Lord of Stormweather

CHAPTER 25

After the blinding light and the horrid keening sound, Tamlin floated in a white abyss. He'd lost both his sword and the mysterious key that had pulsed in his hand as they uncovered the gate. His hand went to his breast. Not only was the flesh unbroken by the wound he was sure had killed him, but it was also bereft of clothing.

As the light receded to a comfortable level, Tamlin saw that he was completely naked.

Also, he was flying.

Tamlin floated in the center of a high hall. Its ceiling soared so far above him that he could barely make out its vaulted arc. He looked down to see that the floor was a distant shadow. All around the curving walls were doors and windows, crooked passages and candlelit promenades, half-balconies and flights of stairs that rose up past balconies of mirrors and portraits, only to turn and end abruptly in midair.

The room looked like a jumbled jigsaw puzzle of Stormweather Towers stacked four stories too high, with pieces lost from a hundred other puzzles mixed in. There stood a gigantic suit of armor that Tamlin's uncle Perivel had once worn. Upon a flight of stairs was a painting of his mother as a young woman, but Tamlin had never seen the portraits to either side of her. One of them was a green-faced lion-woman.

Tamlin was fairly certain he would have heard of such an unusual ancestor.

"Where in the world…?" Tamlin let the question melt away.

"Beats me," replied a voice behind him.

Tamlin tried to turn around, but he managed only to squirm where he hovered in the air.

"Just think about it," said the voice. "Not, 'I'd like to turn around now.' That's not the way it works. Instead, just imagine that you've already turned."

Tamlin did as the voice instructed. His body responded instantly to his will, turning him gracefully around.

"You're a natural!" said the man who floated before him. "It took me hours to figure that out, and a tenday to get good at it."

Apart from the floating, the other figure differed from Tamlin in two significant ways. First, he was fully clothed. Second, he was very nearly transparent.

"Chaney Foxmantle!"

"In the ectoplasm," said Chaney.

"You're a ghost?"

Chaney lifted the collar of his shirt and peered through it at Tamlin.

"Either that, or I've got one hell of a complaint for the girl who does my wash."

"Very funny," said Tamlin.

"I see something funnier," said Chaney, smirking.

Tamlin covered himself with both hands. Scowling at the ghost, he said, "This is no time for jokes."

"Trust me," said Chaney. "There's never a better time for a few laughs than after you've just been killed."

"You saw what happened?"

"I had a box seat," said Chaney. "It's a long story, but you'd better hear it all."

Tamlin listened in wonder as the ghost relayed his tale. By the time he was finished, Tamlin felt a heat for vengeance rising in his heart. He couldn't decide whom he wanted to murder first, but the Hulorn was a favorite for when he was next in a betting mood.

"Not only was I not inducted into this ghostly procession of yours," said Tamlin, "but somehow you and I both ended up in this strange place. It looks a bit like Stormweather here, doesn't it?"

"I was just thinking the same thing. That looks like the banister Tal and I used to slide down when we were boys."

"What do you suppose happened to the other ghosts? Were they destroyed?"

"I don't think so," said Chaney. He pointed to an open hallway lined with windows. "Look there. Can you see it?"

Tamlin saw a shadowy figure lurking by one of the windows. It pressed its smoky hands upon the glass as if trying to escape.

"And there," said Chaney, pointing to a door far below them.

Tamlin saw a pair of dark specters tugging at the latch of a portal that looked exactly like the kitchen door at Stormweather Towers. Despite the shadows' efforts, the latch remained stubbornly fast.

"Why're they here?"

"It must have something to do with that big stone block you dug up. What was that thing?"

"I'm not certain," said Tamlin, "but I suspected it was a secret relic of my grandfather's. Also, it might be the key to my parents' disappearance."

"How so?"

Tamlin told Chaney his story since the kidnapping. While he'd never known his brother's friend very well, he decided it was safe to confide in him. After all, Chaney was already dead. He wouldn't be spreading much gossip in the Green Gauntlet.

"So this portal somehow intercepted them from being trapped inside a magic painting? If so, they must be in here somewhere," suggested Chaney. "Maybe this is some sort of magical family mausoleum."

