Ajacii and Demons: The Ingenairii Series (12 page)

“And station that animal permanently in Oyster Bay for our family to use there?” Jeswyne asked, anticipating Alec’s question. “You know my feelings about that; I wish we could place one there for Alec and Natalya to have at the palace, but I have too many constituencies here I need to placate, and they all are convinced that we’ve given too much to the Dominion already.”

“I know,” Alec conceded with a sigh. “Although of course there’s really been plenty of trade between the two nations over the years that has been good for each country. The clans seem to like the roads and structures the Stone Ingenairii have created, and they don’t complain about the irrigation and fountains the Water Ingenairii have established.”

“I know dear, and you know what would satisfy our clans as an exchange for the gift of a restorer,” Jeswyne shook her head gently.

“
No slavery in the Dominion,” Alec protested, as he always did when the subject came up.

“
You know how mad the merchants get when their slaves make it through the Arhess Pass and declare themselves free in the Dominion,” Jeswyne replied. “If they were allowed to capture slaves in the Dominion and bring them back,” she left the suggestion unfinished, knowing Alec’s response.

The debate over slavery had been a part of their marital, majestic conversations for twenty five years. The debates had begun after Alec had led the ingenairii to construct a passable highway through the mountains that separated the two nations, following the ancient trading route the Michian armies had rediscovered and used for invasion. The regular trade between the nations led the Michian traders to bring slaves as bearers in caravans that carried goods to the markets of the Dominion, as well as from the Dominion. South Harbor in Bondell had grown as a trading center.

The slaves came to discover that there was no slavery in the Dominion, and Alec had instructed the judges to agree. Every slave that claimed freedom was granted freedom when they entered the Dominion, and the Michian traders had appealed to Jeswyne, citing the costs of the lost investment in their slaves. Jeswyne and Alec saw the rightness of their own principles, and they understood the principles of one another as well. But they could reach no compromise, because Alec would not allow slavery to exist in the Dominion.

His opposition to slavery was so well known that the merchants had eventually come to only request that they be allowed to retrieve slaves from the Dominion, without ever making them labor there. Alec had opposed even the capture of fugitive slaves, and so the Dominion had become a dream of the slaves of Michian – it was the place they could go to become free. The slaves of Michian loved Alec, but all the others still feared him, and hated him even more.

“
I know,” Alec sighed. “But it will not be. It just will not be.”

Chapter 10 –
A Dark Promise

"Alec, I watched the dignity you brought to Bethany's death, and the way you honored her wishes," Jeswyne said to her consort during an illness.  "Please grant me the same respect.  I don't expect to live forever.  When my spirit is ready, please let me go," she spoke quietly.

"You're a long way from that kind of decision," Alec spoke, stunned by the topic she raised.  He had seen the obvious, that his own body was not deteriorating with age, and he had let his mind wander down the dark paths of speculation regarding the growing chasm in their physical abilities, but he had never walked up to the subject to face it honestly.

"Jeswyne, we have been together for nearly fifty years, love.  We've had so much together, I don't want to imagine what life would be like without you," he whispered, laying his head on her pillow.

"It won't happen now, or any time soon, but we both know, the whole world knows, that you are not growing old, Alec.  That is how your fate is.  But I have known you and loved you since I was a girl, and you have made this life the best it could possibly be for me," she replied.  "I just want you to know that my spirit will be ready to leave someday, and I hope you will accept that."

Alec nodded his head, but said no more, and he brooded on the conversation long after he healed Jeswyne and they resumed their normal life together.

Chapter 11 – The Lure Beyond Death

The ceremonies were grueling, but they provided structure to the days. After more than sixty years as the Empress of Michian, more than sixty years of marriage to Alec, Jeswyne had passed to the other side. She was the only ruler most Michian citizens had ever known, and she was a beloved ruler, whose death delivered a personal shock to most of those citizens.

There was little sympathy for Alec, who had been disliked by multiple generations of Michian residents, but there was respect for him at Jeswyne’s state funeral in Michian. And then there followed the coronation of their oldest daughter, Valera, as the new empress, ascending to the throne at the age of sixty one.

Following the coronation, Alec removed his belongings from the Michian palace, and returned to Oyster Bay. He held a memorial service there for Jeswyne, who had been queen of the Dominion, through all the decades of Alec’s rule. And then Alec announced he was abdicating the throne of the Dominion, and turning the crown over to his eldest son, Alec.

He no longer wished to be with people. Alec was heartbroken by Jeswyne’s death, and he wanted to go to the retreat in the past, the time before people, where he and Jeswyne had fallen in love and always gone as a personal retreat. He made a series of farewell visits to all his children, and then went to the small headquarters of the declining collective force of the empire’s sorcerers and sorceresses, ordering them to leave Michian. He had no authority to enforce his personal dislike for them, but he hoped that he put enough fear in them to cause them to leave Michian free of their demonic presence.

Then, with that personal priority addressed, Alec sent himself back in time to the lonely seaside cottage known to no one but Jeswyne and himself. Alec went there alone, to come to terms with the loss of his wife. He was near one hundred thirty years old in the terms of the conventional world, with eighty years of experience in a body that appeared to be less than thirty, and there was no one who was a contemporary for him.

Alec thought of the time before his cursed imprisonment as his first life; that first life was the life he had lived among equals, other people who thought of him simply as a person. And then, after his long entrapment with the demon in the energy realm had come his second life, the life he had formed with Jeswyne. It was the life in which only Jeswyne treated him as a peer, a real person; to everyone else in the Empire he had been the feared Demonslayer, and to everyone in the Dominion he had been a revered demi-god ruler.

