The Wiced Tower

All characters in sexual situations are 18 or older. Thanks for reading!

"She's missing?" Cassia frowned at her seneschal. She didn't need this right before the evening fete. This was Bantia's big night. Second only to the wedding itself. "Maybe she ran off? Servants do that from time to time. Can we just find someone to fill in? We do need washers in the scullery for tonight."

"It's more than that." Aulus watched the duchess closely. She seemed poised, but he was fearful of breaking the bad news. "The missing woman's husband also serves in the scullery, and he is threatening that the whole scullery forgo work until she is found."

"A strike?" Cassia stood and rushed to the doorway. "I will see to this." She paused at the door and looked back at Aulus. "What is his name, and is he in the scullery now?"

"Nicias. And yes, you may find him there." Aulus watched her rush out, her stola trailing behind her. He had no doubt that she would set things straight.

~~

Dancers twirled in the lamplight. The percussion of feet and drums echoed around the courtyard. Cassia smiled as she watched Bantia, towering above the other women. Her daughter moved with such joy. Bantia's future husband looked lively too, leading the men in their concomitant dance.

"Any trouble, Duchess?" Valeria leaned over and offered a faint smile to Cassia. The queen regent also watched the wild fete. "You almost missed the opening."

"Just a small staffing issue. We're missing one of our servants, but I made promises, and found a replacement." She glanced at Valeria and Cesphea. And then looked beyond to their mysterious guest. A young woman with a regal face, but poor posture as she slumped in her chair. To be honest, the woman looked under the influence of some narcotic. "Everything is fine, Your Majesty."

Cesphea giggled, and Valeria gave her a stern look. Valeria looked back at the dancers, casually talking to Cassia. "My sister notices your covert looks at our new companion."

Cassia said nothing. She could tell when a person was playing a game with her, and she had no interest in moving across another's board.

"Unfortunately, we were the cause of your little misadventure. Do you not recognize your own servant?" Valeria gestured vaguely at Merope who sat next to Cesphea. "We had to provide her with a gown, and a formal coronet. And clean her up some, too. So, I do not blame you for your confusion."

Cassia's blood boiled. What where they doing? This was beyond anything she would expect from the royal house. She steadied her breathing, keeping her eyes on her joyful daughter. "Oh, really? I don't spend much time in the scullery, so her face was not that familiar to me. Will she be going back to work tonight?" Her voice came out casual. Cassia silently thanked her departed mother for all those years of training.

Cesphea laughed again, a resonant sound mixing in with the percussion. "She will not be... um... available tonight. We have become enamored of her cleaning skills. She will come back to our palace with us on the morrow. You will have to find a permanent replacement for Merope."

"And what of her husband, Your Majesty?" Cassia looked to her left at where her own retainers sat. She caught the sorceress's steely, blue eyes. Brynhild looked to be seething. How odd. What exactly had happened to set off that cool, Northern woman? Cassia bit her lip as her gaze drifted back out to the dance floor. She had the impression that some minor skirmish had been fought, and the queens regent were the gloating victors. But why a scullery servant?

"You ask, what of her husband, Duchess?" Valeria's voice was cold. "He is of no matter. I would think you might be happy that we found such a diligent servant."

"Congratulations, Your Majesty." Cassia stood, and curtsied to the queens. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I must dance with my daughter." She glanced once more at her former servant, Merope. The woman's eyes were glazed, and her face slack.

"Of course." Valeria nodded and put her hand on her sister's thigh to keep Cesphea from audibly snickering. "Enjoy your special night. Two great houses coming together is quite the cause for celebration."

"Yes, Your Majesty." Cassia nodded and glided out onto the dance floor. She would put the whole thing out of her mind. That is, until she had had time to investigate on another day.

~~

"Mercury!" Naevia dropped to a knee and opened her arms for the little monkey. It scurried across the corridor and jumped into her arms, pawing at her bosom. "Easy, now, that hurts." She placed him on her shoulder and turned to her brother as he closed the heavy cypress door to his chambers. "We have our messenger." She pulled a tiny roll of parchment off Mercury's ankle, unrolled it, and read. "

Meet me at the Temple Discordia,

it reads. Where is that?"

"Toward the back of the castle." Vel looked back and forth down the long corridor, expecting the monkey to be a distraction for Dellia's sword. But only a couple merchants from beyond the Roads of Trade ambled by. Vel nodded and smiled. The men nodded back, ambling by and speaking their strange language. When they had passed, he whispered, "Do you have a parchment, Naevia?"

