The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King

Chapter Seven

Hamanu sent them away—all of them: Windreaver, Pavek, Enver, the myriad slaves and templars whose labor fueled the palace routine. The Lion-King retired to distill the reagents and compose the invocation of the stealthy spell he'd need to get close enough to see his creator's prison with his own eyes and—more importantly—get away again.

"Oil, O Mighty Master?" Windreaver whispered from the darkest depths of the room where Hamanu worked into the night.

The storerooms beneath the palace were flooded. Their contents had been hurriedly hauled to the upper rooms for safekeeping, leaving Hamanu's normally austere and organized workroom in chaos. The treasures of a very long lifetime were heaped into precarious pyramids. Windreaver's shadowy form would be lost amid countless other shadows, and Hamanu didn't break his concentration to look for his old enemy.

"Do you truly believe oil from the egg-sack of a red-eyed roc will protect you from your master?"

"... nine hundred eighty... nine hundred eighty-one..." Hamanu replied through clenched teeth.

Shimmering droplets, black as the midnight sky and lustrous as pearls, dripped from the polished porphyry cruet he held over an obsidian cauldron. Four ages ago, he'd harvested this oil from a red-eyed roc. It had vast potential as a magical reagent—potential he had scarcely begun to explore—but he did not expect it to protect him from the first sorcerer.

Nothing but his own wits and all the luck in the world could protect the last champion from Rajaat.

"You're a fool, O Mighty Master. Surrender and be done with it. Become the dragon. Any dragon would be better than Rajaat unchained. You certainly can't fight Rajaat and your peers."

"... nine hundred eighty-eight... nine hundred eighty-nine..."

Unable to provoke an explosion from either Hamanu or the concoction in front of him, Windreaver turned his attention to the clutter. Save for his acid voice and the swirling wake of his anger, the troll had no effect on the living world. That was his protection—he could slip undetected through all but the most rigorous wardings, including the ones Hamanu had set on this room. It was also his frustration.

Whirling through the room, Windreaver shook the clutter and raised a score of cluttering dust devils from its shadows. Hamanu stilled the air with an absentminded thought and counted the nine hundred ninety-second drop of oil. The devils collapsed. There was another table in the workroom, uncluttered save for writing implements and two sheaves of vellum: one blank, the other already written upon, It drew Windreaver's curiosity as a lodestone attracted iron. The air above the table sighed. The corners of the written-upon vellum rustled.

Driven by a very local wind, the brass stylus rolled to the table's edge and clattered loudly to the floor. The vellum remained where it belonged.

"Memoirs, O Mighty Master?" The rustling stopped. "An apology?"

Windreaver's accusations were icy knives against Hamanu's back. The Lion of Urik wore the guise of a human man in his workroom where no illusion was necessary. Human motion, human gestures, were still the movements his mind knew best. He shrugged remembered shoulders beneath an illusory silk shirt and continued his count.

"What fascination does this street-scum orphan hold for you, O Mighty Master? You've wound him tight in a golden chain, and yet you plead for his understanding."

"... one thousand... one thousand one."

Hamanu set the cruet down and, taking up an inix-rib ladle, gave the cauldron a stir. Bubbles burst on the brew's surface. The two-score flames of the overhead candelabra extinguished themselves with a single hiss and the scent of long-dead flowers. A coal brazier glowed beneath the cauldron, but when Hamanu stirred it a second time, the pale illumination came from the cauldron itself.

"I noticed him, this Just-Plain Pavek of yours, Pavek the high templar, Pavek the druid. His scars go deep, O Mighty Master. He's scared to the core, of you, of every little thing."

"Pavek is a wise man."

"He's young."

"He's mortal."

"He's young, O Mighty Master. He has no understanding."

"You're old. Did age make you wise?"

"Wiser than you, Manu. You never became a man."

Manu. The troll had read the uppermost sheet of parchment where the name was written, but he'd known about Manu for ages. Windreaver knew the Lion's history, but Hamanu knew very little about the troll. What was there to know about a ghost?

Shifting the ladle to his off-weapon hand, Hamanu reached into an ordinary-seeming leather pouch sitting lopsidedly on the table. He scooped out a handful of fine, dirt-colored powder and scattered it in an interlocking pattern across the cauldron's seething surface. Flames leapt up along the powder's trail.

Hamanu's glossy black hair danced in the heat. He spoke a word; the flames froze in time. His hair settled against his neck; illusion maintained without thought. Moments later, screams and lamentations erupted far beyond the workroom. The flames flickered, died, and Hamanu stirred the cauldron again.

"You're evil, Manu."

"So say you."

"Aye, I say it. Do you hear me?"

"I hear. You'd do nothing different."

"I'm no sorcerer," the troll swore indignantly.

"A coincidence of opportunity. Rajaat made you before he made me."

"Be damned! We did not start the Cleansing War!"

"Nor did I. I finished it. Would you have finished it differently? Could you have stopped your army before every human man, woman, and child was dead? Could you have stopped yourself?"

The air fell silent.

Iridescence bloomed on the swirling brew. It spread rapidly, then rose: a noxious, rainbow bubble as tall as a man. The bubble burst, spattering Hamanu with foul-smelling mist. The silk of his illusory shirt shriveled, revealing the black dragon-flesh of his true shape. A deep-pitched chuckle rumbled from the workroom's corners before the illusion was restored. Hamanu released the ladle. The inix bone clattered full-circle around the obsidian rim, then it, the penultimate reagent, was consumed. Blue light, noxious and alive, formed a hemisphere above the cauldron, not touching it. With human fingers splayed along his human chin, concealing a very human scowl, Hamanu studied the flickering blue patterns.

Rajaat, creator of sorcery as well as champions, had written the grammar of spellcraft in his own youth, long before the Cleansing Wars began. Since then, additions to the grimoires had been few, and mostly inscribed in blood: a warning to those who followed that the experiment had failed. Hamanu's stealthy spell was perilously unproven. Its name existed only in his imagination. He would, in all likelihood, survive any miscasting, but survival wouldn't be enough.

Still scowling, Hamanu walked away from the table. He stopped at a heap of clutter no different from the others and made high-pitched clicking noises with his tongue. Before Windreaver could say anything, a lizard's head poked up. Kneeling, Hamanu held out his hand.

The lizard, a critic, was ancient for its kind. Its brilliant, many-colored scales had faded to subtle, precious shades. Its movements were slow and deliberate, but without hesitation as it accepted Hamanu's finger and climbed across his wrist to his forearm. Its feet disappeared as it balanced on real flesh within the illusion.

"You astonish me," Windreaver muttered from a corner.

Hamanu let the comment slide, though he, too, was astonished, hearing something akin to admiration in his enemy's voice. He was evil; he accepted that. A thousand times a thousand judgments had been rendered against the Lion of Urik. He'd done many horrible things because they were necessary. He'd done many more because he was bored and craved amusement. But his evil was as illusory as his humanity.

The Lion-King couldn't say what the lizard saw through its eyes. Its mind was too small, too different for him to occupy. Scholars had said, and proven, that critics wouldn't dwell in an ill-omened house. They'd choose death over deception if the household doors were locked against their departure. From scholarly proofs, it was a small step to the assumption that critics wouldn't abide evil's presence, and a smaller step to the corollary that critics and the Lion of Urik should be incompatible.

