by Gabi Moore
“Correct,” she acknowledged. “I seem to recall your name as Dion?”
“Also correct. It seems there is big discussion taking place.” He was about to say something else when a clap of thunder drowned him out.
“We’re trying to figure out which book had the most sales last year,” she explained to him. “Some of us think it’s Bobbin Herrod’s The Wastoids, but I think it’s James St. Susan’s Mountain of the Soldiers. Have you read either one?”
“Sorry,” Dion apologized. “I haven’t had much of a chance to read this past year. I was forced to move in with relatives and spent most of the year adjusting. What line of work are you in?”
“I teach women how to defend themselves,” she explained. “With all the crime these days, it’s important they learn how to do it. I’m certified in three styles and am working on another one. You ever do martial arts?”
“Not yet. It is something I’ve wanted to try for a long time.”
“You should give it the opportunity. Plenty of good schools around and no shortage of qualified instructors. I spent last weekend watching four people learn how to grapple on the ground. You can never tell how those kinds of things will turn out. I was surprised to see the one woman in the group come out on top of them all.”
“So have you written anything yourself?” Dion asked her. He needed to make small talk and get some angle on this woman. She didn’t seem to be what he’d assumed on the first meeting.
“Just some poetry,” she told him. “I don’t give readings very well. I need to work on my delivery and my rhyme scheme. Do you fancy any modern poets?”
“I don’t know enough of them to make a difference,” Dion told her, which was true. He was clueless as the art and literary accomplishments of this time circle. All he could see was the tower, which was impressive enough.
As Dion turned and looked at the women who congregated at the far end of the hall, he began to wonder about them. It was very convenient they showed when they did. They claimed to be tourists on a holiday when their bus broke down in an area plagued by thunderstorms for months. Somehow, their bus managed to miss the Azuroth encampment just outside of the tower. It was too dark and difficult to see anything in this storm beyond the moat, so the bus was not visible. Granted he could summon another one of his two elemental forces that yet remained, but this would be a waste of his resources.
He watched them interact with each other and realized he didn’t know much about this group. As a matter of fact, neither did anyone else in the tower. From what he could tell, the tower and its inhabitants were isolated from the rest of the kingdom and didn’t know much of what happened in the world outside it. How they managed to survive as long as they had was a mystery to him, but there was the mention of tenant farmers who used to live in the valley and the lands around the tower. The tower was of no military value or it wouldn’t have been leased a hundred years ago to the Mahen family.
Did this group of women figure into the plan his uncle had for using the energy from the abyss? His uncle wanted to enrich himself and expand his power base back in his world. Dion looked at them and watched the women continued to talk to each other in the same idyll fashion they’d used since entering the tower. Even Bernice, the one with a military background, didn’t seem too worried over what lay outside the moat or over them.
Still, there was the problem of their arrival. Way too much of a coincidence from Dion’s point of view. He was certain there was a connection to them and the events it the tower. However, he had no way to prove any of it. Right now, it was merely a sensation, but Dion learned a long time ago to trust those.
If they were connected to the assault on the tower, then what was the connection? Dion hadn’t arrived early enough to meet the elemental grandmaster, so he didn’t have a means to judge any link between the women and her. There were ten women in this group, he knew. Ten was a powerful number. Many divine beings came in a series of ten. There were all kinds of decimals in the universe. Elementals came in a series of four, so no connection in that aspect. He watched five women in the far end of the hall talk to each other. He had a difficult time believing they were connected to the attack on the tower. Sometime there were coincidences in the universe. Perhaps now was such a time.
Chapter 15
Dion walked back to the table and seated himself between his parents and the three women at the head of the table. His uncle was still across from them and the fire blazed high at the end of the hall. It was a little hard to see how the fire provided warmth for the hall. It wasn’t too cold outside, but that fire couldn’t possibly supply the heat for the rest of the tower. He didn’t know how the seasons worked in this world, but if they were anything like the ones back home, it meant this place would endure freezing weather three months out of the year. Did each level of the tower have its own fireplace? Perhaps they shut down most of the tower during the colder months. The place was drafty enough and Dion could only imagine what it was like when the inhabitants were all military.
The height of the tower made it an excellent watch on anything coming down the mountain pass. By the time any force penetrated into this side of the pass, the tower could see it and launch their own forces. Even if the advance wasn’t halted, they could send a messenger to the nearest castle or fortress to let them know the enemy was on the march. Plus, the pass was narrow enough that it wouldn’t take too many armored men to halt the advance and plug up the gap.
As he watched one of the tower servants turn the wood and stoke the fire, Dion saw another man in tower livery walk up to Kiley Mahen and hand her a written note. She read it over and tossed the paper in the fire in disgust. Curious as to what it was about, Dion paid close attention to what happened next.
“Tell them to make ready and let us know if anything changes,” she told the man. “I’m going to station someone at the speaker tube. We don’t need it for the elevator since it’s grounded at the bottom of the shaft.”
