by Lynn Abbey
Ages had passed since Hamanu wished that he could weep for his lost past or wished that he was dead within it. There were no gods to grant a champion's wishes. He'd never weep again, and he'd lived too long to throw his life away.
In his natural shape, Hamanu was taller than any troll. He looked directly at the carved inscriptions he'd once studied from the ground, and lost himself recovering their meaning from his memory.
"Can you read it?"
A voice—Windreaver's voice—asked from behind his back. Hamanu let out a breath he'd held since Ur Draxa. He hadn't wanted to be alone. The troll's voice was the right voice for this place, this moment.
" 'Come, blessed sun,' " he answered, tracing the word-symbols as he translated them. " 'Warm my walls and my roof. Send your light of life through my windows and my doors.' " He paused with his finger above the last group of carvings. "This one, 'awaken,' and the next pair, 'stone' plus 'life'—they're on every stone in every wall. Wake up my stones? Wake up my people? I was never certain."
" 'Arise, reborn.' We believed the spirits of our ancestors dwelt in stone. We never mined, not like the dwarves. Mining was desecration. We waited for the stone to rise. The closer it came to the sun—we believed—the closer our ancestors were to the moment of rebirth."
"And do you still believe?" Hamanu asked. He didn't expect an answer, and didn't get one.
"Who taught you to read our script?" Windreaver demanded, as if the knowledge were a sacred trust, not to be shared with outsiders, with humans especially.
"I taught myself. I was here at sunrise, whenever I could get away from my chores, imagining what it had been like. I looked at the inscriptions and asked myself: what would I have written here, if I were a troll, living in this place, watching the sun rise over my house. After a while, I believed I knew."
Silence lengthened. Hamanu thought Windreaver had departed.
He considered issuing a command that the troll couldn't disobey, demanding recognition for his accomplishment. He'd learned the script without assistance and, save for the two symbols that dealt with a faith he couldn't imagine, he'd learned it correctly. But that would be a tawdry triumph in a place that deserved better. With a final caress for the carved stone, Hamanu turned and saw that he wasn't alone.
"I taught myself to read your script. I couldn't teach myself to speak it. If you wish to insult me, do it in a living language."
"I said you read well."
The Lion-King knew his captive companion better than that. "When mekillots fly," he challenged.
"No, you're right. I said something else, but you read well. That's the truth. Nothing else matters, does it—in a living language?"
"Thank you," Hamanu replied. He didn't want an argument, not today. But it seemed he was going to have one: Windreaver's face had soured into an expression he hadn't seen before. "Is it so terrible? A boy comes up here—a human boy. He imagines he's a troll and deciphers your language."
"What I said was: I could wish I had met that remarkable human boy."
Hamanu studied the ground to the right of his feet. He remembered the boy's shape, his voice, and his questions as he stood among these stones. Memory was illusion; there was no going back. "I could wish that, too. But we had no choice, no chance. Rajaat took that away before I was born. Maybe before you were born. Our paths were destined to cross on the battlefield, at the top of a dark-sky cliff, far from anywhere either of us knew. One misstep, by either of us, and we'd never have met at all."
" 'One misstep'?"
"And the Cleansing Wars would have ended worse than they did. You could have held Myron of Yoram to a stalemate, but Rajaat would have found another lump of human clay to mold into his final champion. The dwarves, elves, and giants wouldn't've survived... and neither would the trolls..." he paused a second time and raised his head before adding the long-unspoken words—"My friend."
Windreaver's silver-etched silhouette didn't shift in the sunlight. "I believe you," he said softly, without saying what he believed. "Our race was doomed."
Looking at the troll's slumped, translucent shoulders, the Lion-King remembered compassion. "You believe your dead dwell in stone, awaiting rebirth. When the wind's done scouring these stones, there'll be trolls again, someday. You'll teach them their language." He thought of the pebble imbedded in his forearm. "You might be reborn, yourself."
Terrible silver eyes met Hamanu's. "If the spirits of our dead survived in stone, the War-Bringer would have declared war on stone. He would have made a champion to suck life from stone."
