The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King

Chapter Twelve

By the time Hamanu knew that Rajaat hadn't pursue him, he was far from Ur Draxa, far from the Hollow and the Black, far from the mysterious leonine giant, and far from Urik as well. The narrowness of his escape and a sense of impending doom made his precious city the last place in the heartland he wanted to be. As Hamanu drifted aimlessly through the Gray, however, no other material-world destination sprang into his mind.

He couldn't imagine approaching Gallard or Dregoth as he'd approached Borys of Ebe outside Kemelok all those ages ago, and Inenek was a fool. The heartland was home to guilds of powerful sorcerers, druids, mind-benders, and other magic-wielders. Hamanu knew more about their practices and strongholds than they imagined, and knew, as well, that none of them could light a candle in Rajaat's wind. As the Lion-King of Urik, he'd disdained allies for thirteen ages; as Rajaat's last champion rebelling against his creator, staring at three short days before doom, there was no one who could, or would, help him.

Hamanu needed to think, to examine his choices, if he had any, and to plot a strategy that, if it would not bring him victory, would at least spare his city. He imagined himself on a serene hilltop, reading the answers to his many questions from patterns in the passing clouds. The place was real in Hamanu's mind, but it wasn't real enough to end his netherworld drift. Green hilltops and cloudscapes belonged to Athas's past. Aside from Urik, all the places Hamanu imagined belonged either to the past or to his enemies. His mind's eye finally fixed on a landscape filled with stones the same color as the netherworld: the troll ruins in the Kreegill peaks above Deche. The ruins hadn't changed in the ages since he'd last seen them; he had no difficulty finding them in the netherworld. A few walls had tumbled, and there was no trace at all of the bits of mattress Manu found beneath the massive troll beds, but the rest was exactly as he'd remembered it.

Not so the human villages. Turning away from the troll houses, Hamanu beheld a barren valley. Wars hadn't devastated the Kreegills. The valley had been intact when Hamanu left it last. No other champion had set foot on its fertile soil until Borys came, in his dragon madness, and sucked all the life away.

A hundred years after he'd sated himself completely, metamorphosis, Borys recovered his sanity, but the land— the land wasn't so fortunate. The sky had been permanently reddened by a haze of dust and ash. Until the worm, Tithian, began his sulky storms, a mortal human might experience rain once in a lifetime—as muddy pellets, nothing like the life-giving showers of Manu's boyhood.

Rain or no, wind still blew in the Kreegills. Thirteen ages of constant, parched wind had buried the valleys beneath rippling blankets of loose gray-brown dirt. The soil itself was good, better, perhaps, than the heavy soil Hamanu remembered. If the rains came back—and farmers built terraces to keep the soil in place until long-lived plants put down their roots—the valleys would bloom again. Until then, there'd be only the skeletal branches of the tallest trees reaching out of their graves.

The loss Hamanu felt as he turned away from the valleys was for Athas, not himself. There was nothing down there to remind him of what he'd lost: Deche, Dorean, his own humanity. His memory held a face he named Dorean, but were his Dorean to reappear, he wasn't certain he'd recognize her. She'd never recognize him. The young man who'd danced for her was gone. His metamorphic body could no longer perform the intricate steps.

Ages had passed since Hamanu wished that he could weep for his lost past or wished that he was dead within it. There were no gods to grant a champion's wishes. He'd never weep again, and he'd lived too long to throw his life away.

In his natural shape, Hamanu was taller than any troll. He looked directly at the carved inscriptions he'd once studied from the ground, and lost himself recovering their meaning from his memory.

"Can you read it?"

A voice—Windreaver's voice—asked from behind his back. Hamanu let out a breath he'd held since Ur Draxa. He hadn't wanted to be alone. The troll's voice was the right voice for this place, this moment.

" 'Come, blessed sun,' " he answered, tracing the word-symbols as he translated them. " 'Warm my walls and my roof. Send your light of life through my windows and my doors.' " He paused with his finger above the last group of carvings. "This one, 'awaken,' and the next pair, 'stone' plus 'life'—they're on every stone in every wall. Wake up my stones? Wake up my people? I was never certain."

" 'Arise, reborn.' We believed the spirits of our ancestors dwelt in stone. We never mined, not like the dwarves. Mining was desecration. We waited for the stone to rise. The closer it came to the sun—we believed—the closer our ancestors were to the moment of rebirth."

"And do you still believe?" Hamanu asked. He didn't expect an answer, and didn't get one.

"Who taught you to read our script?" Windreaver demanded, as if the knowledge were a sacred trust, not to be shared with outsiders, with humans especially.

"I taught myself. I was here at sunrise, whenever I could get away from my chores, imagining what it had been like. I looked at the inscriptions and asked myself: what would I have written here, if I were a troll, living in this place, watching the sun rise over my house. After a while, I believed I knew."

Silence lengthened. Hamanu thought Windreaver had departed.

He considered issuing a command that the troll couldn't disobey, demanding recognition for his accomplishment. He'd learned the script without assistance and, save for the two symbols that dealt with a faith he couldn't imagine, he'd learned it correctly. But that would be a tawdry triumph in a place that deserved better. With a final caress for the carved stone, Hamanu turned and saw that he wasn't alone.

"I taught myself to read your script. I couldn't teach myself to speak it. If you wish to insult me, do it in a living language."

"I said you read well."

The Lion-King knew his captive companion better than that. "When mekillots fly," he challenged.

"No, you're right. I said something else, but you read well. That's the truth. Nothing else matters, does it—in a living language?"

"Thank you," Hamanu replied. He didn't want an argument, not today. But it seemed he was going to have one: Windreaver's face had soured into an expression he hadn't seen before. "Is it so terrible? A boy comes up here—a human boy. He imagines he's a troll and deciphers your language."

"What I said was: I could wish I had met that remarkable human boy."

