The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,29
permit that, none of us can. Think about it, Hamanu. Think seriously about it.
The Shadow-King’s image vanished in the heat of Hamanu’s curse. The shard of Rajaat’s sorcery was an unexpected, unpleasant proof of Gallard’s claim. If Rajaat was making sorcery in the material world, then the Hollow was weakening; they’d gone too long without a dragon maintaining it. But if Gallard had found a spell that tempered the madness of dragon creation, Gallard wouldn’t be offering it to him.
Reluctantly, Hamanu reconsidered Windreaver’s recounting of the Gnome-Bane’s strategy. There were three ways to transform a champion into a dragon: his peers pells to accelerate his metamorphosis, he could quicken so many sorcerous spells that he’d transform himself, or—following Kalak of Tyr’s despicable example—he could gorge himself on the death of his entire city. Most likely, Gallard hoped to implement all three.
“Summon the first levy of my armies,” Hamanu told Javed softly, calmly. If he’d allowed any fraction of his own passion into his words, the sounds would have slain both mortals. “Let it be known that everyone who relies on Urik for protection will rally to Urik’s defense—or suffer dire consequences.”
“Who do we fight, Great One?” Javed asked, his voice cracked and weak from poison.
“Do as I command, Javed,” Hamanu scolded his most-trusted officer. “Summon my levy.”
Wisely, the elf nodded and bowed as he rose to his feet. “As you will, Great One. As you command.”
He retreated to the bronze door, which Hamanu opened with a thought. Pavek followed.
“Not you. Not yet.”
Pavek dropped again to his knees. “Your will, Great One.”
“I need you here, in the palace, Pavek, but I need your druid friends as well. Send a message to Quraite. Send a message to Telhami, if you will. Tell her it’s time, Pavek; the end of time.”
“If Urik’s danger is Quraite’s danger, Great One, then I’m sure she already knows. She says there’s only one guardian spirit for all of Athas, and she is part of it now,” Pavek said, still on his knees with his head tightly bowed.
There were many tastes and textures swirling in the young man’s thoughts, but loathing was not among them. Leaning forward, Hamanu hooked a talon under Pavek’s chin, nudging gently until he could see the troubled face his templar strove to conceal. Then, with another talon, he traced the scar across Pavek’s face.
“And if it’s my danger, and only mine, what then, Pavek?”
Once again, Pavek’s mind cleared, like still water on a windless day. Short of slaying the man, there was no way for Hamanu to extract an answer to his question from Pavek’s thoughts. Murder was easy; lowering his hand, letting Pavek rise unsteadily to his feet and leave the chamber alive—that was the hardest thing Hamanu had done in a generation.
Windreaver! Hamanu cast the name into the netherworld along with Gallard’s parchment. Windreaver! Now!
He sat down on the marble bench, which, like the stone bench in his cloister, was strong enough to support his true weight and proportions. Water flowed again over the boulder and down the walls. The Lion-King buried his grotesque face in his malformed hands and tried not to think, or plan, or dread until the air quickened, and the troll appeared.
“I hear, and I obey,” Windreaver said. “I am the doomed servant of a doomed fool.”
Hamanu didn’t rise to the bait. “Did you search the Nibenese camp?”
“Of course. Four hundred ugly women surrounded by four thousand uglier men.”
“Nothing more?” Hamanu betrayed nothing of his suspicions, his anger.
“Nothing, O Mighty One. Enlighten me, O Mighty One: What do you think I should have found?”
“This!” Hamanu brandished the remnant of the obsidian shard. It had shrunk to a fraction of its former size, and the glass was pitted with soot. The troll leapt back, as if he still had life and substance.
“It was not there,” Windreaver insisted, no longer insolent. “I would have known—”
“Nonsense!” Hamanu hurled the shard at his minion; it vanished at the top of its arc, swallowed by the Gray. “You’ve grown deaf and blind, Windreaver—worse, you’ve grown careless.”
“Never… not where he’s concerned. I’d know the War-Bringer’s scent anywhere.”
Hamanu said nothing, merely waited for the troll to hear own his folly and self-deception. Windreaver’s hatred for the War-Bringer was greater than his hatred for the Troll-Scorcher but he hadn’t sensed the shard before Hamanu revealed it. He’d dreamed of watching the champions destroy each other, and his dreams had, indeed, left him careless.
“Is Rajaat free?” the troll asked. “The Dark Lens—it’s where the Tyrian sorceress