The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King

by Lynn Abbey

  But for Hamanu, sending Pavek out of Urik would have been sending away his last—his only—hope. So he'd appealed to the Veiled Alliance of sorcerers in Urik, stunning them, of course, with his knowledge of their leadership, their bolt holes, and all that his knowledge implied. For Urik, he'd told the old rag-seller who was Urik's mistress of unlawful sorcery. And, reluctantly, she'd sent an adept through the Gray with his gifts.

  The adept had arrived. The gifts had been conveyed to the Asticles estate. Beyond that, without Windreaver to be his eyes and ears in tight-warded places, Hamanu knew nothing, which was, itself, an answer. The sorceress wasn't coming. Whether Rajaat plucked Sadira's strings in subtle melodies, or she was simply a mortal woman as stubborn and single-minded as he'd been at her age, was a dilemma the Lion-King would never resolve.

  These last two days, he'd picked apart the memory of their abortive conversations as often as he'd examined the deployments on the sand-table. He'd blamed Sadira— mostly he'd blamed Sadira—for her failure to listen, but he'd blamed Rkard, too, and Rajaat, and Windreaver, for planting the weed's seed in his mind in the first place. At one time or another, Hamanu had blamed everyone for his blundering failure to win Sadira's help.

  Recalling his own words, he'd blamed himself: his blindness, his prejudice, his overwhelming need to answer hurt with hurt. In the end, with the blue silk ribbons still tied in a compact bundle and Gallard's red gem in the sand beside Khelo, blame was unimportant.

  "Mistakes," he told the absent Windreaver, "were made. I had choices, and I made the wrong ones. Now, I pay the price of my own foolishness. What do you think, wherever you are, old friend, old enemy? Will Pavek come to Urik's rescue with his druid guardian? Will the guardian vanquish the dragon I become? Will that be enough? Is there a guardian who can stand against the first sorcerer?"

  He swept his arm across the table, leveling the mounds, burying the multicolored ribbons beneath the sand.

  "From the day he made me his champion, I have prepared for the day when I would face my destiny. I had a thousand times a thousand plans, but I never planned for today."

  Hamanu extinguished the map room lanterns with a thought. He left the room and found Enver sitting on the floor outside the door.

  "You heard?" Hamanu asked.

  The dwarf's upturned face, pale and vacant, answered before his thoughts became coherent.

  "Go home, dear Enver." Hamanu helped his steward to his feet. "Stay there tomorrow. You'll know what to do."

  Enver shook his head slowly from side to side. "No," he whispered. "No..."

  Hamanu laid his hand atop the dwarf's bald head, as he might have done with a child. "It will be better, dear Enver. I will not be able to protect or spare you, and whoever comes after me—" "Omniscience, there can be no after—"

  The dwarf shook his head, ducking out from beneath Hamanu's hand. His focus, that uniquely dwarven trait that guided a dwarf's life and determined his fate after death, was foremost in the thoughts Hamanu gleaned. It was a face the Lion-King scarcely recognized, though it was him, Hamanu, as Enver knew him.

  "Your focus will be fulfilled, dear Enver. It is I who abandon you, not you who abandon me." He put a guiding hand on his steward's shoulder and pointed him away from the map room. "Go home now. It's time."

  Enver took a few flat-footed steps, then turned, painted a new portrait in his mind's eye, and turned away again. The swift painless poison Hamanu had provided for all his household was, in truth, a regular precaution whenever he led his army to war. Rajaat's champions had learned how to kill each other. The dwarf's determination not to use it was an almost-tangible cloak around his shoulders as he walked down the corridor. Hamanu hoped he'd change his mind. The fate of anyone who'd been close to the Lion-King wouldn't be pleasant once the Lion-King was gone.

  Hamanu waited until the corridor ahead of him was silent. Then he followed Enver's footsteps. From the map room, he went to the armory, from the armory slowly through every public room. Except for the slave and servant quarters, which he avoided, the Lion-King's palace was deserted. He'd sent away as many as he could, to Javed's camp or to their own families.

  The sun had set some time ago. Slaves had set torches in the hundreds of wall sconces, as they'd done every night for ages. Hamanu snuffed the torches out, one by one, with a thought or a memory as he walked by. He came to the throne room with its monstrosity of a throne; he wasn't sorry to leave that behind.

