Hamanu recalled the day, over five years earlier, when Borys had been vanquished, along with several other champions. For one afternoon, for the first time in a thousand years, Rajaat had been free. The fact that Rajaat was no longer free and had been returned to his Hollow owed nothing to the cooperation of the three champions who'd survived Borys's death and Rajaat's resurrection. They distrusted each other so much that they'd stood aside and let a mortal woman—a half-elf named Sadira of Tyr—set the prison wards.
It had been different long ago, in the Year of Enemy's Fury in the 177th King's Age. After Borys first set the wards on Rajaat's Hollow, there'd been nearly a score of immortal sorcerers ruling their proud heartland cities. With the passage of thirteen ages, they'd winnowed themselves down to seven. Then a decade ago, Kalak, the Tyrant of Tyr, had been brought down by his own ambition and a handful of mortal rebels, including one of his own high templars and Sadira, the same Sadira who'd vanquished Borys and reset the wards around Rajaat's Hollow.
In the Lion-King's judgment, Kalak was a fool, a careless fool who'd deserved the crime committed against him. Kalak was no champion. Hamanu had, perhaps, trusted the Tyrant of Tyr more than he trusted his peers, but he'd respected him less. He cursed Kalak's name each time it resurrected itself in his memory. Kalak's demise had left an unfillable hole in Tyr, the oldest—if not the largest, wealthiest, or most powerful—city in the heartland. And now, thanks in no small part to the subsequent behavior of the rebels who'd killed their immortal sorcerer-king, the thrones of Balic, Raam, and Draj were vacant, too.
It was easier to list who among Rajaat's champions was left: himself, Gallard in Nibenay, Inenek in Gulg, and undead Dregoth in Giustenal—none of them a dragon.
So long as Rajaat was securely imprisoned in the Hollow beneath the Black, Hamanu didn't object to the missing dragon. Once Borys had completed Rajaat's metamorphosis and walked the heartland as a dragon, Borys had ruled everyone. Even the immortal sorcerers in their proud city-states had jumped to a dragon's whim. There had been wars, of course—cities devastated and abandoned—but the balance of power never truly changed. What Borys demanded, Borys got, because he kept Rajaat confined in the Hollow.
The prospect might have tempted some of them—though never Hamanu—if they hadn't all watched helplessly as a maddened, mindless Borys ravaged the heartland immediately after they'd cast the spells to complete his metamorphosis. For his first hundred years, wherever Borys went, he sucked the life out of everything. When he was done, the heartland was the parched, blasted barren place it remained to this day.
Dregoth had already succumbed to temptation and drawn the wrath of his immortal peers. Borys had rounded them up for a second time, and they'd found a fitting eternal punishment for immortal hubris: they'd ruined his city and stripped all living flesh from the proud Ravager of Giants. He remained the champion he'd been on the day of his death, but he'd never be anything more. Dregoth was what folk called undead, kaiskarga in the halfling tongue, the oldest of the many languages Hamanu knew.
In shame, and under the threat of worse punishment, Dregoth had dwelt for ages beneath his ruined city. Mortal chroniclers forgot Dregoth, but his peers remembered— especially Uyness of Waverly, whom living mortals had called Abalach-Re, Queen of Raam, and whom Dregoth remembered as his betrayer.
Now Uyness was dead with Borys, and Dregoth wanted Raam's empty throne. Hamanu reasoned that Nibenay might well support Giustenal's ambitions in that direction with agafari staves, because, whether or not he conquered every empty-throned city, Dregoth could never become another dragon as Borys had been. Like as not, Gallard would support Dregoth no matter which city the undead champion had designs upon. Like as not, Gallard—who fancied himself the most subtle of Rajaat's champions-hoped there'd come a day when he and Dregoth were the only champions left. If the price of attaining dragonkind was the annihilation of every mortal life in a city or three, how much easier to pay when none of the cities in peril were one's own?
Gallard had that much conscience, at least. Kalak hadn't hesitated at the thought of consuming Tyr. That's what got him killed by his own subject citizens and templars, but Kalak of Tyr had been a fool and freebooter from the start, long before the champions were created.
And Hamanu of Urik—what had he been before he was an immortal champion?
Hamanu's thoughts sluiced sideways. In his mind's eye, he was suddenly far away from his precious city. He stood in another place, another time: a field of golden-ripe himali grain surrounded by hardworking kith and kin. Warm summer breezes lifted his hair and dried the sweat on his back. There was a hay rake in his youthful hands. A youngster—a brother too small to cut grain or rake—sat nearby with reed pipes against his lips, diverting the harvesters as they labored. The brother's tune was lost to time along with his name. But the dark-haired, gray-eyed maiden who stood behind the boy in memory, swaying in the music's rhythm, her name would never be forgotten while the Lion-King lived: Dorean.
For Dorean, Hamanu had become a man in his family's eyes. For him, Dorean had become a woman. The life that had once lain before them, filled with fields of grain, growing children, and a love that never needed words, was the only life Hamanu had ever wanted. If he'd done right by Dorean, if he'd protected her, as a man was sworn to do, he never would have seen the walls of Urik.
His body would lie beside hers, turned to dust and dirt a hundred times over.
A shadow wind sundered Hamanu's memory. He released the balustrade and turned around. A dusty breeze took shape, as tall as he was, yet far broader.
"Windreaver," he said flatly as the shape became substantial and the last commander of the troll army stood between him and the pool. As big as half-giants, as clever as elves or dwarves, trolls had been formidable enemies for a champion-led army, and Windreaver had been—and remained—the most formidable of the trolls. He'd lived and fought for two ages before he and a fifty-year-old Hamanu faced each other and Windreaver fought his last battle. A wispy curtain of silver hair hung around his swept-back ears, and the wrinkles above his bald brow were as pronounced as the brow ridge itself. Age had not dulled Windreaver's obsidian eyes. They were as bright, black, and sharp on the palace roof as they had been on the windswept cliff high above a wracken sea.
Hamanu hissed, an effective, contemptuous gesture in his unnatural shape. When hate was measured, he and Windreaver were peers. If Enver was one aspect of Hamanu's conscience, Windreaver was the other.
The troll would have preferred to die with the rest of his kind; Hamanu had not offered a choice. Windreaver's body had become dust and dirt, as Hamanu's had not, but Windreaver lived, succored by the same starving magic that sustained Hamanu. He was an immortal reminder of genocide to the conquered and to the conqueror who had committed it.
"Look, there, on the horizon," Windreaver pointed to the southwest, toward distant Nibenay, exporter and abandoner of poorly stained agafari staves. "What do you see?"
"What did you see?" Hamanu retorted. "A bundle of sticks laid beside an old well?"
Windreaver served Hamanu. The troll had had no choice in that, either. The King of Urik could abide guilt and hate, but never useless things, be they living, dead, or in between. Windreaver was Hamanu's most trusted spy; the spy he sent to shadow his peers, his fellow champions.
"Do I need a fire to comfort me in my old age?" the troll retorted.