The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,7
score of current favorites, had simpler memories and a more reliable conscience.
Today, however, Enver had exercised his conscience needlessly.
“I have something else in mind, dear Enver. The baker there—” He paused, casting his thoughts adrift in Urik until they found the mind he wanted—“Nouri Nouri’son, he saved my life this morning.”
Enver straightened his spine and his sleeve. “Omniscience, may I inquire how this occurred?”
“Oh, the usual way.” Hamanu sopped up honey with another morsel of bread, chewed it slowly, savoring both it and the dwarf’s bursting curiosity. “The streets were dirty. I’d retreated into an alley to cleanse them, but this baker, Nouri Nouri’son, took it upon himself to rescue me with a kneading mallet.”
“Remarkable, Omniscience.”
“True. All-too-sadly true. He was so intent on saving me that he let the criminals get away.”
“Get away, Omniscience? Not for long, surely.”
“No, no, dear Enver. They live, two of them, anyway. They seemed—how do you so charmingly put it?—they seemed to have learned a lesson, and I could hardly overrule the baker’s justice, could I?”
Enver shook his head. “But you’re watching them, Omniscience?”
“Dear Enver, of course I’m watching them. Even now I’m watching them. But, we were talking about the baker, weren’t we? Yes. I have a task for you. I want two sacks of the finest flour—not warehouse flour, but my flour, white himali from the palace—taken to that baker’s shop on Joiner’s Square, and a purse of silver, too—else he’ll fire the ovens with inix dung! Tell him he is to bake a score of loaves, the best loaves he’s ever baked, and to deliver them to the palace before sundown.”
The dwarf’s grin was as broad and round as Guthay on New Year’s Eve. The executor was quick with numbers and devious despite his rigorous conscience. Nouri Nouri’son could buy a year’s worth of charcoal with a purseful of silver, and unless the man were a complete failure at his trade, he could make a hundred loaves with two sacks of palace flour.
“I shall be seen, Omniscience,” Enver said, more eagerly than before. “The merchant lords, the high templars, the nobles, too, and all their cooks, I shall be seen by them all, Omniscience. By sundown the entire city will know you’re eating bread baked by Nouri Nouri’son. They’ll stand in line outside his doors.”
“Mind you, dear Enver, it’s a small shop on a small square. I think, perhaps, half the city would be sufficient. A quarter might be wiser.”
“Word will spread, Omniscience.”
Hamanu nodded. No one would have noticed three bodies in an alley. No one had noticed the solitary corpse he’d left in a doorway somewhat south of the square. But a generous gesture, that would change lives in ways not even he could predict.
“Is that all, Omniscience?”
The king nodded, then called his steward back. If he was going to make a generous gesture to the man who saved his life, he might as well make a similar gesture to the one whose life he’d borrowed. “There’ll be a beggar on the stoop. A human youth with a crippled leg. Put something useful in his bowl.”
“Oh, yes, Omniscience! Will that be all, Omniscience?”
“One last thing, before you return to the palace, hie yourself to the fountain in Lion’s Square and throw a coin over the edge.”
Enver’s grin faded as his eyes widened. “Omniscience, what should I wish for?”
“Why—that Nouri Nouri’son’s bread is as good as his kneading mallet, what else?”
Chapter Two
Hamanu’s morning audiences began when Enver left the roof. They ended when the king had broken the seal on the last scroll in the baskets on his marble table and had summoned, by a mind-bending prick of conscience, the last petitioner in the unwindowed and, therefore, stifling, waiting chamber below.
Sometimes petitioners abandoned their quest for a private audience before they felt the unforgettable terror of their king’s presence in their thoughts. Sometimes Hamanu didn’t second-guess a petitioner’s misgiving. Other times he pursued the tender-hearted spirit throughout Urik and beyond; he had that power. After thirteen ages of practice, Hamanu could give his whims wills of their own and set them free to wander his city as he himself did almost every night, borrowing shape and memory—stealing them—and making another life his own for a moment, a year, or a lifetime.
Hamanu had a handful of willful whims and stolen shapes loose in the city just then, and touched them lightly as the day’s last petitioner climbed the stairs. A thief who’d shown creative promise in his craft had seized a woman—a child,