The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,64

there like a poleaxed inix. I’ve told you secrets I’ve kept for ages. Don’t you want to know why?”

“O Mighty King, forgive me, but I couldn’t hope to understand. I have so many questions, I wouldn’t know where to begin—”

“Ask, Pavek. Look at me and ask a question, ask as if your life depended on it, for it does!”

The head came up, wide-eyed and very mortal, very fragile. The question flowed exactly as it formed in Pavek’s mind—

“Were you Rajaat’s favorite? Is that what you became after—?”

Two questions: twice as many as he’d commanded and an excuse—if Hamanu needed one—to slay the trembling man where he knelt. But, strangely, the rage was gone. Hamanu walked around the table, righted the chair, and eased his illusory self onto its seat.

“The answer that comes to me, Pavek, is no. I was never Rajaat’s favorite. I hated him before I knew what he was, before he made me what I became, and he knew I hated him. I wouldn’t have tolerated his favor, and for all these years I have believed that I didn’t have it. Tonight, though, it’s not me who asks the question, but you, a mortal, whom some might call my favorite. Hatred doesn’t protect you from my favor, dear Pavek, and so I realize I have become what I hated when I was a man.

“Today is a sad day, Pavek. Today I’ve realized that my hatred amused Rajaat, amuses him still, as yours amuses me. I was the last of his creations—but not because we imprisoned him. No, he’d had two hundred years to ponder his mistakes before he created me. I was the last because I was everything he meant a champion to be. I loathed him, but, yes, Pavek, I was Rajaat’s favorite. I carried in my bones his hopes for a cleansed and purified Athas; I still Hamanu recalled the mortal man he’d been and felt the weight of his immortal age as he’d never felt it before. Looking across his worktable, he saw the gray dust and empty memories of an unnatural life. He didn’t see Pavek at all, until the man said—

“I don’t loathe you or hate you, O Mighty King.”

“Then you are either an innocent or a fool,” Hamanu said wearily, indulging himself in a moment of self-pity—and eager to stifle a favorite, whose voice, at this moment, sounded too much like his own.

“Telhami says not, O Mighty King.”

Perhaps Rajaat was right. Rajaat had already lived two thousand years or more when he began creating his champions. Perhaps a man needed several ages to learn the ropes of immortality—to learn to pick his favorites from the ranks of those who hated him.

When Telhami lived in Urik, Hamanu had forgotten Dorean and every other woman. Her eyes, her hands, her laughter had made him human again. For how long? A year?

Twenty years? Thirty? He’d lived an enchantment. Every day had been bright and sparkling, yet different; every night was the stuff from which men’s dreams were spun. Then, one morning she was dressed in traveler’s clothes.

She’d had a vision during the night of a place beyond the Ringing Mountains, a place where the air was cool and moist, where the ground was a thick, soft green carpet, and trees grew halfway to the sun. Cold springs bubbled year around in the place she’d envisioned, and at the center of everything was a waterfall shrouded in mist and rainbows. Her life in Urik was over; she had to find her waterfall.

Druids cannot stay, she’d said—as if that explained everything.

And he, of course, could not go. Urik had already suffered from his neglect. A generation of templars had succeeded to power thinking that their king was a besotted fool. The ordinary folk on whose shoulders he and the templars stood did truly curse the Lion-King’s name.

Hamanu could have forced Telhami to stay, but he couldn’t command her affection. He could have slain her as she stood before him with her staff and veiled hat. The deaths of mortals—even mortals he loved—was a familiar pain. Being left behind was not.

Will you return? he’d asked, as countless other men and women had asked their departing lovers, but never Hamanu, never the Lion-King, not before or since.

Telhami had returned, in her way. She’d settled her druids close enough to Urik that he knew roughly where she was, but on the far side of lifeless salt, where his magic couldn’t reach her. Until one night, when this Pavek, this stolid,