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My uncanny vision shifted: There was a second cart. Like the first, it ferried a human husk across the barrens. The second body was little more than a black-boned skeleton held together with rags. Its knees were drawn up. Its arms were crossed and fused together. They hid what remained of its face.
Of my face...
The husk was alive; the husk was me.
All the pain I'd felt was nothing compared to my imagination when I saw what had become of Manu, the lithe dancer of Deche. I no longer fought Rajaat's shadow. I surrendered myself to its numbing softness.
Don't despair, Rajaat told me with a grandfather's kindly voice. Pain belongs to your past. Soon you will be reborn and you will never know pain or suffering again.
From the first, I doubted that promise: a life without pain or suffering wouldn't be a human life. But my living corpse was strong in my mind, so I banished my doubts and drifted until I heard his voice again. It is time.
"It is time for you to be reborn."
The pressure was Rajaat's sorcery-laden hands restoring my body around me. His thumbs traced the curves of my eye sockets. Bone grew like bread rising in a baker's oven, but Rajaat's miracle was not without discomfort. Bone was not meant to grow and harden so quickly. For one unbearable moment, the pain was so intense that I would have begged him to stop, if I'd had a mouth or tongue.
Rajaat knew my thoughts. "Patience, child. The worst is behind you. The best is barely begun."
I hadn't been anyone's child for years. I did not care to be reminded of what I'd lost, and I wasn't willing to cede my hard-won manhood, even to a god. A low, rumbling chuckle echoed through my mind. My thoughts scattered as chaff on the wind.
Today, perhaps, I could keep a secret from my creator— certainly that is why I have a spell simmering beside me— but not that day under the relentless sun. I took refuge in the manners my parents had taught me and thanked him properly. Chuckles became a kirre's contented purr.
Pressure shifted. Rajaat began restoring my cheekbones and jaw.
My reborn ears made me aware that Rajaat and I were not alone.
"Look at him," a deep-voiced man said. "A farmer. A dung-skull, no better than a slave. I tell you, there's no need. The Scorcher's finished, but so are the gnomes. There's no need for the War-Bringer to replace him. My army stands ready. They could finish the trolls in a single campaign."
In the Troll-Scorcher's army, we'd heard of the other armies cleansing the human heartland, and of the leader of them all. Even before I knew his true name—before I knew what Rajaat was or what I was to become—I knew that Gal-lard, Bane of Gnomes, was not half the military genius he believed himself to be. Gnomes had been sly and wily, as he was, himself. Gallard's stealthy strategies were effective in the dwindling forests where they dwelt, but Windreaver would have carved the Gnome-Bane and his army into kes'trekel bait.
The Gnome-Bane wasn't my only audience.
"A peasant," a woman agreed. "He might be useful, when the War-Bringer's done with him." Her name, I later learned, was Sielba. I would learn more about her notion of usefulness as the years went on, but at that moment, I had no interest in them or her.
"He can hear you," a third voice, another man, cautioned. He was no less contemptuous of me than the other two had been, but Borys of Ebe always saw much farther into a maze of consequences. "He will be one of us when the War-Bringer's done with him."
After that, they spoke silently, if they spoke at all. My mind filled with eager curiosity; I didn't yet know what being one of us meant. I thought only of leading an army— my army—against the trolls. I envisioned slaughter and victory. Once again, Rajaat's amusement swept over me, dulling my consciousness as he shaped smooth muscles across the newly hardened bones of my face.
When my eyelids were finished, I opened them, curious to see my savior.
I was stunned senseless. In my life, I'd seen only humans and trolls. Myron of Yoram was a fat, bloated sack of a man, but he was—I believed he was—a human man. Beyond humans, there were only trolls. Rajaat War-Bringer wasn't a troll. Trolls were handsome, well-formed mortals, compared to my savior.
In all ways Rajaat lacked the simple left and right symmetry a man expects to see in another man, be he human, troll or some other sentient race. The first sorcerer's head was huge and grotesque. Wisps of colorless hair sprouted between the bulbous swellings that covered his skull like lava seeps. His eyes were mismatched in color, size, and position. His nose was a shapeless growth abo
ve a coarse-lipped mouth that was lined with snaggleteeth. Rajaat wheezed when he inhaled, and when he exhaled, his breath stank of death and disease.
If he were resurrecting me in his own image...
Rajaat laughed and promised me he wasn't. His gnarled, magical fingers tilted my head so I could see the men and women he'd called to witness his making—and unmaking— of a champion.
They are flawed, my savior assured me, turning my head again so my eyes beheld nothing but him. Each of them bears a mistake to which you are the correction. You are my last champion, Manu of Deche, Hamanu Troll-Scorcher. You will cleanse the land of impurities. Athas will become blue again.
In my ignorance, I imagined my familiar world transformed to a world of blue mountains and sand, blue barrens, and blue himali fields. Rajaat changed my mind, showing me blue water beneath a blue sky. I overlooked the oceans; so much water meant nothing to me.
Where was the land? I wondered. Rajaat showed me islands and drifting cities shaped like schooners running before the wind. Where were the people of this blue world? I wondered. The cities teemed with life. Human life, I assumed, and Rajaat did not correct me. Then.
His hands moved from my head to my neck, from my neck to my shoulders and onward, down my body. Bone, sinew, nerve, and every other part of me quickened beneath his fingers. Bit by bit, I became a man again. The pain was exquisite—I ground my regrown tongue until it was a bloody rag between my teeth, lest my soon-to-be peers heard me scream or moan.
Daylight faded. Cool, gray shadows reached across the cart before Rajaat was satisfied with my regeneration. He bid me move each limb, then rise slowly. I sat, stood, and took a tentative step, watching my feet, ankles, knees, and hips as if I had never seen them before. I was myself again, a sound-bodied man, as I had not been when Myron of Yoram's bullies dragged me from the pit. The scars of war and farming were gone, hut my mother would have known me by the crooked big toe on my left foot.
