The Caravan Road Read online

  An hour later they were back in the clinic room, and Alec left the Grazes together to confer while he went to have a bite of lunch and catch up on his other tasks, the first of which was informing Partre that he intended to leave for several weeks. It would be his longest absence from the clinic since Partre had joined him, but Alec had complete confidence that the majordomo would operate the facility flawlessly. And Alec would feel comfortable knowing that there would be adults staying with Jasel and Kriste, though he had some misgivings about how Mr. Graze would treat the teenagers.

  Partre raised his eyebrows at the length of Alec’s anticipated absence. “Will you need to take some retainers with you for such a journey?” he asked.

  “I want to travel alone,” Alec answered. “I’ll travel more quickly without anyone to slow me down.”

  “Where will you be going?” Partre decided to ask.

  “Back to the Avonellene Empire for some business matters,” Alec answered. “That’s all that can be said at this point.”

  That evening, while the Grazes were away from the Lady Grean, eating their dinner, Alec returned to her room and applied his Healing energy to her abdomen, spending several minutes addressing the remnants of her ruptured appendix, and strengthening her body’s ability to heal itself. As he finished his work and stepped back to look at her, the merchant’s eyes fluttered open.

  “Who are you?” she asked in a deep voice.

  “I’m just here to heal you. You need to rest,” Alec spoke softly, and placed his fingertips on her wrist, releasing a slight stream of Spiritual energy to help her calmly fall asleep.

  With that he left the room and returned to his office, where he dealt with several small tasks before he turned to his bed and fell asleep.

  Chapter 4 –Return to Valeriane

  Alec had informed Partre that he intended to leave as early as possible, and shortly before dawn Alec was rummaging through the kitchen pantries, loading a sack of food he could consume during his journey to Black Crag. He also carried coins in a money belt, and a canteen of water. Beyond that he only carried a few articles of clothing, and he wore a sword, a pair of bandoliers of throwing knives, and a bow and arrow strapped to the back of his backpack.

  With a whispered good bye to the guard at the courtyard gate, Alec walked rapidly away from the clinic, and as soon as he was out of sight in the darkness, he engaged his Warrior powers and broke into a loping run that allowed him to travel faster than most horses. He called upon the Warrior energy in a level, steady stream of powers drawn from the energy realm, and let the mechanics of his body maintain the rapid pace while his mind wandered far afield, considering the challenges that were ahead of him as well as the issues he had left behind.

  He regretted that he had not gone back to visit Kriste and Jasel. He had sent a courier with a note explaining that house guests would be coming to stay with them, and he had instructed Partre to increase the visits by the clinic staff to the home to two a day, and to remove the Grazes if Jasel or Kriste expressed misgivings about their guests. Alec’s wandering thoughts mostly focused on the mystery of Kriste’s unique psyche, a personality and spirit that seemed vaguely familiar, but which was different from any person’s soul he could remember encountering at any time in recent years. He hoped that her nightmares were just a passing phase that would diminish quickly.

  The other topic that occupied his mind as he raced along the lonely roadway was the question of how he would go about reasserting his claim to the ducal seat in Valeriane. He would need some time to evaluate the mood of the citizens in the city, to find out how accurate Ezten’s claims about unrest were. The first thing to determine was what had happened to his steward, who he had left in charge a decade earlier. Charls had been in his middle years, a mature and steady man who understood and shared Alec’s values; Alec had felt comfortable leaving Charls as steward and de facto duke of Valeriane, and the people of the city had seemed comfortable with his rule as well.

  There were few other travelers on the road during Alec’s first day of traveling. When he encountered another person or group of people, Alec did one of two things: he either slowed to a normal person’s pace until he passed them, or he used his Light ingenaire abilities to bend the sunlight around himself, rendering him invisible to those he went by.

