How the Warriors were traveling through the lacertii lands was a mystery to Alec. If there was war between the lacertii and humans, he would expect the ingenairii to be a moving target of attacks along the full length of their journey through the lacertii lands, something that would slow them down, and wear them out.
His musing were interrupted as he heard the sounds of battle not far ahead. There had been no indication that he would find the battle front so soon, or so close to the city. He engaged his Warrior powers in preparation for whatever might possibly happen, and began to run up the road. Within a mile the road rose up sharply from a small stream crossing, and as Alec crested the rise he saw a panicked retreat of the forces from Boundary Lake, running towards him pell-mell, no more than a pair of squads of men being pursued by a force ten times their size.
Alec was shocked by the tableau before him. He drew his sword, threw his supply bag by the side of the road, and charged forward. “Rally! Rally for Boundary Lake!” he screamed as he approached the first of the fleeing soldiers from the city. “Stop the invasion now!” he shouted. He passed some of the men as he flew forward, while they continued in full flight towards the city. “Come fight with me,” he shouted as he ran, hoping that they would turn and establish a position.
He made it up to the spot where he ran into his first wave of lacertii, then he began to hack and hew with his sword. A few men who had lagged behind the others were still retreating towards him, having been passed by the fleetest of the lacertii warriors, and they stopped to rally around him as they saw him become a rock on the battlefield, slaying every lacertii that came near him. He began to draw the attention of more of the lacertii who saw an open road ahead of them other than the lonely warrior who stood and fought so viciously.
“We’re with you!” a voice shouted behind Alec, and he heard the clash of metal as other men stopped their flight towards the city and returned to join him in the defensive stand. He continued to swing his sword wildly, never failing to strike an enemy soldier as they came towards him at a fast and furious pace. There were too many to be effectively held by the small handful of men with him, he realized, and he reacted by calling forth his Spirit energy, and then his Air powers.
Alec called a curtain of air down from the sky, extending from one side of the road to the other, at a distance of fifty feet in front of his location, then he stretched the curtain wider, beyond the edges of the road by several feet. The barrier temporarily cut off the approach of more lacertii, as the oncoming swarthy soldiers collided with the unseen impediment in their charge towards the city. Given a moment of time with no new opponents descending upon them, Alec and his small band of supporters cut down all of the lacertii on their side of the curtain.
“Why have they stopped, my lord?” a voice asked Alec as he defeated the last lacertii on their side of the battlefront. He turned and saw that a dozen and a half men had joined him.
“I’ve erected a barrier of hardened air on the road,” Alec answered. “They’ll not be able to penetrate it.” Alec dropped his Warrior and Spirit energies, and channeled more power into his Air abilities, allowing him to draw the curtain boundary even wider, preventing the lacertii from immediately finding the edge they could round.
“How did they come to be here?” Alec asked. “Was there a breach in the front line?”
“There was just an hour ago. The commander sent our three squads to try to slow this lot down while he looked for some reserves to fill the breach. This is all that got through before he patched it up,” a junior officer spoke up. “It’s thin on our side to the northeast, but the worst action’s taking place in the southeast, I hear tell.”
“I’m going to release my shield in a moment, and let a portion of the lacertii through, then I’ll drop the shield again. We should have roughly equal numbers to fight on our side,” Alec told the men. “Spread out in a line, fight back-to-back with a partner,” he directed.
The Boundary Lake forces moved as he directed, and Alec promptly lifted the wall of air for several seconds, allowing nearly half the bottled up lacertii soldiers to run and fall forward. He dropped the curtain back in place as quickly as he could, splitting the lacertii, and then he led the human forces forward in a prolonged, bloody clash that eventually saw a complete victory by Alec and his allies.
“Give me all the arrows you can gather,” Alec instructed the men with him as the last of the lacertii were killed on the east side of the boundary, while screams of outrage and despair came from the group on the west side.
“We’ll fall back a bit,” Alec directed next as he took his bundle of arrows and a bow he scavenged from a dead lacertii, and walked backwards a hundred yards, then turned. He notched his first arrow, then released his Air energies and claimed his Warrior energies to enable him to begin firing off a stream of arrows that rained continual havoc as shaft after shaft left his bow, directed at the charging remnants of the lacertii force, and then at the small handful that began to flee when only they were left, none of them having reached the men who stood beside Alec as he fired his deadly arrows.
When the last retreating lacertii was hit in the back and flung to the ground dead, Alec dropped his bow. “Let me see your wounds,” he instructed the men.
“Who are you, my lord?” the officer asked.
“My name is Alec. I’m a traveler passing through Boundary Lake,” he said simply. With his Healer energy engaged, Alec treated the worst wounds, choosing to be cautious in his energy use and leaving some recovery to nature, just as the wielder of the Healing pendant had done in the hospital in Boundary Lake. He sensed a long day ahead, and already the draining use of power felt heavy upon him.
“I’m to go to a fork in the road ahead, and then go left, to follow a companion who came through a short time ago,” Alec told the squad that was with him as he finished his Healing work.
