The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King

Chapter Two

Hamanu's morning audiences began when Enver left the roof. They ended when the king had broken the seal on the last scroll in the baskets on his marble table and had summoned, by a mind-bending prick of conscience, the last petitioner in the unwindowed and, therefore, stifling, waiting chamber below.

Sometimes petitioners abandoned their quest for a private audience before they felt the unforgettable terror of their king's presence in their thoughts. Sometimes Hamanu didn't second-guess a petitioner's misgiving. Other times he pursued the tender-hearted spirit throughout Urik and beyond; he had that power. After thirteen ages of practice, Hamanu could give his whims wills of their own and set them free to wander his city as he himself did almost every night, borrowing shape and memory—stealing them—and making another life his own for a moment, a year, or a lifetime.

Hamanu had a handful of willful whims and stolen shapes loose in the city just then, and touched them lightly as the day's last petitioner climbed the stairs. A thief who'd shown creative promise in his craft had seized a woman—a child, really, half his age—and forced her to the ground in the kitchen yard of her own modest home.

The king seared the thief's mind and flesh with a single thought. The last image that passed through the thief's senses was the woman screaming as her rapist's hot blood burst over her. Then the thief was thoroughly dead, and the last petitioner was walking across the palace roof.

Deceit was another matter.

He watched the merchant—Eden—lift the hem of her gown and step over the blasted remains of the day's most unfortunate petitioner. Most unfortunate, so far.

Her mind was filled with disgust, not fear. For the corpse, Hamanu hoped. As himself—as Hamanu, King of Urik—he dealt with few women, save templars and whores. His reputation was burdened with an ancient layer of tarnish. Respectable families hid their wives and daughters from him, as if that had ever protected anyone.

This Eden, with her white linen gown, pulled-back hair, and unpainted face, was the epitome of respectability. Far more respectable than the young nobleman—the late, young nobleman—whose bowels were beginning to stink in the brutal sunlight.

Hamanu didn't truly mind that Renady Soleuse had inherited his estate through the proven expedient of slaughtering his father and his brothers and the rest of his inconvenient kin; link's king didn't meddle in family affairs. And Hamanu wasn't outraged that the accusations of water-theft Renady leveled against his neighbors were whole-cloth lies; audacity was, in truth, a reliable pathway to royal favor. But the young man had lied when Hamanu had asked questions about the financial health of the Soleuse estate, and worse, the fool had counted on a defiler charlatan's lizard-skin charm to protect him while he lied.

Hamanu killed for deceit.

The hereditary honor of Soleuse had been extinguished with thought and fire, both somewhat sorcerous in origin and wielded with a soldier's precision. Now, Hamanu and Urik were short a noble family to manage the farms and folk the Soleuse had been lord to. Most likely he'd offer the honor to Enver. After more than an age overseeing a king's private life, Hamanu judged that the affairs of a noble estate should be child's play for the likes of Enver. But, perhaps he'd offer the spoils of Soleuse to this Eden, this plain half-elf woman with a man's name.

He'd hate to have to kill her. Two petitioners in one morning: that was both careless and wasteful.

"Why are you here?" Hamanu asked. His templars had written that she offered trade. No surprise there: she was a merchant; trade was her life's work. But, what sort of trade? "Recount."

She hesitated, moistening her lips with a pasty tongue and wrinkling her linen gown between anxious fingers. "O Mighty King of Urik, King of Athas, King of the Mountains—" Her face turned as pale as her gown: she'd lost the rhythm of his titles and her mind—Hamanu knew for certain—had gone blank.

"And so on," he said helpfully. "You have my attention."

"I am charged with a message from my husband, Chorlas, colleague of the House of Werlithaen."

"I know the name Werlithaen," Hamanu admitted. As the name implied, the Werlithaen were elves. Three generations back, they'd been elves who'd exchanged their kank herds for the tumult of Urik's almost-legal Elven Market. About an age ago, a few of the tribe had abandoned the Market for the civilized ways of the merchant houses. A step down, no doubt, in the eyes of the Werlithaen kindred, and sufficient to account for Eden's plain, diluted features.

The petition had mentioned trade, not a message, but knowledge was sometimes more valuable than water or gold and a sound basis for trade. Eden hadn't yet deceived him.

"What manner of message?" the king continued, curious as to the sort of bargain this woman would offer.