Yet the palace never lacked the reclusive creatures. Shallow bowls of amber honey sat in every chamber for their use—even here, amid the noxious reagents, or on the roof beneath Hamanu's unused bed.

With the critic on his arm, Hamanu returned to the worktable, dipped his finger in just such a delicately painted bowl, and offered a sticky feast to his companion. Its dark tongue flicked once, probing the gift, and a second time, after which the honey was gone. A wide yawn revealed its toothless gums, and then it settled its wrinkled chin flat on the Lion-King's forearm, basking in the warmth of his unnatural flesh.

With a crooked and careful finger, Hamanu stroked the critic's triangular skull and its long flanks. Bending over, he whispered a single word: "Rajaat," and willingly opened his mind to the lizard as so many had unwillingly opened their minds to him.

The critic raised its head, flicked its tongue—as if thoughts were honey in the air. Slowly it straightened its legs, turned around, and made its way back to Hamanu's hand, which was poised above the blue light, above the simmering cauldron.

A shadow fell across Hamanu's arm. "This is not necessary, Manu."

"Evil cares nothing for necessity," Hamanu snapped. "Evil serves itself, because good will not." He surprised himself with his own bitterness. He'd thought he no longer cared what others thought, but that, too, was illusion. "Leave me, Windreaver."

"I'll return to Ur Draxa, O Mighty Master. There is nothing you can learn there that I cannot—and without the risk."

"Go where you will, Windreaver, but go." The critic leapt into the cauldron. For an instant the workroom was plunged in total darkness. When there was light again, it came only from the brazier. The brew's surface was satin smooth; both the troll and the critic were gone.

The reagents must age for two nights and a day before they could be decanted, before the stealthy spell could be invoked.

There was much he could write in that time.

I removed Bult's sword from his lifeless hand. It was the first time I'd held a forged weapon. A thrill like the caress of Dorean's hair against my skin raced along my nerves. The sword would forever be my weapon. Casting my gorestained club aside, I ran my hand along the steel spine. It aroused me, not

as Dorean had aroused my mortal passions, but I knew the sword's secrets as I had known hers.

The dumbstruck veterans of our company retreated when I swept the blade in a slow, wide arc.

"Now we fight trolls," I told them as Bult's corpse cooled. "No more running. If running from your enemy suits your taste, start running, because anyone who won't fight trolls fights me instead."

I dropped down into the swordsman's crouch I'd seen but never tried. I tucked my vitals behind the hilt and found a perfect balance when my shoulders were directly above my feet. It was so comfortable, so natural. Without thinking, I smiled arid bared my teeth.

Three of the men turned tail, running toward the nearest road and the village we'd passed a few days earlier, but the rest stood firm. They accepted me as their leader—me, a Kreegill farmer's son with a wordy tongue, a light-boned dancer, who'd killed a troll and a veteran on the same day.

"Ha-Manu," one man called me: Worthy Manu, Bright Manu, Manu with a sword in his hand and the will to use it.

The sun and the wind and the homage of hard, human eyes made me a warlord that day. My life had come to a tight corner. Looking back, I saw Manu's painful path from Deche: the burning houses, the desecrated corpses of kin... of Dorean. Ahead, the future beckoned him to shape it, to forge it, as his sword had been shaped by heat and hammer.

I couldn't go back to Deche; time's tyranny cannot be overthrown, but I was not compelled to become Hamanu. A man can deny his destiny and remain trapped in the tight corner between past and future until both are unattainable. The choice was mine.

"Break camp," I told them, my first conscious command. "I killed a troll last night. Where there's one troll, there're bound to be more. It's nigh time trolls learned that this is human land."

There were no cheers, just the dusty backs of men and women as they obeyed. Did they obey because I'd killed Bult and they feared me? Did they listen because I offered an opportunity they were ready to seize? Or was it habit, as habit had kept me behind Bult for five years? Probably a bit of each in every mind, and other reasons I didn't guess then, or ever.

In time, I'd learn a thousand ways to insure obedience, but in the end, it's a rare man who wants to go first into the unknown. I was a rare man.

We had three kanks. Two of the bugs carried our baggage: uncut cloth and hides, the big cook pots, food and water beyond the two day's supply every veteran carried in his personal kit—all the bulk a score of rootless humans needed in the barrens. The third kank had carried Bult and Bult's personal possessions and our hoard of coins. I appropriated the poison-spitting bug and rode in unfamiliar style while our trackers searched for troll trails.

I counted the coins in our coin coffer first—what man wouldn't? We could have eaten better, if there'd been better food available at any price in any of the villages where we traded. I found Bult's hidden coin cache and counted those coins, too. Bult had been a wealthy man, for all the good it had done him. Wealth didn't interest me, not half as much as the torn scraps of vellum Bult had kept in a case made from tanned and supple troll hide.

Bult had made other marks on his precious maps: blue curls for sweet streams that flowed year around, three black lines with a triangle below them to mark where we'd buried our dead. Those black lines surprised me: I hadn't thought he'd noticed. The last five years of my life were written on those vellum scraps.

Another scrap held the names of the veterans in his band. I laughed when I read the words he'd written about me: "Bigmouthed farm boy. Talks too much. Thinks too much. Dangerous. Squash him when Jikkana lets him go." A man who has to write such things down in order to remember them is a fool, but I read his entries carefully, committing them, too, to my memory before I burnt the vellum. After all, he'd been right about me; he just hadn't moved fast enough.

There were intact sheets of vellum in the case. Each bore the seal of a higher officer. The words were unfamiliar to me, even when I sounded them out. A code, I decided, but aren't all languages codes, symbols for words, words for things, motions, and ideas? I'd cracked the troll code before I knew that humanity had a code of its own. I had no doubt that I could crack any code Bult had devised.

Of course, Bult hadn't devised the code. It was Myron of Yoram's code: the orders he—or someone he trusted—had sent to bands like ours. On each folded sheet, the officers whose paths crossed ours had written their thoughts about us. As we rarely saw the same officer twice running, the sheets were a sort of conversation among our superiors.

Pouring over them, I easily pictured Bult doing the same. The image inspired me. I cracked the Troll-Scorcher's code three nights later. It was a simple code: one symbol displacing another without variation from one officer to the next. The Troll-Scorcher's officers weren't much cleverer than Bult had been, but their secrets had been safe from our yellow-haired leader. He would never have carried those closely written sheets around for all those years if he'd known how Yoram's officers belittled him.

But there were more than insults coded on those sheets. Word by word, I pieced together the Troll-Scorcher's strategy. He herded the trolls as if they were no more, no less, than kanks. He culled his bugs and kept them moving, lest they overgraze the pasturage: human farms, human villages, human lives.

We— Bult's band and the other bands that mustered each year on the plains—weren't fighting a war; we were shepherds, destined to tend Myron of Yoram's flocks forever.

I read my translations to my veterans the next night. Honest rage choked my throat as I described the Troll-Scorcher's intentions; I couldn't finish. A one-eyed man-one of Bult's confidants and, I'd assumed, no friend of mine—took up after me. He was a halting reader; my ears ached listening to him, but he held the band's attention, which gave me the chance to study my men and women unobserved.

