By my command, we searched the field, looking for the missing drummers. We found the three missing boys before sundown, their cold fingers still wrapped around their drumsticks.

Battle is glorious because you're fighting the enemy, you're fighting for your own life and the lives of the veterans beside you. There's no glory, though, once the battle has ended. Agony sounds the same, whatever language the wounded spoke when they were whole, and a corpse is a tragic-looking thing whether it's a half-grown boy or a fullgrown, warty troll.

There were more than a hundred corpses around that hilltop. I'd walked away from Deche, and the death it harbored, hardly by my own choice. When the time came, I'd buried Jikkana, and Bult, and I'd seen to

it that all the others went honorably into their graves. But a hundred human corpses...

"What do we do with them?" I asked One-Eye over a cold supper of stale bread and stiff, smoked meat. "We'll need ten days to dig their graves. We'll be parched and starving—"

One-Eye found something fascinating in his bread and pretended not to hear me. The woman officer answered instead:

"We leave them for the kes'trekels and all the other scavengers. They're meat, Manu. Might as well let some creature have the good of 'em. We head west at dawn tomorrow—if you want to catch those trolls."

And we did, but not at dawn. The round-faced officer kept us waiting while he buried his boy deep in the ground, where no scavenger would disturb him.

They held me in thrall, those five officers did, with their hard eyes and easy assurance. I knew I was cleverer than Bult and all his ilk, but, though I'd taken their swords away, I felt foolish around them. My veterans saw the difference, sensed my discomfort. By the time we'd marched two days into the west, those who'd joined me before the hilltop battle and those we'd acquired in that battle's aftermath heeded my commands, but only after they'd stolen a glance at my round-faced captive.

"Show me the trolls!" I demanded, seizing his arm and giving him a rude shake.

He staggered, almost losing his balance, almost rubbing the bruise I'd surely given him. But he kept his balance and kept the pain from showing on his face. "They're here," he insisted, waving his other arm across the dry prairie.

The land was as flat as the back of my hand and featureless, except farther to the southwest, where a scattering of cone-shaped mountains erupted from the grass. They were nothing like the rocky Kreegills, but trolls were a mountain folk, and I believed the officer when he said we'd find trolls to the southwest.

There was throttled laughter behind me. As veterans were measured, I scarcely passed muster. I'd seen the Kreegills, and the heartland, but the sinking land—that's what the officers called the prairie—was new to me. It appeared flat, but appearances deceived, and sinking was as good a description as any for the land we crossed.

The dry grass was pocked with sinkholes large enough to swallow an inix. The holes weren't treacherous—not at a slow pace, with men walking ahead, prodding the ground with spear butts to find the hidden ones, the ones crusted over with a thin layer of dirt that wouldn't hold a warrior's weight. But sinkholes weren't the only difficulty the grass concealed. The prairie was riddled with dry stream beds, some a half-stride deep, a half-stride wide. Others cut deeper than a man was tall—deeper than a troll—twice as wide. They were banked with wind-carved dirt that dissolved to clumps and dust under a man's weight.

When we came to such a chasm, there was naught to do but walk the bank until it narrowed—or until we came to an already trampled place where crossing was possible. Muddy water lingered in a few of the chasms. There were footprints in the mud: six-legged bugs, four-footed beasts with cloven hooves, two-footed birds with talons on every toe, and once in a while, the distinctive curve of a leather-shod foot, easily twice the size of mine.

A band of trolls could hide in those muddy chasms. If a troll knew the stream's course—which crossed which, which went where—his band could travel faster than ours, and unobserved.

As the sun grew redder and shadows lengthened, our round-faced officer advised making camp in one of the chasms. There weren't many who wanted to sleep in an open-ended grave. Myself, a boyhood in the Kreegills and five years with Bult had conditioned my notions of safety: I wanted those odd-shaped mountains beneath my feet. I wanted to see my enemy while he was still a long way off.

And I was Hamanu. I got what I wanted.

Marching by torchlight and moonlight, pushing the veterans until they were ready to drop, I made camp at the base of one of the strange mountains. In form, the mountains were like worm mounds or anthills—if either worms or ants had once grown large enough to build mountains with their castings. Their grass-covered slopes were slippery steep, without rocks anywhere to give a handhold or foothold.

By daylight, we'd find a way to the top; that night, though, we made a cold camp at the bottom. The sinking lands were familiar in one way, at least: scorching hot beneath the sun, bone-chilling cold beneath the moon. Veterans and officers wrapped themselves into their cloaks and huddled close together.

I took the first watch with five sturdy men who swore they'd stay awake.

I faced south; the trolls came from the north. The first thing I heard was a human scream cut short. I know we'd fallen into a trap, but to this day I wonder if that trap had been set by the trolls or the Troll-Scorcher's officers. Whichever, it wasn't a battle—only the trolls had weapons; humans died tangled in their cloaks, still drowsy or sound asleep.

I had my sword, but before I could take a swing, a human hand closed around the nape of my neck. My strength drained down my legs, though I remained standing. Fear such as I'd never known before shocked all thoughts of fight or flight from my head. A mind-bender's assault—I know it now—but it was pure magic then, for all I, Manu of Deche, the farmer's son, understood of the Unseen Way.

I thought I'd gone blind and deaf as well, but it was only the Gray, the cold netherworld sucking sound from my ears as I passed through in the grip of another hand, another mind. For one moment I stood on moonlit ground, far from the odd-shaped mountain. Then a raspy, ominous voice said:

"Put him below."

Something hard and heavy hit me from behind. When I awoke, I was in a brick-lined pit with worms and vermin for my company. Light and food and water—just enough of each to keep me alive—fell from a tiny, unreachable hole in the ceiling. I never knew how the last battle of my human life ended, but I can guess.

Hamanu's chin, human-shaped in the morning light that filtered through the latticed walls of his workroom, sagged toward his breastbone. The instant flesh brushed silk, though both were illusory, the king's neck straightened, and he sat bolt upright in his chair.

Grit-filled eyes blinked away astonishment. He who slept once in a decade had caught himself napping. There was tumult in the part of Hamanu's mind where he heard his templars' medalLion-pleas—not the routine pleas of surgeon-sergeants, orators or others whose duties gave them unlimited access to the Dark Lens power he passed along to his minions. To Hamanu's moderate surprise, he'd responded to such routine pleas while he slept. After thirteen ages, he was still learning about the powers Rajaat had bestowed on him. Another time, the discovery would have held Hamanu's attention all day, more, but riot this day. His mind echoed with urgency, death and fear, and other dire savors.

The Lion-King loosed filaments of consciousness through the Gray, one for every inquiry. Like a god he would not claim to be, his mind could be in many places at once—wandering Urik with his varied minions while being scattered across the barrens in search of endangered templars.

The essence of Hamanu, the core of his self—which was much more than a skein of conscious filaments, more even than his physical body—remained in the workroom where he looked down upon a haphazard array of vellum sheets, all covered with his own bold script. Blots as large as his thumbnail stained both the vellum and the exposed table-top, a testament to the haste with which he'd written. There were also inky gouges where he'd wielded the brass stylus like a sword. The ink was dry, though, as was the ink stone.

Tags: Lynn Abbey Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net