Eden made what appeared to be another nervous gesture, fondling the large, pale-green ceramic beads of her bracelet. There was a click that earned Hamanu's undivided attention, and when her hands separated, a coil of parchment bounced in her trembling fingers.

"My husband bade me give you this."

The coil dropped from her fingers onto the black marble table. Hamanu retrieved it and read the words Chorlas had written, telling about three hundred wooden staves caravaned east, out of Nibenay, to a deserted oasis and left, unattended, by moonlight. The staves appeared to be plain brown wood, according to Chorlas, who was in a position to know, having been the owner of that east-bound caravan. But the staves left stains on the palms of the caravaneers who handled them and, afterward, the formerly brown wood had acquired a distinctly bronze-metallic sheen.

Agafari wood, no doubt, Nibenay's most precious resource and a reliable weapon against the serrated obsidian edges of Urik's standard-issue swords. Urik and Nibenay weren't at war, not openly, though there hadn't been true peace between the Lion and the Shadow-King since they'd laid claim to their respective domains long ago. And there'd been no trade between the cities these last three years, for which lapse there were as many reasons as there were grudges between Hamanu and his brother monarch, not least of which was the misfortuned ambition of a Urikite templar named Elabon Escrissar.

Indeed, at the moment, no legal trade passed between Urik and any other city in the old human-dominated heartland. No visitors, either. Folk stayed within Hamanu's purview, if that's where they were when he'd issued his decree, or they stayed outside it, under penalty of death.

There was trade, of course; no city was entirely self-sufficient, though, with well-stocked warehouses, Hamanu's Urik could withstand a siege of many years. The laws merely complicated and compounded the risks all merchants knowingly took when they carried goods among the rival city-states, and gave Hamanu the pretext—as if he needed one—to interfere.

"Was your husband in Nibenay when he wrote this?" Hamanu asked mildly, maliciously. If she lied, he'd know it instantly. If she told the truth, she'd be an accomplice in illegal trade, the punishment for which—at a minimum— was the loss of an eye.

"He was, O Mighty King. He sent this at great risk and bade me bring it here at once. And I did—" she raised her head and, despite crashing waves of cold-blooded terror, met Hamanu's smoldering stare with her own. "Five days ago, O Mighty King."

So, she dared to be indignant with him. On a bad day, that was a death sentence; today, it intrigued him. Hamanu ran a fingertip over Chorlas's words, reading the man who'd written them.

"There was another message," he concluded.

"Only that I was to come directly to you, O Mighty King, as I have already said."

"Your husband has placed you in great danger, dear lady, or do you claim not to know that it is against my laws to have discourse or trade with the Nibenese?"

"O Mighty King, my husband is Urikite born and raised."

Hamanu nodded. His edict isolating Urik from the anarchy spreading across Athas in the wake of the Dragon's demise had sundered families, especially the great, far-flung merchant dynasties, and his was not the only such edict: Tyr and Gulg and Nibenay itself had raised similar prohibitions;

Giustenal had never been without them. But trade and risk were inseparable, as the woman standing before him surely knew.

"That changes nothing, dear lady. I have forbidden all commerce. You have imperiled your life at your husband's bidding. Your life, dear lady, not his. And for what? What trade could justify the risk?" Hamanu could imagine several, but Eden might surprise him, and notwithstanding the content of the message she'd brought him, which was itself enough to merit reward, Hamanu cherished surprises.

Anxiety froze Eden's tongue in her mouth; Hamanu despaired of any surprise, then she spoke:

"O Mighty King, my husband and I, we judge it likely that the king of Nibenay is arming Urik's enemies."

"And?" Hamanu demanded. Her reasoning, though concurred with his own, wasn't the surprise he'd hoped for.

"So he sends you to tell me that Nibenay arms my enemies? That the House of Werlithaen supplies the caravan? And for this mote of good news he expects me to leave Urik's gates ajar so he might return?"

"Yes, O Mighty King. My husband knows the precise location of the deserted oasis; it was not charted on any of his maps—until now."

"The master merchant of Werlithaen thinks that because he did not know the location of an oasis, then / would not know it either."

"Yes, O Mighty King," Eden repeated. Chorlas of Werlithaen had raised her well. She was afraid of him; that was only wise, but fear was not her master. She continued, "It lies outside Urik's purview; outside Nibenay's, as well. It is an oasis of death under Giustenal."

