by Lynn Abbey
Hamanu was an expert at the deceptive mind-bending art of suggestion and false memory. He didn't make many mistakes; he removed them if he had. But his memory of Dorean resonated through Sadira's mind faster than he could remove it. The image, fixed and frozen, had become an inextricable part of the half-elf's experience. As a memory, it was no longer false.
"Who was she?"
There'd be no apologies or explanations, no pleas for understanding or compassion; such notions had no place in Hamanu's life. "Call her Dorean. She was... would have been my wife." He wrenched himself away from the memory they shared. It was difficult, but he was the Lion-King. "And I have been a fool. Rajaat must not escape," he said as if Dorean weren't still bleeding in his mind. "Last time we needed a dragon. This time—"
"A dragon? Is that why you're here? You want me to help you replace Borys. You're no different than Tithian—"
"I'm very different than Tithian or Borys, dear lady. I want to preserve and protect my city and yours. I want—I need—to find a way to keep Rajaat in his prison that doesn't require me—or anyone else—replacing the Dragon of Tyr. I needed to be certain that we agreed—"
"We agree about nothing!" Sadira shouted, then she winced again. Another false memory.
Hamanu didn't skim the image from her mind. Whether she beheld Windreaver or another horror from his own past, he saw that he'd blundered badly when he'd hammered his memories into hers. He shouldn't have done it, and wouldn't have, if he hadn't strangled his rage after she cast her spell. His rage would have killed her, if Windreaver hadn't wished otherwise.
"I have made a mistake. I took a friend's—" He stopped short: friends, that was the greatest mistake of all. Rajaat's champions weren't friends, not toward themselves or anyone, and they didn't attract the friendship of others. "Your spells are failing, dear lady. Rajaat's essence is loose in the world. He says that Nibenay and Gulg and Giustenal dance to his tune. He says they'll destroy the world we know in three days' time. He lies, dear lady. The War-Bringer lies. I'll repair your spells, or replace them. I'll set them right, as they must be set right. You needn't fear—"
"Need not fear what?" she demanded. "You'll set my spells right? You can't make anything right—"
"Woman!" Hamanu shouted. "Curb your tongue, if you value your life!"
Sadira wasn't interested in his warnings. "I've seen how you set everything right for Dorean!"
Hamanu didn't need mind-bending to sense the invective brewing on the back of her tongue. Sadira had a champion's knack for cruelty. He'd given her the measure of his weakness, and she would grind salt in the wound until it killed her—and who knew how many others? Hamanu heard gongs clanging everywhere and pounding footfalls racing closer. Between screams and shouts, half the estate knew the sorceress was locked in a dangerous argument.
The human glamour faded from Hamanu's hand. Black talons absorbed the sunlight as he raised them between himself and Sadira's face. A threatening gesture, for certain—but threat and gesture only: he intended to slash an opening into the netherworld and leave this place before he had even more to regret.
Sadira responded with a head-down lunge at his midsection. Regardless of illusion, the Lion-King carried the weight and strength of his true, metamorphic self. Sadira's attack accomplished nothing—except to increase his anger and confusion. He backhanded her, mildly by a champion's standards, but hard enough to fling her across the room. She hit the doorjamb headfirst, loosening plaster from the walls and ceiling. Her head lolled forward.
Stunned, Hamanu told himself, as he strained his ears, listening for the sound of her heart. Her heart skipped, and her breathing was shallow. A single stride, and he was on one knee beside her. Illusion was restored as he pressed human fingertips against her neck. He found her pulse and steadied it.
"Get away from her!"
With his concentration narrowed, Hamanu hadn't sensed anyone in the doorway until he heard a young man's voice, which he ignored. He hadn't come to the Asticles estate to kill anyone; he wasn't leaving until Sadira was on her feet and cursing him again.
"I said: Get away from her!"
Hamanu felt the air move as a fist was cocked. The blow struck his temple, doing no more damage than Sadira's whole body lunge had done. He raised his head and saw a human-dwarf mul in the doorway.
"I know you," he muttered.
