The Cloud of Darkness (The Ingenairii Series Book 11)

by Jeffrey Quyle

  They went downstairs for breakfast with the roomful of ancient nuns, and Alec announced that the two newlyweds would like to stay for a few days and offer healing services to the public as a way to thank the sisters for their hospitality.

  He looked around the room after his announcement, and saw the looks of concern on several faces.

  “What will we do with all those folks?” one of the ladies asked.

  “You can share the story of John Mark and Jesus with them,” Alec suggested.

  “We could!” she agreed brightly. “We’ve not done such things in a long, long time.”

  The people of the Avonellene Empire did not take religion seriously, Alec knew from his long tenure among the residents, when he had lived as the consort of Caitlen. Caitlen herself had been to John Mark’s cave with Alec, and even with such a direct experience, she had only half-heartedly taken up the faith that Alec held.

  The temples in Avonellene were attended during festivals, but not often troubled with crowds otherwise, and Alec knew little of the local deities. He was thus not surprised that the mission he was in had not found great success nor showed great enthusiasm for proselytizing.

  “Let me go out and make my healing work known, and then folks will start to come visit the mission. We’ll only be here a few days, and then we’ll be on our way,” he assured them.

  After breakfast, Kecil spoke to him. “What am I supposed to do while you use your magic?”

  “I am going to teach you to make some potions and remedies we can give to people so that I don’t have to use my energy all the time. There are many, many treatments we can offer that will work effectively without doing anything out of the ordinary,” he explained. “But I’ll use my Healing power when I need to. Let’s go upstairs and gather up all those things we’ve bought the past couple of days in the market, so that we can start concocting our remedies.”

  They spent the morning in the kitchen of the mission, cutting and mixing and boiling and mashing elements together, according to the vast stories of remedies that were divinely imprinted upon Alec’s memory. When the two sisters assigned to kitchen duty showed evidence of interest, they were recruited to help prepare the remedies as well, speeding the work.

  When the tasks were finished around noon, Alec and Kecil left the mission, and began to enter nearby shops to offer the healing services.

  “We’re from the mission down the street,” Alec began his invitation to the first shopkeeper he visited.

  “What mission?” the man asked.

  “The big building, three doors down, made of stone and brick,” Alec helpfully described.

  “The place with the little old ladies,” Kecil explained.

  “Ah, the ladies,” the shopkeeper understood. “Are they in trouble? Do they need help? They’re the quietest neighbors on the street,” he replied.

  “They don’t need help,” Alec replied. “But they want to help their neighbors, so we’re here to offer help with any aches or illnesses you might have. We have a bag full of cures and treatments.”

  “I’m in good health. Do I look sick to you?” the shopkeeper asked Kecil. “I don’t need anything.”

  “Do you know anyone who does? They can come find us at the mission this afternoon,” Alec offered, and minutes later, he and Kecil left to visit the next shop.

  The woman at the counter of the millinery story examined Alec suspiciously as he explained his purpose.

  “I do have sore feet,” she confessed as though throwing a challenge to him, after hearing his story.

  “Here,” Alec reached into the bag that Kecil carried, and pulled out a small cloth sachet. “Soak a pinch of this in water, then drink the water before you go to bed,” he instructed, and as he handed the pouch to her he let his healing energy flow from his fingertips into her wrist, instantaneously alleviating some of the discomfort that she felt.

  “I will try it,” she agreed in a friendlier tone, then she waved them cheerily out of the shop.

  Half of the remaining shops they visited accepted Alec’s offers of healing, and when they walked back towards the mission, Alec knocked on doors of homes, and treated a number of children.

  “Experience has taught me that if you can cure the children quickly, the parents will come to you and recommend you more often than anyone else,” he confided in Kecil as they returned to the mission in the late afternoon.

  They ate dinner from a street vendor that night, then went to their room.

  “Change me to a lacerta for the night, please,” Kecil pleaded as soon as they were alone in their third floor room once again.

  Alec saw no harm in the request, and took her hand in his, then induced the changes that gave her back the figure she had been born with.

  “Now, let me teach you a lacerta game,” she offered after she had stretched and momentarily enjoyed her restored body.

  “It’s a game that children learn, but adults still play it, even gamble over it,” Kecil explained, as the two of them sat down on the floor with their legs crossed.

  “You hold one hand up like this,” she held a hand in front of her, fingers extended together to make a small screen.

  “And then you hide your other hand behind the screen,” she demonstrated as she made a fist.

  “You decide how many fingers you want to stick out, and then we take turns calling odd or even. When the chooser picks one, then we uncover our fingers,” she raised her shielding hand to reveal two fingers extended behind it, “and if our combined fingers add up to an odd number or an even number as the caller guessed, the caller wins.

  “If they don’t match, the caller loses,” she finished the simple explanation.

  “It seems easy,” Alec commented.

  “Let’s try. You call the total first,” she told him.

  Alec held up his hands as demonstrated, then extended three fingers. “Even,” he called, and they both lifted their hands to reveal the total.

  “It’s odd,” Kecil crowed as her two fingers were added to his three. “I win!”

