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Hamanu departed Urik as a black-haired man. He emerged on the battlefield as the black-maned Lion of Urik, taller than a half-giant, stronger and far more deadly. A gold sword gleamed in his right hand. It sliced through the warrior weapons raised against him, and through the warriors as well. Hamanu wielded his sorcery-laced sword with the skill gained in a very long lifetime of practice, inflicting precise slaughter among his enemies.
He didn't bother to guard his back or slow his attacks with parries; the Lion of Urik was only another glamour, hiding his true form. A calm and sharp-eyed observer—had there been any on the field—would have noticed the discontinuity as metal weapons passed through the Lion's ephemeral form before shattering against otherwise invisible dragon flesh. Wooden and bone-crafted weapons met a different fate. They burst into short-lived flames when they breached his infernal aura.
With their king wreaking havoc among their enemies, the Urikite templars rallied. They surged forward in a score of close-fought skirmishes. Hamanu welcomed their renewed courage; he'd reward them with their lives. And as for the militant who led them...
One lapse of leadership might be forgiven—if the militant's panic hadn't been stronger than Inenek's Unseen interference, Hamanu wouldn't have known that his templars needed him. A second lapse would be unforgivable, unsurvivable. Hamanu strained his hearing. He found half of what he listened for: a mortal heart pounding hard beneath a bronze medallion.
Bakheer! Hamanu seized the militant's disarrayed thoughts and rattled them. Fight, Bakheer.
Hamanu didn't enjoy killing his own templars. At the very least, it was a waste of mortal life. At the worst, because of the medalLion-forged bond he shared with them, their deaths brought his darkest appetites to the fore. Fight the enemy, Bakheer. Fight to the death... or face me.
A sane man would have listened, would have understood and thrown himself at Inenek's minions, but Bakheer was no longer sane. What Inenek had begun, Hamanu inadvertently finished. Bakheer's mind shattere
d. His heart beat one final time, and his spirit flared in the instant before Rajaat's last champion savored it.
The tiny morsel of mortality tantalized Hamanu's much-denied appetites. For a moment, there were neither Urikites nor enemies on the field before him, only aching need, and the motes of life that would sate it.
The Lion of Urik roared words too loud and angry for mortal ears to interpret: "Damn you!"
Hamanu turned away from temptation, away from the battlefield. Abandoning his templars, he cast himself into the netherworld... where a whirlwind awaited him.
Inenek had guessed his choice—his predictable weakness—and caught him in a mind-bender's trap. Stripped of all his glamour, reduced to a spindly shadow of his unnatural form, Hamanu, was sucked away from his templars. He wasn't surprised when a black maw appeared suddenly, far below his feet, growing larger with each howling spiral.
Inenek was sending him toward the Black, toward the Hollow beneath it, and into Rajaat's grasp. Hamanu could imagine what rewards Rajaat had promised her.
But, truly, the Oba of Gulg couldn't harm the Lion of Urik. Her powers, though awesome, were no match for his, when he chose to use them. Radiance blossomed from Hamanu's long, skeletal fingers, wrapping him in a cocoon of light. Inenek's whirlwind lost its hold over him, and he began to rise, slowly at first, then faster, until the whirlwind dissipated in his wake.
Time flowed erratically in the Gray. Days, even years, of sunlit time could vanish during a netherworld sneeze, or time could twist the other way, and a champion could reappear on the battlefield—as Hamanu did—a heartbeat after he'd left.
Hamanu took advantage of his enemies' astonishment and confusion. Two of them died from a single, decapitating sword stroke. Another two tried to run; he took them from behind.
Drubbed in the netherworld, unable to deliver Hamanu to Rajaat, and besieged on the battlefield, Inenek withdrew her support from her templars who, feeling the tide of battle shift away from them, tried to escape a now-inevitable defeat. A few, on the battlefield's fringes, might have succeeded; they were hardly the lucky ones. Inenek wouldn't take them back for fear Hamanu had tampered with them, and ordinary folk made certain that the life of a renegade templar was neither pleasant nor long.
