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

Rkard's axe had taken a chunk out of Borys's shoulder, a blow that would have quartered a mortal man. Battle-stunned and unable to hold his weapon, Borys had fallen. His officers had carried him back to their lines—leaving the sword behind in the hairy dwarf's chest. Borys admitted that he had slain three of his best men before he got his rage controlled, His own life was never in danger, but the damned sword was irreplaceable.

Hamanu listened to the Butcher of Dwarves's tirade and wisely didn't mention that his victory over the trolls hadn't depended on any enchanted weaponry. He waited until the other champion had calmed down enough to ask the obvious questions.

"What do you want? Who sent you? Why are you here?" asked Borys.

"Rajaat came to me in Urik."

"This is my war, Troll-Scorcher, and I'm ending it now. No one's coming in to share my kill. If Rajaat's whispering in your ear, that's your problem, not mine."

"Wrong," Hamanu countered. He opened his mind to share his recent encounter with their mutual creator, but Borys was wa

rded against such invasion. "He means for me to finish your war—"

"Never," Borys snarled and quickened another spell. "I warned you."

"—And start another cleansing war, this time against humanity itself."

A needle-thin ray of orange light shot from the palm of the Butcher of Dwarves to Hamanu's gut, where it raised a finger-wisp of oily smoke before Hamanu deflected it with a gesture of his own. Once pointed at the ground, the orange ray seared a line a hundred paces long across the already ash-streaked dirt.

"He showed me how it would be done," the Lion-King said, "and gave me a foretaste of human death."

"We can all kill, Hamanu," Borys said wearily, as if explaining life's realities to a dull-witted child. "Kill all Urik, if that pleases you, but stay away from my damned dwarves, and know this: make war with humanity, and you're making war with me."

"I'll win."

"When mekillots fly, Hamanu. You're the last, and the least. You may have vanquished the trolls, but they were almost finished when Yoram lost his fire. You don't have the wit or power to battle any one of us. Go back to Urik. Be careful, though—I hear you're taking in half-bloods. Give a dwarf shelter, and I'll make war with you."

"Forget dwarves," Hamanu advised. "Think about what happens next. What did he promise you?"

"A new human kingdom in a new human world, a pure world, without dwarves and the rest of the Rebirth scum. I'll rule from Ebe—or here at Kemelok—until I can wrest Tyr from old Kalak. After that, who knows? We needn't be enemies, Hamanu. There's enough to go around, for now."

"You seemed wiser. I thought you knew better than to believe him."

"If Rajaat could cleanse the world, none of us would exist. He's the War-Bringer, not the war commander; the first sorcerer, but not a sorcerer-king. He needs us more than we need him."

Locked in what he hoped would be humanity's final battle with the Rebirth dwarves, Borys wasn't eager to be seen conferring with a man who was clearly not-quite-human. After throwing a scrap of cloth on the ground, to shape his spell, Borys tried to reconfine Hamanu in his customary black-haired and tawny illusion.

"Begone!" the Butcher of Ebe growled softly with his own true voice.

Hamanu shook off the spell. With a hundred human deaths fresh on the back of his dragon's tongue and Windreaver's taunts still ringing in his ears, he pleaded for an open mind. "Let me show you—"

"I've seen enough."

Abandoning the calm tactics that went against his nature and hadn't accomplished anything, Hamanu gestured widely with both arms. Borys responded with another spell, but before he could cast it, Hamanu cast a spell of his own. The air between Urik's gaunt king and the blond human flashed with lightning brilliance as Hamanu found die veterans from whose life essence Borys was quickening his spell. He annihilated them, in the way he'd learned from Rajaat; Borys felt the echo of their deaths. When the light faded, the Butcher of Dwarves held one hand against his breast, and in his army's camp, clanging gongs signaled an emergency.

With his hand still pressed above his heart, Borys looked from Hamanu to his frantic camp. "I felt them die. I couldn't stop it. If I'd tried, you'd have drained me, too." He lowered his arm and turned back to Hamanu. "Just what are you?"

"Rajaat's last champion: Troll-Scorcher. Annihilator of all humanity. I'll win," Hamanu repeated his earlier assertion. "If I start the war. And if I won't, he'll make another who will."

"The Dark Lens? Is that how you do it? Are you bound to it in a different way than the rest of us?"

"I didn't ask; he didn't enlighten me. Maybe it's the Lens. Sometimes I think it's the sun. It was there from the beginning, I suppose, but I didn't know how to use it until today."

Hamanu opened his mind a third time, and Borys accepted the images of Rajaat's visit to Urik: a hundred humans annihilated in a single breath. Nothing remained of them, not a single greasy, ash-crusted splotch on the palace floors.

Borys lowered his hand. He cursed as any veteran might curse: heartfelt and impotent.

Hamanu interrupted. "He says humanity must be cleansed because we're deformed. He wants to return a cleansed Athas to the halflings. He says it belongs to them, not us."