The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King

Chapter Ten

Hamanu banished his companions from the workroom. He'd lived too long outside the bounds of compassion to be comfortable within its embrace. Not that Windreaver had suddenly mellowed; the shadowy troll departed in a gust of bitter laughter. Hamanu didn't know where his ancient enemy had gone—to Ur Draxa, perhaps, where he should have been all along, spying on Rajaat.

In truth, Hamanu didn't care where Windreaver was. It was Pavek who weighed heavily in his thoughts, and Pavek who ignored his command. The stubborn, insignificant mortal stopped one stride short of the doorway.

"Your hand—" he said, defiance and fear entwined in his voice. Then he held out the honey jar.

"I am the almighty, immortal Lion-King of Urik, or weren't you paying attention?" Hamanu snarled. "My flesh doesn't heal, but it won't putrefy. I require neither your service nor your concern."

Pavek stayed where he was, not talking, not thinking—at least not thinking thoughts that could be skimmed from his mind. Twisting human lips into a scowl, Hamanu shaped and shifted his illusionary body. He intended to snatch the jar from the templar's hand faster than Pavek's mortal eyes could perceive. But Hamanu had a real injury: his reflexes, both illusory and real, were impaired. His fingers slid past the jar. The improvised bandage snagged the rough-glazed pottery and tugged the raw edges of his wound as well.

The Lion-King flinched, the jar shattered on the floor, and Pavek blinked—simply blinked.

Hamanu cradled his hand—the real hand within the illusion—trying to remember the last time he'd misjudged the balance between reality and his own illusions. Before the templar was born, before his grandparents had been born.

"You cannot take my measure, Pavek. A mortal cannot imagine me or judge me." There was more edge to his words than he'd intended, but that was just as well, if it would get the templar moving.

Pavek folded his arms across his chest. "You were mortal when you measured Myron of Yoram and Rajaat. You didn't hesitate to judge them," he said, omitting the Lion-King's titles and honors, as if he and Hamanu were equals.

But he wasn't surprised when the templar disobeyed; he would have been disappointed otherwise. Pavek didn't share Hamanu's hot temper, but the mortal man had a quiet stubbornness that served the same purpose. An ill-omened purpose for any mortal when a champion's mood was more bleak than it had been in an age.

"Go, Pavek, before my patience is exhausted. I do not choose to be lessoned tonight, not by you, Windreaver, or anyone."

"You didn't finish your tale."

"Men have died—and died unpleasantly—" The rest of Hamanu's threat went unspoken. He wouldn't kill tonight, and he'd never kill a man who dared to tell him the truth. "Not tonight, Pavek. Some other time. Go home, Pavek. Eat a late supper with your friends. Sleep well. I'll summon you when I need you."

A thought formed on the surface of Pavek's mind, so clear and simple that Hamanu questioned every assumption he'd ever made about the man's innocence or simplicity. Surely my king needs sleep and food, Pavek thought. Surely he needs friends about him tonight.

I do not sleep, Pavek, Hamanu replied, shoving the words directly into the templar's mind, which was enough, at last, to send him staggering across the threshold.

"Friends," the king muttered to himself when he was finally alone. "A troll who loathes me, justly, and a templar who defies me. Friends. Nonsense. A pox on friends."

But the thought of friendship was no easier to banish than Pavek had been. No one had known Hamanu longer, or knew him better, than the last troll general. Urik's history was their history, laced with venom and bile, but shared all the same. What was Windreaver, if not a friend, as well as an enemy?

And what was a friend, if not a mortal man who overcame his own-good sense to bandage a dragon's hand?

Hamanu's hand, down to its patterned whorls and calluses, was illusion, but the wound was real—he had the power to pierce his own defenses, even absentmindedly. There had been other wounds over the ages, which he'd hidden within illusion. Tonight, sorcery and illusion had failed, or, more truly, Hamanu himself had failed. The sight of molten metal in his palm had filled him with horror and self-loathing, and given Pavek an opportunity no mortal should have had.

Ordinary cloth would have burned or rotted when it touched a champion's changeable flesh. There was only one piece of suitably enchanted cloth in the workroom: the celadon gown of Sieiba Sprite-Claw, champion and queen of Yaramuke. She had worn it when she died in the Lion-King's arms, with his obsidian knife piercing her heart.

