Dave Gross - Lord of Stormweather

Tamlin slammed the window shut. Cooling sweat chilled his hands. He looked at Chaney.

"Did you see that?"

"Uh huh," said Chaney, still staring at the window. "It looked like Talbot."

"What do you think it means?"

"I guess it means you should stay on his good side."

"No chance of that, eh?"

They looked at each other dubiously.

"Maybe it's just a warning of what could be," suggested Tamlin. "It doesn't have to happen."

"You're probably right," offered Chaney. "Still… You want to look through another window?"

"No, thanks," said Tamlin. "Maybe later."

"Then it's back to the doors."

"No," said Tamlin. "I just…"

He pictured his father and mother, and as an afterthought Mister Cale. Closing his eyes again, he willed himself to see where they were. Gradually, he felt drawn to another window. He followed the lure across the room and down a level.

When he opened his eyes, he was hovering before a stained glass oval with no latch or sill.

"Do you have to break it?" asked Chaney.

"I don't think so."

Tamlin reached out to touch the surface of the glass. It became clear, and he looked down from a great height at the top of a tower encircled by giant weather vanes. On the roof between them, his mother and Erevis Cale lay stunned on the ground. Nearby, his father slumped over a sword he used as a cane to keep himself from collapsing on the tower roof.

Behind a screen of guards, a man in a scarlet cloak looked up at the window. Except for his beard, the man looked exactly like Tamlin.

You! he said.

Tamlin sensed the word rather than heard it.

With a gesture, the other man dispelled the vision. Tamlin stared at the stained glass window.

"What was that?" asked Chaney. "He looked just like you."

"I think we'll know soon," said Tamlin.

A few minutes later, a fine network of lightning flashed from window to window, and thunder shook the place between the worlds. Tamlin pushed off from the floor to hover in the air, as if by some forgotten instinct. Chaney followed his example.

"Here he comes," said Tamlin.

"How do you know?"

"I can feel it."

"You!" thundered a voice from high above them. Tamlin looked up to see the bearded image of himself standing before a glowing portal at the end of a floating stairway. "You should not have come here, boy."

"Uh, oh," said Chaney, fading back from the impending conflict.

"Who are you?" demanded Tamlin.

This was the other self he'd seen in his slumbering visions, the cruel avatar of his dreams. He flew up to face his double, and the man flew down to meet him in the center of the hall.

"Don't you recognize me?" his doppelganger sneered at him, but Tamlin perceived a shadow of fear in the man's emerald eyes.

"You are no part of me," said Tamlin. "Somehow you've usurped my dreams, I know that much! And this place, it belongs to my family. You have no right to be here."

"That is where you're wrong, boy. I am the only one who has a right to Stormweather. I'm the one who built it."

"Aldimar," said Tamlin. "Grandfather?"

"Right, and right," said his double. "You are clever enough, if weak and ignorant. No doubt you have a hundred questions for me. If you were anyone else, I might indulge your curiosity. However…"

He shook his fist at Tamlin, then splayed his fingers wide as he shouted a word that had eluded Tamlin in all his half-remembered dreams:

"Anabar!"

Lightning shot from Aldimar's palm, straight toward Tamlin's body. It cascaded over him like cool water, and he jerked in surprise. An instant later, he realized the energy had washed over him harmlessly.

Tamlin had never before been able to trap one of those arcane words in memory. The language of wizards and sorcerers was slippery to the mundane mind, but this one fetched up in his brain.

Anabar, he mused. What other words have I forgotten from dreams?

"What?" roared Aldimar. Tamlin hated the way the man's expression turned his own features into a cruel visage. "What trickery is this?"

"Oh," said Tamlin. The bluff was his favorite gambit among his admittedly limited arsenal of negotiating tactics. "I know a thing or two. Nothing to boast about, mind you. Perhaps I'll trade one to you for your history of the portal and this… nexus."

As Tamlin had calculated, his insouciant bluff irritated his nemesis. Aldimar plucked a bit of black goo from a little pouch in his harness, balled it in his fist, and flung it toward him.

"Effluvaen!"

Tamlin tried not to flinch as the ball of flame rushed toward him, exploding in his face. He felt a warm tingling as the fire burst impotently around him. Not so much as an eyebrow had wilted in the holocaust.

Hearing another arcane word started a miniature avalanche of memories. Half a dozen more magical triggers sprouted in his fallow memory. He did know magic after all-or at least he once had, as a boy, in dreams. Almost two decades later, in a world between worlds, he could evoke them once more. He would need the raw materials to cast the spells himself. As he thought of them, he sensed their scant mass appear in the pockets of his belt. He knew at once this sort of instant summoning was a trick that would only work there, in his home.

His true home, he realized. The Stormweather between the worlds.

"Come now, Grandfather," Tamlin said, surreptitiously touching the conjured items in their pockets. Less a bluff than an educated guess, he revealed his greatest secret hope. "Surely you realize the futility of using my own power against me?"

With that he threw back the fire and lightning, along with a clap of thunder for showmanship.

Aldimar cringed at the first blast, but he held fast against the bolt and the thunder.

"It is true that you were born in the radiance of the Vault. That might give you more natural affinity for its gifts, but I have had decades to learn its power."

"The decades since your death, old man," shot back Tamlin. "What kept you here, when you should have gone on to your just reward?"

"That is the price, lad. See how much you haven't learned? The Vault demands servitude for its gifts, and I would still be its damned gatekeeper if your dreams had not given me a way out. Why should you mind? They were nothing to you but sleeping fancies. For me they were salvation. They were life."

Aldimar flew toward Tamlin, pausing only after he'd come within a yard of his grandson, his identical twin. Tamlin could see the sweat on his neck.

"I have seen what you did with them," said Tamlin. "You corrupted everything I ever dreamed of."

Tamlin pushed a finger into his grandfather's chest and felt a satisfying solidity there. He kept the smile in his heart from reaching his face as he realized how he could end the stalemate.

Aldimar shrugged and said, "Your pubescent fantasies were hardly the sort of world in which a man should live. I made something worthy of them. I built a nation. I became a king!"

"A tyrant, actually," said Tamlin, "but what's the point of quibbling over terminology? Even if I could overlook the rest, I saw what you were doing to my parents. In my opinion, that more than justifies a spot of grand-patricide."

He drew his blade.

"Foolish whelp," said Aldimar. "What makes you think you could match blades with me?"

Aldimar conjured a blade to his own hand and rushed forward in a flying lunge.

"Well," said Tamlin, neatly parrying the attack, "judging from what I've read about your life, you were never the keenest swordsman. Besides, I suspect you have had little opportunity for practice over these past decades, relying as you have on the power you stole from me."

"Don't count on it, child." Aldimar attacked his legs, and Tamlin barely flew back in time to avoid a dire wound.