Fyre (28 page)

Septimus got out of bed and padded across the threadbare rugs to the window. He drew back the moth-eaten curtains and looked out of the window onto a dismal scene. Overnight it had rained, turning everything soggy and miserable, and now a watery mist hung in the air. Along Wizard Way piles of dirty snow and gritty, gray ice were heaped up; the only color was the Wizard Tower at the far end, which shone with its indigo morning
Magyk
lights flickering gently through the misty gloom.

The Wizard Tower now had a strange twin: the Alchemie Chimney at the end of Alchemie Way. It sat in the middle of a large circular space, which people had begun calling by its old name, Alchemie Circus. The chimney was covered with a blue tarpaulin, which glistened with water and shone with its own, more basic lights—the lanterns that Lucy Gringe had had set up inside it to enable building work to continue all night. There were always a few onlookers but today Septimus saw that a fairly substantial crowd was gathered. Suddenly he heard the sound of Lucy Gringe yelling through a megaphone, “Stand back! Stand back! Will you all
get out of the way
!” There was a noise like thousands of flapping sheets, and the tarpaulin fell to the ground.

This was greeted by cheers evenly balanced with boos. Now revealed, the Alchemie Chimney stood tall and oddly out of place. It looked to Septimus like a stranded lighthouse.

Five minutes later, Septimus hurriedly looked into Sarah’s sitting room. Sarah and Sally were giggling by the fire. “I’m off, see you later,” he said.

“Bye, love,” said Sarah. “Don’t forget, I’m cooking a special supper for your last night.”

“I won’t. Bye, Mum, bye, Sally.”

“Lovely lad,” said Sally, as Septimus closed the door.

Septimus ran out of the Palace and headed up Alchemie Way, pleased that the mist—and Jo-Jo’s old Forest tunic that he had taken to wearing—meant that people would be unlikely to recognize him. Something told him that Marcia would not be happy about where he was heading. As Septimus reached Alchemie Circus, he caught sight of Lucy’s distinctive multicolored dress fluttering like a bright butterfly against the granite-gray stones of the base of the chimney. He weaved his way through the onlookers to get a closer look. The sound of Lucy making the scaffolders refold the tarpaulin reached him. “That’s rubbish. Do it again—and do it right this time!”

Septimus was glad Lucy Gringe was not his boss—she made Marcia look like a softy.

“Hey, little bro!” Lucy called out. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Septimus looked up at the chimney. Below the tracery of scaffolding, he saw stone cut so precisely that you could scarcely see the joints and above the stone, the neat circles of frostproof, heatproof and pretty-much-everything-proof brick began. The bricks were graded by size, getting smaller as they delicately traveled upward, each circle subtly different. “Brilliant!” Septimus called back.

Lucy beamed with delight.

Some lettering carved into the great granite slabs at the base of the chimney caught Septimus’s eye. There was the date, followed by:

M
ARCELLUS
P
YE
: L
AST AND
F
IRST
A
LCHEMIST
.

S
IMON
H
EAP
: A
LCHEMIE
A
PPRENTICE
.

L
UCY
H
EAP
: A
RCHITECT
.

H
EATHER
, E
LIZABETH AND
S
AMSON
S
NARP
: S
TONEMASONS AND
L
IGHTHOUSE
B
UILDERS
.

Septimus looked at the names for a few minutes, taking them in. There it was, set in stone—he was no longer anything to do with Marcellus. Or Alchemie. Or the
Fyre
. Where his name could have been, there was Simon’s.

Lucy was so busy supervising the dismantling of the scaffolding that she did not notice Septimus wandering away disconsolately and disappearing into the shadows of Gold Button Drop. The mist in the Drop was thicker than in Alchemie Way. It settled around him like a blanket; it muffled the sound of his boots and set his Dragon Ring glowing in the dull light. The conical shape of the lock-up solidified out of the mist, flat at first like a cardboard cutout; then details came into view: the rough stone blocks, the dark arch of the door. And then he saw the door open and a black-and-red-cloaked figure emerge.

“Marcellus!”

“Ah, Septimus. Well, well, what a coincidence. I was on my way to find you.”

Septimus brightened. “Really?”