So he lived alone in the isolated past, and over the years he talked in his mind to the imaginary friends of his past, talking with Aristotle and Inga and Rubicon and Rander and all the rest, reliving the experiences that remained in his memory alone, so that he slowly fell into a state of mental despair. He began to imagine that he was talking to Bethany more than any other, begging her forgiveness for the fifty years of disappearance. And the longer he lived apart from other people, the longer he nursed his sorrow and loneliness, the more he began to entertain a fantastic notion.

One morning came when Alec stood on the beach and decided to act upon his wild concept. He focused on the elemental steps of acquiring his ingenaire powers, and directed his image into the power realm, then he maintained complete control over the image as he took it deep into the energy realm. He was dressed as a warrior, and he strode forward confidently. Brushing aside the implied promises and the dreamy offers of absolute ability, he walked onward beyond measure through the energy realm, until he came to a barrier, where the dimension of the warrior powers ceased, and the energies of another power, in this case the fire ingenairii, began, he could tell by the images of flame and the longing for heat that he felt.

Alec walked along the barrier, knowing that at some point the barrier between the two would end when they came together at the axis mundi, the point where all energy varieties in the ingenaire energy realm coincided. When he came to the point where a hard barrier separated him from the axis mundi, Alec took steps to enter the central chamber. He re-enacted the steps he had taken decades ago in his life, when he had sought to enter the axis mundi as a way to gain access to the power of the restorers, the translocation energies that he now used so frequently.

He maintained his grasp on the warrior power, then began to force the image of a healer to overtake the warrior weapons he held, until the competing forces began to lift his image out of the warrior realm and towards a more neutral site, the axis. Alec then took the last step in the painful process, as he focused on the process he had used in his battle with the renegade ingenairii in Oyster Bay; he had taken in a variety of different powers, and adjusted them to serve his explosive purpose. He thought again of that balanced absorption of multiple powers, and as he did so, he descended and stood within the axis mundi.

His first objective was to find the great amulet he had seized from the crypt of Carthom Ingenairii Sivis, one of the last acts he had completed back in that long lost first life. That amulet was the means of bringing a physical body into the axis mundi, and he needed the physical presence in order to give his body its first charge of the new energy he wanted to wield. He walked about the axis mundi, approaching its intersection with the trans-location energy, searching until he found the amulet he had left there before, and once he had the amulet, he used it to pull his physical body away from the empty beach at Oyster Bay’s future site, and focused on what he had to do.

This was a neutral ground, or perhaps one that was equally charged by all the fields of ingenairii power. From here he could walk about and look out or up or down or in any direction, and see the ending of each chamber of particular powers. He saw the water powers and the plant powers and the earth powers, but he was searching for one particular power. It was a power that he believed he had seen before, a dark and frightening power, but it offered the energy that he wanted – necromancy.

Alec wanted to go back to speak to his dead friends and loves. He wanted to hear them speak and listen to them tell him their life stories. He wanted the pain of loneliness and abandonment that fueled his mental illness to come to an end.

The number of energies that touched the axis mundi was greater than he realized, for many powers were only subtly evident. Alec’s search among the opportunities in the axis mundi existed in a timeless dimension for him, but at last he found the site he desired, and he fashioned the amulet energy and his own energy to allow him to enter the necromancy energy sector.

It was a different place from any other energy sector he had experienced. There was none of the fantasy of battle he had known in the Warrior realm; this place was a dark place. There was light of some sort, but it barely illuminated a murky atmosphere with an unhealthy glow. Alec felt the energy of the Necromancer power pressing against him, and it felt unwholesome. He grasped the secret of perverting his Spiritual power, turning towards darkness and falsehood; there was no honest way for the dead to speak to the living, he realized; the necromancy power was a distortion, a perversion of power. There was a threat in the air, and he imagined he heard cries faintly beckoning him in the distance.

After a troubling journey through the energy, he saw the far side, the opening that was the means of reaching the necromancy power as an ingenaire. Convinced that he would be able to access the power, Alec exited the necromancy sector to return to the axis mundi, then dropped the amulet there in case he should ever need it again, before he returned to the world of ancient Oyster Bay.

He had been in the energy realm for a long time. The fireplace he kept lit was not only extinguished, but there were small plants starting to sprout inside the fire ring. He had brought his body back to reality as dusk approached, and his first act was to restart the fire. He sat on a stump near the fire, and stared at the flames as night descended. He had grown irrational, despondent and depressed during his isolation, yet the sinister feeling of the necromantic energy had disturbed him to the point that he took no action, but only brooded about the prospect of about using it.

For three days Alec considered whether to attempt the use of the power. He ate and slept with nothing else to do and nothing else on his mind. On the evening of third day he concluded that he must attempt to speak to his old friends, and after nightfall he closed his eyes and focused his attention on directing his spirit through the dimensions between worlds to the entrance to the necromancy.

The light that beckoned him inward was not the bright light of the other energies he knew. It was a dark glow, one that only highlighted other lights, it seemed, without shining any light of its own. Alec paused at the opening, then plunged in.

He faced innumerable doors, each of which was his to open, each offering secrets and knowledge and emotion that lay trapped beneath death. Taking the power, and re-entering his body that sat staring at the fireplace flames, Alec prepared to exercise necromancy for the first time.

“
Bethany,” he called. “Bethany, can you hear me?”