Pandemonium reigned in the tavern as Stracha and Givens returned coins to patrons for the first time that afternoon, and Alec’s opponent held both hands over his head in triumphant celebration.
“Sorry, son, but we all know that a pint of ale is a great equalizer,” he told Alec amiably as he slowly stood up, despite the rain of congratulatory blows that were pounding his back and shoulders.
Alec looked up at Pryce, who was smiling down at him. “Don’t worry, this was perfect! You always want to give something back to your victims so they leave happy. We’ve made all the money we needed this afternoon anyway,” the cagey promoter told him.
Alec belched in reply.
“I don’t know what assignment you’re on that your patrol has managed to spend the whole afternoon here entertaining my patrons,” the serving man said as he stood by Pryce, “but there’s often a patrol of imperials that stops by here just to keep an eye on things around this time of day. If a squad of Canare who speak with Dominion dialects can explain their position, that’s fine by me. But otherwise, you may want to poke your heads upstairs in the private rooms, or leave the tavern altogether.”
Alec suddenly wished that he could be completely sober.
“Let’s go upstairs to a room,” Alec suggested, as he stood up, discovering that his legs were slightly wobbly.
“You don’t drink much, do you?” Lewis asked as the squad began climbing the rickety, narrow stairs.
“No, not much at all,” Alec agreed as he looked down and concentrated on each step.
At the top of the stairs the servant showed them down a dim hall to a large room in the back of the building. “Is there a back way out?” Pryce asked as soon as the door was closed and the Dominion squad was safe.
Givens looked out of a small, dirty window. “We can go out this window. The drop isn’t bad.”
“I have to go out,” Alec said abruptly.
“Go where?” Stracha asked.
“Go,” Alec said just as abruptly, feeling a fierce call of nature. He opened the door. “I’ll be right back. Wait for me here. If we get split apart, meet me in the plaza across from the palace gate, the square we came through earlier.” He walked out the door and stumbled at the top of the stairs. He looked up as he started to fall forward, and saw the ceiling above him in a flash, as he felt his shin hit a step hard, then his head banged into something, giving him sparks of pain, and then he was lying still, his eyes closed, and pain the only thing he was conscious of. He opened his eyes and saw two men in black and red uniforms standing over him.
Chapter 28 – Revenge on the Sorcerers
“We seem to have a problem here,” one guardsman said to the other.
“It’s our duty to help this poor soldier,” the second one responded as he bent down, grabbed Alec’s collar, and pulled roughly, jerking Alec to his feet.
Alec looked around. The tavern was virtually empty, and the few customers there avoided any eye contact. He looked down, and saw blood on the front of his tunic. He carefully placed his fingers to his nose and pulled them away, with red gore liberally present.
“Come with us; we have a nice place to clean you up,” the first guard said, as each guard grabbed an elbow and dragged Alec roughly but effectively out of the tavern into the street. Still dazed by the ale and the tumble, Alec could mount no protest. He noted with concern the eight other guards and three other prisoners.
A shackle was abruptly snapped around his ankle, and he stumbled forward with a jerk as the group began walking down the street.
“This is a mistake!” Alec found his voice for the first time.
A fist belted the side of his head. “Quiet,” a voice spoke the solitary word.
The group of captives was moving rapidly and Alec was struggling to keep up. A whip snapped at his heels and he picked up his pace. Alec ran with the group through the blocks of the city, and he began to feel sobriety returning. He belched, then belched again, and started to feel better. He looked at the person next to him among the prisoners, and saw tears streaming down his face.
At that moment they came within sight of the cathedral, and slowed down. Alec heard a sob from a woman behind him. More red and black guards came out from behind the defensive barricades to join the prisoners’ guards.
Alec felt emotions suddenly wash over him, and he knew he had regained his powers. His spiritual ingenaire powers had felt a wash of horror and sadness and dread and despair. “What are they going to do to us?” Alec asked loudly. The woman behind him sobbed again.
