Chapter Eight

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.

“O Mighty King, my lord above all—”

A new request. Hamanu replied with another filament, this time wound around a question: What is happening?

This wasn’t the first time the Lion-King had been inundated with requests for Dark Lens magic. The desiccated heartland that Rajaat’s champions ruled was a brutal, dangerous place where disaster and emergencies were commonplace. But always before, he’d been awake, alert, when the pleas arrived. His ignorance of the crisis—his templars’ desperation—had never lasted more than a few heartbeats. He’d been awake, now, for many heartbeats, but so far, none of his filaments had looped back to him. He had only his own senses on which to rely.

And dulled senses they were. Hamanu’s illusion wavered as he stood. Between eye blinks, the arms he braced against the table were a tattered patchwork of dragon flesh and human semblance. He yawned, not for drama, but from long-dormant instinct.

“Too much thinking about the past,” he muttered, as if literary exertions could account for the unprecedented disorder in his immortal world. Then, rubbing real grit from the corners of his illusory eyes, Hamanu made his way around the table.

The iron-bound chest where his stealth spell ripened appeared unchanged. Passing his hand above the green-glowing lock, he kenned the spell’s vibrations—complex, but according to expectation—within.

“O Mighty King, my lord above all. Come out of your workroom. Unlock the door. Lion’s Whim, my king—I beg you, O Mighty King: Answer me!”

Still cross-grained and pillow-walking from his interrupted nap, Hamanu turned toward the sound, toward an ordinary door. Neither the voice nor the door struck a chord of recognition.

“Are you within, O Mighty King? It is I, Enver, O Mighty King.”

Enver. Of course it was Enver; the fog in Hamanu’s mind lifted. He could see his steward with his mind’s eye. The loyal dwarf stood just outside the door he’d sealed from the inside with lethal wards. Anxious wrinkles creased Enver’s brow. His fingers were white-knuckled and trembling as he squeezed his medallion.

Hamanu judged it ill omened that this morning, of all mornings, Enver was addressing him as a mighty king rather than an omniscient god. He broke the warding with a wave of his hand, slid back the bolt, and opened the door.

“Here I am, dear Enver. Here I’ve been all along. I was merely sleeping,” Hamanu lapsed into his habitual bone-dry, ironic inflection, as if he were—and had always been—the heavy-sleeping human he appeared to be.

The dwarf was not taken in. His eyes widened, and anxiety rippled above his brows, across his bald head. A frantic dialogue of inquiry and doubt roiled Enver’s thoughts, but his spoken words were calm.

“You’re needed in the throne chamber, O Mighty—Omniscience.” With evident effort, Enver resurrected the habits of a lifetime. “Will you want breakfast, Omniscience? A bath and a swim?”

A few of the filaments Hamanu had released when he awakened were, at last, winding back to him, winding back in a single ominous thread. Templars had died at Todek village, died so fast and thoroughly that their last thoughts revealed nothing, and the living minds that had summoned him were uselessly overwrought.

Elven templars were already running the road from Todek to Urik. Their thoughts were all pulse and breath. Coherent explanations would have to wait until they arrived at the palace.

Other filaments had traveled to a score of templars at a refugee outpost on Urik’s southeastern border. There, the filaments had been frayed and tangled by the same sort of interference the Oba of Gulg had wielded in the southwest yesterday. In the hope that something would get through, Hamanu widened the Dark Lens link between himself and his templars. He granted them whatever spells they’d requested. But it wasn’t spells those desperate minds wanted. They wanted him: Hamanu, the Lion-King, their god and mighty leader, and they wanted him beside them.

There were limits to a champion’s powers: Hamanu couldn’t do everything. Though his thoughts could travel through the netherworld to many places, many minds, and all at once, his body was bound to a single place. To satisfy his beleaguered templars, he would have had to transport his entire self from the palace, as he’d done when the Oba challenged him. But Enver wasn’t the only numb-fingered templar in the palace. A veritable knot of pleas and conscious filaments surrounded his throne chamber where, at first guess, every living gold medallion high templar, along with the upper ranks of the civil and war bureaus, was clamoring for his attention.

The Lion-King wasn’t immune to difficult choices.

“Fresh clothes?”

Extraordinary days—of which this was surely one—required extraordinary displays and extraordinary departures from routine. Hamanu raised one dark eyebrow. “Dear Enver,” he reprimanded softly and, while he had the dwarf’s attention, remade his illusions, adding substantially to his height and transforming his drab, wrinkled garments into state robes of unadorned ebony silk, as befitted a somber occasion. “Clothes, I think, will be the least of our problems today.”

