Kage rotated around through the practice mats to come against Alec, and he grinned, despite the sweat dripping down is forehead. “I haven’t had a workout like this in ten years,” he told Alec as they began to contest.
“We can stop if you want to,” Alec answered.
“I need to keep going. My wife did nothing but talk about your incredible swordsmanship after you rescued me,” Kage said. “You might as well be one of the immortals in her eyes.”
Alec glanced over at where Elena stood; she was watching the match between her husband and her rescuer. “What are you going to learn tonight?” he asked.
“This was supposed to be a taxation meeting. Our group of advisors were supposed to tell the Princess what her new tax proposal would raise, and who it would affect,” Kage said as he looked Alec in the eye while thrusting his blade at Alec’s thighs.
Alec parried the attack and riposted with a slicing motion that crossed the torso padding Kage wore. “Enough!” Kage said loudly. “I’m worn out. Let’s clean up and rest for a bit before we head across town.”
They put away their equipment, and Kage went to talk to Elena while Alec sat with Bethany. “Start preparing them,” Alec told her. “Let them know we think we’re leaving the city. Don’t tell them where yet. Those who say they want to go with us need to pack weapons and blankets and any food you can put together.
“If we don’t come back by tomorrow morning,” Alec began.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Bethany interrupted.
“No, you have to look at the possibilities,” Alec responded. “If I don’t come back, you have to go on without me. I’ll know where you’re going, and I’ll be able to follow you to Black Crag. You can trust these boys,” Alec motioned around them. “And Rahm will never betray you.
“You’re almost good enough to be a guardsman for any ruler. Black Crag will be thrilled to have a prospect like you show up,” Alec bolstered her. They stood up as Kage approached, wearing a cape over his stolen uniform.
We’re off then,” Alec affirmed. He shook hands with several of the boys in the gymnasium, and told them all to follow Bethany, listening with a warm heart to their pledges of fealty to her.
He and Kage left the building, with long, cold shadows stretching across the width of the street as the sun sank towards the western horizon. Cold winds whistled along the roads, and both men held their heads low as they walked through the bitter cold air. The journey was a long one, and nearly forty five minutes passed, with very few other people in sight, before they arrived at a corner where they stopped.
“That building down there, the fourth on the right, is where we’re supposed to meet,” Kage nodded down the right-hand street.
Alec looked up the street, and looked at every dark doorway, not seeing any evidence of watchers. “Is there a back way into the building?” he asked.
“Sure, probably,” Kage replied. “Why? Do you see something? What is it?”
“I don’t see anything. I just feel we need to stay out of sight. Let’s go around,” Alec suggested, tightening his cloak and leading the way to an alley that ran behind the buildings.
The alley was a narrow, dark slot in which they stumbled over unseen obstructions, and counted lit windows to try to find the right building. “Here, let’s go in,” Alec whispered, placing his hand on the building’s door. It opened, and they entered a hallway that felt comparatively balmy. A set of narrow stairs in the back of the building was available for servants to use unseen by the owners of the place, giving Alec and Kage an inconspicuous way to climb up to the fourth floor, where the office for Kage’s meeting waited.
“Alec, this is the wrong building!” Kage exclaimed as he looked at the door he was supposed to knock on. “This isn’t the office. We made a mistake.”
Alec slapped his forehead in exasperation. “Let’s go up to the roof,” he suggested after a moment of consideration. “Maybe from up there we’ll be able to see better; maybe the buildings are connected up there.”
They climbed to the roof, and found that the adjoining rooftops abutted, allowing an easy entry to the correct building, and soon Kage was knocking on the correct door. The door swung timidly open just an inch, paused for several ticks, then opened to admit Kage and Alec.
“What are those uniforms? Have you turned informer?” a voice asked as Alec blinked at the bright light inside the warm room. As his vision returned he saw that there were four other men already in the room, all looking gray and haggard.
“Who’s your companion?” a stout man asked, looking at Alec closely. Only Kage and Alec were armed with swords, Alec realized.
“This is the man who saved me when the Conglomerate goons came to arrest me,” Kage answered. “He helped Elena and I get away. The uniforms are a disguise. How did each of you escape arrest? Are we the only ones free? Where is the princess?”
“We heard you got away. You’re the only report I’ve heard of someone fighting their way to freedom,” the stout man replied. “The three of us weren’t at our homes when the guards came, and we’ve been hiding ever since.”
“I heard they have the Princess in prison along with everyone else they caught,” answered the oldest man in the room, a man who sat in a straight-backed chair, his posture just as stiff as the furniture he occupied. “There were Conglomerate guards at the palace before they went anywhere else. I saw them there, and that’s how I knew not to go back home.”
The four men began talking rapidly among themselves about who they knew that might also show up, and Alec turned away from them to study the room they occupied. It had several desks along one wall, and a large meeting table. One wall was interrupted by three doors, and along another wall were a series of windows, that he walked over to look through.
The room felt melancholy and hopeless, a reflection of the souls of the men in the room, Alec thought; it showed no life or color. He looked out the window onto the street in front of the building, seeing the corner where he and Kage had stood. There was a small band of soldiers there now, he saw in the dim light, and they were taking someone away, he realized. He looked closely at the scene below, and realized there were now men standing in the dark shadows of several doorways. The meeting site was under surveillance!
