The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King

by Lynn Abbey

  Hamanu's glossy black hair danced in the heat. He spoke a word; the flames froze in time. His hair settled against his neck; illusion maintained without thought. Moments later, screams and lamentations erupted far beyond the workroom. The flames flickered, died, and Hamanu stirred the cauldron again.

  "You're evil, Manu."

  "So say you."

  "Aye, I say it. Do you hear me?"

  "I hear. You'd do nothing different."

  "I'm no sorcerer," the troll swore indignantly.

  "A coincidence of opportunity. Rajaat made you before he made me."

  "Be damned! We did not start the Cleansing War!"

  "Nor did I. I finished it. Would you have finished it differently? Could you have stopped your army before every human man, woman, and child was dead? Could you have stopped yourself?"

  The air fell silent.

  Iridescence bloomed on the swirling brew. It spread rapidly, then rose: a noxious, rainbow bubble as tall as a man. The bubble burst, spattering Hamanu with foul-smelling mist. The silk of his illusory shirt shriveled, revealing the black dragon-flesh of his true shape. A deep-pitched chuckle rumbled from the workroom's corners before the illusion was restored. Hamanu released the ladle. The inix bone clattered full-circle around the obsidian rim, then it, the penultimate reagent, was consumed. Blue light, noxious and alive, formed a hemisphere above the cauldron, not touching it. With human fingers splayed along his human chin, concealing a very human scowl, Hamanu studied the flickering blue patterns.

  Rajaat, creator of sorcery as well as champions, had written the grammar of spellcraft in his own youth, long before the Cleansing Wars began. Since then, additions to the grimoires had been few, and mostly inscribed in blood: a warning to those who followed that the experiment had failed. Hamanu's stealthy spell was perilously unproven. Its name existed only in his imagination. He would, in all likelihood, survive any miscasting, but survival wouldn't be enough.

  Still scowling, Hamanu walked away from the table. He stopped at a heap of clutter no different from the others and made high-pitched clicking noises with his tongue. Before Windreaver could say anything, a lizard's head poked up. Kneeling, Hamanu held out his hand.

  The lizard, a critic, was ancient for its kind. Its brilliant, many-colored scales had faded to subtle, precious shades. Its movements were slow and deliberate, but without hesitation as it accepted Hamanu's finger and climbed across his wrist to his forearm. Its feet disappeared as it balanced on real flesh within the illusion.

  "You astonish me," Windreaver muttered from a corner.

  Hamanu let the comment slide, though he, too, was astonished, hearing something akin to admiration in his enemy's voice. He was evil; he accepted that. A thousand times a thousand judgments had been rendered against the Lion of Urik. He'd done many horrible things because they were necessary. He'd done many more because he was bored and craved amusement. But his evil was as illusory as his humanity.

  The Lion-King couldn't say what the lizard saw through its eyes. Its mind was too small, too different for him to occupy. Scholars had said, and proven, that critics wouldn't dwell in an ill-omened house. They'd choose death over deception if the household doors were locked against their departure. From scholarly proofs, it was a small step to the assumption that critics wouldn't abide evil's presence, and a smaller step to the corollary that critics and the Lion of Urik should be incompatible.

  Yet the palace never lacked the reclusive creatures. Shallow bowls of amber honey sat in every chamber for their use—even here, amid the noxious reagents, or on the roof beneath Hamanu's unused bed.

  With the critic on his arm, Hamanu returned to the worktable, dipped his finger in just such a delicately painted bowl, and offered a sticky feast to his companion. Its dark tongue flicked once, probing the gift, and a second time, after which the honey was gone. A wide yawn revealed its toothless gums, and then it settled its wrinkled chin flat on the Lion-King's forearm, basking in the warmth of his unnatural flesh.

  With a crooked and careful finger, Hamanu stroked the critic's triangular skull and its long flanks. Bending over, he whispered a single word: "Rajaat," and willingly opened his mind to the lizard as so many had unwillingly opened their minds to him.