They were mostly the children of veterans. They'd been raised in the sprawling camp in the plains where the whole army mustered once a year until they were old enough to join a band. Their lives had been completely shaped by Myron of Yoram's war against the trolls. When One-Eye finished, they sat mute, staring at the flames with unreadable expressions. For a moment I was flummoxed. Then I realized that their sense of betrayal went deeper than mine. Their very reason for living—the reasons that had sustained their parents and grandparents—was a fraud perpetrated by the very man they called their lord and master: Myron Troll-Scorcher.

It was no longer enough that I lead them from one village to the next, looking for trolls who had—as they did from time to time—vanished overnight from the heartland. If I wanted my veterans to follow me further, I'd have to replace the Troll-Scorcher in their minds.

I'd come to another corner in my life, hard after the last one. I could have sat with them, staring at the flames until the wood was ash and the sun rose. With neither leader nor purpose, we would have drifted apart or fallen prey to trolls, other men, or barrens-beasts, which were, even then, both numerous and deadly. But destiny had already named me Hamanu; I couldn't let the moment pass.

This time there were cheers. Men took my hand; women kissed my cheek. Guide us, Hamanu, they said. We put our lives in your hands. You see light where we see shadows. Guide us. Give us victory. Give us pride, Hamanu.

I heard their pleas, accepted their challenge. I led them toward the light.

After studying Bull's maps, I found a pattern to our wanderings. More, I studied the vast, empty areas where we never wandered and where, I hoped, trolls might go when they vanished from their usual haunts.

There were twenty-three of us left in what had been Bull's band, what had become Hamanu's. We were nowhere near enough warriors to confront trolls in lands that they knew better than we did. So we wandered before heading into the unknown, visiting map-marked villages. By firelight and the blazing midday sun, I told our tale to anyone who'd stand still long enough. Our message was simple: humanity suffers because the army sworn to protect it pursues the unfathomable goals of the Troll-Scorcher instead.

"Turn away from the Troll-Scorcher and the trolls. Take your destinies into your own hands," I said at the end of every telling. "Choose to pay the price of victory now, or resign yourself to defeat forever."

Instinct told me how to hold another human's attention with pitch, rhythm, and gesture, but only practice could teach me the words that would bind a man's heart to my ideas. I learned quickly, but not always quickly enough. At times, my words went wrong, and we left a village with dirt and dung clattering against our heels. But even then, there'd be a few more of us leaving than there'd been when we arrived.

From twenty, we grew to forty; from forty to sixty.

Our reputation—my reputation—spread. Renegade bands whose disillusionment with the Troll-Scorcher's army was older than ours met us on the open plains. Alliances were proposed. My band should fall in step, they advised, and I, being younger in both years and experience, should accept another leader's authority. Duels were fought: I was young, and I was still learning, but I was already Hamanu, and it was my destiny—not theirs—to forge victory.

Bull's metal sword carved the guts of four renegade leaders who couldn't perceive, that truth. After each duel, I invited their veterans to join me. A few did, but loyalty runs deep in the human spirit, and mostly, duels left me with a cloud of enemies who wouldn't join my growing band and couldn't return to the Troll-Scorcher's army. Cut off at the neck, without leaders, and at the knees, with nowhere to go, they were of little consequence.

I had no greater concern for the Troll-Scorcher's loyal bands, which dogged us from village to village. They threatened the villagers who aided us, then melted away, and got in the way of trolls when I tried to pursue them. My trackers guessed that there were, perhaps, three loyalist bands shadowing our movements and intimidating the villages we depended upon for food and water, now that our number I had grown too large for easy forage. Thirty men and women, they said, forty at most, and not an officer among them.

I believed my trackers.

I was stunned speechless one cool morning when the dawn patrol reported dust on the eastern horizon: something coming our way. Something large, with many, many feet.

We'd made a hilltop camp the previous evening. The camp Bult would have made on the ground he would have chosen: the Troll-Scorcher's loyal veterans didn't care if the trolls saw fire against the nighttime sky. They'd choose defense over concealment every time. But the morning's dust cloud didn't rise from the feet of trolls.

"How many?" I demanded of the trackers who'd failed me. Shielding their eyes from the risen sun, they grimaced and squinted with eyes no sharper than my own.

Her companions agreed.

"Are they human?" I asked, already knowing the answer. There were humans in the vicinity, but we hadn't seen troll sign since the day Bult died.

By then the whole camp was awake. The ones who weren't staring at the sun were staring at me. No tracker would meet my eyes.

"How many?" I cocked my wrist at my shoulder, ready to backhand the woman if she failed to answer.

"A hundred," she whispered; the count spread through the camp like fire. "Maybe more, maybe less. More'n us, for certain."

Veterans had at least a hundred curses for an incompetent leader, and I heard them all as the cloud broadened before us. They were getting closer—spreading out to encircle us. There were a whole lot more than a hundred. Sure as sunrise, there was an officer among them, and where there was a loyal officer, there was the Troll-Scorcher's magic, or so the older veterans promised. I'd never seen magic used before—except at the muster, when Myron of Yoram fried a few trolls, or the piddling displays Bult made when we'd held hands and shouted the Troll-Scorcher's name at the moon. We couldn't stand against the one and needn't fear the other.

"What now, Hamanu?" someone finally asked. "What do we do now?"

"It's all up," another man answered for me. "There's too many to outrun. We're meat for sure."

I backhanded him and drew the sword that was at my side, night and day. "We never run; we attack! If Myron of Yoram has sent his army against us instead of trolls, then let his army pay the price."

"Attack how, Hamanu? Attack where?" One-Eye chided me softly.

I'd kept Bult's one-time friend close since he'd taken up my cause. He was twice my age and knew things I couldn't imagine. When he'd been a boy, he'd listened to veterans who'd made the victorious sweep through the Kreegills. I gave One-Eye leave to speak his mind and listened carefully to what he said.

"If we run now," One-Eye continued. "If we scatter in all directions before the noose is closed, leaving everything behind, a few will get away clean. If we stand, we're trapped, Hamanu. Say, they don't have enough punch to charge the hill, they can set the grass afire. There's a time for running, Hamanu."

"We attack," I insisted, fighting my own temper.

My sword hand twitched, eager to slay any man or woman who cast a shadow across my ambitions. The veterans around me saw my inner conflict. Four times—five counting Bult—I'd proven that I could kill anyone who stood in my way. One-Eye presented a greater challenge. His wisdom alone could defeat me, and gutting him would be a hollow victory.

The dust cloud was growing, spreading north and south. We heard drums, keeping the veterans in step and relaying orders from one end of the curving line to the other. My heart beat to their tempo. Fear grew beneath my ribs and in the breasts of all my veterans. There was panic brewing on my hilltop. When I looked at the dusty horizon, my mind was blank, my thoughts were bound in defeat. I wanted to attack, but I had no answer to One-Eye's questions: how? and where?

"You can't hold them," One-Eye warned. "They're going to run. Give the order, Hamanu. Run with them, ahead of them. It's our only chance."

Hearing him, not me, a few men lit out for the west, and a great many more were poised to follow. My sword sang in the warming air and came up short, a hair's breadth from One-Eye's neck. I had my veterans' attention, and a heartbeat to make use of it.

