by Dave Gross
The monster was no longer recognizable as a rat, except for its naked, ringed tail. Tamlin held its body outside the cage as it continued to grow. It tore at his arms, shredding the sleeves of his doublet and tearing ghastly rents in his skin. The pain was awful, but Tamlin was afraid to release it until he was sure it could no longer squeeze between the bars.
"Enough," said Tamlin's captor. He lifted a finger to point to the top of the cage. "Up you go!"
The beast flapped its dewy wings once, then perched atop Tamlin's cage. Its black eyes reflected red in the light of the glass dagger. It stared down at Tamlin as it shifted its weight from one leg to the other and back again. It looked hungry.
Tamlin hunched down as low as he could. The wounds on his arm began burning, and he knew they would soon itch with infection, if not poison.
"You should be more careful, young master," said the man. "It might take us quite some time to find someone who finds your release valuable."
"Just tell my father I'm wounded!" Tamlin was dizzy with anger. For a hot moment, he wished more for a knife and the key to his cell than he did for ransom. "If you continue to mistreat me, he will make you wish you were dead."
"Now you have put your finger on the problem," said the man. "You see, it is your father and mother who are dead."
CHAPTER 6
TRAVELERS
When Thamalon was six, he twirled himself dizzy in the grand courtyard of the first Stormweather Towers. His father's guards watched patiently as the five-year-old second son of Aldimar Uskevren fell laughing on the cobblestones. Thamalon was delighted at his new trick until he tried to stand. His legs seemed to bend like rubber, and he went sideways when he wanted to go forward. He reeled and wobbled until he fell down again, and this time one of the guards snickered until the captain rapped his helmet with a truncheon.
Thamalon couldn't stand up. He felt helpless and sick, and-worst of all-he knew he'd done this harm to himself. From that day, Thamalon knew that the worst thing in the world was feeling helpless.
On the night Stormweather Towers fell to an alliance of the family's rivals, he saw once more that the world turned to chaos when one failed to control it personally. Ever after, he strove to remain the master of his fate.
Also, he never, ever twirled.
Fifty-nine years later, the vertigo of falling up out of his own home reminded Thamalon of his youthful resolve and its futility. No matter how much a man, even a strong one, tried to control his fate, there was always some unanticipated factor that could hurl it out of control. The secret at those times was to regain control and turn circumstances to one's own ends.
Thamalon's fall through the painting at first seemed to spin him up toward the stained glass windows of his library. Lightning flashed and thunder slapped him down, away from his former trajectory. An irresistible grip squeezed him tightly enough to make his ribs creak, and Thamalon's body jerked back and forth like a hated doll in the clutches of a lunatic child.
Oddly, he felt himself falling in two directions at once, though neither of them was anything like "up," "down," or even "sideways" anymore. Just when he felt that the competing forces would divide him into halves, one prevailed.
Where-? his lips moved, but before he could complete the thought, much less the word, he crashed.
A thick, moist carpet softened the blow to his head, but his hip cracked against something hard, shooting red lances of pain down to the bone. It was dark, but he smelled spring grass and flowers.
His first thought was that he'd fallen just outside Stormweather Towers, perhaps into the gardens.
A queer squeaking drew his attention upward. There he saw a swarm of bright blue jellyfish hovering over his head. At his gasp, their translucent bodies pulsed, and they shot away as a swarm.
Thamalon realized he was far outside of Stormweather Towers.
He stood, gingerly favoring his bruised hip. He said a brief prayer of thanks to Tymora and Ilmater for sparing him a worse injury. Konnel Baerent had broken his hip the past winter, and his servants carried him about in a chair ever since.
Konnel was almost ten years younger than Thamalon.
"I'm getting too old for this," he muttered.
His robe and slippers were damp with dew, though it was still too dark to see, so he realized he'd moved through both distance and time. He knew he could be halfway around the world from home.
The thought that he'd been transported hundreds or thousands of miles away irritated him. Unfortunately, it seemed more and more likely as the twilight faded and the first echoes of the sun warmed the clouds. Beneath the clouds lay an alien landscape.
