Добавить в цитаты Настройки чтения

Страница 48 из 68

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-ski

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.

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 farmers built terraces to keep the soil in place until long-lived plants put down their roots—the valleys would bloom again. Until then, there'd be only the skeletal branches of the tallest trees reaching out of their graves.

The loss Hamanu felt as he turned away from the valleys was for Athas, not himself. There was nothing down there to remind him of what he'd lost: Deche, Dorean, his own humanity. His memory held a face he named Dorean, but were his Dorean to reappear, he wasn't certain he'd recognize her. She'd never recognize him. The young man who'd danced for her was gone. His metamorphic body could no longer perform the intricate steps.

Ages had passed since Hamanu wished that he could weep for his lost past or wished that he was dead within it. There were no gods to grant a champion's wishes. He'd never weep again, and he'd lived too long to throw his life away.

In his natural shape, Hamanu was taller than any troll. He looked directly at the carved inscriptions he'd once studied from the ground, and lost himself recovering their meaning from his memory.

"Can you read it?"

A voice—Windreaver's voice—asked from behind his back. Hamanu let out a breath he'd held since Ur Draxa. He hadn't wanted to be alone. The troll's voice was the right voice for this place, this moment.

" 'Come, blessed sun,' " he answered, tracing the word-symbols as he translated them. " 'Warm my walls and my roof. Send your light of life through my windows and my doors.' " He paused with his finger above the last group of carvings. "This one, 'awaken,' and the next pair, 'stone' plus 'life'—they're on every stone in every wall. Wake up my stones? Wake up my people? I was never certain."

" 'Arise, reborn.' We believed the spirits of our ancestors dwelt in stone. We never mined, not like the dwarves. Mining was desecration. We waited for the stone to rise. The closer it came to the sun—we believed—the closer our ancestors were to the moment of rebirth."

"And do you still believe?" Hamanu asked. He didn't expect an answer, and didn't get one.

"Who taught you to read our script?" Windreaver demanded, as if the knowledge were a sacred trust, not to be shared with outsiders, with humans especially.

"I taught myself. I was here at sunrise, whenever I could get away from my chores, imagining what it had been like. I looked at the inscriptions and asked myself: what would I have written here, if I were a troll, living in this place, watching the sun rise over my house. After a while, I believed I knew."

Silence lengthened. Hamanu thought Windreaver had departed.

He considered issuing a command that the troll couldn't disobey, demanding recognition for his accomplishment. He'd learned the script without assistance and, save for the two symbols that dealt with a faith he couldn't imagine, he'd learned it correctly. But that would be a tawdry triumph in a place that deserved better. With a final caress for the carved stone, Hamanu turned and saw that he wasn't alone.

"I taught myself to read your script. I couldn't teach myself to speak it. If you wish to insult me, do it in a living language."

"I said you read well."

The Lion-King knew his captive companion better than that. "When mekillots fly," he challenged.

"No, you're right. I said something else, but you read well. That's the truth. Nothing else matters, does it—in a living language?"

"Thank you," Hamanu replied. He didn't want an argument, not today. But it seemed he was going to have one: Windreaver's face had soured into an expression he hadn't seen before. "Is it so terrible? A boy comes up here—a human boy. He imagines he's a troll and deciphers your language."

"What I said was: I could wish I had met that remarkable human boy."