The Journey Home: The Ingenairii Series: Beyond the Twenty Cities

by Jeffrey Quyle

  Alec immediately released his hold on his Light powers, no longer rendering them invisible, and let loose his Spiritual energies, so that he was only grasping the Air energy he needed to sustain them against the ceiling in the dark room. “I have to lower us now, oh mighty she-devil,” Alec warned just before they plunged downward with little control and hit the ground with moderate force. They both rose and scrambled to the end of the room furthest from the entry hole, then sat in a spot that was behind the wagon Andi had been brought in on.

  Alec was exhausted, and leaned against both Andi and the wall as he sat. His eyes closed, and his head lolled against her as he passed out immediately, still having not yet fully healed his own injury from her attack on him.

  Chapter 16 – Escape from the Lacertii Lands

  Andi awoke with a start. She had fallen asleep resting next to Alec, and had dreamed that they were both lacertii, and had made love, and she said a silent prayer of thanks that at that moment Alec couldn’t feel her spirit the way she felt his. She felt chilly, and looked down at herself, still wearing the same torn clothing she had been captured in days before, holes, rips, and missing patches both testaments to the abuse she had suffered in battle and captivity, and also the reason for her chill. She carefully rolled her body closer to Alec’s in search of his body warmth; she knew that the lacertii she was lying with was Alec, and for that reason she felt none of the revulsion she had felt towards the reptilian-appearing race throughout her captivity. She had been chained to the post the entire time she was transported, subject to slaps and pinches, blows and abuse from the lacertii soldiers who had conveyed her towards her execution. That treatment had enraged Captain Alan of Boundary Lake, who had suffered little of the same, but who had witnessed her humiliation. When an opportunity had come, he had lunged after two of the worst abusers, and snapped their necks before his body had been pierced with swords.

  Alec yawned loudly, and Andi slapped her hand over his mouth to silence him, fearful of guards that might be stationed at their entrance. His eyes flew open, swinging about wildly as he tried to establish his location, until he saw her, and he relaxed. She removed her hand from his mouth, and motioned to the dim entrance hole, lit by the morning light outside, then she returned her supply of weaponry to Alec, replacing the knives in his bandolier and the sword in his scabbard.

  He nodded, then held her hand; she felt him apply Healing energy to himself, completing the repair of the wounds he had suffered at her hand. Let’s get out of here and out into the city, he suggested when he finished. We can deal with your transformation after we’re secure.

  She nodded and stood as he did. He noticed her shiver, and reached out to touch her with his Healing energy, warming her body and drawing a grateful smile. He dropped his Healing energy and seized upon his Light power, then created the bubble of invisibility that hid the two of them as they walked along the side of the wagon and approached the gaping hole in the entrance to the sally port. Alec stepped out first, taking their protection with him, and Andi stepped through right behind him.

  Four guards were posted at the entrance, and a stack of sledgehammers were piled next to the entrance, testimony to the industrious activity that would soon be underway. The human and the lacerta refugees strolled up the drive they had entered upon, and came to the gates that led to the city streets beyond the palace. Alec placed his hand on Andi’s arm and pulled her to the side suddenly, off the drive and into a cluster of decorative shrubs, where they were hidden from view. They sat down upon the ground facing each other, and Alec released his Light energy, then grasped his Healing power, and reached for Andi’s hand.

  He studied her face closely, examining the features she had, and suddenly was struck again by the beauty of her perfectly symmetrical features. There were signs of stress, a few wrinkles he didn’t remember seeing when they had first met, and he was reminded of the burden she carried because of the unrequited love that she extended towards him, while he had returned none of it. He felt affection for her, and pain for all the pain she had suffered. As he looked at her, a tear drop fell down her left cheek, and he realized she was aware of his feelings.

  I won’t be able to make you as beautiful as a lacerta as you are as a human, my dear, so don’t expect to break as many hearts among the lacertii as you do among humans, he told her with his lacerta approximation of a smile, his sharp teeth displayed.

  Thank you, my lord, she said simply, then closed her eyes.

  Alec released his energy upon her, effecting changes little by little, darkening her skin and thinning her hair, changing her skin texture, considerably reducing the profile of her breasts, widening her hip structure to give her stride the gait that was common to lacertii. Minutes later, as he finished his last touches, he severed his use of the Healing energy and grasped his Air, Spirit, and Light powers, then fashioned a large, oblong mirror of air and light, and gave her the opportunity to closely examine her features.

  She reached out and took his hand. It is incredible! she told him. I recognize myself, and yet I do not, of course. You’ve done such a good job. Why did you change my, profile, so significantly? she asked, thinking of a particular part of her anatomy.

  You still have breasts, he motioned to the small dark spots on her chest, but lacertii females do not have any more that you have now. You’d stand out if I hadn’t changed them, he gave a toothy lacerta grin.

  Are you ready to begin our journey west? he asked.

  She nodded, and Alec caused the mirror to vanish, then he enveloped them in invisibility and lifted them off the ground and over the fence, back into the non-royal precincts of the city, where they could walk about freely. They landed gently on the road, and Alec led them into an alley way, where they were unobserved as they became visible once more.

