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

  “Gruy, take him up to his room and check on his monster, then check the other rooms while you’re up there,” the officer told one of the guards who accompanied her, a man who had been standing idly in the background behind her up to that moment.

  Gruy immediately stood straight, and walked over to join the officer and Alec.

  “We’re going this way,” Alec said. He picked up the two bowls, and balanced the bread on top, then started walking slowly towards the hallway of guest rooms. He had to find a way to solve the impending problem he knew. There was a simple way, but it relied on Kecil guessing and acting the right way, and he had no idea how the lacerta would react to the appearance of the new human.

  Alec sent his spirit into the energy realm as they climbed the stairs. He grasped the Light power once again, and carefully projected it into the guest room as he and the guard approached the door. He didn’t know where in the room Kecil was located, but he hoped that she would act sensibly cautious as she heard the two of them approach, and remain still.

  “So you plan to search every room?” Alec said loudly to the guard as the two of them came to a stop at his door. “You’re going to go into every room and look for some sign of the missing monster from the arena? How long will that take? Are you going to search each room for a long time?” he kept up his list of questions long enough and loudly enough to feel confident that Kecil heard them all.

  He shifted his load of food, then opened the door narrowly, and looked in. Kecil was standing, staring at him, a stricken look on her face. Alec twitched his head to the left, towards the portion of the room shielded by his bubble of invisibility, then twitched it again.

  Comprehension dawned on the lacerta’s face, and she scooted left and out of sight.

  “Are you going to let me look in there or not?” the guard asked.

  Alec swung the door open and stepped inside, making space for Gruy to look into the small space through the doorway.

  “Where is she?” the guard asked Alec, without seeming concerned. “Where’s the woman you brought the food up here for?”

  “She may have gone to the temple to say her prayers,” Alec adlibbed.

  The guard looked without interest around the room. “Just the one bed, and a small one. You two are pretty close?” he leered.

  “She’s wild about me,” Alec said in a confidential tone, accompanied by a smirk.

  A grunt sounded from the corner of the room.

  “What was that?” the guard asked, starting to take a step forward.

  “Probably just the mice,” Alec frowned at the corner.

  “You and your lady friend have a good night,” the guard stepped backwards, and then out of the room.

  “Did you have to make that noise?” Alec asked after counting silently to five, waiting long enough to make sure the guard was really gone from the door.

  “Why’d you bring someone here? Was he a guard?” Kecil asked.

  “A squad of guards came into the dining room on a search; they’re searching for us. They must be searching the whole city,” Alec speculated. “I imagine the authorities are pretty embarrassed about that escape happening right in front of the entire stadium audience – all those witnesses.”

  He handed a bowl of the stew over to Kecil, as they both sat on the bed. “If you haven’t eaten a lot lately, you ought to go slowly,” he advised, as Kecil picked a chunk of meat from the stew and began to greedily chew on it.

  There was an unexpected knock on the door. “We have a few questions, for you, my lord,” Alec recognized the voice of the female officer he had seen in the dining room.

  Alec threw his bowl of stew aside and pushed himself onto the lacerta girl, knocking her stew out of her hands and to the floor as well, as he forced them into a prone position on the bed.

  “Trust me,” he said urgently as he cupped his hands around her face while lying on top of her.

  “Oh, what are you doing? I feel something!” Kecil cried, while the door squeaked open, and Alec pressed his lips against those of his companion, feeling the lips plump out against his.

  “Oh, I see your companion is back,” the officer said.

  Alec lifted his face from Kecil’s, and raised his upper torso, while keeping the majority of his body covering the other body on the bed.

  “I thought we already had an inspection,” he protested, as he continued to keep his hands on Kecil, transmitting his healing power into her to transform her surface appearance from lacerta to human. He continued to pour his power into her, making the transformation creep downward along her body, altering her torso and arms, then her hips and loins, and finally her legs.

  “Have some sense of decency and remove yourself from the girl while we’re here talking to you,” the officer snapped.

  Satisfied that his hasty work was sufficiently complete, Alec rolled to the side and sat up, while Kecil’s hands delicately touched the thick, wavy hair on her scalp that had previously been only sparsely covered. Alec removed his hands, letting them delicately trail across the softened flesh of Kecil’s cheeks.

  “So what do you want?” Alec asked.

  “We are carrying out our inspection, and this happened to be the door we came to,” the officer said blandly. “And you do match the description of the man we’re looking for very well. Your clothes are even the correct colors.”

  “I’m just unlucky,” Alec said. “Now that you see there’s no monster here, are you satisfied?”

  “Are you alright, miss?” the officer asked.

  Kecil wordlessly nodded her head.

  “She’s a bit young for you, isn’t she?” the officer said to Alec.

  Alec was speechless for a moment. In all his centuries of life, he’d not ever been seen as the older member of a couple, physically, because his body had always healed and regulated its own condition. Over the course of his marriages to the beloved wives he’d outlived, he’d always come to eventually seem too young for them. His mind momentarily drifted off to memories of Andi, who had always laughed off his eternal youth as she had grown older.

