The Cloud of Darkness (The Ingenairii Series Book 11) (27 page)

“Me?  Why would I write you a note?” she peremptorily snatched the paper from his hand and read it. “What does it even mean?” she asked.

Who could it be from? He asked himself.  “There’s Kale,” he referred to the palace cook who had started the cross-continent adventure with him, then summarily dropped out after just a few days.  Kale wouldn’t have any idea of where he was.  And Kale’s handwriting certainly wouldn’t look at all like the note that Kecil held.

“Could it be Karalee?” he asked aloud, thinking of the steward at the Oyster Bay palace, a competent and capable – almost intimidating – woman.  She would have no reason to write to him, nor would she send any note so cryptic.  Nor would she have any idea of where he was.

“Well?” Kecil interrupted his silent musing as they stood in front of the innkeeper’s desk.

“I have no idea who this is from,” he replied.  He took the paper back, and waved it towards the desk clerk.  “What did the woman look like?” he asked.

“She has very wavy hair, and she was about medium height.  I think she was attractive, in her own way,” the man told him.

“Have you seen her here before?” Alec asked, grasping for clues.

“No, never,” the clerk said assuredly.

“Thank you,” Alec said, and they went up to their room.

After a brief visit, they left the inn again, and strolled to the riverfront, where Alec began to inquire about ships heading towards Stronghold.

When he found a freighter that had a cabin available for passengers, he asked what the fares would cost, and what the expected travel time would be.

“We’ll need ten to twelve days to reach Stronghold,” the first mate guessed.  “And you’ll have to pay for your share of the food each day, or bring your own.”

“What are the chances we can complete the trip in seven days?” Alec asked.

“That’s impossible,” the officer stated flatly.

“Let’s wager on it,” Alec felt suddenly, humorously predatory.  “We’ll pay double or nothing on our fares if we make the trip in seven days or less,” he proposed, and stuck his hand out to seal the deal with a shake.

“The captain will give me a bonus for collecting so much from you,” the mate taunted.

“When will you leave the docks?” Alec asked.

“We leave at moonrise tonight,” the sailor replied.

“We’ll be here then,” Alec assured him, as he began to lead Kecil away.

“Be sure to bring enough to pay twice,” the mate’s voice trailed after him.

“I hope you’re ready for the switch from the luxury of the Golden Bough to the squeeze of a river freighter cabin,” Alec warned Kecil.

“How can you be so sure about the speed of this ship?” Kecil asked.

“It’s got sails,” Alec noted the masts on the ship.  “I can control the breezes that will push us up the river.  And you can be everyone’s friend by practicing your healing arts on the crew members.”

They packed their small packages of belongings, and took their leave from the Golden Bough.  “Are you going to say good bye to all those memories?” Kecil asked.

“I think some of them may travel with me for a while,” Alec answered.  “But the thing that won’t travel with me is the explanation for that note from the Golden Bough.  I still want to solve that mystery.”

Kecil clucked her tongue sympathetically, but still had no answer to provide, and they walked the rest of the return to the inn in silence.

Was he growing old?  Was he going mad? Alec asked himself.  His powers were failing, it seemed, and he couldn’t decipher the question of the mysterious note.  Someone must have expected him to understand it.  The writer must have anticipated that he would remember the context of the comment, and know what it meant, but that hadn’t happened.

They walked back towards the docks once again.

“What about food?” Kecil asked suddenly as their ship came into sight.  “Weren’t we going to pack some to bring with us?”

“I thought I could just pop over to the palace and grab something fresh for us every day,” Alec explained.

“Why are we even going on this ship?” Kecil asked.  She stopped walking, and looked at him with a fixed expression.

“We need to spend time; you still need to wait a few more weeks before you can return,” Alec reminded her.  “And I’d rather spend the time traveling, rather than sitting in a palace, remembering the times I was there with Andi – the things she said, or did, or thought.

“If we keep traveling, keep seeing new places and talking to new people, it helps me move on,” he confessed.

“Oh Alec,” Kecil stepped forward and hugged him fiercely.  “I’m sorry.  I’m sorry I never met your queen; she must have been very special.”

“She was,” Alec agreed.   He reached over and picked up Kecil’s bag.  “Let’s go give this ship a surprise,” his somber face broke into a grin, and they returned to the ship.

