The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King

by Lynn Abbey

  Once he'd stood where I stood, in the center of the champions' scorn. Until I proved myself, he'd give me nothing and set obstacles in my path if he could, but if I triumphed over the trolls he offered something better in the future.

  My own goblet came back to me at the last. It remained half-full; my new peers had been less than gluttonous. I gulped the thick, cooling ichor down. The visions I got from my own blood were the eviscerated memories of Deche. I threw the crystal down hard enough to shatter it.

  "The last champion speaks," green-eyed Gallard said and raised his goblet high before throwing it down.

  The others, even Dregoth who'd assailed me when I'd challenged Borys, copied my gesture. For an instant, there was harmony among us, a shared distrust and disregard for our creator, who watched us with his mismatched eyes from the white tower's gate.

  Then Albeorn said, "Are we done here? I have a war to win."

  The War-Bringer nodded, and our moment of unity evaporated. The Elf-Slayer was gone, vanished into the night, followed by the other champions, until only Borys,

  Sacha Arala, and I remained.

  "I'll go with you," Arala suggested. "You'll need someone to show you the way."

  "Don't listen to him," Borys advised. "Don't trust anyone who's stood beneath the Dark Lens. He doesn't—" Borys shook a finger in Arala's direction, and the Pixie-Blight retreated. "I don't. That's all the advice I got; all that I needed. What you can't learn from Yoram's memories, you can learn as you go."

  He drew a down-thrust line through the air in front of him, as he'd drawn a line on his forearm earlier. Instead of blood dripping into a goblet, silvery mist leaked into the moonlight. Borys's hands disappeared as he thrust them slowly into the mist, which grew thicker, until it surrounded him and he was gone.

  Rajaat' and Arala both watched me as I imitated the Butcher's movements. I shudder to think what would have become of me—of Athas—had cold tendrils of the netherworld not wound themselves immediately around my wrists.

  "You'll serve." Those were the War-Bringer's parting words as I stepped into the Gray.

  Only a fool goes through his life without ever catching the scent of fear around his shoulders. As I am not a fool, I have many times been afraid and never more intensely than that moment when the netherworld closed behind me.

  The Unseen realm measures no east or west, up or down, past or future. If a mortal lost his course, he might drift his life away before he found it again; an immortal man, of course, would drift longer.

  I drifted only long enough to ransack Yoram's memories for his knowledge of the Gray and the striped silk tent at the center of his army. When those brown and ocher stripes were bright as life itself, I fixed them in my mind's eye and strode out of the Gray.

  At the very last I remembered my nakedness and made myself into the warrior Myron of Yoram had never been.

  Slaves slept in the corners of my tent while my officers gamed for gold and jewels at my map table. "Enough!" I shouted, loud enough to wake my slaves and the recently dead, alike.

  "Go to your veterans," I told the human lumps cowering at my feet. "Prepare to break camp. When the bloody sun rises again, this army—my army—is going to fight trolls and fight trolls until there are no more."

  There was mutiny, not that night, but not long after. Yoram's officers were lazy folk, used to living in luxury. Most adapted readily to my methods. Those who didn't perished, one way or another. My first few years as champion were spent putting down mutinies rather than fighting trolls. I had a lot to learn about both fighting and leading, and Yoram's memories were of no use to me on either score.

  More than once, I thought of Borys of Ebe, but the simple truth was that Rajaat kept us champions isolated from each other. I could have sent scouts in search of the Dwarf-Butcher... and lost good scouts for my efforts. I could have searched for him myself, but I hadn't traveled widely, and while the Gray can take you anywhere you desire, it's unwise to let the Gray take you anywhere you haven't been before.

  And Borys had already given me all the advice I needed: what I couldn't extract from Yoram's memories, I learned for myself.

  Five years after I left Rajaat's tower, my army was a small fraction of the size it had been when I claimed it. We traveled kank-back wherever our enemy led us. In those days, my metamorphosis was less advanced, and I rode bugs from dawn till dusk. Every man and woman under my yellow banner was a tried veteran skilled in fighting, scavenging, and survival. And every one of them wore a yellow medallion bearing my likeness around his neck. While I led the Troll-Scorcher's army, no veteran's pleas or prayers went unheard.

