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"Ask for yourself!"
His voice blew Windreaver's silver shadow into the room's four corners. It was no more than a moment's inconvenience for the troll, whose image reappeared as quickly as it had vanished.
"As you command, O Mighty Master. Why did Rajaat choose a thick-skulled, short-witted, blundering dolt, such as you were, to replace Myron of Yoram?"
He almost smiled, almost laughed aloud. "Windreaver, I never asked, and he never told. He must have had good reasons—not from your view, of course. You would have beaten Myron, eventually, but once I was Troll-Scorcher, my victory was inevitable."
A blunt-fingered shadow hand scratched a silvery forward-jutting jaw. "Perhaps. Perhaps not. Someone taught you strategies and tactics Yoram never imagined, and you never guessed while you were..." Windreaver's voice, his deep, sonorous troll's voice, trailed off to a whisper.
"Alive?" Hamanu finished for him. "You cannot accept that the son of a Kreegill farmer conquered the trolls. You'd prefer to believe that Rajaat conjured some long-dead genius to inhabit my body."
"The thought had crossed my mind. I was there in the sinking lands, Manu of Deche. I saw you: a stringy human. You looked young, acted younger, standing behind your bright steel sword with your jaw slung so low that a mekillot could crawl down your gullet. You were unworthy of the weapon you held. I watched as your own men came to kill you for die shame and defeat you'd brought them. Then I blinked, and you were gone. The next time I saw you—"
"Were we betrayed?"
Windreaver inhaled his tears. "Betrayed?"
"Did Myron of Yoram sell my veterans to your trolls? Did you know where to find us?"
"We retreated to the sinking lands whenever the yora plants there had grown high enough to harvest. The Troll-Scorcher never followed us; you learned why—"
"I followed you."
"Yes, O Mighty Master, you followed us everywhere, but Myron of Yoram did not. I think he did not expect you to return, but he didn't betray you, not to us. I didn't guess the great game Yoram played until I looked over Pavek's shoulder and read your recounting."
They stared at each other, through each other—immortal ghost and immortal champion. The air was thick with unspoken ironies and might-have-beens.
Pavek, the mortal who didn't understand, couldn't possibly understand, cleared his throat. "O Mighty King—what happened after the battle? How did you escape from the prison-hole?"
Hamanu shook his head. He hadn't escaped, not truly, not ever.
"Yes," Windreaver added, breaking the spell. "Rajaat must have prepared quite a welcome for you."
"Not Rajaat," Hamanu whispered.
No sorcery or mind-bender's sleights could alter those memories. He could feel the walls as if they were an arm's length away, just as they'd been when he realized he'd been stowed in a grain pit. The remembered bricks were cool and smooth against his fingertips. Give a man a thousand years, and he wouldn't scratch his way through that kiln-baked glaze or pry a brick out of its unmortared wall. Give him another thousand, and he wouldn't budge the sandstone cap at the top of his prison, no matter how many times he pressed his limbs against the bricks and shinnied up the walls, no matter how many times he came crashing down to the layer of filth at the bottom.
"Not Rajaat?" Windreaver and Pavek asked together.
Hamanu spied the brass stylus on the workroom floor. He picked it up and spun it between his fingers before closing his hand around the metal shaft. "The Troll-Scorcher, Myron of Yoram, plucked me out of the sinking lands. He had me thrown in a grain pit on the plains where his army mustered—"
"A grain pit," Windreaver mused. "How appropriate for the pesky son of a farmer."
The Lion-King said nothing, merely bared his gleaming fangs in the lamplight and bent the stylus over a talon as black as obsidian, as hard as steel.
"At night—" Hamanu's lips didn't move; his voice echoed from the corners and the ceiling. "At night I could hear screams and moans through the walls around me. I wasn't alone, Windreaver. The Troll-Scorcher had pitted me in the midst of my enemies: the trolls. Big-boned trolls who could stand, maybe sit cross-legged—if they were young enough, agile enough—but never stretch their legs in front of them, never lie down to sleep. Not once, in all the days and nights of their captivity, which was, of course, as long as mine... or longer. And mine was...
"When did you harvest the yora plants, Windreaver? While the sun ascends, while it's high, or while it descends? The Troll-Scorcher's army mustered at High Sun, so I suppose I was in that pit for less than a year, though it seemed like a lifetime. A human lifetime—but trolls live longer than humans, don't they, Windreaver? A troll's lifetime would seem longer, standing the whole time."
Hamanu clutched the bent stylus in his fist, squeezing tighter, waiting for the old troll, his enemy, to flinch. But it was Pavek who averted his eyes.
"Shall I tell you how I got out of the pit?" Hamanu asked, fastening his cruelty on one who would react, lest his own memories overwhelm him. "First they threw down burning sticks and embers that set the filth afire. Then they lowered a rope. Burn to death or cl
imb. I chose to climb; I chose wrong. Spear-carrying veterans circled the pit, according me a respect I did not deserve. I could stand, but I'd forgotten how to walk. The sun blinded me; tears streamed from my eyes. I fell on my knees, seeking my own shadow, the darkness I'd left behind.
"A man called my name, Manu of Deche; I opened my eyes and beheld the Troll-Scorcher, Myron of Yoram. He was a big man, a huge, shapeless sack of a man wrapped in a tent of flame-colored silk. Two men stood beside him, to aid him when he walked. Another two carried a stout and slope-seated bench that they shoved behind him after every step because he had no strength in his legs and could not sit to rest.
"I mocked him," Hamanu said, remembering the exact words that had earned him another ruthless beating. His mortal eloquence hadn't been limited to long words and flowery phrases. Between his farmyard childhood and his years among the veterans, he'd become a champion of coarse language long before he'd been a champion of anything else. But time was unkind to vulgarity. His profanity had lost its sting; his choicest oaths were quaint now, or forgotten entirely. He was left with paraphrase: "I dubbed him a sexless man, a stinking mound of dung."
