The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King (14 page)

"You're needed in the throne chamber, O Mighty— Omniscience." With evident effort, Enver
resurrected the habits of a lifetime. "Will you want breakfast, Omniscience? A bath and a swim?"

A few of the filaments Hamanu had released when he awakened were, at last, winding back to
him, winding back in a single ominous thread. Templars had died at Todek village, died so fast and
thoroughly that their last thoughts revealed nothing, and the living minds that had summoned him were
uselessly overwrought.

Elven templars were already running the road from Todek to Urik. Their thoughts were all pulse
and breath. Coherent explanations would have to wait until they arrived at the palace.

Other filaments had traveled to a score of templars at a refugee outpost on Urik's southeastern
border. There, the filaments had been frayed and tangled by the same sort of interference the Oba of
Gulg had wielded in the southwest yesterday. In the hope that something would get through, Hamanu
widened the Dark Lens link between himself and his templars. He granted them whatever spells they'd
requested. But it wasn't spells those desperate minds wanted. They wanted him: Hamanu, the Lion-King,
their god and mighty leader, and they wanted him beside them.

There were limits to a champion's powers: Hamanu couldn't do everything. Though his thoughts
could travel through the netherworld to many places, many minds, and all at once, his body was bound to
a single place. To satisfy his beleaguered templars, he would have had to transport his entire self from the
palace, as he'd done when the Oba challenged him. But Enver wasn't the only numb-fingered templar in
the palace. A veritable knot of pleas and conscious filaments surrounded his throne chamber where, at
first guess, every living gold medallion high templar, along with the upper ranks of the civil and war
bureaus, was clamoring for his attention.

The Lion-King wasn't immune to difficult choices.

"Fresh clothes?"

Extraordinary days—of which this was surely one— required extraordinary displays and
extraordinary departures from routine. Hamanu raised one dark eyebrow. "Dear Enver," he reprimanded
softly and, while he had the dwarf's attention, remade his illusions, adding substantially to his height and
transforming his drab, wrinkled garments into state robes of unadorned ebony silk, as befitted a somber
occasion. "Clothes, I think, will be the least of our problems today."

Hamanu strode past his steward's slack-jawed bewilderment, slashed an opening into the Gray
netherworld, and, one stride later, emerged onto the marble-tiled dais of his unbeloved, jewel-encrusted
throne. He needed no magic, no mind-bending sleight to get his templars' attention. The sight of him was
enough to halt every conversation. Hamanu swept his consciousness across their marveling minds,
collecting eighty different savors of apprehension and doubt.

The six civil-bureau janitors, whose duty was to stand beside the empty throne and keep the
great lantern shining above it, were the first templars to recover their poise. In practiced unison, they
pounded spear butts loudly on the floor and slapped their leather-armored breasts. Then the orator who
shared throne-chamber duty with them cleared her throat.

"Hail, O Mighty King, O Mighty Hamanu! Water-Wealth, Maker of Oceans. King of the—"

Mighty Hamanu shot her a look that took her voice away.

The chamber fell silent, except for the creaking of the slave-worked treadmills and the network of
ropes and pulleys that ran from the treadmills to huge red-and-gold fans. At this late hour of the morning,
the heat of day beat down on the roof, and nothing except sorcery could cool the chamber and the
crowd together.

For his part, Hamanu drank down every scent, every taste born in air or thought. His champion's
eyes took in each familiar face without blinking. There was Javed, clad in his usual black and leaning
nonchalantly against a pillar. Javed leaned because the wounds in his leg ached today— Hamanu felt the
pain. But Javed was a champion, too, Hero of Urik, and, like the Lion-King, had appearances to
maintain. Pavek stood near the door, not because he'd arrived late, but because no matter how carefully
and properly his house-servants dressed him, he'd always be a misfit in this congregation. He'd migrated,
by choice, to the rear, where he hoped his high templar peers wouldn't notice him.

Hamanu had other favorites: Xerake with her ebony cane; the Plucrataes heir, eleventh of his
lineage to bear a scholar's medallion and more nearsighted than any of his ancestors; and a score of
others. His favorites were accustomed to his presence. Their minds opened at the slightest pressure.
They were ready, if not quite willing, to speak their concerns aloud. The rest, knowing that the Lion's
favorites were also lightning rods for his wrath, were more than willing to wait.