On board, a crew member showed them to the cramped cabin they were to share, where a pair of hammocks drooped listlessly in the dim light.  “You love birds enjoy,” he laughed coarsely, then left them alone.

“We’ll spend seven days in here?” Kecil looked at the cramped quarters in dismay.

“No, we’ll be on the deck most of the time.  I can give you fencing lessons,” Alec offered.

“Really?” the girl’s interest was immediately sparked.   “No one ever offered fencing lessons before!”

They climbed up to the deck of the ship as the full moon began to rise in the east.  Alec was badgered to pay their passage fare to the captain, and then the ship began to prepare for departure.  The cables from the dock were cast back ashore, and the crew began to press poles to move them out from the piers and into the water. 

“Get those sails up!” the captain shouted, as men scrambled into positions.  “And rowers, unship the oars and get ready to stretch your backs,” he commanded, sending men to their assigned duties with efficiency and speed.  It was a well-run ship, Alec was glad to see.

“Watch this,” Alec wanted Kecil to appreciate his impending trickery.  He watched as the sheets of cloth in the sails were settled into place, and as soon as the crew tied off the ropes to secure them, Alec mustered a strong breeze.

The sails billowed wide open, and the ship surged forward so quickly that Kecil reached out and grabbed Alec’s arm to steady herself on the moving deck.

The Captain shouted orders as the ship moved through the crowded river traffic; he and the crew focused intently on maneuvering their way among the other shipping on the dark water, and for the next hour there was little sound but grunting and cursing as they avoided collision after collision during their inexplicable run.

“Where did this wind come from?” the mate muttered the question aloud.

“None of the other ships caught it – how is that even possible?” another officer asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” the captain interjected, as they broke into an open stretch of river north of the city, and began to cruise in a straight line along the river course.

Alec grinned during the whole escapade, then led Kecil downstairs once the excitement of the wind had settled down.

“I’m hungry,” she said.  “Can we have some dinner?”

“Let me go to the palace and get something.  I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Alec promised.  He was mildly fatigued from the use if the Air energies to propel the ship, but a simple journey to the Healing Spring palace and back was easily manageable.

He switched his use of energies and disappeared from the ship, which immediately slowed its pace as Alec’s driving wind vanished.   Kecil heard the pounding of footsteps overhead, as men began to race to open up and apply the oars they had never touched from the moment of Alec’s first whisper of breeze.  She smiled, then lifted herself up into her hammock and rocked slowly back and forth, humming a tuneless song as she waited.

Alec returned ten minutes later, holding two bucket-like pots filled with fragrant stew, and a bag with a fresh loaf of bread and a bottle of wine. “Just what we need to end a long day,” he said as he handed Kecil her share of the food.

Chapter 23

The bemused crew of the river cruiser reached the docks of the non-Locksfort shippers in Stronghold within five days, a record sailing time in the memory of every member of the crew.  They suspected Alec had some role to play in the inexplicable conditions of the voyage, but they had no proof.  He’d never shown any dramatic signs of manipulating the wind – he’d never chanted incantations or waved his arms in dramatic fashions to summon the wind to obey his commands.  But his presence on the ship coincided with the strange breeze they benefited from, and he and Kecil somehow managed to eat meals of foods that were impossibly present on the ship.  Plus, they practiced swordwork on the deck, even though no one remembered seeing them bring swords onto the ship.

The first mate failed to remember the wager he had made about the free fares Alec and Kecil would pay for a five-day journey up the river, and Alec didn’t press the point.  He and Kecil disembarked quickly and walked into the city to find lodging for their brief stay.

“You promised we could sleep in real beds,” Kecil said insistently.  She had not enjoyed the hammocks they had experienced onboard the ship.

“You’re right, and you deserve a real bed,” Alec agreed complacently.  The girl had been a trooper aboard the ship, and he wanted to give her a good experience, since Stronghold was the last major city, and the last one with real luxury, that they would visit.

“There should be some nice hotels above the falls, and they’ll have a splendid view.  Let’s climb the trail and find a place.”

“We have to climb all the way up there?   Isn’t that farther than the stairs in the cave of John Mark?” Kecil asked skeptically.

“Listen to you,” Alec retorted.  “You need to stretch out those legs with a good climb.  This’ll be good for you.  Let’s go,” he said as he hitched his pack on his back, and they merged into the crowd of city people who were headed towards the upper portion of the city at the top of the falls.