Had Windreaver guessed Pavek's intentions while Hamanu was preoccupied? Had the troll whispered a suggestion in Pavek's mortal ears—

Or, had some instinct guided the templar's search? Some druid instinct? Some druid guardian whose presence a champion's magic couldn't detect?

Hamanu had thought himself clever when he conceived his campaign to win Pavek's support as a means to win the druid guardian's protection for his city. His bandaged hand could be taken as a sign that he was succeeding—but, at what cost?

A wound?

That was nothing. Windreaver spoke the truth: Rajaat's champions didn't heal, but the raw crater would be consumed by Hamanu's inexorable metamorphosis. In the meantime, he'd had a thousand year's practice ignoring worse agony.

A wound, then, was no cost, but what about the nagging emptiness around his slow-beating heart, hinting that he'd lived too long?

He had Urik, and for a thousand years, Urik had been enough. Mortals came and went; Urik endured. The city was immortal; the city had become Hamanu's life. The passions of his minions had supplanted any natural yearning for love or friendship. Then he conceived the notion of writing his history, and after that—after ages of attention and nurturing—his precious minions wandered the city like lost children while he confessed his private history on sheets of vellum. Hamanu berated himself for their neglect and sought his favorites through the netherworld.

The Lion-King turned away. Lord Ursos's bents were familiar, stale, and without fascination. The bath faded from his imagination. He looked around the workroom for another stylus.

I don't know how long I remained strung between life and death, locked in a mind-bender's battle with Myron of Yoram. That's what it was, a netherworld war: the Troll-Scorcher's imagery against mine, his years of experience against the purity of my rage, my hatred. I was, if not dead, at least not truly unconscious when the battle ended. Our battle had lasted long enough and was loud enough to disturb the War-Bringer's peace, and that was what truly mattered.

Rajaat burned through the Gray to find me, though I could not appreciate my rescue or his undoubtedly spectacular appearance on the plains. I was aware of nothing except the pain, the darkness, the silence and—very dimly—that my enemy no longer rose to the challenges I continued, in my mad, mindless way, to hurl at him.

Then there was a ray of light in my black abyss, a wedge of sound, a voice I recognized as power incarnate, telling me to desist.

Your pleas are heard, your wishes granted.

Rajaat. No need for him to state his name, then or ever. When the first sorcerer was present in my mind, the world was Rajaat and Rajaat was the world, endless and eternal.

Look for yourself—

He gave me a kes'trekel's vision and hearing. Peering down from a soaring height, I saw mekillots pulling a four-wheeled cart along a barrens road. There was a cage on the cart, and Myron of Yoram was in the cage. The Troll-Scorcher had himself been scorched. He lay on his back, a bloated, blackened carcass. His charred skin hung in tattered strips that swayed in rhythm with the creaking cart. A cloud of buzzing insects feasted on his suppurating wounds.

I'd judged Yoram a corpse; I was wrong. With Rajaat's aid, I heard pathetic whimpers in the depths of his flame-ravaged throat. I saw delicate silver chains nearly lost in the rotting folds at his wrists and ankles: links of sorcery potent enough to render a champion helpless.

I was pleased, but not satisfied. It was not enough that the Troll-Scorcher suffered for his betrayal of the human cause. The war against the trolls had to be fought and won—

In time, Manu. In due time. Wait. Rest—

A soft shadow surrounded me, not the bleak darkness of my recent torment, but oblivion all the same. I wasn't interested in oblivion or resting or waiting. Childish and petulant, I tried to escape the shadow.

My uncanny vision shifted: There was a second cart. Like the first, it ferried a human husk across the barrens. The second body was little more than a black-boned skeleton held together with rags. Its knees were drawn up. Its arms were crossed and fused together. They hid what remained of its face.

Of my face...

The husk was alive; the husk was me.

All the pain I'd felt was nothing compared to my imagination when I saw what had become of Manu, the lithe dancer of Deche. I no longer fought Rajaat's shadow. I surrendered myself to its numbing softness.

Don't despair, Rajaat told me with a grandfather's kindly voice. Pain belongs to your past. Soon you will be reborn and you will never know pain or suffering again.

From the first, I doubted that promise: a life without pain or suffering wouldn't be a human life. But my living corpse was strong in my mind, so I banished my doubts and drifted until I heard his voice again. It is time.

"It is time for you to be reborn."

