The Echidna's Scale (Alchemy's Apprentice) (16 page)

“Can you fight them, Marco?” Pesino asked.

“Not all twelve at once!” he hissed back.

“Three or four at a time?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied shortly, thinking of his enchanted sword, and what it could do.

“Go back there, and wait for me to bring them to you,” she told him.

“What?” he asked, puzzled by the confusing command.

“Go back to where no one can see you, and wait for me to bring some of them back to you,” she repeated, speaking slowly.  “Do you understand?”

“I’ll wait,” he agreed.

“Good luck, Marco,” Cassius called softly.  “Thanks for coming to rescue us.”

“What’s all that noise over there?” one of the kidnappers called.

“Hey, I’m lonely,” Pesino called out loudly.  Her voice was suddenly rich, conveying a sense of longing and a tone of friendly invitation, and the conversation at the camp fire dropped to a whisper as the men fell under Pesino’s spell.  Marco paused for a second as he scooted backwards, caught momentarily in the trap of her allure, then he shook it off and hurried himself backward into the darkness beyond the bend in the cave.

He watched the fire disappear from direct view, as four men stood up and began to walk towards the captives.  His sword remained in place, its point stuck in the mud of the cave floor, and he pulled it free as he rose from his knees and waited for Pesino to lure the men back to where he waited in ambush.

The sword – and his hand – began to softly glow, standing out from the mud-blackened darkness of the rest of his appearance, and he looked in wonder at the phenomena, until he heard the steps of Pesino’s assailants carrying her towa
rds him.   The whole squad rounded the corner of the cave, the men’s attention focused solely on Pesino, who they carried on their shoulders, when suddenly the foremost of them let loose of her, and she began to slip downward, as the man collapsed for no reason apparent to those behind him.

“What are you doing?” one of the men in the back of the quartet started to ask the leader, when a glowing sword blade suddenly flew in the air near him, disappearing into the torso of another of the men, and then the shiny tip protruded momentarily from his back.  The sword disappeared, then sliced from left to right, and Pesino fell to the ground, landing upon the cushioning of the dead bodies of the men who had expected to assault her.

Marco reached out to find the ropes around Pesino’s wrists, as he crouched directly in front of her. He held her hands high, then sliced the ropes away with one stroke of his sword.  She stretched her arms apart, then lunged forward and embraced Marco in a fierce embrace.  “I knew you weren’t dead!” she whispered.  “I just knew you’d find a way to come save us.”

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t there to protect you,” he answered, then gently broke the clinch and cut the ropes around her ankles.

“You wouldn’t have been able to take them all on at once,” she answered.

“My word, by all the salt in the sea, you’re a mess!” she said a moment later, feeling the mud that had been pressed from his body to hers in their hug.

“Here,” she suddenly stripped off her shirt and handed it to Marco.  “I’ll lure a few more back here for you.  Just be ready,” she said as she stood, undressed from the waist up, and stepped out of the darkness and back into view of the firelight.

“I need a few more good men,” she called to the ruffians.  “Just a few at a time.  Come on back.”

“What happened to Meache and the boys?” a voice from the fire called.

“I was too much woman for them, or maybe they weren’t men enough for me.  But I want more, just a few more,” Pesino called, adopting the sultry voice that prodded men to respond to their loins and not their brains.  “And bring the other girl back too,” she added.

Three of the men rose silently from the group around the fire, and walked over to Kate, who obligingly screamed as they picked her up and carried her towards the back of the cave.  Five men remained in the front of the cave, slightly uneasy about the silence from the dark shadows in the back.  They muttered softly among themselves as they waited, as the silence stretched out over several seconds and became minutes, without the return of any of their companions, nor any screams or shouts.

“Rabe, Carlish?” one of the ruffians finally shouted.  “Are you saving those women for us?”  When no answer came, the man stood up and drew his knife.  The other men remaining at the fire stood as well, as he advanced forward towards the mysterious silent darkness.

Just before he reached the turn in the cave, a glowing sword and glowing hand appeared in the darkness and sliced through his neck, horrifying his companions as he fell silently to the ground.  And then a dark, monstrous figure began to stride towards the fire, the glowing hand and sword the only distinguishable features on Marco, who remained covered in the filth he had crawled through to reach and rescue his friends.

There were four surviving robbers spread out in front of the fire, each of them drawing weapons, and they spoke to one another in fearful tones, urging one another to venture forth and go on the attack, as Marco stepped towards them.  He got close enough to the fire for them to finally recognize that he was just a human, and not a monster, albeit a human whose hand glowed as it held his enchanted sword.

Marco stepped in to engage with the two robbers on his left, and as he did, Kate appeared dimly out of the shadows behind Marco and started throwing large stones at the robbers on his right, driving them away from Marco’s back, as they foundered in confusion and pain and fear at the inexplicable occurrences that were descending upon them.

