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The sun had set some time ago. Slaves had set torches in the hundreds of wall sconces, as they'd done every night for ages. Hamanu snuffed the torches out, one by one, with a thought or a memory as he walked by. He came to the throne room with its monstrosity of a throne; he wasn't sorry to leave that behind.
Above the throne hung the lion's head lantern, the eternal flame of Urik. Hamanu recalled the day he'd hung it there and lit it. Immortal wasn't eternal. He'd known there'd come a day, a night, when it was extinguished—but not this night. He left it burning and felt its yellow eyes on his back as he left the throne room and began his circuit of his private places, closing doors, saying good-bye, until he came to his cloister sanctum.
His vellum history was there, a leather scroll-case beside it. He'd written no further than Windreaver's last battle. A thousand years went unrecounted; wars with all his neighbors, with rebels, criminals, and blighted fools. Except for the dead, all his wars had been alike. If he had written them, they'd all read: We fought; I won. Urik prospered. Urik endured.
There was nothing more to write. Hamanu rolled the vellum sheets together, tied them with a silk cord, and slid them into the case that he slung over his shoulder. Bathed in moonlight, the Kreegill murals painted on the walls were studies in charcoal and silver; they seemed too real to consider touching. Pavek's tools stood where he'd left them, in an orderly row against the little cottage. The novice druid had restored the scorched dirt. He'd planted grain in the ground he'd tilled and tended. High as a man's forearm, it, too, was silver in the moonlight.
Hamanu plucked a sprig and held it to his nose. He remembered the smell.
When the cloister doors were bolted shut for the last time, from the inside, Hamanu made a familiar slashing motion through the air. Netherworld mist enveloped him. He emerged beneath the palace gate-tower, a slightly built, dark-haired human youth with a leather case slung over a narrow shoulder.
The templar guards didn't notice him, nor did anyone else. Urik's streets were quiet, though not as doom-laden as the palace. War had been a regular occurrence throughout the Lion-King's reign. Even siege camps beyond the ring of market villages weren't unknown—and weren't a source of great concern for the ordinary Urikite. After all, as the magic-voiced orators reminded them at the start of each watch: Urik has never lost a battle when the Lion-King leads her armies.
Outside the Lion-King's i
Let him lead us to victory. Make him invincible before our enemies. Return our king, safe, to us—
As if they knew Hamanu, the Lion of Urik, was not a god at all.
He was lost in listening when he felt a tug on the hem of the plain illusory shirt he wore.
"Want to make a wish?" a little boy asked.
The boy's thoughts were of a brother, a giant of a brother who'd been called up in the second levy a quinth ago, and of his mother, a shrunken woman on the other side of the fountain. The woman gave a shy, toothless smile when Hamanu looked at her.
"My brother's outside," the boy said. Neither he nor his mother had the least notion that explanations were u
He had no brothers, not for a thousand years, but Hamanu had somebody—ten thousand somebodies in yellow and mufti—outside the wall. "Yes."
"Bigger'n stronger than you, huh?"
He was Manu tonight, this last night in Urik; it had seemed appropriate. And Manu had been an unimpressive youth, though not as spindly as the boy imagined, comparing Manu to his mountain of a brother. If he'd been real, and not illusion, Manu could have slept outside the walls tonight; the third levy would have taken him.
The boy tugged Hamanu's shirt again. "You scared?" And where the brother had been in the boy's thoughts, there was fear, hurt and emptiness: all that a child could understand of war.
"Yes, a little." Manu knew better than to lie to children.
"Me, too," the boy admitted and held out a dirty, half-size ceramic bit. "We can wish together?"
"What shall we wish for?"
The boy pressed a pudgy finger against his lips. Hamanu nodded quickly. He should have known: wishes were secrets between the wish-maker and the Lion. They tossed their bits in together: two tiny ripples in the moonlight. Not even a god could have said which was which.
"It's go
"He'll try," Hamanu said.
He was spared from saying more when the boy's mother called, "Ranci!" and held out her hand.
"Whim of the Lion," Hamanu said to the boy's shadow as he darted around the fountain. "He'll try to save them all."
The Lion-King put his fountain behind him and wandered the streets of his city. Pools of light spilled out of every tavern doorway where folk came together to either find courage or lose fear at the bottom of a mug. Taverns didn't have anything to soothe a champion's nerves. Nothing he could eat or drink would make this night shorter. Nothing he could imagine would make it easier.
Pavek's thoughts from a few long nights ago came back to him: Surely my king needs friends about him tonight. Hamanu hadn't wanted friends that night, and wasn't entirely certain he wanted them now. But he'd intended from the begi
They hoped.
Within his slight-framed illusion, Hamanu remained Hamanu. His champion's ears listened through the walls as he walked and yanked the most flagrant of his weedy templars as he passed their dwellings. He filled their minds with morbid guilt and lethal nightmares; he savored their anguish as they died. Then he calmed his vengeful heart and put his fist on the door of Pavek's house.
He had to knock twice before he heard someone moving toward the door. Even then, he wasn't certain the woman was coming to open it or was chasing a child who'd strayed into the vestibule. With or without his preternatural senses, Pavek's house was one of the noisiest dwellings in the templar quarter. Hamanu was about to attract Pavek's attention through his gold medallion when, at last, he heard footsteps on the interior stairs, and the door swung open.