The pressure was Rajaat's sorcery-laden hands restoring my body around me. His thumbs traced the curves of my eye sockets. Bone grew like bread rising in a baker's oven, but Rajaat's miracle was not without discomfort. Bone was not meant to grow and harden so quickly. For one unbearable moment, the pain was so intense that I would have begged him to stop, if I'd had a mouth or tongue.

Rajaat knew my thoughts. "Patience, child. The worst is behind you. The best is barely begun."

I hadn't been anyone's child for years. I did not care to be reminded of what I'd lost, and I wasn't willing to cede my hard-won manhood, even to a god. A low, rumbling chuckle echoed through my mind. My thoughts scattered as chaff on the wind.

Today, perhaps, I could keep a secret from my creator— certainly that is why I have a spell simmering beside me— but not that day under the relentless sun. I took refuge in the manners my parents had taught me and thanked him properly. Chuckles became a kirre's contented purr.

Pressure shifted. Rajaat began restoring my cheekbones and jaw.

My reborn ears made me aware that Rajaat and I were not alone.

"Look at him," a deep-voiced man said. "A farmer. A dung-skull, no better than a slave. I tell you, there's no need. The Scorcher's finished, but so are the gnomes. There's no need for the War-Bringer to replace him. My army stands ready. They could finish the trolls in a single campaign."

In the Troll-Scorcher's army, we'd heard of the other armies cleansing the human heartland, and of the leader of them all. Even before I knew his true name—before I knew what Rajaat was or what I was to become—I knew that Gal-lard, Bane of Gnomes, was not half the military genius he believed himself to be. Gnomes had been sly and wily, as he was, himself. Gallard's stealthy strategies were effective in the dwindling forests where they dwelt, but Windreaver would have carved the Gnome-Bane and his army into kes'trekel bait.

The Gnome-Bane wasn't my only audience.

"A peasant," a woman agreed. "He might be useful, when the War-Bringer's done with him." Her name, I later learned, was Sielba. I would learn more about her notion of usefulness as the years went on, but at that moment, I had no interest in them or her.

"He can hear you," a third voice, another man, cautioned. He was no less contemptuous of me than the other two had been, but Borys of Ebe always saw much farther into a maze of consequences. "He will be one of us when the War-Bringer's done with him."

After that, they spoke silently, if they spoke at all. My mind filled with eager curiosity; I didn't yet know what being one of us meant. I thought only of leading an army— my army—against the trolls. I envisioned slaughter and victory. Once again, Rajaat's amusement swept over me, dulling my consciousness as he shaped smooth muscles across the newly hardened bones of my face.

When my eyelids were finished, I opened them, curious to see my savior.

I was stunned senseless. In my life, I'd seen only humans and trolls. Myron of Yoram was a fat, bloated sack of a man, but he was—I believed he was—a human man. Beyond humans, there were only trolls. Rajaat War-Bringer wasn't a troll. Trolls were handsome, well-formed mortals, compared to my savior.

In all ways Rajaat lacked the simple left and right symmetry a man expects to see in another man, be he human, troll or some other sentient race. The first sorcerer's head was huge and grotesque. Wisps of colorless hair sprouted between the bulbous swellings that covered his skull like lava seeps. His eyes were mismatched in color, size, and position. His nose was a shapeless growth above a coarse-lipped mouth that was lined with snaggleteeth. Rajaat wheezed when he inhaled, and when he exhaled, his breath stank of death and disease.

If he were resurrecting me in his own image...

Rajaat laughed and promised me he wasn't. His gnarled, magical fingers tilted my head so I could see the men and women he'd called to witness his making—and unmaking— of a champion.

They are flawed, my savior assured me, turning my head again so my eyes beheld nothing but him. Each of them bears a mistake to which you are the correction. You are my last champion, Manu of Deche, Hamanu Troll-Scorcher. You will cleanse the land of impurities. Athas will become blue again.

In my ignorance, I imagined my familiar world transformed to a world of blue mountains and sand, blue barrens, and blue himali fields. Rajaat changed my mind, showing me blue water beneath a blue sky. I overlooked the oceans; so much water meant nothing to me.

Where was the land? I wondered. Rajaat showed me islands and drifting cities shaped like schooners running before the wind. Where were the people of this blue world? I wondered. The cities teemed with life. Human life, I assumed, and Rajaat did not correct me. Then.