Thamalon stood near a deep blue-green forest whose trees were unlike any he'd ever seen. Black trunks rose straight up for perhaps twenty feet, only to splay out in all directions. Their leaves were as broad as lily pads and unusually bright even in the murk. They looked like the leaves in a child's painting of a tree.
A child's painting was a thought to ponder later, preferably when Thamalon could dispatch his guards to "invite" Pietro Malveen to Stormweather Towers for a private discussion.
Thamalon walked carefully beside the woods, exercising both his bruised hip and his imagination. Why did Tamlin give the enchanted painting to Thamalon? Revenge against an authoritarian father? Too petty. Ambition? The boy had never seemed to have any. Treachery? Did Pietro bribe him to do it?
Thamalon couldn't imagine any of his children, however disaffected, turning against the family. He might not have been a warm father, but he couldn't conceive of his children hating him enough to betray him.
Pietro must have used Tamlin's interest in art to strike at Thamalon. What little he'd gleaned about the past year's attacks on Talbot led him to believe that some members of House Malveen still held him to blame for the fall of their family. Because Aldimar had trafficked with them freely, some of the Malveens held it as a betrayal for Thamalon to turn his back on his father's former partners in crime.
Even this theory struck Thamalon as improbable. Laskar Malveen had always appeared to be Thamalon's sort of fellow, an honest man striving to repair the failings of the previous generation. Perhaps he was a consummate actor, as were many of the Old Chauncel. Foxes and weasels, most of them were, and far better at feigning their emotions than any of the players at Talbot's Wide Realms playhouse. Thamalon preferred to think of himself as a lion among the jackals, fearsome to his enemies while defending his pride.
Thamalon filed investigation and revenge in the library of his memory and looked away from the woods, across a rolling plain interrupted here and there by thick copses and blankets of wildflowers where the morning light grazed the hilltops. The nearest flowers seemed even more foreign than the trees, for they were large and heavy upon their stems. Their yellow, pink, and orange skins seemed less plantlike than fleshy.
Another thought to file for later, Thamalon decided, mostly because it gave him the shivers. He enjoyed exotic flora, but he would have preferred to examine it in the safe confines of the solar back home.
The blue creatures he'd surprised upon his arrival floated nearby. He had briefly hoped they were a trauma-induced delusion, but he saw that they were far from the only strange wildlife. Large, birdlike creatures wheeled in the distance, likely circling above some unseen carrion on the ground, and the whistles and deep hoots from the forest indicated a teeming population.
Far above the carrion eaters, a bank of huge clouds drifted slowly from the east. They were uniformly lozenge-shaped, like finless porpoises, and their advance was so regimented that they held his attention until Thamalon realized they weren't clouds but enormous creatures. Judging from their gradual motion, they must have been miles distant. If so, they had to be at least the size of war galleys. The distance made them ethereal, or perhaps their skins were gossamer thin, like those of the jellyfish creatures he'd seen earlier.
Whatever they were, their strange beauty delighted his heart.
Thamalon slapped his hip and realized he hadn't so
much as a dagger with him. He also realized he'd better not slap that hip again soon. It was still limber, but it would have a deep bruise soon.
From where the sun breached the horizon, he oriented himself: forest north, plains south. He briefly wished he'd snatched up the astrolabe from his new collection just before he was swept away from home. While the Uskevren had avoided direct dealings with the shipping business since old Aldimar had been brought down for piracy, Thamalon remembered a few lessons on navigation from his childhood. When night returned, he could tell by the constellations whether he was anywhere near Selgaunt, Sembia, or even Faerun for that matter.
A distant clamor of voices from the woods jolted Thamalon from his thoughts. Before he could identify the language, a burst of red flame erupted amid the trees, smothering all other sound.
Thamalon crouched low and ran along the forest's edge, looking for a spot that served both as vantage and shelter. His hip complained, but he ignored the pain.
From behind a rotting deadfall, Thamalon spied the source of the fire.