Alec turned and walked back to Kage. “We need to leave,” he said urgently, placing his hand on Kage’s shoulder.
The melancholy atmosphere in the room was cut by confusion, and by one strand of triumph. He didn’t know how he knew, but Alec realized that there was a traitor in the room, someone who had given the secret of the meeting away. They were in a trap, and with every second they were closer to being caught.
“There are soldiers outside,” Alec said. “They’re going to take us into captivity if we don’t get out of here.” The men in the room rushed to the windows to look outside, while Alec went to the door to the hallway. He placed his ear against the wood, and heard the tramping sound of feet on the stairs. It was too late for escape!
Desperately, Alec rushed to each of the office doors, looking into each office to see if they offered an escape route. “What is it Alec?” Kage asked as Alec flew past him to the last office door, finding no hope in the first two. The third office was like the others, without any options for evading the soldiers.
Right on cue the soldiers burst the door down and entered the room. “Put your weapons down! Disarm!” the leading soldiers screamed as a large crowd of them crowded into the room. There were so many of them entering that Alec saw they would be crowding one another, possibly interfering with one another’s motions in battle.
But the numbers were overwhelming. With a sigh, he dropped his sword, and was taken prisoner. He and Kage were both stripped of their uniforms and then marched through the frozen streets in a painful procession that ended at the palace, where they were led into a dungeon prison and locked in cells.
Chapter 5 – Escape From the Palace
The third time Alec awoke in his cell, he stretched his be
aten body as he sat up on the cold stone floor of his cell. He had his ring on the silver chain around his neck still, despite the efforts the jailers had made to take it from him. The fine silver chain had proven to be amazingly strong, too strong for the jailers’ blades to break despite its dainty appearance.
He was confused and amazed; he had dreamed all night long, dreamed of being in a prison cell in Stronghold, beaten by jailers, cut by Mooreen. He sat in dazed befuddlement, uncertain of what was real and what was a dream. He had fallen asleep in a jail cell, then dreamed of falling asleep in a jail cell, and he had awoken here, in his current jail cell. His dreamt past and his present black reality coincided around imprisonment.
He believed it was his memory restored, although he tried to argue with himself that it was only a bad dream, the result of his imprisonment and abuse during the past two days. Yet the logic carried no weight against the conviction in his heart, and the myriad of small and meaningful details that flooded his mind.
He knew who he was, and where he was from. Yet he had no idea of why he was now in Vincennes. His dream told him that Mooreen had slashed his face, while Noranda and Brandeis were in other prison cells nearby. John Mark had restricted his use of his Warrior powers. He was an Ingenairii! He looked at the marks on his arms. They were confusing; along with his Healer and Spiritual marks, his Warrior mark was vibrant and alive, although John Mark had limited it. Yet he had used his powers in his confused ignorance several times, he realized, when he had fought the anideads in the forest, and when he had rescued Kage.
And there were other marks here that he did not know, and could not explain – the horse with the rippling mane, the skull that sullenly sat, colorless and threatening, and the hourglass, whose sand sat still, flat and lifeless. Despite the restoration of his past, he felt a hole in his memory – while a great deal had been restored, there was still much more missing. He felt as though he had relit a lamp in a dark room, casting illumination through a smoky glass, but the lamp had little oil left in it, its flame flickered, and it could not provide enough light for him to see all that he needed to.
But now he understood the exercise of his powers, and he no longer needed to remain as a helpless captive in this dungeon where the careless guards assumed they had beaten all their captives into helpless, frightened men willing to cooperate. They had no notion of ingenairii, or the powers a warrior could possess.
He now knew why he hated the idea of a coup against a Princess he did not know in this land that was not his own, and he knew why the name of a girl called Bethany had stirred such devotion in his heart; though he had botched his end of the relationship, he knew that he and Bethany the ingenaire were mutually infatuated with one another, or had been before he left Oyster Bay behind him. He did not know anything about how far he was from the Dominion, or how to return to resume his task of protecting the crown while waiting for the heir to appear. Again he felt an uneasy sense that not all of his memory had returned. Perhaps there was more that he had done and did not remember.
Through the day he sat in his squalid cell ignored and alone, as he tried to understand and integrate his old life and his new. He easily used his healing powers to treat the bruises and the cuts on his body, and then he stood by the door and listened to the echoing sounds out in the hallway and in the other cells where he heard other prisoners being mauled. Early in his vigil he watched a man being hauled away between two guards, and half an hour later the man was dragged back, bleeding profusely.
A minute later he saw the same guards escorting Kage through the dark corridor. “Kage! Be strong Kage!” Alec called out. “Don’t you hurt him!” Alec shouted at the guards, “You ignorant, weak cowards!” he taunted them, wanting them to open his door and unleash him. He pounded on his door to draw further attention. “Long live the Princess! Long rule the Princess!” he added.
Four guards came hurrying down the corridor, one carrying a coiled whip in his hand. Kage’s guards stopped down the hallway waiting to hear the screams of suffering as the four men entered the prison cell. The cell produced the brief sound of a low conversation, then thuds and sickening sounds of flesh being flayed and beaten for brief moments, and then silence.
