one thing is always true, whatever Rajaat does, his sorcery exacts a price. Each time you resort to the gifts Rajaat’s shadowfolk gave you, whether to quicken your spells or save a life, you slip deeper into Rajaat’s destiny.”
Sadira rose. She stood in the hot sunlight streaming through the open window. Her thoughts moved far below the surface of her mind. Hamanu left them alone. If the sorceress was cold, the light would warm her. If she thought her shadow-gifts would be restored, she’d be sorely disappointed. They’d be back tomorrow, and not one sunbeam sooner.
“I would know,” she said, too softly for mortal ears to overhear, but loud enough for the Lion-King. “I would know if I was one of them. It can’t be true. Hamanu is the liar, the deceiver.”
Silently, Hamanu came up behind her and laid his hands gently on her shoulders. She shuddered as thoughts of resistance rose, then fell, in her consciousness.
“Dear lady, I have neither need nor reason to deceive you. The War-Bringer’s sorcery lives within you as it lives within me. It makes patterns of light and shadow across our thoughts. We deceive ourselves.” For a fleeting moment, the lava lake was foremost in his thoughts. “We’ve deceived each other—”
Sadira cut him short. “I’m not like you. I went to the Pristine Tower because the Dragon had to be destroyed and the shadowfolk could give me the power to destroy him.”
The lake was gone; the cruel need to make her suffer for Windreaver’s loss had returned. “Rajaat’s shadowfolk. Rajaat’s shadowfolk helped you because Borys was the key to Rajaat’s prison. Once you destroyed Borys, Rajaat was free—”
“Tithian freed Rajaat! Tithian had the Dark Lens.”
“Tithian was aided by the same shadowfolk who took you to the Crystal Steeple.”
“I fought Rajaat. He would have killed me if Rkard hadn’t used the sun and the Dark Lens together against him. I cast the spells that put him back beneath the Black. I put his bones and the Dark Lens at the bottom of a lake of molten rock, where no one can retrieve them. How can you dare say that I’m Rajaat’s creation, that I serve him!”
Hamanu amused himself with her hair. Like Manu so many ages ago, Sadira had all the pieces in her hand, but she couldn’t see the pattern. Unlike Manu, she had someone older and wiser who would make the pattern for her. And he would show it to her, without mercy.
“Dear lady—what is obsidian?”
“Black glass. Shards of sharp black glass mined by slaves in Urik.”
“And before it was black glass?” Hamanu ignored her predictable provocations.
She didn’t know, so he told her—
“Obsidian is lava, dear lady. Molten rock. When lava cools very fast it becomes obsidian. You, dear lady—as you said—put Rajaat’s bones and the Dark Lens in a lava lake. Have you felt the Black, dear lady? It’s so very cold, and Rajaat, dear lady, is both beneath the Black and at the bottom of a lava lake. Think of the Dark Lens sealed in an obsidian mountain. Think of Rajaat—or Tithian, if you’d rather—quickening a spell.”
“No,” Sadira whispered. She would have collapsed if his hands hadn’t been there to support her. “No, my spells bind them.”
“Have you returned to Ur Draxa recently?” Hamanu thrust an image of the fog-bound lake into Sadira’s consciousness. “Your spells weaken each night.” Her pulse slowed until it and the sullen red crevasses of the image throbbed in unison. “Rajaat is a shadow of what he was, but with the War-Bringer, shadow is essence. Tithian serves him as Sacha Arala once served him, so blinded by his own arrogance that he doesn’t know he’s a fool. A foolish enemy is sometimes the most dangerous enemy of all—”
Without warning, Hamanu sundered Sadira’s mind. Rajaat’s last champion ransacked every memory she clung to, every wish she’d made since childhood, all in search of their creator’s shadow in her thoughts. He was as fast as he was brutal; the assault was finished before she screamed. Hamanu took her voice away.
Sadira writhed against the hands supporting her shoulders. Hamanu let her go. She reeled and stumbled her way to the window ledge where she crumpled into a small parcel of misery and fear. Her eyes and mouth were open wide. Her fingers fluttered against her voiceless throat.
“I had to know,” he explained. “I had to know what you’re capable of.”
Hamanu already knew what he was capable of—not merely the sundering of a woman’s mind, but the planting of a