Hamanu studied the ground to the right of his feet. He remembered the boy's shape, his voice, and his questions as he stood among these stones. Memory was illusion; there was no going back. "I could wish that, too. But we had no choice, no chance. Rajaat took that away before I was born. Maybe before you were born. Our paths were destined to cross on the battlefield, at the top of a dark-sky cliff, far from anywhere either of us knew. One misstep, by either of us, and we'd never have met at all."

" 'One misstep'?"

"And the Cleansing Wars would have ended worse than they did. You could have held Myron of Yoram to a stalemate, but Rajaat would have found another lump of human clay to mold into his final champion. The dwarves, elves, and giants wouldn't've survived... and neither would the trolls..." he paused a second time and raised his head before adding the long-unspoken words—"My friend."

Windreaver's silver-etched silhouette didn't shift in the sunlight. "I believe you," he said softly, without saying what he believed. "Our race was doomed."

Looking at the troll's slumped, translucent shoulders, the Lion-King remembered compassion. "You believe your dead dwell in stone, awaiting rebirth. When the wind's done scouring these stones, there'll be trolls again, someday. You'll teach them their language." He thought of the pebble imbedded in his forearm. "You might be reborn, yourself."

Terrible silver eyes met Hamanu's. "If the spirits of our dead survived in stone, the War-Bringer would have declared war on stone. He would have made a champion to suck life from stone."

The War-Bringer had. If there'd been life sleeping in these ruins, Rajaat's final champion could have destroyed it. "I wouldn't... won't. It will not happen. Not in three days. Not ever."

"You learn," Windreaver concluded. "Of all your kind, you alone learned from your mistakes."

"I learned from you. But. by then, there were no choices so there couldn't be mistakes. When Rajaat came to me in Urik and I ran from him. it was your taunts—"

"I didn't taunt you, not that day."

"You were waiting for me when I came out of the Gray near Kemelok. You'd gotten there first; you knew exactly where I'd go. You said that if I ran—if I kept running— Rajaat would make another champion to replace me. How many years had it been since that day on the cliff? You hadn't said a word in all that time—I didn't think you could. As a man, I was still young—what did I know? Fighting and forming. You were ages older. Of course I listened to you. 'Think of what the War-Bringer's learned from you!' I've never forgotten it; I remember it as if it were yesterday. I realized that it wasn't enough to disobey Rajaat; I had to stop him. I must remain his final champion. There can none after me."

"I'd sworn I wouldn't speak to you. Then you broke away from the War-Bringer. I saw it, heard it, but I didn't believe it. You refused what he offered. Then you ran to Borys, and I was afraid for you, my enemy, my warden, so I broke my oath," said the troll's spirit, as though in recitation.

"You made me think before I talked to him." "For all the good it did, Manu. For all the good it did, long ago..."

Borys hadn't welcomed another champion's sudden appearance behind his Kemelok siege line. The Butcher of Dwarves hurled a series of Unseen assaults at his illusion-shrouded visitor. Hamanu deflected everything that came his way, all without raising a counterattack. After a short lull, a solitary human strode out of the besieger's camp. It wasn't a good time for meeting another champion. Borys made that clear from the start.

As Borys explained, ten days earlier, he'd fought a pitched, but not quite decisive, battle against the dwarven army here at Kemelok. He'd given their king, Rkard, a fatal wound—at least it should have been fatal. Borys wasn't certain. That was half his anger. The sword Borys had carried into the battle was enchanted. Rajaat had given it to him the day he'd become the thirteenth champion. The sword imparted a lethal essence to any dwarf it cut open, as it had opened Rkard, but the cursed dwarf had gotten lucky.

Rkard's axe had taken a chunk out of Borys's shoulder, a blow that would have quartered a mortal man. Battle-stunned and unable to hold his weapon, Borys had fallen. His officers had carried him back to their lines—leaving the sword behind in the hairy dwarf's chest. Borys admitted that he had slain three of his best men before he got his rage controlled, His own life was never in danger, but the damned sword was irreplaceable.

Hamanu listened to the Butcher of Dwarves's tirade and wisely didn't mention that his victory over the trolls hadn't depended on any enchanted weaponry. He waited until the other champion had calmed down enough to ask the obvious questions.

"What do you want? Who sent you? Why are you here?" asked Borys.

"Rajaat came to me in Urik."

"This is my war, Troll-Scorcher, and I'm ending it now. No one's coming in to share my kill. If Rajaat's whispering in your ear, that's your problem, not mine."

"Wrong," Hamanu countered. He opened his mind to share his recent encounter with their mutual creator, but Borys was warded against such invasion. "He means for me to finish your war—"

"Never," Borys snarled and quickened another spell. "I warned you."

"—And start another cleansing war, this time against humanity itself."

A needle-thin ray of orange light shot from the palm of the Butcher of Dwarves to Hamanu's gut, where it raised a finger-wisp of oily smoke before Hamanu deflected it with a gesture of his own. Once pointed at the ground, the orange ray seared a line a hundred paces long across the already ash-streaked dirt.

"He showed me how it would be done," the Lion-King said, "and gave me a foretaste of human death."

"We can all kill, Hamanu," Borys said wearily, as if explaining life's realities to a dull-witted child. "Kill all Urik, if that pleases you, but stay away from my damned dwarves, and know this: make war with humanity, and you're making war with me."

"I'll win."

"When mekillots fly, Hamanu. You're the last, and the least. You may have vanquished the trolls, but they were almost finished when Yoram lost his fire. You don't have the wit or power to battle any one of us. Go back to Urik. Be careful, though—I hear you're taking in half-bloods. Give a dwarf shelter, and I'll make war with you."

"Forget dwarves," Hamanu advised. "Think about what happens next. What did he promise you?"

"A new human kingdom in a new human world, a pure world, without dwarves and the rest of the Rebirth scum. I'll rule from Ebe—or here at Kemelok—until I can wrest Tyr from old Kalak. After that, who knows? We needn't be enemies, Hamanu. There's enough to go around, for now."

"You seemed wiser. I thought you knew better than to believe him."

