The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,89

with their impurities because humanity itself is a desecration of this world. Forget trolls and the eyes of fire, Hamanu—serve me now as the Dragon of Athas!”

Before Hamanu had recovered from the twin shocks of Rajaat’s appearance and his demands, the first sorcerer had seized his wrists. His illusions had evaporated between heartbeats. He was himself, gaunt, with leathery flesh stretched taut over black bones. Then his body began to swell, and his mind screamed the deaths of five-score mortals, whose only crime was their proximity to him.

Hamanu—and Urik—had survived that day because Rajaat hadn’t conceived that one of his creations could resist not only him but the dragon frenzy as well. In truth, it hadn’t been particularly difficult. When he’d felt the obscene ecstasy surging through his flesh, Hamanu had used it all to quicken a single, explosive spell. He’d hurled himself into the Gray and run to Kemelok, where Rajaat had just told him the one champion he dared trust could be found.

This time there was no Borys, no Kemelok, no place at all to run. There was only Hamanu himself and, still standing guard above the Black, that tawny-skinned giant with a golden sword and a lion’s black mane.

Chapter Twelve

By the time Hamanu knew that Rajaat hadn’t pursue him, he was far from Ur Draxa, far from the Hollow and the Black, far from the mysterious leonine giant, and far from Urik as well. The narrowness of his escape and a sense of impending doom made his precious city the last place in the heartland he wanted to be. As Hamanu drifted aimlessly through the Gray, however, no other material-world destination sprang into his mind.

He couldn’t imagine approaching Gallard or Dregoth as he’d approached Borys of Ebe outside Kemelok all those ages ago, and Inenek was a fool. The heartland was home to guilds of powerful sorcerers, druids, mind-benders, and other magic-wielders. Hamanu knew more about their practices and strongholds than they imagined, and knew, as well, that none of them could light a candle in Rajaat’s wind. As the Lion-King of Urik, he’d disdained allies for thirteen ages; as Rajaat’s last champion rebelling against his creator, staring at three short days before doom, there was no one who could, or would, help him.

Hamanu needed to think, to examine his choices, if he had any, and to plot a strategy that, if it would not bring him victory, would at least spare his city. He imagined himself on a serene hilltop, reading the answers to his many questions from patterns in the passing clouds. The place was real in Hamanu’s mind, but it wasn’t real enough to end his netherworld drift. Green hilltops and cloudscapes belonged to Athas’s past. Aside from Urik, all the places Hamanu imagined belonged either to the past or to his enemies.

His mind’s eye finally fixed on a landscape filled with stones the same color as the netherworld: the troll ruins in the Kreegill peaks above Deche. The ruins hadn’t changed in the ages since he’d last seen them; he had no difficulty finding them in the netherworld. A few walls had tumbled, and there was no trace at all of the bits of mattress Manu found beneath the massive troll beds, but the rest was exactly as he’d remembered it.

Hamanu’s first thoughts outside the Gray had nothing to do with the War-Bringer. His hands, still black-taloned and bony, lingered over the perfect, unmortared seams of a gray-stone doorway. The trolls were gone, but their homes stood ready to welcome them, as if they might return tomorrow.

Not so the human villages. Turning away from the troll houses, Hamanu beheld a barren valley. Wars hadn’t devastated the Kreegills. The valley had been intact when Hamanu left it last. No other champion had set foot on its fertile soil until Borys came, in his dragon madness, and sucked all the life away.

A hundred years after he’d sated himself completely, metamorphosis, Borys recovered his sanity, but the land—the land wasn’t so fortunate. The sky had been permanently reddened by a haze of dust and ash. Until the worm, Tithian, began his sulky storms, a mortal human might experience rain once in a lifetime—as muddy pellets, nothing like the life-giving showers of Manu’s boyhood.

Rain or no, wind still blew in the Kreegills. Thirteen ages of constant, parched wind had buried the valleys beneath rippling blankets of loose gray-brown dirt. The soil itself was good, better, perhaps, than the heavy soil Hamanu remembered. If the rains came back—and