The Echidna's Scale (Alchemy's Apprentice)

by Quyle, Jeffrey

  “Oh, that’s such a dream!” Cassius said.

  “I haven’t thought about actually having my tail back in a long, long time,” Pesino added.

  They all turned then, as they saw Gawail’s light appear nearby.

  “There’s a different patch of woods, down in the cradle of a small valley, not too far away,” the pixie reported.

  They left immediately, passing through a patch of air that stunk of rotten eggs, then safely arrived minutes later among the trees Gawail had found. The four humans reached the new forest, then stopped and looked together towards the side of the mountain that hung over them. A thin line of glowing lava hung in the air above them, a waterfall of fire it appeared.

  “That’s it,” Kate said softly. “That’s the way in that the man in the village talked about.”

  They all settled into a nest among a jumble of rocks in the midst of the wintery forest, and all of them slept uneasily through the rest of the night’s darkness. Marco dreamed of facing the monster, of being dwarfed by the huge figure, and fighting fear as much as dodging the creature’s efforts to capture him. He dreamed that he started throwing things at it – and suddenly his dream was in an alchemy lab, and the Echidna was a Corsair, and he was throwing elements from his workbench at the monster, using the ingredients of a formula as his weapon instead of a sword.

  “Marco,” Pesino said softly, shaking his shoulder. “Wake up! You’re having a dream,” she told him, bringing him back to the reality of the dark woods and the stream of fire that continued to fall nearby. The dream had seemed so real, and he thought back to the fight against the Corsairs in Barcelon, when he’d fought in the alchemy workroom.

  Pesino gripped his shoulder just then, as a faint sound drifted across the mountainside, the noise of the Echidna returning to its lair.

  “Something’s going to happen today,” Marco told her softly. “We’re going to do something remarkable today.”

  “I think that you will. We’ll just be there to help you any way we can,” Pesino answered.

  The sky began to lighten, letting the vast form of the mountain begin to take visible shape as the eastern sky behind it turned rosy red, a color that for long moments perfectly matched the red of the lava fall they were so close to.

  “Let’s get ready to go,” Marco told Kate and Cassius as he shook their shoulders to awaken them. He felt tension and energy growing within him and all around him; they were on the cusp of the action that had been their goal throughout the course of the long, arduous journey, and the realization that the impossible goal was about to come within sight was rattling his soul.

  They left the grove of trees and climbed up the mountainside, following a narrow game path that zigged and zagged back and forth as it rose via switchbacks. The ground and air around them grew noticeably warmer in the short time it took them to climb up the hillside and approach the lava stream, and the sky overhead grew lighter as the sunlight evolved from red to orange to yellow, though they remained on the side of the mountain that was deep in shadows.

  “Look,” Marco told the group softly as they reached the level where the lava flow reached the bottom of its fall. It pooled up, then a stream of it oozed north into a valley, growing cooler and darker as it moved away from the falls. He pointed at an apparent ledge that hugged the mountainside behind the gathered pool of lava and ran out of sight behind the lava fall.

  “Let me go scout the site for you,” Gawail spoke up, catching Marco by surprise as the pixie emerged. “It feels so warm here there’s no good reason to stay bundled up inside,” he testified to the change in temperature. The tiny being flickered his wings momentarily, and then he was gone, flying off towards the wall of granite that was the mountainside.

  Minutes later he returned. “There is a cave back there, in the darkness of the shadows where the mountainside is hidden behind the fiery fall. If you travel carefully along the pathway, I believe you can reach it.”

  “Let’s keep our cloaks on,” Marco suggested. Even though he was feeling warm inside his, he sensed that they would actually help protect the travelers from the short exposure to the intense heat of the firefall they would pass behind. He looked around, to make sure that there were no watchers, though he didn’t know what difference it would have made, then he led them around the curving banks of the pond that was filled with molten rock instead of water, and they clamored up to the rocky shelf that would be their trail to the cave entrance.

  Marco was sweating profusely, and he knew the others were too. It was very, very warm, and as he started walking along the trail, on the narrow ledge between the lava on one side and the hot granite cliff face on the other side, he knew that the clothing that protected him from immediately starting to blister would only protect him for a few seconds more, before the heat grew too intense.

  “We have to run. Move carefully,” he turned and called back, then he looked forward and down, and began to pick his steps carefully as he doubled his speed to cross the distance before him.

  He reached the space behind the firefall, a red, sparkling column on one side that felt like an open oven door, ten times hotter than any oven, and just as he reached that unbearable heat, the granite cliffside curved steeply inward, into darkness, into shelter from the heat, into a bearable atmosphere where he felt he could take in a breath and not scald his throat or his lungs.

  He went deeper into the horizontal crevasse that was narrowing to become a cave, and when the air around him felt merely warm, he stopped. His skin felt raw, as though it had been cooked.

  “Gawail,” he called softly, as he turned to see that his companions were reaching his spot and joining him. “Gawail, will you provide us with light?” he asked.

  The pixie hovered over them, unfazed by the heat, enjoying it apparently, and the little personage immediately increase the intensity of the light he emanated, bathing them all in a glow.

