by David Gross
Among his varied business ventures, Thamalon felt the most pride in his orchards and vineyards. Among his servants, there were few he held in greater esteem than his vintners. Thamalon visited his vineyards as often as he could justify the indulgence to himself. When selecting a new site for a vineyard, he loved to feel the grit and taste the soil as his master vintner explain how it was good, and in which ways it could be richer.
In summer he enjoyed picnicking among the vines with his wife and children, and at Higharvestide he would don homespun trousers and join the harvesters for an afternoon’s picking. How long had it been since he felt the pleasant rupturing of grapes beneath his bare feet? The task had been an owner’s indulgence, since it had been years since his vintners used anything but their efficient oak presses to extract the juice. They humored Thamalon’s whim by providing him with an old-fashioned mashing tun, and he repaid the favor by keeping his visits short and infrequent so as not to slow their production.
Throughout the fermenting, filtering, casking, and aging, Thamalon always felt a sense of nurturing the raw produce of the earth into something far finer—something approaching art. While he didn’t personally oversee the process, it was performed by his support and his will.
In a way, it was like raising children, but without all the bother. Should drought or excessive rains produce an inferior vintage, he had only to wait a year for another chance to get it right.
If only it were so simple to be a father. Unfortunately, in many ways Thamalon had approached parenthood as an owner rather than as a vintner, letting nannies, tutors, and whipping boys attend to the messy business of shaping a child into an adult. He sometimes regretted not tending more often to his children rather than leaving their daily care to his servants. He wondered how much they had suffered from his benign neglect.
The worse thought was that they’d turned out better for lack of his direct attentions. That idea injured his pride, but as one who’d single-handedly rebuilt the empire his father had destroyed, Thamalon believed a man was shaped most profoundly by the decisions he made alone.
Or perhaps that was only a feeble old man’s excuse for spending too little time with his sons and daughter.
Thamalon tried to turn his thoughts back to the matter of the Sorcerer’s wine cellars. What strange fruit did they harvest in this land? How might its yield compare to the vintages famous throughout the lands Thamalon knew? The pride of his own extensive cellars included racks of Arabellan Dry, Berduskan Dark, and Saerloonian Glowfire. He also reserved generous allotments of the finest domestic wines, including the famous House Ansril, House Beldraevin, and House Glaery. It was a source of great pride to him that House Uskevren also had its place among the most estimable vintages, as did his specialty wines, including the Usk Fine Old, Thamalon’s Own, and the tart and fortified Storm Ruby.
Thamalon wished he’d been holding a bottle of one of them when he fell prey to that damnable painting. He would have liked to present it to his host, and perhaps the gesture would be enough to encourage the Sorcerer on to more speedy assistance in returning Thamalon to his homeland.
It was a fleeting, vain hope, but the wistful fantasy was enough to divert Thamalon from unhappier thoughts as he explored the increasingly lonely halls beneath the main floor of Castle Stormweather. Eventually, the tapestries and carpets withdrew to leave only flagstone floors and bare walls. Thamalon followed the trail of crackling torches in their iron sconces until he came to a plain iron gate.
On either side stood a pair of Crimson Guards. Those in front crossed their spears in the ancient gesture of forbiddance.
“Halt,” said one. “It is forbidden to pass.”
“I take it this is not the wine cellar?” said Thamalon amiably.
Beyond the gate he saw a large chamber. On the other side of its shadowy expanse was a heavy stone door embedded with river stones of blue and indigo and incarnadine. Between the gems, the stone curved and whirled in strange geometries that defied all symmetry. There were no recognizable characters among the arcs and spirals, but Thamalon sensed there was some foreign order among the chaotic lines.
“No,” said one of the interposing guards.
He offered no further explanation, but since none of the men seemed especially belligerent, Thamalon pressed another question.
“What is it there?” he said. “Some sort of—?”
“It is forbidden. Away with you!” said one of the guards. He turned his spear to point at Thamalon.
Thamalon bristled as much at the coarse rebuttal as at the threatening gesture.