His hands moved from my head to my neck, from my neck to my shoulders and onward, down my body. Bone, sinew, nerve, and every other part of me quickened beneath his fingers. Bit by bit, I became a man again. The pain was exquisite—I ground my regrown tongue until it was a bloody rag between my teeth, lest my soon-to-be peers heard me scream or moan.

Daylight faded. Cool, gray shadows reached across the cart before Rajaat was satisfied with my regeneration. He bid me move each limb, then rise slowly. I sat, stood, and took a tentative step, watching my feet, ankles, knees, and hips as if I had never seen them before. I was myself again, a sound-bodied man, as I had not been when Myron of Yoram's bullies dragged me from the pit. The scars of war and farming were gone, hut my mother would have known me by the crooked big toe on my left foot.

My audience was clad in silk and jewels or sparkling armor such as Athas has never seen, before or since. I, of course, was birth-naked and subject to intense scrutiny. Visions of grunting beasts and sweating slaves were thrust into my consciousness. Flame-haired Sielba ran her possessive passions over my body. She took me by surprise; I flushed with shame, not because I was a hot-blooded man, easily aroused, but because she meant me to be ashamed.

Only Borys of Ebe would have nothing to do with me. His contempt was complete. Dwarves interested him; my shame and suffering didn't.

"Can you walk?" Rajaat asked.

The War-Bringer stood on a beaten dirt path. Behind him stood a slender spire so amber bright that it seemed aflame, though the color was only the setting sun's reflection on pristine white stone. Myron of Yoram's cart rested beside the path. His flayed, tattered skin moved as he breathed, and his mewling echoed in my ears.

My legs would bear me, but I couldn't walk toward my savior without walking past that cart. I hesitated, summoning my courage. Gallard, Sielba, and the others mocked me; my shame was immense, but it wouldn't move my feet. Rajaat made a slight, two-fingered gesture, after which my strength or courage were of no importance: his will brought me to his side.

"Prepare a feast," the first sorcerer said, speaking to those magnificent men and women as if they were slaves.

He pointed at the cart where he'd restored me and where a mass of tall, crystal goblets instantly stood. I saw outrage flicker, then die, on their faces as, one after another, they started toward the cart. And all the while, Rajaat's steady control over me never wavered. It would be a king's age before I could seize the minds of so many mortals and direct them to separate actions. I cannot, even today, seize a champion's thoughts, nor can any of my peers, but Rajaat could hold us all... easily.

Rajaat was cautious with me. He turned me sunwise; toward the brilliant tower, away from the cart where Myron of Yoram lay. But there wasn't enough caution to spare me the understanding of what food, what drink, would be served at the impending feast. I braced myself against my savior's influence. My new body trembled like a smoke-eater's. Walk! Rajaat roared in my mind. Your destiny awaits.

What are you? I asked, shattering the wall, though my true question was: what will I become?

Rajaat intervened before I had an answer to either question. A cold, gray mist enveloped me. Walk! he commanded a second time, and with his will wrapped around mine, I entered the Gray.

I emerged in a small chamber where light flashed brightly and without warning. The floor beneath my bare feet was quicksilver glass, as cold as a tomb at midnight. A stride ahead, the quicksilver angled into a pool of still, dark water. The ceiling above me was a rainbow of colored crystals, six stones mounted in a ring around a seventh crystal that was darkness incarnate.

While I watched in mute wonder and awe, jagged streams of colored light pulsed from the crystals in the rainbow ring. Each pulse was stronger than the preceding one and brought the separate streams closer to a conjunction at the center of the dark crystal.

Watch, Rajaat told me, though I needed no encouragement.

A pinpoint of pure, colorless light sprang into being the instant the jagged streams touched. It swallowed the rainbow colors and began to swell, growing brighter as it did, until the dark crystal was filled with more light than my still-mortal eyes could bear. I closed my eyes, turned my head, and felt a faint concussion through my private darkness. When I opened my eyes again, the room was dark, as it had been when I entered it, and the jagged rainbow streams were no longer than my finger.

"The Dark Lens in the Steeple of Crystals," Rajaat whispered in my ear. "Do not ask what it is, how it was made, or where it comes from. In all the planes of existence, there is nothing that compares to it. Stand in the pool beneath it and become my greatest creation, my final champion."

