by David Gross
The visitor had dressed for anonymity, so Tamlin assumed his face was magically disguised as well. It wasn’t unhandsome, lined by fifty years or more, and familiar to none of the famous Houses of Selgaunt. Even the man’s amused smile gave Tamlin no clues as to his identity.
“My dear boy,” he said with a nod toward the squirming rat. “If you are still hungry, I will have one of the men fetch you another bowl.”
“Oh, do not trouble yourself,” replied Tamlin. “It’s just that it has been so long since I was last hunting.…” He shrugged in lieu of a wittier riposte.
His captor laughed with surprising warmth. “You have always been such a charming guest, Young Master Thamalon. I hope you shall be my guest again soon, under more pleasant circumstances.”
“I shall look forward to it,” said Tamlin. “Yet perhaps next time I shall be your host.”
“Perhaps,” said the stranger. He gave Tamlin a curious look, as if suspecting his prisoner knew something more than he let on.
Tamlin wished he knew enough to take advantage of his captor’s uncertainty. For lack of a clue on which to build a bluff, he asked the obvious question.
“As much as I appreciate your kind hospitality, may I inquire as to the length of my stay?”
“Ah, to the point then,” said the man. “Therein lies the trouble.”
At first, Tamlin didn’t rise to the man’s unspoken invitation to inquire. The rat spoiled his cool appearance by biting the fleshy web between his thumb and forefinger. Tamlin hissed in irritation.
“Don’t tell me you sent the ransom demand to Argent Hall,” he said. “Last time it took forever for my cousins to redirect the messenger.”
“Droll,” said the man.
He raised the glowing wand for a better look at his captive. Tamlin saw a green stone glitter on the man’s finger. While nothing else about the man was familiar, Tamlin was certain he’d seen that ring before.
“Please,” the stranger said, “do release that vermin. You are liable to catch some dreadful disease if it keeps biting you.”
“If the Old Owl balks at your price, send your man to my mother.”
Tamlin tried to smile to smooth over his hasty words. Like most of the Old Chauncel, he much preferred to talk around a subject than plunge into it, but he was sick, injured, hungry, disgusted, and disgraced beyond all tolerance. Even so, he kept his grasp on the increasingly frantic rat. If its screams annoyed his captor, so much the better.
A petty revenge is better than none, Tamlin thought. More importantly, irritation might prompt the man to reveal a clue.
No, he seems too clever for that sort of ploy. If nothing else, maybe I could throw the rat in his face.
The thought pleased him, though a fleeting pity for the animal gave him qualms.
“The ransom is considerable, but not unreasonable,” said the man. His brow creased in irritation. He couldn’t keep his gaze from Tamlin’s hands and their unwilling occupant.
Tamlin felt relieved that his kidnapper wanted gold after all. The Old Owl might balk at political extortion, but Tamlin was sure he wouldn’t be niggardly with the safety of his heir.
“Perhaps my father is distracted by business matters,” suggested Tamlin. “If you were to send a discreet inquiry to my—”
“I told you to let go of the Cyric-bedamned rat!” snapped his captor.
Stunned by the man’s sudden hostility, Tamlin’s mind raced for a disarming reply. Before one materialized, the man pulled an elaborate brass wand from his sleeve. Demonic bats and lizards crawled across its surface, and its head was an ivory skull of some tiny fanged mammal.
The man aimed the tip of the wand at the rat, and Tamlin knew better than to hold on to the struggling animal. He released the rodent and pushed as far away as the cage bars would let him. He moved just in time, as a crooked shaft of sickly yellow light shot through the bars to envelop the rat. The magical beam left a pale afterimage, like the path of lightning burned onto the eye for an instant after its strike.
The rat squealed louder than ever, writhing on the cell floor. Gleaming black buboes formed on its skin, bursting through its gray pelt to form new, wet appendages on its shoulders. Its head grew longer and thicker, and the new limbs spread wider to form translucent, batlike wings.
In seconds, Tamlin realized, the rat would be too big to escape the cage. His fear of remaining trapped with this transfigured vermin overcame his revulsion, and he lunged at the monster, pushing it out through the bars of the cage. The rat-thing screamed again, this time a deeper, more violent sound. Its black claws hooked the bars and pulled, trying to catch hold of Tamlin’s flesh.
The man laughed heartily and returned the wand to its secret pocket. “We should perform this trick at the Soargyl’s ball next month.”
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 Faerûn 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 cold-blooded 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.