"We'll run, One-Eye," I conceded. Then my destiny burst free. Visions and possibilities flooded my mind. "Aye, we'll run—we'll run and we'll attack! All of us, together. We'll wait until their line is thin around us, then, just when they think they've got us, we'll shape ourselves, shoulder-to-shoulder, into a mighty spear and thrust through them. Let them be the ones who run... from us!" In my mind I saw myself at the spear's tip, my sword Bashing a bloody red as my veterans held fast around me and my enemies fell at my feet. But, what I saw in my mind wasn't enough: I watched One-Eye closely for his reaction.

My fist struck the air above my head—the one and only time that I, Hamanu, saluted another man's wisdom. The orders to stand fast, then charge as a tight-formed group, radiated around the hilltop. Not everyone greeted them with enthusiasm or obedience, but I ran down the first veteran who bolted, hamstringing him before I slashed his throat. After that, they realized it was better to be behind me than to have me behind them.

I held my veterans on the hilltop until the encroaching circle was complete. Grim bravado replaced any lingering thoughts of panic or fear once the circle began to shrink: either we would win through and roll up our enemies' line, or we'd all be dead. At least we hoped we'd be dead. That's what gave my veterans their courage as we started down the hill. Any battlefield death was preferable to the eyes of fire.

How can I describe the exhilaration of that moment? Sixty shrieking humans raced behind me, and the faces of men and women before us turned as pale as the silver Ral when he was alone in the nighttime sky. I'd never led a charge before, never imagined the awesome energy of humanity intent on death.

Every aspect of battle was new to me, and dazzling. We ran so fast; I remember the wind against my face. Yet I also remember realizing that if I continued to hold my sword level in front of me, I'd skewer my first enemy and be helpless before the second, with a man's full weight wedged against the hilt.

There was time to change my grip, to raise my weapon arm high across my off-weapon shoulder, and deliver a sweeping sword stroke as we met their line. A man went down, his head severed. Beside me, One-Eye swung a stone-headed mallet at a woman. I'll never forget the sound of her ribs shattering, or the sight of blood spurting an arm's full length from her open mouth.

A glorious rout had begun. Destiny had pointed our spear at the handful of humanity who could have opposed us: the life-sucking mages who marched with Yoram's army. Their spells were their own, independent of the Troll-Scorcher. But spellcasting requires calm and concentration, neither of which existed for long on that battlefield.

The enemy had expected an easy victory over ragtag renegades. They expected magic to do the hard work of slaying me and my veterans. They weren't prepared for hand-to-hand bloody combat. We took the fighting to them, and they crumpled before us—fleeing, surrendering, dying. At last, we stood before fine-dressed officers with metal weapons, mekillot shields, and boiled-leather armor.

The battle paused while they took my measure and I took theirs. My veterans were ready, and they were prepared to die defending themselves.

But they preferred not to—

"Peace, Manu!" Their spokesman hailed me by my name. "For love of human men and women, stand down!"

"Never!" I snarled back, thinking they'd asked me to surrender, knowing I had the strength around me to slay them all.

To a man, they retreated.

"You've made your point, Manu," the spokesman shouted from behind his shield. "There's no honor in killing a man when there're trolls for the taking not two day's march from here."

I raised my sword. "You lie," I said, not bothering to be more specific.

The officers halted and stood firm. There were five of them. An honor guard stood with them, armed with metal swords and armored in leather, though they lacked the mekillot shields. I judged the guard the tougher fight. We'd already lost at least ten veterans from our sixty, and the pause was giving the enemy the opportunity to regroup.

I took my swing—and reeled into my left-side man as a better swordsman beat my untutored attack aside.

One-Eye and six other voices counseled me against the officer's offer, but she knew me, knew my dilemma. Trolls were the enemy because, after ages of warfare, there could be no peace between us. Myron of Yoram was the enemy because he wouldn't let his army win the war. But humanity was not the enemy. I'd kill humans without remorse if they stood between me and my enemies, but, otherwise, I had no cause against my own folk.

"Lay down your swords," I said to' those before me, and they did. "Call off your veterans!"

Another of the officers—a short, round-faced fellow that no other man would consider a threat in a fight but was the highest ranked of all—shouted, "Recall!" From the midst of the honor guard, a drum began to beat. I waved the armed guard aside and beheld a boy, fair-haired, freckled, and shaking with terror as he struck the recall rhythm with his leather-headed sticks.

His signal was taken up by two other drummers, each with a slight variation. The round-faced officer said there should have been five drummers answering the recall, one for each officer. The drummers were boys, not veterans, not armed. They'd been no threat to us when we attacked and rolled up their line, but the round-faced officer swore they wouldn't have run, that they were as brave as any veteran, ten times braver than I. By the look in his eye, I understood that at least one of the boys was kin to him, one of the boys who hadn't sounded his drum. He judged me the boy's murderer, just as I'd once held Bult responsible for Dorean.

By my command, we searched the field, looking for the missing drummers. We found the three missing boys before sundown, their cold fingers still wrapped around their drumsticks.

Battle is glorious because you're fighting the enemy, you're fighting for your own life and the lives of the veterans beside you. There's no glory, though, once the battle has ended. Agony sounds the same, whatever language the wounded spoke when they were whole, and a corpse is a tragic-looking thing whether it's a half-grown boy or a fullgrown, warty troll.

There were more than a hundred corpses around that hilltop. I'd walked away from Deche, and the death it harbored, hardly by my own choice. When the time came, I'd buried Jikkana, and Bult, and I'd seen to it that all the others went honorably into their graves. But a hundred human corpses...

"What do we do with them?" I asked One-Eye over a cold supper of stale bread and stiff, smoked meat. "We'll need ten days to dig their graves. We'll be parched and starving—"

One-Eye found something fascinating in his bread and pretended not to hear me. The woman officer answered instead:

"We leave them for the kes'trekels and all the other scavengers. They're meat, Manu. Might as well let some creature have the good of 'em. We head west at dawn tomorrow—if you want to catch those trolls."

And we did, but not at dawn. The round-faced officer kept us waiting while he buried his boy deep in the ground, where no scavenger would disturb him.

They held me in thrall, those five officers did, with their hard eyes and easy assurance. I knew I was cleverer than Bult and all his ilk, but, though I'd taken their swords away, I felt foolish around them. My veterans saw the difference, sensed my discomfort. By the time we'd marched two days into the west, those who'd joined me before the hilltop battle and those we'd acquired in that battle's aftermath heeded my commands, but only after they'd stolen a glance at my round-faced captive.

"Show me the trolls!" I demanded, seizing his arm and giving him a rude shake.

He staggered, almost losing his balance, almost rubbing the bruise I'd surely given him. But he kept his balance and kept the pain from showing on his face. "They're here," he insisted, waving his other arm across the dry prairie.

The land was as flat as the back of my hand and featureless, except farther to the southwest, where a scattering of cone-shaped mountains erupted from the grass. They were nothing like the rocky Kreegills, but trolls were a mountain folk, and I believed the officer when he said we'd find trolls to the southwest.

There was throttled laughter behind me. As veterans were measured, I scarcely passed muster. I'd seen the Kreegills, and the heartland, but the sinking land—that's what the officers called the prairie—was new to me. It appeared flat, but appearances deceived, and sinking was as good a description as any for the land we crossed.