Wish for a surprise and get an unpleasant one. Once again Hamanu ran his fingertip over the writing. Five days, she'd said, since she had presented herself to his templars. Ten days, perhaps, since the words beneath his sensitive fingertip had been written. And how many days had passed between Chorlas's leaving the agafari staves for Giustenal's howling army and Chorlas's writing a message to his dear wife? Three, at best, if an old man had overcome elven prejudice, got himself a swift riding kank, then rode the bug into the ground.

Hamanu had his own spies, and those who rode kanks were ever in need of new bugs. He would hear about the staves, the oasis, and Giustenal's ambitions, but he hadn't heard it yet. He touched her mind, a gentle feather's touch that aroused neither her defenses nor her fears. She hadn't eaten in three days, not for poverty, but because her husband had returned to Urik. Chorlas was hiding in the slave quarters of their comfortable home. Between beats of Eden's heart, Hamanu found her Urik home and Chorlas within it. The elf was old and honest, for an elven merchant. His heart was weak, and he did truly wish to die within the massive yellow walls.

"What is your trade, Eden of House Werlithaen? Do you wish to die in Urik, like your husband?"

"O Mighty King, I do not care where I die," she said evenly. "But while I live, I wish to see my city's enemies ground beneath the heel of my king."

Hamanu laughed—what else could any man do, face-to-face with a bloodthirsty woman? He took amber resin from a small box and held it in his hand until it was pliable. "I shall count it treason, then, if my templars do not report seeing you and your emeritus husband beside the Lion Fountain before sunset." He marked the resin with his sea ring, then hardened it again with icy breath.

Her face was pleasing and far from plain when she smiled.

The ever-efficient Enver had completed his tasks in Joiner's Square and returned to the palace before Eden departed, still smiling. Perhaps he passed her on his way to the roof with the usual herd of slaves in his wake, armed, this time, with buckets and bristle brushes. Hamanu didn't ask, didn't pry, anymore than Enver asked about the Soleuse corpse.

Enver was, however, adamantly uninterested in becoming the Soleuse lord.

"Omniscience," the dwarf said from a bow so deep his forehead touched his knees. "Have I or my heirs displeased you so much?"

"Of course not, dear Enver." It was not a question that merited an answer, except that there was no way Enver could have seen his king's grimace. "But after what?— almost three ages between you and your father, is it not? Perhaps you're ready for a change." "Your welfare is my family's life, Omniscience. More than life, it is our eternal honor."

Enver straightened suddenly, with such a look of outrage on his face that Hamanu was obliged to sit back a hair's breadth in his chair.

"I'd sooner die."

"Later, then, dear Enver. In the meantime, who was in charge downstairs this morning? That fool—" Hamanu flicked a forefinger at the wet spot where Renady had died and the slaves were now scrubbing furiously—"stood before me wearing a charm, dear Enver, a charlatan's lizard-skin charm which no one had confiscated. And later, a woman stood where you're standing and removed a message from a bead as large as your thumb! A useful message, to be sure— Nibenay's sent agafari staves to Giustenal—but someone downstairs was more than careless, and I want that someone sent to the obsidian pits."

Enver knew which investigator had been in charge of the waiting room: the face floated instantly to the surface of the dwarf's mind, along with numerous details of the templar's currently troubled life—his mother had died, his father was ailing, his wife was pregnant, and his piles were painfully swollen—none of which mattered to Hamanu.

"To the pits, dear Enver," he said coldly.

And Enver, who surely knew he had no private thoughts when he stood before his king, nodded quickly. "To the pits, immediately, Omniscience." Not as a slave, as Hamanu had intended, but as an overseer, with his sleeve threads intact. The image was crystal clear in Enver's mind.

Hamanu didn't quibble. Left to his own devices, his rule over Urik would be rigid and far too harsh for mortal survival. Left to his own devices, he'd rule over a realm of the undead, as Dregoth did beneath Giustenal. Instead, Hamanu culled his templars, generation after generation, plucking out the debauched, the perverse, and the cruel— like the late Elabon Escrissar, who'd contributed to the latest Nibenese pickle—for his personal amusement. The others, the foursquare, almost-upright folk, he selected to translate his unforgiving harshness into bearable justice.