"I hope you're wrong about that."

"Sorry," said Chaney. "Never mind me. Sometimes I say ridiculous things."

"My bet is that it's some sort of otherworldly hiding place, like the secret passages in Stormweather Towers."

"That makes sense if your grandfather had some secret magical powers," agreed Chaney. "After all, you aren't dead. I mean, you don't look like a ghost."

"And my wound is healed," said Tamlin. "If old Aldimar had some contingency spell that could be triggered only on his death, then it must also be designed to heal him of the wounds that killed him."

"Too bad he didn't spend the extra coin on the clothing spell."

"At least I wouldn't be caught dead in those threadbare rags," Tamlin shot back. "I would make a far more fashionable corpse, I assure you."

He meant it as a friendly jest, and he was glad to see Chaney took it that way.

"You see? It's all much easier when you don't take it too seriously." He stopped laughing abruptly and said, "Hey, how did you do that?"

Tamlin was fully dressed in his favorite attire: a green and blue quilted tunic threaded with gold and pearls, russet velvet trousers held with a jeweled belt, and thigh-high boots made of black leather so supple it might have been silk.

"I need a sword," Tamlin said, and his favorite blade appeared at his hip."

"Nice trick," said Chaney, appreciatively. "Can you get me one?"

Tamlin smiled and buffed his fingernails upon his chest.

"A blade for my friend, if you please."

A short sword appeared in Chaney's grasp. His triumphant grin transformed into a frown as the weapon fell through his intangible hand and down to the distant floor.

"Dark," said Chaney.

"Enough of this. That murderer is still in my house. We have to go back and stop him."

"You mean go back and get killed again?"

"I won't make the same mistake again, I promise you. This time I'll fetch the archers and have him perforated from a distance."

"Not bad," said Chaney, "but how will you get back there?"

"Good question," said Tamlin. "This place is full of doors. What do you say we open a few?"

They flew down. When Tamlin set his feet to the floor, he felt vaguely disappointed as weight settled once more around his shoulders. He willed himself to levitate once more, and he rose a few inches in the air. Satisfied that he'd not lost this miraculous power, he settled down, once again obedient of gravity.

"Nice trick, isn't it?" observed Chaney.

"Somehow, I feel I could do anything here," he said. "It's as if all the powers of my dreams were suddenly real."

Tamlin approached the two dark specters. They withdrew slightly at his approach, but still their hands scrabbled uselessly at the edges of the door. Their faces turned to him hopefully, and they moaned like dogs begging for their supper.

He recognized one of them as the ghostly remains of Stellana Toemalar, a shrewish old widow with a notorious dislike for children and an insistence on hideously complex contracts. Tamlin still hadn't relinquished his own childhood resentment for her scolding ways, but he felt more pity than anything else to see her reduced to a mute and desperate phantom.

"Here," he said, pulling at the latch.

It opened easily, revealing an endless expanse of clockwork machinery-not just a room, but an entire world of gears and pistons and wheels. Cogs and levers formed the plains and mountains, even the seas and clouds of the mechanical world. Tremendous clusters of pulleys and chains floated above the land like clouds. Everything was the color of metal: dull lead, bright brass, deep copper, black iron.

The moaning of the specters turned to a regular pulsing sound as they drifted out through the door. Tamlin watched their bodies transform into solid matter as they came ever closer to their destination. Before they were too distant to see, Tamlin thought he saw them transforming into simpler, puppetlike shapes.

He shuddered and closed the door.

"What in the world…?" he asked, though he felt he knew the answer already. "Another world entirely. Another plane."

"Was that their afterlife?" asked Chaney.

"Perhaps," said Tamlin. "The other specters seem drawn to different doors. Let's have a look."

Tamlin released another phantom into a world of lush forests and prowling beasts. He fell to the grassy ground in a hunter's crouch, his body solidifying into a younger, stronger version of Gorkun Baerent. Tamlin knew him as a fair-dealing man who loved hunting far more than managing his shipping affairs. A feral smile formed on Gorkun's lips as he realized the nature of his new surroundings. The man looked back at Tamlin with a joyous and grateful expression. Tamlin waved to him as he closed the door to the arboreal world.

