The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King

by Lynn Abbey

  Urik's situation had changed overnight, and not for the better. From the south gate tower, Pavek saw the roofs and kitchen-smoke of four market villages, the velvet expanse of Urik's farmland, and well beyond all that, three dusty, torch-lit smears where the armies of Nibenay, Gulg, and Giustenal had reestablished themselves during the night. Urik's army had fallen back into a thick black line between the farmland and the enemy.

  "Orders," Javed said when Pavek stepped back from the tower balustrade. "Everybody's been moving all night. Everybody's tired, and we're jammed up like fish in a barrel. Not enough room to fight. Not for us or them. There's not going to be a battle."

  The ebony-skinned elf stared straight at Pavek, expecting confirmation or denial.

  "He told me to be here at dawn," was Pavek's answer, until he added—foolishly—"Ruari's missing. Gone from his bed. A girl, too."

  It was a foolish remark because there wasn't a full-elf anywhere who'd ever truly sympathized with a half-elf. If the missing girl had been an elf, that might have gotten a rise out of the Hero of Urik, but for Ruari the best Javed could manage was a sigh and an offhand gesture.

  "He destroyed the trolls, every last one of them," the commandant said, as if that accounted for Ruari's fate. "He knows that whether there's battle today or not, he's not walking away from this battlefield. Not the way he walked onto it."

  The Hero of Urik had performed some unpleasant duties during his forty-year tenure. Every few years, he'd marched the slave levies into the barrens and kept watch over them until the Dragon of Tyr showed up.

  "We're meat, Pavek," said the Hero of Urik. "Less than meat. Just grease and ash. That's all that was left when Borys was done with them. But I saw those shards, too." He shook his head. "We die so the Lion can fight Rajaat. It's fair, I suppose, but I'd rather fight Rajaat myself."

  Beyond the steel medallion he wore, Javed didn't have much faith in magic, whether it was sorcery or druidry. But it was magic that drew them all to the balustrade when a sergeant shouted:

  "There he is!"

  The gates hadn't opened, and there were no outbuildings beyond the tower where Hamanu could have hidden while he strapped on the glowing armor that had been his hallmark at the front of Urik armies for thirteen ages. Yet, he was there, a solitary figure, shining in the light as the bloody sun poked above the horizon, walking south to face his enemies' might.

  Pavek wanted to believe. He wanted to feel his heart soar with admiration and awe for a true champion. He even wanted the despair of knowing not even a champion could surmount the odds the Lion-King faced. Instead, he felt nothing, a dull, sour nothing because, in taking Ruari, Hamanu had proved he was no different than his enemies, and there was no hope for Athas.

  Still, he couldn't turn away. He watched, transfixed, as the striding figure grew smaller and smaller, until he couldn't see it at all.

  "What next?" one of the Quraite druids asked. "Is it time to evoke the guardian?"

  Pavek shook his head. He sat down with his back against the southern balustrade and buried his face in his hands. The sun began its daily climb from the eastern horizon. The sky changed color, and the first hints of the day's heat could be felt in the air. Pavek raised his head and studied the light. At the rate Hamanu had been walking, he should have been nearing one of the villages. He lowered his head again.

  "Pavek!"

  He looked up. The voice was so familiar. He thought it had come from his heart, not his ears—but the others with him had heard it, too, and were looking at the stairs.

  "Pavek!"

  Pavek was on his feet when Ruari cleared the last stain. "Pavek—you'll never believe what happened—"

  Pavek needed another moment to realize the shirt was silk, trimmed with gold, nothing Ruari could have found in the red-and-yellow house in the templar quarter.

  Then he seized Ruari's wrists and gave them a violent shake. "Where were you, Ru? I looked all over. You weren't in your room."

  "You'll never believe—" Ruari repeated before his lungs demanded air.

  "Try me."

  They gave him more water and a stool to sit on.

  "I was drunk, Pavek—"

  "I know."

  "I was so drunk I thought she was Death when she came into my room. But she wasn't, Pavek," Ruari gulped more water.

