The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King

by Lynn Abbey

  Windreaver's silver-edged shadow bent low across the table. "When were you ever at risk, Hamanu?" the troll demanded, his voice a cold, bitter whisper. "When did you ever fight a fair battle to an honorable end?"

  "I fought to end the war," Hamanu snarled back, though there was no need to defend himself to a defeated adversary and a thoroughly cowed mortal man. "Peace was my honor—"

  And the risk? What had he risked after he faced Myron of Yoram?

  "I told the truth. I exposed the Troll-Scorcher to the veterans of his army. I accused him of human deaths, countless deaths, pointless deaths. For Dorean and Deche and all the others whose voices were stilled, I raised mine for judgment. I named him Betrayer and Deceiver. I cried out for vengeance—and he struck me with the eyes of fire.

  "My blood grew hot in my veins. It simmered. It boiled in my heart. I opened my mouth to scream; my tongue—"

  There were no more words in the workroom, just as there had been no more words that hot High Sun afternoon on the plains. Writhing under the assault of the Troll-Scorcher's fiery sorcery, Hamanu's mouth had filled with a tongue of flame, not flesh. The last sounds he heard were his own ears crackling, like fat in the fire. Myron of Yoram's corpulence grew vast before his heat-swollen eyes burst. Mortal Hamanu died in a black inferno of heat, silence, and torment that neither words nor memory encompassed.

  The ropes that bound him to the mekillot stake had burnt through. He'd fallen slowly toward the ground, toward death, but Hamanu hadn't died. Myron of Yoram had seized the filaments of his existence and hauled him away from eternity's threshold to agonies redoubled.

  "I would not die," the Lion-King whispered. "Death ceased to have meaning. Life ceased. Pain ceased."

  Hamanu blinked and shuddered free of the memory, as free as he ever was. Windreaver and Pavek were staring at him, at his hand. He looked down. Thick, greasy smoke seeped from the depth of his clenched fist. The stench of charred flesh belonged to the present as well as the past, to reality and illusion. With unfamiliar effort, Hamanu found the muscles of his fingers and straightened them.

  A pool of molten bronze shone brightly in the palm of Hamanu's hand. He felt nothing—nothing new, nothing different, but the long-suffering human core of him shuddered, and the liquid metal dribbled onto the table. While the more benign aromas of burning wood and tempered metal cleansed the workroom air, Hamanu stared at the new crater in his already black and ruined flesh.

  There were other sounds around him, other movements. He ignored them until Pavek—mortal Pavek, who did not understand—stood before him with a length of cloth torn from the treasures of ancient Yaramuke in one hand and the critic-lizard's honey pot in the other.

  Windreaver stirred, casting his shadow between them. "You waste your time, manikin. The Troll-Scorcher neither feels nor heals."

  Pavek said nothing, and his thoughts were tightly shuttered in his druid-templar way. He poured the honey over Hamanu's wound—an old soldier's remedy, Javed would approve, Telhami, too—then wrapped the cloth around it, hiding it from sight. Hamanu closed his eyes and reveled in a newfound pain.

  Chapter Ten

  Hamanu banished his companions from the workroom. He'd lived too long outside the bounds of compassion to be comfortable within its embrace. Not that Windreaver had suddenly mellowed; the shadowy troll departed in a gust of bitter laughter. Hamanu didn't know where his ancient enemy had gone—to Ur Draxa, perhaps, where he should have been all along, spying on Rajaat.

  In truth, Hamanu didn't care where Windreaver was. It was Pavek who weighed heavily in his thoughts, and Pavek who ignored his command. The stubborn, insignificant mortal stopped one stride short of the doorway.

  "Your hand—" he said, defiance and fear entwined in his voice. Then he held out the honey jar.

  "I am the almighty, immortal Lion-King of Urik, or weren't you paying attention?" Hamanu snarled. "My flesh doesn't heal, but it won't putrefy. I require neither your service nor your concern."

  Pavek stayed where he was, not talking, not thinking—at least not thinking thoughts that could be skimmed from his mind. Twisting human lips into a scowl, Hamanu shaped and shifted his illusionary body. He intended to snatch the jar from the templar's hand faster than Pavek's mortal eyes could perceive. But Hamanu had a real injury: his reflexes, both illusory and real, were impaired. His fingers slid past the jar. The improvised bandage snagged the rough-glazed pottery and tugged the raw edges of his wound as well.

