Then Albeorn said, "Are we done here? I have a war to win."
The War-Bringer nodded, and our moment of unity evaporated. The Elf-Slayer was gone, vanished into the night, followed by the other champions, until only Borys,
Sacha Arala, and I remained.
"I'll go with you," Arala suggested. "You'll need someone to show you the way."
"Don't listen to him," Borys advised. "Don't trust anyone who's stood beneath the Dark Lens. He doesn't—" Borys shook a finger in Arala's direction, and the Pixie-Blight retreated. "I don't. That's all the advice I got; all that I needed. What you can't learn from Yoram's memories, you can learn as you go."
He drew a down-thrust line through the air in front of him, as he'd drawn a line on his forearm earlier. Instead of blood dripping into a goblet, silvery mist leaked into the moonlight. Borys's hands disappeared as he thrust them slowly into the mist, which grew thicker, until it surrounded him and he was gone.
Rajaat' and Arala both watched me as I imitated the Butcher's movements. I shudder to think what would have become of me—of Athas—had cold tendrils of the netherworld not wound themselves immediately around my wrists.
"You'll serve." Those were the War-Bringer's parting words as I stepped into the Gray.
Only a fool goes through his life without ever catching the scent of fear around his shoulders. As I am not a fool, I have many times been afraid and never more intensely than that moment when the netherworld closed behind me.
The Unseen realm measures no east or west, up or down, past or future. If a mortal lost his course, he might drift his life away before he found it again; an immortal man, of course, would drift longer.
I drifted only long enough to ransack Yoram's memories for his knowledge of the Gray and the striped silk tent at the center of his army. When those brown and ocher stripes were bright as life itself, I fixed them in my mind's eye and strode out of the Gray.
At the very last I remembered my nakedness and made myself into the warrior Myron of Yoram had never been.
Slaves slept in the corners of my tent while my officers gamed for gold and jewels at my map table. "Enough!" I shouted, loud enough to wake my slaves and the recently dead, alike.
"Go to your veterans," I told the human lumps cowering at my feet. "Prepare to break camp. When the bloody sun rises again, this army—my army—is going to fight trolls and fight trolls until there are no more."
There was mutiny, not that night, but not long after. Yoram's officers were lazy folk, used to living in luxury. Most adapted readily to my methods. Those who didn't perished, one way or another. My first few years as champion were spent putting down mutinies rather than fighting trolls. I had a lot to learn about both fighting and leading, and Yoram's memories were of no use to me on either score.
More than once, I thought of Borys of Ebe, but the simple truth was that Rajaat kept us champions isolated from each other. I could have sent scouts in search of the Dwarf-Butcher... and lost good scouts for my efforts. I could have searched for him myself, but I hadn't traveled widely, and while the Gray can take you anywhere you desire, it's unwise to let the Gray take you anywhere you haven't been before.
And Borys had already given me all the advice I needed: what I couldn't extract from Yoram's memories, I learned for myself.
Five years after I left Rajaat's tower, my army was a small fraction of the size it had been when I claimed it. We traveled kank-back wherever our enemy led us. In those days, my metamorphosis was less advanced, and I rode bugs from dawn till dusk. Every man and woman under my yellow banner was a tried veteran skilled in fighting, scavenging, and survival. And every one of them wore a yellow medallion bearing my likeness around his neck. While I led the Troll-Scorcher's army, no veteran's pleas or prayers went unheard.
Rajaat had made me an immortal champion, with a hunger that only the deaths of trolls could truly sate. Rajaat's Dark Lens had given me an inexplicable ability to channel magic to any man or woman who wore my medallion. Not the life-sucking sorcery such as I had already mastered, but a clean magic, such as elemental priests and druids practiced. Yoram had known of the Dark Lens's power, but he'd never used it, lest a troll escape his appetite.
To my disgust, I came to understand my predecessor's reasoning. Rajaat told his greatest lie when he said pain belonged to my past. Without a steady diet of death—troll death, in particular—my skin collapsed against my bones. I suffered terrible agonies of emptiness, and my black immortal bones ground, one against the other. Let it be said, though, that I had suffered far worse when Myron of Yoram held me in the eyes of fire.
Until I slew a troll with the eyes of fire, I didn't understand the true nature of Rajaat's sorcery. The second time filled me with a self-loathing so profound that I tried, and failed utterly, to kill myself. There was no third time. I schooled myself to live without the obscene bliss the eyes of fire provided. Fear and ordinary death were enough to keep the madness at bay, and once I learned that immortality was not an illusion I could cast aside according to my will, pain itself became meaningless.
I gave my veterans all the spells and magic they desired, thinking I was thwarting Rajaat's plans for both me and Athas. In the seventh year of my campaign against Windreaver's trolls, I learned that I was wrong. Rajaat had anticipated my duplicity. Mote by mote, my body was transformed each time the Dark Lens's power passed through me on its way to my veterans.
One evening, after a routine invocation to purify our drinking water, spasms stiffened my right hand and arm. I retreated from my army, claiming that I needed solitude to plan our next attacks. The truth was simpler: for seven years I hadn't shed my glamour or looked upon my black-boned self, and I wished to be alone when I did. What I saw by Guthay's golden light horrified me. I was taller and heavier than I'd been. My rib cage had narrowed, and my breast-bone thickened into a ridge such as flightless erdlus have beneath their wings. Bony spurs had sprouted above my ankles, and a shiny black claw was rising out of a new knuckle on the least finger of my right hand.
As I stared at what had become of my hand—what would become of it—I heard the War-Bringer's deranged laughter through the Gray. After that, my army fought as human men and women, using our wits and weapons whenever we could, resorting to sorcery and Dark Lens magic only when nothing else would bring us a victory.
For ten long years, my army never camped two nights running in the same place. Windreaver kept his trolls divided. We couldn't pursue them all, all the time, but we tried, and time, inexorable time, was on our side. Human villages still sent their food tithes to the annual muster. There was never a shortage of volunteers to counter attrition in the ranks.
Trolls had neither resource. They couldn't raise their food or purchase it honestly. Every mouthful they ate was stolen from a human field or loft. Every mouth they lost was nigh irreplaceable. They were never a fecund race, and once their women became fighters and raiders, there was very little time for bearing children or raising them.
Chronicles and royal myths are rife with kings who won their petty wars on the battlefields—and perhaps they did. But Rajaat's Cleansing Wars were never the stuff from which great legends are woven. We weren't fighting for land or treasure or vague notions of honor and glory. We fought to exterminate thirteen other races whose only crime was existence. So long as one man and one woman of a Rebirth race remained—so long as the promise of children could be fulfilled—a champion could not claim victory. So long as genocide was the destiny I pursued, pitched battles between armed veterans would resolve nothing.
I waged war on the trolls who didn't fight, on the elders who maintained their race's traditions, and on the young who were their hope and future. My campaign was relentless; my victory inevitable. Sheer and single-minded annihilation has an insurmountable advantage over survival, much less creation.