  “Here,” Alec said as he unslung his pack and dug down into it. He pulled out an extra shirt and handed it to Andi. “It’s not exactly the highest of lacertii fashion, but you’ll be less of a spectacle.”

  “Thank you,” Andi said appreciatively as she buttoned up the front of the shirt, feeling both warmer and less self-conscious. “What do we do now? Where do we go?”

  A nearby voice startled them. “What’s the situation here? Move along you two; no loitering near the palace, you know that,” a policeman called down the alley to them.

  Without comment they both began to move, Alec closing up his pack and slinging it over his shoulder, and they walked past the policeman hand-in-hand, heads bowed guiltily. Neither of them commented as the officer swatted Andi’s rump when she passed him.

  “See? You are attractive as a member of either race,” Alec commented under his breath as they walked away. They strolled for five minutes, until they were sure they were out of sight of the officer, then Alec stopped and looked up at the sky, judging the position of the sun.

  “We need to go west, that way,” Alec told Andi, pointing to his left.

  “I thought we’d go south. Isn’t that where the Warriors were going?” Andi questioned.

  “They were,” Alec agreed. “But I do not know the precise way through the lacertii nation to reach the Michian border. I do know how to get us back to the Dominion, and I know how to get from the Dominion to Michian, going the long way around. Plus,” he hesitated, leaving his thought unfinished.

  “Plus what? What else is there on this trip that you seek?” Andi prompted.

  Alec turned, and started heading west. “Plus we can visit the cave of John Mark, Andi. There is no holy site where I have ever been closer to God than there. We will be refreshed there Andi, and the trip from there will be mostly by river, so we can float instead of walk.”

  “And you can visit all the cities and places you remember?” she asked.

  “I hope to,” he replied, and he held her hand again as they walked “over time, as we need to go to those places to find the ingenairii.”

  “When this is done Alec, what happens?” she asked.

  “I don’t know
, Andi. I don’t know what happens to you, or to me, or to us. I don’t know what kind of a world we will find in the Dominion or Michian,” he replied.

  “But we each will have options to do anything we want, virtually,” he told her more hopefully.

  They walked throughout the morning as they crossed the thronging city, but shortly after noon they reached the west gate and passed through to the sprawl of buildings outside the gate, a sprawl that reached all the way to the low mountains that rose ahead of them at the western edge of the great valley. Those mountains, Alec realized with a lump in his throat, were the Pale Mountains, the eastern side of them. In those mountains had begun the long transformation he had undergone, from carnival helper to dominant ingenaire.

  “We’ll have to make a decision,” Andi told him a half hour later, as they walked amid the stream of traffic on the road. “By the time we get to the foot of the mountains, it’ll be later afternoon. We’ll have to decide whether we want to spend the night down here, or start climbing and spend the night somewhere halfway up the road.

  “Remember when you took our wagon in the air on the way into the Twenty Cities?” she asked. “Oh no, you don’t remember,” she answered her own question, crestfallen. She had felt such comfort in the friendly attitude Alec had shown her since their reunion that she had forgotten about his catastrophic loss of memory.

  “What happened?” Alec asked.

  “The eastern city of the Twenty is Oolitan,” Andi reminded him. “When we came to the end of the mountains, the road down to Oolitan was virtually carved out of a cliff that seemed to be a half mile high, and the city was huge, a tangled mess they told us. So you took our whole group, wagon, horses, mules, people, goods – and you flew us to the ground on the far side of the city. You thought we saved three days when we were following the ingenairii who were kidnapping the girls.”

  Alec remembered the size of the contingent he had been traveling with in the far mountains on the other side of the Twenty Cities. He was shocked by the thought of lifting so much material for any distance, and he suddenly felt a longing for the restoration of his memories.

  “We could fly up there,” he said. ‘I don’t remember flying down over Oolitan, but I don’t think there would be any problem if we climbed up the trail until darkness fell, then flew the rest of the way. There’d be just the two of us,” he appraised the prospect of the journey. So they trudged on relentlessly, and began the climb up the trail when no other lacertii deigned to start the upward journey. The mountainside was already steeped in heavy shadows as the sun set on the far side of the Pale Mountains, where the Dominion would still be enjoying the late day sunshine, Alec realized.

  The pair of ingenairii lacertii climbed steadily upward as the valley below them grew darker and darker, and began to twinkle with lamps and torches in windows of buildings and along the streets. “We can stop,” Alec said a few minutes later. “Hold still,” he told Andi, then applied Healing energy to alleviate the exhaustion that they each felt in the back of their thighs.

  “That is almost as good as the massages you give,” Andi told him playfully as he removed his hands from her hams and wrapped his arms around her.

  “Are you ready to go?” he asked, and before she even answered, Alec established the disk of air beneath them, then lifted them upward.

  “Oh, Alec!” Andi clutched at him tightly as they sped upward, rising far above the valley floor. “Did I mention that I didn’t enjoy flying over Oolitan?”

  Alec looked down at her face, and saw in her brave determination and her lacertii features as much to desire as any woman had tempted him in uncounted years. Her eyes recognized his longing, and she closed her eyes, just before he began to kiss her, his lacerta mouth pressed against hers.

