Hamanu didn't quibble. Left to his own devices, his rule over Urik would be rigid and far too
harsh for mortal survival. Left to his own devices, he'd rule over a realm of the undead, as Dregoth did
beneath Giustenal. Instead, Hamanu culled his templars, generation after generation, plucking out the
debauched, the perverse, and the cruel— like the late Elabon Escrissar, who'd contributed to the latest
Nibenese pickle—for his personal amusement. The others, the foursquare, almost-upright folk, he
selected to translate his unforgiving harshness into bearable justice.
Enver, being one of the latter, was indeed too valuable to exile off to the Soleuse farmlands.
Hamanu tolerated Enver's benign deceit as he'd tolerated Escrissar's malignancy. Both were essential
parts of his thousand-year reign in the yellow-walled city. He'd have to find someone else for Soleuse.
In the meantime, the slaves had finished their labor. All that remained of Renady Soleuse was a
fading wet spot beneath the brutal sun.
Morning was nearly afternoon when Hamanu prepared to go downstairs and deal with his city's
larger and more public affairs. Burnished armor and robes of state had been laid out for his approval,
which he gave, as he almost invariably did, with no more than a cursory glance at his wardrobe.
A patterned silk canopy had been erected over the pool where he would bathe alone, completely
without attendants. It was time, once again, for loyal Enver to depart.
"I await your next summons, Omniscience," the dwarf assured him as he herded the slaves down
the stairs.
Hamanu waited until all his senses, natural and preternatural, were quiet and he knew he was
alone. A shimmering sphere shrouded his right hand as he stood up from his table: a shimmering sphere
from which a black talon as long as an elf's forefinger emerged. With it, Hamanu scored the air in front of
him, as if it were a carcass hung for gutting and butchering.
Mist seeped from the otherwise invisible wound, then, thrusting both hands into the mist, Hamanu
widened the gap. Miniature gray clouds billowed momentarily around his forearms. When the sun had
boiled them away, Hamanu held a carefully folded robe that was, by color and cloth, a perfect match for
the robe he wore, likewise the linen and sandals piled atop the silk, He dropped the sandals at once and
kicked one under the table. He dropped the silk after he'd shaken out the folds, and let the linen fall on
top of it.
When Hamanu was satisfied that he'd created the impression of a heedless king shedding
garments without regard for their worth, the dazzling sphere reappeared around his right hand. It grew
quickly, encompassing first his arm and shoulder, finally all-of him, including his head. The man-shaped
shimmer swelled until it was half again as tall as Hamanu, the human man, had been. Then, as quickly as it
had appeared and spread, the dazzle was gone, and a creature like no other in the city, nor anywhere
beneath the bloody sun, stood in his place.
His skin was pure black, a dull, fathomless shade of ash and soot, stretched taut over a scaffold
of bones too long, too thick, too misshapen to be counted among any of the Rebirth races. There were
hollows between his ribs and between the paired bones of his arms and legs. The undead runners of the
barrens carried more flesh than Urik's gaunt Lion-King. Seeing Hamanu, no mortal would believe that
anything so spindly could be alive, much less move with effortless grace to the bathing pool, as he did.
He paused at the edge. The still water of the bathing pool was an imperfect minor. It showed him
yellow eyes and ivory fangs, but it couldn't resolve the darkness that had replaced his face. With taloned
fingertips, Hamanu explored the sharp angles of his cheeks, the hairless ridge of his brows and the crest
that erupted from his narrowing skull. His ears remained in their customary place and customary fluted
form. His nose had collapsed, what—two ages ago? or was it three? or even four? And his lips...
Hamanu imagined they'd become hard cartilage, like inix lips; he was grateful that he'd never seen them.
Hamanu's feet had lengthened over the ages. He walked more comfortably on his toes than on his
heels. His knees had drawn up, and though he could still straighten his legs when it suited him, they were
most often flexed. Stepping down into the water, his movements resembled a bird's, not a man's.
He dived to the bottom of the pool and rose again to the surface. Habits that thirteen ages of
transformation could not erase brought his hands up to slick nonexistent hair away from his eyes. For a
heartbeat—Hamanu's hollow chest contained a heart; he hoped it remained human, though he couldn't
know for certain—he sank limply through the water. Then the skeletal arms pumped once, demonstrating
no lack of strength, and lifted his entire body out of the water.