Enver, being one of the latter, was indeed too valuable to exile off to the Soleuse farmlands. Hamanu tolerated Enver's benign deceit as he'd tolerated Escrissar's malignancy. Both were essential parts of his thousand-year reign in the yellow-walled city. He'd have to find someone else for Soleuse.

In the meantime, the slaves had finished their labor. All that remained of Renady Soleuse was a fading wet spot beneath the brutal sun.

Morning was nearly afternoon when Hamanu prepared to go downstairs and deal with his city's larger and more public affairs. Burnished armor and robes of state had been laid out for his approval, which he gave, as he almost invariably did, with no more than a cursory glance at his wardrobe.

A patterned silk canopy had been erected over the pool where he would bathe alone, completely without attendants. It was time, once again, for loyal Enver to depart.

"I await your next summons, Omniscience," the dwarf assured him as he herded the slaves down the stairs.

Hamanu waited until all his senses, natural and preternatural, were quiet and he knew he was alone. A shimmering sphere shrouded his right hand as he stood up from his table: a shimmering sphere from which a black talon as long as an elf's forefinger emerged. With it, Hamanu scored the air in front of him, as if it were a carcass hung for gutting and butchering.

Mist seeped from the otherwise invisible wound, then, thrusting both hands into the mist, Hamanu widened the gap. Miniature gray clouds billowed momentarily around his forearms. When the sun had boiled them away, Hamanu held a carefully folded robe that was, by color and cloth, a perfect match for the robe he wore, likewise the linen and sandals piled atop the silk, He dropped the sandals at once and kicked one under the table. He dropped the silk after he'd shaken out the folds, and let the linen fall on top of it.

When Hamanu was satisfied that he'd created the impression of a heedless king shedding garments without regard for their worth, the dazzling sphere reappeared around his right hand. It grew quickly, encompassing first his arm and shoulder, finally all-of him, including his head. The man-shaped shimmer swelled until it was half again as tall as Hamanu, the human man, had been. Then, as quickly as it had appeared and spread, the dazzle was gone, and a creature like no other in the city, nor anywhere beneath the bloody sun, stood in his place.

His skin was pure black, a dull, fathomless shade of ash and soot, stretched taut over a scaffold of bones too long, too thick, too misshapen to be counted among any of the Rebirth races. There were hollows between his ribs and between the paired bones of his arms and legs. The undead runners of the barrens carried more flesh than Urik's gaunt Lion-King. Seeing Hamanu, no mortal would believe that anything so spindly could be alive, much less move with effortless grace to the bathing pool, as he did.

He paused at the edge. The still water of the bathing pool was an imperfect minor. It showed him yellow eyes and ivory fangs, but it couldn't resolve the darkness that had replaced his face. With taloned fingertips, Hamanu explored the sharp angles of his cheeks, the hairless ridge of his brows and the crest that erupted from his narrowing skull. His ears remained in their customary place and customary fluted form. His nose had collapsed, what—two ages ago? or was it three? or even four? And his lips... Hamanu imagined they'd become hard cartilage, like inix lips; he was grateful that he'd never seen them.

Hamanu's feet had lengthened over the ages. He walked more comfortably on his toes than on his heels. His knees had drawn up, and though he could still straighten his legs when it suited him, they were most often flexed. Stepping down into the water, his movements resembled a bird's, not a man's.

He dived to the bottom of the pool and rose again to the surface. Habits that thirteen ages of transformation could not erase brought his hands up to slick nonexistent hair away from his eyes. For a heartbeat—Hamanu's hollow chest contained a heart; he hoped it remained human, though he couldn't know for certain—he sank limply through the water. Then the skeletal arms pumped once, demonstrating no lack of strength, and lifted his entire body out of the water.

The gaunt, black king had the power to hover motionless in the air or to fly faster than any raptor. Hamanu chose, instead, to return to the pool's embrace with a spectacular, unappreciated splash. He rolled onto his back and tumbled through the clear, warm water like a cart's wheel until he'd raised waves high enough to leave puddles on the roof. He was oblivious to everything except his own amusement until a bolt of pain lanced from his forefinger to his spine.

Roaring a curse at the four corners of the world, Hamanu made a fist and studied the pale red and gray sliver protruding through the soot-black flesh. It was bone, of course, human bone, another tiny fragment of his ancient humanity lost, now, forever. He pinched it between two talons and jerked it free.