  Rajaat had made me an immortal champion, with a hunger that only the deaths of trolls could truly sate. Rajaat's Dark Lens had given me an inexplicable ability to channel magic to any man or woman who wore my medallion. Not the life-sucking sorcery such as I had already mastered, but a clean magic, such as elemental priests and druids practiced. Yoram had known of the Dark Lens's power, but he'd never used it, lest a troll escape his appetite.

  To my disgust, I came to understand my predecessor's reasoning. Rajaat told his greatest lie when he said pain belonged to my past. Without a steady diet of death—troll death, in particular—my skin collapsed against my bones. I suffered terrible agonies of emptiness, and my black immortal bones ground, one against the other. Let it be said, though, that I had suffered far worse when Myron of Yoram held me in the eyes of fire.

  Until I slew a troll with the eyes of fire, I didn't understand the true nature of Rajaat's sorcery. The second time filled me with a self-loathing so profound that I tried, and failed utterly, to kill myself. There was no third time. I schooled myself to live without the obscene bliss the eyes of fire provided. Fear and ordinary death were enough to keep the madness at bay, and once I learned that immortality was not an illusion I could cast aside according to my will, pain itself became meaningless.

  I gave my veterans all the spells and magic they desired, thinking I was thwarting Rajaat's plans for both me and Athas. In the seventh year of my campaign against Windreaver's trolls, I learned that I was wrong. Rajaat had anticipated my duplicity. Mote by mote, my body was transformed each time the Dark Lens's power passed through me on its way to my veterans.

  One evening, after a routine invocation to purify our drinking water, spasms stiffened my right hand and arm. I retreated from my army, claiming that I needed solitude to plan our next attacks. The truth was simpler: for seven years I hadn't shed my glamour or looked upon my black-boned self, and I wished to be alone when I did. What I saw by Guthay's golden light horrified me. I was taller and heavier than I'd been. My rib cage had narrowed, and my breast-bone thickened into a ridge such as flightless erdlus have beneath their wings. Bony spurs had sprouted above my ankles, and a shiny black claw was rising out of a new knuckle on the least finger of my right hand.

  As I stared at what had become of my hand—what would become of it—I heard the War-Bringer's deranged laughter through the Gray. After that, my army fought as human men and women, using our wits and weapons whenever we could, resorting to sorcery and Dark Lens magic only when nothing else would bring us a victory.

  For ten long years, my army never camped two nights running in the same place. Windreaver kept his trolls divided. We couldn't pursue them all, all the time, but we tried, and time, inexorable time, was on our side. Human villages still sent their food tithes to the annual muster. There was never a shortage of volunteers to counter attrition in the ranks.

  Trolls had neither resource. They couldn't raise their food or purchase it honestly. Every mouthful they ate was stolen from a human field or loft. Every mouth they lost was nigh irreplaceable. They were never a fecund race, and once their women became fighters and raiders, there was very little time for bearing children or raising them.

  Chronicles and royal myths are rife with kings who won their petty wars on the battlefields—and perhaps they did. But Rajaat's Cleansing Wars were never the stuff from which gre
at legends are woven. We weren't fighting for land or treasure or vague notions of honor and glory. We fought to exterminate thirteen other races whose only crime was existence. So long as one man and one woman of a Rebirth race remained—so long as the promise of children could be fulfilled—a champion could not claim victory. So long as genocide was the destiny I pursued, pitched battles between armed veterans would resolve nothing.

  I waged war on the trolls who didn't fight, on the elders who maintained their race's traditions, and on the young who were their hope and future. My campaign was relentless; my victory inevitable. Sheer and single-minded annihilation has an insurmountable advantage over survival, much less creation.

  You will forgive me, though, if I do not dwell on those years. It is enough to record here that the trolls are gone from Athas, forgotten, and Hamanu bears the blame.

  The end of my war—the end of the trolls—came in the thirty-first year of the 177th Ring's Age, the appropriately named Year of Silt's Vengeance. We'd driven the last of the trolls—some five hundred men, women, and what few of their children as remained—far to the northeast, beyond the vague boundaries of the heartland, and into a land that was as strange to us as it was to them.

