Impatiently, Hamanu cast a net into the netherworld.
Windreaver!
Nearly a quinth had passed since Hamanu had sent the troll to Ur Draxa—not a lot of time,
considering how treacherous the citadel might have become if Rajaat were working sorcery from his
prison.
Windreaver!
Hamanu hadn't been concerned by the troll's absence. In the past, Windreaver had been gone a
year, even a decade, ferreting out secrets. Disembodied, neither dead nor alive, the wayfaring troll had
little effect on the world around him and was equally immune to any manner of assault. And if Windreaver
had been destroyed—Hamanu rubbed his forearm; beneath the leonine illusion he felt a stony lump—the
troll's passing would have been noticed.
Windreaver!
A third call echoed throughout the Gray and died unanswered. Hamanu pondered the
imponderable: Windreaver falling into a trap. Windreaver imprisoned. Windreaver seizing an opportunity
for vengeance. Hamanu would have staked his immortal life that Windreaver wouldn't betray him to
Rajaat or another champion, but he'd been wrong more often than not lately.
To me, Windreaver—now!
Nothing. Not a whisper or a promise anywhere in the netherworld. By sundown, the
surgeon-sergeants had finished their work among the wounded. Hamanu picked up the wrapped shard
and broke it over his thigh. He inhaled the malignant vapors, and then seared Rajaat's spells with his own.
With nothing left to hinder him, Hamanu shouted Windreaver's name to the beginning of time, the end of
space. He harvested countless interrupted thoughts, none of which emanated from a troll.
* * *
After thirteen ages, an enemy was as good as a friend. As the two moons rose together, Hamanu
returned to Urik not merely alone but lonely. He called Enver, Javed, and Pavek away from their
separate suppers. They sat, stiff and still, on the palace roof while he paced beside the balustrade,
disguised as a man and fooling no one. He could perceive their thoughts, their conviction that something
must be terribly wrong, but he couldn't make them speak, not to each other, not to him, not the way
Windreaver would have spoken.
"Such a doleful gathering, O Mighty Master. Is someone you care about dead or dying?" Like a
shadow sketched in darkness with silver ink, Windreaver spun himself out of the night. "I heard you, O
Mighty Master, and thought it might be important."
Hamanu hid his relief. "What have you learned in Ur Draxa? Have you found the source of the
shards?"
Thick silver lips parted, revealing thicker silver teeth. "Shards, O Mighty Master? Have you
found others?"
Hamanu had beaten Windreaver's trolls decisively, but he'd never outsmarted the old general,
who could still make him feel like the young man he'd once been. "Inenek. Today. Destroyed now, like
the first."
"If there were two, O Mighty Master, there are certainly more," Windreaver said in a tone that
might easily be mistaken for concern.
"What of Ur Draxa? What have you learned?"
"That men are fools where women are concerned, O Mighty Master."
"Spare me your homilies. Recount!"
Hamanu squeezed his own forearm, and Windreaver's silvery outline stilled.
Hamanu's heart skipped. "Were?"
"Absolute brilliance that was, O Mighty Master, imprisoning your enemy's bones in a lava lake,
then hurling the Dark Lens in afterward. Absolute pure brilliance. What, after all, is lava but unborn
obsidian? Who's to say now where the Lens ends and the prison begins, eh, O Mighty Master? When
does a prison become a palace? A palace become a prison?"
Beneath Hamanu's hand, one of the balustrade lions cracked and crumbled into dust.
"It's hard to say, for the smoke and steam and fog, but it seemed to me, O Mighty Master, that
the lake's no longer flat. It rises up, I think, in the middle, rather like a baby's gums when the teeth are
about to erupt—Oh, I'm sorry, Mighty Master: You have no children. You wouldn't know about erupting
teeth—"
"Will it hold?" Hamanu demanded. "Will the wards and spells that woman cast hold Rajaat in the
Hollow?"
"By the sun's light, O Mighty Master, they were strained, but strong."
Hamanu sent them away—all of them: Windreaver, Pavek, Enver, the myriad slaves and templars
whose labor fueled the palace routine. The Lion-King retired to distill the reagents and compose the
invocation of the stealthy spell he'd need to get close enough to see his creator's prison with his own eyes
and—more importantly—get away again.
