by Gabi Moore
The groups had known each other a long time and commented on how each other’s husbands and or children were getting along. Pictures were pulled from purses and shown to one another. It was no different from a similar gather in from where Dion came.
“I need to get to a phone soon,” one of the women said as she ate from her bowl. “This stew is great; I need to find out how you make it.” She was a large white woman who wore her hair in a bun. Dion tried to remember her name. It came to him a few minutes later. She was the one called Beth Ravi.
“It helps that we have an endless supply of jackelopes out here,” Kiley Mahen spoke to her. “It’s why the meat is tender.”
“Wild or do you breed them?” the woman named Beth asked her.
“Wild. Too difficult to breed them. Not only do they kick each other but also the males will charge each other with those horns for territory. You have to be very careful if you keep jackelopes for stock and we have never had any luck with them. We use snipes to hunt them in the dry season.”
“Not much ‘dry’ here,” Beth replied, as she wiped a spot of grease from her sweater. “And you’ve had this storm for at least two months? I’ve never seen one last more than three weeks up north. Of course, we can go the entire dry season and not see a drop of rain.”
“The dry season is short down here,” Loris Mahen explained. “We need to get up the capitol sometime next year; you’ll have to let us know what the best sites to see are.”
“I don’t know what you like to see, but they did but in a new quezzrdo in the jeweler’s district. You might want to check it out.”
Dion had the most intense desire to ask her what as “quezzrdo” was, but let it fly. There would be time later to understand the basic differences between this world and his. Right now, he needed to wait and see if the elemental grandmaster would return. He didn’t enjoy the thought of leading everyone to that door for which his uncle possessed the key, but if it came to it, he would do it.
“So what kind of things do you enjoy writing about?” Susan Mahen asked her. Dion wondered when she would break her silence.
“Sports,” she told her. “I’ve written several romances about rockball. Do you follow any of the leagues?”
“Not able to follow much of anything out here,” Susan responded. “We have enough trouble having magazines delivered.”
‘Wow, you are isolated. What happens if you have an emergency? How do you get a doctor out here in a hurry if you have to?”
“We haven’t had that problem in a long time. Rudy is certified in most areas and can handle the occasional household injury. In a real emergency, we have messenger bats that roost on the top of the tower. Haven’t been able to use them in the past few months because of that detestable Queen Lilith and her crew, but we’ll breed some more as soon as we get rid of her.”
As Dion listened to them chat he began to wonder how effective his elemental manipulation powers were in this time circle. According to his uncle, they were very limited here, but he could summon a few elementals for a limited time period from his own world.
Dion still felt very much alone in this place. Back where he came from he could always watch the elementals at play. Air sylphs he could watch dance in the wind and fire salamanders loved to play in the flames of a burning log. As an elemental manipulator, he could always see them. Up until today, he’d assumed it was due to his family lineage, but now he wasn’t so sure. If he was half-Olympian, was it because of that part of his background? He tried not to think about it and returned to his attempts at seeing elementals.
He finally spotted one rolling around on the ground. It wasn’t one of the kinds he’d seen on his own world; this elemental had to be particular to this time circle. He watched it spin around the floor and roll up the walls, then down them again. It stopped when the elemental saw him watch it move across the floor. The small black sphere, invisible to everyone but him, rolled back and stopped in front of his place on the table. It spun around three times and zipped under the door to one of the partitions in the grand hall.
It took Dion a few minutes to realize what kind of elemental it was: an aether elemental. He’d never seen one this bold back on his own world; they were extremely hard to see except in a few locations on Earth. They were the rarest of them all, but here they must be quite common.
The aether was the source of all other elements and aether elementals were difficult to utilize. Only a few elemental manipulators at any given time could work with them. His uncle had some limited ability with them, but even he had more than Dion. He needed to be authorized by the Aether Elemental Grandmaster to use them. He turned to see if his uncle had noticed the small elemental, but his eyes were on the Mahen sisters when it entered the room.
If his uncle couldn’t focus on the small elemental, then how was it that he could see it? Dion wondered if his uncle truly had any aether elemental power at all. He closed his eyes and decided to see if he could summon anything at all from this world in the aether element. Dion concentrated and felt something near him. He opened his eyes and found the form of a black sphinx looking up from the ground. It was only three feet high and no one else in the room seemed to notice. The sphinx waited for Dion to make it an offer, but he simply told it there would be time later for some real employment. The sphinx sniffed the air, collapsed into another small ball and rolled away.
Chapter 11
“What were you doing there?” It was Bernice again. Dion turned to face the older women who had a keen sense of observation. She was close to the color of the Mahen sisters, but a few shades lighter.
“I was communicating,” he told her, not knowing what else to say. Dion had no way to know what the locals thought about elemental manipulation, so he let it be.
“Are you one of those guys who can work with a sphinx?” she asked him. “I haven’t met too many. Adepts, I think you’re called, right?”