The dry grass was pocked with sinkholes large enough to swallow an inix. The holes weren't treacherous—not at a slow pace, with men walking ahead, prodding the ground with spear butts to find the hidden ones, the ones crusted over with a thin layer of dirt that wouldn't hold a warrior's weight. But sinkholes weren't the only difficulty the grass concealed. The prairie was riddled with dry stream beds, some a half-stride deep, a half-stride wide. Others cut deeper than a man was tall—deeper than a troll—twice as wide. They were banked with wind-carved dirt that dissolved to clumps and dust under a man's weight.

When we came to such a chasm, there was naught to do but walk the bank until it narrowed—or until we came to an already trampled place where crossing was possible. Muddy water lingered in a few of the chasms. There were footprints in the mud: six-legged bugs, four-footed beasts with cloven hooves, two-footed birds with talons on every toe, and once in a while, the distinctive curve of a leather-shod foot, easily twice the size of mine.

A band of trolls could hide in those muddy chasms. If a troll knew the stream's course—which crossed which, which went where—his band could travel faster than ours, and unobserved.

As the sun grew redder and shadows lengthened, our round-faced officer advised making camp in one of the chasms. There weren't many who wanted to sleep in an open-ended grave. Myself, a boyhood in the Kreegills and five years with Bult had conditioned my notions of safety: I wanted those odd-shaped mountains beneath my feet. I wanted to see my enemy while he was still a long way off.

And I was Hamanu. I got what I wanted.

Marching by torchlight and moonlight, pushing the veterans until they were ready to drop, I made camp at the base of one of the strange mountains. In form, the mountains were like worm mounds or anthills—if either worms or ants had once grown large enough to build mountains with their castings. Their grass-covered slopes were slippery steep, without rocks anywhere to give a handhold or foothold.

By daylight, we'd find a way to the top; that night, though, we made a cold camp at the bottom. The sinking lands were familiar in one way, at least: scorching hot beneath the sun, bone-chilling cold beneath the moon. Veterans and officers wrapped themselves into their cloaks and huddled close together.

I took the first watch with five sturdy men who swore they'd stay awake.

I faced south; the trolls came from the north. The first thing I heard was a human scream cut short. I know we'd fallen into a trap, but to this day I wonder if that trap had been set by the trolls or the Troll-Scorcher's officers. Whichever, it wasn't a battle—only the trolls had weapons; humans died tangled in their cloaks, still drowsy or sound asleep.

I had my sword, but before I could take a swing, a human hand closed around the nape of my neck. My strength drained down my legs, though I remained standing. Fear such as I'd never known before shocked all thoughts of fight or flight from my head. A mind-bender's assault—I know it now—but it was pure magic then, for all I, Manu of Deche, the farmer's son, understood of the Unseen Way.

I thought I'd gone blind and deaf as well, but it was only the Gray, the cold netherworld sucking sound from my ears as I passed through in the grip of another hand, another mind. For one moment I stood on moonlit ground, far from the odd-shaped mountain. Then a raspy, ominous voice said:

"Put him below."

Something hard and heavy hit me from behind. When I awoke, I was in a brick-lined pit with worms and vermin for my company. Light and food and water—just enough of each to keep me alive—fell from a tiny, unreachable hole in the ceiling. I never knew how the last battle of my human life ended, but I can guess.

Hamanu's chin, human-shaped in the morning light that filtered through the latticed walls of his workroom, sagged toward his breastbone. The instant flesh brushed silk, though both were illusory, the king's neck straightened, and he sat bolt upright in his chair.

Grit-filled eyes blinked away astonishment. He who slept once in a decade had caught himself napping. There was tumult in the part of Hamanu's mind where he heard his templars' medalLion-pleas—not the routine pleas of surgeon-sergeants, orators or others whose duties gave them unlimited access to the Dark Lens power he passed along to his minions. To Hamanu's moderate surprise, he'd responded to such routine pleas while he slept. After thirteen ages, he was still learning about the powers Rajaat had bestowed on him. Another time, the discovery would have held Hamanu's attention all day, more, but riot this day. His mind echoed with urgency, death and fear, and other dire savors.

The Lion-King loosed filaments of consciousness through the Gray, one for every inquiry. Like a god he would not claim to be, his mind could be in many places at once—wandering Urik with his varied minions while being scattered across the barrens in search of endangered templars.

The essence of Hamanu, the core of his self—which was much more than a skein of conscious filaments, more even than his physical body—remained in the workroom where he looked down upon a haphazard array of vellum sheets, all covered with his own bold script. Blots as large as his thumbnail stained both the vellum and the exposed table-top, a testament to the haste with which he'd written. There were also inky gouges where he'd wielded the brass stylus like a sword. The ink was dry, though, as was the ink stone.

"O Mighty King, my lord above all—"

A new request. Hamanu replied with another filament, this time wound around a question: What is happening?

This wasn't the first time the Lion-King had been inundated with requests for Dark Lens magic. The desiccated heartland that Rajaat's champions ruled was a brutal, dangerous place where disaster and emergencies were commonplace. But always before, he'd been awake, alert, when the pleas arrived. His ignorance of the crisis—his templars' desperation—had never lasted more than a few heartbeats. He'd been awake, now, for many heartbeats, but so far, none of his filaments had looped back to him. He had only his own senses on which to rely.

And dulled senses they were. Hamanu's illusion wavered as he stood. Between eye blinks, the arms he braced against the table were a tattered patchwork of dragon flesh and human semblance. He yawned, not for drama, but from long-dormant instinct,

"Too much thinking about the past," he muttered, as if literary exertions could account for the unprecedented disorder in his immortal world. Then, rubbing real grit from the corners of his illusory eyes, Hamanu made his way around the table.

The iron-bound chest where his stealth spell ripened appeared unchanged. Passing his hand above the green-glowing lock, he kenned the spell's vibrations—complex, but according to expectation—within.

"O Mighty King, my lord above all. Come out of your workroom. Unlock the door. Lion's Whim, my king—I beg you, O Mighty King: Answer me!"

Still cross-grained and pillow-walking from his interrupted nap, Hamanu turned toward the sound, toward an ordinary door. Neither the voice nor the door struck a chord of recognition.

"Are you within, O Mighty King? It is I, Enver, O Mighty King."

Enver. Of course it was Enver; the fog in Hamanu's mind lifted. He could see his steward with his mind's eye. The loyal dwarf stood just outside the door he'd sealed from the inside with lethal wards. Anxious wrinkles creased Enver's brow. His fingers were white-knuckled and trembling as he squeezed his medallion.

"Here I am, dear Enver. Here I've been all along. I was merely sleeping," Hamanu lapsed into his habitual bone-dry, ironic inflection, as if he were—and had always been— the heavy-sleeping human he appeared to be.

The dwarf was not taken in. His eyes widened, and anxiety rippled above his brows, across his bald head. A frantic dialogue of inquiry and doubt roiled Enver's thoughts, but his spoken words were calm.

"You're needed in the throne chamber, O Mighty— Omniscience." With evident effort, Enver resurrected the habits of a lifetime. "Will you want breakfast, Omniscience? A bath and a swim?"

A few of the filaments Hamanu had released when he awakened were, at last, winding back to him, winding back in a single ominous thread. Templars had died at Todek village, died so fast and thoroughly that their last thoughts revealed nothing, and the living minds that had summoned him were uselessly overwrought.

