The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,60

insubordination, Hamanu reached into the blond templar’s mind.

Who sent you? What do you know about the message and the object you bore?

Spasms rocked the Raamin templar as he lay unnoticed on the marble floor. He’d need a miracle to survive interrogation by a champion other than his mistress, and despite whatever promises the Raamin queen might have made while she lived, champions couldn’t conjure miracles.

Don’t fight me, Hamanu advised. Answer my questions. Recount.

The templar complied, giving Hamanu vision after vision of a Raam fallen in anarchy deeper than any he’d imagined. Five years after the woman Raamins called Abalach-Re, the grand vizier of a nameless, nonexistent god, had disappeared, Raamin merchants, nobles, templars, and the worst sort of elven tribes had carved her city into warring fiefdoms.

Her templars, as ignorant as ever of the true source of their power, had tried to reestablish their magical link with the god that Uyness had claimed to serve. Small wonder, then, that these days the despised, dispirited Raamin templars struggled to hold their own quarter and the gutted palace. Small wonder, too, that when some of them began seeing a familiar face in their dreams, hearing a voice they’d despaired of hearing again, they’d done whatever it had told them to do. They went down to the dust-scoured wharves where the silt schooners tied up. There they found the shard among the rocks that were sometimes visible along the shore—

Learning that, Hamanu immediately thought of Giustenal on the Silt Sea shore and its ruler, Dregoth, whose designs on Raam were almost as old as Rajaat’s, and whose undead army marched on Urik’s southeastern frontier, ravaging his templars. Hamanu thought, as well, that there was nothing more to dredge out of the templar’s weakening mind. Miracles were beyond Hamanu’s purview, but eternal rest was not; he severed life’s silver thread. No one, not Dregoth, not Rajaat, not Uyness, if she were more than a memory or a pawn, not Hamanu himself, should he change his mind, possessed the power to raise the blond templar from death to undeath or unravel his memory.

Without moving from the dais, Hamanu turned his attention to the elven runner who’d brought the second shard.

Recount, he commanded.

The elf’s heart skipped a beat or two, but he was young and healthy, and he came to no permanent harm.

A pair of messengers, O Mighty King, came to the Todek registrator claiming to be templars from Balk—

Another city, far to the south of Urik, but also on the Sea of Silt.

Our registrator, she disbelieved. They were afoot, rat-faced and worse for traveling, with nothing in their scrips but a handful of ceramic chips so worn there was no telling what oven baked them or where. But they knew the things templars know, O Mighty King, and there was one among us who’d been to Balic and knew they had the city pegged aright: merchants and nobles in charge, just as in Tyr. Templars all dead or in hiding. So, the registrator listened—

We all listened close, O Mighty King, when the pair said King Andropinis wasn’t dead, but that he needed help before he could give them power again. He’d said they’d find help in Urik if they delivered a message.

Hamanu interrupted, And the message was the leather-wrapped parcel?

No, O Mighty King. The parcel was to be a gift, a truth token from King Andropinis himself—or so they said. The registrator, she ordered them to unwrap it. They wouldn’t, until we threatened them. I laughed, O Mighty King, when they cast lots and the loser made his death-promises. But he died a bad death, and the thing was still all wrapped in silk—

Sighing, Hamanu withdrew from the elf’s mind while his templar was still recounting the fate of the Balkans. Would a lightning-limned image of Albeorn Elf-Slayer rise in the storm-lit chamber if he unwrapped this second shard? Would it spew a mix of truth and error, promises and threats? Were there, at this very moment, messengers from the championless city of Draj headed for Urik’s walls with a deadly shard bundled under their arms?

Hamanu let the bundle under his left arm slide back onto the hard seat of the throne behind him. He was ready to deal with his elite templars, ready for the storm to be over, but not quite ready to raise a figurative fist against the powers that spawned it.

Tyr-storms weren’t long-lived. Their violence worked against them. Hamanu listened outside his palace and heard the wind swirl itself into knots