My family did not raise a fool for a son. I didn't need questions to know that the gift Rajaat offered was nothing any sane man should accept. Yet I knew as well that I would not survive refusing it. I'd chosen death once before when I'd faced Myron Troll-Scorcher—and Rajaat had restored me. My life had become too precious to squander a second time. Stubbornness failed, and my legs took me forward, across the quicksilver and into the opaque water as the rainbow streams pulsed toward each other again.

"You will not regret this," Rajaat assured me.

"I already—"

The colored lights merged into a lance of pristine light that pierced my skull with fire. I screamed mortal agony and slowly began to rise. The Dark Lens burst open. Inside, it was exactly as high as a man, exactly as broad as his outstretched arms. When my heart was at its center, it sealed into a perfect sphere again. Rajaat's sorcery took many-colored shape around me. It became a pillar of light, lifting me and the Lens into the sunset sky.

What can I recount of my final mortal moments? My flesh became fire, my bones red-hot steel on the smith's anvil. Even my memories were reduced to flame and ash. Then, when there was nothing left but light itself, the Lens focused inward. Drawing substance from the dying sun, the risen moons, and the countless stars above our cloudless sky, Rajaat created his final champion.

My heart beat in rhythm with the world below me, and I rejoiced as immortality quickened in my veins. I saw Athas as I wished it could be: a bountiful paradise of flowering fields, green forests, white-capped mountains, and blue lakes and rivers, all bound together beneath a shifting lace of clouds.

Never! Rajaat shattered my vision. Athas does not belong to us! We are the unclean, the defilers. Our children are raised from dung. Our blood is filth. It is not for us to envision the future. You must cleanse the world so it may be returned to the pure ones. The blue world he had shown me earlier—the Athas of endless ocean and floating cities—supplanted my own vision. I looked closer and saw that the cities were populated with halflings, which astonished me because then, as now, halflings were not a city-dwelling race. Humanity's debt folk on your shoulders. It must be paid, Manu of Deche. It must be paid in full. Bands of sorcery tightened around me, commanding me to accept my destiny, to obey the War-Bringer, to revere Rajaat, my creator. I surrendered.

The bands loosened, and Rajaat had made his final champion. I cannot speak for the mistakes and flaws Rajaat claimed existed in my peers, but I knew my own even before the Dark Lens settled back into the rainbow ring atop the Crystal Steeple. I took the first sorcerer's gifts because I had no other choice, but I clung to the shards of my vision, a farmer's vision of a many-colored Athas.

And it was well that the seeds of my rebellion were already planted when the Dark Lens spat me out. There could be no secrets as I lay on the quicksilver glass, my translucent skin stretched taut over a star-flecked midnight skeleton.

"Arise."

Lightning fingers caressed me as I gathered myself into a crouch, then slowly stood. I stared at my black-boned hands. I wondered how I could see anything, but I dared not touch my face.

"Are you in pain anywhere? Do you feel the lack of any vital part of yourself?" Rajaat asked from the periphery.

"No, nothing hurts. Nothing's lacking," I answered slowly, realizing that he'd known my answers before he'd asked the questions. "I'm—" I sought words to describe the indescribable. "I'm hollow... empty. I'm hungry."

I met Rajaat's mismatched eyes and saw that he was gleeful. Then I remembered the feast. When my mind's eye touched the memory of Yoram's scorched carcass, my hunger swelled. Looking down, I saw a pulsing hollow beneath my ribs.

"What have you done to me?" I cried out recklessly, though Rajaat would have heard my thoughts had I tried to stifle my words and, in truth, I doubt that I would have tried.

"I have made you a champion. I have instilled in you the power to cleanse Athas of all its impurities. You no longer depend on the fruits of the land or the flesh of life for your nourishment. I have given you a gift beyond measure. Sunlight will sustain you, but you will grow sleek only in pursuit of your destiny. As you cleanse Athas, death will be your ambrosia. Begin with the trolls. Begin with your predecessor. Go down, Hamanu, Scorcher of Trolls, and claim your feast."

Nausea of the mind overwhelmed me. I dropped to my knees and hid my face behind my hands, as a man might do. But I was no longer a man, no longer a mortal man with a mortal man's love of life and fear of death. Grieving for my lost self, I made tears flow from the holes where my eyes should have been. The tears were sorcery. I realized that immortality wasn't the only gift Rajaat had given me. My whims were spells. I marveled at my powers, then I felt my hunger.

I knew in an instant that it was death I craved, not bread.

