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"O Mighty King, my lord above all—"
A new request. Hamanu replied with another filament, this time wound around a question: What is happening?
This wasn't the first time the Lion-King had been inundated with requests for Dark Lens magic. The desiccated heartland that Rajaat's champions ruled was a brutal, dangerous place where disaster and emergencies were commonplace. But always before, he'd been awake, alert, when the pleas arrived. His ignorance of the crisis—his templars' desperation—had never lasted more than a few heartbeats. He'd been awake, now, for many heartbeats, but so far, none of his filaments had looped back to him. He had only his own sen
ses on which to rely.
And dulled senses they were. Hamanu's illusion wavered as he stood. Between eye blinks, the arms he braced against the table were a tattered patchwork of dragon flesh and human semblance. He yawned, not for drama, but from long-dormant instinct,
"Too much thinking about the past," he muttered, as if literary exertions could account for the unprecedented disorder in his immortal world. Then, rubbing real grit from the corners of his illusory eyes, Hamanu made his way around the table.
The iron-bound chest where his stealth spell ripened appeared unchanged. Passing his hand above the green-glowing lock, he kenned the spell's vibrations—complex, but according to expectation—within.
"O Mighty King, my lord above all. Come out of your workroom. Unlock the door. Lion's Whim, my king—I beg you, O Mighty King: Answer me!"
Still cross-grained and pillow-walking from his interrupted nap, Hamanu turned toward the sound, toward an ordinary door. Neither the voice nor the door struck a chord of recognition.
"Are you within, O Mighty King? It is I, Enver, O Mighty King."
Enver. Of course it was Enver; the fog in Hamanu's mind lifted. He could see his steward with his mind's eye. The loyal dwarf stood just outside the door he'd sealed from the inside with lethal wards. Anxious wrinkles creased Enver's brow. His fingers were white-knuckled and trembling as he squeezed his medallion.
"Here I am, dear Enver. Here I've been all along. I was merely sleeping," Hamanu lapsed into his habitual bone-dry, ironic inflection, as if he were—and had always been— the heavy-sleeping human he appeared to be.
The dwarf was not taken in. His eyes widened, and anxiety rippled above his brows, across his bald head. A frantic dialogue of inquiry and doubt roiled Enver's thoughts, but his spoken words were calm.
"You're needed in the throne chamber, O Mighty— Omniscience." With evident effort, Enver resurrected the habits of a lifetime. "Will you want breakfast, Omniscience? A bath and a swim?"
A few of the filaments Hamanu had released when he awakened were, at last, winding back to him, winding back in a single ominous thread. Templars had died at Todek village, died so fast and thoroughly that their last thoughts revealed nothing, and the living minds that had summoned him were uselessly overwrought.
Elven templars were already running the road from Todek to Urik. Their thoughts were all pulse and breath. Coherent explanations would have to wait until they arrived at the palace.
Other filaments had traveled to a score of templars at a refugee outpost on Urik's southeastern border. There, the filaments had been frayed and tangled by the same sort of interference the Oba of Gulg had wielded in the southwest yesterday. In the hope that something would get through, Hamanu widened the Dark Lens link between himself and his templars. He granted them whatever spells they'd requested. But it wasn't spells those desperate minds wanted. They wanted him: Hamanu, the Lion-King, their god and mighty leader, and they wanted him beside them.
There were limits to a champion's powers: Hamanu couldn't do everything. Though his thoughts could travel through the netherworld to many places, many minds, and all at once, his body was bound to a single place. To satisfy his beleaguered templars, he would have had to transport his entire self from the palace, as he'd done when the Oba challenged him. But Enver wasn't the only numb-fingered templar in the palace. A veritable knot of pleas and conscious filaments surrounded his throne chamber where, at first guess, every living gold medallion high templar, along with the upper ranks of the civil and war bureaus, was clamoring for his attention.
The Lion-King wasn't immune to difficult choices.
"Fresh clothes?"
Extraordinary days—of which this was surely one— required extraordinary displays and extraordinary departures from routine. Hamanu raised one dark eyebrow. "Dear Enver," he reprimanded softly and, while he had the dwarf's attention, remade his illusions, adding substantially to his height and transforming his drab, wrinkled garments into state robes of unadorned ebony silk, as befitted a somber occasion. "Clothes, I think, will be the least of our problems today."
Hamanu strode past his steward's slack-jawed bewilderment, slashed an opening into the Gray netherworld, and, one stride later, emerged onto the marble-tiled dais of his unbeloved, jewel-encrusted throne. He needed no magic, no mind-bending sleight to get his templars' attention. The sight of him was enough to halt every conversation. Hamanu swept his consciousness across their marveling minds, collecting eighty different savors of apprehension and doubt.
The six civil-bureau janitors, whose duty was to stand beside the empty throne and keep the great lantern shining above it, were the first templars to recover their poise. In practiced unison, they pounded spear butts loudly on the floor and slapped their leather-armored breasts. Then the orator who shared throne-chamber duty with them cleared her throat.
"Hail, O Mighty King, O Mighty Hamanu! Water-Wealth, Maker of Oceans. King of the—"
Mighty Hamanu shot her a look that took her voice away.
The chamber fell silent, except for the creaking of the slave-worked treadmills and the network of ropes and pulleys that ran from the treadmills to huge red-and-gold fans. At this late hour of the morning, the heat of day beat down on the roof, and nothing except sorcery could cool the chamber and the crowd together.
For his part, Hamanu drank down every scent, every taste born in air or thought. His champion's eyes took in each familiar face without blinking. There was Javed, clad in his usual black and leaning nonchalantly against a pillar. Javed leaned because the wounds in his leg ached today— Hamanu felt the pain. But Javed was a champion, too, Hero of Urik, and, like the Lion-King, had appearances to maintain. Pavek stood near the door, not because he'd arrived late, but because no matter how carefully and properly his house-servants dressed him, he'd always be a misfit in this congregation. He'd migrated, by choice, to the rear, where he hoped his high templar peers wouldn't notice him.
Hamanu had other favorites: Xerake with her ebony cane; the Plucrataes heir, eleventh of his lineage to bear a scholar's medallion and more nearsighted than any of his ancestors; and a score of others. His favorites were accustomed to his presence. Their minds opened at the slightest pressure. They were ready, if not quite willing, to speak their concerns aloud. The rest, knowing that the Lion's favorites were also lightning rods for his wrath, were more than willing to wait.
He let them all wait longer. On the distant southeastern border, a sergeant's despair had burst through the netherworld interference.
Hear me, O Mighty Hamanu!