  The Light ability was one he rarely used. It was not one of his natural ingenaire powers, but one he had adopted within the energy realm back when he had needed the ability to rescue Caitlen and Bethany the guard from the Ajacii prison. Along with his Light powers, Alec had gone into the energy realm and adopted the Stone ingenaire and Air ingenaire abilities – two types of energy that he practiced more often than the Light energies. Those energies were the only ones that he utilized beyond the abilities that were his “natural” ones, the Healing and Warrior and Spiritual powers, that he had held since his youth. He had learned from the story of Hellmann that the ambition to possess multiple powers, the grasping pursuit of ingenaire abilities for their own sake, was a road that led to destruction. He had accepted the loss of powers that had been taken from him over the years, the Traveler energies and the Time energies, with regret, but had carried on a useful life without them. He was glad to be rid of the Necromancy energy, the dark ability that had corrupted his soul as he had sunk down into a personal cesspool of insanity before the spirit of the saint John Mark had rescued him.

  As he bedded down beneath a fir tree at the end of his first day’s run, he sat and ate a piece of dried beef and considered his progress. He’d covered sixty miles, a good distance that covered a considerable portion of the distance between the clinic and Black Crag. He used his Healer powers to raise his body temperature as the air cooled rapidly in the mountain night, then settled down to a sound sleep.

  When Alec awoke the next morning, he understood what Kriste’s peculiar psyche reminded him of – he had dreamed of Cassie, a long-ago friend in the Dominion, a girl whose life he had saved by throwing all of his Healer energies and abilities into a desperate emergency healing operation at a time when he had not yet fully understood those abilities himself. He had invested and exposed his own soul so deeply in the healing effort with Cassie that he had left a residue of his energies behind him, within her. He had realized it at a later date, and through a crude and painful process, managed to integrate that sliver of his energy into Cassie’s own soul, enabling her to exercise Healer powers on her own.

  The shrouded core of Kriste reminded him of the fragment of his own soul that had lain implanted but not integrated within Cassie. The comparison excited and disturbed Alec. He had never found another person outside the Dominion who had the potential to develop ingenaire powers. In Michian and in the Avonellene Empire, only those who he gave extraordinary treatments to had developed any ingenaire abilities, abilities that had usually been weak.

  Alec wondered at the discovery of Kriste’s possible status as an unrealized ingenaire. As he ran along the road during the day he debated the potential steps he could take when he returned to the clinic. He would try to examine the souls of the others in Kriste’s family, to discover if the others were similarly constituted with potential powers. He didn’t recollect ever finding anyone like Kriste before, but he had never examined the souls of his patients in such depth. He wondered if he could have missed something so profound on the other occasions when he had doctored the rest of her family members.

  Could it be the mountain environment, he wondered. Aristotle, his mentor from centuries in the past, had once told him that ingenairii had existed in the land of the Pale Mountains, on the border of the Dominion, long before men had moved down from the mountains into the Dominion. Or perhaps it had been John Mark, Alec mused, not sure who had told him the story of the non-Christian powers of the ingenairii before Christ and John Mark had come to their land. In any event, that seemed like a possible explanation, that Kriste had been born with potential ingenaire powers because she was born in the territory of the Pale Mountains; but it s
uggested that he might actually be living in mountains that were not so extremely distant from the Dominion. And that, he reminded himself, would mean that he was even closer to the lands of the lacertii, and he had never heard any mention of that race in all his time at the clinic, or while living in the Avonellene empire.

  His mind casually explored such potentialities as he ran during his second day, drawing ever closer to Back Crag until he bedded down for the night. On his third day he slowed down considerably. The number of travelers on the road increased significantly. There were scattered settlements in relatively close proximity to Black Crag, the border of the Avonellene Empire, and the residents of those settlements, farms, and mines, regularly journeyed to Black Crag, creating the traffic through which Alec chose not to run at his highest speed. He slowed down to a running pace closer to that of a normal person and stretched his travel time out by an extra day, so that he arrived at Black Crag in the mid-afternoon of his fourth day on the road.