Elven templars were already running the road from Todek to Urik. Their thoughts were all pulse and breath. Coherent explanations would have to wait until they arrived at the palace.

Other filaments had traveled to a score of templars at a refugee outpost on Urik's southeastern border. There, the filaments had been frayed and tangled by the same sort of interference the Oba of Gulg had wielded in the southwest yesterday. In the hope that something would get through, Hamanu widened the Dark Lens link between himself and his templars. He granted them whatever spells they'd requested. But it wasn't spells those desperate minds wanted. They wanted him: Hamanu, the Lion-King, their god and mighty leader, and they wanted him beside them.

There were limits to a champion's powers: Hamanu couldn't do everything. Though his thoughts could travel through the netherworld to many places, many minds, and all at once, his body was bound to a single place. To satisfy his beleaguered templars, he would have had to transport his entire self from the palace, as he'd done when the Oba challenged him. But Enver wasn't the only numb-fingered templar in the palace. A veritable knot of pleas and conscious filaments surrounded his throne chamber where, at first guess, every living gold medallion high templar, along with the upper ranks of the civil and war bureaus, was clamoring for his attention.

The Lion-King wasn't immune to difficult choices.

"Fresh clothes?"

Extraordinary days—of which this was surely one— required extraordinary displays and extraordinary departures from routine. Hamanu raised one dark eyebrow. "Dear Enver," he reprimanded softly and, while he had the dwarf's attention, remade his illusions, adding substantially to his height and transforming his drab, wrinkled garments into state robes of unadorned ebony silk, as befitted a somber occasion. "Clothes, I think, will be the least of our problems today."

Hamanu strode past his steward's slack-jawed bewilderment, slashed an opening into the Gray netherworld, and, one stride later, emerged onto the marble-tiled dais of his unbeloved, jewel-encrusted throne. He needed no magic, no mind-bending sleight to get his templars' attention. The sight of him was enough to halt every conversation. Hamanu swept his consciousness across their marveling minds, collecting eighty different savors of apprehension and doubt.

The six civil-bureau janitors, whose duty was to stand beside the empty throne and keep the great lantern shining above it, were the first templars to recover their poise. In practiced unison, they pounded spear butts loudly on the floor and slapped their leather-armored breasts. Then the orator who shared throne-chamber duty with them cleared her throat.

"Hail, O Mighty King, O Mighty Hamanu! Water-Wealth, Maker of Oceans. King of the—"

Mighty Hamanu shot her a look that took her voice away.

The chamber fell silent, except for the creaking of the slave-worked treadmills and the network of ropes and pulleys that ran from the treadmills to huge red-and-gold fans. At this late hour of the morning, the heat of day beat down on the roof, and nothing except sorcery could cool the chamber and the crowd together.

For his part, Hamanu drank down every scent, every taste born in air or thought. His champion's eyes took in each familiar face without blinking. There was Javed, clad in his usual black and leaning nonchalantly against a pillar. Javed leaned because the wounds in his leg ached today— Hamanu felt the pain. But Javed was a champion, too, Hero of Urik, and, like the Lion-King, had appearances to maintain. Pavek stood near the door, not because he'd arrived late, but because no matter how carefully and properly his house-servants dressed him, he'd always be a misfit in this congregation. He'd migrated, by choice, to the rear, where he hoped his high templar peers wouldn't notice him.

Hamanu had other favorites: Xerake with her ebony cane; the Plucrataes heir, eleventh of his lineage to bear a scholar's medallion and more nearsighted than any of his ancestors; and a score of others. His favorites were accustomed to his presence. Their minds opened at the slightest pressure. They were ready, if not quite willing, to speak their concerns aloud. The rest, knowing that the Lion's favorites were also lightning rods for his wrath, were more than willing to wait.

He let them all wait longer. On the distant southeastern border, a sergeant's despair had burst through the netherworld interference.

Hear me, O Mighty Hamanu!

The Lion-King cast a minor pall over his throne chamber. An eerie quiet spread through the crowd. Conversation, movement, and—most important for a champion who was needed elsewhere, but couldn't be seen with his vacant-eyed attention focused in that elsewhere—memory ceased around him.

I hear you—Hamanu examined the trembling mote of consciousness and found a name— Andelimi. I see you, Andelimi. Take heart.

His words reassured the templar, but they weren't the truth. Hamanu glimpsed the southeast border through a woman's eyes. Her vision was not as sharp as his own would be, but it was sharp enough: black scum dulled an expanse of sand and salt that should been painfully bright.

An army of the undead, he said in Andelimi's mind, because it reassured her to hear the truth of her own fears.

We cannot control them, O Mighty King.

Controlling the undead—of all the mysteries Rajaat's Dark Lens perpetrated, that one remained opaque. Like the other champions, through sorcery Hamanu held vast power over death in all its forms. He could inflict death in countless ways and negate it as well, but always at great cost to his ever-metamorphosing self. Not so his templars, whose borrowed magic had its origin in the Dark Lens and was fundamentally different from the sorcery Rajaat had bestowed on his champions.

The magic his templar syphoned from the Dark Lens neither hastened the dragon metamorphosis nor degraded ordinary life into ash. And, since the undead didn't hunger, didn't thirst, didn't suffer, the champions often relied on their living templars' ability to raise the casualties of earlier battles whenever it seemed that marching a mass of bodies at an enemy would insure victory.

Which wasn't often.

Once a templar had the undead raised and moving, he or she faced the chance that someone else would usurp control of them. Not an equal chance, of course. Some living minds were simply better at controlling undead, and all other aspects being equal, a more experienced templar—not to mention a more experienced priest, druid, sorcerer, or champion could usurp the undead from a novice.

Hamanu personally tested his templars for undead aptitude and made certain the ones who had it got the training they needed. The war bureau wouldn't have allowed Andelimi and the twenty other templars in her maniple out the gates without an apt and trained necromant templar among them—especially in the southeast, where Urik's land abutted Giustenal.

Hamanu stirred Andelimi's thoughts. Where is your necromant? Rihaen tried, O Mighty King, she assured him. Hodit, too.

Her eyes pulled down to the hard-packed dirt to the left of her feet; Hamanu seized control of her body and turned her toward the right. Andelimi was a war-bureau sergeant, a veteran of two decade's worth of campaign. She knew better than to fight her king, but instinct ran deeper than intellect. She'd rather die than look to her right. Hamanu kept her eyes open long enough to see what he needed.

Andelimi's thoughts were bleak. She'd barely begun to mourn. The dead elf had been her lover, the father of her children, the taste of sweet water on her tongue.

Rihaen had tried to turn the undead army, but the same champion who'd sundered the link between Urik's templars and Urik's king had roused these particular corpses. Instead of usurping Giustenal's minions, Rihaen had been usurped by them. His heart had stopped, and he'd become undead himself, under another mind's control. Hodit, who was also apt and trained, had—foolishly—tried to turn Rihaen and suffered the same fate.

The remaining templars of the maniple, including Andelimi, had overcome their own undead. It could be done without recourse to magic, and every templar carried the herbs, the oils, or the weapons to do it. But what the raiser of Giustenal's undead army had done to Rihaen and Hodit could not be undone. For them, the curse of undeath was irrevocable. Their bodies had fallen apart. Nothing recognizable was left of Andelimi's beloved except a necromant's silver medallion and several strands of his long, brown hair, all floating on a pool of putrid gore.

