The Cloud of Darkness (The Ingenairii Series Book 11) (6 page)

He found a nice inn on a quiet square, where the merchants gathered and carried out their exchanges in sedate drawing rooms, and he paid for a small room there.  It was late afternoon, and he decided to go spend the rest of the day observing the entertainment at the harbor front arena, just a few minutes’ walk away from his inn.

He entered the arena, and found it half full of spectators who shouted loudly at the contest taking place in the sandy pit in the center of the ring.  Three men with swords were facing one another, while a pair of former combatants lay on the ground, not moving.  The men were wielding swords that were metal, deadly enough to have wounded or killed the men on the ground, and the three who remained standing carried no protective equipment – not shields or staves or breast plates.  Their flesh was there to be struck, their blood to be spilled.

Alec was appalled at the violence that was staged for the sake of entertainment.  Displays of skill were one thing, but the sacrifice of lives just for the howling masses was unconscionable in his eyes.

He contemplated whether to interfere.  He could jump over the wall and onto the floor of the stadium, and he could interrupt the battle.  He had his many abilities available at hand to use if he chose.  But he paused and contemplated the battle wondering if his interference would make any difference, and as he sat and considered the question, the three survivors entered a go-for-broke skirmish that left none of them standing, while the crowd cheered lustily.

Attendants sauntered across the fighting surface to check all the fighters.  Two were helped to walk off, while the three other bodies were pulled away, and a separate crew of workers installed a tall wooden post in the center of the pit.  The crowd cheered in anticipation as they saw it, and Alec decided he’d seen enough of the bloody sport.  He stood and started to walk up the steps to leave.

There was another roar, and he saw three large cages with lions rolled out to surround the stake, and then four men carried a large burlap sack out towards the stake, the contents of the sack writhing in their grasp.

The crowd screamed wild approval as Alec reached the top of the stairs, and he turned to see that a small dark figure was being chained to the post.  It was an unusual figure, and until he heard it wail with despair, he couldn’t place what it was.

But upon hearing the grief and surrender in its thin, high voice, he realized.  It was a lacerta!

The attendants were moving rapidly away from the scene, and as they went they tugged on heavy ropes that caused the doors of the lions’ cages to open up.

He looked at the poor girl who stood with a short length of chain confining her to just a small circle of movement, surrounded by the snarling lions that were slinking out of their cages, their eyes on her.

Without hesitation – without thought – Alec started sprinting down the steps, headed towards the poor, terrified victim of the stadium, while the crowd continued to roar in bloodthirsty delight at the prospect of seeing the lacerta be mauled to death.

As he ran, Alec called upon his ingenairii powers, focusing on his Warrior abilities, and his speed increased, so that when he reached the end of the stairs, he was able to hurdle over the retaining wall, land on the sandy floor of the arena, and continue to hurl forward towards the girl.

He had no weapons with him, he realized.  He couldn’t use a knife or sword or other means of defense.  He’d have to do something different, something that utilized one of the other ingenaire abilities he had developed over the course of his life.

The first lion was completely free of its cage, and just feet away from the girl.  There was no time to think through a solution – Alec had to act on impulse.  He dropped his Warrior abilities, and called upon his Air abilities, then created a targeted downdraft of air, three simultaneous currents, and focused each of the powerful forces directly into the faces of the lions.

The animals stopped in their tracks and snarled.  One rose up on its hind legs and swatted at its unseen assailant, while the other two snapped their jaws fruitlessly, trying to fight the force that they could not see.  Alec was approaching the battle scene, and he increased the force of the air, trying to not just stop the lions, but to force them to retreat back toward their cages.

He slipped in through the gap between two of the lions.

“Please don’t kill me,” the lacerta sobbed.

“I’m here to help you, little one,” Alec replied, taking a position in front of the girl, and turning to face the lions.

“Though we have not bit one another in the neck, we are friends,” he assured her.

He focused on the air currents, making them wider and stronger, finally creating enough force to make the lions begin to backpedal.

The crowd continued to cheer, surprised by the unexpected turn of events, but still anticipating blood to be shed.

Alec switched powers with a nearly simultaneous dropping of the Air power and then adoption of his Light power.  He focused the beams of sunlight into narrow, intense bands that struck the ropes holding the cage doors open.  All three ropes suddenly flared with bright light and a puff of smoke as the strands parted, and the cage doors slammed shut.

Then, to his surprise, his powers abruptly ceased to flow for a long pause, before they began anew.

The crowd cheered again at yet another unexpected turn of events, one that seemed to be done by magic.

“Kill it!” the crowd began to chant.

Alec turned to the lacerta.  She was a girl, small, as lacerta females were inclined to be.  She was still chained to the post, and backed up against the post as she looked at Alec uncertainly, holding the edges of her tattered clothing tightly as if it could protect her from whatever blow Alec was about to inflict.

The crowd grew silent, ready to see Alec deliver the coup de grace.

Alec held on to his once-more flowing Light power, and stepped closer to the girl.  “Hold still,” he directed, as he lifted her hand with one of his, and stretched out the length of chain with the other hand, then commanded the Light energy to concentrate a narrow stream of sunlight onto a link of the metal chain.

He had a momentary recollection of the battle he had fought with a lacerta army long, long ago.  Alec had fallen unconscious for a portion of the contest, wounded in a battle to save Imelda’s life, as they had fought to seize control of a lacerta army, so that it would listen to the commands of Rosebay, the exiled lacerta regent.  And in that battle, for the first time that any ingenairii could recollect, the Light ingenaire power had been used as a weapon.  After the battle, he’d listened to Shaiss recount the amazing event, telling of his own astonishment at the success.

