by Gabi Moore
The other thing he wanted to ask her about was….
“You uncle is upstairs too,” the woman told him, as she looked back. He red lips contrasted with the rest of her appearance and Dion noted she had red eyes to match. Who had red eyes unless they were bloodshot? In this woman’s case, the entire cornea was red. Was she even human?
“I expected to meet my uncle on this side,” Dion remarked, “just not as quick.”
“He informed us about your arrival,” She told him. “Your uncle is an interesting man, to say the least. He seems to think his birthright was stolen from him. He also felt he could manipulate the abyss to do what he wanted. But now he’s opened a gate to it and we have to deal with the consequences. You’ll learn more when we get the great hall.”
He exited the stairwell into a smaller room. Dion looked up to see the light of the lantern vanish into the open space and realized the small room was divided by a series of partitions. The tower solved the problem of privacy by creating dividers inside each level, but this one lacked a ceiling for some reason. He stopped and let the water flow off him. Kiley opened a small cupboard door and took out some dry clothes.
“Here you go,” she said. “There’s a towel with them too. On the floor, you will find a basket. Drop your wet things into the basket. The maids will take care of them later. Put on what you find in the bundle.”
Dion took the clothes from her.
She handed him a pair of boots. “These should fit you. I’ll be outside with everyone else. When you are ready, come and see us. There are a number of people out there who want to meet you.” She opened the door on the other side of the partition and left him with his clothes.
Dion removed his dripping clothes and dropped them in the basket next to the door. After drying himself off with the towel, he unfolded the clothes she gave him. It consisted of a tunic and pair of loose hose. Since he didn’t want to violate her hospitality, Dion went ahead and put them on, followed by the boots. This was a little bit difficult since there weren’t any chairs in the vestibule. Comfort was not a big item to whoever lived in the tower. And he didn’t even know if it had a name or did they just call it “The Tower”?
He left the vestibule and shut the door behind him. Dion found himself in a large hall, which was, once again, two levels in height. Whoever built the tower wanted it to impress everyone. At one end of the hall was a large fireplace with a stack of wood, which burned and produced enough heat for the entire hall. In front of it was a long table where a group of people was seated. They turned to him when he approached.
It was that moment he recognized his parents.
Chapter 5
Dion’s mother jumped up from the table and ran to him. She wasn’t his height, but his mother could still toss her arms around him. Dion was relieved, as he now knew both of his parents were safe, something which concerned him for the past year. His father stood up and walked over to Dion too, placing his arms around both Dion and his mother.
The other person he noted at the table was his Uncle Seth. His uncle sat closer to the fire, near the three women at the head of the table. As Dion expected, he didn’t look too happy to see him. It was obvious his uncle was not in charge in this place. If anyone was in control of this tower, it had to be the three women on the other end of the table.
One of whom was the same woman that greeted him when he entered the tower.
“I was worried we’d never see you again,” his mother wept on his shoulder. “I knew you’d find us, I always knew you would make it here. Your father worried it was too much responsibility, but I knew you’d come for us.” She continued to sob.
His father removed his arms and stepped back. “As you can see,” he announced to Dion, “We are guests of the ladies who own this tower. As is your Uncle Seth.” He glared at his brother.
Dion was happy to be reunited with his parents, but he needed to know something. When he last confronted his uncle outside the shopping mall, his uncle made a claim that needed to be resolved. This might not be the best time or place to ask such questions, but he had to know for sure.
“I’m glad to see both of you too,” he told them. “But there is something I need to know.” His mother released him and stood back.
“What is so important you need to hear it from us before we get out of this place?” she asked.
Dion looked up at the great hall and thought for a few minutes. He had to word his question with care or he’d never know the truth. And he needed to know, or it would affect his ability to get them all back home. He could see a small window near him and watched the lighting illuminate the sky once again. The storm raged in the distance. He was grateful he’d found his way to the tower before it got this bad.
While the thunder boomed outside, Dion looked the great hall over. He could see several small rooms and partitions that were built into the far end of the wall. Metal pipes ran down into the rooms, which confirmed what he thought. The tower had its own plumbing system and it was protected by the walls. This had to be a recent innovation. Indoor plumbing would not be big concern to a war tower.
Banners hung down from inside the walls. The entire hall was illuminated by lamps and candles. He couldn’t see any electrical devices inside, which seemed to indicate the tower didn’t have electricity. He wondered if this particular time circle used electrical power or did the tower lack it? Surely, wiring the entire tower for power would be expensive, but so would any construction work need to make it into an estate and not a military emplacement.
“I want to know if you are my real parents,” he asked his mother and father. “Uncle Seth claimed you aren’t. I don’t expect much in the way of truth from him, but I need to know.”
His mother appeared shocked, but the look on her face told him a lot, as she lowered he head. His father put his arm protectively against the shoulders of his wife and looked at their son.
“We’re you foster parents, Dion,” he told him. “We planned to tell you when you were much older, but I see my brother has forced this issue.”
