. Everything had changed—except Hamanu, the Lion of Urik. As Hamanu thought of dragons and champions, the last of the Gulg templars heaved a shuddering sigh and passed from life into eternal sleep.

  The Lion-King strode toward the Urik infirmary tended by his surgeon-sergeants. He granted unlimited spells to the war-bureau healers in the aftermath of battle, for all the good it did the injured. Working with second-hand magic, the surgeon-sergeants were barely competent in their craft. Templars moaned and wailed when their wounds were tended. They healed with troublesome scars such as Pavek bore across his otherwise handsome face.

  Hamanu used the endless potential of the Unseen world when he chose to heal. As a restorer of life and health, he was more than competent, but not even his flexible consciousness could attend the needs of so many. He chose not to choose a lucky few among them. He chose, in truth, to keep his compassion well-hidden from the templars who served him, and he defended his choice with the thought that it was better that mortals not rely on his mercy.

  Pale and streaked with clammy sweat, Kalfaen waited precisely where Hamanu had left him.

  "Recount," the Lion commanded, tugging the Unseen strings laced through the elven youth's mind.

  Hamanu's sorcery kept Kalfaen upright. His own will shaped the words and thoughts that the king skimmed off the surface of his mind.

  "There were children with them," Kalfaen explained.

  Despite their strong tribal attachments to kith and kin, elves weren't sentimental about their offspring. They'd abandon anything, anyone if the need arose. On the other side of the coin, a tribe with children in tow appeared both prosperous and fearless. Kalfaen's thoughts were tinged with shame. He'd succumbed to metal-coin bribes, women's charm, and the prejudices of his own race.

  Hamanu returned that shame as a thousand sharp needles lancing Kalfaen's inmost self. The youth gasped involuntarily.

  "I die," he whispered.

  Trust and prejudice together were just another two-sided coin. When the Lion of Urik trusted his mortal templars, he got their prejudices in the bargain. Kalfaen wasn't the only Urikite who'd bought the Gulgan deception. Hamanu's spell kept the youth alive as surely as it kept him standing.

  "Recount," he demanded. "What next? What of the others? Recount!"

  The rest was as simple as it was predictable: something had been slipped into the wine. Immune to their own poisons, the false refugees had slipped away during the night, leaving the templars to death at dawn. But the militant had drunk less than Kalfaen and the rest. He saw telltale dust on the eastern horizon and sounded an alarm, then kicked each of them soundly in the flanks until they roused. By the time Kalfaen was on his feet, the sound of hobnail sandals slapping the barren soil was all around them.

  There was nothing more to say or learn. Hamanu released Kalfaen. The elf collapsed in stages—to his knees, his elbows, his face. Belatedly, he clapped his long-fingered hands over his ears and scalp, as if scraps of mortal flesh could have protected him from Hamanu's inquiry. He reeked of vomit and worse, but he'd live. He'd been tempered in the Lion's fire and, having failed to die, was doomed to survive.

  Hamanu's thoughts were already moving away from the elf. Scanning the remains of the camp, he looked for the missing pieces in the puzzle Inenek had left for him. Her plans had gone awry: he'd arrived early, trying to save his templars, triggering her traps out of sequence. But she had meant for him to come—why else tamper with the mind of his militant or set a whirlwind to wait for him in the Gray?

  The militant, then, was the key. Inenek had meant for the templar to use his medallion to summon him to this barren place, though not during the fighting. The poisoned wine and the netherworld disruption were both designed to keep him away while his templars were slain.... While all save one of his templars were slain....

  Did the Oba think Urik's templars were fools? No war-bureau templar would admit to being the sole survivor of monumental stupidity. He certainly wouldn't summon his immortal king to witness the debacle. A m
ilitant would have needed a better reason.

  "Stand down!" Hamanu's voice roared beyond the battlefield.

  The surgeon-sergeants continued their work, but the templars who'd been gleaning armor, weapons, and other valuables from the corpses of friend and foe alike stood at attention with their arms at their sides. Hamanu's head throbbed—had been throbbing since he stepped from the netherworld. It was a minor ache compared to the agonies he customarily ignored, and no surprise, considering the unnatural power that had been expended in this unlikely place.

  Massaging an illusory forehead with a human-seeming hand, Hamanu dissected his aches. Sorcery and mind-bending, his and Inenek's, had caused much of the harm, and beneath that, the War-Bringer's spoor. The smell of Rajaat was not just in the netherworld, where Hamanu had glimpsed the Black as he battled Inenek's whirlwind, but here, amid the battle refuse.

