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

There was the smell of himali flour, of fresh-bated bread, moist and hot from the oven, filled with sunshine and contentment. Childhood. Family—Mother and Father, brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. Community—Deche and Dorean. Love and the future bound as one, together, forever.

... Omniscience...

Coarse-grain bread, cut with sand, kneaded by war-hardened hands and baked flat on hearthstones. Hollow stomachs and hollower victories under a heavy sky. A sky that had neither stars nor moons to break the darkness. Firelit faces in the darkness, waiting for the future.

... Omniscience...

Bread with a golden-tan crust floating in twilight. A mind floating in a windowless room, a room cluttered with chests and bundles. A room crowded with faces. Faces with open eyes, open mouths, and closed minds. Strangers' faces: some men, some not; some human, some not. All of them waiting; none of them familiar.

"Hamanu."

A jolt of darkness as eyes blinked. His eyes. Him. Hamanu.

One voice that cut through the swirling memories. One face above the crowd. A face unlike the others, drawn in silver on the room's shadows. A face that was, at last, familiar.

"Windreaver."

The sound of his own voice was the final key that released Hamanu's self from a stagnant mire of memory. A surge of self-knowledge began to restore order to his consciousness. He blinked his eyes away from the waiting faces, to gather his wits in a semblance of privacy, glanced down and saw an arm—his arm—little more than bone cased in dull, dark flesh.

The thought came to him: When did that happen? Before the answer had unrolled itself in his consciousness, another question had taken its place: After ages upon ages, have I finally succumbed to Rajaat's madness?

The mere fact that he had to ask the question made any answer suspect.

Hamanu shuddered and closed his eyes.

"Step back from the brink, Hamanu," Windreaver's echoing whisper advised.

What brink? Wasn't he sitting in a crowded room?

Then the windswept peninsula where the last trolls had died sprang up behind Hamanu's eyes, more real than this room and anyone in it, anyone except Windreaver.

"Eat, Omniscience. You haven't eaten—haven't moved— for three days and nights together."

Hamanu recognized a round, hairless, and very worried face. With chilly dread, he marveled that he hadn't recognized the dwarf's voice when he first heard it, or picked Enver's face immediately from the cro

wd. The dread turned icy when he considered that, indeed, he hadn't moved for three days and nights. His joints were rigid, as hard as the black bones that formed them.

He willed his fingers, knuckle by knuckle, to ungrasp the metal stylus. It clattered loudly on the table and rolled beneath an untidy array of parchment sheets, which were slashed and splattered with his frenetic script. He read the last words he'd written: the onus of genocide, rightfully, falls on me, on Hamanu.

So much remembering—reliving—of the past was not a healthy thing.

"This is Nouri Nouri'son's bread: your favorite, since he began baking it for you. If not his bread, then what, Omniscience? You must be starving."

Yes, he was starving, but not for fresh-baked bread, not for anything Enver could imagine. Windreaver knew, and Windreaver had gone. Pavek might have guessed, but Pavek's scarred face wasn't in the crowd. Hamanu reached for the loaf Enver offered. He tore off a large chunk with his teeth, as if it were a panacea for his doubts. He reached for his druid-templar's mind and found him in a city square.

Pavek had summoned the quarter's residents. He was drilling them by morning light: sweep and parry; thrust and block; push away forward, push away and retreat. He'd armed them with bone and wood tools, barrel staves, and mud-caked laths ripped from household roofs, but he drilled them as if they, and their paltry weapons, would make a difference.

"If fortune's wheel turns square and the walls are breached," Pavek shouted, in rhythm with the drill. "Then everyone becomes a warrior for Urik. Make the enemy bleed for every step. Make them climb mountains of their dead. We'll fight for Urik, for our city, our homes, our families, and ourselves."

The same words, no doubt, that Pavek had used to inspire Telhami's Quraite farmers. Like those farmers, the Urikites listened. They worked up a sweat, and not because a score of civil-bureau templars stood on the verge, blocking the streets. The templars weren't watching the citizens; they were drilling, too. Citizen and templar together did what Pavek told them because Pavek was an honest man, a man who told the truth, a man who'd give his life for his city. A man who knew—Hamanu sensed the awareness in Pavek's mind—that his king hadn't moved for three days. Pavek wasn't the only high templar out among the ordinary citizens. Similar scenes played out in other city squares and in the ringing market villages, where the line between templar and citizen was less distinct and the wicker walls were meant to keep kanks, erdlus, and inixes in their pens, not keep a determined enemy out.

O Mighty King, Javed greeted Hamanu with silent, enthusiastic relief. How may I serve you?

You serve me well enough, Hamanu replied. I have been... distracted. As humbling an admission as any he'd made in a thousand years. Has there been change?

Javed spun out his observations, with the assurance that Urik's situation had neither improved nor worsened since they'd last seen each other. The same rival armies still lurked beneath Urik's horizons. There might have been a few skirmishes; it was difficult to be certain: with Hamanu distracted, messages traveled no faster than an elf could run. Relay teams of messenger elves—a tactic the war-bureau employed when its officers didn't wish to be in constant contact with their monarch—had already been established.

Wise, Hamanu conceded. You have matters well under control.