The gaunt, black king had the power to hover motionless in the air or to fly faster than any raptor.
Hamanu chose, instead, to return to the pool's embrace with a spectacular, unappreciated splash. He
rolled onto his back and tumbled through the clear, warm water like a cart's wheel until he'd raised waves
high enough to leave puddles on the roof. He was oblivious to everything except his own amusement until
a bolt of pain lanced from his forefinger to his spine.
Roaring a curse at the four corners of the world, Hamanu made a fist and studied the pale red
and gray sliver protruding through the soot-black flesh. It was bone, of course, human bone, another tiny
fragment of his ancient humanity lost, now, forever. He pinched it between two talons and jerked it free.
A mortal man would have died from the shock. A mortal man did die. Deep within Hamanu's
psyche, a mortal man died a hundred times for every year of his immortal life. He would continue to die,
bit by bit, until there was nothing left and Rajaat's metamorphic spell would have completed its dirty
work. The metamorphosis should have been complete ages ago, but Hamanu, when he'd understood
what Rajaat had intended, had set his will against the War-Bringer. The immortal king of Urik could
neither stop nor reverse his inexorable transformation; he slowed its progress through deprivation and
starvation.
When his loathsome shape was concealed in a tangible human glamour, Hamanu ate with gusto
and drew no nourishment from his food. In his own form, Hamanu lived with agony and hunger, both of
which he'd hardened himself against. He could not die and had long since reached the limits of unnatural
withering. Hamanu endured and swore that by force of will alone he'd deny Rajaat's spell until the end of
time.
A bead of viscous blood the color and temperature of molten lava distended Hamanu's knuckle.
He stared at it with disgust, then thrust his fist beneath the water. Stinking steam broke the surface as a
sinuous black coil streamed away from the open wound. Hamanu sighed, closed his eyes, and with a
sun-warmed thought, congealed his blood into a rock-hard scab.
Another lost battle in a war that had known no victories: magic in any form fueled the
metamorphosis. Hamanu rarely cast spells in their traditional form and was miserly with his templars, yet
his very thoughts were magic and all his glamours. Each act of defiance brought him closer to ultimate
defeat. Even so—and though no one glimpsing him in his bathing pool would suspect it—Hamanu was far
closer to the human he'd been at birth than to what Rajaat intended him to become. Within his still-human
heart, Hamanu believed that in the battle between time and transformation, he would be triumphant.
At this hour, with the red sun just past its zenith, Urik rested quieter than it did at midnight.
Nothing moved save for a clutch of immature kes'trekels making lazy spirals above the walls of the Elven
Market. Slaves, freemen, nobles, and templars; men and women; elves, humans, dwarves, and all the
folk who fell between had gone in search of shadows and shelter from the fierce heat. There was no one
bold or foolish enough to gaze at the sun-hammered palace roof where a lone silhouette loomed against
the dusty sky.
Hamanu touched the minds of his minions throughout the city, as a man might run his tongue along
the backs of his teeth, counting them after a brawl. Half of the citizens were asleep and dreaming. One
was with a woman; another with a man. The rest were lying still, hoarding their thoughts and energy. He
did not disturb them.
His own thoughts drifted back to the woman, Eden, and her message. He asked himself if it was
likely that the Shadow-King Nibenay, once called Gallard, Bane of Gnomes, would send staves of his
precious agafari wood to their undead peer in blasted Giustenal. The answer, without hesitation, was
yes—for a price.
There was no love lost between any of Rajaat's champions, including Dregoth of Giustenal and
Gallard. They didn't trust each other enough for unrequited generosity. They didn't trust each other at all.
It had taken a dragon, Borys of Ebe in the full culmination of Rajaat's metamorphosis, to hold the
champions to the one cause that demanded their cooperation: maintaining the wards on their creator's
netherworld prison, a thing they called the Hollow beneath a place they called the Black.
Hamanu recalled the day, over five years earlier, when Borys had been vanquished, along with
several other champions. For one afternoon, for the first time in a thousand years, Rajaat had been free.
The fact that Rajaat was no longer free and had been returned to his Hollow owed nothing to the
cooperation of the three champions who'd survived Borys's death and Rajaat's resurrection. They
distrusted each other so much that they'd stood aside and let a mortal woman—a half-elf named Sadira
of Tyr—set the prison wards.