He let them all wait longer. On the distant southeastern border, a sergeant's despair had burst
through the netherworld interference.

Hear me, O Mighty Hamanu!

The Lion-King cast a minor pall over his throne chamber. An eerie quiet spread through the
crowd. Conversation, movement, and—most important for a champion who was needed elsewhere, but
couldn't be seen with his vacant-eyed attention focused in that elsewhere—memory ceased around him.

I hear you—Hamanu examined the trembling mote of consciousness and found a name—
Andelimi. I see you, Andelimi. Take heart.

His words reassured the templar, but they weren't the truth. Hamanu glimpsed the southeast
border through a woman's eyes. Her vision was not as sharp as his own would be, but it was sharp
enough: black scum dulled an expanse of sand and salt that should been painfully bright.

An army of the undead, he said in Andelimi's mind, because it reassured her to hear the truth of
her own fears.

We cannot control them, O Mighty King.

Controlling the undead—of all the mysteries Rajaat's Dark Lens perpetrated, that one remained
opaque. Like the other champions, through sorcery Hamanu held vast power over death in all its forms.
He could inflict death in countless ways and negate it as well, but always at great cost to his
ever-metamorphosing self. Not so his templars, whose borrowed magic had its origin in the Dark Lens
and was fundamentally different from the sorcery Rajaat had bestowed on his champions.

The magic his templar syphoned from the Dark Lens neither hastened the dragon metamorphosis
nor degraded ordinary life into ash. And, since the undead didn't hunger, didn't thirst, didn't suffer, the
champions often relied on their living templars' ability to raise the casualties of earlier battles whenever it
seemed that marching a mass of bodies at an enemy would insure victory.

Which wasn't often.

Once a templar had the undead raised and moving, he or she faced the chance that someone else
would usurp control of them. Not an equal chance, of course. Some living minds were simply better at
controlling undead, and all other aspects being equal, a more experienced templar—not to mention a
more experienced priest, druid, sorcerer, or champion could usurp the undead from a novice.

Hamanu personally tested his templars for undead aptitude and made certain the ones who had it
got the training they needed. The war bureau wouldn't have allowed Andelimi and the twenty other
templars in her maniple out the gates without an apt and trained necromant templar among
them—especially in the southeast, where Urik's land abutted Giustenal.

Hamanu stirred Andelimi's thoughts. Where is your necromant?
Rihaen tried, O Mighty King, she assured him. Hodit, too.

Her eyes pulled down to the hard-packed dirt to the left of her feet; Hamanu seized control of
her body and turned her toward the right. Andelimi was a war-bureau sergeant, a veteran of two
decade's worth of campaign. She knew better than to fight her king, but instinct ran deeper than intellect.
She'd rather die than look to her right. Hamanu kept her eyes open long enough to see what he needed.

Andelimi's thoughts were bleak. She'd barely begun to mourn. The dead elf had been her lover,
the father of her children, the taste of sweet water on her tongue.

Rihaen had tried to turn the undead army, but the same champion who'd sundered the link
between Urik's templars and Urik's king had roused these particular corpses. Instead of usurping
Giustenal's minions, Rihaen had been usurped by them. His heart had stopped, and he'd become undead
himself, under another mind's control. Hodit, who was also apt and trained, had—foolishly—tried to turn
Rihaen and suffered the same fate.

The remaining templars of the maniple, including Andelimi, had overcome their own undead. It
could be done without recourse to magic, and every templar carried the herbs, the oils, or the weapons
to do it. But what the raiser of Giustenal's undead army had done to Rihaen and Hodit could not be
undone. For them, the curse of undeath was irrevocable. Their bodies had fallen apart. Nothing
recognizable was left of Andelimi's beloved except a necromant's silver medallion and several strands of
his long, brown hair, all floating on a pool of putrid gore.

For the honor of his own ancient memories of Deche and Dorean, Hamanu would have left
Andelimi alone with her grief. But it had been her anguish that cut through Dregoth's interference, and for
the sake of Urik, he could show her no mercy.

Andelimi!

She crumpled to the ground; he thrust her to her feet.

