The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,14
too much magic, draw too much spell-quickening power from the Dark Lens or any other source, and become the next dragon.
The prospect might have tempted some of them—though never Hamanu—if they hadn’t all watched helplessly as a maddened, mindless Borys ravaged the heartland immediately after they’d cast the spells to complete his metamorphosis. For his first hundred years, wherever Borys went, he sucked the life out of everything. When he was done, the heartland was the parched, blasted barren place it remained to this day.
Dregoth had already succumbed to temptation and drawn the wrath of his immortal peers. Borys had rounded them up for a second time, and they’d found a fitting eternal punishment for immortal hubris: they’d ruined his city and stripped all living flesh from the proud Ravager of Giants. He remained the champion he’d been on the day of his death, but he’d never be anything more. Dregoth was what folk called undead, kaiskarga in the halfling tongue, the oldest of the many languages Hamanu knew.
In shame, and under the threat of worse punishment, Dregoth had dwelt for ages beneath his ruined city. Mortal chroniclers forgot Dregoth, but his peers remembered—especially Uyness of Waverly, whom living mortals had called Abalach-Re, Queen of Raam, and whom Dregoth remembered as his betrayer.
Now Uyness was dead with Borys, and Dregoth wanted Raam’s empty throne. Hamanu reasoned that Nibenay might well support Giustenal’s ambitions in that direction with agafari staves, because, whether or not he conquered every empty-throned city, Dregoth could never become another dragon as Borys had been. Like as not, Gallard would support Dregoth no matter which city the undead champion had designs upon. Like as not, Gallard—who fancied himself the most subtle of Rajaat’s champions-hoped there’d come a day when he and Dregoth were the only champions left. If the price of attaining dragonkind was the annihilation of every mortal life in a city or three, how much easier to pay when none of the cities in peril were one’s own?
Gallard had that much conscience, at least. Kalak hadn’t hesitated at the thought of consuming Tyr. That’s what got him killed by his own subject citizens and templars, but Kalak of Tyr had been a fool and freebooter from the start, long before the champions were created.
And Hamanu of Urik—what had he been before he was an immortal champion?
Hamanu’s thoughts sluiced sideways. In his mind’s eye, he was suddenly far away from his precious city. He stood in another place, another time: a field of golden-ripe himali grain surrounded by hardworking kith and kin. Warm summer breezes lifted his hair and dried the sweat on his back. There was a hay rake in his youthful hands. A youngster—a brother too small to cut grain or rake—sat nearby with reed pipes against his lips, diverting the harvesters as they labored. The brother’s tune was lost to time along with his name. But the dark-haired, gray-eyed maiden who stood behind the boy in memory, swaying in the music’s rhythm, her name would never be forgotten while the Lion-King lived: Dorean.
For Dorean, Hamanu had become a man in his family’s eyes. For him, Dorean had become a woman. The life that had once lain before them, filled with fields of grain, growing children, and a love that never needed words, was the only life Hamanu had ever wanted. If he’d done right by Dorean, if he’d protected her, as a man was sworn to do, he never would have seen the walls of Urik.
His body would lie beside hers, turned to dust and dirt a hundred times over.
A shadow wind sundered Hamanu’s memory. He released the balustrade and turned around. A dusty breeze took shape, as tall as he was, yet far broader.
“Windreaver,” he said flatly as the shape became substantial and the last commander of the troll army stood between him and the pool.
As big as half-giants, as clever as elves or dwarves, trolls had been formidable enemies for a champion-led army, and Windreaver had been—and remained—the most formidable of the trolls. He’d lived and fought for two ages before he and a fifty-year-old Hamanu faced each other and Windreaver fought his last battle. A wispy curtain of silver hair hung around his swept-back ears, and the wrinkles above his bald brow were as pronounced as the brow ridge itself. Age had not dulled Windreaver’s obsidian eyes. They were as bright, black, and sharp on the palace roof as they had been on the windswept cliff high above a wracken