Ascent of the Aliomenti (33 page)

Sarah frowned. “I don’t follow. How do you
move
lightning?”

“I don’t know,” Anna admitted. “But, to Will’s point, I don’t think we could move the
ducts
, at least not fast enough to catch lightning. So can we... I don’t know...
pull
the lightning to the ducts?”

Will smiled. She was figuring it out, changing her entire line of thinking to solve the problem he’d posed.

He excused himself as the two sisters continued to discuss the idea of capturing electricity, with a private apology to Benjamin Franklin. He suspected they weren’t far off from attempting to “pull” lightning to their chosen locations using the equivalent of a lightning rod, a mere four centuries before the venerable Franklin would consider and perfect the same concept. Then again, they had the advantage of the results of Franklin’s studies in the past due to Will’s knowledge of history.

Will stopped to watch William again. The young man had set aside the form with the molten metal to allow it to cool for a few moments. He then finished polishing a lens, and moved on to sharpening a knife, one Will sensed he’d made himself. He’d heard the story of William’s life prior to his rescue by Anna, after which he was restored to health by Sarah. He’d been abandoned on the streets of his hometown at only four years of age, and had survived on scraps of food and charity. It didn’t take much for even his four-year-old self to understand that others considered him subhuman; the occasional handout of food or money had been accompanied by a cruel word or a blow to reinforce society’s view of him as a lesser being.

At the age of twelve, when the handouts slowed to a crawl, he’d finally resorted to stealing food to survive, snagging the occasional loaf of bread or meat pie, unnoticed by the residents of his home town. At least, he
thought
he’d been unnoticed... right up until the day he consumed a meat dish he’d seen sitting out, and realized as the pain wracked his body that the food had been intended for him, and had been poisoned.

They’d wanted him to die, slowly and painfully, for his crimes, for stealing the food he could not earn. He’d asked every craft master to train him in a trade, asking only a meal per day in exchange for whatever labor he could perform. He was turned away with sneers and buffets. Life was a cruel torture for William, and his tormentors had decided to end his life with even greater pain than he’d lived it.

Anna had sensed that pain and felt his agony from several streets away, a pain that awakened her compassion as nothing had before. It was not the physical pain that so captured her attention; it was the emotional pain of a life never lived, of a human being never loved. She was at his side in an instant, and the jeering crowds suddenly felt an overwhelming need to be elsewhere. None of them noticed that the strange woman and William vanished from their midst. In fact, none of them remembered William at all.

Sarah, who had developed deep Energy-based healing skills, managed to purge the poison from his system before it proved fatal. The two then treated him with the food, medicine, and, most importantly, the compassion he needed to make a full recovery. In Sarah and Anna, the two sisters who saved his life, young William found the bonds to others he’d never known; in the boy, the two women found the child neither had ever borne, and never would.

William struggled with Energy development, but his work with the two sisters meant that he’d never be forced out of the Aliomenti, for even the two women did not possess his skill in shaping and polishing lenses. He’d also spent time with the metal workers, who found that the youngster had an innovative mind for their craft. The knife William now sharpened was of his own creation. Will watched the young man’s face tense as he concentrated, and then the knife spun from his hand in a blur, embedding itself in a nearby wall with an audible thud. William smiled.

Will shook his head and continued walking. The youngster could be quite dangerous with a skill like that.

The difficulty with trying to get the women to think about harnessing the power of lightning, of trying to get them to think of it as Will thought of electricity, was that the concept of energy of that sort didn’t exist in this era. It was not a case where they were familiar with steam power and he wanted to introduce an internal combustion engine; in that case, the concepts were comparable even if the technologies to enable the concept were vastly different.

How had history recorded electricity permeating the consciousness of humanity?

He snapped his fingers and turned to head back to visit with Anna and Sarah once more.

The sun was dipping below the horizon, and the outpost was beginning to turn dark as its source of light slowly disappeared. He found Anna and Sarah heading back to the residence building.

“Light!” Will shouted to them.

They paused, turning, and looked at Will, confusion on their faces. “What do you mean?” Anna asked.

“When a storm hits at night, when there’s a great deal of lightning... it makes the night as bright as day. What if... could we harness the lightning to make light wherever we might want it?”

“Why would we want to do that?” Sarah asked.

“Why
wouldn’t
you?” Will asked. “In the winter months, we have just a few hours of daylight. If we could figure out how to use lightning to make
light
... well, we could continue working the same number of hours we work during the summer months. We could make light shine on our shops so that anyone could continue working as long into the night as they’d like, even on those winter evenings when the sunlight vanishes so quickly. We could put the light into our rooms, so that we could read or write well into the evening if that was our desire. We could—“

“We could put lights in the halls leading to the latrines!” Anna exclaimed, then blushed. “Well, sometimes, you just need to go, right?”

Will laughed. “You make a great point.” His face turned serious again. “That’s just an idea that I have. If we can somehow channel that lightning energy, that fire... who knows what all we might be able to do with it? When we learned of Energy, the only hope was that maybe we’d get some basic telepathy skills. Yet we can do so much more than that now.” He glanced back and forth between the sisters. “It’s just something to think about.”

He turned and headed back to his room.

Lighting wasn’t really a huge problem for him, or any other modestly-powerful Aliomenti. He could display Energy as light, a skill he’d learned and used more than two centuries earlier, brightening the cave he used for training himself and Hope out of sight of men like Arthur Lowell. If he wanted to read at night, or visit the latrine, it wasn’t an issue.

