“Hey!” he shouted as Pesino snuck up behind him and poked him in the ribs, just as she had done the previous night. And just as he had done the previous night, he started forward, and fell into the water of the harbor.
“Pesino! That’s mean! And I think it’s a way for you to flirt with me,” Marco said.
Pesino’s head snapped back, and the smile on her face became a straight-lined pair of lips. “And were you flirting back last night?” she asked as they stared at one another.
“I was, a little,” he said slowly, wishing that he could prevent the words from emerging.
“And,” Pesino closed the distance between them, “do you remember our kiss?” she asked. “Because I started it, but you responded, didn’t you?”
“I did,” Marco’s voice was husky now, despite the cool temperature of the water.
“Would you like to kiss again? Would that be flirting some more?” Pesino inched even closer.
Marco closed his eyes. “I’m engaged to a woman, a good woman, a beautiful woman. I shouldn’t do this,” he told her, hoping that he had the will power to resist. His inhibitions against telling the truth had been stripped away, and with them he feared that some other inhibitions had been removed as well.
“Is she a land woman, a woman with legs? Is she close by? Is she the woman you left behind at our village?” Pesino breathed the questions.
“Mirra is my beloved, and she does have legs, as I do. She is far away in Barcelon, and I’ll return to her someday, when all of this is done. And though I think you are very attractive, I do not want to break her heart, Pesino; please don’t temp me,” he begged.
“Am I tempting?” Pesino asked. Darkness had fallen, Marco realized, and he could see the pale oval of her face, and the softly tanned curves of her bare shoulders, falling down to the waterline, where her flesh was partially visible through the opaque water.
Alchemy’s Apprentice Series
1. The Gorgon’s Blood Solution
2. The Echidna’s Scale
The Inner Seas Kingdoms Series
1. The Healing Spring
2. The Yellow Palace
3. Road of Shadows
4. A Foreign Heart
5. Journey to Uniontown
The Ingenairii Series
1. Visions of Power
2. At the Seat of Power: Goldenfields and the Dominion
3. The Loss of Power: Goldenfields and Bondell
4. The Lifesaving Power: Goldenfields and Stronghold
5. Against the Empire
6. Preserving the Ingenairii
7. Rescuing the Captive
8. Ajacii and Demons
9. The Caravan Road
10. The Journey Home
Also by Jeffrey Quyle
The Green Plague
For more information, visit the Ingenairii Series on Facebook, www.facebook.com/ingenairiiseries
The Echidna’s Scale
Alchemy’s Apprentice Series
Book 2
Jeffrey Quyle
Index
Chapter 1 –The Nightmare Page 1
Chapter 2 – The Fall Page 9
Chapter 3 –The Temple on the Isle Page 12
Chapter 4 –The Caverns Below Page 20
Chapter 5 –Back In The Lion City Page 41
Chapter 6 – Honesty Page 52
Chapter 7 –Transformations Page 68
Chapter 8 – The Partners Come Together Page 83
Chapter 9 –Departure From the Lion City Page 93
Chapter 10 –The Amber Trade Road Page 99
Chapter 11 –Among The Pixies Page 115
Chapter 12 – The Pixie Story Page 127
Chapter 13 –A Mountaintop Interlude Page 141
Chapter 14 – The Marriage Ceremony Page 150
Chapter 15 –Honeymoon Page 155
Chapter 16 –The Lonely Road Page 159
Chapter 17 –Adventure at Clovis Page 172
Chapter 18 –The Curse Page 198
Chapter 19 –Negotiating a Trip Page 206
Chapter 20 –The Blind Marchioness Page 214
Chapter 21 – A Different Vision Page 231
Chapter 22 – Arima’s Wilderness Page 235
Chapter 23 – The Echidna’s Cave Page 244
Chapter 24 – The Unwinnable Battle Page 252
Chapter 25 – An Underworld Guide Page 262
Chapter 26 – Alone With A Ghost Page 273
Chapter 27 – The Memories Lost Page 275
List of Characters
Marco, alchemy apprentice from the Lion City
Mirra, Barcelon daughter of Coosie, mother of Sybele
Glaze, Brother of Mirra
Sweetness, cook at Sant Jeroni castle
Sheafield, huntsman at the castle
Perago, steward of the Sant Jeroni castle
Porenn, acolyte on the Isle of Ophiuchus
Algornia, alchemist of the Lion City
Iasco, high priestess of the Order of Ophiuchus
Cassius, Merman of Kreewhite’s village
Pesino, Mermaid siren of Kreewhite’s village
Mitment, guard on the Isle of Ophiuchus
Folence, Barcelon priestess of Ophiuchus
Iago, sorcerer of the Corsairs
Kilson, captain of the palace guard in Barcelon
Constance, dress model in the Lion City
Siplin, duke of Barcelon
Sybele, infant daughter of Mirra
Sty, alchemist of the Lion City
Echidna, great mother of monsters in the north
Asterion, minotaur guardian of the underworld
Prologue
(the story of The Gorgon’s Blood Solution)
Marco was an under-achieving apprentice in a prestigious alchemy shop in the Lion City, one of the most powerful trading metropolises of the cities around the rim of the Great Sea. On a fateful day, a strange, unknown elderly woman gave him a coin, and a threatening stranger frightened him into swallowing the coin.
Marco became suddenly proficient in alchemy, rapidly completing a complex formula and showing promise. But before his promise could be realized, he was caught up in an unforeseen raid on the city by a band of brutal Corsairs, aided by a powerful sorcerer who traveled with them.
Seeing captives destined to become slaves, Marco freed two girls he recognized, but was caught by the sorcerer and taken captive by the Corsairs as they fled from the Lion City harbor. Out at sea, Marco discovered that the other captive held in the bowels of the Corsair ship was a merboy, Kreewhite.
Together, Marco and Kreewhite escaped the sinking ship in a storm, and landed on an enchanted island, Ophiuchus. They became separated, and Marco found that the island was a center and a temple for a female cult of healing.
Marco used his time on the island to befriend dolphins in the surrounding sea. He left the island under a cloud of disapproval, and went to a medium-sized city, Barcelon, where he found work for a dying alchemy shop.
Marco healed and helped a young mother, Mirra, and then helped save the city from both a plague and a raid by the Corsairs and their sorcerer-leader. He suffered a deadly curse by the sorcerer – who he killed, and then fought a bloody battle at the palace of the duke to overcome the threat of the curse. The duke was so pleased with Marco’s successes that he made him a nobleman and gave him a castle of his own.
To be healed from his deadly wounds, Marco was taken back to the isle of Ophiuchus. Afterwards, he returned to Barcelon, and journeyed to a remote mountain castle to finally be re-united with Mirra, with whom he had fallen in love.
Chapter 1 – The Nightmare
Marco awoke in a cold swea
t. 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.
The Echidna's Scale (Alchemy's Apprentice) Page 1