“My lord, that is where we are told the fighting was worst this morning,” the officer repeated. “We’ll go with you to offer any aid that we can.”
Alec considered the potential that Andi might be involved in the battle ahead. The prospect of having a group of men to support him or the Boundary Lake forces under attack seemed useful. He nodded to the officer, “Come on, let’s go then. I’ll pick up arrows on the way.”
They walked through the bloody space of the battlefield they had just won, Alec restocking his quiver, then collecting a second quiver of arrows. Two miles further on they came to a fork, where a branch of the road went to the southwest, dropping into a heavy forest through which there was no visibility because of the dense foliage.
“How far to the front from here?” Alec asked as they began to walk down the road.
“Ten miles,” the officer replied. “That’s what it’s been the past few days at any rate.”
The group had hardly gone two miles when they started to see severely wounded men being carried in the opposite direction, back to the city. “What’s happening?” the officer asked the second cluster they passed.
“The line is collapsing; sectors are being cut off and isolated. We can’t hold them off – it’s a huge advancement by the lacertii. They must have concentrated their forces for the past fortnight to have as many soldiers as they’re throwing at us now,” one of the men carrying a stretcher with two men on it replied.
“Take the men into the city to the fountain in the Great Square,” Alec advised. “And bring all that you can of the fountain water back with you to the front.”
“We need to move up front in a hurry,” Alec told his men, speaking with a sense of urgency, and leading them on the run up the road another three miles, until they heard the shouts and clashes of actual battle. The noise came from both sides of them, and they could see numerous clusters of figures fighting all up and down an uneven line in the forest, a view that diminished among the trees at no great distance. Ahead on the road they could see a huge column of lacertii soldiers approaching, enough to obliterate the struggling Boundary Lake sold
iers who tried to hold the advance skirmishers back.
The column that was approaching was enormous. It would overwhelm any efforts Alec could contribute; it was too large for his Air curtain to hope to delay for any length of time, once the lacertii spread to the right and left and went around the ends of his limited ability to man such a defensive shield.
There was one means left that Alec considered achievable, a way to fence the main lacertii force out of the battlefield, but it would consume his energies to the point that he would not be able to contribute anything else to the battle’s outcome.
“Come forward and protect me,” he told the squad with him, and began to walk towards the lacertii.
“My lord, we cannot protect you any better than you can protect yourself,” one of his men replied.
“While I do what I am about to do, I will be vulnerable. I need your help,” Alec said, continuing to stride ahead. He wanted to be as close to the lacertii as possible. He passed beyond the lacertii skirmishers, and drew closer to the column of lacertii that were marching forward with stolid discipline. His men were growing nervous, he could tell, as the distance between them diminished to mere yards.
He stopped, and seized his Stone energies, and pointed his hands down at the ground in front of his feet, “When this is done, take me back to Boundary Lake,” he shouted back to the men behind him. “I’ll be in no shape to fight. And when you find my companion, Andi, bring her to me.”
He ceased to talk, and channeled his powers into the ground, so that there was a tremendous trembling, knocking all the forces in the vicinity to the earth as the soil shook violently, and then suddenly a monolith of stone burst up through the center of the road, and rose high into the air, ten feet high, then twenty feet, then more, until it was standing thirty feet tall, a pillar of gray granite just inches in front of Alec. He began to spread his hands wide, feeling his energy expand to the left and to the right. The pillar grew wider, as the stone emerged from the ground to either side, turning the pillar into a wall that spread across the width of the road, then spread further, becoming a massive granite curtain. Alec fell to his knees as he called upon more and more of the ingenaire energy, and pushed the wall wider and wider, a hundred yards, then a quarter of a mile, and then all the way to the mountainous cliffs on either side of the valley, completely cutting off the lacertii prospects of advancement towards Boundary Lake.
The forward skirmishers for the lacertii were suddenly cut off from the strength of their army, no longer the vanguard of a vastly superior force, and the members of the Boundary Lake army took joy in the new circumstances. They fought with new energy, fighting and hunting and cutting down the trapped lacertii without mercy.
Alec could not rise from his knees. He remembered the struggle of the war to defend Goldenfields, when he had fought savagely on top of a hill to stay alive and to keep his friends alive as an entire lacertii army had streamed past them. The memories seemed suddenly fresh as his body began to shut down with exhaustion, and he felt as though he were reliving the horrors of that day of endless battle against the lacertii.
He released his Stone energies, and embraced his Light energies, using them to wring out every ounce of ability left in his body to focus the sunlight overhead into a searing, burning ray of death that played across the column of stymied lacertii forces on the other side of the new defensive wall, killing lacertii soldiers he could not see, even though they were only fifty feet away from him. He heard the screams and he smelled the burning flesh, but he kept focusing the sunlight until his stomach churned and he vomited as he passed out, depleted of energy and sick of death.