  “Now it’s my turn to call,” she told him, and they proceeded to play on for several minutes.

  “We use this to pass the time, or some folks gamble, and it’s an easy way to divide chores that no one wants to do,” Kecil said when they finished their bout of playing.

  The next morning, Alec woke Kecil and returned her to human appearance, then the pair went to the market to purchase more breakfast goods and more medicinal supplies.

  “How do you remember all these different medicines?” Kecil asked, as Alec bough a variety of plants and other items.

  “I had help, extraordinary help,” he replied, thinking back to his first experience in John Mark’s cave, when he had gained the beginning of his healing powers, and had seen the vast wall of remedies that had imprinted itself on his memory.

  He recounted the story as they walked back to the mission.

  “And that works for anyone?” Kecil asked.

  “It worked for everyone I took there,” he thought of Rief and Bethany and Caitlen, who had all gained the power to heal after visiting the cave.

  Kecil was quiet as they entered the mission to turn over the breakfast goods to the cooks.

  They ate half their breakfast before the first prospective patients knocked on the door, and called them away to deal with a case of an infant that had croup. A handful of other cases approached the mission during the morning, and the two visitors left the mission in the afternoon to go offer their services to neighbors in the other direction down the street.

  The next day they didn’t have to leave the mission, as enough patients came to visit them to keep them busy. The word of mouth was spreading even faster than Alec had expected, and he began to examine the mission to consider a way to open a clinic. The rooms to the left of the entrance were unused – dingy and dirty, but unused for any purpose, and he persuaded the sisters to clean it up for him to use.

  A wider circle of people began to come
to the clinic where the free medical care was given, and every cure seemed to work, and the following day a pair of patrolmen from the city guards strolled by the building twice, then stood across the street and observed the activity for an hour, before leaving the neighborhood.

  Chapter 9

  “How long will we do this?” Kecil asked two nights after the police had observed them.

  “Well, we’re just taking our time so that we don’t get back to Chanradala too early. You want your year to pass, don’t you?” Alec asked.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Kecil agreed. “But I was thinking: it’s fascinating to watch you do all this healing. Could you take me to this cave, and let me have this healing power too? Then I could help you more, and we could heal more people. Plus, I’d be able to heal people on my own, even after we parted ways, wouldn’t I?” she asked.

  Alec studied her closely, then engaged his Spiritual energy and tried to sense her feeling and motives.

  She was interested, and she was sincere in her interest in healing. But something in the concept of taking a lacerta, a person who had never heard of John Mark or Christ, made him hesitate to agree to take Kecil to the Cave.

  “Let me think about it tonight,” he equivocated, and he fell asleep as his mind considered what was the right thing to do.

  "I could take you to the cave and you'd have a chance to become a Healer too," Alec told Kecil when they awoke the next morning. He’d come to the conclusion that his faith in his religion could, and should, be shared with a lacerta. Souls were souls, regardless of the skin that covered their bodies.

  Her round lacerta eyes widened, then she sprung up into the air, rising from a prone position in a way Alec hadn't considered possible, and landed on her feet. She ran across the room and flung herself atop him with an impact that made him grunt.

  "Really, truly?" she squealed, then rubbed her flattened nose against his affectionately. "You are my best friend!"

  "I'll need to change you to a human, and we'll have to tell the sisters we're going away for a few days," he explained.

  "I'm ready," Kecil enthusiastically replied. She rolled off from the top of him, then stood waiting impatiently.

  Alec rose and used his power to quickly transfigure the girl back to the human shape that she wore, and he led the way downstairs.

  "We're going to go get breakfast food, then we'll be leaving for a few days," he informed the cooks in the kitchen.

  "We'll miss you!" the chief cook replied. She did genuinely enjoy their presence, Alec knew. She had helped them prepare several of the healing formulas, and was becoming proficient at preparing them on her own.

  "We'll be back, and in the meantime, you know enough to help half the people on your own with the basic remedies you can concoct!" Alec laughed, though his words were true.

  He and Kecil shopped at the market and bought eggs and ham for the sisters to enjoy. Once they delivered the food to the kitchen, Alec led Kecil out the door and around to the alley, out of sight.

  "Come hug me tight," he directed.

  "This is really for going to this cave, not a way to enjoy the pleasures of this human body?” she asked suspiciously, as she nonetheless obediently pressed herself against him and wrapped her arms around his waist.

  “Well,” he began to drawl an answer, while he simultaneously engaged his Traveler powers, and they ceased to exist in Avonellene, leaving the alleyway empty, as they entered the nothingness of space and experience that existed in the Traveler dimension.

  Seconds later they re-emerged at Black Crag, on the western edge of the Empire, where the vast mountain wilderness stretched for hundreds of miles to the west. They were in a courtyard in the military quarter of the city, and a squad of astonished guards stared in surprise at the sudden appearance of the pair.

  “You didn’t warn me that was going to happen!” Kecil accused. “I wasn’t ready.”

  “In some ways, you never get ready for that,” Alec replied as he took a deep breath. “Here we go again.”

