“Let’s start to retreat,” he told Kecil, backing up as he watched the arms of darkness approach.
They entered the boundaries of the settlement, and Alec sent a streak of red light up into the sky to signal to the others that the darkness was approaching. Their steps were backwards, as they faced the approaching evil while backpedaling through the settlement, looking for stragglers while keeping an eye on the closing threat.
The tendrils of darkness grew closer and closer as they passed through the village, and by the time Alec and Kecil reached the southern boundary of the settlement, the darkness had completely engulfed the village from side to side, and it continued to roll towards them.
Alec released a burst of intense light at the entity, but watched the cloud pause only momentarily in its advancement in response. Alec felt strained from the release of energy, coming on top of his earlier fight, and the Traveling trips he had completed that morning as well. But he had no choice, he knew. He had to fight or he and Kecil would be consumed, he feared. The cloud was coming faster than the two of them could run, and he didn’t know if he had the power to Travel once again, without a rest.
“Kecil, you start running as fast as you can,” Alec suddenly shouted to the girl. “Don’t stop running until you reach Lieutenant Dale.”
“Are you coming?” she asked.
Alec fired a half dozen bolts of sizzling Light energy.
“Go!” he screamed. “I can’t slow it down much more! Go now!”
Alec took a deep breath as he reached for his drained reserves of ability, and grasped the Light power to his utmost limit, then released a continual stream of Light that burned through the air and struck the advancing darkness, halting its movement, and seeming to penetrate the surface of the mysterious adversary to some degree.
After ten seconds of that drastic last effort, Alec collapsed to his knees, and his flow of energy ceased. The cloud remained paused for a few additional heartbeats, then began to advance again, as a slower rate, as if in pain, but coming closer to the incapacitated Alec nonetheless.
“Alec! Let’s go!” Kecil grabbed his arm and tried to lift him to his feet as he knelt with his head bowed in exhaustion.
“Run Kecil!” he said softly.
“We have to go!” the girl shouted her reply, grabbing him and jerking on his arm frantically, as the cloud picked up speed and approached at a faster rate.
The sky overhead suddenly blossomed with an overpowering brilliance that made Alec and Kecil squint in surprise, and then a wide beam of Light energy came swooping down from above and struck the black cloud relentlessly.
There was a high-pitched sound – a squeal, or perhaps a scream – and the bloom of reddish light appeared deep inside the cloud.
The beam from above continued to bear down from the sky, spending long moments of intense focus on the darkness, and then it abruptly ceased.
The cloud seemed to begin to dissolve from the powerful assault. The dark streamers in the front turned into wisps that rose and vanished, while the main body of the cloud withdrew at an astonishing rate, disappearing back into the village, and then through the village and out of sight, all in a matter of seconds.
“How did you do that?” Kecil asked in astonishment. “I think you killed it!”
“That wasn’t my doing,” Alec replied wearily, thankfully. He bent forward and placed his hands in the dust of the road resting further, before he slowly pressed himself back up to his feet.
“If it wasn’t your doing, what was that?” Kecil asked plaintively.
“It was a miracle,” Alec answered. “John Mark, was it you?” he asked aloud, raising his eyes to look up into the scattered clouds overhead.
There was no answer.
Chapter 19
An hour later, Alec and Kecil reunited with Dale and the score of others who had finally abandoned Gallop.
“We saw that bright light,” the officer told Alec. “What did it mean?”
“It means we have a friend,” Alec replied.
“You don’t look good,” Dale added candidly. “Who’s our helpful friend, do you know?”
“I’m spent,” Alec answered candidly. “I used everything I had to fight the darkness, and I wasn’t winning. I don’t know where that great light came from, but it made all the difference. It was greater than anything I could create. And it set the cloud back, for now.”
“We need more friends like that!” Dale spoke. “Now, what do we do with our people?” she motioned to the small crowd of escapees from the settlement. They were a varied crew, some carrying their worldly belongings in their arms, others with small push carts, while a few had nothing at all.
“Can we go back to town and get our things?” someone in the crowd shouted.
“Not if you want to live,” Alec replied.
“We will go away from Gallop, and keep going until we meet the ingenairii that are headed this way,” he addressed the group. “We should meet them in a day or two, and then we’ll be safe.”
“Safer,” Kecil amended quietly.
Alec ignored her comment. “We’ll come back this way when we’re with the ingenairii, and they will all fight the cloud together, so that we can defeat this menace to the north.”
“I don’t have any food! What am I going to eat?” asked an unkempt-appearing man.
“We’ll have food for you by tomorrow,” Alec said resolutely.
“That’s enough,” Lieutenant Dale spoke sharply. “You’re alive, and lucky to be. You should have left Gallop days ago.” She nodded to her small contingent of guards, a half dozen men standing next to the group of survivors. “We’re going to proceed down the road now, and we encourage you to stick with us.”
The guards began to move forward, and Dale linked her arm through Alec’s as she began the retreat, while Kecil immediately took his other side and began striding forward as well. The remainder of the Gallop population fell in with a murmur of conversation.
