The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King (10 page)

The Ogre-Naught couldn't harm him, but his besieged templars were doomed if he didn't
intervene. With his eyes still glowing, Hamanu turned to Enver, who'd sensed nothing amiss until that
moment.

"I go," he told the dwarf. He caught a fleeting glimpse of Enver's widening eyes before he slit the
rooftop air with a talon and stepped into the Gray.

Hamanu departed Urik as a black-haired man. He emerged on the battlefield as the black-maned
Lion of Urik, taller than a half-giant, stronger and far more deadly. A gold sword gleamed in his right
hand. It sliced through the warrior weapons raised against him, and through the warriors as well. Hamanu
wielded his sorcery-laced sword with the skill gained in a very long lifetime of practice, inflicting precise
slaughter among his enemies.

He didn't bother to guard his back or slow his attacks with parries; the Lion of Urik was only
another glamour, hiding his true form. A calm and sharp-eyed observer—had there been any on the
field—would have noticed the discontinuity as metal weapons passed through the Lion's ephemeral form
before shattering against otherwise invisible dragon flesh. Wooden and bone-crafted weapons met a
different fate. They burst into short-lived flames when they breached his infernal aura.

With their king wreaking havoc among their enemies, the Urikite templars rallied. They surged
forward in a score of close-fought skirmishes. Hamanu welcomed their renewed courage; he'd reward
them with their lives. And as for the militant who led them...

One lapse of leadership might be forgiven—if the militant's panic hadn't been stronger than
Inenek's Unseen interference, Hamanu wouldn't have known that his templars needed him. A second
lapse would be unforgivable, unsurvivable. Hamanu strained his hearing. He found half of what he listened
for: a mortal heart pounding hard beneath a bronze medallion.

Bakheer! Hamanu seized the militant's disarrayed thoughts and rattled them. Fight, Bakheer.

Hamanu didn't enjoy killing his own templars. At the very least, it was a waste of mortal life. At
the worst, because of the medalLion-forged bond he shared with them, their deaths brought his darkest
appetites to the fore. Fight the enemy, Bakheer. Fight to the death... or face me.

A sane man would have listened, would have understood and thrown himself at Inenek's minions,
but Bakheer was no longer sane. What Inenek had begun, Hamanu inadvertently finished. Bakheer's
mind shattered. His heart beat one final time, and his spirit flared in the instant before Rajaat's last
champion savored it.

The tiny morsel of mortality tantalized Hamanu's much-denied appetites. For a moment, there
were neither Urikites nor enemies on the field before him, only aching need, and the motes of life that
would sate it.

The Lion of Urik roared words too loud and angry for mortal ears to interpret: "Damn you!"

Hamanu turned away from temptation, away from the battlefield. Abandoning his templars, he
cast himself into the netherworld... where a whirlwind awaited him.

Inenek had guessed his choice—his predictable weakness—and caught him in a mind-bender's
trap. Stripped of all his glamour, reduced to a spindly shadow of his unnatural form, Hamanu, was
sucked away from his templars. He wasn't surprised when a black maw appeared suddenly, far below
his feet, growing larger with each howling spiral.

Inenek was sending him toward the Black, toward the Hollow beneath it, and into Rajaat's grasp.
Hamanu could imagine what rewards Rajaat had promised her.

But, truly, the Oba of Gulg couldn't harm the Lion of Urik. Her powers, though awesome, were
no match for his, when he chose to use them. Radiance blossomed from Hamanu's long, skeletal fingers,
wrapping him in a cocoon of light. Inenek's whirlwind lost its hold over him, and he began to rise, slowly
at first, then faster, until the whirlwind dissipated in his wake.

Time flowed erratically in the Gray. Days, even years, of sunlit time could vanish during a
netherworld sneeze, or time could twist the other way, and a champion could reappear on the
battlefield—as Hamanu did—a heartbeat after he'd left.

Hamanu took advantage of his enemies' astonishment and confusion. Two of them died from a
single, decapitating sword stroke. Another two tried to run; he took them from behind.