Hamanu strode past his steward’s slack-jawed bewilderment, slashed an opening into the Gray netherworld, and, one stride later, emerged onto the marble-tiled dais of his unbeloved, jewel-encrusted throne. He needed no magic, no mind-bending sleight to get his templars’ attention. The sight of him was enough to halt every conversation. Hamanu swept his consciousness across their marveling minds, collecting eighty different savors of apprehension and doubt.

The six civil-bureau janitors, whose duty was to stand beside the empty throne and keep the great lantern shining above it, were the first templars to recover their poise. In practiced unison, they pounded spear butts loudly on the floor and slapped their leather-armored breasts. Then the orator who shared throne-chamber duty with them cleared her throat.

“Hail, O Mighty King, O Mighty Hamanu! Water-Wealth, Maker of Oceans. King of the—”

Mighty Hamanu shot her a look that took her voice away.

The chamber fell silent, except for the creaking of the slave-worked treadmills and the network of ropes and pulleys that ran from the treadmills to huge red-and-gold fans. At this late hour of the morning, the heat of day beat down on the roof, and nothing except sorcery could cool the chamber and the crowd together.

Exotic and expensive perfumes competed pungently with each other and with the ever-present aroma of mortal sweat. The more delicate and sensitive individuals wore pomander masks or held scented cloth against their noses.

For his part, Hamanu drank down every scent, every taste born in air or thought. His champion’s eyes took in each familiar face without blinking. There was Javed, clad in his usual black and leaning nonchalantly against a pillar. Javed leaned because the wounds in his leg ached today—Hamanu felt the pain. But Javed was a champion, too, Hero of Urik, and, like the Lion-King, had appearances to maintain. Pavek stood near the door, not because he’d arrived late, but because no matter how carefully and properly his house-servants dressed him, he’d always be a misfit in this congregation. He’d migrated, by choice, to the rear, where he hoped his high templar peers wouldn’t notice him.

Hamanu had other favorites: Xerake with her ebony cane; the Plucrataes heir, eleventh of his lineage to bear a scholar’s medallion and more nearsighted than any of his ancestors; and a score of others. His favorites were accustomed to his presence. Their minds opened at the slightest pressure. They were ready, if not quite willing, to speak their concerns aloud. The rest, knowing that the Lion’s favorites were also lightning rods for his wrath, were more than willing to wait.

He let them all wait longer. On the distant southeastern border, a sergeant’s despair had burst through the netherworld interference.

Hear me, O Mighty Hamanu!

The Lion-King cast a minor pall over his throne chamber. An eerie quiet spread through the crowd. Conversation, movement, and—most important for a champion who was needed elsewhere, but couldn’t be seen with his vacant-eyed attention focused in that elsewhere—memory ceased around him.

I hear you—Hamanu examined the trembling mote of consciousness and found a name—Andelimi. I see you, Andelimi. Take heart.

His words reassured the templar, but they weren’t the truth. Hamanu glimpsed the southeast border through a woman’s eyes. Her vision was not as sharp as his own would be, but it was sharp enough: black scum dulled an expanse of sand and salt that should been painfully bright.

An army of the undead, he said in Andelimi’s mind, because it reassured her to hear the truth of her own fears.

We cannot control them, O Mighty King.

Controlling the undead—of all the mysteries Rajaat’s Dark Lens perpetrated, that one remained opaque. Like the other champions, through sorcery Hamanu held vast power over death in all its forms. He could inflict death in countless ways and negate it as well, but always at great cost to his ever-metamorphosing self. Not so his templars, whose borrowed magic had its origin in the Dark Lens and was fundamentally different from the sorcery Rajaat had bestowed on his champions.

The magic his templar syphoned from the Dark Lens neither hastened the dragon metamorphosis nor degraded ordinary life into ash. And, since the undead didn’t hunger, didn’t thirst, didn’t suffer, the champions often relied on their living templars’ ability to raise the casualties of earlier battles whenever it seemed that marching a mass of bodies at an enemy would insure victory.

Which wasn’t often.

Once a templar had the undead raised and moving, he or she faced the chance that someone else would usurp control of them. Not an equal chance, of course. Some living minds were simply better at controlling undead, and all other aspects being equal, a more experienced templar—not to mention a more experienced priest, druid, sorcerer, or champion could usurp the undead from a novice.

