Ajacii and Demons: The Ingenairii Series (34 page)

The road soon grew empty, and Alec knew that if the groom bothered to look backwards for very long he would be easy to spot. But there was no reason for the rider to do anything but watch forward as Leyla’s great strides ate up the road and began to climb the hills that embraced the road as it wandered south away from town. The hills caused the road to twist and turn, so that Alec lost sight of Leyla from time to time, and he put on a burst of speed to reduce the gap between them.

Alec alternated between using his Warrior energy to speed his way along the trail and using his Light energy to avoid detection. By midafternoon the groom decided Leyla had traveled far enough on the road. He pulled the reins back while Alec was in his invisible phase, and turned the horse around, passing Alec and leaving him alone in a matter of minutes. With that, Alec was a few miles south of Valeriane, in the foothills, with mountains looming high immediately before him. He was alone on a well-maintained road.

Alec considered his route as he walked along; the mountain path that had led to Jagine and Dana, a known and traveled trade route, had been less than a fifth the width of this road. The work and expense needed to build and maintain a road to such a standard indicated that someone had invested a great deal in the road even though there seemed to be no traffic using it to go anywhere. There were hours to go until sunset, and Alec chose to walk invisibly, using his normal pace, to avoid being seen. He remembered the groom’s casual comment about feeling like he was being watched, and took it as quite possibly true. The inhabitants of Valer probable did keep an eye on the approach to their village; and if they hadn’t in the past, the occupants certainly had reason to now, as they held a sovereign monarch captive.

By nightfall Alec was worn from climbing to such an altitude, and he knew he had much further to climb as the road coursed its way up into the mountains. He didn’t know how far the village was set back into the wilderness, but he was committed to following the road to find it. He left the smooth road surface to camp for the night in a small valley below the pathway; he built no fire, and warily slept under a bush to minimize his chance of being spotted from the road, even in the dark.

Early in the morning he heard a sound, and used his Warrior abilities to sense that a group of a dozen people were on the road, heading towards Valeriane. The sky was just turning gray, not yet showing color from sunrise. Alec focused on making himself invisible and quietly climbed up to the roadside. He slipped in a small patch of gravel, and froze as the pebbles seemed to clatter down the hillside with dramatic noise, announcing him to the travelers above.

The two men in the back of the group, which was just passing him stopped, and turned to look down at Alec’s position, easily separating to take different angles of observation, and placing their hands on their sword hilts. Their reactions were not startling in the way that an engaged Ajax or Warrior ingenaire would have been, but they nonetheless showed training and ability.

The rest of the company halted after several more steps. “What is it Mal?” a voice asked quietly.

“
We heard a noise,” the man who was nearest to Alec, less than a dozen yards away, answered. “It feels like there’s someone out here, or they’ve been here.” The other attentive guard crept further to Alec’s left, so that they had ninety degrees in the angle they drew on his position. Even invisible, Alec felt vulnerable; he gently fumbled at his belt, trying to prepare to unleash his sword without making a sound.

“
Do you see anything?” the man from the front group asked.

“
No,” replied Mal, the man closest to Alec. “But I feel something.”

“
We’ll ask the guard post up the road if anyone came by,” the leader replied. “We’re under orders to put this message in the post, so let’s keep moving.”

The two guards stood still for a moment more, then stepped back, and reluctantly joined their comrades on the road. Alec remained in the woods without moving for several more minutes, until he finally had to scratch his nose. Tentatively he crept up to the edge of the road and peered cautiously in both directions. No one appeared in sight, and with a sigh of relief Alec stepped up onto the crushed stone surface of the road. There was a flash as the sun rose over the mountains to the east and a ray of early red sunlight glinted off a metal surface far down the road. It was an indication that one of the travelers had stayed behind and kept an eye on the spot of the suspicious sound.

With a deep breath, Alec began to jog up the road, longing for the second he would turn a curve and no longer be in sight, if he had been visible. Even as an invisible man he felt exposed by the heightened sense of the Ajacii. He didn’t know how close he was to the village of the Ajacii, but he was nervous already, and knew he would be until he had Caitlen and Bethany someplace safe.

Alec jogged carefully, raising his feet high with every step to avoid raising dust clouds by scuffing his feet, walking all day long. He ate as he walked, though he ate very little. He had no appetite. He constantly looked above him, trying to find hidden guard posts to be wary of, and keeping an eye open for places he might have to hide with his companions on the way back out. By the end of the day he had climbed several hundred feet higher into the mountains, though not nearly as high as the road to Black Crag had taken him.

He spent the night in a shallow cave, and started the third day of his journey as soon as sunlight appeared over the eastern mountains. At noon the road crested a ridge, and began a precipitous descent. For the next three hours he set his feet and legs at angles to slow his pace as he invisibly descended into a valley. He had caught sight of a flat river valley bottom that cut a wide canyon in the mountains, and a bridge that spanned the river in a village of many buildings.

One of those buildings, he suspected, held his wife and his friend. Even as he descended, Alec tried to evaluate the escape route they would have to take; for now he knew of only this single tortuous path available to leave the village below. Once they got out of the village they would have to climb up the long, grueling mountainside road he was descending now. It would be difficult to climb rapidly, especially for two sets of legs that had probably had little exercise over several days of captivity. The Ajacii would know that they were climbing the road; there was no other exit evident from the village.

