by Lynn Abbey
"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 w
hat?— 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 wo
und. 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.