The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,114
gonna be all right, isn’t it?” the boy asked, looking up at him. “The Lion’ll take care of ’em, won’t he?”
“He’ll try,” Hamanu said.
He was spared from saying more when the boy’s mother called, “Ranci!” and held out her hand.
“Whim of the Lion,” Hamanu said to the boy’s shadow as he darted around the fountain. “He’ll try to save them all.”
The Lion-King put his fountain behind him and wandered the streets of his city. Pools of light spilled out of every tavern doorway where folk came together to either find courage or lose fear at the bottom of a mug. Taverns didn’t have anything to soothe a champion’s nerves. Nothing he could eat or drink would make this night shorter. Nothing he could imagine would make it easier.
Pavek’s thoughts from a few long nights ago came back to him: Surely my king needs friends about him tonight. Hamanu hadn’t wanted friends that night, and wasn’t entirely certain he wanted them now. But he’d intended from the beginning to give his history to the druid-templar who was—he cocked his head and listened through the crowded melange of thoughts and voices—among friends.
Hamanu wandered back toward the palace, toward the templars’ quarter with its crisscross maze of identical red-and-yellow striped facades on identical streets. Throughout the ages, the rivalries within Urik’s templar bureaus had been as intense and deadly as the rivalries among Rajaat’s champions. Nothing Hamanu could have done would have put an end to rivalry, but by keeping the bulk of his templars in yellow robes and all of them in identical dwellings in just one quarter of the city, he’d done as much as one man could to lessen the damage rivalries caused.
The templars’ quarter was busier than the rest of the city. Although the war bureau commanded all of Urik’s forces-including the lower and middle ranks of the civil bureau once the city went on a war footing—their families and households were exempt from the militia levies. A good many of them, as well, had duties that kept them legitimately inside the walls this night. And, since these were Hamanu’s templars, there were some who should have been elsewhere but had bribed, intimidated, and extorted themselves out of harm’s way.
They hoped.
Within his slight-framed illusion, Hamanu remained Hamanu. His champion’s ears listened through the walls as he walked and yanked the most flagrant of his weedy templars as he passed their dwellings. He filled their minds with morbid guilt and lethal nightmares; he savored their anguish as they died. Then he calmed his vengeful heart and put his fist on the door of Pavek’s house.
He had to knock twice before he heard someone moving toward the door. Even then, he wasn’t certain the woman was coming to open it or was chasing a child who’d strayed into the vestibule. With or without his preternatural senses, Pavek’s house was one of the noisiest dwellings in the templar quarter. Hamanu was about to attract Pavek’s attention through his gold medallion when, at last, he heard footsteps on the interior stairs, and the door swung open.
It was the woman he’d heard before, and she did have a damp and writhing child straddling her hip. She wasn’t a slave—Pavek didn’t keep slaves—and she wasn’t one of the servants Hamanu had hired to open the house before Pavek returned to Urik from Quraite. She wasn’t a Quraite druid, either; druidry left its mark on those who practiced it, as did any magical or Unseen art, and she didn’t bear it. Stirring her thoughts gently, Hamanu was surprised to discover she was simply a woman who’d lost her man to the second levy and, reduced to scrounging for herself and her child, had made the fateful mistake of offering herself to a certain scar-faced man.
By the look and sound of the dwelling, she was far from the only stray Pavek had brought home.
“I wish to speak to the high templar, Pavek,” Hamanu said.
He was prepared to stir her thoughts to obedience, but that was unnecessary. Strangers, it seemed, came to this door all the time and, disguised as he was in Manu’s homespun garments, the woman assumed he was another stray like her.
“The lord-templar’s in the atrium. I’ll take you to him—”
Hamanu raised his hand to stop her. There was more life in this place than he wished to have around him tonight. “I have something for him. If you’ll fetch him for me, I’ll give it to him and be gone.”