  “Is this sufficient, blessed one?” the pixie asked.

  “That’s just right,” Marco assured him, as he looked at the faces of his friends. They all looked puffy, red, glowing with heat, undoubtedly feeling as painful as his own exposed flesh felt. He put his backpack down, knelt over it, and looked up at the others. “Let’s stop here to rest for a few minutes; I’ll see if I have enough alchemy material to make something to heal our skin,” he told them all.

  “That would be wonderful Marco,” Kate said thankfully, as she squatted down on the floor of the cavern entrance.

  Marco pulled out his supplies and looked at what he had; there were all the right ingredients because somehow Algornia had miraculously selected the perfect collection of items to give to Marco months earlier in the Lion City. He used the small mortar and pestle included in Algornia’s useful gift, and mixed up a paste of ingredients that would sooth away pain and heal the heated skin by drawing away the impurities and damage the flesh contained. It was always about removing impurities, Marco thought; that was the mantra, the guiding principle that the master alchemist believed was needed to success – purification in order to achieve perfection.

  The concept seemed so logical to Marco, yet it was in opposition to the transformation that the alchemist Sty had believed was the greatest tool for alchemists to exercise. And transformation had done so much for Marco on this adventure, he idly thought as he daubed spots of his creation on the faces of his friends and began to rub the paste into their flesh.

  “Here, let me serve you,” Pesino said, poking her own finger into his bowl and gently spreading it across his own face. He felt immediate relief everywhere the paste covered his skin, and he smiled in appreciation at his friend, his mate and companion in such a true sense over the course of the long journey.

  “Thank you dear,” he told her as she spread the last of the mixture on his forehead.

  “You sound just like an old husband,” she teased him as he put the bowl away in his pack. “Gawail is very happy with this warmth and these surroundings,” she told him.

&nb
sp; “Gawail,” Marco called, “please go forward and find out what’s ahead. Where does this cave go? Then come back and tell us,” he directed.

  The pixie circled once above his head, then sped away quickly, his light disappearing in the distance. Marco looked at his own hand, and carefully managed to produce a moderate amount of light from it. He held the hand over his head, then started walking forward, and waved to the others to follow as he set off on the journey into the depths of the mountain.

  “Do we have to go through a cave?” Pesino asked, a worried expression on her face.

  “We have to,” Marco answered, knowing that there was no alternative in any way.

  The cave they were in continued to rapidly constrict in size, until in dropped to a round passage with a diameter of about ten feet, and it steadily held that size thereafter. It was a smooth-walled tunnel, and the floor at times felt slippery as they walked along, so that they took mincing steps whenever the angle of the passage climbed or dropped.

  Gawail came flying back to meet them five minutes after he had parted from them.

  “Your light is bright,” he commented to Marco once he arrived. “I could see it from a long distance away.”

  Marco looked at his hand, and within seconds of his focused attention, the glow diminished.

  “That is good,” Gawail spoke. “In less than a quarter mile, the cavern is going to split into two passages. I have flown into the passage that goes upward.”

  “Does it lead up to the Echidna’s lair?” Marco asked.

  “No. It shrinks down to a passage that is too small for you to pass through,” Gawail answered.

  “But the entrance to the lair is higher up the mountainside than our entrance was,” Marco protested. “We must have to go up to find the monster.”

  “Just because the entrance is high, you don’t have to assume the lair is high as well,” Cassius pointed out. “Maybe the monster’s cave sinks down into the mountain.”

  “I will go fly into the lower passage,” Gawail said. “When you come to the fork in the cave, take the lower passage, and I will meet you to let you know what I find,” he told them before he flew off again.

  “We’re lucky to have him along,” Kate observed. “It’s pretty handy to have a scout like that.”

  They continued along the cave’s route, and minutes later came to the branching that Gawail had mentioned. Without hesitation they took the route that clearly was the lower route, and started a gentle descent.

  After a quarter of a mile the descent became more rapid, steep at times, and the cavern began a steady curving turn to the left. Gawail came zipping up to them in the warm, dry air of the cavern.

  “There is another fork in the cave, with three choices, just ahead. I went to the left and it comes to an end. You will either have to go right, or straight, but I have not gone either direction to check on them yet,” he told the humans as they continued to stride forward.

  “Here’s the fork,” Gawail said moments later as they reached and paused at the point where a choice was needed.

  “Why don’t we go right, and Gawail can go straight?” Cassius suggested.

  They promptly set off in that fashion. The right tunnel the travelers followed immediately began to plunge down, and entered a vast, open cavern in which Marco’s softly glowing hand provided light that only reached a few feet into the darkness around them. The floor of the chamber was rough, and they climbed up and down around obstacles and mounds of stones that had fallen from the ceiling. After ten minutes of hiking, they encountered an odor of decay, and stopped.

  “What is that?” Pesino asked. “Marco, can you give us some light so that we can see what’s happening?”

  Marco obliged. He climbed up on top of a nearby pile of stone to get some elevation, then raised his hand high. He was more and more comfortable with the simple task of adjusting his glowing hand, so that with hardly a moment of focus he made the hand blaze forth with new light that revealed the enclosed space around them.

