The Journey Home: The Ingenairii Series: Beyond the Twenty Cities (21 page)

Alec left the room, and allowed himself to become visible in the hallway, then went into the next room, where the healing group was preparing to engage its powers to attend to the patient there.

“Let me interrupt you,” Alec said, strolling into the room.

“You’ll need to leave.  This is the healer,” one of the attendees who accompanied the man with the pendant said, walking quickly towards Alec in a threatening manner.

Alec quickly threw up coils of air to seize the man and hold him in place, then erected a wall of air that separated the rest of the group from himself and the patient.  He reached out as the members of the healing group all shouted in fear, frustration and confusion, touched the patient, and administered a dose of his Healing energy, taking away the pale color, the sweaty forehead, and the gaunt appearance of the man who lay in the bed.

“I am an ingenaire,” Alec told the group.  He released the Air energies that held the healers immobile.  “I can touch patients and heal their illnesses and injuries.  Your pendant intrigues me; may I see it?” he asked.

“Where did you come from?” asked the man who held the pendant.  “How do you do that?”

“I am an ingenaire, from a land that was once called the Dominion, and my powers allow me to directly tap a source of energy, perhaps the same energy your pendant provides.  I would like to see it; I promise I will immediately return it, unharmed.”

The man lifted the chain that held the pendant, and raised it over his head.  His hand hesitated for just a moment, then dropped the pendant in Alec’s outstretched hand.

Alec turned towards the window, where the brightening sun’s rays provided better illumination, and looked closely at the round golden disk with the encircling collar of bright gems.  The fine etchings on the face of the pendant were the very same caduceus that was emblazoned on his arm.

He turned and handed the pendant back to the healer.  “Where did you get this pendant?  I have another one like it, one I seized from a man in the Twenty Cities,” Alec said.

“Was it the pendant of lust?” a member of the group asked.

“It is,” Alec said.  “You’ve heard of it?”

“It was taken from this city just two years ago, stolen from the collection in city hall.  We did not know how it was taken, because the pendants are kept securely locked and guarded – they are a part of the ancient heritage of our city,” the man explained.

“Are there more of them?” Alec asked.

“Over a dozen,” the man answered, “and at one time there must have been many more.”

“May I see them?” Alec felt a thrill of excitement at the thought of seeing pendants that allowed mortals to draw upon the energies of the ingenairii and the other races that held abilities.

“We must stay here and heal as many as we can,” a third member of the group explained.

“This man has a marvelous power!  Let him see the pendants,” the patient in the bed spoke up.  “Will you be able to use them to help us?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Alec replied.  “I hadn’t thought about using them.  I just wanted to see them.  If there is some way to use them to help you, I will try,” he offered, though he had no ideas of how anything could be done.

“Let’s go to see the next couple of patients,” Alec suggested.  “I could heal a few of them for you while you heal others, then one of you could take me to the pendant collection.”

They agreed with his plan, so that Alec and one member of the healing group went down the hall as the rest of the group went next door.  Alec was accompanied by an elderly man, Paule.  “I held the healing pendant in my youth, when it was needed to be used,” Paule explained as Alec touch
ed
and healed a woman in a bed, ridding her completely of the plague.  “Not everyone can use the pendant, or use it as effectively as others, and it wears a person out to use it, so we keep it reserved for only special needs.

“We have been using it non-stop for over a week now, wearing o
ur people down, so that they must
only work in short shifts,” he continued his story as Alec quickly healed a second patient.  “And still we do not have any hope
of making a slight reduction in
the number of those who need our help.”

They treated a third and fourth patient as Paule told Alec of the arrival of the plague a fortnight prior, and its rapid spread through the city, at a time when the population had been stressed and frightened by the approaching front line of the war with the lacertii.

“Now, may we go see the pendants?” Alec asked Paule after finishing all the rooms on one side of the hallway.

They left the hospital and walked through the streets, past the square where the Red Horse Inn held Alec’s companions, and then up the steps to city hall, where the same guard Alec had treated was again on duty.  “My lord,” she said to Alec’s companion, who led Alec past her without comment, then up the stairs inside the building, to a large audience hall on the second floor.

A marble stand was on a raised stage at one end of the hall, and Alec examined a shiny metal tray that rested on the tilted surface of the marble stand.  The metal was not one he had ever seen before, its surface without blemish, and shiny as a mirror.  Within the tray was a large, empty indentation in the center, and circling a
round the large indentation were
numerous smaller indentations, half of which were empty, and half full with pendants that appeared identical to the two pendants he had seen already.

Alec picked up one of the pendants that remained, and saw a blacksmith’s anvil and hammer upon it, the same mark that the Metal ingenairii wore.  He laid it down and picked up another, one that had a small chair next to a much larger one, a symbol he did not recognize.  A third pendant had the jug of pouring liquid, the Water ingenaire symbol that he remembered so fondly from Bethany.  He remembered the first time he had ever seen the mark on Leslie, the water ingenaire whose powers he had used to heal Captain Lewis in the far frontier of Goldenfields, before he had even been a recognized ingenaire.  He reflected on that experience, and the aftermath, and suddenly he felt an inspiration to try to create a means to heal all of Boundary Lake at once.

“Paule!” he said with excitement in his voice, “I think we can find a way to heal many people at once with this pendant.  Let me carry it out to the square!”