"If Rajaat could cleanse the world, none of us would exist. He's the War-Bringer, not the war commander; the first sorcerer, but not a sorcerer-king. He needs us more than we need him."

Locked in what he hoped would be humanity's final battle with the Rebirth dwarves, Borys wasn't eager to be seen conferring with a man who was clearly not-quite-human. After throwing a scrap of cloth on the ground, to shape his spell, Borys tried to reconfine Hamanu in his customary black-haired and tawny illusion.

"Begone!" the Butcher of Ebe growled softly with his own true voice.

Hamanu shook off the spell. With a hundred human deaths fresh on the back of his dragon's tongue and Windreaver's taunts still ringing in his ears, he pleaded for an open mind. "Let me show you—"

"I've seen enough."

Abandoning the calm tactics that went against his nature and hadn't accomplished anything, Hamanu gestured widely with both arms. Borys responded with another spell, but before he could cast it, Hamanu cast a spell of his own. The air between Urik's gaunt king and the blond human flashed with lightning brilliance as Hamanu found die veterans from whose life essence Borys was quickening his spell. He annihilated them, in the way he'd learned from Rajaat; Borys felt the echo of their deaths. When the light faded, the Butcher of Dwarves held one hand against his breast, and in his army's camp, clanging gongs signaled an emergency.

With his hand still pressed above his heart, Borys looked from Hamanu to his frantic camp. "I felt them die. I couldn't stop it. If I'd tried, you'd have drained me, too." He lowered his arm and turned back to Hamanu. "Just what are you?"

"Rajaat's last champion: Troll-Scorcher. Annihilator of all humanity. I'll win," Hamanu repeated his earlier assertion. "If I start the war. And if I won't, he'll make another who will."

"The Dark Lens? Is that how you do it? Are you bound to it in a different way than the rest of us?"

"I didn't ask; he didn't enlighten me. Maybe it's the Lens. Sometimes I think it's the sun. It was there from the beginning, I suppose, but I didn't know how to use it until today."

Hamanu opened his mind a third time, and Borys accepted the images of Rajaat's visit to Urik: a hundred humans annihilated in a single breath. Nothing remained of them, not a single greasy, ash-crusted splotch on the palace floors.

Borys lowered his hand. He cursed as any veteran might curse: heartfelt and impotent.

Hamanu interrupted. "He says humanity must be cleansed because we're deformed. He wants to return a cleansed Athas to the halflings. He says it belongs to them, not us."

"He's mad."

"Aye, he'll probably cleanse the halflings, too. The only question worth asking is, can we stop him? I can resist him, disobey him, but I can't stop him, not alone. If we all attack at once..."

"You'd survive," Borys responded quickly, the old distrust burning bright in his eyes. "You could lay back until you were the last—"

"And he'd slay me, then he'd find someone else to annihilate the humans. Maybe a score of someones. He promised you a kingdom, Borys. What price will you pay for it?"

Borys neither spoke nor moved.

"Make up your mind, champion. He's probably out looking for another farmer's son right now. Maybe he'll pluck someone out of your army this time. Maybe he's already dragged the poor sod up the stairs in his damned white tower."

"No. You saw how it was. He needs us—"

"Needed."

Another curse as Borys looked at Kemelok's battered towers. "Five days. If I'm gone longer than that, the siege will fail, and the runts will scatter." Borys allowed a breathtakingly short time in which to bring down the War-Bringer.

"Sielba," Borys replied without hesitation.

Hamanu was inwardly astonished. He'd have left the red-haired Sprite-Scourge and seducer of champions for last. But he'd come this far to get Borys's help and kept his opinions to himself while the Butcher of Dwarves made arrangement with his high-ranking officers to continue the siege while he was gone.

Since the day the champions had drunk each other's blood in the negligible shade of Rajaat's white tower, Sielba had repeatedly invited Hamanu to visit her retreat. The invitations had grown more frequent and enticing in the years since he'd vanquished the trolls and taken his place among the champions who'd achieved their final victories. The notices had become especially regular since he'd settled in Urik and begun to transform the dusty, roadside town into a rival city.

They were neighbors, Sielba would write on ordinary vellum scrolls that her minions delivered to the Urik gates, or she would whisper in a mysterious, musk-scented hush that haunted the midnight corners of Urik's humble palace. They should know each other better. They should explore an alliance; as partners, Sielba promised, they and their cities would be invincible.

Hamanu had ignored every overture. He hadn't forgotten the loathsome combination of lust and contempt with which she'd scrutinized him that one time, the only time they'd stood face to face. He wanted nothing to do with her or her invitations.

However his farmer's son's jaw dropped when Borys led him from the Gray into an alabaster courtyard, and he began to reconsider his reticence. Musical fountains, flowers, lyric birds, an abundance of brightly colored silk... he'd never dreamt of such things. Sielba had cleansed Athas of sprites, then retired to the ancient city of Yaramuke, where she idled away the days and years, ruling a docile citizenry from an imperial palace. Hamanu shook his head and reshaped his appearance to equal the luxury surrounding him—at least he hoped he equaled it.

Sielba greeted Borys warmly and familiarly; Hamanu readily perceived that their acquaintance was both old and intimate. She greeted him like a kes'trekel alighting on a corpse.

"Will you feast with me?" she asked, with her lips against his ear and her hands weaving through his hair.

Lips, ears, hands, hair—even the tense muscles at the back of Hamanu's neck—were all illusions, but beneath their illusions Rajaat's champions remained men and women. Hamanu, at least, knew that he remained a man. He remembered every loving moment in Dorean's arms; Jikkana's, too; and the infrequent others of his mortal years. After Rajaat made him a champion, he'd discovered the hard way that there were lethal limits to illusion. Sielba's sturdy immortality tempted him with dangerous possibilities.

He pushed her away, with more force than he'd intended. "We've come to talk about Rajaat—"

"You still have the manners of a dirt-eater, Hamanu," Borys interrupted. "Try to behave."