Hamanu personally tested his templars for undead aptitude and made certain the ones who had it got the training they needed. The war bureau wouldn’t have allowed Andelimi and the twenty other templars in her maniple out the gates without an apt and trained necromant templar among them—especially in the southeast, where Urik’s land abutted Giustenal.

Hamanu stirred Andelimi’s thoughts. Where is your necromant?

Rihaen tried, O Mighty King, she assured him. Hodit, too.

Her eyes pulled down to the hard-packed dirt to the left of her feet; Hamanu seized control of her body and turned her toward the right. Andelimi was a war-bureau sergeant, a veteran of two decade’s worth of campaign. She knew better than to fight her king, but instinct ran deeper than intellect. She’d rather die than look to her right. Hamanu kept her eyes open long enough to see what he needed.

Rihaen tried…

Andelimi’s thoughts were bleak. She’d barely begun to mourn. The dead elf had been her lover, the father of her children, the taste of sweet water on her tongue.

Rihaen had tried to turn the undead army, but the same champion who’d sundered the link between Urik’s templars and Urik’s king had roused these particular corpses. Instead of usurping Giustenal’s minions, Rihaen had been usurped by them. His heart had stopped, and he’d become undead himself, under another mind’s control. Hodit, who was also apt and trained, had—foolishly—tried to turn Rihaen and suffered the same fate.

The remaining templars of the maniple, including Andelimi, had overcome their own undead. It could be done without recourse to magic, and every templar carried the herbs, the oils, or the weapons to do it. But what the raiser of Giustenal’s undead army had done to Rihaen and Hodit could not be undone. For them, the curse of undeath was irrevocable. Their bodies had fallen apart. Nothing recognizable was left of Andelimi’s beloved except a necromant’s silver medallion and several strands of his long, brown hair, all floating on a pool of putrid gore.

For the honor of his own ancient memories of Deche and Dorean, Hamanu would have left Andelimi alone with her grief. But it had been her anguish that cut through Dregoth’s interference, and for the sake of Urik, he could show her no mercy.

Andelimi!

She crumpled to the ground; he thrust her to her feet.

Where are the others of your maniple? Who survives?

Hamanu would not make her look at Rihaen again, but he needed to see. He forced her eyes open, then blinked away her tears. He found the fifteen surviving templars in a line behind Andelimi. Their varied medallions hung exposed against their breasts. Defeat was written on their faces because he had not heard their pleas in time. They knew what was happening—that he’d taken possession of Andelimi—and that it had happened too late.

“We stand, O Mighty Lion! We fight, O Great Hamanu!” the maniple’s adjutant shouted to the king he knew was watching him through a woman’s eyes. He saluted with a bruising thump on his breast. “Your templars will not fail you!”

The adjutant’s thoughts were white and spongy. His hand trembled when he lowered it. Urik’s templars didn’t have a prayer of winning against the undead legion sprawled before them, and the adjutant knew it. He and Andelimi wished with all their hearts that death—clean, eternal death—would be theirs this afternoon.

They’d get their wish only if Hamanu slew them where they stood and drained their essence, furthering his own metamorphosis.

Hamanu pondered the bitter irony: only living champions were afflicted by the dragon metamorphosis. Dregoth was as undead as the army he’d raised, utterly unable to become a dragon, will he or nill he. There was no limit on Dregoth’s sorcery except the scarcity of life in his underground city.

The very-much-alive Lion of Urik tested the netherworld with a thought, confirming his suspicions. Giustenal’s champion had raised the undead army creeping toward Urik. Hamanu could turn them, mind by empty mind, but he’d have to fight for each one, and victory’s price was unthinkably high.

“You will retreat,” he told the maniple with Andelimi’s voice.

They weren’t reassured. Undead marched slowly but relentlessly; they never tired, never rested. Only elves could outrun them—unless there were elves among the undead.

“Better to stand and fight.” A slow-moving dwarf muttered loudly.

He stood with his fists defiant on his hips. Whatever death Hamanu chose for him—his undercurrent thoughts were clear—it would be preferable to dwarven undeath with its additional banshee curse of an unfulfilled life-focus. In that, the dwarf was mistaken. The Lion-King could craft fates far worse than undeath—as Windreaver would attest—but Hamanu let the challenge pass. Urik’s fate hung in the balance, and Urik was more important than teaching a fool-hearted dwarf an eternal lesson.