  The Lion-King flinched, the jar shattered on the floor, and Pavek blinked—simply blinked.

  Hamanu cradled his hand—the real hand within the illusion—trying to remember the last time he'd misjudged the balance between reality and his own illusions. Before the templar was born, before his grandparents had been born.

  "You cannot take my measure, Pavek. A mortal cannot imagine me or judge me." There was more edge to his words than he'd intended, but that was just as well, if it would get the templar moving.

  Pavek folded his arms across his chest. "You were mortal when you measured Myron of Yoram and Rajaat. You didn't hesitate to judge them," he said, omitting the Lion-King's titles and honors, as if he and Hamanu were equals.

  But he wasn't surprised when the templar disobeyed; he would have been disappointed otherwise. Pavek didn't share Hamanu's hot temper, but the mortal man had a quiet stubbornness that served the same purpose. An ill-omened purpose for any mortal when a champion's mood was more bleak than it had been in an age.

  "Go, Pavek, before my patience is exhausted. I do not choose to be lessoned tonight, not by you, Windreaver, or anyone."

  "You didn't finish your tale."

  "Men have died—and died unpleasantly—" The rest of Hamanu's threat went unspoken. He wouldn't kill tonight, and he'd never kill a man who dared to tell him the truth. "Not tonight, Pavek. Some other time. Go home, Pavek. Eat a late supper with your friends. Sleep well. I'll summon you when I need you."

  A thought formed on the surface of Pavek's mind, so clear and simple that Hamanu questioned every assumption he'd ever made about the man's innocence or simplicity. Surely my king needs sleep and food, Pavek thought. Surely he needs friends about him tonight.

  I do not sleep, Pavek, Hamanu replied, shoving the words directly into the templar's mind, which was enough, at last, to send him staggering across the threshold.

  "Friends," the king muttered to himself when he was finally alone. "A troll who loathes me, justly, and a templar who defies me. Friends. Nonsense. A pox on friends."

  But the thought of friendship was no easier to banish than Pavek had been. No one had known Hamanu longer, or knew him better, than the last troll general. Urik's history was their history, laced with venom and bile, but shared all the same. What was Windreaver, if not a friend, as well as an enemy?

  And what was a friend, if not a mortal man who overcame his own-good sense to bandage a dragon's hand?

  Hamanu's hand, down to its patterned whorls and calluses, was illusion, but the wound was real—he had the power to pierce his own defenses, even absentmindedly. There had been other wounds over the ages, which he'd hidden within illusion. Tonight, sorcery and illusion had failed, or, more truly, Hamanu himself had failed. The sight of molten metal in his palm had filled him with horror and self-loathing, and given Pavek an opportunity no mortal should have had.

  Ordinary cloth would have burned or rotted when it touched a champion's changeable flesh. There was only one piece of suitably enchanted cloth in the workroom: the celadon gown of Sieiba Sprite-Claw, champion and queen of Yaramuke. She had worn it when she died in the Lion-King's arms, with his obsidian knife piercing her heart.

  Had Windreaver guessed Pavek's intentions while Hamanu was preoccupied? Had the troll whispered a suggestion in Pavek's mortal ears—

  Or, had some instinct guided the templar's search? Some druid instinct? Some druid guardian whose presence a champion's magic couldn't detect?

  Hamanu had thought himself clever when he conceived hi
s campaign to win Pavek's support as a means to win the druid guardian's protection for his city. His bandaged hand could be taken as a sign that he was succeeding—but, at what cost?

  A wound?

  That was nothing. Windreaver spoke the truth: Rajaat's champions didn't heal, but the raw crater would be consumed by Hamanu's inexorable metamorphosis. In the meantime, he'd had a thousand year's practice ignoring worse agony.

  A wound, then, was no cost, but what about the nagging emptiness around his slow-beating heart, hinting that he'd lived too long?

  He had Urik, and for a thousand years, Urik had been enough. Mortals came and went; Urik endured. The city was immortal; the city had become Hamanu's life. The passions of his minions had supplanted any natural yearning for love or friendship. Then he conceived the notion of writing his history, and after that—after ages of attention and nurturing—his precious minions wandered the city like lost children while he confessed his private history on sheets of vellum. Hamanu berated himself for their neglect and sought his favorites through the netherworld.