  Because Black Crag was not his destination, and he no longer had any living friends in the border fortress, Alec went past the forbidding dark walls without stopping and continued on the road that led slowly down from the mountain plateau elevation in the center of the continent towards the valleys and the lowlands where the cities of Avonellene held their teeming crowds. Alec traveled much of the way at night to avoid the other travelers on the road, and a few days later he arrived at the outskirts of Valeriane.

  Chapter 5 – Rescuing Carla

  Alec took a room on the outskirts of the city, in a small inn that was clean and prosperous, the type of lodging that was in demand by merchants. Once in his room, he unloaded his personal arsenal of weapons, a lethal collection that had raised eyebrows at the innkeeper’s desk. Then, wearing only a bandolier of throwing knives, he went in search of a tailor to have suitable clothes of the proper quality and current style prepared for his return to the ducal palace. The following day he wandered at random around the city, stopping in markets and taverns and coffeehouses to listen to the chatter in the streets. He overheard a teary-eyed flower vendor at the market telling another vendor of the disappearance of her teenage daughter, a girl who the flower-seller feared had been taken by the Duke’s servants. Similar stories, and complaints of taxes, were commonplace, as were guards, who sullenly patrolled the streets.

  The sense of injustice in the city was palpable, and Alec reacted to it on his third day in the city, when he was sitting at a café beside a farmers market. He watched a foppish man in an officer’s uniform lead a squad of a half dozen soldiers into the square, and he sensed the attitudes of all those present grow tense as the citizens watched to see what the duke’s men intended to do; from the hisses and whispers that began to pass among the people, it was evident that they had witnessed the arrival of such men before, and had seen despicable acts carried out.

  “Why are they here?” Alec asked his waiter, as the square rapidly emptied of people, leaving the soldiers isolated as they followed the officer’s casual pace across the square.

  “They’re either looking for a pretty girl to take back to the palace for the duke and his friends, or they’re looking for boys to recruit for the army. Either way, they’re going to make someone unhappy,” the waiter replied.

  As Alec watched, the officer suddenly picked up his pace and headed towards the market, where the scurrying among the stalls and tables increased significantly as those who feared they were targets began to flee. The officer shouted and motioned to his men as they entered the vending area, and two pairs of soldiers spread wide to either side, before all were lost to sight. For a few moments, nothing seemed to happen, then there was a loud, hysterical scream, followed by a shout that was cut off abruptly, and the squad came back into view, two men dragging a crying girl as they began their return.

  Alec calmly placed his tea cup down on the table and walked out into the square, standing directly in the path of the soldiers. He carried no sword, only his bandolier of knives. The officer looked at him as he approached Alec, a peculiar expression on his face. The soldiers only looked bored, except for those who looked angry; the girl had clearly put up a credible fight – one man had a swollen eye, while two others had wicked scratches and welts on their faces and arms.

  “Clear out of the way of the Duke’s soldiers,” the officer commanded in a bored expression.

  “By order of the Duke, I command you to release that girl,” Alec said loudly, projecting his voice to carry to those who still remained on the perimeter of the square, watching the inexplicable confrontation that suddenly seemed to be brewing.

  “We have orders from the Duke already. Move aside or we’ll take you along with us to the palace,” the officer said as he reached a point just a dozen steps away from Alec.

  “I am the rightful Duke of Valeriane, Duke Alec, appointed by her majesty Empress Caitlen, and I have given no order for innocent citizens to be hauled to the palace,” Alec announced himself. “Release the girl, return to the palace, and tell the pretender who sits there that he has one day to leave my city before I will take action against him.”

  The officer came to a halt when he was within three paces of Alec. “Quite the impudent, and apparently drunk, dog, aren’t you? Since you’re the Duke, why don’t you let us escort you to the palace?” he spoke loudly, above the sobs of his captive, and motioned to two of his soldiers to seize Alec.

