The Echidna's Scale (Alchemy's Apprentice) (21 page)

Chapter 15
– The Honeymoon

Marco awoke late in the morning.  He felt his stomach grumble alarmingly, and he hurried to the jakes for relief.  Once he stepped out, feeling better, he resolved to use his alchemy ingredients to create a remedy for his discomfort.  He’d never drunk so much ale before in one night, and he was sure that he would plan to never do so again.

His alchemy materials were in his pack, which he thought had been left in Pesino’s room.  His fingers stroked the golden collar he wore, uncomfortably aware of the complex implications the drunken ceremony of the night before had spawned, then he walked into the tavern on his way to Pesino’s room.

Kate and Cassius were sitting at a table facing him as he entered the room, and Pesino was sitting with her back to him.  He walked hesitantly over to visit the group, as Kate smiled brightly and Cassius waved.

“I had the strangest dreams last night,” he heard Pesino tell the others.  “There were so many people and so much laughter and singing and I don’t know what else; I don’t know how I managed to put myself to bed last night,” she said sluggishly.

Cassius and Kate were staring at the gleaming metal around Marco’s neck; Cassius’s fingers stroked his own leather collar for a moment.  Alerted by their stares, Pesino turned and looked upward at where Marco stood over her.

She looked at him with a wan smile, then her smile turned into astonishment as her jaw dropped, and she stared at the golden device that he wore.  “Oh shells!” she said softly, and she rose from her seat.

“Oh shells,” she repeated, and her fingers reached out to touch the torq, then she placed her arms around Marco and hugged him tightly.  “I’m sorry, so sorry, so sorry,” she repeated.  “It was just a dream, wasn’t it?”  She reached up and her fingers felt the twisted metal band, searching for a clasp.  “We’ll just take it off and pretend it never happened; we both know it wasn’t real.

“How does this thing come off?” she asked, as her fingers failed to find a catch or knob.

“What happened last night?” Cassius asked, standing up, as did Kate. 

“What did you two do?” he asked.

Kate’s fingers joined Pesino’s in examining the golden torq.  “There’s no catch on this thing Marco.  How do you get it off?” she asked.

Marco sat down, and Pesino sat down next to him, watching him anxiously.  “You don’t hate me, do you?” she asked.

“We went to the church and got married last night,” Marco said simply to Kate, skipping over the preliminary facts.  “And my hand made a spark of something happen, and then the leather turned to metal.”

“Not just metal, gold,” Cassius told him.  “Shiny gold, woven in an intricate pattern of strands.  It makes you look like a prince or something.  It’s beautiful.”

“I’m going to go get my pack from Pesino’s room,” he told them as he stood up.  “I’ll be back in a little while.”

“Would you like for me to come with you?” Pesino asked.

“No,” Marco considered.  “I want to go make something to settle my hangover.”  He walked away, and heard the three of them start talking as soon as he left.

In Pesino’s room he found his pack and started to fix a remedy to relieve his stomach and head pains.

“Can you fix one of those for me too?” Pesino asked as she quietly slipped into the room.

“Marco, I’ve never had that much wine before.  I would have never done this if I had kept my senses,” she told him.  “You don’t hate me, do you?”

Marco added some ingredients to his mixture silently, and stirred it all together.  He held the cup up to his mouth and swallowed half, then held the cup up to Pesino.

“Of course I don’t hate you,” he told her, as he urged the cup towards her.  She lifted it from his hands and drank.

“I don’t know how to fix this.  But this is such a long way down the list it’s not worth worrying about yet.  We’ve got to get to Clovis, then get to the Echidna, then go back to your village, and set Glaze and Porenn free, and get back to the Isle of Ophiuchus, and then,” he paused, “Oh shells, Pessie,” he adopted her own mild oath, “and who know if I’ll even be alive when all that is done, or how long it will take.”  The magnitude of the challenges that piled up before him overwhelmed him.

“I feel better already,” she said as she handed the cup back, “But I feel terrible about marrying you.

“But with Kate and Cassius such a pair now, we’re going to pair off anyway at least for some things,” she tried to point out practically.  “This will make it easier for that.”

“Well, let’s try to make the best of it.  I’ll do anything to help you, you know that.  What would you like to do now?” she asked.

“Let’s,” he paused, as there was a gentle tapping at their door, and he went to open the door, allowing Gawail to come flying into the room.

“Kate and Cassius told me to leave them alone for a while, so ‘they could have some privacy,’” the pixie indignantly said.