  “Our ages are our own affairs,” he said with all the dignity he could muster.

  A knowing smile appeared on the face of the woman, while the guard behind her openly leered.

  “Are we done here?” Alec asked.

  “Well you still seem to be a perfect match for one of our suspects, but the girl can’t be the other, so I suppose we can let you go. Are you going to be here long?” the officer asked. “We may want to ask you a few questions yet.”

  “We planned on leaving tomorrow morning,” Alec replied.

  “Don’t leave too early; wait until midday,” the officer advised, then pulled the door shut, leaving the two in privacy.

  “What did you do to me?” Kecil immediately asked, sitting up next to Alec.

  He called on his Light energies once again, and formed a mirror that floated in front of the girl.

  “This is what you look like now,” he told her, then watched as she examined her image carefully. She had curly blond hair, dark eyes, and a wide mouth. She was pretty, without being stunning. Her body, still clothed in the tattered rags she had been wearing, but now human in appearance, was that of a young woman, perhaps twenty years of age or so.

  “I can’t look that much older than you,” Alec muttered, and he formed another mirror to float alongside the first, and he looked closely at his own features. He had faint crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, perhaps, but other than that, he saw nothing to make him think he looked older than thirty, and perhaps less. For a man who was over half a millennium old, it was a ridiculous matter to consider. Or perhaps he looked closer to forty, he conceded to himself.

  “Bah,” he waved his mirror away, then looked over at Kecil.

  The girl was turning her head slightly to either side, examining her profile. “These lips you have are so big. Do they get in the way when you eat?” she asked seriously.

  “No,” Alec answered dis
tractedly, as he reflected on their situation. The officer clearly had her eye on him, and it seemed unlikely that he was going to leave the inn without further use of his ingenaire abilities. Yet he was growing tired – he’d used a variety of powers in the past several hours, and he’d used them during the majority of the time.

  And then he laughed. In his exhaustion he’d neglected to think about using his Traveling abilities – he’d been so caught up in the minutiae of dealing with the officer and the moment-to-moment issues that he had overlooked the obvious solution. He could take Kecil to safety in a matter of minutes, if he was willing to forego her companionship on the journey. He’d only need four or five jumps through space to reach Chanradala, where he could restore Kecil to her family – and to her original form. It had to be the solution, he concluded.

  “Kecil, I’ve been a fool!” he exclaimed out loud, the realization sunk in.

  “How so, my lord Alec?” she asked.

  “Would you like for me to take you home, back to Chanradala, in half an hour?” he asked with a smile.

  “You cannot do such a thing,” she answered. “And even if you could, I would say no.

  “What I would like for you to do is give me some more dinner, since you spilled mine on the floor before I could eat it,” she replied.

  “Why would you not want to go to Chanradala?” Alec asked, shocked by her refusal to follow the obvious path.

  “Because,” she hesitated. “I ran away,” the words burst out of her mouth, the wide human mouth with the bright red lips.

  “So you ran away; they’ll be delighted to have you back when they find out everything you’ve been through,” Alec consoled her, sure that no parent would hold a grudge against a lost child.

  “I ran away from my own wedding,” Kecil spoke in a meek voice. “On the wedding day. With another man.

  “I was supposed to marry the prince of the land,” she added after another pause. “My parents arranged the marriage. My father is a duke.

  “I ran away with Straystonate, the stable boy,” she saw Alec raise his eyebrows. “He was a traveling companion – nothing more.”

  “I just didn’t think I wanted to live in the palace,” she tried to explain herself.

  Alec maintained his silence.

  “The prince is a nice person, worth having as a husband, but I didn’t really know if I wanted to live in the palace for the rest of my life,” she added.

  “And then, while we were traveling, the stable boy fell off the mountain road and died, and that’s when the humans found me and took me as a slave,” she started to cry.

  Alec wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and pulled the girl against him in a sympathetic hug.

  “So I can’t go back to Chanradala,” she concluded after a pause, as she resisted Alec’s embrace at first, then relaxed and leaned against him. “Not for a while more. Custom says that a broken wedding must be forgiven after a full year, and it’s only been half a year.

  “If you truly mean to take me back,” Kecil looked at Alec, then looked away, “and even if you really can do this magical travel that you say….”

  “I can,” Alec interrupted her.

  “I ask you not to send me back. Let me wear this human disguise and live among these people,” Kecil begged.

  Alec began to respond, but stopped, cut off by another knock on the door, an aggressive pounding. Before the last boom of the door was complete, it flew open, and the guard officer along with a large squad of guards streamed into the room, grabbing hold of both Alec and Kecil.

  “We are placing you under arrest, pending witnesses who will identify you as the man in the stadium who stole the monster,” the officer said in an authoritative, official voice.

  “The girl has nothing to do with this,” Alec said quickly. “Let her go.”

  “We believe you,” the officer said. She nodded to the guards who held Kecil. “Release her.”

  “Bungacantik,” Alec spoke the girl’s full lacerta name, “come to me.”

