The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,48

did from time to time—vanished overnight from the heartland. If I wanted my veterans to follow me further, I’d have to replace the Troll-Scorcher in their minds.

I’d come to another corner in my life, hard after the last one. I could have sat with them, staring at the flames until the wood was ash and the sun rose. With neither leader nor purpose, we would have drifted apart or fallen prey to trolls, other men, or barrens-beasts, which were, even then, both numerous and deadly. But destiny had already named me Hamanu; I couldn’t let the moment pass.

“Perdition,” I said softly as I rose to my feet. There was no need to shout. The camp was grave quiet, and I had their attention. “Perdition for Myron of Yoram and the trolls. We’ll tell the truth in every village and slay any rounds-officer who sniffs up our trail. We’ll take this war back to the trolls. We’ll finish it, and then we’ll come back to finish the Troll-Scorcher!”

This time there were cheers. Men took my hand; women kissed my cheek. Guide us, Hamanu, they said. We put our lives in your hands. You see light where we see shadows. Guide us. Give us victory. Give us pride, Hamanu.

I heard their pleas, accepted their challenge. I led them toward the light.

After studying Bull’s maps, I found a pattern to our wanderings. More, I studied the vast, empty areas where we never wandered and where, I hoped, trolls might go when they vanished from their usual haunts.

There were twenty-three of us left in what had been Bull’s band, what had become Hamanu’s. We were nowhere near enough warriors to confront trolls in lands that they knew better than we did. So we wandered before heading into the unknown, visiting map-marked villages. By firelight and the blazing midday sun, I told our tale to anyone who’d stand still long enough. Our message was simple: humanity suffers because the army sworn to protect it pursues the unfathomable goals of the Troll-Scorcher instead.

“Turn away from the Troll-Scorcher and the trolls. Take your destinies into your own hands,” I said at the end of every telling. “Choose to pay the price of victory now, or resign yourself to defeat forever.”

Instinct told me how to hold another human’s attention with pitch, rhythm, and gesture, but only practice could teach me the words that would bind a man’s heart to my ideas. I learned quickly, but not always quickly enough. At times, my words went wrong, and we left a village with dirt and dung clattering against our heels. But even then, there’d be a few more of us leaving than there’d been when we arrived.

From twenty, we grew to forty; from forty to sixty.

Our reputation—my reputation—spread. Renegade bands whose disillusionment with the Troll-Scorcher’s army was older than ours met us on the open plains. Alliances were proposed. My band should fall in step, they advised, and I, being younger in both years and experience, should accept another leader’s authority. Duels were fought: I was young, and I was still learning, but I was already Hamanu, and it was my destiny—not theirs—to forge victory.

Bull’s metal sword carved the guts of four renegade leaders who couldn’t perceive, that truth. After each duel, I invited their veterans to join me. A few did, but loyalty runs deep in the human spirit, and mostly, duels left me with a cloud of enemies who wouldn’t join my growing band and couldn’t return to the Troll-Scorcher’s army. Cut off at the neck, without leaders, and at the knees, with nowhere to go, they were of little consequence.

I had no greater concern for the Troll-Scorcher’s loyal bands, which dogged us from village to village. They threatened the villagers who aided us, then melted away, and got in the way of trolls when I tried to pursue them. My trackers guessed that there were, perhaps, three loyalist bands shadowing our movements and intimidating the villages we depended upon for food and water, now that our number I had grown too large for easy forage. Thirty men and women, they said, forty at most, and not an officer among them.

I believed my trackers.

I was stunned speechless one cool morning when the dawn patrol reported dust on the eastern horizon: something coming our way. Something large, with many, many feet.

We’d made a hilltop camp the previous evening. The camp Bult would have made on the ground he would have chosen: the Troll-Scorcher’s loyal veterans didn’t care if the