Drubbed in the netherworld, unable to deliver Hamanu to Rajaat, and besieged on the battlefield,
Inenek withdrew her support from her templars who, feeling the tide of battle shift away from them, tried
to escape a now-inevitable defeat. A few, on the battlefield's fringes, might have succeeded; they were
hardly the lucky ones. Inenek wouldn't take them back for fear Hamanu had tampered with them, and
ordinary folk made certain that the life of a renegade templar was neither pleasant nor long.

The Gulg templars who fell into Hamanu's hands knew what their fate would be: a quick death, if
they were lucky, a drawn-out one if they weren't. They didn't know who the sorcerer-kings truly were or
why they despised one another. They only knew that a templar's life was over once he stood before
another sorcerer-king. Two or three of Inenek's templars fell on their knees, renouncing their city; they
offered oaths to Urik's mightier king. But there was no hope in their hearts or useful knowledge in their
heads—and he would never spare a templar who denied his city.

He offered them the same opportunity he offered his templar prisoners—death by their own
hands instead of his. Without exception, they took the easier, safer course: running onto the swords and
spears the Urikites held before them.

"O Mighty One, your will is done," a young adjutant informed Hamanu when the deeds were
finished. The elf's bright yellow robe and metallic right sleeve were torn and stained. The thoughts on his
mind's surface were painfully clear. His name was Kalfaen, and this had been his first campaign. He
hadn't risen through the war-bureau ranks, but had been given an adjutant's enameled medallion on the
strength of his family's connections. "The Oba's templars are all dead, except—except for the
wounded—"

Hamanu ignored the young man's distress. He tolerated nepotism in the templar ranks because it
gave the likes of Kalfaen no real advantage. "Wait here," he commanded, and insured obedience with a
frigid thought that held the youthful elf where he stood. "When I am finished with the wounded, you shall
recount what happened here, from the beginning."

Elves were chancy mortals. A good many of them crumpled and died the first time Hamanu
touched their minds. The best of them matured into loyal, independent templars such as Javed. If he'd
made the effort, Hamanu could have learned to separate the weak from the strong before he put them to
the test, but it was easier—certainly quicker—to nail Kalfaen to the ground and see if he survived.

None of the Oba's wounded templars would survive. Those who remained welcomed the release
provided by yellow-robed surgeon-sergeants, usually with a quick slash through the jugular. The two
knife-wielding sergeants bowed low when Hamanu's shadow fell between them. Without a spoken word,
they scuttled off to join their comrades beside the Urikite wounded. They left their king to tread silently
among the bloody Gulgans, carefully severing the spiritual fibers that bound essence to substance.
Hamanu had subsumed one man's spirit already, and he neither wanted nor needed to add another name
to his army of grievance against Rajaat.

He was careful as well because these templars had belonged to Inenek and she could have easily
tampered with them. He himself had done so, from time to time, with the men and women he'd sent into
war.

With Nibenay between them, Urik and Gulg—the Don-King and the Oba—had rarely warred
with each other. While Borys lived, Rajaat's champions made war with their closest neighbors and
uneasy alliances with the rest of their peers. Gulg and Nibenay had never been anything but enemies, until
now—

Hamanu plunged his awareness deep into the ground and located himself. A chill shook his heart.
This battle had taken place far from any road, farther still from any village or oasis, deep within the barren
borderlands that Urik and Nibenay had contested for thirteen ages.

Hamanu didn't doubt that Gallard knew where Inenek had sent her templars, but he doubted that
his old nemesis knew she'd been trading secrets with Rajaat. In other times, communion with the
War-Bringer was the only crime that the champions would unanimously condemn and punish.

Times had changed. Everything had changed—except Hamanu, the Lion of Urik. As Hamanu
thought of dragons and champions, the last of the Gulg templars heaved a shuddering sigh and passed
from life into eternal sleep.

The Lion-King strode toward the Urik infirmary tended by his surgeon-sergeants. He granted
unlimited spells to the war-bureau healers in the aftermath of battle, for all the good it did the injured.
Working with second-hand magic, the surgeon-sergeants were barely competent in their craft. Templars
moaned and wailed when their wounds were tended. They healed with troublesome scars such as Pavek
bore across his otherwise handsome face.

Hamanu used the endless potential of the Unseen world when he chose to heal. As a restorer of
life and health, he was more than competent, but not even his flexible consciousness could attend the
needs of so many. He chose not to choose a lucky few among them. He chose, in truth, to keep his
compassion well-hidden from the templars who served him, and he defended his choice with the thought
that it was better that mortals not rely on his mercy.

