by Gabi Moore
“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?”
“He knows now. Give us thirty seconds.”
They stepped into the elevator and waited. Dion noted again there was no door on the lift.
“They never saw the reason for an elevator door in this place,” Dion’s uncle explained. “Something to do with the family who leased the tower not wanting to be surprised. They put the elevator shaft in place, in case you wanted to know.”
The elevator began to move up and Dion saw the great hall disappear as they ascended up the shaft. Another room appeared with the next opening, but they continued to travel upwards. It was quite different from being in an elevator from where he came. Dion never liked elevators; he hated the sense of isolation they gave him. It was a discomfort being inside one. It gave him the eerie sensation he was trapped. In this case, it was different; a person could jump off the elevator and reach the floor while it still moved.
“So how did you find this place?” Dion asked his uncle. He continued to watch the floors fall away beneath him.
“The tower?” his uncle asked Dion. “It’s been here a long time. Some people claim it goes back to the third empire of….”
“No, this entire world. How did you locate this particular time circle?”
“Can’t give away all my secrets, Dion. If I did, how could I earn any money at all?”
The rest of the trip to the top was very quiet
.
The elevator came to a rest in a small vestibule, which blocked the view of its floor. Dion noted most of the tower levels had partitions, which made it difficult to see inside them. He speculated the family who remodeled the original military installation wanted to have some privacy against whoever used the lift. Keeping the service door of the elevator open alerted everyone to their presence. The partitions didn’t allow the elevator occupants to see what was happening on the other side.
“Level nineteen,” his uncle announced. “The nursey. Here is where we get off.” Seth Bach stepped out of the elevator.
“I haven’t tried to summon any elementals in this place,” Dion said to his uncle. “I don’t feel their presence here. Do our elemental manipulation abilities work in this place at all? If they don’t, why did you bring me?”
“You can summon elementals from your time circle,” his uncle explained, “but I wouldn’t do it unless you need to do so. There are limits to what you can do. It takes a long time for the energy level to reestablish itself every time you bring one of them over. So once you summon the earth elementals, for instance, you won’t be able to do it again for months. You can call the air or any other elementals right away, but the same limitations apply. You’ll need all of them, once the grandmaster returns, to take care of the problems we have. Ah, there is the stairwell upstairs and you’ll get a firsthand look.”
His uncle strolled past a shelf full of toys and went into the passage. Dion was directly behind him as he climbed the stairs. Dion glanced back at the nursery and noticed everything was covered with a layer of dust.
“Haven’t been any births around here in years,” he explained. “Those sisters are the last ones and they don’t seem interested in breeding. Guess the kingdom will take this place back once they’re gone. Too bad, it would make a nice mansion for the right people.”
Dion looked down. The tunic they’d given him felt a little bit strange. Perhaps the servants would have his clothes dry by the time they returned to the great hall.
All hell was breaking loose when they walked into the level above them, which Dion learned was dedicated to storage. They walked into a group of men who were desperately trying to reinforce the door on the other end of the room. Four of them held it tight while the rest hammered some more boards in place. From the other side, the sounds of growling and screeches could be heard. The door vibrated from whatever pushed against it.
One of the men turned around and Dion noticed the face of one of a security guard fired by his uncle. He was one of the ones replaced by the fire elementals back in the mall yesterday. It appeared they had a new job in a similar line of work. Plaster shook from the walls as something slammed against the other side of the door.
“Mr. Bach,” the man shouted. “We have a problem here. They started to pound this door an hour ago. I don’t know what started it. Oh, hello, Dion, what are you doing here?”
“An hour ago?” his uncle stated. “Right when my nephew arrived. Funny how they can find out these things. Oh, well. Do you have all the important things moved down to the ground level?”
“We salvaged what we could,” another man said to him. “I think we should reconsider holding this level.” The door slammed forward another inch.” Dion noticed twenty men in the other side of the room, which was almost bare of any items.
“Then have everyone retreat to the nursey and block the door down to it. I don’t want to go back further because they’ll have access to the elevator shaft.”
“Those beasts are too stupid to know how to use it,” one of the other men holding the door yelled.
“Inform me if there are any new developments,” his uncle told the man. “We’re going back down to the great hall.” There was another heavy slam from the other side of the door and one of the men was tossed to the ground from the impact.
“I don’t like a fall back,” his uncle explained to Dion. “Don’t know what else we can do. They can’t go anywhere but down. As long as we hold them off until the grandmaster returns, we’ll be okay. She left to get something she needed to send them back to the abyss.”
“What happens if she can’t send them back?” Dion asked his uncle.
“Then we lose the tower and make for the gate that took you into this time circle. I don’t want to make a run for it in this weather, but better the storm than those fiends on the other side of that door.”