  Hamanu bestrode his lifeless militant, who'd fallen exactly where he'd stood when he raised his medallion. The man's mind was cold; when a champion subsumed a mortal spirit, there was nothing left behind for necromantic interrogation.

  With a roar, the Lion of Urik cursed himself, Inenek, Rajaat, and the useless militant. He kicked the corpse aside and knew before it struck ground again that he'd found his missing piece.

  Impatiently, Hamanu cast a net into the netherworld.

  Windreaver!

  Nearly a quinth had passed since Hamanu had sent the troll to Ur Draxa—not a lot of time, considering how treacherous the citadel might have become if Rajaat were working sorcery from his prison.

  Windreaver!

  Hamanu hadn't been concerned by the troll's absence. In the past, Windreaver had been gone a year, even a decade, ferreting out secrets. Disembodied, neither dead nor alive, the wayfaring troll had little effect on the world around him and was equally immune to any manner of assault. And if Windreaver had been destroyed—Hamanu rubbed his forearm; beneath the leonine illusion he felt a stony lump—the troll's passing would have been noticed.

  Windreaver!

  A third call echoed throughout the Gray and died unanswered. Hamanu pondered the imponderable: Windreaver falling into a trap. Windreaver imprisoned. Windreaver seizing an opportunity for vengeance. Hamanu would have staked his immortal life that Windreaver wouldn't betray him to Rajaat or another champion, but he'd been wrong more often than not lately.

  To me, Windreaver—now!

  Nothing. Not a whisper or a promise anywhere in the netherworld. By sundown, the surgeon-sergeants had finished their work among the wounded. Hamanu picked up the wrapped shard and broke it over his thigh. He inhaled the malignant vapors, and then seared Rajaat's spells with his own. With nothing left to hinder him, Hamanu shouted Windreaver's name to the beginning of time, the end of space. He harvested countless interrupted thoughts, none of which emanated from a troll.

  * * *

  After thirteen ages, an enemy was as good as a friend. As the two moons rose together, Hamanu returned to Urik not merely alone but lonely. He called Enver, Javed, and Pavek away from their separate suppers. They sat, stiff and still, on the palace roof while he paced beside the balustrade, disguised as a man and fooling no one. He could perceive their thoughts, their conviction that something must be terribly wrong, but he couldn't make them speak, not to each other, not to him, not the way Windreaver would have spoken.

  "Such a doleful gathering, O Mighty Master. Is someone you care about dead or dying?" Like a shadow sketched in darkness with silver ink, Windreaver spun himself out of the night. "I heard you, O Mighty Master, and thought it might be important."

  Hamanu hid his relief. "What have you learned in Ur Draxa? Have you found the source of the shards?"

  Thick silver lips parted, revealing thicker silver teeth. "Shards, O Mighty Master? Have you found others?"

  Hamanu had beaten Windreaver's trolls decisively, but he'd never outsmarted the old general, who could still make him feel like the young man he'd once been. "Inenek. Today. Destroyed now, like the first."

  "If there were two, O Mighty Master, there are certainly more," Windreaver said in a tone that might easily be mistaken for concern.

  "What of Ur Draxa? What have you learned?"

  "That men are fools where women are concerned, O Mighty Master."

  "Spare me your homilies. Recount!" Hamanu squeezed his own forearm, and Windreaver's silvery outline stilled.

  Hamanu's heart skipped. "Were?"

  "Absolute brilliance that was, O Mighty Master, imprisoning your enemy's bones in a lava lake, then hurling the Dark Lens in afterward. Absolute pure brilliance. What, after all, is lava but unborn obsidian? Who's to say now where the Lens ends and the prison begins, eh, O Mighty Master? When does a prison become a palace? A palace become a prison?"

  Beneath Hamanu's hand, one of the balustrade lions cracked and crumbled into dust.

  "It's hard to say, for the smoke and steam and fog, but it seemed to me, O Mighty Master, that the lake's no longer flat. It rises up, I think, in the middle, rather like a baby's gums when the teeth are about to erupt—Oh, I'm sorry, Mighty Master: You have no children. You wouldn't know about erupting teeth—"

  "Will it hold?" Hamanu demanded. "Will the wards and spells that woman cast hold Rajaat in the Hollow?"