"Hate me, if it pleases you," Rajaat said without losing his smile. My thoughts were transparent to him. "I don't expect thanks... or willing obedience."

I swallowed hard, never mind that I had no gullet except in my imagination; a champion's imagination is more potent than material truth. The imaginary act, however, stirred my appetite to new heights.

"Will you or not, you'll fulfill your destiny." Rajaat's foul teeth showed within his grin. "Be my loyal champion, and you'll rule the world, once it's clean. But, deny your hunger, Hamanu, and you'll go mad. Go mad and know that you will not be sated until you have consumed every living thing beneath the bloody sun. Your choice matters little to me. You will serve, and Athas will be cleansed of its impurities. You will consume the foul and the deformed."

Again I surrendered. Mind against mind, will against will, I was no match for my creator. A battle with him would have left me a maddened beast, ravaging life wherever I found it. He'd told me the truth about myself. My hunger grew less resistible with each beat of my heart.

Rajaat stepped sideways, revealing an open door, and the downward spiral beyond it. Measuring what remained of my sanity, I judged I could get to the ground, where Myron of Yoram awaited me, before I succumbed to madness.

"Your choice," Rajaat reminded me as I strode past him. My choice, indeed, and I descended slowly, testing the limits of madness at each step. While I stood in the Steeple of Crystals, what I knew of sorcery could have been written in bold script on a single vellum sheet. By the time my right heel struck the ground, I was a master. I'd learned the deadly dance of life and magic: My hunger sucked life from plant and animal alike. My hunger killed. I could—and would—learn to use my hunger to fuel mighty sorcery, but it would kill whether I learned or not.

Become careful, Hamanu. Become very careful. Become whatever you want. It won't matter. Your destiny is to use the gifts that I have given you.

Warning and promise together. I knew it at the time, though I thought the War-Bringer meant only that I was to cleanse the world of trolls. I thought—all the champions thought—that Rajaat meant to return Athas to us and to humanity when our wars were finished. We were wrong; I was wrong. It took me many years to understand that Rajaat hated humanity above all, because humanity embodied chaos and transformation. Humanity had engendered the Rebirth races. Rajaat's champions would cleanse Athas of what he considered unnatural creatures—including humanity itself—before returning it to the one race he considered natural and pure: the halflings.

I have never fully understood why the War-Bringer needed champions. His power was so much greater than ours. He could have cleansed Athas of every race in a single afternoon. For thirteen ages, I've examined this question. I have no good answer. The answer must lie with the halflings themselves. Halflings destroyed their blue world, which Rajaat wished to recreate, and when it was gone—before they retreated into their tribal, forest lives—halflings created humanity. But which halflings?

Surely there was some dissent, some rebellion driven underground. Perhaps rebel halflings created Rajaat; perhaps he found them on his own. Whichever, Rajaat had halfling allies before he created the first champion, and he and his allies nurtured one another's hatred of the green world Athas had become. Hatred made them all mad; madness made them devious, and because Rajaat was both mad and devious, he created champions to do the bloody work of cleansing Athas of the races he hated, while his own hands remained unsullied.

It isn't a good explanation, but there can be no good explanation for why Rajaat did what he did.

For myself, when I stood outside the white tower, I, too, was mad—with hunger. When I laid my black-boned hands on Myron of Yoram's quivering chest, I knew I would regret it, but when the Troll-Scorcher's substance began to flow into me, I forgot everything else. It's not a good explanation; it's simply the truth.

Yoram's smoldering eyes reappeared when I touched him, sun bright and malevolent in the lavender twilight. Mauled though he was, he was still a mighty sorcerer, and he recognized me as the renegade farmer's son.

Mann. My name came to me on a netherworld wind of hot, sharp cinders. Kill me if you dare. I'll curse you with my dying breath.

He strained against the thin silver chain that bound him, wrist, ankle, and neck, to the cart. Remembering my helpless day on the plains, bound to a mekillot stake while the eyes of fire blazed within me, I snapped the chains. A great death sigh went up from the plants and wildlife surrounding Rajaat's pristine tower as the erstwhile Troll-Scorcher reaped power for his spell. But he tried too hard and took too long. I pressed my lips against his and sucked him hollow in a single inhaled breath.

Manu, he said again, my human name, and the entirety of his curse.

