The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,26

of deference to his king—because the bug could carry him faster than his own venerable legs.

The green haze of Urik’s irrigated farmland hugged the forward horizon in Javed’s sight.

Great One, grant me swift passage through Modekan, to the gates of Urik, and beyond.

Templars—even exalted commandants, like Javed, or gold-wearers, like Pavek—could use their medallions to communicate directly with their king, but never with each other. If the commandant wanted to avoid a confrontation with the civil-bureau templars who stood watch over the wheel-spoke roads into Urik, much less if he wanted to ride a racing kank clear to the gates of Hamanu’s palace itself, the Lion of Urik would have to make the arrangements.

There were laws that not even Javed was above, and foremost among them was Hamanu’s injunction against beasts of burden on his city’s immaculate streets. It was a wise law that did more than improve the sight and scent of Urik; it kept down the vermin and disease as well. But a man did not reign for thirteen ages without learning when to set his most cherished laws aside.

Granted, Hamanu said. He broke their Unseen connection.

Hamanu summoned the distinctive rooftops of the Modekan barracks from his memory and made them real. Peering out of the netherworld, he watched a score of drowsy, yellow-robed templars clutch their medallions in shock. As one, they turned bloodless faces toward the sky where, by the Lion’s whim, a pair of slitted, sulphurous eyes had opened above them.

“The Champion of Urik approaches.”

Hamanu projected his voice from the palace to the village, where every templar heard it, and the rest of Modekan, too. Cheers went up, and the village gong began a frantic clanging. If he weren’t absolutely confident of Javed’s loyalty, Hamanu would have been greatly displeased by the elf’s popularity. He had to shout his commands.

“The Champion is not to be challenged or impeded. Clear the road to Urik for his swift passage.”

Discipline was lax in the village barracks: half the templars dropped to their knees; the rest thumped their breasts in salute. But Hamanu’s will would be carried out—he caressed each and every templar’s spirit with the razor edge of his wrath before he closed his eyes. The king made a similar appearance above Urik’s southern gate before he blinked and brought his focus back to the cloister.

Pavek still stared at him. Though medallion conversation was inviolate, Pavek had heard the spoken commands and drawn his own conclusions.

“Commandant Javed, Great One?” he asked. “Is Urik in danger, Great One?” The other questions in Pavek’s mind—Is that why you summoned me? Do you expect me to try to summon the guardian?—went unspoken, though not, of course, unheard.

“You may judge for yourself, Pavek,” Hamanu suggested, both generous and demanding. He let the human glamour fade from his eyes and, at last, the templar looked away.

There was enough time for the palace slaves to bathe Pavek with scented soaps and clothe him in finery from the king’s own wardrobe. The silks skimmed Pavek’s shoulders and fell a fashionable length against his arms and legs. By measurement alone, Pavek cut a commanding figure, but he had no majesty. He followed Hamanu into an audience chamber looking exactly like what he was: a common man in borrowed clothes.

The sorcerer-kings, of which Hamanu was one, had built palaces with monumental throne halls meant to belittle the mortals who entered them. Hamanu’s hall had a jewel-encrusted throne that made his back ache no matter how he disguised his body. Even so, circumstance occasionally demanded that he receive supplicants in his fullest panoply, and ache. He wondered, sometimes, how the others endured it—if they knew some sleight of sorcery he’d overlooked or if they simply suffered less because they did not starve themselves and carried more flesh on their immortal bones.

Most likely, the others enjoyed their spectacles, as Hamanu did not. He’d had little enough in common with his peers in the beginning, and nothing had since brought them closer together. He’d seen less of them than he saw of the slaves who clipped his illusory toenails. In truth, Hamanu was a peer unto himself alone. His closest companions were his own thoughts, and the places where he actually dwelt reflected that isolation.

Hamanu preferred to conduct Urik’s state affairs in an austere chamber where a pair of freestanding, ever-luminous torches, a marble bench, and a black boulder set in fine, gray sand were the only furnishings. Water rippled magically over the boulder and, as Hamanu entered the chamber,