Where are the others of your maniple? Who survives?

Hamanu would not make her look at Rihaen again, but he needed to see. He forced her eyes
open, then blinked away her tears. He found the fifteen surviving templars in a line behind Andelimi. Their
varied medallions hung exposed against their breasts. Defeat was written on their faces because he had
not heard their pleas in time. They knew what was happening—that he'd taken possession of
Andelimi—and that it had happened too late.

"We stand, O Mighty Lion! We fight, O Great Hamanu!" the maniple's adjutant shouted to the
king he knew was watching him through a woman's eyes. He saluted with a bruising thump on his breast.
"Your templars will not fail you!"

The adjutant's thoughts were white and spongy. His hand trembled when he lowered it. Urik's
templars didn't have a prayer of winning against the undead legion sprawled before them, and the
adjutant knew it. He and Andelimi wished with all their hearts that death—clean, eternal death— would
be theirs this afternoon.

They'd get their wish only if Hamanu slew them where they stood and drained their essence,
furthering his own metamorphosis.

Hamanu pondered the bitter irony: only living champions were afflicted by the dragon
metamorphosis. Dregoth was as undead as the army he'd raised, utterly unable to become a dragon, will
he or nill he. There was no limit on Dregoth's sorcery except the scarcity of life in his underground city.

The very-much-alive Lion of Urik tested the netherworld with a thought, confirming his
suspicions. Giustenal's champion had raised the undead army creeping toward Urik. Hamanu could turn
them, mind by empty mind, but he'd have to fight for each one, and victory's price was unthinkably high.

"You will retreat," he told the maniple with Andelimi's voice.

They weren't reassured. Undead marched slowly but relentlessly; they never tired, never rested.
Only elves could outrun them—unless there were elves among the undead.

"Better to stand and fight." A slow-moving dwarf muttered loudly.

He stood with his fists defiant on his hips. Whatever death Hamanu chose for him—his
undercurrent thoughts were clear—it would be preferable to dwarven undeath with its additional banshee
curse of an unfulfilled life-focus. In that, the dwarf was mistaken. The Lion-King could craft fates far
worse than undeath—as Windreaver would attest— but Hamanu let the challenge pass. Urik's fate hung
in the balance, and Urik was more important than teaching a fool-hearted dwarf an eternal lesson.

While the adjutant oversaw the assembling of a small pile of waterskins, Hamanu thrust deeper
into Andelimi's consciousness, impressing into her memory the shapes and syllables of the Dark Lens
spell he wanted her to cast. If grief had not already numbed her mind, the mind-bending shock would
have driven her mad. As it was, Hamanu's presence was only another interlude in an already endless
nightmare.

When the waterskin pile was complete and the arcane knowledge imparted, Hamanu made
Andelimi speak again: "After the spell is cast, you will each take up your waterskins again and
begin walking toward the north and west. With every step, a drop of water will fall from your
fingertip to the ground. When the undead walk where you have walked, the lifeless blood in their
lifeless veins will burst into flames."

" There is not enough water here to see us back to our outpost!" the dwarf interrupted, still
hoping for a clean death. "The undead will engulf us—"

"There is a small oasis north of here—"

The maniple knew it well, though it was not marked on any official map. They collected regular
bribes from the runaway slaves it sheltered. It was a minor corruption of the sort Hamanu had tolerated
for thirteen ages.

"Its spring has water enough to hold the undead at bay—simply fill your waterskins from
the spring, and then walk around the oasis. And after the undead army has marched past..."
Hamanu narrowed Andelimi's eyes and made her smile. A lion's fangs appeared where her teeth should
have been. "After the undead army has passed, burn the oasis and bring the vagrants back to Urik
for the punishment they deserve."

They'd obey, these templars he was trying to save. No power under the bloody sun would
protect them otherwise. Hamanu, their king, deserved his cruel, capricious reputation. They'd march to
Urik because it had been known for thirteen ages that there was no way for a yellow-robe templar to
hide from the Lion of Urik. They could bury their medallions, break them, or burn diem, and it wouldn't
save them. Once his mind had touched theirs, he could find them, and so, they would obey-Never
imagining that if Dregoth's army reached Urik, there might not be a Lion left to find them.