The Cloud of Darkness (The Ingenairii Series Book 11) Read online

  “My lord!” Cuck, the senior Spiritual ingenairii shouted excitedly.

  Alec went across the trampled field to respond to the man.

  “My lord,” Cuck reached out and took Alec’s had.

  I feel the evil, my lord. It is growing stronger, he informed Alec.

  “Everyone!” Alec shouted. “Be ready. Something may be about to happen.”

  “I feel something, but I don’t know if it’s evil, or,” the second Spiritual ingenairii, Lair, hesitated, “perhaps I’m confusing your powers with the evil?” he questioned his own senses.

  “It’s very dark in the forest over there!” an ingenairii on the left side shouted.

  All heads turned to look at the blackness that consumed everything beyond the closest rows of tree trunks. The black cloud burst out into the open field on the left, pressing forward across a wide front that was daunting in its scope.

  The ingenairii froze momentarily, unable to process the emergence of such an unconventional and frightening adversary. The reality of the confrontation crystalized into more than just an imaginary opponent for all the ingenairii who had lived in the sheltered life of the Ingenairii Hill campus to that point. The acknowledgement of a violent battle to preserve their own lives exploded upon their consciousnesses, and they could not react for precious seconds.

  “Fight! Fight this thing!” Alec screamed. He called upon his own energies, and released a bolt of bright white power that sizzled the air between two of the stunned, still Light ingenairii as it flew at and then struck the cloud. The impact of the light caused a roiling pause of the advance in the immediate vicinity of Alec’s strike, while the rest of the cloud continued to move forward.

  The sight of Alec’s action seemed to arouse the rest of the group, and a dozen flares of light flashed across the field, hitting the cloud with a volley that stopped the progress of the entire front line of the cloud, and caused momentary flashes of red light to luridly glow within the darkness.

  Fantasy Series by Jeffrey Quyle

  The Inner Seas Kingdoms Series

  The Healing Spring

  The Yellow Palace

  Road of Shadows

  A Foreign Heart

  Journey to Uniontown

  The Guided Journey

  An Unexpected Deity

  A Marriage of Friends

  The Ingenairii Series

  Visions of Power

  2. At the Seat of Power

  3. The Loss of Power

  4. The Lifesaving Power

  5. Against the Empire

  6. Preserving the Ingenairii

  7. Rescuing the Captive

  8. Ajacii and Demons

  9. The Caravan Road

  10. The Journey Home

  11. The Cloud of Darkness

  Alchemy’s Apprentice Series

  The Gorgon’s Blood Solution

  The Echidna’s Scale

  Scarlet from Gold

  The Southern Trail

  The Southern Continent Series

  The Elemental Jewels

  Perilous Travels

  The Greater Challenge

  Out of the Wilderness

  Also by Jeffrey Quyle

  The Green Plague

  For more information, visit the Ingenairii Series on Facebook, www.facebook.com/ingenairiiseries

  The Cloud of Darkness

  The Ingenairii Series

  Book 11

  Jeffrey Quyle

  Index

  Chapter 1 Page 1

  Chapter 2 Page 4

  Chapter 3 Page 9

  Chapter 4 Page 23

  Chapter 5 Page 35

  Chapter 6 Page 46

  Chapter 7 Page 54

  Chapter 8 Page 81

  Chapter 9 Page 86

  Chapter 10 Page 93

  Chapter 11 Page 101

  Chapter 12 Page 108

  Chapter 13 Page 114

  Chapter 14 Page 133

  Chapter 15 Page 135

  Chapter 16 Page 142

  Chapter 17 Page 150

  Chapter 18 Page 156

  Chapter 19 Page 162

  Chapter 20 Page 167

  Chapter 21 Page 176

  Chapter 22 Page 180

  Chapter 23 Page 189

  Chapter 24 Page 193

  Chapter 25 Page 203

  Chapter 26 Page 209

  Chapter 27 Page 215

  Chapter 28 Page 219

  List of Characters

  Straysonate, lacerta stableboy, companion to Kecil

  Bungacantik,formal name of Kecil, lacerta runaway girl from noble family

  Anslow, bartender in northern village of Gallop

  Gleese, Warrior ingenaire female apprentice

  Pranger, Warrior ingenaire boy apprentice

  Sister Glenne, member of Vincennes mission

  Sister Lyster, member of Vincennes mission

  Colonel Thyne, Ajax soldier in Vincennes

  Hope, Lokasennii grandesteur

  Dale, Junior officer of the dominion, stationed at Gallop

  Cuck, Spiritual ingenaire, part of Gallop expedition

  Kalie, Light ingenaire, part of Gallop expedition

  Olivia, descendant chosen by Alec to be Regent of the Dominion

  Lord Smaille, Old One of Exbury,, son of Aja

  Coeur, Old One of Exbury, grandson of Aja

  Aja, former traveling companion of Alec in the Twenty Cities

  Gracloroan, lacerta guard officer at Chanradala palace

  Kale, Healing Spring palace cook

  Kora, Kale’s wife

  Prologue

  Alec advances through the ages, as he completes the tasks that God and his patron saint, John Mark, lay out for him and rely upon him to complete.

