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

"I need you here, in the palace, Pavek, but I need your druid friends as well. Send a message to Quraite. Send a message to Telhami, if you will. Tell her it's time, Pavek; the end of time."

"If Urik's danger is Quraite's danger, Great One, then I'm sure she already knows. She says there's only one guardian spirit for all of Athas, and she is part of it now," Pavek said, still on his knees with his head tightly bowed.

There were many tastes and textures swirling in the young man's thoughts, but loathing was not among them. Leaning forward, Hamanu hooked a talon under Pavek's chin, nudging gently until he could see the troubled face his templar strove to conceal. Then, with another talon, he traced the scar across Pavek's face.

"And if it's my danger, and only mine, what then, Pavek?"

Once again, Pavek's mind cleared, like still water on a windless day. Short of slaying the man, there was no way for Hamanu to extract an answer to his question from Pavek's thoughts. Murder was easy; lowering his hand, letting Pavek rise unsteadily to his feet and leave the chamber alive—that was the hardest thing Hamanu had done in a generation.

Windreaver! Hamanu cast the name into the netherworld along with Gallard's parchment. Windreaver! Now!

He sat down on the marble bench, which, like the stone bench in his cloister, was strong enough to support his true weight and proportions. Water flowed again over the boulder and down the walls. The Lion-King buried his grotesque face in his malformed hands and tried not to think, or plan, or dread until the air quickened, and the troll appeared.

"I hear, and I obey," Windreaver said. "I am the doomed servant of a doomed fool."

Hamanu didn't rise to the bait. "Did you search the Nibenese camp?"

"Of course. Four hundred ugly women surrounded by four thousand uglier men."

"Nothing more?" Hamanu betrayed nothing of his suspicions, his anger.

"Nothing, O Mighty One. Enlighten me, O Mighty One: What do you think I should have found?"

"This!" Hamanu brandished the remnant of the obsidian shard. It had shrunk to a fraction of its former size, and the glass was pitted with soot. The troll leapt back, as if he still had life and substance.

"It was not there," Windreaver insisted, no longer insolent. "I would have known—"

"Nonsense!" Hamanu hurled the shard at his minion; it vanished at the top of its arc, swallowed by the Gray. "You've grown deaf and blind, Windreaver—worse, you've grown careless."

"Never... not where he's concerned. I'd know the War-Bringer's scent anywhere."

Hamanu said nothing, merely waited for the troll to hear own his folly and self-deception. Windreaver's hatred for the War-Bringer was greater than his hatred for the Troll-Scorcher but he hadn't sensed the shard before Hamanu revealed it. He'd dreamed of watching the champions destroy each other, and his dreams had, indeed, left him careless.

"Is Rajaat free?" the troll asked. "The Dark Lens—it's where the Tyrian sorceress put it five years ago, isn't it? No one's stolen it, have they? The templars—? The medallions—?" "Still work," Hamanu assured him. Without the Dark Lens, the champions could not channel magic to their templars. "That shard didn't come from the Dark Lens."

"I don't know, Windreaver—but you'll tell me, when you come back from Ur Draxa."

He expected an argument: Borys's demolished stronghold was a long way away and dangerous, even for a disembodied spirit. But Windreaver was gone before Hamanu finished speaking.

Chapter Five

A pair of silvery rings surrounded the golden face of Guthay, Athas's larger moon, as it neared its zenith in Urik's midnight sky. It was the fourth night in a row that Guthay had worn her crowns, and though Hamanu was alone in his cloister, he knew he wasn't the only man staring at the sky. One more beringed night, and farmers throughout his domain would go down to the parched gullies that ran around and through their fields. They'd inspect each irrigation gate. They'd dig out the silt and make repairs as necessary. Later, they'd meet with their neighbors and draw a numbered pebble out of a sacred urn to determine the order in which the fields received their water.

The lottery was necessary because no one—not even the immortal Lion-King—could predict how long the gullies would seethe with dark, fertile water from the distant mountains. Hamanu couldn't even say for certain that the gullies would fill. A score of times during the last thirteen ages, the flood hadn't come.

All Hamanu knew was what he'd learned from his mother and father long, long ago. When Guthay wore her gossamer crowns for five nights running, it was time to prepare the fields for himali, and the hardy grains, mise and gorm that had sustained the heartland since the rains stopped falling with any regularity. And once the dry fields were planted with seeds more precious than gold or steel, it was time to pray. The gullies would fill within twenty days, or they did not fill at all.

The folk of Urik prayed to their immortal, living god and entreated him with offerings. Already a steady trickle of farmers—nobles, free-peasants, and slaves alike—made their way to the palace gate to offer him a handful of grain. Sometimes the grain was knotted in a tattered rag, other times boxed in a carved-bone casket or sealed in an enameled amphora. Regardless of the package, Hamanu's templars emptied the grain into a huge, inix-hide sack. When the water came, Hamanu would sling the sack over his shoulder and, in the guise of the glorious Lion-King, he'd sow four fields, one to the east of the city walls, the others in the north, the west, and the south.

Tradition, which Hamanu didn't encourage, held that the gift-grain toward the bottom of me sack—the grain that the Lion-King had received first and sowed last—was lucky grain, which presaged great bounty for the farmer who'd donated it. The mortal mind being what it was, Urikite farmers didn't wait for Guthay's fifth ringed night before they brought their gift-grain to the palace. They took the moon on faith and brought their grain early, despite knowing that if the rings did not last for the full five nights, the sack would be emptied, and any grain it had held would be burned.

None of this surprised Hamanu. He'd been one of them once. He knew that all farmers were men of faith and gamblers in their hearts. They gambled every time they poked a seed in the ground. They regarded the gift-grain as a faithful way of evening their odds.

It was an act of faith, as well, for Hamanu, the farmer's son, when he strode barefooted through the fields, scattering the gift-grain. But a man who let himself be worshiped as a god could have faith only in himself. He could never be seen with his head bowed in doubt or prayer. This year, with the Shadow-King's armies dancing along Urik's borders and a pitted remnant of the first sorce

rer's magic still fresh in memory, Hamanu's doubts were especially strong. He'd pray if he knew the name of a god who'd listen.

The longer he delayed summoning the second and third army levies, the greater the chance that Urik's enemies would attack. If he summoned his citizen soldiers too soon, the fields wouldn't get sown, the grain couldn't grow, and, win or lose on the battlefield, there'd be no High Sun harvest. And if the waters didn't come at all...