  The cavern was higher than he had realized – the ceiling was forty feet over their heads. The chamber was not as wide as he had expected – the walls were only thirty feet apart.

  But those dimensions came to his attention only minutes later. The light he had shone forth revealed something much more notable – and horrifying. Scattered about the floor of the cave in front of them was a litter of decaying human body parts. Limbs and bones and portions of flesh covered a long field ahead of them, and stacked in a pile at the far end were a score of skulls, some still covered with tatters of flesh.

  Marco instantly dimmed his hand and lowered it to his side as he jumped down to the ground where the others stood.

  “It’s,” he paused, not sure what to say to describe what he had seen from his perch. “There are parts of dead bodies up ahead…this is the monster’s dining room!”

  The faces of the others went pale, and Cassius pulled his sword free of its scabbard.

  “We need Gawail to return,” Kate muttered, “to tell us exactly where she is and what she’s doing.”

  “I don’t think we should just remain stationary,” Marco said, with an uncomfortable worry that they were being watched. “Let’s move past this and wait for the pixie to rejoin us.”

  He kept his light dim to minimize the others’ exposure to the macabre sights around them, and they quickly hurried through the ghastly space, but there was no avoiding the horrifying sight of the pile of skulls, and they all shuddered as they averted their eyes and went in a wide circle around it.

  Once past that landmark they were beyond the sights of the deadly feasts that occurred in the cavern, and the odor faded behind them. They were frightened now, but also alert, and sure that they were in the right place.

  “I love you,” Marco heard Kate whisper to Cassius soon thereafter, a fearful confession the girl seemed to need to make at least once more before anything terrible might happen.

  And at that moment the Echidna struck.

  Chapter 24 – The Unwinnable Battle

  Marco sensed a movement on his right, and he heard the soft slithering sound of scales passing over the clay floor of the cavern.

  He shouted “Jump back!” to his friends, as he pulled his own sword free.

  The sword immediately took control of his role in the battle, swinging itself upward while it made his body perform a seemingly impossible forward flip that carried him away from the spot where the Echidna’s clawed fingers closed upon empty air.

  He felt his sword strike one of the arms of the monster, and his hand, while holding the sword, flared up in in a blaze of triumphant light to celebrate the joy of landing the first strike of the contest. Marco shuffled his feet as he turned and crouched to protect himself and look at his opponent.

  She was huge; had she been fully woman, instead of having the glistening scales below her waist, she would have been over twenty feet tall, Marco calculated in passing. Her face was actually attractive, filled with a cruel beauty, but the hair that framed it was lank and dirty, falling in long strands that were several feet in length. She had broad shoulders, and strong muscular arms that ended in fingers whose ends were claws, not nails. And her breasts were huge; the venomous breasts that had suckled so many monsters were nearly the size of Marco’s own entire torso.

  Her scales covering the lower portion of her body, which extended over a tail of thirty feet or more in length, were smaller than Marco had feared. His worst case expectation had been large scales, difficult to carry or grasp or certainly to try to mischievously pluck away, unnoticed. The scales were relatively small, no larger than the palm of his hand. And they varied in color, with intricate patterns of darker and lighter shades that wove with a geometric precision and beauty up and down the length of her body from her waist to the tip of her tail. If he were successful in acquiring one, it would be easy to carry out.

  On her right shoulder there was a small bright stripe of red blood, the proof that Marco had landed a blow
upon her. She had her left hand touching the wound, then she looked at the smear of blood that her finger carried away, and she shrieked with a loud and unearthly wail of anger.

  “How dare you strike my flesh?” her voice issued forth in a higher pitch than Marco had expected from the large body. “You are a mere piece of food for me to consume! How dare you?!”

  She struck at him as she spoke the last word, diving forward with an extraordinary speed, her hands grasping forward and her wide mouth gaping open to attack as well, as she flung herself at him.

  Marco stumbled as the wide-flung arms reached towards him, but his sword turned the stumble into an awkward roll that moved him out of the reach of the monster at the last second. He felt the huge claws rake across his back, shredding his pack – which he still wore. He heard the contents of the pack clatter to the ground, and he felt the bulky shape on his back fall away, making his movements easier as the Echidna inadvertently helped him by relieving him of the load he was carrying.

  The monster continued forward in her strike, and for a moment her face came so close to Marco that he smelled the sickeningly sweet odor of her breath, and he saw the sharp fangs of her mouth, before he yelped in fear and rose to his feet.

  “You’re too good to be a mortal, too fast,” the mother of monsters commented as she reared high above him again, preparing to make her next strike. “Perhaps I should save you for last and use you for a bit.” And with that she turned to look at the rest of the invaders who had invaded her lair with incredible foolishness.

  Cassius stood with his sword drawn, holding it defensively, while Kate stood just a step behind, holding a knife as a weapon, puny though it looked compared to the size of the Echidna. Just to the side, Pesino stood, without a weapon, alert to the situation.

  “You hate yourself, don’t you?” Pesino shouted. “You shouldn’t – not just because you are a composite of two creatures. I used to be a mermaid, so I know. There’s no reason to hate yourself because of who you are.”