“We have enough supplies to feed this lot dinner tonight, but it’ll be sparse tomorrow, not that missing a meal is the worst fate in the world,” Dale told Alec.
“If I recover my strength tonight, we’ll have plenty of food tomorrow,” Alec assured her, thinking of Traveling to Healing Spring to retrieve food supplies for delivery once he overcame his weariness from battle.
The road went through alternating stretches of forest with occasional glades and openings, a few settled, though most uninhabited, through which the group slogged until nightfall.
Alec revived enough during the journey so that he was able to call upon the energy to start a fire for the group, once they selected a spot near a brook in the forest. Dale’s troops shared the scant supplies they carried so that everyone had something to eat, and when the guard watch rotation was established, the camp settled into an uncomfortable, exhausted silence.
Alec served on the third shift of the watch, refreshed by the hours of sleep he enjoyed curled up with Kecil for warmth. When the sun rose and the guards relaxed their scrutiny, Alec Traveled to the palace at the Healing Spring.
“Jennings!” he shouted as he arrived at his office in the palace, and opened the door to the hallway.
“Jennings!” he repeated moments later, when he was twenty feet down the hall.
“My lord, this is an unexpected pleasure,” the steward said unflappably as he appeared in a doorway. “How may I assist you?”
“I’d like to have as much bread and breakfast food as possible,” Alec said. “I’m on a camping trip with several people,” he avoided admitting the full truth. “I’m going to go take a warm bath and then I’ll take whatever the chef can have ready, without disrupting the life of the palace, of course.”
“Everything is going well?” the steward asked with a touch of anxiety, sensing some untold element to Alec’s story.
“It’s been a bit touch and go,” Alec admitted. “There’s a problem up in the northlands that I don’t understand. But there’s a whole
cavalcade of ingenairii traveling there to handle the issue together, so there’s nothing to fear.”
He turned and went back to his room, where he luxuriated in a hot bath that lessened the aches of his body, though he felt his ingenaire abilities still strained by the previous day’s challenging actions. Without the mysterious stream of energy from the sky, he would have died the day before, he knew. It was a sobering admission, one that left a shadow of fear upon his heart.
“Will I be coming home to see you soon, master?” he quietly asked John Mark, not expecting any reply, and receiving none.
He rose from the bath and dressed in clean clothes, then armed himself with a pair of bandoliers of knives and a sword, though he knew the weapons were of little use in the battle he was likely to face.
The kitchen had three canvas bags ready for him on the table when he walked in on the staff that was hastily packing a final bag of food for him to take as part of his unusual request. He thanked them, and when all was ready, and the bags were tightly pressed into his arms, he surprised the gathered helpers by disappearing with the goods that were destined to be eaten hundreds of miles away.
“Was there ever anyone like him as the master of the house?” one staffer wondered aloud.
When Alec returned to the camp, all the members of the group were awake. A trio of men shouted in alarm, as Alec appeared at the edge of the camp, but his delivery of fresh, hot breakfast food soon relieved the tension in the camp.
“Well, my lord, I suspect it’s time we move along?” Dale asked Alec as she stood and wiped her hands on her trousers.
“It’s time,” Alec agreed. “I’ll feel better when we can meet the ingenairii and let them protect us.”
Alec walked during the day with his Warrior energy in place at a low level, allowing him to watch for signs of trouble that never occurred as the group moved out of the range of the black cloud. They walked through a more-settled landscape with several active farming and ranching operations evident among the forests and open territories the road passed.
By mid-afternoon, as Alec’s group was wearily resting by a small brook, the company of ingenairii arrived.
“My lord!” Preeble, the head of the Light ingenairii house exclaimed as Alec stood at the roadside. The two Warrior apprentices, Pranger and Gleese, arrived as well, grinning in delight at the sight of their leader.
“We’ve been traveling for most of the past day,” Alec explained. “We had to retreat from Gallop because the darkness invaded the actual town, and it was too strong to withstand,” his comments had the effect of sobering his new companions.
“Kecil and I will turn around and travel with you back to Gallop now,” he said. “And these other refugees can continue south to someplace safe, if they wish.”
“My lord, my squad and I want to return to Gallop with you,” Dale immediately spoke. “It doesn’t feel good to have left our station, and we want to be there when we fight to get it back, even if we won’t be doing the fighting directly ourselves.”
After a brief discussion, a half dozen of the town’s residents decided to travel back to Gallop along with the soldiers and the ingenairii, while the others accepted supplies from the ingenairii and chose to continue to flee to the south.
Alec walked alongside the light ingenairii, and tried to explain to them as much as he could about the opponent they were headed towards.
“It rolls across the ground at a faster pace than a walking person, and I’ve only once ever seen any color inside it. When the Light power came down from the sky and attacked it, the cloud turned red inside, and then it withdrew, completely,” he explained. “And it feels evil.
“The lokasennii said that they can sense an evil presence,” he said speculatively.
“Who are the lokasennii?” one of the light ingenairii asked.
