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Pavek remained where he was, mute and kneeling.
"Very well, doubt it all. Power has limits. Eternity has a beginning and an end. I was born no different than you. I have died many times—Look at me, Lord Pavek!"
Unable to disobey, Pavek straightened his back and neck. The human-seeming Hamanu was gone, replaced by the apparition who'd terrified them all in the audience chamber when he examined the stains on Ruari's staff. The long serpentine neck curved toward him. The whiplike tongue flashed out to touch the scar on his cheek. A blast of hot, reeking air followed the tongue.
"See me as I truly am, Lord Pavek. Borys the Dragon is dead; Hamanu the Dragon is about to be born!"
Another searing blast enveloped Pavek as he knelt, but, hot as it was, it wasn't enough to break the cold terror paralyzing his lungs.
"A thousand years I held back the changes. I hoarded every templar's spell; I kept Urik safe from change, Lord Pavek. Every mote of my magic is a grain of sand falling through the glass, marking the lime until the change, when a dragon must be born. This shape you see is the sum of my changes: a thousand years more than a man, but ten thousand... twenty thousand lives less than a dragon. That incarnate fool, Kalak, would have sacrificed all the lives in his city to birth the dragon within him. I will not sacrifice Urik to any dragon. Urik is mine and I will protect it—but each day that I do nurtures the dragon within me, hastening the moment when it must be born."
The king stretched his long neck toward the bloody sun. His massive, fanged jaws opened and, expecting a mighty roar or a blast of fire, Pavek closed his eyes. But the only sound was a sibilant curse. When Pavek reopened his eyes, Hamanu in his most familiar leonine form had reappeared.
"You can appreciate my dilemma."
Pavek could understand that Urik was in danger either from its own sorcerer-king's transformation or from one of the other remaining sorcerer-kings, but true appreciation of the Lion-King's dilemma was beyond him. He nodded though, since anything else might provoke another transformation.
"Good, then you will be pleased and willing to tell me everything you know about this thing you raised, this druid guardian, this aspect, this semblance that formed in Codesh."
Pavek had been willing to bleed to death rather than respond to that request. He wished for Telhami's wisdom and remembered Telhami implying that she and Urik's king had once been more than friends.
"Great King, I can hardly tell you more than Telhami must have told you. I am a neophyte in the druid mysteries—no better than a third-rank regulator."
"Telhami said our cities were abominations. Gaping sores, she called them, where the natural order is inverted.
She said that Urik obliterated the land from which it rose and swore no guardian could abide within my purview. I believed her then and all the years since, until you came back to Urik—not this time, but once before. Something stirred when you stood outside House Escrissar."
"Yes, Lord Pavek," the Lion-King replied, his voice echoing in Pavek's ears, and between them as well. "I know about House Escrissar." Then he smiled his cruel, perfect smile. "I knew about it then; there was no need to probe deep into yo, past."
"Great King, what can I tell you that you don't already know?"
"How you raised a guardian that Telhami swore couldn't exist."
"Great King, I can't answer that. That first time outside House Escrissar, I didn't know what I'd done. In Codesh, I was desperate," Pavek didn't mention why. "And, suddenly—without my doing anything—the guardian was there."
"If despair is the proper incentive..." The Lion-King extended his claws. "Raise your guardian now."
Pavek, who had not yet risen from his knees, placed his identical palms flat on the ground. If despair were the necessary condition for druidry, he should have been able to raise ten guardians.
"Tell your guardian the Lion of Urik, the King of Mountain and Plain, requires assurance that it is not a pawn of my enemies."
In Codesh and last year, when they searched for Akashia outside the walls of House Escrissar, the guardian power had leapt into Pavek's body, but here, in the palace, in heart of Urik's heart, the land was empty—obliterated, exactly as Telhami had described it. The trees that shaded them were sterile sticks, engendered with Hamanu's magic and sustained in the same way. The stones in the walls were each a tomb for an aspect of a larger, long-vanished guardian.
Nothing Pavek did quickened the land: no druid magic, not even the simplest evocation of water, co
uld be wrought where he knelt. He sat back on his heels.
"There's nothing," he muttered, omitting Hamanu's royal title. "Just nothing, as if there never was anything at all."
"Yet that night outside House Escrissar, something stirred, and in Codesh, you raised an invincible creature out of dust and offal."
Pavek nodded. "And now there's nothing. No guardian, no aspect, nothing at all. Druid magic should not work in Urik, Great King—yet I know it has, and not only for me. I don't understand; I must be doing something wrong. A thousand pardons, Great King. I am not Telhami; I don't have her wisdom or strength. Perhaps if I tried again, if I went back to House Escrissar—"
"Possibly," Hamanu agreed and frowned as well. The retribution Pavek feared seemed unlikely as the Lion-King scratched his chin thoughtfully with a sharp, black claw. "Telhami could get her spellcraft to work elsewhere in Urik, but never when I was nearby. Even so, she could work the lesser arts of druidry, never the great ones, never a guardian. It is a mystery you and I will unravel when you return to Urik."
Pavek sat still a moment, savoring the life he still had before asking: "When I return?"
"Kakzim lives. The Codeshites we interrogated said that Kakzim incited them to their rebellion, then left them to their fate. Some saw him and another halfling running away through the smoke. You will find them and bring them back, Lord Pavek. Justice is the responsibility of the high bureau, your responsibility."