Yet he’d always cautioned the Aliomenti about becoming
too
dependent on their Energy. If they teleported everywhere, they’d lose the ability to walk, ride a horse, or drive a carriage. If they used telekinesis to move objects they needed, they’d lose the ability to grasp objects and carry items from place to place, and would find their bodies weakening from lack of physical activity. If they relied heavily on telepathy and empathy while dealing with others, they’d lose their instinctive ability to read people.

“Who cares?” Arthur had asked. “It’s not as if Energy abilities can be lost.”

Will, thinking of the Hunter Aramis and his Dampering ability, shook his head. “We don’t know that, Arthur. For all we know, such abilities
can
be lost. Perhaps the loss would only be temporary. But you lose your humanity if you forget how to do things in the simplest fashion. And don’t forget, what is the main promise everyone makes when they join? Don’t reveal the secret of our abilities to anyone, right? What bigger risk to exposure could there be than someone who teleports everywhere, or moves everything through the air with telekinesis? If you develop the habit of doing both too often, you’ll very much run that risk of exposing us to the world, because you won’t
think
before using Energy in the wrong circumstance. Perhaps exposure wouldn’t be a bad thing, but if you’re going to do so, you don’t want to do it accidentally.”

“You don’t want to do it at
all
,” Arthur said, and his voice had turned surprisingly savage. “There is
never
a reason, not a permissible one, not a good one or a bad one, to expose
any
of what we are about or able to do to any
humans
who have not joined our group, who have not pledged to maintain our secrecy. In fact...”

Will winced. “In fact... what?”

Arthur cleared his voice. “I think we need to assign a penalty for doing so. To make sure that people realize the seriousness of the oath. It should be something painful, something that adds teeth to the promise.”

Will laughed. “What, should we send them to bed without supper? Kick them out? Throw them in prison?”

Arthur’s eyes narrowed and his look darkened. “You don’t seem to take our secrecy and preservation seriously, Will. Do you have any idea what would happen if others found out about us?”

“They’d want to learn more? Perhaps, rather than hiding, we should head out into the world and teach people. There are many people out there ready to hear what we have to say and teach, Arthur.”

“No, Will. They’ll come after us. They won’t want to learn. They’ll want to
destroy
us.”

“He’s right.” The new voice belonged to William, the young orphan brought into the group by Anna and Sarah.

“What are you talking about?” Will asked. “Each person is unique. True, some –
some
– might want to destroy us out of fear, or perhaps to claim that power and dominance for themselves. Yet there are many others who would welcome this information, who would happily integrate our approaches into their lives. They’d be able to make the world a far better place than it is today. Why deny everyone what we’ve learned because a small minority would react poorly?”

“No,” William said, his eyes full of hurt and anger. “The masses out there? They’re evil, Will. I’ve seen it. They’ll step on you and try to kill you just for being anything they don’t think you should be. They tried to
kill
me, Will. Why? Because my parents were dead before I was able to walk, because I dared to try to survive, because I didn’t meet their definition of someone who they should help. I offered them hard work and perseverance, someone who’d work harder than them to make their craft shop the best it could be, for the mere chance to learn and a few morsels of food. Yet I found the door slammed in my face. And then... then, because I had the nerve to not want to be poor, a penniless wretch stealing food each day to survive... they tried to poison me. If not for Anna and Sarah, I wouldn’t be here. No, we should absolutely
not
run out telling everyone. Only after they’ve been completely screened, only after we’ve made them go through our processes for membership, should we
ever
consider trusting them. You risk our very lives in trusting too much. Far better to sentence all who expose us or learn of us to death first, than to risk them coming after us.” His eyes turned cold. “The human will show us no mercy.”

William turned and walked off, the anger and rage at his upbringing so powerful that even an Aliomenti neophyte could sense it, and perhaps even an untrained human.

Several newer Aliomenti looked at each other, clearly wondering if the young man was suggesting they weren’t trustworthy. “I wouldn’t do that,” one whispered. “He’s exaggerating things.”

Arthur glanced around. “I’m suggesting nothing quite so drastic as William. Nor anything so... draconian as Will’s suggestion of the loss of an evening meal.” Laughter greeted this comment, which was delivered in a tone heavy with sarcasm. “But I do think some type of public shaming might be in order. We might call it a jail or a prison, for lack of a better word. A day inside, so all might see and know those who risk exposing us, who dare to take a chance that William might be right after all.” Arthur paused. “Do we
want
to take that chance?”

The murmurs started. They’d all been mollified by William’s powerful tale, by the passion and anger and hurt behind it all. To reject Arthur’s “compromise” was seen as tacit acceptance of what William had suffered, and seemed to suggest that his suffering was acceptable. No one wanted to go on record in opposition to Arthur’s suggestion for those reasons, save for Will, who urged them to take the time to make a decision not based on emotion, and to find a lesser punishment that better fit a “crime” with an entirely subjective definition. He was ignored. Arthur’s suggestion was adopted, and they built the “prison” a short time later.

No one dared act in a way suggesting that they’d sought to share Aliomenti knowledge with outsiders, with
humans
, as no one wanted to be the first thrown into the jail. Fewer people traveled to outside cities and villages in the months immediately following, as none of them wanted to put themselves in a position to act in a suspicious manner.

Will walked by and looked at the small prison building with a sense of rising dread. This new rule and its penalty were the first incarnation of the Oaths that had led the Hunters to track him down outside his home, what had led the Assassin to target his wife and son for elimination. At this time, to those who’d lived through its implementation, it seemed modest, rather harmless, and no one could understand Will’s unease over it.