The sword in Marco’s hand fought brilliantly and efficiently.  Marco swept the blade as it led him to, slicing across the neck of one opponent, then it blocked a knife attack from his other opponent, and stabbed the man in the throat.  Marco whirled around as both men fell to the ground in death, and he advanced towards the remaining two men who were futilely blocking away the last of the stones thrown by Kate.

Neither of them saw him coming at them immediately, as they focused on the stones that were pelting them, and then Marco was upon them, striking them down.

He looked around, and realized that there were no others left to fight.  Kate remained standing at the rear of the cave, and Pesino was casually pulling her blouse back on as she stood beside her companion.  Cassius remained bound in ropes as he lay on the ground midway between the two.  The glowing light in Marco’s sword and hand quickly extinguished as his battle-rush of energy subsided, and he placed the sword back in his scabbard as he watched Kate kneel by Cassius and cut his bonds away.

“You were amazing,” she said, momentarily looking up at him as he walked back to join his companions.  Cassius sat up, and he and Kate immediately embraced one another in a hug, as the girl began to cry tears of relief.

“You saved all of us,” Cassius spoke up.  “I wish I could have done something to help you.  I felt powerless.”

“What do we do now?” Pesino asked as she came to stand next to Marco.

“You and Kate can go sit down and rest.  Cassius and I will drag those bodies away from the fire, and then we can all sit there and try to get warm,” Marco suggested.  The idea of sitting by the fire appealed to him, as his adrenaline wore off and he suddenly began to feel the cool air of the cave and the damp mud slathered upon his body, making him chilly and uncomfortable.  But he didn’t want to look at dead men’s body when he tried to get warm by the fire.

Cassius rubbed his joints and slowly moved to join Marco.  The two of them each grabbed the legs of the men Marco had fought next to the fire, and they dragged them across the ground to lay them next to where the other men’s bodies were hidden behind the stony walls in the back.

“You killed all these men,” Cassius said softly.  “I never would have known you were capable of doing such work from looking at you.”

“It’s not really me; it’s the sword,” Marco answered.  He was secretly appalled as well, when he saw the dim outline of the mound of bodies of the men he had slain.  Yet the men had been evil, and intended to inflict pain and death on his own friends as well.  Together the two men pulled the last two bodies away from the front of the cave, then went and wearily stood in front of the fire.  Though it was starting to die down as well, the thick bed of embers continued to emit a comforting heat, and Marco gave a contented sigh as he felt the warmth press against the front of his body.  Kate came and stood with Cassius, while Pesino took a seat on a large stone at the edge of the fire ring.

“Where’s your pack, Marco?” she asked quietly.  “Can I get something from it for you to eat or drink?”

“I left it at the other entrance to the cave.  The passage was too narrow for me to bring anything with me other than my sword.”

He looked at the entrance to the cave and saw that there was a dim light appearing outside; sunrise was underway and another morning was beginning.

Chapter 11
– Among the Pixies

“I’ll go get my pack and cape and bow,” he said.  “Why don’t the rest of you look through the supplies here to see if there’s anything we might want to take with us?” he motioned to a sloppy pile of bags and boxes that rested against the wall of the cave.

“Here,” Pesino said, standing up, “I’ll come with you.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Marco protested.  “It’s cold out there and you must be exhausted already.  Stay here and rest.”

“Really, I’d like to go.  There may be a chance to push you in a stream or a pool and clean some of that muck off of you,” she smiled at him, a smile that struck Marco as one that was genuine, not a siren’s posed and polished art.  Perhaps she simply wanted to do something friendly, he concluded.

“Come on then, let’s go,” he told her, holding his hand out to take hers, and he led her through the arched opening of the cave and back out into the mountain wilderness.

Marco had to stop, to try to get his bearings in the world outside the cave.  He felt a brief split second of vertigo as he looked up at the endless sky overhead instead of the confining roof of a cave, but mostly he just felt exhaustion.

He judged the back entrance of the cave to be slightly to the right, and far back, above the main cave entrance, so he led Pesino up the side of the shrinking ravine and around the opening, and back through the undergrowth and around a curve in the relatively gentle topography that prevailed in the area.  He wished the pixie would arrive and lead him to his pile of goods, and then he wondered if he would even be able to see the pixie if it came up to him in the daylight; the creature had been small, its wings had been transparent, and its glow would be virtually indistinguishable in the daylight that had broken over the mountains.

He wondered about the tiny creature.  In the Lion City, people had considered pixies to be the imaginings of country folks, made-up explanations for mistakes and accidents that occurred in everyday life; now he knew they were real, just as he’d learned so many myths were real during the past year.  He hadn’t been able to tell what gender the tiny being was, nor if it even had a gender.  He’d not even learned its name.