“Indeed. The chimney is complete and we are about to bring the
Fyre
up to its operating level. I would like you to see this, so that when you become ExtraOrdinary Wizard—”

“ExtraOrdinary Wizard?” said Septimus.
“Me?”

Marcellus smiled. “Yes,
you
. Do you not expect to be?”

Shaken by seeing Simon’s name carved into the chimney, Septimus was full of regrets for Alchemie. He shook his head. “No. Oh—
I don’t know
.”

“Well, just in case it turns out that way. I want the
Fyre
to be as much part of your life as it is part of mine or, indeed, Simon’s. I want you to trust it and understand it, so that never again does an ExtraOrdinary Wizard even
think
of killing the
Fyre
.”

“I would never do that.
Never
,” said Septimus. “The
Fyre
is amazing. It makes everything, even the Wizard Tower, feel dull.”

“Ah. But you have made your decision, Septimus.”

“I know,” Septimus sighed. “And it’s set in stone.”

Marcellus and Septimus took the climbing shaft and tunnel down to Alchemie Quay and then transferred to a much narrower and steeply sloping tunnel that wound its way in a spiral, down between the web of Ice Tunnels that radiated off from below the Chamber of Alchemie. It was over half an hour later that they reached the end of the tunnel where the upper
Fyre
hatch, illuminated by a
Fyre
Globe, lay.

“This is but a short climb down, Apprentice,” said Marcellus. “But we must make it a fast one. This is the one point where we can be seen on the
Live Plan
. And I do not wish to be seen just yet. You do understand?”

“Yes,” said Septimus a little guiltily.

Marcellus placed his Alchemie
Keye
into the central indentation of the hatch and it sprang open. A waft of heat came up to meet them. Septimus waited while Marcellus swung himself into the shaft, then he quickly followed and pulled the hatch shut. He clambered down the metal ladder and waited while Marcellus opened the lower
Fyre
hatch, then dropped down after Marcellus onto the flimsy metal platform.

Simon, in his black-and-gold Alchemie robes, was waiting for them.

“Hello, Simon,” said Septimus, not entirely pleased to see him.

Simon, however, looked happy to see his little brother. “Hello, Sep,” he said. “What a place. Isn’t it beautiful?” He pointed to the
Fyre
below.

“Yes, it is. It’s amazing,” said Septimus, thawing a little at Simon’s enthusiasm.

“Apprentices,” said Marcellus. “It is not safe for the secrets of the
Fyre
to be known by only one person. Or even two. By the end of today, I hope that there will be three of us who will understand all there is to know about the
Fyre
. ‘Safety in numbers’ is the expression, I believe. And safety is what we want.”

And so, they became a team. Patiently, Marcellus took Simon and Septimus through all the stages of bringing the
Fyre
to its full power, which, now that the chimney was completed, it was safe to do. They worked through the day, methodically running through Marcellus’s long checklist. They regulated the water flow through the Cauldron, cold when it entered, hot when it left to find its way out through the giant emergency drain into the river. They drummed the Cauldron, they measured the height of the
Fyre
rods, they checked the levers that operated the huge hoppers of coal buried in the cavern walls—the
Fyre
blanket, Marcellus called it—and a hundred other small things that Marcellus insisted upon. “For safety,” as he said countless times that day.

It was late afternoon when Marcellus, Septimus and Simon stood once more on the dizzyingly high platform at the top of the
Fyre
Chamber. Above them was the huge oval opening to the Alchemie Chimney, which would take up the heat and the fumes and provide a much-needed airflow through the Chamber. But it was not the unobtrusive opening in the roof that claimed their attention—it was, of course, the perfect circle of the eye of
Fyre
far below, brilliant red brushed with its delicate blue flame, that returned their gaze. Underneath the blue they could see the dark twinkling of the graphite rods, each one a perfect five-pointed star, silently powering the
Fyre
around it. Marcellus smiled. All was well. They climbed up the pole to the lower
Fyre
hatch, sweaty, tired and longing for fresh air once more. But there was one more thing to do.

