Chapter 9

Before the two friends got stuck in, Cat pointed out a problem.

“I know we basically just said, ‘screw the rules’, but I think I’m going to have to veto your outfit.”

Mandalee was wearing one of the combat suits that Daelen had given her while on Earth. It was lightweight, durable and magic-resistant. It was also three centuries ahead of its time, which made it too great a risk to the Timeline. Catriona’s red robes were no problem, of course, but she was keeping her staff firmly tucked away in her pocket dimension. From her research on Shifting Stars and associated texts, she knew her Angel was due to appear any day now and use the staff to do whatever it was they were trying to achieve. Cat couldn’t risk doing anything to potentially disrupt that. Neither did she want Ulvarius to set eyes on it. The same thing applied to Mandalee’s combat suit.

“Don’t worry,” Cat assured her friend. “I have one of your old leather outfits in my pocket dimension. You can do a swap.”

She thought she might need to do a bit of shapeshifting magic on it, to account for Mandalee’s new body shape, but that was simple enough. The druidess opened her pocket dimension and, true to her word, pulled out the familiar white leather.

Reluctantly, Mandalee agreed to change.

As she removed her combat suit, she asked, “By the way, I’ve often wondered, how do you keep track of what’s in your pocket dimension?”

Cat laughed. “I don’t!” she admitted. “I keep thinking one of these days I should pop in and have a good spring clean.”

“Is that safe?” Mandalee wondered, frowning.

Cat shrugged. “I didn’t suffer any ill-effects from being inside the one in Calin’s Tower,” she reminded her. “Like I said, it just looked like a perfectly ordinary night sky inside. I’d just need to be tethered to someone I trust,” she looked pointedly at her best friend. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to get trapped inside one when it closed up. I’m rather afraid anyone in that situation would be lost forever.”

She shuddered at the horrifying thought, but dismissed the feeling, preferring to focus on the tangible threat in the here and now.

As Mandalee finished putting on her leather, Cat put the combat suit into her pocket dimension and closed it.

“Ready?” she checked.

Mandalee grinned, “Let’s go and kick some undead arse!”

*****

The White Assassin burst out of hiding, her swords slicing into the undead guards that were escorting a group of slaves to the Black Tower. Cat supported her with bow and arrows. It had been a long time since she’d fought like this, but it was the most sensible approach. Mandalee wasn’t using her super-speed or any of her clerical powers for the same reason: they didn’t want to play their hand too soon.

Neither woman was worried about a handful of simple undead minions – they’d both faced down much tougher opposition. They weren’t True Undead – Ulvarius hadn’t mastered that magic yet – but he was bound to be linked to them, to some extent. They just couldn’t be sure how deep that connection went. A melee fighter and an archer wouldn’t stand out too much. After all, according to what Cat remembered from history lessons at magic college, people in this age didn’t just stand by and let this happen. There was resistance, albeit limited. This was just another skirmish. The more mundane and ordinary their actions were perceived, the less likely they were to attract the attention of Ulvarius...or history.

On the other hand, if they were to encounter Ulvarius, the less he knew about what they could really do, the higher their chances of escaping unscathed.

Once the undead guards were dead – well, deader – the two friends didn’t wait around for thanks. They just moved on and found another group. Between them, they had agreed on a compromise. They didn’t actively help the prisoners, but merely killed their captors. What happened after that was not their concern. Nor did they plan to rescue anyone already in the Tower. It might be splitting hairs, but Cat thought that strategy would help their actions be swallowed by history. She didn’t know if there was any real basis for that belief, but she clung to it, regardless.

Job done, they needed to find the next closest group of would-be slaves. Not long ago, Cat would have shapeshifted to falcon form for some aerial reconnaissance, but now that was out of the question. Shapeshifting with a baby developing inside her had to be a bad idea. Still, there was a perfectly simple alternative solution: Mandalee was a Cleric of Nature. She could talk to the animals, enlisting them as her network of spies. Through them, she was receiving constant updates, so she could plan their next move. For so much of their quest to stop Kullos, Catriona had taken the lead, and Mandalee simply followed her. Now it was Catriona’s turn to follow where Mandalee led.