“Shut up,” another guard told Alec, and the whip slapped across his back. Alec felt his anger flare. He dropped the spontaneously energized spiritual powers, and engaged his warrior powers.
His group of prisoners were walking into the grounds of the cathedral, and Alec walked in now fully alert, looking in all directions, judging threats and opportunities, hearing screams and scrabbling rodents and shuffling feet. He was sorting through all the noises and sights, and analyzing the situation.
“Wait in there,” the group of prisoners was pushed into a pen of iron bars, located in the nave of the cathedral. A guard came in and unlocked the shackles on each of their legs.
Alec heard a scream, and his head jerked up to see a knife flash down in a dim shaft of sunlight. At the altar of the cathedral. Killing a victim who had been sacrificed for one of the many sorcerers and sorceresses gathered at the altar. The woman in the cage with him sobbed and collapsed.
“We need to take care of our special friends, especially with Emperor Mikhail’s niece here to take command,” the guard said casually.
It was the last thing he said as Alec kicked his face and grabbed his sword. Dashing as fast as his abilities made possible, Alec bolted past the guard at the gate of the cage, slashing the sword down across the guard’s neck as he passed, and he charged up the aisle, aiming directly for the cluster of demon-summoning villains. Screams from the prisoners he had left behind alerted the whole interior of the cathedral to something unusual. Alec sensed an arrow being shot at him from behind, and somersaulted forward to avoid it, maintaining his momentum towards the front.
A knife clattered against a stone pew, and Alec stooped to pick it up.
He had not intended to take any actions during this trip into Oyster Bay. He knew it was foolhardy to reveal the presence of Dominion forces inside the occupied city. But inexplicable circumstances had brought him into the heart of the sorcerers’ domain in the city, and there was no doubt in his mind that he had to take advantage of this chance to kill the source of the evil power that boosted the Michian soldiers. As soon as he sprang into action, Alec had given no thought to escape for himself – he only intended to slaughter as many of the sorcerers as he could. He wanted to prevent them from calling forth demons, and he wanted to put an end to the horror of the daily sacrifices.
Alec was close to the sorcerers now. Guards were scrambling to converge on him from all directions as he roared down upon his target. A guard stood directly in Alec’s path, his sword held in front of him. Alec dispatched him without breaking stride. He pulled back his arm and released the dagger he had picked up, letting it fly at the sorceress whose hands and face were bloody as she stooped over her dead victim, still trussed in ropes on top of the cathedral’s desecrated altar. The knife sank into the chest of the startled butcher, and she toppled to the floor.
Alec swung his sword at the next sorcerer he encountered, beheading the man. None of the black-clad victims in Alec’s sight were armed; they obviously never expected any challenge or threat to reach them here in their most secure location. With his right hand Alec was swinging his sword at every sorcerer he could reach as he ran among them, while he used his left hand to punch others with deadly force. No arrows were being shot at him while he was surrounded by the vulnerable sorcerers, but now guards were intermingling with his targets, running towards him as sorcerers ran away. Alec engaged two guards briefly, slaying them both, then began pursuing the largest
body of sorcerers who were fleeing down a stone staircase towards the catacombs of the cathedral, while guards lagged behind him.
Alec stabbed one sorcerer in the back at the top of the stairs, hurdled over the body, and landed on the back of another, whose neck he sliced. He hacked at others, leaving more bodies on the steps as well, and caught the last of the sorceresses that had unfortunately for them chosen that direction to flee. Three guards were approaching the stairs from the bottom, and Alec killed all three in seconds.
Suddenly, Alec was alone. Over a dozen demon-callers were dead, along with a handful of their guards. Screams and shouts still echoed down the stairwell behind him, but no one within sight was alive. He remembered his friend Rief, and her one quiet mention of her mother, who was killed as a sacrifice by the sorcerers; I’ve avenged your loss, Rief, he said silently in his mind. Alec reduced his ingenaire energy level, dropping to a trickle, but his heart still thumped within his chest as he reacted to the past ninety seconds of activity. What should he do next?
