by Lynn Abbey
The serpent's head was midnight dark when its skull burst. Venom hissed and sputtered on the dais, leaving pits the size of a dwarf's thumbnail in the marble. It fizzled on the illusory golden skin of Hamanu's right arm, where it harmed no living thing.
Hamanu held the serpent's fading, dwindling body aloft so his templars could cheer his triumph. Their celebration would necessarily be brief. The other shard had ceased its thrumming, which Hamanu didn't consider reassuring. The templars hadn't completed their second salute when the chamber darkened. Sunset couldn't be the cause; he hadn't palled the throne chamber long enough for the day to be coming to its natural end. Ash plumes from the Smoking Crown volcano could have caused the darkness; but the eruptions that produced the plumes were invariably preceded by ground tremors.
Hamanu would not tolerate such an affront. He whispered the sorcerer's word for sparks. A sharp pain lanced his flank.
All sorcery required life essences before it kindled. While defilers and preservers quibbled and pointed fingers at one another, Hamanu quickened his spells with life essence from an inexhaustible, uncomplaining source: himself. He willingly sacrificed his own immortal flesh. Pain meant nothing if it thwarted Rajaat's grand design. Whatever essence he surrendered would be replaced, of course. But a man could draw water in a leaky bucket if he moved fast enough, and although the dragon metamorphosis was, ultimately, unstoppable, Hamanu prolonged his own agony at every opportunity.
His thoughts carried the quickened sparks to the lantern wick, and the Lion's eye gleamed gold again. An instant later, brighter light flashed through breezeway lattices-lightning as blue as the shard-born serpent had been, as blue as Rajaat's left eye. A distant crash of thunder accompanied the lightning. Then the throne chamber was dark again—except for the golden-eyed Lion. With his templars silent around him and the wails of Urik's frightened folk penetrating the palace walls, Hamanu waited for the next event, whatever it might be.
He didn't have to wait long.
"Hamanu of Urik."
Through the darkness of his throne chamber, Hamanu recognized the predatory voice of Abalach-Re, once known as Uyness of Waverly, the late ruler of Raam. Over the ages, the Lion-King's eyes had changed, along with the rest of him. Urik's Lion-King could see as dwarves, elves, and the other Rebirth races saw—not merely the reflection of external light, but the warm light that radiated from the bodies of the living. More than that, he could see magic in its ethereal form: the golden glow of the medallions his templars wore, the deep cobalt aura—scarcely visible, even to him—that surrounded the blond Raamin templar.
Uyness's voice came from the aura, but not from any spell the queen of Raam had cast in life or death. Hamanu thought immediately of Rajaat, but the first sorcerer hadn't cast the spell that put words in the air around the dumbfounded Raamin; nor had any other champion. Yet it was a subtle, powerful spell, as subtle and powerful as the stealth spell Hamanu aged in his workroom. The realization that he could not put a name to the sorcerer who cast it sent a shiver down his black-boned spine.
"Mark me well, Hamanu of Urik: the War-Bringer grows restless. He's waited thirteen ages to have his revenge. He remembers you best—you, the youngest, his favorite. The wounds you gave him will not heal, except beneath a balm of your heart's blackest blood. He seeks you first. He'll come for you, little Manu of Deche. He already knows the way."
On any other day, Hamanu might have been amused by the haphazard blend of truth, myth, and outright error the spell-spun voice spoke. He would have roared with laughter, gone looking for the unknown sorcerer, and—just possibly—spared the poor, ignorant wretch's life for amusement's sake.
Any other day, but not today. Not with Rajaat's blue lightning pummeling his city. Though the spell-caster didn't know what Uyness of Waverly would have known from her own memory of the day, thirteen ages ago, when the champions betrayed their creator and created a prison for him beneath the Black, there were undeniable truths in the thick air of the throne chamber. Rajaat was restless, Rajaat wanted revenge, and Rajaat would start with Urik.
Taking the chance that there was a conscious mind still attached to the spell, Hamanu said mildly, "Tell me something I don't already know. Tell me where you are and why you come to Urik now, when the War-Bringer's attention is sure to catch you... again. Wasn't one death enough?"
