Alec left Gottfried’s castle at the break of dawn the following day. “Don’t try to follow her,” Thressa had urged him. “A single man traveling alone won’t stand a chance of surviving the journey through the mountains in the winter.”
“The caravans take special wagons to protect the people from the weather, and they have horses specially bred for the altitude and the cold. It’s a death wish to try to follow her,” Gottfried told Alec. But by the end of the meal, they knew they had failed to dissuade him from the attempt.
“Here,” Gottfried had handed him a small bag of coins. “You’ll be able to buy supplies on the western edge of the city, and more expensive supplies in the first few villages in the low mountains. We will burn incense in your name at the shrines, and hope to see you again someday.”
Alec had walked away, and by midday he was standing with a full pack on the road, just outside the western gate to the city. He’d bought the pack and flints and steel and a small supply of kindling and a variety of travel foods. He’d added a layer of furs and a pair of snowshoes, and had virtually none of Gottfried’s money left.
The mountains provided the source of innumerable stories from the proprietors of the stores he visited, stories about storms and lost travelers and bands of bandits, as well as stories of monsters in the mountains and strange magical spells, and stories about the fierce warriors of Black Crag, some men, but mostly women, who were trained in the use of multiple weapons, and trained to use them all well. They were fair, but not merciful.
Alec adjusted the straps and began his journey. Caitlen had joined the only caravan that had left in the past week, a well-supplied and well-fortified force owned by a rich merchant who dominated the trade with certain tribes of the western barbarians, supplying amber and gold and exotic spices that were not available through the shipping houses on the western seas.
Although Alec believed Caitlen was as well-protected as possible, she was not protected by him, and he was divinely-charged with protecting her, he knew. He had no doubt that he would meet her, and that she would overcome her fears and accept him back as her companion, realizing that they were meant to accomplish something great together. And he hoped that God would intervene and let Bethany and the street tough fighters from Delphi’s gymnasium be there waiting and able to join him as well to fight for the princess as they led a force back down to Vincennes.
That night he slept under a yew bush, shivering in his furs as he awoke several times, and raising his body temperature back to a comfortable level. He awoke in the morning and ate some trail bread and some plants he collected on the way, then resumed a grueling pace that he hoped would let him catch the caravan before it reached Black Crag, a journey that promised to be two weeks long under optimal conditions.
Alec reached a small village in mid-afternoon, after which the road and the valley it followed began to climb much more steeply. Despite the exercise of the climb, Alec still had to devote a great deal of healing energy to keeping his body warm. That night he snuck into a crude barn that sustained an impoverished-looking farm in the mountains. He slept with a group of pigs, relishing the body warmth they shared, and then snuck out when he heard the farmer begin to unlatch the door the next morning.
Through the long, lonely nights of his journey Alec thought often of Caitlen, sometimes with her dark hair, sometimes with her silver hair. And when he didn’t think of the lady of the court, he thought about the Dominion. So long ago and so far away it seemed, but Noranda and Brandeis and Bethany all lived back there with all his other friends, and he missed them, and knew that his absence made the restoration of order in the Dominion a greater challenge.
His third day in the mountains took him through the last village on the road. He stopped in the tavern for warm food, and was looked at as a man already dead because of the impossibility of his task. He warmed himself by the fire, learned that the caravan was still more than two days ahead of him, and then left with the dismal but hot food in his belly.
Two days later he found that his use of healing power was starting to strain his abilities, as he kept climbing into thinner air and more snow. He kept his healing energy on at all times, yet walking against the wind made it difficult sometimes to gain more than a mile in an hour, and then a blizzard blew in. Alec wedged himself into a crevice between two boulders that faced away from the wind, pulled his furs into a cocoon around his body, and stay cramped there for two days until the storm’s fury abated.
