The Echidna's Scale (Alchemy's Apprentice) (2 page)

Chapter 1
– The Nightmare

Marco awoke in a cold sweat.  He sat up abruptly in the dark room, and he felt the cool air on his skin.  He had goose bumps, and he wanted to attribute them to the temperature, but it was more likely that they were the result of the frightening nightmare he had just awoken from, he realized.

He turned his head to both sides, trying to penetrate the darkness of the bedroom, to visually confirm that there was no threat, no evil, within the room.  The gloom grew less dense as his eyes adjusted, and he could see all the features that were worth noting.  There was the wooden wardrobe on the right side along with a door and a table and a chair; the heavy curtains across the windows were on the left side – doing much to keep a brisk breeze from blowing directly through his room, but still allowing the chill to penetrate.  On the far wall was the fireplace, dark now with the extinguished embers of the banked fire, and the head of a bear mounted
above it as a trophy on the wall.

He was used to all those things, or he had grown mostly used to them.  After two months spent living in the luxury of the mountain castle, Marco was used to many things that he never would have even fantasized about prior to his arrival at Sant Jeroni.

He was not used to the type of nightmare that had shaken his soul so violently that it had frightened him awake.  He was not used to the bloody body of Captain Kilson of the guard of the palace at Barcelon, rising from his grave.

Marco had dreamed of walking through the woods on a hunting expedition, as was planned for that morning.  In the dream he had entered a sudden bank of fog in the mountains, and then found himself alone, separated from the other members of the hunting party.   He called for Glaze, Mirra’s brother, a boy who wanted to be the huntsman for the estate someday.

“Here,” a voice had called.  Marco had walked in the direction of the voice, and suddenly emerged out of the fog bank.  The end of the fog was abrupt, as if a wall separated it away in its own space.  Beyond the fog, Marco found himself walking in an endless cemetery.  Graves, marked by a wide variety of monuments, stretched endlessly towards the horizon.  There were numerous trees present, but like all the other trees in the forest, their branches were mostly bare, as autumn’s breezes blew the brown and yellow and red leaves to the ground.  Unlike the trees in the forest though, the trees in the cemetery look ominous and threatening without their leaves; they added to a sense of threat and decay in the cemetery.

“Glaze?  I don’t see you Glaze,” Marco called out as he looked around the inexplicable cemetery.

“He’s over here,” a voice had called from Marco’s right.

Puzzled, Marco looked, but saw no one, neither Glaze nor the person who was calling to him.

“Where?  Who are you?” he asked.

“I am the future,” the voice answered.  “Come see me.”

Marco held his bow and arrow cautiously.  He was not good with the weapon; he’d never shot an arrow before coming to the mountains.  The chief huntsman had been patient in teaching Marco the fundamentals of archery during the past several weeks.  Marco could hit the targets that Sheafeld the huntsman set up for him.  It helped a great deal that the targets stayed stationary, Marco had noted wryly to Sheafeld and Glaze as they continued to practice.  And now Sheafeld had planned to take the new lord of the estate and his future brother-in-law hunting for deer up in the mountains that rose behind the castle.

So holding his bow and arrow, knowing that they would provide little real protection, Marco stepped around a tree and walked slowly in the direction of the voice.  He walked several yards without noise or incident, until the voice spoke.

“You are here with Glaze now,” it announced.

Marco looked around.  There were untidy rows of headstones, most of them too low for a person to hide behind.  Neither Glaze, nor anyone else, was anywhere in sight in the eerie light that seemed to flicker as clouds raced overhead, blocking the sun’s rays to varying degrees.

“Glaze!  Glaze?” Marco called in his dream.

“Down.  Look down,” the voice of the future told Marco.

He looked down, and saw that the headstone he stood near had Glaze’s name upon it.  Marco stepped back in horror, and bumped against another headstone.  He glanced at it, and saw Gabrielle’s name, the widow who had opened her empty alchemy shop to him in Barcelon.

Marco gave a cry and turned.  There was another gravestone immediately in front of him, and Sybele’s name was upon it, the infant girl who would be his stepdaughter come next spring
’s wedding.

“No!” he had shouted fearfully, and then he saw Mirra’s gravestone, and Algornia’s, and Phillippe’s, and then strangely, he had seen Kreewhite’s and Kieweeooee’s gravestone, though neither of the creatures of the sea were likely to be buried upon land.

“Here, look here,” the voice of the future had called from a large tombstone that now appeared before him.

Marco looked, and the tombstone had the name Future etched within the marble, but as he watched, the letters morphed, each of them changing and becoming something different, so that the name was Kilson, and then the earth in front of the tombstone began to rise and crumble apart.  And to Marco’s horror, the decaying body of Kilson climbed out of the disturbed grave with a zombie-like slowness, and drew its sword.

“I am the future, the future of you and all your friends.  You and each of those you know will die, slowly and painfully, as the future catches up to you,” Kilson’s voice had sounded hollowly.

Marco dropped his bow and arrow, and drew his sword as his frightening, dead opponent drew a sword of its own.  They began to fence, and despite the magical powers that Marco’s sword possessed, he suffered a constant barrage of small wounds, shallow stabs, and bleeding slices that forced him to retreat, step by step, as the murderous zombie pressed the attack, its odor of earth and rotten flesh adding to the horror of the nightmare he was trapped in.

He took one last step back away from Kilson, and felt the earth beneath him crumble away.  He fell backwards, back into a hole dug in the ground of the cemetery, and he realized it was his own grave he was falling into before he even landed at the bottom of the hole and laid there, stunned into paralysis.

Kilson gave an evil laugh of triumph, then picked up a shovel, and threw a shovelful of dirt down towards his face.  “You are on your way to the underworld,” he snarled.  “Never to return.”

And that’s when Marco woke up.

