“Wake up, sleepy head,” she said softly. “Do you enjoy sleeping alone so much that you don’t want me to come wake you this morning?”
“No, not at all,” he said groggily. “I missed you,” he said then paused, “but I did sleep pretty well last night,” he admitted.
“It was tough to leave Sybele behind this morning,” Mirra confessed.
“Breakfast will be ready soon. Come down when you want,” she told him, then leaned back into the window frame and returned downstairs.
Marco went down a few minutes later, and sat down across from Gabrielle.
“It’s a bit like old times, isn’t it?” she said as he sat down. “Except for all the gifts we have to put away. But there are worse crosses to bear, aren’t there?” she smiled.
The shop had begun to receive dozens of gifts, tokens of appreciation and thanks for the cures that Marco had delivered. People came into the shop while doses were being dispensed and left food, or money, or any item they thought of value, upon the counter. In the evening people piled items up in front of the door, so that each morning there was a treasure trove to be brought inside.
“We should receive thanks from the baker next door,” Marco commented. “I think we have two dozen loaves of his bread piled up.” Which was true, even after Gabrielle had made Mirra and Glaze take several loaves of bread – and many other food items – home to their apartment.
After breakfast, Marco went to the front of the shop and opened the door. He welcomed in the reduced line of customers who waited for the opening, and as Gabrielle and Mirra dispensed doses of the medicine, Marco carried in armloads of new overnight gifts.
He had enough of the curative medicine prepared that he hoped there would be no need to make a new batch during the day. He returned to the workshop as Mirra left to return home and Gabrielle continued to hand out the medicine, and he began to straighten up. It felt good, restorative, to finally be no longer strictly reacting to the plague crisis. Marco took turns sharing shifts with Gabrielle at the counter, to allow her to rest as well.
The supply of medicinal doses was consumed rapidly as the day progressed, and by the end of the day Marco planned to spend the evening mixing a new supply to be used the following day.
Before nightfall though, when the shop doors were being closed, Marco jumped in surprise when the square outside was suddenly blasted with a blare of horns that inexplicably sounded.
Marco had never heard such a sound before – the square was one of the smaller ones in the city, away from the thoroughfares that carried the main traffic. There was little ceremony that took place there, only the everyday commerce of the neighborhood – except for the crowds that had arrived for the cure to the plague.
He looked out the window as he heard the hallway door open behind him, as Gabrielle also came to find out the cause of the noise.
“It looks like the Duke himself may be in the square,” Marco noted as he observed the score of elaborately-dressed guardsmen and the courtiers who were milling about the square. He turned to see Gabrielle’s reaction, and found to his surprise that Mirra was in the shop as well.
“Is everything okay?” he asked. She was once again wearing one of Gabrielle’s beautiful gowns, and he wondered what special occasion was occurring.
“Everything is more than okay,” Gabrielle said as she walked up to him, then opened the door. “Go on out there and see what the to-do is.”
Marco, obediently followed her directions, and as he stepped into the open, the horns of the heralds blew again.
“That’s him alright,” Marco heard a voice say, and his head turned to find Captain Kilson sitting on a horse next to a richly dressed man sitting on a beautiful animal. There was no doubt in Marco’s mind that it was the Duke of Barcelon himself.
“Marco, alchemist of Barcelon, step forward and be recognized,” a herald said loudly, as Mirra and Gabrielle stepped out of the shop to stand behind Marco in the square. Other neighbors around the square were stepping out to witness the unusual activity as well.
“Marco?” the man next to Kilson asked, as Marco dumbly nodded his head in agreement.
The man dismounted. “I am Duke Siplin, and I have the privilege of coming to you today to recognize you for the tremendous service you have carried out for our citizens these past few days.
“This medal,” he held up a medal on a thin gold chain, and placed it over Marco’s head, “recognizes that you are hereby named a Knight of the Palace, to be accorded all honors that accompany the title.
