The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King

by Lynn Abbey

I'd kept Bult's one-time friend close since he'd taken up my cause. He was twice my age and knew things I couldn't imagine. When he'd been a boy, he'd listened to veterans who'd made the victorious sweep through the Kreegills. I gave One-Eye leave to speak his mind and listened carefully to what he said.

  "If we run now," One-Eye continued. "If we scatter in all directions before the noose is closed, leaving everything behind, a few will get away clean. If we stand, we're trapped, Hamanu. Say, they don't have enough punch to charge the hill, they can set the grass afire. There's a time for running, Hamanu."

  "We attack," I insisted, fighting my own temper.

  My sword hand twitched, eager to slay any man or woman who cast a shadow across my ambitions. The veterans around me saw my inner conflict. Four times—five counting Bult—I'd proven that I could kill anyone who stood in my way. One-Eye presented a greater challenge. His wisdom alone could defeat me, and gutting him would be a hollow victory.

  The dust cloud was growing, spreading north and south. We heard drums, keeping the veterans in step and relaying orders from one end of the curving line to the other. My heart beat to their tempo. Fear grew beneath my ribs and in the breasts of all my veterans. There was panic brewing on my hilltop. When I looked at the dusty horizon, my mind was blank, my thoughts were bound in defeat. I wanted to attack, but I had no answer to One-Eye's questions: how? and where?

  "You can't hold them," One-Eye warned. "They're going to run. Give the order, Hamanu. Run with them, ahead of them. It's our only chance."

  Hearing him, not me, a few men lit out for the west, and a great many more were poised to follow. My sword sang in the warming air and came up short, a hair's breadth from One-Eye's neck. I had my veterans' attention, and a heartbeat to make use of it.

  "We'll run, One-Eye," I conceded. Then my destiny burst free. Visions and possibilities flooded my mind. "Aye, we'll run—we'll run and we'll attack! All of us, together. We'll wait until their line is thin around us, then, just when they think they've got us, we'll shape ourselves, shoulder-to-shoulder, into a mighty spear and thrust through them. Let them be the ones who run... from us!" In my mind I saw myself at the spear's tip, my sword Bashing a bloody red as my veterans held fast around me and my enemies fell at my feet. But, what I saw in my mind wasn't enough: I watched One-Eye closely for his reaction.

  My fist struck the air above my head—the one and only time that I, Hamanu, saluted another man's wisdom. The orders to stand fast, then charge as a tight-formed group, radiated around the hilltop. Not everyone greeted them with enthusiasm or obedience, but I ran down the first veteran who bolted, hamstringing him before I slashed his throat. After that, they realized it was better to be behind me than to have me behind them.

  I held my veterans on the hilltop until the encroaching circle was complete. Grim bravado replaced any lingering thoughts of panic or fear once the circle began to shrink: either we would win through and roll up our enemies' line, or we'd all be dead. At least we hoped we'd be dead. That's what gave my veterans their courage as we started down the hill. Any battlefield death was preferable to the eyes of fire.

  How can I describe the exhilaration of that moment? Sixty shrieking humans raced behind me, and the faces of men and women before us turned as pale as the silver Ral when he was alone in the nighttime sky. I'd never led a charge before, never imagined the awesome energy of humanity intent on death.

  Every aspect of battle was new to me, and dazzling. We ran so fast; I remember the wind against my face. Yet I also remember realizing that if I continued to hold my sword level in front of me, I'd skewer my first enemy and be helpless before the second, with a man's full weight wedged against the hilt.

  There was time to change my grip, to raise my weapon arm high across my off-weapon shoulder, and deliver a sweeping sword stroke as we met their line. A man went down, his head severed. Beside me, One-Eye swung a stone-headed mallet at a woman. I'll never forget the sound of her ribs shattering, or the sight of blood spurting an arm's full length from her open mouth.

  A glorious rout had begun. Destiny had pointed our spear at the handful of humanity who could have opposed us: the life-sucking mages who marched with Yoram's army. Their spells were their own, independent of the Troll-Scorcher. But spellcasting requires calm and concentration, neither of which existed for long on that battlefield.