“We were just about to leave,” Marco told the smallest member of their party.  “You can come with us, or stay in our room if you want.”

“I’ll stay here,” he volunteered quickly.  “It’s warmer here than out there.”

“Come on,” Marco told Pesino, “let’s go check on shipping up to Fortburg, and maybe we can find a market where we can buy some more supplies.”

They said their farewells to Gawail, then left the room, and asked the desk clerk for directions to the riverfront docks.  They proceeded on their way, on a cold, sunny winter’s day, and walked through the city streets for several minutes until they reached the riverfront, where a small collection of ships looked forlorn along the mostly empty piers.

Marco enquired of each ship about the prospect for taking passage up to Fortburg, and found one ship carrying mining ore that agreed to take on passengers in exchange for a steep price, one that cut precipitously into Marco’s dwindling funds.  They bought a few food supplies, and a few alchemical supplies that caught Marco’s eye, then returned to the inn in the mid-afternoon.

“The trip to Fortburg should take four to five days, they told us,” Marco told the others over dinner that night at the tavern.  “We’ll have two cabins, and we’ll have to stay out of the way of the crew,” he gave the basic rules to Cassius and Kate.

“I saw the river,” Pesino told Cassius.  “It wasn’t a great deal of water, but it looked like a lot compared to anything we’ve seen since we came on shore.  It looked cold and murky.  I wouldn’t want to go swimming in it, but it was nice to see the water again.  It seems like a lifetime ago since we had tails and were free to move around.”

“There are some nice compensating factors here on land,” Cassius said with a smile, and Kate grinned along with him, a wide grin that they both held for several seconds as they looked at each other.

Marco slept on the floor in Pesino’s room that night, as did Gawail, and the next morning the group of travelers embarked on the next phase of their quest.

Chapter 16
– The Lonely Road

The crew of the boat wasn’t surly; the members were just busy guiding the ship along the current of the small river.  Within five minutes of casting off from the piers, the small river from the mountains joined with another larger stream, and the Great River of the north was considered to officially begin its long journey north to flow into the Northern Sea.

The crew was undermanned, as the ship captain attempted to reduce his costs and rely on the current to do all the work while floating to Frostburg.  Bored with their limited activities in the cabins, Marco and Cassius offered to help the crew with some simple chores, which earned them some goodwill, and friendly advice.

When they disembarked at Frostburg after four days on the ship, they took the advice of the crew members and took lodging in the home of a ship captain’s widow for the evening, and they enjoyed the hearty home-cooked meal she prepared for them.

“Gracious, two newlywed couples from Boheme,” she smiled with delight, and she prepared a special cake for their dessert.

The next morning they all said a fond goodbye to their hostess, then took the ferry across the water, and started walking again, walking westward to the Nightshade Mountains and the ancient city of Clovis.

On Gawail’s advice, they took the northern road that headed west, one that would plunge them into the Nightshades with a reduced distance to travel through the mountains.

There were farmsteads along the route for the first two days they walked in the chilly weather, but they received no hospitality greater than the approval to sleep in barns, and after that, there were no more farms.

On the fourth day of their journey they woke up in their tent, and opened the flap to find that snow was falling.  “Not this again,” Pesino groaned, and they walked the full day through falling snows in the forest.

“The Nightshades are beautiful in the summertime,” Gawail assured them.  “They’re not as tall and rocky as the Glacials.”

“Do you hear that Marco?” Pesino said.  “Let’s wait until the summer to do this,” she suggested brightly.

On the sixth day of their trip the skies cleared, and they saw the whitened Nightshade Mountains on the horizon.  Two more days of hiking took them into the beginning of the mountains, and they found that the path into the mountains was not as steep as the trail had been in the Glacials.

They did not hike through peaks as steep or high as the Glacials.   The air never grew thin, and the trees never stopped growing, but the up and down of the terrain were still a challenge to their thighs and calves, and they all groaned at the end of each day as they dropped their packs and erected their tent.  Gawail spoke with them two or three times each day, when he roused himself from his warm nest inside Kate or Pesino’s clothing, and take off to fly briefly through the cold mountain air to scout out their location and terrain.

“Can you make the great fire for us, blessed one?” Gawail asked Marco on the eleventh night of their overland journey.  “I wish to be warm.

“Tomorrow we will need to go due north,” he told them, as Marco contemplated the potential of building a fire.  He was cold as well as everyone else, especially his feet, and he wanted to dry out and warm up his feet, socks, and boots.