Pale and streaked with clammy sweat, Kalfaen waited precisely where Hamanu had left him.

"Recount," the Lion commanded, tugging the Unseen strings laced through the elven youth's mind.

Hamanu's sorcery kept Kalfaen upright. His own will shaped the words and thoughts that the
king skimmed off the surface of his mind.

"There were children with them," Kalfaen explained.

Despite their strong tribal attachments to kith and kin, elves weren't sentimental about their
offspring. They'd abandon anything, anyone if the need arose. On the other side of the coin, a tribe with
children in tow appeared both prosperous and fearless. Kalfaen's thoughts were tinged with shame. He'd
succumbed to metal-coin bribes, women's charm, and the prejudices of his own race.

Hamanu returned that shame as a thousand sharp needles lancing Kalfaen's inmost self. The youth
gasped involuntarily.

"I die," he whispered.

Trust and prejudice together were just another two-sided coin. When the Lion of Urik trusted his
mortal templars, he got their prejudices in the bargain. Kalfaen wasn't the only Urikite who'd bought the
Gulgan deception. Hamanu's spell kept the youth alive as surely as it kept him standing.

"Recount," he demanded. "What next? What of the others? Recount!"

The rest was as simple as it was predictable: something had been slipped into the wine. Immune
to their own poisons, the false refugees had slipped away during the night, leaving the templars to death at
dawn. But the militant had drunk less than Kalfaen and the rest. He saw telltale dust on the eastern
horizon and sounded an alarm, then kicked each of them soundly in the flanks until they roused. By the
time Kalfaen was on his feet, the sound of hobnail sandals slapping the barren soil was all around them.

There was nothing more to say or learn. Hamanu released Kalfaen. The elf collapsed in
stages—to his knees, his elbows, his face. Belatedly, he clapped his long-fingered hands over his ears
and scalp, as if scraps of mortal flesh could have protected him from Hamanu's inquiry. He reeked of
vomit and worse, but he'd live. He'd been tempered in the Lion's fire and, having failed to die, was
doomed to survive.

Hamanu's thoughts were already moving away from the elf. Scanning the remains of the camp, he
looked for the missing pieces in the puzzle Inenek had left for him. Her plans had gone awry: he'd arrived
early, trying to save his templars, triggering her traps out of sequence. But she had meant for him to
come—why else tamper with the mind of his militant or set a whirlwind to wait for him in the Gray?

The militant, then, was the key. Inenek had meant for the templar to use his medallion to summon
him to this barren place, though not during the fighting. The poisoned wine and the netherworld disruption
were both designed to keep him away while his templars were slain.... While all save one of his templars
were slain....

Did the Oba think Urik's templars were fools? No war-bureau templar would admit to being the
sole survivor of monumental stupidity. He certainly wouldn't summon his immortal king to witness the
debacle. A militant would have needed a better reason.

"Stand down!" Hamanu's voice roared beyond the battlefield.

The surgeon-sergeants continued their work, but the templars who'd been gleaning armor,
weapons, and other valuables from the corpses of friend and foe alike stood at attention with their arms
at their sides. Hamanu's head throbbed—had been throbbing since he stepped from the netherworld. It
was a minor ache compared to the agonies he customarily ignored, and no surprise, considering the
unnatural power that had been expended in this unlikely place.

Massaging an illusory forehead with a human-seeming hand, Hamanu dissected his aches.
Sorcery and mind-bending, his and Inenek's, had caused much of the harm, and beneath that, the
War-Bringer's spoor. The smell of Rajaat was not just in the netherworld, where Hamanu had glimpsed
the Black as he battled Inenek's whirlwind, but here, amid the battle refuse.

Hamanu bestrode his lifeless militant, who'd fallen exactly where he'd stood when he raised his
medallion. The man's mind was cold; when a champion subsumed a mortal spirit, there was nothing left
behind for necromantic interrogation.

With a roar, the Lion of Urik cursed himself, Inenek, Rajaat, and the useless militant. He kicked
the corpse aside and knew before it struck ground again that he'd found his missing piece.