Lord of Stormweather

by David Gross

  “Lady Shamur?” he called, knowing there would be no answer.

  He silently scolded himself for following Lady Shamur rather than trying to go directly to Thamalon. Why had he done that?

  He answered his own question as he picked up the lamp and stormed to the last place he’d seen the mistress of the house.

  Earlier in the day, Cale had overheard Lady Shamur ordering the maids to tidy mistress Tazi’s bedchamber. It was unlikely she intended a guest to inhabit her daughter’s room, so Cale suspected she had reason to believe her errant daughter’s return was imminent.

  If so, why had Cale not already known? Apart from his many contacts among Selgaunt’s thieves’ guild, he might have expected a message from Tazi herself. Since the young woman had left Stormweather months earlier, Cale had received no word from her.

  That silence cut him to the heart, for he had once, perhaps foolishly, believed he meant something to her.

  Whatever good is in me exists because of you, he’d written to her, before adding in Elvish: Ai armiel telere maenen hir.

  You hold my heart forever.

  When he wrote those words, Tazi lay on the edge of death, and he’d sworn to avenge her.

  In the days that followed, he forsook his hopes of leaving his past behind him and once more donned the leathers of his former profession. The killer in Cale not only fulfilled his promise to Tazi but also discovered that his future portended to bring him as much darkness as his past held.

  Cale returned to Stormweather Towers as a newly awakened cleric of Mask, the Lord of Shadows. While he’d eliminated the current threat to the Uskevren, doing so had required him to delve so deeply into the machinations of the Night Knives that he knew he would never escape his bonds to the dirty underworld of the city—not while he remained in Selgaunt.

  After Tazi at last recovered from her soul-shattering injuries, she’d made no acknowledgement of Cale’s letter. Whether she rejected his feelings or was simply waiting for the right time to speak of them, Cale could only guess. He longed to resume their late-night conversations and the secrets they shared about their mutual avocation.

  When she left the city to pursue an enemy of her own, he realized he couldn’t force her to accept his help, even if he wasn’t already sworn to serve her father. He could only abide and hope that one day she would speak to him. Cale realized that day might never come. He’d had his chance to ask her about her feelings, and without taking it he watched her leave Stormweather Towers.

  The most he could hope for was word from her mother that Tazi had finally returned home. If so, then he would soon have the chance to ask his questions—if he dared.

  Another flash of light seared Cale’s vision, and he felt the floor rumble beneath his feet. He dashed toward the grand stairway.

  At the mouth of the east wing, he encountered a trio of house guards. They saluted briskly and awaited his orders. Since the death of their captain, Jander Orvist, Cale had been their commander. He meant to appoint a replacement, but Thamalon insisted that the men would continue to look to Cale for orders despite any promotions among their own ranks. To tell the truth, Cale enjoyed his interaction with the soldiers. It made him feel more a part of House Uskevren, not a solitary figure whose best work was done at night.

  “The east wing is clear, sir.”

  Cale nodded. “I will check the library. You check the kitchens, then the stables.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  The guards hastened toward the stairway, their hands over the hilts of their long swords.

  The library was dark, as it should never have been. Even when the occupants desired low light, a dozen lamps of continual flames normally flickered around the walls—just one of the late Brom Selwyn’s lingering contributions to Stormweather Towers. Cale noticed that the hall sconces nearest the library were dark, but those ten feet or farther away still flickered in their glass receptacles.

  Cale frowned at that. It meant there was definitely destructive magic at work.

  He paused at the entrance, straining to sense any intruder. He heard nothing unusual, but he smelled lamp oil. After an instant’s consideration, he set his own lamp on a hall table and plucked one of the functioning magic lights from its holder. Despite the orange flames within, the glass was cool to the touch.

  Cale slipped into the library, crouched low and balanced to change course in an instant. His lanky limbs moved as smoothly as river reeds in a breeze. Soon he discovered the source of the odor.

