The Lion-King turned away. Lord Ursos's bents were familiar, stale, and without fascination. The bath faded from his imagination. He looked around the workroom for another stylus.
I don't know how long I remained strung between life and death, locked in a mind-bender's battle with Myron of Yoram. That's what it was, a netherworld war: the Troll-Scorcher's imagery against mine, his years of experience against the purity of my rage, my hatred. I was, if not dead, at least not truly unconscious when the battle ended. Our battle had lasted long enough and was loud enough to disturb the War-Bringer's peace, and that was what truly mattered.
Rajaat burned through the Gray to find me, though I could not appreciate my rescue or his undoubtedly spectacular appearance on the plains. I was aware of nothing except the pain, the darkness, the silence and—very dimly—that my enemy no longer rose to the challenges I continued, in my mad, mindless way, to hurl at him.
Then there was a ray of light in my black abyss, a wedge of sound, a voice I recognized as power incarnate, telling me to desist.
Your pleas are heard, your wishes granted.
Rajaat. No need for him to state his name, then or ever. When the first sorcerer was present in my mind, the world was Rajaat and Rajaat was the world, endless and eternal.
Look for yourself—
He gave me a kes'trekel's vision and hearing. Peering down from a soaring height, I saw mekillots pulling a four-wheeled cart along a barrens road. There was a cage on the cart, and Myron of Yoram was in the cage. The Troll-Scorcher had himself been scorched. He lay on his back, a bloated, blackened carcass. His charred skin hung in tattered strips that swayed in rhythm with the creaking cart. A cloud of buzzing insects feasted on his suppurating wounds.
I'd judged Yoram a corpse; I was wrong. With Rajaat's aid, I heard pathetic whimpers in the depths of his flame-ravaged throat. I saw delicate silver chains nearly lost in the rotting folds at his wrists and ankles: links of sorcery potent enough to render a champion helpless.
I was pleased, but not satisfied. It was not enough that the Troll-Scorcher suffered for his betrayal of the human cause. The war against the trolls had to be fought and won—
In time, Manu. In due time. Wait. Rest—
A soft shadow surrounded me, not the bleak darkness of my recent torment, but oblivion all the same. I wasn't interested in oblivion or resting or waiting. Childish and petulant, I tried to escape the shadow.
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 above 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.