  As they carelessly approached him, Alec engaged his Warrior powers, and flew through the air, raising his legs to kick one soldier in the head as his fists smashed against the face of the other soldier on his opposite side. The two men crumpled to the ground unconscious, and the officer looked at Alec in astonishment.

  “Release the girl, and have your squad take these two back to the palace. Be sure to deliver my message – I am the true Duke of Valeriane, and the pretender is ordered to leave my city within the next day. He should help his friends and hangers-on by taking them as well, because I intend to scour the palace of all unhealthy influences when I enter it,” Alec reiterated his message.

  “Snevins, Watson, kill this man,” the officer ordered angrily, confused by Alec’s success, tired of the confrontation, and interested only in returning to the palace with as little trouble as possible.

  The two soldiers who were unencumbered by the captive unsheathed their swords.

  “Put your swords away,” Alec said commandingly. “You should not raise your weapons against your Duke.”

  The men ignored him as they approached from either side, determined to carry out the officer’s command while remaining cautious of the ability they had just seen demonstrated. Alec disengaged his Warrior powers and drew upon his Air ingenaire abilities, then channeled a small, strong gust of air to drop down from the sky and reflect off the ground, so that the wind blew each man violently backwards, making them fall and stumble several feet away, while Alec calmly drew the sword from one of the unconscious soldiers who lay before him.

  The officer looked at Alec with an undecipherable expression.

  Alec released his Air energy, then stepped up to the officer, sword held low at his side. The sobs of the captive girl had stopped, he realized, as she twisted around to see the drama that was occurring because of her.

  “Who is your second in command?” Alec asked the officer.

  “What?” the officer asked in a tone that was full of doubt.

  In response, Alec swung his confiscated sword at the officer’s neck, intending to decapitate the man, increasingly angered by the thought of men randomly taking women as captives, ruining innocent lives. But to his astonishment the officer jerked his own sword from its scabbard, swung it at Alec’s midriff, and somersaulted backwards to avoid Alec’s attack, all at the same time, displaying a split second’s reaction that was superhuman.

  Alec’s own sword swung unencumbered through the airspace the officer had emptied, free from any contact with the man who had evaded him, while he felt a fiery pain in his stomach and looked
down momentarily to see a shallow bloody gash that nearly ran from hip to hip.

  “Are you an Ajax?” Alec asked in astonishment, engaging his Warrior powers once again, and carefully maneuvering around to the officer’s left side, as the two guards who held the captive backpedaled away from the match.

  “I am, and I should know every other Ajax in Valeriane, but I don’t know you, and I don’t know how you pulled that little magic trick a second ago to knock the guards over,” the officer said urbanely.

  “I told you who I am. I am the Duke Alec, the rightful ruler of Valeriane, and I had a peaceful relationship with the Ajacii when I was the consort to the Empress,” he replied, thinking of the decades he had spent in Vincennes with Caitlen, after he had first battled against Ajacii who were ruthlessly trying to prepare to battle against the restoration of Hellmann’s malign power. During the long years of Caitlen’s reign he had met with Ajacii leaders on many occasions, and maintained a satisfactory relationship with their race. But he had done nothing like that for thirty years, he realized, and apparently a new reality had replaced the one he knew.

  “Why have you come from Valer to participate in this mistreatment of my people?” he asked.

  “Some Ajacii remember that there was a time when our people always had a presence in the court at Valeriane. Duke Alec did disrupt that tradition, but the new Duke has offered to restore the policy, and so a few of us have come to the palace to serve the new duke, to fight in his battles, and to enjoy his city’s,” there was a pause that only lasted a fraction of a second, “hospitality.”

  “The girl is not his to give away,” Alec replied, “nor is she yours to take.

  “When I was sitting as Duke of Valeriane, I respected the Ajacii, but I did not need to employ them. The city was at peace, and the empire was at peace, and the Ajacii were free to live their own lives in Valer. Availlen and the elders of the village had no problem accepting the relationship we held,” Alec explained.