They spent two days in Stronghold. Alec once again led Kecil to the orphanage in the city, the very one he had visited with Johanna, Noranda’s cousin, during his very first visit to the city in his early youth.  They surveyed the rebuilt portions of the city, where the Locksforts and others had reconstructed structures to fill in the brutal damage that the demons of the sorcerers had inflicted on the city during its occupation by the ingenairii under Hellmann’s influence.

And then they planned a ride aboard a freighter that was sailing the portion of the Carmen River that flowed from the east.  Their destination was Sandyforks, a city that mostly shipped farm products down the river to the larger cities in the west.  From Sandyforks, they would begin to journey across the countryside, a land of plains which gave way to emptiness, and then eventually met up with the Pale Mountains.

And once in the mountains, they would only need to follow the unused roads to reach the lands of the lacerta.

Their visit to Stronghold was disturbed by only one inexplicable event.

After their slow and steady climb amidst the stream of others who were moving to the upper portions of Stronghold atop the escarpment, Alec had spotted an elegant-looking inn, and they had gone inside to secure a room.

“This note is waiting for you,” the man at the desk told them as he gave them their room key and directions on how to reach the room on the third floor.

“There must be some mistake,” Alec replied, refusing to take the folded paper that hung in the air, trapped between the fingers of the outstretched hand of the desk clerk.  “No one could have left a note for me – no one knew I was coming here.  I didn’t even know I was coming here to this inn until five minutes ago.”

“This note was dropped off to the morning clerk today, with a description to give it to the middle-aged man and the young lady who will arrive just past noon,” the clerk said.  “It’s addressed to ‘Alec’.  Is that you?” he asked.

Alec gave an involuntary shiver, as his intuition grasped the meaning of the note.  The only way someone could have known he was going to be at the inn was if the deliverer had been present in the future, and known of the certainty of Alec’s arrival.

Someone had come back from the future to deliver the note the clerk still held.  And the only person who was known to be able to travel through time, from the future, was Alec himself.  The circumstantial evidence seemed to indicate that Alec himself had played a role in delivering the message that waited him.  He’d barely practiced Time Travel in many, many decades.  The dangers of visiting the past were too many, he’d come to conclude, with too many opportunities for confusion or worse.

He opened the folded paper, and read the note inside. 

“When your journey to Chanradala is finished, you must come back to save me, K”.

“Did you write this, somehow?” he turned in bewilderment to Kecil.

“How could I do that?” she asked in a flat tone.

“I can’t imagine anyone else with the initial ‘K’ who might have written both these notes,” Alec replied.

“Well, you know it wasn’t me,” Kecil told him with finality.

“We’ll take the keys to our room now,” Alec said to the clerk, as he placed coins on the counter.

When they reached their room shortly afterwards, Alec opened the curtains to show the view to Kecil.  They looked out the window at the wide vistas, showing the lower city, and the river flowing away to the west.

“There’s been a lot of history happen here,” Alec reflected.  “I’ll show you some sights after we go heal the children.”

That afternoon they went to the orphanage and did heal the cases they found.  The following day, they walked back down the trail and Alec showed Kecil the locations of battles and events from his previous lives in Stronghold, then took her to the Locksfort compound, rebuilt after the destruction by the sorcerers and demons a century before.

“Life is exciting among the humans,” Kecil said as they stood in silence.  “So many things happen; so many great powers arise.  But, have we seen them all?  Will there be more along the way?”

“There aren’t any more along our way,” Alec replied, thinking of the placid cities to the east, Sandy Fork and Growertown, where demons and sorcerers have never played a significant role.  They were cities where the ingenairii had seldom been employed as well.  Kecil would see little additional display of human uniqueness along that route.

“But,” he formulated another thought, “we could approach Chanradala from a different direction, and you could see a few more unusual sights if we take our journey to the east.”  He gave a wink.  “We’ll have to use the quicker means of travel to go that way though.”

“If you think it would be more interesting, I’d be happy to fly through the air in your arms instead of walking,” Kecil told him with a toothy grin.

“Let’s go back to the inn and gather our belongings,” Alec proposed.  “It’ll be getting dark over there already.”

And, he thought to himself, whoever the mysterious note deliverer is, they’ll neither be able to anticipate such a move, nor respond quickly to it.  He’d have time to think and analyze the puzzle of the inexplicable messages.