“Let me try to start a fire,” Marco decided.  “The rest of you go ahead and set up the tent.”

The others were very agreeable to enjoying one of Marco’s enchanted fires, and so Marco went into the woods and found tree limbs and wood, then hauled several large stones together into a circle. 

After a half hour’s work, Marco felt ready to start his fire.  He recollected clearly how he had started the two fires before, the two magical fires that had burned hot and bright, without consuming any fuel.  He had felt sympathy, sorry for the suffering of someone else, and the fire had blazed forth as a way to bring comfort, as an expression of his wish to help someone in need.  The first fire had been a spontaneous reaction to Porenn’s state of despair, while the second fire had been more calculated, when he had thought about Mirra, at a time when she had been in terrible despair over Sybele’s seemingly fatal illness.

He closed his eyes, and put his hand on the sticks in the middle of the fire ring, and started to conjure up a memory of Mirra, at her moment of pain and despair.  He tried to call forth the picture of her face, bent over Sybele’s figure in her arms, and to his astonishment, he could not clearly recollect how Mirra had looked when he had first met her.

His eyes popped open in surprise, and then he refocused.  He remembered that he had been in Marches shop, when Gabrielle had called him to the front of the shop because Mirra had entered with her dying baby in her arms.  Poor Sybele had been in such terrible shape, he remembered, a poor baby who had eaten some food that was tainted, or old, or both, and she had suffered greatly.

There was a whoosh, and the fire burst to life, making Marco pull his golden right hand hastily from the flames and rise up.

“Thank you, blessed one,” Gawail said, so happy to have the fire, unaware of the turmoil in Marco’s heart at the moment.

He had not been able to recollect Mirra.  It cut him to the quick to think that he had forgotten the face of the woman he wanted to marry – to really marry in a true ceremony of love.  She was beautiful, exquisite, a great beauty who made men’s heads turn to see her, and yet he could not picture her, though he knew all those things.  He had created the ointment that he had rubbed on her face, an ointment that had healed the acne sores, ending their pain and removing their blemishes.  The ointment had even healed all the scars left by past sores, and had smoothed away lines; it had given her a complexion that was the envy of every woman, and accentuated her eyes and cheeks, yet he could not picture what he knew so well.

“Is everything okay, Marco?” Cassius asked, seeing Marco stand still for long seconds.

At that moment there was a long, low howl, somewhere in the distance.

“What was that?” Cassius asked.

“A wolf,” Gawail replied.  There was another howl just then, even further away, one that had the same dismal quiver at the end of its call.  It was very faint, yet still detectable, and seemed to be a copy of the first.

“Was that another wolf?”  Cassius asked.  “What are they?”

“They’re like the sled dogs,” Marco said.  “Only they’re bigger, and they can be mean.  They’re out hunting for their dinners.”

“They’re fearsome, like sharks?” Cassius astutely asked.

“Yes,” Marco agreed.  “They are fearsome, like sharks.  And they hunt together, in packs.  We’ll be sure to set a watch tonight.”  He’d had no concerns about Gawail’s warning about Clovis up to that point in their journey, but the sudden sounding of the wolves, coming on the heels of his unnerving loss of the memory of Mirra, disturbed him, so that he went to his pile of goods and placed his bow and arrows on top.  He wished he had practiced them more during the journey, so that he would have some faith in his abilities, if they should be called upon.

“Dinner’s ready,” Kate called from the other side of the fire, and Marco saw that she and Pesino had brought out their ration of food for the evening meal.  The sun had set completely, so that the firelight from the fire was all the illumination they had, except for the glow that Gawail produced as he floated in the area, staying close to the fire’s warmth.

“Let’s be alert on watch duty tonight,” Marco warned everyone.  “Those wolves didn’t sound real close, but close enough.”

“And they sounded their call as soon as you used your power,” Gawail added, an additional coincidence that Marco hoped was just coincidence.

Cassius took the first watch, while Marco planned to take the second, and to have the two women share the third.  He crawled into the tent soon after dinner was eaten, and lay in his blankets, troubled for the first time in many days.

He didn’t hear the others come into the tent, and only awoke when Cassius shook his shoulder awake.

“The fire makes it comfortable to stay outside,” he told Marco.  “There’s nothing happening; see you in the morning,” he said as they switched roles, and Marco left the tent.  He went over to the pile of supplies and picked up his bow, then sat down by the fire with the weapon across his lap, and he stared into the flames.  There was a dark spot in the center of the fire, down deep among its roots, and he found his vision focused there, sleepily transfixed by the movement among the fluid flames that rose continually from nothing.