For the honor of his own ancient memories of Deche and Dorean, Hamanu would have left Andelimi alone with her grief. But it had been her anguish that cut through Dregoth's interference, and for the sake of Urik, he could show her no mercy.

Andelimi!

She crumpled to the ground; he thrust her to her feet.

Where are the others of your maniple? Who survives?

Hamanu would not make her look at Rihaen again, but he needed to see. He forced her eyes open, then blinked away her tears. He found the fifteen surviving templars in a line behind Andelimi. Their varied medallions hung exposed against their breasts. Defeat was written on their faces because he had not heard their pleas in time. They knew what was happening—that he'd taken possession of Andelimi—and that it had happened too late.

"We stand, O Mighty Lion! We fight, O Great Hamanu!" the maniple's adjutant shouted to the king he knew was watching him through a woman's eyes. He saluted with a bruising thump on his breast. "Your templars will not fail you!"

The adjutant's thoughts were white and spongy. His hand trembled when he lowered it. Urik's templars didn't have a prayer of winning against the undead legion sprawled before them, and the adjutant knew it. He and Andelimi wished with all their hearts that death—clean, eternal death— would be theirs this afternoon.

They'd get their wish only if Hamanu slew them where they stood and drained their essence, furthering his own metamorphosis.

Hamanu pondered the bitter irony: only living champions were afflicted by the dragon metamorphosis. Dregoth was as undead as the army he'd raised, utterly unable to become a dragon, will he or nill he. There was no limit on Dregoth's sorcery except the scarcity of life in his underground city.

The very-much-alive Lion of Urik tested the netherworld with a thought, confirming his suspicions. Giustenal's champion had raised the undead army creeping toward Urik. Hamanu could turn them, mind by empty mind, but he'd have to fight for each one, and victory's price was unthinkably high.

"You will retreat," he told the maniple with Andelimi's voice.

They weren't reassured. Undead marched slowly but relentlessly; they never tired, never rested. Only elves could outrun them—unless there were elves among the undead.

"Better to stand and fight." A slow-moving dwarf muttered loudly.

He stood with his fists defiant on his hips. Whatever death Hamanu chose for him—his undercurrent thoughts were clear—it would be preferable to dwarven undeath with its additional banshee curse of an unfulfilled life-focus. In that, the dwarf was mistaken. The Lion-King could craft fates far worse than undeath—as Windreaver would attest— but Hamanu let the challenge pass. Urik's fate hung in the balance, and Urik was more important than teaching a fool-hearted dwarf an eternal lesson.

While the adjutant oversaw the assembling of a small pile of waterskins, Hamanu thrust deeper into Andelimi's consciousness, impressing into her memory the shapes and syllables of the Dark Lens spell he wanted her to cast. If grief had not already numbed her mind, the mind-bending shock would have driven her mad. As it was, Hamanu's presence was only another interlude in an already endless nightmare.

When the waterskin pile was complete and the arcane knowledge imparted, Hamanu made Andelimi speak again: "After the spell is cast, you will each take up your waterskins again and begin walking toward the north and west. With every step, a drop of water will fall from your fingertip to the ground. When the undead walk where you have walked, the lifeless blood in their lifeless veins will burst into flames."

" There is not enough water here to see us back to our outpost!" the dwarf interrupted, still hoping for a clean death. "The undead will engulf us—"

"There is a small oasis north of here—"

The maniple knew it well, though it was not marked on any official map. They collected regular bribes from the runaway slaves it sheltered. It was a minor corruption of the sort Hamanu had tolerated for thirteen ages.

"Its spring has water enough to hold the undead at bay—simply fill your waterskins from the spring, and then walk around the oasis. And after the undead army has marched past..." Hamanu narrowed Andelimi's eyes and made her smile. A lion's fangs appeared where her teeth should have been. "After the undead army has passed, burn the oasis and bring the vagrants back to Urik for the punishment they deserve."

They'd obey, these templars he was trying to save. No power under the bloody sun would protect them otherwise. Hamanu, their king, deserved his cruel, capricious reputation. They'd march to Urik because it had been known for thirteen ages that there was no way for a yellow-robe templar to hide from the Lion of Urik. They could bury their medallions, break them, or burn diem, and it wouldn't save them. Once his mind had touched theirs, he could find them, and so, they would obey-Never imagining that if Dregoth's army reached Urik, there might not be a Lion left to find them.

Killer-ward.

Hamanu put the word in Andelimi's mind. She repeated it, triggering the mnemonics he'd forced into her memory. The links between templar and champion, champion and the Dark Lens, were pulled, and magic was evoked. Sparks danced over the waterskins, growing, spreading, until the drab leather was hidden by a luminous white blanket.

After that, it was time for Hamanu to return to Urik, time to tell his exalted templars of the dangers he—and they— faced from yet another direction. He'd done all he could here.

Hamanu blinked and looked out again through his own eyes. His pall persisted in the throne chamber. Two of the templars nearest the dais had not been standing straight on their feet when the pall caught them, and as effects of time could not be easily thwarted, they'd both tumbled forward. One of them would have a bloody nose when awareness returned, the other, a bloody chin. Deeper in the silent crowd others had fallen. One—a woman, Gart Fulda— would never stand up again. She hadn't been particularly old or infirm, but death was always a risk when Hamanu's immortal mind touched a mortal one.

The elven pair from Todek had arrived while Hamanu's attention was on the Giustenal border. They'd been running when they entered the throne chamber, and momentum had carried them several long strides toward the dais before the pall enveloped them. They, too, would tumble when Hamanu lifted his spell. The leading elf would have to take his chances. His companion carried an ominously familiar leather-wrapped bundle under his left arm.

A day that had not begun well and had gone poorly thereafter showed signs of becoming much, much worse. Before he dispelled the pall, Hamanu carefully took the 'bundle from the immobile runner. It thrummed faintly as he carried it back to the throne. Cursing Rajaat yet another time, Hamanu considered destroying it while the pall was still in place. There'd be questions—in the minds of the elven runners, if nowhere else—and questions sired rumors. More questions, if he slew the elves, too. He reconsidered. If the templars in this chamber saw the shard's power before he destroyed it, he wouldn't have to worry about their loyalty when times got difficult, as times were almost certain to do.

"Raam," Hamanu muttered, savoring the stranger as his most agile-minded templars became alert again. "Who in Raam would stand against me? With Dregoth marching, it would be better to make common cause."

Javed, whose mortal mind was among the most agile and alert Hamanu had ever encountered, had heard the thrumming shard. He watched the blue lightning leap from the Lion-King's arm. As Champion of Urik, Javed was privileged to bear his sword in the throne room. He drew the blade as another templar cried out.

Hands pressed against her steaming cheek, she reeled in agony, knocking over several less-alert templars. In her wake, Hamanu got his first eyes-only view of the Raamin stranger.

The Raamin was a striking example of humanity in its prime, taller than average, well fed, well muscled, with sun-streaked hair. That hair had begun to move as if a strong wind blew upward from the. object he clutched against his ribs.

"Drop it!" Hamanu shouted, a sound that loosened dust and plaster flakes from the ceiling, but had no effect on the Raamin's bright blue, pall-glazed eyes.

