The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King

by Lynn Abbey

  "Nothing, Pavek, nothing at all. If anything happens, you'll simply die."

  Hamanu didn't wait for Pavek's reaction. He thrust one arm, then one leg, into the netherworld and strode from the throne chamber to the map room where his war staff had assembled. The Lion-King didn't stand on ceremony with these men and women.

  "We fight for Urik's very life," he told them as he sealed the netherworld rift. "Armies from Nibenay and Gulg pin our flanks while Dregoth sends undead hordes our way from Giustenal. Raam sends messengers, Balic, too, and it's safe to wager they'll be marching before long. It's only a matter of time before we hear from what's left of Draj."

  There was a collective intake of breath, a muttered curse or two, and a question: "What of Tyr?"

  That Hamanu couldn't answer. The free folk of Tyr, having slain their king, a dragon, and returned the War-Bringer to his prison, had become a realm unto themselves, obsessed with laws and councils and taking little interest in the heartland beyond their borders.

  They didn't ask their king what he'd done to incur the wrath of his peers. For the most part, that question didn't occur to them: But other questions did: practical questions about another levy and overextended lines of supply, a shortage of weapons in the city's armory, and the havoc that floods were wreaking on Urik's normally reliable roads. Hamanu listened more than he answered. He'd been Urik's supreme commander for thirteen ages, but, together, the mortal minds he'd assembled had more experience. Individually they offered insights and perspectives he might have overlooked.

  The Lion-King's armies were unbeaten because the Lion-King was not too proud to take his advisers' advice.

  Evaporating puddles from the Tyr-storm made for a sultry, sticky afternoon. Men, women, and Hamanu himself shed their ceremonial garments—or the illusion of them— and, clad in plain linen, thrashed out a battle plan. Night had fallen when Hamanu gave his approval to the best notions that mortal and immortal minds could devise, never hinting that it wouldn't be enough if he were right about the enemy they faced.

  Enemy or enemies.

  Try as he might in odd moments in the map room, or afterward, alone on his storm-tossed rooftop, Hamanu could not wrestle the day's events into a single pattern. Rajaat's champions had weaknesses deriving from their own human natures and the spells that created them. They'd contrived to keep their weaknesses secret, but after ages of spies and spells, Hamanu could scarcely believe that he'd been any more successful keeping his secrets from his peers than they had been keeping theirs from him. He'd had Windreaver, of course, but he didn't know that he was the only champion whose victory was one ghost shy of complete. And Gallard had talked to Borys, who'd known why the Lion of Urik would never become the Dragon of Urik.

  Unless Rajaat were still behind it all. If Rajaat had cast the spells that brought Uyness's voice to the Lion-King's throne...? But, no, Hamanu hadn't recognized the personality behind the spell, and whatever enmity the surviving champion peers had toward one another, it wouldn't dull their wits where the War-Bringer might be involved.

  Or had Rajaat found a way to conceal his sorcerous essence?

  Hamanu found no answers on the rooftop above his moonlit city. The sounds of rescue and repair, of mortal life determined to continue, no matter the price, rasped his nerves. He slashed the air and returned to his workroom, where the city's noise was masked by walls and Pavek was enthralled by the unfinished story written on the vellum sheets.

  The Lion-King's sandals and jewelry were illusion. They made no sound as he approached the lamplit worktable.

  "Were you bored—?"

  Pavek shot out of his seat before Hamanu finished his question. The chair toppled behind him and the table in front of him. Loose vellum, the ink stone, the stylus and— not to forget—the leather-wrapped shard went flying. The air snapped as Hamanu, moving faster than sight or sound, caught the leather a handspan above the floor. For a moment, they both stared at the innocent-seeming parcel, then at each other; then Pavek, who'd barely caught his balance after his leap, dropped hard on his knees.

  "I am an oaf, O Mighty King," Pavek insisted breathlessly, though his agitated thoughts implied that the Lion of Urik might have given a poor man a bit of warning.

  "And I might have warned you, mightn't I?"

  Wisely, Pavek said nothing. Hamanu righted the table, returned the shard to its top, and collected a handful of vellum sheets.

