Chapter 11

“Wow!” Mandalee declared as she stepped inside. “I’ve always wanted to see inside the Black Tower, haven’t you, Rose?”

“Hmmm?” Cat wondered. A look of puzzlement flashed across her face before she realised what her friend was doing. Catriona hadn’t been paying any attention to their surroundings because they were so familiar – this was her home. But they couldn’t let Ulvarius know that. They had to stay in character, and the Mel and Rose of this time would be awed at being inside the infamous Black Tower.

“Oh, yes, it’s amazing,” she agreed, but then she decided there was no reason she couldn’t put a little of herself into her character. Wiping a finger along the porch door, she pulled off a layer of dust. “Mind you,” she added, pulling a face, “I thought it would be cleaner.” Wagging her dusty finger at Ulvarius, she warned him, “You’d better wash the cups before we start!”

“The cups?” Ulvarius wondered.

“The teacups,” Cat clarified. “The way you invited us over, I assume this is the part where you offer us a nice cup of tea and a chat.”

“No, this is the part where I torture you, bleed you dry and take your magic for myself.”

“To be fair, Rose,” Mandalee put in, “that is more what I was expecting.”

“What!” gasped Catriona, as if scandalised. “No tea?”

Mandalee shook her head.

“Well, Ulvarius could offer you tea,” Ulvarius allowed. “But then another village would burn every five minutes.”

“The deal was you’d stop when we reached the door!” Mandalee protested.

“I didn’t say the front door. I meant the door to my torture chamber.”

“Torture chamber?” Cat scoffed. “Bit on the nose, isn’t it? Not ‘Interrogation Room’ or maybe…” she thought for a moment “…the CHamber for Information and Magic Extraction?”

“CHIME,” Mandalee said, realising the acronym. “I like it. Did you come up with that on the spot?”

Cat nodded.

“Go ahead, make jokes,” their captor cut in. “Ulvarius will just keep burning villages.”

“Not for another three minutes by my count,” Cat retorted. “Still, I suppose we should probably be going.”

“Torture chamber it is, then,” the White Assassin sighed.

Turning to Ulvarius, “Well?” Cat prompted him, indignantly. “If you’re not going to make tea, you can at least show us to our room.”

The Black robe wizard gestured up the steps. “Top of the stairs and turn right.”

Cat pulled a face. “Stairs? I was hoping for teleportation,” she grumbled as she started to climb.

“I know,” Mandalee agreed, taking her arm as if going for a stroll. “First he makes us run here and now he expects us to climb up all these steps!”

“The hospitality here is appalling.”

“To be fair, we were promised torture, and these steps definitely qualify.”

“Could you stop being fair to our torturer, please?”

“Sorry.”

*****

The ‘torture chamber’ was a room with which Catriona was intimately familiar. Dreya had never found a use for it in the years she’d owned the Black Tower, other than as a place to store junk that she didn’t really need. Only yesterday – three hundred and twelve years in the future – she and Dreya had started clearing it out. They were planning to redecorate and turn it into a nursery for the new arrival. It was tempting to let the idea that it had once been a torture chamber put her off such plans, but the druidess dismissed the notion. In the time of Ulvarius, every room in the Tower had probably been used for all kinds of evil purposes, but it wasn’t the Tower’s fault. It wasn’t cursed or damned or haunted. It was just a building. In fact, if this Tower had previously been used to bring death, surely that was all the more reason to turn it into a place to nurture new life.

Right now, though, the walls of the room were lined with people of all ages, chained up, in varying degrees of pain and torment. Two dozen in all. Some were in shock, others were crying, and at least one woman had clearly given up. Ulvarius had set up automated, self-sustaining magic to systematically drain their blood and store it all in bottles that levitated themselves into a glass-fronted cabinet in one corner near the door. It was like a twisted version of the medical technology on StormClaw that Daelen had used after they had saved his life following the accident with Pyrah.

Cat hadn’t seen the Ysirian snake since the Battle of Rhynas Desert, but there was nothing unusual in that. She’d turn up sooner or later.

Mandalee and Cat shared a glance. Without a word or even a sympathic message, they agreed that their rule about not helping people who were already captured had just been rescinded. It didn’t matter about the Timeline; they couldn’t just save themselves and leave all these people if there was any way to help them.

The suddenness of the way Ulvarius casually killed two of his prisoners to make room for the new captives gave the Guardians no time to react. They both closed their eyes against the horror of it, but they knew that they couldn’t let it stop them from doing what they came here to do. Those two had been on the verge of death, anyway, having been drained of so much blood. At least now their suffering was over.

They co-operated when he commanded them to strip down to their underwear, and allowed themselves to be chained up. Any resistance at this stage and Ulvarius might simply decide to dispose of them. Catriona had read some of Ulvarius’ journals, so she had a good idea of how his mind worked. Mandalee understood that and was content to follow her best friend’s lead. Once they were safely locked up, then they could start to cause trouble, because if he couldn’t control his captives, he would view that as a personal failure. Killing prisoners before he was done with them would be proof of that failure, so he would do so only as a last resort.