The War-Bringer had. If there'd been life sleeping in these ruins, Rajaat's final champion could have destroyed it. "I wouldn't... won't. It will not happen. Not in three days. Not ever."
"You learn," Windreaver concluded. "Of all your kind, you alone learned from your mistakes."
"I learned from you. But. by then, there were no choices so there couldn't be mistakes. When Rajaat came to me in Urik and I ran from him. it was your taunts—"
"I didn't taunt you, not that day."
"You were waiting for me when I came out of the Gray near Kemelok. You'd gotten there first; you knew exactly where I'd go. You said that if I ran—if I kept running— Rajaat would make another champion to replace me. How many years had it been since that day on the cliff? You hadn't said a word in all that time—I didn't think you could. As a man, I was still young—what did I know? Fighting and forming. You were ages older. Of course I listened to you. 'Think of what the War-Bringer's learned from you!' I've never forgotten it; I remember it as if it were yesterday. I realized that it wasn't enough to disobey Rajaat; I had to stop him. I must remain his final champion. There can none after me."
"I'd sworn I wouldn't speak to you. Then you broke away from the War-Bringer. I saw it, heard it, but I didn't believe it. You refused what he offered. Then you ran to Borys, and I was afraid for you, my enemy, my warden, so I broke my oath," said the troll's spirit, as though in recitation.
"You made me think before I talked to him." "For all the good it did, Manu. For all the good it did, long ago..."
Borys hadn't welcomed another champion's sudden appearance behind his Kemelok siege line. The Butcher of Dwarves hurled a series of Unseen assaults at his illusion-shrouded visitor. Hamanu deflected everything that came his way, all without raising a counterattack. After a short lull, a solitary human strode out of the besieger's camp. It wasn't a good time for meeting another champion. Borys made that clear from the start.
As Borys explained, ten days earlier, he'd fought a pitched, but not quite decisive, battle against the dwarven army here at Kemelok. He'd given their king, Rkard, a fatal wound—at least it should have been fatal. Borys wasn't certain. That was half his anger. The sword Borys had carried into the battle was enchanted. Rajaat had given it to him the day he'd become the thirteenth champion. The sword imparted a lethal essence to any dwarf it cut open, as it had opened Rkard, but the cursed dwarf had gotten lucky.
Rkard's axe had taken a chunk out of Borys's shoulder, a blow that would have quartered a mortal man. Battle-stunned and unable to hold his weapon, Borys had fallen. His officers had carried him back to their lines—leaving the sword behind in the hairy dwarf's chest. Borys admitted that he had slain three of his best men before he got his rage controlled, His own life was never in danger, but the damned sword was irreplaceable.
Hamanu listened to the Butcher of Dwarves's tirade and wisely didn't mention that his victory over the trolls hadn't depended on any enchanted weaponry. He waited until the other champion had calmed down enough to ask the obvious questions.
"What do you want? Who sent you? Why are you here?" asked Borys.
"Rajaat came to me in Urik."
"This is my war, Troll-Scorcher, and I'm ending it now. No one's coming in to share my kill. If Rajaat's whispering in your ear, that's your problem, not mine."
"Wrong," Hamanu countered. He opened his mind to share his recent encounter with their mutual creator, but Borys was wa
rded against such invasion. "He means for me to finish your war—"
"Never," Borys snarled and quickened another spell. "I warned you."
"—And start another cleansing war, this time against humanity itself."
A needle-thin ray of orange light shot from the palm of the Butcher of Dwarves to Hamanu's gut, where it raised a finger-wisp of oily smoke before Hamanu deflected it with a gesture of his own. Once pointed at the ground, the orange ray seared a line a hundred paces long across the already ash-streaked dirt.
"He showed me how it would be done," the Lion-King said, "and gave me a foretaste of human death."
"We can all kill, Hamanu," Borys said wearily, as if explaining life's realities to a dull-witted child. "Kill all Urik, if that pleases you, but stay away from my damned dwarves, and know this: make war with humanity, and you're making war with me."
"I'll win."
