The Echidna's Scale (Alchemy's Apprentice) (35 page)

“Marco, we have to go!” Cassius spoke to him, grabbing both Marco’s hands and lifting him up.  Marco lolled into unconsciousness from the pain and expenditure of energy and shocks of the encounter, so that Cassius was forced to sling the unawake hero over his shoulder, then lumber back to the two women.

“Cassius, we have to escape!” Kate shouted, pointing at where the lava was falling steadily down.  It was entombing the Echidna under a fiery layer of molten rock that sealed the fallen ceiling stones on place on top of the monster; but the lava was also starting to flow towards where the small band of attackers stood.

“Wait!  We need one more thing!” Pesino cried, and then she darted directly towards the dangerous, creeping stream of lava.  She stopped just short of the flaming mass and stooped to pick up Gawail, then came running back to the others, her skin on one arm an angry red color from the burns that the heat the lava had inflicted upon her.

Kate picked up a pair of packs of supplies and the threesome started running through the cavern, headed now in the opposite direction from the way they had entered, lit only by the red glow of the lava, and they stumbled onward as quickly as they could.  The cave grew dimmer and cooler as they moved further from the lava, and they slowed their pace as they lost visibility in the dark cavern.  The dimness faded to blackness, and they slowed down to a point of Kate holding onto the back of Cassius’s cape, as Pesino held onto Kate’s and they carefully continued to move, finding the cavern descending now at a steep incline.

“Let’s stop and rest a moment,” Cassius soon said, panting from the exertion of carrying Marco in the darkness.  They all stopped, and Cassius laid Marco down.

“Do you think he’s okay?” Kate asked.

“Let me check him,” Pesino cautiously felt her way forward and placed her hands on Marco, then carefully moved her face down to his, and knelt silently, detecting his feeling as well as his breathing.  “Marco,” she murmured softly, then pressed her lips against his in a tender kiss.  “Marco, you saved us,” she said softly.  “We’re all alive and getting away,” she told him.  “But we need you to light the way for us.”

She gently massaged his forehead and his temples and then his cheeks, trying to rouse him from his slumber.

“Where are we?” he mumbled moments later.  “I can’t see.  Am I blind?” he asked.

“Praise the lord!” Kate said joyfully.

“No, I don’t think you’re blind.  We’re just in a cave without any light,” Pesino answered his question.

“You beat the Echidna!” she told him proudly.  “You beat it and we got away!”

“I didn’t beat it forever,” Marco answered, as he remembered the end of the battle.  “I just trapped it, but didn’t kill it.  The monster will come out again someday I’m afraid.

“Help me sit up,” he told her, and felt her hand slide under his back, then raise him upright.

“Thank you,” he grunted painfully moments later.  And a moment after that his hand flickered into a dim brilliance, illuminating the area around them.

“It’s good to see you all,” he said, looking around at his friends.  Pesino looked burned on one arm, but there were few other signs of injury.

“How do you feel?” Pesino asked.

“It hurts to breath; I think that thing cracked some of my ribs,” he answered, then looked around.  “Where is Gawail?  Is he okay?”

Pesino reached into her cape and gently pulled the pixie out, then held her hand open, the tiny body lying limp on her palm.  Marco stared at the small hero, who had saved his life.

“Here,” he said after several seconds, “lay him on my hand,” and he held his right hand out, palm up.

Pesino gently deposited the pixie in Marco’s hand and they all looked.   Marco closed his fingers carefully over the tiny hero, covering him completely, before his hand began to glow more brightly, shifting colors slowly, then rapidly, then suddenly dimming to a low white color.  He opened his fingers, and they all looked carefully at the pixie.

Gawail suddenly gave a cough, and sat up.  He looked around and up at the four faces that stared so intently down at him.  “You’re all okay.  I’m okay too!” he stood up and laughed, and the others laughed with him.  “Did we win?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Kate answered.  “Marco got his scales, and we got away from the monster, but now we’re lost in the caves.”

“Well then, let us find our way out,” Gawail said.  He fluttered his wings, and floated up into the air.  “I’ll start scouting what’s ahead.  Which way are we going?” he asked.

“We were going that way,” Cassius pointed, and Gawail shot off through the air, disappearing in seconds.

“What did you do to him?”  Kate asked.  “Was he dead?  Did you bring him back to life?”

“The power of the hand told me what to do,” Marco answered.  “I’m still not sure what I did.  I’m not sure about anything right now,” he said as he closed his eyes and rubbed them with his fingers.

“Let’s get going,” he said a moment later, and he held his hands out, seeking assistance to help him rise to his feet.

They resumed moving through the cavern, following in the direction Gawail had flown.  “I’m heading towards my fate, Marco,” Pesino told him a few minutes later.

“What do you mean?” Marco asked slowly.  His breathing was labored, for every breath he took was shallow and painful.