His uncle seemed to be afraid of what lay on the other side, so Dion didn’t ask any more questions about them. He didn’t say anything else until they were half-way down to the great hall in the lift.
“How long have those former mall guards been keeping the tower safe from what was up in the tower?” Dion asked his uncle.
“About two months,” his uncle replied. “After the first month, the Mahen sisters’ couldn’t field any more tower guards to contain them and everything I tried to send those them back didn’t work. Since I needed to get rid of those guards at the mall, I made them an offer to transfer somewhere else at a better pay rate. I tried to locate Karanzen, their former post lieutenant, but he was gone.”
“Two months? I was at the mall yesterday when they were let go! What are you talking about?”
“Time runs different in this circle,” his uncle explained. “Don’t worry about the return; I can put us all back two seconds after you left.”
This was the second time he’d heard about the time discrepancy. Was it even true?
The elevator stopped at the bottom of the great hall. Dion and his uncle stepped out of the open door and returned to the long table next to the fireplace. The same group of people was still sitting next to the fire. As Dion sat down next to his parents, he noticed a pair of serving women place bowels down. Dion made a point to thank the lady who set his service out in front of him.
“So did you have any further trouble in the tower?” Kiley Mahen asked Dion’s uncle. “You weren’t up there very long.”
“They’re about to break through,” he told her. “I ordered the guards to abandon the warehouse and work on the next barricade to the level instead. Most of the important materials were transferred down to the warehouse, so that is no concern.
“If they could break through to the nursey,” Susan Mahen spoke, “and then they could get to the next level.”
“And so on,” commented her sister Loris. All three sisters shook their heads.
“Sometimes I wish I wasn’t born the oldest,” Kiley spoke. “It’s my duty to see this tower is preserved. Without the tower, we won’t have a purpose as a family.”
“With no heirs,” Dion’s mother pointed out, “you won’t have much of any future.”
“We’ve been over this before,” Susan grumbled to her. “All of us have to be married at the same time or there will be arguments over the succession lines. We’re young enough. Once we get this matter resolved with Queen Lilith and her horde, we’ll return to finding suitable matches.”
The window to their right lit with another lighting strike, but they ignored it. “You needed my brother’s schemes to increase your endowment,” Dion’s father mentioned to them. “Right now your fortune is in decline. What happens when your money runs out?”
One of the sisters was about to say something when they heard footsteps approach the table from the stairs. Dion turned and saw a small man carrying a lantern in one hand walk to the table and bow. He looked up and spoke in a soft, muffled voice that was still loud enough to hear.
“Excuse me, ladies,” he said to the sisters. “It appears you have some unexpected guests.”
Chapter 7
“Please let us know the nature of these guests,” Kiley said to him. She leaned back in her chair, but Dion noticed she never took her eyes away from the newcomer, nor did he look away from her.
“A bus has broken down outside in the storm. “There are ten members of a women amateur writing club on their way to Shedreck. They are down stairs removing their rain cloaks. Shall I have them come upst
airs?”
“Ten women?” Loris said to her sisters. “This is unexpected. What in the world is a tourist bus doing around these parts? We hardly ever get any traffic through here.”
“Writers,” Susan rolled her eyes. “Tell them to come up here and join us. Also, have the cooks bring some more bowels. I’m sure they’re hungry. They always are.”
The man bowed low again and walked back down the stairs. Dion noted he didn’t turn his back on the sisters until he reached the stairwell.
“That was Rudy,” Kiley explained to him. “He’s been a retainer with our family before any of us were born. He almost raised us. Mother and Father were gone on business much of the time and he became the only parental figure we knew.”
“He is deaf, in case you didn’t notice,” Susan, the youngest sister, spoke. She adjusted her green gown and continued to eat the stew.
“You have to make sure he is looking directly at you,” Loris added. “Elsewise he can’t understand what you say. Rudy reads lips, but can’t hear a thing.”
“Was he born deaf?” Dion asked her.
“No, his hearing was normal until he was eight. He came down with a fever that lasted for weeks. He survived it, but lost his hearing as a result. This all happened before any of us were born.”
“Where are we going to place all these women?” Susan asked her sisters. “We have those creatures on the top level tying to work their way down and now a whole group of women who will need care.”
“Send one of the mechanics out in the morning and have them look at the bus,” Kiley recommended. “That man Giles can do miracles with his tools. Maybe he’ll know how to fix a bus.”
“Do you have any motor vehicles here?” Dion asked them.
“Of course not!” Kiley snapped at him, her red lips quivering.
“Not on your life,” Susan added.
“Disgusting things,” Loris chimed in. “See, even the one they used broke down. A team of horses wouldn’t break down if you treat them right.”
