The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King

Hamanu studied the ground to the right of his feet. He remembered the boy's shape, his voice, and his questions as he stood among these stones. Memory was illusion; there was no going back. "I could wish that, too. But we had no choice, no chance. Rajaat took that away before I was born. Maybe before you were born. Our paths were destined to cross on the battlefield, at the top of a dark-sky cliff, far from anywhere either of us knew. One misstep, by either of us, and we'd never have met at all."

" 'One misstep'?"

"And the Cleansing Wars would have ended worse than they did. You could have held Myron of Yoram to a stalemate, but Rajaat would have found another lump of human clay to mold into his final champion. The dwarves, elves, and giants wouldn't've survived... and neither would the trolls..." he paused a second time and raised his head before adding the long-unspoken words—"My friend."

Windreaver's silver-etched silhouette didn't shift in the sunlight. "I believe you," he said softly, without saying what he believed. "Our race was doomed."

Looking at the troll's slumped, translucent shoulders, the Lion-King remembered compassion. "You believe your dead dwell in stone, awaiting rebirth. When the wind's done scouring these stones, there'll be trolls again, someday. You'll teach them their language." He thought of the pebble imbedded in his forearm. "You might be reborn, yourself."

Terrible silver eyes met Hamanu's. "If the spirits of our dead survived in stone, the War-Bringer would have declared war on stone. He would have made a champion to suck life from stone."

The War-Bringer had. If there'd been life sleeping in these ruins, Rajaat's final champion could have destroyed it. "I wouldn't... won't. It will not happen. Not in three days. Not ever."

"You learn," Windreaver concluded. "Of all your kind, you alone learned from your mistakes."

"I learned from you. But. by then, there were no choices so there couldn't be mistakes. When Rajaat came to me in Urik and I ran from him. it was your taunts—"

"I didn't taunt you, not that day."

"You were waiting for me when I came out of the Gray near Kemelok. You'd gotten there first; you knew exactly where I'd go. You said that if I ran—if I kept ru

"I'd sworn I wouldn't speak to you. Then you broke away from the War-Bringer. I saw it, heard it, but I didn't believe it. You refused what he offered. Then you ran to Borys, and I was afraid for you, my enemy, my warden, so I broke my oath," said the troll's spirit, as though in recitation.

"You made me think before I talked to him." "For all the good it did, Manu. For all the good it did, long ago..."

Borys hadn't welcomed another champion's sudden appearance behind his Kemelok siege line. The Butcher of Dwarves hurled a series of Unseen assaults at his illusion-shrouded visitor. Hamanu deflected everything that came his way, all without raising a counterattack. After a short lull, a solitary human strode out of the besieger's camp. It wasn't a good time for meeting another champion. Borys made that clear from the start.

As Borys explained, ten days earlier, he'd fought a pitched, but not quite decisive, battle against the dwarven army here at Kemelok. He'd given their king, Rkard, a fatal wound—at least it should have been fatal. Borys wasn't certain. That was half his anger. The sword Borys had carried into the battle was enchanted. Rajaat had given it to him the day he'd become the thirteenth champion. The sword imparted a lethal essence to any dwarf it cut open, as it had opened Rkard, but the cursed dwarf had gotten lucky.

Rkard's axe had taken a chunk out of Borys's shoulder, a blow that would have quartered a mortal man. Battle-stu

Hamanu listened to the Butcher of Dwarves's tirade and wisely didn't mention that his victory over the trolls hadn't depended on any enchanted weaponry. He waited until the other champion had calmed down enough to ask the obvious questions.

"What do you want? Who sent you? Why are you here?" asked Borys.

"Rajaat came to me in Urik."

"This is my war, Troll-Scorcher, and I'm ending it now. No one's coming in to share my kill. If Rajaat's whispering in your ear, that's your problem, not mine."

"Wrong," Hamanu countered. He opened his mind to share his recent encounter with their mutual creator, but Borys was warded against such invasion. "He means for me to finish your war—"

"Never," Borys snarled and quickened another spell. "I warned you."

"—And start another cleansing war, this time against humanity itself."

A needle-thin ray of orange light shot from the palm of the Butcher of Dwarves to Hamanu's gut, where it raised a finger-wisp of oily smoke before Hamanu deflected it with a gesture of his own. Once pointed at the ground, the orange ray seared a line a hundred paces long across the already ash-streaked dirt.

"He showed me how it would be done," the Lion-King said, "and gave me a foretaste of human death."

"We can all kill, Hamanu," Borys said wearily, as if explaining life's realities to a dull-witted child. "Kill all Urik, if that pleases you, but stay away from my damned dwarves, and know this: make war with humanity, and you're making war with me."

"I'll win."

"When mekillots fly, Hamanu. You're the last, and the least. You may have vanquished the trolls, but they were almost finished when Yoram lost his fire. You don't have the wit or power to battle any one of us. Go back to Urik. Be careful, though—I hear you're taking in half-bloods. Give a dwarf shelter, and I'll make war with you."

"Forget dwarves," Hamanu advised. "Think about what happens next. What did he promise you?"

"A new human kingdom in a new human world, a pure world, without dwarves and the rest of the Rebirth scum. I'll rule from Ebe—or here at Kemelok—until I can wrest Tyr from old Kalak. After that, who knows? We needn't be enemies, Hamanu. There's enough to go around, for now."

"You seemed wiser. I thought you knew better than to believe him."

"If Rajaat could cleanse the world, none of us would exist. He's the War-Bringer, not the war commander; the first sorcerer, but not a sorcerer-king. He needs us more than we need him."

Locked in what he hoped would be humanity's final battle with the Rebirth dwarves, Borys wasn't eager to be seen conferring with a man who was clearly not-quite-human. After throwing a scrap of cloth on the ground, to shape his spell, Borys tried to reconfine Hamanu in his customary black-haired and tawny illusion.

"Begone!" the Butcher of Ebe growled softly with his own true voice.

Hamanu shook off the spell. With a hundred human deaths fresh on the back of his dragon's tongue and Windreaver's taunts still ringing in his ears, he pleaded for an open mind. "Let me show you—"

"I've seen enough."

Abandoning the calm tactics that went against his nature and hadn't accomplished anything, Hamanu gestured widely with both arms. Borys responded with another spell, but before he could cast it, Hamanu cast a spell of his own. The air between Urik's gaunt king and the blond human flashed with lightning brilliance as Hamanu found die veterans from whose life essence Borys was quickening his spell. He a