  The Lion-King turned away. Lord Ursos's bents were familiar, stale, and without fascination. The bath faded from his imagination. He looked around the workroom for another stylus.

  * * *

  I don't know how long I remained strung between life and death, locked in a mind-bender's battle with Myron of Yoram. That's what it was, a netherworld war: the Troll-Scorcher's imagery against mine, his years of experience against the purity of my rage, my hatred. I was, if not dead, at least not truly unconscious when the battle ended. Our battle had lasted long enough and was loud enough to disturb the War-Bringer's peace, and that was what truly mattered.

  Rajaat burned through the Gray to find me, though I could not appreciate my rescue or his undoubtedly spectacular appearance on the plains. I was aware of nothing except the pain, the darkness, the silence and—very dimly—that my enemy no longer rose to the challenges I continued, in my mad, mindless way, to hurl at him.

  Then there was a ray of light in my black abyss, a wedge of sound, a voice I recognized as power incarnate, telling me to desist.

  Your pleas are heard, your wishes granted.

  Rajaat. No need for him to state his name, then or ever. When the first sorcerer was present in my mind, the world was Rajaat and Rajaat was the world, endless and eternal.

  Look for yourself—

  He gave me a kes'trekel's vision and hearing. Peering down from a soaring height, I saw mekillots pulling a four-wheeled cart along a barrens road. There was a cage on the cart, and Myron of Yoram was in the cage. The Troll-Scorcher had himself been scorched. He lay on his back, a bloated, blackened carcass. His charred skin hung in tattered strips that swayed in rhythm with the creaking cart. A cloud of buzzing insects feasted on his suppurating wounds.

  I'd judged Yoram a corpse; I was wrong. With Rajaat's aid, I heard pathetic whimpers in the depths of his flame-ravaged throat. I saw delicate silver chains nearly lost in the rotting folds at his wrists and ankles: links of sorcery potent enough to render a champion helpless.

  I was pleased, but not satisfied. It was not enough that the Troll-Scorcher suffered for his betrayal of the human cause. The war against the trolls had to be fought and won—

  In time, Manu. In due time. Wait. Rest—

  A soft shadow surrounded me, not the bleak darkness of my recent torment, but oblivion all the same. I wasn't interested in oblivion or resting or waiting. Childish and petulant, I tried to escape the shadow.

  My uncanny vision shifted: There was a second cart. Like the first, it ferried a human husk across the barrens. The second body was little more than a black-boned skeleton held together with rags. Its knees were drawn up. Its arms were crossed and fused together. They hid what remained of its face.

  Of my face...

  The husk was alive; the husk was me.

  All the pain I'd felt was nothing compared to my imagination when I saw what had become of Manu, the lithe dancer of Deche. I no longer fought Rajaat's shadow. I surrendered myself to its numbing softness.

  Don't despair, Rajaat told me with a grandfather's kindly voice. Pain belongs to your past. Soon you will be reborn and you will never know pain or suffering again.

  From the first, I doubted that promise: a life without pain or suffering wouldn't be a human life. But my living corpse was strong in my mind, so I banished my doubts and drifted until I heard his voice again. It is time.

  "It is time for you to be reborn."

  The pressure was Rajaat's sorcery-laden hands restoring my body around me. His thumbs traced the curves of my eye sockets. Bone grew like bread rising in a baker's oven, but Rajaat's miracle was not without discomfort. Bone was not meant to grow and harden so quickly. For one unbearable moment, the pain was so intense that I would have begged him to stop, if I'd had a mouth or tongue.

  Rajaat knew my thoughts. "Patience, child. The worst is behind you. The best is barely begun."

  I hadn't been anyone's child for years. I did not care to be reminded of what I'd lost, and I wasn't willing to cede my hard-won manhood, even to a god. A low, rumbling chuckle echoed through my mind. My thoughts scattered as chaff on the wind.

  Today, perhaps, I could keep a secret from my creator— certainly that is why I have a spell simmering beside me— but not that day under the relentless sun. I took refuge in the manners my parents had taught me and thanked him properly. Chuckles became a kirre's contented purr.

  Pressure shifted. Rajaat began restoring my cheekbones and jaw.

  My reborn ears made me aware that Rajaat and I were not alone.

  "Look at him," a deep-voiced man said. "A farmer. A dung-skull, no better than a slave. I tell you, there's no need. The Scorcher's finished, but so are the gnomes. There's no need for the War-Bringer to replace him. My army stands ready. They could finish the trolls in a single campaign."