Kage’s escort waited expectantly. Suddenly, Alec leapt out into the corridor, the whip cocked behind his head, and he cracked it at the trio, striking one guard’s throat, then unleashing it again to wrap around the ankle of the other guard, and pulled the shocked man towards him. Alec pulled the man up to his feet, wrenching his sword from him. “Go pick up your companion and put him in that cell with the others,” Alec motioned towards the stone-walled room he had just emerged from.
The man walked away from Alec in a daze. The whip cracked just an inch from his ear as he reached his unconscious partner. “Don’t think about trying to run away,” Alec told him sternly. “The penalty for failure is severe.” The man turned and looked at him, then bent and began pulling his partner towards the room. Alec accompanied them into the cell, and came out alone, carrying a half dozen swords, a set of keys and a bandolier of knives.
“How did you do that?” Kage asked Alec in astonishment, speaking for the first time. Alec appraised his companion for a moment, stood still for another moment, then reached out and gently touched him in several places. Kage felt his aches and soreness vanish.
“How did you do that?” he repeated again, this time in a whisper. The look on his face was one part awe and one part fear.
“I have unique abilities,” Alec answered. “Let’s get your companions out of their cells. Is the Princess being held someplace within reach?” He threw the keys to Kage, who hurried to a cell door where a recognized face was one of many prisoners watching the incredible tableau unfold.
After trying three keys, Kage set the man free, and Alec handed him a sword. Kage set others free, and Alec handed out the rest of his swords. They soon had a dozen men free, emptying all the cells in the block, when they heard the rattle of the outside door, indicating the likely arrival of new guards.
Alec motioned all his new allies back, and stood with the whip in one hand and two knives in the other. The door opened, and four guards entered the passage, looking with curiosity at Alec. “Lay down your weapons and enter that cell,” Alec ordered in a commanding voice.
“What nonsense is this?” one of the guards began to reply scornfully, as Alec tossed both knives with one hand, and uncoiled the long whip with his other hand. Three of the four men were instantly down with leg wounds, and the fourth stood open-mouthed.
“Help them into the cell,” Alec called upon Kage’s friends, “and disarm them.”
“Who are you? Kage, who is he?” the freed men asked when the cell door was closed and the group of former prisoners stood in a circle.
“I’m here to help you help your princess. The first thing we have to do is set her free, and after that we can figure out what to do,” Alec answered quickly. “We have to act rapidly, right now, while we have the element of surprise. So if anyone knows where the princess is being held, we need to start moving in that direction now.”
“She’s being held in the Visitor’s Palace in the north garden,” said someone in the crowd.
“Is that right? Do we know that’s correct?” Alec pressed.
“Yes, it’s correct,” a blue-skinned man replied. “They took me to see her, and implied that she would be sent to the dungeons with the rest of us soon if we didn’t cooperate with them.”
“How long will it take to get there? How exposed is the route?” Alec tried to evaluate what to do.
“We’ll have to walk through the garden for at least one hundred yards,” the oddly-colored man estimated.
“Kage, take three men into that cell and take the uniforms from every guard in there,” Alec gestured.
Alec stood silently on his spot, while the uniforms were taken, and the rest of the freed prisoners murmured among themselves.
“We aren’t all going to go set the princess free,”
Alec said when Kage and his companions returned. “Our group is too large. I need volunteers to leave the palace. We will set six of you free in the city, and the rest of us will try to free the princess.”
The group stood silent, a collection of unwarlike men in an unexpectedly dangerous situation.
“Kage and I can take two uniforms and go to get the princess, if the rest of you want to act like a group of guards taking prisoners to a different location, you’ll be able to go free,” Alec proposed.
“I’ll go with you,” the blue man said.
“What’s your name?” Alec asked.
“I’m Nichols. Ask your friend,” was the prompt answer.
Kage nodded his assent. “Nichols is a good man, surprisingly good for a Jagine. Bring him along, if you really mean to do this.”
Alec did a double-take as his glance snapped around to look at Kage, surprised by the doubt in his voice. “This is your princess we’re going to rescue,” Alec spoke emphatically, his accent growing heavier and harsher.
“This is a suicide mission, Alec. We’re lucky you’ve gotten us out of our cells, but there’s going to be a lot of bloodshed just to get us up to where we can see sunlight, let alone out of the palace safely, not to mention storming into the garden to try to set the Princess free,” Kage said suddenly, surprising Alec with his words. “And a lot of these men don’t want to trust and follow a foreigner; they’re not soldiers. I know what you’ve done for me, but they don’t have any such reason to trust you. And I’m not the kind of fighter you want.”
“Nichols, will you lead me to the Princess?” Alec turned to the silent man in the silent crowd, who nodded affirmation.
“Someone give Nichols a sword. The rest of you put on those uniforms. Let’s get going,” Alec spoke, shocked by the totally unexpected cowardice of Kage and the others. Alec was driven by the use of his Warrior powers, convinced he could carry out any mission of this nature.
Rescuing the Captive: The Ingenairii Series Page 8