  The critic raised its head, flicked its tongue—as if thoughts were honey in the air. Slowly it straightened its legs, turned around, and made its way back to Hamanu's hand, which was poised above the blue light, above the simmering cauldron.

  A shadow fell across Hamanu's arm. "This is not necessary, Manu."

  "Evil cares nothing for necessity," Hamanu snapped. "Evil serves itself, because good will not." He surprised himself with his own bitterness. He'd thought he no longer cared what others thought, but that, too, was illusion. "Leave me, Windreaver."

  "I'll return to Ur Draxa, O Mighty Master. There is nothing you can learn there that I cannot—and without the risk."

  "Go where you will, Windreaver, but go." The critic leapt into the cauldron. For an instant the workroom was plunged in total darkness. When there was light again, it came only from the brazier. The brew's surface was satin smooth; both the troll and the critic were gone.

  The reagents must age for two nights and a day before they could be decanted, before the stealthy spell could be invoked.

  There was much he could write in that time.

  * * *

  I removed Bult's sword from his lifeless hand. It was the first time I'd held a forged weapon. A thrill like the caress of Dorean's hair against my skin raced along my nerves. The sword would forever be my weapon. Casting my gorestained club aside, I ran my hand along the steel spine. It aroused me, not

  as Dorean had aroused my mortal passions, but I knew the sword's secrets as I had known hers.

  The dumbstruck veterans of our company retreated when I swept the blade in a slow, wide arc.

  "Now we fight trolls," I told them as Bult's corpse cooled. "No more running. If running from your enemy suits your taste, start running, because anyone who won't fight trolls fights me instead."

  I dropped down into the swordsman's crouch I'd seen but never tried. I tucked my vitals behind the hilt and found a perfect balance when my shoulders were directly above my feet. It was so comfortable, so natural. Without thinking, I smiled arid bared my teeth.

  Three of the men turned tail, running toward the nearest road and the village we'd passed a few days earlier, but the rest stood firm. They accepted me as their leader—me, a Kreegill farmer's son with a wordy tongue, a light-boned dancer, who'd killed a troll and a veteran on the same day.

  "Ha-Manu," one man called me: Worthy Manu, Bright Manu, Manu with a sword in his hand and the will to use it.

  The sun and the wind and the homage of hard, human eyes made me a warlord that day. My life had come to a tight corner. Looking back, I saw Manu's painful path from Deche: the burning houses, the desecrated corpses of kin... of Dorean. Ahead, the future beckoned him to shape it, to forge it, as his sword had been shaped by heat and hammer.

  I couldn't go back to Deche; time's tyranny cannot be overthrown, but I was not compelled to become Hamanu. A man can deny his destiny and remain trapped in the tight corner between past and future until both are unattainable. The choice was mine.

  "Break camp," I told them, my first conscious command. "I killed a troll last night. Where there's one troll, there're bound to be more. It's nigh time trolls learned that this is human land."

  There were no cheers, just the dusty backs of men and women as they obeyed. Did they obey because I'd killed Bult and they feared me? Did they listen because I offered an opportunity they were ready to seize? Or was it habit, as habit had kept me behind Bult for five years? Probably a bit of each in every mind, and other reasons I didn't guess then, or ever.

  In time, I'd learn a thousand ways to insure obedience, but in the end, it's a rare man who wants to go first into the unknown. I was a rare man.

  We had three kanks. Two of the bugs carried our baggage: uncut clo
th and hides, the big cook pots, food and water beyond the two day's supply every veteran carried in his personal kit—all the bulk a score of rootless humans needed in the barrens. The third kank had carried Bult and Bult's personal possessions and our hoard of coins. I appropriated the poison-spitting bug and rode in unfamiliar style while our trackers searched for troll trails.

  I counted the coins in our coin coffer first—what man wouldn't? We could have eaten better, if there'd been better food available at any price in any of the villages where we traded. I found Bult's hidden coin cache and counted those coins, too. Bult had been a wealthy man, for all the good it had done him. Wealth didn't interest me, not half as much as the torn scraps of vellum Bult had kept in a case made from tanned and supple troll hide.