“Set all your water before me.”

While the adjutant oversaw the assembling of a small pile of waterskins, Hamanu thrust deeper into Andelimi’s consciousness, impressing into her memory the shapes and syllables of the Dark Lens spell he wanted her to cast. If grief had not already numbed her mind, the mind-bending shock would have driven her mad. As it was, Hamanu’s presence was only another interlude in an already endless nightmare.

When the waterskin pile was complete and the arcane knowledge imparted, Hamanu made Andelimi speak again: “After the spell is cast, you will each take up your waterskins again and begin walking toward the north and west. With every step, a drop of water will fall from your fingertip to the ground. When the undead walk where you have walked, the lifeless blood in their lifeless veins will burst into flames.”

“There is not enough water here to see us back to our outpost!” the dwarf interrupted, still hoping for a clean death. “The undead will engulf us—”

“There is a small oasis north of here—”

The maniple knew it well, though it was not marked on any official map. They collected regular bribes from the runaway slaves it sheltered. It was a minor corruption of the sort Hamanu had tolerated for thirteen ages.

“Its spring has water enough to hold the undead at bay—simply fill your waterskins from the spring, and then walk around the oasis. And after the undead army has marched past…” Hamanu narrowed Andelimi’s eyes and made her smile. A lion’s fangs appeared where her teeth should have been. “After the undead army has passed, burn the oasis and bring the vagrants back to Urik for the punishment they deserve.”

They’d obey, these templars he was trying to save. No power under the bloody sun would protect them otherwise. Hamanu, their king, deserved his cruel, capricious reputation. They’d march to Urik because it had been known for thirteen ages that there was no way for a yellow-robe templar to hide from the Lion of Urik. They could bury their medallions, break them, or burn diem, and it wouldn’t save them. Once his mind had touched theirs, he could find them, and so, they would obey-Never imagining that if Dregoth’s army reached Urik, there might not be a Lion left to find them.

Killer-ward.

Hamanu put the word in Andelimi’s mind. She repeated it, triggering the mnemonics he’d forced into her memory. The links between templar and champion, champion and the Dark Lens, were pulled, and magic was evoked. Sparks danced over the waterskins, growing, spreading, until the drab leather was hidden by a luminous white blanket.

After that, it was time for Hamanu to return to Urik, time to tell his exalted templars of the dangers he—and they—faced from yet another direction. He’d done all he could here.

Hamanu blinked and looked out again through his own eyes. His pall persisted in the throne chamber. Two of the templars nearest the dais had not been standing straight on their feet when the pall caught them, and as effects of time could not be easily thwarted, they’d both tumbled forward. One of them would have a bloody nose when awareness returned, the other, a bloody chin. Deeper in the silent crowd others had fallen. One—a woman, Gart Fulda—would never stand up again. She hadn’t been particularly old or infirm, but death was always a risk when Hamanu’s immortal mind touched a mortal one.

The elven pair from Todek had arrived while Hamanu’s attention was on the Giustenal border. They’d been running when they entered the throne chamber, and momentum had carried them several long strides toward the dais before the pall enveloped them. They, too, would tumble when Hamanu lifted his spell. The leading elf would have to take his chances. His companion carried an ominously familiar leather-wrapped bundle under his left arm.

A day that had not begun well and had gone poorly thereafter showed signs of becoming much, much worse.

Before he dispelled the pall, Hamanu carefully took the bundle from the immobile runner. It thrummed faintly as he carried it back to the throne. Cursing Rajaat yet another time, Hamanu considered destroying it while the pall was still in place. There’d be questions—in the minds of the elven runners, if nowhere else—and questions sired rumors. More questions, if he slew the elves, too. He reconsidered. If the templars in this chamber saw the shard’s power before he destroyed it, he wouldn’t have to worry about their loyalty when times got difficult, as times were almost certain to do.

After a sigh, Hamanu inhaled the pall into his lungs. The elven runners tumbled. Others gasped or yelped as words trapped in their throats broke free. None of the commotion held Hamanu’s attention when a trace of blue lightning, such as heralded a Tyr-storm, leapt from the shard’s leather-wrapped tip. The flash grounded itself in the crowd. Hamanu followed it to a strange templar’s mind.

“Raam,” Hamanu muttered, savoring the stranger as his most agile-minded templars became alert again. “Who in Raam would stand against me? With Dregoth marching, it would be better to make common cause.”