“Are there pixies or fairies in the sea?” he asked Pesino, suddenly wondering if the world of the mermaid had such magical creatures as well.

“What are pixies?” Pesino asked.  Marco came to a stop, and she came up to stand next to him, both of them breathing heavily from the exertion of the climb.

“They are tiny beings that can fly around.  They have some magical powers and are supposed to pull pranks and do mischief,” Marco explained.

“We have the k’anan, the magical seahorses,” Pesino answered.  “They can carry messages from one end of the ocean to the other, instantly.  They like to sneak up on us and pull pranks.”

They started walking again, and Marco recognized two things: the dead body of the first guard he had killed, as well as the pile of belongings he had shed before going on his desperate spelunking adventure.

“Wait here,” he said softly to Pesino, holding an arm out in front of her as a gate to prevent her from having to witness the bloody body of another victim of his violence.  “I’ll get my things and be right back,” he explained, then walked ahead fifteen yards and bent to pick up his items.

“Your quest was successful, blessed one?” he heard a soft voice in his ear, and he turned his head.  He didn’t see the pixie, though he had heard it clearly.

And then his eyes focused on the recognizable form that they had missed before, only faintly visible in the daylight that shone upon the scene.

“Yes little friend, thanks to your help I did succeed.  I saved my friends; one of them is back there waiting for me right now,” he motioned.

“How can I thank you for your help?” he asked.

“Save my daughter,” the pixie replied immediately.

“Your daughter?” Marco asked in confusion.

“She’s very ill.   She’s going to die, unless you save her,” the pixie cried out.

“I don’t know anything about pixies.  What can I do?  Why do you think I can help?” Marco asked, feeling confused and helpless.

“You have the blessing upon you.  You can make her well; I see this destiny upon you,” the pixie told him.

“Where is your daughter?” Marco asked.  “Can I see her?”

“She is up at the place of steaming waters,” the pixie told him.  It pointed its thin arm upward to the north.

“How long would it take for me to get there?” Marco asked, feeling a strange sense of fate – not a compulsion, but more a sense of destiny – that he was going to go attend to a pixie child.

“You move slowly – probably a day for you to get there,” the pixie told him.

“Let me go get my friends, and we will go to your daughter,” Marco resolved to make the attempt to help the pixie.

“I’ll come with you and lead you,” the pixie told him.

Marco pulled his cape over his head, then added his pack and his bow, and returned to where Pesino was waiting.

“What took you so long?  What were you doing?” she asked as he arrived.

“I had a talk with a pixie,” Marco answered.  He saw the small being hovering nearby, and held his hand out flat, and watched the creature gently land there.

“By all the shells!” Pesino said explosively.  “That’s beautiful!”

“I prefer to be called handsome,” the pixie said.

“Of course you do,” Pesino agreed.  “My apologies, sir pixie.  What is your name?”

“I am Aleo,” the pixie’s voice carried to them.

“Well Aleo, we need to return to my other friends in the cave and get them,” Marco said.  “We’re going to Aleo’s village to check on his daughter, to see if I can heal her,” he told Pesino.

“Of course you can,” Pesino answered.  “Anyone who can turn mermaids into humans can certainly heal a pixie.”

“You can do this?  Thank you, blessed one!” Aleo spoke up.  “Let’s be on our way.”

Marco and Pesino scrambled back to the cave entrance, as Aleo flew alongside them.

“We’ve been asked to go to a different destination,” Marco announced.

“By a pixie!” Pesino chimed in.

“A what?” Cassius had a confused look on his face as he bent over a wooden chest he was rifling through.

Just then there was a glow in the dim recess of the cave.

“There,” Marco said conversationally.  “That’s the pixie that helped me find the back entrance to the cave.  His name is Aleo, and he wants us to go to his daughter and try to heal her.”

“Succeed in healing her,” Aleo corrected as he floated in among the humans.  “Are you ready to go?”

“Let us pack up,” Marco said.  He looked at Kate and Cassius.  “Did you find anything we can use?”

“There’s some cheese and some hard bread and some dried meat,” Kate told him.

“And lots of extra weapons.  Would you like to have any extra knives?” Cassius asked.

Marco declined, but they all filled sacks with food, taking on as much as they could carry, then left the cave entrance.  They walked for half an hour to return to the campsite where they had been ambushed the night before.

“What happened to you last night?” Kate asked.  “How did you escape capture?”

“I left the campsite; I thought I saw something and went to investigate it, so I was gone when they captured everyone,” Marco admitted.  “I’m sorry; I felt bad about not being where I should have.”

“So that they could have captured you to, or killed you?” Kate asked.  “This worked out much better.”