“Your lord and master welcomed me as his guest. I doubt he would be pleased to hear that one of his—”
One of the other guards marked Thamalon’s surprise and stepped forward. He lay a hand on the weapon to turn its point away from Thamalon’s chest.
“You are the recent arrival?” he said. “The one they call Far-Traveler?”
Thamalon nodded curtly, holding his chin high.
The guard nodded back. He wasn’t as unctuously accommodating as the upstairs servants, but he had none of the insolent tone of his fellow.
“The chamberlain must have been diverted by his scheduled visitors when you came to court. He is always distracted as the Sorcerer prepares to hunt. Otherwise, he would have told you that my lord invites his favored guests to enjoy all the chambers of his abode but one.” He indicated the room behind him with a flick of his eyes. “The Ineffable Vault.”
“I see,” said Thamalon. He could practically hear the capital letters. He felt his eyes drawn inexorably toward the gloom-shrouded vault. “Had I known …” He raised his empty palms to the ceiling.
“If you wish, I shall escort you to the cellars. The sommelier would be pleased to show you the stores.”
Thamalon followed the man away from the guarded portal. It was perfectly sensible for a man to keep visitors out of his treasury, but something about the unusual door made him think there was more than coin stored within.
Together they walked away from the gate, the hard heels of the guard’s boots tapping a cadence on the stone floor. Once they were out of hearing range of the other guards, Thamalon’s escort stopped. He removed his helmet and turned to face Thamalon.
“If you please, sir,” he said. He was a young man, and his cornflower blue eyes were wide with trepidation. “Allow me to report my fellow’s insolence to our captain. I assure you he enforces strict discipline and will not overlook the offense.”
Thamalon sensed the fear in the man’s voice. A bead of sweat ran down the guard’s cheek to vanish in his downy beard.
“Of course,” said Thamalon. “I have no wish to trouble your master with such a trifle, especially since you have been so helpful.”
The guard snapped his heels and bowed over his fist. “Thank you, sir.”
As they continued their journey, Thamalon mused aloud, “I wonder what is so ‘ineffable’ about it?”
The guard cast a nervous glance at him and said, “I would not know, sir. No one ever enters it but the Sorcerer.” After a few steps, he added, “On pain of death.”
“I see,” said Thamalon. After a few more steps, he ventured, “Surely you must have wondered.”
“No, sir. It is forbidden.”
“Where is the harm? I mean, why give it such a mysterious name if you don’t want anyone wondering what’s inside? Why block it with a gate that lets you see exactly what is being forbidden? Tantalizing, isn’t it?”
The guard shrugged and kept his silence.
Thamalon tried not thinking about the mysterious vault, but of course the seed of curiosity had been planted, and his imagination fed it. He had a suspicion that the Sorcerer named his forbidden room exactly for that reason, and he remembered the old adage about the flying carpet that worked only when its owner did not think about elephants.
The past summer, Talbot’s troupe had performed a play about a sorcerous queen who married a handsome but common man on the sole condition
that he never open her wardrobe doors. Naturally, the man burned with curiosity about what his wife might be concealing inside that cabinet. One day, as his wife took her bath, he crept inside her bedchamber and opened the wardrobe door—only to find her empty skin hanging there. When the fiend heard his screams, she emerged from her bath and gobbled up her disobedient husband.
Was this Ineffable Vault the Sorcerer’s own test of his guest’s fidelity?
Thamalon weighed his curiosity against his desire to be a good guest. In any other situation, he would never even consider snooping about his host’s abode. The twin coincidences of the castle’s name and the Sorcerer’s appearance, however, tilted the scales toward impropriety.
Even as he considered where next to investigate his new surroundings, Thamalon couldn’t dispel the memory of the guard’s fear when he imagined the Sorcerer’s displeasure. If insolence to a guest was so awful an offense as to set a young man to trembling, Thamalon didn’t wish to learn what punishment the Sorcerer reserved for those who abused his hospitality.
