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"I'm sure it is." Pavek held Ruari at arm's length; the young man was clearly besotted. But that was hardly surprising. "I'm sure you'll be very happy together."
He saw them together in his mind's eye—Ruari and a beautiful woman and children, also beautiful; one of whom had yellow eyes. Pavek hadn't ever had a vision before; prophecy wasn't at all common among druids... or templars. But he believed what he saw, and it lifted his heart. He hugged Ruari again, then let him go, and walked by himself to the tower's southern balustrade where, with his vision still strong in his mind, he stared at the empty road until he could see both of them together.
A hand fell heavily on his shoulder: Javed, his face deep in a hard, unreadable expression.
"Manu?" the elven commandant asked.
"Yes." Javed's hand left Pavek's shoulder. It made a fist that struck the black breastplate armor over the commandant's heart: a lifetime of unquestioning obedience followed by an eyes-closed sigh.
Pavek nodded. "Hope," he agreed.
But not for long. While both men watched, a second sun began to rise where the southern road met the horizon. It was as bright as the eastern sun and the same bloody color.
"Whim of the lion," one of the sergeants swore; the rest of them had lost their voices.
The templars lost more a few moments later when every medalLion-wearing man and woman collapsed. Pavek wrapped his arms around his head, lest his skull burst from the fire within. He beat his forehead on the rough planks of the watchtower floor. That helped, countering pain with pain. Someone stood behind him and broke his medallion's golden chain; that helped more.
But by then, it wasn't the physical pain that kept him on his knees with his face to the floor. It was the certain knowledge that the Lion-King, the Unseen presence in his life since he'd turned fifteen and received his first crude, ceramic medallion, had released him, had abandoned him, rather than destroy him.
Slowly, Pavek straightened and sat back on his heels. Javed was in front of him; his lips were bleeding where he'd bitten them. There were no words for what they felt as they steadied themselves against the balustrade and stood up. They turned away from each other and looked south, where the second sun had vanished behind—or within—a towering pillar of dust and light.
One of the lesser-ranked templars in the gate tower began a cheer. It died unfinished in her throat. No mortal could celebrate what was happening in the south once the sounds of death and sorcery reached the Urik walls.
The cloud-pillar grew until it could grow no higher—as high and mighty as the towering plumes that heralded an eruption of the Smoking Crown volcano to the northwest. Then, like those sooty plumes, the pillar began to flatten and spread out at its top. Lightning arcs co
Pavek knew—they all knew, though none of them was a weather witch—that the bolts sprang up from the ground, not down from the cloud.
The templars of Nibenay, Gulg, and Giustenal were not as fortunate as their Urikite peers. Their kings had sacrificed them and the rest of the three enemy armies to the dragon taking shape within the seething pillar.
Without warning, the cloud disintegrated before their awestruck eyes. A deep, rumbling roar struck the tower a few heartbeats later. Like a mighty fist—a dragon's fist—it drove each and every one of them backward. The tower shuddered and swayed; strong men and women fell to their knees and screamed in abject terror. Behind them, within Urik itself, roofs and walls collapsed, their lesser tumult subsumed in the ongoing echo of the southern blast. An echo that seemed, to Pavek, to last forever.
"We're next!" he shouted. He felt his words in his lungs and on his tongue, but his voice never penetrated his deafened ears.
But one voice did: Behold! The Dragon of Urik!
And another voice, immediately after the first: Now, Pavek.
He crawled to the balustrade. The blast-weakened rail crumbled in his hand when he clutched it. Pavek stood carefully, looked south. Everything was quiet beneath the light and heat of a single sun. The cloud was gone—as if it had never been. The three dark sprawls where the three enemy armies had camped were gone, too. The places where they'd been were as pale and dazzling as bleached bones in the morning light.
But the dark line of Urik's army still circled the still-green fields. They'd survived. They'd all survived. Their king was, indeed, stronger than the nature Rajaat and the other champions had given him.
Now, Pavek. Now, or never!
There was a black dot on the southern road, moving toward them. Far smaller than the monstrous creature Pavek had seen within the cloud, he didn't, at first, comprehend the words echoing in his thoughts. He didn't comprehend that they had not come from a frantic Quraite druid, but from the moving dot, the dragon, racing toward Urik's walls.
There were no mnemonics or patterns in Pavek's mind when he evoked the city's essence, just need—burning, desperate need.
Surely need had never been greater than the moment when Pavek reached out of himself to evoke—to implore and beg for—the Urik guardian's aid. The other times, the guardian had been pleased to save a handful of individuals. Surely, the guardian would be pleased now to save the entire city.
Hamanu had thought so, and as he poured himself into the evocation, Pavek believed in Hamanu and the guardian equally, together. The guardian was the life essence of the city and Hamanu—the Hamanu that Pavek had known-had just died for it. No one could do more than the Lion-
King had done, yet Pavek tried, pouring himself into the evocation until he was empty, until they could see the dragon clearly: a scintillating black presence, as tall as the south gate tower and coming closer, with nothing—nothing at all—rousing from the depths to stop him.
Wisps of netherworld mist rose from the dragon's lustrous hide. His shape shifted subtly as he approached the tower. The changes were difficult for a mortal eye to perceive, but the eldest of the Quraite druids had a notion:
"He's not finished, not fully realized."
Pavek remembered the vellum, remembered the passages about Borys and the hundred years during which the unfinished dragon had ravaged the heartland before he regained his sanity.
"He's bigger than the Dragon of Tyr," Javed said to no one in particular; he was the only one among them who could make the comparison. "Different, yet the same."
"The guardian, Pavek." That was Ruari. "Where's the guardian?"
"I couldn't evoke it," he answered, giving voice to defeat and despair. "They can't be in the same place, Hamanu and the guardian."
A chorus of curses erupted, followed by moans of fear and despair, and a shout as one of the druids chose to leap from the tower to her death rather than face the Dragon of Urik. The dragon was a hundred paces away—a hundred of Pavek's paces, about eighty of Javed's, about ten of the dragon's. They could see it quite clearly now, more clearly than anyone truly wished to see a dragon.
Pavek, who'd seen Hamanu's true shape, saw the resemblance, though, in truth, the resemblance wasn't great. The talons were the same, though much larger, and the dragon's eyes were sulphur yellow. They were lidless eyes, now, covered with iridescent scales that shimmered in the light. Their pupils were sword-shaped, sword-sized. They did not seem so much to be eyes looking out as they seemed to be openings into a fathomless, dark space.
The longer Pavek looked at them, the less resemblance there seemed to be, until the dragon tilted its massive head.