With words and a few subtle gestures, the two more experienced champions pierced Hamanu's defenses. They shrouded him with an awkwardness that wasn't illusion. He was young compared to them, and ignorant. He knew how to fight, but not how to sit amid the wealth of cushions surrounding Sielba's banquet table, or which of the unfamiliar delicacies were eaten with fingers, and which required a knife.

As for the urgent matter that had brought Hamanu first to Kemelok and then to Yaramuke, Borys disposed of it between the berries and the cream.

"The War-Bringer's not going to stop with the Rebirth races," he said bluntly, but casually. "He's going to create another champion to cleanse Athas of humanity."

Sielba set down her goblet of iridescent wine. Her illusion retained its beauty when she frowned, but her inner nature— the heart and conscience of a victorious champion—revealed itself as well. "And us? What about his promises? Are we to rule a world filled with beasts and halflings?"

"Apparently," Borys replied, with studied nonchalance balancing a mottled berry on the tip of his knife. He exploded it with a thought. "Or he'll create a champion to cleanse us, too." "He has to be stopped."

Lips as red as the stain parted in a condescending smile. "Do you have a plan?" she asked Borys, not Hamanu.

"Of course, but it will require all of us, together."

Sielba's dark eyes narrowed. "And you need to know where everyone is?"

"I can hardly ask the War-Bringer, can I?"

"Or little Sacha."

"I'll get him last, and bring him here by force, if I have to."

"After I've told you what you need to know?"

"I have hopes, my dear enchantress." Borys laid his hand atop Sielba's.

She withdrew hers from below. "And you have promises, promises as hollow as Rajaat's." Her smile belied her words.

So much, then, Hamanu observed, for Borys's persuasion—or any acknowledgment that without him they'd be ignorant of the War-Bringer's plans. The elder champions disappeared, leaving Hamanu with the silks, the slaves, and the remains of their feast. When they returned, Sielba settled herself on the cushions close beside him, while Borys stood beside the door.

"Stay here, Hamanu," the elder champion said.

An order, not a suggestion, and Hamanu didn't take orders; he wouldn't be treated like a child or slave. If Borys hadn't learned that at Kemelok, he'd learn it now.

The air in Sielba's banquet hall stilled. Water drops hung suspended in the fountains, and the human slaves fell to the floor. Borys's doing; Hamanu had done nothing to harm them.

As he started to stand, Sielba threw herself at Hamanu's feet. She tangled him in the cushions. The huge and well-built palace shuddered when they collapsed together.

"Stay with me, Lion of Urik," she urged as they wrestled with small but potent sorcery.

Long ago, Myron of Yoram's officers had humiliated him with their superior sword-skills. Hamanu then spent years practicing with every weapon known to man to insure that such a thing would never happen again. He thought that because he was strong and skilled, he could win any fight. He should have taken a few days, at least, to learn the cunning strategies with which women traditionally fought and won. Sielba used his lion's strength against him. She drained his spells as fast as he conceived them and then twisted his arm behind his back so thoroughly that the black bones beneath his illusion threatened to snap. When he was aware of his predicament, she whispered in his ear again, in her huskily seductive voice:

"It's better this way. Trust me."

Hamanu was no more inclined to do that than he was to trust Rajaat.

"I'll return with the others, then we'll deal with the War-Bringer," Borys said from the doorway. "In the meantime, maybe you'll learn something useful."

Sielba let her guard down once Borys was gone. The Lion of Urik, taking quick advantage of the tricks she'd just taught him, freed himself, and achieved a similar twisting grip on her arm.

"And now, what are you going to do, Lion of Urik?" she asked. Her voice came from behind his shoulder though her face was smothered in the pillows. "You're a quick and rever farmer's lad, but that's hardly enough."

Later Hamanu would blame the wine, Sielba's shifty and shimmering red-blue iridescent wine. The wine wasn't to blame; no amount of wine could affect him, no more than the spiced delicacies could fatten his gaunt body. He was young as immortals reckoned age, but a score of years had passed since he'd touched a woman's cheek without leaving a bruise or kissed her lips without bloodying them.

In time, Hamanu mastered illusion's most subtle aspects and could seduce whomever he wished or secret himself in a mortal mind to explore the world with another's senses. In time, he and Yaramuke's queen would descend into the quarrel that ended with her death and the destruction of her city. Until then, Sielba offered, if not love, fascination, and he offered the same to her. The Lion of Urik was a different man when Borys returned two days later. The ten other champions emerged, one after another, from the Butcher's netherworld wake. Hamanu kept his temper and said nothing when he saw how thoroughly the Butcher of Ebe had established himself as the champions' champion, the one who would free them from their creator.

Hamanu had already measured himself against Borys, and the Dwarf Butcher was no War-Bringer. If Borys wished to be the touchstone of their rebellion, he'd let Borys have his wish. There'd be opportunity for another rebellion, if necessity demanded one. Rajaat's champions had treachery bred in their bones. Hamanu was no exception.

As afternoon in Yaramuke became evening and their strategy took its final shape, Hamanu quietly accepted a subordinate's role. The champions' strategy was as simple as it was risky. Emerging from the Gray, all at the same time and close to Rajaat's tower, they'd each cast a different, destructive spell. No one of the spells would be sufficient to overpower the first sorcerer, but together, they might distract and confound him long enough for Borys, or Dregoth, or Pennarin, or even Hamanu—the four champions who prided themselves on their sheer, brute strength—to dispatch their creator with a physical weapon. Failing that— but only if the quartet seemed truly doomed—the others would attempt to destroy Rajaat's Dark Lens.

Better, they'd decided, to live without the magic they passed to their minions than to face Rajaat's wrath with the Lens still in existence.

Their simple strategy collapsed as soon as they were in the Gray. Savage winds erupted from every corner of the netherworld. The winds buffeted the mighty sorcerers, sending them caroming into each other and away from each other, as well.

