Lynn Abbey - The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King

Look away quick, Hamanu advised, but druid-trained Ruari resisted Unseen suggestion.

Ruari's eyes narrowed, and he tried to stop the critic from climbing down his arm. Outrage, jealousy, and envy erupted from the half-elf's spirit, piquing the attention of the other sensitives in the atrium. Pavek, who alone knew how hot the fire Ruari played with truly burned, was frantic in his determination to break the attractive spell between them.

Pavek might have succeeded. Critic minds didn't comprehend sorcerous illusion. The critic saw what it saw and placed its feet accordingly. Once the lizard had ambled across the table and begun its journey up Manu's arm, Hamanu had to pay more attention to the substance of his illusion than to the half-elf glowering at him.

Then someone—possibly Javed, Hamanu quite didn't catch the voice—said something about the ways in which a veteran might fortify himself before a battle that might well be his last.

"I know what I'd do," Ruari interjected boldly. His narrow-eyed stare was still fastened on Manu, whom he clearly considered younger and less experienced than himself. "I'd find myself a woman and take her back to my room."

But Ruari didn't stop there. He went on, describing his wine-fueled fantasies—and they were fantasies. Hamanu perceived that on the top of Ruari's thoughts: the boy had dallied, nothing more. Pavek told his young friend to be quiet. By then it was too late.

Too late to visit Lord Ursos.

Too late for Ruari.

Though Pavek tried, putting himself squarely between them when the supper was, at last, concluded and the guests were departing. Ruari was the last to find his feet. Lopsided and stumbling from the wine, he aimed himself at an open door and headed off, alone, for his bed.

"He's hotheaded and harmless," Pavek insisted, and beneath his words the thought: If you must consume someone, Great One, consume me.

That would have defeated Hamanu's hopes and intentions entirely. They were alone now, except for the critic still balanced on Hamanu's shoulder. The lizard never flinched when Hamanu remade his illusion, becoming the tawny-skinned, black-haired man Pavek knew—or thought he knew—best.

"You will come to the southern gate at dawn."

They stood face-to-face, Pavek a bit shorter now, but not falling to his knees.

"I know."

Hamanu unslung the scroll case. "For Urik." He placed his unnaturally warm hands over Pavek's and molded them over the scuffed leather. "When I am gone, you will raise that guardian spirit of yours."

"I will try, Great One."

"You will not try, Pavek. You will succeed. You will raise Urik's guardian. You will evoke every power it possesses, and you will destroy me, Pavek. That is my command."

Rajaat, the Dark Lens, the Gray, the Black, and a dragon, they were all just words to Pavek. He tried to rank them in his mortal mind, but for him, there was no catastrophe greater than Urik without its Lion-King.

"You'll know, Pavek. You'll know when you see what I become. Your conscience won't trouble you."

"But Rajaat—" the templar protested. "A dragon will protect Athas from Rajaat, isn't that true? Isn't that what the dragon—what Borys the Butcher of Gnomes did for two thousand years?"

Rajaat wasn't Pavek's worry. Rajaat would be Sadira's worry, and Rkard's. Rajaat would be their punishment for doing nothing when they could have put an end to both Rajaat and dragons. Hamanu wouldn't talk to Pavek about Rajaat.

"Borys was the Butcher of Dwarves," Hamanu corrected gently, after forcing the War-Bringer out of his mind. "Gal-lard was the Gnome-Bane; he took the name of Nibenay after Borys became the dragon, which was a thousand years ago, not two thousand."

"But—" Pavek had been educated in the templar orphanage; he knew the official history of his city.

"We lie, Pavek. We've all lied; all the champions. When the wars ended, Tyr measured its years from one High Sun solstice to the next, a full three hundred and seventy-five days, but Draj and Balic measured theirs by equinoxes. Their years were half as long. Albeorn—Andropinis of Balic—didn't want to be associated with the champion Elf-

Slayer. So we lied, we took history apart and put it back together again so mortals who might remember the Cleansing Wars might never think that we had led them." Hamanu squeezed Pavek's hands tighter around the scroll case, then let go. "This, and this alone, is the truth. Keep it safe."

Pavek frowned. The gesture tugged his scar and caused a twinge of pain, which Hamanu shared.

"You should let me fix this."

"More illusions? More taking history apart and putting it back different?" Pavek asked.

"You'd be a handsome man. Women would notice."

"It's not my face that keeps Kashi away," Pavek said honestly.

And Hamanu had to agree. He traced the ugly scar with a fingertip, but left it alone. "Good-bye, Pavek, Just-Plain Pavek. It's time for me to go."

Pavek started to nod, but his chin stayed down against his chest. "I will miss you, Great One." His voice was thick. "If ever I have a son, I will name him Hamanu."

"Kashi won't stand for that," Hamanu said as he turned away.

He was halfway to the door when Pavek called him back.

"Telhami—" the templar began. His face was raised; his eyes were glistening. He had to begin again. "Telhami will be waiting for you."

Hamanu cocked an eyebrow, not trusting his own voice.

"When... if... you'll become part of the guardian after, Great One. That's what she says. And she'll be waiting for you."

He hadn't thought about after; it gave him the strength to turn away and walk out the door.

Ruari had wedged himself into the corner where his narrow cot met the walls of his room, the better to keep both cot and walls from swaying wildly. His eyelids were the heaviest part of his body, but he didn't dare let them close. Without the moonlight patterns on the wall to tell him up from down, he'd be overwhelmed with the sensation of falling backward, endlessly falling backward until his gut began to heave in the other direction.

The half-elf knew this because it had already happened, not once, but twice. He'd shed his reeking clothes outside the room and crawled the last distance to his cot on his hands and knees. His mind wasn't working particularly well, but it seemed fairly certain that he'd never felt quite this sick, this stupid, this drunk before. Given a choice between death right then or holding the walls up and his gut down until dawn, Ruari would have chosen death without hesitation.

"Preserve and protect," he muttered, the conclusion of a druid blessing the first few words of which he'd forgotten.

Grinding his heels into the mattress, Ruari pushed himself backward, but his legs were weak and the walls of Pavek's red-and-yellow house were made of brick, not woven reeds, like the walls of his hut back in Quraite. Terror seized him when she reached the cot and laid a surprisingly warm—for death, anyway—hand on his foot.

Terror was nothing Ruari's wine-drenched gut could handle at that moment. He made a desperate sideways lunge. Death caught him before he hit the floor.

"You shouldn't drink so much," she chided him.

Death smoothed his dank hair behind his ears—which Ruari didn't appreciate. Ears were supposed to match and his didn't. One of them was more tapering, more elven, than the other. He tried to hide the defect; she caught his hand before he caught his hair.

"Relax," she suggested, raising his hand. "You'll feel better." She pressed her lips against his knuckles.

Very warm lips.

Very warm and relaxing lips.

Ruari did feel better than he had a moment ago. His gut was calmer, and when she put her-arms around him, the room no longer threatened to spin wildly, either sideways or backward. He protested when she released him, but it was only to stand a moment while she undid the laces of her shift. It fell in a dun-colored circle about her ankles, revealing soft curves that glowed in the moonlight.