CHAPTER 14
ABOVE THE CLOUDS
Cale watched Shamur lean into the wind, her eyes closed. The light of sunset turned her hair to gold as the wind lifted it up from her shoulders.
Fleetingly, Cale missed the feeling of wind combing through his hair.
Since a spell had rendered him permanently bald, he’d had few occasions to regret the loss of his distinctive red locks. In the years since, he had devoted himself so completely to service—first to Thamalon Uskevren, then to the Righteous Man, and finally to the Lord of Shadows himself—he’d rarely had time for mourning such petty pleasures such as the feeling of wind in his hair.
Besides, his baldness saved him the unpleasant task of washing skwalos mucous out of his hair.
When the creature’s mouth had first shut upon him, Cale thrashed against the suffocating enclosure. Not only did he fail to escape but he also managed to fill his nose with the faintly citric saliva that washed over him.
Before he was smothered, his fleshy prison convulsed and sent his body deeper into the belly of the skwalos. Cale felt himself squeezed upward, then to one side, then upward again. Each time he turned or paused, another titanic contraction of muscles sent him shooting in another direction.
For a frantic instant, he imagined the experience was not unlike birth. The life-affirming image did nothing to comfort him.
Cale’s lungs craved air. He wished he’d taken a deep breath before entering the mouth of the skwalos. He wondered whether Muenda had failed to warn him out of spite or mischief. Perhaps he thought it best not to frighten his guests. Or perhaps, Cale mused darkly, Muenda hadn’t warned him because he wasn’t being welcomed but eaten.
Just as the throbbing emptiness in his lungs began to ache, the skwalos spat him out onto a soft, moist surface.
Cale had emerged into a cavernous room. Blue-green light filtered through the translucent membranes of the ceiling. A single round passage led from the room to a brighter chamber beyond.
Strong hands gripped Cale’s arms and helped him stand.
“Fun, yes?” Muenda asked, smiling at him through a thick glaze of mucous.
Cale couldn’t be sure whether his enthusiasm was genuine or a subtle form of mockery. He gave the elf the benefit of the doubt and didn’t punch him in the mouth.
Shamur emerged moments later, smothered in pinkish slime. She waved away the elves who awaited her and rose with as much dignity as a woman dripping with sputum could muster. Wiping the stuff from her mouth, she gave Cale a few succinct requests she wished relayed to their hosts.
Cale translated them in more diplomatic terms than she’d employed, omitting certain emphatic adjectives.
Fortunately, the elves were accustomed to the bizarre mode of transportation, and Shamur’s first demand was quickly satisfied.
The elves led them to the next chamber, the yawning mouth of which opened to the bright sky. There they found a natural pool in the surface of the skwalos. Without ceremony, Muenda and his companions plunged into the bracing rainwater. Cale and Shamur followed their example.
As they washed the slime from their bodies and clothes, Cale and Shamur gazed out over the broad back of the skwalos.
From this vantage, the place—Cale could still not think of it as a creature—seemed like a mountain plateau. It was as wide as Selgaunt Bay and four or five times longer.
On top, the creature’s hide was almost entirely opaque except for a few wide patches on the side where thin membranes ballooned from its sides. Its surface was more rugged in a wide swath running ventrally from its blunt head and tail. From deep crags and furrows sprouted wild bushes and fruit trees. Among the flora walked elves with the same deeply tanned skin and black hair as Muenda. Some tended the plants, while others knelt over smooth patches of the skwalos, stroking its bare hide.
Almost without exception, the elves sang as they worked. Some of the lyrics were strange, perhaps in an ancient dialect peculiar to these elves. Some of them were more familiar. Cale heard invocations for spring rain, odes to elven beauty, and even a few old ballads whose lyrics had inspired a hundred legendary human bards across Faerûn.
Cale spotted five small circular tents scattered over the length of the skwalos. When Muenda noticed the direction of his gaze, he said, “When the moon rises, you will talk with our elders.”