“What was that about?” Loris asked her sister. Even Susan Mahen took an interest in the note.
“The Azuroth have begun to pound on the door again,” she told them, while the flames leaped higher not three feet from them. “Dion’s elementals sealed it better than any of our people could have done, but they’ll get through eventually.”
“Do we need to have the servants bring out our body armor?” Susan asked her older sister. “It’s downstairs in the warehouse. I had it taken down there when this whole mess began.”
“Not yet,” Kiley responded. “We wait until they’ve begun a concerted move down to the main level before we go that route. I want to avoid bloodshed as much as possible. According to the accounts I heard from the guards, Dion’s elementals proved those creatures will flee if shown some pain.”
“So long as we are the ones who administer the pain,” Loris reminded her. “I don’t want to be on the receiving end of it.”
“We all know what to do if this situation gets out of control,” Kiley reminded her.
“Run to the hills?” Susan asked. “Can we make this gate in the rocks that Dion and his uncle claim to have used? There is no guarantee is it will work for us.”
“I’m not talking about the three of us,” Kiley snapped back. “Our people in this tower can make a run for the gate. You know it’s not an option for us. I refer to the prophecy.”
“Oh, there she goes again with the prophecy,” Loris sighed, as she leaned back in her chair. The glass she held made a loud clunk as it hit the table. “We’ve all heard it since the day we were born. Do you think it will apply in this situation?”
“I didn’t think so at first,” Kiley spoke. “But the more I think about it, the more I am convinced it will. Too many coincidences to think otherwise. When the fifth element grandmaster showed, I knew there had to be a connection.”
“I never saw her do much with her supposed abilities,” Loris said. “If she was so all-powerful, why didn’t she get rid of those things when they entered the
tower?”
“She tried,” Kiley pointed out. “It was because of her that we didn’t have things become much worse. Do you not recall she stopped them from leaving the top levels? She summoned those dwellers from the threshold. Queen Lilith and her thugs went into full retreat.”
“Why didn’t she get rid of them at that moment?” Susan demanded. “Like I said, if she is so awesome, why are they still there? Couldn’t she use that thing she summoned to send them back to the abyss?”
“All I know is that she claimed they had too much combined power in this world to open the gate and return them without letting anymore of them inside. I was impressed enough by the stories everyone told me as to how she stopped them in the first place. Plus, she didn’t want the Threshold Dweller to stay around very long. Some of the maids still have nightmares over what they saw when she summoned it.”
“I wish she would get back soon,” Loris stated. “We could use her help. Those things stayed at the top of the tower until this evening for some reason.”
“Something she needed to find,” Kiley pointed out. “I didn’t get a straight answer from her about what it was. But there was something she needed we didn’t have that would get rid of Queen Lilith.”
“I hope she brings it back," Susan gave her opinion. “Because I am tired of living under siege in our own home. Several times I’ve been ready to take a pike up there and end our problems the quick way.”
“I don’t think you’d get very far,” Kiley pointed out. “There are quite a few of them up there.”
“So how long do you think this siege will last?” a voice said to his left. Dion turned to see one of the bus women he hadn’t spoken with sitting next to him. She was a tiny woman, not much taller than five feet with a pair of horn-rim glasses. She spoke in a soft voice, which was hard to hear due to the continuous conversation in the back of the hall.
“Mary Tangent,” she said, while offering her hand. “I was bored listening to all the talk about which writer was better than another, so I came over here.”
“Dion,” he introduced himself again after accepting her hand. These introductions were routine.
“I teach math,” she told him. “At the academy in Ynos. It doesn’t pay the best, but I like my work, so there is that. Symbolic logic is a hobby of mine.”
“If P, then Q?” Dion asked her with a smirk on his face. The fire began to die down so one of the servants worked to keep it burning.
“It begins with that,” she laughed at him. “Gets much more complicated later.” They were illuminated by a flash of lighting from the window.
“That storm is one of the worst I’ve ever seen,” she told him. “Worse than the one which took out most of the street lights in my hometown. I’d heard for years the weather was crazy up in the hills, guess I had to come here and see it for myself. Now I know it’s crazy.”
“Do the people in Ynos appreciate the work you do?” Dion asked her. He still knew very little about this world and not enough to make a judgement call.
“They claim my work is valuable,” she told him. “But if it had value, why do they make such an effort about money to support the academy? Every time there is a financial crisis, I and my colleges are recruited to get the kingdom out of a mess. They sing our praises later, but in a few years, another issue arises and they need us again. They claim our fees are too high and the budget could not withstand what we might charge. I think they are worried we’d dig a little too deep into their sources of income.”
“Furthermore,” she continued, “they waste all kinds of funds on absurd educational projects which never show results. In math, results are easy enough to duplicate and resolve once you understand the underlying equations. In these social sciences, not so much. They freely admit their results can’t be duplicated, and then wonder why so few of us take them seriously.”