They were fighting their fourth group of undead when they got a sympathic call from Dreya. She wanted to meet up at their original rendezvous to discuss her plan.

*****

“You want us to what!” Mandalee demanded, incredulously, when Dreya explained what she needed.

“It’s the only way I can see of getting our hands on the control device fragment and putting history back on track,” Dreya insisted.

“But Dreya,” Catriona objected, “we’ve been trying to keep a low profile. Now you want us to attract attention from the boss himself?”

“Look,” Dreya sighed, patiently, “I’ve got my side of things sorted out. An army of wizards ready to go – again – and I need you to play your part. You’ve said it yourself, Cat: Control the information, and you control the situation. We need Ulvarius to get this information, and we need him to believe it.”

“We can’t just knock on the door to the Black Tower and tell him,” Mandalee put in. “He’d get suspicious.”

Cat shook her head. “Doesn’t apply – we’d never get through his grounds alive, anyway. No, much as I hate it, I think Dreya’s right. It’s the only way.”

*****

The ‘only way’ in this case, gentle reader, was for Cat and Mandalee to get captured. The only people who could gain access to the Black Tower and Ulvarius were his undead guards and his prisoners. Since they had no wish to become the former, they were going to have to be the latter. Only then would they be in a position to sow the seeds of Ulvarius’ downfall.

*****

“What about a Mirror Image?” Mandalee suggested. Surely sending in magical copies would be safer, she thought, but Dreya immediately vetoed the idea.

“There’s too great a risk that the Black Tower’s defences would detect an anomalous magical signature.”

“Besides,” Cat added, “if Ulvarius were to suspect any subterfuge on our part…”

“…he would naturally distrust the information, which would defeat the object of this ridiculous radical plan,” Mandalee finished, clearly not happy about this idea.

“Hey!” Cat objected. “I thought you liked ridiculous radical plans.”

“I like your ridiculous radical plans, Cat,” she replied. “They have a strong pedigree. I’m just not sure about hers.” She cut off any reply, saying, “But I don’t have any better ideas, so I’ll do it.”

“Excellent, thank you,” Dreya approved. “Just be careful and look after Cat, OK?”

Mandalee smiled. “Of course. That’s what I’m here for.”

Dreya acknowledged that with a nod and teleported back to Walminster.

“OK, then,” Cat remarked, breezily, when she’d gone. “It’s time to stop playing nice. No more subtlety. We need to attract attention.”

“Yay!” Mandalee cried with mock enthusiasm. “Let’s get ourselves captured, enslaved and quite possibly tortured by the most dangerous tyrant in history, who’s even more dangerous than he should be. Sounds like a party to me. Dear gods, I need a drink.”

*****

Throughout the next few battles, they used plenty of unnecessary magical force.

Mandalee sheathed one of her swords, in favour of a conjured flame hammer. Her remaining blade she enchanted with her clerical powers as best she could, or rather she enchanted the socket gems that were embedded into the hilt. Everyone knew enchanting steel was impossible.

She missed her Pureblade so much. It had been the finest weapon she’d ever wielded. Sadly, it had shattered along with Kullos’ control device and then, presumably, got sucked through the Cosmic Rift to be unmade along with the original Tempestria.

As they advanced on the undead that were escorting the latest batch of prisoners – Faery prisoners – on the edge of Sylfrania, Cat caused the foliage to grab and restrain their captors.

Mandalee had been practising her clerical magic, and that practice paid off now as she cast spells to ignite the air, send out jets of fire from her fingers and shroud them in fog, while giving her friend and herself catlike night sight. She paralysed the undead and disrupted the magic that animated them with Holy Water, which her friend replicated before there was any danger of running out. Holy Water wasn’t really necessary because they weren’t True Undead, just animated corpses, but it would cause them pain, which she hoped Ulvarius might just feel, too.

Cat ran on her Windy Steps and Rainbow Roads, smashing the skeletal warriors with super-dense air. Ice walls blocked them, ice shards severed their limbs at the joints, and the trees and plants not only restrained them but also pulled them apart.

Despite their new approach to their battles, they still maintained their policy of ignoring the pleas of those they rescued for further help in getting away from the area. There was always a chance they could be recaptured or even killed on their respective journeys, but the two friends were resolute in their belief that they needed to leave that to history.

