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

Javed made his own concession: So far, our enemies have not resorted to templar magic. They sit in their camps, awaiting some signal. The palls that Nibenay and Gulg have cast over the land hinder them as much as they hinder us. Away from the city, the war bureau doesn't know how far-reaching our danger has become. They ask no questions, and we give them no answers.

In his workroom, Hamanu swallowed hard and broke the Unseen connection with Javed. He looked at Enver and the others—the men and women of his templarate and the handful of sorcerers who lived on sufferance, casting the war-spells the Dark Lens could not empower and battering down the wards on his workroom door. The wards on his immortal mind were secure from mortal mind-bending and sorcery. But mortals based their opinions on cruder measurements: three days staring into the past. Three days without moving a muscle. The fear in the workroom wasn't fear of a champion's might but fear for his sanity.

Hamanu couldn't begin to explain and didn't bother to try.

"I didn't not summon you, dear Enver, nor anyone else. I'd cast my mind adrift. I hadn't found what I was seeking; certainly, I had not asked for assistance."

The dwarf executor bowed low. "I thought—"

Hamanu cut him off. "I know what you thought, dear Enver." And he did; it shamed him to quarrel with mortal compassion, however misdirected. "I will summon you when I need you, I do not expect or need to see you a moment earlier."

"Yes, Omniscience."

The others, templars and pasty-faced sorcerers alike, were skulking across the threshold, leaving Enver to face the Lion-King's wrath. Hamanu permitted their escape, waiting until he and the dwarf were alone before saying:

"Thank you, dear Enver."

Enver raised his head. "Thank you, Omniscience? I've served you since I was a boy. I thought I was accustomed to your ways; I was wrong. Forgive me, Omniscience. I shan't make the mistake again."

"No," Hamanu agreed as the dwarf straightened and retreated toward the door. The time for mistakes and triumphs was growing short. "Enver—"

The dwarf halted in his tracks.

"—Thank you for the bread. It was delicious."

A faint smile creased Enver's face, then he was gone. The workroom door was gone, as well. Not even dust remained. Hamanu could have cast a spell to set an illusion in its place, and yet another to ward the illusion thoroughly. He tidied the parchment sheets instead—as much to exercise stiff muscles as anything else.

Invoking fortune's round and fickle wheel, Hamanu rose unsteadily to his feet. He needed three stiff-legged steps to reach the iron-bound chest. The chest was intact; that was a good sign. Still, Hamanu held his breath while he unspelled the locks and lifted the lid. The many-colored sand around the crucible had bleached bone-white; that, too, was a good sign. He didn't let go of his breath until he'd lifted the crucible out of the sand. Its surface was marred with tiny pits, and the seam between its base and lid had fused. Hamanu rapped it soundly with a forefinger. Metal flakes fell onto the sand. The lid lifted cleanly.

More than a score of lustrous beads, some tiny, some as large as Hamanu's thumbnail, filled the crucible's bottom. He poured them carefully into his palm. He dribbled half of the beads, by volume, into an amulet case, then swallowed the rest, gagging out the words of invocation and reaching out to brace himself against the wall as the beads melted in his throat.

The discomfort was minimal compared to the disorientation the spell caused as it ate through his illusions from the inside. For a few moments, Hamanu's skin was uniformly luminous. Then the workroom was awash in sharp, shifting light beams. The light danced across his skin, leaving patches of sooty darkness in its wake. Hamanu snatched the amulet case from the bleached sand, where he'd dropped it when the spell began its work. He slashed the air in front of him. Mist danced with the spell-light as he strode quickly into the Gray, lest he be trapped in a room too small to contain his metamorphic self.

Another illusion seized Hamanu once he was fully, exclusively, in the Gray. It was an illusion that was all the more remarkable because it made the Lion-King of Urik appear-in this most magical of places—completely ordinary. He marveled at the symmetry of his human hands, the tangles in his coarse, black hair, the puckered scar that ran from the underside of his right eye, across the bridge of his nose, and ended with a painful lump on the dark seam of his upper lip.