  "You were reading. What do you think?" A veritable storm of thoughts stewed in Pavek's mind, but they were all half-formed and elusive. As impatient as any fountain-side poet reciting for his supper, Hamanu had to wait for the man's spoken words.

  "That's all? No greater understanding of me, of the choices I made and make? It is not the version you were taught in the orphanage," Hamanu said with certainty. That version—the Lion-King's official history—was a god's tale, full of miracles, revelations, and infallibility, nothing like the human frailties the vellum revealed.

  It was embarrassing to beg a mortal's opinion. It was degrading. Worse, it stirred the dark fire of Hamanu's anger. "Speak, Pavek! Look at me! Ask a question, any question at all. Don't just kneel there like a poleaxed inix. I've told you secrets I've kept for ages. Don't you want to know why?"

  "O Mighty King, forgive me, but I couldn't hope to understand. I have so many questions, I wouldn't know where to begin—"

  "Ask, Pavek. Look at me and ask a question, ask as if your life depended on it, for it does!"

  The head came up, wide-eyed and very mortal, very fragile. The question flowed exactly as it formed in Pavek's mind—

  "Were you Rajaat's favorite? Is that what you became after—?"

  Two questions: twice as many as he'd commanded and an excuse—if Hamanu needed one—to slay the trembling man where he knelt. But, strangely, the rage was gone. Hamanu walked around the table, righted the chair, and eased his illusory self onto its seat.

  "The answer that comes to me, Pavek, is no. I was never Rajaat's favorite. I hated him before I knew what he was, before he made me what I became, and he knew I hated him. I wouldn't have tolerated his favor, and for all these years I have believed that I didn't have it. Tonight, though, it's not me who asks the question, but you, a mortal, whom some might call my favorite. Hatred doesn't protect you from my favor, dear Pavek, and so I realize I have become what I hated when I was a man.

  "Today is a sad day, Pavek. Today I've realized that my hatred amused Rajaat, amuses him still, as yours amuses me. I was the last of his creations—but not because we imprisoned him. No, he'd had two hundred years to ponder his mistakes before he created me. I was the last because I was everything he meant a champion to be. I loathed him, but, yes, Pavek, I was Rajaat's favorite. I carried in my bones his hopes for a cleansed and purified Athas; I still Hamanu recalled the mortal man he'd been and felt the weight of his immortal age as he'd never felt it before. Looking across his worktable, he saw the gray dust and empty memories of an unnatural life. He didn't see Pavek at all, until the man said—

  "I don't loathe you or hate you, O Mighty King."

  "Then you are either an innocent or a fool," Hamanu said wearily, indulging himself in a moment of self-pity— and eager to stifle a favorite, whose voice, at this moment, sounded too much like his own.

  "Telhami says not, O Mighty King."

  Perhaps Rajaat was right. Rajaat had already lived two thousand years or more when he began creating his champions. Perhaps a man needed several ages to learn the ropes of immortality—to learn to pick his favorites from the ranks of those who hated him.

  When Telhami lived in Urik, Hamanu had forgotten Dorean and every other woman. Her eyes, her hands, her laughter had made him human again. For how long? A year?

  Twenty years? Thirty? He'd lived an enchantment. Every day had been bright and sparkling, yet different; every night was the stuff from which men's dreams were spun. Then, one morning she was dressed in traveler's clothes.

  She'd had a vision during the night of a place b
eyond the Ringing Mountains, a place where the air was cool and moist, where the ground was a thick, soft green carpet, and trees grew halfway to the sun. Cold springs bubbled year around in the place she'd envisioned, and at the center of everything was a waterfall shrouded in mist and rainbows. Her life in Urik was over; she had to find her waterfall.

  Druids cannot stay, she'd said—as if that explained everything.

  And he, of course, could not go. Urik had already suffered from his neglect. A generation of templars had succeeded to power thinking that their king was a besotted fool. The ordinary folk on whose shoulders he and the templars stood did truly curse the Lion-King's name.

  Will you return? he'd asked, as countless other men and women had asked their departing lovers, but never Hamanu, never the Lion-King, not before or since.

  Telhami had returned, in her way. She'd settled her druids close enough to Urik that he knew roughly where she was, but on the far side of lifeless salt, where his magic couldn't reach her. Until one night, when this Pavek, this stolid, stubborn lump of humanity who stirred forgotten memories, gave his king passage across the waste. Hamanu had saved Telhami's village from one of his own. He would have saved her, too, but she chose to die, instead.

