The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King (Dark Sun: Chronicles of Athas 5)

The yellow-haired man smiled. His teeth were stained, and one was sharpened to a fang point. "That's for the Troll-Scorcher, boy. He's the one, the only one, who slays trolls. We hunt 'em, boy, an' hunt 'em an' hunt 'em, but that's all we do. He comes an' scorches 'em. We touch one gray wart an' we'd be the ones getting cindered-up from the inside out. I seen it happen, boy. This"—he cocked his callused thumb at poor Dorean—"this ain't nothing, boy, compared to scorching. Trolls could take you an' yours a thousand times, an' it don't matter to me, so long as there's trolls for scorchin' when he comes."

I stood mute, strung between disgust and rage. The woman beside me squeezed my arm.

"It's the truth, boy," she said.

Swallowing my disgust, I let my rage speak, soft, slow, and cold. "Where is Myron of Yoram?" I asked. "When does the Troll-Scorcher come?" I thought I knew the answer, but I needed to hear it.

Another smile from the yellow-haired man. "Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day. We been following these trolls since the start of High Sun." The grin soured. "He knows where we are, boy. He'll come when it suits him, not before. Till then, we follow the trolls an' we follow 'em close, so no man knows we're here."

"I'm a man," I said, "I know."

He drew a bone knife from his belt. "Trolls leave meat behind, not men."

I should have died. Everything I loved and cherished had already died. Their shades called me through the darkness. I belonged with Deche, with my family, with my beloved. But my rage was stronger and my thirst for vengeance against trolls, men, and Myron of Yoram couldn't be slaked by death. A voice I scarcely recognized as my own stirred in my throat.

"A good-for-nothing farmer's boy? What can you do, boy—besides dig furrows in the dirt?"

"I'll keep him," the woman, still beside me, said before I could speak.

"Jikkana! Jikkana! You break my heart," another man cried out in mock grief. "He's a boy. He won't last ten nights in your bed!"

She spun around. "My second-best knife says he lasts longer than you did!"

Her knife was never at risk.

* * *

A lavender glow had appeared above the painted mountains on the eastern wall of Hamanu's cloister. The quiet of night gave way to the barked commands of the day-watch officers taking their posts along the city's walls. Another Urik morning had begun. Setting his stylus aside, Urik's king massaged his cramped fingers. Bold, black characters marched precisely across several sheets of pearly vellum. Several more lay scrunched and scattered through the neglected garden. Two sheets remained untouched.

"I'll need more vellum," Hamanu mused, "and more time."

Chapter Four

The heat of day had come again to Urik. Here and there, insect swarms raised raucous chorus. All other creatures, if they had the wit and freedom, sought shelter from the sun's brutal strength. Throughout Hamanu's domain, the din of commerce faded, and labor's pace slowed to a snore. Mindless mirage sprites danced across the burning pavement of the city's deserted market squares, while merchants of every variety dozed in the oppressive shade of their stalls.

Beyond the city walls, in the green fields and villages, workers set aside tools and napped beside their beasts. Farther away, in the gaping complex of mountain pits that was the Urikite obsidian mines, overseers drank cool, fruited tea beneath leather awnings and the wretched mass of slaves received a few hours' rest and unrestricted access to the water barrels.

No great mercy there, the king reminded himself as he, like the distant slaves, sipped water from a wooden ladle in the shadows of the peasant cloister, deep within his palace. While he'd lived, Borys, the Dragon of Tyr, had levied a thousand lives each year from each champion to maintain the spells around Rajaat's prison. The obsidian mines required even more lives—too many more lives—to keep Urik secure.

Letting slaves rest each afternoon insured that they'd live to hack at the black veins for a few more days. The life span of a mine slave was rarely more than two seventy-five-day quinths of the three-hundred-seventy-five-day Athasian year. An obsidian sword didn't last much longer, chipping and flaking into uselessness. Maintaining the balance between able-bodied slaves and the baskets of sharp-edged ore Urik's defense required was one task Hamanu refused to delegate to his templars. It was his age-old decree that gave the wretches their daily rest and the threat of his intervention that kept the templar overseers obediently under their awning.

It certainly wasn't mercy.

Mercy was standing here, concealing his presence from Pavek, who'd fallen asleep in the shade of one of the dead fruit-trees. Waking the scar-faced man would have been as easy as breathing out, but Hamanu resisted the temptation that was, truly, no temptation at all. He could experience a mortal's abject terror anytime; the sweet-dreaming sleep of an exhausted man was precious and tare.

As soon as he'd returned to the city yesterday afternoon, Enver had sent a messenger to the palace, begging a full day's recovery before he resumed his duties. Faithful Pavek, however, had visited his Urik house only long enough to bathe and change his travel-stained clothes. He appeared at the palace gates as the sun was setting and passed a good part of the moonlit night reading the vellum sheets still spread across the worktable.

Naked tree stumps and neatly tied bales of twigs and straw testified to Pavek's diligent labor—at least until exhaustion had claimed him. He sprawled across the fresh-cleared dirt, legs crooked and one arm tucked under his cheek, as careless as a child. Images, not unlike the heat mirages above the market squares, shimmered above Pavek's gently moving ribs, though unlike a true mirage, which any mortal could observe, only Hamanu could see the wispy substance of the templar's dreams.

They were a simple man's dreams: the shapes of Pavek's loved ones as they lived within him. There was a woman at his dream's shimmering center; Hamanu's human lips curved into an appreciative smile. She was blond and beautiful and, having met her one momentous night in Quraite, the Lion of Urik knew his ugly templar didn't embellish her features. Hamanu didn't know her name; there weren't enough mortal names to label all the faces in thirteen ages of memory. He recalled her by the texture of her spirit and through the uncompromising honesty of Pavek's dream.

The blond druid had fallen afoul of Hamanu's one-time favorite, Elabon Escrissar, during the zarneeka crisis that had first brought Pavek to Hamanu's attention. Scars of abuse, disgrace, and torment entwined beneath her loveliness. She'd healed somewhat in the years since Hamanu had last seen her, but she'd heal more if she'd accept the love, as well as the friendship, his high templar offered her. She might, in time; women often grew wise in the ways of mortal hearts, and she'd been raised by the archdruid, Telhami, who was among the wisest of women.

Or, she might not. Bitter scars might offer more consistency and security than any man's love.

Regarding mortal frailty and apologies, Hamanu had seen almost everything in his life; very little surprised anymore—or intrigued him. Enver's father, who'd lived two hundred fifty-six years, had begun to see the world with immortal detachment shortly before he died. Pavek, though, was a young man, and the woman he loved was younger still. Men and women lived longer and in greater variety than flowers, but Hamanu had seen how fast they withered—especially when he embraced them.

He gestured subtly with an index finger. Pavek sighed, and the woman's dream images collapsed into one another, then reformed. There was a boy above Pavek's shoulder, a sturdy black-haired boy who smiled too easily to have been raised in a templar orphanage, as Pavek had been. In the quirky way of memory, Hamanu remembered learning the boy's name, Zvain, in another part of this palace a little more than two years ago. He recalled the name because it was uncommon in Urik and because the taste of the boy's shame and misery had been as honey on his immortal tongue.