  Pavek waited. He didn't really need to hear anything more. It was enough that Ruari had survived whatever encounter he'd had with the Lion-King, because, surely, that was Hamanu's shirt he was wearing. He wanted nothing more than to grab his friend and hold him tight, but Ruari had gotten his breath and was talking again.

  "She was so beautiful, standing there in the moonlight. I thought—I thought it couldn't get better, then we were flying, Pavek—"

  Pavek started to shake his head in disbelief, then curbed himself. Ruari hadn't been in his room; Ruari had been with Hamanu—whatever else the half-elf had seen or thought or chose to believe—and he could very well have been flying. There had to be some explanation for the shirt.

  "Then, I woke up in this huge bed—on the palace roof. The palace roof! Do you believe it?"

  Pavek nodded.

  "Wind and fire—I knew you'd be looking for me. I found some clothes and got out of there as quick as I could—I knew you'd be angry, Pavek. I knew you would. But what does it mean?"

  "Whim of the Lion," a druid and sergeant said together.

  "What about the girl?" Pavek asked.

  Ruari blushed; his already heat-flushed skin turned a shade darker than the bloody sun. "I sent her back to your house—in a shirt, Pavek. I found another shirt for her and sent her back to the templar quarter."

  There was laughter, from the women as well as the men. Ruari's face became dangerously bright.

  "What else was I supposed to do?" he demanded.

  "Nothing, Ru," Pavek assured him. "You did the right thing." Then he welcomed his friend back from the presumed-dead with a bone-snapping embrace. "What's her name?"

  "I don't know, Pavek. But she's beautiful, and I think she loves me," Ruari whispered his answers before they separated. "I think it's forever."

  "I'm sure it is." Pavek held Ruari at arm's length; the young man was clearly besotted. But that was hardly surprising. "I'm sure you'll be very happy together."

  He saw them together in his mind's eye—Ruari and a beautiful woman and children, also beautiful; one of whom had yellow eyes. Pavek hadn't ever had a vision before; prophecy wasn't at all common among druids... or templars. But he believed what he saw, and it lifted his heart. He hugged Ruari again, then let him go, and walked by himself to the tower's southern balustrade where, with his vision still strong in his mind, he stared at the empty road until he could see both of them together.

  A hand fell heavily on his shoulder: Javed, his face deep in a hard, unreadable expression.

  "Manu?" the elven commandant asked.

  "Yes." Javed's hand left Pavek's shoulder. It made a fist that struck the black breastplate armor over the commandant's heart: a lifetime of unquestioning obedience followed by an eyes-closed sigh.

  Pavek nodded. "Hope," he agreed.

  But not for long. While both men watched, a second sun began to rise where the southern road met the horizon. It was as bright as the eastern sun and the same bloody color.

  "Whim of the lion," one of the sergeants swore; the rest of them had lost their voices.

  The templars lost more a few moments later when every medalLion-wearing man and woman collapsed. Pavek wrapped his arms around his head, lest his skull burst from the fire within. He beat his forehead on the rough planks of the watchtower floor. That helped, countering pain with pain. Someone stood behind him and broke his medallion's golden chain; that helped more.

  But by then, it wasn't the physical pain that kept him on his knees with his face to the floor. It was the certain knowledge that the Lion-King, the Unseen presence in his life since he'd turned fifteen and received his first crude, ceramic medallion, had released him,
had abandoned him, rather than destroy him.

  Slowly, Pavek straightened and sat back on his heels. Javed was in front of him; his lips were bleeding where he'd bitten them. There were no words for what they felt as they steadied themselves against the balustrade and stood up. They turned away from each other and looked south, where the second sun had vanished behind—or within—a towering pillar of dust and light.

  One of the lesser-ranked templars in the gate tower began a cheer. It died unfinished in her throat. No mortal could celebrate what was happening in the south once the sounds of death and sorcery reached the Urik walls.

  The cloud-pillar grew until it could grow no higher—as high and mighty as the towering plumes that heralded an eruption of the Smoking Crown volcano to the northwest. Then, like those sooty plumes, the pillar began to flatten and spread out at its top. Lightning arcs connected the outer edge of the spreading cloud with the ground. The lightning danced wildly; it persisted longer than the blue bolts of a Tyr-storm.