  He never knew if she'd found her damned waterfall. Because he'd loved her, he hoped she had. Because she'd left him, he hoped otherwise. Pavek might know, but thirteen ages had taught a farmer's son not to ask questions unless he truly wanted the answers.

  "Go home," he told Pavek. "I'll watch the chest overnight. Come back tomorrow or the day after."

  The templar rose to one knee, then froze as a breeze spiraled down from the ceiling, a silver-edged breeze that roiled the vellum and became Windreaver.

  A fittingly unpleasant end to an unpleasant day.

  "I thought you'd gone to Ur Draxa."

  "I have a question, O Mighty Master."

  "I might have known."

  A breeze and a shadow, that was all the influence the troll had in the material world, but he could observe anything— Rajaat in his Ur Draxan prison or a scarred templar reading sheet after sheet of script-covered vellum.

  "Your little friend might find the answer interesting, O Mighty Master if you're inclined to answer."

  Hamanu could pluck thoughts from a living mind or unravel the memories of the naturally dead; he could do nothing with his old enemy, Windreaver, except say—"Ask for yourself. Don't involve Pavek in your schemes."

  "O Mighty Master, it's his question as well as mine. I heard it off his own tongue as he turned the last sheet over."

  Poor Pavek—he'd said something that Windreaver had overheard, and now he was using every trick he'd learned as a templar, every bit of druidry Telhami had taught him, to keep his wayward thoughts from betraying him. It was a futile fight, or it would have been, if Hamanu weren't wise to Windreaver's bitter ways.

  "Ask for yourself!"

  His voice blew Windreaver's silver shadow into the room's four corners. It was no more than a moment's inconvenience for the troll, whose image reappeared as quickly as it had vanished.

  "As you command, O Mighty Master. Why did Rajaat choose a thick-skulled, short-witted, blundering dolt, such as you were, to replace Myron of Yoram?"

  He almost smiled, almost laughed aloud. "Windreaver, I never asked, and he never told. He must have had good reasons—not from your view, of course. You would have beaten Myron, eventually, but once I was Troll-Scorcher, my victory was inevitable."

  A blunt-fingered shadow hand scratched a silvery forward-jutting jaw. "Perhaps. Perhaps not. Someone taught you strategies and tactics Yoram never imagined, and you never guessed while you were..." Windreaver's voice, his deep, sonorous troll's voice, trailed off to a whisper.

  "Alive?" Hamanu finished for him. "You cannot accept that the son of a Kreegill farmer conquered the trolls. You'd prefer to believe that Rajaat conjured some long-dead genius to inhabit my body."

  "The thought had crossed my mind. I was there in the sinking lands, Manu of Deche. I saw you: a stringy human. You looked young, acted younger, standing behind your bright steel sword with your jaw slung so low that a mekillot could crawl down your gullet. You were unworthy of the weapon you held. I watched as your own men came to kill you for die shame and defeat you'd brought them. Then I blinked, and you were gone. The next time I saw you—"

  "Were we betrayed?"

  Windreaver inhaled his tears. "Betrayed?"

  "Did Myron of Yoram sell my veterans to your trolls? Did you know where to find us?"

  "We retreated to the sinking lands whenever the yora plants there had grown high enough to harvest. The Troll-Scorcher never followed us; you learned why—"

  "I followed you."

  "Yes, O Mighty Master, you followed us everywhere, but Myron of Yoram did not. I think he did not expect you to return, but he didn't betray you, not to us. I didn't guess the great game Yoram played until I looked over Pavek's shoulder and read your recounting."

  They stared at each other, through each other—immortal ghost and immortal champion. The air was thick with unspoken ironies and might-have-beens.

  Pavek, the mortal who didn't understand, couldn't possibly understand, cleared his throat. "O Mighty King—what happened after the battle? How did you escape from the prison-hole?"

  Hamanu shook his head. He hadn't escaped, not truly, not ever.

  "Yes," Windreaver added, breaking the spell. "Rajaat must have prepared quite a welcome for you."

  "Not Rajaat," Hamanu whispered.