Resolute, that is, until the children.

They numbered a dozen: human, Faery and one of mixed heritage. Cat had not expected that. Human-Faery couples were still rare even in her time, though there was a gradual, noticeable increase in that number. In this time, Cat believed they could tour Elvaria for a year, travelling from place to place and still not find another half-Faery.

All the children were crying and shivering with both cold and fear. They were tired and dirty, their clothes ragged, their shoes worn out. They had obviously been forced to travel a long way.

Their undead guards were no more challenging to defeat, but when the moment came to leave, Cat just couldn’t do it.

“We can’t abandon kids,” she insisted. “Adults, fine, they’re old enough to take care of themselves, but here I draw the line.”

“Why does he even want kids?” Mandalee whispered. “What does he plan on doing with them? Actually,” she reconsidered, “I’m not sure I want to know.”

Cat thought she knew the answer. She and Dreya had read Ulvarius’ diaries, and this stuck in her mind for obvious reasons.

“If I’m right about who these kids are, then he wants them for their magic.” Young mages were bristling with untapped magical energy that they hadn’t yet learned to control, which was why Ulvarius favoured young victims. Cat estimated that this group were all between the ages of about ten and fourteen. Perfect specimens, ripe for the harvest.

To check her hypothesis, Cat knelt, so she was at eye level with the half-Faery girl and introduced herself.

“Hi, I’m Rose and this is my friend, Melanda,” she lied, using the names from the books she had seen in Daelen’s library. Books that were written by a kind of alternative future version of herself, far in the past.

“Call me Mel,” Mandalee put in, kneeling beside Catriona.

Cat turned to her with a puzzled look. ‘Mel’? she mouthed, silently.

Mandalee shrugged. She wasn’t keen on the name ‘Melanda’, and she was also concerned that, being so close to her real name, she might accidentally trip over her tongue and say the wrong one. ‘Mel’ removed that danger and although she’d just come up with it, she found she quite liked it.

Turning back to the half-Faery girl, Cat tried to reassure her, “Don’t worry, we’re here to help. Can you tell us your name?”

“Vashti,” she answered quietly.

“Where are you from, Vashti?”

“Tedstone,” she replied.

Mandalee recognised the name. In her time, it was known as Tedstone Warf, a cosmopolitan port town in South West Elvaria.

She had spent some time in that region, not long ago from her perspective. It was not far from Tedstone that she’d taken the contract to stop Daelen StormTiger destroying the world. The contract that brought her to the home of Justaria, where she ran into her old friend, Catriona. On horseback, Mandalee had travelled three hundred miles in two weeks. She suspected these kids had been forced to make a similar journey on foot.

More than ever, Cat was convinced that her friend was right. They couldn’t stand by and let them complete their journey to the slaughterhouse of the Black Tower. History be damned.

Timidly reaching out a hand to trace the faint Faery spots on Catriona’s neck, Vashti marvelled, “You’re like me, aren’t you?”

Cat smiled. “In more ways than one, I think. We’re both half-Faery, and you have magic like me, too, don’t you?”

Vashti nodded. “We’re all at magic school together.”

“Magic school?” Mandalee wondered. She’d had no idea there was such a thing in this time.

Again, Vashti nodded. “A few mages in the town got together and started it up. They thought we’d learn better if we could learn together. It’s fun!” She broke off, and tears welled up in her eyes. “Until the monsters came and killed our teachers.”

Cat reached out and hugged her close. “I’m so sorry this happened to you.”

Vashti’s story confirmed Cat’s suspicions. Not wanting to scare the kids any more than they already were, she answered her friend’s question sympathically.

‘Draining magic,’ and ‘Draining blood.’

Ulvarius intended to bleed them dry, both metaphorically and literally, robbing them of their magic and their lives. It was linked to his experimentation with blood magic and was partly why both White and Red mages in the early Council put a complete ban on any form of the practice. Ulvarius would bind his victims’ wrists, suspend them, and then slice open a vein to let them bleed out, all the time channelling their magic though the spilt blood, enhancing it. The renegade wizard tried various methods to gain power from this, ranging from changing the polarity of his own magic to attract and absorb the magic from the blood, to bathing in the blood to absorb it through the skin, and even drinking the magic-rich blood. The latter began the process that would see him ultimately turn into a lich, in which form he would ‘kill’ himself, and remain dormant in his grounds for the next three hundred years. Until a young Faery sorceress named Dreya came along and finished him off for good.