“I’ve had dreams in recent days, dreams of being in a cave and approaching something that I can’t see, but something that I know is going to change my life.  And now, I think this is the cave I dreamed of,” she explained.

“I’ll protect you from anything,” Marco reassured her.

“What if I find out I don’t want to be protected?” Pesino asked softly.

Marco had no answer, and continued to walk, troubled by the implication of her question.  He wasn’t sure he was ready to face a future without Pesino, as the conversation seemed to imply might happen.

Gawail returned to rejoin them later, though none of them knew how much later.  “There is an airflow coming through the tunnels, so they must lead to the surface,” Gawail said, “But so far I have not found a way out.”

They stopped to eat a brief meal of their supplies, and came to the realization that they had brought no water with them, which immediately made them all feel thirsty.  Gawail left them to go scouting further ahead, and they resumed walking.

“There is a stream not far ahead,” he told the others when he next returned.  “You’ll reach it soon, and then we’ll have to make a choice.

“There are two directions to go at a fork ahead.  Both lead upward, but I can’t find which is best.”

They soon reached the stream, a swift-moving current of water in a narrow channel that raced through a part of their cavern before draining away into a hole in the floor, and they all took turns drinking greedily from it. 

“Was that water safe to drink?” Kate asked moments after they passed over the stream.  “I feel strange.”

A fog started to rise around them, a fog so thick that the walls of the cave were invisible.

“I feel different too, different in my body and even my soul,” Cassius answered as they came to a halt.  “I feel lighter,” he said.

“I feel different too, like big problems don’t matter anymore,” Pesino agreed.

“We’ve got a big problem that still matters to us,” Marco answered.  “We’ve got to find our way out of here.”

Soon after that they came to the spot where the cavern offered two choices.  A smaller cave on the right and the main cave straight ahead both appeared to rise towards the surface, but Gawail could offer no advice about which to follow.

“Let’s spend the night here and rest,” Cassius suggested.  They were all tired from the long, grueling day, and agreed to his idea.  Marco extinguished the light coming from his hand, and they all settled in to sleep.

“Marco,” Pesino said some time later, awakening Marco from his sound sleep, “I feel something is approaching.”

“Is it hostile?” Marco asked. 

“Yes and no,” the girl answered.  “It is hostile, but maybe it doesn’t have to be,” she answered with a note of confusion in her voice.

Marco awoke Cassius and Kate, and Gawail as well, then lit his hand to illuminate them all.  They heard a sound coming from the small cave on the right, and Marco drew his sword as he moved to the front of the group, though his injured ribs continued to constrain any ease of movement.

A movement was suddenly visible among the shadows inside the cavern, and then they all stared in horror at what emerged from the darkness.

Chapter 25 – An Underworld Guide

A minotaur came charging out of the cavern and ran towards them at high speed, stopping only when he took note of Marco’s glowing hand and shining sword.

“Go back!”  He ordered, pointing in the direction he had just come from.  “Go back!  You know you may not return to the land of the living.  Return and find peace.”

The sight of the minotaur was fascinating.  The monstrously large head and shoulders of a bull, with eyes that blazed red, sat atop a muscular man’s torso.  The monster held a spear in one hand, and a shield in the other.

“Leave us alone,” Marco answered.  “We’re just travelers.  We
don’t want to fight with you.”

The monster laughed.  “Travelers!  That’s a delightful way to describe the journey to the underworld!  Travelers!

“Well travelers, it’s your turn to travel back to where you belong.  You’ve left the world of the living behind, and you are now to spend some portion of your eternal time in the underworld, among the other dead,” he answered.  “I don’t know how you got this far along, but you may not leave – you may not go back to haunt your former families and lovers.  Come back with me to the underworld.”

All four of the humans gaped at the minotaur in astonishment.

“We’re not dead!” Cassius exclaimed.  “The sky knows we should be after all we’ve been through, especially beating the Echidna, but we’re still living!”

The minotaur laughed.  “Fought the
Echidna!  That’s one I’ve not heard before!  As many people are down here who tried to fight the mother of us all, or I should say so many who didn’t even bother to try to fight her, you’re the first to try to claim you fought and won.”

“We did win,” Marco said gent
ly.  He reached into his shredded bag, knotted and tied in many places to make it secure, and he pulled out one of the scales he had claimed.  He calmly threw the artifact at the feet of the minotaur.  “There’s the proof.  We came to get that, and we did.  The Echidna’s not dead – I know we can’t kill her; but she’s buried under a pile of rubble and lava that’ll take her years to dig her way out of.”

The monster stopped laughing, and bent down to pick up the scale.  Gawail suddenly illuminated his light and flew over to the space above the monster.  “Is this enough light for you to see by?” he asked.

