Morning was nearly afternoon when Hamanu prepared to go downstairs and deal with his city's larger and more public affairs. Burnished armor and robes of state had been laid out for his approval, which he gave, as he almost invariably did, with no more than a cursory glance at his wardrobe.
A patterned silk canopy had been erected over the pool where he would bathe alone, completely without attendants. It was time, once again, for loyal Enver to depart.
"I await your next summons, Omniscience," the dwarf assured him as he herded the slaves down the stairs.
Hamanu waited until all his senses, natural and preternatural, were quiet and he knew he was alone. A shimmering sphere shrouded his right hand as he stood up from his table: a shimmering sphere from which a black talon as long as an elf's forefinger emerged. With it, Hamanu scored the air in front of him, as if it were a carcass hung for gutting and butchering.
Mist seeped from the otherwise invisible wound, then, thrusting both hands into the mist, Hamanu widened the gap. Miniature gray clouds billowed momentarily around his forearms. When the sun had boiled them away, Hamanu held a carefully folded robe that was, by color and cloth, a perfect match for the robe he wore, likewise the linen and sandals piled atop the silk, He dropped the sandals at once and kicked one under the table. He dropped the silk after he'd shaken out the folds, and let the linen fall on top of it.
When Hamanu was satisfied that he'd created the impression of a heedless king shedding garments without regard for their worth, the dazzling sphere reappeared around his right hand. It grew quickly, encompassing first his arm and shoulder, finally all-of him, including his head. The man-shaped shimmer swelled until it was half again as tall as Hamanu, the human man, had been. Then, as quickly as it had appeared and spread, the dazzle was gone, and a creature like no other in the city, nor anywhere beneath the bloody sun, stood in his place.
His skin was pure black, a dull, fathomless shade of ash and soot, stretched taut over a scaffold of bones too long, too thick, too misshapen to be counted among any of the Rebirth races. There were hollows between his ribs and between the paired bones of his arms and legs. The undead runners of the barrens carried more flesh than Urik's gaunt Lion-King. Seeing Hamanu, no mortal would believe that anything so spindly could be alive, much less move with effortless grace to the bathing pool, as he did.
He paused at the edge. The still water of the bathing pool was an imperfect minor. It showed him yellow eyes and ivory fangs, but it couldn't resolve the darkness that had replaced his face. With taloned fingertips, Hamanu explored the sharp angles of his cheeks, the hairless ridge of his brows and the crest that erupted from his narrowing skull. His ears remained in their customary place and customary fluted form. His nose had collapsed, what—two ages ago? or was it three? or even four? And his lips... Hamanu imagined they'd become hard cartilage, like inix lips; he was grateful that he'd never seen them.
Hamanu's feet had lengthened over the ages. He walked more comfortably on his toes than on his heels. His knees had drawn up, and though he could still straighten his legs when it suited him, they were most often flexed. Stepping down into the water, his movements resembled a bird's, not a man's.
He dived to the bottom of the pool and rose again to the surface. Habits that thirteen ages of transformation could not erase brought his hands up to slick nonexistent hair away from his eyes. For a heartbeat—Hamanu's hollow chest contained a heart; he hoped it remained human, though he couldn't know for certain—he sank limply through the water. Then the skeletal arms pumped once, demonstrating no lack of strength, and lifted his entire body out of the water.
The gaunt, black king had the power to hover motionless in the air or to fly faster than any raptor. Hamanu chose, instead, to return to the pool's embrace with a spectacular, unappreciated splash. He rolled onto his back and tumbled through the clear, warm water like a cart's wheel until he'd raised waves high enough to leave puddles on the roof. He was oblivious to everything except his own amusement until a bolt of pain lanced from his forefinger to his spine.
Roaring a curse at the four corners of the world, Hamanu made a fist and studied the pale red and gray sliver protruding through the soot-black flesh. It was bone, of course, human bone, another tiny fragment of his ancient humanity lost, now, forever. He pinched it between two talons and jerked it free.
A mortal man would have died from the shock. A mortal man did die. Deep within Hamanu's psyche, a mortal man died a hundred times for every year of his immortal life. He would continue to die, bit by bit, until there was nothing left and Rajaat's metamorphic spell would have completed its dirty work. The metamorphosis should have been complete ages ago, but Hamanu, when he'd understood what Rajaat had intended, had set his will against the War-Bringer. The immortal king of Urik could neither stop nor reverse his inexorable transformation; he slowed its progress through deprivation and starvation.
When his loathsome shape was concealed in a tangible human glamour, Hamanu ate with gusto and drew no nourishment from his food. In his own form, Hamanu lived with agony and hunger, both of which he'd hardened himself against. He could not die and had long since reached the limits of unnatural withering. Hamanu endured and swore that by force of will alone he'd deny Rajaat's spell until the end of time.
A bead of viscous blood the color and temperature of molten lava distended Hamanu's knuckle. He stared at it with disgust, then thrust his fist beneath the water. Stinking steam broke the surface as a sinuous black coil streamed away from the open wound. Hamanu sighed, closed his eyes, and with a sun-warmed thought, congealed his blood into a rock-hard scab. Another lost battle in a war that had known no victories: magic in any form fueled the metamorphosis. Hamanu rarely cast spells in their traditional form and was miserly with his templars, yet his very thoughts were magic and all his glamours. Each act of defiance brought him closer to ultimate defeat. Even so—and though no one glimpsing him in his bathing pool would suspect it—Hamanu was far closer to the human he'd been at birth than to what Rajaat intended him to become. Within his still-human heart, Hamanu believed that in the battle between time and transformation, he would be triumphant.
At this hour, with the red sun just past its zenith, Urik rested quieter than it did at midnight. Nothing moved save for a clutch of immature kes'trekels making lazy spirals above the walls of the Elven Market. Slaves, freemen, nobles, and templars; men and women; elves, humans, dwarves, and all the folk who fell between had gone in search of shadows and shelter from the fierce heat. There was no one bold or foolish enough to gaze at the sun-hammered palace roof where a lone silhouette loomed against the dusty sky.
Hamanu touched the minds of his minions throughout the city, as a man might run his tongue along the backs of his teeth, counting them after a brawl. Half of the citizens were asleep and dreaming. One was with a woman; another with a man. The rest were lying still, hoarding their thoughts and energy. He did not disturb them.
His own thoughts drifted back to the woman, Eden, and her message. He asked himself if it was likely that the Shadow-King Nibenay, once called Gallard, Bane of Gnomes, would send staves of his precious agafari wood to their undead peer in blasted Giustenal. The answer, without hesitation, was yes—for a price.
There was no love lost between any of Rajaat's champions, including Dregoth of Giustenal and Gallard. They didn't trust each other enough for unrequited generosity. They didn't trust each other at all. It had taken a dragon, Borys of Ebe in the full culmination of Rajaat's metamorphosis, to hold the champions to the one cause that demanded their cooperation: maintaining the wards on their creator's netherworld prison, a thing they called the Hollow beneath a place they called the Black.