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

Pouring over them, I easily pictured Bult doing the same. The image inspired me. I cracked the Troll-Scorcher's code three nights later. It was a simple code: one symbol displacing another without variation from one officer to the next. The Troll-Scorcher's officers weren't much cleverer than Bult had been, but their secrets had been safe from our yellow-haired leader. He would never have carried those closely written sheets around for all those years if he'd known how Yoram's officers belittled him.

But there were more than insults coded on those sheets. Word by word, I pieced together the Troll-Scorcher's strategy. He herded the trolls as if they were no more, no less, than kanks. He culled his bugs and kept them moving, lest they overgraze the pasturage: human farms, human villages, human lives.

We— Bult's band and the other bands that mustered each year on the plains—weren't fighting a war; we were shepherds, destined to tend Myron of Yoram's flocks forever.

I read my translations to my veterans the next night. Honest rage choked my throat as I described the Troll-Scorcher's intentions; I couldn't finish. A one-eyed man-one of Bult's confidants and, I'd assumed, no friend of mine—took up after me. He was a halting reader; my ears ached listening to him, but he held the band's attention, which gave me the chance to study my men and women unobserved.

They were mostly the children of veterans. They'd been raised in the sprawling camp in the plains where the whole army mustered once a year until they were old enough to join a band. Their lives had been completely shaped by Myron of Yoram's war against the trolls. When One-Eye finished, they sat mute, staring at the flames with unreadable expressions. For a moment I was flummoxed. Then I realized that their sense of betrayal went deeper than mine. Their very reason for living—the reasons that had sustained their parents and grandparents—was a fraud perpetrated by the very man they called their lord and master: Myron Troll-Scorcher.

It was no longer enough that I lead them from one village to the next, looking for trolls who had—as they did from time to time—vanished overnight from the heartland. If I wanted my veterans to follow me further, I'd have to replace the Troll-Scorcher in their minds.

I'd come to another corner in my life, hard after the last one. I could have sat with them, staring at the flames until the wood was ash and the sun rose. With neither leader nor purpose, we would have drifted apart or fallen prey to trolls, other men, or barrens-beasts, which were, even then, both numerous and deadly. But destiny had already named me Hamanu; I couldn't let the moment pass.

This time there were cheers. Men took my hand; women kissed my cheek. Guide us, Hamanu, they said. We put our lives in your hands. You see light where we see shadows. Guide us. Give us victory. Give us pride, Hamanu.

I heard their pleas, accepted their challenge. I led them toward the light.

After studying Bull's maps, I found a pattern to our wanderings. More, I studied the vast, empty areas where we never wandered and where, I hoped, trolls might go when they vanished from their usual haunts.

There were twenty-three of us left in what had been Bull's band, what had become Hamanu's. We were nowhere near enough warriors to confront trolls in lands that they knew better than we did. So we wandered before heading into the unknown, visiting map-marked villages. By firelight and the blazing midday sun, I told our tale to anyone who'd stand still long enough. Our message was simple: humanity suffers because the army sworn to protect it pursues the unfathomable goals of the Troll-Scorcher instead.

"Turn away from the Troll-Scorcher and the trolls. Take your destinies into your own hands," I said at the end of every telling. "Choose to pay the price of victory now, or resign yourself to defeat forever."

Instinct told me how to hold another human's attention with pitch, rhythm, and gesture, but only practice could teach me the words that would bind a man's heart to my ideas. I learned quickly, but not always quickly enough. At times, my words went wrong, and we left a village with dirt and dung clattering against our heels. But even then, there'd be a few more of us leaving than there'd been when we arrived.

From twenty, we grew to forty; from forty to sixty.

Our reputation—my reputation—spread. Renegade bands whose disillusionment with the Troll-Scorcher's army was older than ours met us on the open plains. Alliances were proposed. My band should fall in step, they advised, and I, being younger in both years and experience, should accept another leader's authority. Duels were fought: I was young, and I was still learning, but I was already Hamanu, and it was my destiny—not theirs—to forge victory.

Bull's metal sword carved the guts of four renegade leaders who couldn't perceive, that truth. After each duel, I invited their veterans to join me. A few did, but loyalty runs deep in the human spirit, and mostly, duels left me with a cloud of enemies who wouldn't join my growing band and couldn't return to the Troll-Scorcher's army. Cut off at the neck, without leaders, and at the knees, with nowhere to go, they were of little consequence.

I had no greater concern for the Troll-Scorcher's loyal bands, which dogged us from village to village. They threatened the villagers who aided us, then melted away, and got in the way of trolls when I tried to pursue them. My trackers guessed that there were, perhaps, three loyalist bands shadowing our movements and intimidating the villages we depended upon for food and water, now that our number I had grown too large for easy forage. Thirty men and women, they said, forty at most, and not an officer among them.

I believed my trackers.

I was stunned speechless one cool morning when the dawn patrol reported dust on the eastern horizon: something coming our way. Something large, with many, many feet.

We'd made a hilltop camp the previous evening. The camp Bult would have made on the ground he would have chosen: the Troll-Scorcher's loyal veterans didn't care if the trolls saw fire again

st the nighttime sky. They'd choose defense over concealment every time. But the morning's dust cloud didn't rise from the feet of trolls.

"How many?" I demanded of the trackers who'd failed me. Shielding their eyes from the risen sun, they grimaced and squinted with eyes no sharper than my own.

Her companions agreed.

"Are they human?" I asked, already knowing the answer. There were humans in the vicinity, but we hadn't seen troll sign since the day Bult died.

By then the whole camp was awake. The ones who weren't staring at the sun were staring at me. No tracker would meet my eyes.

"How many?" I cocked my wrist at my shoulder, ready to backhand the woman if she failed to answer.

"A hundred," she whispered; the count spread through the camp like fire. "Maybe more, maybe less. More'n us, for certain."

Veterans had at least a hundred curses for an incompetent leader, and I heard them all as the cloud broadened before us. They were getting closer—spreading out to encircle us. There were a whole lot more than a hundred. Sure as sunrise, there was an officer among them, and where there was a loyal officer, there was the Troll-Scorcher's magic, or so the older veterans promised. I'd never seen magic used before—except at the muster, when Myron of Yoram fried a few trolls, or the piddling displays Bult made when we'd held hands and shouted the Troll-Scorcher's name at the moon. We couldn't stand against the one and needn't fear the other.

"What now, Hamanu?" someone finally asked. "What do we do now?"

"It's all up," another man answered for me. "There's too many to outrun. We're meat for sure."