  In the decades that follow his second and definitive defeat of the risen super-ingenaire, Hellmann, Alec and his wife Andi have jointly ruled the lands of the Dominion and Michian, restoring the norms of civil society as Alec believes is best. And the two live their long decades of life happily. They are bound together by a strongly-shared joint awareness. They can communicate over great distances, they can share each other emotions, and can even recall one another’s memories.

  But while Andi’s physical body eventually succumbs to the effects of the passage of time, Alec’s extraordinary frame continues to repair and restore itself, aging at only a fraction of the speed of Andi and the mortals around them. And the time comes when Andi is no longer able to cheat Death.

  Alec is left with a heavy heart and tries to turn to travel as a way to distract himself from the heavy solitude he feels with Andi’s passing. But almost from the moment his journey begins, new adventures find him and draw him into a series of surprises, confrontations, and mysteries that bring him new distractions and companions.

  Chapter 1

  Alec sat on his haunches, watching the fox cross the open field with a rabbit in its mouth. The mother was heading to her den to feed her kits.

  By the time the kits were mature animals, the hunting might turn more difficult for them, or they might end up being hunted themselves, Alec suspected.

  The land was changing. The population of the settled and sedate Dominion was growing, and settlers were moving out past the frontiers to repopulate the empty lands in the north. Yet there were recent rumors of settlers who disappeared after going north, people who were never seen again, and Alec had an interest in knowing what was afoot. But there was no evidence of anything amiss on this day – it was just a good day to be a fox in the wilderness.

  There were fewer and fewer such good days ahead. People were returning, and their return wa
s going to make life less easy for the foxes and some other predators in the northern forest.

  It is the way of the world, my love, Andi’s voice sounded faintly in his mind.

  I know, he agreed. It’s good that the Dominion is strong enough for people to want to spread out and reclaim the old farmlands. But the foxes won’t see it the same way, he ventured.

  That’s one old fox looking out for the others, eh? Alec heard the gentle humor in his wife’s thought.

  I’ll be home to see you soon, he said affectionately. He watched the fox’s bushy tail disappear into an opening among the raspberry bushes on the verge of the nearby trees, and then the animal was gone from his sight.

  Alec stood up, the brief nature show over. With an application of his will, he exercised his Traveler power, and jumped through space, leaving the yet-uninhabited forest behind, so that he could return to the castle that sat upon the banks of the Giffey River, far to the south of Goldenfields city, not far from the healing spring, the source of the miraculous water that provided health and healing with a sip or a bath.

  The spring and its waters were the reason Alec had moved to that location, and built that castle, just a few years ago. As Andi grew older, the easy availability of the water helped her body to cope with the inevitabilities that time brought to all people.

  All people except Alec himself. Alec was ageless, with a body that never ceased to repair and rejuvenate itself, so that he was perpetually a healthy adult in his prime. Over the centuries his apparent age had slowly shifted upward, but he still looked like a vigorous adult, not much more than forty, younger than his own grandchildren. And he looked much younger than his wife of many decades, Andi.

  He quelled his thoughts, before they went too far, became too prominent and came to Andi’s attention. He played a delicate game, working to keep private the thoughts that he tried to avoid revealing to Andi, the inescapable wanderings of his mind, as he stumbled into idle speculation about the health of the wife who could read his mind to a great degree. It was better not to think at all than to let Andi know that some part of him would needlessly speculate about her health and longevity.

  Alec had watched beloved wives grow old and die before. It was a curse of the eternal life he seemed to live, and he had no wish to suffer it again. He’d not intended to fall in love with Andi, but the accidental merging of their souls when he had rescued her from death had created a powerful bond that had overcome his defenses. And the love had been worth it, he knew.

  There had been so many, many good days in the past, when they had both been full of energy and ability. The memories of those days pressed themselves into his consciousness. But they could do no more than tempt and remind him; he would not use his incredible ability to Travel back in time and live among those days again. The saintly spirit of John Mark had told him that the history that had been made was not to be tampered with, unless holy prophecy specifically demanded it. So Alec remained in his own time, happy to share the time he had left with Andi, and he avoided Time Traveling altogether.

  But now, decades of love and partnership and devotion were stumbling towards a sobering conclusion. And it was painful, even more painful because of the mutual access the two lovers had to one another’s thoughts. Alec tried so very, very, very hard not to reveal his surprise and pain at the growing gaps he recognized in Andi’s capacity. He saw it all from the inside and the out, and worked hard to not display his sadness.

  He put all that aside, and imposed the brighter, happier thoughts upon himself that he wore whenever he returned home to Andi, to the special palace they had built just in the last few years, a span of time that felt like the blink of an eye to Alec.