"Oil, O Mighty Master?" Windreaver whispered from the darkest depths of the room where
Hamanu worked into the night.
The storerooms beneath the palace were flooded. Their contents had been hurriedly hauled to the
upper rooms for safekeeping, leaving Hamanu's normally austere and organized workroom in chaos. The
treasures of a very long lifetime were heaped into precarious pyramids. Windreaver's shadowy form
would be lost amid countless other shadows, and Hamanu didn't break his concentration to look for his
old enemy.
"Do you truly believe oil from the egg-sack of a red-eyed roc will protect you from your
master?"
"... nine hundred eighty... nine hundred eighty-one..." Hamanu replied through clenched teeth.
Shimmering droplets, black as the midnight sky and lustrous as pearls, dripped from the polished
porphyry cruet he held over an obsidian cauldron. Four ages ago, he'd harvested this oil from a red-eyed
roc. It had vast potential as a magical reagent—potential he had scarcely begun to explore—but he did
not expect it to protect him from the first sorcerer.
Nothing but his own wits and all the luck in the world could protect the last champion from
Rajaat.
"You're a fool, O Mighty Master. Surrender and be done with it. Become the dragon. Any
dragon would be better than Rajaat unchained. You certainly can't fight Rajaat and your peers."
"... nine hundred eighty-eight... nine hundred eighty-nine..."
Unable to provoke an explosion from either Hamanu or the concoction in front of him,
Windreaver turned his attention to the clutter. Save for his acid voice and the swirling wake of his anger,
the troll had no effect on the living world. That was his protection—he could slip undetected through all
but the most rigorous wardings, including the ones Hamanu had set on this room. It was also his
frustration.
Whirling through the room, Windreaver shook the clutter and raised a score of cluttering dust
devils from its shadows. Hamanu stilled the air with an absentminded thought and counted the nine
hundred ninety-second drop of oil. The devils collapsed.
There was another table in the workroom, uncluttered save for writing implements and two
sheaves of vellum: one blank, the other already written upon, It drew Windreaver's curiosity as a
lodestone attracted iron. The air above the table sighed. The corners of the written-upon vellum rustled.
Driven by a very local wind, the brass stylus rolled to the table's edge and clattered loudly to the
floor. The vellum remained where it belonged.
"Memoirs, O Mighty Master?" The rustling stopped. "An apology?"
Windreaver's accusations were icy knives against Hamanu's back. The Lion of Urik wore the
guise of a human man in his workroom where no illusion was necessary. Human motion, human gestures,
were still the movements his mind knew best. He shrugged remembered shoulders beneath an illusory silk
shirt and continued his count.
"What fascination does this street-scum orphan hold for you, O Mighty Master? You've wound
him tight in a golden chain, and yet you plead for his understanding."
"... one thousand... one thousand one."
Hamanu set the cruet down and, taking up an inix-rib ladle, gave the cauldron a stir. Bubbles
burst on the brew's surface. The two-score flames of the overhead candelabra extinguished themselves
with a single hiss and the scent of long-dead flowers. A coal brazier glowed beneath the cauldron, but
when Hamanu stirred it a second time, the pale illumination came from the cauldron itself.
"I noticed him, this Just-Plain Pavek of yours, Pavek the high templar, Pavek the druid. His scars
go deep, O Mighty Master. He's scared to the core, of you, of every little thing."
"Pavek is a wise man."
"He's young."
"He's mortal."
"He's young, O Mighty Master. He has no understanding."
"You're old. Did age make you wise?"
"Wiser than you, Manu. You never became a man."
Manu. The troll had read the uppermost sheet of parchment where the name was written, but
he'd known about Manu for ages. Windreaver knew the Lion's history, but Hamanu knew very little
about the troll. What was there to know about a ghost?
Shifting the ladle to his off-weapon hand, Hamanu reached into an ordinary-seeming leather
pouch sitting lopsidedly on the table. He scooped out a handful of fine, dirt-colored powder and
scattered it in an interlocking pattern across the cauldron's seething surface. Flames leapt up along the
powder's trail.