Teams of six-legged reptiles led a pair of armored wagons through the forest. Thamalon briefly feared they were basilisks but then realized the creatures' eyes were not hooded, and the drivers were not harmed by their gaze.
The wagons were massive cylindrical vehicles supported by wide, ironclad wheels. Along each side hung a pair of hooded, armored baskets fitted with cross-shaped archery slots. From the openings, bolts flew up toward the trees at such a rate that Thamalon guessed each cramped shelter must contain at least two archers.
Three stout figures stood in the driver's basket of each wagon, neither of them more than five feet tall. One goaded the beasts forward, while his companions fired heavy crossbows at unseen assailants in the trees. On the broad back of each wagon, an armored figure aimed a sort of metal ballista at the trees. Their faces were concealed behind full helms with bulging glass hemispheres over the eyes, but judging by the thick beards curling beneath their visors, Thamalon presumed they were dwarves.
Arrows rained down from the trees, glancing off the dwarves' armor and the heavy plates of their vehicle. The drivers goaded and shouted at their mounts, but the coldblooded beasts plodded steadily forward, seemingly oblivious to their peril. The lead team suddenly veered from the path, despite the frantic yells of its driver.
As Thamalon watched, the weapon atop the second wagon belched forth another gout of flame. The guards in the driver's basket fired into the flaming boughs, and one was rewarded by the fall of a slender burning figure from the high branches.
Beating the lead lizard's head with the goad, the driver of the errant wagon finally forced the beasts to return to the path. They were less than thirty yards away from the edge of the forest.
They didn't see the mass of choke creeper that awaited them.
Thamalon had studied the dangerous plant the previous summer, when the elves of Tangled Trees and the armies of Sembia teetered on the brink of war. The elves had used the vines as a weapon against human trade caravans.
Thamalon stood to reveal himself. He regretted knowing so few words in Dwarvish.
"Beware!" he shouted, pointing to the treacherous patch. The vines had already begun reaching out toward the reptiles' legs. "Bad there!"
A flurry of arrows shot toward him. Thamalon dropped behind the hollow log. An arrow had pierced his robe and hung there just under his left armpit. He felt the burning edge of the arrowhead against his ribs and hoped it was only a light graze.
"Do you speak the trade tongue?" called a gruff voice from the wagons.
The dwarf's Common was far better than Thamalon's six or eight words of the dwarven language. Moreover, the sound of his native tongue gave Thamalon hope that he wasn't so far from Sembia as he'd first feared.
Two more arrows pierced the rotting bark of his shelter and sank into the ground near Thamalon's feet. He shouted back without rising, "There's choke creeper between you and the clearing! Your front wagon is nearly in the stuff!"
The dwarves shouted in their own language, and Thamalon heard another great whoosh from their flame projector. It sounded like thunder amid the downpour of arrows striking the armored dwarves and their wagons.
He dared another glance above the log. Luckily, the unseen attackers concentrated all their fire on the draft beasts.
Fortunately for the caravan, the lizards' hide was as tough as the dwarves' armor. Only a few arrows stuck in their skin, and those sank only an inch or two into their targets.
Unfortunately for the lizards, the tough green vines had already slithered up and around their short, elephantine legs. Thamalon knew how tenacious the creeper was. It could strangle a strong man to death in a matter of minutes.
The two guards in the lead wagon dropped their crossbows in favor of sharp axes and leaped to the ground. There they hewed like harvesters, chopping the lively vines as near to their beasts' feet as they dared.
The reptilian creatures plodded forward against the vines, the only indication of their panic a steady, lowering moan.
The fire-throwers covered their companions' actions with a series of short bursts. Despite the dwarves' restraint, the boughs above them crackled with flame. Blackened limbs began to droop precipitously over the wagons.
One of the dwarves on the ground shouted a familiar-sounding epithet. The vines had encircled both of his legs and was pulling him away from the struggling lizards, toward the squirming center of the patch.
"I am definitely too old for this," muttered Thamalon.
He ran toward the fallen dwarf, crouching low to present as small a target as possible to the unseen archers. His injured hip gave him a horrendous limp that might have looked comical in other circumstances.