  Above the throne hung the lion's head lantern, the eternal flame of Urik. Hamanu recalled the day he'd hung it there and lit it. Immortal wasn't eternal. He'd known there'd come a day, a night, when it was extinguished—but not this night. He left it burning and felt its yellow eyes on his back as he left the throne room and began his circuit of his private places, closing doors, saying good-bye, until he came to his cloister sanctum.

  His vellum history was there, a leather scroll-case beside it. He'd written no further than Windreaver's last battle. A thousand years went unrecounted; wars with all his neighbors, with rebels, criminals, and blighted fools. Except for the dead, all his wars had been alike. If he had written them, they'd all read: We fought; I won. Urik prospered. Urik endured.

  There was nothing more to write. Hamanu rolled the vellum sheets together, tied them with a silk cord, and slid them into the case that he slung over his shoulder. Bathed in moonlight, the Kreegill murals painted on the walls were studies in charcoal and silver; they seemed too real to consider touching. Pavek's tools stood where he'd left them, in an orderly row against the little cottage. The novice druid had restored the scorched dirt. He'd planted grain in the ground he'd tilled and tended. High as a man's forearm, it, too, was silver in the moonlight.

  Hamanu plucked a sprig and held it to his nose. He remembered the smell.

  When the cloister doors were bolted shut for the last time, from the inside, Hamanu made a familiar slashing motion through the air. Netherworld mist enveloped him. He emerged beneath the palace gate-tower, a slightly built, dark-haired human youth with a leather case slung over a narrow shoulder.

  The templar guards didn't notice him, nor did anyone else. Urik's streets were quiet, though not as doom-laden as the palace. War had been a regular occurrence throughout the Lion-King's reign. Even siege camps beyond the ring of market villages weren't unknown—and weren't a source of great concern for the ordinary Urikite. After all, as the magic-voiced orators reminded them at the start of each watch: Urik has never lost a battle when the Lion-King leads her armies.

  Outside the Lion-King's inner circle of confidants and advisors, the city's plight was not widely known. Mortal minds, Hamanu had learned long ago, were ill-suited for lengthy confrontations with despair. Let them carry their faith to the end, or to the Lion-King's fountain in the city's center where, by moonlight and torchlight, a small crowd had gathered. Long, slender eel-fish swam in the fountain's lower pools. They were bright streaks by day, dark shadows by moonlight, and sharp-toothed at any time. When a Urikite made a wish, second thoughts were ill-advised, and woe betide any light-fingered criminal who tried to skim the ceramic bits from the bottom. Those coins belonged to the Lion-King, the living god who cherished them, though he had no use for them. His eel-fish would eat just about anything, but their favorite snack was a finger or a toe.

  Let him lead us to victory. Make him invincible before our enemies. Return our king, safe, to us—

  As if they knew Hamanu, the Lion of Urik, was not a god at all.

  He was lost in listening when he felt a tug on the hem of the plain illusory shirt he wore.

  "Want to make a wish?" a little boy asked.

  The boy's thoughts were of a brother, a giant of a brother who'd been called up in the second levy a quinth ago, and of his mother, a shrunken woman on the other side of the fountain. The woman gave a shy, toothless smile when Hamanu looked at her.

  "My brother's outside," the boy said. Neither he nor his mother had the least notion that explanations were unnecessary. "You g
ot a brother outside? A sister? Somebody?"

  He had no brothers, not for a thousand years, but Hamanu had somebody—ten thousand somebodies in yellow and mufti—outside the wall. "Yes."

  "Bigger'n stronger than you, huh?"

  He was Manu tonight, this last night in Urik; it had seemed appropriate. And Manu had been an unimpressive youth, though not as spindly as the boy imagined, comparing Manu to his mountain of a brother. If he'd been real, and not illusion, Manu could have slept outside the walls tonight; the third levy would have taken him.

  The boy tugged Hamanu's shirt again. "You scared?" And where the brother had been in the boy's thoughts, there was fear, hurt and emptiness: all that a child could understand of war.

  "Yes, a little." Manu knew better than to lie to children.

  "Me, too," the boy admitted and held out a dirty, half-size ceramic bit. "We can wish together?"