“They are,” Alec began, then paused, “they are a race that is the forerunners of the Spirit ingenairii; that’s the best I can do to describe them. They still live in a land far away, and they have told me of the dangerous new evil they have sensed. I think it might be the same evil that we are fighting, but they describe something about the evil that makes no sense.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Kecil emphatically echoed.
“What is it they say?” one of the ingenairii dutifully asked, as the others in the group looked at Alec.
“They say they sensed something like me as part of the evil energy,” Alec said with a skeptical tone. “That’s why we have the Spiritual ingenairii with us – to help to try to detect any relationship between this power and me.” He motioned towards the two ingenairii who rode near the back of the group. “It’s preposterous, of course,” he added, as much for his own flailing peace of mind as for any other reason.
The group continued to march on, and spent the night in the wilderness, then resumed their travels the next morning. They reached the outskirts of Gallop in the late morning, and stopped to prepare for their anticipated encounter with the evil darkness.
Chapter 20
Gallop sat silent and empty, visible across the landscape of the fields that bordered it on its southern side. The group of ingenairii and the survivors of the settlement stood and discussed the enemy they expected to soon confront.
“We must keep the Light ingenairii near one another,” Alec directed. “Who is the most powerful of you?” he asked.
“Kalie,” a pair of voices called, while other hands pointed at a dark-complexed girl who sat on a horse near the rear of the group.
“We’re going to put Kalie in the center of our group, and protect her as best we can,” Alec explained. “Everyone is going to have to use their power – use a great deal of it – to keep the cloud from attacking us. That will mean constantly firing bursts of concentrated light at the cloud if it gets too close to our group.
“And Kalie,” he pointed at the girl himself, “will focus all her power on trying to shoot her energy right into the heart of the cloud. I don’t know if this will work; if it doesn’t we’ll have to retreat and try a different tactic. But Kecil and I saw the cloud retreat after it was hit with a powerful blast of power.
“It can be hurt. I hope that we will be able to hurt it – badly and permanently – by all working together,” he told the group.
They moved towards the village and through it. The few residents peeled away from their protectors to return to their homes and gather items they had abandoned, as the ingenairii rode through the center of the settlement and reached the northern side. Alec spread them across a semicircle formation, with Kalie, the Spiritual ingenairii, and the Warrior apprentices in the center.
The air was full of tension, as the ingenairii all stared out across the open fields, each watching their own quadrant of the surrounding territory, expectant, nervous, and ready to fight the unknown foe. Alec walked among them, comforting them and encouraging them, certain that the cloud would pounce upon the Ingenairii force very soon.
The minutes passed, and the tension grew to anxiety, and then to boredom, and then to relief. The afternoon began to become evening, and Kecil motioned to Alec.
“You might as well take them down now; they’ve been out here so long they lost their focus,” she told him when he approached her.
He nodded his agreement with her, and called the ingenairii back towards Gallop. As the group strolled back, Alec took the hand of Cuck, the senior Spiritual ingenairii.
Did you feel any sense of evil, or, he paused, of anything else? He asked silently.
I did not have any sense of anything except the anxiety of my companions, my lord, the man replied.
Then our adversary was not active near us, Alec concluded. Thank you. He released his grip on the man and they walked into town together.
The squad ate dinner around a bonfire in the courtyard of the guard post that night, and settled into an uneasy sleep. When the morning broke in the eastern sky, the members of the assemblage awoke, one by one, and prepared for another day of anticipated
battle.
After breakfast, they trooped out into the open fields, and took up their positions again, then settled in to wait.
“What if it doesn’t come?” Kecil asked Alec midway through the morning.
“My lord!” Cuck, the senior Spiritual ingenairii shouted excitedly.
Alec went across the trampled field to respond to the man.
“My lord,” Cuck reached out and took Alec’s had.
I feel the evil, my lord. It is growing stronger, he informed Alec.
“Everyone!” Alec shouted. “Be ready. Something may be about to happen.”
“I feel something, but I don’t know if it’s evil, or,” the second Spiritual ingenairii, Lair, hesitated, “perhaps I’m confusing your powers with the evil?” he questioned his own senses.
“It’s very dark in the forest over there!” an ingenairii on the left side shouted.
All heads turned to look at the blackness that consumed everything beyond the closest rows of tree trunks. The black cloud burst out into the open field on the left, pressing forward across a wide front that was daunting in its scope.
The ingenairii froze momentarily, unable to process the emergence of such an unconventional and frightening adversary. The reality of the confrontation crystalized into the existence for all the ingenairii who had lived only in the sheltered life of the Ingenairii Hill campus to that point. The acknowledgement of a violent battle to preserve their own lives exploded upon their consciousnesses, and they could not react for precious seconds.
“Fight! Fight this thing!” Alec screamed. He called upon his own energies, and released a bolt of bright white power that sizzled the air between two of the stunned, still Light ingenairii as it flew at and then struck the cloud. The impact of the light caused a roiling pause of the advance in the immediate vicinity of Alec’s strike, while the rest of the cloud continued to move forward.
The Cloud of Darkness (The Ingenairii Series Book 11) Page 20