“And this,” the duke added, as he held out a small leather bag, “is another means of inadequately repaying you for the services you have performed.” Marco took the bag, which felt heavy, filled with coins.
“I invite you to come to the palace ten days hence, when we will have a formal dinner to recognize you in front of the assembled nobles of the court,” he told Marco, then held out his hand and firmly shook Marco’s hand in his.
“I look forward to seeing you and your lovely companion,” the Duke said, with a nod over Marco’s shoulder towards Mirra, “in just a few days, and many times thereafter.”
With that, the short public ceremony ended, and the Duke and his men left the square, leaving Marco at the mercy of the many neighbors who came to congratulate him and pound him on the back.
“You knew about this!” he said accusingly to Mirra and Gabrielle when he finally returned to the inside of the shop, after darkness had fallen.
Both women grinned at him. “Captain Kilson came by the shop yesterday morning while you were in your work shop, to make the arrangements,” Mirra said.
“And to chat with a pretty young lady at the shop,” Gabrielle added with a twinkle in her eye, making Mirra faintly blush.
“So we knew when to expect the Duke to stop by,” Gabrielle continued.
“And no one in the city deserves any greater honor than you do, Marco,” Mirra told him earnestly. “I’m so glad I got to see it.
“But I must get home to Sybele now; she’s staying with a neighbor while Glaze is at work,” she added.
“I’ll walk you home,” Marco instantly offered, and so the two of them strolled through the streets of the city. There were no longer corpses along the sides of the roads, but there were few people walking out along the byways, and some lights were unlit.
“What will we do at the palace?” Marco asked.
“I don’t have any idea,” Mirra replied as they reached the doorway of her building. “I’ve never been to any such place.”
“The Duke invited both of us,” Marco reminded her. “So we better ask Gabrielle what to expect.”
“Oh Marco! I would never in a hundred years have thought that I would ever be a guest at the Duke’s palace,” she exclaimed.
“And you’ll be the most beautiful woman there,” Marco said sincerely.
They kissed good night and looked at one another, then Marco began the walk back to the shop. As he strolled through the streets he heard a number, an unusual number, of screams in the city. Most of the shouts, and occasional sounds of fighting came from the direction of the docks, and Marco wondered if they were a belated outbreak of lawlessness, of looting taking place where the merchants kept their goods stored in dockside warehouses.
Back at the shop he returned to the work room and lit the lantern there to provide a small pool of dim light, enough illumination to allow him to work on his project of having doses of the plague cure ready to go when the morning crowd of customers arrived. He worked intently, absorbed in his work, until he heard a crashing sound somewhere close to the shop.
It sounded as though someone was breaking into a shop nearby, and he cocked his head, trying to decipher what direction the noise came from. There was a rumble of low voices, but no other clues. Marco sat motionless, waiting for more, then slowly stood, as the hair on the back of his neck rose inexplicably. He heard the clatter of heavy boots on the paving stones just outside of Marches’ shop, and he moved to
the hallway, then realized that his sword was upstairs in his garret room above.
Marco decided there was no harm in feeling the handle of his sword in his hand, and he started to climb the stairs to the attic. As he headed up he heard a rending and tearing of wood, and then the breaking of glass, followed by shouts, and he knew that Gabrielle’s shop was under attack.
He raced up to the small bedroom and picked up his sword, which seemed to gleam and shine even though there was virtually no light present in the small space, and then he raced back down the stairs, hoping that Gabrielle and the work shop were still safe.
When he reached the main floor he heard men breaking the work room apart, and he burst through the door, shouted, then stopped in horror and amazement at the sight that confronted him.
He felt he was reliving the nightmare that had ripped him away from the Lion City – the work room was besieged by a half dozen Corsairs. The men all wore the chainmail and helmets that Marco had seen in the raid on the Lion City. They turned and stared at him momentary, then two of them said something in their strange, foreign language.
Three of the Corsairs started directly towards Marco. One held an axe, while the other two held heavy swords.