  Pavek knew—they all knew, though none of them was a weather witch—that the bolts sprang up from the ground, not down from the cloud.

  The templars of Nibenay, Gulg, and Giustenal were not as fortunate as their Urikite peers. Their kings had sacrificed them and the rest of the three enemy armies to the dragon taking shape within the seething pillar.

  Without warning, the cloud disintegrated before their awestruck eyes. A deep, rumbling roar struck the tower a few heartbeats later. Like a mighty fist—a dragon's fist—it drove each and every one of them backward. The tower shuddered and swayed; strong men and women fell to their knees and screamed in abject terror. Behind them, within Urik itself, roofs and walls collapsed, their lesser tumult subsumed in the ongoing echo of the southern blast. An echo that seemed, to Pavek, to last forever.

  "We're next!" he shouted. He felt his words in his lungs and on his tongue, but his voice never penetrated his deafened ears.

  But one voice did: Behold! The Dragon of Urik!

  And another voice, immediately after the first: Now, Pavek.

  He crawled to the balustrade. The blast-weakened rail crumbled in his hand when he clutched it. Pavek stood carefully, looked south. Everything was quiet beneath the light and heat of a single sun. The cloud was gone—as if it had never been. The three dark sprawls where the three enemy armies had camped were gone, too. The places where they'd been were as pale and dazzling as bleached bones in the morning light.

  But the dark line of Urik's army still circled the still-green fields. They'd survived. They'd all survived. Their king was, indeed, stronger than the nature Rajaat and the other champions had given him.

  Now, Pavek. Now, or never!

  There was a black dot on the southern road, moving toward them. Far smaller than the monstrous creature Pavek had seen within the cloud, he didn't, at first, comprehend the words echoing in his thoughts. He didn't comprehend that they had not come from a frantic Quraite druid, but from the moving dot, the dragon, racing toward Urik's walls.

  There were no mnemonics or patterns in Pavek's mind when he evoked the city's essence, just need—burning, desperate need.

  Surely need had never been greater than the moment when Pavek reached out of himself to evoke—to implore and beg for—the Urik guardian's aid. The other times, the guardian had been pleased to save a handful of individuals. Surely, the guardian would be pleased now to save the entire city.

  Hamanu had thought so, and as he poured himself into the evocation, Pavek believed in Hamanu and the guardian equally, together. The guardian was the life essence of the city and Hamanu—the Hamanu that Pavek had known-had just died for it. No one could do more than the Lion-

  King had done, yet Pavek tried, pouring himself into the evocation until he was empty, until they could see the dragon clearly: a scintillating black presence, as tall as the south gate tower and coming closer, with nothing—nothing at all—rousing from the depths to stop him.

  Wisps of netherworld mist rose from the dragon's lustrous hide. His shape shifted subtly as he approached the tower. The changes were difficult for a mortal eye to perceive, but the eldest of the Quraite druids had a notion:

  "He's not finished, not fully realized."

  Pavek remembered the vellum, remembered the passages about Borys and the hundred years during which the unfinished dragon had ravaged the heartland before he regained his sanity.

  "He's bigger than the Dragon of Tyr," Javed said to no one in particular; he was the only one among them who could make the comparison. "Different, yet the same."

  "The guardian, Pavek." That was Ruari. "Where's the guardian?"

  "I couldn't evoke it," he answered, giving voice to defeat and despair. "They can't be in the same place, Hamanu and the guardian."

  A chorus of curses erupted, followed by moans of fear and despair, and a shout as one of the druids chose to leap from the tower to her death rather than face the Dragon of Urik. The dragon was a hundred paces away—a hundred of Pavek's paces, about eighty of Javed's, about ten of the dragon's. They could see it quite clearly now, more clearly than anyone truly wished to see a dragon.

  Pavek, who'd seen Hamanu's true shape, saw the resemblance, though, in truth, the resemblance wasn't great. The talons were the same, though much larger, and the dragon's eyes were sulphur yellow. They were lidless eyes, now, covered with iridescent scales that shimmered in the light. Their pupils were sword-shaped, sword-sized. They did not seem so much to be eyes looking out as they seemed to be openings into a fathomless, dark space.