"When mekillots fly, Hamanu. You're the last, and the least. You may have vanquished the trolls, but they were almost finished when Yoram lost his fire. You don't have the wit or power to battle any one of us. Go back to Urik. Be careful, though—I hear you're taking in half-bloods. Give a dwarf shelter, and I'll make war with you."
"Forget dwarves," Hamanu advised. "Think about what happens next. What did he promise you?"
"A new human kingdom in a new human world, a pure world, without dwarves and the rest of the Rebirth scum. I'll rule from Ebe—or here at Kemelok—until I can wrest Tyr from old Kalak. After that, who knows? We needn't be enemies, Hamanu. There's enough to go around, for now."
"You seemed wiser. I thought you knew better than to believe him."
"If Rajaat could cleanse the world, none of us would exist. He's the War-Bringer, not the war commander; the first sorcerer, but not a sorcerer-king. He needs us more than we need him."
Locked in what he hoped would be humanity's final battle with the Rebirth dwarves, Borys wasn't eager to be seen conferring with a man who was clearly not-quite-human. After throwing a scrap of cloth on the ground, to shape his spell, Borys tried to reconfine Hamanu in his customary black-haired and tawny illusion.
"Begone!" the Butcher of Ebe growled softly with his own true voice.
Hamanu shook off the spell. With a hundred human deaths fresh on the back of his dragon's tongue and Windreaver's taunts still ringing in his ears, he pleaded for an open mind. "Let me show you—"
"I've seen enough."
Abandoning the calm tactics that went against his nature and hadn't accomplished anything, Hamanu gestured widely with both arms. Borys responded with another spell, but before he could cast it, Hamanu cast a spell of his own. The air between Urik's gaunt king and the blond human flashed with lightning brilliance as Hamanu found die veterans from whose life essence Borys was quickening his spell. He annihilated them, in the way he'd learned from Rajaat; Borys felt the echo of their deaths. When the light faded, the Butcher of Dwarves held one hand against his breast, and in his army's camp, clanging gongs signaled an emergency.
With his hand still pressed above his heart, Borys looked from Hamanu to his frantic camp. "I felt them die. I couldn't stop it. If I'd tried, you'd have drained me, too." He lowered his arm and turned back to Hamanu. "Just what are you?"
"Rajaat's last champion: Troll-Scorcher. Annihilator of all humanity. I'll win," Hamanu repeated his earlier assertion. "If I start the war. And if I won't, he'll make another who will."
"The Dark Lens? Is that how you do it? Are you bound to it in a different way than the rest of us?"
"I didn't ask; he didn't enlighten me. Maybe it's the Lens. Sometimes I think it's the sun. It was there from the beginning, I suppose, but I didn't know how to use it until today."
Hamanu opened his mind a third time, and Borys accepted the images of Rajaat's visit to Urik: a hundred humans annihilated in a single breath. Nothing remained of them, not a single greasy, ash-crusted splotch on the palace floors.
Borys lowered his hand. He cursed as any veteran might curse: heartfelt and impotent.
Hamanu interrupted. "He says humanity must be cleansed because we're deformed. He wants to return a cleansed Athas to the halflings. He says it belongs to them, not us."
"He's mad."
"Aye, he'll probably cleanse the halflings, too. The only question worth asking is, can we stop him? I can resist him, disobey him, but I can't stop him, not alone. If we all attack at once..."
"You'd survive," Borys responded quickly, the old distrust burning bright in his eyes. "You could lay back until you were the last—"
"And he'd slay me, then he'd find someone else to annihilate the humans. Maybe a score of someones. He promised you a kingdom, Borys. What price will you pay for it?"
Borys neither spoke nor moved.
"Make up your mind, champion. He's probably out looking for another farmer's son right now. Maybe he'll pluck someone out of your army this time. Maybe he's already dragged the poor sod up the stairs in his damned white tower."
"No. You saw how it was. He needs us—"
"Needed."
Another curse as Borys looked at Kemelok's battered towers. "Five days. If I'm gone longer than that, the siege will fail, and the runts will scatter." Borys allowed a breathtakingly short time in which to bring down the War-Bringer.
"Sielba," Borys replied without hesitation.