The Lion-King wasn't good when it came to putting children together with their proper identities, and the mul, cocking his fist for another try, was still several years short of maturity. Children were changeable, both in their bodies and their thoughts, but there were only two muls Hamanu associated with Sadira. One was Rikus, who was old enough to know better when he'd led a cohort of Tyrian gladiators in a foolish assault against Urik over ten years ago. The other had been a half-grown boy when he wielded the sun spell that had separated Rajaat's essence from the substance of his shadow.
"Rkard," Hamanu said, flushing the name of Borys's ancient enemy out of his memory. "Rkard, go away. There's nothing for you to do here."
The youth blinked and lowered his fist. Confusion wrinkled his handsome face. It seemed, for a moment, that he'd simply do as he'd been told. But that moment passed, and he laid his hand rudely on Hamanu's shoulder.
Hamanu lowered the sorceress gently to the floor. She, Rikus, and the rest of the Tyrian hotheads had raised the young man staring intently at him. He had a fair idea what was going to happen once Rkard recognized him.
"Rkard, don't do it."
The warning came too late. Three separate streams of fire, one orange, one gold, and the third the same color as the sun, grew out of the young mul's sun-scarred hands. As Rkard cried out—sun magic exacted a fearsome price on its initiates—the fire-streams braided together and bridged the gap between them.
Hamanu cried out as well. The sun's power was real. His flesh burned within his illusion, but it could burn for a long time before he'd be seriously injured. Hamanu could have brushed the sun-spell aside but, almost certainly, it would have gone to ground in Sadira's defenseless flesh.
He tried to reason with the mul and got no further than his name, "Rkard—"
Rkard howled again as he evoked greater power from his element. The braided flames became brighter, hotter. Hamanu's illusion wavered in the heat; he ceased to resemble a human man. He retreated toward the open window. The mul followed, a smile—a foolish, ignorant smile— twisting his lips.
"Let it go, Rkard, before someone gets hurt."
The mul couldn't talk while he cast his sun-spell. He let his hands speak for him, clenching his fists until the tricolored flame was a white-hot spear impaling a tawny-skinned human man against a wall.
Hamanu closed his eyes. A thousand years evaporated in the heat. In his mind, he was a man again, with his back to a mekillot rib as Myron Troll-Scorcher assailed him with the eyes of fire, only now he could fight back. The sun behind him and the shadow at his feet were both his to command. All he had to do was open his eyes and his tormentor would be ash.
Hamanu did open his eyes but, rather than quicken any of the myriad destructive sorceries lurking in his memory, he thrust his hand into Rkard's incendiary sun-spell, then closed his fingers around it. The white fire consumed his illusion. To keep his fist where it needed to remain, Hamanu folded his spindly, metamorph's legs beneath him. He hunched his shoulders and crooked his neck. All the while, the bloody sun's might was held captive in the Lion-King's fist.
Hamanu squeezed tighter. He transcended pain and found triumph where he least expected it.
The spells of sorcery, the formulas of the magic that Rajaat had discovered, mastered, and bequeathed to Athas before he decided to cleanse it, had to be quickened before they could be cast. Something had to be sacrificed before sorcery kept its promise. The dilemma facing any sorcerer, from the most self-righteous member of the Veiled Alliance to Rajaat's last champion, was—at its simplest—what to destroy?
Preservers strove to limit the sacrifice by ex
tracting a few motes of life's essence from many sources, destroying none of them; defilers didn't care. Those who could used obsidian to quicken their spells with the essences of animals as well as plants. Champions could hoard the life essence of the dead. A few—Hamanu, Sadira, and Rajaat's shadow-minions—quickened spells by transforming sunlight, the ultimate essence of all life, into shadow.
The Dark Lens intensified a spell after it was cast, but no sorcerer—including Hamanu and Sadira—could use the Dark Lens as Rkard had used it against Rajaat: focusing the bloody sun's light first inside the Lens, then letting it out again, letting it consume the War-Bringer's shadow. And not even Rkard could duplicate that uncanny feat: Sadira had buried the Lens and Rajaat had almost certainly found a better hiding place for his own life essence than his shadow.