  Bult had made other marks on his precious maps: blue curls for sweet streams that flowed year around, three black lines with a triangle below them to mark where we'd buried our dead. Those black lines surprised me: I hadn't thought he'd noticed. The last five years of my life were written on those vellum scraps.

  Another scrap held the names of the veterans in his band. I laughed when I read the words he'd written about me: "Bigmouthed farm boy. Talks too much. Thinks too much. Dangerous. Squash him when Jikkana lets him go." A man who has to write such things down in order to remember them is a fool, but I read his entries carefully, committing them, too, to my memory before I burnt the vellum. After all, he'd been right about me; he just hadn't moved fast enough.

  There were intact sheets of vellum in the case. Each bore the seal of a higher officer. The words were unfamiliar to me, even when I sounded them out. A code, I decided, but aren't all languages codes, symbols for words, words for things, motions, and ideas? I'd cracked the troll code before I knew that humanity had a code of its own. I had no doubt that I could crack any code Bult had devised.

  Of course, Bult hadn't devised the code. It was Myron of Yoram's code: the orders he—or someone he trusted—had sent to bands like ours. On each folded sheet, the officers whose paths crossed ours had written their thoughts about us. As we rarely saw the same officer twice running, the sheets were a sort of conversation among our superiors.

  Pouring over them, I easily pictured Bult doing the same. The image inspired me. I cracked the Troll-Scorcher's code three nights later. It was a simple code: one symbol displacing another without variation from one officer to the next. The Troll-Scorcher's officers weren't much cleverer than Bult had been, but their secrets had been safe from our yellow-haired leader. He would never have carried those closely written sheets around for all those years if he'd known how Yoram's officers belittled him.

  But there were more than insults coded on those sheets. Word by word, I pieced together the Troll-Scorcher's strategy. He herded the trolls as if they were no more, no less, than kanks. He culled his bugs and kept them moving, lest they overgraze the pasturage: human farms, human villages, human lives.

  We— Bult's band and the other bands that mustered each year on the plains—weren't fighting a war; we were shepherds, destined to tend Myron of Yoram's flocks forever.

  I read my translations to my veterans the next night. Honest rage choked my throat as I described the Troll-Scorcher's intentions; I couldn't finish. A one-eyed man-one of Bult's confidants and, I'd assumed, no friend of mine—took up after me. He was a halting reader; my ears ached listening to him, but he held the band's attention, which gave me the chance to study my men and women unobserved.

  They were mostly the children of veterans. They'd been raised in the sprawling camp in the plains where the whole army mustered once a year until they were old enough to join a band. Their lives had been completely shaped by Myron of Yoram's war against the trolls. When One-Eye finished, they sat mute, staring at the flames with unreadable expressions. For a moment I was flummoxed. Then I realized that their sense of betrayal went deeper than mine. Their very reason for living—the reasons that had sustained their parents and grandparents—was a fraud perpetrated by the very man they called their lord and master: Myron Troll-Scorcher.

  It was no longer enough that I lead them from one village to the next, looking for trolls who had—as they did from time to time—vanished overnight from the heartland. If I wanted my veterans to follow me further, I'd have to replace the Troll-Scorcher in their minds.

  I'd come to another corner in my life, hard after the last one. I could have sat with them, staring at the flames until the wood was ash and the sun rose. With neither leader nor purpose, we would have drifted apart or fallen prey to trolls, other men, or barrens-beasts, which were, even then, both numerous and deadly. But destiny had already named me Hamanu; I couldn't let the moment pass.

  This time there were cheers. Men took my hand; women kissed my cheek. Guide us, Hamanu, they said. We put our lives in your hands. You see light where we see shadows. Guide us. Give us victory. Give us pride, Hamanu.

  I heard their pleas, accepted their challenge. I led them toward the light.

  After studying Bull's maps, I found a pattern to our wanderings. More, I studied the vast, empty areas where we never wandered and where, I hoped, trolls might go when they vanished from their usual haunts.