He understood the impossibility of a single man getting through this journey, and questioned whether he would have been able to bring Caitlen safely through the dangerous passage. He presumed he was still less than halfway to Black Crag. With the blizzard past, he strapped on his snow shoes and began to walk over the deep new layer of snow it had deposited. The snow shoes were effective, but cumbersome and slow, making his attitude grow blacker hour by hour.
The next day, things got worse.
Chapter 16 – Raspute’s Cave
Alec pulled his snow shoes on in the morning as he rolled out of his small campsite, a rock overhang that passed as a cave in his eyes. By midday, as he stepped atop the drifts in the road, he had a nagging sense that he was being watched. He dropped his healer power and drew upon his warrior energies, scanning the countryside for evidence of danger. A movement on a hillside above the next valley caught his attention. It was at least an hour away, he judged, so he resumed using his healing powers to warm himself, and cautiously proceeded.
Banditry in the harsh winter conditions seemed impossible to Alec. The weather would make the terrain a difficult place to survive, and the number of caravans in the winter time seemed too few to support anyone up here. In all his time climbing the mountain road he’d not seen another living person since he had left the last village. As he drew closer, he dropped his healer energy and resumed his warrior energy, pulling a throwing knife outside his coat for ready access.
There was a man kneeling in the snow behind a bush on his left, and another one in the rocks on his right, plus the one he had seen originally, slowly working his way down the hillside, closer to the road. “I know the three of you are here,” he shouted loudly. He heard his voice echo down the valley below. “I will not harm you if you let me pass peacefully.”
The man behind the bush stood up. “Are you traveling alone? By yourself in the mountains?” he asked.
“I am. My destination is Black Crag,” Alec replied feeling colder, but still keeping his warrior powers engaged as he stepped further forward. “I’m not a trader, I have no money. Just let me pass.”
“We will let you pass peacefully if you pay the toll. Otherwise you need to turn around,” the man on the left said. The man on the right stood up too, and began to approach him, while the man up ahead finally descended to the level of the road.
Alec awkwardly unsheathed his sword, and pulled it out in his left hand, while he held the knife in his right. “I can pay the toll in a different way, without money,” he offered. “I have healing powers that will sooth your aches, cure your ills and mend your wounds. Let me heal each of you and I’ll be on my way. I don’t want to have to kill you.”
“What? Magical powers? Are you one of the lokasennii? I’ve never heard a claim that they possess healing powers?” the robber on the right answered as he came within reach of Alec. They seemed to be taking Alec seriously without dismissing his claims out of hand.
Taking a chance, Alec released his Warrior energy, and re-engaged his healer powers. He warmed himself with his first burst, as he turned to look at the man on his left. The robber had a terrible infection in his tonsils, and a festering sore in his right foot. “Give me your hand,” Alec told his unknowing patient.
“What? So you can stab me up close?” the man asked.
Alec hastily sheathed both his weapons, and reached his hand out, as if to an unknown dog. The robber’s gloved hand stretched out towards him, and Alec grabbed the exposed wrist above the glove, injecting his energy i
nto the man, and removing the two local pains that bothered him.
“He really did it! Bodie, Saynge, he really heals!” the amazed robber shouted. “If you heal all of us, you may pass on your way,” he told Alec.
“Let me touch you,” Alec said to the other two. The sun was falling towards the horizon, and he wanted to get on his way before night fell.
“Oh no, not just the three of us,” Bodie, the man coming from in front of the scene said. “You’ll need to come with us to heal every member of our society. “We can’t accept payment just for ourselves.”
And so Alec ended up following a narrow, mountain-hugging trail to the entrance of a cave. Inside the dim cavern were twenty-some men gathered out of the cold, living among casks and crates of food and drink they had confiscated from passing travelers during the good weather season when the traders came by.
“Linnie was kind to you,” the chief of the bandits told Alec. King Raspute, as he called himself in the third person, struck Alec as a cruel and sadistic person. Alec reached out to his hand as the first of those he healed in the cave, and he drove away lice, removed venereal disease, and healed fractured bones in the man’s hand. He puzzled over a strange condition in the man’s digestive tract, but because he couldn’t identify it, he did nothing to change it.