At least, she would if they could get the Timeline back on track.

Dreya herself used a form of blood magic, of course, but the only blood she had ever spilt for that purpose was her own. And then only one drop at a time. She also possessed a talent for draining magic and, more recently, higher planar energy. But she only took it from others in battle, or otherwise in defence of herself and those she cared about. Plus, she had developed Ulvarius’ concept of power words – compressed magic that could be activated by a single word, with the intricate writing in the language of magic prepared mentally, in advance. Once again, she had achieved this through hard work, dedication and study, not by torturing others.

Unfortunately, Cat knew there were still those who saw only the similarities in the magic of Dreya and Ulvarius and not the crucial differences. Differences that were all the more apparent in this age: Dreya was trying to build a co-operative future for magic, through the fledgeling Council. If left unchecked, Ulvarius would destroy that future. Ulvarius wanted to grow his power by taking it from innocent people, and to destroy any potential challenge for the title of the Greatest Mage Who Ever Lived. Dreya wanted to nurture and develop magic in others. She would take from those who attacked her, yes, but she wanted to be challenged so that she could be the best of the best. Dreya’s initial interest in Cat had been sparked because the druidess had offered the sorceress that kind of challenge. Their sort of magical attraction had led not to death, but to a whole new life. A relationship that Dreya had vowed meant even more to her than her magic.

And yet still people compared her fiancée to the worst tyrant who ever lived just because they happened to use some of the same tools. It was like comparing a chef to a serial murderer because they both used knives.

Well, this tyrant was not getting anywhere near these kids. Cat was adamant about that. She knew for a fact Dreya would agree and if history had a problem with that, then so be it. Mandalee was right. They had to do the right thing while they were here. They could deal with any future consequences later.

To further engender the trust of the young Vashti, Cat asked, “For me, it was my dad who was Faery. My mum was human. Was it that way for you?”

Vashti shook her head. “Don’t have a dad. One of my mums is Faery.”

“Vashti!” the boy next to her gasped. “You know you’re not supposed to tell that to people outside Tedstone!”

Cat knew that in her time, Tedstone Wharf had a history of progressive social attitudes, but she hadn’t realised that history stretched back quite this far. She was impressed.

“Mel and Rose saved our lives, Fumika!” Vashti shot back. “I trust them.” Turning to Cat and Mandalee, she introduced him. “This is my cousin, Fumika. He worries too much.”

“Well, your cousin might have a point,” Mandalee cautioned. “Some people might have a problem with you having two Mums.” She knew from personal experience how some people reacted towards those they saw as different. “But you can trust us.”

Cat held up her left hand to show the ring that adorned the fourth finger. “Actually, see this? This is called an engagement ring,” she explained. “It’s a custom of a…faraway land I once visited, like a betrothal. It means I’m going to marry the person who gave it to me: my girlfriend.”

“You and Mel?” Fumika asked.

The two friends laughed, “No,” Mandalee shook her head, “I’m their best friend. I helped them get engaged, and soon I’m going to be an aunt because my friend Rose is pregnant.”

The kids gasped at that. “Really?” Vashti wondered.

Cat nodded. “Really. So you see, Vashti, I think it’s great that you have two Mums. My child will, too.”

Through this common ground, Cat knew she knew they’d managed to get the children to forget their fears and trust them. But she still had the problem of what to do with a dozen kids three hundred miles from home. She and Mandalee couldn’t keep them while they were hunting Ulvarius’ minions, especially now they’d abandoned their low profile. Robbing him of these kids would get his attention like nothing else, and he’d know about it soon if he didn’t already. Time was short.

Mandalee could read her best friend well enough by now to know what she was thinking.

“Speaking of your fiancée, Rose,” she put in, “do you think she could help? I’m sure her new friends could find a safe place for them.”

Cat nodded. It made sense and truth be told, she was curious to see what Dreya the Dark would be like with children.