What would Pavek think, if Pavek's netherworld self were to wander past and see its double hovering nearby?

Not that such an encounter was likely. Magicians and mind-benders of many stripes could, and did, meet in the Gray, but rarely by accident. A strong presence—such as Hamanu was, no matter how thorough his disguise—could attract lesser presences: lost spirits, misplaced artifacts, and novice druids—or repel them, which was the Lion-King's intent as he navigated through the ether. Not a profound repulsion that would, itself, rouse the interest of any other strong presence, but a subtle, ignore-me-I'm-not-here rebuff that would permit him to approach his chosen destinations without anyone, specifically Rajaat, noticing him.

If Rajaat did, by mischance, sense scarred Pavek drifting close—well, the first sorcerer would attempt something unpleasant, but not as vengefully unpleasant as he'd attempt if he thought that one of his rebellious champions were nearby. The champion in question, therefore, might have a heartbeat or two in which to make his escape.

There were two places Hamanu intended to visit before his stealth spell lost its potency. Both of them were supremely dangerous for a champion. Both of them were, in a way, Rajaat's prisons.

When the champions rebelled a thousand years ago, they'd achieved their lasting victory by separating Rajaat's tangible substance from his living essence. They'd imprisoned their creator's essence in the Hollow beneath the Black, a pulsing heart of shadow and darkness at the netherworld's core. They'd imprisoned Rajaat's immortal body in a stone cyst that Borys had enshrined in the center of his circular city, Ur Draxa. For a thousand years—more accurately, nine hundred years, because Borys had been mad for the first hundred years and didn't build Ur Draxa and its shrine until after he'd recovered—Borys maintained the spells that kept Rajaat's essence in the Hollow and kept the Hollow away from Ur Draxa.

So it would have remained after Borys's death—at least long enough for the champions to have considered the matter—except for the Dark Lens. The Lens had disappeared shortly after Borys became a dragon. It had been lost by Borys himself, or stolen by his dwarven enemies—Hamanu had heard both versions of the story. Borys insisted the loss wasn't a problem, so long as the Lens wasn't near Ur Draxa.

What happened next was a matter of opinion. In Tyr, opinion held that Sadira and a young mul named Rkard had saved the world. In Urik, opinion was, understandably, different.

What mattered, though, was that Rajaat had been stopped. His essence had again been separated from his substance. Hamanu, Gallard, and Inenek had reimprisoned their creator's essence in the Hollow beneath the Black. The sorceress, Sadira, had interred Rajaat's substance beneath a lava lake. That left the Dark Lens. In the end, it had gone into the lava lake with Rajaat's bones. retrospect, Hamanu marveled that any of them, mortal or immortal, could have been so foolish as

to leave the Lens anywhere near Rajaat's bones. There was a resonance between the Black and the Dark Lens, at least insofar as Rajaat was responsible for both of them and only he understood their secrets. And, of course, there was resonance between the first sorcerer's essence and his substance. For five years—five uninterrupted, unobserved years—Rajaat had been exploring those resonances.

Hamanu had to find out what the War-Bringer had accomplished in that time.

The first part of Hamanu's plan was simple, in concept, if not execution: a careful approach to the throbbing Black, along a line oblique enough to give him a glimpse of the Hollow while, at the same time, leaving him with enough speed and energy to escape its lethal attraction. The spell he'd cast moments ago in his workroom gave him a good chance for success. If he'd truly been Pavek, in the flesh or spirit, he might have evoked the Lion-King's name. But Hamanu didn't believe in his own power over fate and fortune:

A shadow sprouted around Hamanu, a Pavek-shaped shadow reaching through the Gray toward the Black where all shadows were born or died. Flecks of brilliant white, paradoxical and inexplicable, appeared in the Black, migrating, as Hamanu's shadow lengthened, to the point where the shadow and the Black would meet. Hamanu struggled not to follow his shadow.