Marco was barefoot, and wore a white shirt and pants. He held his sword, and nothing else. But he was angry. His anger and his outrage at the invasion of the shop overcame his fear of the brutal-looking men he faced, and he stepped forward, then thrust his sword at the first of the raiders that came within his range.
He stabbed at the man with the axe, then jumped back as he heard and felt his sword crunch against – but not penetrate – the man’s armor, while he jumped backwards to avoid the vicious swing of the weapon. His sword magically swung itself downward atop the axeman’s arms, and sliced so deeply that he felt it hit the bones, while the man grunted in pain and dropped his weapon.
Marco spun as he swung the sword, or rather, he felt the sword force his body to spin. He dodged a sword that was stabbed at him by one of the men who pursued him, then he kicked the face of the axe-wielder who had fallen to the floor, and finally stabbed his sword at the neck of the third attacker, finding a vulnerable spot free of the chainmail protection. The man’s blood spurted out from the wound, and suddenly the odds were improved as Marco stood unharmed inside the room, with two of his opponents down.
The remaining attacker shouted, and two more Corsairs left their search of the workshop to join the attack against him. He fell back towards a set of shelves, then stopped and traded sword work with the three Corsairs who faced him. His free hand groped around the shelves behind his back, and randomly pulled out a container, that he hurled at the face of the Corsair in the center of the trio he was fighting.
The container burst open upon contact, and the Corsair screamed as flames engulfed his face. It was a compound containing phosphorus, Marco realized. As the other two Corsairs stopped momentarily and flinched in horror at the sight, Marco stabbed his sword at the thigh of one of them.
He heard the one Corsair who was still searching the shop shout in victory, then saw the man run from the shop. The one Corsair who was fighting him, and still uninjured, slashed at Marco, then slid behind the man who was clutching at his burning face, and used his partner as an effective human shield.
Marco fenced with the man, while the man with the leg wound writhed in the ground, until the Corsair with the burning face abruptly collapsed, unconscious. Without the human shield to block its work, Marco’s sword quickly stabbed the last effective fighter in the throat, and suddenly Marco was the only uninjured person left in the destroyed work room.
He looked around at the rubble that littered the room, the destruction of all that Marches had built up, and that he had himself worked so hard to restore. He felt his anger boiling inside, and then he suddenly thought of Gabrielle.
He rushed up the stairs to the second floor. “Gabrielle! Are you okay?” Marco asked in a panic. Her door was locked.
“Marco? Is that you? Are you okay? Come in here – be safe!” he heard her voice, high-pitched and scared through the door, then a latch turned and he saw that she was unharmed.
“I was in a fight downstairs – there are Corsairs in the city! They raided our shop!” he spoke in a loud voice. “I beat them though; all but one who got away.
“They wrecked the work room. They were looking for something,” he told her.
“Is it safe down there now? Should we call the patrol to come?” she asked, looking fearful.
“I think the patrol’s probably pretty busy right now,” Marco told her gently. “I’ll go downstairs and clean things up,” he told her. “You stay locked up here until I tell you to come out.”
Holding his sword at the ready, Marco crept down the stairs and looked at the work room. The Corsair who had held the axe had left, and left a bloody trail. The other four men he had fought were still present, and to his shock, Marco discovered that all were dead. The man who had been stabbed in the legs had bled to death, and the man whose face had burned has died a gruesome death as well; Marco lifted the body to look at the wounds to the dead man, then dropped the corpse immediately and retched in reaction to the horrific sight.
He dragged the bodies one-by-one out to the square in front of the shop, going through the open doorway, which had been splintered open. With the four bodies out of the way, Marco returned to the work room and turned up the lantern to better illuminate the terrible mess in the room. It would take days to clean up. Somehow, miraculously, the plague cure he had been working on sat untouched, ready to be offered to victims of the plague.