Too many champions, too many unnatural creatures for even this unnatural place, Hamanu thought as he struggled to retain his orientation in the chaos.

Borys had a less charitable notion: Arala! Get a ward on Sacha Arala—he's behind it.

Prudence launched a bolt of blue-green sorcery off Hamanu's right hand, and off other hands, as well. They blinded each other in their eagerness to stop Sacha Arala's treachery. The Curse of Kobolds screamed for mercy that was not forthcoming until Dregoth announced that he had the traitor in his grasp. The winds ebbed. The champions regrouped and continued toward Rajaat's tower, which shone in the Gray as a sliver of pure white light.

In silence, the champions surrounded the netherworld beacon, then returned to the material world where, hiding in the moonlight shadows, Rajaat War-Bringer waited for them.

A fiery maw engulfed Pennarin before he'd invoked his spell. The maw closed, and Rajaat's first champion was gone.

Hamanu took a breath and cast his spell: a simple transmutation of dry, rock-hard dirt into mire as hot and viscous as molten lava. The ground beneath Rajaat's feet began to glow. Through the tumult of spells and counterspells, the Lion of Urik heard the War-Bringer cry his name.

"Hamanu... Hamanu, you're next!"

A writhing, dark counterspell came Hamanu's way. Gelid and corrosive, it would have consumed his immortal flesh eventually, but it was as slow as it was icy. Hamanu dodged and sent Rajaat's wrath oozing harmlessly into the Gray. Then he drew his golden sword. With his hands on its hilt, Hamanu advanced toward his creator across ground his own spell had made treacherous.

The champions' strategy had been sound. Though they'd never had the surprise advantage Borys planned for, and they'd lost Pennarin at the start, the War-Bringer was thoroughly beset. Borys was wading through Hamanu's steaming mire toward Rajaat ahead of Hamanu. The Butcher of Dwarves had drawn his sword, a dark-metal weapon that seethed with crimson fire against the midnight stars. It wasn't the sword Rajaat had given him; he swore the crimson blade would be a telling weapon against the War-Bringer. Hamanu hadn't argued. He wasn't going to tell another champion what weapon to bring to their rebellion.

The Butcher of Dwarves swung first: a solid cut across Rajaat's ribs, ending deep in his gut. Blood and viscera sluiced over the dark crimson blade. The War-Bringer bellowed; fire roared out of his gaping mouth. Hamanu ducked his head beneath the flames and stalked forward, thrusting his sword into Rajaat's flank. The golden sword slid between the first sorcerer's ribs, then stopped, as if it had struck unyielding stone. Hamanu sank his black-taloned feet into the mire and pushed; the sword began to move again.

Fire seared Hamanu's scalp and the length of his back.

Somehow he kept his hands on the hilt and kept the sword creeping deeper.

Hamanu. Look at me, Hamanu.

There was compulsion in the words the War-Bringer placed in Hamanu's mind, compulsion that made the Lion of Urik raise his head to meet his creator's mismatched eyes.

Take them, Hamanu. Take them all! You have the power.

It was the same power Rajaat had offered in Urik. Hamanu refused it a second time.

"Never!" he swore.

He found a last reserve of strength within himself and, with a roar of his own, surged behind his sword. Rajaat fell back, toward Dregoth, who swung his maul just once. A sound like the moons colliding pummeled the white tower. Rajaat heaved away from Dregoth's completed stroke. The mire quaked, the champions fought for balance, but the War-Bringer was down. Potent sorcery, no longer under the control of Rajaat's unfathomable intellect, sizzled wildly and died.

"Is he dead?" one of the women asked.

"No," Borys, Hamanu, and Dregoth said together before Dregoth hoisted his maul for another blow.

The Ravager of Giants smashed Rajaat's protuberant brow, but the answer didn't change.

"He can't die," someone said. "Not while we're alive."

No one argued.

"So, what now?" That from Albeorn, whose metamorphosis had given him an erdlulike aspect. "If we can't kill him, what do we do?"

"Lock him up someplace. Some place dark and deep," Inenek suggested.

Gallard Gnome-Bane snorted. "Fool. Shadow's the source of the War-Bringer's power,"

"When it gets dark enough, there aren't any shadows. I can think of a few places that never feel the light of day or any other light," Dregoth said with a malicious laugh.

"Put him there," Gallard countered, "and he'll use the Dark Lens to fry us all."

Borys cleaned his simmering sword and sheathed it in a scabbard that vanished against his leg. "All right, Gallard, where do you suggest?" He swept his arm wide in an exaggerated bow, but kept his head up and his eyes fixed on the Gnome-Bane's face.

"At the center of the Gray netherworld lies the Black, and beneath the Black—"

"The Gray isn't flat," Albeorn interrupted. "If there's black at its center, then there's more Gray beneath it!"

"Shut up, twerp!"

Gallard shot sorcery at his critic. The air around the Elf-Slayer shimmered with ward spells, then it shimmered around everyone else, as well. For several long moments, no one said anything. At last, Sielba lowered her guard.

"And beneath the black?" she urged Gallard to finish.

"Beneath the Black, we can make a hollow where neither light nor shadow exist, nor can exist." Borys had a question: "What about the Dark Lens?"

"Better we cut him apart and each take a piece with us," Wyan of Bodach interjected.

Hamanu stared at the Pixie-Blight. Stripped of illusion— as they all were—Bodach was a small-statured creature. He'd destroyed the smaller, defenseless race of shy, tree-worshipers not by slaying them but by turning their god-trees to sorcerous ash. While Hamanu wondered why such I a coward would suggest carving their still-living creator into bloody chunks of meat, the other champions bantered about how Rajaat should be divvied up and which part should go to whom.

The lewd conversation ended abruptly when a blue spark flickered amid the gore that had been Rajaat's face.

"He's healing himself." Borys confirmed what they'd all felt.

There was a round of curses as they each cast a warding spell over their creator.