The Gulg templars who fell into Hamanu's hands knew what their fate would be: a quick death, if they were lucky, a drawn-out one if they weren't. They didn't know who the sorcerer-kings truly were or why they despised one another. They only knew that a templar's life was over once he stood before another sorcerer-king. Two or three of Inenek's templars fell on their knees, renouncing their city; they offered oaths to Urik's mightier king. But there was no hope in their hearts or useful knowledge in their heads—and he would never spare a templar who denied his city.
He offered them the same opportunity he offered his templar prisoners—death by their own hands instead of his. Without exception, they took the easier, safer course: running onto the swords and spears the Urikites held before them.
"O Mighty One, your will is done," a young adjutant informed Hamanu when the deeds were finished. The elf's bright yellow robe and metallic right sleeve were torn and stained. The thoughts on his mind's surface were painfully clear. His name was Kalfaen, and this had been his first campaign. He hadn't risen through the war-bureau ranks, but had been given an adjutant's enameled medallion on the strength of his family's connections. "The Oba's templars are all dead, except—except for the wounded—"
Hamanu ignored the young man's distress. He tolerated nepotism in the templar ranks because it gave the likes of Kalfaen no real advantage. "Wait here," he commanded, and insured obedience with a frigid thought that held the youthful elf where he stood. "When I am finished with the wounded, you shall recount what happened here, from the beginning."
Elves were chancy mortals. A good many of them crumpled and died the first time Hamanu touched their minds. The best of them matured into loyal, independent templars such as Javed. If he'd made the effort, Hamanu could have learned to separate the weak from the strong before he put them to the test, but it was easier—certainly quicker—to nail Kalfaen to the ground and see if he survived.
None of the Oba's wounded templars would survive. Those who remained welcomed the release provided by yellow-robed surgeon-sergeants, usually with a quick slash through the jugular. The two knife-wielding sergeants bowed low when Hamanu's shadow fell between them. Without a spoken word, they scuttled off to join their comrades beside the Urikite wounded. They left their king to tread silently among the bloody Gulgans, carefully severing the spiritual fibers that bound essence to substance. Hamanu had subsumed one man's spirit already, and he neither wanted nor needed to add another name to his army of grievance against Rajaat.
He was careful as well because these templars had belonged to Inenek and she could have easily tampered with them. He himself had done so, from time to time, with the men and women he'd sent into war.
With Nibenay between them, Urik and Gulg—the Don-King and the Oba—had rarely warred with each other. While Borys lived, Rajaat's champions made war with their closest neighbors and uneasy alliances with the rest of their peers. Gulg and Nibenay had never been anything but enemies, until now—
Hamanu plunged his awareness deep into the ground and located himself. A chill shook his heart. This battle had taken place far from any road, farther still from any village or oasis, deep within the barren borderlands that Urik and Nibenay had contested for thirteen ages.
Hamanu didn't doubt that Gallard knew where Inenek had sent her templars, but he doubted that his old nemesis knew she'd been trading secrets with Rajaat. In other times, communion with the War-Bringer was the only crime that the champions would unanimously condemn and punish.
Times had changed. Everything had changed—except Hamanu, the Lion of Urik. As Hamanu thought of dragons and champions, the last of the Gulg templars heaved a shuddering sigh and passed from life into eternal sleep.
The Lion-King strode toward the Urik infirmary tended by his surgeon-sergeants. He granted unlimited spells to the war-bureau healers in the aftermath of battle, for all the good it did the injured. Working with second-hand magic, the surgeon-sergeants were barely competent in their craft. Templars moaned and wailed when their wounds were tended. They healed with troublesome scars such as Pavek bore across his otherwise handsome face.
Hamanu used the endless potential of the Unseen world when he chose to heal. As a restorer of life and health, he was more than competent, but not even his flexible consciousness could attend the needs of so many. He chose not to choose a lucky few among them. He chose, in truth, to keep his compassion well-hidden from the templars who served him, and he defended his choice with the thought that it was better that mortals not rely on his mercy.