An hour later, the decoy fire in the furnace of the Great Chamber of Alchemie and Physik was lit and burning well. Marcellus lowered the conical fireguard over it so that the flames were safely contained. “Good,” he said. “That will produce enough smoke to satisfy everyone. Time to go.”

They headed wearily up the long incline back to the lock-up. Septimus had been so impressed with Marcellus’s insistence on safety that—even though he knew Marcellus did not like to talk about it—he said, “I just don’t understand how the Great Alchemie Disaster ever happened.”

Marcellus sighed. “That, Septimus, makes two of us. I don’t understand either. It makes no more sense to me now than it did all those hundreds of years ago. But what I do know is that if the ExtraOrdinary Wizard had not intervened in such a high-handed manner—excuse me, Septimus, it rankles to this day—and closed down the
Fyre
, then many lives would have been saved. And my house in Snake Slipway would not be so perishing cold every Big Freeze.” Marcellus smiled at Septimus’s bemused expression. “The Ice Tunnels were not just the old communication tunnels between the ancient Castle buildings; many of them were also part of the Castle heating system. As you know, they run beneath every old house. The hot water from the
Fyre
kept us all warm. People loved the
Fyre
in those days.”

“Ah,” said Septimus, thinking that that made a lot of sense.

Evening was falling when they emerged from the lock-up. They hurried off to Alchemie Circus, where Lucy had been anxiously awaiting the first plume of smoke to appear from the chimney. She ran excitedly toward them.

“It’s working—look!” Lucy pointed up to the thin wraith of white smoke that was climbing lazily up into the evening sky.

“Well done, Lu,” said Simon. “It’s a brilliant chimney.”

“Thanks, Si,” said Lucy.

“Yes,” said Marcellus. “It’s very nice. Very nice indeed.”

People had been hanging around Alchemie Circus all day, waiting for the first breath of smoke to emerge from the chimney, but with the onset of dusk, most had drifted away. But although the Living had got bored and gone home for supper, Alchemie Circus was, in fact, still packed—with ghosts. They had come to see what many considered to be the very heart of the Castle come alive once more. Most approved, but there were some who did not. These were the ghosts who had been present at the Great Alchemie Disaster. Indeed there were some there who had entered ghosthood because of the disaster. Some had been burnt to death by the hundreds of subsidiary fires that had swept through the Venting system and burst, unannounced, up through the floors of houses. Others—like Eldred and Alfred Stone—had been frozen into the Ice Tunnels during the panic to
Freeze
them. But those who had lived before the disaster had good memories of the
Fyre
. It had been the beating heart of the Castle, and those who had known life with it considered the present-day,
Fyre
-free Castle to be a poorer place.

But nothing stayed secret in the Castle for long and word soon spread that the
Fyre
was lit. Later that evening, after Septimus had gone back to the Palace for Sarah’s last-night-of-the-holiday supper, Marcellus, Simon and Lucy joined the edgy crowd at the foot of the chimney, many of whom were clutching the recently reissued
All You Need To Know About The Great Alchemie Disaster
pamphlet.

“Oi!” someone called out. “It’s the Alchemist fellow.”

A young woman carrying a toddler waved the pamphlet angrily. “Have you read this?” she demanded.

“Madam, I
wrote
it,” said Marcellus.

“Rubbish!” yelled a bookish, elderly man wearing a fine pair of gold-rimmed glasses.

“Well, I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy it. I did my best.”

“I meant there is no
way
you wrote this. You
Alchemists
!” the man spat out the word in disgust. He waved his copy of the pamphlet under Marcellus’s nose. Marcellus caught a waft of old paper—it was one of the original ones. “You Alchemists always covered everything up. And you, Mr. Pye, were one of the worst offenders.”

Marcellus held his hand up in protest. “I am sorry,” he said. “Please believe me, the Great Alchemie Disaster was not of our making.”

“So whose fault was it, then?” demanded a teenage boy. “The tooth fairy’s?” The crowd giggled.

Marcellus had known that the return of the
Fyre
to the Castle would not be popular. He had given the problem a lot of thought and he hoped he had a solution. He raised his voice above the murmurings of discontent. “To prove to you that we have nothing to hide, we will be starting guided tours of the Great Chamber of Alchemie.”

There was a stunned silence.