The vines stripped the dwarf's axe from his hands and drew him deeper into their tangled mass, leaving the weapon behind.
"Roendhalg!" the dwarf's companion called, turning to cleave a path through the wriggling vines between them.
Arrows spanked off the back of his steel armor, but one found the gap between his helmet and his back plate. The dwarf reeled forward, clutching awkwardly at the arrow in his neck. The vines reached for his legs.
Thamalon snatched up Roendhalg's axe and chopped at the vines encircling the other dwarf's ankles. Three strokes was all it took to free him that far from the center of the creeper. The freed dwarf backstepped and fell as the shock of the arrow wound struck him fully. Thamalon dropped the axe and grabbed the fallen dwarf. He was heavier than he looked, even considering the armor.
"Get away!" shouted the dwarf atop the wagon.
He finally turned the flame weapon toward the creeper. The monstrous plant had already plucked the captured dwarf's helmet from his head and was peeling off his armor. Beneath his black beard, the dwarf's face was red from throttling, his eyes bulging, tongue distended.
Thamalon dragged his charge back toward the wagon. He heard a hiss as the dwarf atop the wagon squeezed the lever for his flame weapon.
"Wait!"
Heedless of Thamalon's shout, the dwarf unleashed a tremendous burst of fire upon the creeper and its captive. The vines thrashed as the flame blasted away their leaves, leaving nothing but the blackened stems and the immolated corpse of their last victim.
"Lift him up!" yelled the driver. He reached down to receive the lolling body of his wounded guard. Immediately after, he offered his arm to Thamalon. "Up you come!"
Inside the basket, Thamalon knelt beside the wounded dwarf while the driver once more took up his goad. While he was no battlefield surgeon, Thamalon knew the basics of tending a wound. Careful not to bump the driver as he beat and cajoled the draft beasts, Thamalon gently removed the wounded dwarf's helmet and began unbuckling his armor. He left the arrow in place. It had pierced the thick muscle of the dwarf's neck about a handspan away from his spine. Thamalon shrugged off his robe and tore a sleeve from his linen shirt to staunch the bleeding.
Behind them, someone in the second wagon blew a staccato
blast on an iron horn. The wagons lurched forward as the reptiles slowly but steadily left the forest and their arboreal attackers.
Only after they were out of range of the arrows did Thamalon realize sadly that their attackers had almost certainly been elves. While he had no elf blood, Thamalon had always felt an affinity with the fair folk-so much so that he had sired a pair of twins with an elf woman named Trisdea, even after his marriage to Shamur.
"How fares Grunlaern?"
The driver's question spared Thamalon from further uncomfortable introspection. He glanced only briefly at Thamalon before returning his attention on the path ahead.
"It is a dire wound," reported Thamalon, "but not mortal, I think. As soon as we can stop, someone should cut out the arrowhead and bandage this properly."
They halted the caravan half an hour later, when the wagons were well clear of any trees. While one of the dwarves tended Grunlaern, the other examined the damage to their wagons. They plucked a few dozen arrows from the wagons, murmuring appreciatively when they saw none had penetrated the armored flanks.
"Well met," said one of the dwarves who'd operated the flame weapons. He carried his goggled helmet under one arm as he walked toward Thamalon. The dwarf smelled faintly of candied almonds. He clasped Thamalon's forearm in a gloved hand. "I am Baeron Longstrides of the Deepspire Miners, son of Hurglud of the Keen Nose, sub-commander of the throbe caravans."
"Well indeed," said Thamalon, returning the grasp. He'd already decided that he didn't wish his true identity known until he was sure he was among allies. "Call me Nelember the Far-Traveler."
The dwarf's eyes narrowed as he considered the introduction, but he slowly nodded. Thamalon had offered a sufficiently polite disclaimer that he wasn't sharing his true name.
"In fact, I am so far-traveled," added Thamalon, "that I have completely lost my way. Is your destination near?"
"Three days," said Baeron. "We owe you a service. If you wish it, you may ride with us."
Thamalon nodded. "I will. Perhaps there I can recover my bearings."