“I hate to interrupt this moment,” Seth Bach spoke from the table near the fireplace, “But we have to talk about something. In particular, the reason we are all in this place. You’ve just had your tearful family reunion and I sympathize with what you had to go through to be here, Dion.”
“In spite of the fact that it’s because of you I’m here,” Dion snapped from across the room. “You did your best to keep me from reaching the elemental grandmasters that just happened to be working in the shopping mall you owned. You had my parents abducted over a year ago and paid to have my friends snatched away too. You’ve threatened me with all kinds of things and tried to keep me away from fulfilling my quest. Now, what on earth could you have to say?”
“I think he’s a little bit angry, don’t you?” It was one of the women at the other end of the table, close to the fireplace. “Why don’t you come and sit at the table Dion. Dinner is almost ready and I’m told you like beef stew. The cooks are serving it tonight. I’m sure you’ll like their recipe.”
“Let’s go sit down,” his father said to him. Dion still thought of the two people who raised him as his real parents, even though they’d confessed to being his foster parents. Dion followed them to the table where they seated themselves between his uncle and the three women on the end.
“So what did you want to talk about?” Dion said to his uncle. “I don’t have the slightest idea where I am. I went through a door into your clock tower in the middle of the mall and emerged in two different rooms. The last one ended up across the fields. Where is this place?”
“Outside the time circle you remember,” his uncle Seth replied. “I expect you understand this after what you had to endure. Sorry about all the trouble I had to put you through to get you to the tower, but it was the only way I could accomplish it. I knew if your parents were gone, you’d do anything to get them back, including obtaining full elemental powers from the grandmasters. No, they weren�
��t in on my little ruse. I really didn’t think you would pull it off, but you impressed me. And now you are here to obtain the Aether Grandmaster’s accolade, but she is nowhere to be found.”
“She supposed to be back,” said one of the women at the other end of the table.
“Why did you allow her to leave?” one of the other women asked her.
“Wasn’t my place to stop her.”
Dion looked at the two women who sat next to Kiley Mahen. It took him a few minutes to realize it, but they were related. The same body types and facial structures. All were as dark as Kiley, but they were of different ages. The one who sat next to her wore the same kind of gown, but it was golden yellow. The woman to her right was dressed the same too, but she wore green.
Although Kiley appeared to be in her thirties, the women in yellow looked in her late twenties, with the remaining women in her early twenties, perhaps just eighteen. All of them possessed the intense dark complexion and red eyes. If they were the same age, the women would’ve passed for triplets.
Dion tensed as another clap of thunder boomed outside the tower.
“Don’t worry about it,” the women in yellow said to him. “Lightning rods protect this place. We’ve put them all over the tower.”
“Forgive our lack of manners,” Kiley said to him. “These are my sisters, as you probably can tell.”
“There is a slight resemblance…” Dion began to say.
“The lady next to me is my younger sister Loris,” Kiley told him. “The one in green next to her is my youngest sister, Susan. We own this tower.”
“Lease it from the kingdom, actually,” said the one called Loris. “The kingdom owns it.”
“We have a thirteen hundred year lease on the tower and the property,” Susan explained. “Yes, the kingdom does technically own it, but our family has been here the past hundred years, ever since the tower was decommissioned. So long as the court gets their money, no one cares what we do here.”
“That is all about to change,” Seth Bach said, as he placed a glass of wine down on the table. “When your illustrious sovereign finds out who’s taken the tower, I dare say she’ll have it pulverized.”
“We have them under control!” Kiley snapped at him. “And they wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t showed up with your schemes.”
“You didn’t mind the funds when I gave them to you,” he sneered. “A little short on the monthly payments to the capitol? It’s hard to make those transactions when the local farmers have packed-up and left. No farmer to soak for taxes means no cash for the tower.”
“It was a temporary condition,” Susan spoke up. “But you convinced us to allow you to establish the abyss link and now we’re stuck with what’s in the top of the tower.”
“Stuck with what?” Dion said. “You haven’t made any sense so far.”
“Queen Lilith and her Azuroth hordes,” Kiley explained. “They control the top two levels of the tower.”
“And they’re about to burst through to the one below that,” Seth told him. “The abyss experiment was supposed to ground the mall’s clock tower in this time circle and provide me an unlimited source of electrical power for the mall. If I could’ve taken the mall off the power grid, it would show the way to provide cheap electrical power for the rest of the country.”
“Which,” Dion’s father pointed out, “you would have provided cost-free to everyone.”
“Nothing is cost-free,” Seth Back snapped back. “Of course I expected to get something out of it. Do you think John D. Rockefeller gave away the oil from his wells? At least America would no longer have to worry about foreign oil.”
“One set of infernal deals for another,” Dion’s father grumbled.
“It didn’t work out so well,” Dion’s mother told him. “Your uncle let in a horde of creatures from the abyss to this place before he closed the gate. He can’t send them back and they don’t want to return.”