  He triggered his powers once again, as the guards began to walk towards his location. With his departure, he did not see the shock that registered on their faces, nor hear the shouts they released.

  Instead, he experienced the gray nothingness of Traveling, then returned to the world in a stable yard in Boundary Lake.

  “That was a long jump,” he informed Kecil. “Let’s rest for a moment.”

  “How far did we go?” Kecil asked.

  Alec mumbled out loud, as he considered the question. “Black Crag to the Twenty Cities, across the Twenty Cities, up through the mountains. I’d say over a thousand miles.”

  “Where are we?” Kecil asked in astonishment.

  “We’re in Boundary Lake,” he replied, as he recollected the time he’d been in the city and had rescued Andi and several hostage girls from captivity by the renegade ingenairii, then raised a fountain of healing water to help the city fight a plague, and finally raised a vast granite barrier that had cut off a lacerta invasion of the city.

  And after all that had happened in that long-ago time, he’d continued traveling westward on foot, traveling through the lacerta nation in pursuit of Andi, who’d been captured by their army and transferred to Chanradala, their capital city, for display and execution. Except for Alec’s timely arrival, himself morphed into a lacerta to facilitate his passage through the land.

  And after that, he and Andi had regained the deep integration of love and life and memories and emotions that had lasted for decades, right up until her passing just a month in the past.

  “Boundary Lake!” Kecil exclaimed, unaware of the meditative reverie that Alec had descended into. “That’s where I was going to wait out my year of exile after running from the prince! That’s where my friend Straystonate was killed and I was taken prisoner. That was months ago! We traveled all this way in five minutes?

  “Alec? Alec?” she repeated to draw his attention as he was lost in his memories.

  “What, yes,” he answered. “We’ve only got two more jumps to make,” he informed her. “Are you ready?”

  “Let’s go,” she answered, and he began the process again, taking them to another alley way, one in the outer district of Chanradala.

  “Look at them!” Kecil cried, staring down at the opening of the alley, where lacerta were passing by as they strode towards their appointments and friends and businesses and lovers. “We’re in my land!”

  “Not for long,” Alec answered. “Take one last look,” he instructed, then sent them towards their last destination on the trip.

  They landed in a deserted forest dell, tree-covered walls on three sides, and a narrow, dark passage dimly evident at the far end.

  “Where are we now?” Kecil asked.

  Alec sighed deeply. “We are in the Pale Mountains, the wilderness that lies between your nation and mine.” He thought about the change in his life that had come about because he had been a flunky in Richard’s carnival, when Richard had decided to leave the security of the Dominion behind in hopes of garnering big profits in the frontier settlements of the Pale Mountains. Richard and most of the carnival had perished, while Alec had miraculously been directed to visit the cave that was waiting just on the other side of the dark crevasse.

  “Let’s go this way,” he directed. It was very early in the morning, a result of their westward travel faster than the time of day progressed across the face of the planet, and the dell was dim. The crevasse was darkness itself, a place that would have been frightening to enter if Alec hadn’t known that it was safe, and that John Mark’s cave waited at the other end. He stretched his arm out and offered his hand to Kecil as they approached the entrance to the passage, and she accepted the offer as they left the dell and entered the narrow confines.

  “This is the magic cave?” she questioned doubtfully as they walked between the dank, stony walls.

  “No, this is just the way to get to the cave,” Alec assured her, and minutes later they emerge
d on the ledge that protruded from the cliff that was just steps away from the entrance to the cave. They climbed up, and Alec felt his heart start to beat faster as he beheld the round door that was the entrance to the sacred spot.

  “We can’t take any weapons inside,” he told Kecil as he carefully placed his knife and his sword on the ground, then approached the door.

  “You open it,” he directed, as Kecil came to stand beside him, and he watched as it easily swung open in response to her efforts.

  “This looks like a magic cave,” she said in wonder as she stared into the darkness.

  “The magic is just beginning!” Alec laughed. “You go in first, and I’ll follow you,” he gestured for her to enter, and immediately watched in amazement as the power of the cave manifested itself.

  Kecil stepped in to the cave, and she immediately stepped under the shower of water that fell from the walls of the cave. It was a sheet of water, one that drenched every inch of anyone who entered the cavern, and it was a cleansing tool, a means the cave used to prepare entrants for the holiness of the site they stepped into.

  Alec remembered how the water had stripped away his fears and pretensions and left him with eyes and heart full of wonder and even innocence as he stepped into the cave. It was a wonderful experience all by itself, nothing to be minimized, even though it was only a prelude to the vastly greater, life-changing knowledge that the top of the cave would impart.

  But at the moment of her entrance into the cave, as Kecil slowly glided through the cleaning sheet of water, it stripped away not only her spiritual and mental failings and falsities, but it even altered her physical appearance, sloughing off her human appearance that Alec had provided. Kecil reverted to her true form, as a lacerta, and stood in the antechamber, the opening gallery of the cave, from which the incredible view of the endless staircase arose.

  “What has happened? This is wonderful!” Kecil crowed softly, as Alec also passed through the water and joined her in the circular room where the falling water collected and drained away.