was illusion. “Leave me, Windreaver.”
“I’ll return to Ur Draxa, O Mighty Master. There is nothing you can learn there that I cannot—and without the risk.”
“Go where you will, Windreaver, but go.”
The critic leapt into the cauldron. For an instant the workroom was plunged in total darkness. When there was light again, it came only from the brazier. The brew’s surface was satin smooth; both the troll and the critic were gone.
With doubts and emptiness he did not usually feel, Hamanu lifted the cauldron. He set it down again in an iron-strapped chest inscribed all over with words from a language that had been forgotten before Rajaat was born. Then Hamanu locked the chest with green-glowing magic and, feeling every one of his thousand years, sat down before the ink stone and parchment.
The reagents must age for two nights and a day before they could be decanted, before the stealthy spell could be invoked.
There was much he could write in that time.
* * *
I removed Bult’s sword from his lifeless hand. It was the first time I’d held a forged weapon. A thrill like the caress of Dorean’s hair against my skin raced along my nerves. The sword would forever be my weapon. Casting my gorestained club aside, I ran my hand along the steel spine. It aroused me, not as Dorean had aroused my mortal passions, but I knew the sword’s secrets as I had known hers.
The dumbstruck veterans of our company retreated when I swept the blade in a slow, wide arc.
“Now we fight trolls,” I told them as Bult’s corpse cooled. “No more running. If running from your enemy suits your taste, start running, because anyone who won’t fight trolls fights me instead.”
I dropped down into the swordsman’s crouch I’d seen but never tried. I tucked my vitals behind the hilt and found a perfect balance when my shoulders were directly above my feet. It was so comfortable, so natural. Without thinking, I smiled arid bared my teeth.
Three of the men turned tail, running toward the nearest road and the village we’d passed a few days earlier, but the rest stood firm. They accepted me as their leader—me, a Kreegill farmer’s son with a wordy tongue, a light-boned dancer, who’d killed a troll and a veteran on the same day.
“Ha-Manu,” one man called me: Worthy Manu, Bright Manu, Manu with a sword in his hand and the will to use it.
The sun and the wind and the homage of hard, human eyes made me a warlord that day. My life had come to a tight corner. Looking back, I saw Manu’s painful path from Deche: the burning houses, the desecrated corpses of kin… of Dorean. Ahead, the future beckoned him to shape it, to forge it, as his sword had been shaped by heat and hammer.
I couldn’t go back to Deche; time’s tyranny cannot be overthrown, but I was not compelled to become Hamanu. A man can deny his destiny and remain trapped in the tight corner between past and future until both are unattainable. The choice was mine.
“Break camp,” I told them, my first conscious command. “I killed a troll last night. Where there’s one troll, there’re bound to be more. It’s nigh time trolls learned that this is human land.”
There were no cheers, just the dusty backs of men and women as they obeyed. Did they obey because I’d killed Bult and they feared me? Did they listen because I offered an opportunity they were ready to seize? Or was it habit, as habit had kept me behind Bult for five years? Probably a bit of each in every mind, and other reasons I didn’t guess then, or ever.
In time, I’d learn a thousand ways to insure obedience, but in the end, it’s a rare man who wants to go first into the unknown. I was a rare man.
We had three kanks. Two of the bugs carried our baggage: uncut cloth and hides, the big cook pots, food and water beyond the two day’s supply every veteran carried in his personal kit—all the bulk a score of rootless humans needed in the barrens. The third kank had carried Bult and Bult’s personal possessions and our hoard of coins. I appropriated the poison-spitting bug and rode in unfamiliar style while our trackers searched for troll trails.
I counted the coins in our coin coffer first—what man wouldn’t? We could have eaten better, if there’d been better food available at any price in any of the villages where we