A mortal man would have died from the shock. A mortal man did die. Deep within Hamanu's psyche, a mortal man died a hundred times for every year of his immortal life. He would continue to die, bit by bit, until there was nothing left and Rajaat's metamorphic spell would have completed its dirty work. The metamorphosis should have been complete ages ago, but Hamanu, when he'd understood what Rajaat had intended, had set his will against the War-Bringer. The immortal king of Urik could neither stop nor reverse his inexorable transformation; he slowed its progress through deprivation and starvation.

When his loathsome shape was concealed in a tangible human glamour, Hamanu ate with gusto and drew no nourishment from his food. In his own form, Hamanu lived with agony and hunger, both of which he'd hardened himself against. He could not die and had long since reached the limits of unnatural withering. Hamanu endured and swore that by force of will alone he'd deny Rajaat's spell until the end of time.

A bead of viscous blood the color and temperature of molten lava distended Hamanu's knuckle. He stared at it with disgust, then thrust his fist beneath the water. Stinking steam broke the surface as a sinuous black coil streamed away from the open wound. Hamanu sighed, closed his eyes, and with a sun-warmed thought, congealed his blood into a rock-hard scab. Another lost battle in a war that had known no victories: magic in any form fueled the metamorphosis. Hamanu rarely cast spells in their traditional form and was miserly with his templars, yet his very thoughts were magic and all his glamours. Each act of defiance brought him closer to ultimate defeat. Even so—and though no one glimpsing him in his bathing pool would suspect it—Hamanu was far closer to the human he'd been at birth than to what Rajaat intended him to become. Within his still-human heart, Hamanu believed that in the battle between time and transformation, he would be triumphant.

At this hour, with the red sun just past its zenith, Urik rested quieter than it did at midnight. Nothing moved save for a clutch of immature kes'trekels making lazy spirals above the walls of the Elven Market. Slaves, freemen, nobles, and templars; men and women; elves, humans, dwarves, and all the folk who fell between had gone in search of shadows and shelter from the fierce heat. There was no one bold or foolish enough to gaze at the sun-hammered palace roof where a lone silhouette loomed against the dusty sky.

Hamanu touched the minds of his minions throughout the city, as a man might run his tongue along the backs of his teeth, counting them after a brawl. Half of the citizens were asleep and dreaming. One was with a woman; another with a man. The rest were lying still, hoarding their thoughts and energy. He did not disturb them.

His own thoughts drifted back to the woman, Eden, and her message. He asked himself if it was likely that the Shadow-King Nibenay, once called Gallard, Bane of Gnomes, would send staves of his precious agafari wood to their undead peer in blasted Giustenal. The answer, without hesitation, was yes—for a price.

There was no love lost between any of Rajaat's champions, including Dregoth of Giustenal and Gallard. They didn't trust each other enough for unrequited generosity. They didn't trust each other at all. It had taken a dragon, Borys of Ebe in the full culmination of Rajaat's metamorphosis, to hold the champions to the one cause that demanded their cooperation: maintaining the wards on their creator's netherworld prison, a thing they called the Hollow beneath a place they called the Black.

Hamanu recalled the day, over five years earlier, when Borys had been vanquished, along with several other champions. For one afternoon, for the first time in a thousand years, Rajaat had been free. The fact that Rajaat was no longer free and had been returned to his Hollow owed nothing to the cooperation of the three champions who'd survived Borys's death and Rajaat's resurrection. They distrusted each other so much that they'd stood aside and let a mortal woman—a half-elf named Sadira of Tyr—set the prison wards.

It had been different long ago, in the Year of Enemy's Fury in the 177th King's Age. After Borys first set the wards on Rajaat's Hollow, there'd been nearly a score of immortal sorcerers ruling their proud heartland cities. With the passage of thirteen ages, they'd winnowed themselves down to seven. Then a decade ago, Kalak, the Tyrant of Tyr, had been brought down by his own ambition and a handful of mortal rebels, including one of his own high templars and Sadira, the same Sadira who'd vanquished Borys and reset the wards around Rajaat's Hollow.