Javed, whose mortal mind was among the most agile and alert Hamanu had ever encountered, had heard the thrumming shard. He watched the blue lightning leap from the Lion-King’s arm. As Champion of Urik, Javed was privileged to bear his sword in the throne room. He drew the blade as another templar cried out.

Hands pressed against her steaming cheek, she reeled in agony, knocking over several less-alert templars. In her wake, Hamanu got his first eyes-only view of the Raamin stranger.

The Raamin was a striking example of humanity in its prime, taller than average, well fed, well muscled, with sun-streaked hair. That hair had begun to move as if a strong wind blew upward from the. object he clutched against his ribs.

“Drop it!” Hamanu shouted, a sound that loosened dust and plaster flakes from the ceiling, but had no effect on the Raamin’s bright blue, pall-glazed eyes.

Hamanu put the shard he held behind his back. Lightning danced on his chest, his shoulders, his neck. It penetrated the Lion-King’s human illusion without destroying it or harming him—yet.

“Drop it, now!” he shouted, louder than the first time. He didn’t dare any kind of magic or mind-bending, not with Rajaat’s malice whirling around the chamber.

The stupefied Raamin didn’t so much as blink. From his appearance, he’d been one of Abalach-Re’s templars; the Raamin queen had never been particularly concerned with cleverness when she picked her templars. Fortunately, Urik’s king had other prejudices. Urik’s elite templars were bold enough to take matters into their own hands. A handful of men and women wrestled the crackling bundle from the stiff-armed stranger and deposited it before their king’s throne, where, within a heartbeat, its wrapping had disintegrated.

Rather than the black-glass shard Hamanu had expected, a sky-blue serpent slithered lightning-bright and -fast across the marble dais. It struck his ankle, easily piercing the human illusion. Unbounded rage and hatred boiled against Hamanu’s immortal skin. Sorcerous fangs struck deep, but there was only bone, obsidian black and obsidian hard, beneath his gaunt flesh.

With the Todek shard in his left hand, secure at his back, Hamanu reached his right hand down. He seized the serpent behind its scintillating eyes. The sorcerous creature was more sophisticated than the one he’d squelched in Nibenay’s abandoned camp, but its venom had no effect on him.

“You surprise me, War-Bringer,” he said as he held the construct up for his templars to see. He began to squeeze, and the sky-blue head darkened. “Thirteen ages beneath the Black has dimmed your wits, while mine have grown sharper in the sun.”

The serpent’s head was midnight dark when its skull burst. Venom hissed and sputtered on the dais, leaving pits the size of a dwarf’s thumbnail in the marble. It fizzled on the illusory golden skin of Hamanu’s right arm, where it harmed no living thing.

Hamanu held the serpent’s fading, dwindling body aloft so his templars could cheer his triumph. Their celebration would necessarily be brief. The other shard had ceased its thrumming, which Hamanu didn’t consider reassuring. The templars hadn’t completed their second salute when the chamber darkened. Sunset couldn’t be the cause; he hadn’t palled the throne chamber long enough for the day to be coming to its natural end. Ash plumes from the Smoking Crown volcano could have caused the darkness; but the eruptions that produced the plumes were invariably preceded by ground tremors.

A Tyr-storm was the most likely cause, those fast-moving tempests born from the would-be dragon Tithian’s failed ambitions and fueled by Rajaat’s rage. Tyr-storms were destructive, deadly, maddening, and, in the end, altogether preferable to the darkness that descended on the throne chamber once the eternal flame in the Lion’s head lantern suspended above the throne flickered, then vanished.

Hamanu would not tolerate such an affront. He whispered the sorcerer’s word for sparks. A sharp pain lanced his flank.

All sorcery required life essences before it kindled. While defilers and preservers quibbled and pointed fingers at one another, Hamanu quickened his spells with life essence from an inexhaustible, uncomplaining source: himself. He willingly sacrificed his own immortal flesh. Pain meant nothing if it thwarted Rajaat’s grand design. Whatever essence he surrendered would be replaced, of course. But a man could draw water in a leaky bucket if he moved fast enough, and although the dragon metamorphosis was, ultimately, unstoppable, Hamanu prolonged his own agony at every opportunity.