“If it had been me out there instead of Linnie, you would have been killed and your carcass robbed afterwards without bargaining. But Linnie got it right this one time with his soft approach it seems,” Raspute said. “Men line up for your miracle healing. What type of wizard are you?” he asked Alec.
“I am an ingenaire,” Alec replied.
“I’ve heard the name, but thought they were just myths, stories among the barbarians,” Raspute said.
“Really? You’ve heard of my kind?” Alec said in amazement.
“I used to work in the caravan crews that went west to the barbarians and wilderness in the west. The wild tribes out there told of ingenairii who lived among great mythical cities even further west of west, but I never believed any of it,” Raspute acknowledged, even using the correct plural form of the word. “And your accent is certainly strange enough to be from some far away land we don’t know.
“Now show what you can do so you can earn your right to keep living,” he ended on a flat and threatening note, and walked away, as a dutiful line of men formed before Alec.
The first man stepped up, and Alec noticed that he had the same strange conditions in his gut as Raspute. He also had a number of bruises, and a severe cut on his shoulder. Alec healed those, and sent the man away. A second man in line had been stabbed in the thigh, and also had the stomach condition of the other two. Alec worked slowly through the line, hobbled by his long exertions during the journey; after an hour he had only treated half the men in line.
All of them shared the strange stomach condition, and all suffered signs of recent battle, with cuts, bruises and stab wounds prevalent. Alec asked to take a break, and his obvious success in healing the men earned him the opportunity to sit in the back of the cave for a few minutes to ponder what he found.
“Help me,” a voice called in a whisper. Alec looked up, his senses alert. He closed his eyes, and chose to try to use his Spiritual power instead of his Warrior power to find the source of the voice. Unpredictable though his ability to control the Spiritual abilities was, it engaged immediately, and he was assailed by the awareness it provided. The cave was full of evil, hatred, self-loathing and rancor. The men around him were evil men in every regard.
But there was one entity that was different, in a way he had no comprehension of. There were tendrils of anger, but also compassion, and great suffering. Yet it didn’t feel fully human to him, however that was possible.
He dropped the use of his Spiritual energy and looked behind him, to where he had felt the unusual psyche. A tall box, with fine mesh-covered small windows, was a shadow in the darkness at the back of the cave.
“I’m in here,” the voice called from the box.
Alec extended his healer energy to diagnose the person in the box. The results were stunning. A woman was trapped in the box, one who had been subjected to torture and horrible abuse. He felt abysmal at the thought that he was helping these people who could do such things to the woman.
But his evaluation revealed a strange network of small, inexplicable organ-like objects throughout her body. The organs were connected to one another by what seemed to be a secondary, network of nerves, or some similar type of tissue. The woman was like no one he had ever met before. He poked a finger in through the mesh screen; his finger touched her, and he let a blaze of healing energy reduce the pain she felt, softening the worst of the injuries.
“Please set me free,” she called in a soft voice, pleading.
Alec took a deep breath. He knew that if he set her free the two of them would be trapped together in the recesses of the cave, and he knew he didn’t have the energy to fight all the men he would face.
They aren’t going to let you live anyway. Set me free and I will go get help, the woman’s voice spoke inside his head, as though she too were a Spiritual ingenaire.
He was astonished by her ability.
“And I am astonished by yours as well,” she spoke out loud. “You’ve heard my spirit voice, and you’ve analyzed me in at least two ways that no one else in this land could do.”
“Are you an ingenaire?” he asked quietly, bending down to the box and speaking though the grill.
“No. I am a lokasenna,” she spoke a word he had never heard before.
“You are doomed if you don’t set me free. I am your only hope,” she urged.
“Healer, it’s time to get back to work. Where are you?” a rough voice asked.
“They’re cannibals,” the woman told him.