  The enemy had expected an easy victory over ragtag renegades. They expected magic to do the hard work of slaying me and my veterans. They weren't prepared for hand-to-hand bloody combat. We took the fighting to them, and they crumpled before us—fleeing, surrendering, dying. At last, we stood before fine-dressed officers with metal weapons, mekillot shields, and boiled-leather armor.

  The battle paused while they took my measure and I took theirs. My veterans were ready, and they were prepared to die defending themselves.

  But they preferred not to—

  "Peace, Manu!" Their spokesman hailed me by my name. "For love of human men and women, stand down!"

  "Never!" I snarled back, thinking they'd asked me to surrender, knowing I had the strength around me to slay them all.

  To a man, they retreated.

  "You've made your point, Manu," the spokesman shouted from behind his shield. "There's no honor in killing a man when there're trolls for the taking not two day's march from here."

  I raised my sword. "You lie," I said, not bothering to be more specific.

  The officers halted and stood firm. There were five of them. An honor guard stood with them, armed with metal swords and armored in leather, though they lacked the mekillot shields. I judged the guard the tougher fight. We'd already lost at least ten veterans from our sixty, and the pause was giving the enemy the opportunity to regroup.

  I took my swing—and reeled into my left-side man as a better swordsman beat my untutored attack aside.

  One-Eye and six other voices counseled me against the officer's offer, but she knew me, knew my dilemma. Trolls were the enemy because, after ages of warfare, there could be no peace between us. Myron of Yoram was the enemy because he wouldn't let his army win the war. But humanity was not the enemy. I'd kill humans without remorse if they stood between me and my enemies, but, otherwise, I had no cause against my own folk.

  "Lay down your swords," I said to' those before me, and they did. "Call off your veterans!"

  Another of the officers—a short, round-faced fellow that no other man would consider a threat in a fight but was the highest ranked of all—shouted, "Recall!" From the midst of the honor guard, a drum began to beat. I waved the armed guard aside and beheld a boy, fair-haired, freckled, and shaking with terror as he struck the recall rhythm with his leather-headed sticks.

  His signal was taken up by two other drummers, each with a slight variation. The round-faced officer said there should have been five drummers answering the recall, one for each officer. The drummers were boys, not veterans, not armed. They'd been no threat to us when we attacked and rolled up their line, but the round-faced officer swore they wouldn't have run, that they were as brave as any veteran, ten times braver than I. By the look in his eye, I understood that at least one of the boys was kin to him, one of the boys who hadn't sounded his drum. He judged me the boy's murderer, just as I'd once held Bult responsible for Dorean.

  By my command, we searched the field, looking for the missing drummers. We found the three missing boys before sundown, their cold fingers still wrapped around their drumsticks.

  Battle is glorious because you're fighting the enemy, you're fighting for your own life and the lives of the veterans beside you. There's no glory, though, once the battle has ended. Agony sounds the same, whatever language the wounded spoke when they were whole, and a corpse is a tragic-looking thing whether it's a half-grown boy or a fullgrown, warty troll.

  There were more than a hundred corpses around that hilltop. I'd walked away from Deche, and the death it harbored, hardly by my own choice. When the time came, I'd buried Jikkana, and Bult, and I'd seen to
it that all the others went honorably into their graves. But a hundred human corpses...

  "What do we do with them?" I asked One-Eye over a cold supper of stale bread and stiff, smoked meat. "We'll need ten days to dig their graves. We'll be parched and starving—"

  One-Eye found something fascinating in his bread and pretended not to hear me. The woman officer answered instead:

  "We leave them for the kes'trekels and all the other scavengers. They're meat, Manu. Might as well let some creature have the good of 'em. We head west at dawn tomorrow—if you want to catch those trolls."

  And we did, but not at dawn. The round-faced officer kept us waiting while he buried his boy deep in the ground, where no scavenger would disturb him.

  They held me in thrall, those five officers did, with their hard eyes and easy assurance. I knew I was cleverer than Bult and all his ilk, but, though I'd taken their swords away, I felt foolish around them. My veterans saw the difference, sensed my discomfort. By the time we'd marched two days into the west, those who'd joined me before the hilltop battle and those we'd acquired in that battle's aftermath heeded my commands, but only after they'd stolen a glance at my round-faced captive.

