"And I might have warned you, mightn't I?"
Wisely, Pavek said nothing. Hamanu righted the table, returned the shard to its top, and collected a handful of vellum sheets.
"You were reading. What do you think?" A veritable storm of thoughts stewed in Pavek's mind, but they were all half-formed and elusive. As impatient as any fountain-side poet reciting for his supper, Hamanu had to wait for the man's spoken words.
"That's all? No greater understanding of me, of the choices I made and make? It is not the version you were taught in the orphanage," Hamanu said with certainty. That version—the Lion-King's official history—was a god's tale, full of miracles, revelations, and infallibility, nothing like the human frailties the vellum revealed.
It was embarrassing to beg a mortal's opinion. It was degrading. Worse, it stirred the dark fire of Hamanu's anger. "Speak, Pavek! Look at me! Ask a question, any question at all. Don't just kneel there like a poleaxed inix. I've told you secrets I've kept for ages. Don't you want to know why?"
"O Mighty King, forgive me, but I couldn't hope to understand. I have so many questions, I wouldn't know where to begin—"
"Ask, Pavek. Look at me and ask a question, ask as if your life depended on it, for it does!"
The head came up, wide-eyed and very mortal, very fragile. The question flowed exactly as it formed in Pavek's mind—
"Were you Rajaat's favorite? Is that what you became after—?"
Two questions: twice as many as he'd commanded and an excuse—if Hamanu needed one—to slay the trembling man where he knelt. But, strangely, the rage was gone. Hamanu walked around the table, righted the chair, and eased his illusory self onto its seat.
"The answer that comes to me, Pavek, is no. I was never Rajaat's favorite. I hated him before I knew what he was, before he made me what I became, and he knew I hated him. I wouldn't have tolerated his favor, and for all these years I have believed that I didn't have it. Tonight, though, it's not me who asks the question, but you, a mortal, whom some might call my favorite. Hatred doesn't protect you from my favor, dear Pavek, and so I realize I have become what I hated when I was a man.
"Today is a sad day, Pavek. Today I've realized that my hatred amused Rajaat, amuses him still, as yours amuses me. I was the last of his creations—but not because we imprisoned him. No, he'd had two hundred years to ponder his mistakes before he created me. I was the last because I was everything he meant a champion to be. I loathed him, but, yes, Pavek, I was Rajaat's favorite. I carried in my bones his hopes for a cleansed and purified Athas; I still Hamanu recalled the mortal man he'd been and felt the weight of his immortal age as he'd never felt it before. Looking across his worktable, he saw the gray dust and empty memories of an unnatural life. He didn't see Pavek at all, until the man said—
"I don't loathe you or hate you, O Mighty King."
"Then you are either an innocent or a fool," Hamanu said wearily, indulging himself in a moment of self-pity— and eager to stifle a favorite, whose voice, at this moment, sounded too much like his own.
"Telhami says not, O Mighty King."
Perhaps Rajaat was right. Rajaat had already lived two thousand years or more when he began creating his champions. Perhaps a man needed several ages to learn the ropes of immortality—to learn to pick his favorites from the ranks of those who hated him.
When Telhami lived in Urik, Hamanu had forgotten Dorean and every other woman. Her eyes, her hands, her laughter had made him human again. For how long? A year?
Twenty years? Thirty? He'd lived an enchantment. Every day had been bright and sparkling, yet different; every night was the stuff from which men's dreams were spun. Then, one morning she was dressed in traveler's clothes.
She'd had a vision during the night of a place beyond the Ringing Mountains, a place where the air was cool and moist, where the ground was a thick, soft green carpet, and trees grew halfway to the sun. Cold springs bubbled year around in the place she'd envisioned, and at the center of everything was a waterfall shrouded in mist and rainbows. Her life in Urik was over; she had to find her waterfall.
Druids cannot stay, she'd said—as if that explained everything.
And he, of course, could not go. Urik had already suffered from his neglect. A generation of templars had succeeded to power thinking that their king was a besotted fool. The ordinary folk on whose shoulders he and the templars stood did truly curse the Lion-King's name.
Will you return? he'd asked, as countless other men and women had asked their departing lovers, but never Hamanu, never the Lion-King, not before or since.
Telhami had returned, in her way. She'd settled her druids close enough to Urik that he knew roughly where she was, but on the far side of lifeless salt, where his magic couldn't reach her. Until one night, when this Pavek, this stolid, stubborn lump of humanity who stirred forgotten memories, gave his king passage across the waste. Hamanu had saved Telhami's village from one of his own. He would have saved her, too, but she chose to die, instead.
He never knew if she'd found her damned waterfall. Because he'd loved her, he hoped she had. Because she'd left him, he hoped otherwise. Pavek might know, but thirteen ages had taught a farmer's son not to ask questions unless he truly wanted the answers.
"Go home," he told Pavek. "I'll watch the chest overnight. Come back tomorrow or the day after."
The templar rose to one knee, then froze as a breeze spiraled down from the ceiling, a silver-edged breeze that roiled the vellum and became Windreaver.
A fittingly unpleasant end to an unpleasant day.
"I thought you'd gone to Ur Draxa."
"I have a question, O Mighty Master."
"I might have known."
A breeze and a shadow, that was all the influence the troll had in the material world, but he could observe anything— Rajaat in his Ur Draxan prison or a scarred templar reading sheet after sheet of script-covered vellum.
"Your little friend might find the answer interesting, O Mighty Master if you're inclined to answer."
Hamanu could pluck thoughts from a living mind or unravel the memories of the naturally dead; he could do nothing with his old enemy, Windreaver, except say—"Ask for yourself. Don't involve Pavek in your schemes."
"O Mighty Master, it's his question as well as mine. I heard it off his own tongue as he turned the last sheet over."
Poor Pavek—he'd said something that Windreaver had overheard, and now he was using every trick he'd learned as a templar, every bit of druidry Telhami had taught him, to keep his wayward thoughts from betraying him. It was a futile fight, or it would have been, if Hamanu weren't wise to Windreaver's bitter ways.
"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."