Not knowing how to answer her question, Dion told her ‘yes’. He waited for a reaction.
“Never could see the reason for fooling with those things,” she told him. “I’ve had neighbors swear they can guard your house and more, but what kind of natural force comes in so mixed up? Face of a human, wings of a bird, body of a lion. It’s as if someone couldn’t make up his or her mind what kind of creature to construct. I always said they were built by a committee.”
“Now a dragon,” she said, “they have character. You always know where you stand with them even if they look at you as food. You feed them on a regular basis, work with them, play with them and they’ll look after you. If I were allowed, I would take the one I used to work with home with me. Can’t do that because of the regulations. They aren’t allowed off the base, even though you bond with them after a while. I was so close with some of the females I cared for they would even let me approach while nesting. Most people would never even consider being near a dragon when it’s nesting, too dangerous and a good way to get cremated.”
“You sound quite the expert on dragons,” Dion laughed. “It sounds like you miss them.”
“I do,” she continued. “People never liked getting too close to them, but they liked the air shows we put on once a year. It was really something to see a whole pack of dragons flying in formation around the base. They could roast an entire barbecue on the ground. Folks would ask to get their picture taken with them, but we couldn’t do that, too risky for anyone to get near a dragon unless they’ve trained with it.”
“Here,” she told him, as Bernice pulled out some pictures from her purse. “These are from right before I retired.”
She let Dion see the photographs of her standing next to an enormous lizard with wings that almost covered the both of them. The lizard was her military spec dragon, which she trained from the moment it hatched. Bernice went on to tell him the dragons had long lifespans and she personally taught her replacement how to work with the beast.
“She sends me updates every few weeks,” she finished. “And the dragon
is quite fine.”
“So anyway,” she changed the subject, “just what is upstairs in this tower that the sister is worried about?”
“I’m not exactly sure myself,” Dion told her. He looked across the table and saw the form of his uncle starring off into space.
“Uncle Seth,” he asked him. “What is up there in the tower you let in from the abyss? You’ve talked of Queen Lilith and her Azuroth, but you haven’t been too specific about what we’re up against.
“She waits at the gate, always trying to get through to any time circle she can find,” Seth Bach described. “I don’t know where she comes from, or how long she’s been there, but anyone working the abyss has to find a way to keep her under control. I thought we had her boxed in, but she found a way to get through when we weren’t watching. She managed to bring through some minions called the Azuroth with her and we have both of them to contend with now. At least they’re not very powerful, but there are enough of those things to be a nuisance. The aether grandmaster was supposed to find a way to send them back, but she has yet to return.”
“What about the ones out at the front of the gate?” Dion asked him. “How did they get out there? Kiley claims they are a different species.”
“I have no idea how that batch got through,” his uncle said. “I hope the elemental grandmaster gets back soon enough because if she doesn’t we will have to deal with both groups without any help. That is not a prospect I look forward to.”
“And you have no idea where the grandmaster went?” Dion asked him.
“Not a one. She was here one day, the next she was gone. She said something about needing extra help and that was the last conversation I had with her.”
Something didn’t seem right about this whole affair to Dion. According to his uncle, everything he’d suffered through over the past year was from the efforts of his uncle to get him to the tower from the other world and return Queen Lilith and her horde back to the abyss. But he wondered how much his uncle was telling him was true. What if he was holding crucial information from him? It was strange that his uncle had worked so hard to keep him away from the elemental grandmasters back in Ohio, yet claimed he needed Dion’s help.
What if Queen Lilith was far more dangerous than he allowed everyone to think? It would explain all the obstacles he’d put in his path. His uncle wanted to make sure he had the right fortitude before he put him against the things upstairs and now out in front of the tower. Dion tapped his fingers on the table and thought it all over. He didn’t like what it all added up to, but there was nothing he could do about it right now.
Dion’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of men who ran out of the stairwell that led up wards to the next level. There were two of them and he recognized them as the security guards from the mall. They were guarding the tower’s upper levels against the invasion. Both of them looked exhausted, which meant they ran all the way down the tower without the elevator. One of them nearly tripped over a chair as he made his way to the great table. He was surprised by so many outsiders in the great hall.
“Word with you, ma’am,” the other guard managed to breathe out as he reached the table. He looked direct at Kiley Mahen. His face was flushed and his uniform covered in sweat.
“You look exhausted,” she said to the man. Kiley leaned over the table and handed him a glass of wine. “Go ahead and talk, I need to hear.”
He drained the cup in one gulp. “Thank you,” he said to her. The guard turned to Kiley. “They broke through, but we’ve been able to stop them.”
“How far did they get?” she asked him.
“Right over the sauna,” he told them. “They caught us off guard. We finished securing the stairwell from the nursey and they calmed down. We heard some noise up there, but not enough to get excited about. So I had the men stand down and take a break. I thought they might be tired out after that last rush and wouldn’t try anything for a few hours.”
