by Gabi Moore
“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?”
“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?”