  The trolls hoped, perhaps, that I would abandon pursuit if they retreated far enough, long enough. But even if they'd trudged to the end of the world, I would have plagued their heels as they plunged over the edge. And, indeed, that was very nearly what happened.

  Whether through miscalculation or some half-conscious desire to meet doom at his chosen time, not mine, Windreaver backed his people onto a rocky peninsula jutting into the brack-water and wrack-water we now call the Sea of Silt. There, under an ominous and gritty sky, the trolls stretched their tanned human hides over drum heads for the last time.

  "Will we fight?" my adjutant asked when he found me on the mainland heights overlooking Windreaver's camp.

  By my count, I had three veterans to pit against each and every troll, which any fool will tell you isn't enough when the cover is sparse and there's a narrows to be won and held at the battle's start. Simpler, wiser by far to sit in my mainland camp until disease and starvation winnowed their ranks. Simplest and wisest of all to wait until those invisible allies won the battle outright. But those drums took a steady toll on my army's morale, and neither disease nor starvation would respect the line between our opposing camps for long. I couldn't guess how long my slight advantage in numbers would hold, or when I might find myself in a disadvantageous retreat.

  "We'll fight," I decided. "Spread the word: All or nothing, at dawn."

  The land offered little choice in tactics. Wave after wave of my veterans sallied up the peninsula's neck while I stood on the heights, protecting them from the troll shamans and their rock-hurling magic. When the neck was secure, I left the heights and entered the battle myself. Not long before, I'd seen the animal that was to become my emblem forever after: the tawny lion with his thick black mane, ivory fangs, and lethal claws. I cloaked myself in a glamour that was half human, half lion. My sword was precious steel, as long as my leg and honed to a deadly edge. I gave it a golden sheen to match my lion's hide. My own men fell to their knees when they saw me; the troll drums lost their rhythm.

  I sought Windreaver myself—his axe against my sword. It was no contest. By the time I found him, he was bleeding from a score of wounds. His white hair was red and matted with blood from a skull wound that would have killed a human twice over. One eye had swollen shut. One arm hung useless at his side; the other trembled when he raised his axe to salute me. I thrust my glowing sword into the dirt.

  "Finish it," he demanded. "There'll be no surrender. Not to you. Not to any puny human."

  I balked on brink of total victory. I'd come to the end of my destiny: Windreaver and his few battered companions were the last. When they were gone, there'd be no more. My champion's hunger gnawed in my empty gut; all day, I'd turned away from every troll death. The thought of Windreaver's spirit writhing through my grasp as it sought eternity left me burning with anticipated bliss.

  And for that reason, I couldn't do it.

  "Live out your lives," I offered. "Men and women apart from each other, until your race comes to a natural end."

  Had I stood where the old troll stood, I'd have spit in my own eye, and that was exactly what he did. Still, I wouldn't kill him; I wouldn't kill the last troll, nor would any of my veterans. I made them kill themselves, marching off the seaward cliff. Windreaver stood silently beside me. He was no sorcerer, but he was the first person I'd met who could hide his thoughts beneath an empty, surface calm.

  Singly and in pairs, clinging to one another for support-but never moaning, never wailing—the trolls hurled themselves over the edge. Trolls couldn't, by nature, swim, even if they'd tried. Those who didn't die on the rocks drowned quickly in the wracken surf. With my eyes closed, I counted their deaths, forty-seven in all. Forty-eight, when Windreaver left me.

  He meant to be the last and knew—I suppose—that I would not let him go as easily as the others. I would not let him go at all. I was ready when, on the verge of leaping, he thrust his knife into the big veins of his neck. I caught his escaping spirit, imprisoned it in a smooth gray pebble, and I say this now, thirteen ages after: I was not wrong to bring death to an entire race. The wrong was Rajaat's and Rajaat's madness. But I was not right, and the onus of genocide, rightfully, falls on me, on Hamanu.

  Chapter Eleven

  ... Omniscience...

  There was the smell of himali flour, of fresh-bated bread, moist and hot from the oven, filled with sunshine and contentment. Childhood. Family—Mother and Father, brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. Community—Deche and Dorean. Love and the future bound as one, together, forever.

  ... Omniscience...

