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

After thirteen ages, an enemy was as good as a friend. As the two moons rose together, Hamanu returned to Urik not merely alone but lonely. He called Enver, Javed, and Pavek away from their separate suppers. They sat, stiff and still, on the palace roof while he paced beside the balustrade, disguised as a man and fooling no one. He could perceive their thoughts, their conviction that something must be terribly wrong, but he couldn't make them speak, not to each other, not to him, not the way Windreaver would have spoken.

"Such a doleful gathering, O Mighty Master. Is someone you care about dead or dying?" Like a shadow sketched in darkness with silver ink, Windreaver spun himself out of the night. "I heard you, O Mighty Master, and thought it might be important."

Hamanu hid his relief. "What have you learned in Ur Draxa? Have you found the source of the shards?"

Thick silver lips parted, revealing thicker silver teeth. "Shards, O Mighty Master? Have you found others?"

Hamanu had beaten Windreaver's trolls decisively, but he'd never outsmarted the old general, who could still make him feel like the young man he'd once been. "Inenek. Today. Destroyed now, like the first."

"If there were two, O Mighty Master, there are certainly more," Windreaver said in a tone that might easily be mistaken for concern.

"What of Ur Draxa? What have you learned?"

"That men are fools where women are concerned, O Mighty Master."

"Spare me your homilies. Recount!" Hamanu squeezed his own forearm, and Windreaver's silvery outline stilled.

Hamanu's heart skipped. "Were?"

"Absolute brilliance that was, O Mighty Master, imprisoning your enemy's bones in a lava lake, then hurling the Dark Lens in afterward. Absolute pure brilliance. What, after all, is lava but unborn obsidian? Who's to say now where the Lens ends and the prison begins, eh, O Mighty Master? When does a prison become a palace? A palace become a prison?"

Beneath Hamanu's hand, one of the balustrade lions cracked and crumbled into dust.

"It's hard to say, for the smoke and steam and fog, but it seemed to me, O Mighty Master, that the lake's no longer flat. It rises up, I think, in the middle, rather like a baby's gums when the teeth are about to erupt—Oh, I'm sorry, Mighty Master: You have no children. You wouldn't know about erupting teeth—"

"Will it hold?" Hamanu demanded. "Will the wards and spells that woman cast hold Rajaat in the Hollow?"

"By the sun's light, O Mighty Master, they were strained, but strong."

Chapter Seven

Hamanu sent them away—all of them: Windreaver, Pavek, Enver, the myriad slaves and templars whose labor fueled the palace routine. The Lion-King retired to distill the reagents and compose the invocation of the stealthy spell he'd need to get close enough to see his creator's prison with his own eyes and—more importantly—get away again.

"Oil, O Mighty Master?" Windreaver whispered from the darkest depths of the room where Hamanu worked into the night.

The storerooms beneath the palace were flooded. Their contents had been hurriedly hauled to the upper rooms for safekeeping, leaving Hamanu's normally austere and organized workroom in chaos. The treasures of a very long lifetime were heaped into precarious pyramids. Windreaver's shadowy form would be lost amid countless other shadows, and Hamanu didn't break his concentration to look for his old enemy.

"Do you truly believe oil from the egg-sack of a red-eyed roc will protect you from your master?"

"... nine hundred eighty... nine hundred eighty-one..." Hamanu replied through clenched teeth.

Shimmering droplets, black as the midnight sky and lustrous as pearls, dripped from the polished porphyry cruet he held over an obsidian cauldron. Four ages ago, he'd harvested this oil from a red-eyed roc. It had vast potential as a magical reagent—potential he had scarcely begun to explore—but he did not expect it to protect him from the first sorcerer.

Nothing but his own wits and all the luck in the world could protect the last champion from Rajaat.

"You're a fool, O Mighty Master. Surrender and be done with it. Become the dragon. Any dragon would be better than Rajaat unchained. You certainly can't fight Rajaat and your peers."

"... nine hundred eighty-eight... nine hundred eighty-nine..."

Unable to provoke an explosion from either Hamanu or the concoction in front of him, Windreaver turned his attention to the clutter. Save for his acid voice and the swirling wake of his anger, the troll had no effect on the living world. That was his protection—he could slip undetected through all but the most rigorous wardings, including the ones Hamanu had set on this room. It was also his frustration.

Whirling through the room, Windreaver shook the clutter and raised a score of cluttering dust devils from its shadows. Hamanu stilled the air with an absentminded thought and counted the nine hundred ninety-second drop of oil. The devils collapsed. There was another table in the workroom, uncluttered save for writing implements and two sheaves of vellum: one blank, the other already written upon, It drew Windreaver's curiosity as a lodestone attracted iron. The air above the table sighed. The corners of the written-upon vellum rustled.

Driven

by a very local wind, the brass stylus rolled to the table's edge and clattered loudly to the floor. The vellum remained where it belonged.

"Memoirs, O Mighty Master?" The rustling stopped. "An apology?"