  "What shall we wish for?"

  The boy pressed a pudgy finger against his lips. Hamanu nodded quickly. He should have known: wishes were secrets between the wish-maker and the Lion. They tossed their bits in together: two tiny ripples in the moonlight. Not even a god could have said which was which.

  "It's gonna be all right, isn't it?" the boy asked, looking up at him. "The Lion'll take care of 'em, won't he?"

  "He'll try," Hamanu said.

  He was spared from saying more when the boy's mother called, "Ranci!" and held out her hand.

  "Whim of the Lion," Hamanu said to the boy's shadow as he darted around the fountain. "He'll try to save them all."

  The Lion-King put his fountain behind him and wandered the streets of his city. Pools of light spilled out of every tavern doorway where folk came together to either find courage or lose fear at the bottom of a mug. Taverns didn't have anything to soothe a champion's nerves. Nothing he could eat or drink would make this night shorter. Nothing he could imagine would make it easier.

  Pavek's thoughts from a few long nights ago came back to him: Surely my king needs friends about him tonight. Hamanu hadn't wanted friends that night, and wasn't entirely certain he wanted them now. But he'd intended from the beginning to give his history to the druid-templar who was—he cocked his head and listened through the crowded melange of thoughts and voices—among friends. Hamanu wandered back toward the palace, toward the templars' quarter with its crisscross maze of identical red-and-yellow striped facades on identical streets. Throughout the ages, the rivalries within Urik's templar bureaus had been as intense and deadly as the rivalries among Rajaat's champions. Nothing Hamanu could have done would have put an end to rivalry, but by keeping the bulk of his templars in yellow robes and all of them in identical dwellings in just one quarter of the city, he'd done as much as one man could to lessen the damage rivalries caused.

  They hoped.

  Within his slight-framed illusion, Hamanu remained Hamanu. His champion's ears listened through the walls as he walked and yanked the most flagrant of his weedy templars as he passed their dwellings. He filled their minds with morbid guilt and lethal nightmares; he savored their anguish as they died. Then he calmed his vengeful heart and put his fist on the door of Pavek's house.

  He had to knock twice before he heard someone moving toward the door. Even then, he wasn't certain the woman was coming to open it or was chasing a child who'd strayed into the vestibule. With or without his preternatural senses, Pavek's house was one of the noisiest dwellings in the templar quarter. Hamanu was about to attract Pavek's attention through his gold medallion when, at last, he heard footsteps on the interior stairs, and the door swung open.

  It was the woman he'd heard before, and she did have a damp and writhing child straddling her hip. She wasn't a slave—Pavek didn't keep slaves—and she wasn't one of the servants Hamanu had hired to open the house before Pavek returned to Urik from Quraite. She wasn't a Quraite druid, either; druidry left its mark on those who practiced it, as did any magical or Unseen art, and she didn't bear it. Stirring her thoughts gently, Hamanu was surprised to discover she was simply a woman who'd lost her man to the second levy and, reduced to scrounging for herself and her child, had made the fateful mistake of offering herself to a certain scar-faced man.

  By the look and sound of the dwelling, she was far from the only stray Pavek had brought home.

  "I wish to speak to the high templar, Pavek," Hamanu said.

  He was prepared to stir her thoughts to obedience, but that was unnecessary. Strangers, it seemed, came to this door all the time and, disguised as he was in Manu's homespun garments, the woman assumed he was another stray like her.

  "The lord-templar's in the atrium. I'll take you to him—"

  Hamanu raised his hand to stop her. There was more life in this place than he wished to have around him tonight. "I have something for him. If you'll fetch him for me, I'll give it to him and be gone."

  She shrugged and hitched the toddler higher on her hip. "What's your name?"

  He hesitated, then said, "Manu. Tell Lord Pavek that Manu is here to see him."

  The name was common enough in this, Hamanu's city. She repeated it once and disappeared up the steps into the living quarters. Hamanu shut the door—a slave's job, but there were no slaves here—and settled down to wait on a tradesman's bench.

  In a few moments Pavek appeared at the top of the stairs. He was alone. His right hand was tucked under his shirt hem and resting lightly on the hilt of a steel-bladed knife.

