The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,43
had sent the troll to Ur Draxa—not a lot of time, considering how treacherous the citadel might have become if Rajaat were working sorcery from his prison.
Windreaver!
Hamanu hadn’t been concerned by the troll’s absence. In the past, Windreaver had been gone a year, even a decade, ferreting out secrets. Disembodied, neither dead nor alive, the wayfaring troll had little effect on the world around him and was equally immune to any manner of assault. And if Windreaver had been destroyed—Hamanu rubbed his forearm; beneath the leonine illusion he felt a stony lump—the troll’s passing would have been noticed.
Windreaver!
A third call echoed throughout the Gray and died unanswered. Hamanu pondered the imponderable: Windreaver falling into a trap. Windreaver imprisoned. Windreaver seizing an opportunity for vengeance. Hamanu would have staked his immortal life that Windreaver wouldn’t betray him to Rajaat or another champion, but he’d been wrong more often than not lately.
To me, Windreaver—now!
Nothing. Not a whisper or a promise anywhere in the netherworld. By sundown, the surgeon-sergeants had finished their work among the wounded. Hamanu picked up the wrapped shard and broke it over his thigh. He inhaled the malignant vapors, and then seared Rajaat’s spells with his own. With nothing left to hinder him, Hamanu shouted Windreaver’s name to the beginning of time, the end of space. He harvested countless interrupted thoughts, none of which emanated from a troll.
* * *
After thirteen ages, an enemy was as good as a friend. As the two moons rose together, Hamanu returned to Urik not merely alone but lonely. He called Enver, Javed, and Pavek away from their separate suppers. They sat, stiff and still, on the palace roof while he paced beside the balustrade, disguised as a man and fooling no one. He could perceive their thoughts, their conviction that something must be terribly wrong, but he couldn’t make them speak, not to each other, not to him, not the way Windreaver would have spoken.
“Such a doleful gathering, O Mighty Master. Is someone you care about dead or dying?” Like a shadow sketched in darkness with silver ink, Windreaver spun himself out of the night. “I heard you, O Mighty Master, and thought it might be important.”
Hamanu hid his relief. “What have you learned in Ur Draxa? Have you found the source of the shards?”
Thick silver lips parted, revealing thicker silver teeth. “Shards, O Mighty Master? Have you found others?”
Hamanu had beaten Windreaver’s trolls decisively, but he’d never outsmarted the old general, who could still make him feel like the young man he’d once been. “Inenek. Today. Destroyed now, like the first.”
“If there were two, O Mighty Master, there are certainly more,” Windreaver said in a tone that might easily be mistaken for concern.
“What of Ur Draxa? What have you learned?”
“That men are fools where women are concerned, O Mighty Master.”
“Spare me your homilies. Recount!”
Hamanu squeezed his own forearm, and Windreaver’s silvery outline stilled.
“The Usurper’s storm still rages, O Mighty Master. Cold rain falls on molten rock. Steam and ice exist side by side above the black lake where the War-Bringer’s bones were imprisoned.”
Hamanu’s heart skipped. “Were?”
“Absolute brilliance that was, O Mighty Master, imprisoning your enemy’s bones in a lava lake, then hurling the Dark Lens in afterward. Absolute pure brilliance. What, after all, is lava but unborn obsidian? Who’s to say now where the Lens ends and the prison begins, eh, O Mighty Master? When does a prison become a palace? A palace become a prison?”
Beneath Hamanu’s hand, one of the balustrade lions cracked and crumbled into dust.
“It’s hard to say, for the smoke and steam and fog, but it seemed to me, O Mighty Master, that the lake’s no longer flat. It rises up, I think, in the middle, rather like a baby’s gums when the teeth are about to erupt—Oh, I’m sorry, Mighty Master: You have no children. You wouldn’t know about erupting teeth—”
“Will it hold?” Hamanu demanded. “Will the wards and spells that woman cast hold Rajaat in the Hollow?”
“By the sun’s light, O Mighty Master, they were strained, but strong.”
Chapter Seven
Hamanu sent them away—all of them: Windreaver, Pavek, Enver, the myriad slaves and templars whose labor fueled the palace routine. The Lion-King retired to distill the reagents and compose the invocation of the stealthy spell he’d need to get close enough to see his creator’s prison with his own eyes and—more importantly—get away again.
“Oil, O Mighty Master?” Windreaver whispered from the darkest depths of the room where Hamanu worked into the night.