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"Fool!" Hamanu replied, which froze the commandant where he stood, though it was neither the Shadow-King nor Javed who occupied the forefront of his thoughts. "I am no longer the man fate made of me," he warned the sooty serpent constricting his ribs and neck.
Working his hand through the serpent's sorcerous coils, Hamanu found the head and wrenched it into the light where he could see it. And it could see him.
"I am not the man you thought I was."
With a flicking gesture, Hamanu impaled the serpent's head on his thumb's talon, then he let the heat of his rage escape from his heart. The serpent writhed. Ignoring the talon piercing its skull, it opened its mouth and hissed. Glowing, molten blood flowed from its fangs, covering Hamanu's wrist. Hamanu hissed back and, reaching into the Gray, summoned a knife from the void.
He cut off the serpent's head. Its coils fell heavily to the floor around his feet, where they released noxious vapors as they dissolved.
The poison posed no threat to Hamanu, but Javed and Pavek fell to their knees. The Lion of Urik was in no mood for sacrifice, especially of his own men. Reversing his grip on the hilt of his knife, which was forged from the same black glass as the now-shrunken shard, Hamanu drew a line along his forearm.
His hot blood sizzled when it struck the ooze on the floor. Dark, oily smoke rose as it consumed the dregs of vanquished sorcery. The stench grew worse, but it was no longer deadly. When the ooze was gone, Hamanu inhaled the odor into himself. He looked down on his mortal companions, who were still on their knees and far beyond fear.
"Did you bring the message?"
Javed nodded, then produced a stiff, stained sheet of human parchment. "I knew you'd want it, Great One."
Hamanu seized the parchment with a movement too quick for mortal eyes to follow. The ink was gone, as Javed warned, but there were other ways to read a champion's message. He closed his eyes, and the Shadow-King's blurred features appeared in his mind.
You have seen our danger. This was sent to me. You can imagine who, imagine how. We've gone too long without a dragon. If we can't make one, he will. Mark me well, Hamanu: he'll find a way to shape that turd, Tithian, into a dragon, if we don't stop him. Long before he died, Borys confided in me that Rajaat had intended to shape you into the Dragon of Tyr until he—Borys, that is—decided otherwise. It's not too late. The three of us can shape you before Rajaat tries again with Tithian. I've evolved a spell that will preserve your sanity. It won't be the way it was with Borys; we can't permit that, none of us can. Think about it, Hamanu. Think seriously about it.
The Shadow-King's image vanished in the heat of Hamanu's curse. The shard of Rajaat's sorcery was an unexpected, unpleasant proof of Gallard's claim. If Rajaat was making sorcery in the material world, then the Hollow was weakening; they'd gone too long without a dragon maintaining it. But if Gallard had found a spell that tempered the madness of dragon creation, Gallard wouldn't be offering it to him.
Reluctantly, Hamanu reconsidered Windreaver's recounting of the Gnome-Bane's strategy. There were three ways to transform a champion into a dragon: his peers pells to accelerate his metamorphosis, he could quicken so many sorcerous spells that he'd transform himself, or—following Kalak of Tyr's despicable example—he could gorge himself on the death of his entire city. Most likely, Gallard hoped to implement all three.
"Who do we fight, Great One?" Javed asked, his voice cracked and weak from poison.
"Do as I command, Javed," Hamanu scolded his most-trusted officer. "Summon my levy."
Wisely, the elf nodded and bowed as he rose to his feet. "As you will, Great One. As you command."
He retreated to the bronze door, which Hamanu opened with a thought. Pavek followed.
"Not you. Not yet."
Pavek dropped again to his knees. "Your will, Great One."
"I need you here, in the palace, Pavek, but I need your druid friends as well. Send a message to Quraite. Send a message to Telhami, if you will. Tell her it's time, Pavek; the end of time."
"If Urik's danger is Quraite's danger, Great One, then I'm sure she already knows. She says there's only one guardian spirit for all of Athas, and she is part of it now," Pavek said, still on his knees with his head tightly bowed.
There were many tastes and textures swirling in the young man's thoughts, but loathing was not among them. Leaning forward, Hamanu hooked a talon under Pavek's chin, nudging gently until he could see the troubled face his templar strove to conceal. Then, with another talon, he traced the scar across Pavek's face.
"And if it's my danger, and only mine, what then, Pavek?"
Once again, Pavek's mind cleared, like still water on a windless day. Short of slaying the man, there was no way for Hamanu to extract an answer to his question from Pavek's thoughts. Murder was easy; lowering his hand, letting Pavek rise unsteadily to his feet and leave the chamber alive—that was the hardest thing Hamanu had done in a generation.
Windreaver! Hamanu cast the name into the netherworld along with Gallard's parchment. Windreaver! Now!
He sat down on the marble bench, which, like the stone bench in his cloister, was strong enough to support his true weight and proportions. Water flowed again over the boulder and down the walls. The Lion-King buried his grotesque face in his malformed hands and tried not to think, or plan, or dread until the air quickened, and the troll appeared.
"I hear, and I obey," Windreaver said. "I am the doomed servant of a doomed fool."
Hamanu didn't rise to the bait. "Did you search the Nibenese camp?"
"Of course. Four hundred ugly women surrounded by four thousand uglier men."
"Nothing more?" Hamanu betrayed nothing of his suspicions, his anger.
"Nothing, O Mighty One. Enlighten me, O Mighty One: What do you think I should have found?"
"This!" Hamanu brandished the remnant of the obsidian shard. It had shrunk to a fraction of its former size, and the glass was pitted with soot. The troll leapt back, as if he still had life and substance.
"It was not there," Windreaver insisted, no longer insolent. "I would have known—"
"Nonsense!" Hamanu hurled the shard at his minion; it vanished at the top of its arc, swallowed by the Gray. "You've grown deaf and blind, Windreaver—worse, you've grown careless."
"Never... not where he's concerned. I'd know the War-Bringer's scent anywhere."
Hamanu said nothing, merely waited for the troll to hear own his folly and self-deception. Windreaver's hatred for the War-Bringer was greater than his hatred for the Troll-Scorcher but he hadn't sensed the shard before Hamanu revealed it. He'd dreamed of watching the champions destroy each other, and his dreams had, indeed, left him careless.
"Is Rajaat free?" the troll asked. "The Dark Lens—it's where the Tyrian sorceress put it five years ago, isn't it? No one's stolen it, have they? The templars—? The medallions—?" "Still work," Hamanu assured him. Without the Dark Lens, the champions could not cha
"I don't know, Windreaver—but you'll tell me, when you come back from Ur Draxa."
He expected an argument: Borys's demolished stronghold was a long way away and dangerous, even for a disembodied spirit. But Windreaver was gone before Hamanu finished speaking.