The cobalt aura flickered, as it might if motes of the Raamin champion's true essence had been used in its creation. "The Shadow-King found me," she said when her aura was restored. The statement wasn't quite an answer to Hamanu's questions. It might have been an evasion. It certainly couldn't lave been the truth. Gallard of Nibenay was many things, none of them foolish enough to search the Black near Rajaat's Hollow prison for the lingering remains of any champion, least of all, Uyness of Waverly. More than the rest of them, the Raamin queen relied on myth and theological bombast to sustain her rule. There were two reasons Nibenay hadn't swallowed Raam long ago: One was Urik, sitting between the cities; the other was Dregoth, who hated Uyness with undead passion.
The Tyr-storm, which had lapsed into faint rumblings after its initial surge, showed its power before the spellcast voice answered. Thunderbolts rained down on Hamanu's yellow-walled city—his keen ears recorded a score of strikes before echoes made an accurate count impossible. An acrid stench filled the chamber and brought tears to the eyes of his assembled templars. The storm's blue light shimmered in the pungent air, then coalesced into a swirling, luminous pillar that swiftly became Uyness of Waverly in her most beautiful disguise, her most seductive posture.
"Rajaat grows strong on our weakness, Hamanu. Without a dragon among us, no spell will hold him. We need a dragon, Hamanu. We need a dragon to keep Rajaat in the Hollow. We need a dragon to create more of our own kind, to restore order to our world. We choose you to be the dragon. Rajaat will come to Urik for revenge. He will destroy you. Then he will destroy everything. The champions come to honor you, Hamanu of Urik. We offer you lives by the thousand. You will become the dragon, and Athas will be saved."
Chapter Nine
Another barrage of blue lightning and deafening thunder pummeled Urik from above. The lightning-limned figure of the Raamin queen vanished with the afterglow and didn't reform. In the tumult, the sound of one man collapsing slowly on the marble tiles was heard only by Hamanu, who bent a thought around the blond templar's heart to keep it beating.
This Tyr-storm seemed fiercer than the last such storm to pound Urik's walls. Indeed, it seemed fiercer than any since the first—perhaps because like that storm, this one had arrived unexpectedly. Five years ago, Urik's most exalted templars had succumbed, at least temporarily, to the madness Tyr-storms inspired. Now the survivors stood impassively in the flickering blue light. If they were not confident that the storm would spend itself quickly—and Hamanu discerned their doubts through the lightning and the thunder—they were at least determined not to let their neighbors see their weakness.
Hamanu tolerated any mortal trait in his templars, except weakness. The men and women in his throne chamber were hard, often to the point of cruelty; competent, to the point of arrogance; and strong willed, even in his presence. They'd hesitate to ask the questions the Raamin queen's voice had raised in their minds, but inevitably, one of them would overcome that hesitation.
To forestall the death that would follow such insubordination, Hamanu reached into the blond templar's mind.
Who sent you? What do you know about the message and the object you bore?
Spasms rocked the Raamin templar as he lay unnoticed on the marble floor. He'd need a miracle to survive interrogation by a champion other than his mistress, and despite whatever promises the Raamin queen might have made while she lived, champions couldn't conjure miracles.
Don't fight me, Hamanu advised. Answer my questions. Recount.
The templar complied, giving Hamanu vision after vision of a Raam fallen in anarchy deeper than any he'd imagined. Five years after the woman Raamins called Abalach-Re,
the grand vizier of a nameless, nonexistent god, had disappeared, Raamin merchants, nobles, templars, and the worst sort of elven tribes had carved her city into warring fiefdoms.
Her templars, as ignorant as ever of the true source of their power, had tried to reestablish their magical link with the god that Uyness had claimed to serve. Small wonder, then, that these days the despised, dispirited Raamin templars struggled to hold their own quarter and the gutted palace. Small wonder, too, that when some of them began seeing a familiar face in their dreams, hearing a voice they'd despaired of hearing again, they'd done whatever it had told them to do. They went down to the dust-scoured wharves where the silt schooners tied up. There they found the shard among the rocks that were sometimes visible along the shore—
Without moving from the dais, Hamanu turned his attention to the elven runner who'd brought the second shard.