  "By the sun's light, O Mighty Master, they were strained, but strong."

  Chapter Seven

  Hamanu sent them away—all of them: Windreaver, Pavek, Enver, the myriad slaves and templars whose labor fueled the palace routine. The Lion-King retired to distill the reagents and compose the invocation of the stealthy spell he'd need to get close enough to see his creator's prison with his own eyes and—more importantly—get away again.

  "Oil, O Mighty Master?" Windreaver whispered from the darkest depths of the room where Hamanu worked into the night.

  The storerooms beneath the palace were flooded. Their contents had been hurriedly hauled to the upper rooms for safekeeping, leaving Hamanu's normally austere and organized workroom in chaos. The treasures of a very long lifetime were heaped into precarious pyramids. Windreaver's shadowy form would be lost amid countless other shadows, and Hamanu didn't break his concentration to look for his old enemy.

  "Do you truly believe oil from the egg-sack of a red-eyed roc will protect you from your master?"

  "... nine hundred eighty... nine hundred eighty-one..." Hamanu replied through clenched teeth.

  Shimmering droplets, black as the midnight sky and lustrous as pearls, dripped from the polished porphyry cruet he held over an obsidian cauldron. Four ages ago, he'd harvested this oil from a red-eyed roc. It had vast potential as a magical reagent—potential he had scarcely begun to explore—but he did not expect it to protect him from the first sorcerer.

  Nothing but his own wits and all the luck in the world could protect the last champion from Rajaat.

  "You're a fool, O Mighty Master. Surrender and be done with it. Become the dragon. Any dragon would be better than Rajaat unchained. You certainly can't fight Rajaat and your peers."

  "... nine hundred eighty-eight... nine hundred eighty-nine..."

  Unable to provoke an explosion from either Hamanu or the concoction in front of him, Windreaver turned his attention to the clutter. Save for his acid voice and the swirling wake of his anger, the troll had no effect on the living world. That was his protection—he could slip undetected through all but the most rigorous wardings, including the ones Hamanu had set on this room. It was also his frustration.

  Whirling through the room, Windreaver shook the clutter and raised a score of cluttering dust devils from its shadows. Hamanu stilled the air with an absentminded thought and counted the nine hundred ninety-second drop of oil. The devils collapsed. There was another table in the workroom, uncluttered save for writing implements and two sheaves of vellum: one blank, the other already written upon, It drew Windreaver's curiosity as a lodestone attracted iron. The air above the table sighed. The corners of the written-upon vellum rustled.

  Driven
by a very local wind, the brass stylus rolled to the table's edge and clattered loudly to the floor. The vellum remained where it belonged.

  "Memoirs, O Mighty Master?" The rustling stopped. "An apology?"

  Windreaver's accusations were icy knives against Hamanu's back. The Lion of Urik wore the guise of a human man in his workroom where no illusion was necessary. Human motion, human gestures, were still the movements his mind knew best. He shrugged remembered shoulders beneath an illusory silk shirt and continued his count.

  "What fascination does this street-scum orphan hold for you, O Mighty Master? You've wound him tight in a golden chain, and yet you plead for his understanding."

  "... one thousand... one thousand one."

  Hamanu set the cruet down and, taking up an inix-rib ladle, gave the cauldron a stir. Bubbles burst on the brew's surface. The two-score flames of the overhead candelabra extinguished themselves with a single hiss and the scent of long-dead flowers. A coal brazier glowed beneath the cauldron, but when Hamanu stirred it a second time, the pale illumination came from the cauldron itself.

  "I noticed him, this Just-Plain Pavek of yours, Pavek the high templar, Pavek the druid. His scars go deep, O Mighty Master. He's scared to the core, of you, of every little thing."

  "Pavek is a wise man."

  "He's young."

  "He's mortal."

  "He's young, O Mighty Master. He has no understanding."

  "You're old. Did age make you wise?"

  "Wiser than you, Manu. You never became a man."

  Manu. The troll had read the uppermost sheet of parchment where the name was written, but he'd known about Manu for ages. Windreaver knew the Lion's history, but Hamanu knew very little about the troll. What was there to know about a ghost?

  Shifting the ladle to his off-weapon hand, Hamanu reached into an ordinary-seeming leather pouch sitting lopsidedly on the table. He scooped out a handful of fine, dirt-colored powder and scattered it in an interlocking pattern across the cauldron's seething surface. Flames leapt up along the powder's trail.