The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,11
a woman stood where you’re standing and removed a message from a bead as large as your thumb! A useful message, to be sure—Nibenay’s sent agafari staves to Giustenal—but someone downstairs was more than careless, and I want that someone sent to the obsidian pits.”
Enver knew which investigator had been in charge of the waiting room: the face floated instantly to the surface of the dwarf’s mind, along with numerous details of the templar’s currently troubled life—his mother had died, his father was ailing, his wife was pregnant, and his piles were painfully swollen—none of which mattered to Hamanu.
“To the pits, dear Enver,” he said coldly.
And Enver, who surely knew he had no private thoughts when he stood before his king, nodded quickly. “To the pits, immediately, Omniscience.” Not as a slave, as Hamanu had intended, but as an overseer, with his sleeve threads intact. The image was crystal clear in Enver’s mind.
Hamanu didn’t quibble. Left to his own devices, his rule over Urik would be rigid and far too harsh for mortal survival. Left to his own devices, he’d rule over a realm of the undead, as Dregoth did beneath Giustenal. Instead, Hamanu culled his templars, generation after generation, plucking out the debauched, the perverse, and the cruel—like the late Elabon Escrissar, who’d contributed to the latest Nibenese pickle—for his personal amusement. The others, the foursquare, almost-upright folk, he selected to translate his unforgiving harshness into bearable justice.
Enver, being one of the latter, was indeed too valuable to exile off to the Soleuse farmlands. Hamanu tolerated Enver’s benign deceit as he’d tolerated Escrissar’s malignancy. Both were essential parts of his thousand-year reign in the yellow-walled city. He’d have to find someone else for Soleuse.
In the meantime, the slaves had finished their labor. All that remained of Renady Soleuse was a fading wet spot beneath the brutal sun.
Morning was nearly afternoon when Hamanu prepared to go downstairs and deal with his city’s larger and more public affairs. Burnished armor and robes of state had been laid out for his approval, which he gave, as he almost invariably did, with no more than a cursory glance at his wardrobe.
A patterned silk canopy had been erected over the pool where he would bathe alone, completely without attendants. It was time, once again, for loyal Enver to depart.
“I await your next summons, Omniscience,” the dwarf assured him as he herded the slaves down the stairs.
Hamanu waited until all his senses, natural and preternatural, were quiet and he knew he was alone. A shimmering sphere shrouded his right hand as he stood up from his table: a shimmering sphere from which a black talon as long as an elf’s forefinger emerged. With it, Hamanu scored the air in front of him, as if it were a carcass hung for gutting and butchering.
Mist seeped from the otherwise invisible wound, then, thrusting both hands into the mist, Hamanu widened the gap. Miniature gray clouds billowed momentarily around his forearms. When the sun had boiled them away, Hamanu held a carefully folded robe that was, by color and cloth, a perfect match for the robe he wore, likewise the linen and sandals piled atop the silk, He dropped the sandals at once and kicked one under the table. He dropped the silk after he’d shaken out the folds, and let the linen fall on top of it.
When Hamanu was satisfied that he’d created the impression of a heedless king shedding garments without regard for their worth, the dazzling sphere reappeared around his right hand. It grew quickly, encompassing first his arm and shoulder, finally all-of him, including his head. The man-shaped shimmer swelled until it was half again as tall as Hamanu, the human man, had been. Then, as quickly as it had appeared and spread, the dazzle was gone, and a creature like no other in the city, nor anywhere beneath the bloody sun, stood in his place.
Stark naked, Hamanu looked down upon what he had become. He fought nausea, or the memory of nausea, since even so minor a mortality as nausea had been denied to him for ages. Rajaat, the War-Bringer, the first sorcerer, had seen to that. But Rajaat had not made Hamanu what he was. Rajaat had had a vision, Hamanu had had another, and for the last thirteen ages, Hamanu’s vision had prevailed.
His skin was pure black, a dull, fathomless shade of ash and soot, stretched taut over a scaffold of bones too long, too thick, too misshapen to be counted