Cat had been stripped of her spell components but, not understanding their significance, Ulvarius had left them in the room, dumping them in the corner. As for Mandalee’s weapons, he was at least smart enough to take them all into another room…all except the two small dragonclaw knives she kept strapped to her wrists. Evidently, Ulvarius couldn’t see through a perception filter. Chained up as she was, they weren’t going to be much use to her, but she still had her cleric magic. He couldn’t take that away from her – a fact she was about to demonstrate.

Ulvarius wasted no time in using his magic to make a surgical slice across a vein in her arm. He was careful not to catch an artery – that would make her bleed out too fast for him to extract her magic. Mandalee didn’t even flinch. Instead, she just let out a bored sigh and healed herself right up. Ulvarius inflicted more cuts. Same result. Such low-level healing wasn’t even a challenge. She could keep this up for a week without feeling drained.

“You know how we were talking earlier about pointless people doing pointless things?” she smirked. “Well, I guess this makes you one of those. Trying to torture a cleric healer with paper cuts is an exercise in futility.”

Ulvarius continued to cut her arms, regardless. Each cut only bled a little before it healed, but each time Ulvarius collected the blood in a small glass, perhaps half the size of a champagne flute. When the glass was about half full, Ulvarius stopped cutting, swirled the blood around the glass and drank it in one go.

“A really disgusting exercise in futility,” the assassin amended.

Ulvarius scoffed. “You think Ulvarius hasn’t captured clerics before? The flavour of your magic is a little different, though, I admit. I just wondered if there might be an element of wizard magic in there, too.”

“You could have just asked,” Mandalee grumbled, “and if you’re going to try and drain my magic next, I really wouldn’t bother. Trust me, you’ll only embarrass yourself.”

Ulvarius was scathing. “You clerics think you’re so special! You all think your power comes from the gods, and that makes your magic untouchable. Cut the spiritual crap, and it’s just energy from inter-planar forces, the same as wizards use. It’s just been filtered a bit. But no, Ulvarius is not going to drain you just yet. I’m more interested in your friend.”

“It’s nice to feel wanted,” Cat remarked.

He stepped over to the druidess and tried to slice her open in the same way, with much the same result. Like Mandalee, she could heal such small cuts with barely a thought.

“Druid magic,” Ulvarius noted, after drinking her blood. He sounded intrigued. “A dash of wizard in there, too. Hardly enough to be worth taking, but waste not, want not. Ulvarius may not be able to bleed you – at least not without doing so much damage as to defeat the object – but I have other ways of draining magic. Never saw the point of druids before, but the magic you were doing, while you were out playing the hero, was something new. Ulvarius is going to enjoy taking that power. But which of you first?” he pondered. Then he made up his mind. “Save the special treat for last. Always the best way.” Moving back to Mandalee, he placed his hands on her bare arms and closed his eyes, preparing to drain her magic directly.

The journals Catriona had read hadn’t explicitly mentioned how he did this, but clearly, it required direct skin contact. Just another way in which his abilities were inferior to those her fiancée had perfected. Dreya needed nothing more than line of sight. The sorceress could feel the way magic flowed; sometimes, she almost thought she could see it.

Although Dreya was wholly committed to the order of Dark magic and the quest for power, she had never lost touch with her Red robe training. She was meticulous in her preparations before attempting any new magic. She kept unnecessary risks to a minimum as she tried to peel back the layers of magic and find out how it worked so that she could truly master it. Ulvarius simply got an idea in his head and used it to gain power. He was obviously powerful and gifted, but he didn’t really know what he was doing. A fact the two Guardians were happy to demonstrate.

The look of concentration on what little remained of Ulvarius’ face grew in intensity. He began to grunt with the effort, a grunt that grew into a scream, as if he were trying to lift something far too heavy, or stretch every tendon and ligament trying to grasp something that was always going to be out of reach. At last, he was forced to give up, panting with the effort.

“Told you so!” Mandalee taunted.

She wasn’t like other clerics. Her magic came from Shyleen, the leopard god who left her plane of existence and came to live on Tempestria. Mandalee freely shared her soul in exchange for access to clerical magic and complete understanding of wild things. She was a Cleric of Nature. Moreover, at the moment, the source of her magic was three hundred years in the future. That didn’t matter to Mandalee – her bond with Shyleen transcended Time, thanks to the Guardianship – but Ulvarius didn’t know the first thing about Temporal magic, so he had no way of reaching Shyleen’s power.

Ulvarius was livid. “How are you blocking Ulvarius?”

“I’m not, exactly,” she replied. “My magic’s just…inaccessible to anyone but me.”

“How?”

“That would be telling,” she told him with a smirk.

“Alright, if you want to play games, you can watch while Ulvarius drains your friend!”

“You really don’t want to do that,” Cat warned him.

Ignoring her, he placed his hands on her bare arms and tried to focus. He made the connection with her magic and pulled, the same as he always did, but instead of a steady stream that he could control, he got a tidal wave of power. The power surge travelled up his arms and hit him square in the chest, sending him flying backwards. The instant he was in midair, Cat used the magic he had released to generate a gust of wind that blew Ulvarius exactly where she wanted him – crashing right into his blood-filled cabinet. The glass front broke on impact, the cupboard collapsed, and the bottles all shattered, spilling their vile contents.