"It won't be enough," Gallard warned. "Wards won't keep out the sun once it rises. His own bones will make the shadows. We put him beneath the Black tonight, or we'll join Pennarin tomorrow."

Pennarin. Where was Pennarin? The Black, Gallard said. And how did Gallard come to know so much about the center of the Gray or what lay beneath it? Who'd taught the Bane of Gnomes? Why had he needed to learn? Who had he planned to imprison in a nowhere place where neither light nor shadow, time nor substance existed? Rajaat? Or had Gallard planned to imprison them all there eventually?

So many questions, but no reason to ask any of them. The champions couldn't kill their creator and couldn't let him heal himself whole. That left Gallard's Hollow beneath the Black. As little as he relished the notion of trusting Gallard's notion, Hamanu had nothing to offer in its place— nor did anyone else.

"Is there time?" he asked, breaking the silence that threatened to last until dawn.

Gallard grinned, revealing steel-sharp fangs behind his slack and blubbery lips. "Only one way to find out, isn't there?"

Indeed, there was only one way: follow the Gnome-Bane's instructions, stretch their powers to exhaustion scouring the heartland for reagents before dawn's light, and deliver the noxious reagents to the top of Rajaat's white tower where Gallard—and only Gallard—sat in the Crystal Steeple, waiting, enshrined beneath the Dark Lens.

After depositing a vial of fuming realgar at the Gnome-Bane's feet, Hamanu plodded down the spiral stairs. Resuming his human illusion—because it was more comfortable than his gaunt natural form—he leaned back against a crumbled wall. Champions needed sleep no more than they needed food, but even an immortal mind needed a quiet moment to reflect, this day and night.

Big Guthay had set. Little Ral was alone in a sky of a thousand stars. None shone brighter than the warding spells layered over Rajaat's body, like so many green silk veils. Hamanu lost himself in the spells' constantly changing patterns. His thoughts wandered so far that his mind seemed empty, almost peaceful. Looking straight ahead, he saw nothing until—with a jolt of returning consciousness—he saw that a black shadow had cut the warding spells in two.

He's healed. He's breaking the wards, Hamanu thought, a lump of cold terror clogging his throat.

But the shadow wasn't Rajaat's. A man crouched over Rajaat's body, casting the shadow Hamanu saw. A man who was so intent on peeling back the warding spells that he didn't hear the light tread of another champion's feet behind him, or sense another shadow mingling with his until it was too late.

"Arala!" Hamanu shouted as he seized a scrawny neck and jerked the traitor from his mischief.

Objects that might have been the War-Bringer's teeth or finger bones showered from Sacha's hands—except, the culprit wasn't Sacha Arala. In the brief moment Hamanu had before the illusion became a writhing metamorph, he recognized Wyan Bodach's face: Wyan Bodach, who'd suggested chopping Rajaat into pieces earlier.

All arms and legs in his natural form, the Pixie-Blight sprouted claws that raked through illusion to Hamanu's true flesh. The Lion roared, but held on until another champion came to investigate the furor. Unable to sort innocent from guilty, the newcomer slapped spells around them both. Hamanu's limbs grew heavy as a Kreegill peak, and Wyan was even heavier, but he kept hold. Another spell—two, three, more than he could count—wrapped around them. The arm that had been as heavy as a mountain was stone-stiff when the spellcasting was finished and Dregoth reached in to pry Bodach free.

"And do you deny it?" Dregoth asked Hamanu.

The heavy paralysis was withdrawn. Hamanu flexed his muscles and said: "I do. Wyan said he wanted a piece of Rajaat's body earlier. It's his own deceit he describes, not mine. I thought it was Sacha Arala at first. I cried out his name by mistake."

Vapors seeped from Dregoth's nose as he looked from Hamanu to Wyan and back again.

"And where is Sacha?" Albeorn asked from far on Hamanu's right side.

He and the others had gathered quickly. Some had emerged from the netherworld, the rest strode out of the nighttime shadows. Sacha Arala wasn't among them, nor was Borys, nor, of course, was Gallard. Hamanu realized they were all looking at him, distrusting him more than Wyan because he was still the outsider. He had several long moments to wonder exactly what Borys had told them while Sielba had entertained him in Yaramuke, before Sielba's husky voice broke the silence.

"Sacha's with Borys, where else? He's got no part in this—whatever this is. And neither has Hamanu. If the Lion of Urik says Wyan was cutting off bits of Rajaat, then I believe him, and I suggest we find out why before Borys gets back here."

Sielba was right about Hamanu, though he knew he'd pay dearly for her defense. She might have been right about Sacha, too. Rajaat's sycophant might have had nothing to do with Wyan's macabre gleaning. But Wyan swore otherwise.

"It was all Sacha's plan," the Pixie-Blight insisted. "He said Rajaat has no one vital part; he can regenerate himself entirely if any living part of him is placed in the pool beneath the Dark Lens. He knew you'd keep close wards on him, so he came to me—"

"—And you went to Rajaat. You made the Gray-storm when we left Yaramuke. You used it to hide yourself while you raced here and back again. That's why he was waiting for us, why Pennarin was consumed," Uyness, who'd cleansed Athas of orcs, concluded.

It could be a true explanation. One of them had warned Rajaat—unless Rajaat's sorcery were so much more subtle than theirs that he'd spied on them in Yaramuke without their knowledge. Unless Uyness herself was their traitor: whenever one champion explained the behavior of another, she, or he, became suspect in other eyes. Hamanu had gotten a dose of that himself a few moments back. But if there'd ever been an enduring partnership among the champions, it was between Uyness and Pennarin, and they all preferred to think that there was some limit to their creator's power.

Suspicion fixed on Wyan, who threw the real onus on Sacha Arala, who wasn't there to defend himself. By Hamanu's reckoning, events didn't require Arala's treachery: Wyan could have learned all he needed from the War-Bringer after he'd raced through the Gray to warn him. But Hamanu kept his thoughts about traitors to himself, saying nothing when Borys returned with two flawless obsidian spheres and the enthralled Curse of Kobolds.