But when he seized the white-hot stream and contained Rkard's sun-spell within his fist, Hamanu found that the young mul was a living lens who concentrated the sun's quickening energy before a spell was cast. With Rkard beside him, Hamanu could seal Rajaat's bones and the Dark Lens in a cyst the size of a mountain. He could counter anything his fellow champions threw at Urik, be it spells or armies of the living or the undead. And, for the first time in a thousand years, Hamanu thought it might be possible to thwart a champion's metamorphosis.
Hamanu appealed to the mul with thought and words,
"The sun is stronger than both of us, Rkard. Together, we can forge spells that mill imprison Rajaat forever, but only if you relent now. Persist, and the sun will destroy you long before it destroys me. Save yourself, Rkard—"
"Never! Betrayer! Deceiver! You die first, or we die together and forever."
Hamanu remembered himself on the dusty plain, a young man consumed by hate and purpose. He opened his fist. The sun-spell engulfed his arm; the obscene bliss of the eyes of fire threatened to overwhelm him. He remade his fist; the threat receded but didn't disappear.
Sunlight, Hamanu thought. Blocking the sun and casting his own shadow over Rkard might break the spell. He straightened his legs, bursting the room's walls and ceiling.
Somewhere outside the white fire, a woman screamed.
Still catching the sun-spell in his fist, Hamanu edged sideways. Rkard collapsed when the fringe of the champion's shadow touched him. The white fire darkened to pale yellow; tiny flames danced on the youth's arms. While Hamanu hesitated, Rkard wrenched free of shadow. The sun-spell whitened. The youth would not relent—no more than Manu would have relented a thousand years ago.
Hamanu's short-lived dreams crumbled: the chance of finding another young mul already hardened to the bloody sun's merciless might—of finding one in time—was incalculably remote. He prepared to take the larger step that would center his black shadow over Rkard and his spell.
The woman screamed again, this time the mul's name, "Rkard!"
A red-haired streak shot through Hamanu's shadow. It wrapped itself around the enthralled youth and heaved him sideways. The spell broke free, a diminutive sun hovering an arm's length above the mosaic. In a heartbeat, it had begun to strengthen. In another, Hamanu had thrown himself on top of it. The ground shuddered. For an instant, Hamanu was freed from his black-boned body. Then the instant was gone, and he was himself again, reforming the flawless illusion of a tawny-skinned man.
Sadira cradled the mul's head and shoulders in her lap. He was exhausted, unable to speak or move, but otherwise unmarked, unhurt. Hamanu's spirits soared.
"It could be done! We could do it. We could go to Ur Draxa and repair your ward-spells. We could save Urik. Together nothing could stand against—"
The sorceress's eyes narrowed. She wrapped her arms protectively over Rkard. "Stand with you?" Her expression said the rest: I'll kill him myself before I let that happen.
Hamanu tried to explain what had happened when Rkard's sun-spell struck him. Sadira listened; he perceived the spirals of her thoughts as she considered everything he said, but none of her conclusions included helping a champion save his city.
"I took the sun-spell inside, into my heart and spirit. Your shadow-sorcery doesn't go that deep," he warned. "You'd be consumed."
"So you say, but I don't believe you. Dragons lie, and you're a dragon. You'd deceive us and betray us. While even one of your kind exists, Athas can never be free."
"Free," Hamanu muttered. He had a thousand arguments against such foolishness, and none of them would sway her. Better to let her learn the hard way, though she wouldn't survive the lesson, and there was no guarantee Rkard would cooperate afterward. "For Athas, then, and your precious freedom—go carefully to Ur Draxa, look at what's happened to the lake where you sealed Rajaat's bones beside the Dark Lens. Look, then come to Urik at dawn, three days from now. I'll be waiting for you."
Chapter Fourteen
Enver stood in the map room doorway. "Omniscience, a messenger approaches."
The sharpest mortal ear could not pick out the sounds of sandals rapidly slapping the tiles of the palace corridors as the messenger neared the end of her journey. Her journey continued because Hamanu didn't rely on his immortal ears. He'd known about the message since it passed through Javed's hands in Javed's encampment south of the market village ring.
"Good news or bad, Omniscience?"
Hamanu smiled fleetingly. "Good. Nibenay sent it with our messenger, alive and intact. I believe he has accepted my terms. We'll know for certain in a moment, won't we?"
Enver nodded. "For certain, Omniscience. Our messenger alive, that's certainly good news."