  "Show me the trolls!" I demanded, seizing his arm and giving him a rude shake.

  He staggered, almost losing his balance, almost rubbing the bruise I'd surely given him. But he kept his balance and kept the pain from showing on his face. "They're here," he insisted, waving his other arm across the dry prairie.

  The land was as flat as the back of my hand and featureless, except farther to the southwest, where a scattering of cone-shaped mountains erupted from the grass. They were nothing like the rocky Kreegills, but trolls were a mountain folk, and I believed the officer when he said we'd find trolls to the southwest.

  There was throttled laughter behind me. As veterans were measured, I scarcely passed muster. I'd seen the Kreegills, and the heartland, but the sinking land—that's what the officers called the prairie—was new to me. It appeared flat, but appearances deceived, and sinking was as good a description as any for the land we crossed.

  The dry grass was pocked with sinkholes large enough to swallow an inix. The holes weren't treacherous—not at a slow pace, with men walking ahead, prodding the ground with spear butts to find the hidden ones, the ones crusted over with a thin layer of dirt that wouldn't hold a warrior's weight. But sinkholes weren't the only difficulty the grass concealed. The prairie was riddled with dry stream beds, some a half-stride deep, a half-stride wide. Others cut deeper than a man was tall—deeper than a troll—twice as wide. They were banked with wind-carved dirt that dissolved to clumps and dust under a man's weight.

  When we came to such a chasm, there was naught to do but walk the bank until it narrowed—or until we came to an already trampled place where crossing was possible. Muddy water lingered in a few of the chasms. There were footprints in the mud: six-legged bugs, four-footed beasts with cloven hooves, two-footed birds with talons on every toe, and once in a while, the distinctive curve of a leather-shod foot, easily twice the size of mine.

  A band of trolls could hide in those muddy chasms. If a troll knew the stream's course—which crossed which, which went where—his band could travel faster than ours, and unobserved.

  As the sun grew redder and shadows lengthened, our round-faced officer advised making camp in one of the chasms. There weren't many who wanted to sleep in an open-ended grave. Myself, a boyhood in the Kreegills and five years with Bult had conditioned my notions of safety: I wanted those odd-shaped mountains beneath my feet. I wanted to see my enemy while he was still a long way off.

  And I was Hamanu. I got what I wanted.

  Marching by torchlight and moonlight, pushing the veterans until they were ready to drop, I made camp at the base of one of the strange mountains. In form, the mountains were like worm mounds or anthills—if either worms or ants had once grown large enough to build mountains with their castings. Their grass-covered slopes were slippery steep, without rocks anywhere to give a handhold or foothold.

  By daylight, we'd find a way to the top; that night, though, we made a cold camp at the bottom. The sinking lands were familiar in one way, at least: scorching hot beneath the sun, bone-chilling cold beneath the moon. Veterans and officers wrapped themselves into their cloaks and huddled close together.

  I took the first watch with five sturdy men who swore they'd stay awake.

  I faced south; the trolls came from the north. The first thing I heard was a human scream cut short. I know we'd fallen into a trap, but to this day I wonder if that trap had been set by the trolls or the Troll-Scorcher's officers. Whichever, it wasn't a battle—only the trolls had weapons; humans died tangled in their cloaks, still drowsy or sound asleep.

  I had my sword, but before I could take a swing, a human hand closed around the nape of my neck. My strength drained down my legs, though I remained standing. Fear such as I'd never known before shocked all thoughts of fight or flight from my head. A mind-bender's assault—I know it now—but it was pure magic then, for all I, Manu of Deche, the farmer's son, understood of the Unseen Way.

  I thought I'd gone blind and deaf as well, but it was only the Gray, the cold netherworld sucking sound from my ears as I passed through in the grip of another hand, another mind. For one moment I stood on moonlit ground, far from the odd-shaped mountain. Then a raspy, ominous voice said:

  "Put him below."

  Something hard and heavy hit me from behind. When I awoke, I was in a brick-lined pit with worms and vermin for my company. Light and food and water—just enough of each to keep me alive—fell from a tiny, unreachable hole in the ceiling. I never knew how the last battle of my human life ended, but I can guess.