“My lord,” Paule replied, reaching for the pendant, “this is a pendant of water powers, not healing.”

Alec reached for the pendant
more quickly than Paule
, took it in his hands, and began to leave the room.  “I once was able to create a fountain of waters that held healing power.  By drinking the water from that fountain, a person could become healthier,” he explained over his shoulder as he ran down the stairs.  “I didn’t know how I created the fountain then, because I was young and new to the power.  But I think I can use my own powers, and add th
em to the energy from this pendant
, to create such a fountain here in Boundary Lake, where everyone can come and drink and improve their health.”

He reached the square in front of city hall and walked several yards out in front of the building, putting space between himself and the stairs.

He closed his eyes and held tightly to the pendant, and began to send his Spirit down into the pendant, looking for the energy it provided, thinking of Bethany and Leslie and the water powers they had held.  The water was below him in the ground, he could feel, and the pendant was extending its energy towards his spirit, acting as a guide that led its user into the power.  He could feel it leading him towards a portal of power and bring
ing
the energy forth to him; the pendant was dragging the power out of the energy realm as though it were an ingenaire itself, and then it was transferring that power to him.

He felt the Water power, and knew that he possessed it.  He redirected his Spirit energy, readapting it to serve as an insulator once again, allowing him to bring forth multiple streams of power within himself without doing harm to his own body and abilities.

With the Spirit energy and the Water power in place, Alec paused.  He had done this before, but never deliberately.  He had made fountains rise, and the fountains had spewed forth water endowed with energy, but those endowments had been fixtures that had grown organically from the process of Alec dispelling energy in a catastrophic manner.  Somehow he had expelled so much energy from himself that the energy had infused and become captured by the structure of the fountain itself, becoming a self-sustaining portal to the energy realm in a way that allowed the energy to disperse into the water that flowed past it.  One part of his mind contemplated the way to recreate the energization of the fountain, while the other part continued to focus on the manipulation of his energies, a chore in and of itself.

Alec called forth his Stone energy next, giving him the ability he would need to combine with his temporary Water power in order to create the perpetual flow of water from the earth through the fountain he was about to create.  Calling upon the Stone power as his third engaged power was a challenge, but one that was manageable; he had often called forth three energies together, but the newness of the Water energy, an energy he had never controlled before, made his control less steady and sure as he tried to both
actively manage the energy and continue
to analyze what to do with it.

He had a vision finally of how he was going to manage this event, to create the tool that would help heal a city and end the horrible suffering he had seen throughout the city.  For his next step, he would call forth his Healer energy, but only up to the threshold between the energy realm and the physical world, and he would do the same with his Water and Stone energies, so that he
would develop
a tremendous energy pressure within himself with all the needed energies striving to explode forth.  Then, when he found himself at the critica
l edge of losing control, he wou
ld channel the three energies together and direct them into the earth, creating the stone channel, calling forth the water, and embedding the healing energy at the site.

And then he would have to survive.  He shook his head at the thought of how his body had managed to survive such explosive releases in the past, but felt comfort in knowing that his past experiences proved that survival was possible.

He took another deep breath and closed his eyes, then began to call upon the Healer energy.  It was a fragile feeling from the very beginning of the effort; his Spirit abilities were strained in their ability to insulate so many other power capacities, and he felt the bumping and churning of the energies he sought, all bottled up within the energy realm, being called forth but not released.

“Alec!  What are you doing Alec?  Stop, you’re killing yourself,” he distantly heard Andi’s voice calling him.  “This feels wrong.  It feels dangerous, Alec.  Please stop,” she spoke from somewhere far away.

The pressure of the energy was building
with
greater
intensity
within him, and he refocused himself on the restraint of the power, trying to keep it continually dammed as it piled more and more power upon itself.

Alec!” his body shook violently, and he opened his eyes to see Andi standing in front of him, shaking his shoulders, as others stood watching her confront him.

He felt the dam he had built start to rupture as his focus was distracted.  Andi was literally with him, in danger of fatal injury from the explosion that was about to occur, he could tell.

With a desperate surge of effort, Alec thrust his arms forward, hitting Andi in the chest and driving her away from him.  He saw the startlement in her eyes, and the sense of pain and rejection from his abrupt gesture, but he had no time to apologize as the energy conflict within him built to a crescendo.  Then he released his Spirit power and seized his Air power.  He let the blockage of all the powers dissolve, and he sculpted his Air power into the form of a narrow tube, one that placed him in the inside, and everyone else on the outside.

Even as he did that, his energies went firing into the ground below him, explosively punching a tube through the stone, and powerfully calling the water forth, while his Healer energies infused the area with the components of their nature.   The ground buckled in a mighty flash of power, and even the tube of compressed air Alec had erected could not protect those in the square from feeling some fraction of the force of the explosion, as they all were knocked violently backward.

Alec felt himself lifted upward with material blowing his body and violently propelling him into the sky above the site of his efforts.  He passed out, and felt nothing of the violent impact when he fell back to earth.

Chapter 13
– Boundary Lake’s Salvation

Alec awoke slowly, in stages of returning consciousness.  His head rolled on his neck first, three days after the explosion.  His eyes opened without comprehension in the next stage, a day later.  And finally, five days after he created the fountain, he became aware of himself again.

“What day is it?” he asked when he finally came to hold enough self-awareness to be able to think about what he had done.