  Near Lord Thamalon’s writing desk, upon the fine carpet, a dark stain was still spreading from the ruins of another ordinary lamp. Beside the spill, a small table lay overturned, its contents scattered on the floor along with the painting Master Tamlin had sent his father. There was one other strange addition: a white length of exquisite Sembian lace.

  Lady Shamur’s evening shawl.

  Cale had never stopped listening for intruders, and he held his lamp high to spot further signs of a struggle. One of the fallen objects glittered in the dark.

  It was a gray crystal sphere slightly larger than his fist. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of points reflected the lamplight through the globe’s translucent body. Many of them glittered like silver filings, while others were luminous spots of color. At its center was a tiny dark sphere, its details invisible in the orange light.

  Cale wasn’t certain, but he thought he might have glimpsed the object among the astrological oddities his master had recently acquired. Still, there was something interesting about the sphere. Whatever it was, it probably wasn’t urgent or relevant to the immediate problem. He dropped it into the side pocket of his coat.

  He lifted Lady Shamur’s shawl from beneath the painting. Oil had stained its edge, but Cale was relieved to see no further mark of violence upon it. Cale set it on the desk and carefully lifted the painting. There was nothing else beneath it, and it seemed undamaged. He propped it against the side of the desk and crouched for a closer look.

  While Cale hadn’t enjoyed the privileged upbringing of the Uskevren, he considered himself educated and not entirely untouched by culture. Still, he couldn’t imagine anyone who could appreciate this unsettling landscape. The artist had skill and energy, but he must have been the very caricature of the tortured artist to produce a vision of such striking ugliness.

  Still, the work was oddly compelling. Cale found himself examining its vague details for some clue … about what, he couldn’t say. It was foolish to think the painting would reveal where his lord and lady had gone.

  Too late, Cale sensed the danger. It was the painting that had taken Shamur and Thamalon, and it was planting some obsession in his own mind. He tried to look away, but all he could manage was to turn his chin while his eyes remained locked to the image, which began to sway.

  He should have armed himself immediately upon hearing the first thunderbolt, he realized. Without his dagger in hand, he struck out at the painting with the continual flame lamp. The glass broke upon the picture frame, and Cale slashed at the canvas with the broken shards. A black line appeared on the painting, and for an instant Cale thought he’d broken its spell.

  Then lightning flashed for the third time that night in Stormweather Towers, and Cale fell helplessly out of the world.

  CHAPTER 5

  TRANSFORMATIONS

  Tamlin moaned as he awoke.

  “Bleeding dark blasted damned bloody, bloody, bloody!” he croaked. He was still in the disgusting cell, and he’d been much happier about his predicament while asleep.

  He’d been dreaming again, this time more pleasantly. He remembered squinting into the morning light reflected off a thousand burnished shields. He admired the deep red glow of his soldier’s armor from a high palanquin, where he reclined with three fragrant maidens veiled in gossamer-thin silks. A cool breeze thrilled his skin, lifting the fine hairs on his naked legs.

  In the waking world, his throat was rough and dry, and the memory of sipping cool nectar from an ivory cup did nothing to a
ssuage his thirst.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a wee little flask stashed somewhere, would you, Ratty?”

  The rat had crept outside the cage. Tamlin watched as the animal sniffed cautiously at the chalk circle before recoiling. Tamlin’s eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, or else the ring’s faint luminescence had increased. Either way, he could make out the edges of a few barrels on one side of the chamber, as well as the outlines of what might have been a garbage chute before it was boarded shut.

  The rat rose up on its hind legs, crouched, and leaped nimbly over the chalk line. Safely on the other side, the rodent scurried away.

  “Clever lad,” said Tamlin.

  He mused for a while on the rat’s powers of perception. Was the creature the familiar of his kidnapper? Was it a polymorphed incarnation of the mage himself?

  Or herself, Tamlin amended.

  Apart from the recently deceased Stormweather house mage, Brom Selwyn, the first three wizards Tamlin could name were all women: Helara, and the albino sisters, Ophelia and Magdon, of the Wizards’ Guild. Any of them might devise a spell—or in Magdon’s case, a magical gadget—that could free him from his prison for a price.

