The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,36
for my fellows’ hands and shouted our champion’s name.
We all shouted as if Guthay were rising. Bult hit the dust with his eyes squeezed shut. Nothing happened—but, nothing ever happened when a poor, mortal human called Myron of Yoram.
When the time came and the dark magic was mine, I gave all my templars medallions—lumps of fired clay for most of them, but hardened with my breath, so they’d never doubt that I could hear them, see them. No less than Jikkana, Bult was my teacher; he taught me that in the field, fear, morale, and discipline are different words for the same thing.
And I learned from my younger self, too. If Myron of Yoram had been half a man to begin with, he’d have heard Bult that day. He’d have stirred himself across the netherworld—I know he had the power, what he lacked was will and wit—and he’d have struck me down with the eyes of fire.
It was not a mistake I’ve ever made. When my templars call me, my will is theirs; and when they rebel or rise against me, I reduce them to grease and ash, as if they’d never been born.
Not Myron of Yoram. I killed Jikkana, my solitary troll, and ten thousand others since, but Myron of Yoram killed Bult.
“It’s outrage,” I said softly while Bult still struggled to catch our champion’s attention. “We stand by, human men and women, while trolls ravage our own folk. If we don’t run, we howl at the moon, like beasts, hoping, year after futile year, that someone will hear us, that someone cares enough to come and kill our enemies for us. What sort of man do we serve? What sort of man is Myron of Yoram, Myron Troll-Scorcher? It’s been ages since he led his army to victory in the Kreegills. Now he hoards trolls like a miser hoarding metal. He doesn’t want victory—he wants his eyes of fire to burn slow from now until eternity!”
They heard me; my fellows heard me. They let go of one another’s hands, shook their heads, and whispered among themselves. I couldn’t hear their words, but—O Whim of the Lion—if only I’d listened to myself! I held every piece of the puzzle in the palm of my hand, but it slipped away. Instead of rallying them all—humans, trolls, and every other race alike—against Rajaat’s champions, I took the club they returned to me and smashed it into the side of Bult’s yellow-haired head.
Chapter Six
“It’s been ages since Guthay wore two crowns for seven days, and then, a single crown for another three nights. Ten nights together, Omniscience! Not since the Year of Ral’s Vengeance in the 177th King’s Age,” Enver said, reading from a freshly written scroll. “The high bureau scholars have taken half a quinth to research the archives, but they’ve at last confirmed what you, Omniscience, no doubt, remembered.”
Hamanu nodded, not because he agreed, but because when Enver’s recitation slowed, it was time for Enver’s king to nod his head… and recall what the dwarf had said. Hamanu did pay attention to what his executor told him, and certain words or intonations would prick him to instant awareness. For the rest, though, Hamanu remembered faster than Enver recited. He listened with an empty ear, gathering words the way a drip bucket gathered water, until it was time to nod, and remember.
Having nodded and remembered, Hamanu’s thoughts went wandering again as Enver read what the scholars had dug out of the Urik archives. He had not recalled the exact date when Guthay had put on her last ten-night performance—the systematic reckoning of years and ages meant little to him anymore—but he certainly remembered the event, two years after Borys, Butcher of Dwarves, had become Borys, Dragon of Tyr. That year, whole swaths of the heartland had turned gray with sorcerous ash, but, yes, Guthay had promised water in abundance and kept her promise.
As she’d kept it this year.
Fifty-eight days ago—twenty days after Guthay had shed her last crown—the gullies north of Urik had begun to fill. Ten days later, every cultivated field had received twice its allotment of silt-rich water. At the head of a planting army larger than the first military levy, which Commandant Javed drilled on the southern high ground, the Lion-King had marched into the pondlike fields and with back-breaking, dawn-to-dusk labor, planted a year’s worth of hope.
The precious water flowed for another ten days. Gullies overflowed their banks. Walls of sun-baked brick dissolved into mounds of slick,