Recount, he commanded.
The elf's heart skipped a beat or two, but he was young and healthy, and he came to no permanent harm.
A pair of messengers, O Mighty King, came to the Todek registrator claiming to be templars from Balk—
Another city, far to the south of Urik, but also on the Sea of Silt.
Our registrator, she disbelieved. They were afoot, rat-faced and worse for traveling, with nothing in their scrips but a handful of ceramic chips so worn there was no telling what oven baked them or where. But they knew the things templars know, O Mighty King, and there was one among us who'd been to Balic and knew they had the city pegged aright: merchants and nobles in charge, just as in Tyr. Templars all dead or in hiding. So, the registrator listened—
We all listened close, O Mighty King, when the pair said King Andropinis wasn't dead, but that he needed help before he could give them power again. He'd said they'd find help in Urik if they delivered a message.
Hamanu interrupted, And the message was the leather-wrapped parcel?
No, O Mighty King. The parcel was to be a gift, a truth token from King Andropinis himself—or so they said. The registrator, she ordered them to unwrap it. They wouldn't, until we threatened them. I laughed, O Mighty King, when they cast lots and the loser made his death-promises. But he died a bad death, and the thing was still all wrapped in silk—
Sighing, Hamanu withdrew from the elf's mind while his templar was still recounting the fate of the Balkans. Would a lightning-limned image of Albeorn Elf-Slayer rise in the storm-lit chamber if he unwrapped this second shard? Would it spew a mix of truth and error, promises and threats? Were there, at this very moment, messengers from the championless city of Draj headed for Urik's walls with a deadly shard bundled under their arms?
Hamanu let the bundle under his left arm slide back onto the hard seat of the throne behind him. He was ready to deal with his elite templars, ready for the storm to be over, but not quite ready to raise a figurative fist against the powers that spawned it.
Tyr-storms weren't long-lived. Their violence worked against them. Hamanu listened outside his palace and heard the wind swirl itself into knots and die. Lightning paled quickly; thunder faded. Cold black rain pelted the city as the air cooled to a midnight chill. The pounding of countless drops was as loud as thunder. Every wall, every roof, every market square and street would have to be scrubbed clean. The Lion-King's monumental bas-reliefs that paraded around the outer walls would have to be repainted—an enormous expenditure of labor and wealth that couldn't be avoided, not even when every army in the heartland seemed to be marching toward Urik.
Hamanu cast his netherworld net beyond the city. The corners of his mouth pulled upward with relief: the Tyr-storm's fury was so tightly centered above the palace that the fields outside the walls had suffered no worse than a steady rain. The workers were safe in whatever shelters they'd found for themselves, and the seeds they'd planted were safe, as well.
His elite templars wouldn't sleep before midnight. As the storm grumbled to a close, Hamanu crafted orders for his men and women. He'd meet immediately with his war-bureau commandants and a few others in the map room, but most of his elite templars would find themselves with civic duties in the storm's aftermath. Keeping order was the templars' responsibility. There'd been casualties—he could feel the Urikite dead and dying—and property damage: collapsed buildings; fires, despite the black rain; and a smattering of mad folk, some pathetically helpless, and others more dangerous than any arena beast.
Hamanu's yellow-robed templars would see to it all. They'd dispatch the dead to the knackers; the injured to whatever healers they could afford; and they'd keep the city safe from looting, riot, and madmen. They'd organize the work gangs to put out the fires and dig out survivors. They'd get their own hands dirty, if he told them to.
And he would.
"I retire to consider what I've learned," Hamanu announced before any templar had overcome his or her reluctance to ask questions. "You will each do what your office commands in the aftermath of a Tyr-storm." The individual orders he'd crafted flowed simultaneously from his mind to theirs. "Are there any questions?"
He looked around the chamber, meeting and breaking the stare of anyone who considered a time-wasting inquiry. The templars began departing. As soon as there was a clear path to the corpse, the slaves left the treadmills. They took up the blond Raamin's body and bore it respectfully from the chamber.