"A little. And some charcoal." Naevia patted the bag slung under her arm. "Shall I write back?"

"Not now. But if anything goes wrong, we may need to send a message later." Vel had been offered a tour of the viscount's castle by Tes-amen several times, but he'd deferred. He'd been busy. Now he wished he'd taken the man up on his offer. "I'm pretty sure we go this way." They turned left and wound their way to the stairs, dropped two floors, and then tried to head north.

Mercury excitedly chittered on Naevia's shoulder, screeching here and there like he was offering directions. After a while, they came to a row of cavernous archways. The entrances to several temples. These were the sanctums of the lesser gods, lodged closer to storage rooms and servants' quarters, than the main living areas. They passed the temple of Muta. Then, Pomona, Rumina, and Volumna. Vel, Naevia, and Mercury stopped when the entrance to Discordia's temple came into view. Sitting on a bench just outside, leaning forward as if she were in deep contemplation, was Dellia. Her sword was still in its sheath.

"Oh. There you are." Dellia looked over at them like she'd just wakened from a slumber. "I see our friend delivered the message. He's a good monkey." She slowly stood, her scale armor softly chiming with her movements. She held out a little scroll of parchment. "When I left this morning, the little guy was waiting right outside your door."

"Naevia found herself a pet." Vel's hand found the hilt of his sword.

"You two always had a way of acquiring pets. Remember the goat you found wandering outside the Ostia's walls? What was he called?" Dellia's face was dark, but inscrutable.

"Um... his name was Ramses." Naevia could sense something was quite unstable in their cousin. Some sort of warped gear skipping and failing to catch against the rest. "Will you let us pass?"

"Mmm?" Dellia's face brightened as if she had come to a decision. "On that matter I have had thoughts, secondary musings, and tertiary judgements. First, you should know that I was to report back last evening to Spurrius. When I did not, it seems he became worried. I signaled him outside the castle this morning. He signaled back that all exits are being watched and you are wanted by the Vulpes for questioning." She absentmindedly put her hand to her belly. "I feel absolutely sick when I think of what they might do to you."

"Can you... call them off?" Vel looked at his sister. He had gone from fearing the presence of his cousin to realizing that she was their best hope.

"I could, yes." Dellia nodded slowly and looked into the Discordia's temple. "If I do nothing, they'll take you. They are only waiting for the viscount's permission to enter the castle. A strange formality still in place from the time of dragons. I wonder if..." her voice trailed off and she stared blankly into the empty sanctum.

"Will you... please... Dellia? Will you call them off?" Naevia reached for her brother's hand and pulled it into her grip. It was warm and dry and comforting.

"I want to." Dellia nodded. "I do. But I can't signal them such a message. Spurrius would want to see me in person. To know that I am not... coerced. And... I cannot do that now. I feel... very strange about my husband."

Vel and Naevia exchanged a look with raised eyebrows. They didn't know what to expect from their cousin.

"We'll find a way out of this. You don't want to harm us, and we don't want to be harmed. So, we have common ground." Vel took his free hand away from his sword. "What's the next step?"

"The tunnel?" Dellia looked back and forth between her cousins and the temple door as if she was seeing an obvious solution and they were both idiots. "The tunnel entrance is hidden by Discordia. Very few people know of it."

"Tunnel?" Naevia did not much enjoy enclosed spaces, but an escape was an escape.

"And then there's your father's message." Dellia held up the small, rolled parchment in her hand. "I took it from the monkey when I left you the note to meet me here." A vague smile spread across her lips. "It is not only pigeons that can be intercepted." She closed her fist around the scroll. "Your father wishes to meet you. He gives a time and place. I plan on using the tunnel with you to pass unseen past the Vulpes. We'll fetch Gallio Tullius ourselves, and then turn him over. All of us heroes. Our loyalty proven. Then, perhaps, I can face my husband again."

"We're not --" Vel was cut off by Naevia's sharp squeeze on his hand.

"We're not going to say no to that. It's the only way." Naevia stepped forward. "Lead the way."

"Very good." Dellia sighed with relief. "I'm glad you two finally have some sense between you. And we can forget the... misunderstanding we had yesterday and never speak of it again."

"I'm sorry, Dellia. You were attacking me and I --" Vel started.