His thoughts carried the quickened sparks to the lantern wick, and the Lion’s eye gleamed gold again. An instant later, brighter light flashed through breezeway lattices-lightning as blue as the shard-born serpent had been, as blue as Rajaat’s left eye. A distant crash of thunder accompanied the lightning. Then the throne chamber was dark again—except for the golden-eyed Lion. With his templars silent around him and the wails of Urik’s frightened folk penetrating the palace walls, Hamanu waited for the next event, whatever it might be.

He didn’t have to wait long.

“Hamanu of Urik.”

Through the darkness of his throne chamber, Hamanu recognized the predatory voice of Abalach-Re, once known as Uyness of Waverly, the late ruler of Raam. Over the ages, the Lion-King’s eyes had changed, along with the rest of him. Urik’s Lion-King could see as dwarves, elves, and the other Rebirth races saw—not merely the reflection of external light, but the warm light that radiated from the bodies of the living. More than that, he could see magic in its ethereal form: the golden glow of the medallions his templars wore, the deep cobalt aura—scarcely visible, even to him—that surrounded the blond Raamin templar.

Uyness’s voice came from the aura, but not from any spell the queen of Raam had cast in life or death. Hamanu thought immediately of Rajaat, but the first sorcerer hadn’t cast the spell that put words in the air around the dumbfounded Raamin; nor had any other champion. Yet it was a subtle, powerful spell, as subtle and powerful as the stealth spell Hamanu aged in his workroom. The realization that he could not put a name to the sorcerer who cast it sent a shiver down his black-boned spine.

“Mark me well, Hamanu of Urik: the War-Bringer grows restless. He’s waited thirteen ages to have his revenge. He remembers you best—you, the youngest, his favorite. The wounds you gave him will not heal, except beneath a balm of your heart’s blackest blood. He seeks you first. He’ll come for you, little Manu of Deche. He already knows the way.”

On any other day, Hamanu might have been amused by the haphazard blend of truth, myth, and outright error the spell-spun voice spoke. He would have roared with laughter, gone looking for the unknown sorcerer, and—just possibly—spared the poor, ignorant wretch’s life for amusement’s sake.

Any other day, but not today. Not with Rajaat’s blue lightning pummeling his city. Though the spell-caster didn’t know what Uyness of Waverly would have known from her own memory of the day, thirteen ages ago, when the champions betrayed their creator and created a prison for him beneath the Black, there were undeniable truths in the thick air of the throne chamber. Rajaat was restless, Rajaat wanted revenge, and Rajaat would start with Urik.

Taking the chance that there was a conscious mind still attached to the spell, Hamanu said mildly, “Tell me something I don’t already know. Tell me where you are and why you come to Urik now, when the War-Bringer’s attention is sure to catch you… again. Wasn’t one death enough?”

The cobalt aura flickered, as it might if motes of the Raamin champion’s true essence had been used in its creation. “The Shadow-King found me,” she said when her aura was restored.

The statement wasn’t quite an answer to Hamanu’s questions. It might have been an evasion. It certainly couldn’t lave been the truth. Gallard of Nibenay was many things, none of them foolish enough to search the Black near Rajaat’s Hollow prison for the lingering remains of any champion, least of all, Uyness of Waverly. More than the rest of them, the Raamin queen relied on myth and theological bombast to sustain her rule. There were two reasons Nibenay hadn’t swallowed Raam long ago: One was Urik, sitting between the cities; the other was Dregoth, who hated Uyness with undead passion.

“And the Shadow-King sent you to me?” Hamanu asked, hiding his disbelief behind a still-soft voice and keeping his true questions to himself.

The Tyr-storm, which had lapsed into faint rumblings after its initial surge, showed its power before the spellcast voice answered. Thunderbolts rained down on Hamanu’s yellow-walled city—his keen ears recorded a score of strikes before echoes made an accurate count impossible. An acrid stench filled the chamber and brought tears to the eyes of his assembled templars. The storm’s blue light shimmered in the pungent air, then coalesced into a swirling, luminous pillar that swiftly became Uyness of Waverly in her most beautiful disguise, her most seductive posture.

“Rajaat grows strong on our weakness, Hamanu. Without a dragon among us, no spell will hold him. We need a dragon, Hamanu. We need a dragon to keep Rajaat in the Hollow. We need a dragon to create more of our own kind, to restore order to our world. We choose you to be the dragon. Rajaat will come to Urik for revenge. He will destroy you. Then he will destroy everything. The champions come to honor you, Hamanu of Urik. We offer you lives by the thousand. You will become the dragon, and Athas will be saved.”