“What?  You have one of the enchanted with you?   They are not a part of the underworld!  What impossible story is this?” the minotaur cried.  “This is a scale of the mother!  Yet it would be impossible to imagine that mere mortals could even think to fight her, let alone defeat her.”

“My lord,” Pesino spoke for the first time, and Marco’s head swiveled to look at her.  For the first time in weeks she was employing her siren’s voice, and she was using it to seduce the monster who confronted them.

“I know what it is that you desire, my lord,” she took a step forward, swaying her body and cocking her hip in a way that let no doubt exist that she was the most desirable female on the planet at that moment.

“Pesino,” Marco spoke in a tone of voice that carried a warning of his displeasure with her action.  “Now is not the time, Pesino,” he told her.  Even wounded and slowed with his aching body, he would rather fight the monster than allow his companion to entice it with her favors.

“Marco, he is not what he seems,” she spoke back, in a tone that seemed sharp after the allure of the voice she had formerly used with the minotaur.  “He is not a bad soul under that exterior,” she said.

“Let the lady speak and do as she wishes,” the minotaur spoke sharply to Marco, as he advanced another cautious step.  “And tell me by what chance of fortune you managed to find these fragments.”

“It was no chance of fortune that we found them,” Marco answered.  “We set out deliberately to find them; I was sent on a quest to acquire such a scale.  It’s more a chance of fortune that we survived the encounter in which I got the scales though.  And after that encounter, we’ve been trying to find our way back to the surface, back among the living where we belong.”

“We are truly alive, truly flesh and blood,” Pesino spoke to the minotaur in a conventional voice.  “You may poke my flesh if you want proof.  We are bodies that belong among the living.”

With an eye on Marco, the minotaur advanced, and Pesino stepped without hesitation towards him.

“Stop!  Both of you stop,” Marco growled.  He unconsciously turned up the brightness of the illumination
coming from his hand, making the minotaur growl and block the light with a hand held before its eyes.

“Marco, stop that!” Pesino called.  “What is your name?” she asked the monster.

“My name?  Who has ever asked or cared about my name?  Nobody – I was always just ‘the monster’ to all who met me,” the minotaur said philosophically.  “My name is Asterion,” he answered with a note of proud defiance.

“Asterion, we are not escaped spirits of the dead,” Pesino’s voice was suggestive and pleading together now.  “We are the living.  We must return to the land of the living, where many people wait upon our return.  Can you not help us?  Please, lead us to the surface.  Show us the way back.”

“What are you?” the minotaur asked.  “Are you bewitching me?  You sound reasonable; you seem plausible.  I almost want to help you; I almost want to believe that you would help me if you could.”

“I do!  I would!” Pesino said eagerly.  “I do want to help you, and I will, if you will help us.  I can feel the
goodness in your soul, and there is not evil within you.  You have been assigned this damning task, and you have your appearance against you, so that you do suffer the worst expectations from all the world.

“But I believe we can make your life better.  This mighty leader, this great hero,” she motioned towards Marco, “is an alchemist, among his other abilities.  And he has acquired these potions that can change the forms we live in.  That man,” she pointed at Cassius, who still stood close by, his sword drawn, keeping himself in a protective position between Kate and the minotaur, “was formerly a merman, but a dose of this potion turned him into all human,” she explained, without revealing her own heritage.

“Help us,” she wheedled now, “and his potion can help you as well.  You could become all human,” she promised.

“Why should I believe such a fairy tale?” the minotaur asked scornfully.

“Because it is the truth!” Marco shouted.  “Or mostly the truth.  I may not be the hero she says, but the potion did change him from merman to human,” Marco affirmed.  He had doubts about what effect it would have on the minotaur, although he had just seen it impact the Echidna as well as the merfolks, so he did not deny that it might work as Pesino promised.

“If you can change me into a human, so that I may walk above the ground and not draw attacks and screams, I will give you this break; I’ll lead you to the surface, but you’ll have to let me carry the potion,” he insisted.

“And if, when we get to the surface, it does not work, I will bring you back to the land of the dead for all of eternity,” the monster warned.

Marco stood, looking at the minotaur, thinking quickly, trying to decide if the deal that Pesino had struck on their behalf was a good one, and whether the minotaur was to be trusted.  Gawail hovered overhead, his light having diminished to a dimmer state, and Marco cautiously approached the monster, then held out his hand.

“I’ll take the scale back,” he said cautiously, ready to react if the monster attacked.

The minotaur held out the scale.  “Never has anyone come from the
Echidna’s lair alive.  You must be a fearful warrior indeed,” the creature commented in an almost conversational tone, although it kept its shield held ready to defend itself in the event of an attack.

Marco took the scale and stepped back, then slid the fragment into his backpack and stepped back further to stand next to Pesino.  He put his sword away, then spoke to her.  “What made you do this?  What makes you think we can trust it to help us?” he asked in a low voice.

