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

"Can you read it?"

A voice—Windreaver's voice—asked from behind his back. Hamanu let out a breath he'd held since Ur Draxa. He hadn't wanted to be alone. The troll's voice was the right voice for this place, this moment.

" 'Come, blessed sun,' " he answered, tracing the word-symbols as he translated them. " 'Warm my walls and my roof. Send your light of life through my windows and my doors.' " He paused with his finger above the last group of carvings. "This one, 'awaken,' and the next pair, 'stone' plus 'life'—they're on every stone in every wall. Wake up my stones? Wake up my people? I was never certain."

" 'Arise, reborn.' We believed the spirits of our ancestors dwelt in stone. We never mined, not like the dwarves. Mining was desecration. We waited for the stone to rise. The closer it came to the sun—we believed—the closer our ancestors were to the moment of rebirth."

"And do you still believe?" Hamanu asked. He didn't expect an answer, and didn't get one.

"Who taught you to read our script?" Windreaver demanded, as if the knowledge were a sacred trust, not to be shared with outsiders, with humans especially.

"I taught myself. I was here at sunrise, whenever I could get away from my chores, imagining what it had been like. I looked at the inscriptions and asked myself: what would I have written here, if I were a troll, living in this place, watching the sun rise over my house. After a while, I believed I knew."

Silence lengthened. Hamanu thought Windreaver had departed.

He considered issuing a command that the troll couldn't disobey, demanding recognition for his accomplishment. He'd learned the script without assistance and, save for the two symbols that dealt with a faith he couldn't imagine, he'd learned it correctly. But that would be a tawdry triumph in a place that deserved better. With a final caress for the carved stone, Hamanu turned and saw that he wasn't alone.

"I taught myself to read your script. I couldn't teach myself to speak it. If you wish to insult me, do it in a living language."

"I said you read well."

The Lion-King knew his captive companion better than that. "When mekillots fly," he challenged.

"No, you're right. I said something else, but you read well. That's the truth. Nothing else matters, does it—in a living language?"

"Thank you," Hamanu replied. He didn't want an argument, not today. But it seemed he was going to have one: Windreaver's face had soured into an expression he hadn't seen before. "Is it so terrible? A boy comes up here—a human boy. He imagines he's a troll and deciphers your language."

"What I said was: I could wish I had met that remarkable human boy."

Hamanu studied the ground to the right of his feet. He remembered the boy's shape, his voice, and his questions as he stood among these stones. Memory was illusion; there was no going back. "I could wish that, too. But we had no choice, no chance. Rajaat took that away before I was born. Maybe before you were born. Our paths were destined to cross on the battlefield, at the top of a dark-sky cliff, far from anywhere either of us knew. One misstep, by either of us, and we'd never have met at all."

" 'One misstep'?"

"And the Cleansing Wars would have ended worse than they did. You could have held Myron of Yoram to a stalemate, but Rajaat would have found another lump of human clay to mold into his final champion. The dwarves, elves, and giants wouldn't've survived... and neither would the trolls..." he paused a second time and raised his head before adding the long-unspoken words—"My friend."

Windreaver's silver-etched silhouette didn't shift in the sunlight. "I believe you," he said softly, without saying what he believed. "Our race was doomed."

Looking at the troll's slumped, translucent shoulders, the Lion-King remembered compassion. "You believe your dead dwell in stone, awaiting rebirth. When the wind's done scouring these stones, there'll be trolls again, someday. You'll teach them their language." He thought of the pebble imbedded in his forearm. "You might be reborn, yourself."

Terrible silver eyes met Hamanu's. "If the spirits of our dead survived in stone, the War-Bringer would have declared war on stone. He would have made a champion to suck life from stone."

The War-Bringer had. If there'd been life sleeping in these ruins, Rajaat's final champion could have destroyed it. "I wouldn't... won't. It will not happen. Not in three days. Not ever."

"You learn," Windreaver concluded. "Of all your kind, you alone learned from your mistakes."

"I learned from you. But. by then, there were no choices so there couldn't be mistakes. When Rajaat came to me in Urik and I ran from him. it was your taunts—"

"I didn't taunt you, not that day."

"You were waiting for me when I came out of the Gray near Kemelok. You'd gotten there first; you knew exactly where I'd go. You said that if I ran—if I kept running— Rajaat would make another champion to replace me. How many years had it been since that day on the cliff? You hadn't said a word in all that time—I didn't think you could. As a man, I was still young—what did I know? Fighting and forming. You were ages older. Of course I listened to you. 'Think of what the War-Bringer's learned from you!' I've never forgotten it; I remember it as if it were yesterday. I realized that it wasn't enough to disobey Rajaat; I had to stop him. I must remain his final champion. There can none after me."

"I'd sworn I wouldn't speak to you. Then you broke away from the War-Bringer. I saw it, heard it, but I didn't believe it. You refused what he offered. Then you ran to Borys, and I was afraid for you, my enemy, my warden, so I broke my oath," said the troll's spirit, as though in recitation.

"You made me think before I talked to him." "For all the good it did, Manu. For all the good it did, long ago..."

Borys hadn't welcomed another champion's sudden appearance behind his Kemelok siege line. The Butcher of Dwarves hurled a series of Unseen assaults at his illusion-shrouded visitor. Hamanu deflected everything that came his way, all without raising a counterattack. After a short lull, a solitary human strode out of the besieger's camp. It wasn't a good time for meeting another champion. Borys made that clear from the start.

As Borys explained, ten days earlier, he'd fought a pitched, but not quite decisive, battle against the dwarven army here at Kemelok. He'd given their king, Rkard, a fatal wound—at least it should have been fatal. Borys wasn't certain. That was half his anger. The sword Borys had carried into the battle was enchanted. Rajaat had given it to him the day he'd become the thirteenth champion. The sword imparted a lethal essence to any dwarf it cut open, as it had opened Rkard, but the cursed dwarf had gotten lucky.