  In the Troll-Scorcher's army, we'd heard of the other armies cleansing the human heartland, and of the leader of them all. Even before I knew his true name—before I knew what Rajaat was or what I was to become—I knew that Gal-lard, Bane of Gnomes, was not half the military genius he believed himself to be. Gnomes had been sly and wily, as he was, himself. Gallard's stealthy strategies were effective in the dwindling forests where they dwelt, but Windreaver would have carved the Gnome-Bane and his army into kes'trekel bait.

  The Gnome-Bane wasn't my only audience.

  "A peasant," a woman agreed. "He might be useful, when the War-Bringer's done with him." Her name, I later learned, was Sielba. I would learn more about her notion of usefulness as the years went on, but at that moment, I had no interest in them or her.

  "He can hear you," a third voice, another man, cautioned. He was no less contemptuous of me than the other two had been, but Borys of Ebe always saw much farther into a maze of consequences. "He will be one of us when the War-Bringer's done with him."

  After that, they spoke silently, if they spoke at all. My mind filled with eager curiosity; I didn't yet know what being one of us meant. I thought only of leading an army— my army—against the trolls. I envisioned slaughter and victory. Once again, Rajaat's amusement swept over me, dulling my consciousness as he shaped smooth muscles across the newly hardened bones of my face.

  When my eyelids were finished, I opened them, curious to see my savior.

  I was stunned senseless. In my life, I'd seen only humans and trolls. Myron of Yoram was a fat, bloated sack of a man, but he was—I believed he was—a human man. Beyond humans, there were only trolls. Rajaat War-Bringer wasn't a troll. Trolls were handsome, well-formed mortals, compared to my savior.

  In all ways Rajaat lacked the simple left and right symmetry a man expects to see in another man, be he human, troll or some other sentient race. The first sorcerer's head was huge and grotesque. Wisps of colorless hair sprouted between the bulbous swellings that covered his skull like lava seeps. His eyes were mismatched in color, size, and position. His nose was a shapeless growth abo
ve a coarse-lipped mouth that was lined with snaggleteeth. Rajaat wheezed when he inhaled, and when he exhaled, his breath stank of death and disease.

  If he were resurrecting me in his own image...

  Rajaat laughed and promised me he wasn't. His gnarled, magical fingers tilted my head so I could see the men and women he'd called to witness his making—and unmaking— of a champion.

  They are flawed, my savior assured me, turning my head again so my eyes beheld nothing but him. Each of them bears a mistake to which you are the correction. You are my last champion, Manu of Deche, Hamanu Troll-Scorcher. You will cleanse the land of impurities. Athas will become blue again.

  In my ignorance, I imagined my familiar world transformed to a world of blue mountains and sand, blue barrens, and blue himali fields. Rajaat changed my mind, showing me blue water beneath a blue sky. I overlooked the oceans; so much water meant nothing to me.

  Where was the land? I wondered. Rajaat showed me islands and drifting cities shaped like schooners running before the wind. Where were the people of this blue world? I wondered. The cities teemed with life. Human life, I assumed, and Rajaat did not correct me. Then.

  His hands moved from my head to my neck, from my neck to my shoulders and onward, down my body. Bone, sinew, nerve, and every other part of me quickened beneath his fingers. Bit by bit, I became a man again. The pain was exquisite—I ground my regrown tongue until it was a bloody rag between my teeth, lest my soon-to-be peers heard me scream or moan.

  Daylight faded. Cool, gray shadows reached across the cart before Rajaat was satisfied with my regeneration. He bid me move each limb, then rise slowly. I sat, stood, and took a tentative step, watching my feet, ankles, knees, and hips as if I had never seen them before. I was myself again, a sound-bodied man, as I had not been when Myron of Yoram's bullies dragged me from the pit. The scars of war and farming were gone, hut my mother would have known me by the crooked big toe on my left foot.

  My audience was clad in silk and jewels or sparkling armor such as Athas has never seen, before or since. I, of course, was birth-naked and subject to intense scrutiny. Visions of grunting beasts and sweating slaves were thrust into my consciousness. Flame-haired Sielba ran her possessive passions over my body. She took me by surprise; I flushed with shame, not because I was a hot-blooded man, easily aroused, but because she meant me to be ashamed.