In the hours since, the elves had left Cale and Shamur alone to explore their fabulous conveyance. They went to the farthest edge of the creature and found a ridge of hard, gnarly thatch that marked the safe margin of the skwalos’ flat back. From there they looked down on the land. The deep green forest sprawled to each horizon. A few meadow clearings dotted the expanse, rare and lonely among the uncountable trees. To the northeast, Cale spotted the mountains he’d seen earlier. South of them, a flat blue crescent curved toward them from the horizon, a vast lake or sea.
Cale and Shamur scanned the landscape for any sign of human habitation, but they saw none. The skwalos rose into the wispy clouds, and the fine mist briefly invigorated their tired bodies. When the creature emerged into the naked sky, fatigue gripped them at last. They left the edge of the skwalos and climbed to a higher vantage point upon the rugged spinal ridge. There they rested as the breeze dried their bodies and their clothes.
Several times they repeated their respective stories of the previous night, speculating on which of the Uskevren’s enemies was behind the latest assault. The Talendar and Soargyls were obvious candidates. Their wealth and enmity for the Uskevren were almost without limit. Shamur favored the former House, assuming they wanted revenge for her killing Marance Talendar. Cale pointed out that the surviving Talendar had equally good reason to thank her for ridding them of their undead ancestor.
Shamur suggested the possibility that their rivals had joined forces, as they’d done so long ago to destroy Thamalon’s father. Cale allowed that it was possible but reminded her that the Talendar and Soargyls hated each other even more than either of them hated the Uskevren.
They considered other political permutations. They considered the thieves’ guild. They considered personal vendettas. Everything seemed possible. Nothing seemed likely, much less certain.
Eventually their conversation dwindled with the daylight.
As the last embers of twilight faded in the west and the skwalos drifted south with the breeze, Cale was fretting uselessly about not feeling the wind in his hair.
In any event, it wasn’t his long-lost hair or even his brief spate of vanity that troubled him.
It was the night sky.
Cale knew the constellations as well as most any man, and he recognized no pattern in the emerging stars.
“Look,” said Shamur. She pointed to the horizon. There rose the crescent moon, lonely in a sky of distant stars. At a glance it appeared normal, but its attendant shards were missing. “That is not Selûne.”
“The stars are wrong, too,” said Cale. “I think we aren’t only fa
r from Faerûn but far from Toril.”
To Cale’s surprise, Shamur nodded as if she had already been thinking of that possibility.
“The journey through the painting,” she said, “reminded me of a time I traveled to another plane of existence.”
Cale felt an eyebrow rise at her remark, but Shamur didn’t seem to notice. Cale was beginning to understand that she hadn’t revealed all of her secrets. Not by a long shot.
Shamur sighed and leaned into the oncoming breeze.
“In other circumstances,” she said. “I might have enjoyed this strange journey.”
Cale knew how she felt, but he kept it to himself. Rarely did he question his continued service to the Uskevren. Since the death of the Righteous Man and the revelation of his own role as the Shadow Lord’s favored servant, Cale had wondered about his purpose. It was becoming increasingly difficult to believe that his masquerade as a servant among the nobles of Selgaunt had any great purpose.
Perhaps it was only sentiment that had kept him there so long. For years, he’d dedicated himself to serving the Uskevren family without becoming a part of it. No matter what affections he held for them, he remained a favored servant—separate and unequal.
Even in the familiar halls of Stormweather Towers, he knew, Cale had no home in Sembia. In his heart, he felt his destiny lay elsewhere, as yet undiscovered.
All he needed was a sign to know it was true.
“It has all the makings of one of Tazi’s ‘wildings,’ ” said Cale.
Shamur turned her head to him.
Cale didn’t meet her gaze. Instead, he affected not to notice how much his comment had surprised her. In truth, he’d surprised himself with it. He had sometimes wondered whether Shamur suspected his affection for her daughter was more than protective. The constant spats between Tazi and Shamur were sparked not by their differences but by their sameness. Cale was certain of it.
So, too, was he certain that if anyone in the Uskevren household could guess his love for Tazi, it would be Shamur. To provoke her on the issue, however subtly, was undoubtedly dangerous.