Hamanu picked out one particular dark-haired head among those moving toward the door. Flicking a finger through the netherness, he tapped the man sharply on the shoulder. Pavek's face slumped forward even as his spine straightened—an impressive physical performance in its helpless, hapless mortal way—but otherwise no one suspected that he'd been singled out for private conversation with his king.
Pavek was learning the tricks of his new trade.
"I gave you no orders," Hamanu said once they were alone. He narrowed his eyes and got a good taste of common-born fear before Pavek managed to swallow it.
Slowly, Pavek raised his head. Dark mortal eyes, wide with dread, found the strength to defy the Lion-King. "O Mighty King, I was following the commands of my office. There are Quraite farmers planting seed north of the walls—"
"Eight of whom are more competent druids than you'll ever be! If all of Urik were so well protected, the fiercest Tyr-storm would be tamed to a breeze long before it got here."
Pavek gulped. Guilty thoughts swirled in his mind. He'd known about six of the druids, but not eight. He was afraid for himself, more afraid for them. It was the latter fear that stiffened his spine. "O Mighty King, you said it was time for Quraite to pay the price of your protection. It was their choice. More would have come—"
"But you thought six was enough. I tell you, Pavek, they sneaked an extra two in without your knowledge."
The man broke at last. His posture went limp; he stared at his feet and muttered, "It was their choice, O Mighty King. They know their magic is forbidden, but they came anyway. You made them understand that Quraite is as much a part of Urik as the Lion's fountain."
Even in defeat—especially in defeat—Pavek spoke the words that formed in his heart. Once, never more than twice, in a human generation, Hamanu found a man who'd tell the truth, no matter the risk.
"I need you here, Just-Plain Pavek."
"O Mighty King, I'm yours to command."
"Good." Hamanu smiled, baring pointed golden teeth, but the illusion went for naught because Pavek continued to stare at his toes. He reached around for the wrapped bundle he'd left on the throne seat. It was heavier now and definitely inert. "You will take this to my workroom—Look at me, Pavek! Look at me when I'm giving you an order!"
"I meant no disrespect, O Mighty King."
Hamanu seldom explained himself or apologized for anything. He hid his cursed fangs within blunt-edged human illusions and considered that sufficient. He shoved the bundle into Pavek's reluctant arms. "You will take this to my workroom; I judge it harmless enough now, but it warrants further examination. You'll find a table covered with vellum. Put it on the tab
le and wait for me to return. While you're waiting, you'll see an iron-bound chest against the far wall. Keep a careful eye on it, Pavek, but otherwise, leave it alone."
"I will not touch anything, O Mighty King. I wouldn't consider it."
"Keep an eye on the chest. Don't fret over the rest. It's loot, mostly, from Yaramuke and other forgotten places. With all the flooding, the palace is as damp as the rest of Urik. There's water below and history piled everywhere that's still dry."
Another man hearing of Yaramuke's fabled treasure might be tempted with greedy thoughts. Not Pavek. His thoughts were utterly guileless when he said, "I will wait, O Mighty King, and watch the iron-bound chest, as you ordered."
"You might read the vellum," Hamanu suggested, tamping the seeds of curiosity firmly into Pavek's consciousness.
"If you so command, O Mighty King."
Hamanu silently bemoaned the frustrations of tempting an honest man. "You might be waiting a while, Pavek. You might grow bored. You might read the vellum, if you do grow bored."
"I will remember that, O Mighty King."
Like as not, Pavek would never succumb, and Hamanu would have to order the man to read what he'd written, as he had before. "Go," he said wearily. "Wait, grow bored, and remember whatever you wish."
"Your will, O Mighty King." Pavek bowed awkwardly— he'd never have the grace of a properly obsequious courtier—and retreated toward the door.
Hamanu had slit the air before him in preparation to entering the Gray when the mortal man stopped suddenly and turned around. Misty tendrils of the netherworld wafted between them. Pavek affected not to notice, but the man was a druid—however rudimentary his training, he had the raw talent to see the mist and know what it was.
"Yes, Pavek?"
The scarred templar blinked and shuddered. He'd almost forgotten why he'd stopped. Then the thought reformed in his mind. "O Mighty King, the iron-bound chest that I'm supposed to watch. What am I watching for? What should I do if... if something happens to it?"