Chapter 14 – The Loss of Andi
Alec awoke in bed, back in the same room he had left before in the Red Horse Inn, and knew immediately where he was. He remembered what he had done; he had saved Boundary Lake by erecting the massive barrier, the sheer granite divider that closed off an entire valley from movement. And then he had gone beyond merely defending the city, hopefully defending Andi as well, and he had struck a murderous blow at the lacertii army, burning an entire column of soldiers to death, he knew.
He closed his eyes. It was war, and death was a part of war, yet he felt sickened by the manner in which he had dispatched so many lives so impersonally.
The latch of the door to his room lifted, and he turned his head, eyes open, to see who was entering the room. It was a servant of the inn; he recognized the man, the one who had genuflected to him the morning he had left the inn, yesterday, or some number of days earlier.
“How are you today, my lord?” the man asked humbly, not entering the room completely. Alec closed his eyes, and for a moment he wished that Aja was present to talk with him, to tell him that what he had done was not wrong.
“I am awake, and I feel as though I am recovering, thank you,” Alec answered. “How long have I been here?”
“Four days, my lord,” the man replied. “Would you like something to eat, or drink?”
“I would like both, please,” Alec answered. “Is Andi here?” he asked quickly, before the servant could leave to fetch his meal.
“The woman who traveled with you before?” the man clarified. Alec nodded curtly. “No, sir, she has not been here since the morning you both left, the morning you saved the city from the lacertii.
“I’ll go fetch a tray of food and be back,” the man added, then pulled the door shut before Alec could ask any further questions.
When he returned, two men came with him, and entered the room silently as the servant carried in a tray of food, quietly placed it upon a table next to Alec’s bed, and left again without speaking.
Alec sat up straight upon his mattress, and looked at the two men who stood near the door.
“My name is Marshall Rommen,” one of them, the older of the two, spoke, “and this is Major Whime.”
“We, and all of Boundary Lake, are in your debt for the extraordinary things you have done for our city,” Rommen said. “The lacertii are in disarray from the loss of an entire army, and we are strengthened for having one less front to have to defend with many forces.
“We came to thank you for what you have done for us,” the Major added. “And if there is anything we can do for you, the city is at your disposal.”
“My companion, Andi, do you know where she is?” Alec asked. “She had left the city just a few hours before me, heading towards the front where the battle took place.”
“We were told that your last request was to be united with her, and we have searched for her,” Rommen replied. “She was seen in the company of two officers heading towards the front where you defeated the lacertii. One of them has been found dead in the forest, killed in the battle there. But neither your companion, nor the captain she was with, Captain Alan, has been seen since.”
“There was no sign of bodies?” Alec questioned.
“None,” Rommen agreed.
“Could the lacertii have taken them captive?” Alec asked, sensing worse news was coming on top of the bad news he had just heard.
“We believe they have been taken prisoner,” Rommen answered.
Alec closed his eyes. “Do you know where they would have been taken? Is there a camp where prisoners are held?” he asked.
“We do not know. None have been returned to us since the war began,” Whime said bleakly.
“Thank you,” Alec answered, and said no more, contemplating how he was going to go after Andi in the land of the lacertii.
“What can we do for you, my lord?” Rommen asked.
“Pack a good supply of travel foods for me,” Alec said, swinging his legs out of bed and searching for his pants. “I’m going to go after them.”
“How can we help?” Rommen asked again.
“Get the food I need, and have it ready for me when I get downstairs,” Alec answered, standing and retrieving his clothes. “I’ll be down in just a few minutes,” he added, seeing the officers standing there. “Go,” he added plainly, and saw them qu
ickly exit his room.
Alec sat back down and ate the bread on the tray upon the table, then ate the carrots, soft with age, and drank the juice in the cup. He pulled on a shirt from his pack, and his entire arsenal of weapons, bandolier of knives, sword, and bow and arrow, checked that he still had the lip balm from Birnam Woods, then slung his bag over his free shoulder and went downstairs.
Servants stood silently, heads bowed as he passed. He walked without comment to the doorway, and found Rommen and Whimme outside the Red Horse, a full bag of rations ready for him.
“Thank you,” Alec said simply. “If I can find any captives, I will send them home to you,” he promised, and then without fanfare he left the inn again.
Chapter 15 – Racing Through Lacertii Lands
Two days later Alec was well behind the lacertii lines, trudging invisibly along the roads of the lacertii-held territory, frustrated by his lack of knowledge. He had invisibly flown over the wall he created, then headed down the road, past the blackened corpses that still remained on the ground, producing a horrible stench which hung heavily in the air throughout the valley, and nearly made him gag for two hours. He traveled in search of a large camp, where he expected to either find Andi and Alan held captive, or to hear that they had been sent elsewhere. Instead the road had been empty, so that after a day he had doubled back and gone in search of an army headquarters near the northwestern front that Boundary Lake defended.
By late afternoon on the second day he had finally found the camp he sought. It was not as large as he had expected, which relieved him, because it meant he had less camp to search. He remained invisible, though after two days of constantly drawing upon his Light powers to maintain his invisibility he was feeling worn thin.
The Journey Home: The Ingenairii Series: Beyond the Twenty Cities Page 16