  They held each other and kissed passionately during an endless embrace, until Andi opened her eyes and saw the dark sky above and behind Alec’s head. She abruptly pulled away from him and looked around. The sky was black, and the stars barely twinkled. The sunset had become visible again, a thin, red, curving line on a far-off horizon below them.

  “Alec! Alec! Where are we going?” she asked, holding onto him tightly.

  He opened his eyes at last, and saw the predicament he had created as he had allowed his Air energy to propel them upward unimpeded and uncontrolled while his passion had focused all his attention on Andi. He stopped the continuing climb, and instead set them on a gradual glide towards the west. They fell slowly at an angle, as Alec’s attention focused on the patterns of small lights that provided an indication of where below within the dark mountainous mass the road towards the Dominion ran. He flew them through the chilly air as they passed above mile after mile, while the long, fingers of his hands unintentionally massaged small circles in the muscles of Andi’s back.

  When they finally touched down on the surface of the road, there was no telling how far they had traveled. The road was in the center of a lacertii village in the Pale Mountains, a village whose dim lights had guided Alec to his target, and one that smelled strongly of livestock. They walked away from the lights and remained on the road for another half hour, until they found themselves in a pitch dark stretch of road where little starlight illuminated their way.

  “We can spend the night here,” Alec suggested. They hiked off the road’s surface and into the forest that climbed the hilly surroundings. Alec opened up a small cave in a cliff along a small stream, and then he heated up a number of stones to create warmth in the darkness, and finally hung a small ball of light upon the ceiling of their chamber.

  “Would you like something to eat?” he asked as he squatted over the pack of dwindling supplies he carried.

  “I’m famished,” Andi replied enthusiastically, as Alec laid out his assortment of dried fruits and meats and crusty travel bread.

  They each ate in silence, Andi ravenously and Alec thoughtfully. “It was completely dark out there in the sky,” he mentioned at last.

  “Yes,” Andi agreed, looking at him inquisitively.

  “That means it’s a new moon, so the full moon is two weeks away,” he explained. “That’s when I’ll recover my memories, if I kiss you by the full moon with the special salve on each of our lips.”

  “Ah,” Andi understood at last.

  “I’d like to practice for it some more,” Alec said with a crooked grin. “Just to make sure we can do it right. What would you say if I were to convert us back into human form, so that we have full lips to practice with?”

  “But what about when we travel tomorrow? Are you going to turn us back into lacertii again in the morning?” Andi asked.

  I think that if we use our Warrior abilities, and remain invisible, we could run perhaps all the way out of lacertii lands by the end of tomorrow, or perhaps the next day.

  “And in the meantime, we could practice,” he told her.

  She studied him. “I’ll say yes, of course.”

  There was a moment of introspection, before she added, “I just marvel at the way your spirit has turned around in your affection for me, even without your memories being restored. Thank you, my love.”

  “I’m a practical man,” he protested. “What man wouldn’t be in love with a beautiful woman who also happens to be a Warrior ingenaire, capable of attacking with deadly force at any moment?”

  She shot an elbow into his ribs.

  “Just like that,” he tried to have the last word, before Andi pushed him backwards and sat atop him, looking down sternly. “Now get to work on this change!” she ordered.

  Alec focused his healing energies on their bodies, and slowly reconverted them each back to their human form, so that they could spent the night comfortably together.

  In the morning time Alec and Andi ate all but a few pieces of the remaining food supplies, then left their cave and returned to the road. A lacerta boy was driving a herd of goats along the way. “I’ll create the bubble of invisibility,” Alec informed Andi, as she stood behind him, her fingers idly scratch
ing his back. “It’s not big enough for us to separate by any great distance, so stay on my heels. I won’t go as fast as possible if I split my abilities between the powers, so don’t expect to push your limit.” And with that last set of instructions he burst out of the bushes by the side of the road and began the race to the border of the lacertii lands. The lacertii shepherd noticed the motion of the bushes, and a pair of his goats bleated plaintively seconds later, but nothing further occurred to distract the boy from his daydream as he kept the sheep moving to the marketplace.

  Alec and Andi ran with easy, loping strides, not slowing when rain moved in. They passed only farms and villages in the morning, but as the sun rose to someplace directly overhead, above and behind the thin clouds that continued to release a soft drizzle upon the land, they began to pass units of the lacertii army on the road, or others that were maintaining bases along the way. Throughout the afternoon they had to weave their way around other traffic, both civilian and military, and at sunset they came to a heavily maintained roadblock, the apparent extent of lacertii control over the boundary with either the Dominion or the unclaimed wilderness.

  The two ingenairii slowed to a walk to squeeze around the barriers that prevented the visible passage of travelers, and then jogged for a few more minutes in the increasingly dim valley that the road followed. “We’re free, Andi!” Alec said exuberantly, when he no longer sensed any lacertii patrols within any proximity of them. “We’re in lands not controlled by the lacertii! We don’t have to set any girls free! All we have to do is hunt down a pair of Warriors and then we’ll be free to decide what to do next.” He reached over and squeezed her hand in joy, then dropped his invisibility and slowed to a walk, content to end the day in a relaxed state.