The dwarf's tightly ordered mind accepted that the Shadow-King was also a living god, and that gods, all other aspects being equal, weren't omniscient with regard to one another. His eyes were wide with awe and dread when the dusty half-elf slapped to a halt beside him. She clutched Gallard's black scroll-case tightly in both hands, as if it were a living thing that might try to escape or attack her. Nibenay's nine-rayed star glowed faintly on the case's wax seal, which protruded between her thumbs.
Knowing what she carried, although not the message it contained, she'd pushed herself to her limit and beyond, as had every other relay-runner who'd touched it
"O Mighty One—" she gasped, beginning to cramp from her exertions.
Enver steadied her. He put his own powerful short-fingered hand around hers, lest the scroll case slip through her trembling fingers and shatter on the floor.
"Give it to me," Hamanu suggested, reaching across the sand-table where he'd recreated Urik and its battle lines.
The half-elf doubled over the instant Enver took the case. The trembling was contagious; the dwarf's fingers shook as he handed it to Hamanu.
"See to her needs, dear Enver," the Lion-King said, dismissing them and their mortal curiosity with a nod of his head.
Ah, the predictable frailties of his mortal servants... the pair stopped as soon as they were out of sight and wrung their hands together in desperate, silent prayers: Good news. Good news. Whim of the Lion, let the news be good.
Hamanu slid his thumb under the scroll-case seal. The hardened wax popped free, and a tiny red gem rolled onto the sand pile that stood for the village of Farl. Never one to believe in omens, Hamanu fished it out of the sand and squeezed it.
Alone. When the sun is an hour above the eastern horizon, he heard the Shadow-King's hollow, whispery voice between his own thoughts. The armies will begin their engagement. I will cast the first spell, then Dregoth, then Inenek. Do what must be done, and the walk of Urik will be standing at sundown. This I solemnly swear.
The Lion-King let the bright gem fall back on the sand. By itself, the gem was worth many times its weight in gold. What was the worth of a champion's solemn oath? At least Gallard was no longer spouting nonsense about spells to forestall the creation madness that had overtaken Borys. Beyond that, Gallard's oath was worth what Hamanu's oath would have been in similar circumstances: very, very little, no more than a single grain of sand.
Hamanu studied the sand-table in front of him. Gentl
e mounds and grooves imitated the more detailed map of Urik's environs carved onto the map room's northern wall. Strips of silk littered the sand: yellow, of course, for the city's forces, green for Gulg, red for Nibenay, black for the largely undead army of Giustenal. The red, green, and black strips were where Rajaat promised they'd be. If there was a battle tomorrow, it would be on a scale not seen since the Cleansing Wars. If ±ere wasn't a battle, there'd be mortal sacrifice to equal the day Borys laid waste to Bodach.
Was there a third alternative?
Yellow silk fingers surrounded the sandpile that stood for the market village of Todek, southwest of the city. They faced nothing, except a tied-up bundle of blue ribbons. Blue, for the armies of Tyr. Blue, for the army—enemy or ally—that hadn't arrived. Hamanu's eyelids fell shut. He clutched his left forearm where, beneath illusion, an empty place remained unfilled.
Not an army. An army wouldn't make a difference. But two people—even one person, one young mul with the sun's bloody mark on his forehead—that could make all the difference in the world.
Windreaver couldn't answer. There'd be no answer.
As soon as he'd returned to Urik after his disastrous meeting with Sadira at the Asticles estate outside of Tyr, Hamanu had sent a peace offering to the sorceress: a champion's apology, rarer than iron, rarer than a gentle rain in this dragon-blasted world. He'd sent golden-crust himali bread from his own ovens, because bread had been peace and life and all good things in the Kreegills, and a hastily scribed copy of the history he'd written for Pavek, in the hope that she would understand why he was what he was, and why losing Windreaver was a loss beyond measure.
He should have sent Pavek. Pavek had a true genius for charming his enemies. As a runaway templar, he'd charmed the druids of Quraite. As both a runaway and a would-be druid, he'd charmed the Lion-King himself. If anyone could have undone the hash that Hamanu had made of his Tyrian visit, Pavek would have been the one.
