Dave Gross: Lord of Stormweather

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."

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.