  Hiring a wizard was no small expense. On the other hand, kidnapping was cheap enough and often quite profitable.

  Tamlin had been kidnapped twice before. The first kidnappers lost their nerve while debating who would deliver the ransom demand to Stormweather Towers, leaving the teenaged Tamlin to be rescued a few hours later. The second group held out until the ransom arrived, then they released their captive. The villains enjoyed two nights and a day spending their coin before the Uskevren House Guard and a furious Vox caught up to them. Those who survived arrest were still rotting in the dungeons of Selgaunt’s prison.

  Neither of those groups had enjoyed the advantage of magic, and Tamlin imagined the expense would compound their ransom demand many times over. Despite his father’s great wealth, he feared the Old Owl would think twice before paying for Tamlin’s return, especially considering the terms on which they’d parted.

  “Mother will make him pay,” Tamlin reassured himself.

  Shamur Uskevren had always doted on her children, and where Thamalon deplored his indolence, his mother adored her firstborn’s easy charm and social grace. While she didn’t play favorites—not obviously, anyway—Tamlin was certain she’d always loved him best of her three children.

  Tamlin rose and immediately planted his elbow in a bowl of something lukewarm and wet. He tasted it on his fingers—a bland gruel bolstered with chunks of salt pork—and realized why the rodent had fled upon his waking.

  Tamlin hesitated only briefly to weigh hunger against his disdain for peasant fare. Worse still, Tamlin hated to eat anything Escevar hadn’t tasted for him. It was a habit born as much from superstition as from fear of poison. He’d read somewhere that wizards often cast spells on the food of their enemies.

  “To the hells with it.”

  Tamlin spooned up the glob with two fingers. The stuff didn’t taste as bad as he’d feared, but Tamlin cringed to imagine how he must look in his miserable cell with his fine clothes soiled, slurping from a bowl like some beggar. If the six dozen young women vying for his attentions in the spring socials could see him in such a state, they might prefer to marry a Baerent, a Foxmantle, or—gods help them—even a Toemalar.

  Tamlin thought of the rat’s whiskered snout rooting around in the food before him. While that wasn’t enough to quell his famished stomach, it did give him an idea.

  “Psst, Ratty,” he hissed, scraping the bottom of the bowl against the stone floor.

  He clicked his tongue as he used to do to summon his gyrfalcon, Honeylass. The beautiful creature had perished almost a year earlier in yet another attack on the Uskevren family.

  Like Honeylass, the rat seemed more perceptive than the rest of his kind. Unlike the loyal bird, though, the rat had not been trained to trust a human master. It remained warily outside the magic circle.

  Tamlin set the remains of his meal aside. If he could lure the rat back to the cage, he thought he might be able to tie a note to the creature. Assuming he emerged to scavenge on the streets at night, perhaps a passerby might spot the message and take it to Stormweather—

  “What am I thinking?”

  The absurdity of his plan struck Tamlin like a splash of cold water. Even if he could manage to capture the suspicious rodent, somehow manufacture writing materials, and tie a message to the squirming beast, the thought that someone would actually find it was—

  “Preposterous,” he muttered.

  He shook his head in despair. Moments later, he brightened under a variation of his wretched plan. If he could attach a bit of the meat from his gruel to a string, then toss it across the magic circle, maybe he could erase a span and break the spell.

  He tried tearing a strip of fabric from his blouse, but it was tougher than it appeared.

  “I shall have to thank my tailor,” he sneered. “If I ever get out of here.”

  He plucked the fertility fetish from his collar, hoping it could serve as a crude knife. Unfortunately, one glance at the ornament confirmed what he had feared. It was as dull as a spoon.

  If it would not serve as a cutting edge, then perhaps the pin could become a lockpick. The silver charm consisted of a pair of blunt arrows—or what Tamlin called arrows when his more respectable acquaintances inquired. He carefully bent them apart, leaving them attached at the base and straightening them to form a more slender and fragile length of silver.