  There were twenty-three of us left in what had been Bull's band, what had become Hamanu's. We were nowhere near enough warriors to confront trolls in lands that they knew better than we did. So we wandered before heading into the unknown, visiting map-marked villages. By firelight and the blazing midday sun, I told our tale to anyone who'd stand still long enough. Our message was simple: humanity suffers because the army sworn to protect it pursues the unfathomable goals of the Troll-Scorcher instead.

  "Turn away from the Troll-Scorcher and the trolls. Take your destinies into your own hands," I said at the end of every telling. "Choose to pay the price of victory now, or resign yourself to defeat forever."

  Instinct told me how to hold another human's attention with pitch, rhythm, and gesture, but only practice could teach me the words that would bind a man's heart to my ideas. I learned quickly, but not always quickly enough. At times, my words went wrong, and we left a village with dirt and dung clattering against our heels. But even then, there'd be a few more of us leaving than there'd been when we arrived.

  From twenty, we grew to forty; from forty to sixty.

  Our reputation—my reputation—spread. Renegade bands whose disillusionment with the Troll-Scorcher's army was older than ours met us on the open plains. Alliances were proposed. My band should fall in step, they advised, and I, being younger in both years and experience, should accept another leader's authority. Duels were fought: I was young, and I was still learning, but I was already Hamanu, and it was my destiny—not theirs—to forge victory.

  Bull's metal sword carved the guts of four renegade leaders who couldn't perceive, that truth. After each duel, I invited their veterans to join me. A few did, but loyalty runs deep in the human spirit, and mostly, duels left me with a cloud of enemies who wouldn't join my growing band and couldn't return to the Troll-Scorcher's army. Cut off at the neck, without leaders, and at the knees, with nowhere to go, they were of little consequence.

  I had no greater concern for the Troll-Scorcher's loyal bands, which dogged us from village to village. They threatened the villagers who aided us, then melted away, and got in the way of trolls when I tried to pursue them. My trackers guessed that there were, perhaps, three loyalist bands shadowing our movements and intimidating the villages we depended upon for food and water, now that our number I had grown too large for easy forage. Thirty men and women, they said, forty at most, and not an officer among them.

  I believed my trackers.

  I was stunned speechless one cool morning when the dawn patrol reported dust on the eastern horizon: something coming our way. Something large, with many, many feet.

  We'd made a hilltop camp the previous evening. The camp Bult would have made on the ground he would have chosen: the Troll-Scorcher's loyal veterans didn't care if the trolls saw fire again
st the nighttime sky. They'd choose defense over concealment every time. But the morning's dust cloud didn't rise from the feet of trolls.

  "How many?" I demanded of the trackers who'd failed me. Shielding their eyes from the risen sun, they grimaced and squinted with eyes no sharper than my own.

  Her companions agreed.

  "Are they human?" I asked, already knowing the answer. There were humans in the vicinity, but we hadn't seen troll sign since the day Bult died.

  By then the whole camp was awake. The ones who weren't staring at the sun were staring at me. No tracker would meet my eyes.

  "How many?" I cocked my wrist at my shoulder, ready to backhand the woman if she failed to answer.

  "A hundred," she whispered; the count spread through the camp like fire. "Maybe more, maybe less. More'n us, for certain."

  Veterans had at least a hundred curses for an incompetent leader, and I heard them all as the cloud broadened before us. They were getting closer—spreading out to encircle us. There were a whole lot more than a hundred. Sure as sunrise, there was an officer among them, and where there was a loyal officer, there was the Troll-Scorcher's magic, or so the older veterans promised. I'd never seen magic used before—except at the muster, when Myron of Yoram fried a few trolls, or the piddling displays Bult made when we'd held hands and shouted the Troll-Scorcher's name at the moon. We couldn't stand against the one and needn't fear the other.

  "What now, Hamanu?" someone finally asked. "What do we do now?"

  "It's all up," another man answered for me. "There's too many to outrun. We're meat for sure."

  I backhanded him and drew the sword that was at my side, night and day. "We never run; we attack! If Myron of Yoram has sent his army against us instead of trolls, then let his army pay the price."

  "Attack how, Hamanu? Attack where?" One-Eye chided me softly.