In the Lion-King's judgment, Kalak was a fool, a careless fool who'd deserved the crime committed against him. Kalak was no champion. Hamanu had, perhaps, trusted the Tyrant of Tyr more than he trusted his peers, but he'd respected him less. He cursed Kalak's name each time it resurrected itself in his memory. Kalak's demise had left an unfillable hole in Tyr, the oldest—if not the largest, wealthiest, or most powerful—city in the heartland. And now, thanks in no small part to the subsequent behavior of the rebels who'd killed their immortal sorcerer-king, the thrones of Balic, Raam, and Draj were vacant, too.

It was easier to list who among Rajaat's champions was left: himself, Gallard in Nibenay, Inenek in Gulg, and undead Dregoth in Giustenal—none of them a dragon.

So long as Rajaat was securely imprisoned in the Hollow beneath the Black, Hamanu didn't object to the missing dragon. Once Borys had completed Rajaat's metamorphosis and walked the heartland as a dragon, Borys had ruled everyone. Even the immortal sorcerers in their proud city-states had jumped to a dragon's whim. There had been wars, of course—cities devastated and abandoned—but the balance of power never truly changed. What Borys demanded, Borys got, because he kept Rajaat confined in the Hollow.

The prospect might have tempted some of them—though never Hamanu—if they hadn't all watched helplessly as a maddened, mindless Borys ravaged the heartland immediately after they'd cast the spells to complete his metamorphosis. For his first hundred years, wherever Borys went, he sucked the life out of everything. When he was done, the heartland was the parched, blasted barren place it remained to this day.

Dregoth had already succumbed to temptation and drawn the wrath of his immortal peers. Borys had rounded them up for a second time, and they'd found a fitting eternal punishment for immortal hubris: they'd ruined his city and stripped all living flesh from the proud Ravager of Giants. He remained the champion he'd been on the day of his death, but he'd never be anything more. Dregoth was what folk called undead, kaiskarga in the halfling tongue, the oldest of the many languages Hamanu knew.

In shame, and under the threat of worse punishment, Dregoth had dwelt for ages beneath his ruined city. Mortal chroniclers forgot Dregoth, but his peers remembered— especially Uyness of Waverly, whom living mortals had called Abalach-Re, Queen of Raam, and whom Dregoth remembered as his betrayer.

Now Uyness was dead with Borys, and Dregoth wanted Raam's empty throne. Hamanu reasoned that Nibenay might well support Giustenal's ambitions in that direction with agafari staves, because, whether or not he conquered every empty-throned city, Dregoth could never become another dragon as Borys had been. Like as not, Gallard would support Dregoth no matter which city the undead champion had designs upon. Like as not, Gallard—who fancied himself the most subtle of Rajaat's champions-hoped there'd come a day when he and Dregoth were the only champions left. If the price of attaining dragonkind was the annihilation of every mortal life in a city or three, how much easier to pay when none of the cities in peril were one's own?

Gallard had that much conscience, at least. Kalak hadn't hesitated at the thought of consuming Tyr. That's what got him killed by his own subject citizens and templars, but Kalak of Tyr had been a fool and freebooter from the start, long before the champions were created.

And Hamanu of Urik—what had he been before he was an immortal champion?

Hamanu's thoughts sluiced sideways. In his mind's eye, he was suddenly far away from his precious city. He stood in another place, another time: a field of golden-ripe himali grain surrounded by hardworking kith and kin. Warm summer breezes lifted his hair and dried the sweat on his back. There was a hay rake in his youthful hands. A youngster—a brother too small to cut grain or rake—sat nearby with reed pipes against his lips, diverting the harvesters as they labored. The brother's tune was lost to time along with his name. But the dark-haired, gray-eyed maiden who stood behind the boy in memory, swaying in the music's rhythm, her name would never be forgotten while the Lion-King lived: Dorean.

For Dorean, Hamanu had become a man in his family's eyes. For him, Dorean had become a woman. The life that had once lain before them, filled with fields of grain, growing children, and a love that never needed words, was the only life Hamanu had ever wanted. If he'd done right by Dorean, if he'd protected her, as a man was sworn to do, he never would have seen the walls of Urik.

His body would lie beside hers, turned to dust and dirt a hundred times over.

A shadow wind sundered Hamanu's memory. He released the balustrade and turned around. A dusty breeze took shape, as tall as he was, yet far broader.