  He felt outside the cage for a keyhole, then grinned when he discovered he could insert his little finger almost to the first knuckle into the opening.

  “This will be easy.”

  Probing the lock was indeed no great challenge, but Tamlin soon discovered four different places where his makeshift pick could move some mechanism inside the lock. The problem was in moving more than one at a time.

  Briefly he wished his sister were present. Since childhood, Tazi had had a talent for escaping her bedroom despite the vigilance of the staff. Tamlin had always been jealous of her ability to scale a seemingly sheer garden wall or to tease open a drawing room lock with a few hairpins.

  Within a few years, Tazi gained notoriety among the household for her “wildings,” nights on which she would escape the confines of Stormweather Towers for the dangerous freedom of the Oxblood Quarter or the docks. In the beginning, Tamlin would try to follow her with Vox and Escevar in tow. Even then, it didn’t take Tazi long to shake her hecklers, and it had been years since they could follow her trail.

  When Shamur Uskevren revealed her own secret past as a daring burglar, the rest of the family nodded and sighed, as if heredity explained it all. What it didn’t explain was Tazi’s sudden disappearance months earlier. At first frantic, Shamur and Thamalon calmed themselves after Songmaster Ammhaddan assured them that their daughter remained alive and free, if beyond their protection. Thamalon had wanted to launch an expedition to recover his wayward child—and Tamlin had hoped for command of the venture—before a long, private discussion between husband and wife concluded that Tazi would return on her own, when and if she willed.

  Tamlin felt another pang of jealousy at his sister’s freedom. If only he’d been similarly bold and had struck out on his own, he wouldn’t be in his predicament.

  He worked at the lock for what felt like an hour. Even on such a dull tool, he somehow managed to prick a thumb and two fingers, and his neck throbbed painfully. His cage door remained smugly fast.

  Tamlin sighed heavily. He was too tired to muster a good curse. Instead, he lay back on the floor for a rest. Soon his eyes fluttered, and he teetered on the edge of sleep before a faint clicking arrested his attention.

  The rat was creeping toward his cage again.

  Tamlin feigned sleep. He had so much practice, he felt it was a special knack of his to keep his breathing slow and steady until a pesky servant finally gave up waking the youn
g noble and left him dozing in his great bed. Tamlin hoped the rat wasn’t much harder to trick.

  When he heard the porridge bowl rock under the rat’s weight, Tamlin rolled quickly over both rodent and dish. The rat wriggled and squealed, but Tamlin held it to the floor with his body while he snaked his hands under his chest to get a grip on some toothless and clawless region of the creature’s body. Soon he had one hand firmly around the rat’s throat and upper paws, while its lower claws made bloody stripes on his wrist.

  “Loviatar’s kisses!” hissed Tamlin.

  Evoking the goddess of agonies made Tamlin wonder just how cruel his captors might be. He’d never understood the masochists who surrendered themselves to the Mistress of Pain, but those who inflicted her tortures on the unwilling seemed monstrous and unknowable.

  He held the rat to the floor to keep it from attacking him. Though he had the thing, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. He looked at the bowl and considered using it as a rat-sized version of his own prison. The rat might not even mind, if there was enough food left inside.

  Before Tamlin decided, old iron hinges creaked, and the heavy door to the dark room opened. A pair of guards in shabby black tabards stood outside. Bits of thread curled at the outlines of emblems that had been torn from their breasts. One of them held a torch whose flame snapped like a flag. The breeze that shook the fire brought a sewer stench into the already noisome chamber.

  A tall man in a long green cape swept past the guards, then gestured to them to shut the door. When they obeyed, the man unsheathed a brightly glowing glass wand.

  Tamlin didn’t recognize the man, but immediately knew he was a noble. He had the bearing of one who is accustomed to respect without asking for it. His golden-brown hair fell in ringlets to the shoulders of his fine linen cape, which was clasped with twin bronze raven medallions—a common icon among Selgaunt’s merchants. Beneath the cape he wore a white linen doublet without ensign. The man’s high boots and woolen hose were fashionable but not distinctive.