“Tried to warn you!” Cat teased in a sing-song voice.

Druid magic came from a different source to that of clerics or wizards. They believed it came from Blessed Alycia, Mother of Nature. Ulvarius had tried to drain Catriona’s power, but the power was never really hers. In effect, he was trying to drain Nature herself, and not being one to withhold her power, she let him have it, and he got the force of Nature full in the chest.

If Ulvarius was angry before, now he was in a full-blown rage. Considering he drank blood, Ulvarius’s skeletal body didn’t seem to have much in its veins. Mandalee didn’t think he had enough left to make his face turn red, but he seemed to be giving it a good try.

“You said yourself my magic’s like nothing you’ve seen before,” Cat pointed out. “My friend’s is pretty unique too. Did you not think to wonder if it might react differently?”

“Ah, but are they unique, Rose?” Mandalee put in. “Maybe Ulvarius simply doesn’t know as much about magic as he thinks.”

“That’s a good point, Mel,” Cat agreed. “Maybe there are loads of us with magic he can’t drain; power he can’t master.”

“Maybe Ulvarius isn’t as powerful as he thinks he is,” Mandalee suggested. “Not without a certain magical talisman.”

Ulvarius rushed over to them and demanded, “What do you know about that?”

“Oh, we know all kinds of things, don’t we, Mel?” Cat remarked, needling him further.

“Yep,” she agreed. “You see, Ulvarius, this was your mistake: you captured us and went straight to torture and magic draining.”

Cat nodded. “You forgot all about interrogation because you’re arrogant enough to think you know it all already. But you didn’t know about us, did you?”

“So, what else don’t you know about?” Mandalee wondered.

One could be forgiven for thinking they’d rehearsed this routine, but the truth was they knew each other so well that they didn’t need to.

“Tell Ulvarius what you know!” he demanded.

Cat shook her head. “Nope, it’s not going to be that easy. You really don’t do interrogation very well, do you?”

“How can Ulvarius be sure you even know anything?” he growled, menacingly, leaning close to Mandalee.

Breathing in at the wrong time led to a coughing fit. “Dear gods, you stink!” the White Guardian complained when she could speak again. “Tell you what, we’ll give you a sample on one condition: you go and clean yourself up. We’re not talking to you while you’re covered in blood, it’s disgusting.”

“And to sweeten the deal,” Cat put in, “we’ll even clean the floor for you. It’s not good to have all that blood lying around.”

“You think Ulvarius is fool enough to let you out of your chains?”

“No need,” Cat assured him. “Just bring a couple of mops and buckets of water into the room, and I can do it perfectly well from here.”

Keeping a lid on his rage, Ulvarius considered that for a moment and then acquiesced.

“Very well, Ulvarius is intrigued. Deal accepted,” he agreed, adding the caveat, “if I believe your information is of value.”

“OK, here’s your sample,” Mandalee offered. “That magic totem or talisman, or whatever you call it, it’s not unique. It’s a fragment, nothing more.”

“Ulvarius suspected as much. It appears to have broken off something. What is it? Do you know?”

Mandalee sidestepped the question. “What it’s from isn’t the point. The point is who it belongs to: Kullos.”

Ulvarius reflexively stepped back on hearing that name. “Higher planar energy! That’s what this strange power is!”

Cat shrugged. “Sorry, we assumed you knew that bit. Whatever strange device it once was, it was destroyed a th— a long time ago.”

She mentally cursed herself for the slipup. It was about a thousand years ago relative to her time, but they were three hundred years in the past. That meant the original shattering of Kullos’ dimensional control device took place more like seven hundred years ago. That was not a mistake anyone from this time would make. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to notice. He could see power in what they were telling him, and he was so focused on that, it blinded him to all else. Now they had his attention, it was time to bait him properly.

“Kullos has been collecting the pieces, and he has most of them,” Mandalee told him.

“Almost all of them, we think,” Cat agreed. “All except the one you’ve got…and one other.”

In truth, Catriona had no idea how long Kullos had spent collecting the fragments before the events that ultimately led to his downfall. Still, she thought it unlikely that even Ulvarius was arrogant enough to go and ask the shadow warrior to verify this information. Ulvarius may have been the worst tyrant who ever lived, but next to Kullos, he was just a bully in a school playground.

“You know where there’s another fragment?” Ulvarius breathed in wonder.

This was a good sign, Cat thought. Assuming Ulvarius wasn’t fool enough to imagine he could take on Kullos, the promise of another fragment should be irresistible. Even if he suspected something, he would still have to check it out for himself. If there was another fragment, he wouldn’t risk anyone else getting their hands on it. If they were lying and there wasn’t, well, they were captives under his control. He could just kill them later.

“If you want to know more, you’ll have to do what we agreed and then come back here to discuss terms,” Mandalee insisted.

“Very well,” Ulvarius agreed. He inscribed the language of magic in the air, and a pair of wooden mops and buckets appeared.

“Get cleaning. I’ll be back shortly to continue this.”

With that, he left the room.