Hamanu's glossy black hair danced in the heat. He spoke a word; the flames froze in time. His
hair settled against his neck; illusion maintained without thought. Moments later, screams and lamentations
erupted far beyond the workroom. The flames flickered, died, and Hamanu stirred the cauldron again.
"You're evil, Manu."
"So say you."
"Aye, I say it. Do you hear me?"
"I hear. You'd do nothing different."
"I'm no sorcerer," the troll swore indignantly.
"A coincidence of opportunity. Rajaat made you before he made me."
"Be damned! We did not start the Cleansing War!"
"Nor did I. I finished it. Would you have finished it differently? Could you have stopped your
army before every human man, woman, and child was dead? Could you have stopped yourself?"
The air fell silent.
Iridescence bloomed on the swirling brew. It spread rapidly, then rose: a noxious, rainbow
bubble as tall as a man. The bubble burst, spattering Hamanu with foul-smelling mist. The silk of his
illusory shirt shriveled, revealing the black dragon-flesh of his true shape. A deep-pitched chuckle
rumbled from the workroom's corners before the illusion was restored.
Hamanu released the ladle. The inix bone clattered full-circle around the obsidian rim, then it, the
penultimate reagent, was consumed. Blue light, noxious and alive, formed a hemisphere above the
cauldron, not touching it. With human fingers splayed along his human chin, concealing a very human
scowl, Hamanu studied the flickering blue patterns.
Rajaat, creator of sorcery as well as champions, had written the grammar of spellcraft in his own
youth, long before the Cleansing Wars began. Since then, additions to the grimoires had been few, and
mostly inscribed in blood: a warning to those who followed that the experiment had failed. Hamanu's
stealthy spell was perilously unproven. Its name existed only in his imagination. He would, in all
likelihood, survive any miscasting, but survival wouldn't be enough.
Still scowling, Hamanu walked away from the table. He stopped at a heap of clutter no different
from the others and made high-pitched clicking noises with his tongue. Before Windreaver could say
anything, a lizard's head poked up. Kneeling, Hamanu held out his hand.
The lizard, a critic, was ancient for its kind. Its brilliant, many-colored scales had faded to subtle,
precious shades. Its movements were slow and deliberate, but without hesitation as it accepted Hamanu's
finger and climbed across his wrist to his forearm. Its feet disappeared as it balanced on real flesh within
the illusion.
"You astonish me," Windreaver muttered from a corner.
Hamanu let the comment slide, though he, too, was astonished, hearing something akin to
admiration in his enemy's voice. He was evil; he accepted that. A thousand times a thousand judgments
had been rendered against the Lion of Urik. He'd done many horrible things because they were
necessary. He'd done many more because he was bored and craved amusement. But his evil was as
illusory as his humanity.
The Lion-King couldn't say what the lizard saw through its eyes. Its mind was too small, too
different for him to occupy. Scholars had said, and proven, that critics wouldn't dwell in an ill-omened
house. They'd choose death over deception if the household doors were locked against their departure.
From scholarly proofs, it was a small step to the assumption that critics wouldn't abide evil's presence,
and a smaller step to the corollary that critics and the Lion of Urik should be incompatible.
Yet the palace never lacked the reclusive creatures. Shallow bowls of amber honey sat in every
chamber for their use—even here, amid the noxious reagents, or on the roof beneath Hamanu's unused
bed.
With the critic on his arm, Hamanu returned to the worktable, dipped his finger in just such a
delicately painted bowl, and offered a sticky feast to his companion. Its dark tongue flicked once,
probing the gift, and a second time, after which the honey was gone. A wide yawn revealed its toothless
gums, and then it settled its wrinkled chin flat on the Lion-King's forearm, basking in the warmth of his
unnatural flesh.
With a crooked and careful finger, Hamanu stroked the critic's triangular skull and its long flanks.
Bending over, he whispered a single word: "Rajaat," and willingly opened his mind to the lizard as so
many had unwillingly opened their minds to him.