He looked down at one of the dead guards, and his mind began to race. He dropped his sword and began undressing the dead body, stripped off his own yellow outfit and donned the black and red, then buckled on the sword belt, grabbed daggers from the other dead guards to place in the belt as well, and picked up his first sword again. He took a moment to put the yellow clothes on the dead man he had stripped, hoping to give himself time to escape.
Alec climbed the stairs and returned to the main nave, coming out near the wooden boxes that had held the choir formerly. “Did you see him down there?” another guard shouted at him.
“There are dead bodies down there, and one of them is Canare. He must have gone that way,” Alec replied.
“There’s a dead Canare in the catacombs,” several voices shouted simultaneously, and guards began racing towards the stairs, brushing and knocking Alec in their hopeful haste. Alec edged away and began working his way along the western aisle, staying close to the wall as he furtively sought to escape from the cathedral. He reached the main entrance, which was unmanned, and stepped out into the plaza in front of the cathedral. He walked towards the gates, where there were still guards at their posts.
“What’s happening in there?” they all excitedly asked Alec, taking him for one of their fellow guards.
“Someone went crazy with a sword; he killed a dozen people or more,” Alec replied.
“The great ceremony was supposed to happen today! What will the emperor’s niece say when it doesn’t happen?” one of the guards asked fearfully.
“I’m supposed to go to the palace right now with a message,” Alec answered, stepping past the post and out into the street beyond. Outside the cathedral boundaries the city remained calm, unaffected by the calamity that had befallen the sorcerers’ isolated enclave, and Alec was able to walk at a quick pace down the road to the plaza in front of the palace. He entered the plaza, noticing that the general population gave him a wide berth as he stood in the uniform of the sorcerers’ guards. He spotted a knot of yellow and red uniforms standing in a doorway, and walked over to them, an idea beginning to form in his mind.
Alec was able to walk virtually into the midst of his friends, who were watching intently for his yellow outfit. “Alec?” Stracha squealed. “You made it! What happened to your uniform? Tell us what happened,” she spit out her questions as the rest of the squad gathered around in relief. Alec could sense the tension draining away from his companions.
“Let’s get inside some place to talk,” Alec responded. He looked around the fairly busy square, spotting a building whose upper floor was clearly vacant. “Follow me,” he instructed, and led the rest of the group to a door in an alley, which he broke, then they climbed the stairs and wandered into a room whose windows looked out over the square.
“Some merchant must have lived up here, above his shop on the ground,” Givens imagined as he looked out the window.
“What happened to you, and what’s your plan for next, Alec?” Lewis asked.
“I was taken prisoner by the guards for the sorcerers,” Alec explained. “And I couldn’t use my powers to fight because I drank too much ale,” he stared meaningfully at Pryce.
“Hey, it wasn’t my idea!” Pryce shrank back.
“The guards had rounded up several prisoners, and they took us back to the cathedral. The sorcerers have to perform a human sacrifice every day for their powers, and we were supposed to be the sacrifices for today,” Alec told his companions. Stracha’s face turned white, and there were uneasy shuffling feet among the others, he observed.
“By the time I was in the cage with the other captives, my powers returned. I used them to kill as many sorcerers as I could, and a few guards, then I left and came over here to find you,” he neatly summarized.
“We waited about ten minutes because we thought you were, well, you know,” Givens began.
“And then we went downstairs and the barkeeper told us you had been taken by guards, but we didn’t know where you were going,” Lewis resumed telling the story, “so we came here and stood waiting. I was worried we were becoming too obvious, and we were just about ready to shift positions for a while when you showed up!
“And I know we’re all mighty glad to see you,” she added.
“I’m even more glad to see all of you!” Alec said.
“What does it mean, now that you’ve killed the sorcerers?” Givens asked. “Are all the demons gone?”
