The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,22

places. I can take you to them.”

Behind my eyes I saw the folk of Corlane not as I had known them, but as my own people were: mutilated, faceless, and bleeding. I felt nothing for them; I felt nothing at all, except the need for vengeance.

“You can slaughter them as they slaughtered Deche.”

“Slaughter!” the yellow-haired man snorted. “Us? Us slaughtering trolls? Risking our lives for the likes of them… or you?”

There was a secret in his eyes. I saw that, and a challenge. He’d answer my questions if I had the guts, the gall, to ask them, but he didn’t think I’d survive the knowing. Perhaps, I wouldn’t have if he hadn’t tempered me, then and there, in his contempt.

“Why are you here?” I demanded, returning to my earlier questions. “Why do you feast with the dead as witnesses?

Why don’t you hunt and slaughter the trolls who hunted and slaughtered us?”

The yellow-haired man smiled. His teeth were stained, and one was sharpened to a fang point. “That’s for the Troll-Scorcher, boy. He’s the one, the only one, who slays trolls. We hunt ’em, boy, an’ hunt ’em an’ hunt ’em, but that’s all we do. He comes an’ scorches ’em. We touch one gray wart an’ we’d be the ones getting cindered-up from the inside out. I seen it happen, boy. This”—he cocked his callused thumb at poor Dorean—“this ain’t nothing, boy, compared to scorching. Trolls could take you an’ yours a thousand times, an’ it don’t matter to me, so long as there’s trolls for scorchin’ when he comes.”

I stood mute, strung between disgust and rage. The woman beside me squeezed my arm.

“It’s the truth, boy,” she said.

Swallowing my disgust, I let my rage speak, soft, slow, and cold. “Where is Myron of Yoram?” I asked. “When does the Troll-Scorcher come?” I thought I knew the answer, but I needed to hear it.

Another smile from the yellow-haired man. “Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day. We been following these trolls since the start of High Sun.” The grin soured. “He knows where we are, boy. He’ll come when it suits him, not before. Till then, we follow the trolls an’ we follow ’em close, so no man knows we’re here.”

“I’m a man,” I said, “I know.”

He drew a bone knife from his belt. “Trolls leave meat behind, not men.”

I should have died. Everything I loved and cherished had already died. Their shades called me through the darkness. I belonged with Deche, with my family, with my beloved. But my rage was stronger and my thirst for vengeance against trolls, men, and Myron of Yoram couldn’t be slaked by death. A voice I scarcely recognized as my own stirred in my throat.

“Take me with you,” I said. “Let me follow the trolls with you until the Troll-Scorcher comes.”

“A good-for-nothing farmer’s boy? What can you do, boy—besides dig furrows in the dirt?”

“I’ll keep him,” the woman, still beside me, said before I could speak.

“Jikkana! Jikkana! You break my heart,” another man cried out in mock grief. “He’s a boy. He won’t last ten nights in your bed!”

She spun around. “My second-best knife says he lasts longer than you did!”

Her knife was never at risk.

* * *

A lavender glow had appeared above the painted mountains on the eastern wall of Hamanu’s cloister. The quiet of night gave way to the barked commands of the day-watch officers taking their posts along the city’s walls. Another Urik morning had begun. Setting his stylus aside, Urik’s king massaged his cramped fingers. Bold, black characters marched precisely across several sheets of pearly vellum. Several more lay scrunched and scattered through the neglected garden. Two sheets remained untouched.

“I’ll need more vellum,” Hamanu mused, “and more time.”

Chapter Four

The heat of day had come again to Urik. Here and there, insect swarms raised raucous chorus. All other creatures, if they had the wit and freedom, sought shelter from the sun’s brutal strength. Throughout Hamanu’s domain, the din of commerce faded, and labor’s pace slowed to a snore. Mindless mirage sprites danced across the burning pavement of the city’s deserted market squares, while merchants of every variety dozed in the oppressive shade of their stalls.

Beyond the city walls, in the green fields and villages, workers set aside tools and napped beside their beasts. Farther away, in the gaping complex of mountain pits that was the Urikite obsidian mines, overseers drank cool, fruited tea beneath leather awnings and the wretched mass of slaves received a few hours’ rest and unrestricted access to