The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,84

sight. He was moving fast through the Gray, and a sense of boundary had already sprung up in his mind.

Hamanu ripped out of the netherworld while he was some distance above the ground. The choice was deliberate: he didn’t know where he was, and while a fall wouldn’t hurt him, an emergence that left him half in and half out of any solid object would be fatal, even for an immortal champion. Tucking his head and shoulder as he hit the ground, Hamanu rolled several times before he got his feet under him.

A true adept of mind-bending or magic could always establish his place in the world. Though the hot daytime air around him was saturated with water and, therefore, more opaque than the netherworld, Hamanu felt the push and pull of Athas beneath his feet, and knew for certain that he was within the ruins of Borys’s city, Ur Draxa.

A thick mat of squishy plants had cushioned his fall, a mat that covered every surface, including the walls, where the walls were still standing. Stagnant water seeped through the illusory soles of Hamanu’s illusory sandals. He gave himself sturdier footwear and wrestled with garments that were already damp and clinging to his skin.

Ahead, Hamanu heard the rumble of thunder, the ear-popping crack of lightning. He was puzzled for a moment; then he understood: five years after Tithian had been trapped inside the Dark Lens, his rage continued unabated. The would-be Tyrant of Tyr was responsible for the violent Tyr-storms throughout the heartland. Here in Ur Draxa, he was responsible for the unrelenting, stifling fog. He’d forged an environment like nothing Hamanu had encountered elsewhere on Athas.

Taking a step in the direction where his inner senses told him he’d find the lava lake, Hamanu’s foot sank to midcalf depth before striking a buried cobblestone path. The squishy mat belched, and twin scents of rot and decay filled his nose. Initially, Hamanu the Lion-King was repelled by the stench. After a moment’s reflection, Manu the Fanner recognized that the streets of Ur Draxa were more fertile I than Urik’s best fields.

He slogged the next little distance plotting the ways and means to bring the riches home.

Hamanu wasn’t the only one stumbling through to Ur Draxa’s treasure. His inhumanly sharp ears picked up other feet sinking in the bog. He didn’t fear discovery; the fog hid him better than any spell. A talkative pair slogged past, so close and diffident, he could have stolen their belt-pouches. By their accents, they were Ur Draxans struggling to adapt to a diet of slugs, snails, and dankweed.

How the mighty had fallen! While Borys ruled the city that he’d founded nine hundred years ago, the Ur Draxans were the fiercest warriors beneath the bloody sun. Now they were bog farmers, and Hamanu dismissed them as no threat to the veterans he’d send to harvest Tithian’s sludge.

On the other hand, Manu had been raised by farmers who went to war against nature each time they planted their seeds in the unforgiving ground. He knew that farmers weren’t meek in defense of their land. The battles would be different here, but folk who fought them would be as tenacious as any farmer, anywhere.

As tenacious as he himself had been, returning to the Kreegills after the trolls were gone.

He’d discharged his veterans, giving each of them a year’s wages and a lecture on the virtues of going home. He told them to rebuild what the war had destroyed and to forget what they’d seen, what they’d done in his service. His mistake—if it was a mistake and not another sleight of destiny’s hand—was telling them about the home he wanted to rebuild for himself in the Kreegills.

For Hamanu, the war had had a clear beginning and a clean end. He was scarcely fifty years old when the war ended. He’d fought for over thirty years but, considering his immortality, he’d remained a young man, clinging to a young man’s dreams. He’d forgotten that for his veterans, war was the life they’d known for generations. They didn’t have homes to rebuild. Some of them followed him into the Kreegills where the fields were overgrown and time had scrubbed the empty, desecrated villages.

A man could spend a lifetime bringing the valley back to what he remembered—an immortal lifetime. Hamanu tried, though he was hindered from the start by the best efforts of his companions, who didn’t know the first thing about growing grain, or living in the same place, day-in, day-out,