Borys had another suspect: "Gallard!" he shouted loud enough to shake the white tower where the Gnome-Bane prepared the imprisonment spell. "Gallard! Here! Now!"

Gallard grumbled and Gallard resisted. The air between the steeple chamber at the top of the tower and Borys on the ground beside Rajaat rained sparks as they argued silently, mind against mind. Then the air stilled and Gallard came outside. He swore he didn't know what Wyan was talking about.

"But, if the coward's telling the truth, then that's all the more reason to get Rajaat locked beneath the Black."

Borys disagreed. "Not in the tower or the pool. Not near the Dark Lens. Not if it's going to regenerate him."

The Gnome-Bane said there was no such danger with the spell he intended to cast. Though he'd use the Dark Lens to intensify his sorcery, Rajaat's body would stay where it was, well away from the white tower's mysterious black-water pool. "Stay here and watch," Gallard offered with rare generosity, "or come up to the steeple while I cast the spell."

"Someone cheated," Inenek protested.

"And someone didn't," Dregoth observed mildly. "I'll stay below with Hamanu. We'll deal with our traitors once we've dealt with Rajaat."

Borys gave orders as if he'd been ordained their leader, but the Butcher of Dwarves tread carefully around Dregoth. The Ravager of Giants was unique, even among the champions: when Rajaat found him, Dregoth was already immortal and already at war with the giant race. In his natural form, he was, by far, the largest, most powerful champion, the closest to the death-dealing creature the world called Dragon.

With Dregoth volunteering to change his bead's color, none of the others felt the need to change theirs.

"We'll know if they try to deceive us," Dregoth said, pointing at the wards over Rajaat's body.

Hamanu, seeing no reason to admit he had no idea what Dregoth was talking about, grunted noncommittally.

"And it would be a poor time for you to think about deception," Dregoth added.

"I have no reason to."

Dregoth seemed not to have heard. "There's no place where you could hide, Hamanu, should you try to escape."

"I have no reason to," Hamanu repeated. "I'm the one who didn't cheat."

The third champion found Hamanu's remark amusing and chuckled softly until, in the tower, Gallard cast his spell beneath the Dark Lens.

In the years since he'd watched the last trolls march off a cliff, Hamanu had spent more time governing unruly humans than he'd spent learning about the netherworld. He knew the Gray was more shadow than substance and the Black was pure shadow and the absence of substance. He wasn't confident about any of it. Still, he thought he understood Gallard's proposal, and he expected that Rajaat's warded body would vanish from the moonlit world and wind up in a hollow place, beneath another place that had no substance. He was more than mildly startled, then, when Gallard's mighty spell seemed to do nothing more than seal Athas's first sorcerer in an egg-shaped rock.

"I'd sooner have carved out a hole in a Kreegill peak and shoved him down to the bottom," he muttered.

"Interesting," was all Dregoth had to say.

It seemed to Hamanu that a huge, mottled rock was not quite what Gallard expected to find when he led his audience into the dawn light. For a fleeting moment, the Gnome-Bane's eyes showed white all around their dark irises, and his mouth was slack-jawed, but only for a moment. By the time the questions and accusations started, Gallard was either honestly confident of his spell or a better illusionist than Hamanu ever hoped to be.

"Something had to be done with his substance!" he declared, letting his irritation show. "I couldn't put substance beneath the Black. That would be a complete contradiction, an intolerable paradox. There's no guessing what would have happened. So, I left his substance here, a cyst in a world of substance. His essence, I assure you all, is in the Hollow."

Borys put his fist on the rock. "If I broke this open—"

"—You can't," the Gnome-Bane insisted.

"But if I did, I'd find the War-Bringer's substance, and if I poked my head inside this Hollow of yours—"

"—You wouldn't." "But if I did, you say I'd find his essence?"

"In what manner?" Borys hammered the rock with his fist.

Hamanu didn't see what happened, like a mortal fool, he'd winced. He wasn't the only one: Dregoth's eyes were still closed when Hamanu opened his again. Bathed in the ruddy light of the rising sun, Gallard's egg-shaped rock was... a rock. It wasn't hollow; Rajaat's bones didn't rattle inside. There were no cracks where the Butcher's fist struck, no luminous leaks of sorcery.

"It's finished. Done," the Gnome-Bane said. "He's bound beneath the Black for all eternity."

"And we can get back to what we were doing," Albeorn urged.

That was Uyness's cue to lunge for Wyan's throat, shrieking, "Vengeance! Vengeance for Pennarin! Death!"

Vengeance was easier threatened than accomplished. Without Rajaat's sorcery, no one of them knew how to kill another champion—yet. Will-sapping spells such as the one Borys cast on Sacha were harder on the spell-caster than they were on their targets. And, anyway, Uyness wasn't interested in a painless punishment. She wanted the Pixie-Blight's death in the worst possible way; Hamanu saw that clearly on her face when she looked at Wyan of Bodach. He saw deadly determination on a number of other faces, including Sielba's.

Distrust would become murder before long. They'd all have to keep warding spells at their backs. But Albeorn Elf-Slayer wasn't the only champion eager to leave the white tower. Borys and Dregoth had wars to fight and finish.

Rajaat's demise wouldn't end the Cleansing Wars against the elves, the dwarves, or the giants any more than Myron of Yoram's death had spared the trolls. They'd saved humanity, that was all. The children of their own ancestors need never fear a champion-led army. And aside from Borys, who gave a barely perceptible nod when the Lion of Urik stared straight at him, none of the champions suspected how grave humanity's danger had been.

Wyan and Sacha got reprieves. If they were wise, they'd hie themselves as far from the human heartland as the sun and moons allowed. As the champions parted company without fare-thee-wells or other false promises, Hamanu wondered if he, too, wouldn't be wiser himself to leave Urik. There was a lot of world beyond the heartland. He'd seen a bit of it chasing trolls. Surely a man—an immortal champion starving for the savor of human death in his heart-could find better neighbors.