Mounds of reeking meat collapsed inward, becoming ash and dust that vanished quickly in the evening breeze. I stood straight, sated and clearheaded. Layers of Yoram's substance padded my bones. My ribs had expanded as the old Troll-Scorcher died; they contracted as I exhaled. I felt a warm stream of breath against the back of my tawny-skinned hand. A part of me felt human again.

Look at him! A champion's vagrant thought pierced me to the heart. They'd arrayed themselves in a ring around me and the now-empty cart. Their auras shone brighter than Ral or Guthay above the eastern horizon. None among them seemed well-disposed toward me; none among them was well-disposed toward me.

"Don't be a fool!"

Borys of Ebe identified himself with his warning; I recognized his name from my mortal days in the Troll-Scorcher's army and recalled his voice from earlier in the afternoon. I turned toward his voice as an invisible wall came down between me and the rest. The Dwarf-Butcher held out his hand, not in friendship, but to demonstrate that he controlled the wall. He was a powerfully built man, like the race he slaughtered, and tall. His hair was pale and confined in long braids; his eyes glowed with a blue fire.

"We cannot harm one another—not here," Borys explained, leaving no room for doubt in my mind that he would harm me where he could, when he could. "Clothe yourself, man, and we'll be done with this. I won't drink blood with a naked peon."

"Naked peon—?" I began, letting my rage flare.

The wall glowed crimson, stifling my inept spell. Snickering echoed at my back: with Yoram's substance clinging to my bones I was not a handsome man. Shamed and bested, I imagined a drab, homespun cloak—and yelped with surprise when the heavy cloth manifested around me.

But I learn quickly. Unfurling the coarse cloak from my shoulders, I heaved it into the night air and transformed it into shimmering cloth-of-gold. I transformed myself, as well, becoming Hamanu Troll-Scorcher before the radiant cloak touched me again. I was as tall as Borys of Ebe, but lithe and graceful as Manu had been, crowned with Dorean's long black hair, and meeting Borys's stare through her calm, gray eyes.

"Will you drink blood with me now?" I challenged without knowing precisely what I implied.

But before Borys could answer, the invisible wall around me flared crimson again as it absorbed another champion's wrath. Not mine, or Borys's, though he was quickly engulfed in the tumult as spells rebounded around the circle. Untouched in the center, I saw that my peers despised me no more than they despised one another, and that I had "nothing to fear from them.

Fear was something we all reserved for Rajaat, our creator, whose hand fell harshly upon us, scattering the rampant spells, smashing Borys's wall, and quenching each aura, each illusion. We were all naked before him, and though none of us was as grotesque as the War-Bringer himself, our ensorcelled flesh was no improvement on the natural human form.

Fill them! Share them! Drink them!

Rajaat's commands were more than words; they were demanding images that seared my consciousness. Two of the women and one of the men fell to their knees. A fourth champion vomited bile that etched a crater in the ground. I, at least, held my feet and saw the crystal goblets rise from the cart where they'd first appeared. I caught mine before it struck me; several others weren't so quick or lucky.

The overdressed jozhal's knife would have been useful. I hadn't begun to master the art of putting an edge on an illusion and I was, of course, too proudly stubborn to ask questions. The flame-haired woman bit her tongue until her blood flowed freely, but that reminded me too much of the moments when Rajaat was healing me. I watched Borys slit a vein in his forearm with an extension of his thumbnail and managed a similar gesture.

When our goblets were filled and steaming, Rajaat bid us exchange them. I sought the Dwarf-Butcher, but he eluded me, and I sipped the jozhal's thick blood instead. Sacha Arala, Curse of Kobolds: his name and more filled my conscious mind, as my name must have entered his. Arala's cleansing war against the mischievous kobolds had ended shortly after the Troll-Scorcher's war against the trolls had begun. He passed his empty days in Rajaat's shadow.

In my mind he said he'd befriend me and teach me the champion's way. I didn't need sorcery to know a lie when I heard it.

The blood of another forgotten king, Gallard Gnome-Bane, was in the third goblet. After that, I grew confused as one after another of Rajaat's champions battered me with lies and illusions.

I remember Borys, though, whose blood filled my eighth goblet. The dwarves had slain the first champion Rajaat dedicated against them. He, like I, was a recreation. His goblet held a nameless past along with his own. The first Butcher had claimed kingship and royal ancestry, but Borys had been a commoner before Rajaat plucked him off the blasted battlefield.

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 great 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.