  Coarse-grain bread, cut with sand, kneaded by war-hardened hands and baked flat on hearthstones. Hollow stomachs and hollower victories under a heavy sky. A sky that had neither stars nor moons to break the darkness. Firelit faces in the darkness, waiting for the future.

  ... Omniscience...

  Bread with a golden-tan crust floating in twilight. A mind floating in a windowless room, a room cluttered with chests and bundles. A room crowded with faces. Faces with open eyes, open mouths, and closed minds. Strangers' faces: some men, some not; some human, some not. All of them waiting; none of them familiar.

  "Hamanu."

  A jolt of darkness as eyes blinked. His eyes. Him. Hamanu.

  One voice that cut through the swirling memories. One face above the crowd. A face unlike the others, drawn in silver on the room's shadows. A face that was, at last, familiar.

  "Windreaver."

  The sound of his own voice was the final key that released Hamanu's self from a stagnant mire of memory. A surge of self-knowledge began to restore order to his consciousness. He blinked his eyes away from the waiting faces, to gather his wits in a semblance of privacy, glanced down and saw an arm—his arm—little more than bone cased in dull, dark flesh.

  The thought came to him: When did that happen? Before the answer had unrolled itself in his consciousness, another question had taken its place: After ages upon ages, have I finally succumbed to Rajaat's madness?

  The mere fact that he had to ask the question made any answer suspect.

  Hamanu shuddered and closed his eyes.

  "Step back from the brink, Hamanu," Windreaver's echoing whisper advised.

  What brink? Wasn't he sitting in a crowded room?

  Then the windswept peninsula where the last trolls had died sprang up behind Hamanu's eyes, more real than this room and anyone in it, anyone except Windreaver.

  "Eat, Omniscience. You haven't eaten—haven't moved— for three days and nights together."

  Hamanu recognized a round, hairless, and very worried face. With chilly dread, he marveled that he hadn't recognized the dwarf's voice when he first heard it, or picked Enver's face immediately from the cro
wd. The dread turned icy when he considered that, indeed, he hadn't moved for three days and nights. His joints were rigid, as hard as the black bones that formed them.

  He willed his fingers, knuckle by knuckle, to ungrasp the metal stylus. It clattered loudly on the table and rolled beneath an untidy array of parchment sheets, which were slashed and splattered with his frenetic script. He read the last words he'd written: the onus of genocide, rightfully, falls on me, on Hamanu.

  So much remembering—reliving—of the past was not a healthy thing.

  "This is Nouri Nouri'son's bread: your favorite, since he began baking it for you. If not his bread, then what, Omniscience? You must be starving."

  Yes, he was starving, but not for fresh-baked bread, not for anything Enver could imagine. Windreaver knew, and Windreaver had gone. Pavek might have guessed, but Pavek's scarred face wasn't in the crowd. Hamanu reached for the loaf Enver offered. He tore off a large chunk with his teeth, as if it were a panacea for his doubts. He reached for his druid-templar's mind and found him in a city square.

  Pavek had summoned the quarter's residents. He was drilling them by morning light: sweep and parry; thrust and block; push away forward, push away and retreat. He'd armed them with bone and wood tools, barrel staves, and mud-caked laths ripped from household roofs, but he drilled them as if they, and their paltry weapons, would make a difference.

  "If fortune's wheel turns square and the walls are breached," Pavek shouted, in rhythm with the drill. "Then everyone becomes a warrior for Urik. Make the enemy bleed for every step. Make them climb mountains of their dead. We'll fight for Urik, for our city, our homes, our families, and ourselves."

  The same words, no doubt, that Pavek had used to inspire Telhami's Quraite farmers. Like those farmers, the Urikites listened. They worked up a sweat, and not because a score of civil-bureau templars stood on the verge, blocking the streets. The templars weren't watching the citizens; they were drilling, too. Citizen and templar together did what Pavek told them because Pavek was an honest man, a man who told the truth, a man who'd give his life for his city. A man who knew—Hamanu sensed the awareness in Pavek's mind—that his king hadn't moved for three days. Pavek wasn't the only high templar out among the ordinary citizens. Similar scenes played out in other city squares and in the ringing market villages, where the line between templar and citizen was less distinct and the wicker walls were meant to keep kanks, erdlus, and inixes in their pens, not keep a determined enemy out.