"Windreaver," he said flatly as the shape became substantial and the last commander of the troll army stood between him and the pool. As big as half-giants, as clever as elves or dwarves, trolls had been formidable enemies for a champion-led army, and Windreaver had been—and remained—the most formidable of the trolls. He'd lived and fought for two ages before he and a fifty-year-old Hamanu faced each other and Windreaver fought his last battle. A wispy curtain of silver hair hung around his swept-back ears, and the wrinkles above his bald brow were as pronounced as the brow ridge itself. Age had not dulled Windreaver's obsidian eyes. They were as bright, black, and sharp on the palace roof as they had been on the windswept cliff high above a wracken sea.

Hamanu hissed, an effective, contemptuous gesture in his unnatural shape. When hate was measured, he and Windreaver were peers. If Enver was one aspect of Hamanu's conscience, Windreaver was the other.

The troll would have preferred to die with the rest of his kind; Hamanu had not offered a choice. Windreaver's body had become dust and dirt, as Hamanu's had not, but Windreaver lived, succored by the same starving magic that sustained Hamanu. He was an immortal reminder of genocide to the conquered and to the conqueror who had committed it.

"Look, there, on the horizon," Windreaver pointed to the southwest, toward distant Nibenay, exporter and abandoner of poorly stained agafari staves. "What do you see?"

"What did you see?" Hamanu retorted. "A bundle of sticks laid beside an old well?"

Windreaver served Hamanu. The troll had had no choice in that, either. The King of Urik could abide guilt and hate, but never useless things, be they living, dead, or in between. Windreaver was Hamanu's most trusted spy; the spy he sent to shadow his peers, his fellow champions.

"Do I need a fire to comfort me in my old age?" the troll retorted.

"Not when you can bring me bad news."

The troll chuckled, showing blunt teeth in a jaw that could crush stone. "The worst, O Mighty Master. There's an army forming on the plains beyond Nibenay. Old Gallard does not lead it—not yet. But I've skirled through the commanders' tents, and I've seen the maps drawn in blood on the tanned hides of Urikite templars. Nibenay's coming, Manu; mark me well, I know what I have seen. What Gallard sends to Giustenal doesn't matter. Gallard, Bane of Gnomes, means to become Gallard, Bane of Urik."

Hamanu bared his dripping fangs in contempt and disbelief.

Gallard might be marching—toward Tyr perhaps, or more distant Draj. Draj had been Lord Ursos's home until two years ago, and amid the lord's debauched memories were images of its bloody anarchy. Gallard wouldn't waste his army against Urik's walls, not while Draj's throne sat empty. It was impolite to march across another champion's purview, but not unprecedented.

"You're wrong this time, Windreaver. You've overreached yourself."

Disappointed, Windreaver sucked air and tried again. "He brings his children, his thousand times a thousand children. He will set them in your place, and you will do his bidding, and I will hover about you, a swarm of stinging gnats to blind your eyes as you weep. Where are your children, Lion-King of Urik?"

A thousand years had sharpened the troll's tongue to an acid edge. His final question lanced an old, old wound. Hamanu hissed again, and the dust that was Windreaver swirled apart. "Urik is my child, with fifty thousand hearts, each braver than yours. Go back to Nibenay. Sting Gallard's eyes, if you dare. Listen to his words when there's no one else about to hear them, then tell me of his plans."

Dust rose on its own wind and was gone. Hamanu inspected the armor and garments the slaves had laid out for him. His taloned hand trembled as it made another misty gray slit in the afternoon's torrid air. Anger, he told himself as he shoved armor and garments together into the trackless netherworld. Rage at Windreaver, because the troll had done what he always did, and at himself, because this time the barbs had struck home.

Urik was his child, his only child. He'd face them all— Gallard, Dregoth, anyone who dared threaten Urik. He'd risk the fate Rajaat laid before him, but for Urik's sake, he'd win. The Lion-King had never lost a battle, except for the very first.

There was a way, if they all came at him, all at once and in all their strength and he had to choose between himself and his city.... At least, Hamanu thought there was a way to preserve Urik. But the risks were incalculable, and he'd require the cooperation of a man who was, in his simple way, as extraordinary as any champion, a man who kept his own conscience and who served a primal force that couldn't be coerced.

The time, perhaps, had come to secure that man's sympathy. Without it, there could be a dragon more terrible than Borys roaming the heartland.

"I'll tell the whole story, in writing," Hamanu said to the rampant lions lining his balustrade. "When he has read it through, then he can judge for himself, and if he judges favorably, the Urik guardian will respect his plea when he calls."