"Never speak of it again, Your Grace." Dellia turned and marched into the temple. "Now come." They entered the temple. It was a small room, and although the torches were lit, the place looked like it hadn't been cleaned in ages. Cobwebs hung from a circle of statues carved into the outer wall. Every statue had a different scale and subject, and they were spaced at uneven intervals. It was distracting to look at.

"Ouch." Naevia stubbed one sandaled toe on a stone that stuck out of the uneven floor. "This room is a wreck."

"What do you expect from discord?" Dellia found the switch behind the broken statue of a boar-headed man, and part of the stone wall slid back to reveal a black, yawning mouth of a passage. A draft of cool air pushed past them. "Torches."

Each of them took a torch from the wall and entered the tunnel. Dellia touched a switch inside and they were suddenly sealed in. Mercury let out a long wail, and clutched tighter to Naevia's shoulder.

"It's okay, Mercury." Naevia patted his tiny back.

"Quiet now," Dellia hissed. "This tunnel is old and built by magic. I don't want it falling on our heads." She stalked off down the tunnel with firm, deliberate strides. She muttered to herself something about the Tullius brats and their pets.

Vel held Naevia back a moment and leaned down to whisper in her ear. "What are we doing?"

"Waiting for our moment to ditch her or change her mind," Naevia whispered back. "There was no upside to arguing in the castle all day."

"Right, okay." Vel held his torch aloft and followed their cousin, Naevia right behind him.

They walked in silence for a long time, the tunnel angling down and down. Presently, they came to a fork. Dellia stopped, her head swiveling as she regarded their two choices. One dark, and one glowing an azure iridescence. "There should be only one tunnel here," she whispered.

Vel reached up and touched the archway. The stonework seemed ancient. "Perhaps your information was a bit off. This split is old." He held the torch low and bent down. "You can even see where the stone is worn from feet traveled down both paths. Which way?"

"Perhaps we should follow that blue glow." Naevia pointed to the right. "It seems the safer way." There was something compelling about the azure light.

"Yes, I agree." Dellia sounded almost mesmerized.

"What glow? I see no light but our torches." Vel watched as both women calmly walked to the right. "Um... this isn't decided on." They continued on. Something in the air, stale and foul, wafted from the tunnel on the left. He followed the women to the right. "Yes, follow the glow only women can see. Excellent choice."

They came to several other forks that Dellia insisted should not be there, and each time they took the path that Dellia and Naevia insisted glowed a faint, metallic azure, like the wings of the milkweed beetle. After about an hour, their tunnel ended with a patinaed, copper cage about the size of a storage closet. The thing was intricately wrought with the same discordant characters as those depicted by the statues in the temple long behind them. There was a slim opening, and both women stepped into the cage immediately.

"What is this place?" Vel didn't like the way the pale, green metal seemed to dance under their flickering torchlight. The flames behaved as if there was a draft, but this was the end of the tunnel. He looked up and saw that cables ran from the cage into a hole in the rock above it. And there were rails, too. Vel stepped into the cage with them.

"Isn't it beautiful, Vel?" Naevia rubbed his arm.

"The light is like the ocean in a storm as lightning hits. It's very pretty," Dellia said in a soft, quavering voice quite uncharacteristic of her. They were close together in the cage, and she involuntarily stood close enough to Vel for her shoulder to push up against his chest. The contact made her tremble. She tried to focus on the mission. They had a few hours to meet and apprehend Gallio Tullius. She would get that done, and the rest would sort itself out. But try as she might, she couldn't disentangle her mind from the jolts of lightning contact with Vel brought her.

"So, you're still seeing the blue light?" Vel had been expecting movement, but his heart still leaped when the cage lurched upward. It moved fast enough that wind extinguished the torches. He was in total black. His stomach fell as the cage surged up and up.

"It grows faint." There was deep disappointment in Naevia's voice. "The light's almost disappeared."

"I see it, too." Dellia moved closer to Vel, and now felt Naevia press into them. The three huddled in darkness as they hurdled upward. The metal cage and rails whined at them at an increasing pitch.