It had been different long ago, in the Year of Enemy's Fury in the 177th King's Age. After Borys
first set the wards on Rajaat's Hollow, there'd been nearly a score of immortal sorcerers ruling their
proud heartland cities. With the passage of thirteen ages, they'd winnowed themselves down to seven.
Then a decade ago, Kalak, the Tyrant of Tyr, had been brought down by his own ambition and a handful
of mortal rebels, including one of his own high templars and Sadira, the same Sadira who'd vanquished
Borys and reset the wards around Rajaat's Hollow.
In the Lion-King's judgment, Kalak was a fool, a careless fool who'd deserved the crime
committed against him. Kalak was no champion. Hamanu had, perhaps, trusted the Tyrant of Tyr more
than he trusted his peers, but he'd respected him less. He cursed Kalak's name each time it resurrected
itself in his memory. Kalak's demise had left an unfillable hole in Tyr, the oldest—if not the largest,
wealthiest, or most powerful—city in the heartland. And now, thanks in no small part to the subsequent
behavior of the rebels who'd killed their immortal sorcerer-king, the thrones of Balic, Raam, and Draj
were vacant, too.
It was easier to list who among Rajaat's champions was left: himself, Gallard in Nibenay, Inenek
in Gulg, and undead Dregoth in Giustenal—none of them a dragon.
So long as Rajaat was securely imprisoned in the Hollow beneath the Black, Hamanu didn't
object to the missing dragon.
Once Borys had completed Rajaat's metamorphosis and walked the heartland as a dragon,
Borys had ruled everyone. Even the immortal sorcerers in their proud city-states had jumped to a
dragon's whim. There had been wars, of course—cities devastated and abandoned—but the balance of
power never truly changed. What Borys demanded, Borys got, because he kept Rajaat confined in the
Hollow.
The prospect might have tempted some of them—though never Hamanu—if they hadn't all
watched helplessly as a maddened, mindless Borys ravaged the heartland immediately after they'd cast
the spells to complete his metamorphosis. For his first hundred years, wherever Borys went, he sucked
the life out of everything. When he was done, the heartland was the parched, blasted barren place it
remained to this day.
Dregoth had already succumbed to temptation and drawn the wrath of his immortal peers. Borys
had rounded them up for a second time, and they'd found a fitting eternal punishment for immortal hubris:
they'd ruined his city and stripped all living flesh from the proud Ravager of Giants. He remained the
champion he'd been on the day of his death, but he'd never be anything more. Dregoth was what folk
called undead, kaiskarga in the halfling tongue, the oldest of the many languages Hamanu knew.
In shame, and under the threat of worse punishment, Dregoth had dwelt for ages beneath his
ruined city. Mortal chroniclers forgot Dregoth, but his peers remembered— especially Uyness of
Waverly, whom living mortals had called Abalach-Re, Queen of Raam, and whom Dregoth remembered
as his betrayer.
Now Uyness was dead with Borys, and Dregoth wanted Raam's empty throne. Hamanu
reasoned that Nibenay might well support Giustenal's ambitions in that direction with agafari staves,
because, whether or not he conquered every empty-throned city, Dregoth could never become another
dragon as Borys had been. Like as not, Gallard would support Dregoth no matter which city the undead
champion had designs upon. Like as not, Gallard—who fancied himself the most subtle of Rajaat's
champions-hoped there'd come a day when he and Dregoth were the only champions left. If the price of
attaining dragonkind was the annihilation of every mortal life in a city or three, how much easier to pay
when none of the cities in peril were one's own?
Gallard had that much conscience, at least. Kalak hadn't hesitated at the thought of consuming
Tyr. That's what got him killed by his own subject citizens and templars, but Kalak of Tyr had been a
fool and freebooter from the start, long before the champions were created.
And Hamanu of Urik—what had he been before he was an immortal champion?
Hamanu's thoughts sluiced sideways. In his mind's eye, he was suddenly far away from his
precious city. He stood in another place, another time: a field of golden-ripe himali grain surrounded by
hardworking kith and kin. Warm summer breezes lifted his hair and dried the sweat on his back. There
was a hay rake in his youthful hands. A youngster—a brother too small to cut grain or rake—sat nearby
with reed pipes against his lips, diverting the harvesters as they labored. The brother's tune was lost to
time along with his name. But the dark-haired, gray-eyed maiden who stood behind the boy in memory,
swaying in the music's rhythm, her name would never be forgotten while the Lion-King lived: Dorean.