There was no going back to sleep.  He pulled on a pair of pants and a heavy shirt, then silently padded out into the hallway and closed his door behind himself.  He looked down the hall towards where Mirra and Sybele had a suite, tempted to go down to check on their safety, to see them sleeping peacefully, as he knew they must be.

After moments of longing indecision, Marco went the other direction, then down the stairs in the tower that provided the only means of access to the bedrooms where he stayed.  The castle was not very defensible as a castle in many ways, but the single winding staircase access did provide maximum security for the bedrooms, the way Marco had imagined a castle would.  It had no great, thick walls, not even a moat, and it had too many windows, but it had that isolated wing with a solitary staircase where one could assume a defensive position.

He passed through the great hall and the entry, then opened the door and stepped out into the evening darkness.  His breath made a slow-moving cloud in front of his face, and he looked up through the pure mountain air of the evening, and stared at the stars overhead.  Orion was high in the sky, and Jupiter was far above the horizon as well, both signs that dawn lay not too far away in the east.  He’d watched Jupiter during the late summer, as it had started as the morning star, and gradually risen earlier and earlier, until it now was a bright jewel high overhead by the time of sunrise, giving astrologers something to discuss with their customers.  He experienced a momentary flash of a memory of the astrology shops he had seen in the Lion City, where men with neatly trimmed beards had worn long robes and promised customers to tell their futures.

Perhaps the sun was already starting to rise on the eastern lands, places such as the land of the Corsairs, far, far to the east, or even the Lion City, relatively closer but still east of his new home near Barcelon.

The cold air remained cold, and Marco shivered, then turned and hastily re-entered the castle and went back to the back of the building.  He stopped in the kitchen and lit a candle, then went down to the subterranean chamber that he had appropriated for his own use.  The former cool larder, where the cook had kept root vegetables and smoked hams
, had been turned into Marco’s own small alchemy workroom.  He didn’t know where the poor cook had been forced to relocate the dispossessed food stuffs; he only knew he now had the place he wanted for his dreams of dabbling in alchemy.

With his candle he lit two lanterns and turned their wicks up, adding a cheery illumination to the space, and helping to take the last steps needed to dispel the discomfort he felt from the terrible nightmare.  He looked at the various items that he had acquired, the supplies and elements and tools and compounds, an expensive investment of his funds in order to give him most of what he imagined he might need to follow the formulae that roamed around inside his head, the alchemical instructions that were permanently imprinted on his brain, giving him the knowledge to mix together a cure for nearly any illness or physical ailment known.

He needed more saltpeter, he saw as he sat at his desk and looked at the glass jars lined up on the wall behind him.  And more prismatic sulfur as well.  He needed potassium permanganate and he suddenly realized that he needed many ingredients, enough that he decided he would take a trip down to Barcelon within a few days to purchase the things he thought he needed.

He wanted to have everything he could afford before the snows started to fall.  The staff at the castle, and the local residents he had met, told him that the roads became impassable, or at least unpredictable, once snow was on the ground.  He had more money available to him than he’d ever had in his life – more than he’d ever even dreamed he could imagine having – but the steward told him that he’d need to hold much of it back for the spring time, when the crops would have to be planted, and his taxes to the king would be paid, and when he’d have his wedding to pay for.  Still, he calculated he could afford to indulge himself in the one
luxurious habit he enjoyed, alchemy.

Marco looked up at a dim corner shelf, where a small dark box held an even smaller container of gorgon’s blood.  Gabrielle had given the rare element to him, asserting that he would be able to use it better than anyone she knew.  He had placed the exotic material in his small laboratory, not sure when he might ever have to use its extraordinary characteristics; he held it mostly to keep it safe from others who might be looking for it,
those who might seek to use it in nefarious ways.

There were faint noises coming down the staircase, and he realized that the cooks must be in the kitchen, starting their morning routine.  He felt full of restless energy, with the horror of the nightmare receding in the background, and he felt hungry too.  He extinguished the lanterns and bounded up the stairs, opening the door to the kitchen and producing a shriek from the cook who was bent over the wood pile.

“Lord Marco!” she exclaimed.  “You frightened me so!  I apologize for shouting.  I’m still not used to having someone down in the root cellar, I’m sure, my lord.  And you shouldn’t be out of bed before sunrise anyway.  You’ve got that nice big mattress to sleep on, beside which,” she added with a smile.

“I’m hardly a lord, you know, Sweetness,” he told the cook, restraining a smile at the nickname by which the cook was universally referred.  “Can I bring in some firewood for you?”

“Gracious me, Lord Marco!  You can’t be doing that kind of work, just because that lazy Nathin can’t get in here early to do his chores,” Sweetness protested.

“I surely can,” Marco assured her, heading towards the door.  “I’ve been doing chores most of my life,” he said as he went outside, much to her consternation, and carried in several armloads of firewood that she nonetheless promptly used to heat up the fireplace and the ovens.

He met Mirra at breakfast, and chatted amiably with her as they ate their breakfast.  The staff served them attentively; Marco had noticed that the staff members of both sexes doted on Mirra.  The men were drawn by her tremendous beauty, while the women were charmed by her amiable personality and her lack of airs, as she still failed to appreciate how extraordinary her appearance was, even after weeks of enjoying the benefits of the salve that Marco had applied to her.

“Marco, I never did understand exactly who that lady was
at the palace ball,” Mirra spoke up that morning, as he stared at her.  She was truly curious, Marco could tell by the reference, because he knew that the horrific events at the ball had terrorized Mirra, and made the dance something that his lady preferred not to discuss.  “The one with the odd,” she trailed off momentarily, “the one who seemed to be Lady Folence’s superior,” she explained.  Mirra’s manners were too delicate to mention the exotic, striped complexion that Iasco wore.