The critic raised its head, flicked its tongue—as if thoughts were honey in the air. Slowly it
straightened its legs, turned around, and made its way back to Hamanu's hand, which was poised above
the blue light, above the simmering cauldron.
A shadow fell across Hamanu's arm. "This is not necessary, Manu."
"Evil cares nothing for necessity," Hamanu snapped. "Evil serves itself, because good will not."
He surprised himself with his own bitterness. He'd thought he no longer cared what others thought, but
that, too, was illusion. "Leave me, Windreaver."
"I'll return to Ur Draxa, O Mighty Master. There is nothing you can learn there that I
cannot—and without the risk."
"Go where you will, Windreaver, but go."
The critic leapt into the cauldron. For an instant the workroom was plunged in total darkness.
When there was light again, it came only from the brazier. The brew's surface was satin smooth; both the
troll and the critic were gone.
The reagents must age for two nights and a day before they could be decanted, before the
stealthy spell could be invoked.
There was much he could write in that time.
* * *
I removed Bult's sword from his lifeless hand. It was the first time I'd held a forged weapon. A
thrill like the caress of Dorean's hair against my skin raced along my nerves. The sword would forever be
my weapon. Casting my gorestained club aside, I ran my hand along the steel spine. It aroused me, not
as Dorean had aroused my mortal passions, but I knew the sword's secrets as I had known hers.
The dumbstruck veterans of our company retreated when I swept the blade in a slow, wide arc.
"Now we fight trolls," I told them as Bult's corpse cooled. "No more running. If running from your
enemy suits your taste, start running, because anyone who won't fight trolls fights me instead."
I dropped down into the swordsman's crouch I'd seen but never tried. I tucked my vitals behind
the hilt and found a perfect balance when my shoulders were directly above my feet. It was so
comfortable, so natural. Without thinking, I smiled arid bared my teeth.
Three of the men turned tail, running toward the nearest road and the village we'd passed a few
days earlier, but the rest stood firm. They accepted me as their leader—me, a Kreegill farmer's son with
a wordy tongue, a light-boned dancer, who'd killed a troll and a veteran on the same day.
"Ha-Manu," one man called me: Worthy Manu, Bright Manu, Manu with a sword in his hand and
the will to use it.
The sun and the wind and the homage of hard, human eyes made me a warlord that day. My life
had come to a tight corner. Looking back, I saw Manu's painful path from Deche: the burning houses, the
desecrated corpses of kin... of Dorean. Ahead, the future beckoned him to shape it, to forge it, as his
sword had been shaped by heat and hammer.
I couldn't go back to Deche; time's tyranny cannot be overthrown, but I was not compelled to
become Hamanu. A man can deny his destiny and remain trapped in the tight corner between past and
future until both are unattainable. The choice was mine.
"Break camp," I told them, my first conscious command. "I killed a troll last night. Where there's
one troll, there're bound to be more. It's nigh time trolls learned that this is human land."
There were no cheers, just the dusty backs of men and women as they obeyed. Did they obey
because I'd killed Bult and they feared me? Did they listen because I offered an opportunity they were
ready to seize? Or was it habit, as habit had kept me behind Bult for five years? Probably a bit of each in
every mind, and other reasons I didn't guess then, or ever.
In time, I'd learn a thousand ways to insure obedience, but in the end, it's a rare man who wants
to go first into the unknown. I was a rare man.
We had three kanks. Two of the bugs carried our baggage: uncut cloth and hides, the big cook
pots, food and water beyond the two day's supply every veteran carried in his personal kit—all the bulk
a score of rootless humans needed in the barrens. The third kank had carried Bult and Bult's personal
possessions and our hoard of coins. I appropriated the poison-spitting bug and rode in unfamiliar style
while our trackers searched for troll trails.
I counted the coins in our coin coffer first—what man wouldn't? We could have eaten better, if
there'd been better food available at any price in any of the villages where we traded. I found Bult's
hidden coin cache and counted those coins, too. Bult had been a wealthy man, for all the good it had
done him. Wealth didn't interest me, not half as much as the torn scraps of vellum Bult had kept in a case
made from tanned and supple troll hide.