“I was wrong.”
“About fifteen minutes ago, they slammed hard against the door and knocked the barricade loose. I had the men fall back to the level below it. We secured that door, but I knew it wouldn’t hold them for long, so I kept falling back, locking doors behind me as I went. We went through the living areas and school floors until we got to the sauna. The door is smaller on that level for some reason, so I had the men use what bits of furniture we grabbed on the way down to secure it the right way. We finished blocking it up the best way we could the very moment we heard some noise in the level over it. They’re still trying to get through, but I believe we’ve held them for the moment. There isn’t much else I can do other than get the pikes out and distribute them to the men.”
“I don’t want to go that far,” she told him. “Why didn’t you take the elevator down?”
“It all happened so fast, I didn’t have a chance to call the operator. Besides, the elevator is at the sauna level. If we use it, the shaft will be open and I don’t want to give those things any opening to the inside of the tower. I know they’ve been scared to climb down the tower on the outside, but they might not be so scarred of it on the inside.”
“You did good,” Kiley approved. “Take your time about returning to the sauna.”
“We have to get back up there. It’s important we’re there because one man less means that floor has fewer men to secure it.”
“I’ll go with them,” Dion spoke up from his place at table. “They can use help up there. And perhaps I can summon something to assist them if they can’t stop the advance.”
Kiley Mahen turned to Dion’s uncle and gave him a puzzled look. “My nephew can work some of the basic elements,” he told her. “I don’t think he can send them back without the grandmaster help, but Dion can do some basic work to assist the guards. It sounds as if they could use it. Until the Aether Elemental Grandmaster returns.”
“I suppose they can use the help,” She responded.
Kiley looked in the direction of Dion’s parents. “So long as it’s alright with them.”
His mother nodded. “I trust Dion to make the right decision,” she said to her. “I’ve done my best to raise him with an understanding of his abilities.”
As Dion began to get up from the table, he heard the voice of Bernice Cosmo. “I’ll go too. You could use someone up there with a little field experience.”
They headed up the stairwell just behind the two guards who’d rested from the trip back downstairs.
Chapter 12
“I don’t mind the climb,” Dion spoke to her, “It’s the time it consumes. We’ll spend more time on the stairs then we will fight those creatures.”
“Imagine how bad it must have been doing this in armor,” she replied. “Think about wearing another sixty-five pounds of chainmail and plate while you’re climbing the stairs. Also, you’d have a metal sword in one hand and a matching shield in the other. I think we have it easy.”
“Notice the curve of these stairs,” she told him as they crossed from one level to another and made for the next stairwell. “There is a slight bend to the right in each one. Can you guess what that might be?”
“They wanted to make it easier to get from one level to the next?” Dion asked her.
“No, they wanted to give the defenders an advantage. The stairwells always curve to the left. Most people are left-handed and it gave them an advantage in swinging a sword. The attackers needed to hit the defenders with an off-handed sword blow, while the defenders’ target had a direct line to swing a sword.
Dion almost corrected her as nearly every one he knew was right-handed until it dawned on him that it might not be true in this world.
They continued the climb to the level still under control by the tower’s defenders while Bernice rambled on and on about the tower and its history. It figured with prominence in many of the kingdom epics and she recited lines of poetry where the tower was mentioned. Dion admitted it was a quite a construction accomplishment. The tower was built when th
e techniques were very crude. Most of the blocks were hauled by carts and horses from the nearest quarry, which was twenty-five miles away. Angles were calculated with a square and compass.
Dion and Bernice arrived a few minutes on the sauna level behind the guards. The instant they walked into the room, which was sectioned off like the others, they heard a loud noise at one end. It reminded him of someone pounding on a door. Dion looked down the hall formed by the partitions and saw the guards attempting to hold the door with a pile of broken up furniture and wood.
Whatever was on the other end of that door was not happy. It was a thick door, just as all the other doors inside the tower were. This one still had its military function and was covered in steel studs and held together with metal hinges. It shook constantly as something began to force it loose from the frame. Dion could see plaster fall from the walls from the shock waves created from the impacts. In between the slams to the door, he could hear the snarls and grunts of large animals. Had he not known about what was on the other side of the door? Dion wondered if they were up against a herd of boars.
“It won’t hold this time,” one of the guards said to the man who acted as sergeant. “And we won’t be able to retreat fast enough either. I suggest we break out those pikes.” He waved to the wall where a row of spears with ax blades attached sat at the ready.
“If you use those pikes, you better know what you’re doing,” Bernice yelled at the defenders. “A few of them turned around to see who addressed them.
“Do any of you know how to use them?” she yelled over the sound of the pounding on the door. “If not, you better grab them and run to the next level. I don’t know what’s behind that door, but it sounds pretty mean.”