  The longer Pavek looked at them, the less resemblance there seemed to be, until the dragon tilted its massive head.

  "He sees us," Javed said. "Hamanu knows we're here. Go away, O Mighty One! Urik isn't your home any longer. Go fight Rajaat!"

  The dragon cocked its head to the other side. Pavek was tempted—they were all tempted—to hope that something of Urik's Lion-King remained, resisting the madness that had claimed Borys's sanity for a hundred years. Hope vanished when the dragon roared and a gout of steaming grit battered the massive gate directly beneath them.

  The dragon strode forward, its arms spread wide enough to seize a mekillot, ghastly liquid dripping from its bared fangs. Pavek's heart froze beneath his ribs; he couldn't keep his eyes open. The blasted, battered walls shuddered, and then there was light—brilliant, golden light that blinded him though his eyes were closed. There was a second dragon roar, and a third, with mortal screams between them. The air reeked and steamed. Pavek thought he was going to die with the others, but death didn't take him, and when he opened his eyes he saw that everyone around him remained alive, as well. Those who'd screamed had screamed from terror, not injury.

  Urik's walls replied with another golden flash, and the dragon retreated.

  "The Lion-Kings!" a templar shouted. "The eyes of the Lion-Kings."

  The huge crystal eyes of the carved and painted portraits that marched along the city's walls were the source of the golden light that flashed a third time to drive the dragon farther back.

  "The guardian," Pavek corrected as he began to laugh and shout for joy.

  His celebration was contagious, but short-lived. The dragon didn't give up, and though the guardian lights drove it back every time it surged forward, the stalemate could not endure indefinitely.

  And wouldn't have to. Well before midday, there was another cloud pillar spilling over the southern horizon. They speculated, exchanging the names of their enemies, until the cloud was large enough, close enough, that they could see the blue lightning seething inside.

  "Tyr-storm," was the general consensus, but Javed and Pavek knew better:

  "Rajaat," they told each other.

  "They'll fight; the Lion-King will win, the Dragon of Urik will win," Javed continued.

  "Not here," Pavek countered. "They'll destroy the city."

  "Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he'll see it coming and go south to meet it. Far enough south to save the city."

  They made fools of
themselves, then, while Rajaat's storm cloud drew closer, jumping up and down, waving their arms, shouting, trying to get the dragon's attention. It was mad, or mindless; it didn't understand, never looked over its shoulder to see another enemy coming up behind it.

  If it—if the Dragon of Urik perceived Rajaat as the enemy. If enough of Hamanu remained within it, hating his creator. If it hadn't become Rajaat's final champion, destined to cleanse humanity from everywhere in the heartland.

  The guardian was enough against a mad, mindless dragon, but not against Rajaat's conscious insanity. Pavek slipped down the tower stairs. He opened the postern door—its warding had been dispelled when Hamanu released the medallions—and began walking toward the dragon.

  "Rajaat," he shouted, though the words he held in his mind were the words Hamanu had written and the images they conjured. "Rajaat is coming to destroy Urik."

  The dragon surged forward, arms out, reaching for Pavek. The yellow Lion-King lights drove it back.

  Pavek tried again: "Urik, Hamanu—Rajaat will destroy Urik!"

  Another surge, another flash.

  "The fields, Hamanu! He'll destroy the fields where the green grain grows!"

  This time the dragon stopped. It cocked its head, as it had before, and swiveled its long neck down to get a better look.

  "Rajaat will destroy the fields, Hamanu. Winning's no good, if the grain won't grow."

  A brimstone sigh washed over him. The dragon straightened and turned. It pointed its snout at the approaching storm and along the horizon, swaying from east to west, where—Pavek hoped—it saw the fields. At last the dragon roared and began walking—then running—to the south.

  * * *

  The blue storm raged above the black dragon and the dragon raged back. Neither fought with conscious intent, but instinct was strong, as was hatred—especially in the dragon, which moved constantly to the south, then to the southeast, as it fought. When they entered the Sea of Silt, they raised enough dust to blot out the sun for the three days they needed to reach the island where another dragon had built a city around a prison.