  She sensed the purpose in his decision to call her by the formal moniker, and she stepped towards him.

  “You stay away from him,” the officer ordered. “You may not touch him.”

  Kecil’s arms were already spreading wide to hug Alec farewell, and she was only a step away when the officer spoke, but spoke in the language of Avonellene, a language the lacerta did not speak. Alec wrenched himself from the grip of his captors and gathered her in his grip.

  “Stop this!” the officer ordered.

  Alec held tightly to Kecil, then looked over his shoulder at the officer and smiled. And then the pair of captives seemed to slightly glow, and they disappeared from the room.

  Chapter 6

  Kecil was caught unprepared for Alec’s maneuver, and when they pair passed through the nothingness of the Traveling experience, then rematerialized in a dark city alley, she gasped deep breaths of air.

  “What did you do? Where are we?” she asked. “How did you do that? It felt awful!”

  Alec was pleased that the girl didn’t seemed too panicked, although he had sprung the maneuver on her without any warning.

  “It does feel odd,” Alec agreed. “I’ve been traveling that way for a long time, and it does still feel uncomfortable, even now.

  “We’re back at the stadium. I needed to take us someplace where I knew no one would be around, so that we could escape arrest and catch our breath,” he explained.

  “We need to leave Witten,” he stated the obvious. “Are you sure you don’t want me to take you back to Chanradala?”

  Kecil looked up at Alec, studying his face. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “I’ve only known you for a couple of hours, but in that time, look what you’ve done to me – you’ve saved my life, changed my appearance, made me invisible, and now moved me magically.

  “And I think I can trust you,” she added. “Yes,” she spoke to herself more than him, “I do think I can trust you.

  “I still must stay away from Chanradala for a few more months. Is there a safe journey we can take to reach the city more slowly than what we just did?”

  “Let’s just skip up the river to Vincennes for tonight,” Alec suggested. “We can leave our troubles in Witten, and start the journey from the capital.

  “Are you ready this time?” he asked, as he clasped his arms around the girl.

  She took a deep breath, and then Alec triggered his powers, so that they left the city of troubles, and moved to an alleyway in the metropolitan city of Vincennes.

  “That’s a first step,” Alec muttered. He wasn’t sure what the next step would be.

  He didn’t have any money, he realized. He’d left everything behind in the inn they had fled from.

  “I’m going to go back and get some money for us,” he told Kecil. “You stay right here.”

  Alec engaged his powers and returned to the room at the inn in Witten, where he found the officer still in the room, without her accompanying guards.

  "Have you come back to punish me?" she asked, staring at Alec as he slowly bent to grab his bags of supplies, his eyes watching her.

  "I don't know of any punishment you deserve," he replied. "And I'm not the one to decide that matter anyway."

  "What are you, and where's the monster?" the woman asked.

  "There is no monster," Alec replied from his heart. "There's a girl who looks differently from you and me, but she's not a monster.

  "The girl who was with me is the girl I rescued," he spoke.

  "She didn't look at all like the description," the officer objected.

  "But she's still just a girl, and she shouldn't have been used in the stadium the way she was," Alec insisted as he lifted the bags of supplies.

  "We're going to Vincennes, so you can call off the search," he advised, and then he disappeared from the room.

  "What was that?" one of her guards asked, leaning into the room from the hall.

  "That was the end of our search," the office
r replied. "Let’s report back to headquarters that they got away," she directed, and she left the room without any further glance at the empty space, praying that no one would ask for details of her encounter with the fugitives.

  As Alec returned to rejoin Kecil in the alley in Vincennes, he found a well-meaning woman in the alley talking urgently to his companion.

  "You don't have to live like this," the woman told the disguised lacerta girl. "We have a shelter where you can be safe. We'll give you clothes and some money so that you can return to your family.

  "Who are you and what do you mean to do to this poor girl?" she turned sharply on Alec as she became aware of his presence.

  The woman protectively wrapped an arm around Kecil's shoulders and began to guide her out of the alley.

  "We know your type, ready to take advantage of a poor friendless girl in the city," the woman castigated Alec. "You'll not get away with it this time."

  "It's alright," Kecil protested to her self-appointed protector. "He's my friend. He's taking care of me," she said insistently as they exited the alley.

  "Better not to take any chances," the older woman ignored Kecil's comments. "Take care of him boys; I've got our new girl."

  As Alec followed the perplexing conversation out of the alley, three men with knives jumped at him from both sides of the alley mouth, long blades held ready to strike.

  Belatedly recognizing the ambush under way, Alec seized hold of his sluggish Warrior powers.

  He stepped back with a backwards somersault that cleared him from the targeted strikes by the assailants, who inadvertently crashed into one another, leaving two of them on the ground. Alec immediately stepped forward and punched the third, disarming him and leaving him unconscious.

  Armed with the knife he had seized, Alec turned to face the woman who held Kecil's arm while she stared in confusion at the defeated trio of rogues she counted on to enforce her commands.

  "You're a procuress," Alec accused, pointing the knife at the woman. "Step away from Kecil now," he commanded.