Hamanu was inwardly astonished. He'd have left the red-haired Sprite-Scourge and seducer of champions for last. But he'd come this far to get Borys's help and kept his opinions to himself while the Butcher of Dwarves made arrangement with his high-ranking officers to continue the siege while he was gone.
Since the day the champions had drunk each other's blood in the negligible shade of Rajaat's white tower, Sielba had repeatedly invited Hamanu to visit her retreat. The invitations had grown more frequent and enticing in the years since he'd vanquished the trolls and taken his place among the champions who'd achieved their final victories. The notices had become especially regular since he'd settled in Urik and begun to transform the dusty, roadside town into a rival city.
They were neighbors, Sielba would write on ordinary vellum scrolls that her minions delivered to the Urik gates, or she would whisper in a mysterious, musk-scented hush that haunted the midnight corners of Urik's humble palace. They should know each other better. They should explore an alliance; as partners, Sielba promised, they and their cities would be invincible.
Hamanu had ignored every overture. He hadn't forgotten the loathsome combination of lust and contempt with which she'd scrutinized him that one time, the only time they'd stood face to face. He wanted nothing to do with her or her invitations.
However his farmer's son's jaw dropped when Borys led him from the Gray into an alabaster courtyard, and he began to reconsider his reticence. Musical fountains, flowers, lyric birds, an abundance of brightly colored silk... he'd never dreamt of such things. Sielba had cleansed Athas of sprites, then retired to the ancient city of Yaramuke, where she idled away the days and years, ruling a docile citizenry from an imperial palace. Hamanu shook his head and reshaped his appearance to equal the luxury surrounding him—at least he hoped he equaled it.
Sielba greeted Borys warmly and familiarly; Hamanu readily perceived that their acquaintance was both old and intimate. She greeted him like a kes'trekel alighting on a corpse.
"Will you feast with me?" she asked, with her lips against his ear and her hands weaving through his hair.
Lips, ears, hands, hair—even the tense muscles at the back of Hamanu's neck—were all illusions, but beneath their illusions Rajaat's champions remained men and women. Hamanu, at least, knew that he remained a man. He remembered every loving moment in Dorean's arms; Jikkana's, too; and the infrequent others of his mortal years. After Rajaat made him a champion, he'd discovered the hard way that there were lethal limits to illusion. Sielba's sturdy immortality tempted him with dangerous possibilities.
He pushed her away, with more force than he'd intended. "We've come to talk about
Rajaat—"
"You still have the manners of a dirt-eater, Hamanu," Borys interrupted. "Try to behave."
With words and a few subtle gestures, the two more experienced champions pierced Hamanu's defenses. They shrouded him with an awkwardness that wasn't illusion. He was young compared to them, and ignorant. He knew how to fight, but not how to sit amid the wealth of cushions surrounding Sielba's banquet table, or which of the unfamiliar delicacies were eaten with fingers, and which required a knife.
As for the urgent matter that had brought Hamanu first to Kemelok and then to Yaramuke, Borys disposed of it between the berries and the cream.
"The War-Bringer's not going to stop with the Rebirth races," he said bluntly, but casually. "He's going to create another champion to cleanse Athas of humanity."
Sielba set down her goblet of iridescent wine. Her illusion retained its beauty when she frowned, but her inner nature— the heart and conscience of a victorious champion—revealed itself as well. "And us? What about his promises? Are we to rule a world filled with beasts and halflings?"
"Apparently," Borys replied, with studied nonchalance balancing a mottled berry on the tip of his knife. He exploded it with a thought. "Or he'll create a champion to cleanse us, too." "He has to be stopped."
Lips as red as the stain parted in a condescending smile. "Do you have a plan?" she asked Borys, not Hamanu.
"Of course, but it will require all of us, together."
Sielba's dark eyes narrowed. "And you need to know where everyone is?"
"I can hardly ask the War-Bringer, can I?"
"Or little Sacha."
"I'll get him last, and bring him here by force, if I have to."
"After I've told you what you need to know?"
"I have hopes, my dear enchantress." Borys laid his hand atop Sielba's.