Suddenly, he understood the strange condition of the stomachs of the men he had treated. Their diet consisted of the flesh of other men, causing their digestive systems to adjust to the meat; he gagged at the thought of consuming human flesh. Drawing his sword, he engaged his warrior powers and brought his sword down powerfully on the angle of the clasp that held the box closed. The woman immediately pushed upward and the lid flew open.
“What was that noise? Healer come out here now,” a voice spoke in a demanding tone.
Alec sheathed his sword and placed an arrow on his bow. He was watching the shadows carefully now. He diverted his attention for a split second to look at the woman in the box; she was gone.
I won’t abandon you. I will bring back help. Thank you for freeing me, her voice was in his mind again, and then it was gone, and he was alone.
“What are you up to healer?” Raspute appeared before him, holding a torch above his head. “What happened to the lokasenna?” he asked. Alec raised his bow. “Do you realize what you’ve let loose on the world?” Raspute screamed, as Alec released his bow, letting the arrow fly to the gang leader’s heart.
Raspute fell forward, and his torch lay on the floor, its flame flickering unsteadily while Raspute lay still.
“What’s happening back there?” another voice shouted, and a man’s head appeared behind the corner of a barrel. Alec shot another arrow quickly, and the man screamed briefly.
“The healer…” he heard a conversation begin, but he scrambled backwards, further into the recesses of the cavern. The flame from Raspute’s torch was steady, showing no noticeable movement of air through the cave, indicating that Alec was backing into a dead end, just as he had already backed into a deathtrap and a mystery.
What had happened to the woman he had set free? And who was she? She was able to detect his use of ingenaire powers, and had used the same ability herself, or something similar. She had disappeared, absolutely disappeared. And Raspute had been thrown into fear by the thought of the woman at loose. Alec was at a loss as to what he had done, and could only pray that anything disliked by someone as evil as Raspute had to be a good thing in the world.
There was a sudden burst of
flame in front of him, as someone threw a pail full of oil onto the rocks around Raspute’s torch, and the whole affair lit up brilliantly in front of Alec. He squinted and dodged behind a new boulder, in a part of the cave where he had to crouch slightly to fit. As he moved an arrow flew at him, careening off the stony floor and ricocheting upwards to strike his calf.
He rolled his eyes in astonishment at his bad luck, until the pain reached his brain, and he stifled a yelp. The arrowed had not penetrated his flesh deeply, and he pulled the arrow out, then sprayed three arrows of his own in front of him, striking at least one more antagonist.
An armful of wood had been thrown into the blazing puddle of oil, and now thick coarse smoke was beginning to rise to the ceiling and roll across it in all directions. Alec coughed, and realized the intelligence of the bandits’ method. They were going to smoke him out of his crevice in the back of the cave. More wood was thrown on the fire, setting off an eruption of sparks, and a thicker, darker smoke began to rise and spread.
“Dear Lord, please take care of Caitlen and her princess,” he said a quick prayer. “Please take care of Bethany and Ari and Noranda and Appel and Cassie and Rander, and all my other friends in the Dominion.” He steeled himself to jump through the fire. He would have some advantage – the bandits would be momentarily blinded from looking into the flames. He’d suffer the same affliction, but he knew that all he had to do when he was through the flame was to run towards the entrance. It seemed plausible that he might get out; the distance from the fire to the outside was little more than thirty yards, he estimated.
He jumped upward and outward, his head grazing the stony top of the cave, then he took another huge bound, and closed his eyes as he entered the flames. He heard the crackling roar of the fire around him for just a second, a passage that was painful and yet somehow purifying. She told me she loved me, he suddenly remembered Caitlen’s words when he had lain wounded in her arms on the floor of the restaurant in Eckerd. He hadn’t processed the words when she spoke them weeping over him as he lay with his terrible injuries, approaching the darkness of death.
Rescuing the Captive: The Ingenairii Series Page 18