“I didn’t get to kill all the sorcerers,” Alec answered. “They scattered in all directions when I started to slaughter them. A few got away.”
“But maybe we can correct that,” he added.
“Alec, we are behind enemy lines, in the middle of a city controlled by Michian. We don’t even have any orders to be here!” Lewis said in a reasonable tone. “We are supposed to report to headquarters tomorrow – that’s our own headquarters, on the other side of the lines, not the Michian headquarters on this side of the line. We don’t really have time to take on another adventure, do we?”
“Let me tell you what I’m thinking,” Alec answered, and he began his proposal.
Chapter 29 – Problem at the Palace
Alec was leading Givens, Danel and another man through the back halls of the palace. They were clad in the gray uniforms with gold trim that were the sign of members of the imperial guard. Alec had led his three companions to a back entrance to the palace, where they had overpowered the guards at a gate and taken their uniforms, then acquired more uniforms along the way. They had visited the armory, where Alec had acquired two bandoliers of throwing knives.
“The sleeping rooms are this way,” Alec indicated, as they turned a corner. A pair of guards was stationed at an approaching intersecting hall.
“What brings you here?” they challenged Alec’s crew.
“We were told to provide escort service for someone,” Alec artfully dissembled.
“You’re too late for that!” the second guard spoke. “What have you been doing? The emperor’s niece and her retinue left fifteen minutes ago.”
“Thank you,” Alec said, slightly flustered by the unexpected movement of the imperial niece. “We’ll try to catch up.”
“The only thing you’ll catch is twenty lashes, is my guess,” the first guard said. “Take the first turn on the right and you might reach them before they get outside for the ceremony,” he suggested, without much apparent hope they would succeed.
“We’ll go right now,” Alec said, and thanked the guards, then led the others men away.
“What now?” Danel asked.
“We’ll see what we can salvage,” Alec said. “Follow me.” He proceeded to begin weaving through halls and rooms and even a kitchen, giving no one time to ask him any questions. They entered the arrival hall, the large ceremonial space inside the main doors of the palace, and saw that the imperial procession had just left through the doors, and was already in the plaza.
“We can make this work,” A
lec turned and spoke over his shoulder. He felt his pulse pumping with excitement as he saw a way to achieve this great victory. “Givens, you and your squad stay here. I’ll run out and begin an attack on the guards out there. When it looks bad for the imperial niece, you run out, rescue her, and take her back to the palace armory, and wait for me to catch up with you.
“Stay low, stay out of trouble,” he laughingly told his companions.
“And then we’ll be able to use the niece as a hostage to end the war? You really believe that?” Givens asked.
“It will work like clockwork,” Alec guaranteed. He knew his plan could work. Lewis and the other Dominion forces were waiting on roof tops with bows and arrows, ready to shoot at the sorcerers, according to the original plan, which had expected Alec and the others to be the escorts for the niece in the first place.
“Watch this,” he said, as he pulled out four knives, two trapped between the fingers of each hand. He took a deep breath, engaged his warrior powers once again, and ran out into the plaza.
Alec’s eyes took in the scene at a glance and he let the four knives fly with swift small motions and reached for four more, even as he realized that the situation was not what he had expected. It was worse, much worse than he had imagined it could be.
Chapter 30 – A Plan Falls Apart
The imperial niece stood near the far end of the plaza, surrounded by guards whose chests were suddenly blossoming knives. Alec was confident that he would be able to reach her or shepherd her back to the waiting arms of Givens if needed. Alec had expected to find sorcerers present as well, as the comment from the cathedral had hinted. He had not expected to find the sorcerers already finishing their spells to summon demons, nor to find them so heavily guarded and well protected. Even as screams erupted from the sudden death sown among the niece’s guards, Alec felt a demon beginning to materialize. His spiritual powers, now in a fuller state than he had ever possessed in any previous battle with demons, were painfully able to detect the arrival of the personified malignity.
Preserving the Ingenairii Page 21