  Hamanu's chin, human-shaped in the morning light that filtered through the latticed walls of his workroom, sagged toward his breastbone. The instant flesh brushed silk, though both were illusory, the king's neck straightened, and he sat bolt upright in his chair.

  Grit-filled eyes blinked away astonishment. He who slept once in a decade had caught himself napping. There was tumult in the part of Hamanu's mind where he heard his templars' medalLion-pleas—not the routine pleas of surgeon-sergeants, orators or others whose duties gave them unlimited access to the Dark Lens power he passed along to his minions. To Hamanu's moderate surprise, he'd responded to such routine pleas while he slept. After thirteen ages, he was still learning about the powers Rajaat had bestowed on him. Another time, the discovery would have held Hamanu's attention all day, more, but riot this day. His mind echoed with urgency, death and fear, and other dire savors.

  The Lion-King loosed filaments of consciousness through the Gray, one for every inquiry. Like a god he would not claim to be, his mind could be in many places at once—wandering Urik with his varied minions while being scattered across the barrens in search of endangered templars.

  The essence of Hamanu, the core of his self—which was much more than a skein of conscious filaments, more even than his physical body—remained in the workroom where he looked down upon a haphazard array of vellum sheets, all covered with his own bold script. Blots as large as his thumbnail stained both the vellum and the exposed table-top, a testament to the haste with which he'd written. There were also inky gouges where he'd wielded the brass stylus like a sword. The ink was dry, though, as was the ink stone.

  "O Mighty King, my lord above all—"

  A new request. Hamanu replied with another filament, this time wound around a question: What is happening?

  This wasn't the first time the Lion-King had been inundated with requests for Dark Lens magic. The desiccated heartland that Rajaat's champions ruled was a brutal, dangerous place where disaster and emergencies were commonplace. But always before, he'd been awake, alert, when the pleas arrived. His ignorance of the crisis—his templars' desperation—had never lasted more than a few heartbeats. He'd been awake, now, for many heartbeats, but so far, none of his filaments had looped back to him. He had only his own sen
ses on which to rely.

  And dulled senses they were. Hamanu's illusion wavered as he stood. Between eye blinks, the arms he braced against the table were a tattered patchwork of dragon flesh and human semblance. He yawned, not for drama, but from long-dormant instinct,

  "Too much thinking about the past," he muttered, as if literary exertions could account for the unprecedented disorder in his immortal world. Then, rubbing real grit from the corners of his illusory eyes, Hamanu made his way around the table.

  The iron-bound chest where his stealth spell ripened appeared unchanged. Passing his hand above the green-glowing lock, he kenned the spell's vibrations—complex, but according to expectation—within.

  "O Mighty King, my lord above all. Come out of your workroom. Unlock the door. Lion's Whim, my king—I beg you, O Mighty King: Answer me!"

  Still cross-grained and pillow-walking from his interrupted nap, Hamanu turned toward the sound, toward an ordinary door. Neither the voice nor the door struck a chord of recognition.

  "Are you within, O Mighty King? It is I, Enver, O Mighty King."

  Enver. Of course it was Enver; the fog in Hamanu's mind lifted. He could see his steward with his mind's eye. The loyal dwarf stood just outside the door he'd sealed from the inside with lethal wards. Anxious wrinkles creased Enver's brow. His fingers were white-knuckled and trembling as he squeezed his medallion.

  "Here I am, dear Enver. Here I've been all along. I was merely sleeping," Hamanu lapsed into his habitual bone-dry, ironic inflection, as if he were—and had always been— the heavy-sleeping human he appeared to be.

  The dwarf was not taken in. His eyes widened, and anxiety rippled above his brows, across his bald head. A frantic dialogue of inquiry and doubt roiled Enver's thoughts, but his spoken words were calm.

  "You're needed in the throne chamber, O Mighty— Omniscience." With evident effort, Enver resurrected the habits of a lifetime. "Will you want breakfast, Omniscience? A bath and a swim?"

  A few of the filaments Hamanu had released when he awakened were, at last, winding back to him, winding back in a single ominous thread. Templars had died at Todek village, died so fast and thoroughly that their last thoughts revealed nothing, and the living minds that had summoned him were uselessly overwrought.