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The steward chuckled and rubbed his hands together. "Follow me, good man. I'm sure she'll want some for both Rikus and Rkard."
Hamanu wondered what the man had seen, but kept his wondering to himself as the steward led him through a series of corridors and courtyards to a small, elegant chamber where—by the bittersweet flavor of the air—Sadira of Tyr was in the midst of a melancholy daydream.
No need for you to remain. Hamanu put the thought in the steward's mind. I'll introduce myself to your mistress.
When the steward was out of sight in the next corridor, Hamanu erased his entire presence from the mortal's memory. Then he crossed the threshold into Sadira's chamber.
"Dear lady—?" He interrupted her as gently, as unmagically as he could, though aside from his simple peddler's illusion, he'd done nothing to disguise himself, and Sadira should recognize him instantly.
She did. "Hamanu!"
"No cause for alarm, dear lady," he said quickly, holding his hands palms-up, though, like her, he didn't need conventional gestures, conventional sources to quicken his sorcery. "I've come to talk—"
Before Hamanu could say anything more to reassure her, the sorceress quickened a spell. It erupted faster than thought, and whatever its intended purpose, its sole effect was to destroy completely the little pebble Hamanu cached between the black bones of his left forearm.
A smoking gap formed in Hamanu's peddler illusion. Hot, viscous blood dripped onto the floor, corroding the delicate mosaic. The physical pain was intense, but it paled beside the heart-stopping shock as greasy smoke began to flow from the wound. Hamanu clapped his right hand over the gap. The smoke seeped around his fingers. Windreaver took shape in the smoke.
"We come to the end of the trolls at last."
"No." A soft, impotent denial. "Let go of the past, Hamanu. It's time."
"Leave it be, Hamanu," Windreaver cautioned, and laid a faintly warm, faintly tangible hand over the Lion-King's wounded arm. "I know your ways. You think this is no accident. You think this is my vengeance. It's not. Thirteen ages is too long to think of vengeance, Hamanu. We've fought the past long enough. Think of the future." The troll's smoky fingers began to collapse. "I'll wait for you, Manu of Deche. I'll prepare a place beside me, where the stone is young..."
Four greasy streaks of soot on Hamanu's arm and a larger splotch on the floor were all the remained of the last and greatest commander of the once-great race known as trolls.
Sadira rose from her stool. Her foot came down beside the stain.
"Stay back!" Hamanu warned.
The power of death was inside him, and the will to use it She lived because Windreaver wished her to live. Hamanu would honor the last troll's wish—if he could. And if he couldn't let her live, then he'd live with the consequences, as he'd lived with all his other consequences.
Sadira sensed her danger and retreated. "What—" she began, then corrected herself. "Who was that? Another dragon?"
It was an almost-honest question. The half-elf had no notion of trolls or the Troll-Scorcher. Her experience bound Hamanu with dragons instead. He collected his wits and tried to speak, but it was too soon.
Sadira mistook his silence. "Did you think that you could come in here and work your foul sorcery on me?" she asked with all the arrogance that Rajaat's sorcery could breed in a sorcerer's mind. "I know how to destroy dragons. Kalak, Rajaat, Borys, you—you're all alike. You destroy my world. Athas won't be safe until every dragon's dead."
Hamanu's tangled emotions snapped free. The rage that killed with a thought vanished like a cool breeze at midday. Grief and mourning were set aside for the moment when he'd be alone—very alone. He forgot, in large part, why he'd come, and that Rajaat's promised doom hung over his city. What remained was the capriciousness, the cruelty that fully deserved the hatred the half-elf directed at him.
She was a fool, and he intended to enjoy proving it to her.
"You know very little, Sadira of Tyr, if you don't know the difference between Kalak and Borys, Borys and Rajaat, Rajaat and me."
"There is no difference. You're all the same. All evil. All life-sucking defilers," she insisted. "I know you get your magic from the Dark Lens. I know you'd enslave all Athas if no one stood against you. I know all the lies, you told me that day in Ur Draxa when Rkard bested Rajaat. You were children rebelling against your father, but the only reason you rebelled was envy. You wanted his power for yourselves. What more do I need to know?"
"You need to know that every dragon is different and that Rajaat created dragons when he created sorcery and that was long before he created champions to wage his Cleansing Wars. You need to know that if a sorcerer lives long enough to master the secrets of the Unseen netherworld, then that immortal sorcerer will change into a dragon—but not a dragon like Borys. Borys wasn't a sorcerer when he became a dragon; he was a champion. Rajaat shaped his champions out of human clay in his white tower. He bathed them in a black-water pool and stood them in a Crystal Steeple beneath the Dark Lens. The dragon is a part of a champion's nature—a large part, an inevitable part—but not the only part, or the most powerful part."
"Anything else?" Sadira asked, feigning disinterest.
She feigned disinterest because she owed her sooty armor and shadow magic to an immersion in that black-water pool and to spells cast in the Crystal Steeple. Her i
Hamanu savored her worry. "Borys was a champion. I was Rajaat's last champion of the Cleansing Wars. Kalak wasn't a champion—" Hamanu began.
"Sacha Arala and Wyan were Kalak's champions—fools and traitors, too. They gave Tyr's templars their spells. They could have done the same for anyone—especially after Tithian found the Dark Lens."
"Tithian," Sadira sighed. In Tyr, the conversation always came back to Tithian.
"Tithian wanted it all: Rajaat's spells, the pool, the tower, the Dark Lens. He didn't think about dragons. He thought he wanted to be a sorcerer-king, but what he truly wanted to be was a champion."
"Would he—" the sorceress succumbed to her own curiosity. "Would Rajaat have made Tithian into something like you or Borys? The way Rajaat was hunting and killing sorcerer-kings, I wouldn't think he'd ever make another champion."
The trap was set, the prey was sniffing at the bait, all that remained was a little tug on the trip-cord. "Rajaat already had his next creation: something better than an immortal champion who'd slip from his control. His minions had already shaped her in his tower—with his permission, of course. They couldn't have worked magic there otherwise. She can't draw on the Dark Lens, can't cha
Sadira boiled off her stool. The shadow-stuff that cloaked her skin when the bloody sun was above the horizon came alive with the sorcery she intended to hurl at him. But Rajaat's last champion—his last true champion-sprang his trap. Pursing his lips, Hamanu inhaled through his mouth. A thin stream of shadow-stuff whirled from her to him, and, to Sadira's wide-eyed horror, she couldn't stop it.
"There are," Hamanu explained when she was mortally pale and shaken, "a few things you don't know about yourself."