The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,40

weapons met a different fate. They burst into short-lived flames when they breached his infernal aura.

With their king wreaking havoc among their enemies, the Urikite templars rallied. They surged forward in a score of close-fought skirmishes. Hamanu welcomed their renewed courage; he’d reward them with their lives. And as for the militant who led them…

His leonine ears flicked as the golden sword brought death to another five fighters. He listened for two particular sounds: the militant’s pulse, and the clang of his metal sword.

One lapse of leadership might be forgiven—if the militant’s panic hadn’t been stronger than Inenek’s Unseen interference, Hamanu wouldn’t have known that his templars needed him. A second lapse would be unforgivable, unsurvivable. Hamanu strained his hearing. He found half of what he listened for: a mortal heart pounding hard beneath a bronze medallion.

Bakheer! Hamanu seized the militant’s disarrayed thoughts and rattled them. Fight, Bakheer.

Hamanu didn’t enjoy killing his own templars. At the very least, it was a waste of mortal life. At the worst, because of the medallion-forged bond he shared with them, their deaths brought his darkest appetites to the fore. Fight the enemy, Bakheer. Fight to the death… or face me.

A sane man would have listened, would have understood and thrown himself at Inenek’s minions, but Bakheer was no longer sane. What Inenek had begun, Hamanu inadvertently finished. Bakheer’s mind shattered. His heart beat one final time, and his spirit flared in the instant before Rajaat’s last champion savored it.

The tiny morsel of mortality tantalized Hamanu’s much-denied appetites. For a moment, there were neither Urikites nor enemies on the field before him, only aching need, and the motes of life that would sate it.

The Lion of Urik roared words too loud and angry for mortal ears to interpret: “Damn you!”

Hamanu turned away from temptation, away from the battlefield. Abandoning his templars, he cast himself into the netherworld… where a whirlwind awaited him.

Inenek had guessed his choice—his predictable weakness—and caught him in a mind-bender’s trap. Stripped of all his glamour, reduced to a spindly shadow of his unnatural form, Hamanu, was sucked away from his templars. He wasn’t surprised when a black maw appeared suddenly, far below his feet, growing larger with each howling spiral.

Inenek was sending him toward the Black, toward the Hollow beneath it, and into Rajaat’s grasp. Hamanu could imagine what rewards Rajaat had promised her.

But, truly, the Oba of Gulg couldn’t harm the Lion of Urik. Her powers, though awesome, were no match for his, when he chose to use them. Radiance blossomed from Hamanu’s long, skeletal fingers, wrapping him in a cocoon of light. Inenek’s whirlwind lost its hold over him, and he began to rise, slowly at first, then faster, until the whirlwind dissipated in his wake.

Time flowed erratically in the Gray. Days, even years, of sunlit time could vanish during a netherworld sneeze, or time could twist the other way, and a champion could reappear on the battlefield—as Hamanu did—a heartbeat after he’d left.

Hamanu took advantage of his enemies’ astonishment and confusion. Two of them died from a single, decapitating sword stroke. Another two tried to run; he took them from behind.

Drubbed in the netherworld, unable to deliver Hamanu to Rajaat, and besieged on the battlefield, Inenek withdrew her support from her templars who, feeling the tide of battle shift away from them, tried to escape a now-inevitable defeat. A few, on the battlefield’s fringes, might have succeeded; they were hardly the lucky ones. Inenek wouldn’t take them back for fear Hamanu had tampered with them, and ordinary folk made certain that the life of a renegade templar was neither pleasant nor long.

The Gulg templars who fell into Hamanu’s hands knew what their fate would be: a quick death, if they were lucky, a drawn-out one if they weren’t. They didn’t know who the sorcerer-kings truly were or why they despised one another. They only knew that a templar’s life was over once he stood before another sorcerer-king. Two or three of Inenek’s templars fell on their knees, renouncing their city; they offered oaths to Urik’s mightier king. But there was no hope in their hearts or useful knowledge in their heads—and he would never spare a templar who denied his city.

He offered them the same opportunity he offered his templar prisoners—death by their own hands instead of his. Without exception, they took the easier, safer course: running onto the swords and spears the Urikites held before them.

“O Mighty One, your will is done,” a young adjutant informed