“I can see the nature of his soul.  Despite his exterior, there is honor within, and he is a man to be trusted.  If he looked like others, and were treated fairly by others, he would show his good heart – he would wear it on his sleeve,” she replied calmly.  “Leave him to me, and we will travel well and reach our destination,” she told Marco, as she put her hand on his arm.

“And Marco,” she added, and he heard a note of sadness creep into her voice, “when you have a chance when next we stop, please use my knife and cut the leather wedding band away from my neck.  We won’t have to keep up the subterfuge any longer.”

Marco stared at her, his eyes locking on hers, stunned by the request.  He knew it made no difference whatsoever, yet he felt hurt by the thought of losing the symbol of intimacy between them.  He cared for the mermaid with legs deeply, and though he knew he could not honorably act on his feelings, he did not want to lose the collars that created the fiction he had grown so comfortable with.

“What’s the hurry?” he asked.  “Why now?”

“There’s no hurry,” Pesino replied.  Her eyes grew wide, and she removed her hand from his arm, then embraced him in a hug, one that he wholeheartedly returned; he hugged her with a fierce affection, an unspoken demonstration of how he had come to feel towards her after their long journey together, and also with a sense that a chapter in their story together was coming to an end.

“There’s no hurry,” Pesino repeated, “but there’s no reason to keep it on either.  If I had the tools and the skill, I’d offer to remove the golden torq from your neck as well.   Oh Marco dear!  I wish we had met under different circumstances; what a life you could have led me,” she said with a catch in her voice.

“Is everything okay?” Cassius asked.  Marco and Pesino broke their hug and looked around.  “Fine – everything’s fine,” Marco answered.  He took a deep breath, then felt a stabbing pain from his cracked ribs, and winced.  “Are you ready to lead us on?” he asked the minotaur.

“Start leading, Asterion,” Pesino spoke, stepping away from Marco and walking up next to the minotaur.  “We’re ready to move on; the sooner we get back to the surface and the land of the living, the sooner we’ll be home.”

The monster gave what might have been a smile in his taurean features, then began to walk up the cave passage he had descended from.  “Follow me,” he called over his shoulder.  “This will provide the fastest way to the land of the living.  We’ll use Persephone’s Gate,” he called as he began hiking at a rapid pace.

They all fell into a line behind the monster, Pesino then Cassius then Kate then Marco, with Gawail floating above Kate.  Marco wished that he could be up front, behind the monster to fight it should it turn upon them, but the pain in his rib cage slowed him down, and he fell a step behind the others immediately, then lost another step’s distance a few minutes later, and another as they climbed up the tunnel that rose at a steep angle.

Marco watched the others slowly separate from him, all of them working hard to match their steps to the pace the minotaur set, and the light that Gawail provided slowly dwindled into a small dot of light as they got further and further ahead, until after an hour, when the others stopped, and Marco caught up.

“I thought you were a mighty warrior who fought the
Echidna; can’t you keep up better?” the monster asked when Marco finally caught them.

‘Marco was injured in the battle.  She was not gentle in her treatment of him, but he is still alive and free,” Cassius said indignantly.  “Can’t we travel more slowly, so he can keep up?”

“We’re going to Persephone’s Gate because it’s the closest,” the minotaur answered.

“But can’t we go there slower?” Kate asked again.

“Don’t you understand?” the minotaur asked in exasperation.  He looked around at them all, and saw the blank looks on their faces.  “Maybe you don’t,” he muttered in a softer tone.

“Persephone’s Gate only opens two days a year – once on the first day of spring and once on the first day of autumn.  If we want to reach the gate when it’s open tomorrow, we need to move in a hurry.  Otherwise, we’ve got a long journey ahead of us to get to the usual entry,” he explained.

“Thank you; we didn’t know,” Pesino said.  “That helps us understand.  We’ll have to stop to sleep sometime too; we’re all exhausted from this trip as it is.  Will there be much time for sleep?”

“Some perhaps, if we don’t delay too long,” Asterion replied as he looked at Marco.

“You just set the pace and I’ll keep up,” Marco spoke up, feeling that he had caught his breath as best he was able during the break.  “Let’s get going.”

They moved on again, and though the pace started out slightly slower, they soon began to travel more rapidly, and Marco began to fall slightly behind.  He tried to ignore the pain in his chest as he breathed, and forced himself to quicken his pace, so that he fell behind more slowly.

As he walked, he felt a sense of being watched, but as he turned around to look, he could find no one else in the cavern.

The passage they were in opened dramatically into a vast chamber, one that was so large Marco could not begin to sense a ceiling or walls.  He stopped to catch his breath, then raised his hand, curious to see what was around them, and called forth the brilliant light his hand could produce, and gazed in wonder at what he saw.