Hamanu never had the chance to look. The champions turned on each other before the white tower's netherworld glow had vanished behind them. Wild sorcery raised whirl-winds in the Gray. Hamanu didn't know if the assault spells were aimed at him or were echoes of other quarrels. The way the netherworld was spinning, it didn't matter. He took his chances with unfamiliar, but real, terrain, tumbling from the morning sky onto an empty plain. He took his bearing from the sun and started walking.

Four long but uneventful days later, the Lion of Urik walked through the gates of his palace. He was astonished to find Gallard waiting for him by the well in one of the inner courtyards.

"Peace. Truce. Whatever," Gallard said quickly, shedding his servant's illusion and holding his hands palms-up, to indicate that he had no spells quickening on his fingertips. "We thought we'd lost you."

While Hamanu cooled himself and slaked his thirst, the Gnome-Bane told him what had happened in the Gray: who'd attacked whom and with what success. Gallard would have told him more, but Hamanu cut his litany short.

"Your feuds mean nothing to me. Why should I care?"

The Gnome-Bane had a quick, disturbing answer: "Because between them, Sacha Arala and Wyan have cracked the cyst."

Hamanu finished pouring a bucket of water over his head then heaved the clay-coated straw bucket across the courtyard. It hit the wall with a satisfying thud and collapsed in a shapeless, useless mass on the ground.

"Is he free?" Gallard writhed. "Not yet. We need you, Hamanu. We need everyone."

"It's too late for that. We've got to hurry."

Hamanu's peers still hadn't found a way to kill each other, but they were getting closer. Sacha Arala and Wyan were unrecognizable, indistinguishable, as they sagged against what appeared to be ordinary ropes binding them to columns on either side of the white tower's gate. Uyness kept watch over them with Dregoth's stone-headed maul braced across her arms. They'd have been wiser to run—if they'd gotten the chance.

Of far greater concern to Hamanu than the fates of two lesser champions was Gallard's egg-shaped cyst around which the remaining seven champions had gathered. Thick layers of shimmering green warding couldn't hide the damage. While Hamanu watched, finger-length worms of intensely bright sorcery oozed from dark cracks. They wriggled like slugs until the warding destroyed them. With the Dark Lens nearby, the champions could renew the warding continuously. With no more than a thought and a twitch of his thumb, Hamanu added his own spell to the mix. But warding wouldn't hold forever, not against humanity's first sorcerer.

"What about the Hollow beneath the Black?" Hamanu asked.

Borys glowered at Gallard, who shook his head. "Too dangerous to get close enough to look. But it holds... it must! If the Hollow were cracked, nothing could hold here."

"So, do we wait until he breaks free, or what?"

"Another rock," Albeorn advised. "A bigger rock, around this one."

Hamanu arched a highly skeptical eyebrow.

"You've got a better idea?" Borys demanded, cocking his fist for emphasis.

The Lion of Urik was no master of sorcery, at least not then, and having nothing better to offer, he could only go along, providing the strength, both physical and sorcerous, that his elders requested. Working together, the cooperating champions did construct a second cyst around the original one. It seemed that the new prison would hold, but there were dark lines on the mottled surface by sundown and flashes of dark blue light by moonrise.

"He exploits the weaknesses between us," Sielba said wearily.

Hamanu had come to the same conclusion, but the red-haired champion spoke first.

"We need to make our own Rajaat before we can make Rajaat's prison," Borys suggested softly.

Hamanu thought the Borys who stood before them, tall, thick-necked, and armored like a troll, was the Butcher of Dwarves in his true, metamorph's shape, but that was illusion, too. As golden light cascaded around him, Borys reformed himself. His head became a fang-filled wedge. His eyes glowed with the sun's bloody color. His limbs lengthened and changed proportion. Though he remained upright on two legs, it was clear as his torso grew more massive that he'd be more comfortable and more powerful if he balanced his burgeoning weight on his arms as well.

"I offer myself." Borys shaped his words with sorcery and left them hanging above the insufficient prison. "Help me finish the metamorphosis, and I will keep Rajaat in the Hollow."

Dregoth roared, but he wasn't nearly the dragon Borys already was. His outrage was moot and impotent.

"Think of the risks," Hamanu said, thinking of himself and the metamorphosis that lay before him. He was unaware that he'd spoken aloud.

I have, Borys said in Hamanu's mind alone. My risks are not so great as yours would be. I will finish the dwarves—the elves and the giants, too—but humanity has nothing to fear. Athas will be our world, a world of humans and champions where Rajaat has no power, no influence.

"I believed him," Hamanu said to Windreaver when they had talked and recounted their way through events they both recalled. Windreaver had been at the white tower the night when Hamanu and the others champions had fledged a dragon, with the Dark Lens's help.

In the ancient landscape of his memory, Hamanu recalled Dark Lens sorcery shrouding Borys in a cloud of scintillating mist. The cloud grew and grew until it engulfed the white tower and threatened to engulf the champions as well. Wyan and Sacha had screamed together, then fallen silent. Two small, dark globes had flown out of the mist and vanished in the night. The globes were the traitors' severed heads, still imbued with immortal life, because Borys hadn't had been able to kill them outright when he consumed their bodies. Uyness had cheered, then she, too, had screamed.

Borys couldn't stop with the traitors: he needed every one of them. They'd all underestimated how far Rajaat's metamorphosis would go, how much life the spell would consume before the dragon quickened. In agony and immortal fear, the champions had torn away from the Dark Lens, saving themselves, but leaving a half-born dragon behind.

For a hundred years Borys had ravaged the heartland, finishing the sorcerous transformation he'd begun beside Rajaat's tower.

"He was not Rajaat." Hamanu stated, which was half of the truth. "He wasn't what I would have been."

"You can't be sure," Windreaver chided.

"I've looked inside myself. I've seen the Dragon of Urik, old friend. I'm sure. There were no choices, no mistakes."