  The palace at the healing spring was modest by way of comparison to other palaces he and his family occupied. It had only been constructed a decade prior, when Andi’s fragility had begun to become apparent and insurmountable without regular doses and baths in the spring water. Alec had ordered the removal of the abandoned fortifications at the spring, and built the palace in their place, then moved with Andi into the relatively isolated home.

  It was the place he called home, and it was the place he was heading to. He would leave behind his thoughts about Andi, and his concerns over the rumors of people who disappeared from the empty northlands.

  Chapter 2

  Alec arrived back in the special room at the top of the southern tower. By the rules of the palace, it was the one place he used to arrive or depart with his abilities as a Traveler ingenairii. His agreement to exclusively use that room prevented others from finding him suddenly appearing in the middle of conversations or meals or other activities in other rooms of the palace. And all others agreed to stay out of the room so that he was given the opportunity to arrive in peace and privacy and to prepare himself for anything that might be awaiting him.

  Not that any stressful issues did await him at the healing spring home, other than the issue of Andi’s health. He still made sure to travel on a nearly daily schedule to Oyster Bay and occasionally to Michian, to help maintain the fiction of his rule over the two nations and the organization of Ingenairii Hill. But he did little enough work or governance in any of those places; he simply held seats and titles, and thereby prevented anyone else from claiming the titles of Emperor or King or Head of the Ingenairii Council.

  He stood atop the tower, and looked out the window that allowed him to look down at the healing spring not far away. There was the usual busy traffic there, the water merchants who captured every pint of the water they could manage to, so that they could ship it to the ends of the earth as a commodity that was forever in demand.

  Alec had ended the monopoly on the procurement of the water as one of his first actions when he’d seized control of the Dominion, and let different trading companies have turns at the spring – companies that shipped the water to a variety of markets and competed to sell it. One of the trading companies even had a lacerta partner, while another partner was from the city of Vincennes, capital of the Avonellene empire, the land that Andi had originally come from in the previous century.

  You’re here; good, Andi’s thoughts were clear, without any diminution from distance.

  Alec turned his eyes from the spring, and went downstairs to the residential floors below the tower, then walked to Andi’s door, entered the room, and smiled at the nurse who sat quietly nearby. Alec gave the man a nod, and he discreetly slipped out of the room, leaving the ruling couple of the land alone.

  Alec studied the wispy figure that lay in the bed.

  “I am not too thin,” Andi said with quiet indignation, speaking aloud.

  “I always enjoyed you with a little more meat on those bones,” Alec replied with a grin. She had been a girl, a young member of the Black Crag guard, assigned to help Alec when they had first been thrown together on the caravan road so many decades earlier. They and others had traveled across the road through the mountainous wilderness, the thin commercial link between the Avonellene lands and the great civilization of the Twenty Cities.

  That journey, a long, desperate race to try to rescue kidnapped girls taken by renegade Ingenairii, had been the cause of Andi and Alec’s match. They had traveled together and fought together, then even cohabitated a single body at one point, and had become lovers.

  “I remember what you enjoyed, you old fox, you,” Andi said with a glint in her eye.

  They grinned at one another.

  “Maybe I should give you your bath tonight,” he offered.

  “Ha, ha!” Andi laughed. “You just want to rattle these old bones one more time!

  “Let’s have dinner early instead, and talk,” she offered.

  “I’ll go see if the kitchen has anything ready,” Alec acquiesced, and left the room. He wore a gentle smile as he walked through the palace, pleased to see his love’s good spirits. Members of the small palace staff stood aside and bowed as he passed by, pleased to see their master at home and in the halls of the palace.

&
nbsp; “Would you be able to deliver some dinner to my lady’s room soon?” he startled the cook by asking as he walked into the kitchen unexpectedly.

  “Of course my lord. We’ve got some nice asparagus and some rabbit stew we were preparing.”

  Kale the cook quickly recovered his wits and replied to the king of the land. He was used to the unexpected at the palace by the Healing Spring. The chance to see Alec was the reason he’d left the Goldenfields palace kitchen and traveled through the sparsely-populated countryside to come to the small settlement in the first place. His wife still wasn’t pleased with the relocation away from the glamor or the cosmopolitan experiences of the great city; he promised her that their stay at the Healing Spring location would be a short one, no more than a couple of years.

  And two years would be up soon. The cook didn’t look forward to telling the king that he’d be leaving service at the castle to return to Goldenfields.

  A short time later, the royal couple sat at the table on Andi’s balcony as the servants brought in two trays, two delightful testaments to the abilities of the young chef. The servants placed the trays on the table where the royal couple sat, and laid out the plates of cheeses, bread, cooked items, and pickled relishes.

  Let’s eat in private tonight, Andi suggested to Alec.

  He raised his eyebrows momentarily, then looked at the servants.

  “We’ll be able to take care of ourselves. You’re dismissed,” he told the pair. “Go and enjoy some time with your own families.”

  The two men in the green coats bowed their acknowledgement, then silently walked away from the table.

  “Did you see that?” one of them said to the other as they approached the door to the hallway. “I’ll bet you tomorrow night’s wine bottle they spoke to one another in their minds.”