Hamanu put the shard he held behind his back. Lightning danced on his chest, his shoulders, his neck. It penetrated the Lion-King's human illusion without destroying it or harming him—yet.

"Drop it, now!" he shouted, louder than the first time. He didn't dare any kind of magic or mind-bending, not with Rajaat's malice whirling around the chamber.

The stupefied Raamin didn't so much as blink. From his appearance, he'd been one of Abalach-Re's templars; the Raamin queen had never been particularly concerned with cleverness when she picked her templars. Fortunately, Urik's king had other prejudices. Urik's elite templars were bold enough to take matters into their own hands. A handful of men and women wrestled the crackling bundle from the stiff-armed stranger and deposited it before their king's throne, where, within a heartbeat, its wrapping had disintegrated.

Rather than the black-glass shard Hamanu had expected, a sky-blue serpent slithered lightning-bright and -fast across the marble dais. It struck his ankle, easily piercing the human illusion. Unbounded rage and hatred boiled against Hamanu's immortal skin. Sorcerous fangs struck deep, but there was only bone, obsidian black and obsidian hard, beneath his gaunt flesh.

With the Todek shard in his left hand, secure at his back, Hamanu reached his right hand down. He seized the serpent behind its scintillating eyes. The sorcerous creature was more sophisticated than the one he'd squelched in Nibenay's abandoned camp, but its venom had no effect on him.

"You surprise me, War-Bringer," he said as he held the construct up for his templars to see. He began to squeeze, and the sky-blue head darkened. "Thirteen ages beneath the Black has dimmed your wits, while mine have grown sharper in the sun."

The serpent's head was midnight dark when its skull burst. Venom hissed and sputtered on the dais, leaving pits the size of a dwarf's thumbnail in the marble. It fizzled on the illusory golden skin of Hamanu's right arm, where it harmed no living thing.

Hamanu held the serpent's fading, dwindling body aloft so his templars could cheer his triumph. Their celebration would necessarily be brief. The other shard had ceased its thrumming, which Hamanu didn't consider reassuring. The templars hadn't completed their second salute when the chamber darkened. Sunset couldn't be the cause; he hadn't palled the throne chamber long enough for the day to be coming to its natural end. Ash plumes from the Smoking Crown volcano could have caused the darkness; but the eruptions that produced the plumes were invariably preceded by ground tremors.

Hamanu would not tolerate such an affront. He whispered the sorcerer's word for sparks. A sharp pain lanced his flank.

All sorcery required life essences before it kindled. While defilers and preservers quibbled and pointed fingers at one another, Hamanu quickened his spells with life essence from an inexhaustible, uncomplaining source: himself. He willingly sacrificed his own immortal flesh. Pain meant nothing if it thwarted Rajaat's grand design. Whatever essence he surrendered would be replaced, of course. But a man could draw water in a leaky bucket if he moved fast enough, and although the dragon metamorphosis was, ultimately, unstoppable, Hamanu prolonged his own agony at every opportunity.

His thoughts carried the quickened sparks to the lantern wick, and the Lion's eye gleamed gold again. An instant later, brighter light flashed through breezeway lattices-lightning as blue as the shard-born serpent had been, as blue as Rajaat's left eye. A distant crash of thunder accompanied the lightning. Then the throne chamber was dark again—except for the golden-eyed Lion. With his templars silent around him and the wails of Urik's frightened folk penetrating the palace walls, Hamanu waited for the next event, whatever it might be.

He didn't have to wait long.

"Hamanu of Urik."

Through the darkness of his throne chamber, Hamanu recognized the predatory voice of Abalach-Re, once known as Uyness of Waverly, the late ruler of Raam. Over the ages, the Lion-King's eyes had changed, along with the rest of him. Urik's Lion-King could see as dwarves, elves, and the other Rebirth races saw—not merely the reflection of external light, but the warm light that radiated from the bodies of the living. More than that, he could see magic in its ethereal form: the golden glow of the medallions his templars wore, the deep cobalt aura—scarcely visible, even to him—that surrounded the blond Raamin templar.

Uyness's voice came from the aura, but not from any spell the queen of Raam had cast in life or death. Hamanu thought immediately of Rajaat, but the first sorcerer hadn't cast the spell that put words in the air around the dumbfounded Raamin; nor had any other champion. Yet it was a subtle, powerful spell, as subtle and powerful as the stealth spell Hamanu aged in his workroom. The realization that he could not put a name to the sorcerer who cast it sent a shiver down his black-boned spine.

"Mark me well, Hamanu of Urik: the War-Bringer grows restless. He's waited thirteen ages to have his revenge. He remembers you best—you, the youngest, his favorite. The wounds you gave him will not heal, except beneath a balm of your heart's blackest blood. He seeks you first. He'll come for you, little Manu of Deche. He already knows the way."

On any other day, Hamanu might have been amused by the haphazard blend of truth, myth, and outright error the spell-spun voice spoke. He would have roared with laughter, gone looking for the unknown sorcerer, and—just possibly—spared the poor, ignorant wretch's life for amusement's sake.

Any other day, but not today. Not with Rajaat's blue lightning pummeling his city. Though the spell-caster didn't know what Uyness of Waverly would have known from her own memory of the day, thirteen ages ago, when the champions betrayed their creator and created a prison for him beneath the Black, there were undeniable truths in the thick air of the throne chamber. Rajaat was restless, Rajaat wanted revenge, and Rajaat would start with Urik.

Taking the chance that there was a conscious mind still attached to the spell, Hamanu said mildly, "Tell me something I don't already know. Tell me where you are and why you come to Urik now, when the War-Bringer's attention is sure to catch you... again. Wasn't one death enough?"

The cobalt aura flickered, as it might if motes of the Raamin champion's true essence had been used in its creation. "The Shadow-King found me," she said when her aura was restored. The statement wasn't quite an answer to Hamanu's questions. It might have been an evasion. It certainly couldn't lave been the truth. Gallard of Nibenay was many things, none of them foolish enough to search the Black near Rajaat's Hollow prison for the lingering remains of any champion, least of all, Uyness of Waverly. More than the rest of them, the Raamin queen relied on myth and theological bombast to sustain her rule. There were two reasons Nibenay hadn't swallowed Raam long ago: One was Urik, sitting between the cities; the other was Dregoth, who hated Uyness with undead passion.

The Tyr-storm, which had lapsed into faint rumblings after its initial surge, showed its power before the spellcast voice answered. Thunderbolts rained down on Hamanu's yellow-walled city—his keen ears recorded a score of strikes before echoes made an accurate count impossible. An acrid stench filled the chamber and brought tears to the eyes of his assembled templars. The storm's blue light shimmered in the pungent air, then coalesced into a swirling, luminous pillar that swiftly became Uyness of Waverly in her most beautiful disguise, her most seductive posture.

"Rajaat grows strong on our weakness, Hamanu. Without a dragon among us, no spell will hold him. We need a dragon, Hamanu. We need a dragon to keep Rajaat in the Hollow. We need a dragon to create more of our own kind, to restore order to our world. We choose you to be the dragon. Rajaat will come to Urik for revenge. He will destroy you. Then he will destroy everything. The champions come to honor you, Hamanu of Urik. We offer you lives by the thousand. You will become the dragon, and Athas will be saved."