And the irony struck him, as he watched the metal chain link glow red, then smoke and sizzle and suddenly snap apart.  The power had been used against lacertii that first time, and it was now being used on behalf of a lacerta.

“What’s your name?” Alec asked the girl as the remains of the metal link fell into the sand.

“Bungacantik,” she replied.

“That’s a long name for such a small person,” he smiled at her.

“My friends call me Kecil,” she said shyly.  “What are you going to do now?”

“I’m going to take you out of here,” he told her.

The crowd sensed that they were being denied the violence they expected, and a squad of stadium staff people were running from an open gateway.  There was a discontented murmur sounding from all sides of the arena.

“I will call you Kecil, because today I am your friend,” Alec told her.  He reached around and placed an arm around her shoulders, drawing her in close to him.

“What are you doing?” she asked apprehensively.

“Kecil,” Alec paused and focused his attention and his Light energies momentarily, then began to walk towards the open gate, and the attendants that were running towards them.  “Kecil, be very silent.  We are invisible at the moment, and,” his voice dropped to a whisper, “if we don’t say anything, we can walk right past them all and walk out of this place.”

The crowd gave a scream of astonishment as the two figures vanished from sight, and the approaching attendants halted in their tracks in confusion.

“Do you take me for a fool?” Kecil asked in a hiss.  She squirmed out from Alec’s grasp and stepped away from him.  “This is just some cruel, evil trick to make me think I’m saved before I get killed!  You’re an evil, evil man!  All you humans are evil!” she cried.

She stepped further away from him, and as she did, she moved outside the small area that Alec had protected with invisibility by bending light around it.  As she suddenly appeared visible to the rest of the stadium, the crowd gave full throat to its demand for her death, and the attendants on the stadium floor shouted and pointed and started running again.

“Just trust me, you little fool!” Alec shouted at her.  She looked around in confusion and defeat, shocked by the new wave of hateful voices, while Alec stepped towards her, and engulfed her in his bubble of invisibility once again.  The crowd screamed in a new tone, and the attendants stopped running once again.

Alec grabbed her arm with a firm grip.  “I’ve saved a lacerta before, and if you don’t screw this up, I’ll save you too!” he told her, as he began to drag her to the side, out of the path the attendants were headed on.  “Rosebay was much more accommodating that this.”

“Rosebay?  Rosebay the queen?  What do you know of our myths?” Kecil asked.

Alec continued to drag the girl to the side.  They slipped between two of the lion cages, out into the open floor space of the stadium.

“Look,” Alec directed his companion’s attention to the attendants.  The group of men were spreading out, and cautiously directing all their attention towards the center of the stadium, near the abandoned post, though the target of their attention had moved off to the side.  “They don’t see us,” Alec emphasized each word one at a time in a percussive whisper.  “Now come quietly, and we’ll get out of this mess.”

He held firmly to Kecil’s’ arm, conscious of the dry, scaly skin beneath his fingers, and he walked with exaggerated steps, raising each foot deliberately so that he didn’t leave any telltale scuff marks in the sand, and he motioned for Kecil to do the same.  They walked slowly, in a wide circle, around the stadium staff, as the staff members wandered towards the center uncertainly, their eyes roving wildly in all directions as they sought their quarry.

Alec guided the submissive Kecil to the open gateway and the pair stood by the side for a moment, as they turned to watch the bewildered attendants wandering around and between the cages and the post, at a loss, while the crowd hurled insults and objects at the field.

“Let’s get you out of here,” Alec said softly. 

“Can you stop squeezing my arm?  I promise I won’t try to run away?” Kecil said pitifully.

Alec immediately loosened his grip.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized, and he slid his hand down to the girl’s hand, then interlaced his fingers with her long fingers, and began to lead her through the dim maze of passages beneath the stadium stands.

“That’s where they kept me,” Kecil said softly as the pair of them passed an empty cage, one that had a bear as a neighbor on one side, and a pair of surly prisoners on the other.  “I didn’t think anything could be any worse, until they took me out there and chained me to that post.”

The two of them moved past the squalid holding pen, and walked on through the hidden space beneath the stands.  They got lost once, trapped in a dead end, but then reversed course and eventually made their way out – out of the dead end, out of the filthy prisoner section, and then out of the working area altogether.  They stood by a torch lit opening, and looked out at the sun setting over the city outside of the stadium, while crowds of attendees streamed away from the arena after the completion of the last of the contests.

“Where are you going to take me now?” Kecil asked Alec as they stood and observed the crowd.

It was the very question he asked himself.

“I just wanted to save you,” he answered, speaking out loud, but speaking more to himself that to her.  “I don’t have a plan.” He looked down at her and considered what to do.

“I can’t just turn you loose here in this city,” he said.  “I’ll have to take you some place safe.”

“There is no place safe for me,” she suddenly broke down and sobbed.  “Not within a thousand miles.”

Alec considered the simple solution of wrapping his arms around the creature and using his Traveler abilities to carry her back to safety in her own land.  But he felt a pinprick of stubbornness and curiosity mixed together; he didn’t want to have to resort to the simple solution, and he idly wondered if the lacerta might become the traveling companion that Kale had failed to be – someone who could be a suitable conversationalist and observer of the world they passed through.

“My road ahead takes me to your homeland, to the land of the lacerta,” he said with only a moment’s hesitation.  He had felt relieved to look forward to an unaccompanied trip, and that prospect was about to disappear.  But there was no other option.  He couldn’t abandon the girl; he couldn’t imagine anyone else he could turn her over to.

“You can’t possibly know what you’re saying.  The journey here from my land took half a year!” Kecil exclaimed.