In the fire he suddenly saw images, and he stared intently, mesmerized by the visions within the flames.  He saw his companions and himself running from wolves, being chased relentlessly through a forest, as Marco fought against them with his bow and his sword.  The wolves were closing in, he saw, watching the vision with horrified fascination, and there were wolves on three sides of his people.  He could see the fear on all their faces, as they kept running.

The landscape changed; the trees began to suffer interruptions from walls, and buildings with collapsed roofs, though the trees grew up from within the abandoned structures, then suddenly there was a sturdy wall, a whole one, with a gate that was open, and manned by guards.  Marco and his friends ran towards the gate, and the guards came out to help, but as they did, the wolves grew more aggressive, and closed in on Marco in particular.

He ran out of arrows, and the wolves focused on him, as Kate and Pesino and Cassius made it to safety, then the wolves surrounded him, and he flailed in all directions with his sword, as the teeth of the wolves clamped upon his clothes and dragged him down.  There was a flash of teeth, and he witnessed a wolf’s jaws closing upon his throat, and he felt his heart skip a beat in horror and fear.

And suddenly a wolf howled somewhere very near Marco, somewhere in the real Nightshade Mountains, not in a fire-fueled fantasy, and the howl made Marco jump up.  He drew his eyes away from the fire, but he could see nothing in the darkness, temporarily blinded by his stare into the bright vision.  He drew his sword with his right hand, and held his bow in his left hand, then walked away from the fire, in the direction of the howl, frantic to see if the wolf was at hand as a threat to the camp.

He saw nothing at first, until his eyes began to dilate in the darkness, adjusting to the forest at night.

“What is it blessed one?” Gawail was with him, hovering near his ear.

“Did you hear the wolf howl?” Marco asked.

“I heard nothing, great warrior and healer.  I heard you stand suddenly and venture from the comfort of the fire, so I came to see if you need my help,” the pixie answered.

“Look out in the darkness.  What do you see?  Is there a wolf close by?” Marco asked.

Gawail flew past him instantly, going out into the cold forest to scout out their surroundings, and Marco edged towards the tent, wanted to be ready to protect his sleeping friends if an attack were to occur.  The forest was silent; only the faint crackle of the unending fire was audible, as the animals and insects of the forest slept or hibernated and awaited warmer times.

“There are no wolves out there,” Gawail came back to Marco.  “I must go to the fire,” the pixie told him as he floated past Marco and sought the warmth from the flames.

“No wolves?  None at all?   Not in that direction?” Marco was astounded by Gawail’s report.

“None at all, in any direction.  I flew a circle through the dark forest around all sides of our camp,” Gawail affirmed.

“Perhaps you fell asleep?” Gawail asked delicately.

I was staring at the fire, and I saw a vision, a vision of all of us running from wolves.  We went from a forest to ruins to a great wall with a gate, and the wolves were chasing us,” Marco explained part of his vision, not willing to mention the horrific ending.

“Perhaps it was a waking dream, and the wolf howl was a part of it?” Gawail suggested.

Marco looked around, as he stood near the fire and reabsorbed its warmth.  “Perhaps,” he reluctantly agreed.

“I will go check one more time,” Gawail offered, and before Marco could respond, he was up in the air and out in the darkness, doing his part to secure the safety of the group.

Marco waited for two minutes before the pixie retuned.  “Something moves far out in the woods in that direction,” Gawail pointed off into the forest, “but it was too far for me to go look at.”

“Stay here and stay warm,” Marco said, “and maybe go out again in a few minutes.”

His turn on watch duty was nearly over, he realized sometime later, as he saw the position of the stars overhead.  He sent Gawail out one more time around the forest, and when the pixie reported no intruders, Marco crawled into the tent and awoke Pesino and Kate, then crawled into the covers they left behind to finish his night of interrupted sleep.

In the morning, he woke up as Kate came in to tell him that dawn was on the horizon.  She and Pesino returned to the tent to sleep for a precious few additional minutes as Marco and Cassius left the tent.  The forest around then was beautifully coated with frost, and the orange rays from the sunrise created a bright world that seemed enchanted with light.

Marco began to walk in a circle around the campsite, strolling through the woods, then stopped and looked down at a spot where the dead leaves had been swept clean off the soil, and a set of foot prints were clearly visible.  To Marco they looked like dog prints, or wolf prints, he suspected.  He looked back over at the camp, and saw that it was clearly visible, and not terribly far away.