  No sorcery or mind-bender's sleights could alter those memories. He could feel the walls as if they were an arm's length away, just as they'd been when he realized he'd been stowed in a grain pit. The remembered bricks were cool and smooth against his fingertips. Give a man a thousand years, and he wouldn't scratch his way through that kiln-baked glaze or pry a brick out of its unmortared wall. Give him another thousand, and he wouldn't budge the sandstone cap at the top of his prison, no matter how many times he pressed his limbs against the bricks and shinnied up the walls, no matter how many times he came crashing down to the layer of filth at the bottom.

  "Not Rajaat?" Windreaver and Pavek asked together.

  Hamanu spied the brass stylus on the workroom floor. He picked it up and spun it between his fingers before closing his hand around the metal shaft. "The Troll-Scorcher, Myron of Yoram, plucked me out of the sinking lands. He had me thrown in a grain pit on the plains where his army mustered—"

  "A grain pit," Windreaver mused. "How appropriate for the pesky son of a farmer."

  The Lion-King said nothing, merely bared his gleaming fangs in the lamplight and bent the stylus over a talon as black as obsidian, as hard as steel.

  "At night—" Hamanu's lips didn't move; his voice echoed from the corners and the ceiling. "At night I could hear screams and moans through the walls around me. I wasn't alone, Windreaver. The Troll-Scorcher had pitted me in the midst of my enemies: the trolls. Big-boned trolls who could stand, maybe sit cross-legged—if they were young enough, agile enough—but never stretch their legs in front of them, never lie down to sleep. Not once, in all the days and nights of their captivity, which was, of course, as long as mine... or longer. And mine was...

  "When did you harvest the yora plants, Windreaver? While the sun ascends, while it's high, or while it descends? The Troll-Scorcher's army mustered at High Sun, so I suppose I was in that pit for less than a year, though it seemed like a lifetime. A human lifetime—but trolls live longer than humans, don't they, Windreaver? A troll's lifetime would seem longer, standing the whole time."

  Hamanu clutched the bent stylus in his fist, squeezing tighter, waiting for the old troll, his enemy, to flinch. But it was Pavek who averted his eyes.

  "Shall I tell you how I got out of the pit?" Hamanu asked, fastening his cruelty on one who would react, lest his own memories overwhelm him. "First they threw down burning sticks and embers that set the filth afire. Then they lowered a rope. Burn to death or cl
imb. I chose to climb; I chose wrong. Spear-carrying veterans circled the pit, according me a respect I did not deserve. I could stand, but I'd forgotten how to walk. The sun blinded me; tears streamed from my eyes. I fell on my knees, seeking my own shadow, the darkness I'd left behind.

  "A man called my name, Manu of Deche; I opened my eyes and beheld the Troll-Scorcher, Myron of Yoram. He was a big man, a huge, shapeless sack of a man wrapped in a tent of flame-colored silk. Two men stood beside him, to aid him when he walked. Another two carried a stout and slope-seated bench that they shoved behind him after every step because he had no strength in his legs and could not sit to rest.

  "I mocked him," Hamanu said, remembering the exact words that had earned him another ruthless beating. His mortal eloquence hadn't been limited to long words and flowery phrases. Between his farmyard childhood and his years among the veterans, he'd become a champion of coarse language long before he'd been a champion of anything else. But time was unkind to vulgarity. His profanity had lost its sting; his choicest oaths were quaint now, or forgotten entirely. He was left with paraphrase: "I dubbed him a sexless man, a stinking mound of dung."

  "You'd figured out where you were and what was about to happen. You'd decided to get yourself killed, no doubt," Windreaver suggested.

  "I recognized the place, yes: the plains, the mustered army, the trolls staked out on either side of me. Seeing him, though... seeing what he was, the Troll-Scorcher who'd let Deche and a hundred other human villages die, I wasn't thinking of death, only of my hatred. You cannot imagine my hatred when I looked at him."

  "Oh, I can, O Mighty Master, each time I look at you."

  Once again Hamanu locked eyes with the ghost. Windreaver's hate was his most tangible aspect, yet it paled beside the memory of Myron of Yoram.

  "He was a failure, a coward who could not face his enemies. He was a glutton for pain and suffering—when he had nothing at risk—"