They would have to try to make their escape up the mountainside by night, for any traveler on this path was eminently visible to the eyes of the entire village below. Alec’s bubble of invisibility would be limited and unreliable; he had too little practice to be able to make it spread widely and consistently. The three of them would have to huddle close together, and hope that the combination of night time and invisibility would be enough to give them a wide lead in the race out of Valer. And if the rest of his plan worked, the escape would be possible.

At the bottom of the trail there were a half dozen houses built along the hill the road descended, houses painted in bright pastel colors that seemed cheerful, incongruous with the expectations Alec had for what would exist here; the Ajacii were a race he had expected to be colorless and without pleasure in such simple things as bright paints. The rest of the village was similar housing, some large buildings that seemed suited for public use or retail activity, and a public square in which a body hung limply from a gibbet.

The sun still reached down into the valley bottom as Alec arrived in the village proper, and walked carefully and invisibly among the other people who strolled or walked briskly about their business. He headed to the public buildings, so that he could study them from the outside. He found guards posted at the doors, something he might have expected in a normal city, but that he found pointless in this village. What would be the use of trying to guard a building in a village full of Ajacii, he wondered. Even an Ajax guard would be unable to stop a mob of determined Ajacii citizens.

He found a spot against the wall of the front of the building, beneath a window, from which he could observe and listen to all that was happening around him before sunset. He was convinced that Caitlen and Bethany could only be in this village, and he needed to find where they were held; then he would need time to study the prison facilities and operations to find the best way to carry out his rescue.

The window he was beneath was an office he realized, when he overheard three men inside talking, discussing their alliance with the sorcerers.

“
They failed us,” one voice said in a matter-of-fact tone, evidently repeating something that seemed clear to him. “We expected their monsters, the demons, to fight the battles that would defeat the princess’s armies, and let us be the heroes when we brought them under control. Instead, they’ve all been killed, even the secret one you sent to the palace to assassinate the Princess.”

“
You didn’t foresee the impact of this meddling foreigner, did you?” another voice snapped. “If you did, you didn’t tell anyone. We’ve had to make contingencies for contingencies after our contingency plans blew up! That son-of-the-dark-one is still alive and still in the palace. You heard me say he killed Stocker didn’t you? What are we going to do next?”

“
There are still the Sleagh Maith. Their emissary arrived today. We can hope that they are ready to rouse themselves from their long slumber and join our plan,” the first voice replied.

“
We still have the princess. She’s still held here, surrounded by a village of Ajacii. We can find a way to win control of the empire. We may need to send a full squad of our best warriors to Vincennes to find him and kill this Alec, but we can do it,” a third voice, a smooth, confident voice spoke. “Abelard started this mess; if he would have married the girl immediately in the first place instead of playing with Isial we would have taken control a long time ago.”

“
Maybe the foreigner is going to leave again soon,” the second voice said. “He seems to run out on her every so often. If we wait, we can swoop in and make her obey us the next time he leaves.”

Alec felt his anger starting to rise, then heard the third voice reply. “He doesn’t have that power to disappear any longer. We can corner him and kill him.”

“
You said the last demon would do that,” the first man’s voice replied disparagingly.

“
Don’t,” the third man’s voice lost its smoothness as he spoke through gritted teeth. “Don’t think,” the man said after a pause, as he seemed to collect himself, “that I don’t know that this jumped up foreigner has won every one of the key battles so far. He freed the princess when we had Abelard designated to rescue her, he set her free again and again, he went to the north and won at Krimshelm, he went south and won against the demons. He has gotten the girl pregnant and given her an heir, which we’ll have to deal with.”

Alec choked on his anger as he listened to the cold-hearted plotting.

“
If the Sleagh Maith stick to the plan to join us now, we will have their unique abilities to use, and we can send an ambassador south to find the other coven of sorcerers to join us,” the voice continued.

“
We can’t find the Lokasennii, although we know they still are out there. Perhaps we’ll be able to locate them and deal with them at an appropriate time,” another voice chimed in.

“
Do you think we could ask the foreigner to join us?” he asked after a pause, his voice betraying his expectations of refusal, as Alec shook his head in astonishment at the futility of such a thought.

“
You have to be drunk!” one voice replied

“
Maybe he would have in the beginning, but not now,” the other answered. “If we had known what he was, all of this could have been carried out so much more effectively. That is water past the dam; what do we do now?”

“
Here is what we can do…”

Suddenly there was a noise from above him and he looked up to see a pail of water pouring down from a bucket held out of the second story window. The cold water drenched him and he involuntarily shouted in dismay. He slapped his hand over his mouth, and looked around to see what the reaction was.

The guard at the building door was looking directly at him, and another guard’s head stuck out the doorway to look towards him as well. “It came from right there,” the guard said to his associate.

“
But there’s no one there,” the second guard objected.

“
No, but look at the ground,” the first guard said, and then stopped speaking further as a sly look came over his face.

Alec looked down and saw that the bucketful of water had created a large wet puddle on the pavement, except directly below him, where an inexplicable dry spot was in the center of the puddle. Alec looked up at the window and saw three men looking down directly at him, also investigating the shout he had given. He stepped quickly aside several steps, and as he did so the guard at the door snatch up a bow, strung an arrow, and with the speed and ability of an evident Ajax, fired an arrow at the spot Alec had just vacated.