That was a small silver lining, he thought grimly, as his eyes roamed around the spoiled shelves and cabinets in the room. And then his eyes stopped, frozen in place by a sight that filled him with uncomprehending horror. The gorgon’s blood container was missing.
As soon as he realized it was gone, his mind began to catalog all the formulae that the powerful agent could be used in – recipes for death and for life, formulae that were extraordinary in the things they were intended to accomplish. Marco hurried to the side of the room where the container had been kept, and hurriedly scraped around among the debris, hoping to find some trace of the material; surely no group of Corsairs would know what gorgon’s blood was, let alone the capacity it would offer to its owner, he told himself.
The gorgon’s blood was nowhere to be found, and Marco belatedly remembered the shout of triumph a Corsair had given – from that same portion of the room – before he had run from the shop.
The Corsairs had it, and as he comprehended that fact, Marco felt determined to get it back.
He ran out of the shop, and started running through the city streets, dodging signs of damage the raiders had done in other places throughout the city, and ignoring the signs of death and pain they had inflicted on the city that was already wounded by the effects of the plague.
As he approached the harbor front, his steps momentarily faltered. There was a bright yellow glow in the air, and he felt his stomach flip with fear at the certainty that a sorcerer was with the Corsairs – perhaps the very sorcerer he had fought in the Lion City. He turned a corner at an intersection just two blocks away from the water, and from there he saw the glowing yellow dome that protected the Corsairs, giving their ships a safe harbor within the harbor.
Marco stood at the water front, just a score of yards from where the yellow dome touched the land. He examined the sights before his eyes, and it was like he was looking at a living, breathing picture of the catastrophic Lion City expedition. There were the same piles of booty sitting on the piers, the same small flotilla of boats tied to the docks, and the same sorcerer standing in his gowns, looking supremely confident and assured.
But in this instance there was a single Corsair speaking to the sorcerer, standing with the evil man in the robes holding a small dark object out in both hands as an offering to the sorcerer. Marco began to creep along a pier that was outside the dome, one that jutted out
into the water on a parallel to the domain the sorcerer and the Corsairs controlled. He watched as the sorcerer took the container of gorgon’s blood from the Corsair who had gotten away from Marco. The sorcerer patted the Corsair on the head, the way a man might pat a dog on the head to express approval, then he examined the container of the dangerous crystals intently, oblivious to Marco’s stealthy trip to the end of the other pier.
The sorcerer spent several minutes, and all of his attention examining the container, as Marco climbed down the ladder at the end of his pier. He put his face in the water and called. “Kieweeooee! Kieweeooee, are you close?” he called.
There was no answer, as Marco tried to devise and carry out a desperate plan. He stripped off his clothes to ease his swimming, then grimly held his sword between his hands and dove deep into the harbor waters. He swam downward, towards the sorcerer, hoping there was a bottom gap below the dome, where it plunged underneath the surface of the water, a place he’d be able to swim down to and through, to get within the protective dome.
The glow of the dome appeared suddenly in front of him, and his fingers touched its crystal hard surface. His lungs began to burn from his prolonged submersion, and he swam rapidly upward to the surface, rising along the edge of the dome to reach the air, where he gasped deeply, sucking in great gulps of air that refilled his lungs and restored oxygen to his blood.
“Marco legs?” Kieweeooee scared him by speaking right next to him, making him give a startled yelp as he turned.
“Why are you here by this evil thing?” the dolphin asked him.
“Kieweeooee!” he exclaimed. “Thank you for coming.
“There are going to be bad things happen unless I get inside this shell,” he said urgently. “Does it go all the way to the bottom? Can I swim under it?” he asked.
The dolphin stared at him. He’d never known his finned friend to be speechless before, but he knew his declaration had made it happen.
“Wait here,” Kieweeooee said, then disappeared beneath the water.
Seconds later the dolphin returned. “There is a space. You can go inside the evil shell. Must you do so? Can I help you? I will go with you,” she offered.
The Gorgon's Blood Solution Page 22