He tried another door, slamming it almost immediately after the specter lingering at the portal slipped through, falling down into a mass of fighting bodies. The clamor of the place, the screams of triumph and agony, were deafening and repulsive.

"What is this place?" asked Chaney.

"Some sort of nexus of worlds," speculated Tamlin. Even as he said the words, he heard their ring of truth. "The ghosts seem drawn to particular worlds, perhaps their just rewards… or torments."

"Then why don't I feel drawn to any of them?"

Tamlin shrugged, then said, "Wait a moment."

He closed his eyes and tried to feel any attraction to a particular door. Soon he realized he was merely listening rather than extending any intellectual or emotional sense. Still, he imagined he could feel currents flowing through the weird house, invisible avenues running from door to door-or to the windows and chimneys, and up and down the stairways.

"Are you getting anything?" asked Chaney.

"Something, yes… but I still don't know what it is. Let's try some of those windows."

Together, they flew up to a high balcony housing six windows. The glass appeared clear from their side, but all they saw beyond was starless night.

Tamlin opened one.

The smell of autumn leaves rushed into the room, and the breeze chilled his body. Beyond the open portal, clouds rushed across the full face of Selune and her attendant shards. Far below, the moonlight illuminated a grassy plain where hundreds of wolves loped toward them. Their pace increased as they strove to keep up with their leader, a naked, hirsute brute whose dark hair whipped back like a war banner. He raised a sword the size of a wagon axle and lowered its point toward Stormweather, and all the beasts swarmed down from the hills.

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.

Despite his bravado, he knew he was at a disadvantage off the ground. He flew to the floor and turned to receive Aldimar's charge. His wily opponent circled to the left and above him, refusing to join Tamlin on the floor.

"Fledgling!" he cried. "You can only dream of flying. Surrender and let it end swiftly, or watch as I return to the Vanes and finish off your parents."

"No!" Tamlin flew up, furiously beating his opponent's blade to create an opening. "You're never going back there."

Aldimar laughed as he retreated up toward the door from which he'd arrived. Despite all the power of his will, Tamlin couldn't match his speed. Aldimar had his hand on the door as Tamlin landed on the high stairway.

"And how will you stop me?" Aldimar taunted as he pulled on the door latch.

It didn't budge.

"Well," said Tamlin, relief giving him new strength. "I suppose I could refuse to open the door. Among the many things you don't know is that I died to get here. I'm thinking that makes me the gatekeeper now, and that means you're going nowhere."

Aldimar fairly snarled as he glowered at his grandson, then he forced a laugh. Tamlin heard its falseness.

"I wonder what will happen when I kill you here," Aldimar said, "in the seat of our shared power."

He made a savage ballestra down the stairs, slashing at Tamlin's head.

Tamlin stepped away from the cut and riposted at Aldimar's wrist as the Sorcerer tried to recover. His blade slipped off the man's bracer and barely grazed his thumb. Still, Aldimar hissed like a man long unused to pain. He retreated to the top of the stairs, his back against the unyielding portal.

"I hope my father wasn't unduly fond of you," said Tamlin. "It would seem not, since he hardly ever mentions you. But then, my father is never one to dwell overmuch on failures."

He parried every attack with as much nonchalance as he could muster, grinning up at his counterpart with a cool facade despite the fear that churned in his heart.

Aldimar grew more frantic with every attack, slashing wildly at Tamlin's head and arms, and abandoning the use of his blade's point all together. Tamlin recognized the flaw in his attack and exploited it with quick, short thrusts after each parry, pinking Aldimar's thigh, then his shin and his foot. The tiny wounds did little harm, but they enraged his opponent beyond the last bastion of reason. Tamlin watched for the inevitable rush.

It wasn't long in coming. Aldimar bulled his way down the stairs. Tamlin immediately retreated, crouched low, and thrust up into the man's belly, just below the sternum. His blade sank deep into Aldimar's body, stopped briefly as his heart contracted around the wound, and pressed in inches farther as Tamlin renewed his thrust. He bent his elbow and followed his sword upward until he was face-to-face with the man who had stolen his appearance, his power, and his dreams.

"That's all for you, old man."