“Queen Lilith and her minions,” Seth grumbled as he took another sip. “She controls the top levels right now. My development laboratory was up there and she came through with her bad boys the first time the gate lifted. We had to retreat lower and barricade the stairs. This all happened three months ago, I don’t see any further reason to discuss it further now that Dion knows about it.”
“We had every precaution taken!” Seth Bach continued. “There wasn’t a single safety factor we ignored. I had the instruments charged, the right protection in place and opened the gate to the generators. They were waiting on the other side. Someone tipped her off and she blew through with her minions the moment we began to pull power from the differential between the two universes. She destroyed every bit of equipment we had in place when they all charged through the opening.”
“We know about it,” Kiley Mahen replied, as she lifted a goblet to her mouth. “The noise was horrible. It woke up everyone.”
“We had to send all our household guards up there with Seth’s men to keep them from taking over the entire tower,” Loris grumbled. “And we can’t get rid of them.”
“The gate closed when they destroyed the equipment,” Seth explained. “I have no way to send them back.”
“I still say we should have contacted the sovereign,” Susan sniped. “When she finds out we opened a gate to the abyss, she’ll send the army down here and they’ll blow the entire tower up.”
“And we could kiss good-bye our lease and property,” Kiley returned. “Seth seems to think his nephew can succeed where he’s failed.”
“How am I supposed to bring this thing to an end?” Dion asked them. “Besides, I’m strictly here to get my parents and the aether grandmaster back home.”
“You can’t do that unless I open the door back to our time circle,” his uncle explained. “You have four elemental powers and will soon have the fifth when the grandmaster returns. Then you will be strong enough to open the gate and send them back.”
“I thought you had full power over the aether, dear uncle,” Dion sneered. “Why can’t you use it to send them back?”
“Because it takes all five powers,” he reasoned. “Don’t they teach you young elemental workers anything? Abyss creatures only respond to a combination of all five. When our grandmaster returns, you’ll have them all.”
Dion sighed. “Does this tower have a name?” he asked. “Or is it the only tower around?”
“Peace,” Kiley Mahen told him from her side of the table. “Its official name is the Tower of Eternal Peace. But the locals call it Peace Tower.”
Seth Bach stood up from the table. “Come on, Dion, you might as well see what we have to deal with in this place. I refuse to apologize for my actions because everyone sitting here would be wealthy beyond their dreams if it had worked out. I took a chance and it failed. Now I’ve had to do some bad things to fix it. Discussion over. Let’s go, the elevator will take us most of the way up. Trust me; you don’t want to walk all the way to the top of this tower. Its twenty-two stories high. The elevator can take us most of the distance. We take the elevator after you’ve seen the kitchen. You might as well get to see more of the tower”
Dion stood up, gave his mother one more hug and left with his uncle.
Just before he departed, Dion turned to the Mahen sisters at the table and asked them something on his mind. “Did you say your problems started three years ago?” he asked. “My uncle kidnapped my parents over a year ago.”
“Different time circles,” Susan Mahen told him. “The passage of time is different where you come from.”
“Does that mean years will have passed when I return to my time?”
“No,” Loris cut-in, “The door you used can be recalibrated to take you back to the moment you left, or at least a few seconds beyond it.”
Dion nodded and followed his uncle upstairs.
Chapter 6
They stepped out of the stairwell into a huge kitchen, which took up one entire level. The kitchen area was designed as a combination mess
hall, pantry and cooking area. Dion could see four or five cooks working away at the end of a table and using a stove that vented to the outside. A small fire provided heat from one end of the room. He could only speculate how cold this place became during the winter months.
“Next stairwell is over there,” he pointed to another door. “The stair system doesn’t connect. It was built that way in case the defenders needed to retreat to the top of the tower.”
Dion followed him to the next stairwell, but stopped when he saw an open door between both passages. He turned and looked at his uncle with confusion. He doubted the builders of the tower had cut closets or rooms into the walls since that would have weakened them.
“Elevator shaft,” he explained to him. “One of the few designs in this castle which turned out to anticipate the future. It still works because the counterbalance and pulley system is internal. Thank our lucky stars the maintenance crew finished working on it last month because we sure need it today.”
Dion followed her into the next stairwell. This one took less time to ascend as the kitchen was built on a single level and not as large as the ground floor warehouse.
The elevator shaft was built into the inside of the tower, much in the manner of the plumbing. It wasn’t very big and could only hold four people at most. Dion expected some heavy freight elevator, such as the ones found in industrial plants where he originated, but this one was much smaller.
His uncle went to a small tube attached to the wall and blew a whistle, attached to the tube into it. “Murphy here,” came the muffled voice from the tube.
“I’m in the great hall, Murphy,” Dion’s uncle said to the person on the other end of the tube. “We need to go up to the top. I’ve got my nephew with me and he needs to see what we have to contend with.”
“Okay, “the voice replied. “You’ll go all the way up to the nursey. Did you tell him you’ll have to walk up to the next level beyond it?”