  "It's a little late for caution, Pavek," Hamanu observed without raising his head. "Half the city could walk through your unguarded door. Half the city already has."

  "Manu?" Pavek descended a few steps. "Manu? Do I know you? Step into the light a moment."

  Hamanu obeyed. His illusion was, as always, perfect, and though Pavek could not hide his novice druidry from one of Rajaat's champions, there was nothing at all magical about the aura the illusory Manu projected. Indeed, there was nothing about Manu that Pavek should have recognized, including the scroll case, which was plain leather, sturdy, but scuffed. A child's spindle top shot out of the doorway behind Pavek, followed immediately by the child who'd lost it. The top bounced down the stairs, coming to rest at Hamanu's feet. Pavek put a hand out to stop the child, a scruffy little creature of indeterminate race and gender. He bent down and whispered something in the child's ear. There was a hug and a high-pitched giggle, then the child was gone, and Pavek was coming slowly down the stairs.

  Hamanu picked up the toy and handed it to Pavek as he reached the last step. Their eyes met in the lantern light. Manu's eyes were brown, plain brown—even Dorean, who'd loved every part of Manu, said his eyes were ordinary, unremarkable. Hamanu's eyes, the eyes Rajaat had given him, were obsidian pupils swimming in molten sulphur. When Hamanu crafted his illusions, he always got the eyes correct, yet Pavek stared at his eyes and would not look away.

  "Great One," he said at last, trying—and failing—to kneel on the entrance steps of his own home. "Great One."

  Pavek lost his balance. Hamanu caught him as he fell forward, and held him until he was steady on his feet again.

  Somewhere a child screamed, as children would, and incited a commiserating chorus.

  Hamanu plucked the top out of the air where it had hovered while the Lion-King assisted his templar. He'd changed his mind about staying here. "Is there room in this house for one more?" he asked, dropping the toy in Pavek's nerveless hands.

  "It is yours, Great One. Everything I have—"

  "Manu," he said, grabbing Pavek's arm to keep him from kneeling.

  Pavek nodded. "Your will, Great One—Manu."

  They went up the stairs together. The child who'd lost the toy was waiting inside the hall along with two others, one definitely a dwarf, the other definitely a girl. They were soft-voiced and polite until Pavek relinquished the top. Then they were off, shrieking like harpies.

  "Are you collecting every castoff and stray in Urik?"

  "They have nowhere else to go, Gr—" Pavek caught himself.
"I find one... but there's never just one. There's a sister, or a friend, or someone." He gestured at the ceiling. "This place, it's so big. How can I say no?"

  "I can't have this, Pavek. You're giving the bureaus a bad name."

  Pavek gave Hamanu the same worried look Enver had given him at least once a day. But Pavek—Whim of the Lion—knew when his humor was being tested.

  "Not to worry, Manu. My neighbors think I'm fattening them up for market."

  They laughed. It was invigorating to laugh in the face of doom. Manu, head-and-shoulders shorter than Pavek, reached out and gave the bigger-seeming man a hearty, laughing thump between the shoulder blades, which rocked him forward onto his toes. For a heartbeat, there was silence, and a world of doubt in Pavek's thoughts. Then Pavek dropped an arm on Manu's shoulder and laughed— tentatively—again.

  A cold supper had been laid out in the moonlit atrium and a score of men and women gathered together to enjoy it. Hamanu was mildly surprised to see Javed sitting beside his chalk-skinned bride. The king of Urik might reasonably expect the Hero of Urik to lay his old bones on the hard ground of the army encampment the night before a great battle. But Javed knew exactly what they faced and how little difference his own presence on the battlefield would make tomorrow, and Mahtra, his bride, was as comfortable in this dwelling as she was anywhere. She'd practically lived here when it had belonged to Elabon Escrissar.

  For that matter, Hamanu had visited House Escrissar many times and in many guises, but never as himself, certainly never as Manu.

  There was a glimmer of inquiry from Javed's mind when Pavek introduced Manu, a Gold Street scribe left behind when his employer pulled up stakes and ran for a noble estate outside the walls. Hamanu had no difficulty raising a mind-bender's facade to defeat the commandant's curiosity. He had to scramble a bit, though, to keep up with the story that Pavek was cutting quickly out of whole cloth.