“It reminds me of many of the arguments I hear in my own kingdom,” Dion told her. “So much money spent on nonsense just to make someone feel good about themselves or to line pockets. I think you will find it everywhere, no matter where you travel. At least I have.”
As Mary Tangent continued on about her work in symbolic logic, Dion’s mind began to wonder. Not only was the arrival of the women in the bus too much of a coincidence to be taken lightly, so was his uncle’s relationship with this Queen Lilith and her horde. According to his uncle, it was a minor issue that Dion was needed to send them back. However, he seemed to have invested a lot of time and energy into this tower project, and the one in their mutual world, for these things just to appear by accident. Did his uncle have some reason he wasn’t telling him? Dion wasn’t sure, but intended to find out.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” he said to the math teacher, “but I need to have a conversation with my uncle for a moment.” Dion got up from his side of the table and walked around to his uncle’s side of the table.
His uncle looked up at Dion. “What do you want, nephew?” he asked with sarcasm. “I am in the same tower as all of us, so don’t expect I have any solution to the current predicament.”
“Come take a walk with me, uncle,” Dion told him. “There are some wall hangings I would like you to tell me about.”
Not sure where Dion was headed with his line of conversation, Seth Back left the table with Dion. They walked to another part of the great hall where the sound wouldn’t echo as bad. Dion made certain no one was near them when he asked what was on his mind.
“So how much do you know about this Queen Lilith?” he questioned his uncle.
“Only what you have heard,” he replied. “She’s some being from the abyss that always looks for a way out.”
“Really, uncle?” Dion asked again. “It seems to me that it’s awful convenient you had a major force from the abyss work its way into this realm while you were opening the gate. Surely someone of your level of skill should know what is on the other side?’
“What are you trying to say Dion?” his uncle snapped at him. Although no one could hear them at this range, he fought to keep his voice down.
“I think it was very fortunate for you, this arrival of a demoness and her horde. Then you had a reason to bring me and my parents to this time circle. You claim I’m needed by the Aether Elemental Grandmaster, but she is nowhere to be found. Very handy accident on your part, I might ad.”
“Spell it out, nephew!”
“I once heard about a factory owner who was heavy in debt to the banks. He also was over-insured. When his factory burned under mysterious circumstances, he collected his check, paid the creditors and sold the business. To this day, people say the secret of his success was lighting a match.”
“You draw too many unrelated conclusions!” his uncle unloaded at Dion and stormed back to the table.
“Hit a nerve, did I?” Dion said to himself.
Dion walked back over to the table where he sat down next to his parents. His uncle returned to his place at the same table near the Mahen sisters, who were in another one of their deep discussions. He tried not to pay much attention to what they talked about, as it didn’t concern him. Finances. They were in a heated discussion about the monetary state of the family and of the tower. From what Dion could tell, they’d missed several payments to the kingdom on the lease of the tower. Susan let it slide that their parents had never had such problems when they ran the tower’s affairs. Kiley fired back that the financial status was in excellent shape, thank you, and anytime she needed to dip into the cash reserves she could do so. However, as the eldest she felt it irresponsible to run the bank account so low when there were plenty of retainers to take care of and a budget to maintain.
“She does have a point,” Loris said to her older sister, “we could let some of the people who work here go and we’d have more many to spend.”
“I’ll not toss the retainers who have stood by us all these years out the door!” Kiley thundered back at her while the lightening lit up the great hall. “Did you forget these are the same
people who have taken care of you since the day we were all born?”
“You don’ have to make it permanent,” Loris replied in a cool voice, “Just send them away for a while. Only until we can get the tower back on its foundation.”
“Do you have the sensation they have bickered this way for years?” a voice to his right said to him. Dion turned and expected to see the math instructor.
Instead, he faced an older woman. She was the leader of the group, he seemed to recall. What was her name? Dion thought for a few seconds and remembered. This was Kristen Malar. He didn’t have a clue as to what she did, but it had to be important by the way the other women respected her.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said to her. “Their parents vanished suddenly, leaving all of them to handle the affairs of the tower.”
“In my line of work,” she said to him while swirling the glass she carried, “you want to minimize arguments between women. It creates a bad reputation for the establishment. Clients see all the negativity and they take their money elsewhere.”
“No argument there,” Dion responded. “What kind of work do you do?”
She hesitated which told him a lot. “I manage a social exchange club. We supply entertainment to clients for many occasions. Most of our customer base is men.”
Dion nodded. She had told him quite a bit.
A few minutes later, Dion saw Susan Mahen get up from the table and walk away. He had no idea where she was headed, nor did he really concern himself with her destination. The tower was vast. She disappeared into the stairwell, which led to the warehouse at the bottom. This was the same place Dion was greeted by Kiley Mahen when he first entered the tower. It still puzzled him why she was the one who greeted him and how she knew he was on the way. It had to do with his uncle, he decided. Uncle Seth had arranged things so he would be greeted by the chatelaine of the tower herself. No minor functionaries for his nephew. He wanted to see Dion impressed.