After a minute, Vel spoke. "How deep under the city were we? It seems --" The cage lurched to a stop and the three of them stumbled together and fell to the floor. They were flooded with daylight, and Vel shielded his eyes with his hand and looked at an opening in the shaft they had traveled. All he could see was blue sky. He pushed Dellia off him and stood. He then helped Naevia to her feet and they walked out of the copper cage. As his eyes adjusted, he took in his surroundings. They were on a large, circular space made of stone, with guard rails all around. He blinked again. There was a bath to his left, and furniture to his right. It was... the same furniture from the bedroom in the broken tower. "What the...?"

"Vel, do you know where we are?" Naevia took a few unsteady steps and rushed to the guard rail. Far, far below them, the city spread like something from a child's game. They were so high above it, that she could only barely hear the steady hum of activity always present in Kart Hadasht. The people below looked like ants. She smiled broadly. A surge of energy rushed through her. "Look, Vel, look." Mercury clung tightly to her shoulder, looking down at the city with wide eyes.

"I'm coming." He passed a table laid out with grapes, dates, venison, and wine. Vel stopped next to Naevia and her stomach nearly rolled over. Clutching the guard rail, he felt the wind tug at his hair. They were so high up that his mind rebelled. A cold, prickly sensation spread over his skin. He felt himself pitching forward.

"Careful, cousin." Dellia stood to Vel's other side. She took a fistful of his robes and prevented him from tumbling over the side. "We didn't get you all the way out of that castle so you could go flying now." She tried to wipe the smile off her face, but she could not. Had she ever felt more happy than at that moment? Well, maybe on her wedding day. And maybe, although she would have denied it to anyone that made the assertion, the day before when she'd felt Vel move deep inside her. She looked up at the sun and tried to gauge the time. "We have some time yet before we have to meet your father." She pulled Vel away from the edge and sat him down on a sofa. She unfastened her weapons and laid them at her feet. Slowly, she undid the clasps to her armor, and dropped it with a jangle. She then pulled off her tunic, kicked off her sandals, and removed her chest band and underwear. "Time for a bath."

"Are you insane? We're on the resurrected tower. It could fall." Vel watched her boobs bounce in unison as she ran over the stones and hopped into the bath with a splash. Maybe this was the distraction they needed to get away from Dellia.

"This is it, Naevia," he whispered, stood, and turned to his sister.

"Agreed, Vel." Naevia put down the piece of charcoal she was holding and tucked the rolled note she'd just written onto Mercury's ankle. "Go find Father," she said to the monkey. She put Mercury down and watched him run across the floor and scamper down an open hatchway where the stairs began. Mercury disappeared from sight.

"What did you write?" Vel's eyes widened when he saw her removing her stola. Her weapons were already on the stones about her. Her pale skin was almost blinding in the full sunlight.

"I told him to run," she whispered. And then much louder, she said, "A bath sounds delightful." Naevia laughed and moved over to her brother, pushing him toward the water. "How about we wash and then enjoy a midafternoon snack. Those grapes look delicious."

"Are you... are you drunk?" Vel stumbled as she pushed him. She kicked off her sandals as they went, and tossed her chest band and underwear behind her. He went up right to the edge of the bath and paused, as though she expected him to undress. But instead, she gave him one last shove, his arms windmilled, and he fell into the water.

"I do feel... a little drunk." Naevia frowned, but her smile returned when she noticed that despite his sputtering, his eyes were on her boobs. She stuck her chest out a little and made a little pose for him. She knew he hadn't watched Dellia's nakedness with the same look.

"Your weapons will rust, Your Grace." Dellia moved languidly in the water over to him and reached under the surface to remove his belt. "You cannot fight with a rusty sword. That's rule one. Or, maybe rule three." Her knuckles brushed against his soft leviathan, and she shivered. She tried very hard to keep her mission in the front of her mind. Once Gallio was captured, everything would sort itself out. She lifted his sword out of the water, unsheathed it, and left it in the hot sun to dry. Her breasts brushed against his soaked robes and she shuddered. She leaned up to him and planted an awkward kiss on his lips. She felt him resist, and that did not please her, so she pushed his back against the side of the tub and kissed him more aggressively. A warm radiance spread from him to her mouth and tongue.

Discord and turmoil reigned in Vel's mind. She had fought him like a spitting cat the day before, and now she kissed him like he quenched a thirst. It was not unpleasant to have his cousin assaulting him so, but it was more than jarring. Even more discordant, his naked sister watched them while standing above. And this was all happening on the top of a resurrected relic tower in the middle of an escape from the Vulpes. Despite it all, he felt his cock rising under the clothes.