“I thought so too,” Aleo spoke up, reminding them that he was still with them.  “I lured the blessed one away so that he wouldn’t get captured.”

“Thank you for your cleverness,” Cassius said.  “I wish there was something I could have done, instead of being so useless.”

“Hardly useless,” Kate comforted him as she retrieved her pack and began to transfer her new food supplies into it.  “None of us could do anything under the circumstances.”

The others also restocked their backpacks with the additional food, and then they returned to the road, and began climbing north, towards the saddle between the two high peaks.

That day they climbed, then dipped slightly in a curving section of trail that skirted the head of a canyon, then began the final approach to the high pass that they had seen the day before.

“We have to go up there,” Aleo told them when they paused for a late afternoon rest.  “The steaming waters are on the far side of that mountain,” he pointed towards the mountain on the west side of the saddle.

The walk up to the saddle was difficult, as blustery, cold winds blew into their faces along the whole course of the journey.   They were exhausted from the travails of the cave the evening before, and when they finally reached the crest in the late afternoon, they stopped and looked first forward, and then backward.  Ridges of mountains were visible as far as the eye could see, disappearing into the thin clouds of their elevation.

“We go this way now,” the pixie directed them to the left.  They walked atop the saddle, constantly blown sideways by the cross winds, and by sunset they were climbing the mountain.

Marco looked back at his companions, and saw them straining mightily to continue the journey.

“Aleo,” he called.  “We are exhausted.  We can’t go much further.  We have to stop for the night to rest.”

“It’s not much further, and my daughter is there,” Aleo pleaded.  “Just ten more minutes, please.”

“Okay,” Marco agreed with a heavy sigh.

The pixie directed them to take a faint path that climbed and curved around the south side of the mountain.  They walked on with increasingly slower steps, until they made a sharp turn around a large turret of granite.

As they made the turn, they were suddenly fully protected from the biting winds, and they all felt immensely better.  The path continued on for another hundred yards, then passed beneath a natural bridge of stone, and as they stepped beneath the arch, they each stopped, and looked in wonder at the landscape before them.

A tiny valley with a flat floor awaited them.  Green plants were growing here, inexplicably, above the elevation of the last sizable plants they had seen.  There were multiple small pools of water connected by shimmering streams, and the water from each pool gave rise to a plume of gentle steam, indicative of thermal springs.  And in the air, or on the plants, there were the flickering lights of pixies, glowing with the gentle warm glow of the light that emanated from them.

As soon as the four humans and former merpeople arrived at the stone gateway, dozens of the tiny lights began to move towards them, and they stood in wonder, looking at the scenery, at the pixies, and at each other, bathed in the warm radiance of the scene.

“Aleo!  What have you done, bringing these humans here?  It is forbidden!” one of the arriving pixies thundered in a tiny voice.

“Look at this one!  He has the blessing of the spirit upon him!” Aleo immediately shot back.

“I brought him in hopes that he could heal Ariel,” Aleo added in a more contrite tone.  “He has the blessing upon him; he must be able to heal her.  And with the blessing, surely he could do us no harm.”

We are not humans,” Cassius spoke up.  “We,” he motioned to Pesino and himself, “are merpeople, from the great sea.  Marco has transformed us – turned our tails into legs – so that we may walk upon the land as his companions.  He has great powers, and he does not mean to harm anyone.”

The fluttering lights that encircled them buzzed among themselves in response to the extraordinary assertion.

“Take him to your daughter,” the chief pixie told Aleo, deciding to accept the prohibited humans’ visit as a fait accompli.

“My friends, can they go rest in one of the warm springs?” Marco asked immediately on behalf of his companions.  “Is it safe for them?”

“They are welcome to go to the Jade pool,” the chief pixie responded.  “I will lead them there, while you take your blessing to see Ariel,” he told Marco.

Marco looked at his friends and nodded, then watched his guide intently as he followed Aleo, who hovered and wove a path through the many other pixies in the air.

They entered a small, compact hollow on the side of the valley, where ferns overhung the top of a cozy space less than ten feet wide and deep.  On a series of natural stony shelves that protruded, a dozen pixie nests were constructed of stones and twigs and brightly colored objects.  Aleo alit next to one in which a pixie slept in a curled-up fetal position.  The pixies who occupied a few of the other nests all rose to their feet to look at Marco, or rose into the air to watch him.

“This is Ariel,” Aleo said, gently stroking the hair off the forehead of the little slumberer.  “She’s been ill for a fortnight, and then it got worse three days ago, and she hasn’t woken up since then.”

“What were the symptoms of her illness?  Did she have an upset stomach?  Did she have headaches?  Were her joints sore?” Marco asked, trying to think of how to pinpoint what alchemical cures he might try to compose treat the tiny girl’s ailment.