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The human glamour faded from Hamanu's hand. Black talons absorbed the sunlight as he raised them between himself and Sadira's face. A threatening gesture, for certain—but threat and gesture only: he intended to slash an opening into the netherworld and leave this place before he had even more to regret.
Sadira responded with a head-down lunge at his midsection. Regardless of illusion, the Lion-King carried the weight and strength of his true, metamorphic self. Sadira's attack accomplished nothing—except to increase his anger and confusion. He backhanded her, mildly by a champion's standards, but hard enough to fling her across the room. She hit the doorjamb headfirst, loosening plaster from the walls and ceiling. Her head lolled forward.
Stunned, Hamanu told himself, as he strained his ears, listening for the sound of her heart. Her heart skipped, and her breathing was shallow. A single stride, and he was on one knee beside her. Illusion was restored as he pressed human fingertips against her neck. He found her pulse and steadied it.
"Get away from her!"
With his concentration narrowed, Hamanu hadn't sensed anyone in the doorway until he heard a young man's voice, which he ignored. He hadn't come to the Asticles estate to kill anyone; he wasn't leaving until Sadira was on her feet and cursing him again.
"I said: Get away from her!"
Hamanu felt the air move as a fist was cocked. The blow struck his temple, doing no more damage than Sadira's whole body lunge had done. He raised his head and saw a human-dwarf mul in the doorway.
"I know you," he muttered.
The Lion-King wasn't good when it came to putting children together with their proper identities, and the mul, cocking his fist for another try, was still several years short of maturity. Children were changeable, both in their bodies and their thoughts, but there were only two muls Hamanu associated with Sadira. One was Rikus, who was old enough to know better when he'd led a cohort of Tyrian gladiators in a foolish assault against Urik over ten years ago. The other had been a half-grown boy when he wielded the sun spell that had separated Rajaat's essence from the substance of his shadow.
"Rkard," Hamanu said, flushing the name of Borys's ancient enemy out of his memory. "Rkard, go away. There's nothing for you to do here."
The youth blinked and lowered his fist. Confusion wrinkled his handsome face. It seemed, for a moment, that he'd simply do as he'd been told. But that moment passed, and he laid his hand rudely on Hamanu's shoulder.
Hamanu lowered the sorceress gently to the floor. She, Rikus, and the rest of the Tyrian hotheads had raised the young man staring intently at him. He had a fair idea what was going to happen once Rkard recognized him.
"Rkard, don't do it."
The warning came too late. Three separate streams of fire, one orange, one gold, and the third the same color as the sun, grew out of the young mul's sun-scarred hands. As Rkard cried out—sun magic exacted a fearsome price on its initiates—the fire-streams braided together and bridged the gap between them.
Hamanu cried out as well. The sun's power was real. His flesh burned within his illusion, but it could burn for a long time before he'd be seriously injured. Hamanu could have brushed the sun-spell aside but, almost certainly, it would have gone to ground in Sadira's defenseless flesh.
He tried to reason with the mul and got no further than his name, "Rkard—"
Rkard howled again as he evoked greater power from his element. The braided flames became brighter, hotter. Hamanu's illusion wavered in the heat; he ceased to resemble a human man. He retreated toward the open window. The mul followed, a smile—a foolish, ignorant smile— twisting his lips.
"Let it go, Rkard, before someone gets hurt."
The mul couldn't talk while he cast his sun-spell. He let his hands speak for him, clenching his fists until the tricolored flame was a white-hot spear impaling a tawny-skinned human man against a wall.
Hamanu closed his eyes. A thousand years evaporated in the heat. In his mind, he was a man again, with his back to a mekillot rib as Myron Troll-Scorcher assailed him with the eyes of fire, only now he could fight back. The sun behind him and the shadow at his feet were both his to command. All he had to do was open his eyes and his tormentor would be ash.
Hamanu did open his eyes but, rather than quicken any of the myriad destructive sorceries lurking in his memory, he thrust his hand into Rkard's incendiary sun-spell, then closed his fingers around it. The white fire consumed his illusion. To keep his fist where it needed to remain, Hamanu folded his spindly, metamorph's legs beneath him. He hunched his shoulders and crooked his neck. All the while, the bloody sun's might was held captive in the Lion-King's fist.
Hamanu squeezed tighter. He transcended pain and found triumph where he least expected it.
The spells of sorcery, the formulas of the magic that Rajaat had discovered, mastered, and bequeathed to Athas before he decided to cleanse it, had to be quickened before they could be cast. Something had to be sacrificed before sorcery kept its promise. The dilemma facing any sorcerer, from the most self-righteous member of the Veiled Alliance to Rajaat's last champion, was—at its simplest—what to destroy?
Preservers strove to limit the sacrifice by ex
tracting a few motes of life's essence from many sources, destroying none of them; defilers didn't care. Those who could used obsidian to quicken their spells with the essences of animals as well as plants. Champions could hoard the life essence of the dead. A few—Hamanu, Sadira, and Rajaat's shadow-minions—quickened spells by transforming sunlight, the ultimate essence of all life, into shadow.
The Dark Lens intensified a spell after it was cast, but no sorcerer—including Hamanu and Sadira—could use the Dark Lens as Rkard had used it against Rajaat: focusing the bloody sun's light first inside the Lens, then letting it out again, letting it consume the War-Bringer's shadow. And not even Rkard could duplicate that uncanny feat: Sadira had buried the Lens and Rajaat had almost certainly found a better hiding place for his own life essence than his shadow.
But when he seized the white-hot stream and contained Rkard's sun-spell within his fist, Hamanu found that the young mul was a living lens who concentrated the sun's quickening energy before a spell was cast. With Rkard beside him, Hamanu could seal Rajaat's bones and the Dark Lens in a cyst the size of a mountain. He could counter anything his fellow champions threw at Urik, be it spells or armies of the living or the undead. And, for the first time in a thousand years, Hamanu thought it might be possible to thwart a champion's metamorphosis.
Hamanu appealed to the mul with thought and words,
"The sun is stronger than both of us, Rkard. Together, we can forge spells that mill imprison Rajaat forever, but only if you relent now. Persist, and the sun will destroy you long before it destroys me. Save yourself, Rkard—"
"Never! Betrayer! Deceiver! You die first, or we die together and forever."
